Category: To Be Filed

• I’m going to do less punching across and more punching up. That doesn’t mean that I agree with everything my fellow leftists are doing—after all, I’m still the Woke Contrarian—but I don’t think it’s a good use of my time anymore. I’m probably going to edit or private some of my older posts. Not because I’m complying in advance, but because I don’t think they reflect my current views.
• I am unspeakably angry at Trump for refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m still a critical supporter of Ukraine, but I’m still a supporter. Russia was wrong to invade. There’s no way around it, no matter what Trump says.
• We are going through an administrative coup led by Elon Musk. Democratic legislators, governors, and other politicians need to take it seriously and stop treating Trump, Musk, and their administration as though it were a normal Republican administration. The same goes for the legacy media.

…of Trumpers, tankies, TERFs, Tories, theocrats, and terrorists.

… I imagine the settler units from the Civilization games: people with their possessions on their backs, bending down to found Washington, London, or Kyoto. (Or the old-school covered wagons from Civ I.)

“Anticapitalist politic.” “That’s not my politic.” “I support a politic of decolonial liberation.” Why not just call it “politics,” “view,” “viewpoint,” “stance,” or just plain “opinion”? Or just replace it with -ism, like “anticapitalism” or “anticolonialism.” “Politic” as a singular is weird jargon.

(As an aside, what is the deal with “praxis” instead of “practices” or merely “actions”? Or just dropping the word altogether, as with “politic,” and replacing it with -ism, -ation, -ity, or some other suffix? For example, “liberatory praxis” instead of “liberation.”)

Is this some subconscious desire to sound more educated or woke if they write and talk like this? I don’t think most of it is intentional, but it makes me want to gouge my eyes out every time I read it.

(CW: child sexual abuse, incest, and rape)

1. Abolitionism or defunding the police. I’m no fan of prisons, policing, or psychiatric wards, but abolitionists need to be clear about what the alternatives are. People aren’t going to trust you if you think “restorative justice” is going to stop murderers, rapists, and child molesters. (I don’t think restorative justice would have stopped my paedophilic child-raping father from attacking me when I was a preschooler. There’s no restoring someone who destroys a child’s innocence.) Rapists, serial killers, and child molesters do not deserve to be in the community. Would you want Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, or Ted Bundy walking free to rape, murder, and torture more victims? I don’t, either. You need to present a solution for policing, forced psychiatric holds, and prisons that is free from logical holes and written in plain language. So far I haven’t seen anything of the sort, even though I’m sympathetic to their cause (with the exception of exceptionally violent criminals).
2. Decolonial/decolonise. I’ve complained about this term before, since it’s often used to defend authoritarian groups and regimes like Hamas, the Taliban, and North Korea. But it’s ambiguous: do you mean creating systems that include peoples who were or are formerly imperial subjects? Or do you mean that you want to kill everyone who belongs to the coloniser’s ethnic group, regardless of their individual political beliefs (Hamas)? Or are you trying to establish a new form of ethnic supremacy to replace the previous one (North Korea)?
3. Anticapitalism. What do you mean? Do you mean doing away with the market economy? Or private business? Or do you mean using barter instead of currency? For me, anticapitalism refers to socialist economic systems in which the general public (or a government representing the public) controls some or all of the means of production. Goods and services can be provided by governments, individuals, and unions, depending on the form of socialism. Socialism on its own doesn’t lead to equity (cases in point: USSR and my favourite whipping boy, North Korea).

If we’re going to have prisons at all, we don’t need sex segregation to keep victims of rape or sexual abuse safe (I am a survivor of sexual abuse and rape myself). Instead…

1. Refrain from imprisoning nonviolent or mildly violent offenders, including low-level drug dealing. The broken-windows model of policing does not work. Instead, use alternative methods of nonviolent offenders from society—for example, house arrest.
2. Instead of using assigned sex at birth, or even gender identity, separate prisoners based on the severity of the crime. A serial killer is a serial killer, no matter what’s between their legs.

You are the mean, the median, the mode. You are average. You are not unique or special for being a man who is sexually attracted to women, someone who cannot see the difference between sex and gender, a white person in Europe or a country settled by Europeans. You may as well brag that you got average scores on standardised tests at school, or that you drive a Toyota or an Opel, that you shop at discount stores, and are neither poor nor rich. That you have a pulse. That you speak a language. That you shit, eat, sleep, and will eventually be six feet under.

In short, you are just like (nearly) everyone else.

Averageness as heterodoxy is nothing but a swindle. It is an Orwellian distortion of what it means to tackle the Big Questions. It is a way for dreary old bores to pretend they’re different by ostracising the truly different. You are nothing more than the primary-school bully who picks on the misfit kids—or you’re one of the misfit kids trying to overcompensate.

The rabid defence of social conformity is not and never will be heterodoxy. It is orthodoxy, and you are afraid of having the existing social order challenged. Call yourself a conservative, call yourself a traditionalist. But don’t call yourself heterodox. There’s nothing strange about fitting in.