Censorshills

We really are are own worst enemies. The more time passes, the more one looks at the heated cultural climate and the absolutely moronic things we still argue over, the more it becomes clear that we really do have our heads lodged up our rears. We talk a good game, but when push comes to shove we will always do what is easy over what is hard. That's just how it is.

And when we slack and lose focus? That is when evil slips into the unguarded door and destroys everything it can. This happens every single time, and we refuse to admit it or address the issue. Sometimes you really do deserve what you get.

Take the infamous Ramones song "Censorshit", which is about the PRMC's successful quest to destroy popular music and how evil such people were. The songs sounds meaningful, but history has proved it full of hot air. Just about every "hero" in that old fight these days applauds the government censorship they supposedly fought against. It's not even new people: it is the exact same people they were supposedly railing against that is still doing it today. I would like to think the Ramones were different, but unfortunately, at least one of them today would absolutely be on the side of the people they were supposedly against at the time. We even have proof.

From wiki:

"Johnny Ramone stated that he "didn't like the lyrics on 'Censorshit.' "It was stupid. I liked the song, though. Joey wrote this song about Vice President Al Gore's wife, Tipper Gore, then he went on and voted for Bill Clinton.""

Many such cases. You're hard in on your beliefs, until it effects the team score. This is why nothing really changes on a meaningful level.

So what was the result of Joey's posturing, but complete lack of follow through on his beliefs? The scene he created is dead. All because he couldn't follow through on his own words. Oh, and as a fan of cartoons he also supported the administration that eventually killed Saturday mornings for kids everywhere. All because he needed to vote for Good Guys instead of voting for his principles. This isn't about sides--it's about knowing what it is you're actually supporting.

This is what happens when you don't silence usurpers or gatekeep poseurs out of spaces they have no place being in. Fail to keep them out and they will keep you out instead. But we were taught to be nice and forgiving, even to those who hate us, and this Boomer logic has crippled us from taking necessary and decisive action against such deception. The solution goes against this programming. You don't show mercy to the unmerciful--that is a quick way to be shot in the back. Civilization's rules are for the civilized only, not those who want to destroy civilization. Play by the right rules, the ones your enemies define, or you will lose.

And that's why we have lost that battle.

Gatekeeping, for as long as we've known it, has been a reviled thing. It's just plain mean! You've heard it before. 

"It's not being inclusive!" 

"Who put you in charge?" 

"Everybody should have access to anything they want at any time." 

"Don't you like freedom?" 

These are the sorts of arguments one gets as to why gatekeeping things is wrong and evil. This is an attempt at emotional manipulation.

Why are you being some confrontational? Don't you know that you are being a Bad Person? Maybe you are the one who should be gatekept!

As if that wasn't the end goal to begin with.

And yet if one looks around today you will see that everything is actually gatekept very heavily despite everything supposedly being so "inclusive" now. The only thing that has changed is the people being gatekept out of these spaces. Now it happens to be normal people: non-pop cultists who don't treat hobbies as replacement religions and false communities. It is essentially, like so much else these days, completely backwards.

How could this have happened? Wasn't gatekeeping an evil scourge that only bad people do to innocent unassuming newbies? Well, no. That was the argument the poseurs and frauds used so they could slip into the gate. Just like that old Frank Herbert quote, these usurpers took advantage of your weakness in order to wrestle away control. Now that they have it, they need to get rid of you. They need to do this to erase the knowledge that they are attempting to rewrite everything.

What happens when usurpers become gatekeepers? They destroy everything. Under the guise of making things "more accessible" they actually do the exact opposite and narrow the space into nothing, eventually killing the target dead.

It works like this:

In these late days of modernity, and as things fall apart around us, we've all learned a lot of hard truths about how the world really works, and how just about all conventional wisdom created in living memory has been proven horrifically incorrect. It is as if the game was rigged from the start and you were always destined to lose what you hold dear.

More than that, nothing is as simple as they once said it was.

We learned Satanic Panic wasn't real. We learned "Progress" doesn't exist. We learned the people who rule us actually hate us, disproving the old chestnut of never attributing to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Turns out even that was wrong. Perhaps intentionally. So it only stands to reason that a lot of things we took for granted as obvious truths or conventional wisdom will have to be thoroughly reexamined again. If you want to know why there is a rise in weird beliefs recently, it is because of this. Had the people in charge not lost all trust, it wouldn't be the case. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in now. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

One such issue needing to be reevaluated is the completely misunderstood topic of censorship. We need a new frame.

You probably had a flicker of an emotion when you read that hated "C" word, didn't you? Did your programming kick in to tell you that the term signifies fascism and tyranny, or that it is a word only evil people use to justify not being able to say or do evil things against righteous and the just with their hateful words? In the old days it was one or the other, no middle ground.

And yet, both are incorrect.

What censorship is remains much simpler. Censorship is a way of silencing ideas deemed harmful for the general populace by simply forbidding them. Popular ways to implement it include government enforcement, social and peer pressure, mafia-style threats, and outright violence. We live in a world of censorship, and we probably always will. This is an unfortunate reality. The difference comes in how the issue is broached. If we have one blind spot today, it is that our outdated way of dealing with this topic is completely useless and weak.

What the topic of censorship requires as a reassessment. Censorship really is a deliberate landmine placed strategically and meant to destroy the enemy and idea you wish to erase. Every politician and ruler uses their power as a way to be able to freely promote what they want while simultaneously silently smothering what they do not want.

It's easy.

If anyone is actually for the "Free Exchange of Ideas" they will always make concessions for material they deem harmful by their own personal standards. In other words, they have caveats to their very strong moral code. But those very same caveats are the breach in the door that will get them overthrown in the end. Your stand against hypocrisy over all will be used to bludgeon you with charges of the very same thing you hate until you are the one on your knees. It is a losing game that is designed without victory conditions. The tug of war goes on forever until one of you is dead and the loser's history effectively erased from the record.

Nothing about this works. It's just an endless headache without any relief. All of this because censorship is so easy to use as a weapon. It never occurs to us that there is another option besides mindlessly shooting at each other, day in day out.

The true way to handle censorship, is to tackle it head on. Despite what you may think, or have been told via very brave nonexistent people from badly written Hollywood movies, we have never actually confronted or discussed the issue of censorship from a standpoint other than "What I Want Should be Heard" Vs. "Everything Should be Free to be Heard" as if this is the only angle on the topic. This isn't an zero sum game.

The truth about censorship is that the reason it exists is because modern man is lazy and is fundamentally a moral and spiritual coward who wants to rid of dissidents to their ideas as easily as possible. Censorship being right or wrong as a concept isn't the point. The point is that it exists at all because we are afraid to confront the reason it was ever deemed suitable as a tactic to begin with. We have never addressed the root cause.

Censorship exists because it is easy for those in power, and no other reason. It is the refuge of the slothful. Since one of man's defining traits is the endless pursuit of comfort over all else, it makes sense that only we would come up with it as a way to avoid necessary conflict. If you simply board up a fire hazard of an old shack, no one will go into it. Simple! That's much easier than keeping guards on patrol to prevent anyone from going inside, or tearing it down or fixing it. One requires much more effort than the other to do. Which do you think an average person will go with? You already know the answer to that. Heck, you've probably seen such situations yourself.

Because we are so lazy, we allow those stronger in their convictions and far more wily to manipulate us into giving them control. We let them do it because we don't want to fight for anything. Why fight when you can just write "No" on a piece of paper and point to it when anyone says otherwise. No wonder the last two decades have been filled with collapse and mindless subversion. No one bothered to prepare any arguments against their enemies at all.

All a usurper has to do is sneak into their arena of choice and subtly change the majority opinion like a frog boiling in water. Who would argue with them? They weren't taught how to. Once this usurper is able to, they seize control. Once in charge, they begin to disassemble the past and reassemble it in their favor. What better way to reshape reality then by rewriting it? Now you are the bad guy and the evil one who must be censored. 

Funny how that works.

For instance, here is a recent example of subtle censorship as control, taken from Geek Gab goliath, Daddy Warpig, on Twitter:

Now, there is certainly a combination of reasons for this happening. It's simply cheaper for OldPub to cut out unprofitable (and overpriced) ebooks and at the same time suppress material you don't want the populace to have anymore.

For those who know anything about the people who run OldPub, they clearly have it in for the sort of material Daddy Warpig posted above. Adventure stories, especially those primarily enjoyed by the very male demographic they have been successfully chasing out of reading for decades now, are easy cuts for them. Soon enough you will only find the genre in NewPub. All because the usurpers were allowed in the door to ruin the old industry.

In this era of safe checkbox fiction, a hotblooded traditional adventure tale is simply not allowed. With Hollywood, the video game industry, and the like, also doing the same, it is clear that very soon you will only be able to find fresh material in independent and NewPub spaces. If that isn't already the case. This is what happens when you don't know how to fight without pointing to a rule list and expecting your foes to fall in line. You can't beat them with Facts and Logic when they merely change the definition of said things. It's a losing game.

Everything is now being tailor-made, not for an audience that exists or doesn't exist, and not even for an audience they want. Everything is being crafted for an audience they want to create. Their endgame is to make an audience that they can hold completely captive and mold in their image instead of an audience they have to cater to. The exact wrong people are in charge of your entertainment. How does that happen unless such people are allowed in the door to begin with? Answer: it can't. They were let in, and now you're going to suffer for it.

One such example of this already happening was the insidious fabrication known as Science Fiction & Fantasy and its fandom. This was one of the early attempts to bury the past and attempt to reshape the world in a false image. Of course, it eventually failed and died, falsehoods always eventually do, but it remains the blueprint for what is currently being done today in every space. Still nobody can even define the concocted terms of "SF&F" or whatever made up "genre" they came up with last week, yet will fight to the death for these meaningless labels they had ingrained in them as kids. This, even though it was enforced by people who hate them. It was a successful subversion, for as long as they could keep it going, anyway. Now the "genre" is dead.

You want to know why what you loved is being obliterated? This is why. As long as the past is destroyed by such people, it is a win to them. You are currently going through the same transformation that pulled apart adventure fiction and chased the male demographic entirely out of reading for the benefit of small cliques. Now it is happening everywhere.

At the end of modernity, everything gets to die.

What censorship does is offer cover fire for these subversives. Because it's such a braindead way of arguing ("You can't have this because I say so" is not exactly a winning argument) it allows easy rhetoric to combat and gives anyone with an axe to grind the ammo for arguing against your rote cause. You are left at an advantage.

Simply saying things like "blood has no place in entertainment" without any sense of context or discussion around the purpose of storytelling itself weakens your side of the argument. And it should, because it is an incredibly stupid thing to argue. However, being that inept at gatekeeping allows degeneracy to sneak in under the guise of being "shocking" and "revolutionary" instead of what it actually is, which is hacky and simple. This happens because you ceded ground to them by taking an idiotic position instead of stronger one. If you had defended the arts properly and taught them to the younger generations correctly, no one would have bothered to think "pushing limits" was necessary because there wouldn't be any "limits" to push. Nuance would be understood, as would the purpose of the craft. You would only have honest storytellers left.

Instead we have a climate of wannabe revolutionaries more interested in controlling their audience than they are in entertaining them. Should one point this insanity out, they will usually get shouted down and smothered to silence. Usually by zombies who will swallow anything as long as it had a brand name on the box. In other words, people who have already had their brains successfully cleaned and scrubbed for them by the invading cult. This is what happens when you passively take in entertainment instead of interacting with it or attempting to teach it right. This happens when you don't treat art like you are supposed to.

Consumer cultists will defend anything. Here is yet another example from Twitter from back when the new Looney Tunes cartoon made a weird anti-gun stance by taking away Elmer Fudd's signature weapon. For no real reason except politics. This despite it plainly obviously being against what the original cartoons were about or what the creators intended.

See how easy it is to have corporate drones attack their supposed customers? All of this is being weaponized to destroy the past.

There might even be people in these industries who don't hate you, but they suspiciously have little to no power in them. So, functionally, what is the difference?

A similar example would be the recent unnecessary Animaniacs reboot deliberately not calling in the people from the 1990s that made it a success. Warner Bros. instead stole their property legally and gave it to a bunch of handpicked corporate artists who licked the right boots. Why? To assert complete control over your nostalgia and past. This is what they do in every industry now. They can't create anything new, so they have to destroy everything old. The pop cultists, of course, defended it because Brand, despite it being built on a lie. And it will happen again. And again. And again. And again.

You cannot get away from it, and that is the point.

The key takeaway from the above is this:

It's about control, not entertainment. This censorship is meant to mold your brain properly and turn you into a good citizen. You need to have the right views before we can entertain you! That is the only reason this censorship exists. Entertainment doesn't factor into this at all. It never does, and it never will.

Which is part of the reason the usage of censorship was always bad. It isn't and has never been about children, don't fool yourself. It was only ever about control.

Censorship is the lazy man's way of controlling art instead of exercising the purpose of the form: discussion. It is one of many 20th century weapons that have evolved to be used against the culture that helped spawn it to begin with. That is because tools based on deceit and cowardice can always be used by those who treasure those very things. What else would you consider what is happening right now? This mess is called getting what you deserve.

I'm not saying this to be smug, I'm saying it because it has to be realized. We've wasted enough time on this nonsense. Censorship is a result of bad curation of the arts made by people who did not appreciate or understand the various forms and saw them only as weapons for social control. Were they treated as they should be: as works designed to affirm humanity, imagination, and possibility beyond the known world, we would be living in a far different world than Current Year. And I would argue it would be a much better one.

But of course we don't live in that world. We live in a much more mundane one, run by those with the imagination of a grape nut, and used against the populace instead of reinforcing universal truths we can all get behind and come together on. Despite that, it doesn't mean we have to live in this world forever. The times will eventually change, whether you want them to or not. Whatever comes down the pike will lead to a much different climate than this one. It's inevitable. You simply can't fight the passage of time.

What comes next us up to you.

And that's all there is to it. Censorship is the refuge of the cowardly, but that is why it was created to begin with. It is a way to exercise control and authority without having to have the ability to demonstrate either yourself. This makes it a paper tiger, easy to be knocked down and usurped. Taking a gander at the world we live in today should prove that much.

What we need is a climate of confrontation, discussion, and yes, bad words and mean thoughts. I'd rather two philosophers having street fights over the validity of nudity in storytelling than having one simply get a position of authority and impose the side he prefers. This doesn't solve anything, it only makes the powder keg worse.

A culture of honesty would do as all a lot of good. No more hiding, no more cowering, and now more subterfuge. This is what makes for the best art, so it only stand to reason that it would make for the best cultural climate too. This is something to strive for.

At the end of the day, that's all anyone really needs. Hopefully one day we can get there, whenever we get out of this endless cycle we are stuck in.

Then perhaps we will get what we finally deserve, and it will be much better than this as a result. One can only hope!

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