there is a striking self-unawareness to a great many people; they stand unable to see in themselves that which is so often their center and therefore find obnoxious in others the selfsame behavior that has so often been their own and that of their tribe. and the world is full of ink blots that reveal this.

this behavior emerges in many forms and fashions, even and perhaps especially among those who claim themselves to be “above it” and their personal animosities and preferences create a form of concept blindness and shape non-rotation that renders them unknowingly partisan.

consider large X account i/o whose tagline is “Good and bad ideas are fairly equally distributed across the political spectrum.”

interesting take (and debatable), but one whose application seems wanting here.

being upset at trump re-naming things is a fascinating ink-blot.

trump is trolling. he’s deliberatly doing this to get a rise out of people. one can find it boorish or petty, but i think his intent is pretty clear:

he’s ratcheting up aggression.

renaming geography is a typical act of conquest intended to show that one is taking over. it’s a laying of claim to territory. judea got renamed palestina, st petersburg (petrograd) became lenningrad, and new amsterdam got renamed new york. that’s how dominion and regime power work.

you can agree or disagree with the move, but that’s the flex and the US is hardly the first nationstate to do such things. it’s a practice no great power from back in the day would fail to recognize. (it’s also one that every marxist knows by heart)

i supect that most of what’s arousing the anger of the left is that they see in this practice the precise echo of their own, they recognize this praxis of conquest and its demand for submission precisely because this has, for so long, been their own game of choice, the go to “3 yards and a cloud of dust” play for marxists and post modernists (tribes of increasingly little separation) alike.

this is what i/o is missing.

biden in particular and the left in general during the protection of his tenure routinely came out with vastly greater nominal absurdities.

and it was not just “emergent consensus” or some such, it was deliberate provocation and aggression, just like this is.

they just did it with bureaucracy instead of a bully pulpit.

consider a construction like “latinx” or the pretense to not know what a woman is or the recategorizing groups of once-women as “birthing persons” and seeking to use that phrase in medical schools. consider ideas like “we must call them cis-gender so that no gender is seen as “normal” or “stright.”“

none of the people to whom these terms were applied wanted them or consented.

consider the idea of “you must use my bespoke pronouns of xi/xim/meow or you’ll lose your teaching job.”

this man in a dress is the most beautiful and glamorous woman in the world and if you disagree you’re “phobic” and need “re-education.”

this all carries an extreme aggression element.

as ostentatious attack, can one seriously think that “lake america” compares to that?

what if trump, with the backing of some buffoons from some faculty lounge somewhere, had decided one morning to have public broadcasting start refering to black people as “negrix”?

how does everyone imagine that would have gone over?

to my mind, these ideas of societal and biological redefinition seem far more socially and personally intrusive than changing the name of a body of water and a great deal more arbitrary as well.

it’s also the same sort of attack.

since time out of mind, claiming the right to name a thing has been a means to lay claim to that which you have conquered and forcing submission to the nominism nouveau is the application and demonstration of power.

i can make you change your words and definitions, your reality.

you tear down their symbols and make them your own.

and your not liking/finding it offensive is a feature not a bug. it reinforces the fact that you were conquered and have no choice but to comply.

that’s why it was coercive.

it’s also what made the marxist/post modern/wokester versions of this different and more intrusive than mere map manipulations.

i note that no one will get in trouble for deadnaming the lake.

and at least people can pronounce it. the thickness of the irony around some of these folks laying claim to “reality” is exceeded only by the density of their own obliviousness and their determination to always accuse the other side of that which they themselves stand guilty.

from tearing down monuments to renaming schools and public spaces, this practice has been endemic. i suspect this group dislikes having their own practice turned upon them precisely because they understand it for the weapon that it is.

i would actually go so far as to argue that one of the primary practices of the purported progressives during the biden years was renaming things for no good reason (or for some very bad ones) and adopting the most outlandish and divisive aspects of hard left academia to weaponize semantic identity politics.

it was a form of enforced submission.

if you tried to call president puddinhead anyhting at all about it, you got attacked, shouted down, and subjected to cancel culture struggle sessions seemingly mandated or at least encouraged by federal, state, and local agencies and the DoE. even the military was forced to play along.

if you find renaming lake ontario puzzling, i really must ask, “how about renaming a male rapist “woman” so he can go to a female prison?”

what is one to name that?

why does that principle suddenly disappear when the object being renamed is a demographic category, a sex category, a pronoun, or some other noun of longstanding currency? lakes are somehow sacrosanct in this regard?

what i find interesting here is how upset the left (and some of the allegedly even handed self-styled center) become about a lake and how they seem unable to see the obvious nominative parallels to aggressive wokery or even the direct parallel to their having renamed 1,000 buildings and squares and schools in exactly this fashion and for exactly these reasons.

personally, i think “lake america” is kind of an overdone gambit to generate attention (often of the wrong sort) to a political issue (trade war) and calculated upset certain folks. perhaps this is a good negotiating tactic, perhaps not. i guess time will tell, but the great illumination here is that it certainly seems like many of those at whom it was aimed cannot tolerate even extremely mild doses of the medicine they so relentlessly dished out to others back when they themselves were wielding the whip hand.

the “mirror as inkblot” becomes unmistakable and the grand denial that all of these constant, unrelenting diversity demagogue assaults were just a peaceful search for justice and identity falls apart in the reflection.

this gang sure does not like to eat its own cooking and if semantic coercion is claimed to be good for geese, surely the ganders must accept it as legitimate as well.

it’s an odd blindspot for a guy like i/o and the idea that the renaming of a geographical feature is somehow absurd in a manner that renaming an entire foundational aspect of biology or whole ethnic groups seems a massive miss, both as analogy and as ability to perceive aggression. interestingly, my sense is that an idea like “appeal to misanthropic academia” or mere “popularity” would seem unlikely to sway him. (he’s pretty aggressively anti-DEI/woke). this seems to be something else.

it’s what makes this so striking to me: i/o does not fail to understand coercion, quite the opposite: he understands it unusually well. what makes his reaction interesting is that he struggles to imagine the left doing a thing that was ostentatiously near to being their stock in trade.

if his point were “this is all pissing on fire hydrants and i oppose it” then the take would seem coherent/consistent, but this idea of “i cannot imagine biden doing this” just seems so wildly wide of the mark that it strikes me as some sort of core blindness to the manner in which that team operated or the uncritical acceptance of some seeming figleaf of “well, biden pretended to have debate and consensus when he did it” as though such pretense somehow makes a difference as opposed to just being more layers of doctrinaire dominion.

perhaps he is uncomfortable with that level of alpha expression in a leader but sleeps easier or notices it less with it coming from deeper within the state. perhaps he just attributes a level of potency to trump he did not to sleepy brandon, a focus on visible over ambient agency.

perhaps it’s that biden mostly used agencies and broadcasters and schools to do things like this while trump does them personally and as such he’s missing the storm for the lightning rod and fixating upon an individual and not the effects of a regime.

but that’s not a distinction i’d feel safe behind.

i frankly find the latter far more threatening and comprehensive, especially when they wage the war by dragging in the children as combatants. this, unnlike trump makes them far more sinister and far less easy to see or oppose.

“woke semantics” was a very direct attack on large parts of the US society by a faction seeking to dominate and cow them and those who most avidly led that charge seem most offended to see trump utilizing their own playbook, likely because the lie of “it’s just words” they they themselves so shamelessly told is revealed, by their own reactions to lakespeak, as the lie that it always was.

the fact that they they used elmo and school boards and unions instead of personal statements provides no mitigation there. proxy war is still war, but it does not feel the same.

this points to what i beleive is a deeper structure.

this is a wild time to be alive.

we’re seeing amazing amounts of core human drives exploded upon a new media canvas and surging to replace with (and rediscover within) the secular that which was once the province of the divine or the mystic. it fills with odd prodigies and wonders.

it makes me wonder if a large part of the TDS phenomenon is just that trump himself is such a prominent avatar and that he is, therefore, a perfect effigy upon which to scrawl our age and our divisions, upon which to project the failings or promise of whole regimes in a manner that diffuse bureaucracy cannot provide. perhaps he’s become something atavistic and raw hearkening back to scapegoat sin eaters and pharmakoi, kings of the bean and jacks of lent needed by groups as an icon upon which to project themselves that they might consider their own souls clean.

the unusual part is that trump looks to have become the competing avatar for both of two warring tribes. to his fans, he’s king carnival and lord of misrule and they revel in his boastful lawlessness and seek to project their desires within it; to his detractors he’s the folk devil, the embodiment of society’s problems and “other” given a face and a shock of hair, the vessel that receives their hatreds and from which flows righteous license for opposition.

in a sense, perhaps “the donald” has come to be the avatar of excess for both sides of a culture war, a hyper-condensed and lossily amplified dimensional simplification of a deep divide and conflict.

the salient is agreed, the moral sign it represents is disputed.

perhaps it’s the very agreement about his excessiveness mapped divergently onto both good and evil that keeps him in such lurid focus and seems to always make everything about the man as opposed to the action. the man could cure cancer or set fire to an orphanage and the minds of neither tribe would change. it’s all predetermined by preconception.

this may be more natural than many realize. such things are always easier to foist upon the one than upon a diffuse regime. the symbols matter as does the amount of behavior one seeks to expiate or justify.

if this is so, small wonder he’s such a flashpoint and that his nominal designation, king or criminal, fascist or savior, is of such import.

in a sense, he’s the distilled fault line of the larger issue of semantic and perceptive dominion. depending upon which side of that line one is on, his disrespect for a standing order and norms constitutes a threat or a promise. did the king of the carnival liberate or the folk devil defile? it’s another ink blot that shows you only what you brought with you.

there is, perhaps, a telling lesson there about seeing most readily in others the very faults one possesses in abundance and about the correlation of this sort of crybully cultism and a profound inability to rotate shapes.

and this is where i become unable to support ideas like “good and bad ideas are fairly equally distributed across the political spectrum.” to be sure no side has a monopoly on bad ideas, but much of the aggression and lack of constraints carnival king lionization currently seen on the right is the reflexive response to having been cornered by cancel culture and “rub your nose in it”social conquest cast as moral imperative and which left no civil outlet with which to fight it.

of course they elected (and re-elected) the lord of misrule.

that’s what the lord of misrule is for.

he was empowered, entrusted, perhaps constructed to personify the overturn of their system, nemesis invoked by hubris and come to lay pride low.

it’s why many of the critiques about nominative aggression here ring at once so shallow and so false.

the left being upset with the right for changing the names of things seems like the most noir of pots calling a shiny copper kettle black.

“lake america” has nothing on the “fake america” to which we were being demanded to uncritally aceede. the matter at hand is that its deconstruction strikes one group as holy, the other as profane and that holding up as mirror the nastypants viciousness of the wokester warlord campaign of recent years produces a reflection the left and soy center seem unable to bear.

talk about “reality” in this goes a bit wonky because the avatarian nature of the system has generated a displacement where nothing is ever about the act itself: if trump is your folk demon, all that he does becomes demon things; if he is your abbot of unreason, all his excesses are to the point and to the plan. put yourself firmly in either camp and the names of lakes take on oceans of differing connotation.

and no middle or accommodation can be found.

the symbolism is so thick you can stand a spoon in it.

the left instantiated in the idea of trump this avatar, called him devil, fascist, literally worse than hitler, struck it down, and 4 years later it came back imbued with greater potency.

could one imagine a more potent prodigy and threat for each of these two sides?

what interests me is that the right can go on without him, but the left seems to need him in order to remain coherent. they need their devil to blame more than the right needs their carnival misrule. (perhaps they have a greater need for a religion because so few are devout?)

humans cannot outrun their psychological needs and the current “progressive” tribe seems unusually needy and neurotic, prone to both anxiety and irritability. (an argument i/o himself has made) it’s quite a potent setup to require and therefore to erect such an avatar.

you fill zozobra with yourself then burn him to the ground and declare yourself free.

i wonder what they will do when he is gone?

apart from devil donnie, their effigies look pretty uncompelling.