To clear my head from all the suffocating admin and boring behind-the-scenes nonsense, I have been doing some walking and exploring. This included a trip to Cape Town a few weeks ago, which is always good value for seeing interesting stuff, for better or worse. But on this occasion most of it was pretty cool.

One of the most memorable sights I came across was… my book. My sister and I set out to scale Table Mountain, the plateau of which looms over the city. There’s a cable car that you can take to go up, but that’s cheating (although we still took it down, which in my view, is different since you’ve earned it. If you disagree, let me know in the comments below (👇( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 👇)

At the summit, enjoying a well-earned beer (there is a food court and a cocktail bar and a couple of gift shops and even a wine bar to service all the cable car-riders), I saw something remarkable: my book, How the Rhino Lost His Horn(©)! Two hikers were reading it. I did not want to disturb them, as they were so engrossed. They were taking it in turns to read various passages aloud to each other: they laughed ‘til they cried at the funny parts, they wept at the poignant parts, and literally mouthed “wow”s and/or raised their eyebrows at the insightful/thought-provoking parts. It’s always nice to see your work resonating with people. At a break between readings, I snuck over and introduced myself and generously signed their copy before excusing myself to let them continue.1 I did sneak a picture, just for my own personal records.

Later, one of the guys reached out to me (through my people) to let me know that he was a pilot and would love to take my book for a spin around the Cape the next time he went up.

Obviously, one cannot decline such an offer. When you’re in Africa, you must go along with the various tribal welcome gifts and rituals, as unusual or as discomfiting as they might appear to your western sensibilities.

So, yeah, not only have I seen some cool things lately, but the book itself has, too.

More next time. Remember to share/subscribe here:

Share

Subscribe now

If you want, you can follow me on instagram for hilarious/high-quality content, and also, again, please grab a copy of the book if you haven’t already (I made the ebook dirt cheap so you have no excuse) and leave a review. Here’s the US link 🇺🇸, and here’s the UK one 🇬🇧. (You can also find it through the other big book retailers if you prefer; Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, etc., but only amazon has the [DIRT CHEAP FOR A LIMITED TIME] ebook.)We’ve got to try and keep the #1 spot….

As a kid I had an old copy of Kipling’s Just So stories, which, for anyone not familiar, is a collection of little fables “explaining” how various exotic creatures came to have their unique traits. The premise for these is a kind of pre-/anti-Darwinian theory of evolution called Lamarckism, which claims that creatures acquire/“learn” their adaptations after birth and then pass them down to their children. The classic example being the giraffe, which (according to the theory) once had short necks and were basically horses, but then the short trees all died out or whatever and so they had to streeeetch their necks to reach the higher branches for fruit; the ones who were able to do this passed those traits down.

As it happens, one of the Just So stories explains how the rhino came to have all that excess skin. I won’t spoil it, but it involves him being pranked while he was busy swimming on a hot day (he’d left his skin-suit, hitherto snug-fitting, onshore).

And so the title was a shout-out to those stories, which have, I’m sure, captured the imagination of countless kids over the last century or so, inspiring them to take an interest in wildlife and nature and to dream about maybe seeing these creatures some day, and even heading off to the far corners of the world to see them in their natural habitats.

There is of course the colonial/imperialist context/elephant-in-the-room here, re: Kipling and his contemporaries, but this is so inextricable from South Africa’s history and present (as well as that of the whole region) that I think it’s fitting to reference it. (And I do go on to address all this in the book.) I wanted to put a darker twist on those old, ostensibly virtuous notions, of expansion and “discovery”; the self-bestowed “burden” Westerners had to bring enlightenment and civilization to these backwards places, with their strange animals and people.

I wanted to hint that we may need an updated version of the old stories we told ourselves about the world, now that we actually have a grasp on the impact we’ve had. Our relationship with these “exotic” places aren’t as. . . mutually beneficial as we might have been led to believe in. We’ve inflicted untold damage on natural habitats, animal migration patterns, local populations (both human and not) over the centuries.

Despite Lamarckism being debunked, though, I think we’ll always gravitate toward it (when it suits, at least). Something about that line of thinking just resonates. There’s consolation, I think, in believing that we’re in control of our own destinies, that we are more than just one tiny, predetermined link in a chain; that our decisions matter, that we are unique, sovereign actors.

Sure enough, we’ve spent untold hours/dollars/lives in our attempts to play god — a position for which we are uniquely unqualified — with all sorts of things over the years, genetically modifying plants and animals (and people), trying to live forever and basically trying to bend the natural world to suit us, instead of the other way around. Our human/Western exceptionalism won’t let us concede defeat. The laws of nature are there to be broken. That shit may apply to squirrels or fruit flies or whatever, but not us.

So, in that way, Just So stories, silly little children’s stories though they may ostensibly be, are right up our alley. We love the idea that an individual could break free from the herd and change the course of a species’ history. This sort of myth-making, wherein we believe that our [positive] traits, such as our wealth, our success, our work-ethic, our cunning, are a product of our decisions, and nobody else’s, is irresistible. This feels especially apposite to our Westernized, “highly-advanced”, digital Silicon Valley-technocract-driven; the world of the gig/hustle/grindset economy, of every man for himself. Our economic system, and thus the culture and society we’ve built around it, is predicated on the notion that the individual is ultimately responsible for any successes and/or failures that occur in the course of their lives; “there is no such thing as society”, you’re on your own.

Of course, the flip-side to all this is particularly dangerous, as it means that we can pretty easily be talked into believing that anyone suffering is doing so due to their own poor decisions, and thus deserves to suffer. The other corollary here, of believing that we are not beholden to the past, that we are separate and above the natural world, is that we owe the planet nothing. And these are both some pretty slippery slopes — that we’re already well on our way down.

So I explore these themes throughout the book: whether this is the way things have to be, whether this is the natural, inevitable state of things, i.e., that we don’t have an obligation to each other, to future generations, or to those that aren’t our direct offspring.

I also wanted to nod to the unenviable task of trying to tackle problems in a world where the challenges we face are so interconnected. It’s akin to playing a cross between Whac-a-Mole and Operation: our every action — however well-meaning! — can and will have unintended consequences, and can often completely fail to address the root issue, or even exacerbate it. I.e., even if we’ve “solved” the problem for the rhino (how generous of us!) by sanding away its horn, we ought not hang up the “Mission Accomplished!” banners just yet. The work has only just begun. This all applies to my involvement, too: Why is it that kids like me love going off to the third world to “save the children”? Have I actually made a difference? Even if I have, has the benefit been canceled out by the fact that I just gave a bunch of money to a potentially corrupt NGO? These are the sorts of questions we’ve now got to think about, and that persist throughout the book (not that I can guarantee any satisfactory answers!): What it means to be an ethical citizen, traveler, environmentalist, altruist. What our obligation is to these places around the world.

As far as the art, I worked with a really good graphic designer, Ed Simkins. In the end we had much less time to do it than I would have liked. (Admittedly, sometimes a time constraint is actually a good thing; you can get so caught up in perfectionism, tweaking things back and forth, that you never let things go otherwise.) Before he was brought in to rescue things, suffice to say things were. . . not looking good. That’s a funny story that I will share once the book is out.

Anyway, I think it does a nice job of capturing the spirit of the book. I wanted it to be kind of multi-varied and unorthodox and patchwork, to let the reader know that it might not be this perfectly streamlined, neat-and-tidy, boilerplate coming-of-age story. South Africa’s not that kind of place, those aren’t the times we’re living in, and I’m not that kind of person/writer (not in this story, at least!).

That’s all for now. The book will be coming out on January 13; there will be a pre-order link available soon. (I’ll send another post out when that’s ready, and I’ll also update this post to include it.) Remember to subscribe and share ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Share

Subscribe now

Anyway, a nice nurse patched me up after my tantrum and led me back out to my seat, urging me to give the day another chance. There was a surprise coming, she said, that would restore my faith in our great nation. And boy was she was right.

It wasn’t long before we heard a faint rumble, coming from above. It slowly grew thicker and heavier in the sky, eventually becoming so deafening that it drowned out the crowd. And then they appeared: the choppers. Half a dozen of them doing a flyover. Not like the Huey gunships from back in ‘Nam (unfortunately), just those long twin-rotored ones they use to rescue people at sea. Still, pretty cool. Once they’d passed and the din had receded, the announcer explained that this was to honor a couple of veterans. The jumbotron then cut to a handful of guys in full desert camo fatigues sitting down in the front row (I assume these were the veterans, but in PA you never really know). The crowd went wild, whirling their Terrible Towels™ overhead with great gusto.

The frenzy died down when the stadium announcer came back over the PA. As it turned out, the marines down in front were only the appetizer. The pièce de résistance was actually the 100-year-old veteran who’d just been wheeled out into the south end zone during the commotion. He was presented with the purple heart award, which you get if you were injured in wartime. (I think it has to be combat related—it can’t be that you cut yourself shaving while sitting in your trench in the Ardennes, or something.) I don’t know which war he was involved in, but it wasn’t anything recent, that was for sure. It could have been anything from “Korea” all the way back to “Civil”. As you’d imagine, this sent the crowd into a frothing hysteria. Everyone rose to their feet as if on cue. (Everyone except the crippled centenarian, obviously. Now that would have been cool.) As a guy a couple of rows in front of me stood up, I got a chance to read the text on the back of his shirt:

It is not clear if he actually was a veteran (again, in PA, when it comes to the sort of folks who wear this sort of merch, or military-issue camo/boots, their military/police involvement is by no means guaranteed). It’s also unclear whether he knew in advance that there would be veterans honored at the game. I think there’s a high chance he was going to wear that shirt regardless, game or no game, ceremony or no ceremony. But one doesn’t ask those sorts of questions—and certainly not within a few days of 9/11—unless one wants to be outed as an enemy sympathizer.1 Anyway, a U-S-A chant started rippling through the stadium. And not an awkward, embarrassing, Elon Musk-esque one, either:

No, sir. A proper one. A Miller Lite drinkin’, apple pie guzzlin’, backroad-drivin’, U-S-A chant. The terrible towels were now so frenzied, so numerous, that a yellow blur had appeared over the crowd. A veritable fleet, then, 65-thousand-strong, of gilt-bladed choppers spinning up, preparing to ride out; metaphorical blank checks signed and sealed. An Apocalypse Now-esque air cavalry, if you will: low altitude, tight formation, Flight of the Valkyries blasting, as we swarm down upon the enemy, payloads of napalm or Agent Orange or whatever at the ready. A stirring scene, to be sure.

One young man had to be calmed down by a steward; he’d sprinted down from a few sections further back to hang over the railing, desperate to be as close as he could to the field. I managed to catch a few seconds of it before things really hotted up:

Sadly, the game eventually had to resume; I used this as a chance to run to the bathroom. Down in the concourse, I saw a young man being stretchered out towards a service elevator by a quartet of paramedics. An aide ran alongside holding an ice pack to the man’s forehead and making sure the oxygen mask strapped to his face was working properly.

I think the Steelers gameday organizing team will have learned from this; you just have to be so mindful of crowd welfare when it’s hot weather. There should have been a warning beforehand so that people had a chance to go get some cold water or take a few minutes of shade before being whipped into a jingoistic frenzy.

I feel I should take a second to clarify here, since it may seem confusing that the flyover/ceremony/half-mast flag stuff somehow cheered me up, considering my visceral contempt for politics being shoved down my throat when I’m trying to watch my team play (as discussed last time). You (well-meaning but ultimately uninformed) might try to point out that “wars are inherently political”; that “politics and sport are inextricably linked”. But here’s the thing. Whether or not you’re right about that (unlikely), you’d be missing the deeper point: we have a moral imperative to support our troops/veterans/tiktok/youtube influencers, because they’re our husbands, sons, grandpas. Because they’re Americans. At the end of the day, they’re just regular, freedom-loving folks trying to put bread on the table, just like you and me. Some issues should—and must—transcend our tribal “red team/blue team” bickering.

And so I was thrilled to see this in action; to see the NFL using its platform for good; to sow unity, not division. Sport is a powerful unifying force; it allows us to transcend our petty disagreements and come together to mourn, to commemorate, to begin to heal, as a community and as a nation. It reminds us that we are more similar than we are different. That we are all on the same team at the end of the day. That we are all running the same race. The human race. (Or whatever.) It reminds us that, although we may disagree on certain things (like suffrage, or healthcare being a human right, etc.), these disputes are trivial at the end of the day, and shouldn’t take precedence over the things that really matter. Je Suis Charlie, you suis Charlie, we all suis Charlie. And Charlie suis all of us.

As far as the on-field spectacle, the crowd didn’t seem nearly as manic. They were definitely still engaged, of course, but not at the “fight or flight” level, as they had been for the flyover/ceremony. (It would be physically impossible to maintain that for three hours, in fairness.) We ended up losing to the Seahawks, who moved the ball with worrying ease. (The mulleted guy behind me described our defense as “Swiss cheese”.)2 So this was a lowlight, I guess.

Another highlight, though: the general lack of animosity—at least compared to the Premier League. In the Premier League, here in the UK, fans of the two teams have to be separated. The visiting team gets a designated section or two somewhere in the stadium that even has a separate entrance/exit, and it’s guarded before and during the match by stewards. Even afterwards, if it’s a match between rivals, the (rowdy, potentially aggressive) away fans will sometimes be kept in the stadium for up to a couple of hours until the home fans have had a chance to clear out and get to safety.

At Heinz Field Acrisure Stadium, the Seahawks fans were just sitting among us— they even had the audacity to wear their team jerseys! Nobody shoved them down and trampled them, glassed them, or cornered them in the bathroom. Nobody even jostled them on the way past, or heckled them. It was all very wholesome. Where was the hate speech? There was, at most, a bit of friendly back and forth, but overall there was a marked—and mildly disappointing—lack of that nice little undercurrent of hostility and bitterness that you get in England (…whether you’re at a match or not). This undercurrent persists even among fans of the same team, by the way. Groups of scruffy young guys roll around wearing no discernible team gear and you get the strong sense that the match is just an excuse to do coke/get shitfaced and scream at various people to “fuck off” and/or “get fucked”, etc.

Subscribe now

Likewise, I was also struck by how diverse the crowd was. I guess it has just been a few years since I’d been to a major sporting event in the US. In the UK, the match-going crowd (especially for teams from smaller, working-class towns) is predominantly white, and predominantly male. It’s much more repressive and (I’d assume) intimidating.

The question, I guess, is whether this friendliness costs you in terms of atmosphere. The balance between “family-friendly” and “feral” is tough to find. You don’t want things to be too sterile. Without the off-pitch bells and whistles (and helicopters) to keep them riled up, would the US crowd be able to push their team on for several hours? What would they do without the jumbotron? How would they know when a pivotal moment in the game had arrived?

After the final whistle, I stopped by the main club shop and at a few of the merch stands. But nothing stood out, so I kept my powder dry. And thank god I did. A block or two outside the stadium, I came upon a couple of enterprising fellows who had just the thing for me. I had just popped in my airpods to listen to some more Charlie Kirk highlights. He was right in the middle of preaching that, “It’s happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” I nodded in agreement as I mouthed the words along with him, and, with my bottom lip starting to tremble, wiped a tear from my eye—nobody could sum up our country’s issues like Charlie could.

Then I looked up. A full-blown miracle. The ever-prescient Charlie had been speaking to me from beyond the grave. (Just like he’d tried to warn me about the uber drivers!)

In this case, though, I have to admit that I was more than happy to be “targeted”. What’s wrong with a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit, especially if it’s to honor a True American Patriot?

As you can imagine, these shirts were selling like hot cakes. You’d have to say that, in the dog-eat-dog world of the Free Market, these guys were veritable “super-predators”!

The woman in the second photo was buying one for her husband (just out of shot), who had asked for an extra-large before she interjected: “Yeah, right. He thinks he’s got enough muscle to fill out an XL. No chance. Give him a large.” The husband looked down sheepishly. Clearly this was not the first time he’d tried to get away with this sort of stunt. She forked over the 30 or 40 bucks, and they moved along.

I moved along, too, but now I regret not asking a few more questions. Did these salesmen print these shirts themselves? They did not seem to be doing this ironically/for fun. Did they know who Kirk was, or the things he stood for? Did these guys know that Kirk’s last words were “gang violence”? (For those who don’t know/haven’t seen the video, someone in the crowd asked him if he knew how many mass shootings there had been in the past year. Charlie whipped out the trump card, reminding us that black people kill each other all the time and the media conveniently ignores that to focus on the [white] school/church/mosque shooters.)

You’d struggle to find a better encapsulation—ad absurdum—of how the working class is utterly alienated from their labor. People are in such a precarious situation that they must, or at least become willing to, debase themselves in service of clients/customers/corporations who revile them. Whether driven there by desperation or socialization, the notion of wasting any time on moral scruples becomes unthinkable; it’s the ethos of “Republicans buy shoes shirts, too.” “Securing the bag” takes precedence over things like self-respect—or we are made to believe that the two are one and the same.

Also, what “justice” are they talking about here? He was only killed a couple of days ago—as yet there has been no miscarriage of justice on his behalf. (Maybe the shirts were printed before they’d arrested the alleged killer…?) And besides, penal-system justice is nice and all, but that’s small potatoes. Charlie had already received justice, in the cosmic sense. He died doing what he loved, and what he was best at: being right. His thesis, after all, when it came to gun violence, was that “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

It’s rare that these Logic and Reason-obsessed debate bros, “trolley problem”-fetishists, hard-line utilitarians, etc. are not completely insulated from any and all negative consequences of the ideas/arguments they so vehemently defend/claim to hold. This incident was the rare exception to that rule.

Unless gun laws are radically overhauled before the next mass shooting (which will probably have already happened by the time this post is out [EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED)3, Chuck will once again be proven right: a “handful” of deaths is an acceptable trade-off to keep the 2nd amendment around. And so Charlie got to go out like all of us would like to, I’m sure: On Top. It’s like Pete Sampras retiring after winning the US Open. Or Heath Ledger, cemented in our collective memory as the Joker in the Dark Knight. This, I’m sure, will be no small consolation to his friends and family.

Another highlight: a few blocks from the stadium, I came upon the river trail, which runs from the city for a few miles east. Everyone was out enjoying the sun. People had pulled up their boats and were playing Jimmy Buffett and were handing out beers. I like it when a city does a good job of incorporating nature, specifically water. It is good for collective morale. Too much concrete and metal and gray is trouble.

Wanting to stretch my legs before my flight that evening, I wandered along for a couple of hours, and ended up taking it pretty much all the way back to the hotel.

It was time to head to the airport. I was home and dry. . . almost.

I called my uber and got matched with a fellow named Mahmoud. This time, I recognized it as a name right away (which makes me a good person). He was from Syria. I asked him a follow up question; “What brought you here” or similar. He smiled and shook his head and said “no English.” Alrighty then. (How do these guys make it this far?? Surely, rural America would be almost impossible to navigate without any grasp of the language. Impressive!) As we got moving, he reached for the center console and started rummaging around. I froze. This was it. He was about to slit my throat, as had been foretold by Charlie. He was at least going to castrate me as part of the “great replacement” scheme.

But when his hand emerged, it held only his phone, which he offered me so that I could play some music from Spotify. I told him to just put on whatever he liked; something from his country. That’s how we spent the next forty minutes listening to George Wassouf, whom I’d never heard of but is apparently big in the Middle East. (He’s a Billy Joel/Tony Bennett sort of figure, from the looks of things.)

With this, my stint on the front lines was over. I was alive, barely. It was time to head back to, as Charlie described it, my “totalitarian third world shithole”.

I was in Pittsburgh over the weekend, ostensibly for a wedding. A reader of the blog had reached out via my agent to inquire about my appearance fee/availability. I usually say no to this sort of thing; I don’t like to give my fans the impression that I am a regular person (and therefore potentially boring/underwhelming). It’s much better for my brand if I maintain the aloof/enigmatic persona. But I decided to break from standard procedure in this case.

1) He was quite insistent, to the point where he offered to quadruple my usual fee (which is frankly extortionate to begin with).

2) He promised that I’d get to be a groomsman (more camera time) and told me he had already paid for my suit. I reminded him that I only wear Gucci (I am a brand ambassador), and would need to be wearing an all-white ensemble (so as to show off what’s left of my summer tan). He said this would be no problem at all.

3) He paid for my private charter jet (w/ unlimited food/champagne service added).

With this, the deal was sealed. He almost certainly still got the better end of it, but it was close enough that I decided to go through with it regardless. After all, I had a far more personal, more important motive…. Suffice to say, it’s been a tough few days for me after the Charlie Kirk thing. I haven’t slept or eaten much, and I just felt so isolated over in the UK. I was desperate to go pay my respects, but also to see how things were looking on the ground. As many politicians/influencers/pundits on the right have been proclaiming, the “Left just fucked up. Big time”; “There will be hell to pay”; “Forgiveness is for the weak”, etc. So, with the Civil War looming, I wanted to be on the right side of history (my IDF application got rejected, so I figured this might be my only chance to get a taste of combat. I have been chomping at the bit). I had to get over there, stat. Sure, I was disappointed to miss out on meeting up with my buddies at the “Unite the Kingdom” meetup in London, but I knew they’d understand. I had territory to go reclaim. As Charlie “O Captain, My Captain” Kirk put it, “The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”

I had never been to Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania is quite big, is the thing, and other than the Steelers, the city’s NFL team that I’ve supported since I was a kid, there’s not really any other reason you’d find yourself doing a 5-hour drive west, through the state gamelands. As James Carville said, “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between.” I discovered that, if this is true, it’s more descriptive of voting demographics more than anything else (the two metropoles reliably vote blue, the rest of the state goes red). Pittsburgh is way closer in size to Harrisburg (the current state capital), or Lancaster (the country’s former capital—albeit very briefly). This is not a slight—“it’s not about the size of the boat”, etc.—I really liked what I saw of the city. But it is very much still rural, small town PA. Recognizably so. If you’ve got to go to PA, though, fall is probably the best time to do it. Especially if you can catch the leaves as they turn their reds, oranges, and golds. If you miss the trees, but still want to see those nice autumnal colors, you can just take a walk anywhere around the outskirts/less-trafficked parts of town:

Anyway, some other highlights:

Finally made it to a Steelers game. It was their first home game of the season, against the Seahawks. There is something nice about being in a small town where sport is the main focus, and where there’s only one team to get behind. Every car has a Steelers bumper sticker, the dogs all have Steelers-themed collars, the businesses all have a Steelers flag or some other show of allegiance. All the grandmas have jerseys on. It’s very endearing.

Also: the uber drivers I met while I was there. I had three. In terms of English, they spoke: “seemingly none”, “very broken but eager to learn”, and “barely any”, in that order. But we made do.

The first one’s name was Bositkhon. I’m usually pretty good with this stuff, but at first I thought his name was the car license plate I was supposed to look out for. In my defense I’d just landed and was quite jet-lagged.

Not to be outdone, the second one’s name was Dzhamshed. He took me from the hotel to the game on Sunday. Once again, I initially thought his name was the license plate. No defense for this one, maybe I am just a racist. (All I’ll say is that I barely use Uber and haven’t for over a year. I don’t know where things are. And they print these names in all-caps. I mean, come on!)

He supplemented his English with the google translate app, speaking into it whenever he needed help conveying his thoughts, which would show up in text after a couple of seconds. This worked surprisingly well. He was very nice; he told me he spoke Russian and Farsi and I think another couple of languages along with English. His last customer had been someone who ran the city ballet (or something close to this?), and had promised to get him tickets for a show. So Dzhamshed was very excited to take his 9 year old daughter—whose english, he added, was better than his. It turned out he was from Tajikstan. I pretended like I knew where this was. But he pulled out google maps anyway to show me where exactly his hometown was. He said the country is 90% mountains, he told me, as he traced his finger along some of the jagged, haphazard borders in the area (you know how they get over there, with their disputed territories and so on) and said “we are here, in the head of the tiger, as you can see”. It was like when someone points in the general direction of some “constellation” in the night sky and tells you that you’re looking at, like, “Octavius the Druid King”, who is apparently locked in battle with a dragon or something. You just nod and say “Ohhhh, yeah, I see it now, that’s his battleaxe in his right hand.” Their capital is called Dushanbe, which translates to “victory”, which I won’t fact check because I trust him.

We got so caught up in our geography lesson that he accidentally drove right by the stadium and we ended up merging onto a highway and going over a bridge across the river (in his defense there are about 15 bridges in/around the city, it’d be harder to not cross one on even a short drive). He grabbed the phone and pulled up google translate, speaking some hurried Russian into it. I think he was worried I might complain to uber and have him deported. Wearing an apologetic smile, he turned the phone toward me to show me the results: “I’m gonna get you to that stadium, buddy, I promise you. Do not worry.” Talk about a heartstring-puller. I told him not to worry at all, and asked him another question about Tajikstan to show him that I really wasn’t bothered if we were a few minutes late.

Obviously, as soon as I got back home I filed a report with ICE (they put me straight through since I’m such a regular and trusted client). I’d had a chance to think clearly by this point, and to recall what Charlie had taught me about Dzhamshed and his ilk; about the unstoppable tide of Islam, which Charlie somewhat ominously described as being “the sword the Left is using to slit the throat of America.” Nice try, Dzhamshed.

Lowlights: I learned as I walked up to the stadium that it was no longer called Heinz Field, but Acrisure Stadium, meaning it has lost its iconic name to join the growing list of generic, AI-generated-sounding stadiums across the US/UK. A travesty. Ideally, your stadium is named after a road/geographic landmark unique to the city. (Pittsburgh’s old stadium was even better: “Three Rivers Stadium”; as the city sits at the juncture of the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Monongohela—don’t forget those, there will be a pop quiz later!)

I don’t mind it being named after a person. But they have to be dead (or freakishly old), and done extraordinary things on the field, or for their fellow man.

If it has to be named after a brand, it should be one that was founded in or is unique to the city in some way. Heinz, for example, is a ketchup company that was founded in Pittsburgh in 1869, and so this, conveniently, would qualify. It also has to be a brand that sells a physical product, and has brick and mortar stores. I do not like the growing trend of venues that are named for intangible (read: completely made up, socially corrosive, parasitic) industries: equity firms, crypto, AI, and other junk software/pyramid schemes. It has all become too soulless, too impersonal. We have lost our way.

So I was already on edge from all this as I got into the stadium and found my seat. Alas, things then got worse, when I looked down onto the field and saw that we have a wide receiver who wears the number 4 and a linebacker who wears the number 6. Utter woke nonsense. An affront to our flagship sport and therefore our country. I do not care why they chose these numbers—I would at least hope they have some sort of deep emotional connection. Whatever the case, they should be suspended from the team immediately and banned from all team facilities/activities until their squad numbers have been swapped out for more suitable alternatives. Linebackers should be somewhere in the 50s. Wide receivers should be in the 80s. (The english football equivalent to this is like when Morgan Schneiderlin wore #2 as a central midfielder for Everton.) These players have gotten too big for their boots, they “need straightened out”, as we’d say in PA.1

Again, we’ve lost our way. By my reckoning, it all started with Colin Kaepernick. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. And I know a lot of my readers will feel the same way. No player is bigger than the sport. These cocky young guys come in and think they can piss all over our time-honored traditions, our hallowed halls. When I tune in on Sundays, I don’t want to have the fourth wall broken by this sort of nonsense. I tune in to forget about the outside world. No politics, no “activism” being shoved down my throat, just good old pigskin-tossing and CTE propagation.

It all got to be a bit too much. It was a hot, humid day; I was still slightly drunk from the wedding the night before; I’d never really stopped crying from the national anthem before the game, and I’d been up until five or six in the morning watching Charlie Kirk highlights and sobbing my eyes out. I was not doin’ too hot. I was a powder keg ready to blow, and the #4/#6 thing put me over the top; the red mist began to descend. I excused myself to the bathroom to blow off some steam. I have no idea what happened next. All I know is I started swinging.

A couple of nice guys apparently found me curled up in the corner midway through the first half. I’d lost quite a lot of blood, having cut my wrist while shattering the mirror. I can’t quite be sure when it happened, exactly; I was pretty much blacked-out from the adrenaline. I know I pummeled that wall like a boxer’s speed bag. They sat with me for a while, wrapped some napkins around my bleeding knuckles/wrists, and applied some pressure. Once I’d stopped hyperventilating and could stand up, they walked me over to a First Aid station where I could get myself patched up. The nice nurse gave me a blue raspberry ice pop for me to suckle on (I requested tropical punch, but they did not have one in their little cooler bag).

My blood sugar was low, and I get terribly grumpy when I’m hungry. I can’t help but think this played into it. Luckily there was an Auntie Anne’s vendor in the concourse. You can’t get soft pretzels in the UK, and the country is worse for it. So this was another highlight.

By the second half, I felt much better, and had finally calmed down enough to be discharged. I’d been venting to one of the nurses walking me out, who gave a sympathetic smile and said that I ought to give the game one more chance; there was a surprise coming that would cheer me right up. I obliged. Back at my seat, refreshed, I now noticed that all the American flags around the stadium had been lowered to half-mast to commemorate our fallen brother. This cheered me up a bit. Maybe our country hadn’t gone completely to shit just yet. But things were about to get even better….

Part 2 shortly! Thanks for tuning in ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Subscribe for more hard-hitting, on the ground journalism.

Subscribe now

Share

In light of that, I’d been reflecting about how things have become quite confusing nowadays. One person’s “chivalry” is another person’s “infantilization”; what one person sees as “friendliness”, another sees as “creepiness”, etc. At this point, anyone who’s remotely clued-in has had it drilled into them that, if in doubt, your best bet is to just leave people alone. (Or so I’d assumed, until I ran into the stroller lady.)

This general shift is obviously a response to decades/centuries of oppressive social norms. But at this point I think it’s safe to say there’s been an overcorrection: risk-aversion and misanthropy has bled into aspects of our lives where it’s deeply unhelpful. The baby (i.e. healthy, normal social behaviors) has been thrown out with the bathwater (all social interaction). It just so happens (incidentally, I’m sure!) that this shift has coincided with the rise of technology that’s designed to atomize people and make them distrustful of each other by allowing/incentivizing us to record and analyze each other at all times. People are pretty much compelled to become neurotic and self-conscious, in the knowledge that everything they do is under surveillance by the digital panopticon. There’s no room for mistakes (or so it seems, at least); in the end, the only safe bet is to just stay inside, where things feel under our control.

Unsurprisingly, young people are having a lot of trouble figuring out how to proceed: they either become intimidated by other people, resentful of them, or both. There have been a bunch of studies on this: way over 50% of men say they haven’t approached a woman within the last year. Less than a quarter of men have even approached one. (For the record, I’m not saying I would have hit on the pram-lady1, we’re just using her to talk about the broader point.)

On the other side, things are just as confusing. About 70% of women say they’d like to be approached more—but then you come across this gender wars slop/rage-bait, like the “Would You Rather Be Stuck in the Woods With a Man, or a Bear??” debate, that racks up millions of views, with many, if not the majority, of the “votes” being vocally on the side of “bear”2.

It’s clear that there’s some very serious cognitive dissonance being wrestled with here. Because everyone is performing; obsessed with having the right opinions—and, more importantly, being seen to have the right opinions—a rift inevitably forms between what people actually want/think and what they feel obligated to say they want/think (this applies to politics, relationships, or anything else.) In the end, the tension can become so severe that it fries our brains, resulting in a pretty incoherent worldview: a cocktail of desperation and loneliness and frustration and self-loathing, which we end up projecting onto unwitting strangers… and this of course elicits exactly the sort of negative responses we’d assumed we’d get beforehand. A self-fulfilling—but of course self-defeating—prophecy.

This—ad absurdum—is what we saw from the tube-station lady. I read into this a bit more, and found a good piece on the issues of modern dating/relationships by J Sanilac; she talks about how a lot of women have been shunted into an ultimately self-defeating position she terms “aggressive indifference”.

Aggressive indifference to the desires of the opposite sex sounds contrary to nature. But it's pervasive among women today nonetheless. That's because three ingredients — self-defense from unattainable ideals, modern ideology about independence, and the pornographically escalated desire to be dominated that we've just discussed — have accidentally mixed together into a poisonous cocktail. This cocktail intoxicates women with the feeling that not caring about men's desires is the ideal feminine attitude, and one that they ought to pursue deliberately.

Given that reproduction/finding a worthy mate is literally the most important thing for humans, or any living organism, to do, you’d think that people would be impervious to attempts to make them act against their own interests in this, if no other, aspect of their lives. Not so. It turns out we’re just as susceptible on this front as we are when it comes to, say, shopping for a new pair of shoes.

The dating apps epitomize this. Surely, this would be the one arena where outright disdain for the opposite sex would be so self-defeating that it would not exist. Anyone who can’t even manage to present a facade of friendliness (let alone sex appeal), even just in service of trying to elicit a “match” or a message to satisfy their own vanity, would surely not even bother to make an account in the first place; they’d be wasting their own time, as much as their perceived enemies’. You wouldn’t show up at a speed-dating night and intentionally piss your pants in the parking lot before heading inside. “I’m going to ward off any men who might have gotten the idea that I was going to hook up with them tonight. That’ll show ‘em.” And yet, the online equivalent is rampant; half of the “bio” sections are things like:

• FED UP WITH MEN 🖕

• DON’T BOTHER MESSAGING, I WON’T RESPOND

• I DON’T CARE ABOUT THIS ACCOUNT/MY FRIENDS MADE IT FOR ME AS A JOKE

• I WILL PROBABLY LIKE YOUR DAD/YOUR DOG MORE THAN YOU

It seems like a lot of people have been tricked into a reverse-arms race where being a progressive/“modern” woman is inversely correlated to their opinion of men (and one’s interest in appealing to them).

Obviously, like with so many social movements, if you go back far enough you can see that the original intentions/concerns/advocates were perfectly legitimate. But once it goes mainstream, and becomes commodified, things get murkier: all sorts of unscrupulous actors jump onboard, using it as a vehicle/smokescreen/trojan horse to further their own interests (political, financial, or even just personal).

These actors know that, because it’s a self-proclaimed “progressive” movement, it therefore receives an aura of moral infallibility; any dissenters are shamed/criticized (for being brainwashed, for being a self-hating traitor, etc). And so regular people (who may have perfectly valid concerns) end up figuring that it’s easier to just get along to go along.

Regardless of how you got there, though, at certain point you end up in a bizarre situation where you’ve got a critical mass of people cutting off their nose to spite their face. And this is bad news for any society that wants to, well, not collapse. We’ve become so atomized that we end up trusting nobody; seeing every interaction (especially with the opposite sex) as a zero-sum game that must be “won” at all costs.

So it’s important that we be discerning about who we get our ideas/opinions from—however empowering they may sound. As tough as it is, in a world of parasocial relationships with our favorite celebrities/thought leaders, we’ve got to remember that the they are far less morally/ideologically stringent than their public personas would have us believe.

An example: I was unlucky enough to hear a minute or so of a Call Her Daddy episode a few years ago. The host, a woman named Alex, was giving advice to a listener who’d written in or something, and was telling their millions of listeners (almost all of them young women, you’d have thought), with great authority/confidence, to get it into their heads that every man cheats, it’s just a matter of when; all you can do is cheat on them in advance, as a sort of preemptive strike.

Funnily enough, I then saw her at a hotel last summer, having dinner a couple of tables away. She was with a boyfriend (whom I’ve just looked up and learned is her husband). I wonder what’d changed. Is she still dispensing the same sort of advice? Is he aware of those episodes? Or can she invoke the classic podcaster defense of “I’m just a comedian/it’s just a stage persona; I don’t actually hold those views in real life.” In fairness, if I had a podcast deal worth a few hundred million that was contingent on getting/keeping an audience of jaded, lonely young women, I’d dispense the same sort of inflammatory advice, lest they go off and find a better use for their time than listening to me.

A good rule of thumb, I guess, re: this trojan horse/ulterior motive issue, is that, any time your social movement is being supported/echoed/propagated by billionaires and/or corporations, alarm bells should be ringing. (This means that it has been deemed not to be threatening to the status quo/entrenched power.) Anything that leads to more atomization/tribalism/activism-via-consumption is music to their ears.

If I were a corporation, for example, I’d be thrilled to promote the idea that the best way for a woman to empower herself would be to… dedicate herself to her career at my company, working herself to the bone for a few decades. (For good measure, I’d happily profess my indignation about the lack of female CEOs. I would maybe even add a couple of token women to the board/C-suite to dangle the carrot for the young women to focus on.)

Likewise, if I were a dating app company, I would be thrilled to help promote the idea that the best way for women to stick it to men would be to… try to emulate them when it comes to relationships/the dating “market”. I don’t care how/why people use my app, I just want them to use it, after all. And so I would want to create as few meaningful, steady relationships as possible. I’d want as many people as possible to be seeking short-term gratification, and if I could convince them that this was not selfish/destructive, and was in fact a form of empowerment/liberation, then all the better.

. . .But you shouldn’t listen to me, I’m just a guy trying to deflect from the fact that I was an asshole to that poor single mother on the stairway. These posts are just a transcription of all the mental gymnastics I’ve been doing to try and avoid the truth. More on all this next time! Remember to subscribe/share ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Subscribe now

Share

I’d talked about being stuck on the sidewalk behind a woman pushing a stroller/pram. Any other time, I’d have carried on walking without a second thought. Maybe I’d have acknowledged her (or even the kid) on my way past; who knows. But I was on tenterhooks, as a few weeks prior I’d had a strange interaction, one that made me regard all stroller/pram-pushers with suspicion. . .

I had to go into the city. The nearest subway tube station to my house is under a busy intersection. There’s an entrance/exit on either side of the main road, each with a stairway of 15 or so steps. As I began my descent, I saw a woman, already close to the bottom, carrying a stroller. She looked perfectly capable, and had seemingly got it down there without much trouble, judging by the unfazed-seeming infant (although I guess there’s always a chance the kid had been dosed with some sort of tranquilizing agent before they’d left the house). A few other people were passing her on the stairs below, headed in both directions.

The timing was such that I ended up walking past her on the short walk towards the ticket turnstiles. She huffed, glared at me, then looked down and started ostensibly talking to her child (I was the only other person in earshot).

“Yes, darling, I know! Some people are just selfish assholes. Oh, well. You can’t expect them to do the right thing.”

I feel obligated here to state, for the record, that, had we both arrived at the top of the stairs at the same time, I really would have offered to help. With her only having two steps to go, however, I’d figured it would be inadvisable for me to talk down to her, literally, and imply that she didn’t look capable of getting across the finish line without a man’s help.

On top of that, there was the “kid” issue—which added a whole ‘nother layer. In this day and age, if you see some guy being a little too insistent on helping some woman with her kid, you’ve got to assume that he finds (at least) one of them desirable. I’m not saying that this knee-jerk reaction is good or right, just that certain gestures, comments, interactions, or hobbies that were once considered benign, or even respectable, have now taken on a negative stigma. It’s a real minefield out there—everyone’s on a hair trigger. Demetri Martin had a great joke about this; you’ve gotta pick your words very carefully:

The trouble is that at a certain point it also means that anyone who is (or who wishes to appear) remotely normal/non-threatening knows not to go anywhere near this stuff; it’s radioactive. Earnest, well-meaning people who, in a different time, may have gone up to a lost/scared-looking child at the beach or an amusement park and offer to help, would now think twice. Let alone people who might have aspired to be more involved, like a Scout Leader, or whatever; those folks know they’d be submitting themselves to a lifetime of scrutiny and skepticism. It’s a no-win situation. There’s no way to ever get people off the scent, even if you are totally kosher. Cue the classic Mike Ginn tweet:

And so the only people left (i.e., the people who carry on as if that shift hasn’t happened) are those who don’t care about negative stigma, or don’t have to. They’ve either got some sort of Zuckerberg-level sociopathy/autism, or have the money/power to cover it up (or a combination of both).

. . . Or it’s people who want the forbidden fruit so badly that they’re willing to accept any consequences it might incur. Cue Louis CK:

With all this in mind, back to our subway damsel-definitely-not-in-distress. As I passed her at the bottom of the stairs I gave her a 80% smile/20% wince that I hoped would convey all of the above (i.e., that I was actually being a good guy by leaving her alone). I’m not sure she saw me. She went through the turnstile next to mine, before barging past me on her way towards the platform.

“Don’t worry,” she said over her shoulder, “I forgive you.” She then looked down at her child. “We forgive him, don’t we, darling?”

“I didn’t apologize for anything,” I said.

She glared at me again, then made a big show of hurrying to the top of the stairway (which was perhaps twice as long as the first one) before picking the stroller up with a big old huff and starting downwards.

Was there any alternate sequence of events where she didn’t still end up annoyed? It seemed unlikely. I wondered which had come first: Her visceral contempt for people, or her crippling loneliness? The classic incel chicken-or-egg. Either way, obviously, the “admonishing people for how shitty they are for not giving you a hand” strategy is a great way to make sure they don’t give you a hand next time.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel slightly bad for her. Most of the time, this sort of self-sabotage is only a defense mechanism: you’ve been burned in the past, and you want to make sure nobody’s ever able to get close enough to hurt you again. But you’re still a human who wants and deserves intimacy at a fundamental level, so you end up trying to juggle these instincts in some pretty curious ways (e.g., those girls whose dating app bios are just statements like “FED UP WITH GUYS 🖕”).

Beneath her world-weary, miserable exterior, under all those layers of ossified scar-tissue, there was a hopeless romantic crying for help. She would never have admitted it, but I bet she had some sort of rom-com fantasy wherein a guy would find her abrasiveness endearing or charming; like a “how to lose a guy in ten days” thing; this was her clumsy way of “negging”. Maybe she spent her free time trolling all over Notting Hill hoping to meet her own Hugh Grant.

She just happened to be a few decades behind the times: in her day (she looked 40-something) a kid used to be a perfectly viable prop/conversation starter. Nowadays it’s like trying to hit on someone with a visible piss stream running down your leg. So we’d have to forgive her ill-advised strategy, and focus on the intent, not the execution.

Maybe I’d finally met my match; maybe this was the kind of kick up the ass I needed. Someone who would hold me to account, make a man out of me. Someone who wasn’t afraid to call me on my bullshit. This was a sign from the universe, a fork in the road: Step Up and Make Something of Myself? Or continue on being a sniveling, pathetic manchild. Hmm. . .

This imaginary meet-cute of hers was all-too easy to conjure: after receiving my slap on the wrist back at the first stairway, I would feel terribly ashamed, and would begin to grovel, and offer my Chivalry Services for the next stairway. At first, she (prim, aloof, chin-upturned, not even meeting my eye) would decline. I would insist. She’d decline again, but with slight hesitation this time. I’d insist once more. At last, she would acquiesce, but make clear that this was for my benefit, not hers. I would agree, and thank her for the opportunity.

Upon reaching the top of the stairway, I would realize that the stroller would be almost too heavy to pick up, but I’d manage to play it cool. On the way down, I’d joke about the kid having a future as a sumo wrestler or an NFL linesman (“Whatever your beautiful mom is feeding you, it’s working. You’re lucky to have her in your life. . .”). She’d sneak a glance at my rippling biceps, and be unable to help but be impressed. She bites her bottom lip and looks away, not wanting to be caught staring. Down on the platform, we’d get to talking. She’d apologize for being curt with me earlier; she’d just been having a rough day. (Her baby daddy was being an asshole again; withholding child support; unreachable, off the grid in Italy with that little whore he met at work.) I’d offer my sympathies, and ask her if she’d want to have a drink sometime; it sure sounds like she’s got a lot to get off her chest. It’d have to be at her apartment, she says, so that she could keep an eye on the baby. Of course, I’d say; he comes first—oh, and you’re a great mom, by the way. I can tell he’s your world; I really respect that. Ha, she’d say, tell Marcus that; he says I use the child support checks to go shopping. Well, let’s forget about him. You don’t need that drama anymore. Don’t I know it, she’d say. I’d cut to the chase: How about tonight? She’d pretend to think about it, before agreeing.

8 pm. She lets me in. I play with the kid in the living room for a little while, letting him show me his rock collection or whatever while she leans against the doorway, watching over us. She’s surprised by how easy; how natural this all feels. Eventually, it’s the kid’s bed time. She takes him to his room down the hallway. She reads him a story, and as she turns off the lights I can hear him ask one last desperate question: “Mama, can that man be my new daddy?” She pauses. “. . .I hope so, baby. But that’s up to him.” She’d come back down the hallway and curl up next to me on the couch. Alone at last. (I’d pretend not to have heard anything.) I’d slap on a Kenny G playlist, pour us both a glass of cab-sav, and get to work. I want to know the real her. Start from the beginning; we’ve got nothing but time. Midway through our second bottle, the floodgates would open. And my shoulder would be there to soak up the tears. Jeez, your dad sounds like a real asshole. Wow, thank you, he was. (Etc., etc.) I’d tell her that I could fix her, I could teach her how to love again: Guys are assholes, you’re so right about that. But I’m not like the others. I’ll treat you right. And the kid? No problem. I wouldn’t be the “step-dad”, I’d be the dad who “stepped-up”.

Obviously, this was all hugely tempting. There’s nothing I enjoy more than wasting a significant amount of my time and energy to prove a random stranger wrong. But Operation “Not-All-Men” would have to wait: a train had just shown up, so I hurried down to catch it, passing her halfway. As the doors slid closed, I turned around, and we made eye contact. I smiled and gave her a little wave.

NEXT STOP: ETERNAL PUSSYHOOD, baby. Full steam ahead.

More on all this next time.

In the meantime, a nugget wisdom of wisdom: Choose your path wisely. It may, at times, feel like there’s no difference, that they both lead to the same place, and that, whatever you do, somebody’s going to have an issue, so there’s no point in even thinking about things in this way. Whenever you feel that, just remember: that’s exactly what they want you to think…..

… Oh, before you choose your path, though, make sure to subscribe and share with anyone who you think would enjoy it. (Or someone who wouldn’t. Either’s cool.)

Share

Subscribe now

I’d been talking about my walk to the office the other day. A young woman pushing a stroller was up ahead of me, and I was trying to figure out how/when to overtake. This required thorough consideration of all relevant factors, which included the stroller, and specifically its occupant (assuming there was one).

What if she was one of those people who pushed their dog(s) around? Or what if it was one of those lifelike baby dolls? Or one of those dolls that appeal to what you’d have thought was a nonexistent niche in the market, the “lifelike” renditions of fictional characters, e.g. the Grinch:

(P.S., I’ve also learned they do these for aliens, too.)

With this thought, the inevitable question was what the hell was going on here, as far as these dolls. A digression, admittedly; Why worry about something so ridiculous and impossible? Well, that’s the thing. We’ve got to start taking this sort of thing seriously. Smart money, historically, would be that the customers only want these dolls for some sort of deviant/fetishistic behavior. But the world is changing; we’ve got to keep up. We’ve got to consider that there’s nothing Haram going on here, nor anything sexual at all, and the interest in these dolls is actually a manifestation of some obscure body dysmorphic disorder. As in, the owners “mothers” of these dolls “babies” in some way identify with their offspring; there’s some sort of genuine kinship bond there.

It’d only be a logical extension of the “Disney Adult” phenomenon: popular media has wormed its tendrils so deep into our collective consciousness that there’s no longer any demarcation between parasite and host (which one’s which!?). Our conceptions of even our most basic biological needs and functions can now only exist in relation/as a response to our media. (This explains, for example, the romanticization of previously abstract/uncommodifiable concepts such as “homemaking”. Even this has become a status symbol, an aesthetic™, something to be performed.)

To bring it back to the hyper-realistic doll question: Our “consensus reality” includes, of course, our coping mechanisms: i.e., the state-sanctioned/socially acceptable methods we’re given to address our mental/physical ailments. One such mechanism is elective plastic surgery. Hordes of young women (and quite a few men) have gone under the knife/needle because of internet-borne body dysmorphia/FOMO/etc. The opportunistic doctors must know that many/most of these people are mentally unwell, that the vast majority of procedures are detrimental/unhelpful. You’re tackling a symptom, not the cause. But I guess it’s a multi-polar trap: You, Dr. (of the spray tanned-skin, fluorescent veneers, taut forehead), might as well give the 19-year-old depressed girl the lip filler/quadruple D’s that she wants so badly, because even if you say no she’ll just cross the street and the next surgeon will be happy to do it.

In any case, since there aren’t any checks and balances on this stuff, it becomes the wild west. People can now pretty much just show up with a picture of the celebrity they want to look like, sort of like how you can make a request at a barber shop, but for your entire face/body. You’ve heard of these people, I’m sure. One guy has spent tens of thousands to become a doppelgänger of David Beckham:

(Oops! I forgot to clarify: the patient is actually on the left; that’s David on the right. I know—uncanny.)

We already know about celebrity culture and the weird parasocial dynamics it creates, but with airbrush/“filter” culture, things have gotten way more sticky. You’ve now got an arms race where people have to use these AI filters just to keep pace with their competition. Which means that there’s an ever-growing rift between what people look like online and what they actually look like—and this is obviously a time bomb, psychologically speaking. You have to go get lip filler or botox just to try and match your appearance to the image that other people associate with you (and this is, of course, a fictional, very often obviously unnatural-looking person).

At any rate, once you’ve started, it’s like an addiction. And so it’s no wonder that quite a few people have just gone all-in on this arms race and shown up at the clinic with a picture not of an idealized human filled with tons of plastic (e.g. Becks, Kim K., et al.), but of an idealized human made of plastic: i.e., a doll. The jump really isn’t that big of one to make (especially now that the big movie studios have vacuumed all this IP and are churning out movies where our favorite toys/dolls/video game characters are anthropomorphized as Margot Robbie or whomever). We are fully in “Life imitates art” territory. Which explains how we get people like Valeria Lukyanova, more commonly known as the “Human Barbie™”. (She now sells some sort of course involving holistic wellness/the occult, and calls herself “An expert in spiritual development, cleansing and rejuvenation. Which I consider 100% interconnected.” Very little mention of any surgery.)

Unsurprisingly, doctors have caught on to all this, and now specifically advertise being able to make your doll-related dreams come true. A quick Google search turns up dozens of self-proclaimed “Barbie Nose” specialists (most, if not all, of whom are……….Turkey baste ………( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) )

So, I’d argue that it’s not much of a jump from there to think that people would start to identify not only as barbie but as other fictional, vaguely humanoid creatures/characters, too, as the feedback loop (of peer pressure/the insatiable thirst for validation + an endless supply of willing surgeons) continues. And once you’re divorced from physical reality, it’s pretty likely you’d want your offspring to affirm/align with your self-image, whatever that looks like. I mean, if you’re a card-carrying “furry”, the last thing you’re going to want is a regular old human-looking baby—how insulting; how traumatic.

Consciously or not, you’d reject it, like those wild animals that can sense their newborn isn’t actually theirs, or it’s sick/crippled, and they leave it for dead or even eat it.

You think it would be fair to this guy or a baby to force them to coexist? Get with the times. This is the path we’re on, and there’s no turning back now. These dolls are basically the terminally Disney/Barbie-brained population’s version of Crispr. With online echo chambers getting louder and AI and photo filters only getting better, grinch babies will be the least of it. Obviously, they’ve got to settle for their offspring being inanimate for now, but with advancements in cloning/synthetic organs coming so quickly these days, we aren’t far away. There are already precursors for this sort of “offspring dysmorphia”: think of those stories about the women who kidnap chimps or orangutans and raise the animals as their own [human] children. (This rarely, if ever, ends well, of course, especially with chimpanzees; lots of faces/limbs getting ripped off, SWAT teams getting called in, etc.)

In the end, the lady on the hill answered the question for me: turned out, she was not a proud grinch-mother (in public, at least). She had pulled out her phone and was scrolling through her photos. Then, right before I overtook her, she slowed down, stopped the stroller, and bent around it to check on the baby. She put the phone in front of its face and tapped on one the video to start it playing. It was a video of the baby itself, taken just a short while before, in fact.

“Do you know who that is?” she said to the baby, which was looking at her, gargling. “It’s you! Look how cute you are! You love playing with [other baby whose name I can’t remember], don’t you?”

(The baby did not respond.)

“And we’ll see her again tomorrow. Isn’t that exciting?” She then straightened up and went back to pushing the baby down the hill while scrolling on her phone. We did not acknowledge each other as I passed by.

The purpose of this was unclear—had the baby been having some sort of existential/ontological crisis, or was it known to suffer from bouts of amnesia? Dissociation? (If so, how had it communicated any of this?)

At the bottom of the hill there was a garbage truck. Weird—I’d never seen one on this road before. It must have come to a stop several minutes earlier, as it hadn’t passed us on our way down. As I walked past the vehicle I saw that there was no driver, nor apparently any crew.

Based on the evidence, however, it was very much on duty: it’d seemingly been tasked with onboarding several weeks’-worth of offcuts from an industrial abattoir and had needed to pull over to digest. The thresher/compactor inside was fighting for its life; I could hear the strain of the hydraulic pumps inside and the muffled screeching of metal-on-metal as the compactor tried to get things under control. Blood ran down the outside of its lower “jaw” in rivulets, dripping down onto the street. Luckily, the breeze was at my back, and I think the bloodbath was so recent that the smell (which was as nauseating) had not yet begun to properly emanate. I looked back up the hill. The woman, still scrolling, hadn’t yet noticed, but the baby had. It wasn’t crying, though, only staring intently, with far more interest than it’d shown the iPhone. I took a left and continued on my way.

A few days later, on my way home, a stretch of the road just a few blocks from the hill was cordoned off with police tape. The man standing guard told me I’d have to take a detour. A body had been found, it turned out; a baby’s. It had been put into a plastic carrier bag and left on the pavement next to a public garbage dumpster.

But!—he reassured me with a smile—not to worry: the forensics team had more or less finished with the site; the road would almost certainly be open as usual the next day. So I smiled back and thanked him, quite relieved that this would be the extent of the inconvenience.

Share

Subscribe now

Firstly, some sort of allegory (or parable?). A woman pushing a baby in a pram (a.k.a. stroller) down the same hill where I witnessed the middle-aged biker decapitate himself. (🕊️R.I.P.🕊️ ; story linked below.)

I see the woman as I turn left down onto the hill (which is only a gentle slope, about a 150 meters or so long, and ends with a perpendicular road at the bottom). She’s got a head start of 4 or 5 car-lengths, but I’m gaining ground, and eventually I realize I’ll have to overtake her at some point. There’s just too much hill left; too much to just hover behind her. (Depending on the situation, I’d argue that it’s perfectly acceptable—and even polite—to hover for a few seconds. For example, if there’s a shop/house/some other place you’re headed that the person in front is about to walk past, it doesn’t make sense to overtake them just to then get in their way. Here, though, I’m in no-man’s land.)

I slow down to buy some time. Luckily, I’m still far enough behind her that I’m outside of “hovering” territory (although I am perhaps right on the bubble of “lurking”). My options are:

1. Downshift like an F1 driver overtaking a flagging opponent on a straightaway: set my jaw, lock my gaze into a thousand-yard stare, break into a power-walk and surge past her. But this of course risks spooking her if she hears my aggressive-sounding footsteps.

2. Continue on at my improbably/suspiciously slow pace. But this also risks spooking her if she turns around.

3. Cross the road. But we’re on the left side of the hill and I’ve got to turn left at the bottom, so she might take it the wrong way if she sees me making a big show of steering clear, as if she is giving off some sort of repulsive odor. (You never know if someone is having confidence issues, and this is the straw that’ll break the camel’s back.) For the record, I wouldn’t normally be on eggshells, but I was still recovering from a bizarre incident that’d happened a few weeks before, which I’ll talk about in another post. Not incidentally, this one also involved a woman with a stroller.

Speaking of strollers (a.k.a. prams), this was another moving part—not necessarily a confounding one, but one worth considering in the name of due diligence (especially after the aforementioned incident): the kid. What were we dealing with here? I had to be prepared, in case I had to acknowledge it for some reason on the way past. The stroller is facing downhill, so I actually haven’t seen its occupant yet, but I do have reason to believe it is occupied, otherwise she is just cooing/rambling on in a high-pitched baby-voice to herself.

Although perhaps she was grieving; this was her way of saying goodbye to a child/life that she never got to know…

~ ~ For Sale: Pram/Stroller, Never Lightly Used ~ ~

Grim. And unlikely. We’ll rule that out.

She may well have been pushing something, but it then hits me that there was every chance it wasn’t necessarily a human—you just never know these days in this neck of the woods. You see lots of folks (mostly women, but by no means all) pushing around Pomeranians, Chihuahuas, and all those other bug-eyed, wheezing, walnut-brained, “toy” breeds (those affronts-to-nature that seemingly exist solely as tributes to human selfishness; those reminders that not all innovation is necessary or worthwhile).

But it looked a bit too much like a proper baby stroller for that. No; there was definitely some sort of “traditional” baby in there. But even this didn’t guarantee anything. It could have been filled by a non-living baby; not non-living as in dead, but inanimate: e.g., she could have been a high schooler given one of those test babies to see if you can keep it alive for 48 hours or whatever (I never had to do this, but I’ve heard this exists). Or she could’ve been one of the weirdos who get those creepily realistic Reborn™ dolls. (They’ve gotten pretty good at this, in fairness. See if you can tell which one’s the doll!?)

Trick question—they’re both real! Gotcha!!

(Here’s one of those dolls, though, just for reference, so that I don’t leave you hanging.)

See what I mean? Freaky….1

It’s funny, though, because I can’t figure out if it’s more or less freaky than the people who get these sorts of lifelike dolls but of various fictional characters. (For the record, I am only aware of these thanks to my research, and definitely not because I am a proud owner of anything of the sort.)

What the fuck is going on here? These things aren’t cheap by the way. Who’s buying them? Fetishists of some form or fashion, would be my first thought. (Obviously, this is mere speculation. Still, though, even if I did have experience with this sort of thing2, I certainly wouldn’t tell you. Not that there’s any shame in it. Everyone has their “thing”.)

Anyway, time for a quick break. We’ll come back to the Headless Hill lady soon, but first, a word from our new official sponsor: BabyLove™ All-Purpose Dolls, made with patented “RealFeel™” silicone-based blend: dishwasher safe, microwaveable (within reason), lifetime guarantee3.

Share

So I was using the steam room at the gym the other day. It’s a bit bigger than the sauna, with a bench that goes around the room, meaning there’s room for a couple of people to lay down, should they so choose.

In this case, I so chose, and was laying pretty much flat on the ceramic—or it could have been some sort of porcelain…?—either way, it’s a flush surface. This is important, because a flush surface is what you need to create a suction effect. And this is important, because that’s exactly what happened. I sat up slightly to shift my weight and got a not-inaudible whoopie cushion effect from my lower back. It was just a quick bubble-burst sound, not too prolonged or cartoonish. Very dignified. (“He doth protest too much,” etc… but it’s true, I swear.) Variations of this happen all the time—even the most casual sauna/steam room user would have known what had happened.

Sure enough, the meditative man sitting on the bench across from me did not react in any way.

The middle-aged man on the bench between us, though, apparently did not know what had happened. This was strange, because a sauna/steam-room neophyte he was not—quite the opposite. This was the same fellow, you see, who also enjoyed stretching out in the sauna (which only had room for about four people, sitting). And there, of course, it wasn’t unisex like the steam-room, meaning he did not have to trouble himself with such nuisances as “clothing” or “modesty”. He also happens to be the type to want to squeeze every possible day out of his membership—fair enough I guess, but I’ve never seen him on the gym floor, only in the changing room/sauna area. Invariably, you open the sauna door and see him, and he says “Oh, sorry, I must be in the way—let me sit up.” He huffs and puffs and makes a show of looking like he’s made the offer in good faith, like someone at a restaurant patting around for a wallet they know they left at home. Being a polite, conscientious person, though, you reassure him that he’s not in the way at all, and to lay back down at once, good sir. Having made your bed, you are then faced with the choice of sitting by his feet, knowing that if you turn your head you’ll have no choice but to take stock of his exposed manhood. Alternatively, you can sit on the lower bench below him, letting his sweat drip down on you from above. (Both sides have their obvious advantages—I like to mix it up.)

Anyway, this was the guy who happened to be in the steam room on the day in question. The sauna was out of service for repairs, so he’d been forced to migrate over. He’d thrown a pair of courtesy briefs on, at least, but evidently this compromise had been a source of tension. He was out of his (nudist) element, I guess—and, in such cases, it’s common for things to get psychosomatic. The body keeps the score, and all that. You never know how pent-up stress will manifest: lower back pain, headaches, general fatigue. In his case, apparently, it took the form of indigestion.

Luckily for him, then, I’d provided this Popeye with the spinach he needed to get back on track, gastroenterologically speaking: upon hearing my ambiguous air-outburst, he relaxed, assuming that this was somehow an invitation; a gesture of reassurance that this was a safe space; we were all friends here.

Clearly inspired, he gave an “Mmm. . .” of relief/approval. He then proceeded to pull his knees up to his stomach, hugging them tight while taking some deep breaths—it was clear that this was not his first rodeo. Sure enough, within seconds, he entered his flow state, and proceeded to spend the next minute or so passing a frankly remarkable volume of gas. Not a minute straight, mind you, just intermittently. Still, it was a tour de force: he achieved an impressive range of octaves and key changes and tempos, at what sounded like quite a few different liquid-to-gas ratios and PSI levels. It was a masterclass in body control, akin to a professional eater or sword swallower or whatever.

After a thunderous, triumphant crescendo, he finished on a delicate, poignant diminuendo, leaving the listener hanging on a note of sombre reflection (and yet a quiet hope).

Utterly spent, the human bagpipe puffed out his cheeks and gave a big “Phew” of relief, letting his legs collapse back onto the bench and his arms flop down by his sides. I’d been desperately trying not to stare, but in my periphery I’m convinced I saw him give a nod in my direction, and then look over to the third fellow, with a look of: “Well? We’ve taken our turns. What are you waiting for?” He then closed his eyes and a sleepy, serene smile came over his face. “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about…”

I tried to make eye contact with the poor third guy to let him know that the gas-man and I were actually not in cahoots. But it did not seem to work. Deciding that he could no longer abide whatever strange little ritual was being staged by this [G]ay-December couple, he promptly stood up and left.

The gas-man then looked over at me with a “What the hell was that guy’s deal. . .? Did he have a stick up his ass, or what? Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, let’s get back to work.”

But we at least ended on a small victory: in his half-sedated state, I was able to snap a quick picture of him before I got the hell out of there.

Luckily, I found a scrap of paper and a pen just outside the door—never miss a chance to do some product placement! (“Always Be Closing. Always Be Closing.”)

On that note, everyone say hello to the newest member of our community!

Subscribe now

Share

The counter-argument here, made by Trump, Vince McMahon, and all the other right-wing grifters/populists, is that I’m patronizing these good people (the aforementioned masses). Regular folks, they say, are perfectly capable of making rational decisions in their own best interests; there is no exploitation going on here. (As evidenced by the remarks from one pro wrestler in that McMahon documentary I’d referenced in an earlier post: “Who’s worse? The people who make the product? Or the millions of people who lap it up?”)

The thing is, the evidence doesn’t seem to support this. I saw couple of stats recently. One was that the US was outside the top 100 in the world for literacy rate. The other was that more than half the population reads at or below a sixth grade level. (I’m not a statistician… can someone tell me if those numbers are good??)

There’s that old quote about how the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. If you tend to believe that, then spending any time on social media within the last two decades will have only cemented your opinion. And that’s the problem; the curtain has fallen. There are simply too many opportunities for the [supposedly informed] average consumer/voter to reveal that they are not, in fact, capable of much critical thought whatsoever.

I present Exhibit 15d:

So, yeah. This is who the DNC is getting trounced by. (Both the companies running the AI and the people who think the images are real, that is.) As AI and social media advance, the lines between fiction and reality will blur further, making social engineering even easier.

Editor’s note: Coincidentally, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that there would no longer be fact-checking on Facebook/Instagram, which will doubtless endear him to the incoming Trump/Elon administration. But, again, what do I know? Even a blind squirrel, etc.

---

I don’t mean to pick on Americans, here. You’ll have heard about the French woman who got scammed by “Brad Pitt”…

The other argument from these guys (Trump, Musk, Zuck, et al) is that there’s nothing inherently unethical about what they’re doing—they’re just holding a mirror up to society. If they’re morally bankrupt, then their immense success is proof that the general population is no better. I’d buy this argument if these guys didn’t happen to be directly profiting from both the erosion of literacy/education/civic responsibility and the general standard of living among their working-class fans. It’s like Marlboro pointing to their millions of “loyal” (addicted) customers as proof of the company’s/product’s virtue.

Still, there must be some truth to it: whether we like it or not, these guys are clearly tapping into something. We’re talking, after all, about 70 million(!) voters.*

So that’s the elephant in the room: the Zucks and Musks and Trumps aren’t doing anything that isn’t completely aligned with/incentivized by America’s core precepts. (Namely: Might Makes Right.) Our systems/institutions are so useless at curtailing these actors because, well, they are not actually designed to do that. You simply do not attain global hegemonic power without an insatiable, psychopathic thirst for blood. You need to have a singular, long-term vision for this sort of thing; the consolidation of power can’t be left to chance. You can’t be stopping and starting every four years at the whim of every new president. Which is why foreign policy has usually been taken care of by the CIA and other unelected bodies. Obviously, it’s nice if you can instate a president whose worldview happens to align with your own, in which case he can shoulder some of the PR burden (e.g. Dubya, with his war on terror, for example). But having a black guy or a woman to provide token “progress” and give people a false sense of agency is just as useful, in moderation.

But we’ve been over all that—and, as we’ve discussed, there’s evidence that the curtain has started to fall (hence the outpouring of public sympathy/support for Mr. Mangione, for example). It turns out that propaganda is a lot more effective when you allow your subjects to have a dignified existence. You can only bleed people dry for so long. Sure enough, there are—supposedly—a lot of people who are supposedly fed up. We noted this a few posts ago:

So, where is this mythical super majority that’s desperate for change? Well, they’ve been systematically beaten down, both psychologically and economically. Their anxiety, depression, and financial struggles have been individualized, and they’ve lost all belief, both in the electoral system, and in themselves, as far as their ability to affect change. That’s the catch: the people who are aware that they’re being bent over a barrel are also the people who’ve realized that voting for a broken system doesn’t actually do much. The only people who haven’t lost faith are the people whom the system serves (or those who still believe that the system serves them). (This bloc includes, of course, our AI-picture-commenters/AI-Brad-Pitt-victims.)

The other plot hole here, which you might have already figured out, is that, if both this “liberal majority” chart and the literacy stats mentioned earlier are true, then there would have to be a pretty significant overlap between the “slack-jawed masses” and this mythical, left-leaning, super-majority.

Which ties back, yet again, to my proposed blueprint. This isn’t about the [good] smart guys vs. the [bad] dumb guys anymore—if it ever was. That ship has sailed. Everyone is, statistically, pretty dumb. Strategically speaking, that’s not inherently a bad thing. It means you don’t have to be a physicist to work out that the billionaire/donor class do not care whether you (and the people you love) live or die, as long as shareholder value increases.

That said, it can be dangerous if people are dumb, pissed off, and if they aren’t pissed off in the right direction. Because of America’s utter (and not-incidental) lack of class consciousness, people don’t have the tools to articulate their concerns, let alone channel them in any sort of productive way. (Hence why we saw people voting for a New York millionaire on the grounds that he would “drain the swamp.”) Since Bernie, the only people filling this vacuum have been the grifters/gurus. But, again, they can only do so much to keep people distracted; as evidenced by Luigi, who reminded us that, for all of the right-wing’s apparent popularity, there remains a massive—hitherto untapped—reserve of pent-up resentment. I guess only time will tell!

Anyway, one of our loyal readers has been stuck in the hospital for the last few weeks after some surgery complications. He woke up for long enough to have the nurse take his picture yesterday; I promised him I’d post it.

You wouldn’t ignore a dying man’s wish, would you?

Share

Subscribe now

Anyway, we had been smack-bang in the middle of a post-mortem for the 2024 US election. We’d been trying to figure out why, exactly, the Dems had made so many seemingly inexplicably poor decisions in the preceding months. The best we could come up with was the theory that they don’t actually care that much about winning, preferring instead to be the noble/sanctimonious losers (while helping to maintain the status quo). For the fun of it, I threw my “political consultant” hat into the ring, and gave them a blueprint on how they might go about securing an election victory for themselves, if someone was holding a [3D-printed?] gun to their head.

The gist of my pitch to them was that they were out of touch, and would need to undergo a full-scale re-brand. Their fetishization of “due process” and “respectful debate” and “bipartisan cooperation” and all those other serious-sounding buzzwords has proven to be manifestly useless. I mean, their (supposed) opposition, the GOP, have made it clear that they don’t give a shit about any of that stuff. So, our high-minded notions of what Politics™ should be/look like have gotta go. We’ve got to appeal to the gen pop’s most base desires: sex, fear, blood-thirst, etc.

If we want to compete, we’ve gotta get with the times. To drive home the point (for my clients), the stylistic comparison I drew was between Trump and Vince McMahon (and the latter’s billion-dollar brand, the WWE). These guys have mastered the formula: pantomime villains, incorrigible womanizers, cutthroat businessmen, psychopathic wills-to-power, etc. Crucially, they know how to work a crowd—specifically a poor/working class one—into a frenzy. In the same vein, they know that bad press is better than no press.

So, you may not think highly of ‘em, but this electorate is the hand you’ve been dealt (by yourself, but that’s not the point right now), and it’s your job to make the best out of it. Scolding people isn’t going to win them over. Folks are telling you what they want: WWE storylines. Big, brash, violent, explicit. So give them what they want: soundbyte-able, quotable, meme-able stuff. (Trump almost getting JFK’ed back in July was gold dust, for instance.)

As far as our prospective candidate goes, then, this means playing the hits: he’s gonna need to be a straight, white male. You’ve got to beat these “alpha males” at their own game.

The logical extension, then—as far as I could see—was that our guy would need to possess the one trump card that the smooth-brained masses could not deny. . .

Indeed, we mustn’t forget that there’s a not-particularly-well-disguised homoerotic subtext over in the MAGA/MAGA-adjacent tent. Lots of repressed desires. For example, the leaked texts from Vince “The Cuckold” McMahon salivating over the idea of his mistress getting taken to pound-town by his buddies.

. . . or Trump bragging about his buddy Arnold Palmer’s penis.

. . . or the leaked audio of Jerry Jones (owner of the NFL Cowboys) doing the same thing about his players’.

. . . or Joe Rogan’s subconscious desperately trying to come out on his behalf.

I’ll quit beating around the bush: our candidate’s schlong is gonna have to be bigger than Trump’s.

I promise that this will sway more people than you realize. Way more than the 50,000 or whatever that swung the 2016 election. Way, way more. Several million at least.

Call this crass, unethical, undignified/unbecoming/socially corrosive or whatever else if you like. But remember, that’s just your old training talking. We’re ditching that line of thinking; it doesn’t work. I’m the captain now. You and I both know, deep down, that what I’m saying is true. There’s tons of precedent for the court of public opinion being swayed by all sorts of irrelevant factors: millions of people believed that OJ had to be innocent solely because he’d been such a talented football player, for god’s sake. And, lest we forget, there’s people who develop parasocial relationships with serial killers like Ted Bundy, writing them love letters on death row. (People still get crushes on these charismatic killers today, as they binge watch true crime shows.)

This is good news for us. Really good news. Our candidate doesn’t have to be someone with a particularly coherent ideology, let alone a “qualified” politician (in fact, this would likely hurt our case). General sex appeal will be more than enough. Basically, it just can’t be another robotic, unlikeable careerist put forth by the DNC focus-group machine. We can’t discount the value of celebrity here (I mentioned that Kamala would have done better with the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as her running mate). People have voted Arnold Schwarzenegger into office. And Reagan. And there’s still an appetite for this, as proven by Trump, obviously, but it’s not just a partisan thing: loads of people have been calling for Jon Stewart to run for office. And, over the last few weeks, that clip of an impassioned/informed Matt Damon has made the rounds and won more than a few people over. (“Now that’s a guy I would vote for!”)

I suggested that we could astroturf someone if need be, like how Kim K broke onto the scene with her “leaked” sex tape. We want someone who isn’t afraid to be controversial; to put themselves out there. Just give us this platform, and we can work from there. . . . But who would it be?

This was all very tentative; hypothetical. These blueprints were (very) rough drafts. The election had only happened a couple of weeks earlier, after all. Before I could even send out the next chunk of the proposal, though, one of our subscribers1 took it upon himself to go out there (into the real world!) and get the ball rolling himself. . .

Get this: a wealthy (check) white (check) dude (check) under 45 (check) with a six-pack (check) who at least presented as straight (check) decided to go out and make himself famous (check) by killing someone whose demise the vast majority of Americans could revel in.

(Funnily enough, we’ve just finished talking about schadenfreude, and how it was only going to get more common among the increasing poor/working class, what with political division increasing and material conditions worsening. The first of those posts is linked ⬇️here⬇️.)

I mean, talk about “taking initiative”! That’s the American spirit right there. This kid’s going places, I’m telling you. You just can’t teach those intangibles.

So, I don’t see the murder charge being a hurdle. We’ve learned, after all, that having a criminal record means nothing. You can confess/be convicted of whatever you want, and people will forgive—and even defend—you if they like you enough. There are loopholes for everything; it’s just a matter of creating/taking advantage of them. Besides, he’s still too young to run for president as things stand, so he had a few years to burn anyway.

Remember when we talked about how we were going to have to figure out how to build a big tent? How we were maybe going to have to cooperate with people with whom we may disagree on certain particulars? How about when I said (only semi-jokingly) that it’s private interest groups like the NRA/KKK/Taliban who we should be keeping an eye on? How those were the real “swing states”? Well, look: Mr. Luigi’s already got the 2nd amendment crowd on board, just like that. Bang. (So to speak.) That’s a lot of donor money behind him. (Look how Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero for these people.) As a self-styled tech bro, Luigi will also appeal to the enlightened-centrist/Musk-fanboy/crypto-bro crowd. Sure enough, an e-coin in his name has already been “minted” (?) and has a market cap of several million. It seems like he’s also going to do well with the black/latino bloc. The ones in his cell block, at least: he got a fresh new haircut from one of them while in prison, which is apparently a good sign.

Look, I’m not an expert on any of this. (Clearly.) I’m just a kook/disseminator of misinformation. These posts are purely satirical, half-baked ramblings that have no bearing on reality. Me predicting the rise of (or setting the stage for?) someone like Luigi was just a case of the blind squirrel finding a nut. (That said, I’ll still post the remaining chunk of the “blueprint” next time, if only because I’d already drafted it and don’t want it to go to waste.) All I’m saying is, this kid already has more political capital—and public goodwill—in his pinkie than a dozen Kamalas/Hillarys combined (whether you condone what he did or not). Who knows what he’ll do with it?

1

For the record, I can’t prove that Luigi was a subscriber of this publication. But we know he used substack, and there are already a few other bloggers out there wondering whether they are to blame, and I want to feel important too. Plus, I managed to get my hands on his actual manifesto, and learned that it was actually two pages; of which the lame-stream media released only the first. (As it’s an ongoing investigation, I ran the picture through a filter to disguise his handwriting. For some reason, it scrambled a couple of letters around. Ignore that. I also had to redact a couple of details to protect his privacy.) In this never-before-seen second section, he makes a couple of references that I don’t think can be a coincidence. But I’ll let you be the judge.

So, what do you think? Sheer happenstance? Or something more. . .? Could he have been referencing this post?

Or this one, perhaps?

Anyway, he doesn’t seem like a guy you want to get on the wrong side of. On an unrelated note:

Subscribe now

Share

Anyway, the point I was making was that they’ve been clinging on to this outdated idea of what capital-P Politics should look like. They’ve got to cut their losses. It’s time to face facts: the definition of what makes a candidate “qualified”/deserving will need a rollback facelift. If you are going to start fighting on the fronts that the modern voter actually cares about, that is. Here’s your blueprint: you will need a man. To put it bluntly: it mustn’t be overlooked that millions of people who voted for Trump (in 2016 and 2024) did so because he had the bigger penis of the two candidates. Technically, it was because he had one, while his opposition did not. (For many millions of people, “something” is always better than “nothing.” This applies to non-voters, too: they might not have refused to vote for Trump, but they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a She/Her.)

This means, if you’ve not been keeping track, that he’s been able to win the “Whip-‘Em-Out” battle by default. . . Twice!! (And the one time he couldn’t, he lost. You think that’s a coincidence? Ignoring the data here is insane. Suicidal, even. It’s like giving your opponent in the 100-meter dash a five-minute head start.

Our guy’s going to need to be 35-50(ish), and at least 6 feet tall, and at least mildly handsome. These are non-negotiables; this is your bread and butter. Anyone putting together a winning team knows that you’ve got to start with a solid defense/foundation and build from there. You can never be too good at the fundamentals.

Obviously, this means he’ll have to be white (unless you’ve got another Obama in the pipeline, which you don’t). Trump got the endorsement of the KKK and the Taliban before the last few elections. Forget “Pennsylvania” and “Ohio,” those blocs are the real “swing states.” They’re your litmus test. We’ve gotta meet people where they are. This means we’ve got to start working with: Pornhub, Playboy, Call of Duty. Do those guys do political collabs/endorsements? If they don’t, we’ve gotta start negotiations ASAP. Everyone has a price.

What it comes down to is that you need someone who can, if nothing else, out-Alpha Trump. It doesn’t have to be a politician—indeed, it’s probably better if he’s not—but someone with a pre-existing fanbase would be ideal. (I was serious when I said Kamala would have done better with the Rock as her VP.) It doesn’t matter what he’s famous for; athlete, musician, podcaster, megachurch pastor. Free idea: astro-turf someone, Kim K-style, “leaking” a sex tape and revealing our prospective candidate’s massive hog. Needless to say, the “massive” bit is crucial.

. . . although, now that I think about it, I suppose we don’t actually know if it would need to be “massive.” Perhaps “above average” would be enough; I’m just erring on the side of caution here, as chief consultant. It just has to be observably bigger than Trump’s. This means getting our hands dirty, and paying/extorting any of the women whom Donald’s bragged about groping/screwing/exposing himself to to break their NDAs and cough up the deets. Who knows, you may get lucky; it could be an Epstein thing, where you find out it’s “very tiny” and “deformed,” a “teardrop”/ “egg” shaped thing.

Once you have this box checked, it goes without saying that the challenge [to “whip ‘em out and compare”] should be issued by our candidate early and often. It’s classic “pig-fucker” politics. Once you’ve raised the question, Trump will be backed into a corner: if he ignores it, people will take his silence as an admission of defeat. Even if he comes out and denies it, people still won’t believe him without evidence.

Crude, you may say. Unbecoming, even. But this sort of thinking is closer to what it’ll take to win than people want to admit. This is the WWE, and that means you need WWE-esque storylines. Trump’s a natural, he understands this. (He’ll have known that that assassination attempt back in the summer was gold dust.)

On that note, I watched the Mr. McMahon documentary on netflix recently. (For research purposes, obviously, as freelance consultant for the DNC.)

I didn’t watch WWE growing up, so it was all mostly new to me, even if it didn’t reveal anything particularly groundbreaking. It was striking how many parallels there were between him and Trump and their respective families. There’s the nature of their personal “brands,” of course. They both embody (conspicuously): Showbiz™, opulence, “prime-time TV.” To their credit, they both have an incredible knack for working a crowd.

Despite their “bad-boy,” image, relishing their role as “the villain you love to hate,” the irony is that they are magnificently effective apparatchiks for the state. They are popularizers/vulgarizers, caricaturing—but never condemning—our fetishized American ideals of “ruthless corporatism,” “masculinity,” “Dog-Eat-Dog” for their working class audience(s).

Both men, of course, are malignant narcissists who’ve spent their adult lives exploiting people and abusing power as they accumulated it. In terms of their families, there’s also their fail-son(s) who desperately want their approval, and who are willing to spend their whole lives debasing themselves to try and earn it. There’s also the sexually charged relationships with their “smokin’ hot” daughters. And there’s the chaos they’ve left in their wakes: affairs/allegations/lawsuits. Speaking of, check these messages out. Incredible. These are between McMahon and the female employee he was with (to be clear: the gray ones are from him). Disclaimer: Not for the faint of heart, or for those under 18.

See? It ties right back into what we were saying last time, re: Musk, et al.: the general public DOES NOT care that these self-styled “Alpha males” are obviously overcompensating/covering for something.

Anyway, most of the wrestlers they interview in the doc are surprisingly lucid (although they all deny the existence of CTE—which could be a symptom of CTE, or a “symptom” of still being employed by the company who gave it to them). In one of the interviews, the wrestler (Triple H, I think, or the Undertaker) is asked about the highly-controversial content of the so-called “Attitude” era of the WWE from the early 2000s, during which the storylines (most of which were drawn up by McMahon) shifted from generally kid-friendly to almost X-rated (gore, sex, xenophobia, etc.). He responds with something to the effect of: “Well, yeah, but the ratings hit record highs. We were just giving them what they wanted. So, who’s worse, the people who made the product, or the people who loved it? ”

The same sort of sleight of hand happens with Trump: the performer/millionaire pretends that he is (beneath the flashy facade) simply a humble man of the people, and that his relationship with them is not a parasocial/exploitative one, but is in fact symbiotic, their interests being totally aligned. By doing this, he absolves himself of any civic responsibility. It’s sort of like a parent or teacher letting a kid eat a whole bag of candy for breakfast, then saying, “Well, who’s worse? The one who put the candy on the table, or the one who ate it?”

The wrestlers can claim all they want that their audience is a discerning one, and that the product doesn’t have any bearing on their (the viewers’) reality/worldview, but if that’s the case then these fans deserve Oscars: There was another doc a few months earlier, called Wrestlers, which follows a semi-pro wrestling league based in Kentucky. That one’s way less polished, staging low-budget fights in fire-halls and car parks, but even there, the fans are clearly hugely invested. They may know it’s not strictly speaking “real life,” but that doesn’t mean they think it’s not deeply serious and worthwhile. It’s the same as “Disney/Harry Potter adults.”

…I’ll leave you with that for now. More next time.

In the meantime, here’s another one of those texts from our kinky wrestler man. (The link above only shows a fraction of the several hundred that got released; it took me hours to go through them all.)

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I stumbled upon this one. . . what on earth do you think it means?

It’s none of my business, but I hope she decides to do the right thing. (For her sake.)

Anyway,

Subscribe now

Share

We tried a bit of creative reverse engineering. We looked at everything they’d had done over the last few decades through a very specific lens: that the democrats do not actually care about winning. Okay, that’s not entirely fair. They care about winning, but only insofar as their two real priorities are satisfied. The first of these being that the status quo must remain largely unchanged. The other being that they get to retain their sense of moral/intellectual superiority. A victory that does not satisfy these two conditions is no victory at all.

It’s a shame this theory is so absurd, because it sure would tie up a lot of loose ends, including:

• Obama being championed as some sort of civil rights hero simply for being black, despite being manifestly conservative/spineless (supreme court—RBG/Garland, drone strikes, Flint, MI, let the banks off the hook, etc.).

• The DNC’s cradle-strangling of the more popular Sanders campaign in 2016, and Hillary being championed as a women’s rights hero despite being a neo-con.

• Biden’s win in 2020 and subsequent refusal to step down (whether this was his decision or the DNC’s, the point stands), even at the cost of the 2024 election.

• Finally, the short-lived, yet disastrous Harris campaign, which saw her underperform Biden in every state and even manage to lose the popular vote.

For shits and giggles, we set ourselves the task of trying to figure out how, hypothetically, they might go about achieving a general election victory, if they had to.

It would require that at least one of the two main priorities to be re-jigged/demoted. We quickly ruled out number #1; too indivisible. This left us with #2, the one about the moral superiority/martyr complex. This one was a little more in play, not least because it seems to be a relatively recent addition. It’s a vestige of the peak 90’s-era, post-Berlin Wall “end of history”/liberal democracy circlejerk. The thinking was that: [Geo]politics/economics had pretty much reached its final form, and it was now just about working out the kinks. Liberals believed that everyone (blue and red) was on the same page about this, at heart. Progress could therefore be achieved through: earnest bipartisanship, and the fetishization of things like “procedure,” “norms,” and “decorum.” (Basically, the things that got us this far. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.)

This is why they love to say things like “Guys, remember: A good democracy/America NEEDS a strong and healthy republican party.” All of this sounds good when you’re the one in power. It makes you look mature, gracious, and respectable.

When you’re not in power, though, and the other guy doesn’t return the favor, then you pretty quickly just become the meek, sweaty guy sitting in the cuck chair over in the corner, saying “No, no, I’m not jealous or upset. A good marriage NEEDS a strong and [well-endowed bull to service my wife on occasion].”

This should have been made clear enough in the early 2000s, with the advent of George W., the neo-cons, and the evangelical right. (Which coincided, not incidentally, with the rise in political division and illiteracy, as fueled by the increasingly corporate-captured internet and legacy media). This should have snuffed the idealism out for good, but it was revived (to some extent) again in 2008: the dems were the “smartest guys in the room” once more. By then, though, the GOP had realized that they could be as blatantly obstructive/cynical as they liked. They knew that the Democrats were unable or unwilling to fight dirty and that even when they did manage to gain power (as they did in 2008), they refused to consolidate their position; they will not act without the GOP’s permission/consent.

After all these years, you’d have thought that the libs would have found some shame. Did they really not notice that for all their “I love you’s,” they never got anything back, except for the occasional “Aww, thank you!”, or the classic “. . .And I love spending time with you.” But they’re as deferential as ever, even despite their opposition having become “fascists.” Hmmm.

The notion that snappy dialogue and catchy historically-themed raps will win over the audience/mythical “undecided voter”—or that is how power works—is of course tragically naive. But this is the point. It’s not that they don’t know this, it’s that they do not care: politics does not affect their lives in any meaningful way. We’ve got to remember that, for the “theater-kid”/Disney-brain contingent, capital-p Politics is their version of making it to the big leagues; it’s right up there with Broadway and Hollywood. “Politics” is just a vessel; a stage to act out their power fantasies. It’s like when the school bully embarrasses you (the dweeb/virgin/friendless loser) in front of your crush, and you spend the rest of the night crafting/rehearsing the comeback you didn’t think of in the moment. Here, though, you actually get to deliver it, to the rapturous applause of all your friends.

Now, it doesn’t take a psychology degree to see that there’s a deep-seated longing for attention/affirmation at work here.

. . . But this, my friends, is exactly why priority #2 is on the table. Because this is why they’re here. It’s not that they don’t worship priority #1, it’s just that they take it for granted; it’s the air they breath. At the emotional/day-to-day level, it’s the dividends of priority #2 that they’re chasing. And this is good. We can work with this. We just need to harness/redirect some of their insatiable longing to be seen as the cool kids.

My first recommendation as official Victory Consultant is that we’re gonna need to identify/cut our losses. This means updating our idea of what “cool” means, since our current assumption is 20+ years out of date. For “some” reason (spoiler: it’s a coping mechanism), we’ve married ourselves to it, and now have to pretend that being over-rehearsed, prudish, humorless, and meek is somehow inherently virtuous. The democrats have completely failed to adapt to a world where people get their “news” from Tiktok, Joe Rogan, video game streamers, etc.

It’s time to focus on the battle at hand: The Race to the Bottom. This means accepting that Trump has dragged you into the mud. You may not like it, but that’s where you are. And you’ve known it for pretty much a whole decade, so whining about the mud is no longer an option. “No more when they go low, we go high.” The bar/brow is low, and only getting lower.

Luckily, the foundation has already been laid: if your whole platform is “Vote for us, because you have to, because the other guy is worse,” fine. But no half measures. Calling the other team “weird” for a couple of days isn’t going to cut it. You’ve got to go full pro-wrestling. Bigger, stronger, funnier, crazier; gore, terror, shock value. I’m almost positive Kamala wouldn’t have done worse if she’d have made the Rock her VP (he could go back and forth between Dwayne Johnson and the actual Rock character, depending on the location/type of rally).

It also means accepting that charisma and star-power and controversy are non-negotiables. Which means lame old celebrity endorsements aren’t going to cut it anymore. It’s tone-deaf, the same as this sort of shit.

This brings us to the elephant in the room: the DNC’s sex appeal issue. Specifically, their lack of it. I’m not sure what this is caused by—perhaps it’s been an intentional shift (fuelled by the Woke Mind Virus™) to make the party seem as welcoming/neutral/non-threatening as possible? I.e., a sort of overcorrection in response to Trump/#MeToo™?

Or maybe it’s because the party’s been completely overrun by corporate lobbyists/ghouls, and this has sucked all the life out; everything’s been focus-grouped and split-tested. This includes their stilted politician-speak, which now seems inauthentic and robotic. Authenticity, being flawed, is key. Think of Rudy Giuliani accidentally booking Four Seasons Landscaping for a press conference, instead of the hotel of the same name:

People don’t know anyone who talks like Kamala or Hillary in real life—but they “know” a ton of Trumps and Rogans. (In real life or otherwise: people spend, collectively, millions of hours per week listening to these voices.)

If I’m a lonely, frustrated, sexless young dude, who am I going to turn to for help? Which barbeque am I gonna go to? The one with Sleepy Joe, weird Kamala, and scornful Hillary? Not a chance in hell. It’s lame and boring and sterile and corporate. You can already tell they only have bean burgers and alcohol-free beer. “B-b-but what’s wrong with professionalism? Politics is serious and high-minded, and needs to be conducted by serious, high-minded people!” Wrong, wrong. All wrong. Nobody cares anymore, idiot. The rulebook’s out the window. Nothing matters. Hand-wringing over hypocrisy and double-standards is pissing into the wind. Wake up: people do not care about their own interests. Women don’t give a shit about a candidate’s sexual misdeeds (yet again, a majority of white women voted for Trump).

It’s time to give the people what they want. And what they[’ve been conditioned to] want is: sex. At the moment, the bad guys are winning on this front unopposed. Put it this way. When someone says: “Beach Babes/Bikini Models for __________!!!”, who comes to mind? Exactly:

And that’s only part of it. They’ve also managed to co-opt the Flag, the Bald Eagle, guns, and all the other core tenets of what it means to be American. If I say: “Get your Gun-Shootin’/Flag-Wavin’/NFL-Lovin’ Titties out for _____!”, who do you think of? (Hint: it’s not “Tim Walz!”, I’ll tell you that much.)

This what you’re up against, and the importance of this can’t be overstated. This is soft power, my friends. Trump’s married to an eastern European hooker/model, for christ’s sake (whom he doesn’t even pretend to give a shit about, and vice versa), he’s had affairs with pornstars, and he talks openly about wanting to bang his own daughter. I mean, come on. This guy oozes charisma. This is a man’s man we’re talking about here. If you want any chance, you’ve got to positively reek of libido, hot-bloodedness, healthy sperm count, etc.

I know what you’re thinking: the whole point of our party is that it’s a home for people who are intimidated/repulsed by, or are biologically incapable of achieving this sort of thing. True. But that’s no longer an excuse. Technological advancements have been made. Anabolic steroids, HGH, synthetic T; it’s all available now. So start using it. All of it. Antler dust, special blood transfusions, everything. There’s no time to fuck around; the other team is drinking/injecting a specially-formulated cocktail of this shit on the hour (mixed in with their Huel/AG1 shake). Adapt or die.

The results don’t have to be perfect. Fake it til you make it. That’s what they’re doing. No, seriously. I’m telling you. There’s a huge margin for error here:

These men have millions of fans specifically because they are perceived as “masculine” and “alpha.” This is what the people want to see, no matter how obviously artificial or grotesque. They don’t care if the election erection is “rigged,” as it were. All this applies to the women, too, obviously:

Point being: we mustn’t let the “perfect” be the enemy of the “good” here. The palate is not what you would call a “discerning” one. People do not understand/care about nuance, subtext, irony, or even obvious homoeroticism. They see Patrick Bateman as an aspirational figure, for christ’s sake.

More on all this to come; thanks for tuning in. In the meantime, don’t forget to

Subscribe now

Share

Specifically, we were scratching our heads at some of their strategic decisions given that this was apparently the Most Important Election of All Time™. For the fate of the world being on the line, the DNC sure didn’t put up much of a fight. (Kamala did worse than Biden in every single state!) It’s almost as if they . . . knew that their survival would be assured either way? But wait—if the Destroyers of Democracy were as fundamentally opposed to you as you claimed, wouldn’t that be impossible? (Hmm. . . We’ll put a pin in that for now.)

So, what happened? Was it hubris? Denial? Ignorance? Complacency? Why would you not only let Joe Biden totter around for 18 months, losing his mental and physical faculties in front of the entire world as inflation (and his unpopularity) spiked, but also insist on running him against a revenge-mission-Trump until the last possible second?Bad enough—but then, despite knowing how unpopular Biden was, and knowing that incumbents face an uphill battle at the best of times, you replaced him with someone who was basically his surrogate, policy-wise. And not just anyone, but a black woman. Oh, and you threw her in at the eleventh hour, and without conducting a primary—talk about leading a lamb to slaughter. You did this despite what happened in 2016, when the electorate rejected a white woman (and a far more “qualified” one) in favor of The Donald. You were shocked and outraged by this at the time, with half the country having outed themselves as “deplorables,” “bigots,” etc. But that was eight years ago. Why would anything have changed? Fool me once, right?

If you were being cynical, you might wonder if the selection of these specific candidates was a strategic decision by the DNC to insulate themselves from criticism. Even if these women were openly center-right compared to someone like Bernie, dissent could be waved away as sexism—and, in Kamala’s case, racism. So, maybe poor Kamala was just an extension of the “woke capitalism” thing. To be clear, this isn’t to say they ran a campaign on “wokeness,” or anything, just that she was a focus-grouped attempt by the (corporate-captured) DNC to connect with their consumers (who, in fairness, do tend to lap this shit up). Hillary only checked one “box,” Harris checked two; the DNC gambled on a double-or-nothing-guilt-trip.

I get their thinking: people (outside of MAGA circles) are given the impression that any black person or a woman in power must inherently be more progressive/inspiring than a white man (hence why we saw the bizarre championing of Harris by her supporters as some sort of women’s rights icon; “Brat summer,” etc.). People desperately want to believe that there’s inherent solidarity within these various identity groups.

To be clear, this wish is often well-meaning; it’s a response to the blatant disregard for women/minorities exhibited on the right. Because of liberals’ blind spot when it comes to their conception of being the good guys (and the smartest guys in the room), it’s inconceivable that they might be being taken advantage of—especially by their own “team.” Sadly, we see it happen all the time. All a brand has to do to earn our affection is change its logo to the rainbow theme during pride month. It’s the same sort of thing as when Disney or Marvel give people a black or asian superhero and watch millions of people seal clap about “representation” and how they finally feel seen and loved. It falls under the same umbrella as this shit:

(The umbrella being: “How Do You Do, Fellow [Humans/Wokes]?”)

At any rate, it all reeks of the DNC’s decision-makers being chronically online/echo-chambered, and it meant they made some pretty head-scratching oversights: by refusing to break with the establishment on Israel, they let the republicans position themselves as the party of peace(!). By alienating your progressive base over the past decade, and letting yourselves get completely overrun by PACs and lobbyists, you became the establishment/elitist/status quo party, the party of smug Ivy Leaguers. Even if you aren’t, perception is reality. This was a massive missed opportunity, it turns out: guess which of these two groups’ members all have Ivy League degrees.

Group A: Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Tim Walz.

Group B: (professed billionaire) Trump, JD Vance, Meatball Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, RFK Jr., (billionaire) Elon Musk.

(You get three guesses.)

None of it makes any sense. Let’s try to reverse engineer it. One possibility is that the DNC let Hillary Clinton pull the strings for the last 6 months. (Not the craziest theory, actually; she’s the happiest person in the world right now.)

Alternatively, it’s as if they asked AI for help, and it asked them to punch in their main priorities. Let’s assume (for our experiment’s sake), that these were:

• #1: We don’t want things to change too much, systemically/structurally; this would threaten our own material conditions, and risk angering corporate donors.

(By “we,” they’re referring to the the affluent/educated DNC loyalists, the professional managerial class, the liberal media/political classes, and so on.)

• #2: Nevertheless, We have observed (online, which is where we spend most of our time) that many young/progressive people seem to dislike Trump and his blatant misogyny, xenophobia, etc. As such, it seems like it would be good PR to distance ourselves from that.

• #3: Lastly, we would like to win. But only if the first two conditions are met.

If you look at it through this lens, everything begins to make more sense.

It all ties back into the SNL/West Wing fantasy, as discussed last time: losing, but getting to say “I told you so” is arguably more delicious a prospect than winning. Winning means you have to shut up and actually do something. . . Eek!

Their condition only really allows for being the noble loser; the prospect of actually being in power is completely paralyzing. Just look at how ineffective Biden was. Or, a few years further back, another prime example: Why didn’t they codify Roe v. Wade when they had the chance? (Answers that involve any respect for the GOP, or reverence for norms/traditions etc., only prove the point: the DNC’s ineffectiveness is not only voluntary, but self-inflicted.)

The cocktail of martyr complex, self-loathing, and self-congratulation is too potent; they are doomed to be the cuckold. Doomed is the wrong word, though, since that implies that they don’t derive a great deal of perverse satisfaction from all this. Four more years of scolding and moralizing, and SNL impressions of Trump, and Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow being on the verge of tears every night? Sign them up. That stuff is their catnip.

Case-in-point for any visual learners: they would rather be Pelosi (subordinate, BUT girl-boss/clever/sassy/brave) in this image, than Trump (president, BUT white/male/dumb/bad).

The Biden situation will be looked back on in much the same way as that of Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. If these geriatrics actually gave a shit about their constituents—indeed, about anything other than their careers—they would have stepped down before they died (to varying degrees) on the job, putting millions of lives/generations of damage at stake. But they just can’t help themselves, and we apparently can’t help but keep lionizing them:

Alright, fine. But let’s say the third priority (winning) had to be bumped up; someone was holding a gun to their head and demanding that they win an election. This would mean one of the other two priorities would need to be rejigged/reconsidered.

How about the first one? Well, on paper, this would be easy; the blueprint already exists. I’m stealing the image below from Michael Moore’s page. Let’s take a look.

This stuff is all low-hanging fruit, or so you’d think. So how many of these policies did Officer Harris run on?

Yikes. Yeah—this is not the “people’s” party. This is a risk-averse, ipso-fatso-conservative party.

Do you know how much you have to like the status quo to refuse to meaningfully engage with that list, knowing that you have millions of willing voters sitting right-fucking-there, should you make even the slightest effort to reach them? Especially with the knowledge that you’re going to lose the election if you don’t? Spoiler: you have to like it an awful lot.

It cannot be overstated that the corollary to the third “priority” above (and to the first one, too) is that the DNC would happily gift their “opposition” (i.e., the Fascist Devils) the victory if it meant stopping their shared nemesis (the dreaded “left”) from winning. We already learned this way back in 2016, when the DNC fucked over Bernie despite his mass appeal (and higher likelihood of beating Trump than Hillary).

Okay, fine. Priority #1 is a no-go-zone. So, my advice to them would be: stop pretending; save your breath. Just own it. People can smell the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing thing, and it’s a turn-off. This means that the only remaining option is Priority #2, the one about being “the adults in the room.” The one where we fetishize things like “civility” and “decorum.”

But we’ll get to that next time. (Off the record, though, I have to say the forecast ain’t lookin good for “Priority #2” . . . )

Share

This was all the way back in April, mind you, so this was still the Biden-era of the campaign. It had been prompted by a clip I saw of Hillary Clinton on some late-night show. When asked what she would say to any voters who had the gall to doubt whether the blue team actually gave a shit about them, she responded with something to the effect of: “Get over it [you whiny little shit-stains].”

But it struck me—and many others, I’m sure—as a questionable route to take, albeit a revealing one. Her bitterness is obvious—and I don’t blame her, after 2016. I’d be projecting blame, too. She’d been angling for the presidency her whole life, and had had all sorts of smoke blown up her ass along the way, only to get punked by some spray-tanned retired guy who didn’t even actually want to win. Demoralizing stuff. She’d probably have thought that her husband would be the last good ole’ boy to embarrass her on the global stage. Alas. (And somehow, Bill wasn’t even the worst.)

For her unconditionally loyal supporters, her disdain is/was probably quite cathartic. But it made me wonder. You can only play the “Why vote for us? Because the other team is worse!” card so many times before it’s a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario. And doesn’t it also conveniently absolve you of any responsibility to offer a platform that’s appealing in its own right? There is no actual interest in providing anything more than the bare minimum. You’ll vote for us because you have to. Why offer a carrot, when we can just use the stick? It’s basically spinning “Hey, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the other guy” as some virtuous ideal; as if it’s anything close to a long-term plan.

The hubris and complacency (and denial) on show is staggering—as evidenced by their inexplicable attempt to run the 108-year old Biden up until the last possible second, despite his mental and physical faculties eroding by the day. In this regard, his victory in 2020 was a disaster. Even though it may only have happened with the help of a global pandemic, they took it as evidence that they could rest on their laurels, believing that their “Good guys vs. Fascism” ploy was/would be an effective one: The American people had come running back with their tail between their legs, and that was the end of the matter. The lumpen proles had learned their lesson (after 2016), and it was back to business as usual.

With this, the dems went with pretty much the exact same strategy as they had in 2016 and 2020: Don’t rock the boat too much; just give it a couple of months, and everyone’s going to realize how deserving we are. This election will win itself. All we’ve got to do is point out how crazy and evil the other side is. So, even though they would have known Biden was unpopular, they even try to distance themselves from him. They had Kamala toe the line, not taking any potentially inflammatory stances, e.g. on the Gazan genocide. All we’ve got to do is appeal to “moderates” (a demographic which, like the mythical “undecided voter,” is but a figment of some legacy media wet dream).

Spoiler: this wasn’t enough. After an initial spike in popularity following Joe’s stepping down, it was downhill from there, culminating with her getting spanked on election night. As usual, this elicited the same sort of scolding and finger-pointing from democrats that we saw in 2016, when Hillary got a spanking of her own. Whose fault was it this time? Poor blacks? Poor whites? Poor racists? Rich racists? Latinos? The left? All of the above?

One thing was for sure: it wasn’t the DNC’s fault [that they’d managed to lose 20 million votes in the Election for Democracy].

How about we figure out what lessons we’d learned from 2016, the last time we trotted out a female candidate to compete with this spray-tanned professional roast comic who had nothing to lose? There weren’t many, apparently. Their uninspired campaign strategy was proof that they’re still decades behind.

The thing is, there’s a liberal (Sorkin-era) fantasy that a lot of affluent/otherwise insulated dems still have about what Washington should be. It’s their version of “MAGA”—a mythical, idealized bygone era that never existed. A world where politicians, no matter their differences, could share a deep respect for each other, knowing they both wanted what was best for the country. Here’s a really good article on this which has only gotten more accurate.

In practice, this manifests as a sort of performative affection/token gestures of “bipartisanship”. Here’s a perfect example of something that warms these folks’ hearts:

Basically, it’s a fantasy for a lot of liberals (especially educated/affluent/insulated ones) that the machinations of high level politics are not completely cynical, and are not conducted almost exclusively by unelected bodies. There therefore remains a reverence—if not a fetishization—of due process, of our hallowed institutions, of rigorous, yet respectful debate, of presenting an image of decency and good faith. Pomp and circumstance, “decorum,” and “civility” are the things that really matter. You’ve got to shake your opponent’s hand, and look him in the eye. You’ve got to hear him out, understand him, and compromise—no matter how wide the ideological gap. This is how we reach the truth: through cooperation and rigorous—but unfailingly civil—discourse. All we (as the good guys need to do) is to deliver witty one-liners and rousing monologues. If we provide enough of these, people will see how much smarter and educated and qualified we are than our well-meaning, but ultimately smooth-brained competition (hard-workin’ blue collar folks who just need some enlightenment).

The democrats continue to cream themselves over this sort of thing, chasing the GOP as they’ve lurched rightward, and despite their efforts being completely unrequited in any meaningful way for at least two decades.

Case in point in the 2024 campaign: Kamala saying the only thing she’d do differently to Biden would be to. . . appoint a Republican to her cabinet. And then playing footsie with Liz Cheney, daughter of noted war criminal Dick Cheney, in an attempt to appeal to “moderate republicans.” Obviously, this won over absolutely zero republicans, who’ve realized there is absolutely no need to even pretend that they give a shit. Indeed, their voters do not want this; it’s a sign of weakness. (If I wanted right wing policies, why would I not just vote right wing?) Even after getting her ass kicked by what is supposedly a party/candidate that intends to destroy democracy—a pretty big deal!—they can’t help but genuflect: they send Kamala up to give a concession speech that talks about how gracious the Dems will be in defeat and how it will absolutely be a peaceful transfer of power.

In any case, this is why it was such a shock (to people who get their news from SNL and MSNBC and who put “Refugees Welcome” signs in front of their houses) that Hillary lost: her being more deserving was supposed to be self-evident. She had the perfect “resumé”—including, most notably, her being a woman. Based on all the movies and TV shows these people had ever watched, along with all the pundits (who watched the same movies and TV shows), Hillary was the good guy, and the good guys always win in the end. This was supposed to be their fairytale ending. It wasn’t, obviously. But we know all this. As she and the DNC will tell you, the electorate let her down.

So what lessons did they learn from this for 2024? (2020 was an aberration; too many confounding variables—COVID-19, Biden being a white guy, etc.) Why isn’t it a case of “fool me once?” If the country was as incurably bigoted/misogynistic as you discovered it to be in 2016, whose fault is it if you try the same thing 8 years later—except that your new candidate is black, too? Maybe they assumed it would be another Obama/identity politics thing, i.e., that the mere sight of a black candidate would win them the POC vote; platform didn’t really matter. But that’d only worked because Obama was a unicorn, as far as oration/charisma went. Plus, he’d been up against the most milquetoast, humorless white dudes of all time: pastor-like John McCain, and youth pastor-like Mitt Romney. (It was sort of the same with Trump in 2016, who ate his gormless Republican competition alive on his way to becoming the tzar of the party—as satirized here.) If it really was the Most Important Election Ever™, why the fuck would you take the risk of sending an under-qualified, uncharismatic black woman into the gladiator ring with only a few months’ notice, knowing how the jury would react? This was not the time to try and shift the overton window. What were you trying to prove? None of it makes sense.

. . . unless you had some sort of sadomasochistic martyr complex, where you’d rather have America/global democracy collapse just to be able to say “See? We knew you were all stupid, racist, misogynists. So there!”

At any rate, it tells us a lot about the DNC’s insulation/disconnect from the real world (and from their supposed constituents). In the main, the fallout from a Trump victory won’t really affect them—certainly not enough to outweigh the temptation of the massive “I told you so”/“Gotcha!” his victory offers. They relish in being right; in exposing how backwards so much of the population is. For them, then, it’s a win-win; either outcome allows them four years of self-congratulation.

If they’d really wanted to win, all they had to do was shoot me a message. But we’ll get into that next time. For now . . .

Subscribe now

Share

But not all of the fallout from his resurrection was good . . .

It was also revealed to us (and by “us,” I’m referring to anyone who witnesses any sort of Looney Tunes-esque mishap/accident like this one) that our tendency to laugh/snicker/giggle uncontrollably in such moments is actually cause for concern. It’s proof, you see, that we have Low Self-Esteem.

A real boot-in-the-teeth. And a particularly steel-toed one, given who’d delivered it: Wikipedia, who’d always been such a loyal steed for us over the years—so it’s fair to say our friendship’s on the rocks.

Obviously, we immediately set off to prove Wikipedius, the Filthy Backstabber wrong; to find some justification for our behavior that made no mention of our self-esteem.

We learned that the drivers for this phenomenon (called “Schadenfreude,” wherein we take pleasure in others’ misfortune) are, apparently, “rivalry,” “aggression,” and “justice.” We then set about trying to figure out which of those had been at play in this incident. It wasn’t obvious, since I’d never met the poor guy, nor even seen him until after the accident, so that more or less ruled out “rivalry” and “aggression.” In a way, this was good news, because “justice” happened to be the most noble-sounding of the three. (From what I could tell, the more “justice” had been served, the more “enjoyment” we were allowed to derive, morally speaking. . . Or something like that.) But what “justice” had been served? The punishment—i.e., his near-decapitation—couldn’t possibly have been deserved, unless he’d done something seriously wrong.

After some thought, though, it hit me: he had . . in the view of my subconscious, at least. It turned out that any “pleasure” I’d taken in the cyclist’s misfortune was not caused by any lack of self-esteem, but instead by long-repressed trauma. That’s right. I—not the cyclist—was the victim here. Allow me to explain . . .

Subscribe now

Here’s what happened. As I stewed over everything that evening, I remembered that a few nights earlier I’d watched the new documentary ESPN had released (in their “30-for-30” series) . . . which was about none other than Lance “LiveStrong™” ArmStrong.

For anyone unfamiliar, Armstrong was a cyclist who’d been a pillar of American culture in the early 2000s (my formative years—which will become relevant). He’d inspired millions by beating cancer and going on to win the Tour de France multiple times, becoming a global superstar in the process. I was never a fan of cycling, but you didn’t have to be; he transcended the sport. He presented himself (and, in fairness, was presented by the media) as a superhero, representing everything that was good and pure and noble: he worked hard, he overcame adversity, he was white/from Texas, etc., etc. The total package, American Dream™-wise.

And then it all came tumbling down, when it came to light that he’d lied, bullied, and cheated his way to the top. (You might say he liked to Strong-arm. . .?) Millions of fans were left horrified, enraged, betrayed, heartbroken; he’d let us all down.

My theory is that I must have absorbed that by osmosis in my young/impressionable state. So—as I build my case here—that’s the wider cultural context for you.

The other connection, which I’d been reminded of by the documentary, was even more personal. Get this: growing up, I was pretty much neighbors with Lance’s nemesis, a guy named Floyd Landis. He’d won the Tour de France in 2006, but then took the fall for doping, letting Lance get away with it. After serving his suspension, Landis expected a thank you/welcome back into the team, but found himself iced out, with his teammate Lance showing him no loyalty/gratitude. As you can imagine, this rubbed our buddy Floyd (as a Mennonite/man of principle, etc.) the wrong way, and so he decided to blow the whistle on the whole thing, which led to Armstrong being taken down.

Full disclosure, Floyd and I weren’t actual neighbors, only “spiritual” ones, he was from a town just a couple miles away back in central PA. But, still, one time, when I was a kid (it must have been before the doping controversy and his subsequent retirement, so between 2002-’05) my mom and I saw him on a training ride one on one of the wooded, winding roads which cover so much of the region. (He didn’t wave to us as we drove past, or anything, but I don’t hold that against him. Safety first.)

Point being: blood’s thicker than water, and so my loyalties lie with Floyd, my Amish-country brother. So, in solidarity, I’ll always have a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to Armstrong, the International Cycling Federation, and any other relevant parties. (We’ll throw in cyclists in general, just to be safe.) Oh—and, last but certainly not least, the iconic yellow jersey, the one that our good friend Floyd had had ripped away, and the one that Lance had been allowed to desecrate for so many years. This, in particular, is a real sore spot. The courts can technically nullify Armstrong’s seven victories, but we all know the damage is done: whether we like it or not, his name, his likeness, is synonymous with that jersey (the maillot jaune, as it’s called in French). Just search his name on google images. I’ve been scrolling for 17 minutes, and I haven’t seen one goddamn syringe—hundreds of yellow jerseys, though, that’s for sure:

It’s like Tiger Woods with his signature “victory red” polo; these things are indivisible, inextricable. (Obviously, these marriages aren’t always for the better: like how Daniel Radcliffe will never escape being seen as Harry Potter. Or like Subway with Jared Fogle.)

At any rate, I believe this [unresolved trauma] is where my moment of “weakness” came from. The cyclist in the bright yellow jacket must’ve struck some long-forgotten nerve, leading me to believe, for a moment, that our semi-castrated nemesis had finally got his comeuppance. Obviously, this all lasted no more than a few fractions of a second, and was totally unfounded, but I think it shows just how close to the surface a lot of that trauma still is. So, if we want to blame anyone for my unsympathetic reaction, blame Lance Armstrong for scarring a generation of young people, poisoning them against cyclists—especially ones in yellow jerseys.

With this, I rest my case. I think our work here’s done, as far as clearing our name. We’ve at least muddied the waters. (Take that, Wikipedius, you asshole.)

For any fellow witnesses who happen to stumble in here, you’re welcome to use this “defense” if you want. (I’d strongly recommend it—it’s a real weight off.)

Subscribe now

Share

Anyway, as soon as I looked down at my phone, I heard a flesh-on-metal crash behind me, and turned to see that a cyclist had apparently whizzed past me and gone straight into the back of a parked truck, the loading ramp of which was extended horizontally at neck-height. The way he was sprawled out on the concrete, it looked very much as if he’d managed to decapitate himself.

Artist’s [dramatized] depiction:

It was not clear why or how this “traffic collision” had happened; it was a dry, clear day, and road conditions were perfect. As such, I’d spent the last couple of posts here searching for answers—and trying to figure out who was culpable.

In this one, linked below, we asked whether or not the film production company had committed any wrongdoing. Technically they’d just left their truck there, in a legal parking spot, unmanned. Sure, its loading ramp was potentially a tool for dismemberment, but was that their problem? After all, lots of seemingly-harmless things could be employed for sinister purposes; where do you draw the line?

This sent us down a “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” rabbit hole, during which we pondered how one might go about “baby-proofing” the world, given that anyone who’s intent on doing themselves or others bodily harm will probably be able to do so with instruments far less “obviously” dangerous than actual guillotines or firearms.

This idea (i.e., what role the state should play in putting up these sort of societal guardrails) is especially interesting when it comes to the “melting pot” of the modern world, what with all our different ideas about what a “cohesive,” advanced, society’s ethics/goals should look like. (This also means norms and laws can change quite quickly; for example, the banning of smoking indoors and on planes, which we now completely take for granted even though it was only a couple of decades ago.) Gun control/seatbelts/smoking are the more obvious debate, but there’s infinite directions you can go: Should restaurants be required to list the calorie count of their offerings? Etc.

We then wondered whether the man’s seemingly inexplicable crash had actually been an ultimate celebration, then, of his individual sovereignty; a commentary on a world where the overbearing Nanny State encroaches ever further into our lives, as if it knows best. “Smoking kills? So what!? I’ll do what I want!”

Or maybe, in a similar vein, it was a sort of lament, for a world that used to be linear and comprehensible, where our interactions with each other/the world were transparent and predictable and analog. The guillotine was a relic of this simpler time. A time when men were men, etc. That post is here:

We’ve also been reflecting on broader trends/patterns of behavior. Namely, that there will always be contrarians, folks who flat-out refuse to comply with any suggestions/laws passed down by any authority sheerly on principle. This applies even if the directive in question applies to something that even the subject knows to be in their best interest. (Although we’ve also discussed how this stubbornness exists for a reason.) We’ve been discussing the implications of all this in a digitizing world where “authority” and “control” are increasingly faceless, de-centralized, and far, far more omnipresent than it’s ever been, and if we therefore might need to rethink our relationship to concepts like “government” and “authority” and “individual agency.”

Heavy stuff. Thankfully, we’re spared from having to dig any deeper into this nonsense (for now) . . .

After a few moments of stunned silence, the man then began to wheeze and moan and writhe around. Reports of his death had, it turned out, been greatly exaggerated; his head had not been clotheslined clean off his body. Before long, a staff member found the on-site medic, who came over and tended to him.

All of my theories that’d revolved around him intentionally guillotining himself had been somewhat undermined, anyway, given his choice of clothing: a high-viz, neon yellow jacket, a helmet with one of those road cameras attached to the top (how priceless would that footage be!?). As such, the only viable explanation I can think of was that he’d been rubbernecking, trying to look over into the house/garden where the crew were filming.

(Apparently not everyone calls this “rubbernecking”!? Like when traffic slows down because everyone wants to get a better look at a car crash? There’s a quiz I remember from a while ago that can approximate where you’re from in the US based on the different terms/pronunciations you use for things. “Soda” vs. “pop,” etc. . . I think I found it here!)

Anyway, the other thing you realize—and thankfully these sort of incidents don’t happen too often, so we (i.e., the voyeurs/witnesses) aren’t regularly exposed for being shitty people—is that there’s something about this sort of incident that impels us to laugh. I know this because, as I looked around at the crew and the other passersby, I saw the universal trying-not-to-giggle-twitching at the corners of every mouth. For the record, this only started once we were sure he was 100% alive/“capitated,” which maybe lets us off the hook a little. We’d never want him to actually be dead, or grievously injured—we aren’t monsters…

It’s still a little concerning, though, because, if we’re honest, laughter of this specific genre is definitely slightly more sinister than a laugh of pure relief. There’s an undeniable note - not that any of us would ever admit it - of amusement. So what’s going on here? Are we all bad people, under the surface? Or is this response neutral (and thus acceptable), morally speaking? After all, it’s not like we can help laughing when we see the pantomime fool/stooge slip on a banana peel or whatever; it’s instinctive.

The “official” word for this is a German one, and captures the nuance better than anything we have in English; Schadenfreude: “taking pleasure in others’ discomfort.” I’m reliably informed [by Wikipedia] that the three main ingredients/drivers for this are: Aggression, Rivalry, and Justice. Hmm. . . Well, as far as aggression, I didn’t feel any animosity towards the biker. Not at any conscious level, at least. I’d never met him, nor, as far as I know, had I ever even seen him before; I hadn’t even heard him whiz past me before the crash. So I’m ruling “aggression” out for now, and “rivalry,” too. (Unless it’s a more primal thing, i.e., I’m happy to see a potential competitor [for available mates] bite the dust. . . But I doubt it.)

This left us with “Justice,” which was, at least, the most noble-sounding of the three possible factors.

Evidently, some part of me was happy to see retribution handed down—but retribution for what? I knew nothing about him, except that he was an old, white dude. Was it something to do with his race? This was a white-guilt thing, perhaps; my time in South Africa had radicalized me without my knowledge.

Maybe it was his age: the “anti-boomer” sentiment expressed in some of my earlier posts was less ironic than I realized.

Or, maybe, my moral high-ground had even pettier foundations, like: “That’s what you get for rubbernecking, you nosy bastard,” (or “for wearing that silly-looking jacket in the middle of the day.”)

Obviously, none of these theories are too satisfying—none of them reflect too well on yours truly. According to Wikipedia, it seemed like I was fucked regardless: apparently, there’s a negative correlation between “Schadenfreude” and self-esteem: the lower the latter, the more often/more intensely we experience the former.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Wikipedia, my old friend, had turned on me, not just armchair-psychoanalyzing me without my consent, but outing me as an insecure, spiteful little cretin. E tu, Wikipedius? This is the thanks I got for donating $5 back in 2018, I guess.

I know; I’m shooting the messenger. ‘Pedius was just relaying the facts. This couldn’t have been easy for him, either. Still, I resented his accusation; and, whether he liked it or not, these were fightin’ words, and I wasn’t going to go down easily. (“You want low self-esteem? I’ll show you low self-esteem!”)

But I knew I still needed a credible defense; anything to justify—even just in part—my apparent moral shortcomings. But what on earth would it be? I prayed long and hard into night, begging any/all deities I could think of to help get me off the hook. In the end, one of them must have heard me, and taken pity. Not a top level one, I don’t think, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. The divine assistance came in a somewhat camouflaged form. It took me a couple of sleepless nights before things clicked, but click they certainly did. . .

Make sure to subscribe to be kept up to date on our hunt for revenge/justice:

Share

Subscribe now

In the previous post (linked here),

we were talking about how that old found-footage of people doing things like defending drunk-driving could serve as more than just a stick to beat our forebears with. (Not that it can’t be that, too.)

Here’s one of those clips in question, for reference:

I’d been wondering aloud whether this sort of footage might actually be more relevant to our own lives than we’d like to think; it gives us a peek into the future, showing us just how ignorant/boneheaded we’ll come to look/sound in a few years. And this might inspire us to examine our own entrenched positions - or at least remind us not to get too dogmatic in our defense of them.

So that’s one side of the coin; the Cautionary Tale side. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Now, I don’t know any of those specific pro-DUI/anti-seatbelt car-owners from the videos personally, so they may not have changed their opinions/habits over time, but the stats tell us that they probably did: 90% of folks now wear their ‘belts today (compared to, like, 15% as recently as the 1980s), and this trends upward every year. So, these sorts of videos should also be taken as inspiration: they teach us how quickly things can change; things like social norms, public sentiment, and political will. (Again, look how confident that all of them were that they were on the right side of history.) These are all pretty powerful sentiments when it comes to social change - and ones that are extra important in a world where it’s easy to be overwhelmed, and to fall into defeatism/nihilism. These videos remind us that “Nobody cares until everyone does,” a phenomenon summed up well by this video (if you can disregard the abrasive audio):

The slightly ironic thing is that it does take a certain degree of [healthy] cynicism, in that you have to accept that a significant percentage of people (far more than we might realize/hope/prefer) fall into the “bulk” of the behavioral bell-curve. As much as we’d all like to think of ourselves as trend-setters, Free-Thinkers, and definitely-not-sheeple, the truth is that most of us are the people sitting on the hill in the video above. Even if we want to dance, we won’t join in unless/until it’s socially acceptable. This holds true in general life: the average person doesn’t have the time/interest to be informed - let alone to form their own distinct, nuanced opinion on - whatever your given cause/movement may be.

. . . on that note, make sure you’re subscribed. Everyone else is, so you’re missing out!!

Subscribe now

Share

Anyway, this means (and this is where the cynicism comes in, even if it’s just under the heading of: “Work smarter, not harder”) that the “cares” in “Nobody cares until everyone does” doesn’t have to mean actually cares, then, but rather: “is willing to be seen appearing to care.” This sounds like semantics, but it’s an important distinction, the upshot being that it’s usually not worth trying to get people to actually give a shit, or to be comprehensively informed about whatever it is you desperately want them to be. (Not at first, at least.) That’s very noble, but it’d take a ton of resources - if it were even possible. People are simply too resistant to change - especially if it seems like it’ll be socially risky, or will require any real activation energy . . . and that’s whether the status quo helps them or not.

All of this, by the way, is stuff that people with far less noble aspirations than you and I (and with far greater resources) have been fully aware of for a good while now. They know that if you really want to make things happen, you’re better off following the Golden Rule (as far as getting what you want): Ask for forgiveness, not permission. As in, if you want to implement something/or not for your own benefit, just do it. Deal with the consequences later. Wanna send troops to Iraq? Do it. Or charge people more for whatever subscription service you offer? Do it. Wanna sell their data in the process? Do it! They’ll put up a stink, but they’ll get over it eventually. They might even come to take your side! (Is it Stockholm Syndrome? Or something else?)We see this everywhere. Just look at how you still get working-class people defending Musk, et al., or even stuff like the $7.25 federal minimum wage in the US (the equivalent of about 5 gbp today. . . but at times it’s dropped to the equivalent of as low as 3.50!). It’s been the same since 2009, despite massive rises in inflation, house prices, gas prices, and the general cost of living. Those numbers/rates, though, like the “too big to fail” Wall St. banks [and their massive bailout packages], aren’t decided/managed/controlled by any elected officials/governing body. . . and yet look what happens: invariably, we acquiesce. In general, there are no ongoing, large-scale protests (for Iraq, I guess, but by the time we pulled everyone out of the region, the damage had been done), no bipartisan political movements, no collective action, etc. We grumble, but invariably knuckle down and keep moving, blaming each other, or immigrants, or some other nebulous force to blow off steam as/when needed.

Another perfect example: look at what Zuckerberg, Bezos, Apple, et al., did during the internet boom in the early 2000s. They went hog wild, playing god with all sorts of behaviorally manipulative algorithms/software and shiny, sweatshop-made devices, taking advantage of an American legal/political system that was (and still is) completely unequipped to manage this exponential rise in complexity and interconnectedness. Sure, our buddy Zuck gets called into senate hearings and fined a few million every couple of years, but so what? The damage is done. He’s made his billions, and has become arguably one of the most politically/socially influential people of all time. He sets the tune, and the government, along with billions of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp-consumers, march to it. Was any permission requested? No, of course not. And yet, we forgive. If, back in the mid-2000s, he would have gone around explaining the multifarious intentions of Facebook and the sociocultural and political implications of his actions (if he could have even known them), people would have tuned out, or expressed their disinterest.

In fairness, maybe he did try to get permission - but has anyone read more than a line and a half of any Terms and Conditions page, ever? Not I. But this only proves the point: he knew, and is showing us, that people will sacrifice pretty much everything - their privacy, attention, money, dignity - for absolutely nothing more than the ever-elusive reassurance that they’re not “missing out.” Once we were hooked, it didn’t matter if the downsides became public knowledge.

Until a few decades ago, the gap in political/tech literacy between the average person and the people at the bleeding edge of the metaphorical Wild West (of tech/innovation, etc.) has been somewhat manageable: The “innovators,” “mavericks,” and “disruptors” pushed the boundaries into the unknown (i.e., a legal/ethical gray area), and made a killing along the way, but the lovable old local cops always caught up a couple of years later, slightly out of breath, to deliver the slap(s) on the relevant wrist(s). The cycle continued on like this for centuries, driving society forward™. A little bit of lag between the bleeding edge and the trailing gen. pop. was fine. Hard-workin’, god-fearin’ folks could at least see/understand the gist of the Wild West, even if they didn’t want any part of it.

But what happens when one guy in this footrace (that’s gone on for tens of thousands of years) stumbles upon a motorbike, or even just a segway [and uses it to consolidate his lead to the point where it’s completely insurmountable]?

There’s a theory called Moore’s Law which says that technology (microchips, etc.) double in capability every two years, while reducing in price/size. This might be a good thing, if it weren’t for the fact that nothing else has kept pace. For example, it’s said that, if vehicles had advanced at the same pace, they’d cost nothing more than a few pennies, they’d be able to go 1,000,000 miles an hour, and get 1,000,000 miles to the gallon. Alas, not only have the other material aspects of our lives failed to keep pace, but our general understanding of things has, too. We have no understanding whatsoever of most of the stuff we use, consume, and ingest on a day-to-day basis How many people actually understand how a lightbulb or a toilet works, let alone wifi, Or their computer’s motherboard? We’re increasingly alienated from almost all aspects of our lived experience.

Point being: the gap in resources/knowledge between social classes/between those on the cutting edge and those who weren’t was microscopic compared to what it is today. If this were a boxing match, the ref would’ve stopped the fight.

The power dynamic between these elites and the rest of society has become closer to something from the pre-industrial, or even feudal age. Our tech billionaires have more power and influence (by far) than our elected officials, yet have had to pass no sort of test/evaluation neither of their mental states, nor of their intentions for themselves or society, nor anything else. And yet there’s nothing we can do about this, other than hope they decide, on some ego-/drug-fueled flight of fancy, to divert us from our headlong course towards climate collapse.

It’s worth mentioning that the risk of the general, working public banding together to reject change is especially low, by the way, in a culture built on the back of puritanical values like work ethic/hyper-individualism; one in which both our problems/sins/shortcomings – poverty, mental health, climate change, etc. – and the responsibility for resolving them (and therefore getting to heaven) lay at the feet of the individual. . . but I’m sure this is just a coincidence!

We may need to confront the fact that the high-minded ideas we have about “government” - or governance, or autonomy, or the ability of the average person to make well-informed decisions in pursuit of their own “rational self-interest,” might be a little outdated. The fact that we aren’t capable of navigating/resisting these immensely complex issues we face, nor the immensely powerful forces working against us. All of the conditions necessary to do so - time, disposable income, creativity, civic pride, faith in institutions, general optimism - have all been systematically neutered. (While the opposite: greed, hyper-individualism, etc., have been incentivized.) We’ll need an organized, collaborative effort.

Besides, the “Don’t Tread on Me”/“Give Me Liberty or Give me Death” stuff doesn’t have as much rhetorical bite when it’s being shared and discussed on websites that are harvesting data from us around the clock, and that wouldn’t host any material that genuinely threatened their bottom line. How can we begin to talk about what a “Nanny State,” or “[Big] Government,” or “The Market” should look like if we don’t even know what it actually is?

Defending the sanctity of “The Marketplace of Ideas” was fine when we were talking about a town of, like, two dozen agrarians, max - and when their ideas/inventions/etc. weren’t capable of affecting billions of people. . . numbers we literally can’t even comprehend. The relationship between Actors used to be linear, quantifiable, and pretty much analogous: I give you one (1) cow, you give me a bushel of apples (125, roughly), or your daughter (11, nearly 12), and that was it. Nice doing business with you, cousin; until next time. But this is no longer the case. Things like “derivatives” and “futures” and 129-page Terms and Conditions Agreements are intentionally designed to be impenetrable for the average citizen - even though our lives are shaped by this stuff.

Wait. . . Maybe that was the cyclist’s message! A Lament for Yesteryear! For the “Good Ol’ Days,” back when things were simple and pure and good. For a time when you could see where your money was going; where you felt like things were in your hands, for better or worse. His use of the “guillotine,” that time-honored tool, was no accident. The medium was the message. This was implicit rejection of the modern world and its trappings, where things are outsourced, automated, over-complicated.

Perhaps he’d been radicalized on some bodybuilding/beefcake forum; having decided he couldn’t spend one more second in this dystopian, Low-T hellscape, he’d set out to make a martyr of himself.

He’d become one of those Red Pill guys who fetishized the Ancient World. You know who I’m talking about; the ones who say stuff like: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” The Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity™ guys. . .

Definitely no homo-erotic undertones here! (It tickles me that these folks always seem to idolize Patrick Bateman from American Psycho as some sort of paragon of stoicism/pro-capitalist “grindset” work ethic, or whatever. If they aren’t being ironic, that is, which I don’t think they are.)

But we mustn’t laugh at our biker friend; this could have been any of us. You never know what these internet echo chambers will do to someone. (I’ve lost more family/close friends to the 🐺 Furry Community 🐾 than I care to count.)

Anyway, I pulled some strings, and actually managed to get my hands on the portrait our [apparently freshly-waxed] biker had taken at a local agency moments before he set off on his Last Ride (destination: Eternal Glory) . . .

Here’s the link to that post, in case you missed it:

Anyway, having grown up in the US, my first thought (after sending my thoughts and prayers to the now-seemingly-headless man’s loved ones, obviously) was of Litigation: We’ve gotta figure out who’s at fault here (and if I should prepare to be called as a witness in a grueling, protracted trial).

This is where things got sticky. Was there even fault to allocate? Nobody had thrown a banana skin or oil slick onto the road to sabotage the cyclist; nobody had even been around/operating the truck (so this wasn’t an Alec Baldwin thing where there’d been some sort of ill-fated breakdown in communication between any of the staff/crew/grips).

But could we really blame the makeshift guillotine itself? Was it not just minding its own business? I guess so. But do any guillotines kill people ever, then? With that logic, the most you could get them (i.e. guillotines) on was “involuntary manslaughter;” they’re just puppets at our mercy, after all.

What about the even worse stuff, then, like napalm, or smallpox blankets? Are they protected under this principle, too? If you ask a lot of “Guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people™” people, they’d have to say yes, right? Everything that happens, ever, is solely the responsibility of the Individual Actor. We must let the “Free Market” [of information/choice] decide. Things will - and therefore must - be left to sort themselves out, however long that process takes.

I can see the appeal of all this, but I’d have an easier time getting on board if it weren’t also the case that these same advocates also seem to have no problem with criminalizing marijuana and crack cocaine, nor with keeping prisons privatized/filled with all sorts of non-violent offenders. (…It’s almost as if… no… surely not…)

On top of that, it’s become manifestly clear over the past few decades that this Trickle-Down™-adjacent line of thinking was flat-out untrue, which also didn’t help their case (as far as trusting things to even out). Turns out, a system centered on the accumulation of wealth can - and will - only lead to greater inequality. Who could’ve seen it coming!?

So, yeah, we were talking about how this ostensibly virtuous, hard-line approach to Liberty™ is actually applied pretty inconsistently - incoherently, even - in the real world, and also how it turns out that we actually don’t mind making some concessions here and there [as far as our god-given rights go], although we’ll certainly put up a stink first (as evidenced by our pro-DUI drivers in last post’s video: “You’re telling me a hardworkin’ guy like me can’t kill a 12-pack of Bud Light and go for a Friday night joyride anymore!? I didn’t know we were living in fucking NORTH KOREA!!)

The banning of smoking indoors/on planes was another example of such a shift, 99.99 (repeating, of course) percent of which have already happened and are therefore taken for granted, or altogether forgotten about. Like how it’s inconceivable to us today that children used to just wake up and walk over to work in the coal mine or factory.

At the time, though, I’d bet you had folks arguing that implementing any sort of childrens’/workers’ rights laws was against the spirit of the free market/bad for business (and therefore unethical/unpatriotic/sacrilegious). The government shouldn’t ever get involved in private business, nor insert itself between capital and labor (and speak for either party) - that would be tyranny. Only the individual knows what’s right for the individual.

Kind of the same argument as the anti-seatbelt crowd: If I want to do something that puts my life in danger, whatever that thing is, I should be allowed. Thus, if the humble laborer “agrees” to sell their waking hours to me [for pennies on the dollar], we must let him. (Never mind the implications of this, for example that I’m then incentivized to create the social conditions whereby laborers have little choice but to take such a raw deal.)

At any rate, I imagine that the proponents of now-outdated and obviously inhumane norms probably got much less vocal about their beliefs once they sensed public opinion changing.

But that raises an interesting point, as far as our DUI-videos go. Back then - for almost all of human history, in fact - people could be as reactionary/bone-headed as they wanted, and change their tune later on down the line as/when necessary. We had no choice but to take someone’s word for it when/if they professed to have always been on the right side of history, or when they claimed that things were better in Their Day, or how they “would have gone pro [if they hadn’t messed up their knee]”.

That’s what we were working with: hearsay, trial and error, Chinese whispers, etc.; communicating with each other - but also down through the generations - with little more than cave paintings and smoke signals at our disposal. Thousands and thousands of years of pretty much having to start from scratch every generation, re: figuring out stuff like “how the world works,” and how most people (even our leaders/the ones we look up to) are filled up to their eyebrows with bullshit. No wonder history has tended to repeat itself: unless you were a trained historian (pretty tough, if you weren’t a royal or in some other esteemed position) you were pretty much flying blind, at the whims of basic human nature; learning every single lesson the hard way (like every other species).

Thankfully, we now have better tools to record things, giving us more data about the way things were, and about the people that came before us - how they actually thought and lived. With our mythologies having lost their luster; we’re no longer obligated to give the past - or those who lived through it - undue reverence. So that’s the “fun” thing about all this tech, I guess: if you like “gotcha” moments, you can pretty much have your fill. The average person’s mistakes/misapprehensions are on display for the world to see, judge, and ridicule…and it turns out, the average person makes a ton of mistakes, and has a ton of misapprehensions - meaning there’s effectively infinite low-hanging fruit, since everything’s a matter of public record. In a climate where regular people (especially young ones) are made to feel pretty disenfranchised/bitter about the state of the world - and those who had a hand in shaping it - it’s no wonder we dine out on all this. We might not have much, but at least we have the moral high ground.

But I wonder if we’re leaving meat on the bone here (to switch food-centric metaphors); maybe there’s some practical use we can get from these, too, beyond simple amusement.

For example, maybe we should be grateful that we now have irrefutable evidence of just how simple-minded we are; how boneheaded; how myopic. Now, I’m not saying the subjects of those interviews are dullards because they have those specific opinions. (They could still very well could be dullards, of course, that’d just be a separate issue.) The point is, those folks are no different to any of us; just swap out their manifestly false/absurd/self-destructive opinions for any current one(s) you want.

Videos like these show us how silly and backwards all of us will inevitably be made to look; how willingly we’ll argue against our own best interests - things like our health, happiness, and security - in the name of essentially inconsequential (when it comes to our day-to-day existence, that is), abstract things, like “National Values™,” “the Free Market;” how we’ll get red in the face over things we don’t even understand, like the “national debt” or “GDP.” Look how confident they (the DUI-defenders) are; how self-assured. Not one of them thinks they’re going to be on the wrong side of history, or that they’ll be a laughing stock within just a couple of decades - or just within a generation.

So, we can beat them (our poor old, much-maligned boomers, that is) over the head all day long, but we’d be falling into the same trap they did.

Obviously, seeing it from this lens is slightly less cathartic - it’s way more fun to think that those videos are far more a window into the past than any sort of mirror. It also requires resisting our nature: in our estimation, we are stronger, faster, and smarter than anyone who came before (and we now have video proof!) Alas, 100 billion people have come and gone before us; all of whom were convinced they were special and unique, too. (If you’re interested, this bias, where we assume the way things are now is the best they’ve ever been, or ever will be, is called “presentism.”)

This sort of footage, then, gives us a hitherto impossible peek behind the curtain, showing us the self-delusion, unwarranted confidence, and admittedly impressive degree of boneheadedness that’s been required to make it as far as we’ve made it as a species, given our pretty bleak circumstances (i.e., having to navigate a brutal, unforgiving planet while being cursed with consciousness and the knowledge of our own mortality, etc.).

So, while it’s no wonder that this stuff has come to seem like a shameful affliction in the internet age, it’s good to keep in mind that it doesn’t come from nowhere: it’s been one of our most useful tools [species-wise], letting/forcing us to prioritize meeting our basic survival/reproductive needs above all else, while filtering out all other distractions and concerns. This ties in with our impressive resilience/adaptability, which explain how we can get desensitized to these ostensibly earth-shattering (or Liberty-impinging) changes and get on with our lives so quickly - for better or worse.

We touched on this in our Discontented Frogs/Rising Tide™ Life Vests post, by the way:

Throw in “love of comfort”/“general distrust of the unknown”, and it’s really no surprise that, as individuals, we’re not too great at imagining any world/civilization where things were (or could be) fundamentally different to our own - even if we’re talking about something as seemingly innocuous as being “forced” to drive sober against our will.

All this to say: our myopia/hard-headedness aren’t any sort of character flaws, or down (strictly) to low IQ. They’re baked in, and we aren’t going to be able to get rid of them - but being aware of this stuff is a good start; it should - in theory - help us to get out in front of the issue as we try to move forward, reminding us to be a little less close-minded/stubborn/dogmatic.

Of course, you’re always going to get your contrarians who will happily die on their respective hills; the “Don’t Tread on Me’s” who’d happily cut off their nose (or get sent through a windshield) to spite their face. I’m thinking of the people who buy these sorts of things:

Ohhhh…..hang on a second… maybe that’s what our biker’s motive was! Some sort of eccentric form of protest/social commentary, like those avant-garde “artistes” who put their lives on the line for their extreme performance art. I’m thinking of that woman who stood naked next to a bunch of random items on a table and let the crowd do whatever they wanted to her. (It was some sort of commentary on group psychology, apparently.)

In this case, our biker’s beef was against the Nanny State (the one hell-bent on taking away our cherished weapons and medieval instruments of torture). He knew that: If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

How inspiring: a sort of real-life Walter White, refusing to be beaten down by a ball-busting wife and the unforgiving world closing in around him, deciding to take his fate into his own hands. A sort of: “You can’t fire me if I quit!”

His self-decapitation was the ultimate celebration of Individual Agency; Freedom of Choice in its purest, most fundamental form. (A shout-out to the French Revolution, maybe, what with its anti-big-government message, and all.)

A good a theory as any for his inexplicable crash, I guess.

If we can put the human tragedy aspect of it all aside for a second (it’s what he would have wanted, I’d like to think) we’d concede that his grisly fate raised some mouth-watering philosophical/legal questions around things like negligence/manslaughter/individual liberty, e.g.: If you leave a guillotine outside your house and someone happens to use it to decapitate themselves, can/should you be held responsible?

I think we can all admit that we ask ourselves this constantly. (…right?)

It’s actually not that much of a joke, in the US, at least: we’ve gone back and forth - vociferously - on this sort of thing for a while now. Not with execution machines from the French revolution, necessarily, but definitely with regard to other instruments of warfare; guns, namely. I’m sure you know how the tried-and-true NRA party line goes: “They don’t kill people [you fucking idiot], people kill people.” We usually say this sort of thing in a vaguely threatening manner, to make it clear that, if push came to shove, we’d do whatever we needed to do. (Some people, of course, like the giant dude from Happy Gilmore, don’t fuck around with any of that “subtext” nonsense…)

So, I guess if you’re a libertarian/anti-nanny state kind of person, you’d have to say “No,” right? As far as whether the driver of the “Too Much Grips” truck or the production company at large were guilty of wrongdoing? After all: Individual actors (e.g. cyclists) must be allowed to make individual decisions [which may involve self-decapitation].

Share

In fairness to the “guillotines don’t kill people” crowd, I can see that it is sort of a slippery slope: once you start baby-proofing the world, where do you stop? One man’s “common sense guardrail” is another man’s “chokehold on the neck of liberty” (or whatever). In light of this, it’s no surprise that our results, legislatively, are somewhat incongruous: Somehow, we’ve agreed to put a speed limit on our highways, but can’t seem to reach any consensus on questions like whether My Right to Hunt (or just do some target practice) with my extended-mag machine gun(s) takes precedence over your Kid’s Right to Make it Through First Grade Without Getting Shot. (There’s pros and cons to both sides, I guess. Let’s not be hasty.) Once you allow for the idea that some degree of unnecessary suffering/tragedy is acceptable (and indeed necessary; rationalizing it as “the Price of Freedom”), you open the door to all sorts of interesting theories about what Freedom and Government and Civic Society actually mean/should look like in practice.

Still, you’d think/hope there’d be a few lowest-common denominators that everyone could agree on; guardrails that are incontrovertibly a net benefit for everyone - ones that, crucially, come with so few drawbacks that there simply isn’t any logical reason to not comply. Suggestions like, “No making bio-weapons/napalm in your garage, please.” Or the mere suggestion of “driving sober.” Or of “using seatbelts.” Pretty entry-level stuff, as far as building a society that keeps unnecessary death and suffering to a minimum.

Again, though: You’d think.

Which brings us to one of my favorite videos, or at least one on which I reflect often, given how much it tells us about not only our culture, but how we (in America, but more generally, too) think:

…Incredible. How quickly things change! We could never imagine a world where people felt totally comfortable defending their right to drive drunk on live TV. This is kind of how it goes, though; it’s always impossible to imagine how things worked in the past: how it took so long for people to figure out that bloodletting or mercury didn’t cure blindness (or whatever), or that perhaps lead wasn’t a great substance to make our pipes from, or to smear all over our walls, furniture, and kids toys.

Things did change, obviously, but I’m sure the transition wasn’t seamless: I’ll bet you had loads of people arguing in defense of leeches and mercury and lead, including their god-given right to use/consume them. That was the world they knew, for better or worse. Better the devil you know. (Even things like the women’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s US had loads of detractors - many of them women!)

One of these more recent paradigm shifts was the banning of smoking indoors. The notion that this smokelessness isn’t how things were - up until so very recently! - is incomprehensible to me, and I’m sure many other people under 35 or so. It feels like a different universe, one where nobody had higher than double-digit IQs (on second thought, maybe all that lead had more of an impact than we realize); there’s simply no other explanation for their not seeing how bad an idea that was. All the facts were right in front of them! You’re saying people were just going around filling every house, car, school, and restaurant with smoke, and nobody seemed to mind!?

On every flight I take I wonder how it can possibly be that they still - in 2020-something! - have to put a No Smoking sign above every seat. Evidently, there remains a small - yet very real - cohort of chainsmoking-first-time-fliers on every plane that must be accounted for. It must be so: these companies focus-group everything. Still, it feels impossible. Maybe my being hung up on this stems from my cultural ignorance: for whatever reason, smoking - of all things - was the one product/destructive habit we were warned off (we were shunted in the direction of more suitable alternatives, like ultra-processed foods, sugars, trans fats, etc.). From what I’ve seen, smoking’s a lot less common in the US than in places like the UK, Europe, and South Africa - even among young people. So maybe the signs are for the benefit of people from those other places.

Even if that is the case, it raises a couple of questions (I’m digressing here, but oh, well): in my estimation as a somewhat-qualified social scientist, the fellow back in 28C who - due to ignorance or stubbornness or any other reason - still tries to light up is probably also the guy who has a few other habits/attitudes we might deem “regressive” or “socially abrasive.”

I’m picturing the tripartite Venn Diagram of “Heavy Smokers” + “First Time Fliers” + “People Oblivious/Resistant to Modern Social Norms/Signage” … in my mind, there’s a lot of overlap going on. Point being, I think it’d be a safe bet that Mr. 28C (and thus those around him), would almost certainly benefit from a few other reminders, too. Requests to please refrain “from slapping The Wife if/when she talks back,” and “from referring to other ethnicities by any of the slurs/epithets listed on the pamphlet in the seat-back in front of you.”

But we never see/hear anything like that; not once have I seen an illuminated sign that made any reference to: Slapping/Groping/Cross-Burning/Bestiality/etc.

Strange, isn’t it? Their silence is deafening.

Maybe these airlines are just single-issue (i.e., anti-Big Tobacco) activists, I guess; but come on, use your platform for good, why don’t you? What about FGM, for christ’s sake!? Take a fucking stand! I know; I’m being obtuse. It’s not really that the airlines are spineless, fence-sitting cowards. They’re far less worried about the wellbeing of your lungs/your wife/that other trivial nonsense, and more about keeping their plane not-on-fire and its occupants alive.

That said, maybe there’s something to it (i.e. protecting their bottom line). As mentioned, we know these companies have focused-grouped everything… I’m reminded of Michael Jordan’s response back in the ‘90s when asked why he refused to speak out in support of progressive social movements: “Republicans buy shoes, too.” Is that what this was, then, Delta? United? BA? …Hmm!? Some sort of self-satisfied equivocation, a reluctance to alienate your wealthiest customers? A tacit admission that “Hey, man, bigots, abusers, savages, war criminals, and kidnappers buy plane tickets, too”…!?

Questions for another day, I guess; that’s all the time we have. I got side-tracked by the smoking stuff; we’ll get to the point - or at least start heading in that direction - next time.

Given that I’m a serious/highly ethical journalist, I booked a flight this past weekend to test my theory. Before I ripped them a new one, I wanted to make sure the airlines were still fence-riding, effectively condoning anti-social/potentially criminal behavior by refusing to drop their ridiculous “libertarian”/anti-Nanny State spiel.

My worst fears were confirmed: my seat had been taken by a character I can only describe as “unsavory.” But it was too late to get off; we’d already started taxiing.

Things went as you might expect: sure enough, for the next 13 hours (why, why, why did I book a direct flight to Sydney, of all places!? Was there some part of me, deep down inside, that wanted this?) I became his prison wife/masseur. For the sake of my fellow passengers, I complied willingly. Quoth Big Daddy: It wasn’t gonna suck itself [babygirl]. And he was right. A dirty 'job, but somebody had to do it.

We actually ended things on pretty good terms. I managed to snap a pic as I was de-boarding (he was staying on; the next leg of the flight was to Thailand, his final destination):

Share