Hi Emily, Your comment automatically posted - I haven't been screening comments from people with Dreamwidth handles, since the trolls haven't exactly been beating down my doors - but you can delete it if you like. If you do, I will delete this lengthy ranting comment.
I have been a longtime fan of JMG's. His earlier books dealing with long-range views of history and several related subjects always seemed very rational and well-informed to me, well worth reading, and his fiction is brilliant. Unfortunately, he's apparently gotten more right-wing in recent years, sneering at anyone who objects to the Jan. 6 coup attempt, quicker to label more of the world as menacing Wokesters and to call his readers liars, trolls, or shills if they express even direct personal observations that challenge his current beliefs about, e.g., vast no-go-zones in Portland. Though he could tend to assume disagreement was due to laziness or bad faith, he used to be a writer who regularly warned others to avoid binary thinking, factionalism, and associated lazy rhetoric, such as "cold prickly" or "snarl words." Now, everything he doesn't personally like seems to be Woke.
He's not a white nationalist (if something of a Great Replacement Islamophobe), I'm 100% certain of that from his writing, yet he's got a coterie of pet white nationalists whom you will be booted for arguing with. I've been booted from his blogs more than once - the last time right after I got this Dreamwidth handle, I made the mistake of arguing with and scoffing at the crew that thinks a proposal to make artificial meat from insects is an anti-white plot - then the next day I found my handle was banned. And you know what, I knew better, so I shrug and say "his blog, his rules." Except, the readers' malevolent rhetoric has escalated to the point that he's allowed two rightists recently to say explicitly that they want to see all LGBTQ or "Left" people slaughtered, and to participate. "Common courtesy" now apparently includes allowing some very fine readers to comment about how they hope to kill other readers.
I wish I could say to him, what are you doing here? Have you really changed, or are you perhaps just riding the tiger? Did your long-term view of history convince you that democracy will fall, that fascism is inevitable, so you'd better make nice with the brownshirts since they'll soon have the power of life and death over you? Because surely you don't really believe we're heading in the right direction.
A second major bone to pick: As one of the dead armadillos in the middle of the road, I do NOT want to get into fighting over covid vaccines here. I respect Greer for creating a space in which people could discuss heretical views that are sometimes simply acknowledgements of data - though other commenters come up with QAnon-level paranoia - but he continues to mention his "intuitive sense" that "most if not all of the people who've been vaccinated for Covid would die as a result of side effects." That was today; he used to say most or all people who've been *boosted*, so he's escalating the vision of doom at the very time when, though it's become obvious that the vaccines are much less safe and effective than originally claimed, it's also obvious that most people who got two shots, quite a long time ago now, are not dying like flies. And I (with some biological background) see no evidence for any mechanism that could cause mass dieoff much later.
I find this frightening, not because it could terrify the gullible vaxxed or discourage people from getting endlessly boosted without evidence of benefit, but because it's feeding a contingent of his followers who imagine that "the vaxxed" are all "PMCs", people with desk jobs, who, for one reason or another, deserve to die. Since I don't think Greer really wants to see a new American Holocaust, I've actually wondered if he is not playing a long game to try to defuse the ultraright's preparations for violence by convincing them that if they bide their time, the liberals and urbanites will all drop dead on their own (or become sickly and easier to kill). If so, I fear that promising them mass Blue Faction death in the near future could backfire, as those who eagerly believed would become increasingly impatient when - okay, if - it continues not to arrive on schedule.
I've bought at least 30 of Greer's books. I think he's an excellent writer, well-read, smart and creative, with an authorial voice I always took great pleasure in reading. But ever since Trumpism started its march to power, I've been watching his public character change in what appears to me to be a negative direction and wondering, with disappointment, why. If he should actually see this, I don't expect that he would answer me, but I truly wish I could understand what's motivating him at this point.
Re: Jmg...
Your comment automatically posted - I haven't been screening comments from people with Dreamwidth handles, since the trolls haven't exactly been beating down my doors - but you can delete it if you like. If you do, I will delete this lengthy ranting comment.
I have been a longtime fan of JMG's. His earlier books dealing with long-range views of history and several related subjects always seemed very rational and well-informed to me, well worth reading, and his fiction is brilliant. Unfortunately, he's apparently gotten more right-wing in recent years, sneering at anyone who objects to the Jan. 6 coup attempt, quicker to label more of the world as menacing Wokesters and to call his readers liars, trolls, or shills if they express even direct personal observations that challenge his current beliefs about, e.g., vast no-go-zones in Portland. Though he could tend to assume disagreement was due to laziness or bad faith, he used to be a writer who regularly warned others to avoid binary thinking, factionalism, and associated lazy rhetoric, such as "cold prickly" or "snarl words." Now, everything he doesn't personally like seems to be Woke.
He's not a white nationalist (if something of a Great Replacement Islamophobe), I'm 100% certain of that from his writing, yet he's got a coterie of pet white nationalists whom you will be booted for arguing with. I've been booted from his blogs more than once - the last time right after I got this Dreamwidth handle, I made the mistake of arguing with and scoffing at the crew that thinks a proposal to make artificial meat from insects is an anti-white plot - then the next day I found my handle was banned. And you know what, I knew better, so I shrug and say "his blog, his rules." Except, the readers' malevolent rhetoric has escalated to the point that he's allowed two rightists recently to say explicitly that they want to see all LGBTQ or "Left" people slaughtered, and to participate. "Common courtesy" now apparently includes allowing some very fine readers to comment about how they hope to kill other readers.
I wish I could say to him, what are you doing here? Have you really changed, or are you perhaps just riding the tiger? Did your long-term view of history convince you that democracy will fall, that fascism is inevitable, so you'd better make nice with the brownshirts since they'll soon have the power of life and death over you? Because surely you don't really believe we're heading in the right direction.
A second major bone to pick: As one of the dead armadillos in the middle of the road, I do NOT want to get into fighting over covid vaccines here. I respect Greer for creating a space in which people could discuss heretical views that are sometimes simply acknowledgements of data - though other commenters come up with QAnon-level paranoia - but he continues to mention his "intuitive sense" that "most if not all of the people who've been vaccinated for Covid would die as a result of side effects." That was today; he used to say most or all people who've been *boosted*, so he's escalating the vision of doom at the very time when, though it's become obvious that the vaccines are much less safe and effective than originally claimed, it's also obvious that most people who got two shots, quite a long time ago now, are not dying like flies. And I (with some biological background) see no evidence for any mechanism that could cause mass dieoff much later.
I find this frightening, not because it could terrify the gullible vaxxed or discourage people from getting endlessly boosted without evidence of benefit, but because it's feeding a contingent of his followers who imagine that "the vaxxed" are all "PMCs", people with desk jobs, who, for one reason or another, deserve to die. Since I don't think Greer really wants to see a new American Holocaust, I've actually wondered if he is not playing a long game to try to defuse the ultraright's preparations for violence by convincing them that if they bide their time, the liberals and urbanites will all drop dead on their own (or become sickly and easier to kill). If so, I fear that promising them mass Blue Faction death in the near future could backfire, as those who eagerly believed would become increasingly impatient when - okay, if - it continues not to arrive on schedule.
I've bought at least 30 of Greer's books. I think he's an excellent writer, well-read, smart and creative, with an authorial voice I always took great pleasure in reading. But ever since Trumpism started its march to power, I've been watching his public character change in what appears to me to be a negative direction and wondering, with disappointment, why. If he should actually see this, I don't expect that he would answer me, but I truly wish I could understand what's motivating him at this point.