SurrealPolitiks S01E025 - Pressure Points
SurrealPolitiks Podcast

SurrealPolitiks S01E025 – Pressure Points

Written by SurrealPolitiks

In the constant rush of information dumped upon us by the Internet and modernity more broadly, it can be easy to get caught up in the distractions of the day and speak endlessly about the news or whatever ultimately inconsequential fluff is fed us by the people who do not want us to make any progress. Here at SurrealPolitiks we aim to rise above this, and we consider ourselves ahead of the game when we say that the results have been mixed.

The news of the day is not without consequence. One must be informed to be involved in discussions, and discussions are ultimately second only to physical force in terms of political importance, but it is among our aspirational goals to cut past the minutia and get down to the Realpolitik.

In keeping with this I spent many hours last night on what may at first glance appear a frivolous exercise. For more than 12 hours I was arguing with subhuman intellects on a discussion forum about the merits of promoting homosexual propaganda through advertisements in the web hosting industry.

As one might expect from that description, most of my opponents were not up to the task. They resorted to slander, personal attacks, making inaccurate critiques of my physical fitness, and generally behaving like a bunch of poorly raised children on a playground.

So why would I bother to get in the mud with these wretches? Have I nothing better to do with my time than to try and convince fools that they are in fact fools? What benefit could there be to enduring slanderous personal attacks all night long from people who are wholly invested in their own ignorance?

Well, clearly, if this is what I had done, this would be a waste of my time. Fortunately, this is not what I was doing.

The forum in question is known as LowEndTalk. It is the discussion forum for a blog called LowEndBox, and this is themed around discounted web hosting. It is not a place where politics is generally the topic of discussion. I have been a participant there for many years and I read their newsletters with some frequency because I was in the web hosting business prior to becoming a media personality, and because I need to stay apprised of what goes on in that industry to stay ahead of deplatforming efforts and other disreputable behavior by our political opponents.

You can read what I was able to save of the discussion thread on my other website, but the content of the discussion there is not so much what I mean to get at today.

I have titled today’s episode “Pressure Points” because this is a meaningful lesson in Realpolitik. The people I was arguing with made no effort to address the point being raised because they did not have a leg to stand on, and real debate would not suit their agenda. They understand as well as anyone that the transgender agenda cannot actually exist without a great deal of help. It is an extremist political movement parading as civil rights. They require the assistance of governments and corporations to inculcate their ideology into the minds of the people, because this is not an actual thing outside of the propaganda.

The culture war does not begin when the drag queen starts reading “Lawn Boy” to the kindergarteners. It begins well prior to this, and in no place more prominently than in the advertising industry. It is a parasitic relationship between these activists and the ad industry. The activists want to tack their message onto the advertisements of businesses, so as to get a free ride into the minds of their victims. The advertisements are supposed to be selling products, but instead they are made to sell projects. This comes at the expense of the companies being manipulated by activists who parade as marketing professionals.

The incident in question came at one of the more crucial intersections of our economy. This was an advertisement, for web hosting. Web hosting is what makes the Internet work. If you can get your message into the infrastructure of the Internet, then you are functionally a part of the central nervous system of society, and this has profound implications well distant from the wires and the electrical signals in the air.

We saw this most prominently in 2017 and 2018. In the mass deplatforming that followed in the wake of the Unite The Right Rally, the entire infrastructure of the Internet was turned to political purposes. It was absolutely against the financial interests of these companies to do this, but they did it anyway because their attentions were wholly occupied by the shrieking voices of Left wing activists. This occupied all of their cognitive bandwidth and filled them with the sort of anxiety that one cannot help but want to stop, at and a certain level the costs cease to matter. All that one can concern themselves with is reducing the tension.

  • The people responsible for making these decisions are given a very clear choice by the activists.
    • Silence our critics, and we will stop making you uncomfortable.
    • Fail to do this, and we will make your life a living hell.

Recognizing this pattern, albeit crudely, some elements of the right tried to replicate it. This had the predictable result of Right wingers going to prison. When the Right does this, it is called harassment, stalking, and extortion. When the Left does this, it is called activism.

This is due in part to power dynamics. The Left does these things because they have power. They do not have power because they do these things. The order of operations is important to understand. The Left can commit crimes and civil torts without fear of repercussion, and they can define the mundane behaviors of their political opponents as crimes and civil torts, because they have already engaged in all the tedium required to find themselves in positions of influence. They have sweet talked and flattered people, they have performed favors (including those of the sexual variety), they have bribed, and traded secrets, and pretended to share the values of the people they are abusing.

Now, they are “the good guys”  they are the “advocates of tolerance and diversity” and anyone who opposes them is “hate and bigotry”.

Since “hate and bigotry” are naturally considered negative traits, it is not a difficult thing to predict who will win out when uninitiated people are asked to choose between the two. “Hello sir, do you choose good or bad?” is not a difficult question. 100% of the time, people will choose  good, even if they sorta know it isn’t actually good. They just want to be seen as being good, because being seen as choosing bad will have social consequences and a pain response from the associated anxiety of the aforementioned shrieking.

When Right wingers attempt to emulate this from outside the circles of influence, they are uniformly dismissed if not prosecuted. They are not in a position to decide what is “good or bad”. They are the ones who are having these judgements rendered upon them, because they do not have power. This persists no matter the results of the prior election.

The power being wielded is deciding what is good or bad. Or perhaps more accurately, to influence the perceptions of decision makers as to what is good or bad.

Once the person who decides whether you have internet access decides you are bad. He is eventually going to decide that you do not deserve to have internet access.

The equation, for most people, is simpler than most Right wing activists would like to think. They have filled their heads with complex ideological theories and views about genetics and culture which overcomplicate the picture. “Are you good or bad?” is simpler, and it is not much more than this that you can expect from people who do not spend all day reading philosophy.

What was demonstrated very clearly in the aforementioned discussion is that the Left wing activists were bad. Even people generally inclined to side with them over me noticed it and said things to the effect of “you’re making him look good by comparison”. The post I made was very reasonable. It was very well written. It was very moderate. It was not hateful. It was speaking to the interests of the people who run the platform and I spoke positively of them and their talents and I called on them to live up to the standards they had earned through prior good behavior.

The only thing the activists could do, was create a haze of hysteria and attack me personally and try to have the thread removed. They ultimately succeeded in this, but not before I made some new friends. They also tried to have me banned from the forum. An effort which continues at this moment, and has been thus far unsuccessful.

The activists plague the LowEndTalk forum because they understand this to be a place where they can wield an undue influence on society. There is no barrier to entry so they can send their least sophisticated there and all they have to do is behave badly and avoid being banned themselves. The people who run the place are responsible for deciding who gets to be on the Internet, and that is a very powerful position to be in, so influencing those people is a thing worth doing.

What I think was the most interesting thing to observe about it, and it is not something I had failed to anticipate, but the time and the venue caught me by surprise, was that I have been given a unique advantage in these situations by the fact that my reputation precedes me. When I went and made a very modest and respectful critique of something, the Left wing activists did not respond to the posts. They responded to the guy in the Vice News video. They made absolute fools of themselves by doing this and made me look like the adult in the room. They are very fortunate to have succeeded in having the entire thread removed because nobody who looks at that sees what they did as appropriate.

This is a success worth replicating, and I have been doing a good deal of thinking about it. It’s not the sort of thing you want to plan out in the open, but finding these fulcrums where Leftists exert their toxic influence, showing up, appearing reasonable, and making them discredit themselves is a thing that can be done on purposes.

The key takeaways to think about here are these;

  1. Make a very narrow purpose of diminishing Left wing influence by causing them to discredit themselves in a venue where they are exerting outsized influence.
  2. Be reasonable. Do not make it about anything broader than it has to be for the venue and the moment. Call them out when they change the subject by challenging some other aspect of your perceived ideology or political agenda. In the case of LowEndTalk, it was about marketing a web hosting company as queer and the website promoting this as a virtue using plainly fictional language. The activists kept trying to bait me into discussions about race and Jews and Hitler. I did not accept the bait, and you should not either.
  3. Do not “call names”. Criticize behavior, and point out patterns of behavior that resemble pathologies, but never say “You are a …”. They do that, and it makes them look bad. You just say “The behavior your are exhibiting is indicative of your incapacity to engage honestly because your ideas clearly do not stand up to scrutiny.”
  4.  Be an actual part of the community. The only reason I was able to do this yesterday was because I am an actual interested party and I have been on that forum and reading that blog and commenting there for years. If I just showed up to push a political agenda it would not have gone over well. Whatever the fulcrum of influence is that you want to place pressure on, you can’t show up and just start making demands. You must first have standing.

 

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