Banned Brains

Average depiction of a modern Book Cultist

Sorry to say that for today I will be going back on the recent tone shift around here. I apologize, but it must be done. Recent events have proven to me just how hopeless OldPub really is, and we need to expound upon it here. Hopefully we can move on from this in future entries, but today, right here and right now, this must really be addressed.

You know the score by now. It wouldn't be the modern day if we didn't worship products, industries, and celebrities, despite how hollow they might ultimately be. It's been decades of decay, and still we cling to the bad habits of idolatry and materialism that led us down this rabbit hole in the first place. And somehow we are still hitting new lows.

The 21st century is a guerrilla war with bodies and rubble laying strewn across a blown out countryside. The thing is, all of the chaos you see from it are remnants of the 20th century, battles long since fought and won, or lost. We are still trapped here in this same forever war, firing at zombies that refuse to stay dead and ghosts we refuse to admit already are. It's a conflict long since over, with no reason to still be going, but still we fight over nothing regardless. We do this despite there being nothing left to go to war over. It's all already all gone.

And there are still active landmines buried all over the place for the survivors to still watch out for. One such place where they remain plentiful, is in the arts and the entertainment world. It is as if it were boobytrapped by those who laid down inside those buildings and died decades back. We're still fighting those ghosts today.

The most obvious example of this tiresome climate, is the old book publishing industry. OldPub destroyed reading as a hobby for normal people long ago, and they are very interested in keeping it dead. Destroyers can never stop destroying.

The worst thing that ever happened to the hobby of reading was mystifying it and turning a simple pastime into a personality trait for hipster types and loners. This has not led to anything good. The process of transforming something anyone can (and should) do into an identity for antisocial people has transformed the entire industry into an ongoing war against general customers and the Average Joe. It has chased normal people away from something they should already be doing normally by weaponizing stories instead of giving them what they want. Not only that, but the hobby has been refashioned into a (failing) industry based on syphoning money through said antisocial behavior to spread even more antisocial behavior, with plenty of money laundering, of course, and is even backed up by the public school system to continue this nonsense forever. One can argue, correctly, that this is a symptom wider cultural problem in the West, and not a recent one, but I am increasingly under the belief that this particular industry was where it all started from.

The book industry is patient zero to every modern ill the West is currently suffering from, and the one most diseased and closest to death from its long unaddressed and untreated sickness. Its death from self-inflicted wounds has been a long time coming. Were it not for NewPub, the entire system would have already collapsed by now.

As an example, take the scam known as Banned Book Week. This forged celebration centered on an ad campaign for Big Publishing is a way of mystifying the act of buying a corporate product as if it were some sort of suppressed religious text from the Enemy. But that isn't what it actually is. You've probably heard the justification for supporting it, too. "If it's banned then it must be worth reading!" they scream as they hand over their money to buy books that simply weren't placed on one random school's reading list in some random state once. That's right, the definition of "banned" means less than nothing. And these lists never have books that have always been and are still banned to this day, including recent ones scraped off of Amazon itself for dubious reasons. Why are these banned? Because they don't contain the Cult's religious tract in it. "Banned Books" as defined by OldPub simply means what stock they want to clear out that week. They have successfully convinced cultists that rule the industry that The Man is somehow in charge and fighting against freedoms or whatever vague nonsense they were taught by their cult leaders, and buying corporate product will help you fight back. Yes, book cultists actually believe this. Truth is, it's just a lie to spur the ingroup on to spend more money buying more cultist tract and give the illusion that they are some kind of warrior for the cause. It has nothing to do with books, banned or not.

Want an example of how it's a scam? The Bible, an actual religious book, is never on any of these lists or sold at the front of the store during the sham festivities. One of Solzhenitsyn's last books has been suppressed in the West since it originally came out, because no one wishes to discuss the contents within. Not much for freethinking, these freethinkers are. They do not think and they are not free; they are merely cogs in Big Publishing's machine. 

But weren't we told that reading was supposed to be about expanding your mind and growing as a human being? Is this not what it was sold to you as back when you were a rug rat watching carefully curated episodes of Reading Rainbow on the old PBS back in the day? Isn't reading a magical act that makes you whole, especially for understanding perspectives outside your own? Wasn't censorship of books supposed to be bad because it goes against this? How can you address ideas if you can't face them down or argue against them? By having the billion dollar corporations and their pals in governments and schools do the thinking for you, after all. 

If any of the above was actually is true then why do all of those frauds continue to ignore the elephant in the room with their mystical talk of books? Why do they still pretend to be oppressed despite being the oppressors and having billionaire friends in every space and adjacent industry, able to suppress whatever they desire? These people even brag about censoring their enemies. They aren't fighting the censors: they are the censors.

Reading is being destroyed as a hobby, it has been since at least Cultural Ground Zero, and all your heroes are the ones burning the books and suppressing competing texts to their cult beliefs. And no one appears to be the wiser.

Let us get blunt. OldPub is currently in the process of gutting old works (or pretending to do so in order to gain publicity for newer releases, which is no better) in order to appease a small cadre of anti-social urbanites who won't buy these books in the first place. OldPub is speed-running its collapse in real time, showing the rest of the world what a fraud it always was in the first place, and it's taking everything it dubiously owns down with it. This whole set was never anything other than a cult that existed to indoctrinate you into the fold.

By now you've certainly heard about what happened with Roald Dahl's works, editors without tact licking their chops over butchering his works for children. Why? Because they have decided his words are not as important as their message. Because they are the Masters of the written word, they have free reign over all words past, present, and future. They can do whatever they want, and you have to obey. And every single person in the industry right now, and those who still buy their books, is culpable for their current false king status.

This is not the first time such censorship has been enacted, and if you think the second hand market will help fight the insanity going on, you might be surprised at how bad things really are now. The cult is winning in their quest to destroy reading.

When publishers banned Dr. Seuss books (Forget about this one? The book worshipers in OldPub sure have!) several were banned from even being sold on eBay, in the second hand market, essentially informing readers they wanted contraband and that was just plain illegal. The billionaire corps decided you can't read these books so by gum you will NOT read them. They are your masters, and they know better. And every adjacent industry and platform rushed to help them do it. This is only the first example. It will happen again in the future, because no one is interested in stopping them from banning books they shouldn't own the rights to in the first place.

By the way, Dr. Seuss has also not made it onto the corporate-approved Banned Books Week, either. What a surprise, the cult has not decreed it important! Scammers live to scam, and we're all fine with letting them scam.

Right now, more than any imagined time portrayed in a Book Cultist's fantasies, we are living through a cultural book burning celebrated by an entire government-backed group of supposed freethinkers and progressive creatives who somehow consider themselves rebels. And it is being lead by every aspect of the modern world, including those who pretend they are not doing so. It's not censorship if the billionaire corporation owns the rights to the art it had no hand in creating, it seems. They have free reign to edit any book and prevent selling of any older version. They own the very being of art. It's very normal, you see!

Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl are merely two targets, and are easy ones because the publishers can strongarm (or inject infiltrators) into the estates of these long dead writers and get "permission" (permission they should have no rights to have, by the way) to do whatever they want to art they had no input in creating in the first place. This is a clear loophole to the copyright issue, the flipside of the one the Walt Disney Corporation has been abusing for ages to no reasonable pushback from anyone. If you think extending copyright indefinitely on creations no one alive today had any hand in creating is good for creativity, I have a bridge to sell you. Dante and Homer didn't need to be owned by Disney to survive the passage of time, but somehow everything today does? At this point, everyone should be seeing this scam for what it is.

As an example, look up who owns the rights too Robert E. Howard's work and marvel at the fact that somehow these people think they have any right to profit off his name or creations. It hasn't been owned by anyone affiliated with him in any way for nearly a century. All it takes is one of these types to smell blood in the water, and do the same his works they are planning for the above authors. And what right do they have to do such a thing to his works?

They have none. Nonetheless, they will get unlimited support from the Book Cult to fleece readers forever. Truly an industry of rebels and freethinkers.

If you think it will stop here, then you have not been paying attention. Once the precedent is set, it never stops. Especially in OldPub, when it involves anti-art and anti-reader action above everything else. Eventually they will work their way up to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and by then it will be too late to do anything about it. The book cult will remake everything in its own image. And yes, they will be saved for last. And nothing will be done to stop them.

The longer this goes on, the worse it will get.

Should OldPub continue their war against normality, everything they own, including that which it doesn't, will be destroyed. And yes, they will push to obliterate even that which it should have no control over too begin with, like the classic fairy tales we so take for granted. Nothing can be hated by this crowd more than purity or beauty, so it must be subverted or destroyed. There is no other option. This is the poison of the anti-social mentality infecting its soul. Eventually it turns against what created it in the first place.

It won't stop with fairy tales, it merely begins there. Just like our modern wonder stories do, so will the infection that fights to kill them.

As you can tell, this isn't stopping. The cultists are only attacking harder and harder, and have no one to push back the tide against their advance. When you leave anti-social and hate-filled bugmen in control of your entire industry of art, don't be surprised when they eventually learn to hate it as much as they hate you. They will eventually steamroll it all. This is where we are now.

There will be no survivors, if this crowd has its way. No more connection to the past, just endless rewrites and scripture updates for the ever-changing modern dogma that our betters will decide on for the rest of us.

Leaving Fanatics in control of anything was always a terrible idea, and we are living through the result of doing such a thing long ago. Until they are flushed out back to the margins where they originally skulked out of, they will only continue to destroy and find justifications so they can keep doing it forever. When one has their hearts poisoned by evil and cannot be reasoned with, they must be stopped. Otherwise everyone loses.

And one should be vigilante, even among those he trusts. Infiltrators are everywhere, and getting support from those who sell themselves on knowing better. It is getting darker out there, and it feels as if there are less and less of those willing to stand against them.

Because these antisocial types are not only in OldPub, they are trying to squeeze into NewPub, as well. They are attempting to jump from their burning car into the neighboring train so they can crash that one too. And they are having old guard support from the industry to do so. Because destroying one industry wasn't enough for any of them.

We've been dealing with an industry on decline for longer than most of us have been alive. It's time to stop doing things like this. There is no excuse to be supporting people who not only hate you, but hate everything their industry came from.

There is no excuse for this one, sorry. I don't care if said magazine has roped in a Brand Name author or two for its table of contents, it doesn't excuse supporting subverters and destroyers of your industry at this juncture. They are not working to fix any actual issues, they just want to be kings of the junk heap and get back pats for saying the Right Things. There is nothing being fixed here, just more support of mindless cults.

I can't count the number of vanity projects like the above have been bandied about this sphere longer than I've been alive. They always have an initial pop from labeling and insiders pushing the project before instantly fading into obscurity afterwards, never attracting anyone other than a rabid fringe that disappears as soon as they see shiny keys elsewhere. If this sort of thing worked, they wouldn't still be rehashing these same tired ideas for well over a decade at this point to absolutely no fanfare or interest. And yet here we are again with the same failed nonsense.

These sorts of projects don't grow the market, they never grow the readership, they don't attempt anything new despite their cliched buzzwords being thrown around. The biggest red flag that is never addressed: It doesn't appeal to normal people, no wider audience. So who is this sort of project meant to impress? How many times are you meant to regurgitate the same idea and act as if it is fresh? Corporate buzzwords that don't even sell books in OldPub? Name Brand Authors from half a century ago being bandied about on crowdfund campaign pages? This isn't offering anything new, it is relying on selling ideas that haven't sold since the 20th century, if they ever sold in the first place. None of this exists to benefit the readers or the art--it's all ego. It's about the self over all, and that has been a problem with Fanatics in this industry since they seized control back in the late 1930s. They don't want art: they want to be a part of the in-crowd.

At what point do we begin trying to grow this space instead of deliberately shrinking it? How many more decades do we have to sit through where things just get worse and more insular while being told the opposite is happening by the same crowd censoring books and saying they are not censoring them? How long are they going to be allowed free reign to destroy? At what point do we stop playing stupid games without even any prizes?

As for censorship, don't think they will start with obvious examples like a 1984 or Brave New World. This industry has mastered only one thing besides virtue signaling to its cultist followers, and that is slowly boiling the frog, usually be distracting with Brand Names and misplaced nostalgia. By the time anyone notices they are being cooked, it will be much too late. And make no mistake, it is much later than you think.

Of course the censors will start with the more controversial, in their mind, yet less popular titles and authors before they move forward with bigger. That is also why they went after Ian Fleming's work. his is the source of a billion dollar corporate franchise, of course, so it needs to be wrestled away from its creator and made to be acceptable to the executives who get to profit off of it now. The same people who had nothing to do with its existence in the first place get to control the work now. Who cares if it bares little resemblance to what the original author wrote when we can rewrite what he wrote. All for the greater good.

What matters is that it says the right thing today in Current Year dogma. Because, again, that is all that matters to the zealot. You will have to constantly update it in the future, of course, but that is a job you give to your allies to justify a paycheck in a dying industry like this one. This is nothing more than another mean girls' table for people who never grew up.

And all the people who fancy themselves geniuses because they read books, because Reading Makes You Smart like the propaganda from the industry said, are so sucked into their cult that they do not even see what is going on around them. No, that is incorrect. They see it, but they are incapable of processing what is happening because they are the Good Guys. They can't possibly be in the wrong. No, as that Simpsons meme says, it is the children who are wrong.

There is no excuse to be silent over any of this, especially if you are involved in any form of art in any similar industry, even as an amateur or hobbyist. Yet, there is a palpable silence over this exact issue right now. We have case after case being reported, downplayed by the allies in the old media and ignored by the willfully blind Professional Authors. None of them are taking this seriously, and they are hoping you don't notice. The Book Cult have been dead quiet, talking instead about holding book conferences outside concentration camps in Chengdu and pondering how much money to give China while these Professional Authors can lecture on injustice to their home country out of the other side of their mouths. Because they loathe normal people more than they care about any form of justice, or any art. It's never been about anything else.

It's a scam; always has been and always will be. Antisocial hatred runs deep. There is no love to be found here.

Guess whose social media accounts are dead silent over the issue?

Not a word from the above crowd. Not a single solitary comment aside from self promotion and virtue signaling the same inane Book Cultist platitudes on their social media accounts. Because it isn't about the art, not really, and it never has been. It's about what you can squeeze out of it for yourself and get ahead of your supposed allies.

But be sure to check out the new adaption of their work streaming on the multibillion dollar streaming service right now! You don't want to pirate it, would you? That would be unethical! And we know this crowd is all about ethics. Things should be wiped out of existence if corporations can't pay me $$$ to terribly adapt my work in any sloppy and halfhearted way they decide to do it. Better for something too get wiped out of existence than me missing out on a single penny I could have gotten from desecrating what I made. I should also attack any reader who dislikes the changes because corporations are fragile little things who need my protection. Can't let a scorned reader potentially affect my bottom line. It's all so admirable.

These noble people even gave out wooden assholes at the Hugos once because the wrong people voted for their tiny, meaningless clique awards. Something they still seethe over at the drop of a hat today! They have their priorities straight. It's all about ethics and art for the people who really count! And those who count obey Big Publishing.

You won't see any wider pushback in OldPub or any of the old industries to this obvious insanity. It will not happen, at best it will be excused. It is always excused. Remember, this is the group that cared more about trying to take down the Internet Archive over fears they might not get a few pennies from it (more than what they are getting from OldPub, mind you) then they do about any form of creation or shared culture. It's all empty rhetoric meant to trick people. They will do anything to make a buck and scrap some clout to stand out among their allies in the unending struggle against normality. It's the mean girls' lunch table, because none of these people have ever moved on from high school. And they never will. They can't.

If anything, this whole scenario should give you definitive proof that reading doesn't make you smart. That's just another lie told by people who hate you and see you as a wallet with legs. Book Cultists are no different than those still obsessing over Disney or Funko Pops as if they are personality traits. They just go to WorldCon instead of drunk singles vacations to Disney World. It gives them the illusion of having principles or an identity because otherwise they have neither. There is nothing under the surface to be found except more Brand. It's all the same cult.

No, the only thing you can do is remember what is happening right now, record it into your mind in as much detail as you can, and really take into account how much these people hate you and wish to destroy everything around them. Make sure future generations see this nonsense for what it is. Preserve what you can, while you can preserve it, because in the next few years you will see a lot of things you have taken for granted disappear without a trace. It doesn't matter what it is, all of this is in danger of being erased, rewritten, or revised for modern audiencesthe cult, not unlike what I described happened nearly a century ago in The Last Fanatics. Those people never went away, they've just devolved into an even cruder mockery of what they once were, and they will decimate anything they can in their quest to claw their way to the top of their sad pack and rule as king of the junk heap. You will find no help from them, no respite from their constant barrage of attacks. They will destroy everything on their quest to destroy themselves. It is time to accept this nonsense for what it is.

Here's another harsh truth: the Book Cult also will work around the author to get what they want. Whether the author is a member of their ingroup or not does not factor into this. They will take what they want from them regardless. They are all disposable cogs in a machine, no different than any other random office job.

The most recent example of this happening is the news of censorship around author R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series.

The site in question is linked here

For those who don't know, Goosebumps abruptly vanished in the early 2000s because noble publisher Scholastic wrestled the rights away from its author and deliberately cratered sales and promotion to take it away from him. It is one of the many shortsighted moves the Book Cult has made to crush its own industry. They have control over the property now, including those totally coincidental Hollywood movies they keep making out of the series while the above censorship is going on. Can't have outdated word usage affect the modern dogma that needs to be spread among the sheepchildren.. This will also not be their last attack. They will never stop.

Everyone is a target in their path. This is the future looming ahead of us in the years to come. Assume no one else will preserve anything, and get to work doing it yourself. Prepare accordingly. Dark times are coming.

One of the most fascinating outcomes of the Cult of Books seizing control of reading as an industry has been their shift to worshiping multibillion corporations over appreciating the stories themselves. This is because the corporations make sure only the Good books with the Right messages will get printed, while the heretical competing texts will be filtered out. The new priest class has created the new official canon, one you must follow, and if it falls outside that limited ideological span then it is considered blasphemy and evil. It must be suppressed.

And this is what is happening on all the cases we have mentioned so far. There is nothing about quality factored in here, though their cult allies in education will make sure to force you to think it is quality work, but about purity. This isn't about reading, it's about obeying and being a cog in the machine of the new world. Obey your betters or be cast out.

There is no third choice. It isn't even a choice, in the end. Cults don't give choices: they give ultimatums.

It has gotten to the point that actual censorship of books exists in OldPub because it is Good For Them to be tampered with, as if constantly updating books like they were the satanic reverse of sacred scripture (in that must always change with the whims of those in charge instead of being eternal everlasting truth), is the end goal. This mutation of common sense really should show how degraded our culture is today and how much it's decayed. No one would have accepted this at any other point in time, except one with high levels of depression, heavy medication, self-destruction, and atomization, being ignored by the current cult in charge of it all. It's pathetic that we let it persist, at this point. And yet, that is what we do.

The solution to all of this is to keep a clear head. While Book Cultists, like every other person who turns their hobby into a personality trait, continue to spiral down the drain of worshiping their corporate overlords and justifying their hatred of everyone outside their silly club, you can bypass the whole lot of them by just being normal and continuing to be so. Just don't be one of them. The most rebellious thing you can be in a society that hates normality more than it does evil, is to just be a normal human being. Be something other than a cultist that lives off product and cloud and uses supplements to deal with the resulting alienation from their own backwards mindset. It shouldn't be that hard if you live the opposite life of literally everyone ruling these corporations.

What we need is a true revival of what we have forgotten, not more irrelevant corporate jargon used to sell more product to people only slightly less depressed than the one selling it to them. We need to aim higher than what we have now. This isn't good enough anymore, and it never was in the first place. Art is important, and should not be treated as a disposable commodity or worshiped like a cult tract. We should be ashamed at letting it get this bad.

Religious thought and worship belong to real religion, hobbies belong to everyone who wants to engage and learn, subcultures are meant for you to grow in and not for them to bend to you, and art is meant to connect instead of being ran by an iron fist by unelected commissars of the revolution. This is all backwards today, and it must be repaired before we can even thinking of moving forward from it. Whatever pathetic revolution these types think this is, they can never really win it. But they can take a lot of good things down with them along the way to the grave. Be sure to prepare accordingly. They still have further to fall, and they will most definitely not go quietly into the night once they realize how futile it is. They will not be able to lie to themselves forever and when they explode, we will get caught in the blast. Remember that, in the end, their motivator is hate, not stupidity. they know what they are doing. Never forget that.

We can't bend the knee to them anymore. We need to do better than supporting people who hate is. we need to push back against infiltrators like this:

I have never interacted with this account, by the way.

And that's the bottom line.

"This one hits HARD on several levels." ~ N.R. LaPoint