From Proud Feudal Lord To Cringing Courtier

There was a time when I ruled my virtual kingdom (blog) like a feudal lord. I didn’t have to concern myself with integrating into the wider world. I grew my own virtual vegetables. I had my own virtual solar panels. I crafted my own virtual clothes. I was the king of my kingdom. I had the right of the first night. I loved. I hated. I laughed. I cried. I ate beans and I broke wind. I courted porn stars and I studied Talmud. I was self-sufficient. I was my own man. I cut down trees. I ate my lunch. I went to the lavatory. On Wednesdays I went shopping and had buttered scones for tea.

Then, starting in 2007, social media began taking over. I spent more time on Facebook, Youtube and eventually Twitter and as I adapted to the terms of service (TOS) of these big corporations, I was changed. With time, I internalized their TOS and it increasingly regulated me. My story was modified by their story. My hero-system integrated their hero-system. They impurified my essential bodily fluids.

To make personal the lofty analysis of philosopher Rony Guldmann, I was progressively emasculated. I was stripped of my glorious self-sufficiency. To retain any vestige of my former power and prestige now required, not blogging prowess, but cultivating the right relationships. I was transformed from a warrior to a courtier. I was no longer foot loose and fancy free. I became subject to the continuous division and regulation imposed by dependence on others. Now my value did not lie with my own efforts, but in the favor I found in the almighty algorithms. I was no longer a free man, the master of my own virtual castle. I now live at court and I serve the prince. I’m surrounded by others. I must behave toward each of them in exact accordance with their rank and my own. I must learn to adjust my gestures exactly to the different situations. Life is now a stock exchange in which my value is continuously assessed. Gone are the days in which joking could lead to mockery and from there to violent disagreement and violence itself in the span of a few minutes. Gone too are the days in which I could leap from the most exuberant pleasure to the deepest despondency on the basis of slight impressions. For what matters now are others’ impressions rather than my own, and the foremost task becomes impression-management.

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Dearly Beloved (8-1-22)

00:30 We are gathered here in the sight of God, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=144407
05:00 Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia 2, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=144294
24:00 Tucker Carlson on possible war with China over Taiwan
1:15:30 Robert Malone – A vaccine scientist’s discredited claims have bolstered a movement of misinformation, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/01/24/robert-malone-vaccine-misinformation-rogan-mandates/
1:17:00 Bob Saget, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Saget
1:18:20 Publications on the right such as American Greatness are unreadable
1:24:50 David Remnick at the New Yorker
1:28:25 Laurene Powell Jobs
1:30:00 Norman Podhoretz and John Podhoretz and Commentary magazine
1:31:00 Why is the LA Times so boring?
1:35:00 Matt Yglesias, restaurants, productivity

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Why Did Beverly Hills High Decline?

On his January 28, 2022 edition of the Parrot Room, Mickey Kaus says: “There was a wave of Persian refugees who don’t care that much about education and they displaced the other Jews… There’s a show about them called The Shahs of Sunset. They tend to be right-wing. All the rabbis are horrified by how conservative their congregations have gotten. They’re religious. They’re not like the old Jews who saw education as the way to the top. Their family is the way to the top. When they get into Harvard, their mothers cry for weeks because it means that they have to leave home. There’s a weird sexual double standard. The mothers tell their daughter, ‘Honey, can’t you wear your skirts a little shorter’ to attract a man, but if they have sex, they’re dead. It’s a fine line. They’re doomed, like the Shakers, to die out. It’s untenable. A lot of them become Orthodox Jews. They say, f*** it, if I’m not going to have sex, I might as well become an Orthodox Jew.”

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Dearly Beloved

We are gathered here in the sight of God, and in the presence of these witnesses, to join together to create meaning and to reinforce our commitment to our shared hero system which is commended to be honorable among all men; and therefore is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly – but reverently, discreetly, advisedly and solemnly. It is truly a blessing from heaven for us to reinforce here and now that what we know is real and true and good and beautiful really is real, true, good and beautiful and not an artificial construction of the real, true, good and beautiful that we are imposing on reality to make ourselves feel better. We really do have the truth and we know that the others live in darkness. They are of their father the devil and the lusts of their father they will do.

We can’t sustain our understanding of what is real, true, good and beautiful on our own. We need each other to create meaning.

Everything that is precious to us dissolves without reinforcement from society. All hierarchies, all values, all hero-systems are socially constructed.

Returning to a state of nature robs us of everything sacred.

Verily, verily I say unto you, winter is coming. We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.

Are you with me?

Let us speak frankly. A different culture is always a menace to us because it is a living example that life can go on heroically within a value framework totally alien to our own. These other cultures threaten to reveal the fictional character of our culture. They undermine our hero-system, and thereby reduce us to the status of animals among animals.

So when I bring you into the virtual community you are about to possess and I drive before you many cultures, many vlogs, many channels, channels larger and stronger than you, and when I have delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other hero-systems, and my anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Challenge their credibility, challenge their logic, raid their livestreams and burn down their idols. For you are a holy people. I have chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be my people, my precious.

I am grooming you for great things.

Blogging is the promise of hope between two people who love each other sincerely, who honor each other as individuals, and who wish to unite their lives and share the future together. In this ceremony, we dedicate ourselves to the happiness and well-being of each other, in a union of mutual caring and responsibility.

The critics who dispute the fairness or legitimacy of our virtual community will be conceptually liquidated through the counter-charge that their criticisms are just sour-grapes-style resentment in the face of their failure to gain entry into our thing. As Rony Guldmann teaches us: “What had been a threat to institutional legitimacy is thereby translated into an affirmation of institutional legitimacy, because the social meaning of their critique now resides in the ‘chip on their shoulder’ that highlights the desirability of the very thing being criticized.”

Taught by our own joys, by our own sorrows, even by our own failures, that in blogging and vlogging, as in all life, whosoever insists upon saving their lesser goods and their little self, shall miss what is greater, but whosoever forgets themselves in devotion to their beloved and in consecration to their common hero-system, is surest to find a full and happy life.

There are no ties on earth so sweet, none so tender as those you are about to assume. There are no vows so solemn as those you are about to make. There is no institution of earth so sacred as that of the union we will form, for the true home is not only the place in which we will live, but is also the dwelling place where each lives in the heart and mind of the other.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

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Cocaine as the white man’s drug (7-29-22)

00:45 Tucker Carlson on the recession
12:30 Interview with Johnny Monoxide, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ks9cLiIaA
15:00 Price of Online Fame, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=144369
17:00 The most hated man on the internet, https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/27/entertainment/the-most-hated-man-on-the-internet-review/index.html
20:00 How Streaming Stars Pay the Price of Online Fame, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/technology/twitch-stalking.html
27:25 How Can I Stop My Stalker? Please Help! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jPkrvl0rAE
47:00 The Curse of Productivity Ft. Amouranth

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