I normally leave tin foil hat stuff alone, unless of course I’m mocking stuff like Chemtrails believers, flat Earthers, 5G mind control radio frequency ignoramuses, the Q-Anon-ists and the ‘there’s a Zionist plotter under my bed’* types. A lot of this sort of stuff is misreadings of information mixed with too much paranoia. I have found that because those who believe in this sort of stuff cleave to it like a shipwrecked man clings to a life-raft, they are often extremely immune to challenge with factual data, which is why my preferred approach to such individuals is mockery. I find I have to treat those who believe in Chemtrails etc as believers in and members of a quasi-religion. Just as it is extremely difficult for a person to get a committed Christian to leave his or her church and become a neo-Pagan, it is equally difficult to shift someone from an erroneous belief that, as in the case of the Q Anon types, Ex-President Trump is going to ride into Washington DC on a white charger and arrest the ‘elite paedophiles’.
As well as being a difficult and lengthy endeavour to pull someone out of a rabbit hole of wrong assumptions using correct and verifiable data, my other disagreement with those in various conspiracy based quasi-religions is that they can have really bad outcomes for a society. The first eruption of anti-vaccination misbeliefs about the Smallpox vaccine in the 19th century might have made people more hesitant about such vaccination and thereby allowed Smallpox to ravage the West for more years than it actually did. It’s difficult to be sure about this but if we look at the MMR vaccine scandal, where parents en masse falsely believed that this vaccine could damage their children, a scandal which happened much closer to our own time, we can see reports that in some parts of Britain, following the Wakefield MMR damage hoax, MMR vaccine coverage dropped to 50% of those who potentially should have been vaccinated.
We also have the examples of how plausible sounding bullshit was used by the great and terrible dictatorships of the 20th century, dictatorships who murdered millions who, to the dictators, were the wrong ‘race’ or ‘class’, for the societies they were building. These dictatorships thrived on conspiracy theories and these theories whether they be about Jews or Capitalists, were the priming charges for mass murder. However because these dictatorships controlled all mass media, there was very little chance of any factual challenge being able to be made to the false ideas that these dictatorships were founded on, no way for anyone who disagreed with the dictator to say to a wide audience that neither the Jew nor the Kulak was an enemy of the people.
There are claims made by tin foilers that are obviously and provably wrong, for example the belief held by some loony tunes that ‘The Earth is flat but the malevolent Jews want you to think otherwise’ which are completely and utterly mental. However there are other claims that could quite possibly occupy that crepuscular area between truth and bollocks. I’m very much an Occam’s Razor sort of person who believes that the least complex explanation for an event might be more likely to be the correct one. For example a carrier bag full of sand would not throw itself off of a roof, someone or something threw it or knocked it off the roof and it’s unlikely to be the case that a gang of angry fairies emerged from an empty Tennent’s Super Lager can and moved the bag via telekinesis.
My Occam’s Razor sense pricked up recently when I watched a video on the travails at Disney and the ‘woke wankers’ working in the media in general that was published by Doomcock/Overlord DVD, a commentator whose content I have watched a lot of recently. From what I have seen of Doomcock’s content, which is mostly concerned with culture war and pop culture matters, it does appear to be mostly sound. Doomcock does seem to have an extensive set of contacts in the mass media industry and I get the impression that most of his contacts are those who are mightily pissed off with the sort of woke wankery that is hitting not just the bottom line of the media companies his contacts work for but also endangers his contacts jobs. One of the things that impresses me about Doomcock is that he divides the information he has received into two categories. The first category is stuff that he has managed to corroborate and verify whilst the second category is what he calls ‘the rumour zone’ or stuff that he has not managed to corroborate to his satisfaction but is either worth hearing or might cause others in the media industries to come forward to confirm or deny the rumours.
Doomcock has recently put out a video that is slightly different from the usual stuff that he publishes and even though it might occupy the twilight zone between truth and untruth, fact and tin foil hat nonsense, nevertheless I think it is worth discussing. The video concerns some thoughts that Doomcock has been having as to why Western pop culture has been turned to shit. He’s been wondering and voicing his thoughts as to why, for example, established heroes in pop culture artefacts, in modern remakes and re-imaginings, get turned into graceless, cynical, extremely flawed, alcoholics and why the often derided Mary Sue phenomenon where heroines are unnaturally and unbelievably talented, is now so common and predictable in modern pop culture.
Doomcock is wondering in the video below whether the destruction of the West’s heroes and the stories that provide some of the glue that holds our societies together is deliberate and planned.
I can certainly understand why he wishes to consider deliberate action by high ups in the media industry and in particular the Disney Corporation, destroying pop culture as a explanation for the degradation of pop culture. We only need to look at the list of major institutional shareholders in this entity which include investors like Blackrock and Vanguard who are big players in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) field to get some idea of the sort of money behind woke culture and how big money promotes ‘Big Woke’. But pressures by big institutional investors might not be the only reason why companies like Disney, which used to produce competent and often much loved entertainment products, now only seem to make the sort of ‘woke shit’ that the public doesn’t want to buy. This is why Doomcock’s view that Disney and other entertainment companies are deliberately destroying Western pop culture canon is not entirely a position that I can completely agree with and is something about which I take a more nuanced view. This is because there are other explanations for the current rubbish that is being sold as pop culture that do not involve there existing an individual or a group of people deliberately trashing the culture. Deliberate action might be part of the problem but there are also other factors we need to take into consideration.
Firstly there is the echo chamber issue where people work, socialise and otherwise interact only with those who reflect their own point of view which gives them the false impression that everyone else thinks and feels the way they do. To give an example, there are probably lots of people in companies or NGO’s and in politics who see nothing wrong in Drag Queen Storytime (DQS), to them such events are not contentious because the peer group made up of those who promote such things doesn’t see them as contentious. It’s only when the general public are confronted with these events that the contentiousness of the Drag Queen Storytime phenomena is exposed and the response of those behind them is not to examine whether or not they are wrong to support such things, but to blame and defame those who are critical of DQS.
Then there is the ‘company man’ phenomenon where individuals working for companies or NGO’s or government departments cleave without much thought to the organisation and its policies. I’ve seen this in the retail sector where the company men had a level of loyalty to the company that was misplaced. If the company, in my case one in the electronics sector, told the staff to promote a crap product as the latest wonderful thing then they did it because for them the company and not the customer was always right. This problem was exacerbated because they, unlike the more junior staff, were somewhat insulated from the angry customers bringing back crap products. We drones on the shop floor knew that pushing these items would result in us having to deal with angry disappointed customers a few days later but because we didn’t want to lose our jobs by telling senior staff that the item was not fit for purpose, we quietly steered customers away from the bad sale items. If it was difficult to speak truth to power in somewhere like retail then it must be orders of magnitude more difficult for a lower level staff member at Disney or Paramount or Netflix to tell their managers that turning a beloved male cultural icon into a one legged black lesbian in order to gain virtue signalling points from the management’s peers, would be a very bad idea.
Another explanation for the current poor state of pop culture is fashion. Some things are fashionable for a while and go away but that doesn’t mean that the negative affects of the fashion go away as quickly. A good example of this is social work training in the 1970’s. Training institutions that had a far left Communist/Trotskyist bias in its teaching, such as the North London Polytechnic, churned out social workers who had imbibed social work training that had a far left aspect to it. These former students went out into the world and applied what they had learned to the real world and thereby did little to solve the problems of their clients and in some cases may have made the client’s problems worse, because they put their personal politics above the needs of the service users. In the case of North London Poly, although the far left dominance of the institution and its social work training department was done away with by the late seventies and early eighties, the graduates who had left the institution prior to the purging of the extremists were now in the workplace and pushing their left infused politics there whilst they rose up the hierarchy, something that doesn’t really have helped the end users of these services.
Doomcock has some interesting thoughts about why pop culture is in freefall and why feminised males and masculinised females are the order of the day, but I’m not sure that the idea that there is a deliberate plot to do this, as the only reason, passes the Occam’s Razor test. There are, as I’ve pointed out, other aspects such as echo chamber thinking, a monothought clique of company men and the blind following of fashion that could be equally valid ways to describe what has happened with pop culture. I mean no personal criticism of Doomcock, he’s an excellent content creator who’s well worth watching, but he might be adding two and two together and making five here. So what do you all think? Is Doomcock correct and there is a deliberate and concerted effort by malevolent and motivated individuals to destroy the canon of Western pop culture or is he being a little bit tin foil hat?
*I was once accused by a particularly deranged nutcase on one of the more free speech orientated internet fora of being a paid Zionist troll who is probably going to be rewarded by the Israelis for my work mocking the Jew-botherers with a tropical island to which I replied: ‘The Israelis have not offered me a tropical island, they haven’t even offered me the Isle of Sheppey’
