Thread by @Jebadoo2

1/ Welcome to the second dark age. The second counter enlightenment

The age of unreason. The age that says feelings are more important than evidence, the age that reunifies state and public belief

Welcome to the great intellectual recession. A dark age so dark the lights go out

2/ How did you get here? Well. In simple terms, you arrive at this dark, lonely isle via two things. Feelings and pictures.

You see. The old enlightenment was but on the opposite of pictures and feelings. It was built on words and reason. That's why all your institutions fail

3/ That's why they are "captured" or have otherwise capitulated to the post modern malignity de jour whether it's critical race theory, gender, whatever.

The point is those old bulwarks. Those great phalanxes of rights and rationality. They spoke words and reason.

4/ Around the mid 1980s feelings became fashionable. Theraputic public discourse from Oprah to everyone having a therapist and that not being an issue assuaged and blunted moral consequence. No one was feckless, they were sex addicts. No one a drunk, they had an illness. Etc.

5/ The primacy of feelings emerged as an explanation for everything. "I'm a trans woman because I FEEL like a woman". You can't use the wrong pronouns, how would the recipient "feel". You want to look for the real enlightenment. Look at this.

https://twitter.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1679777245106434048?s=20

6/ I'm doomed to think "I don't care" is the most revolutionary statement a man or woman can make now. For the obligation to care. The primacy of feelings. The safe spaces. The trigger warnings. The specious claims to feel "unsafe" because a lesbian says she is a lesbian...

7/ Not caring is now a revolutionary act. And so to aesthetics.

The modern human child has consumed 100 times more more images than their grandparents. They endlessly are told to curate online avatars and selfies and Instagrams. Pictures have defeated the words.

8/ Don't believe me? Tell me why women's sports pictures like this cut through harder than forgotten oubliette women in prisons. Tell me why the breastfeeding AGP picture cuts through harder than him typing this was the case. Face it. You're in an aesthetic revolution.

9/ Now, we can combat a word of aesthetics and anime avatars and curated appearance and memes hitting harder than words with the grotesque unfairness visited by gender.

But we must recognise that's what we're doing.

10/ And if we're doing so. Or hitting back by saying "I don't care" what we're doing is recognising the nature of the beast.

This is the shadow of an old dead religion. These are the appetites of such. This is unreason. This is the second dark age.

11/ So we will continue to meet and fight this old beast. But let's be clear. This is a force from long ago, a thing that has holy castes, monks with it's asexuals, heresy and witchtrials with it's terf cancelling, catechisms and mantras.

This is a very, very old friend.

12/ And a very, very old enemy. Much that it fights the enlightenment. It comes from a time before it. It is the state of nature at war. It is the atavism of chaos. "Queer theory" breaks down boundaries and ushers in the law of the jungle.

But only predators prosper in nature.