From the Narrow Desert

"Inclusion," in a single screenshot:

This is from an organization that was in the news recently for vandalizing the works of Roald Dahl (removing such offensive words as black, white, fat, and attractive), so I went to their website to send them some hate mail -- er, I mean some diverse mail expressing my own differing viewpoint as informed by my lived experience as person of diverseness.*

I guess I'm not the only one. The "contact us" page on the site is now blank, although the Wayback Machine shows that it didn't use to be. Oddly enough, their donation buttons are still operational.

Also scrubbed from the current site, but still viewable on the Wayback, is the list of individuals involved: directors Jessi Parrott, A. M. Dassu, and Heather Lacey; and founders Beth Cox and Alexandra Strick. (Hmm, one "diverse" group is rather surprisingly conspicuous by its absence. Almost every single time.)

As the unexpurgated Dahl himself put it, "I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women."

*I can't be diverse because I'm white, you say? Fool, I'm Ukrainian. Beat that!**

**I hope the inclusionnaires appreciate how I self-censored and went with "fool."

I hadn't made this obvious connection until I watched this video by Jonathan Pageau, in which he gives an extremely insightful analysis of a speech given by Apple CEO Tim Cook a few years ago. (I've been watching more and more talking videos recently, having discovered the trick of playing them at 1.5 or 1.75 speed to make the experience more tolerable.)

Cook is giving a fiery speech about how Apple is standing up for its "values" because "it's the right thing to do" -- and, as Pageau shows, he makes it perfectly clear what those values are. Pageau's summary:

The only value that really matters is the value of inclusion, and the only thing that is a problem is if you oppose yourself to that system which is created to include everybody.

Cook talks about how Apple is going to deplatform anything that promotes "hate" or "violence," but, as Pageau points out, the two examples Cook focuses on are not songs and movies that literally glorify hate and violence (those are okay, obviously!), but rather "white supremacy," i.e. excluding and marginalizing other races, and "violent conspiracy theories," i.e., questioning the System and its motives. (By the way, what the hell is a "violent conspiracy theory"? Must be something like a colorless green idea!)

"Inclusion" means everyone and everything must be fully incorporated into the System. No one is allowed to be excluded or even marginal. The excluded must be included, the marginal must be redefined as central. There's a classic cartoon-villain term for this goal: taking over the world.

And those who would exclude or marginalize others, or who would question the goodness of the System itself? Are they to be excluded, leading to an obvious self-contradiction? No, they are to be either assimilated or destroyed. When Cook says that those who "push division and violence" (meaning, as we have seen, exclusion of others and criticism of the System) "have no place on our platform," he obviously doesn't mean that they should leave Apple and find some other platform. No alternative platforms can be tolerated, since then there would no longer be one single all-inclusive system. He's not telling white supremacists and conspiracy theorists to take their business elsewhere; he's telling them to fuck off and die. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

A very clear example of the Ahrimanic ideal: "that one soul shall not be lost."