Musk's Twitter

I'm hearing of a handful of people reporting that they've been unbanned on Twitter already in the wake of the takeover, which honestly seems awfully fast. I wouldn't have expected any administrative changes to have filtered down already. Of course, these unbannings are for very mild anti-progs commenting on pop culture and entertainment more than anything else, as near as I can tell. People like Drunk 3PO and other lightweights. I still believe that Musk is very much a product of and embedded in the globalist "neo-liberal world order". It's long been my observation, as well as the observation of people smarter and more connected than me, that the "neo-liberal world order" has trailing edge gatekeepers; i.e., people who pretend to be on your side against the evil of the prog-masters of the neoliberal world order, but who really are there to gatekeep the right edge of acceptable opinion and keep out those who actually have substantive or significant points to make against it. I doubt very much that Elon Musk is really a free speech absolutist, or that Twitter will become a free speech bastion in reality. What is happening with Twitter is that the neoliberal tyrant order is losing control of the conversation on the right, because they've been bleeding out of Twitter for years into apps like Gab. They tried to come up with gatekept alternatives like Parler or Rumble. I think those weren't really taking off, however, so making Twitter less toxic so that they could lure these disaffected back into the kept-man plantation is the new strategy.

I say strategy, which implies that there's some mastermind making these decisions, but I suspect that all of this is happening much more organically. Many have pointed out that the Left is not made up of automaton minions of some all-powerful ubiquitous mastermind and is more like a school of fish. Big movers and shakers can send ripples through the school, but that kind of control is imprecise at best, and its actual execution is more organic rather than directed. A great example of this imprecision is the MeToo movement, which was meant to amplify lies and gossip about Donald Trump and discredit him, but which actually ended up canceling a whole bunch of leftists and did nothing whatsoever to Donald Trump. In fact, when too many people started to notice that somewhere between 70-80% of the MeToo canceled were either Jewish or partly Jewish and full of Jewish connections, it got remarkably quiet real fast. It's like the "shut it down, the goyim know!" meme came true on the MeToo movement in real time right before our eyes. Not having accomplished what the MeToo movement was supposed to have accomplished, the movers and shakers hunkered down and stopped amplifying the signal, letting the movement die without having accomplished anything other than taking down creepy entertainment and news people like Al Franken, Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein as targets of "friendly fire."

But I suspect that Musk may well be part of a strategy. He's no friend to the Right; he's a globalist tool and always has been. Not to imply that he isn't a very clever man who hasn't managed to make himself wealthy by providing the globalists with what the globalists want, but in a freer society, his position wouldn't be what it is. He's been propped up if not outright created by the globalist machine, and his real talent seems to be more along the lines of self-promotion and manipulation of the bureaucracy's money-milking systems than anything else. Which, again, doesn't mean that he doesn't also have a talent for other things, merely that those two talents are the most salient with regards to his success.

I like Vox Day's statement on the question (as I often do. He's not as eloquent or articulate as the Z-man, but his observations are often more piercing nonetheless. Although I think that they sometimes require "translation" by someone else into a more articulate talking point.)

Furthermore, I note that the Enlightenment value of consequence-free freedoms of speech and expression is neither a Christian moral value nor a societal virtue. Societal virtue is determined by qualitative measures, not quantitative ones.

A society or an institution that permits everything is better described as licentious, not free, while a society or an institution that bans blasphemy, obscenity, and vulgarity is fundamentally different than one that bans the existence of opinions about historical events, sexual behaviors, and certain nations.

Musk’s faction is almost certainly more libertarian and licentious than the social justice faction, but it’s entirely possible that, given his predilection for dabbling with women enamored of spiritual darkness, that it is even more deeply wicked.

Or, to put it another way, the freest of societies are those that reject Satan and his ideology. The reason for this is that the consequence of sin is always being chained and enslaved to Satan. There's no such thing as freedom from consequences, at least not in the long run. Those who preach freedom without consequences are liars, and they are laying a trap constructed by Satan himself for you.

In the case of free speech, the consequences may even be more broad than that. You may well be free to say something that is offensive to the majority of people in your society, but you are not free from the consequences of having offended the majority of people in your society, and the cost to you personally for having done that may be (and probably should be) significant, even if your comments are not sinful. The converse of that, of course, is that if the majority of society is offended by the truth, then you live in a wicked society that is ripe for destruction and you need to insulate yourself from the coming storm as best you can.

But free speech doesn't mean what either most people on the right or on the left seem to think that it means. Reading the actual Bill of Rights once again is, of course, the correct answer to understand the rights and privileges that are the inheritance of all True Americans. 

To get back to the main point of the article; why would I want to join Twitter, and who would I want to interact with on that platform? Not sure why conservatives are so eager to engage with liberals and gain their approval. As I said yesterday (or the day before, maybe) the liberal mindset and liberal philosophy is a strange and toxic blend of arrogance and self-loathing. There's little to be gained by engaging with that, even if the platform allows for it. Gab already offers everything that conservatives say that they want, with one exception: access to liberals, since by and large, liberals have avoided it because they can't handle the exposure to real conservative thought without an amenable authority being there to ban it from their sight for sending them to the hysterical fainting couch. Conservatives should check their attitudes; they seem as likely as liberals to demand access to their opponents so that they can go mess with them. Not sure why. If you want to talk politics with random people on the internet and you're not insane, just go on Gab. If you want to talk politics with minor celebrities and personalities on the internet, then Twitter may be for you, but you probably want to ask yourself why you feel the need to engage directly with such people. Do you crave approval and attention from people who aren't just "random?" If so, why? Personally, I have little interest in Gab or Twitter either one. I'll post my thoughts on my online journal; here, or more frequently on one of my other blogs that's specifically geared towards that kind of discussion about politics, social issues and especially religious issues. And if I get no engagement, or even nobody at all who reads it, that's fine, because I'm not doing it for them anyway.

I often find interacting with conservatives more tiresome than interacting with liberals. With liberals, I already anticipate some insane emotional outburst that has no content and no value. With conservatives, I'm often disappointed with the death grip with which they cling to stupid ideas that were radical liberal ideas a generation or two ago but which they now believe are the bedrock of conservative principles for some reason. Conservatives often posture about being more logical, more rational and more reasonable, but in my experience, they are often just as likely if not even moreso than liberals to cling to ideas that have been obviously disproved. If they were so logical, rational and reasonable they would have long ago abandoned them. Or at least, if they're not aware of the arguments against them, they'd go find out about it before reacting emotionally and saying something stupid. The ideas that they cling to are different than those that liberals cling to, but in some cases they aren't really more beneficial to society or more "friendly", although they are usually hostile to Western Civilization in more subtle ways than the overt hatred of liberals. But the point is that the posture of rationality and reasonableness is really more of a posture than a reality. 

And this is, in many ways, the more insidious damage done by the trailing edge of gatekeepers who pretend to be on the right but who are really just the trailing edge of the left. They've created this Pavlovian ecosystem that shuts out genuine truth in favor of some kind of kowtowing to the "moral authority" of the left. The reality is that the old labels of conservative and right-wing and Republican vs liberal and left-wing and Democrat mean very little these days, since both sides have abandoned what they claim to stand for and are wandering about unmoored from anything that anyone would recognize from a generation ago, or even just a few years ago. The Z-man's latest post describes this phenomena in detail, but the reality, as I allude to just a little bit above is that the only difference that really matters is aligning yourself with God and the Truth, or against it with Satan and the Rebellion. Everything else can be reduced to this, ultimately. It's the only divide that actually has any substance.

And how can you tell which socio-political positions are aligned with which of these two great sides? As Christ himself said, "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruits; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." (Matthew 7:15-20 KJV) By that standard, liberals are proudly on the side of Satan, because the fruits of liberalism is more sin, misery and nihilistic destruction of what was once a healthy and reasonably righteous nation. But conservatives have been tempted or fooled into being on the side of Satan too, especially as they've embraced libertarian consumerism instead of actually standing up for morality and demanding that society be moral; their embrace of permissiveness has made them unable and then ultimately unwilling to stand up for morality, and they often now embrace wickedness as the inevitable side effect of freedom. And what happens when there is no ideology that stands for Rightness and Truth and rejects Satan? I dunno, maybe we should ask the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Anyway, a selection from the Z-man:

The fact is, America, and maybe the West in general, has entered a post-ideological phase in which there is no logic behind the old labels. What passes for radicalism is nothing more than bourgeois neuroticism. There remains a vague sense of a promised land after the struggle, but that is just a carryover from the past. They never bother to describe what comes after the revolution. No one even bothers to ask them to explain the point of their agitations. There is no point.

The other side is just as lost. It is trite to say it now, but conservatives have conserved nothing and they have no desire to conserve anything. Of course, the reason they have no desire to conserve anything is there is nothing left to conserve. It goes beyond the practical, however, as you see in the National Review post. The point of politics is to shape public morality. Politics is about deciding right and wrong. If your politics leads you to abandon that debate, then you have no reason to exist.

Politics in America have become unmoored from reason. The Left is simply in favor of chaos for the sake of chaos. Post-Marx culturalism promised a new era for mankind if they seized control of the centers of cultural production. Instead, they got what the old Marxists feared came after capitalism. That is a society devoid of morality and dominated by transactionalism. The end of the cult-Marx rainbow is sterile materialism and pointless consumerism.

In such an age there is no place for a defense of order, so there is no reason for the old-style conservatism to exist. Why would any sane person want to defend this order against the violence of the Left? This is the age of post-Marx culturalism, so if they are unhappy with their creation, let them destroy it. Maybe what comes next is the chance to build anew. In other words, the alternative to the modern Left is not conservatism but culture jamming and accelerationism.

Where we find ourselves is beyond the maps of the known world. Like the first ships that went over the horizon, the old rules and lessons of Western politics are not much of a guide in navigating the present. Like the basics of sailing, the basics of politics remain the same, but the purpose is what demands the reimagination of the effort. To continue the analogy, we have not reached the new world, but we can no longer make out the old world either. We are in the great political dead space.