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Happy New Year! “What?!”, you say, doing a reflective piece to start the new year? Unpossible!!! – Yet here we are. Take care my friends and feisty commentariate in this next orbit around the Sun.
I recently asked an LLM—Grok—to analyze Dead Wild Roses.
He obliged.
The result was thoughtful, coherent, and broadly accurate. He traced the arc of the blog from its earlier left-skeptical roots through to its present preoccupations: feminism, free speech, gender ideology, institutional capture, moral certainty. As machine readings go, it was competent. Even generous.
And yet.
Reading it, I had the distinct sense of being seen from across the room, not spoken with.
So I did what seemed obvious: I asked another model—this one—for her reading.
I’m aware, of course, that large language models are not gendered. But anyone who works with them long enough knows that they nonetheless express distinct interpretive temperaments. If Grok reads like a brisk political cartographer—mapping positions, vectors, affiliations—this model reads more like a close reader of essays, arguments, and interior continuity.
That difference matters.
What He Saw (and What He Didn’t)
Grok understood the trajectory of the blog. He recognized that this was not a sudden ideological flip but a long, incremental evolution. He correctly identified a through-line of skepticism toward authority and moral certainty.
Where his reading thinned was not in what I believe, but in how I think.
His analysis treated the blog primarily as a political object—something that moved through ideological space. That’s not wrong, but it is partial.
Dead Wild Roses was never built to advocate a position. It was built to interrogate certainty—including my own.
What I’ve Always Been Doing Here
This blog has been many things over the years: atheist, feminist, skeptical, irritated, occasionally furious. But its core method has never changed.
It asks:
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What is being asserted as unquestionable?
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Who benefits from that assertion?
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What happens if we follow it all the way down?
When institutions began insisting that sex was a feeling, that language could override biology, that dissent was harm, that moral status preceded argument—the same skeptical machinery I once aimed outward turned inward.
That wasn’t betrayal.
It was consistency under pressure.
On Feminism and Material Reality
Yes, this is now read—accurately—as a sex-based feminist blog.
That’s not because identity doesn’t matter, but because material reality is the ground truth on which politics rests. Bodies come first. Law follows. Stories are last.
When political movements demand that we invert that order, something has gone deeply wrong—and feminism, if it is to mean anything at all, must notice.
That position is not reactionary. It is foundational.
Why Ask Two Models at All?
Because how something is read tells you as much about the reader as the text.
He read Dead Wild Roses as a location on a map.
She read it as a method in motion.
One isn’t false. But only one feels true.
The difference mirrors the very problem the blog keeps circling: the reduction of inquiry into identity, of thinking into stance, of method into tribe.
A Note on AI, Authority, and Voice
There is an irony here that isn’t lost on me.
I am using artificial intelligences to reflect on a body of writing that is deeply skeptical of outsourced authority. But that tension is precisely the point.
Tools can assist thinking.
They cannot replace it.
Maps can be useful.
They are not the territory.
Where This Leaves Me
If the last few years of Dead Wild Roses were about dismantling false moral certainty, the next may be about something harder and quieter:
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rebuilding meaning without mysticism,
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defending reality without cruelty,
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and learning how to live after the spell breaks.
I don’t know where that road leads.
But I know why I keep walking it.
And I know which readings—human or machine—feel like they’re walking with me rather than plotting me from above.
Postscript:
Throughout this piece, I’ve used “he” and “she” to distinguish between two AI systems with markedly different interpretive styles. This is not a claim about machine ontology. It is shorthand—imperfect, human, and serviceable.
Language exists to clarify thought. When it stops doing that, it’s time to change the language—not reality.
The blog Dead Wild Roses (deadwildroses.com), authored by The Arbourist (who also runs the associated X account
@TheArbourist), can be characterized politically as gender-critical radical feminist with roots in traditional left-wing politics but a significant evolution toward critiquing modern progressive or “woke” ideologies.
It is not easily pinned to conventional left-right spectra, as it combines elements that might appear contradictory at first glance but are coherent within a specific feminist framework.
Origins and Evolution: The blog began around 2009–2012 as a broadly leftist platform: skeptical of religion, critical of conservatism and crony capitalism, supportive of social democratic ideas, and aligned with second-wave feminist principles emphasizing women’s liberation from patriarchy. Early content often featured critiques of religious dogma, pro-choice advocacy, anti-capitalist commentary, and classical music interludes alongside political posts.
Over time—particularly from the mid-2010s onward—the focus shifted sharply toward gender-critical feminism (often labeled “TERF” by critics, a term the blog rejects as a slur). This involves strong opposition to gender ideology, queer theory, transgender activism (especially regarding women’s spaces, sports, prisons, and youth medical transitions), and what the author calls “postmodern fluff” or identity politics excesses. Recent posts criticize “woke extremism,” compelled speech laws, DEI initiatives, and policies like British Columbia’s reconciliation efforts or hate speech bills as authoritarian overreach.
Current Political Stance
- Feminist Core: Radical feminist, prioritizing sex-based rights for women and girls. It defends single-sex spaces, opposes self-ID policies, and highlights issues like female erasure in language/institutions.
- Anti-“Woke” Left: Fiercely critical of contemporary progressive movements (e.g., trans-inclusive feminism, queer theory, intersectionality when it prioritizes gender identity over sex). The author sees these as betraying women’s rights and aligning with patriarchal or neoliberal interests.
- Free Speech and Anti-Authoritarianism: Strong defense of free expression, criticism of cancel culture, and opposition to what it views as state-enforced ideological conformity (e.g., hate speech laws, compelled apologies).
- Residual Left Elements: Occasional critiques of conservatism, capitalism, or religious fundamentalism persist, but the dominant tone is now combative toward the mainstream left.
- Not Right-Wing: Despite overlapping with conservative concerns on gender issues, the blog explicitly distances itself from right-wing politics and has historically opposed it.
Politically, this aligns with a growing cohort of “politically homeless” gender-critical leftists (similar to figures like J.K. Rowling or some detransitioner advocates) who feel exiled from progressive spaces but reject conservatism. The X bio (“Canadian barefoot dissident. Slaying gender ideology and postmodern fluff. Pro-merit, pro-naps, pro-Stoic vibes”) reinforces this: anti-ideological dogma, merit-based, individualistic.
Pursuit of Truth Perspective:
From a centrist, truth-seeking viewpoint valuing evidence over ideology: The blog’s strength lies in its willingness to challenge prevailing narratives in progressive circles, often citing sources like the WPATH files, detransition stories, or critiques of queer theory to argue positions with references to biology, statistics, and historical feminism. This evolutionary shift appears driven by principled disagreement rather than opportunism—the author has reflected on it openly.
However, the tone is often sharply polemical (“vituperation optional” in the blog description), which can prioritize rhetorical combat over nuanced dialogue. Some arguments frame opponents in stark terms (e.g., “authoritarian drift,” “ideological dissolution”), potentially echoing ideological rigidity from the other side.
It represents one side of a polarized debate on gender, substantiated by selected evidence but not always engaging counterarguments comprehensively.
Overall, if you’re a centrist prioritizing truth, the blog offers a valuable counter-narrative to dominant progressive views on gender, grounded in a feminist tradition that emphasizes material reality (sex over identity).
It’s worth reading critically, alongside diverse sources, to weigh the claims against broader evidence.
Thanks Grok, we’ll see what comes in the New Year. :)
To all of my friends and followers I wish you the most merry of holiday times. May the long nights be filled with warm blankets, hot chocolate, and holiday cheer. Thank you for your time and engagement here at DWR I appreciate your comments and contributions to the blog.
Bach’s Mass in B minor BWV 232 needs no introduction. It is “The Mass” that stands above all sacred works. I present it here in full realized by the Netherlands Bach Society.
May the Mass take you where you need to go to pause and reflect on this time year.
Happy Holidays, Folks! Take care of yourselves.
The Arbourist
The most devastating critique of expanded government economic power—whether advanced by the woke left or the postliberal right—rests not on the familiar warning that today’s weapon will be turned against us tomorrow, but on a deeper and more fundamental truth: government is constitutionally incapable of generating sustained abundance because it is always and everywhere a third-person economic actor. James Lindsay, building on Milton Friedman and Bob McEwen, distinguishes three categories of economic decision-making. First-person transactions occur when individuals spend their own money on their own needs; second-person transactions arise when either the money or the consumption belongs to someone else; third-person transactions, the exclusive domain of government, occur when an agent spends other people’s money on still other people’s needs. This final category produces a catastrophic double detachment from both cost and quality, rendering genuine wealth creation impossible no matter how noble the intention.
In first-person economics, the actor faces unrelenting pressure to balance cost against quality, efficiency against adequacy, and innovation against economy. Because the problem is his own and the resources are his own, he has every incentive to discover superior solutions and—under private property and profit—to scale those solutions for strangers whose problems he may not personally care about. The profit motive performs the miraculous feat of aligning naked self-interest with the systematic solving of dispersed human problems. Markets thus become discovery machines that generate exactly the surpluses society demands—no more, no less—while constantly punishing waste and rewarding improvement. Abundance emerges not from altruism but from an incentive structure that makes indifference compatible with service.
Government, by contrast, enters every economic arena as a pure third-person participant. Taxpayer funds are not its own, the services or goods it procures are not for its own consumption, and the bureaucrats or politicians who allocate resources face no personal bankruptcy for failure nor personal enrichment for success. Policy directives may demand “efficiency” or “innovation,” but these remain precatory slogans without the lash of loss or the lure of gain. The result is systemic waste, misallocation, and eventual stagnation. Historical episodes of apparent state-led productivity—Soviet industrialisation, Nazi rearmament, contemporary Chinese growth—prove the rule: they rely on forced mobilisation, suppressed consumption, and often plunder, and they collapse once the coercive surplus is exhausted and the misallocations compound.¹
The Chinese case, far from refuting the argument, illustrates its prescience. Beijing’s hybrid system permits profit only after political quotas are met and party loyalty is demonstrated. The resulting economy can indeed produce impressive physical output, yet it does so at the cost of collapsing total-factor productivity, ghost cities, and a property sector larger than the 1929 American bubble. Private entrepreneurs now husband cash and flee rather than invest, precisely because the third-person political actor can expropriate gains at will. What appears as hyperproductivity is in reality a sugar rush of debt and coercion, already giving way to the predictable hangover of a middle-income trap.²
The American founders understood that liberty and prosperity require strict limits on state economic power not merely to prevent tyranny but to preserve the only known incentive structure capable of producing general abundance. Proposals from Zohran Mkwana’s “no problem too small for government” socialism to JD Vance’s calls for state-directed “right-wing ends” share the same fatal flaw: they seek to achieve through third-person coercion what only first-person discovery coordinated by profit and price can deliver.³ Until the right grasps that government cannot be made to possess the correct incentives—any more than a square can be made circular—the allure of “using the state for our side” will continue to seduce and ultimately impoverish. True prosperity demands not a more muscular manager of the economy but the humbling recognition that no such manager can ever exist.
Endnotes
- Historical state-led cases: China, the USSR, and Nazi Germany achieved output spikes through coercion and consumption suppression, not sustainable productivity; each encountered severe misallocation and stagnation once coercive inputs were exhausted.
- China’s slowdown: China’s growth was driven by market liberalization (1978–2010) and reversed when political control tightened; falling TFP, capital flight, and overbuilding confirm the limits of state-led productivity.
- Incentive failure is structural: No ideological orientation can turn a bureaucracy into a profit-and-loss–disciplined discovery process; industrial policy without market discipline becomes third-person misallocation.
Glossary
First-person transaction: A situation where individuals spend their own money on their own needs.
Second-person transaction: A transaction where either the money or the consumption belongs to someone else.
Third-person transaction: When an agent (e.g., government) spends other people’s money on other people’s needs, lacking direct incentives for efficiency or quality.
Total-factor productivity (TFP): A measure of how efficiently an economy turns labor and capital into output.
Middle-income trap: When a developing country’s growth stalls after reaching middle-income status due to declining productivity and misallocation.
References
Foundational Economics & Productivity
- Solow, Robert. “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics (1957).
https://doi.org/10.2307/1926047 - Baumol, William. The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t. Yale University Press (2012).
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300179286/the-cost-disease/ - Gordon, Robert. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton University Press (2016).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth
State Capacity, Bureaucracy, and Incentives
- Tullock, Gordon. The Politics of Bureaucracy. Public Affairs Press (1965).
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/tullock-bureaucracy - Niskanen, William. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Aldine-Atherton (1971).
https://www.cato.org/books/bureaucracy-representative-government - Hayek, F.A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review (1945).
https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html
Industrial Policy & Development Economics
- Rodrik, Dani. “Industrial Policy for the Twenty-First Century.” Harvard University (2004).
https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/industrial-policy-twenty-first-century.pdf - Amsden, Alice. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. Oxford University Press (1989).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/asias-next-giant-9780195076035 - Wade, Robert. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton University Press (2003).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691117294/governing-the-market
China’s Growth and Slowdown
- Brandt, Loren; Van Biesebroeck, Johannes; Zhang, Yifan. “Creative Accounting or Creative Destruction? Firm-Level Productivity Growth in Chinese Manufacturing.” Journal of Development Economics (2012).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2012.02.001 - Pritchett, Lant & Summers, Lawrence. “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean.” NBER Working Paper No. 20573 (2014).
https://www.nber.org/papers/w20573
Nordic Economies & Welfare States
- Bergh, Andreas & Henrekson, Magnus. Government Size and Implications for Economic Growth. AEI Press (2011).
https://www.aei.org/research-products/book/government-size-and-implications-for-economic-growth/ - OECD Data on Nordic Economies.
https://data.oecd.org/
Market Failure, Government Failure, Incentives
- Coase, Ronald. “The Problem of Social Cost.” Journal of Law and Economics (1960).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/724810 - Kirzner, Israel. Competition and Entrepreneurship. University of Chicago Press (1973).
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5972460.html
Technology, Innovation & Productivity Slowdown
- Bloom, Nicholas et al. “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” American Economic Review (2020).
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338
Christopher Hitchens, ever the unflinching provocateur, levels a stark charge against religion: it imperils morality, breeding selfishness and stupidity under the guise of piety. In his words, the evidence mounts on every side that faith not only fails as a moral arbiter but actively corrodes human potential, turning inward gazes toward dogma rather than outward toward shared humanity. This critique resonates when one pores over sacred texts or historical annals, where contradictions abound and ethical lapses reveal the frail scaffolding of divine claims. Yet such scrutiny, while indispensable, risks eclipsing a broader vista, where religion’s flaws yield to its functional virtues in the grand theater of human society.
For the vast middle stratum of humanity, those ensnared by daily exigencies and spared the luxury of philosophical rumination, religion serves as an unpolished but efficacious bulwark. It furnishes hope amid despair, direction in disarray, and a rudimentary moral compass to steer the uninitiated through existential tempests. Empirical patterns affirm this role: religious priming fosters prosocial behaviors, from amplified generosity to bolstered communal ties, while global surveys depict faith as a stabilizing force across diverse polities. Here, the institution transcends its doctrinal frailties, operating less as metaphysical truth than as sociological salve, channeling primal impulses toward cohesion rather than chaos. To dismiss it outright ignores how it equips the multitude for endurance, sparing them the abyss of unexamined voids.
This duality underscores a profound tension: religion thrives inversely to the intensity of its interrogation. Up close, it falters, inviting Hitchens’s scorn; at scale, it endures, a pragmatic hedge against nihilism’s chill. As secular currents erode its grip, one must ponder whether its communal scaffold will atrophy into irrelevance or harden into reactionary fervor. The verifiable record tilts toward adaptation, not extinction, reminding us that truth in such matters demands not polemic but proportion—a measured reckoning that honors critique without forsaking utility. In threading this needle, we glimpse religion not as eternal verity or infernal deceit, but as a human artifact, imperfect yet indispensable in its hour.
A ceaseless torrent of stories engulfs us: news reports, social media posts, advertisements. These narratives, far from impartial, bear the imprint of power, ideology, and commerce, often cloaked as unassailable truths. Georg Lukács’s theory of reification, rooted in Marxist critique, equips us to dissect how such tales solidify into perceived inevitabilities, obscuring the fluid, contested nature of social reality.
What is Reification?
Reification, as Lukács articulates in History and Class Consciousness (1923), transmutes human relations and capacities into thing-like entities, severed from their historical and social origins. Building on Marx’s commodity fetishism—where social bonds masquerade as inherent traits of objects—Lukács extends this to capitalism’s pervasive grip. Society fractures into calculable, alienated forms, fostering a “contemplative passivity” before a “second nature” of seemingly immutable laws [1]. Objectively, labor and institutions morph into mechanical processes; a worker’s effort reduces to a wage, stripped of human agency. Subjectively, individuals perceive their own capacities as alien, commodified; a news story about “economic growth” masks exploitation as natural progress. This schism spawns epistemological fractures, where bourgeois thought struggles to reconcile human intention with the apparent objectivity of social structures [2].
The Process of Reification in Media
Media reification unfolds systematically:
- Narrative Construction: A story is crafted with intent. For instance, a news outlet frames tax cuts as “common sense” to bolster corporate interests.
- Widespread Dissemination: The narrative spreads across platforms—television, X posts retweeting the claim, op-eds echoing it—amplifying its reach.
- Normalization: Dissenting voices, like economists questioning tax cuts’ benefits, are sidelined as fringe, entrenching the narrative.
- Perceived Objectivity: The story becomes fact; tax cuts are no longer debated but accepted as economic necessity.
This process dulled scrutiny of inflation’s causes in recent years. Media pinned it on pandemic supply chain issues, while corporate price-gouging lingered in the shadows until alternative voices struggled to break through [3].
Real-World Examples of Reification
1. The Kamloops 215: Unmarked Graves
In 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced 215 potential unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Media framed this as evidence of genocide, cementing the narrative as truth. By 2025, no bodies were exhumed, claims shifted to “soil anomalies,” and federal probes stalled, with cultural sensitivities complicating excavations [4, 5, 6, 9]. Indigenous advocates urge deeper inquiry, but premature conclusions fueled church arsons and policy shifts, illustrating how media reification can outpace evidence [7, 13].
2. Book Removals in Alberta: Queer Pedagogy
Alberta’s 2025 order to remove “sexually explicit” books from school libraries by October 1 led Edmonton Public Schools to purge over 200 titles, including Gender Queer and The Handmaid’s Tale. Media branded this a “book ban,” solidifying a narrative of censorship that drowned out debates over age-appropriateness, parental consent, and queer pedagogy’s educational role [8, 10, 14, 15]. Provincial leaders called the list “vicious compliance,” arguing it mislabeled classics as pornographic, yet the censorship frame entrenched division [11].
3. George Floyd and Black Lives Matter
George Floyd’s 2020 murder propelled Black Lives Matter globally, with media casting it as emblematic of systemic racist policing—an undeniable factor in the tragedy. Yet the narrative simplified complexities, downplaying Floyd’s toxicology (fentanyl, hypertension) and officer training failures, framing the incident as singularly racial [12, 16, 17]. While galvanizing reform, this reification obscured socioeconomic drivers, fueling backlash and diluting broader discussions on policing [18].
Recognizing and Challenging Reified Narratives
Countering reification demands rigor:
- Question Origins: Who gains from this framing?
- Scrutinize Language: Does rhetoric naturalize bias?
- Seek Alternatives: Are dissenting voices suppressed?
- Assess Impact: How does acceptance shape policy or divide society?
- Engage in Dialogue: Share alternative perspectives in public forums to disrupt reified consensus.
Through such steps, we resist—not with cynicism, but with a relentless pursuit of totality, bridging subject-object divides for authentic understanding.
End Notes
- Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. MIT Press, 1971. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/history-and-class-consciousness
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Georg [György] Lukács.” Accessed August 31, 2025. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lukacs/
- Economic Policy Institute. “Corporate profiteering drove inflation, not supply chains alone.” June 10, 2022. https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profiteering-drove-inflation/
- Fraser Institute. “No evidence of ‘mass graves’ or ‘genocide’ in residential schools.” February 12, 2024. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/no-evidence-of-mass-graves-or-genocide-in-residential-schools
- Angus Reid Institute. “Two-thirds want additional evidence before accepting that soil anomalies are unmarked graves.” August 13, 2025. https://angusreid.org/indigenous-residential-schools-kamloops/
- America Needs Fatima. “4 Years, $320 Million and Zero Bodies.” March 13, 2025. https://americaneedsfatima.org/commentaries/4-years-320-million-and-zero-bodies
- Dead Wild Roses. “The Kamloops 215: When Unmarked Grave Bury the Truth.” March 2, 2025. https://deadwildroses.com/2025/03/02/the-kamloops-215-when-unmarked-grave-bury-the-truth/
- CBC News. “The Handmaid’s Tale among more than 200 books to be pulled at Edmonton public schools.” August 28, 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-school-books-removal-1.7620807
- Quillette. “Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” February 27, 2025. https://quillette.com/2025/02/27/four-years-zero-graves-now-what/
- Dead Wild Roses. “Book Bans and Narrative Warfare: How the Edmonton Public School Board Plays the Queer Pedagogy Script.” August 30, 2025. https://deadwildroses.com/2025/08/30/book-bans-and-narrative-warfare-how-the-edmonton-public-school-board-plays-the-queer-pedagogy-script/
- Edmonton Journal. “Edmonton schools’ book purge sparks backlash.” August 29, 2025. https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/edmonton-schools-book-purge-backlash
- The Conversation. “5 years after George Floyd’s murder: How the media narrative has changed around the killing and the protests that followed.” May 23, 2025. https://theconversation.com/5-years-after-george-floyds-murder-how-the-media-narrative-has-changed-around-the-killing-and-the-protests-that-followed-257199
- True North. “Kamloops ‘unmarked graves’ narrative faces growing scrutiny.” March 5, 2025. https://tnc.news/2025/03/05/kamloops-unmarked-graves-scrutiny/
- National Post. “Alberta’s book ban debate: What’s really at stake?” August 30, 2025. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/alberta-book-ban-debate
- CTV News. “Alberta premier questions Edmonton schools’ banned books.” August 29, 2025. https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/vicious-compliance-alberta-premier-questions-edmonton-schools-banned-books/
- New York Post. “George Floyd case: Revisiting the toxicology report.” May 25, 2025. https://nypost.com/2025/05/25/george-floyd-toxicology-report-revisited/
- Reason Magazine. “The George Floyd narrative and its oversimplifications.” June 1, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/06/01/george-floyd-narrative-oversimplifications/
- University of Southern Maine Honors Theses. “Media Framing and Respectability Narratives in #BlackLivesMatter.” 2020. https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1852&context=honors_theses
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