RIP Wired

The Wired article I posted about here created quite a stir. It is from the latest issue, which I’ve looked through — it looks like a desperate ploy for attention, and the readers reacted in the Wired.com comments on the editorial lead-in story, “The Battle for Equality is WIRED,” with these perfect skewerings:

You know what the saddest part of this is? The equality movement had won. It won ages ago, decades. Oh, those beating the drum may not think so, but they had. I turn 40 in a week. When I was a kid, it was drilled into me to treat people with compassion whether they were white, black, straight, homosexual, whatever. I was happy to do it. The only missing element to the change that the equality movement wants was one that change requires – time. Over time, with little nudging, minds would change, attitudes would change.

But no, it’s wanted right now. People are to simply wake up and instantly think in a completely different way. To accomplish this, the movement has used the tools reserved for the worst of budding oppressive regimes – shaming, fear, threats to livelihood, all behind a facade of inclusiveness and friendliness, a mockery of compassion, and a play of weakness even as the movement has held all the power. The question of government is no longer how to promote freedom for us all by finding common ground, but whose side it will take. Because the movement has snapped the common thread among us, it is required that a “side” must be chosen within this country (Talking the U.S. here). And while it may seem the movement is ahead, trust me, there is NO winner in such a scenario.

Note that I said in the beginning that the equality movement “had” won. This barrage of constant propaganda, this barbaric level of social engineering to force people to crawl into their own heads and hide, while having to outwardly smile and pretend to behave as told is beginning to fail. Just looking at comments on articles such as this is evidence of it. They’re sick of it – I’m sick of it. Equality and diversity are lofty, wonderful goals – but as with anything else, they twist into a tragic evil when they become an obsession. And in the United States, at least, this has become an obsession.

I know by now anyone who disagrees with me is probably foaming at the mouth thinking me the root of all evil. But this isn’t a “I can’t wait to see you fail” message. Actually just noting that the path this movement is no longer attracting people, it’s pushing them away. The answer? Stop pushing. To be truly inclusive is to invite everyone with the understanding not everyone will take that invitation.

To sum up for Wired – Perhaps maybe you should take the suggestions I see from many on here and return to a focus on, I don’t know, technology? How about a positive-toned magazine showing what the best and brightest in the world are creating, and how it can help? I miss that optimism Wired once had. Frankly, if I want drab “oh what a horrible unfair world we live in” media, I have essentially almost every other publication or news broadcast around to look at.

And that’s the end of my rambling.

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Problem is, morally driven people simply can’t accept their quest is over, that they won or even leave it alone. That’s because, deep within, we are addicted to righteousness. That feel good sensation of being just and fair, on the side of good. Religion thrives on that addiction. People will devote their entire lives to get it and keep it flowing.

But currently religion no longer is the main purveyor of moral righteousness, at least in the West. It’s all these secular moral quests (feminism, pacifism, the green movement, etc), started mostly during the XXth century and with good reasons behind them. Created to supposedly change and fight the older moral codes and former causes for feeling righteous and good, but mostly, as a replacement for religious fervor and righteousness.

It’s also a matter of education: since the counter-culture movement started, most educated people has been raised with the liberal mindset almost burned into them as an unthinking code of behavior, and the unflinching belief that they are special and worthy, whatever they are, with their goal in life being happy.

But guess what? life really doesn’t warrant those expectations of self-importance and value all the time. Even people raised in the most liberal and sensitive background can be mistreated, undervalued and unhappy with their overall life.

What’s wrong with the world then? if the liberal mindset won and I’m aligned with it, why am I so unhappy, aimless and lacking purpose?

It must be a conspiracy of course! the Man and the old boogeymen have made a return and one with a vengeance! because other people can’t see the ugliness me and my Internet-enabled peers have seen. And thanks to the Internet, I now have an echo chamber of people keeping my confirmation bias strong and going.

James May posted these two comments on my piece which deserve to be read more widely:

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein had an imaginary Future History timeline which included an era called “The Crazy Years.” It’s amazing the SF community was the first to completely fall to our current gender feminist madness, the irony being SF was the most prepared to avoid it by being a canary-in-a-coal-mine genre of warning literature of precisely this type of dystopian world. Even more irony is we were sandbagged by Orwell’s perceptual trap where authoritarian fascism wormed its way in by talking about wheel chair access, social justice and allergies to scented products. The modern KKK is probably kicking themselves for not coming up with that first.

Typical of our new lack of self-awareness is our Orwellian habit of looking at bald-faced racism and bigotry straight in the face and calling it “anti-racism” and “anti-bigotry.” A small slice of how stupid our community has become is typified by TorCom’s Liz Bourke and her column “Sleeps With Monsters,” the title of which is a quote from a poem by the insane lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich. In that 1963 poem Rich shows marriage in the same dystopian light Orwell did his future England, a place of scuffed edges, dead dreams and hollow stupidity. Why are we not surprised a bigoted lesbian ideologue like Bourke was among the first to fist-pump Ann Leckie’s SF novel Ancillary Justice, a mediocre work but which had the good sense to signal boost lesbian feminist dogma about “genderblindess,” the cure for Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality.”

In keeping with the idea of seeing marriage as a cultural cul-de-sac, we have retroactively not only declared all SFF prior to 2009 or thereabouts as a woman-hating, racist, homophobic delight through our new “feminist” lens, but any straight white male who had the temerity to be born without apologizing to our new overlords for the East India Company, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and pretty much any evil humankind has ever indulged in, as long as all other ethnic groups who did the same are thrown into Orwell’s memory hole. We have also decided to wage war on success itself and build statues to failure who talk to us about imaginary restaurants full of menacing face-punching “white cis dudes.”

The Wired article is fit only for Orwell’s Ministry of Information and as an illustration of how far we’ve fallen, been duped, become stupid and utterly unworthy of a legacy where E. M. Forester and Ray Bradbury shouted at us to no avail. Adrienne Rich is our literary hero now, and God help us.

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Let’s call the Wired article what it is: lying. It lies from the beginning to the end. I’d need to write a short book to unpack all the falsehoods. One bald-faced lie even touches on GamerGate, and the irony there is one of the sore points with GamerGate were unethical articles like this one which put forth premises with no sourcing or quotes whatsoever and treats them as gospel. And that gospel is the same as in GamerGate: a moral ethos based on straight white men always being wrong and always up to something. For a sick ideology which laughs at the idea of “cabals,” the justice league of race and gender stipulates any time there are too many men, whites or heterosexuals in a hobby there’s some sort of collusion at work, though these sorry “feminists” never provide any proof of such a thing other than demonization theories about “white male cis privilege.”

In a few short years these nuthatches have ruined our hobby. I’ll tell you this, anyone who holds N. K. Jemisin up as a voice of social justice is too far gone to reach.