Qualifiers first.
I am grateful for a platform that isn’t censoring me. I am grateful for the way that the platform is easier to use and more streamlined than Wordpress. And the money that my fellow Slavland Stalkers have pledged to me will start covering my rent. Thank you again for the support, guys. Really.
All that aside, the people who inhabit this platform have lowered my already low opinion of both the herd and the drovers that move them from grazing pasture to slaughter house.
I’m not really mad at the peasants though. That is simply their nature. To be fattened up and then eaten, over and over again. Their righteous squealing simply a before-dinner mood-setter.
I was prompted to write the rant by several factors. One was a post that was published on Gab, not Substack, where the founder of the platform, Andrew Torba, put out a serious call for the establishment of a Christian Kingdom in the Appalachian mountains. Putting aside just how ridiculous such a proposition is and the unfeasibility of the project, the wave of indignant comments that this inspired was even worse. The Trump/Q anon exiles from Twitter mobbed Torba for revealing his “Fascist” and “Authoritarian” colors. “No kings allowed!” was the rallying cry of the mob. These were the same people who have spent the last 6+ years praising their God-Emperor and begging him to cross the Rubicon, literally arrest prominent Democrats and Deep-Staters and then put either Ivanka or his sons on the throne after him.
The cognitive dissonance of the average Gabber is strong. But, seeing as these people are literally double-digit IQ proles and peasants, such behavior shouldn’t surprise anyone. The masses rallying behind a Populist strongman, storming the Congress and yet simultaneously declaring their undying fealty to Republican values is, well, a feature not a bug of low IQ and years of propaganda turning whatever brain cells were there into a soft mush.
But, surely, on Substack, where grassroots “rebel leaders” take the time to organize their thoughts and create a coherent worldview or counter-narrative to the agenda of the powers that be, well, surely there would be a higher quality of thinking present here, no?
Wrong. It’s the same, but also far worse.
At least the stupidity on Gab is limited by character counts. Here, the bloat and bloviating from windbags saying absolutely nothing of any value is allowed free reign. What’s worse, the verbal diarrhea is couched in long-winded paragraphs and run-on sentences that groan in protest from the undue strain that the author puts on the grammar of the English language.
The primary target of Substack sophistry, however, isn’t the no-wit rabble of Gab or Twitter for that matter, but the mid-wit fart-sniffers with a chip on their shoulder who are tickled pink by the acadamese or “vag-talk” as it is referred to by experts in the field, that they can understand and replicate to a certain degree.
Which makes them so so smart, doncha know!!!
*sniff* take that libruhls!!! I can speak the same language as the priest-professors who rule over me!!! i’m better at being an elitist snob than they are!!! why are my talents unrecognized by the people that hate me and want me dead!!! i’m not as dumb as my enemies think I am!!! I can prove it by imitating their style and worshipping the same idols as they do!!! owned!!! epic!!! *sniff*
The outrage that I have been feeling towards my fellow “rebel leaders” has been growing for a while now. I cannot name any specific posts that definitively crossed my disgust threshold. There is simply too much ideological cravenness and intellectual cuckoldry to list out exhaustively, so I’d rather get mad systematically. First though, I’ll just share what really got me wound up this week, assured that in another week’s time I will find fresh examples to rail at. So:
This week on Substack, we had brave system-dissenters praising MLK, the founding father of the USSA, a new country built on the ruins of the USA and its founding fathers, which was overthrown in the 70s. These people lament that the elites aren’t honoring the sacred teachings of the magic POC who appeared to spread his gospel of love and tolerance and then died for our sins.
On Substack, the default positions of the rebels is the typical revolutionary Libertine “have-it-your-way” radical individualism that eroded all organized resistance to violations of the moral code that brought us to into this civilizational free-fall that we are experiencing now. Resistance to COVID-tyranny is literally built on the sacred philosophical principle of “nuh-uh, you can’t tell me what to do” followed by pouting and ritualized chest-thumping.
On Substack, brave free-thinkers repeat literally every single system-approved moral protocol and condemn other writers like frumpy soccer marms for, well, thinking a little bit more outside of the box than they are comfortable doing. This is because holding the positions of a Democrat from the 00s is now considered all edgy and like, super, totally punk rock and shit.
Now, it is one thing to make fun of Twitter people. Or the people in the comments sections of YouTube videos. Those are effectively public squares shared by the prophets of tomorrow, imperial decree-readers, religious authorities and raving-mad lunatics throwing shit at merchant hawking their wares. In other words, it is semi-contested ground. Establishment shill and satraps and spooks all share their regime-approved views on there as well. But, with platforms like Gab or Substack, which are either explicitly or implicitly platforms for dissenters who got booted out of the main public square, the standards of evaluation have to be applied differently.
All of us here are off the reservation and yet, so few of us actually act like it.
Also, despite condemning group-think and NPC-behavior, these brave individualist whiskey-sipping, cigar-chomping, swashbuckling warriors of wit and pen gather behind the scenes into group chats on Telegram where they decide who gets to be part of their little “recommendation” mafia and who doesn’t. In other words, despite having run afoul of regime-approved cultural commissars on other platforms, they are quite keen to replicate the same model. The only criteria on which there is any agreement is that the current cultural commissars are bad and that it ought to be them in charge instead. But that doesn’t mean that there is any commitment to, or interest even, in entertaining alternative viewpoints, or even taking the role of “rebels” seriously.
And the same tribe of cultural commissars has its agents sitting on the new commissions, monitoring them and policing what the “rebel leaders” are allowed to say to their audiences. I have known and been in several such groups, temporarily, and seen the same policing phenomenon at work in all of them.
To drive home the nature of the control-paradigm, I thought I’d share an anecdote from a buddy of mine who lived and worked as an apparatchik in DC. He noted that both the Republicans and the Democrats go to the same strip clubs and sleep with the same prostitutes.
Actually, I took it in stride and confessed a certain relief upon hearing that so many of our politicians are still heterosexuals.
But the same principles apply to writers and Tweeters and self-styled intellectual rebels. You may think that they’re all independent because they talk about different topics in slightly different ways. But, at the end of the day, being “rebel leaders”, they have more in common with each other than with you and they gather together to talk about the “customers” and how to better fleece them and even how to tweak their writing to reinforce and stay within the parameters of the group-approved, dissident-sounding narrative.
And, despite the fact that this colluding, cartel-forming behavior is everywhere apparent in other walks of life like business, politics, the local PTA, the workplace, the high school cafeteria and so on, the peasants are unable to extrapolate and wonder just how many of their rebel leaders are actually as independent and intrepid as they portray themselves.
They also scarf down both pearls and slop on offer to them and like the taste just the same. Knowing this, it is a crime of the highest order to actually feed the masses the same slop that they have been conditioned to think that they want because of the unspoken premise that “the customer is always right” and “they had a choice”. This is the mentality and justification of drug-dealers and pedophiles and our current ruling class. But I repeat myself. If you actually care about the peasant masses, you will realize that dangling poison in front of them and letting them have their pick of it is exploitative behavior, however way you try to justify it. Giving the peasants a choice, knowing that they can’t help themselves but choose to get addicted to pills, to corn-syrup flavored foods, to doodling obscenities all over their body, to shoving bananas up their ass for money, and to sinking to the absolute lowest common denominator of depravity is an unforgivable crime. And the same poison slop is readily available in ideological forms as well.
In other words, Substack is simply a drover’s dispensary of mind-slop for the swine masses.
If we want to get more specific then I’m more than willing to list all the particular problems that I see with the intrepid intellectual rebels and their fawning flocks here. But, fundamentally, the problem is that the mind-drovers here all think and behave in the same way as the powers-that-be that they criticize. It is these similarities that are worth pointing out. You have:
The same ideological cartelism
The obsession with the trappings of respectability provided by a society and its institution that don’t deserve any of our respect
Telling the peasant masses what they are already comfortable hearing
Selling the lie that the solution to the problems that we face is actually upholding an older version of the moral and ideological code that the powers that be fashioned to get us to the point where we are now and then jettisoned when they were ready for the next stage in their social engineering plan
Lack of a vision beyond puffing oneself up, standing athwart one’s blog and crying out, “I withdraw my consent!” followed by, “I have rights!” and, inevitably, “Am I being detained?”
I could go on.
Funny enough, the last time I took a shot at someone in an article, I got emails and comments and messages from people thinking that I was referring to them. This simply proves the age-old adage that “the guilty man flees when none pursueth”. And the guy I actually had in mind to rib had no idea that I was using him as an archetypical punching bag. This is because he has no moral code and therefore thinks he is a very moral person by default.
So I had no one in mind in particular when writing this screed. And if you think that what I wrote applies to you, well, consider it a cry coming from your own consciousness and change your behavior accordingly. Or just get mad at me for pricking your pride, that works too.
I can’t even differentiate all the whimsical names of the various stacks that I’ve perused over the months and the writers on them in my head, really. It’s all the same slop, with a few notable pearls thrown in here and there. I only try to engage with and collaborate with writers who dispense pearls of wisdom. And I am very grateful to anyone who is willing to pursue a cooperation strategy as opposed to a competition strategy together with me.
The rest are fair game as far as I am concerned.
Fuck ‘em.
99% of everything is shit, always has been, always will be. Music, art, scientific papers - applies everywhere. Best you can do is put out the best you can and try not to let the cacaphonous fluting of the mad idiot god Azathoth get to you.
Hi Rolo,
You have an uncanny ability to surprise. Your rant is thoughtful.
I used to read reddit; 12-15 years ago. Discussions were free although many descended in acrimony. Then in 2014-2015 the righteous started censoring ideas and many subreddits split, mostly on the progressive-reactionary fault line. Both sides censored the ideas of the opposing side. I left Reddit then.
The phenomenon prompted some thinking. Printed press used to be segmented : communist, socialist, liberal, conservative, christian, monarchist, reactionary papers flourished and appealed to their particular readership. You named the phenomenon selling mind slop. Why not. The free exchange of ideas occurred only on TV because channels were few and every faction wanted to be present, so they had to share the same broadcasts. Same thing on the internet : debating by educated people on Usenet in the 1980's and 1990's was integrated then split when computers became more powerful and the creation of newsgroups easier ; same on Digg in the 2000's and on Reddit circa 2008-2014.
Hence the scarceness of the medium drove the integration of the debate, even among the educated, not the love of free speech. It must be an inherently human proclivity. Being attached to free speech and debating is unnatural hence can be learned and sustained only by a small minority.