Over the past decade or so with the rise of big tech and social media, we're seeing arbitrary standard being put into place about what we can and cannot say. I will not belabor the point of tech censorship, but instead I will focus on how groups in power are allowed to talk about whatever they want while simultaneously silencing other groups under the pretense of terms like "hate speech". This essay is about how certain groups are allowed to talk about politics as much as they want while shutting down opposition. ¹

Note that I haven't looked at the Trump executive media this-or-that—my political efficacy is pretty low, so I tend to be pretty stoic about political matters. ² I will not discuss the specifics of some law/policy.

What follows is thus... just an analysis. I'm not trying to win your vote or anything nor do I demand you to participate in some revolution or change your Facebook profile picture.

It's okay to talk about XYZ, as long as you agree with me

In the mainstream media (including social media, where this content is often aggregated), we see ample "discussions" of all of the following things:

• race
• gender
• social classes
• geopolitics (e.g. Hong Kong action; bad guy China)

All of these things are discussed openly, but certain positions are not allowed to be articulated. This is the 1984/fake news/etc. "matrix" of controlled opposition. You are free to move about in the same way as a train on tracks.

For instance, you can say Latinx female and non-binary individuals are the target of oppression by you-know-who, so we need to allow for XYZ in the name of human rights. However, if you were to create an exposé on Latino (or some other Officially Oppressed ™ group) on East Asian violence, you would probably get chased off social media by angry mobs, unless all your friends happen to be Nazis. They would tell you that you-know-who just wants to divide People of Color ™ to keep them oppressed.

You may be forgiven if you say that you mis-spoke and that what you really meant was that XYZ aliens in such and such fictional universe have legitimate greviances against ABC aliens. Talking about "nerd/geek" stuff like... the Marvel universe or Harry Potter or something, you can see how all sorts of ideas can be discussed—but only in fictional worlds and the abstract. It is okay to talk about politics as long as you fall into line with current political actors.

The main point here is that there are certain narratives—which may be very political in the sense that they're about how force is used to change how people interact with another—which are perfectly okay to talk about at the dinner tables of many "nice people". They have no problem with you talking about politics as long as you agree with them. What there is a problem with is disagreement or lack of obedience—e.g. refusal to regurgitate talking points.

And so, mantras of social alignment are repeated so that people can signal which groups they belong to.

So are you telling me that group XYZ are actually in power?

Yes, and no... You can imagine how different groups can win/lose the favor of a ruling elite. For instance, the US government may prop up Taiwan's KMT party one day and then later decide that they are corrupt and "anti-democracy" and switch support to another group.

I haven't read much about what has been going on with ISIS and Syria and all that, but I imagine studying that region or Latin America would give some historical backing to the above claim.

What I'm saying is that if you have a strong opinion about some situation, e.g. the following issues,

• Free Tibet
• Free Hong Kong
• Cuban communism is not even that bad
• Russia wants the worse for the US
• Japan needs more immigration because of an aging population
• Catholicism needs to reform for the 21st century
• Christianity needs to "return to its fundamentals"
• Islam is "a religion of peace" (conversely, "Islam is the worst thing that has happened to the world since electric (non-gas) stoves")

...you may have been pressured by all sorts of top-down planning to arrive at your conclusion. That's okay, but I urge you to consider again hopping onto some political movement so as to not become somebody else's "useful idiot".

It is fine to just say "I don't know enough about XYZ to form an opinion" or even "I don't think the government should legislate on ABC". When the time comes to have "skin in the game" and vote with our feet/dollars, people will make political decisions.

Our tech overlords, tagged data sets

Our silicon valley tech-utopian overlords would like us to tag and label ourselves in all sorts of ways. This is how "machine learning" and "big data" works. People create data by expressing choices among a small set of discrete options.

Once you come up with some "classification task", you can sort desirable versus undesirable thinking. ³

Note that voting and democracy often works in a similar way. What we are getting is a kind of automatic voting through opinion expressing for our technocratic oligarchs to push their transhumanist ideals incrementally on the unsuspecting consoomer masses.

Hiding in my text editor

The past month or so, I've largely turned to arcane technical things for personal development, entertainment, and network formation. ³ Even talking about stuff like popular entertainment can get pretty political pretty fast as talk about such-and-such discrimination here-and-there and under/over representation this-and-that is often the analysis of professional opinion-expressers. ⁴

At a certain point, many people don't want to be political—by this I mean, we want to just go about our days not talking about how groups leverage government (force) to accomplish their end-goals. There are other things to use language for such as: displaying affection towards one another, composing music and poetry, solving difficult technical problems, learning the names of things (e.g. muscle groups for sports training or drawing anime)

What I present here is thus a rant about how normal people get nudged into pushing politics to everything and how we have a choice to be less political by actively recognizing the double-standards applied to "political speech" of all sorts.

Most of the time I don't talk about politics... but when I do, I'd rather hear most people reason abstractly about Starwars (omg light side vs dark side) than talk about some not-so-well understood "facts" reported from halfway across the globe.