…because there is precious little well-argued push-back against any number of social engineering projects currently running. One key-word, in c. 2008, in a Google search on a controversial subject was enough to trigger a cascade of links to dissenting opinions; to try it now is to find a baffling (and terrifying) uniformity of Tone out there. Have We changed that much… or has Google? Manufacturing a normative attitudinal consensus among the Soc Med Target Demos is now as concrete a step, before passing New Legislation, and implementing new restrictions on Speech and Thought Crime, as the process of bribery-based “sausage-making” in Congress was a generation ago.
A few days back, during a break at the recording studio, a few hours before midnight turned me into a 60-year-old pumpkin, I was in a prole-y supermarket with my co-producer. The “prole-y” bit is not gratuitous class-slander (and am I not a Prole/Serf?**) but key to the essence of my story. Co-producer was looking for a frozen meal to fry up in the little kitchen across the hall from the Control Room. In the prole-y mart’s freezer, next to the frozen curry rice product that co-prod was eyeing, I peeped a box that presented a cheerful photo of a suspect-looking open-faced burger on its front. The box said, “GERMANY’S FIRST INSECT-BURGER!”
Now, I ask you: is that how Capitalism works? Or is that, more accurately, how Social Engineering works? Isn’t Capitalism that creepy, dark, viscous and smelly fluid that flows toward all sucking sounds, loud and small, to fill all cracks and gaps and orifices (ie “niche markets”), with the lethal mechanical inevitability of oil-spilled quicksand? Isn’t there usually a modicum of “demand” in The Market Place detected before some greedy entrepreneur develops, manufactures and markets an unusual product?
When Eddie Bernays famously tricked Women into becoming consumers of cigarettes, a century ago, he was performing both a Capitalist, and Social Engineering, function (not that the two functions are often distinguishable), but he wasn’t working with a mind-bendingly tricky-to-market concept. Women were already long used to seeing husbands, brothers, fathers and others sucking cancer sticks when they were finally suckered (or sucked up) on to the cancer stick bandwagon by Bernays’ campaign; the fact that half the population had traditionally “enjoyed” a product, that the other half was traditionally forbidden, was already a powerful and aspirational marketing tool.
But who gambles a considerable investment in the manufacture and marketing of a “snack” food that has been socialized, among the target demo, as patently repulsive for centuries? It’s not as though Men, or the Upper class, have been snobbishly enjoying the chowing of mandibled things that were off-limits for the envious lower orders. Proles-of-the-West have known for decades that chocolate-covered ants, for example, are a “gourmet” food of the pretentious among the Rich and they have mocked this pretension and steadfastly stuck to the lusty, boozy bonhomie of their cow, pig, fowl and venison barbecues. Whether or not the farming of animals on an industrial scale is immoral, or an environmental threat (and whether or not these are fixable problems, within the context of meat-eating), who goes into the R&D, manufacture, marketing and distribution of insect-based snacks with the dream of making money? Wouldn’t a new kind of chocolate-flavored potato chip make lots more sense?
Where’s the profit model in marketing insect burgers to Duh cow-gobbling Masses? What’s the thinking in distributing insect-burgers to prole-y neighborhoods which still consider even mere vegetarianism to be silly, fey, commie, oppressive and/or weird? Who thinks there’s real money in taking on such ingrained presets? Or is this part of a greater social engineering scheme to change Traditional Social Patterns very, very fast with the very, very fast and powerful Social Media Social Engineering Tools the 21st century suddenly offers?
It’s not difficult to imagine .00000001%ers working on creating a stylistically two (or three or more) tiered social order with the top of the pyramids enjoying thick steaks, natural reproduction, December-March sexual affairs, leather-bound editions of Proust, etc, with unnaturally-extended lifespans as the icing on the Pharaonic cake… versus illiterate, insect-eating, in-vitro-baby-based, gender-neutral, deeply age-ist*** Proles with short lives and cheap electronic entertainments to keep them “happy” in the hamster wheel. If you’ve been watching things for as long as I have, you will have detected various trends and undercurrents, friends. If you’re not even a little suspicious about this stuff, our looming Huxwellian nightmare was made just for you.
Now, specifically, to the Social Engineering. We know TFIC don’t want you to be Literate and Analytically Critical and suspicious of the Rich and Powerful; we know they like you to thrill-seek (to make better soldiers?) and that they work to inure you to atrocities with ultra-violent entertainment (to make you better soldiers and/or lovers of Imperial Invasions?) ; we know they want you to keep Blacks at a distance as a Permanent Other (demonized Blacks are a source of powerful political energy with which to frighten college-educated Whites); we know they want you to focus on hating the grotesque Trump Doll (so they can reach the rest of the list of sinister objectives they started under the grand distraction of Obama)… what else do they want?
One of YouTube’s most engaging personality-performers, Natalie Wynn, aka ContraPoints, the former penis-identified grad student (in Philosophy), now transitioning to a bespoke postmodern Womanhood, has posted a video that opens with a vignette attacking Germaine Greer as a bigot. The opening of the video quotes a passage from the following quotation, from Greer, that was probably got by Wynn (directly or down the line) from a 2015 posting on a Facebook page called Trans Scripts:
“On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem.
I should have said ‘You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’ The transvestite (sic) held me in a rapist’s grip… Knee-jerk etiquette demanded that I humour this gross parody of my sex by accepting him as female, even to the point of allowing him to come to the lavatory with me. Bureaucratic moves were afoot to give him and his kind the right to female identity, a female passport even … It is strange though that a vocal and combative body of feminists did not throw the whole idea out on its’ ear before it was quietly and sneakily implemented.”
Wynn performs the first half of the text (up to the “piss off”) and does so in a theatrical voice meant to make Greer sound boorish, nasty, ignorant and cruel. Well, I use the unflattering visual characterization “thick-fingered vulgarian,” all the time and SJWs attack their opponents’ “tiny dicks” and Gender-Fluid types often characterize Het Males as disgusting Cromagnons, while BLMers riff on “Crackers” and their pasty skin/ stringy hair… but are all the above-mentioned satirists necessarily boorish, nasty, ignorant and cruel?
One fights from one’s corner of the ring and deploys all the weapons, at one’s disposal, against one’s opponent(s). ContraPoints against the “boorish, nasty, ignorant and cruel,” Greer, no less than Germaine Greer against the “knuckly, hairy be-ringed” Transvestite (why “sic”?) she sees as nothing more than a Man attempting to hijack the concept of Woman. We are all Propagandists of our worldviews. Which of us are crossing a line? And where is the line?
Does anyone on Earth (barring the tragic examples of the catastrophically injured, or malformed at birth, as targets of this rhetorical question) look grotesque to anyone else on Earth? Can no one on Earth reasonably be described as grotesque? Can no body-builder be described as grotesque, or as a “gross parody”? Can no botoxed, lip-injected, chemically peeled, nose-jobbed Hollywoodite or Instagrammer reasonably be derogated as ridiculous-looking? When Lil Kim Michael-Jacksoned herself into someone who put me in mind of Bela Lugosi’s famous riff from the movie of Wells’ book The Island of Dr Moreau, was it “wrong” for any commentator to point out how awful she looked? Is it “wrong” to point out that many among the bizarre species of current “rappers” present an absurd, grotesque appearance that savors of “gross parody”? Is Jennifer Hopelezz not, to anyone, a “gross parody” of anything and how boorish, cruel and ignorant is it to ask this question?
We have a Culture War to unpack, with the Trans Topic, that twists on many levels. One level is Aesthetic (what looks good to whom, when and why) and another level is SocioPolitical: who are the people who want to radically alter the legal, ethical, casual (folk) and scientific definitions of Woman and why?
I left the following comment on Contrapoints’ latest video (I do not, in all honesty, expect to be engaged by Wynn herself or in any meaningful way by one of her fans) :
Ms. Wynn, your target demo consists of Americanoid ( i.e. of “The West”) consumer-kids who are used to parroting the projected attitudes and preferences of attractive celebrity-units who embody The Imperial Project (in your case, the Lefty-Liberal side of the coin; in, e.g., StyxHexenhammer’s (sp?) case, the Fasco-Libertarian). Getting this target demo to consider your rhetoric to be irrefutably true is even easier than getting them to buy X-product, because all they need do, in this case, is find you smart, beautiful, charming, funny and “relatable” … none of which, separately or in a cluster, is the same as being persuaded by a watertight argument.
You like doing/being X/Y/Z and you are a highly effective propagandist in support of doing/being X/Y/Z. But you haven’t made an irrefutable case for why “society” should or must accept your self-definition as a Woman (not, in my view, that that should be the requirement for feeling like one, or presenting as one). To use a crass commercial analogy: does an exciting new fizzy drink, on the market, get to call itself Coca Cola? No, there’s already a fizzy drink, dating back millions of years, with properties slightly different (more familiar, even boring to some, though dear to many) than the new drink, called Coca Cola. The New Fizzy Drink merely needs to come up with its own name/ brand. Unless conceptually replacing Coca Cola with an ersatz was the point all along?*
Or, from another metaphorical POV: Thought Experiment: take the Catherine MacKinnon quote @8:50 and replace “woman” with “Black person” and replace “man” with “White person”. If you think the resulting analogy doesn’t hold, please explain why it doesn’t, given that the essence of MacKinnon’s remark concerns any given human’s freedom to credibly self-describe or Identify. Also please relate (as honestly as possible) how you would perceive a “White person” who decided to identify as “Black,” or vice versa. Plus your thoughts, possibly, on how the world would view this hypothetical “Race Change” as a rhetorical, then physical, procedure? Would, e.g., Black people who “transitioned” to being White people “work” better, after surgery (and chemical skin-lighteners and hair straighteners) and be more “acceptable” … or would even Black people who still looked “Black,” but merely asserted themselves as “White,” work, and be acceptably self-Identified, too?
Whatever anyone makes of my comment, I think you’re quite cool. But you haven’t addressed the arguments, that you set out to address, as thoroughly as your video makes it seem that you have.
*There’s a creditable sentiment among Radicals that The Gov supports any trend/meme that supports the notion that Truth/Facts are a matter of Feelings/ Beliefs, because whatever regime controls the Media Apparatus for manufacturing Feelings/ Beliefs therefore controls what’s considered True/ Factual.
(part one of my engagement with Ms. Wynn’s project is HERE)
The older, wiser, saner, deeper, ever-angry Ms. Greer:
**The distinction I make between “Prole” and “serf” is that a Prole has a job within the Normal Mechanism of The State, sweeping the streets or driving a bus or painting houses, et al… is, in other words, a perfectly-functioning cog in the machine, whereas a Serf, of the same essential class, may or may not be a perfectly-functioning cog. He or she may be busted or dissident cog or no cog at all, observing the machine from its periphery or from the ground it rolls over.
***What’s the point of engineering the Proles/ Serfs to be as Age-ist (as well as Sexist and Racist: divide and conquer) as possible? Because older Proles are sometimes wise and joining the wisdom of the Aged to the power/vitality of Ignorant/ Innocent Youth would be bad news for the Control Apparatus. Why is most advertizing/ brainwashing aimed at Youth? Because Youth represent such a wealthy demographic? Surely not. Youth is just very easy to bamboozle/ manipulate/ indoctrinate. Look at Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Who were its terrifyingly irrational, atrocities-perpetrating foot soldiers…?
I’m not, btw, suggesting that ContraPoints is working, wittingly, for or with a Social Engineering conspiracy. Like so many of us, she’s a very intelligent Useful “Idiot”, arguing her own preferences while incidentally adding entertainment value to a Greater (creepy) Agenda.
THE IMPERIALIST 