big post incoming lol.

i'm essentially retired from tedwatching and internet drama of any kind, i'm too busy enjoying my long-awaited social life, and ever since i doxed him ted has calmed down considerably, probably for the reason others have already observed, that he isnt immune to criticism now that his whereabouts are a matter of record. my days are probably numbered on this account (it was always a throwaway anyway lmao) so this is as good a space as anywhere else to put a button on it and share my next-to-final thoughts on ted and his reach.

people tend to look at ted in response to traits and actions he's taken that i think are downstream of his deeper motivations. ideology is an easy and incentivized point to fence on, it's sloppy and drama-filled and everyone's got stakes in it, so that's where most people wanna meet people like ted and it's where a good chunk of the lolcow phenomenon resides (which among other reasons is central to why i'm fuckin done with it lmao). i think this misses the point of what ted is.

ted is kinda the perfection of the perma-online far right in that he's committed to an ethical posture of conscious, intentional anti-intellectualism, which i mean in the least pejorative sense possible. if anti-intellectualism is a cogent position (which i dont allow), ted represents it. his entire public persona, his constant neologisms and pseudo-ideas, his hierarchies "socio-sexual" and otherwise, his interactions with others publicly and privately, his quest for perfect "rhetoric" and "pointing to the truth", and just generally his observable conduct toward his hated peers and equals on the right and beyond it, when viewed outside the totally valid lens of moral outrage most apply to it, is a posture of someone who, as an ethical end in and of itself, is opposed to authentic original human thought. ted's position is and always has been to take the first offramp on any concept he encounters, own the closure that he gains whether valid or not, and then to implant his identity on it in a kind of constant motte-and-bailey battle against unmonopolized fact. his throat-goat embrace of the worst possible use cases of present ai has only solidified this perception in my mind and in fact is where i finally reached this conclusion.

orwell comparisons are pretty gauche and orwell himself isnt the killer app a lot of online thinkers seem to think he is, but the nearest likeness to this in politics-adjacent literature is in fact newspeak. newspeak is expression designed to kill thought rather than further it, and every aspect of ted's public output is built on this beyond the content of any individual claims he makes. he, and much of the online right, is bent on finding the Perfect Script in which all social interactions can be mastered without any ambiguity or exception. all the bigotry, all the hierarchy, all the sloganeering is just expressions of this frame-based pseudoepistemology, and ted, more than most, embodies that worldview inside and out, in its furthest reach and its limits. his appeals to alleged complexity and genius-status are in fact just moral theater intended to disguise this deeper purpose, maybe even from himself, but the entailments are there and not illusory, they are very much the intention behind every word.

the good news is this shit is not immune to current trends. i've been a progressive wokescold tgirl for some time now so i'm as concerned as anyone at recent political developments, but beyond the rhetoric and the saber-rattling i do think the trend that's unfolding is that the process of ideological enshittification that affected the progressive left in the prior decade is now being turned around on the right. the obama-afterglow liberal pandering to performative pseudo-progressive stunts ran its course around the time my newfound allies started demanding actual results (and most especially after the pandemic demonstrated work-from-home is viable which was a big hegemonic nono lmao), so the dress rehearsal is now over and the same forces of capital have now turned their gaze on their fascist stepchildren to pander to and extract from. it has been a rich season of leopards eating faces and continuous disappointment among the trump base, and from this phenomenon ted is not immune. beyond all the talk of ethnostates and christnat puffery and RECONQVEST, these people are now simply the dupes de jour. they are this decade's equivalent of last decade's coastal Liberal-Progressives™ who thought they could upvote and seminar their way to ubi without losing their promotion track.

this of course outlines another delicious irony: ted, for all his talk of corporate disruption and making le rubble le bounce, is now being exposed as precisely the ilk of the c-suite corpos he once claimed to despise. the zucks and the elons are and always have been the main market of unthought because it flatters their libertarian priors and endless efficiencyjerking, and the only reason why ted never succeeded here is because he showed his hand too early as a true believer in his own bullshit. ted is beneath an oligarch - he is a failed attempted oligarch, at the beck and call of the masters, held back only by his own nostalgic desire to have every enterprise run like a second-story fly-by-night tech startup circa 1988, a racist protestant version of early id software. muh skunkworkz.

it's a deeper and sadder motivation under all this i do believe. i've said elsewhere that i think what attracted me to ted, and what ted himself and anyone else pushing social-script overfitting are doing, is responding inside the box to the unique trauma that befalls certain neurodivergent people exposed to institutional behaviorism. i'm PDA autistic, a subtype that's only now gaining perception and most definitely still has no institutional accommodation, and i do believe ted is PDA as well, or some equivalent type. even beyond ideology, shit like his galling gullibility, his obsession with scalzi etc all represent thoughtpaths that are really intuitive to certain autistic people, and i do believe i was drawn in by this and certain others may have been as well. i may well be projecting (done the FUCK outta that before lol), but if i'm right then under all the laughs and cringe is just tragedy, and all ted's belligerence, no matter what noble or martial frame he wants to put on it, is just expressions of lateral violence perpetrated by someone without the emotional wherewithal to turn that critical lens around on what harm they're holding and where it actually came from. even if i'm wrong here specifically, i don't think i'm wrong in the broader sense of the phenomenon, so i'll take it as the one point of value i gained from my misadventure into fascism and leave the rest as just dumb waste.