(10-21-2025, 01:33 PM)UltraBudgie Wrote: A wee bit hyperbolic—"everything coercive is rape, in a way" is a spiral to be avoided—but I see where you're coming from.
....
I thought about the characterization... but I announced "sentiment" plainly.
Take it, I would hope, as an affirmation of my insistence on "dignity" as a hallmark of civilization...
Some, even here, appear to 'make themselves' deaf to it's silence... not a flaw... but sadly, an opportunity.
Since I desperately loathe the theatrics of activism, I don't "use" it to persuade, but to inform... this is my sentiment... this is a 'feeling'... which those who shun such things can feel free to ignore, attack, ignore, seek to elaborate, or whatever..
But it also shows that I do feel things, I'm not uncaring... just trying to stay dispassionate enough to talk about things, to learn, to hope.
Or I could go full Vulcan... a tempting option... (We could really benefit from a Vulcan "journalist.")...
but this is my choice:
Always to convey that somethings about the author of thoughts are intertwined and part of who they are...
The current trend is to strip that away, to isolate one from the other... to offer fact from opinion... but to blend them into a baseline which, the terrible "they," can exploit.
The re-enforced private communication platforms all principally (and deliberately) amplify the main things:
Hate, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Fear... I could go on. (Might there not be some wisdom in actually addressing which industry 'sells' what?)
Now we have from one industry alone....Voyeuristic Virtue fodder, Almost non-stop partisan bullshit street-gang like turf wars, Inflammatory ignorance elevated to glory, and a full diet of 'commerce.'
When I say that it felt to me, as if we had been raped by the institutions of trust... at every level, and people (with few exceptions) reliving the frenzy of social "pressure" used only in some people's wildest imaginations - like some Hitleresque, shades of Pol Pot... nightmare.
Then there "they" were... laughing... going out drinking ... many unmasked in public. The sheer lunacy of the mask policy alone was a bold-faced insult...
akin to those who walk up to you and say... "You know what? I'm going to rape you and you ARE going to love me for it!" The quintessential "Big Brother."
And guess what... some did... sang songs, laughed with malicious glee, and provided everyone you know (generally speaking) exactly how "we" are feeling. It was affirmation that the right kind of activism is a weapon... and they were gleeful a kids on Christmas to 'use' it... THAT was the headline stuff... not how people simply dropped from middle-class to lower class by the hundreds of thousands in a matter of weeks.
Still I remain un-alarmed
by them.
Because not one of them is much more than a caricature of a cloister-headed idiot... whose focus has led them completely into a death spiral. They will simply destroy themselves... their chasing the wrong Utopia.