Toxic #Wokeness and the Ten Principles

It seems some Social Justice Warriors have been riled up on Twitter today. The thread got a bit jumbled up so I’m recreating it here.

Neither of these tweets seems particularly partisan. Both are good questions, but some people seem to be triggered – perhaps because one side of politics doesn’t have good answers.

My response was simple and to the point, referencing The Tin Principles. Sadly, this seemed to only fan the flames of the fans of flames even more:

Here’s the official description of the “Civic Responsibility” Principle:

Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

It’s hard to see how this blog violates this principle in any way. We value civil society here, not a single political party or monoculture. We’re not organizing any events and we’re certainly not breaking any local, state, Federal or international laws.

“I hope you’re ostracized [for having different views to me]” and “GTFO” do not seem to fit the idea of “Radical Inclusion”. Are heterosexual white males no longer welcome at Burning Man?

Unfortunately for Cynthia, Burning Man is still predominantly white, male, and heterosexual.

The most recent Census data from 2019 shows that Burning Man is still 76% white and 1% black; 56% male and 42% female, and 66% heterosexual:

It seems not much has changed demographically since Larry Harvey’s infamous 2015 statement that “black folks don’t like to camp”:

“Steve in Real Life”, who moved from the Bay Area to Reno in 1992, started out strong. Burning Man indeed has a proud history of assholery.

Unfortunately Steve got twiggered by a couple of retweets and decided to throw all the Principles of Burning Man out the window, insult us then block us while joining the call for this blog to be de-platformed:

Summer Burkes then chose to weigh in. She seems to have forgotten her previous work celebrating the gun-toting, Second Amendment loving cowboy history of Burning Man.

Here’s Summer in 2014, misspelling the name of the man she’s glorifying:

Fight Club is a book written in 1996 and then turned into a movie released 15 years ago this fall (we won’t provide any spoilers if we can help it). Author Chuck Pahlaniuk confirmed at several book-release events last year the “Project Mayhem” group in Fight Club’s story is indeed the Cacophony Society in real life … a wackier bunch of people, without the men-only Iron John subplot or all the property destruction and violence. (Well, serious violence, anyway.)

Source: Summer Burkes, burningman.org

Chuck Palahniuk proudly takes credit for the modern use of the term “snowflake”, and has been called a “darling of the alt-right and AntiFa”.

Source: Medium

Chuck believes in Radical Self-Expression and Radical Inclusion, unlike Summer:

Source: Medium

The word “heck” is clearly too controversial for Snowflake Summer to say, while calling for the silencing of different viewpoints is completely compatible with her tone of moral superiority:

I have always been quite clear to state that this blog has nothing to do with the Burning Man organization in any way.

Mere minutes before that tweet Summer had quite the potty mouth:

Her plan now is complete de-platforming of any voice she doesn’t agree with. No Radical Self-Expression, Radical Inclusion, Gifting, or Communal Effort for Summer! Will she be successful, or is there still a First Amendment in the Default World?

How does Summer reconcile her cult-like “literal worship” of Larry Harvey with his statements that Burning Man is the poster child for old-fashioned, Main Street Republicanism?

Source: Washington Post, via archive.org

Or what about Larry’s friendship with Republican strategist Grover Norquist, who on Burn Night proudly wore his Russian military uniform (allegedly obtained from shadowy ops arming the Taliban in Afghanistan)?

Grover got his freak on in classic Soviet Military Uniform

I have long advocated here that politics and Burning Man don’t mix, but it seems the Org has a different view, inviting Denis Kucinich to give the Keynote address at the 2015 Global Leadership summit:

2015 was a big year for politics invading the Playa:

We’ll let the late Larry Harvey have the last word:

Source: Washington Post, via archive.org

Can’t we all just get along? I thought that was the entire point of Burning Man.

Rare Video of Early Burning Man at Baker Beach

This was posted in 2019 and has received very few views (258 at the time of writing).

The claim is that the footage is from 1986. The number of people around does seem to match the official story of the first burn.

Can anyone identify the people in this video? Larry Harvey, Jerry James, Flash…who else?

The head of the Man being burned in this video looks much like the traditional Burning Man trapezoidal face we see today.

1. Source: YouTube

However, the first Burning Man looked markedly different.

This image we have of the Burning Man on the Summer Solstice sunset 1986 was originally posted on Burning Man Founder “Danger Ranger”‘s Flickr page, with photo credit to Jerry James. The EXIF metadata of this photo has the date as 2008, perhaps when it was digitally scanned.

2. Image: Jerry James
3. Source: YouTube

Although there are some similarities, to me these figures look noticeably different. The first image looks most like the modern day Burning Man, with a triangular head and only 2 “horns”. The second looks like Pan or Baphomet with flared hips and muscular parallel legs, goat head, devil horns, and an occult heptagon central shape. The third has a love heart face, pentagon central shape, boobs, hourglass figure with straightened shoulders and more human-looking hips, angled legs and crown.

Why Are There Multiple Original Burning Man Effigies?

Did they rearrange one statue to get two different images? As above, so below? Or was there a Satanic burn in 1985, followed by a love heart “Burning Woman” in 1986 which they brought a film camera to?

The Horned Devil image was chosen to represent Burning Man in this flyer for the 1987 Summer Solstice (Midsommar) event:

Here is one of the earliest recordings of Larry Harvey’s story of how it all got started. The clip at the start of this post seems to have been taken from here. Note that he says “1985” at 0:57 seconds; at 1:18 he says “ten feet tall”.

According to the official story, the Burning Man effigy has never been 10 feet tall.

The oldest “official” footage from the Burning Man Project’s channel is from 1988. There were quite a few more people around by then, and The Man is much bigger.

The 1988 statue is definitely 30 feet tall

Was it 10 feet taller again in 1989?


The Burning Man origin myth is explored in great detail in Part 4 of my series Silicon Valley’s Secret Weapon – the Shadow History of Burners.

Snake Theater Beelzebub Burn, Sausalito 1979. Image: Bruce Forrester
Timothy O’Neill, aka Elder Mech, held Wicker Man burns on Ocean Beach SF before 1986
Video

The Man With The Hat – A Celebration of Larry’s Life and Legacy

The Man with the Hat: A Celebration of Larry Harvey’s Life and Legacy (1948–2018), at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre on Saturday, July 14, 2018. On this special evening, we celebrated Larry Harvey’s life, legacy and influence, through storytelling, live music and performance, videos, and audience participation.