Inside Baseball
You were talk, talk, talk, talkin' in circles
This essay has to be one of my favorites. I've never been into professional wrestling due to a series of factors in my childhood and teenage years. If the situation were altered, I would probably be a person with multiple WWE tattoos of some variety. I am excessively eager and enthusiastic when I get into something, and I would have been a super fan for sure. But all of that got routed towards John HALO & Lt. Rasczak, and for a long time I was one of those smirking assholes forever ready to "inform" anyone & everyone that "You know wrestling isn't real, right?"
I read the Antidem essay for the first time a year or so after I got redpilled. The revelations were initially significant, as well they ramped in intensity over time, and even to this day I will be blindsided by something that makes me realize my own constructed interpretive framework differs substantially from the vestiges of my presumptive interpretive framework. I think I reread it two times after the initial read through, as in I scrolled up and read it all again, word for word, twice. The essay laid it out so cleanly, and I guess I was able to be very objective because I was learning things about wrestling that were fascinating but completely neutral valence regarding morals or preference or analysis. Antipodal to that, I was having my eyelids surgically removed while some 8D rhetoric daemon was digging six fingerclaws into my skull, forcing me to stare at something I "just believed" and see it for what it really was. This was my own personal “everything I thought was real is fake & gay” moment regarding American politics.
From a very early age, I enjoyed the minutiae of American politics. I really liked listening to C-SPAN, particularly SCOTUS oral arguments. Something about the act of public debate just appeals to me. Two sides using all the powers of fact and eloquence at their disposal in an effort to confront that which they deny or disagree with. An intelligent man standing before his peers & betters, making a case regarding something he has considered long and is intimately familiar with. Combatants sword fighting with words & phrases, a contest of will, character, and lexicographical tenacity… I understand how off-putting and tiresome we theorycels can be. It’s no different than the way I roll my eyes when people start talking about fantasy football.
I’ve painted a very rosy picture here, and it is indeed a lovely fiction. The reality is best illustrated by this, for me and for many reasons, depressing image:
Oral argument in the supreme court is superfluous to the actual process of adjudication. The justices correspond in writing, and if a justice is going to change their mind, something that I think is very rare, it will be due to that correspondence, not the time-wasting chatter we plebs get to watch on CSPAN. And it should be mentioned that the fear of bodily harm, protracted social disturbances, or accelerated collapse of the bureaucratic dominated status quo as factors influencing SCOTUS justices undeniably dwarf the impact of their internal correspondence. This bit of forgotten modern history is illustrative of the state of argument. It is great fun to talk and debate, speaking or writing, but when push comes to shove, words are wind1.
A second headstone for the grave of argument is the depressing reality that public speaking is an excellent smokescreen for inferior intellect. Morons in suits or robes can galivant as thinkers & leaders by emitting a rolling fog of words which delude many into believing they are capable, intelligent, and/or worthy. In certain cases, the more one speaks, the less they actually know2. When it comes to making effective arguments, it is most often the case that Less Is More.
There’s a third chunk of granite can be rolled in front of the tomb. Pint sized Pharisee Ben Shapiro will be remembered for his catch phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings.” This is not an untrue statement, but it is an aphorism I would characterize as True But Trivial, meaning largely worthless, precisely because the converse statement, “feelings don’t care about your facts,” is not only true, it is a far more incisive statement when it comes to the business of case making and argument.
Here is the bare truth of argument from my perspective: the identity of the interlocuters in a public debate has more impact on initiating introspection and swaying minds than the arguments they deploy. People prefer to agree with the attractive, the humorous, and those that seem or feel the most put-together. If a pretty girl is making an argument, any argument, your mind will find and deploy whatever is required to make it make sense. If you happen upon an ongoing discussion regarding something with which you have little or no familiarity, you will tend to agree with whichever side is most visually appealing, and this includes ethnic identity, political persuasion, and shared geography when it comes to “appeal.”
As frustrating as this might be for theorycels, ideologues, and the lads wot do the big thonk, it’s not all bad. Loyalty based on identity is a feature, not a bug, and it needs to happen more among global minorities3 and various dissident movements who have coalesced around acceptance of reality, nature, and the true dynamics of human society. That kind of loyalty blossoms from repeated instances of unfettered support leading to victories and conquests in both the virtual and physical realms. If the system can be gamed by well-spoken men with granitic jawlines and well-coifed hair, it is incumbent upon the good guys to play the game as it is.
All of this leads us to the conclusion that the distributed act of argument can be fairly assessed as pointless, or at least classified as a waste of effort. It is better to solidify the base though cheap but effective “curveballs” that embarrass the adversary and energize the fellas.
Feelings don’t care about your facts. The battle lines have been drawn and the sides are already chosen. Cry “Tl;dr” and let slip the memes of war.
Argument is dead.
Except, I don't think it is. The previous thoughts are not refuted by this, but must be considered alongside the fact that I was convinced to dramatically alter my outlook and social identity based on arguments, and I know for a fact I am not the only one.
The Game
In the American political ecosystem, there are three distinct spheres of type when it comes to argument efficacy, targeting, and various methods. The following is a baseball metaphor, so please forgive any technical or terminological inaccuracies4:
The Staff; the owners, coaches, managers, trainers, and batboys.
The Players; the batters, pitchers, fielders, and runners.
The Fans; the masses in the stadia and the viewers at home.
Each of these different groups have different motivations when it comes to their involvement in “the Game.”
The Fans are pure followers who are willing to shell out time and/or money just to witness someone else participating in a thing. They demand and deserve a good show, but there is a lot of variation in what that means and how they go about expressing their satisfaction or disappointment with the Game. The fans are important, but only as blocks and only in the aggregate. Individual fans do not matter, and it is dangerous to build any kind of focus group or system that listens to a meager handful of them.
The Players are politicians, their proxies, celebrities, and influencers. They are like fans in terms of attachment dynamics and involvement but there are fewer of them. They are one-dimensional as it pertains to the Game, bound to a specific team with that binding characterizing their total “political identity,” or their uniform. Of course they expect to be paid instead of paying, but otherwise they are fairly indistinguishable from the fans because they are only involved based on their ability to perform, with throwing, hitting, and running being a parallel to speechmaking, conveying ideas, and looking attractive on camera. This is a weird situation that is challenging to mentally navigate due to the widely held belief in the artifice of democracy, but that's what happens when you let your society get infected by liberalism. If you find it hard to believe, just refer once again to Professional Wrestling for Reactionaries5. The fans are utterly convinced that the players are the luminaries, the people doing all the real work, the pillars around which the Game is anchored, but it just isn’t the case. They can be bought, sold, traded, expelled, elevated, and sidelined on a whim, with very rare exception6. It is really bad etiquette and a terrible strategy to point any of this out when fans are around. In wrestling, it’s called “breaking kayfabe.”7
The Staff are the people who actually understand what is for real and what is for show. They are much closer in proximity to real decisions, and they are deeply acquainted with the actual dynamics of the Game. Because of this, they are likely to be jaded, enervated, or numb to the whole process. From that batboys to the owners, from the paid organizers to the chiefs of staff, they are quite confident that they know better than everyone else about the actual Game, and they should be, owing to their position behind the curtain.
Accepting the outlined structure, we can reasonably infer that the most likely place arguments would be strategically effective are in regards to the Staff. Because they are behind the curtain, because they are excessively acquainted with how the sausage gets made, and because they know first hand how artificial and indistinguishable the Players are, as well as how ignorant and fickle the Fans are, they should be the prime targets for informed & intentional argument.
The Staff, for the most part, will reside at the intersection of Informed and Susceptible, which is the only place arguments can really shape the battlefield, be it cultural, narrative, or spiritual.
This is rather easy to explain compared to the actual task of effective argument, which is complex and challenging. Arguments have to be crafted such that they breach the numbness and/or layers of cynical irony, or the high barriers of rewarding party loyalty, or just the self-fleecing intellectual wool8 that "keeps out the cold" without initiating some kind of mental breakdown or "walk away from it all" moment. The arguments must be compelling and comprehensive, able to answer questions before they are asked in addition to guiding their target to productive and viable alternatives to the now-degraded modes of being and interpretation. Imagine condensing the information & insights contained in a high quality book into a series of concatenated paragraphs without losing intellectual clarity or spiritual resolution. This is no small task, and it is not going to happen accidentally or easily. But I remain convinced that it can happen.
The Staff is, rather should be, the primary target for strategic argument, but because it is not by any measure low hanging fruit, you rarely hear of it being attempted, rarer still to see it accomplished. It’s critical to understand that if/when arguments like this are being made, it is over drinks, around campfires, in the insulated environment of an unexpected or emergency-initiated car ride, or any other place where context + participants create an exclusion zone of privacy and willful mental vulnerability9. As I said, very rare.
But the impulse to argue is overwhelming for many, very much including myself. Even when you know you’re hopelessly mired in a muddy rut, stepping on the gas pedal and spinning your wheels feels more productive than sitting there with tear-laden eyes as you roll the radio wheel to Tranpo’s channel. For those who were convinced by a compelling framework of argumentation, the tendency is to take hold of those tools or methods and propagate the effect outward. We’d like to believe that there are many other minds out there susceptible to internally consistent & coherent arguments.
Even if one realizes that there is a marked paucity of that type of mind as well as the previously described scenario of insulated vulnerability with politically relevant persons, the will to argue doesn't always abate. This is where the willingness and drive to create “fake debates” comes from. Shapiro probably wasted a fair amount of money & time trying to convince other lawyers and the well-to-do denizens of New Israel before he came up with the idea of getting paid exorbitant amounts of cash to browbeat college kids. The model of “fake debate for profit” is extendable outside of the “change my mind” folding table debate-slop. Lot’s of people crave the gotcha moment where a banger retort sends bluntz & sunglasses raining down from heaven on high as the libtard gets owned and the republican party swells by another 6 million members10. More seriously but no less futile is the baseless belief that the One Argument To Convince Them All is somewhere out there, just waiting to be unleashed on the deluded masses11.
So the song & dance of fake debate carries on, but its only real utility is exciting those who are already convinced, one way or another, and addicted to the dumb show of democracy. It can generate revenue, or more likely “clicks,” but it’s not really going to do anything meaningful in regards to convincing people to change their positions.
You can argue with Fans, but really only one-on-one will actually do anything, and be prepared to go through hundreds of revelations like "Okay sure, the Bluejays aren’t actually competing, but surely the Tigers are real, and of course the Dolphins and the Orioles and the Cardinals too, those can't be fake, right?" The fans are loyal and full of love for their team, and they are virulently opposed to the enemy team, but it's not some kind of position they were argued into, so it's not likely they're going to be argued out of it. They like the Game because it is exciting and entertaining. Their dad liked Local Team, and they do too, maybe moreso because they moved away from Previously Local Area and it sets them apart. But what is fun about starting with the premise that the whole thing “isn’t real?”
You could conceivably argue with Players, but it's also a waste of effort because the ones smart enough to make and understand arguments for themselves are probably already spiritual mercenaries putting on an act for The Team because they pay the most while requiring the least amount of effort with the lowest level of risk. If they’ve put any thought into it at all, they have conformed their political identity to their inner circle, the small group of people able or willing to treat them like a normal human person, regardless of the color of their jersey or the mascot of the team. So long as the checks keep coming with valid signatures, the points on the scoreboard are largely a secondary consideration. Indeed, the Players need the show to go on more than anyone, and all they are and do will be in service to this need.
This essay is a jumble of mixed signals, or could be construed as such, and I do not expect it to convince very many people to change their perspective. Those that agree will nod their perfectly shaped skulls, while those that disagree will shake their microcephalic vestigial crania, and life will go on. I think it is worthy and worthwhile to keep fencing, even if it is highly unlikely you or I will ever get into a swordfight. A keen mind is a joy unto itself, having expansive and informative arguments with likeminded individuals refines the character, and being prepared for that rare day when you might be able to convince a mind that matters will be worth it after the fact.
It is good to exercise, even if you aren’t competing for a trophy.
The 2020 election was stolen, and the whole of the bureaucracy was overjoyed to legitimize the steal. I will weep no tears when that whole crowd of charlatans, cowards, cucks, and cunts are consigned to the dustbin of history.
I am aware I am dropping rounds on my own position here. 仕方がない
For instance, any racial group who is 11% of the global population and falling.
There is no sport but hockey, and MMA is its prophet.
That’s right, I linked it a second time. You know what… https://antidem.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/professional-wrestling-for-reactionaries/
Donald Trump is the one who defines The Exception. All hail.
By this I mean the pretty lies many of us tell ourselves regarding our oftentimes unavoidable association with and participation is systems of spiritual oppression and human degradation.
Picture me, in a ski mask, holding a submachine gun, explaining why Monarchy is awesome to the 10 most influential, behind-the-scenes political people in a homemade submarine. I’d watch that movie.
Even a couple hundred thousand is a lot, you know.
Picture Ben Shapiro, in a loincloth, skin gray and pebbly from centuries of no sun, hiding in a cave and eating raw Gefilte Fish, petting a corporeal tweet as he mumbles “my precioussss…”