CEO Snuff Merchants, and Other Discontents

You’re not going to understand CEO snuff merchants and their ilk unless you understand TPOT. TPOT stands for “this part of twitter.” The acronym really doesn’t fit anymore, because its devotees have moved to Yells at Clouds.com after Obergruppenfuhrer Musk bought Twitter. They’re all PostRats. That’s means they’re post rationalists. I don’t have the time, the familiarity, or the energy to explain the post rationalist worldview. It’s not really coherent, so any analysis quickly leads to a popsicle headache for anyone with a library card instead of a Twitter account. Their worldview is that they’re smart and you’re not, so there. Okey dokey, then.

What you’re seeing is the logical extension of internauts who have been wearing trilbys and neckbeards on both their chins in their online icon photos, deriding people for believing in invisible sky wizards, and similar infantile glosses on many profound metaphysical thoughts. They, as they say in the local parlance, fucking love science, because they’ve mistaken a potty mouth for edginess, among other silliness. They became so open minded that their brains fell out. They started out by rejecting any form of religion because it wasn’t rational. They thought they could figure out the world like a million Mr. Spocks. They slowly learned they were wrong. Bill Nye is not a scientician, no matter how many times he appears on the teevee, and he’s certainly not an appropriate stand-in for John the Baptist.

So they all decided to believe in an incredibly silly and diverse stew of foolishness that couldn’t be proven rationally, but appealed to the very large rational vacuum between their ears. Space aliens, witchcraft, invisible cabals, the wonders of pornography, that sort of thing. You could boil it down to changing out Thomas Aquinas for Steven King. We recently had a neighbor whose wifi name, visible on our router, was !!HAILSATAN666!!. They have a pet sematary in their front yard. My wife and I used to joke that those weren’t their Halloween plastic skeletons hanging in the trees. Those were their everyday skeletons. The woman of the house dressed all in black and was convinced that her devil worship was somehow anti-war, and had flags displayed to that effect. In reality, she is as edgy as a marble, but all the flummery makes her feel interesting, I gather. The ridiculous elephantine year-long fascination with Halloween is a tell for the mindset.

Any religion, even primitive ones, basically boils down to an arbitrary set of rules that everyone agrees to follow, or get a smack on the nose if they don’t. PostRats think they’re very wise, but vocabulary isn’t their strong suit. They think “arbitrary’ can only mean “bad.” The original Latin means “relating to or depending on the discretion of an arbiter.” So if you’re religious, the arbiter is that invisible sky wizard I mentioned. If you’re not, you’re your own invisible sky wizard, and the rules are decided daily online.

Say what you want about the Ten Commandments, but as the wag once noted, at least there’s only ten of them. Keeping up with the rules in the PostRat world must be exhausting. Because it’s just claiming your rationality entitles you to dream up a voodoo religion on the spot for any occasion, based solely on your feelz. Of course your feelz are delivered to you via a social media drip, and the adumbration of them is obscure.

So I’m sure the CEO snuff merchant thought we was the love child of Jacques Derrida and Jason Bourne, but in reality, I’ve seen his ilk before. And remember, don’t call him stupid. PostRats hate that.