Storming the beaches
The culture wars have finally bought their special brand of crazy to New Zealand
I don’t have too much to add on the way Posie Parker and the women who tried to talk at her event, were treated at Albert Park. Which is lucky because in this age of instant opinion I doubt anyone would care by now.
To see such vitriolic rage directed against women and to be so contemptuous of their freedom to express themselves is both saddening and alarming.
Spider Cat’s Substack has covered in some detail the violent misogyny generated towards Parker and the women attempting to speak with her so swing over there because he has waded through the Twitter cesspool so you don’t have to.
It is jarring to realize we seem to be lurching from one cultish movement to the next and the period between the cults arising seems to be getting shorter and shorter. It is as if New Zealand is becoming a theocracy, dominated by cultish witch hunts, openly supported by prominent politicians and legacy media.
Let me be clear I see this event as little to do with the rights of trans people, which I would expect something like 90% or more of the population (including myself) have no real issue with. This was not “feminazis” standing outside toilets, shaming trans women wishing to enter. This is about women stating something utterly obvious; that they have a right to at least offer their opinion on the topic of who, other than them, may enter their spaces.
In the end what interests me is not the wrong headedness of the witch hunters or their untethered and violent behaviour. These aspects while worrying are obvious. What interests me is how did their heads got so wrong? And how can they be so wrong, when the broad framework of their movement would broach little objection from most people? The vast majority of people are fine with trans people having the same rights as everyone else. Of course there is still discrimination, there probably always will be. But this battle has largely already been won.
So why the screaming? How can two seemingly broadly aligned groups have such a jarringly different view of the world?
I think we must attempt to understand how these activists came to be at Albert Park. This is clearly not about trans rights, as no trans rights were endangered by the “let women speak” event. They clearly aren’t interested in agreed views on logic, good faith debate, equality or even physical reality. So arguing in these terms seems to be largely futile. Thus we may need a different tact, other than logic, truth, a willingness to listen and broad fairness. A tough challenge! But rise to this challenge we must for the activists have shown that they are unhinged, violent, fascistic and psychologically unstable.
I believe that central to much of our societal problems is that we are living through the obvious decline of the Western culture, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This decline has allowed a sense of doubt, uncertainty and a general untethering to enter into the Western Zeitgeist. We have to some extent, lost our purpose and our place. We can argue about whether this is what we deserve or not, but it is what it is.
With the fall of the Berlin wall and its concomitant rise to almost complete supremacy, Western culture (particularly American culture) has lost the “bad guy over there” to rally against. And the communist Russians were pretty impressive bad guys, requiring massive levels of military industry, propaganda and intelligence gathering.
If you don’t have a genuine enemy to rally your massive military, intelligence and propaganda apparatus against, what to do? Dismantle the apparatus? And lose all those jobs, of course not. What you do is you manufacture enemies, no different to what Orwell predicted over 70 years ago. Made up enemies are the best because they can never be beaten and the war can go for ever. Hurrah!
So, throughout the 90’s and into the 2000’s we saw endless wars on things, both kinetic and political. The West invaded countries because “weapons of mass destruction” (among other reasons) and went on endless “peacekeeping missions”, where sometimes the peacekeepers watched on as civilians were massacred.
Eventually this pissed off enough people that they fought back with whatever they could find at their disposal and by the end of a decade we ended up with September the 11th and a “War on Terror”.
Throughout this time we were still trying to fill the God shaped hole that the decline in religion had left. Mainly with things. Shiny new stuff. Stuff we didn’t know we needed until advertising told us how pathetic we really were without this shiny new stuff. When we couldn’t afford it any more, we borrowed. Taking from the future, to purchase in the present, to make up for what we hadn’t realised we had lost in the past. Corporations were only too happy to oblige, using ever more sophisticated propaganda advertising campaigns to make us feel ugly and inadequate while offering us the solution for just 9.99. Attempting to consume our way to happiness is not new. Nor is corporate propaganda. What is new is the decrease of greater purpose, the purpose that counteracts the spiritual emptiness thereby making consumerism somewhat sustainable.
Foreign wars, less religion and more consumption, none of this gave us purpose. Or made us happy. But it was distracting.
This just about kept the Western ship together.
As the the internet became more capable the dotcom bust led eventually to the rise of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and also the beginning of the decline of Mainstream Media. For me, the GFC was the first sign that something serious was wrong. Because although we had been given bottomless credit to fuel the consumption to plug our souls it turned out we hadn’t filled anything. Except the boots of bankers, politicians and others who already had very full boots. And when the bill came due although only a small amount of us benefited, we all paid.
And then, bizarrely although we talked much of moral hazard, we pretended nothing happened and the same people who blew everything up went back to doing exactly what they were doing before the GFC. But with a heap more leverage.
Parallel with this hollowing of souls and unity and real wealth, there is the modern Western phenomenon of trying to ruin our children. We had the day school sex abuse moral panic in the 80’s and 90’s and by the 2000’s The Great Coddling was well underway. In my 20 odd years of education I am pretty sure I could count all of my certificates on two hands. In my kids first year of school they already had so many certificates for unremarkable events, that they had completely lost any meaning. Schools became increasingly focused on homogeneity. It is true that no one should be made to feel bad because they aren’t bright or they are crap at sports. But not singling out brilliance, because it makes the others feel left out…..that is the rise of the Mediocracy. And not only should our kids all be equally average but they must avoid physical danger at all costs. They are not allowed to fall over. Climbing trees at school is banned. Their playgrounds are lamer and lamer. They are connecting various aspects of their physical reality with various aspects of the physical world, less and less. So it is not the just rise of the Mediocracy. It is the rise of the Safe Mediocracy.
Stay safe. Be safe.
Safe is also a four letter word.
While over bearing helicopter parenting stunted our younger children our teens went on to be exposed to increasing Examism and the bubble in University education. New Zealand Highschool children spend way, way too much time preparing for exams. They look at previous exams, spend hours understanding how to get all the marks for a question, managing exam time, mock exams, practice exams…. all pointless skills with very little real world use, aside from understanding how to game systems. A conflating of the metric of the goal, with the actual goal. While pointless for our children, getting them good at gaming exams is great for gaming how well a specific school or indeed an entire education system, is “achieving”. This is what happens when our systems are completely handed to the management class. Targets are set. Targets are met.
If there is a point of Examism it is that everyone go to University. Which begs the question: Why does everyone need to go to University?
As recently as the mid 80’s the people who came out of University overwhelmingly went into good, high paying jobs. At those times only the best and brightest of the middle and elite classes went to University to study things like engineering, physics, medicine or lawyering. As there were not many people studying these topics there was a high demand for their skills. But even the less applied fields; history, fine arts or social science also had relatively high quality outcomes. They often went in to teaching or in to academia, or other jobs adjacent to what they studied. You could get some value from those degrees.
Various do-gooders and politicians saw what they thought was the obvious. University education is a “good thing”, and more of a good thing is clearly gooder. The key to improving society lay in getting as many people as possible into University.
This is certainly true if applied to the working class and the poor. Ensuring that a brilliant poor kid does not fall through the cracks is an obvious net gain for society. But this was not about getting more brilliant poor people into University, this was about getting more people into University full stop. The way to do that? Game exams and make it easier to get into University. Finding entry into an already dumbed down Engineering degree still too hard? No worries, you can do an even dumber Social Science degree.
So we have a situation where never before have more people gained University degrees and never before has a University degree meant so little. A person who would not have been good enough to get into a University Social Science degree 35 years ago, now gets into an Engineering degree. One can only imagine the quality of most of the people doing Social Science degrees now and how much that has taken from the practical professions. Political Science and Communication majors are in bullshit jobs throughout society, but particularly in politics. In New Zealand 37% of all MPs have humanities degrees. But you can’t find a plumber.
Given the last three years is it any surprise that:
“MPs with qualifications in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects are particularly underrepresented in (NZs) Parliament.”
And yet society still prizes these degrees as if they mean the same. It still thinks they mean now, what they meant 40 years ago. No one has caught up with the inflationary erosion of University degrees. And with the culture wars, that erosion is accelerating.
Perhaps even more important than all of this is the rise of gaming and gamification. I am uncertain of the repercussion of our children spending more and more time trying to beat the rules in digital worlds. But the casual violence, the lost time outdoors, the ceding of practical skills must surely have some negative influence on our children, particularly our boys.
However I think the gamification of everything in society is a far bigger problem. Here, I mean gamification in the sense of trying to get the result you want out of a process rather than the result that is intended that will bring benefit.
If we look at Examism in schools we see a perfect example of this. The true point of the exam is to show your knowledge on a topic. Knowledge in the broad sense, learning facts and figures on a topic is part of that, but discussing and critiquing, threading disparate strands together, understanding a topic in it’s context with other topics. Thinking, not remembering. Humans love stories. Understanding the story of a topic is different to remembering when it happened.
But Examism allows the education system to be gamed. You don’t need to understand context, opposing views or the overarching story. You just need to know the bits that let you beat the exam. The structure of the exam and how to disassemble and beat it, is more important than the knowledge. You don’t need to learn, you don’t to discuss with peers or opponents, you don’t need wisdom. Repetition and a few memorising tricks will work fine.
An important aspect of the game is the score. The highest score wins. So an important aspect of the exam also becomes the score. For the student it is about the best way to get the highest score and for the principal (who’s reputation is also very much linked to the exam score) it becomes about the best way to facilitate the student getting a high score. Unfortunately for our children, beating exams is not a useful skill. Unfortunately for our society teaching our kids to game situations is also not useful.
This gamification is all around us and has wreaked real havoc. The GFC arose because rules and regulations designed to protect individuals and systems, were seen merely as impediments to getting the highest score. The context of them, the history of them, why they were there and what they protected was ignored because the rules of the game are not the point. The score is the point.
Almost every single aspect of the covid “vaccines” was gamed. The trials were gamed, as they often are by pharma companies because the point of the game is not to protect people, it is not to heal them, it is not to make sure they are better off overall with the drug then without, it is to get the highest score. 95% effective is the figure pharma wanted. They didn’t want it because you and I will be better if 95% is the figure or because our elected officials want that. They wanted it because it is a way for them to get the highest score. Pharma doesn’t “submit” to the FDA because they understand it is a way to protect innocent people from dying from something they don’t need. Submitting to the FDA is just a sub level of the game, that has to be beaten. To capture the FDA, to infiltrate it with money and lobbying and massive advertising budgets and revolving doors and to buyout scientists and Universities…..these things have nothing to do with advancing science or making people healthier. These are just more efficient ways to get the highest score, then actually doing the necessary work to make a good product.
Pharma plays the game with cheat mode fully activated.
While not new this system gaming is far more insidious, now extending deep into the bodies that are supposed to protect us from it. What is new is we now teach our kids how to do this, we justify it and we reward it. The exam is something to beat so that you can go to the next stage. It is not about knowledge it is about beating the exam and getting to the next level.
And if the next level for these kids, is working at a Pharma company then what do we expect them to do? We have shown them exams are not actually about testing knowledge, but about the most efficient way to beat the exam. So what will they do when the problem is not exams, but clinical trials, or social justice? Why would they not game them as well?
For many things important to society, the score is not the point. Gaming systems gives an unreal result in a world where it is already difficult to tell what is real and what matters. Another way we slip further from what is real.
But the West wasn’t done with irreality yet.
Because into the hands of everyone, including these safety saturated, over validated children and the “University educated” adults, these people with no great unifying project and nothing but new TVs or the latest guru urine diet in their souls, these gamers who are taught to game systems as well; into all those hands you place a “smart” phone. And this small, pocket sized “device”, is a rectangular window into a parallel universe. A universe similar to this one in many ways. But not the same. Not the real universe around us, rather a digital universe where nothing is actually real but some things are truthful and some things are not and for many things it is tough to tell either way. And this universe is ruled by advertising and attention and “social” media. And the algorithms soon learned that nothing kept attention on social media longer, than outrage. And as they dominated our attention with outrage they also sold us ads. And the ad revenue went from the newspapers to the outrage search engine. And the Mainstream Media became more and more desperate.
Desperation. Disruption. Overvalidation. Loss of Purpose. Coddling. A disconnection from the physical. Gamification. We are left with shadows. Shadows of the great things Western culture was. Shadows of truth and reality. Shadows of community and fairness and justice. Shadows of meaning.
And when we amalgamate all of this together? What then? Revolution?
Or civil war?
The culture wars represent people of remarkably similar backgrounds turning against each other in the sort of vicious way that only people who know each other well, can.
Friend against friend. Sister against sister.
The culture wars are civil wars.
Yet it sort of still held on, The West. It kind of still stood for the things that had made it supreme and had ended history. It was ugly and battered and everyone could see it was in decay. Yet it still clung on.
But finally, into this fractured, untethered, irreal situation, where nothing was too safe and less and less held us together came……The Orange One. And love him or loathe him, he sure knew how to bam outrage up a notch. And then some.
There are many things that might explain what happened at Albert Park. But when I looked at those crowds I see a lot of the same threads running through them that ran through most of the calamities of the last 15 years or so.
Much of that crowd does not exist in the same world that you and I do. They live in a pretend world, where everything is dangerous it is harder and harder to tell truth from fiction and everything is out to get them. It’s confusing and they are afraid. A natural response to confusion and fear, is anger.
The second Iraq war, The War on Terror, The GFC, Trump derangement, the “climate emergency”, the culture wars, outsized fear for our children, dumbing down of education and covid. All these things are united by the fact that at some stage they were justified by being the “right thing” to do. The good thing to do. Saving our children, our democracy, foreigners, trans people, Granny, THE ENTIRE WORLD.
But what also unites these things is none of them are especially real. They do not offer something we can touch or feel or interact with in our caveman minds. They involve the increasing separation of ourselves from reality, in an overwhelming cultural moment where it might be easier to let everything burn to the ground then try and revitalize it. Do any of these things really happen in the real world? Or just online? How would you know the difference?
Is that really air you’re breathing?
Sure the Americans really did blow some shit up in Iraq, but based on lies and fabrications and it was all like, you know, over there somewhere. Most Americans couldn’t find Iraq on a map. While at home, there was no rationing, no blitz, no hunkering in bunkers, no sounds of explosions. A TV war.
The Twin Towers really got knocked down (although even that was on TV for most people) but what is a “War on Terror”? Is it better or worse than a “War on Drugs”? Where does it happen aside from classified intelligence assessments, random drone strikes killing often innocent people, caves in third world crapholes and mystery “rendition sites” away from the prying eyes of pesky laws and human rights?
The GFC consisted of contracts, leveraged onto other contracts and then cut and pasted to other contracts backed by not even a prayer. NINJA loans. The regulators went right along with it. We were told, it was all so complex and difficult to understand. But actually Ponzi schemes are pretty straightforward. If all the banks had been allowed to fail, why could some new tech company not have popped up and kept making all the contracts and loans (out of thin air) just like the banks were in the first place?
Trump is not a great human and a bit of a downer after Obama. But he is hardly Hitler or Stalin or anything especially evil. At worst he’s just another arrogant rich arsehole living by rich arsehole rules. There are plenty of them around. Yet the Trump derangement syndrome was frothing-at-the-mouth insane. It compromised morals and the truth. Anything was ok to get rid of Trump. Take the higher road? Fuck that, we have to get deeper into the gutter than he is! The derangement syndrome railed against this great hulking evil, that really wasn’t. Annoying, vulgar, self-serving, sure. Kinda funny? Sometimes. But evil? It was fake evil, to make fake news, in a fake war.
The climate emergency? What emergency exactly? The whole thing is predicated on “bad things will happen in the future” which itself is predicated on pseudoscientific modelling that absolutely does not tell us anything accurate about what will happen in the future. This sets aside that in the history of the Earth, many, many bad things have happened and we are probably living in an unusually benign period in Earths history. Warming by 1.5 degrees ranks very much near the bottom of the “bad thing” range. The only thing we can be sure of with future climate change is that we will not predict it accurately. Of course the elites love it as it’s an emergency so big that we will need supranational institutions to fight it. Bigger government to rescue the planet.
Covid. The poor little one in one hundred year event, that wasn’t. A lab leaked virus, that started somewhere in the region of bad flu and is now nothing more than a cold. The whole “response” perverted by fear, dominated by pseudoscience with a sprinkling of low grade hugs fascism. Not only was it never an emergency but it involves yet another thing humans cannot touch or feel. It may as well just be another app on our phones. And a waning Western Civilization, ruled by “liberal” governments showed how eager the elites are to use an “emergency” to seize more power for themselves and tell us all “Shucks those Chinese have a good thing going don’t they?”
Generations that are increasingly less fit, less strong, less co-ordinated, less connected with their physical self and less aware of their actual physical place in the physical world around them and constantly gaming. If you haven’t grasped the physical world by being in it and judging it, in real terms (how far to that next branch?, will it hold my weight?, how high up am I?) then it becomes easier to believe that the physical is meaningless and you can just “decide” what you are. And when you realise that the worthless degree you paid so much money for doesn’t validate you in the real world and all that exam expertise was for nothing and you know longer get a certificate for remembering your library books? And you have all the information of the world in your pocket and you confuse that with knowledge or wisdom……….
Probably a bit of a shock right? Might make you scream and shout and act a bit erratically? Might make you jump into some cult and act like a bit of a fool? Or even a complete arsehole? Might make you think it’s a good idea to smash stuff down as none of it’s real anyway?
And so the culture wars. An argument about things everyone already agreed were bad, actually being really, really bad. So bad that people who had nothing to do with those things should feel endlessly guilty because they happen to have the same skin colour as some person they never met or knew, who did some shit thing, 200 years ago. Oh and that women can actually have dicks. That one was a bit of a surprise to me. Can’t forget that.
Like so much of our life now, the culture wars are not about what is real. They are not actual. They are slants, fabrications, simulations, misallocations, models and lies. They are a game you play for likes on Twitter, where the score is measured in reach and powered by outrage. They are about the score, not what the score is supposed to signify. They are your lived experience. They are digital representations of somebodies version of the truth. They are things that largely happen to other people in other places somewhere, supposedly. They are real crimes but made in a history no one has experienced.
I have not been involved in terrorism. I am not affected by climate change. I do not want people to die in foreign countries so some leader somewhere can make some point about something they completely lied about in the first place. I do not know anyone who got seriously sick from covid. I have never seen a women with a penis. Perhaps I am just lucky.
But Mainstream Media feels we should be very concerned about these things. Pleeeease listen to them be serious about these things. They desperately need to sell some ads.
So we have a cultural phenomenan. It largely occurs online, in spaces where attention is the currency and outrage is the best way to cash in. All set up and maintained by a gaming ethos. Because online is not real, symbology becomes important. Text. Emojis. Handles. Bios. Symbols to show we are good people. Symbols to show we are in the right tribe. Symbols to show we have beaten the last bad guy and made it to the next level.
All ages are susceptible to it. We are all part of a waning and forlorn Western legacy. We are the products of a world where we won all the major battles and didn’t realise that the fight was more important then the victory. So we got fat and lazy. And complacent. Timid and fearful. We binged on credit and consumption. We lost God and we tried to replace him with a TV, or a special diet, or Liberalism, or Scientism, or Activism, or Trumpism, or Covidism. And all the isms shouted at one another.
But more concerning are the younger members of this phenomonen. They have been bought up to be told they are great and can achieve anything. Endlessly validated with certificates and gold stars to the point of narcissism. They have been kept away from fear and danger, so they have become obsessed with safety. Their attention spans have been stunted. They have all the information in the world in their pockets but no context to connect the dots that lead to actual knowledge. They are not in touch with their physical self. They exist where emergencies are on endless scroll. And they readily accept them as true because they are used to truth coming from their devices where nothing is real anyway. If the emergency is not real they will accept it anyway, because they don’t deal much with real anymore. The online world is as real to them as the offline. Perhaps more real. And it’s easier to game. And they are good at gaming.
In one to one interactions they are hyper liberal simply because liberalism is another “good thing”. They don’t understand it really, because they don’t understand the road that led us to it. They collect badges and buttons because while they don’t know what the badges mean they know those badges and buttons will help them get the highest score. If liberalism had an emoji, they would put it on their Twitter handle and then they would be liberals. And then with a pocket full of Twitter and a mind full of outrage, they will march off and attempt to violently supress someone’s right to express themselves. But kindly.
To people who exist in that place a social credit score sounds like a great idea. All you have to do is figure out what the hack is.
They are more attuned to symbology than any generation before. Which is great because the elites are big on symbology. Our current crop of construct politicians fit in this world perfectly because they are also not real.
Listen to commentary on Jacinda Arderns “achievements”. Did she deliver? Of course she did because delivery doesn’t mean delivering things. It means making everyone believe you are a person that delivers things. Then you don’t have to actually deliver anything. But clearly, you still get the high score.
And listen also to the elites talk on her “legacy”. RNZ finds not one political scientist but two. They do not get a commentator who deals with the results of anything that Ardern actually did or did not do. Hungry kids, increased crime, broken businesses, depression, expensive food, vaccine injuries, real stuff doesn’t matter. Rather we get to listen to two people, with pointless degrees tell us that communication is the most important thing about being a leader. Not what they do or don’t do, or how they do it, but what they say and how they say it that is what is important for a leader of a country. They tell us, not only was Jacinda a great communicator but she is the greatest ever because we have Russian bots constantly trying to make us dislike Jacinda, but Jacinda gets that and she out-communicates the bots and wins for democracy. Huzzah!
Because communication is just the bestest and most importantist thing when you are in the MSM, a political scientist or a politician. It doesn’t require you to be strong or smart or disciplined. It doesn’t require a journey. There is no physical risk. It doesn’t require knowledge. It just requires that you can talk enough shit to confuse your opponent into giving up. Talking shit is just another symbol the elites present, to show their superiority and membership of the elite.
Our construct politicians are an assembly of inputs from focus groups and press secretaries and surveys and social media feeds, all stuff that isn’t real, rather a construct of what reality might be if you bothered to go and experience it. They have come through the Universities and gained pointless degrees. They are probably quite good at exams. They probably can’t climb a tree. They have not worked a normal job, or owned a business. They are not farmers. They are not artists. They are not roofers or plumbers or Uber drivers or bakers. They are what ever they need to be to get your vote. They are everything and nothing. They are perfect for a generation raised on irreality, symbology and gamification that puts less and less value on actually doing the right things and more and more on signalling that you do more right things than everybody else. So you get the highest score.
It’s not surprising when asked “what is a women”, such a person might just blink repeatedly and claim the question has come out of “leftfield”: