Supply

 
Sorry about yesterday.  It's my way of sorting myself from those who's motives are grift, grift and more grift.

I've had too much time this week to stew and stare at internet content, catching up on the state of the world and the perversity that has become youtube.  The drive towards abhorrence content had subsumed most of the channels I used to be subscribed to, so that I ended in cancelling some two dozen subscriptions this week simply because I don't want to be told what's wrong with things.  It's all too clear that if I should wish to increase my viewership and presumably my online intake, I should pick something that (a) I know well; (b) deserves respect; and (c) write continuously about how shitty it is and why no one should ever do it, like it, care about it or spend a moment thinking about it.  Dissonance, obviously, since its like the old joke about the Hasidic Jew who spends his life obsessively thinking about how much he hates God, only to find that his constant wrestling with God throughout his life lands him in heaven, because "constant awareness was a sort of prayer."

Following this practice, then, I ought to diatribe at length on why first edition sucks, and by extension why D&D sucks, why it's stupid that anyone plays it, because obviously it's for weak-minded, cretinous, deserving losers who should be laughed-at and vilified for wasting so much of their time buying shit and attending games.  I should write brutal take-downs of every sort of product, belief, cherished ideal or notion that the game — and by extension, every other like game — sucks, the players suck, you the reader sucks, etcetera, while funding the blog with online internet products and such.  Because, after all, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is obviously a grifter, stoicism was invented for immature males, A.I. is on the verge of destroying the film industry, atheism is poison, as is bubble tea, and so on.

It's not that I want to unplug.  I just don't want any part of... this.  The decision to commodify hate, coupled with pandering to the lowest common denominator blessed with a work-job and no dependents, simply isn't something I want to be part of.  The urge to step back, get out of the internet-farming plague crowd and watch it tread by from a quiet, reclusive sideline is becoming desirable.  The act of burning my bridges, pulling up the drawbridges, to stop performing, to cease looking for a public place in this horrorshow, increasingly seems like the only rational alternative.  Every part of me wants to clamp down, close shop, work quietly on  my projects and just not engage.  Because... this... is just awful.

Some history.

Jim Keegstra was a Canadian high school teacher and mayor of Eckville, in Alberta, about 7 miles west of our family cabin on Sylvan Lake.  In the early 80s, when I was 18 and just out of high school, the stories of Keegstra teaching his students anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial and claims of a global Jewish plot, hit pretty close to me.  Keegstra was dismissed form his position, charged, and the ensuing legal case set a significant precedent in Canadian law regarding the balance between free speech and protection against free speech.

In short, I live in a country where free speech is not a blanket right, where "sunshine" is not the best disinfectant, where the vocalisations that has made the American system can't be trotted out and given room to breathe here as they are there.  It's not legal here for people to express themselves as they might wish where that expression is harmful, as judged by people who do not see "hate" as a privilege or a virtue.  Such people need not be muzzled, but it must be made clear that there's a line that needs not to be crossed in a civilised country.

Presently, despite the imposition of an increasingly authoritarian government in El Salvador, the dramatic reduction in gang violence — effectively ending a reign of terror that lasted over a decade and was exacerbated by transnational criminal networks and external demand for narcotics — has led to a significant improvement in public safety.  For those who hav elived under the daily threat of gang violence, the change has been immediate and profound.  Areas once dominated by gang control are now accessible, and many Salvadorans feel freer in their movements, even as legal and civil freedoms have eroded. This perceived restoration of order has earned Bukele immense support, especially among lower-income and rural populations who bore the brunt of gang rule.

Personally, I don't know what to think of that.  On the one hand, I am sick to death of freedom being the watchword of every half-assed moron ready to throw anything and everything on the pyre for the sake of a few bucks awarded by an excessively indifferent trillionaire industry operating without oversight.  On the other, I'm not certain the solution is to kick in doors and shoot the motherfucking hate-mongers in their chairs upon their pressing "enter."  I would like to see some legislation... and not the sort that requires 15 years of "fact-finding" and "investigation," designed to ensure that nothing is conceivably done to those able to continue funding all of the world's elections to their favour simultaneously.

I'm concerned that the Chinese route is inevitable.

Meanwhile, I'm not onboard.  I'm not encouraged to defend any form of D&D at present, especially on a silent stage, while my present investigations into creative writing and youtube on that account are entirely personal.  My wiki is privately connected to the internet and certainly isn't about hate.  This blog has become equivalent to dead air.  My patreon is evaporating, presumably because I don't spew the material it wants to support.  Meanwhile, I have probably another 20-30 years to spend on the planet, doing something with a physical body in a steady state of degredation.

There are going to be many bad days ahead and, I think, in the end, it's not going to matter whether I have access to the internet or not.  There may not be anything here that I ever want to engage with.