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Requiem for a Blogger
--AntiDem, "Wonders In The Darkness"
I recently learned that The Anti-Democracy Activist, AntiDem for short, or AnnoDomini as he styled himself in his later years, has died.
I don't idolize actors or singers the way normies do; it means nothing to me that Val Kilmer or Ozzy Osbourne passed away earlier this year. But I do idolize thinkers, and this death hit me harder than usual.
I have been reading AntiDem for over a decade. He was among my top influences; one of my intellectual fathers, alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Bryan Caplan, and The Dreaded Jim. His writing was beautiful, poetic, and evocative without ever veering into purple prose or melodrama. He was specially good at telling stories, whether they came from his own life, such as his conversion to Christianity and his disappointment with a unicorn, his encounters with other interesting people, such as his memoir of crossplayer Peter Brown and his summary of drinks with his friend Psycho Dish, or a historical tale used as the lead in to some larger political point, such as his account of the Christmas Bullet and his telling of the doomed airline passenger.
AntiDem was a man of faith, and his religious convictions frequently informed his column. In "Down And Out In Christania", he imagined what a truly biblical approach to the welfare state might look like, while in "Femboy and I", his Christian love and compassion for the sinner manifested themselves even as he never stopped hating the sin. This aspect of his writing was especially transformative to me, coming as I did from the New Atheist tradition that held all religion to be primitive nonsense; AntiDem never converted me, but he helped me see that there was much wisdom in the faith of my ancestors.
AntiDem was also an old-school otaku, from back in the day when waifus came in VHS tapes. He had a knack for combining his love of Japanese animation with his culture war positions to create memorable posts, such as "On Homosexuality And Uranus" or "Miyazaki And Human Space". I was already a weeb when I found him, but his knowledge and experience helped to foment my growth and appreciation for the artform. I learned about the precursor to the three-episode rule from "In Which I Determine Whether Friendship Really Is Magic" and I still find myself quoting his explanation for the appeal of anime.
Now I know what he felt when he said goodbye to Rush Limbaugh.
Aged like Milk.
"Democracy is over. January 6th was the last stand. The progs have won." Then, in 2024, Joe Biden dies in the middle of the campaign and Trump 2.0 defeats DEI personified.
This is why "no fucking blackpilling" is a constant refrain for me. Losers gonna talk loser shit and, more embarrassingly, wind up with egg all over their face.
In the two extremes are FDR and Hitler: the former changes his society in such a manner, undoing his changes is unthinkable. The latter's changes are deemed so harmful, all of them are denoted by the prefix signaling when they were enacted and the implication they must be undone.
To celebrate now is like celebrating the wrongness of Spengler's thesis that all societies perish, that a Caeser cannot save a country, in Berlin, 1935.
Perhaps Trump and his associates could evade Nuremberg, by using Biden's tactic of a general pre-emptive pardon on the last in office. Possible, Supreme Court would in its current constitution probably uphold it. So here I think Trump et al are in the clear.
But this does not guarantee his reforms will posses ratchet nature. You mention Trump defeating DEI-incarnate. True, but it does not follow DEI itself is defeated:
Some say DEI was born from US anti-discrimination laws, key phrases from them have been used to advance DEIsm, but this ideology took on a life of its own, indepedent of current government support. This is most in aspects of US society which are traditionally indepedent of the government's line, even if only when an R is in charge. Trump has the right idea of targeting universities, antisemitism being convenient in that unlike other prejudices common there in practise and preaching, it is less likely to be okayed by courts.
Let's say universities will if they want to receive givernment funding, have to abandon DEI. The trouble Trunp faces here is that the government carrot is a baby one, while private donors, legacies one is bigger. And the latter align more with DEI and with the traditional American value of keeping the government meddling away from universities.
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