Pretty sure this sort of thing tends to be frowned upon by the Secret Service. Imagine this was 2014 and the play used an Obama stand-in…
Stay classy, actrons.
I’ve been watching the rise of Kek & Kekistan for the last several months with what can best be described as “bemusement.” If you are unaware of Kek/Kekistan… first, where the hell have you been? Second, the easiest way to think of Kek it to think back to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. FSM and the Church of the FSM were created as satire, a way to poke creationists with a pointy stick. They use they same lame-brained arguments in favor of teaching “intelligent design” by introducing a wholly ridiculous pseudo-religion that is just as valid an explanation at the traditional “creationist” explanations.
Kek/Kekistan is the same sort of idea, but instead of aimed at creationism, it’s aimed at political correctness and current Leftist extremism. The idea seemed to have arisen after it was pointed out that online trolls -specifically “sh*tposters” who tend to go after social justice warriors – qualify as an ethnic group under British law. What seems to typify Kekistanis is a willingness, nay, a gleeful enthusiasm, to poke the PC talking point of the day, to take the big scary moral panic and wear it like a party hat. The biggest symbol of this is Pepe The Frog. Originally a conventional cartoon character, it was turned into a meme For All Purposes. But since it was *also* sometimes used by members of the alt-Right, many on the far left freaked directly out and declared that Pepe was a symbol of white supremacy/nationalism. If the Left had ignored it, Pepe would have faded away. But they couldn’t let it go, so the alt-Right took it and ran with it. And now Pepe has gone through an apotheosis, turning into Kek (a frog-headed Egyptian god and symbol of the Kekistanis). This is a defining feature of the Kekistanis; the thing you freak out about the most is the thing they’re going to proudly wave as a banner. Call them Nazis and they will start waving swastikas around. Scream at them that they’re racist, and you’ll be bombarded with a million racist memes. The flag of Kekistan is now a green, modified version of a Nazi-era German military flag. The motive isn’t, I think, to actually be racist, but to irritate the hell out of the people who too easily toss such accusations about. The moment you see something and say “that’s not funny,” they’ll take it as a challenge. Too soon for Hitler jokes? Guess what’s coming.
If nothing else, Kekistan is a stellar example of basic human nature. The left demands that certain ideas, thoughts, images and symbols be never allowed. They demand that identity politics be held up as inviolable and divine. And the Kekistanis, being human, respond to such demands as the best of all humans do… with an upraised middle finger. For decades the PC brigade has used beratement and browbeating to bully people into not speaking up, and this sort of thing – and the election of the idiot buffoon Trump – is the natural response. And at least unlike the anti-Trumpers, the Kekistanis are generally funny and non-violent.
On my recent trip to the USAF Museum in Dayton, somewhere along the line I stopped and had a Kek spotting out in the wild:
The video below is a satire of the sort of thing MSNBC would put out about Kekistan. And it takes a good long while to be obvious that it’s *not* straight outta MSNBC.
Insofar as there is an ideology, it seems to be something that was virtually inevitable. For my entire adult life I’ve seen the PC fascists trying to control actions, thought and speech; the lefties should be damned grateful that the result seems to be this satirical response rather than a boot to the head.
Here’s a description of the Kekistanis from the guy who essentially created ’em, YouTuber Sargon of Akkad:
There seem to be two primary ways to tell if a forthcoming movie or TV series is going to be bad:
With Star Trek: Discovery, we’ve had a whole lot of #1. The disregard for established continuity, the jarring design elements, the apparent lack of any actual familiarity with Star Trek on the part of the people behind the show have led a *lot* or people to conclude that this STD is gonna burn.
But now they’re entering into Phase 2. Specifically… the “Ghostbusters 2016” playbook of “let’s blame the fans:”
Yeah, that’ll certainly help fix the problem. Someone doesn’t like your show? Call them a racist or a sexist. It worked *so* well for Ghostbusters 2016.
For those who don’t recall… Clochmed was the kid who took the electrical bits out of a commercial digital plug-in-the-wall clock and re-installed them within a nicely conductive metal case (an off the shelf pencil box, now equipped with wall plug and exposed wiring). When he was arrested for bringing a “hoax bomb” to school (note: not for bringing a bomb… nobody on scene thought it was actually a bomb, they just assumed that it was something meant to *look* like a bomb in order to scare people), his family was able to parlay that into lots of swag, visits to the President, ill-advised compliments from people who should have known better about what a brilliant “inventor” the kid was (remember: he didn’t build the clock… he just took it out of a plastic housing and put it in a metal one), and a chance to play lawsuit lotto with the town of Irving, Texas. The family, after complaining about Clochmeds human rights being violated, pulled up stakes and moved to Qatar where their human rights are certain to be safe.
If there’s anyone about dense enough to think that*clearly* this was racism/Islamophobia on the part of the authorities in Irving, and that such a thing would never happen to Privileged White Kids, let me REMIND YOU: Pop Tart Pistols.
One one side: a lone guy holding up a sign that says “The Right to Openly Discuss Ideas Must be Defended.” On the other side: a mob that uses shouting, namecalling, shoving, violence and theft to silence even the mildest of differing views. which side is the most closely aligned to the actual fascists?
STEM is values-neutral. By that I mean, with engineering you can design a better hammer… but that hammer could be used to drive a nail to built a kitten orphanage (good), or it could be used to knock someones brains out (quite possibly bad). Here’s an example of STEM, in the form of an app developed for smart phones (themselves the result of thousands of years of STEM work), being used to promote superstitious, fictitious and malicious bullcrap:
In short: this app – apparently not designed in entire seriousness, but as some sort of attempt at what SJWs consider to be humor – divides a lunch bill “fairly.” Now, to my mind if a group of people go to a restaurant and want to divide the bill fairly, the easiest way would be to simply get separate bills, and each pay their own way. The guy who ordered the lobster and steak would pay more than the guy who ordered a cup of soup because he ordered the more expensive item. Simple, right? But this apps developers have different ideas. The bill is split up evenly among the number of people on it… and then the fractions are weighted based on each persons “privilege.” Using the long-discredited, yet still quite popular, delusion of the “wage gap,” the white guy is charged a buck, the black woman $0.64, and so on.
Of course, this will be perfectly “fair” for the white guy office drone out to lunch with the black female CEO…
Again, this was done as satire to teach white people that they suck and will perpetually be browbeaten over invented nonsense. But apparently the app is real and downloadable… and if recent history of apparently nonsensical stuff (and I’m looking at *you,* Nordstrom’s “muddy jeans”) teaches us anything, it’s that a whole lot pf people will willingly glom onto complete nonsense – often at considerable cost to themselves- if they think that it makes them cool, hip, popular, politically correct. People *will* obtain and use this app in all seriousness, thinking that by screwing over one person in order to make someone else feel better, they’re actually carrying out acts of “justice.” But it seems to me that what an app like this will really do is help speed the segregation process along. if you were invited to lunch with people who you knew were going to financially screw you over… would you go? I’d be brown-baggin’ it. And I’d remember that those people are *not* my friends, but are rather thieves, idiots or ideological monsters.
It has been a long time since I regularly watched The Simpsons. Seem like there might still be a spark left in the old girl.
Sure, that’s not really news. Many of them can be set off simply by the appearance of a white man, or a woman expressing views that are not in line with Angry Feminist Theology. But here’s the latest:
And what is this “white supremacist hand sign” they made?
No, really. SJWs are convinced that the age-old “ok” sign is a Sekrit White Power Gang Sign. They have diagrams and everything:
Sure, why not.
And So On.
Now, for all I know white supremacists actually do use that hand sign for… something. Damned if I can figure out what for. But if it is actually being used by white supremacists *now,* it’s almost certainly for the purpose of trolling the idiots who think that white supremacy is a real and serious problem right up there with the patriarchy and the wage gap and Pepe the frog. A whole lot of non-white supremacists will *certainly* be flashing that sign for no purpose other than to annoy the kind of person who’s annoyed by that kind of thing. And there are a lot of those kind of easily annoyed people loudly proclaiming their leftist annoyance.
Of course, it turns out that the “ok sign is a white power symbol” was a hoax/stunt on “Sup forums,” the intent of which was to get the SJWs/media to actually believe it. And they succeeded… “Operation O-KKK”has been a roaring success.
Leftist violence seems to be all the rage these days (get it? get it? bah. I’m dropping comedy gold here, people). The fascists in the antifa movement, the nuts in the anarchist movement, the whackos in the “social justice” cult… they’ve been using screaming, shouting, screwing with people just trying to get to work and a whole lot of poorly focused violence. On the whole this seems stupid. heck, i’ve pointed out before “this is why Trump won.”
Well, guess what. Now there’s science.
Prior work shows that extreme protest tactics – actions that are highly counter-normative, disruptive, or harmful to others, including inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and damaging property – are effective for gaining publicity. However, we find across three experiments that extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement.
In short: most people are just regular folk. Most protesters in the US, however, are not regular folk; they tend towards the excitable and highly irrational. So, when Regular Folk watch Excitable Idjits acting the fool, the Regular Folk unconsciously apply a simple test: Would I do that? And, well… no. And the result is that while “extreme protest tactics” gets more press, it turns people *away* from the goal of the movement, even if people might be otherwise sympathetic.
The study tested the reactions of test subjects to edited reports about animal rights protesters, Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-Trump protesters. Small changes in the reports – such as one version has the BLM protesters chanting anti-racist slogans, another has them chanting for violence against cops – led to noticeable differences in the stances of the participants. And those participants exposed to anti-Trump extremists wound up increasing their support *for* Trump.
So, go on, kids. Scream in the streets. Block the roads. Burn stuff what ain’t yours. Act like crazed lunatics. Your irrational hatred only strengthens the other side.
And thus we come to the Modest Proposal phase of the post: let’s use this. Can we come up with a way to infiltrate, say, Greenpeace, and influence them to use these whacko “extreme protest tactics” against something like, say, nuclear rockets? Can we get them to be *so* over the top that the end result is a Congressional mandate for SpaceX to build and fly a plasma-core nuclear rocket within five years? Can we so tweak the “Sanctuary City” and other pro-immigration-law-violation groups that the end result is that the US winds up not dissolving it’s borders, but instead colonizes and claims the Moon?
If you’ve been wondering how the party of fear-mongering and authoritarianism was going to respond to the idea of private American companies going to space and the moon, I believe we have us an early test balloon:
One “Brianna Wu” scientifically embarrasses herself, but likely improves her standing with the Luddites, by claiming that “Rocks dropped from there have power of 100s of nuclear bombs.”
Now, on one hand this is true. If you fling a big enough rock from the surface of the moon, it could hit the Earth with kinetic energy similar to the total energy of a nuke. But there’s the thing: in order to do that, you need to *impart* damn near a nukes worth of kinetic energy in the first place. Simply chucking a rock from the lunar surface at lunar escape velocity (about 2.4 km/sec) will not put that rock on a trajectory to the Earths surface, but rather just in a very wide orbit , basically the same orbit the moon has. You’d need to cancel out the orbital velocity, another kilometer or so per second. From there the rock would “fall” to Earth, picking up speed and smacking down with no more than Earth escape velocity, or no more than 11.2 km/sec. So, by accelerating a rock to about 3.5 km/sec, you get it to hit the Earth at about 11 km/sec.
Sounds great for a weapons system. At 11 km/sec, the kinetic energy of one kilogram of rock (or anything) is 60.5 megajoules. One single kiloton of yield is defined as 4.184 terajoules. So to get a kiloton of bang out of a lunar rock, you’d need to launch (4.184 terajoules/60.5 megajoules) 69,157 kilos of rock. Lobbing a seventy-metric ton rock to 3.5 kilometers per second is a non-trivial act. Plus, you have to assure that the rock not only hits the target via accurate guidance, but survives passage through the atmosphere.
But Wu didn’t just say that a rock would have the power of a nuke, but “hundreds” of them. So… let’s say 100 times Fat Man, or 1.5 megatons. That would require the launch not of 70 metric tones, but 105,000 metric tons. The USS Nimitz displaces about 100,000 metric tons. So according to Ms. Wu, the threat posed by the likes of Elon Musk is that he will toss aircraft carriers off the surface of the moon.
Ms. Wu then went on to claim that any criticism of her rather unrealistic fearmongering was due to sexism, and to then decry the militarization of space. Because apparently a few tourists going around the moon will be able to grab chunks of moonrock the size of a carrier battle group and hurl it at Earth.
Silly as her fears are, I won;t be the least bit surprised if they gain traction, and this is used as the basis of an attempt to shut down private spaceflight in the US… or at least to nationalize it “for the children.”
Thanks to blog reader SE Jones for heads-up on this miserable little story.
As always, feel free to check my math.