The Sewer of Anti-Discourse Discourse
get in the mind-channel, nazi
A year ago, the Canadian government was preparing to implement travel restrictions that made the rest of the world look sane, trapping the filthy bodies of the unvaxxed — who hadn’t received the sacrament of the mRNA injections, giving them the “freedom to be safe” — in a societal cage. Litigation followed, and plaintiffs got their hands on government communications showing that officials spent the weeks leading up to the travel ban trying (without success) to figure out a basis for implementing it. This week, the independent Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya obtained those documents, and reported on them:
Tolerant, broadminded Canadian liberals responded with the usual good faith effort to understand the story:
Putin Putin Putin! TRUMP! Sedition!
Here, for comparison, is a highly educated policy analyst in the United States, offering his thoughtful response to critics of the mRNA injections:
This is a societal wildfire, or at least it aspires to be. We’ve trained people to not discuss; we’ve taught people — “liberals” and “intellectuals” — that disagreement means that someone is being a Nazi, or working for Putin.
“It looks to me like the available evidence suggests that Current Thing is not correct.”
“YOU NAZI SCUM DID PUTIN TELL YOU TO SAY THAT WHITE SUPREMACY TRUMP FOX NEWS SEDITION NAZI”
And so a reader emailed to ask me about this post, a discussion of the amazing banality of the global leader and public intelle— okay, sorry, I can’t finish typing that last word, but stay with me here — Klaus Schwab:
While wholly agreeing that Schwab is basically just another variant of doofus, and agreeing that he "speaks in the language of the audience of the thoughtless, mindless, and clueless who land at Davos in their corporate jets" -- which thereby gives him a "platform" -- why, oh why, has there been so much "subscription"? He, like Kamala Harris, Friedman, and Pointy-haired-boss, deserves just to be gently laughed out of the room. Instead he holds in thrall presidents and prime ministers.
I think it’s impossible to exaggerate the aggressiveness and scope of the shaping project, the effort over the last twenty years — and the frantic effort over the last ten years — to channel the minds of highly credentialed IYI slogan-chanters. I’ve written semi-often on the National Science Foundation’s hard turn toward woke science, DEI frameworks, and politicized research, and the point is that the NSF pays for science. If you’re a scientist in academia, you absolutely don’t have to follow the NSF down its cultural path — you can think whatever you want, and have complete intellectual freedom.
(long pause)
Now, how are you going to fund your research, you absolute Nazi?
Ten years from now, or a lot sooner than that, scientists and engineers in academia who don’t perform wokeness in their research will be gone — unfunded, untenured, driven out. And then people outside academia will look at academic science and say that man, how did academic science descend into groupthink like that?
So how does a banal slogan-chanter hold prime ministers in thrall? Because they went through twenty years of cultural preparation that made them available for banality. Intellectual conditioning, relentless sorting, rooms that quickly become uncomfortable for people who don’t Believe In Current Thing. They subscribe to the thing they’ve been trained in, to narrowness and slogans. Anti-discourse discourse has shaped them, shaped the people who trained them, shaped the journalists who cover them, shaped the people who work for them, and shaped the people who will replace them. The dolt with the tweet up above, the “anti-vaxxer scum” kid? He’ll be in Congress in ten years.
Here, I’ll end with a joke:
Despite the depth and rigor of Justin Trudeau’s intellectual training, he still fell for the emptiness of Klaus Schwab’s banal project.
You laughed, right?
"You laughed, right?" Laughing to keep from crying.
Good grief. Your writing and social analysis are excellent. And fucking depressing. I will be lucky to fall asleep.