“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

When I was six, I found out that my parents could yell, they could threaten, but they couldn’t actually, physically, get in my brain and make my body do things. This must have led to a fun and exciting time for my parents, in finishing raising me.

However, to this day, I remember that. In the ultimate analysis I am free. People can kill me, but they can’t MAKE me do stuff. (absent neural programming, which Speaker assures me we don’t have yet.)

In the same way, in the course of almost as many years as Shakespeare’s total life, I’ve found Heinlein was right.

I don’t care how noble a side sounds, how profoundly urgent its benevolent message, if they say “this you cannot think. This you cannot read. This you cannot even consider” they are a tyranny in the making. If they get power over you and yours soon you’ll find that it’s “This air you cannot breathe.”

They are also unsure of their logical appeal and their ability to withstand the market place of ideas. Otherwise, why ban certain thoughts and ideas and points of view?

This is why “political correctness” is a bad thing, because it takes away your tools to think of things properly. If you can’t even express that men and women might be different, you surely can’t think about it.

It is also why progressivism with its ever growing list of “forbidden terms and words” because of racist sexist and imperialist bad thought (brown bag, really?) is a tyranny in the making.

I read an article this week, from Popehat about gamergate. I would like to say he made some good points, but he didn’t. Impossible to make good points when you mis-define the sides in the Gamergate and (by extension) the SFWA dispute and everywhere your favorite Social (in)Justice Whiners attack. He seems to have bought into the definition of the sides brought by the SJWs and so views them as mostly urban, educated, often in tech professions, etc. I.e. “Smart and cutting edge.” He also seems to think they’re in search of true social justice. (Le sigh.) He says he is neither on “team blue” or “team red” (his terms) because while he’s fiscally conservative he’s for gay marriage and he prefers urban environments. And he defines the opponents to SJWs as homophobes. (I wonder if he defines them as racist and sexist too? Including the women and the many gamergaters of interesting racial origin?)

Yeah, by that measurement, and actually including the “well educated” and “citizen of the world” measurements, I’d be in between too.

I’m not in between. I’m staunchly in opposition to the SJWs. Why? Because the sides aren’t as pictured.

Are there some homophobes on the side of Gamergate? I doubt it, particularly in the States. Look, most of these people are younger than I, and gay relationships are just a thing that at worst we don’t care about one way or another. Are there some homophobes on the right side of politics? Undoubtedly. Probably not as many as there are on the left, though. (No? Look to their favorite slurs and accusations to people they hate.) More organized, maybe, though disapproval of homosexuality for religious reasons is not necessarily (or often) homophobia. (Can be, but I’ve met very few.)

As for educated… pfui. It’s possible that on the SJW side there are more graduates of “good universities” with impeccable credentials, but listen to them for ten minutes and you realize these credentials were acquired by regurgitating the indoctrination poured down their throats by their patchouli-infused professors. In fact, if you try to discuss anything real with them, from the history of Western culture, to the real issues of some non-western civilizations, they gape at you like guppies in search of a crumb. You’re talking of things they were told don’t exist and they can’t think about them, because thinking about them would make them automatically bad people.

So if your head hurts and you’re confused, this is because Popehat mis-defined the sides involved in this dispute.

The SJWs aren’t for equality or inclusion or any of that grand stuff. They’re not even for upending the “scales of privilege” which at any rate haven’t been as described for at least fifty years.

They are for one thing only “Do as we say, and enshrine us as arbiters of all that’s right and just.”

Because their “system” of competing victimhoods is so confusing and irrational, they need someone to tell you when and how to discriminate, and whether a black handicapped straight woman has precedence over a Muslim, communist, gay guy. These hierarchies change, too, depending on whim and whatever comes from the top.

So you need to constantly pay attention to the “voices from above” to know what to think and believe. And even the wrong word you didn’t know was wrong — “lady” — can get you attacked by people who are keeping up with the SJW diktats.

Which means there must be SJWs in charge, and they must be listened to constantly. IOW they get power to tell you what to do, what to think, what to read and what to believe. Read or believe the wrong thing, and the pack descends on you like the red brigades on a deviationist.

In fact the whole thing smells of the power struggles in the Soviet Union.

This is not coincidental.

Both systems are tyrannical and aim at controlling your thought.

This you must not read, this you must not think, this you must not see even if it happens before your very eyes.

To be an SJW you must believe that, the long history of life on Earth notwithstanding, the attraction between male and female is arbitrary and part of “conditioning.” That men and women are both exactly alike save for sex organs, and completely different in that women as historical victims have all the virtues of humanity, including compassion, peacefulness, healing, etc. That if only we weren’t “oppressed” by a capitalist system, everyone would have enough of what they need/want and there would be no war or strife. That saying that a 200lb man can carry a 90lb woman under one arm and laugh at her struggles is sexist. That saying cultures are differently functional is somehow racist (even when the cultures belong to the exact same race, like say, Morocco and Italy.)

In other words, you have to be willing to believe things that just ain’t so and that simply won’t work in the real world.

In the article, Popehat makes reference to how they’re trying to get into gaming because it’s one of the sectors of the economy still doing well. All the places that the SJWs have colonized before: books, news, industry, corporations are floundering.

It never occurs to him there is a cause and effect here. As John C. Wright points out, everything they touch they destroy. EVERYTHING. That is because what they want is power over the human mind, and because their set of beliefs is completely out of touch with reality.

You can’t, for instance, run a corporation as though men and women were exactly the same from the neck up. As though they were both capable of leadership sure. Identical, though? Never. Women have a completely different style in social relations. To deny that is the true sexism.

The difference between the two sides is not red and blue, a scheme that changed in my lifetime anyway (Really, since when isn’t red communist? Were they afraid of the linkage?)

The difference is between the bound and the free, the mentally enslaved and those who can read and think anything.

To compare us to the “party of the past” and the “party of the future” and to ascribe to the SJWs the future is to forget that America is not Europe. Our past is not the staid past of aristocrats and serfs. It is the past of revolution and freedom. And none of us is advocating stasis.

We know technology changes, and its changes affect society. It is the SJWs, the party of the past of Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao and other blood stained, dead, and for the most part white males, who are afraid of the change. They own the imagined future of the past and they can’t face the real future with interpersonal communications they don’t control, news they don’t control, entertainment they don’t control.

It is they who want to shut down internet discourse, or at least control it. It is they who hate the free and chaotic environment online.

It is they who run around telling everyone “this you must not do” and “this you must not think” and “this person you must not associate with” on pain of being ‘worse than Hitler’.

We?

Heck, I gave my sons The Communist Manifesto when they were 12. I figured it was better they taste the poison from the source, and not from the various repackagers who made it more palatable. Looked at, in its naked horror, the ideology can’t fail to repel.

I also let them read their fill of various of the diluted sources afterwards, because if you’re armed with logic, the dankiest corners of the SJW universe hold no terrors. Mostly, they hold boredom, because without the ability to be challenged there can be no independent, individual or new thought.

The two sides are as follows:

They’re the would be slave masters; we’re the free men, holding two middle fingers aloft in their faces.

Yours is the choice.