KMO Show, episode number 32, prepared for release
on Tuesday, May 27th, 2025. You are listening
to the KMO Show. I am your host, KMO, and I am
speaking with the librarian of... Kalino, who's
handled pronunciation I just now learned, so
I hope I got it right. Yes, very much so. Thank
you. Thank you for having me. Ah, my pleasure.
I know you, well, don't really know you, but
we're speaking because of Substack. I've been
on it, I guess, a couple of years, but for the
first nine months or so, I was not posting regularly.
I was writing a novel instead, and I find it's
a lot easier to write a novel when you're not
also a blogger. But you have, I think, been quite
a success on Substack. So did you bring an audience
or did you build an audience on Substack? I built
an audience. I started off from ground zero.
I was told the story a couple other times. I
was a commenter, basically, on John Carter, postcards
from Barsoom, his Substack, which is a great
Substack. Everybody should subscribe to it. I
was a commenter there. And then some people responded
kind of positively to some of my comments. And
so I thought, oh, maybe I can give this a try.
I like writing. And then I went from there and
got my first subscriber. And everything I have
came from Substack. Right on. I brought an audience
to Substack, but it was a small one because I've
discovered that audiences are not particularly
portable. Like if you start a new podcast with
a new RSS feed. Good luck. Yeah, it's something
some of the people I sort of know on Substack,
we talk about the Cringe Stack authors that bring
over 100 ,000 people with them, instant purple
checkmark. And there's a way you can do it, I
guess, if you're media savvy and have people.
But for the most part, yeah, you're pretty much
on your own to build your own organic audience
if you're not already famous. Yeah, but you can
come in and write a post about how to build an
audience on Substack and get a whole bunch of...
I guess one -time readers that way. Yeah, five
tips to grow your stack. Five tips to get more
paid subscribers. How I got 30 ,000 paid subscribers
in a month. Okay. That was like half my feed
for a while. When you are not the librarian on
Substack, you are an educator. Yes, I'm a high
school teacher. I'm actually transitioning jobs
right now. Lost one job, got another one. So
I'm starting a new career at a different school.
But I teach high school. I also teach college
classes here and there. And obviously I write.
So that's pretty much my spectrum of careers.
And you also teach some online courses, is that
right? Yes, online college classes. Yeah. So
with AI, large language models, writing papers
for students, like... I was a grad student in
the 90s and I taught undergraduate courses and
I had to grade a lot of papers. And I remember,
you know, end of semester, I had my own papers
to write. You know, I had my own classwork that
I had to really, you know, buckle down on. But
also, you know, all the student papers are coming
in. And if I read like two paragraphs of a paper
and the first paragraph is like a proper opening
saying this is the subject matter I will cover.
This is the position I will defend. And, you
know, it's all punctuated correctly. A, put an
A at the top of that paper, circle it and move
on to the next one. And it's the C minus papers
that I'm struggling with trying to figure out
what the student is trying to say. You know,
and I always felt like I was doing a disservice
to those A students not reading their papers.
But, you know, if I'm going to pass most people,
you know, and justify those C minuses, well,
the A papers were just, you know, if there was
a grade higher than A plus, that's what they
would get. Yeah. But AI changes all that. Now,
anybody who wants to can write perfectly without,
you know, knowing how to use a semicolon or an
em dash. It's actually become kind of a, I would
say, a personal challenge where I would say I've
become better as a reader just from seeing so
much of this AI stuff to where I can spot the
subtle nuances. between something AI generated
and something human generated. And I can say
with no small amount of pride, I think I'm actually
kind of a pretty good detector. There's just
a way that AI prose appears that is just distinct.
It's this flat aspect, like someone with a thought
processing disorder trying to explain something.
It's just not right. It's not everything. The
words are all there, but the meaning is just
so... formulaic and devoid of human emotion or
input or anything. It's just obviously something
machine generated. The worry becomes, I think
that, I mean, and when I see something obviously
AI generated, that creates a moral problem because
now I have to ask myself, all right, well, do
I slap an F on it like the school says to? But
because I can't prove it, if a student actually
were to say, no, I totally wrote that. I'd be
without recourse and I'd have to give them an
A anyway. So what I've kind of started doing
is if I see something that I'm pretty sure is
AI, I swear in court is AI, but it's not, but
I can't prove it, you know. I'll usually slap
a grade on there of like, you know, B plus, you
know, and I'll call out any, like if they ask
why, I'll say, well, you know, this sentence
wasn't very good or you could have expressed
this better or something like that. I'll grade
those papers much more harshly. And then the
kids who authentically are writing things, I
give them the A plus because they actually put
in the work. How are how's their writing? Because
when I was grading papers, you know, university
student papers back in the 90s, kids couldn't
write then. And I don't imagine it's gotten better.
As a whole. Well, so one thing I'll say, the
pool of people I draw from, I mostly handle dual
enrollment. So these tend to be the smartest
kids in the high school. And in that group, I
do tend to get, you know, 25 % of them are pretty
competent writers. They can express themselves.
Another 50%, they can get their point across,
but it's not done very artfully. And then another
25%, even though they're smart, they just struggle
with expressing themselves. It's hard. And if
you work with them, they can get passable as
writers. But the ones that are the worst off
are the ones that have the most recourse to AI.
Because they're not confident, they go straight
to chat GPT, tell them to bang out an essay.
Sometimes it's laziness, but a lot of times it's
just fear. They don't want to be judged because...
They're in dual enrollment. They think all their
other peers can write, and they're just scared
to do it themselves. I try to get across to them.
I'm not there to judge them. Now, the population
as a whole, like when I teach high school and
I'm just getting a general cross -section of
the population, no, they cannot write. It's bad.
I had one kid. He turned in some paragraphs he
was supposed to write to answer questions, and
I actually— No joke. I went to the dean and I
said, I think this kid is still suffering from
concussion symptoms. And I showed him the paper
and he agreed. And it was that bad. The words
were just disjointed. It looked like something
like a serial killer who'd been up for three
weeks would scrawl in his insane journal. This
is a senior about to graduate high school. It's
unfortunate. AI is happy to, I say AI, I should
say large language models, but they are happy
to crank out whatever piece of writing you ask
them to. And compared to most of the population,
they're brilliant at it. I mean, compared to
professional writers, yeah, they're certainly
flawed and limited, but compared to most people,
they are superhuman. And it's unfortunate that
they can write at that level, but they're not
very good at editing. Because I think if a lot
of people would just, you know, take the plunge
and just put something down, like, you know,
crank out 1500 words and then ask a patient's
skillful editor, hey, how can we make this into
something that I would want to show to somebody?
Then AI would be beneficial. But, you know, just
saying, hey, I don't feel like doing this. You
do it. Yeah, that's the worst. The papers that
are the most that I would say get past my mental
detector the most. are the ones where the kid
clearly put in some effort. They've got the core
of something there, and then they had AI come
in and, like, modify it in some way. I've dinged
people for AI where they've come back and said,
no, I wrote it. I just used Grammarly to come
in and, you know, change up a ton of stuff. And
it's like, well, you can't do that either. You
know, it's got to be your work. But those papers
tend to look better than the ones where the kid
literally just typed in a prompt. You know, I
need five paragraphs about, you know, Abraham
Lincoln. Yes. But given the students that you're
dealing with, you don't see that all that much,
I'm guessing. So, yeah, the online dual enrollment
kids tend to be a little bit brighter and more
assertive and able to express themselves better.
The regular high school kids lack either the
ability or the will or both. And it all stems
from the same cause. People who can't write can't
write because they don't read. And they don't
read because they can't read, because they lack
the discipline, because they haven't, at a young
age, put themselves through that necessary process
of being able to sit still, tune everything out,
and focus on a written word. History, which is
my main discipline, it's a text -based discipline.
It's all about going in, looking at a text, analyzing
it, drawing meaning from it. Being able to draw
meaning from a text is the essential skill. And
as a history teacher, I have to say, not many
people have that skill. I do a lot of reading
these days, but it's all on screen. If I take
in a novel, it's most likely going to be an audio
book. But it was Robert E. Howard's Conan stories
that turned me into a reader. And, you know,
as a teenager in the 80s or maybe even a preteen,
I think I was like 14, 15 when I started reading
this. There was material in there that was not
age appropriate. Yeah, I've read those stories.
Right. But because, you know, because it's just
words on a page and nobody's going to read what
I'm reading, you know, that was a place where
I could go to get stuff that wasn't available
to me above board. like I would go to the bookstores
at the mall and the science fiction sections,
which we know were science fiction and fantasy
then as well. Yeah. You know, the, the covers
by Frazetta and Vallejo, I mean, they were just
soft core porn and it was just, it was. You're
telling me that chain mail bikini isn't battle
ready. I think it's, I think it's, it makes tactical
sense. Exactly. Distraction, distract the enemy.
But, you know, so the thing that kills me is
I'm. I work in a library. I hesitate to call
myself a librarian because I'm at the bottom
of the library hierarchy totem pole. But men
my age, I mean, I'm at the very, I'm 57 and I'm
at the very youngest layer of readers, you know,
male readers in the library. Yeah. Millennial,
Gen Z men, they do not read. period they simply
do not go back into the stacks they have no interest
they come in every day you know and they go right
to the computers but they don't read women read
girls read and so science fiction my my genre
that i just love has become fantasy book porn
for girls yeah and the more that the the publishers
cater to that audience you know the more they
drive away what few uh male Readers and I think
probably a lot of other people who would be writing
science fiction, they're just driven to computer
games. Yeah. And, you know, there's there's this
really what I consider horrible feedback loop
on the other end of that. So I worked I used
to work in an all boys male military school or
all boys male. Yeah. But an all male. military
boarding school so it's none of the boys and
um the dean was really into this like uh boys
brains are different guru type guy and he would
come in and he would say like yeah boys you know
boys can't focus on texts boys are very physically
oriented so you can't can't have them read for
more than 20 minutes and you got to have them
up and active and doing stuff boy girls will
sit and read but boys have to be moving all the
time and And I'm thinking to myself, as this
guy's going on like this, who wrote all these
texts? Everything we read is written by a guy.
So a man can sit there and type a 30 ,000 -word
book, but no male can be bothered to sit and
read it? That doesn't make any sense. People
used to read these things. All of these things
used to have a male audience. So if your argument
is that boys are biologically disinclined to
read, you really have a – you've kind of begged
the question there of why that genetic predisposition
did not manifest itself before the 1990s. And
it's a dodge. It's a way of rationalizing our
– I'll say our as in me – our failure as educators.
to get these boys the discipline they need to
be able to use their imaginations and focus on
these texts and draw meaning from them, not just
the factual meaning, but aesthetic meaning, emotional
meaning, to make a connection with these words.
It's a tragedy what's happening to them. I have
boys in my class, or I had in my school years
over, but I had boys in my class who would read.
And I kept my own library in my classroom. And
the boys would come in, and I'd let them borrow
books, and some of them would borrow and read
very serious books and ask for more. And I can't
help but think that if they had gone to another
teacher, that guy would have said, well, shouldn't
you be running around in a circle or something?
What are you supposed to do? A lot of it, too,
is the education profession is heavily, heavily
female, especially in the public schools. My
school, a little bit different. It's a military
boarding school, so a lot more male teachers.
But your typical school, elementary schools will
be 80 % women. High schools will be 60 % women,
some of them. And the male teachers tend to be
not English. If they're in history, they're coaches.
So you end up with a whole system that does just
sort of take it for granted. Oh, boys don't read.
Girls read. Boys don't read. And that mindset,
that background set of assumptions, I think is
really poisoning boys. ability to access these
bugs. Yeah. And just the fact that there's not
naked women on the covers anymore. That's a real
blow. Oh, yeah. The 80s movie posters, too. Roger
Corman movies. Oh, yeah. Galaxy of Terror. I
was thinking Deathstalker. Oh, that's got a Vallejo
poster, as I recall. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.
Boy, I was probably in my late 20s before I learned
how to pronounce Vallejo. Yeah. Not a lot of
Spanish speakers when I was growing up in Kansas
City. Yeah, I learned how to pronounce Nietzsche.
I don't know. I was probably 30. I'm still not
confident that I've got it right. Well, Nietzsche
is an interesting point to change direction.
Was raised in the Southern Baptist faith, but
some of my earliest prayers that I can remember
were me bargaining with God saying, OK, if I
if I stop believing, my salvation is still locked
in. Right. Because a lot of this I'm just I'm
having trouble with. And so I've, you know, I've
been a. What I would now call a Christian atheist
for most of my life for a brief period. You know,
when I was young, I was an obnoxious sort of
evangelical atheist, but put that behind me fairly
quickly. But these days, Sam Harris years. Yeah.
Well, Sam Harris is not that much older than
me. So, yeah, I had never heard of Sam Harris
at the time that I was. And I think he was probably
just, you know, either a high school student
or a college student when when I was going through
the evangelical atheist phase. But these days,
you know, I look around and I look at people
who go to church and I look at people who are
not necessarily philosophically atheists. They're
just sort of, you know, a religious because the
culture is a religious and they're just sort
of, you know, temperamentally. Yeah, well, they're
living the default life. They're not really put
much into it. This is really manifest for me
at the library because our library is right across
the street from the county courthouse. And on
days when court is in session, you know, the
white criminal underclass comes into the library
to use the photocopier to send faxes or whatnot.
So that's that's a group that I see regularly,
you know, up close, talk to them. You know, the
ones with the neck and facial tattoos and who
look way older than they are in most cases. And
then another group that also comes in regularly
are Mennonites. And, you know, these young Mennonite
men and women, they're just they look so healthy
and so fit. And, you know, they come in and,
you know, the girls check out Amish romance books
and the boys get online and they go to YouTube
and they watch, you know, horse training videos
or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But they just seem
so much better off. Just look at life outcomes.
The people with, you know, Christian religion
seem to be killing it. And the people without
are struggling. And so I'm I'm actually like
part of me says you should go to church, young
man. But well. The part of me that says young
man is being facetious, but I'm not going to
my mother's church. I live in the same house
with my mother. She's about to turn 86 and she
goes to a Southern Baptist church, but I can't
stand the Southern Baptist services. I get plenty
of her religion on TV because she's got it going
all day on Sunday. But my father was Roman Catholic.
And there was a time when they were still trying
to make me go to church and they gave me a choice
of the Southern Baptist service or the Catholic
service. And I opted for the Catholic service
a lot of the times because it was shorter. But
my father was not a regular enough attender of
his, you know, his mass for me to really go full
time there. And also, you know, as soon as he
was out of the house and his authority was gone,
I just stopped going to church. There's a Catholic
church here in my small Arkansas town, and I've
thought about going, but another part of me says,
you know what, that's kind of abusive because
you're not really one of them. It would be sort
of an esoteric project for you, and that's not
fair to this community. But then another part
of me says, no, outreach is their job. If I go
and sit in the church, even if I don't believe,
I'm doing half their job for them. You probably
know how all that spun out from just the mention
of Nietzsche. So I'll stop talking and then let
you pick up. So, yeah, I think there's a lot
to unpack there. So the Mennonites, by the way,
my people, my ancestors were Mennonites. My last
name in real life is a very unusual one. And
you only find it in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Back when they had phone books, my last name
was like, there's like a million of them in the
phone book and it's the only place where there
ever was. So every one of my ancestors comes
from that community. And I've learned about that
community on and off throughout my life. I'm
not a member of it myself, but I know, you know,
I kind of know about them. It's their religious
faith and it's also their sense of community.
You know, they have this shared sense of identity
and belonging. They feel like they're a part
of something bigger than themselves. So there's
psychological factors involved, apart from the
faith factor, which is obviously the most important.
In terms of, you know, should you go to a Roman
Catholic? Should anybody go to a Roman Catholic
church? Should they go to church locally? Is
it wrong to do that if your commitment is half
-hearted? I think if there's 1 % of you saying,
I should go to church, you should go to church.
You know, everybody there, everybody in that
room, I can guarantee you, including the priest
and the priest, I'm sure would tell you this.
Everybody there is there like as a percentage
of how much they want to be there. You know,
the one guy 70 % wants to be there. 30 % want
to stay home that day. You know, another guy's
there, 95 % there, but 5 % he's struggling with
a little bit. And then there's one person there
who's. there because somebody made him come.
He's 5 % wanting to be there and 95 % wanting
to be someone else. Everybody, nobody's there
a hundred percent. We can't be because we're
not perfect. You know, the only person who's
a hundred percent there is Christ. And that's
why you go there to meet him. You know, the,
the, the gaps are what he fills in when you ask
him to, you know, that, that, you know, I'm Lord,
1 % of me wants to be in this place. Would you
please provide me the other 99? And I truly believe
if you ask for it, it will come if you want it.
Now, of course, and I hesitate to talk about
religion because I don't want to put myself out
there like I'm this extremely religious guy that
I regularly go to church all the time and I always
do what I'm supposed to do. I don't. I'm a sinner.
I'll put that out there. I'm the worst sinner
out there as far as I'm concerned in my own mind.
But at the same time, I know that when I will
myself to do it, when I ask for God's help, it
happens. And if you have that 1 % commitment
and you ask God to give you the other 99%, there
has to be space for that. You have to clear out
everything else that's in there to allow that
99 % to come in. And to the degree you clear
out those other factors that are keeping you
out is the degree that other things will show
up and make it more – give you that sense of
fulfillment, I think, that you're looking for.
Because the things that keep you out of church
are – we all have this. I'm not singling you
out. Our judgments. The people that go to this
place are all fake. I don't like how long the
service is. I don't like how short it is. I don't
like the language it's in. I don't like what
they wear. I don't like – the smile. There's
all these things that come from pride, where
the correct attitude is always to humble yourself
and approach these mysteries as they are, as
mysteries, and take it on faith that what they
have to offer, you might not always understand
it. You might not like the people around you.
There might be things about the politics going
on that you don't like, but you're here ultimately
for an encounter with God. Now, Nietzsche, and
I'm going to monopolize here, but Nietzsche,
to my mind, could never get past that. He could
never get past those superficialities. He looked
at the Christianity of his age and he judged
it. You know, these are the last men. These are
bourgeois people. This is convention. And the
problem with Nietzsche is that he was right.
You know, there was a lot lacking in that faith.
There was a lot lacking in that faith in AD 33.
There's going to be a lot lacking in that faith
in 10 ,000 years, if God wills. Nietzsche was
correct in his critique, but he was not able
to humble himself to look past it. I use Nietzsche
as the segue to this topic because on Substack,
I think there are a lot of people who are kind
of like me who look at Christianity and see it
as a positive force in terms of its social effects,
but they just can't bring themselves to believe.
the cosmology behind it. And so they try to substitute.
And what a lot of people go for is a sort of
Nietzschean vitalism. And they try to use that
in place of God. And people on the right tend
to be better than people on the left in terms
of not forming a circular firing squad. And so
there's some infighting there, but there's also
a lot of accommodation of different people's
viewpoints. I know that you must deal with or
hear from a lot more people from that, you know,
both aspects, both cells in that community than
I do. So what's. He's having an affair with one
of his friends and then was hooking up with Sigmund
Freud and this other guy and could not manage
a family life, could not mean, I mean, just nothing
like this. Just there's nothing about this guy's
life that I would look at it and say, well, I
want to be like that, you know. And granted,
I guess he lived the way he wanted to, but I
just can't imagine wanting to live like that.
But at the same time, you know, do his ideas
have value? Sure. Sure. I mean, there's a lot
of things he said that were very interesting
and profound. I would say the same thing about
Karl Marx. I have no interest in living like
Karl Marx or being a Marxist, but certainly there's
play aspects of Karl Marx's social critique that
I think are very valid and interesting. On the
right, you know. There isn't this necessarily
need for ideological purity. What makes someone
right wing? I mean, there's obviously a core
around this idea of tradition and hierarchy and
transcendent value that kind of make you the
right. But beyond that, I think people are pretty
tolerant. Certainly, you know, my own following
includes people who are Christians and missions
and atheists. All kinds of others. I've got people
who are avowed leftists who read and subscribe
to my work, which I find interesting and I'm
grateful for. You know, I'm not I don't look
at people in terms of, well, you believe this,
so I hate you. I'm interested in dialoguing with
anyone. I'm interested in anybody's critique
of my work. And I think that attitude you see
more on the right than the left. And that's why
the right, I think, is becoming an ever more
attractive place for ideas. People are comfortable
expressing themselves on the right. I mean, compare
right wing subset to, you know, blue sky, blue
sky. I mean, it's horrible. It's just nothing
but like all the maniac tendencies of the left
cranked up to 11. They're always attacking each
other. You know, this one doesn't respect this
one's neo pronouns. This one supported Biden
when he shouldn't have. And this is ridiculous.
I mean, I get people who will argue with me sometimes.
They tend to be the base pagans that I poke fun
at sometimes. They'll argue with me and stuff,
but I mean, that's a small group for the most
part. Pretty much everybody, I mean, the range
of people I get along with on Substack is probably
better than the range I get along with in real
life. Unfortunately, all of my social contact
other than talking to my mother and brother comes
from my job working at the library. Yeah. Where
I meet a lot of people and I interact with a
lot of people and I, you know, I have informal
conversations with a lot of people. But when
it comes to political topics or, you know, anything
that's potentially divisive, you know, my my
professionalism requires me to just shut up and
just smile and nod and not really get into any
anything in any depth that could be, you know,
that could attract other ears in the library.
Yeah. So that's. On that level, it's sort of
pallid, but it does give me a nice vantage point
from which to make observations. Hopefully, none
of my co -workers are reading my substack. I
do my best not to ever mention the name of the
library, but it would not be hard for anybody
who was looking to nail me to the wall to figure
out which library I'm talking about. For my part,
in those doxing terms, I obviously write under
a pen name, but I mean, I give enough details
about my life that if someone really wanted to,
some hope not hate nutcase came or, you know,
what do you call it? SPLC guy came after me or
something. They could probably figure out who
I was, but it doesn't bother me that much because,
I mean, there's not really anything I say on
Substack that I wouldn't say in real life to
somebody. So, you know, I don't, I'm not one
of these people. You get people who just want
to run their mouths online and say offensive
stuff and hurtful stuff and be nasty. And then
they're worried about getting called out. But
I mean, I don't, my, the librarian and who I
am in real life, it's the same person. I just,
I don't want people like calling up the school
where I work and bugging people just because
they've got some beef about what I said, you
know, it causes problems for other people. Right.
Well, I'm not sure what you just said, but it
popped into my head that it was an anchor point
for the topic of. race and the discussions of
race that on right wing Substack. Actually, before
we get into that, you know, you mentioned Blue
Sky. Every now and again, I will somehow end
up looking at the main Substack page when I'm
not logged in. And it's Blue Sky. Oh, yeah. Substack,
for whatever reason, just promotes these people.
And it's, you know, I talked about earlier, Cringestack,
you know, this just sludge. coming out that's
just nothing but this you know i hate donald
trump it's all they write about every single
week they have nothing else to say and they say
the same thing and they have subscribers there
are people who pay to hear this they cannot get
enough of it these people that subscribe paid
subscribers to 10 15 20 sub stacks and it's the
same thing they just they pay to have this like
ridiculous echo chamber. Any day now, Trump's
going to jail. Any, oh, the economy just crashed.
Oh, well, it didn't. Oh, it's just so dumb. And
you almost have, this is a running joke I have
with people in my circles where we all say we're
going to come up with like a, you know, cringe
stack publications making fun of Donald Trump
all the time, where we just use chat GPT to just
write these sludge articles one after another.
and just get these people to pay us and then
use that money for our actual work, you know?
Now, there's a use for, you know, using an LLM
to write for you that I could totally get behind.
I actually did one time. I didn't post it, but
I asked Grok. I said, Grok, write me an article
in the style of Steve Schmidt about why Donald
Trump is bad. And what it came up with was indistinguishable
from what he actually wrote. You would think
if I just created a parody account and posted
it, people would think it was him. So one last
thing on Substack and the mainstream left, if
that's what you want to call them. Whenever I
do end up looking at the main page when I'm not
logged in and I'm seeing all these Orange Man
bad posts, I always see one of my posts in there
as well. Which just says to me, OK, look, you
know, it's me because I know you're not promoting
my work to anybody else. They have like IT checkers
or something, I'm sure. I don't know how that
stuff works, the algorithms, but they know. Yeah.
So, you know, why why go to the pretense then
of, you know, showing me things that, you know,
I'm not interested in, but whatever. So, John
Carter. You say you got your start basically
as a commenter on his posts. And John Carter,
who writes postcards from Barsoom. I mean, anybody
who's a fan of classic science fiction recognizes
that that's, you know, not William S. Burroughs,
but Edgar. So, you know, he's a very, like I
would say, upwing, forward looking. you know,
tech positive sort of person, but he also has
conservative views and he is, I guess you'd say
what a race realist. Well, that, that word, I
mean, there's a spectrum, you know, that kind
of, that, that term implies there's people who,
I mean, there's a sense in which I'm a race realist
where I would say, you know, race is a thing.
It is a real thing to just sort of say that all
people are. indistinguishable blank slates, I
think is wrong. And then there's like another
end of the race realist spectrum where it's,
you know, races are biologically, you know, immutable.
And, you know, these people have low IQs and
we need eugenics. And, you know, I think that
you can make positive claims, like empirical
claims about something and not necessarily draw
the moral conclusions and political conclusions
that some of those more extreme people draw.
John Carter has, I'm not going to speak for him,
he's his own guy, but he's Canadian. And the
situation in Canada, they have a lot of immigration.
I'm not sure the exact ratios, but I would say
in terms of their population, they have right
now more immigrants in their country per capita
than we have in America. And a lot of them are
coming from the Indian subcontinent. And a lot
of people who have lived in Canada for generations,
they call them heritage Canadians. you know,
don't like that. They don't like the changes
that their country is undergoing. And I think
rightly so. I think there's very much a place
for that critique. You know, can it veer into
hatefulness? Sure. But I think that that, in
a lot of ways, is just sort of downstream from
the fact that the government of Canada does not
take these critiques seriously. people vote over
and over again. They say, we want less immigration.
We want these people to assimilate. We want to
keep Canada the way it was. And kind of like
in America, before Trump took over, nobody cared.
They just sort of kept going with what they wanted
to do. That's that managerial system I write
about a lot. So I think that there's definitely
a place for that sort of critique, yeah. So you're
talking to me and I read his, I read John Carter's
posts, but for somebody who doesn't, You've basically
gestured at things without naming them. So what
critique are you talking about? So John Carter
and a lot of other people, too, and Substack
is actually kind of dense with Canadians a little
bit. The critique of sort of the idea of the
multicultural society, which is the sort of ideal
of the managerial system, that human beings are
these fungible economic units. You can import
massive numbers of people from any part of the
world to any other part of the world, although
this tends to just be importing from the third
world to the Western world. You can import people
and there'll be no friction. There's no problems.
Everybody is basically the same and everybody
will basically get along. And if they're not
getting along, it's because of racism on the
part of white people. And so the managerial class,
the globalists that run all this stuff, tend
to interpret critiques of immigration as that
kind of racist friction that's keeping everything
from working the way it should. And people like
John Carter, and again, I don't want to speak
for him, he's got his own views and everything,
but people like John Carter, people like Fortisax,
and there's a lot of other, Kryptos a little
bit, look at this and they say, you know, no,
the point where, this is absurd, it's just a
violation of basic common sense. You can't take
people from one part of the world who've lived
a certain way for millennia and put them in a
different society and just expect everything
to work out harmoniously. It's just not. It doesn't
make sense. It's never worked before in history.
Why would it work now? But there's this sort
of neoliberal mindset, the ideology of the managerial
elite, this neoliberal ideology of, well, with
the proper social inputs and the proper organization
and the proper education and everything like
that, we can just will it into being. You know,
we human beings are blank slates and we're the
ones that write on them. And that's what I mean
by critique. People are critiquing that neoliberal
managerial. ideology of all human beings are
basically fungible economic widgets. So you mentioned
that John Carter is Canadian. I, from the year
2006 through, I don't know, a couple of years
ago, I was doing something called the C Realm
Podcast, which is the letter C and then a dash
and then R -E -A -L -M. And C stood for consciousness
most, you know, most prominently, but also a
lot of other things. And jokingly, I would say
it also stood for Canadian. because a disproportionate
portion of my audience were Canadians. And when
I would travel internationally, I would often
be mistaken for a Canadian, which I took as a
compliment at the time, because when I was traveling
internationally, I was still of the mindset that
one distinguished oneself as an intellectual
by being hypercritical of the United States.
Yeah. Yeah. I've gone probably too far in the
other direction since then, but I used to be
on that page. But I have a friend, somebody I've
known since the mid 90s, who's Canadian. And
he worked in tech in San Francisco in the late
90s and early 2000s and did pretty well for himself
before basically being kicked out of the United
States for some, I don't, I can't even reproduce
what it was. It was some trivial, trivial, you
know, visa irregularity. And now he's, you know,
he's banished. But I sent him a post by John
Carter. And, you know, it had something to do
with science fiction and tech. And my friend
is, you know, he's into tech and he's in the
makerspace. And, you know, I thought he'd be
interested. And he basically just wrote back
and said, that's racist. End of discussion. I'm
like, okay, this is probably the wrong John Carter.
article to start you with here let me send you
a different one and i sent him one called the
whims of mars and which you know john carter's
mostly talking about the the prospect of um you
know a robust population establishing themselves
on mars yeah and yeah you know he's actually
an astronomer by trade oh no i didn't did not
know that oh that's that's great so anyway i
sent this follow -up to my canadian friend who
said, this is racist too. Whims, it's right there
in the title. And I'm like, okay, so that's just
the thought stopper. I mean, if there's anything
that can be considered racist, then nothing the
person has to say is worth discussing. And I'm
not singling my friend out for particular intolerance
or having a particular blind spot. It's just
that's the culture in which he lives. You will
not... He lives in Toronto. You will not be branded
a racist in Toronto, particularly in the, you
know, the progressive tech scene. If you are,
you're done. You know, it reminds me of the book
Dune, D -U -N -E for the readers of Dune, Frank
Herbert, where the Bene Gesserit sisterhood could
use these hypnotic techniques. You called it
Prana Bindu binding. Binding, I think was what
they called it, where, or hypnoligation, where
they could put a. word subconsciously into someone's
head that if another person said it, it would
cause the guy to have some kind of psychosomatic
reaction. And they had the knife fight at the
end where Paul Atreides is fighting Faye Rautha.
Faye Rautha had one of those words in his head
where if Paul had said it, it would have caused
his whole body to shut down. And Paul didn't
want to win that way. And I think part of what
our neoliberal managerial class does... is create
these kind of hypnoligations in our heads, especially
Canadian heads, but a lot of Americans do, where
they hear certain things, whim, ooh, shut down
racist, shut down, ooh, and the whole system
crashes, and they're blue all to death, they
can't handle it. It's like, you know, it really
does. It's like this learned, like, disgust reflex
or something, where it literally makes these
people sick to hear certain ideas. even if they
make sense, even if they're logical, even if
you spell it out in a way where, okay, I proved
point A, I proved point B, so point C must be
true. Their minds just cannot go there. The programming
is too deep. They have become, in the truest
sense, NPCs. You know, I've tried to look up
the definition of whim while you were talking,
and I'm just getting the proper definition, you
know, of the noun. It means like a wish or something,
like you want something to happen, a desire.
Right. It's a WIM. But when it's in all caps,
it's white, what is it, hierarchical, what does
it stand for? All right. WIMS stands for White
Hierarchical Individualistic Male. Yeah. So the
white hierarchical individualist males will go
to Mars and create a robust society where they're
They are allowed to form and bask in asabiyah.
Yes, community building. Yes. I think asabiyah
is more of a community spirit. It's a vitalism
that lends itself not necessarily to community
building, but just group formation and group
identity. And everybody's allowed to have it
except white people these days. Yeah. And that's
kind of the point he was making. You know, and
that's again, so somebody that's racist. OK,
well, let's let's look at this. Right. So is
it is it good that people from India are allowed
to be Indians? Yeah, of course. Why would it
be wrong? All right. So and they're allowed to
be Indians wherever they are. Right. They're
in India. They're in Canada. Yeah, absolutely.
Multicultural society. Anybody can be who they
are. So with that logic, then should white people
be allowed to live like they are? That's racist.
Like it just shuts down. You know, it's just
there's no there's no getting past that. It's
not a logical thing. It's like something placed
deep in that lizard brain part, you know, where
you just vomit up a dead insect, you know, like
in the most primitive form of life. Yeah, my
last name is O 'Connor, so I can be Irish, you
know, and being Irish by, not necessarily anymore,
but for most of my life, being Irish by definition
meant you were white. Yeah. Do you remember when
Google image search, if you asked for a white
couple, it would definitely show you a whole
page full of interracial couples. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
George Washington thing they had that called
the Gemini, I think it was. Well, that was a
different incident, actually. Yeah. You're thinking
of generative AI, you know, if you ask for an
image to be created, like, you know, founding
fathers, it would show them as black or Chinese
or something. Yeah. But a few years before that.
Just with the image search, you know, if you
search for white couple, it would show you a
full page of mixed race couples or black couples
or whatever. Basically, it would it would scold
you for searching for the wrong things. So if
you wanted a picture of a white couple, you would
type in Irish couple, you know, or Polish couple.
Well, even that would kind of screw you up. The
thing about all that stuff is like you can construct
a white identity. as something negative. You're
allowed to say whiteness exists if it's being
excoriated. But the problem for these people
comes where you can't talk about whiteness and
not make people think about it. You know, if
you beat into somebody's head, you're white,
you're white, you're white, you're white, even
if you're constructing as something negative,
people will see it as inherently part of themselves.
So the whole project of creating a colorblind
society like neoliberalism wants to do falters
on the premise of, you know, everybody gets to
be who they are, but white people have to be
something that white people hate. Whiteness is
only an attitude of contempt. But at the same
time, it's immutable and inescapable. You know,
you can't get rid of your whiteness. You can
critique it. You can denounce it. But you can
never, ever free yourself from it. And because
I, as a white guy, can never free myself from
my whiteness, that forces me to think of my race
as an immutable characteristic. And thus, logically,
everybody else's race as an immutable characteristic
with its own particular features. So I have a
Substack friend. who probably wouldn't mind his
name being mentioned, but I won't anyway. But
he's into science fiction like I am, but he's
also a Gen Xer like me, but he's a black man.
But he reads and restacks posts by John Carter.
And, you know, I've said to him, hey, I need
to get you on the line and have you discuss that
on a podcast. And I thought he would be reticent
to do so. He said, no, sure, I'll come on. There
are no bigger race realists, I would say on Earth,
but definitely in America, than black Americans.
Like, they will give you a frank assessment of
the characteristics of every race, including
their own, without hesitation. There's a whole
section of Black YouTube, I don't know if you've
ever heard of a guy, Tommy Sotomayor, who just
goes in and just lambasts in characteristics
of Black society. He goes after other people
too, and he's a Black man. Just lambasting characteristics
of Black culture he sees as negative in terms
that if a white man were to use it, would just
be completely socially out of bounds. I'm not
surprised he agreed to talk about it. My high
school where I went to was a very highly majority
black school. And you would just hear them casually,
you know, like even among themselves, you know,
the degrees of coloration matter quite a bit.
The ones with lighter skin would make fun of
the ones with darker skin and vice versa. They
would have these beefs over that. So again, if
you want race realism, that's a good place to
start. Yeah. So I've, you know, for years I've
been thinking, as the left and, you know, the
cultural left, the economic left, as they've
been denouncing white people and, you know, shaming
people for being white, shaming people for, you
know, something they can't change and justifying,
you know, mistreatment of them on the basis of
historical, the writing of historical wrongs.
I've just been thinking, you know, you guys,
you realize that the pendulum's going to swing
the other way, right? And the worse you are when
you're in power, the more vociferous, you know,
the reaction will be. So you think you're going
to be in power forever? I mean, has the pendulum
stopped swinging? There was a, there was a real
telling, I wish I could remember the exact circumstance.
I think Ramsey Paul had a YouTube show about
it one time where he talked about it. It was
in Wisconsin and they were trying to teach the
kids at this like all white school about their
white privilege. And so to do it, they gave them
those little like rubber wristbands, you know,
that people wear, like they say, what would Jesus
do and stuff? Well, they gave out these little
rubber wristbands that were just white. And you
were supposed to wear this white wristband to
remind you of your white privilege. But they
stopped doing it because the kids were wearing
it like ironically, like to demonstrate how white
they were. Like kids would get like five or six
of them and wear them. And it was like this whole
thing where they were just, you know, there was
a. I think it was in Colorado. Somebody was protesting
the Native American names for, you know, football
teams and stuff. And he came up with a shirt
called the Fighting Whiteys. And he thought this
was going to be like a dunk, you know, like,
oh, burn, white guy on a shirt. And it's like
he had like an Etsy store or something for it.
It sold out like immediately. People were buying
these shirts and wanting to wear them because
they thought it was awesome. So anytime, again,
you know, they think they're being clever. By
just constantly throwing in white people's faces,
you're white, you're white, you're white, you're
white. But I mean, you can't really control where
the imagination leads you from that. Yeah. I'm
not sure that this is necessarily thematically
connected to what we've been talking about, but
I have a dog and I walk my dog every day and
there's a dog park within an easy walk of where
I live. So we go there every day. Sometimes some
of the people who are there are not locals. They're
traveling cross country, but they've stopped
at this place and they're, you know, letting
their dogs play in the dog park. And there was
this one couple I was talking to, and the man,
like, within a couple of sentences, you know,
after hello, was, you're not a Trump supporter,
are you? And one, you know, dude, this is Northwest
Arkansas you're traveling through. You're going
to run into a few. I didn't say that to him,
but, you know, I was not looking to escalate,
but he was giving, you know, somebody who would.
take those as fighting words, ample opportunity
to take offense. But I will say those folks are
much preferable to the ones who won't go into
the dog park unless it's empty. Sometimes I'll
be in the dog park and I can see that somebody
has pulled up and they've got dogs in the car
and they're just waiting for me to leave before
they will go into the dog park. I'm like, I think
you're missing the whole purpose of the dog park.
It's not the prison yard, you know, where you
let the inmates out to walk in solitude for an
hour. It's a place to socialize for humans and
dogs. You know, I'm actually kind of surprised
nobody's come up with the concept, like the drug
companies, no one's come up with the concept
of dog autism. You know, like to medicate the
dogs, like your dog won't socialize with the
other dogs and you won't do whatever the, oh,
dog's got autism, here's a pill. And then you
can imagine somebody doing that, like, oh, I
can't let my dog play with other dogs. You've
got dog autism. But people will. So right now
I'm in Florida with my dad, helping him out with
stuff. And the area where he lives, Florida's
pretty much a solid red state at this point.
But a lot of the snowbirds come down, and they
come from Massachusetts or Connecticut or all
these other places. New York City. Yeah, New
York. They'll just be, you know. I can't believe
that Donald Trump got elected. These people are
such rednecks. And they're so used to everybody
just agreeing with them. It's beyond them that
people could think differently. And it's why,
you know, these white people, I'm a white nationalist.
I'm not a white nationalist. I have nothing in
common with these people. I don't know what they're
about. I don't want to live in a society where
they're in charge. I know they want to live in
my society because they keep coming down here
where I live in the South. I don't want to live
with them. And it really is like just a different,
a different nationality, a different country.
Like they just have, they have totally different
conceptions about how the world should operate.
All right. That was the librarian of Kalino.
There's like another 20 minutes left, but today
is Tuesday. And that is the day that I both write
and post my Gen X. science fiction and futurism
post for the week. And I haven't even started
yet. And it's a little after 4 p .m. So I got
to put this podcast to bed and get to writing.
I will share the final 20 minutes, which I will
tell you up front is pretty unfocused and is
me jumping around from topic to topic. You've
heard the best part of the podcast, but I will
put that in Sea Realm Vault episode number 475.
But that will probably be a few days before I
post it. The Sea Realm Vault podcast is available
on Patreon, and I also post it to Substack, so
it is accessible to those people who have paid
subscriptions to my Substack. Most everything
I put on the Substack is free, so the paid subscribers
are really, they're not doing it for the extra
content. They are doing it to support my work,
and they have my sincere gratitude for that.
All right, I must go. Talk to you soon. Stay
well.