Caustic Ramblings

I was planning on doing a follow-up to my last blog on Right Wing Neopaganism, this time on the Hellenic side of this seeming phenomenon. On second thought, there’s really not much to this beyond some online noise that may or may not matter much. In other words, I’m going to keep this short.

What has happened is that a few right-wing internet personalities have taken to calling what they do “Hellenism.” Now, what is it that they do exactly? I can say one thing – it’s not anything that really has much to do with pagan religion in any practical sense. Rather it’s just an aesthetic that employs some degree of Ancient Greek branding. In this case, it’s a mix of “gym bro” culture, some "Manosphere" (i.e. anywhere on the internet men gather to talk about men's issues without the presence of female nagging) themes, the usual assortment of objections and counterarguments to leftism and feminism, and a pseudo-Nietzschean philosophical orientation.

There is one particular internet personality I have in mind – the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). He is an author and internet provocateur best known for his book, Bronze Age Mindset. I haven’t actually read it myself, but I have seen enough quoted excerpts from it to get the general idea of what it’s all about. In essence, it’s a Nietzsche-flavored attempt at formulating an alternative morality for men who have rejected progressivism and the constellation of institutional and establishmentarian organizations and causes which now mindlessly parrot the woke progressivist party line. Since his book became a big hit back around 2017-2018, BAP has gathered a fair number of followers on Twitter and other social medias. Like any band of good little sycophants, many of these followers attempt to ape his general demeanor and aesthetic. In addition to that, there is no shortage of copycat social media profiles with names like “Stone Age Herbalist” and “Raw Egg Nationalist,” to name a couple of examples.

Anyway, what’s this “new” morality all about? Well, I think the Nietzschean part gives it away. Or should I say, a shallow interpretation of Nietzsche. In other words, nothing new under the sun. We’ve already seen the likes of Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, Ayn Rand, Anton LaVey, and other edgy pop culture personages attempt to make contrarian cultural waves during each of their respective times. BAP takes a similar approach and glorifies the the “overman” concept, plus engaging in a not-so-subtle inversion of Christian morality and the general Piscean religious paradigm that has been the default thinking of Western culture for the past 1000+ years. What this means in practical terms is the promotion of a martial and vitalist ethos and a rejection of values like compassion, self-sacrifice for some cause other than self-glorification, and really anything containing a hint of feminine or communal sentimentalism. BAP (ironically, it seems) praises the unsung heroes of history like brigands, pirates, kings with massive harems, conquistadors, the Sea Peoples, shameless tyrants who ruled their city states with an iron fist, and “Trad Olympic” athletes, just to name a few.


Yes, so Greek.

So the obvious question arises: what has any of this to do with Hellenism in the religious sense? I would say, not a whole lot, beyond a smattering of superficial elements. It seems like BAP’s “Hellenism” is yet another postmodernistic collage. There’s quite a lot of homoeroticism (ironic or not) strewn about BAP’s works and internet sh*tpostings, which plays on established stereotypes we have today about the sexual proclivities of Ancient Greek men. Then there’s his literal readings of Homeric literature. Again, this is probably more irony than anything serious. I would have to say that for me the most audacious thing BAP does is praise the reckless and hubristic Athenian politician Alcibiades as the “real hero” in the Socratic dialogue that goes by his name. This should maybe clue any serious spiritual seeker to the fact that BAP is all fun and games and not anything approaching a serious commentator on spiritual or philosophical matters. Rather, we could say that his shtick is a way the original spirit of “punk rock” might manifest in the current year. On a more positive note, it seems like we might have the stirrings of a (rather weird) resurgence of classicism, i.e. a take on what exactly it means to be "Western" sans the usual Judeo-Christian baggage.

Since I don’t want this blog turning into an exhaustive exposition on BAPism, I will conclude here with my general observation that for the most part it seems that Neopagan Hellenism conforms to the same left-leaning, progressivist cultural motif that defines most of the other Neopaganisms. Yes, I have encountered a stray person or group here and there asserting an explicitly anti-progressivist Hellenic practice, but for the most part, the former pattern tends to hold true.

Addendum: for anyone who is interested in reading a full-on critique of BAP and his ideas from the perspective of an established spiritual system, here is a very good (IMHO) essay by a Buddhist ex-monk:
https://politicallyincorrectdharma.blogspot.com/2021/06/bronze-age-mindset-more-or-less.html

Unless of course we consider the Global-Oligarch establishment to be a party, which they are in a sense. But for the sake of this entry, let's stick to the conventional definition of partisanship, i.e. that of official political parties and ideological factions.

Anyway, in the face is what's now an unrelenting assault on independent political commentators with internet-based platforms, many voices on the dissident right are trying to claim that it's only right-wingers, conservatives and libertarians who are the ones on the receiving end of this censorship, demonetization and de-platforming frenzy being carried out by Big Tech giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, and now even smaller tech companies like Patreon.

What the independent-right content creators are ignoring is the fact that independent creators on the left are getting it big time as well. I've heard plenty of stories about Progressive Facebook pages being taken down, their videos being shadowbanned or removed altogether, and all other sorts of shady censorship shenanigans the Zuck machine has been pulling. In the video Below, Jimmy Dore (one of the few voices on the left today whom I find tolerable) has on as a guest a young anti-establishment Progressive media activist whom Facebook has majorly censored.



So we know this is not a conspiracy to stuff out conservative voices online, but rather a coordinated effort to harass and scare off ALL independent political commentators off the big platforms. The reason why Big Tech is doing this is painfully obvious and shouldn't have to be explained. But to be brief: Any and all political commentary that doesn't 100% shill for the oligarch-establishment narrative is seen as an existential threat to the establishment. What they're particularly scared about is that independent media appeals to a much younger demographic than the god-awful Corporate Propaganda-spewing MSM (Mainstream Media) can ever hope to garner. MSM networks are the dinosaur media and they're left with a rapidly-aging and dying audience. I believe the average age of CNN viewers hovers somewhere around 70. Ouch. Other corporate networks like Fox and MSNBC aren't faring much better. And of course the dinosaur alphabet networks like CBS, NBC and ABC all have geriatric audiences as far as their news programming is concerned. Tune into the hyper-vacuous "Nightly News" on any one of those networks and wait until commercial time; they're all pharmaceutical ads. This is a telltale sign that the primary viewing demographic is on death's door. And look at the big-name news personalities these networks have been keeping around for years; many of them are geriatric as well. Many of the best-known news magazine "journalists" (think of shows like 60 Minutes) work on-air until the day they die. Take everything I said above and see how all of these facts together fail to present a very appealing face to younger audiences.

In a nutshell: with ubiquitous high-speed internet, we information consumers now have a seemingly-infinite amount of choice. The old limitations of broadcast bands and cable channel slots are now totally irrelevant. The internet is now the equivalent of what the printing press was in 16th century Europe. Young people don't want to watch an incestuous gaggle of grey-haired, Washington-insider (Deep State) media pundits spinning stupid establishment narratives that no truly-intelligent person falls for any longer. The establishment must know this in the back of their hive mind (I'm being a bit hyperbolic here) and as a result, are in censorship-happy panic mode. But of course, overt censorship just ends up revealing their hand even more to those who are actually paying attention. This won't end well for them unless they figure out a way to adapt to the rapidly-shifting cultural paradigm.

In summary, the establishment oligarchy and their mega corporations are coming after every new media voice who pushes a competing narrative to that of their own. And it's not the fringe voices they care so much about; they love keeping a few alt-right idiots around as a convenient boogeyman to scare the sheep. Like wise, the horde of screeching SJWs and anarcho-crazies (ANTIFA goons) are quite convenient for the elites as well, as they provide an inexhaustible supply of red meat to distract and enrage the dissident right. The voices the establishment really finds to be a threat are those commentators closer to the middle; the ones who offer sane and rational anti-establishment content. People like Sargon of Akkad, Tim Pool, Styxhexenhammer666, Computing Forever, ect., are the real threats; they are the commentators best equipped to steer normies away from establishment narratives. They'll be coming for Tim next, but he's super careful and meticulous about everything he puts out, so if the Big Tech giants does nab him for some tiny little technicality, it will look supremely awful for them. Who knows what'll happen though. My best guess is that it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Let's not mince words here; Facebook and Twitter are both unethical as all hell and monopolistic to the bone (which big corp isn't???). But, in my humble view, they are not the worst of Big Tech. I'd say that unholy award goes to Google and Apple. After all, no one has to to through Facebook or Twitter to access the internet.

So why Google and Apple? Because those two megacorps are now collectively THE gatekeeper of the internet. And it's the mobile paradigm which enabled this sorry state of affairs to come about. Those who have so short-sightedly shifted their primary internet usage to mobile devices are now subjects of the App Story Duopoly of Google (Android) and Apple (iOS). Those two giants are now effectively gatekeepers of the entire mobile internet; both of them can decide exactly which apps are and aren't allowed for users to download and use. Sure, on Android devices users can opt to use third party apps and app stores, but by doing so they're opening up themselves to a lot of malware risks, and besides that, most "normie user" (i.e. the non-tech-saavy multitudes)can't be bothered with wandering off the plantation that is the theme-park-style basic usability of their devices. But I digress. Apple and Google are judge, jury and executioner of everything mobile.

The best thing we can hope for in the US at this point is significant anti-trust legislation (not holding my breath here) that would effectively dissolve GoogleApple's app store juggernaut. Meanwhile, those of us who actually give a damn about internet freedom can stick to using desktop devices (i.e. PCs, laptops, ect.) for the bulk of our internet needs. IMHO, mobile devices should never be relied upon for anything beyond quick on-the-go conveniences while away from the home or office, but that is neither here no there.

In the not-too-distant future I'll be summarizing my experiences with and overall impressions of each of the new/emerging "Alt Tech" social media and content-hosting platforms that have arisen in response to Big Tech's (Silicon Valley) ever-increasing censorship of any form of expression that doesn't bend the knee to their cultural-left ideology.

Here's but a few of the new platforms and my very basic and highly-opinionated impression of each of them:

Gab(dot)com - Gab is a Twitter clone and doesn't really pretend it's anything beyond being a "Free Speech" version of Twitter. It began as a haven for people banned from Twitter for arbitrarily-defined infractions like hate speech and harassment. The interface is slick and user-friendly, though the site itself has been buggy an unreliable since the recent attacks on them by SJW craptivists and tech infrastructure corporations (like domain registrars and hosting companies) that easily cave into pressure campaigns from the aforementioned censorship-loving puritans. Having said that, I've found the site's core user base to be pretty cancerous, as from day one it's been a safe haven for the far-right, i.e. the Alt Right: those obsessive white nationalists/identitarians and pathetic Nazi-LARPers. This is what I mean the actual far-right, not the imaginary one the mainstream media bills as anyone with a right-of-center and anti-establishment opinion. Half the posts I scroll by on Gab is an endless stream of drivel that blames "teh Jooz!" and nonwhites for every imaginable problem with Western culture today. That's not the majority of the user base however. The rest tend to be basic-bitch MAGA-populist conservative types who worship President Trump and have a worldview that is a rough mashup of watered-down libertarianism and a protestant Christian identity, i.e. typical American prole conservatism. I don't have a problem with these folk per-se, I just find them to be rather boring, vacuous and something quite obnoxious when the Buble-thumping factor is cranked to 11. It's because of this boring and annoying atmosphere, I don't really use Gab much. The cherry on top is that I pretty much despise microblogging to begin with.

Minds(dot)com - Minds presents itself as a "Free Speech" Facebook alternative, though in practice it tries to combine the functions of several different social platforms without implementing any of those functions in a way that's equal to or better than the originals. On top of that, the user interface is cluttered as hell and the feed is massively-spammy due to Minds's poorly-thought-out BOOST feature, which also happens to be its most annoying feature. Not only that but you have to pay Minds a small monthly fee to get rid of BOOSTS from random users popping up in your feed. Having laid all that out, I actually like the culture that has grown on Minds. It's more of an artistic and creative leaning user base, (i.e. the kind of people I tend to get along with) as opposed to the boring conservatives of Gab I mentioned above. If Minds is to grow and be a true replacement for any of the bigger platforms it needs to clean up its interface and functionality and start redesigning the site with the end user in mind. As it stands now, it's not a place where I can keep up with friends, due to the lack of differentiation between different user types. In other words, Minds needs to look more like Faceboook and less like a bastardization of Twitter and Youtube. I keep coming back to Minds and seeing the same old crap, despite an occasional cosmetic facelift. Finally, Minds can be a rather nice place to look at photography and art that users upload. And oh yeah, they've taken some cues from Steemit and now offer an Ethereum-based points system for content sharing.

Steemit - It's a blockchain-oriented blogging platform with some incorporated features like DTube (another alt video hosting service). I have to admit that I don't really "get" Steemit, nor the particular appeal of Steemit; it looks to me like a blogging site that tries to be a social media platform too. Most of the hot topics users write about are about tech and cryptocurrency. While I find those things interesting, they're not my core areas of interest and thus I'm not sure the kind of stuff I write about would find much of a receptive audience there. Overall, Steemit looks to me like a minimalist, less artsy, and much less annoying version of Minds. There quite an active community established there and the interface gets right to the point and is super easy to use for basic functionality like posting. But beyond that, effective use of Steemit it's quite complicated in a tech-arcane sort of way and this will serve as a deterrent to anything approaching mass-adoption. The whole thing looks like it was designed by eggheads for eggheads. Perhaps my non-egghead self will mirror this entry on Steemit and see how it goes over ;)

Bitchute - In short, a Youtube alternative. Like the others above, it's geared toward "Free Speech" and basically lets users upload whatever they want, within the limits of the law of course. It's main distinguishing feature is the way it distributes the bandwidth for each video among the users viewing the video, not so different from the way the BitTorrent protocol decentralizes bandwidth. In practice, Bitchute has become a haven for Youtube content creators who have had their videos age-restricted, demonetized and even take down, for reasons that often border on frivolous and absurd. And as of recent Bitchute had their Paypal account suspended (see: craptivist brigading), effectively cutting off their main income stream. In summary, as long as Youtube keeps censoring and harassing its creators, the more sites like Bitchute will need to exist. And hopefully these site will survive the constant attacks from the BigTech-MSM-Deepstate cabal.

MeWe - It's a true Facebook clone and looks quite nice when it comes to the site's design and features. Though I'm weary about it being a "Free Speech" platform as it seems to be run by the usual gaggle of San Francisco leftists. I've only played around with it a little and my overall impression is that it's nicely-designed social platform waiting for a user base. In other words, it's pretty dead and there's not very much engagement on user posts. Lack of engagement is effectively death for a social media platform, as without the "social" aspect there is no network or media. We'll see how this goes; my hopes for MeWe aren't too high.

Mastodon/Ostatus - This is a federated version of Twitter. Federated means the overall service is decentralized into a network of independent servers, or "instances" ... kind of like nodes in a network. Each instance can institute its own rules for its users. In a user feed using software like Mastodon, the user can either browse just the activity on their own instance or they can see the entire "Fediverse" which is the global network. Users can even block out entire instances they might deem to be objectionable for whatever reason. And instance admins can also block out other instances, as far as I know. I like the overall concept of the Fediverse and there's a chance a system like this could be the future of internet social networking. However this arrangement does tend to encourage the sort of ideological tribalism we're so used to seeing in the currentyear. Each instance can become an echo chamber for whatever the prevailing ideology that instance was formed around. And then instances which allow for controversial content are easily assigned an outcast status and mass-blocked from other instances. The Ostatus protocol seems to have taken cues from the now-moribund Diaspora project, which was an attempt to create a decentralized version of Facebook. Ostatus platforms like Mastodon might go the way of Diaspora. While the federated structure is great in theory, it does require some degree of tech literacy to navigate. In other words, such a system will probably never attract a critical mass of "normies" who seem to love those invasive, centralized platforms that make everything just so damn easy and convenient!

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There's surely more platforms to go over, but I can't really think of any major ones at the moment, so I'll stop here. And for some of the more notable ones like Gab and Minds, I'll go into more detail on in follow-up posts at some point.

I've realized this way too late in life, but I've now firmly concluded that internet comment sections/threads are a massive waste of time and both emotional and intellectual energy. If one is looking to maintain their wits and any sense of emotional balance, it's probably just best to just avoid comment sections altogether.

τέχνη

UNLESS, it's a "tips of the trade" sort of online group, community or forum where people come for concrete advice on how to perform specific practical tasks. In that case, the forum in question will likely have a group of experts who are recognized as established authorities on whatever trade, discipline or hobby the forum is all about; group members will be able to easily recognize novices, noobs, wannabees and people full of shit, and easily call them out on any misinformation or unhelpful tips they attempt to assert and spread.

ἐπιστήμη + δόξα

In contrast, on forums and comment sections oriented around general and qualitative subject matter, the expert hierarchy becomes much more difficult to establish and concretely explain, because the topics usually lack any element of practical application within the context of a single individual and what they might be capable of accomplishing all on their own. In other words, who is an expert and who is a poser or faker is more based on group opinion than things that are firmly demonstrable to a non-expert. Now, by qualitative I mean subjects dealing with things like politics, religion, psychology, general life advice, ect. Forums revolving around these topics are chok full of plenty of people who think they know exactly what they are talking about, but in reality, know very little about what they feel the burning need to run their mouth about incessantly. And oftentimes, it's the people totally full of shit who are the most confident and resolute when it comes to the correctness of their opinions. Trying to argue with them is almost always a losing proposition for you, as no matter how much you might be able to poke holes in their flimsy logic or lack of relevant knowledge, they will double down and believe themselves to be even more "in the right" than when they first entered the discussion arena. When it comes to qualitative knowledge, the Dunning-Kruger effect is always something to look out for. Because it's pretty much everywhere.

γνῶσις

A little confession here: I've been there, done that. I've been both the know-it-all idiot and the person on the other end who sees the various logical fallacies being employed in service of a quick and easy ego-gratifying answer to some question. I know well know that if I'm looking to truly LEARN something, it's best to go straight to the expert and stay the hell of away from the peanut gallery, in terms of both reading and participation. Giving into the temptation to participate and show off your supposed knowledge, just feeds the beast. We now live in an era when the age-old Master/Apprentice relationship has been all-but tossed to the wolves and everyone and their grandmother fancies themselves an expert on one thing or another without having to demonstrate their knowledge or expertise. Beware of the idiots abound.