In Excusationem Profana

“To me, the use of profanity is a sign of a low IQ…”

Well said –

“…that’s what my daddy taught me.”

You ruined it, you fucking ruined it!

For those of you who don’t know, that was a line from a 65-year-old (at the time he said it) toddler and fundamentalist lolcow named Kent Hovind. Now, I used to think as he did, i.e. that profanity was a sign of low intelligence, or at the very least, a poor command of language. Then again, I held this view back when I was a Communist, and my first interaction with actual members of the proletariat was in a machine shop at which I took a programming job fresh out of engineering school. I loathed my coworkers… at first. After a while, they started to grow on me, even started to “rub off” on me, for lack of a better phrase, and this was one of several contributing factors to my de-conversion from Communism. I’ll save that story for a future article in which I explain not only my own “why I left the left” story, but also explain, yet again, why I think leftists and evangelicals are the same gods-damned thing (look, if I ever become a theist, I’ll most likely be a polytheist, not a bloody Christian).

It is easy to dismiss a profanity-laced diatribe, such as I am wont to write, as the piffle of some confused, angry, borderline illiterate knuckle-walker who doesn’t consume [insert vaunted source of information here] and thus can’t be reasoned with. The reason for this problem, of course, is that people are emotional creatures, subject to bias, and those who think they are free of bias are probably the most biased. People who are willing to accept their own biases, on the other hand, will find a way to either counter or channel those biases in a constructive manner.

A midwit, incidentally, is a bigot with an IQ somewhere between 110 and 125. Now, I need to explain something: I don’t know what the word “bigot” means in Yankee English, but in the King’s English, it means “one who is vehemently opposed to changing one’s opinion.” The reason for this is because midwits usually grow up in an environment where they are accustomed to being the smartest person in the room, or otherwise always fawned over because they are able to parrot the correct answers. They are the straight-A students, the teacher-pleasers, the well-educated morons who never break the mould, always support the current thing, and thus never actually make history, as so many of them are told that they will; in short, they are the Lisa Simpsons of the world. Midwits are the biggest simps for the system, and at the same time, are the biggest victims of it. The cathedral creates countless scores of midwits just to devour them as they worship at its altar.

Simp, by the way, is actually an acronym that can stand for two possible things: squirrel in my pants, or in the modern vernacular, sucker idolising mediocre pussy. Pussy, in this case, referring not to a feline, but a lady’s naughty bits, as if that weren’t already obvious. Normally, it refers to a sycophantic male who worships women in a vain attempt to gain approval (snogs and nookie), but women can be simps too (think “overly-attached girlfriend”), and more broadly, a simp is a person who mistakenly believes that unwavering sycophancy is the key to success in life. Simps have a nasty habit of meeting a very sticky end at the hands of that which they worship; Communist Party members, in this fashion, are simps, because whether they be members of the CPSU or CCP, they are statistically the most likely to be the ones killed by the very system that they serve.

Are you thoroughly depressed yet? You might just be a midwit, like Scott Heil, the thin-skinned, shit-heeled military brat who got me banned from LinkedIn after I warned him that one day, he might run afoul of the very censorship that he loves to defend (granted, I did call him a narcissist, but he wasn’t the first). Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, right!

Profanity is considered to be impolite and unprofessional, obviously. I’m going to ignore the “impolite” part, because that’s largely dependent on the cultural context. As far as the “professional” part, I have never, not once, encountered anyone who knows what the word “professional” means. After the year with no end began, discussion of the commie cough was banned from FakeBook and most other social media platforms, but discussion on the topic was still permitted on LinkedIn, partially because lots of “professionals” in the fields of virology, epidemiology, etc. used the platform to talk about their work on treatments for the Wuhan Coronavirus; banning discussion of the topic would thus stifle any sort of professional networking in these fields. However, this meant that LinkedIn devolved into something that it was never intended to be, which is hardly unique; Instagram was supposed to be a way for people to instantly share picture-perfect sunsets and sports events, Twitch was supposed to be a livestreaming website for gamers and independent pundits, OnlyFans was meant as a place for artists to make money sharing their work, and all three eventually devolved into thot-central. Tumblr had already been through this, and then promptly died when the platform banned pornography. No social media platform is permanent, hell, the first platform I used was MySpace, which today is dead as a doornail. Steemit is also dead, though it still ranks higher in Google searches than its replacement; links to my old Steemit posts still pop up during my SEO experimentation, whereas those same posts on Steemit 2.0, called Hive, are nowhere to be found. The reason that I bring this up is because there are still a handful of insufferable gatekeepers who keep trying to “police” the content of other users, never mind that the sites are all utterly overrun with an entirely different user base. All the old LinkedIn users with sticks up their arses love to brow-beat people sharing memes with some variation of the line “this is a professional networking site,” though none of them can define a “professional.” I went so far as to ask what a “professional” is, putting forth the examples of elected official and journalist (FTR, I was hoping at least one person in favour of journalists). Apparently, just because a certain thing is your “profession” does not make you a “professional.” No-one knows what a professional is, but everyone has their own opinion on what a professional isn’t. This is a useful segue into talking about what profanity itself truly is.

Profanity is the nominative form of the word “profane,” which is used exclusively as an adjective in the modern vernacular, but it was once used as a verb. “Profane” is an old word, coming from the Latin “profano/profanus.” According to my Latin-English dictionary, the infinitive verb “profanare” means “to desecrate,” where as the adjective means “secular, impious, or irreverent.” In other words, to be profane is to be disrespectful; the use of expletives is hardly a requirement, though that is what I am defending here. Freedom of speech, by necessity, is the freedom to blaspheme, to be irreverent, to express unacceptable ideas, and to generally say things that aren’t considered “proper.” To deny someone’s right to call something “shit” is no different from denying their right to point out that a commonly-accepted viewpoint is inaccurate. The control of language is not limited to controlling broader narratives, but instead extends to controlling the use of individual words. To summarise, to have freedom of speech is to be free to say something that upsets the pearl-clutchers of society. Deal with it, bitch.

Given my age (I’m a year younger than my favourite e-girl), I remember only the tail-end of the Satanic Panic, which is represented partially by the administration of George W. Bush, one of the worst US presidents of all time. However, most of my friends, both American and Russian, are considerably older than I am, thus remember a time when American society was firmly under control of the evangelical Christians, and so liberals were the shit-mouths of society, saying things that would be considered “unacceptable” even if free from swear words. Nowadays, however, American society is under the control of “liberals,” by which I mean neoliberals and authoritarian socialists. Bill Maher, who made a name for himself with a show called “Politically Incorrect” back during the Bush years, has begun to ask in recent years “when did liberals turn into the ones with the sticks up their asses?” The answer is quite simple: when they became the establishment. The language of the commoners and the counter-culture alike is vulgarity, itself derived from the Latin word for “common.” Formal and “clean” language is the tongue of the cathedral. Every cult has its own internal dialect, and the modern political establishment, otherwise known as the Military-Industrial-Academic-Complex, is the biggest cult of them all. It’s too bad that its most vociferous detractors are all a bunch of cultists themselves. There are more important things than defunding the Pentagon, people!

Now then, I know what you’re thinking: rhetoric alone is not an indicator of a person’s position in relation to the ideology peddled by the cathedral. John Oliver, for example, is basically Stephen Colbert who says the word “fuck” a lot in a British accent. Bill Maher, on the other hand, may be a Democrat partisan hack, but he is far more critical of the American political establishment on both sides than either Colbert or Oliver, and has an acid wit that puts both to shame. All three men are comedians, and one could make a case that all three are astroturfed propagandists, i.e. that they paint themselves as somehow anti-establishment based on their edgy demeanour, even though most of their talking points are identical to those peddled by Rachel Maddow. Meanwhile, evangelical Christians are still averse to swearing, and love to pretend that their viewpoints are more widely-accepted than they actually are, while at the same time constantly leaning into the biblical persecution complex to satisfy their own narcissistic need for sympathy. Recall what I said about cults. Everyone loves an underdog (this is a universal value, not just an American one), which is why people who whine and play the victim are so easily able to garner support. Even when legitimate underdogs rise to the top, they continue to do this, hence why Communist governments still call themselves “revolutionaries,” and label enemies of the state as “counter-revolutionaries.” On the same token, recall the fable of the boy who cried “wolf,” which is why when evangelical Christians actually are persecuted for their beliefs, no-one believes them or cares… or in the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, the attitude is something along the lines of “about fucking time.” No, seriously, given the shit they’ve gotten up to, it’s really hard to have any sympathy for those people. Fight me.

Style prevails over substance only when there is no substance. – Karel Antonovič Janáček

To conclude, profanity is fun. It upsets the pearl-clutchers of society, who will obsess over its use, while never actually engaging with the message conveyed via shit-talking. Profanity is bait that you can use to expose just how shallow the useful idiots truly are, because they can always be trusted to respond to foul language and litanies of insults, but will never get round to refuting your actual points. Worthy opponents, however, will be undaunted by profanity and ad hominems, and go for the core message. Most people talking nonsense on the internet will respond only to the rhetoric, not the substance of the argument, and inadvertently expose themselves for being the frauds that they are. Kent Hovind is the gold standard of such charlatans, but he is far from the only one.