Scott
Verified User
I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but after having read John Carter's article, I thought I might not be the only person who might find his thoughts interesting, if sobering. As I've said elsewhere, I'm something of a political hybrid, so I don't agree with -everything- he says, but he has some insights that I think are really spot on. Here's the article from which I got the title of this thread:
barsoom.substack.com
Below, I quote the introduction and the conclusion:
**
March 26, 2025
“But that’s not how biological sex is defined,” I replied. “Testosterone is just a hormone. It’s only present in vertebrates. Insects don’t have it, and neither do plants, but they still have biological sex. Sex is defined according to whether an organism produces mobile gametes or sessile gametes, which is basically universal across multicellular life forms.”
“I don’t understand what that means,” she chirped, still thinking we were playing language games. “Like I don’t know what a ‘sessile gamete’ is.”
“Oh,” I responded helpfully, “A gamete is just a reproductive cell. Sessile means it doesn’t move. So –”
The horrible reality of what I was saying dawned upon her. “I just realized that this isn’t a conversation I should be having,” she cut me off, and walked away.
It was remarkable. The mindworm parasitizing her consciousness had detected a threat to its structural integrity, and ordered its host to remove herself from the interaction before she consumed a malinformative infohazard. She didn’t even pretend that this wasn’t what she was doing. I’d never before seen something quite like it.
There’s a long-standing joke that liberals don’t know things, that their entire worldview seems to be formed by the ersatz experiences of visual entertainment. When they discuss the war in Ukraine, they express it in terms of Marvel comic book movies or Star Wars; when thinking of President Trump, in terms of Harry Potter. Black people are all wise and benevolent and great dancers because this is what Fresh Prince and Morgan Freeman told them; white men are all inbred stupid Klansmen because of Mississippi Burning and Roots; girls are just as strong as boys (stronger, actually) because Black Widow kicks butt; and so on. Even their favourite point of historical reference – World War Two, the Nazis, Hitler – seems to be almost entirely a palimpsest of Steven Spielberg movies like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.
It isn’t just that they use fictional references as metaphors or allusions. That’s a very human thing to do, and the right is certainly no stranger to Tolkien analogies. But liberals seem to do this a lot, with only the most tenuous connection back to reality. Their inner world is a series of self-referential fantasies. The right uses fictional references as metaphors to explain facts; the left substitutes fictional metaphors for facts, and then forgets that it does this.
The recent Netflix drama Adolescence is a striking case in point. It portrays the fictional story of a 13-year-old white boy who stabs a female classmate to death because his brain was twisted into a pretzel by exposure to the incel subculture over social media. Following its premier, the British government has been using it to gin up a moral panic, with calls to censor social media to tackle the urgent problem of toxic masculinity. After watching the show, Two-Tier Keir Starmer took it as an excuse to denounce the influence of Andrew Tate and other male influencers:
Here you can see an address to Parliament given by a frog-faced scold with the improbably Dickensian name of Anneliese Midge demanding that the show be screened in schools around the country to educate children about the urgent problem of boyslistening to men telling them they should stand up for themselves being turned into mass murderers by the manosphere. The show is feeding calls to ban teenagers from social media and ban phones from schools. None of the leftlings worked up into a frenzy by this fictional creation seem to understand that it is an entirely fictional creation. Now, sure, you can argue that this is all just typical regime cynicism, and you’re probably most right about that ... but in Starmer’s response to Midge, he has a Freudian moment and refers to the show as a documentary. It’s much easier to lie when you believe your own lies, as any clinical narcissist will tell you.
[snip]
Leave the psychos in power, and they’ll burn it all down; remove them from power, and they’ll burn it all down. Try to reason with them, and their psychosis drowns out every word you say; bite your tongue, and their paranoia invents things you never said.
I don’t really have any obvious, easy solutions to this. Even if things don’t devolve into mass violence, dealing with millions of people undergoing a permanent mass psychotic break cannot be anything but a total mess. All I can say is, stay alert, keep your head on a swivel, try to keep your wits about you, practice cognitive hygiene, and don’t go looking for trouble. No storm lasts forever; if nothing else, I doubt they’ll have the biological energy to keep it up for long ... the psychic parasite they’re enslaved to is draining their bodies dry, something we’ve also been seeing happen in real time. One way or another, we’re going to win this thing.
But things might get weird for a while.
**
The Involution of the Liberal Mind
The left is treating a Netflix drama like it’s real life, marking a turning point in mass liberal psychosis.
barsoom.substack.com
Below, I quote the introduction and the conclusion:
**
March 26, 2025
The left is treating a Netflix drama like it’s real life, marking a turning point in mass liberal psychosis.
Some years ago I was provided a fascinating psychological experience in the form of a young graduate student in the English literature program, whom I encountered because they (you heard me) was (God that’s grammatically awkward) married to a colleague. She (I’m not doing this anymore) specialized in the study of propaganda, by which of course she meant everything her backwards conservative parents in Nowhere, Nebrahoma believed, and not anything she believed. One evening, after enthusiastically explaining the symbolism of the inverted pentagram tattooed on her shoulder, she informed me with invincible confidence that not only was gender an arbitrary social construction, but that even the idea of biological sex was nothing more than convention. Her reasoning, which I presume she’d gleaned from a seminar on radically liberatory queer theory, was that testosterone levels fluctuated during the day, so ‘males’ changed their degree of ‘maleness’ all the time, and how can something that’s constantly changing be used as the basis for a hard binary distinction?“But that’s not how biological sex is defined,” I replied. “Testosterone is just a hormone. It’s only present in vertebrates. Insects don’t have it, and neither do plants, but they still have biological sex. Sex is defined according to whether an organism produces mobile gametes or sessile gametes, which is basically universal across multicellular life forms.”
“I don’t understand what that means,” she chirped, still thinking we were playing language games. “Like I don’t know what a ‘sessile gamete’ is.”
“Oh,” I responded helpfully, “A gamete is just a reproductive cell. Sessile means it doesn’t move. So –”
The horrible reality of what I was saying dawned upon her. “I just realized that this isn’t a conversation I should be having,” she cut me off, and walked away.
It was remarkable. The mindworm parasitizing her consciousness had detected a threat to its structural integrity, and ordered its host to remove herself from the interaction before she consumed a malinformative infohazard. She didn’t even pretend that this wasn’t what she was doing. I’d never before seen something quite like it.
There’s a long-standing joke that liberals don’t know things, that their entire worldview seems to be formed by the ersatz experiences of visual entertainment. When they discuss the war in Ukraine, they express it in terms of Marvel comic book movies or Star Wars; when thinking of President Trump, in terms of Harry Potter. Black people are all wise and benevolent and great dancers because this is what Fresh Prince and Morgan Freeman told them; white men are all inbred stupid Klansmen because of Mississippi Burning and Roots; girls are just as strong as boys (stronger, actually) because Black Widow kicks butt; and so on. Even their favourite point of historical reference – World War Two, the Nazis, Hitler – seems to be almost entirely a palimpsest of Steven Spielberg movies like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.
It isn’t just that they use fictional references as metaphors or allusions. That’s a very human thing to do, and the right is certainly no stranger to Tolkien analogies. But liberals seem to do this a lot, with only the most tenuous connection back to reality. Their inner world is a series of self-referential fantasies. The right uses fictional references as metaphors to explain facts; the left substitutes fictional metaphors for facts, and then forgets that it does this.
The recent Netflix drama Adolescence is a striking case in point. It portrays the fictional story of a 13-year-old white boy who stabs a female classmate to death because his brain was twisted into a pretzel by exposure to the incel subculture over social media. Following its premier, the British government has been using it to gin up a moral panic, with calls to censor social media to tackle the urgent problem of toxic masculinity. After watching the show, Two-Tier Keir Starmer took it as an excuse to denounce the influence of Andrew Tate and other male influencers:
Here you can see an address to Parliament given by a frog-faced scold with the improbably Dickensian name of Anneliese Midge demanding that the show be screened in schools around the country to educate children about the urgent problem of boys
[snip]
Leave the psychos in power, and they’ll burn it all down; remove them from power, and they’ll burn it all down. Try to reason with them, and their psychosis drowns out every word you say; bite your tongue, and their paranoia invents things you never said.
I don’t really have any obvious, easy solutions to this. Even if things don’t devolve into mass violence, dealing with millions of people undergoing a permanent mass psychotic break cannot be anything but a total mess. All I can say is, stay alert, keep your head on a swivel, try to keep your wits about you, practice cognitive hygiene, and don’t go looking for trouble. No storm lasts forever; if nothing else, I doubt they’ll have the biological energy to keep it up for long ... the psychic parasite they’re enslaved to is draining their bodies dry, something we’ve also been seeing happen in real time. One way or another, we’re going to win this thing.
But things might get weird for a while.
**