Poisoning the Well

The rhetorical campaign against the SSH

An astute observer of all things scientific drew my attention to a stupid song that he heard some 12-year-old boys singing the other day.

Just a heads up about a disturbing sigma sighting in the wild. At a camp out this weekend, some twelve-year-old scouts were tossing around the term sigma, so I took the opportunity to explain what it meant. That was a positive learning experience. However one of the scouts kept singing what I thought was a silly children's song with a line, "my friends all call me sigma." It was loaded with other slang terms I didn't know about, and had to track down when I got home. 

Maybe I've led a sheltered life, but it's full of awful slang that I had to look up (and that's not appropriate for twelve year olds). This strikes me as a particularly skillful and competent attempt to debase, degrade, and redefine "sigma" in young minds: turning it into a kind of filth by association.

I've reached out to the scout's dad. This is also a good opportunity to remind parents to do a better job keeping their children away from such vile content. Your book is coming out in the nick of time.

I didn’t think anything of it when some version of these “banned words” signs began floating around a few months ago. I did think it was a little unusual, of course, given that teenagers around the world have irritated adults for decades by adopting and overusing various words and phrases that serve to distinguish themselves from their elders. In the 80s, “mint” would have been banned, “wazzup” in the 90s; even in Italy, in the 00s, the young men were constantly saying “mitico” or “mythic'“ to express a superlative.

But this memetic campaign of “banned words” looks less and less organic over time, given the way that some of the various words keep being tied together in a way that we really haven’t observed before. Now, the media has always been prone to manufacturing nonexistent trends, as despite what the movies tell you, literally no one ever said “totally tubular” in the 1980s except on a film set. “Totally” yes, “tubular” no. So it’s possible that these “banned words” are just a manifestation of media cool-hunting.

But the reality is that all of the Clown World governments and dozens, if not hundreds, of their media stringers, are actively occupied in suppression of bad thought as well as online hasbara. The continuing success of GamerGate against corruption in gaming and the presidential memewars of 2016 alarmed the clowns who are responsible for the Narrative. So, as ridiculous and paranoid as it sounds, the reader’s suspicion that repeatedly tying these unrelated words together is an oblique attempt to address the virality of the SSH is more likely correct than not.

It’s only a matter of time before Sigmaman makes an appearance.

It doesn’t really matter, though. Once an observable concept is out in the wild, it’s there to be picked up and utilized by anyone who finds it useful. As with most people who fail to grasp the essence of the SSH, the particular terms of the taxonomy don’t matter in the slightest. Different football teams use different terminologies for the same plays; West Coast offenses use words while Air Coryell offenses use more numbers and the Erhardt-Perkins system freely combines both, but they are all just different ways of describing the same thing.

F Right 72 Ghost/Tosser = Passing play with 5-step drop with the line in a full slide, and they will be sliding to the left. The outside receiver will run a fade/go route with an outside release, the second receiver on his side will run a 10 yard out, and the two receivers on the other side run double slants.

What I find more interesting is the way Gammas always attempt to redefine Gamma. Such as the way one Gamma commenter here did yesterday:

He was Arian? Seems Gamma to me lol

The retardery of this cannot be exaggerated. The attempt to retroactively denigrate a particular strain of Christianity that was significant in the 4th Century AD is strange enough, although the chances that this particular retard actually knows anything about actual Arian theology or understands its historical appeal are extremely low. And the idea that a reluctant Roman emperor, who died bravely leading men into battle against tens of thousands of Gothic warriors could have been more of a Gamma than some spaghetti-armed pencilneck who drops two signifiers in a single sentence of five words is absurd on its face.

Words either mean things or they are empty tools for emotional manipulation. Once you rule out the former, the only thing left is to determine what is the objective of the latter.