Good morning, all. It’s time for a Sunday morning rant from your favourite freelance skipper.
Aside from all the death and destruction on the Red Sea, we now have to accept that Somali piracy has returned! Oh joy.
I can live through all that again, but what my anger is truly directed at today is internet culture. While sailors are being blown to pieces and killed, in order to keep global trade limping along, do people care online? No. I’ve seen beautiful female vloggers in their twenties literally in tears, crying over the environmental disaster of some shrimp washing up on a beach in Yemen after a ship was ‘lost’. (“Where are the environmentalists calling out the disastrous effects of Israel’s aggression!? Look at these poor shrimp”). Meanwhile not a peep for the poor Filipinos who’re going to spend the next couple of years tied to a f*cking tree in Mogadishu (off-pay).
Or the people who ignore the plight of Israel hostages being kept as sex slaves, and confirmation of the use of rape as a weapon of war in Israel. While at the same time calling for ‘equality’ on ‘International Women’s Day’.
Vampires have no reflection.
As the threat of a day above 9°C remains lingeringly incredible, I’ve had a little bit of time open up in recent weeks. Business is going well enough. I’ve even had the great pleasure of turning down several unsolicited job offers this week. One of which included 10% of all sales revenue from an AI product under development. That was flattering, but I think my own vision for the future will work out just fine. But I am really starting to get itchy feet. I’m really looking forward to getting some surveys or trips at sea under my belt soon, as us freelancers come back into season.
My accidental lent (which I’ve dubbed ‘Acci-Lent’) has come to an end just in time for a wedding. The antibiotics I’ve been on have played havoc with my skin, my bowels, and my happiness these past 4 weeks. The only benefit being that four weeks with zero alcohol provided me a good ‘hard-reset’ that I don’t often get while working ashore.
Like most seafarers in the energy industry, my trips at sea are usually governed by a zero-tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol. I used to miss it, but most of the time I don’t even give it a second thought when I’m offshore. I tend to look forward to the more basic conditions on board, as a kind of temporary monastic retreat. The solitary environs of a cabin make a surprisingly agreeable cell. It’s the best possible place to get through that book that’s been sat on your bedside for the last two years, looking at you like your wife waiting for you to clean out your closet, or tile the downstairs WC.
All things are temporary. As such, the evening after I get home is usually a one-man Saturnalia. Having children keeps me constrained within socially acceptable limits, but from dinner to about ten pm, I usually aim to mix grape and grain for maximum effect. When working offshore regularly I don’t have to worry too much about developing a drinking problem, because I know I’ll be away again soon. If I’m spending 60-70% of the year ‘dry’ anyway, what does it matter if I have a drink at home?
Some of the real drinkers are not even sober for five minutes when they get home. From the moment they hit the airport on the way home until they start packing their bag to come back a month later, there is a beer alongside their personage, morning, noon and night. These guys need to go back to sea to stay alive. They call it ‘Sea-hab’, instead of Rehab.
It’s easy to see how alcohol can ruin a life. One of the harder things I found was how temptation increases with material prosperity. As my income grew, so did my appreciation for the finer things. It’s a lot harder to find a reason to say no to a wee dram, when you suddenly have access to the finest single malts, dessert wines, and other magic potions on offer in your average Scottish vintner’s. If you have the money, why not have a nice little glass of wine with dinner every night?
I’ve been ashore for a good long while now, so ‘every night’ was starting to rack up to a good long streak. As such, I was rather grateful for ‘Accilent’.
They say lent is designed for you to fail. It’s supposed to reveal to you the passions which have part of your soul enslaved. I can see that. However, I’m not one of those people who thinks that alcohol is only a bad thing. If it were, how could we explain Jesus’ first miracle?
Coincidentally, I have had to go back onto social media this week. It seems appropriate timing, as my period of mandatory sobriety comes to an end, that a need to start marketing my business has prompted me to return to another great enslaver of our time. Big Social.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. (FLIYT for short. You’re welcome).
Like alcohol, the original impulse behind these platforms was good. They united people, built communities, gave people centre, identity, and home.
The early days of the internet were different. Ukraine and Israel are not unique or pioneering in their glorification of snuff films on the internet. I remember spending all morning before my Physics exam in first-year Uni, watching beheadings online.
The internet may be 50% pornographic but don’t forget the rest. Sex goes hand in hand with death. This leads to vulnerability, then vanity, and the manufacture of mirrors and weapons of war. As surely as the fall leads to Tubal Cain and the tower of Babel, we have porn, violence, threats, filters, impression management, cancel culture, censorship, and the Online Harms Bill. Justin Trudeau and Tubal Cain have a lot more in common than you may think when you look at the pattern playing out.
I left Facebook more or less four years ago. I left Twitter and Instagram shortly after the October 7th attacks in Israel. TikTok never lasted more than three minutes, as I found it to be like Twitter on methamphetamine. Couldn’t handle it.
The only one I really liked was Instagram. Not much politics, or argument. Tribalism was mostly harmless. It was just nice pictures. At least the way the algorithm treated me.
That all changed on October 7th, with the reincarnation of Schrödinger’s Jew.
You remember that Jew, don’t you? He was the one responsible for the evils of both Capitalism and Communism. The one who was both weak, racially and intellectually inferior, but somehow capable of multi-generational conspiracy that enslaves all of mankind. The guy who gave us the founding principles of all that is good in Western culture, but also somehow, only cares about himself, money and control. The one who orchestrates every false flag attack, war and famine that has ever plagued mankind, but somehow can’t seem to control a tiny piece of beachfront real estate in Gaza. The one who controls all government, media and social media as part of his nefarious ‘impression management strategy’, even though he can’t walk down the street in London or get the police to enforce hate Speech laws in any direction other than his own.
The postwar joke among Jewish refugees summed it up. One Jew asks another "Why do you read that stupid propaganda paper "Der Stürmer"?" and the other one answers "Well, I read the other papers and they're full of pogroms, genocide and other crimes committed against our people. But then I open up the Stürmer and it's all about how we control politics, own the banks and rule the world and I feel much better."
It makes sense, then, that the Jews have now created Schrödinger’s hostage and Schrödinger’s genocide. The civilian hostage that somehow doesn’t count as a civilian, or as a rape victim, because they ‘had it coming’ as an oppressor. Or the ‘genocide’ against ‘refugees’, where their population increases over multiple generations.
The lies surrounding Ukraine weren’t much better. Although it seems more like foreplay now, looking back on how a supposedly ethnic Jew, Zelensky, has now overseen the futile slaughter of the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe, with his Biden-sanctioned conflict. You know, the one he was specifically elected to avoid, as the peace candidate. (But he’s wearing a green T-shirt now, so you know it’s serious).
It has been a blessed relief living without social media these past 4.5 months. Substack doesn’t count, of course. It still brings people together. It still allows the only form of liberty and independence that matters. Its members are ‘free to disagree’. That is civil.
I dipped my toe back in the water with Instagram. I thought I’d share a screenshot I found on Substack, which I found funny:
Apologies that I can’t remember the source. If someone knows, please attribute in the comments
I found this so funny in within the context of internet culture these days. With every serpent from self-help to activist offering some blue, red, black or white pill to ‘set you free’, and help you ‘question everything’, the idea of rebelliousness has become comical. The obvious parallel with the pill metaphor, and the implication that we know we are consuming poison when we indulge in this narcissistic form of entertainment, instantly builds a connection with everyone on the internet. The punchline is so funny because we know that poison won’t set us free. It kills us. So the joke is an ‘inside joke’, for people who don’t actually expect to be ‘set free’ by the trash they consume on the internet.
Fairly classic use of irony, right?
Except, no.
Having been back on the platform for less than a week, Instagram found my reposting of this relatively harmless joke, utterly beyond the pale. My post was removed, and now I can’t log in to Instagram without the sort of warning that the Samaritans used to post on high bridges.
I have even had advertising privileges revoked from my personal account. Which is hilarious.
I LOVE that they included ‘Eating Disorders’.
I miss irony. It was always my absolute favourite form of humour, from a very early age. Grown-ups would say things that were not true or were close to the opposite of what was true. It wasn’t cruel like so much sarcasm. It was situational and philosophical. It sharpened you up.
Irony died on the internet, as wokeness arose, with cancel-culture in tow. It’s hard to know if this came about purely in reaction to the successes of the Alt-Right (circa 2014-2017). Or if this humourlessness came about organically as the children of a majority divorced or overly-career focused children, raised by the state and cheap migrant labour, came to adulthood in the over-medicated USA.
In either case, the result is the same. We are living in a dangerously humourless time. And I’m fairly willing to bet that this is how it felt in Afghanistan, shortly before the Taliban ascended.
Along the lines of some slightly more serious irony, the number of times I’ve seen or heard the misattributed quote: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”, repeated in recent months has been disturbing. It is of course being invoked to imply that Jews control the media, so no information in favour of the IDF or that contradicts Hamas can be trusted.
This quote is deliberately misattributed to various philosophers like Voltaire, on the FLIYT platforms. In fact, a very cursory search engine check will tell you that this was coined by Kevin Alfred Strom. A massive racist, American Neo-Nazi.
It is indicative of the clown-world we live in, a marker that the carnival of our civilisation is nearing its revolutionary end, when people can quote a neo-Nazi, mob the streets of London, threaten their MPs with violence, and claim to be freedom fighters.
Amazing how those 15 Million Jews can oppress 1.9 Billion Muslims, isn’t it? They must be so sneaky.
The layer upon layer of irony acted out, as pro-Hamas supporters beat a man holding a sign saying ‘Hamas is a terrorist organisation’ in London last week. The police arrested the man for inciting hatred. The mob, on the other hand, was exercising free speech, outside the mother of parliaments, in the birthplace of property rights and freedom.
We all know who you can’t criticise in this world. Zionists, ethnic Jews, and religious Jews clearly do not fall under that category.
This irony isn’t funny. It is deadly serious. Although, it isn’t surprising.
Antisemitism is part and parcel of revolution and the post-enlightenment worldview. You can’t have a revolution if people are in touch with their tradition, or their history. That’s why we have to remove children from the family and get them into state schools as early as possible. So they bond with outsiders and peers over family. That’s why we have to pretend the Old Testament is entirely out of line with the New Testament. And why we have to commit the original act of antisemitism and pretend that Jesus Christ looked like Chuck Norris in a bathrobe, instead of like the Judean he was.
No, we live in a brave new world, where celebrity jesters and fools are called stars, and treated as saints. Where our aristocrats and ‘leaders’ are fools, with no fealty or connection to those whose backs they live off. Our merchants and physicians have become rulers, through regulatory capture, and social connection has become something governed by demons in Silicone Valley, rather than something organic. People look to server farms in a distant desert to provide ‘peer-to-peer’ distributed autonomy. People who spend $280 per month on entertainment think that putting £5 a week into a collection plate is the greatest act of evil and manipulation there ever was.
We have almost fully inverted the world that gave birth to us. Forget about the Great Reset. We’re all about to undergo the Great Re-Discovery. And some people are really, really not going to like that.
I rather fancy your rants… just saying
Another excellent read. Many people are Pro Palestinian and anti Israel because it allows them to be antisemetic without the guilt.