Algorithmic social media platforms are an incubator for performative histrionics & help fuel a pernicious cancel culture that hijacks the normative capacity to experience fear, anxiety, & guilt.
I spent a long time in progressive spaces. I have written before about the forces that shape this kind of activism. Disorganized thinking has derailed many activist projects. Alinsky's title, "Rules for Radicals," is aimed squarely at the instinct of so many ardent young idealists to shoot themselves in the foot. "The left" has no central nervous function or immune system that says "defund cops is political poison" to protect the whole. People with no larger responsibility than "owning the man" don't think about third and fourth-order consequences of the visuals they create or the demands they make. This is how radical groups like the Weathermen eroded the liberal alliance created in the 1950s by the end of the 1970s. Those of us who are old enough to remember Reagan being elected, and what America was like at the time, understand the consequences of this spiral.
Exactly. That old adage about the right falling in line, while the left demands to fall in love? It's the basic challenge for any Democrat in the USA. Yes, Republicans love their Republicans, but even Trump will prove interchangeable enough. They are *organized,* and that is why they keep winning even when they lose.
One might aver that the difficult personal integration that mature spirituality entails is difficult to recapitulate at the merely atomic individual level, as if the average person might suddenly discover within them the stoic truths of Marcus Aurelius... This of course rarely happens, though the human longing may be there for greatness more widely than cynics think.
There is an inborn grandiosity in us each which it is the task of adolescence and then adulthood to progressively overcome. The on-campus Marxist fusion of "the social is political" has inflated students right when they should be running into structures that might discipline their impulses and chthonian chaos. This is a deeply pernicious form of intellectual abuse.
A university that reviles both itself and the West -- having been inseminated deeply by the life-hating Marxist strain now predominating -- teaches students to explicitly reject structure in society per se and meaning in life per se, which is a dangerous cocktail of the purest nihilism.
This is what Paglia meant by "Happy are those times when religion is strong." The great challenge is how do we reintroduce a sense of the sacred and transcendent now that organized religion is gone? Most will not become philosopher kings...
While these are the deeper, grander questions, the immediate question of getting control of our governance and wresting control from the hard left is now preeminent.
The public is going to have to rapidly regain respect for law and order, disciplining wayward students (both in primary school and college), curtailing gender experiments with children, and a sort of awkward but just-doable painful discussion about how racial consciousness of a healthy sort does not entail the toxin now being poured down the throats of students of every color, but a different and more sophisticated rapprochement with an imperfect past must instead be made.
Organized religion is not gone; the Catholic Church endures, however diminished in its human element -- even from within. And it will endure until the end of time. What needs to be done is to restore the Church and evangelize.
A lapsed Catholic, I share a warm devotion to the Church despite no longer being able to subscribe its ontological claims, having become a modern "spiritual but not religious" agnostic who doesn't find faith when I search deeply and well within.
But I don't take the Hitchens/Dawkins view of religion; I take the Paglia one. Though an atheist, she respects it deeply and the many things it gets right.
An interesting question arises whether there can be an ecumenism or rapprochement between the Church and moral unbelievers. It's a fascinating but understated vagary of Catholic teaching that doubt per se is not sin, and there's a reading of Christ's invocation of the psalm on the Cross that has him experiencing the doubt of the atheist. (Bishop Fulton Sheen once advanced this thesis.)
So then the interesting question is what kind of dialogue might emerge between Catholic theologians and those spiritual-but-not-religious moderns who recognize the dangers of nihilism and moral relativism but can't buy into the full catechism of Christian teachings. Could a vanguard be forged between these two groups of good, sincere people?
I don't know the answer, but I feel like the West must unite to meet the demonic challenge before us... Marxism is the enemy, both within and (far more commonly) outside the Church.
As someone who has spent more time staring at a computer screen than in bed and on a couch combined over the past thirty years, I see it as a threefold problem.
1:
People are flocking to the internet and social media not just for entertainment but socializing. Television provides a space where someone’s ideas regarding something had been restricted to people around them while watching. With every camera in every pocket able to upload, now they are the stars of their own reality TV shows able to vocalize their poorly thought-out ideas about a reality they barely comprehend. COVID lockdowns propelled this transition.
Social media has created new styles of communication that have both positive and negative effects on human behavior and society. On one hand, social media has empowered its citizens toward solidarity through collective action, such as raising awareness of social issues, organizing protests, and supporting causes. On the other hand, social media has also facilitated the spread of false information, sensationalized content, and polarized opinions that can undermine democracy, erode trust, and fuel conflict.
Social media has changed how we interact with each other and ourselves. While social media can help us stay connected with our friends and family across distances, it can also reduce our face-to-face time with our close relational partners and increase our feelings of loneliness and isolation. Social media can also affect our self-esteem, mental health, and well-being by exposing us to unrealistic standards of beauty, success, and happiness that can make us feel inadequate or dissatisfied with our lives.
2:
Education and indoctrination are two different ways of teaching that have different goals and methods. Education is the process of receiving knowledge, skills, habits, and theories using methods like teaching and discussion in formal and informal settings. Education is objective, meaning it does not favor one system of thought over another. Education encourages students to think critically and independently, to question what they learn, and to explore different perspectives.
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, beliefs, and attitudes of certain philosophies. Indoctrination is subjective, meaning it elevates one system of thought over another. Indoctrination discourages students from thinking critically and independently, from questioning what they learn, and from exploring different perspectives. Indoctrination aims to make students accept a certain worldview without evidence or reasoning.
The difference between education and indoctrination is important because it affects how students develop their cognitive abilities, their values, and their identities. Education fosters intellectual growth, curiosity, creativity, diversity, and democracy. Indoctrination hinders intellectual growth, curiosity, creativity, diversity, and democracy. Education prepares students for a complex and changing world. Indoctrination prepares students for a rigid and dogmatic world.
3:
One of the challenges of using the internet as a source of information is to avoid internet bias. Internet bias refers to the tendency of some websites or platforms to present false logic or misleading information that confirms their own views or agendas. Internet bias is primarily due to politicization of Big Tech, Big social media, and Mass Media utilizing censorship, content editing, moderation, and cancel culture to mold opinions. Opinions get molded due to politics, personal recognition (Clout) social acceptance, and nefarious purposes by more intelligent actors using anti-racist virtue signals to propose racist results such as BLM, Woke, or Transgender while lacking any definition or redefining words.
Diversity for instance today is referred to as something without substance, of color not ethnicity, of gender not sex, of sexual preference as part of an identity which normally would have no business being in a civilized conversation. Diversity can mean hundreds of things and is what defines every person as an individual. Ideas, ethnicity, culture, geography, passions goals and more.
Through censorship a rational person meets lunacy with ridicule and the cancel culture comes to rescue the virtue signaling in a bipolar world of redecided and predetermined sides. Left Right Democrat Republican Straight Other lacking context of right and wrong with virtue signals over morality so there is no shame when there should be and anyone who shames someone that deserves it is singled out. Simply stating you are “Woke” if you are not Black (Using their vernacular instead of African American) is inherently racist because it’s cultural appropriation using an Ebonics term.
To avoid internet bias, one should always check the reliability and credibility of the sources they use. They should also look for evidence that supports or contradicts their claims. They should also be aware of their own biases and how they might influence their interpretation of information. By doing so they can ensure that they are not misled by false logic or misleading information on the internet. But due to problem number two with education most younger adults cannot do this.
Many people are being offered solutions to things that cannot be changed. For example, some claim that they can alter the weather or modify one's biological characteristics. However, these are futile attempts to fix what is not broken. One should accept the natural conditions of life, such as the weather, one's birth, sex, and ethnicity. These are immutable aspects of reality that no one can change.
To tactically dissolve the three-fold problem, pull from the bottom up. Start with 3, then 2, and eventually 1 will right itself as people are allowed to socialize without social media or move on to a new interactive platform such as the Metaverse. Which has its own problems to tackle later and if it maintains social environments such as social media spheres like VR-Chat should legally require a separation between age groups by generation for group socializing.
I spent a little more time writing this than intended, but it is a very important topic, and I hope someone of merit reads and utilizes this information.
It's not just education and indoctrination. There is considerable effort made to identify student views, assessed in how well they coincide with the socialist worldview, and with "remedial" classes imposed on students both to see if divergence can be corrected and to isolate and punish more determined dissidents. There is a well organized and determined effort to create "safe spaces" where the prevailing socialist ideology may not be brought into question, while simultaneously preventing any non-socialist groups from gaining any sort of foothold. When this is unavoidable, such groups are ceaselessly attacked as "racist" and "fascist" or otherwise hounded. This is especially applicable to college Christian clubs of any sort, even those who try to be friendly with and accepting towards these Leftist factions. This literally includes forcing them out of an actual space, like a club office, that some of these groups have occupied for decades, and then directly replacing them with the headquarters of a new pro-socialist group.
The nonsensical nature of some of these proposals appears to be quite intentional. These radicals are deliberately trying to provoke controversy and outrage to test the loyalty of their "allies." They neither seek intellectual acceptance based on logical argument nor tolerate any sort of dissent for any reason, but rather demand unquestioning agreement and lockstep obedience. Isolating and disposing of thoughtful resistance before it can become organized seems to be one of their most important objectives.
I have commented on several platforms that the internet is being turned into a safe space AOL for children. Technology companies are no longer focused on technology but focused on their political agendas surrounding the socialist and communist movements. There seems to be a larger problem, perhaps mental acuity or stability, where causality is no longer understood, because if Big Tech gets there way with this type of movement they will inevitably go bankrupt. I know the breaking of action and reaction is commonplace with people suffering from sociopathy and psychopathy, but the issues seem to have spread beyond these afflictions.
The driving force is the oligarchy under the Trilateral and WEF twisting information and redefining words to promote evil ideals with woke virtue signals.
I covered more of that under section 3.
They are promising to fix the impossible with lies and virtue signals and combined with the degradation of the educational systems the average person is not able to critically and independently reason the end result of any proposal. I'm not sure if you saw the read more under section 3 and approach to unravel this trend, but it begins with unraveling this "Safe Space" ideal in what equates to a public place. Today’s youth is so unfamiliar with real hardship they believe words are equivalent to physical violence.
I started a new Substack on this because the damage is going to be much further reaching with the advancements in AI and how it functions. You’re welcome to read through it as I do not intend on making any money from this project and am still debating weather or not to continue it since hope for actual change or future of our species is fading from my mind and recognize humanity is at a very dangerous fork in the road for both society and technology.
Yep. All this affect needs to be discharged somehow.
Most other nations have issues with their neighboring countries, i. e. external scape goats.
It feels like Americans need to continually persecute one another since they can't take it out on their neighbors (not much of a threat).
In short, young people need to have their own hero's journey (i.e. infusing their life with meaning) and this is how they do it these days.
What can I say, it looks like the perfect representation of the drama triangle in Transactional Analysis: victim - persecuter - rescuer, provoking one another into third degree psychological games.
I repeatedly find myself returning to this article over and over again.
Now here’s a story for you:
A little over a month ago a woman cycling in a so-called “protected bike lane” in San Francisco took a video of herself acting utterly hysterical over an ambulance parked in the her path. Instead of simply going around the stopped vehicle she decided to make a video and share it online - naturally on Bird App.
The incident is covered here along with a transcript and link to the video itself.
It turns out the individual had a history of using her social media presence to “stage” similar events including a somewhat fake arrest.
Despite her plea that car drivers were consistently endangering her life, it was revealed that she posted video from a few years ago of her driving her car.
This week activist media publication Streetsblog (see last article for a deep dive on their background) invited her to tell her story. Streetsblog, like many of the other examples of media “elevated” the pathological victim ignoring her past as a motorist who used her mobile phone to film video while driving.
In truth these organizations snuff out actual locals and experts in cycling safety. There’s a lot of grift opportunities out there in the greater “urbanist” domain. Wokism has also completely parasitized the traditional movements.
Streetsblog, like many “progressive” causes, claims they’re “for the people” (so long as they don’t drive cars) but are really backed by large non-profits and billionaires pushing Successor Ideology dogma.
Consider the scenario that this is not a random occurrence, that the similarity to the social crisis of the late 1960s in the West is not a simple coincidence, and that very intelligent and malicious socialists have as a deliberate intention to undermine and destroy the social underpinnings of European and US culture. Consider a Marxist ideology that posits the creation of social chaos to achieve the conditions necessary for a violent socialist revolution. Imagine a "woke" Leninist vanguard who have been studying the errors of their last seditionist insurrection for the last few decades, and have decided to use the new opportunities provided by globalization and social media to make a new attempt.
Note that this new iteration is not about simple nihilism. The easiest method of determining this is to propose some antagonist attitude towards socialism in a supposedly unrelated discussion, such as for example how to proceed regarding trans acceptance and the proper role of new pronouns. My experience is that those who profess to be trans advocates become even more hostile and angry when socialism is challenged than when their propositions regarding the LGBTQIA+ community are questioned. One would expect a neutral or dismissive attitude from activists who are exclusively motivated by trans rights issues, but this is clearly not the case. Likewise the similar hostility to those who have chosen to detransition is most suspicious. The same hypersensitivity to any criticism of socialism applies to advocates of Critical Race Theory, and pundits like Ibram Kendi have openly linked the attack on "whiteness" to an attack on capitalism. Black critics of socialism are again not protected from the ire of such people.
Great article but it would help if you didn't use the new favorite woke word "performative." It's vomit-inducing. Why not use "theatrical" or "contrived"?
I spent a long time in progressive spaces. I have written before about the forces that shape this kind of activism. Disorganized thinking has derailed many activist projects. Alinsky's title, "Rules for Radicals," is aimed squarely at the instinct of so many ardent young idealists to shoot themselves in the foot. "The left" has no central nervous function or immune system that says "defund cops is political poison" to protect the whole. People with no larger responsibility than "owning the man" don't think about third and fourth-order consequences of the visuals they create or the demands they make. This is how radical groups like the Weathermen eroded the liberal alliance created in the 1950s by the end of the 1970s. Those of us who are old enough to remember Reagan being elected, and what America was like at the time, understand the consequences of this spiral.
The tyranny of structurelessness.
Exactly. That old adage about the right falling in line, while the left demands to fall in love? It's the basic challenge for any Democrat in the USA. Yes, Republicans love their Republicans, but even Trump will prove interchangeable enough. They are *organized,* and that is why they keep winning even when they lose.
Excellent as always.
One might aver that the difficult personal integration that mature spirituality entails is difficult to recapitulate at the merely atomic individual level, as if the average person might suddenly discover within them the stoic truths of Marcus Aurelius... This of course rarely happens, though the human longing may be there for greatness more widely than cynics think.
There is an inborn grandiosity in us each which it is the task of adolescence and then adulthood to progressively overcome. The on-campus Marxist fusion of "the social is political" has inflated students right when they should be running into structures that might discipline their impulses and chthonian chaos. This is a deeply pernicious form of intellectual abuse.
A university that reviles both itself and the West -- having been inseminated deeply by the life-hating Marxist strain now predominating -- teaches students to explicitly reject structure in society per se and meaning in life per se, which is a dangerous cocktail of the purest nihilism.
This is what Paglia meant by "Happy are those times when religion is strong." The great challenge is how do we reintroduce a sense of the sacred and transcendent now that organized religion is gone? Most will not become philosopher kings...
While these are the deeper, grander questions, the immediate question of getting control of our governance and wresting control from the hard left is now preeminent.
The public is going to have to rapidly regain respect for law and order, disciplining wayward students (both in primary school and college), curtailing gender experiments with children, and a sort of awkward but just-doable painful discussion about how racial consciousness of a healthy sort does not entail the toxin now being poured down the throats of students of every color, but a different and more sophisticated rapprochement with an imperfect past must instead be made.
Organized religion is not gone; the Catholic Church endures, however diminished in its human element -- even from within. And it will endure until the end of time. What needs to be done is to restore the Church and evangelize.
A lapsed Catholic, I share a warm devotion to the Church despite no longer being able to subscribe its ontological claims, having become a modern "spiritual but not religious" agnostic who doesn't find faith when I search deeply and well within.
But I don't take the Hitchens/Dawkins view of religion; I take the Paglia one. Though an atheist, she respects it deeply and the many things it gets right.
An interesting question arises whether there can be an ecumenism or rapprochement between the Church and moral unbelievers. It's a fascinating but understated vagary of Catholic teaching that doubt per se is not sin, and there's a reading of Christ's invocation of the psalm on the Cross that has him experiencing the doubt of the atheist. (Bishop Fulton Sheen once advanced this thesis.)
So then the interesting question is what kind of dialogue might emerge between Catholic theologians and those spiritual-but-not-religious moderns who recognize the dangers of nihilism and moral relativism but can't buy into the full catechism of Christian teachings. Could a vanguard be forged between these two groups of good, sincere people?
I don't know the answer, but I feel like the West must unite to meet the demonic challenge before us... Marxism is the enemy, both within and (far more commonly) outside the Church.
The work of Rieff explores these issues in great depth.
Important article! I'll be talking about this in a video in the next few days.
Thank you! Please let me know when you discuss. I would like to amplify the video.
It's Cluster B and its associated effects all the way down, just like turtles.
As someone who has spent more time staring at a computer screen than in bed and on a couch combined over the past thirty years, I see it as a threefold problem.
1:
People are flocking to the internet and social media not just for entertainment but socializing. Television provides a space where someone’s ideas regarding something had been restricted to people around them while watching. With every camera in every pocket able to upload, now they are the stars of their own reality TV shows able to vocalize their poorly thought-out ideas about a reality they barely comprehend. COVID lockdowns propelled this transition.
Social media has created new styles of communication that have both positive and negative effects on human behavior and society. On one hand, social media has empowered its citizens toward solidarity through collective action, such as raising awareness of social issues, organizing protests, and supporting causes. On the other hand, social media has also facilitated the spread of false information, sensationalized content, and polarized opinions that can undermine democracy, erode trust, and fuel conflict.
Social media has changed how we interact with each other and ourselves. While social media can help us stay connected with our friends and family across distances, it can also reduce our face-to-face time with our close relational partners and increase our feelings of loneliness and isolation. Social media can also affect our self-esteem, mental health, and well-being by exposing us to unrealistic standards of beauty, success, and happiness that can make us feel inadequate or dissatisfied with our lives.
2:
Education and indoctrination are two different ways of teaching that have different goals and methods. Education is the process of receiving knowledge, skills, habits, and theories using methods like teaching and discussion in formal and informal settings. Education is objective, meaning it does not favor one system of thought over another. Education encourages students to think critically and independently, to question what they learn, and to explore different perspectives.
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, beliefs, and attitudes of certain philosophies. Indoctrination is subjective, meaning it elevates one system of thought over another. Indoctrination discourages students from thinking critically and independently, from questioning what they learn, and from exploring different perspectives. Indoctrination aims to make students accept a certain worldview without evidence or reasoning.
The difference between education and indoctrination is important because it affects how students develop their cognitive abilities, their values, and their identities. Education fosters intellectual growth, curiosity, creativity, diversity, and democracy. Indoctrination hinders intellectual growth, curiosity, creativity, diversity, and democracy. Education prepares students for a complex and changing world. Indoctrination prepares students for a rigid and dogmatic world.
3:
One of the challenges of using the internet as a source of information is to avoid internet bias. Internet bias refers to the tendency of some websites or platforms to present false logic or misleading information that confirms their own views or agendas. Internet bias is primarily due to politicization of Big Tech, Big social media, and Mass Media utilizing censorship, content editing, moderation, and cancel culture to mold opinions. Opinions get molded due to politics, personal recognition (Clout) social acceptance, and nefarious purposes by more intelligent actors using anti-racist virtue signals to propose racist results such as BLM, Woke, or Transgender while lacking any definition or redefining words.
Diversity for instance today is referred to as something without substance, of color not ethnicity, of gender not sex, of sexual preference as part of an identity which normally would have no business being in a civilized conversation. Diversity can mean hundreds of things and is what defines every person as an individual. Ideas, ethnicity, culture, geography, passions goals and more.
Through censorship a rational person meets lunacy with ridicule and the cancel culture comes to rescue the virtue signaling in a bipolar world of redecided and predetermined sides. Left Right Democrat Republican Straight Other lacking context of right and wrong with virtue signals over morality so there is no shame when there should be and anyone who shames someone that deserves it is singled out. Simply stating you are “Woke” if you are not Black (Using their vernacular instead of African American) is inherently racist because it’s cultural appropriation using an Ebonics term.
To avoid internet bias, one should always check the reliability and credibility of the sources they use. They should also look for evidence that supports or contradicts their claims. They should also be aware of their own biases and how they might influence their interpretation of information. By doing so they can ensure that they are not misled by false logic or misleading information on the internet. But due to problem number two with education most younger adults cannot do this.
Many people are being offered solutions to things that cannot be changed. For example, some claim that they can alter the weather or modify one's biological characteristics. However, these are futile attempts to fix what is not broken. One should accept the natural conditions of life, such as the weather, one's birth, sex, and ethnicity. These are immutable aspects of reality that no one can change.
To tactically dissolve the three-fold problem, pull from the bottom up. Start with 3, then 2, and eventually 1 will right itself as people are allowed to socialize without social media or move on to a new interactive platform such as the Metaverse. Which has its own problems to tackle later and if it maintains social environments such as social media spheres like VR-Chat should legally require a separation between age groups by generation for group socializing.
I spent a little more time writing this than intended, but it is a very important topic, and I hope someone of merit reads and utilizes this information.
It's not just education and indoctrination. There is considerable effort made to identify student views, assessed in how well they coincide with the socialist worldview, and with "remedial" classes imposed on students both to see if divergence can be corrected and to isolate and punish more determined dissidents. There is a well organized and determined effort to create "safe spaces" where the prevailing socialist ideology may not be brought into question, while simultaneously preventing any non-socialist groups from gaining any sort of foothold. When this is unavoidable, such groups are ceaselessly attacked as "racist" and "fascist" or otherwise hounded. This is especially applicable to college Christian clubs of any sort, even those who try to be friendly with and accepting towards these Leftist factions. This literally includes forcing them out of an actual space, like a club office, that some of these groups have occupied for decades, and then directly replacing them with the headquarters of a new pro-socialist group.
The nonsensical nature of some of these proposals appears to be quite intentional. These radicals are deliberately trying to provoke controversy and outrage to test the loyalty of their "allies." They neither seek intellectual acceptance based on logical argument nor tolerate any sort of dissent for any reason, but rather demand unquestioning agreement and lockstep obedience. Isolating and disposing of thoughtful resistance before it can become organized seems to be one of their most important objectives.
I have commented on several platforms that the internet is being turned into a safe space AOL for children. Technology companies are no longer focused on technology but focused on their political agendas surrounding the socialist and communist movements. There seems to be a larger problem, perhaps mental acuity or stability, where causality is no longer understood, because if Big Tech gets there way with this type of movement they will inevitably go bankrupt. I know the breaking of action and reaction is commonplace with people suffering from sociopathy and psychopathy, but the issues seem to have spread beyond these afflictions.
The driving force is the oligarchy under the Trilateral and WEF twisting information and redefining words to promote evil ideals with woke virtue signals.
I covered more of that under section 3.
They are promising to fix the impossible with lies and virtue signals and combined with the degradation of the educational systems the average person is not able to critically and independently reason the end result of any proposal. I'm not sure if you saw the read more under section 3 and approach to unravel this trend, but it begins with unraveling this "Safe Space" ideal in what equates to a public place. Today’s youth is so unfamiliar with real hardship they believe words are equivalent to physical violence.
I started a new Substack on this because the damage is going to be much further reaching with the advancements in AI and how it functions. You’re welcome to read through it as I do not intend on making any money from this project and am still debating weather or not to continue it since hope for actual change or future of our species is fading from my mind and recognize humanity is at a very dangerous fork in the road for both society and technology.
Yep. All this affect needs to be discharged somehow.
Most other nations have issues with their neighboring countries, i. e. external scape goats.
It feels like Americans need to continually persecute one another since they can't take it out on their neighbors (not much of a threat).
In short, young people need to have their own hero's journey (i.e. infusing their life with meaning) and this is how they do it these days.
What can I say, it looks like the perfect representation of the drama triangle in Transactional Analysis: victim - persecuter - rescuer, provoking one another into third degree psychological games.
JD,
I repeatedly find myself returning to this article over and over again.
Now here’s a story for you:
A little over a month ago a woman cycling in a so-called “protected bike lane” in San Francisco took a video of herself acting utterly hysterical over an ambulance parked in the her path. Instead of simply going around the stopped vehicle she decided to make a video and share it online - naturally on Bird App.
The incident is covered here along with a transcript and link to the video itself.
https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/just-stop-killing-us
It turns out the individual had a history of using her social media presence to “stage” similar events including a somewhat fake arrest.
Despite her plea that car drivers were consistently endangering her life, it was revealed that she posted video from a few years ago of her driving her car.
This week activist media publication Streetsblog (see last article for a deep dive on their background) invited her to tell her story. Streetsblog, like many of the other examples of media “elevated” the pathological victim ignoring her past as a motorist who used her mobile phone to film video while driving.
In truth these organizations snuff out actual locals and experts in cycling safety. There’s a lot of grift opportunities out there in the greater “urbanist” domain. Wokism has also completely parasitized the traditional movements.
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2023/01/31/entitled-bike-lane-lady-speaks-out/
Streetsblog, like many “progressive” causes, claims they’re “for the people” (so long as they don’t drive cars) but are really backed by large non-profits and billionaires pushing Successor Ideology dogma.
https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/the-streetsblog-files-part-i-of
Bruh...nailed it
Consider the scenario that this is not a random occurrence, that the similarity to the social crisis of the late 1960s in the West is not a simple coincidence, and that very intelligent and malicious socialists have as a deliberate intention to undermine and destroy the social underpinnings of European and US culture. Consider a Marxist ideology that posits the creation of social chaos to achieve the conditions necessary for a violent socialist revolution. Imagine a "woke" Leninist vanguard who have been studying the errors of their last seditionist insurrection for the last few decades, and have decided to use the new opportunities provided by globalization and social media to make a new attempt.
Note that this new iteration is not about simple nihilism. The easiest method of determining this is to propose some antagonist attitude towards socialism in a supposedly unrelated discussion, such as for example how to proceed regarding trans acceptance and the proper role of new pronouns. My experience is that those who profess to be trans advocates become even more hostile and angry when socialism is challenged than when their propositions regarding the LGBTQIA+ community are questioned. One would expect a neutral or dismissive attitude from activists who are exclusively motivated by trans rights issues, but this is clearly not the case. Likewise the similar hostility to those who have chosen to detransition is most suspicious. The same hypersensitivity to any criticism of socialism applies to advocates of Critical Race Theory, and pundits like Ibram Kendi have openly linked the attack on "whiteness" to an attack on capitalism. Black critics of socialism are again not protected from the ire of such people.
Great article but it would help if you didn't use the new favorite woke word "performative." It's vomit-inducing. Why not use "theatrical" or "contrived"?