Re: The States: Why does Minnesota wanna be Kansas?
That must be a bit he's running, right? Claiming to adhere/enjoy one or two of those things he's listed, that's plausible. But claiming, or celebrating, all of those traits, that must be a bit.
He's been doing it long enough that I don't think it's a bit.
If you go on sites like Less Wrong there is a delight among subcultures in taking a premise and following it all the way to its conclusion, regardless of how counter-intuitive. People who do that think they are being groundbreaking and revolutionary. They actually like it when their statements become more shocking, because they equate "shock" with taking people out of the presumptive haze of everyday sheeple training. You can see that in Flag. He
likes it when we are disgusted by his prattle because he thinks that means he's challenging our programming.
That is how a cult gets people to truly believe prima facie ridiculous things. It all leads back to vanity: if I'm breaking your norm that
must mean I am Zarathustra, seeing beyond you. It's adolescent thinking, perfectly understandable and a necessary phase when you are 14 -- deeply sad and pathetic when you are 34.
c.f. incels, anarchists, von Miseans, Randians, Marxists, supremacists of all stripes, Scientologists, Zulu Nation, InfoWars, about a million (maybe every) religions.
Murray Rothbard wrote in defense of his brand of libertarian hokum that it
does not matter if empirical data refutes his claims because his claims follow logically from irrefutable axioms, therefore the data has to be irrelevant or wrong. That unfalsifiability is the trademark of the pseudo-intellectual snake oil salesman: what he sells his followers is the appeal to their vanity that They Alone Follow The Difficult And Thankless Way.
These are people who have literally receded into their rationalist fantasies and are unreachable by real life. They live in their theoretical projection of reality. They don't just mistake the map for the territory, they
glory in it. In short, they're willing mental and moral castrati who preen that their self-mutilation is Enlightenment.
