The other day I was out driving around — you know, just motorvating, experiencing the wonder and freedom of the internal combustion engine before it’s banned — and I saw a sign for some kind of “heritage festival” in one of the little farming towns nearby. So I stopped, hoping for one last nostalgic glimpse of what America used to be.

Big mistake.

Yeah yeah, I know, what part of “everything in Clown World is fake and gay” am I failing to process? Still, this was a town of a few hundred people out in the boonies. Surely, I thought, the poz can’t have totally taken over…

And to be fair, there was less poz. For one thing, they were still holding the damn thing, meaning that people were actually getting out in the sunshine and walking around and interacting with each other. Cotton candy, dunking booths, carriage rides, the whole deal, no social distancing and very, very few face diapers, and those only on the faces of the die-hard virtue signalers…

But nonetheless, they persisted. As did the other kinds of Leftist (for convenience) virtue signalers. No BLM shit that I saw, but plenty of rainbow crap. Plenty of t-shirts with slogans like “love has no color” and “hate has no home here” and so forth. A few librarian types with shirts touting vaccinations and “trusting the science” to go along with their Sriracha-enema expressions….

And it seems no town in AINO, however small, can escape the Pox. Even there, you had a few grossly obese White women with bizarrely colored hair pushing around strollers full of adopted Africans. Another set of fat White women, also dyed up like poisonous jungle frogs, hauling their little hafus around.* A few of those hafus, all growned up, and a few full bloods, with blonde girlfriends of course. And all the might’ve-been-pretty blonde girls with huge obnoxious tattoos and face piercings. The town itself was straight out of a Grant Wood painting, but the townspeople belonged in the Mos Eisley cantina, same as it ever was.

Makes you wish George and the boys would’ve just fucking surrendered at Valley Forge, don’t it?

Speaking of George and the boys, the vast majority of the virtue signaling — I’m talking “makes you want to slit your wrists and be done with it” levels — came from the “right” (again, for convenience). Every third guy was wearing some variant of those “wounded warrior” t-shirts. Freedom isn’t free. Stand for the flag, kneel for the cross. Land of the free, because of the brave. These colors don’t run. And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo, ad fucking nauseam. Another third was sportsball and NASCAR, and of course every man, and no few women, was wearing caps with professional sportsball logos. The bratwurst was delicious, I’ll give them that.

Let’s be optimistic and call these people the “desperately patriotic.” Twenty years ago, dressing up like that was a joke. It was literally a big part of Yakov “What a Country!” Smirnoff’s act.

Nowadays, even old people are wearing their “veteran” caps, and while it’s nice to see the Vietnam guys finally get their parade, advertising your military service — especially your peacetime service — is the kind of thing they used to make fun of with “Gen. Jack D. Ripper” jokes. Twenty years ago, country singer Toby Keith

was a national punchline. “We’ll put a boot in your ass, courtesy of the red, white, and blue.” These days, Toby Keith’s an amateur. Walking around this little small town festival was like getting a red white and blue flag shoved up your ass — one made in China and delivered by Amazon Prime.

It’s that kind of thing that makes me suspect we have a long, long, long way to go, Kameraden. In my blackest-pill moods, I think all these people will march willingly into the boxcars. Because muh prinzibuls! Muh Constitution!

On the other hand, I wasn’t kidding — these people are desperately patriotic. This little heartland town’s entire vibe reminded me of a guy who can no longer deny the very obvious fact that his girlfriend is cheating on him, but still refuses to take that final step. I’m sure you’ve all seen it — she’s openly texting her side piece, while he’s making plans for romantic dinners and a getaway weekends.

That only ever ends one way…. but sometimes it takes years, because he’s afraid he can’t do better and she’s got it too good mooching off him to put him out of his misery.

*A term we need to nationalize from the Japanese, to avoid the censor.

UPDATE: Per Dinothedoxie‘s suggestion, below, if the great mass of flag-wavin’ normies are reachable — which I doubt, personally, but we owe it to humanity to try — then what they need is a symbol. I know I bang on this drum all the time, but part of the deep appeal of ALL forms of collectivism is the uniform. Cat Fancy had the slickest ones, no doubt, but the Soviets were no slouches either. And not just their military uniforms — quick, pull up a mental picture of “an intellectual.” It’s 100:1 that we all saw the same thing — a tweedy, sloppy, down-at-heel-looking goateed fellow with big problem glasses. The Bolsheviks invented that look. That’s a smashing success, one we can learn from.

To that end, I suggest repurposing a blast from the past.

That’s Custer’s flag from Little Bighorn, but I prefer to call it “the Cavalry Flag” (echoes “Calvary”) or “the Flag that Won the West.” It’s obviously an American flag, but it’s a throwback to when America was a real country. (I know, I know, to really accomplish that, you’d need something pre-1861, but not everyone out there knows as much history as we do). It looks like the old Betsey Ross flag, with the circle, but with more stars. And it’s got that indentation in the middle, whatever you call the triangle snipped out to form a guidon. If you know what a guidon symbolizes — the smallest tactical unit capable of acting independently, basically — that’s a real plus; exactly the kind of symbolism we need. If you don’t, well, it looks old-timey and historical, which makes it interesting and distinctive.

What say you?

Remember that old movie? Don’t worry, I don’t either (though evidently one of our regular commenters does). But it’s one of those movies that even if you haven’t seen, you’ve “seen,” thanks to endless pop culture references to it.* In this case, it’s the sentence “the only way to win is not to play.”

Such is the case with politics today.

For instance: Via SovietMen, a link to a piece about the MAGAtards, by David Cole.

[Before we begin, a disclaimer. I’d normally put stuff like this in the footnotes, but I want to be absolutely clear on this, to head off any potential distractions in the comments: This is the first piece I’ve ever read by this guy, so I’m writing about it blind, as it were. I have no idea who this dude is or what he’s about, save that he has apparently gotten a lot of grief for challenging the official numbers of The Worst Event Ever.

I have no dog in that fight. As a (formerly) professional historian, I know how archives work, and the kinds of statistics that can and can’t be derived from them, and their relative accuracy. I can also recognize an Official Narrative when one is being shoved down my throat, and when it comes to battling Official Narratives, see above: the only way to win is not to play. I have zero interest in any speculation of any sort in re: the numbers of The Worst Event Ever, because a) I’m not conversant with the relevant sources, and b) I find that kind of thing beyond boring regardless of the topic, and c) once more, with feeling, I have no dog in that fight. Please don’t attempt to re-litigate it in the comments here].

Like a good magic trick, this one has three parts. First, the pledge:

Unite the Right, 1/6, the Baked Alaska/Augustus Invictus-led mob attack on a community center “white privilege” seminar (which I covered back in 2018), the MAGA anti-mask mall invasions I covered in January…what ground was gained from any of it? I mean, I can tell you what was lost. Every one of those aktions led to either genuinely bad things that deservedly sullied the MAGA brand, or openings for the media to distort the event to sully the MAGA brand (like the “fine people” quote, which the media did indeed distort, leading to a momentum-killing side skirmish in which the right had to play defense to explain the “akshully” of the quote just to regain the lost ground).

I had no idea that there were “MAGA” groups out there doing “direct action,” as the Left calls it. Frankly, I’m surprised any of them had the sack. What, was there no sportsball game on? Did the grill run out of propane?

The turn:

The 1/6 hearings were purposely engineered so that cops would take the stand and big-shot rightists would slam them. Democrats could then defend cops, because Dems realize that they overplayed their hand last year with “defund the police,” and now their only way out in the face of skyrocketing crime rates is to do a switcheroo where they get you to seem anti-cop so they can pretend they were pro-cop all along (exactly what Biden is doing), thus robbing rightists of the ability to exploit the crime stats to their own advantage.

Just so. Let’s give the Left this: Though they’re all stuck in their cosplay fantasies about The Sixties ™, at least they learned a lesson or two from The Sixties ™. Well, actually in this case it was “the Seventies,” specifically 1972, but roll with me here: In that presidential campaign, the Dems were so inept that they allowed Richard Nixon to somehow run as the antiwar candidate. Against the war that he, personally, was right at that moment running. It was one hell of a trick — they didn’t call him Tricky Dick for nothing — but when you’ve got your hippie goof candidate out there promising to amnesty draft dodgers and a guaranteed national income (just in case anyone thought that was a new idea), you don’t exactly have to be Machiavelli. When your candidate is the “run away with your tail between your legs” candidate, the “peace with honor” guy seems a Metternich-level statesman.

According to Cole, and I agree, the Dems are trying something similar here, and the Republicans, being at best too stupid to live, are helping them. (We’ll stipulate, for the sake of argument, that there are a few Republicans out there who still think of themselves as a separate party, and not merely the rightist wing of The Uniparty). Like Nixon pledging peace while engineering an invasion of Cambodia, so the BLM-enabling, police-defunding Democrats are posing as the party of law and order.

Finally, the prestige:

There are currently two ways for L.A. MAGAs to make a concrete difference electorally.

If you don’t like masks or lockdowns, tell me…what do you think is more effective? Angrily harassing shoppers and diners? Or canvasing for Larry Elder in the recall?

Those MAGA morons could be out there working for the recall or collecting signatures to defeat Soros. But no. They wanna brawl. Because that’s what MAGAs have become: apologists for unrest.

Say WHAT?!?

All that astute analysis of the “right” beclowning themselves by playing the Left’s game, on the Left’s turf, with the Left’s referees, and that’s your solution? Vote harder?!?

Since we started with computers, let’s end there. I look at even the Dissident-curious — and let’s not forget that Taki publishes Z Man — and all I can think of is the dumbass IT guys from my old job at Globohomocorp. Did you shut down and reboot? Oh, you did, and it didn’t work? Hmmm…. maybe you should try shutting down and rebooting again.

The system is broken beyond all hope of repair. What part of “they stole the 2020 presidential election” are y’all still not getting? Vote as hard as you like, gang. Vote three, four, five times, like the Dems do. Have all your pets and dead relatives and dead relatives’ pets vote, like the Dems do. None of it matters, because they count the votes. And even if you somehow get more votes than they do, it still won’t matter — some Hawaiian Judge will declare the Dem the winner, because reasons. Let me go ahead and be the first to congratulate Gov. Newsom on his successful recall campaign.

The social contract is broken. Participating in it — in ANY capacity — just gives a fig leaf of legitimacy to an utterly lawless system. The only way to win is not to play.

*Lots of films like that. Funny, too, how the bits that stick in pop culture are often minor parts of the original film. The “Russian roulette” scene from The Deer Hunter, for instance, is about five minutes of what feels like a seven hour film, but it’s the only one “everybody knows.” The “Ride of the Valkyries” scene, complete with “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” is the only thing anyone remembers about Apocalypse Now, but that was one of the less absurd scenes in that movie (which was absurd on purpose, and I love). And so on.

courtesy of Pickle Rick

Curious in Japan asks

What are we to call those who wish crash it all?

Since Left/Right doesn’t apply anymore – and something objective such as “those damn dirty hippies!” isn’t broad enough now that everyone is drilling holes in the bottom of the boat called civilization – can the rest of us get a good name for the group of them? I’d prefer something in German.

Do you have any suggestions?

I usually use “shit-flinging nihilists,” but admit that’s deficient in so many ways. If we want to go highbrow with it, we could call them The New Werthers. In addition to sounding like a pretentious college-rock band — always a plus — it alludes to the modern “Left’s” (for convenience) total dearth of ideas. This is one of those stories my historian’s Spidey Sense tells me is apocryphal, but apparently Europe was plagued with young men killing themselves after reading Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. As we all know, you could get an SJW to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of winter if Rachel Maddow did it first, or if Orange Man said not to. Since they’re totally imitative and not-so-secretly long to kill themselves…

Speaking of band names, I’d just call them The Cult, but there was a band called The Cult, and at one time they kicked ass. (They were like The Doors — lots of their stuff was terrible, but when they were on, they were world class. So much like The Doors were they that their singer, Ian Astbury, went on to tour with the surviving Doors, because I guess everyone needed the money). I’d hate to insult The Cult by comparing them to SJWs, even if the guys in the band are themselves Leftists (I have no idea what their politics actually are, nor care to know). The Moldbug / Heartiste suggestion, “the Cathedral,” seems too esoteric, not to mention blasphemous.

I checked the google machine, which informs me that the German word for “nihilist” is “Nihilist,” so no help there.

So I guess I’m buffaloed. Any suggestions, gang?

From Some Guy,

How do the university faculty get along with the coaches and assorted employees? Is there some sort of rivalry, or are the sports teams mostly left alone as they are a major source of revenue?

In my experience, they’re almost entirely different worlds. Even at your SPLACs, in my limited experience, the ball coach exists on an entirely different plane. The faculty constantly complain about sportsball, but since at many SPLACs half the student body plays something — it has to be that way, given the numbers, if they want to field a team — they know there’s nothing to be done; shut down sportsball, and alienate half the student body. So the faculty just ignore the coaches, and vice versa. There’s pretty much zero professional overlap — a few times a semester, all the student-athletes come up with these forms the professors have to sign, to prove continuing academic eligibility, and that’s about it.

At Flyover State, sportsball was for all intents and purposes a professional program. I don’t mean that the Mighty Mammals were a particularly good team — they weren’t; the best they’d do is one of those week-before-Christmas games on ESPN 8, the Ocho — but in the academic sense of “professional.” The law school, the med school, the dental school, that kind of thing — at the highest administrative level, they usually fall under the “division of graduate and professional studies,” and they’re completely separate from the rest of the school. Students could request books from the Law and Med libraries, but it was a pain in the butt, and in general the great unwashed mass of undergrads wasn’t allowed in their buildings. Similarly, there was almost no contact, professionally or socially, between the faculty.

Sportsball was like that, it being understood by all and sundry that the “student-athletes” were athletes first and “students” only notionally. As you might imagine, there was an entirely separate, rather large apparatus for the sole purpose of keeping Cthulhuvious and Sasqueetchia academically eligible. You’d occasionally see these magnificent specimens of intellectual excellence in your classes if you taught the freshman-level surveys, but their training facilities, dorms, etc. had the kind of massive, shoot-to-kill security that surrounds a Democrat politician at a “defund the police” rally.

In short, then, there’s not enough contact between the faculty and the Sportsball Guild for any kind of relationship — antagonistic, friendly, or rivalrous — to develop in the first place.

From texinole,

What’s the biggest change of mind you’ve had, political or ideological, since turning 30?

That’s a toughie. I’m a totally different guy in middle age.

[Quick aside: That’s why stuff like high school reunions have always bugged me, or getting friend requests from old high school buddies back when I was on Facebook. I hated every fucking second of high school, but even if it had been the Al Bundy-like highlight of my existence, the fact remains that I was a very different person back then, and I sincerely hope that’s true of all my classmates as well. Thus high school reunions strike me as absurd; it’s like a reunion of everyone on some perfectly ordinary cross-country flight from 30 years ago. Hey, remember all that turbulence over Denver? Same deal with the friend requests. No, I don’t want to grab a beer while you’re passing through town. Why would I? If the normal maturation process has happened for both of us, we’re effectively strangers, and if it hasn’t, then one of us is a creepy weirdo who’s going to freak the other one out, so let’s pass…]

In middle age, I’ve done a 180 regarding the concept of freedom. Texinole’s is a heavy question, and any discussion of “freedom” is bound to be heavier, so it seems like a cop out to post a link, but Nikolai over at Soviet Men did a whole piece on this just the other day which expresses it well:

Freedom, for most, is dangerous and unnecessary. While they cannot psychologically realize it, they’d be happier if we went back to having one Church, two sexes with clearly defined roles, a simple family structure and predictable work.

They never asked for the Enlightenment model of individualism. Nor did they demand the Nietzschean ideal of self-actualization that he never intended for everyone, anyway.

When Rousseau said you’d need to force men to be free, he wasn’t joking. It’s hard to admit the truth of that statement, especially as Rousseau, like all Leftists, quite obviously pleasured himself to the thought of forcing great masses of people to do things, but he’s right for all that. As Nikolai points out, so many people quite obviously enjoy the COVID madness, because it gives structure to their otherwise stressfully chaotic lives. Everyone, even the most rugged Marlboro Man individualist, has experienced “analysis paralysis,” that rising sense of near-panic that comes from having too many choices. Your developmentally normal person quickly snaps out of it — a mental slap upside the head in the form of “it’s just peanut butter, dummy!” usually does it — but a vast and increasing number of people never do.

Since this is my blog and it’s Friday and all that, I’ll go ahead and expand this into a nebulous Theory of Everything: What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.

If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small.” If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.

It works outside the academy too, of course. The two main CRT loons, Robin De Angelo and that Ibram X. Kendi guy, are maxed out and they know it. They weep, because they’ve seen they have no more worlds to conquer. Ever-escalating lunacy is the only emotional escape hatch they have left. You saw the same deal with “the workers” under Communism. They’re stuck there, forever, and they know it. They can’t move up — wrong class background, comrade, plus you lack Party connections — but they can’t really move down, either, if for no other reason than the KGB, vast as it is, can’t bother with every moribund tractor factory in Krasnoyarsk. Can’t move up, can’t move down, so you drink yourself into oblivion and spend your still-conscious hours in petty backbiting.

There’s an old Russian joke, I’m told, one that even predates the Bolsheviks, that sums up the attitude perfectly: Boris and Ivan live in the same village. Boris has three cows, Ivan has none. One day Ivan is walking through the fields and stumbles over a magic lamp. He rubs it, the genie pops out, and in gratitude offers Ivan a wish. One thing, but anything. Ivan scratches his head for a moment, then says “I wish that Boris’s cows would die.”

That’s the mental world most people live in, Kameraden, here in rat utopia. There’s no realistic way to move up, since a few giant Globohomocorps control everything. But there’s no real way to move down, either, because what could “moving down” possibly mean, in a world where even our “poor” people have 60″ tvs and smartphones, and die of heart disease and diabetes? Under those conditions, “freedom” boils down to “choice of consumer products,” and it’s not liberating, it’s stressful.

Actual freedom — the ability to live your life as you choose, and to take the consequences of your choice — never registers, because how could it? As I’m told the kids say these days, everything here in Clown World is fake and gay. Our “jobs” are fake; COVID proved that (another Soviet quip: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”). Religion is fake — you can listen to an entire year’s worth of sermons from the average “Christian” preacher and not hear word one about that “Jesus” fellow, because why would you? You’re super awesome just the way you are, you multi-pierced, blue-haired genderqueer sodomite, you!

“Art” is fake and gay — every song on the radio is the same crap, written by the same two guys, “performed” by machines and fronted by whichever intersectional genderfluid Central Casting sent over this week, and as for the fine arts, they’re just google image searches, devoid of context and therefore of meaning. Quick, tell me, what’s this?

Answer: the first thing that popped up when I typed “great art” into a google image search. I know, I know, you’d expect a negro in the top spot, but as it happens this particular piece links to an ad for “great art.” The first page of results in the regular website search, of course, was all ads: “Top Ten great art Near You.” “Great art with Yelp Reviews.” “See more Great Art at Amazon.com.”

Anything that could possibly give meaning to life is fake and gay, so all that’s left is petty interpersonal drama. You’re free to choose, all right — indeed, you’re spoiled for choice — but all those choices end with Hobson. No wonder nobody wants it.

Have a great weekend, Kameraden.

I really enjoyed the latest iteration of those Castle Wolfenstein games (except the dual-player one, because I hate those). The action was as fun as it could be for a guy with “too old to be playing video games” reflexes, but it was the aesthetic I really enjoyed, and the backstory. The stuff about the Moon Base and Venus and all that was deliberate B-movie cheese, of course — and wicked fun — but nonetheless the designers captured something essential about Cat Fancy: It’s shark-like. Just as the shark dies if it stops swimming, so Cat Fancy dies the moment it runs out of worlds to conquer.

That’s one of two pillars of the collectivist personality. As they have dedicated themselves to an impossible goal, they must distract themselves at all times. I’ve often said that Trotsky’s idea of “permanent revolution” is best understood in the purely physical sense — constantly spinning, spinning, spinning in place, going nowhere, because the motion is the point. So, too, with the Nazis. Leaving aside the fascinating recent speculation about who would’ve fired the first shot on the Ostfront, that shot would’ve been fired, no question. Two collectivists, facing each other across Poland, could end no other way.

This is a crucial lesson to keep in mind when trying to predict what our current crop of collectivist overlords will do. Trying to predict specific events is of course a mug’s game, but the trend lines are easy to spot. The danger is the nearly irresistible temptation to retcon psychological events into political decisions.

Knowing full well how dumb it is to bring up World War II on the Internet, consider that a pretty reasonable case can be constructed for Operation Barbarossa. Having purged all their competent, experienced officers, the Red Army had just gotten their clocks cleaned by the Finns in the Winter War. Yeah, the Soviets “won” in the end, but with that disparity of forces, there’s pretty much no possible “win” that doesn’t look like a loss… and the Soviets, to put it mildly, were nowhere near that best-case scenario. Moreover, even if you took the show trials for exactly that — kangaroo courts — their very existence showed there was a deep rift at the very top of the Soviet leadership. Anyone, not just Hitler, could be forgiven for thinking that the Soviet Union would collapse under one big sledgehammer blow.*

It works the other way, too. If we accept the “Suvorov Thesis,” that Hitler only attacked Stalin because Stalin was gearing up to attack Hitler, then we can easily construct a similar case from The Boss’s perspective: The Wehrmacht can’t play defense. The one time they came up against anything approaching a real opponent with technological parity (the Battle of Britain), it was at best a bloody draw, more than likely a stinging defeat. And the Hitler regime was reeling, internally. No show trials for der Fuhrer, but Rudolf Hess, who was at least the number three man in the Reich and at the time Hitler’s heir apparent, had just defected to the British. Anyone, not just Stalin, could be forgiven for thinking that the Third Reich would collapse under one big sledgehammer blow.

See what I mean? Both of those cases are quite plausible, and fit with most known historical facts… and yet, they’re retcons. “Rationalizations” might even be a better word, because the thing is, even though those arguments are “logical,” and might indeed have been convincing to important people at the time, that’s not why Hitler did what he did, or why Stalin would’ve done what he would’ve done under the Suvorov Thesis. No, the truth is simpler, and much more horrifying: They would’ve done it anyway, because that’s who they were.

That’s what the Castle Wolfenstein people got right about the Nazis. Same deal with that Amazon show (which was interesting for a season) The Man in the High Castle. In the real world, there’s no possible way the Nazis could’ve invaded the USA, no matter how it turned out on the Eastern Front…

…but in the real world they would’ve tried nonetheless, somehow, because that’s just who they were. Everything Stalin, Khrushchev, et al did during the Cold War here in the real world, Hitler, Heydrich, and the gang would’ve done in the Castle Wolfenstein world where the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk went the other way.** They couldn’t have done any different, without being different people, and while it’s fun to speculate on questions like “who would’ve been the Nazi Gorbachev, who self-destructed the Reich by attempting however you say ‘perestroika’ in German,” it’s not really germane.

The point is that any rational, logical case you can construct for a particular ideological action is a retcon. In the Castle Wolfenstein world of Castle Wolfenstein, the video game series, the Nazis won the war with magic, but it doesn’t matter — all that stuff is just an excuse for some cool shoot-em-up action. The Moon Base, Venus, all that is just set dressing… but even though the details are pure fantasy, they nailed the true spirit of National Socialism. The decisions of any given Nazi, at any level — from commander of the OKW down to the lowest Pimpf — might indeed be coldly logical. They could, in fact, be the optimal decisions, given all the facts, in this world or any other. And yet, at bottom, they won’t be logical decisions; they’re ideological decisions that just happen to overlap with logic.

Thus the “decisions” of our very own Man in the High Chair, Totally Legit Joe. Leaving aside the obvious fact that the toughest decision he makes is which pudding cup to have before naptime, nonetheless someone is issuing directives from the High Chair in his name. Those directives are petulant, childish, often downright insane, and we’re baffled by them… but we shouldn’t be, Kameraden. For instance, word comes that Totally Legit Joe is going to order all active duty military to get “vaccinated.” Given that at least a third of the military isn’t “vaccinated” despite what must be overwhelming pressure, one is forced to ask: Is he trying to provoke a mutiny?

No, Kameraden, he’s not. It’s all a part of the ongoing show trials which, like Stalin’s, will end up gutting the apparat. See above, re: Hitler’s “logical” case for Barbarossa. Stalin really did purge some huge fraction of his army, including almost all of the talented, experienced officer corps, and again, he did it because that’s what collectivists do. And if military efficiency must suffer as a result…

….ahh, but there’s the insidiousness of the retcon, my friends. I was going to write “and if military efficiency must suffer, then so be it,” but there’s that earth-logic trying to sneak back in through the back door. It wasn’t that Stalin was ignorant of his decision’s likely effect on the Red Army — he knew. And it wasn’t that he didn’t care — he cared intensely about the effectiveness of his legions, because he planned to use them ASAP, whether Suvorov is right or not (see the aforementioned Winter War). It’s just that Stalin, being an ideologue, really thought his purges would improve the Red Army. Yes, he really believed that, the same way that Mao Zedong really believed his peasants could make industrial-grade steel in their backyards if they just tried hard enough.

That’s what ideologues DO, friends. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is off the table, because they’re not using earth-logic at all. There’s no plan, no grand design. Hell, there’s not even really anyone in charge; most days, the pudding-smeared High Chair in Tubman DF is empty, while President Joe lies tucked in bed with a bottle and a binkie. All the madness we see is the result of a million little apparatchiks doing what they think is best within the parameters of Zhou Bai-den Thought (“my butt’s been wiped!”). If there seems to be some pattern in it, some design, that’s at best a coincidence; most likely you’re just retconning.

This is why I keep insisting that The Incident, when it comes, will be faster than anyone expects, and dumber than anyone can imagine.

*And Soviet losses were stupendous, utterly mind-boggling, in the first few months of Barbarossa. Tanks and planes destroyed in their tens of thousands, prisoners captured in millions. Even as it became clear that OKW had underestimated Red Army strength by orders of magnitude, it was still almost inconceivable that they had anything left to fight with. Just one more push…

**This is actually the world of a fun novel, Robert Harris’s Fatherland.

Programming note #1: This is a mailbag question from Jennifer7084 that deserves its own separate post. I really appreciate all questions, especially ones like these.

Programming note #2: No, seriously, I really do. The whole “reader mailbag” thing can be overblown, and lots of people who do them seem to only be doing them for the ego-stroke — “dear internet rando I have for some reason taken as my guru, should I propose marriage to an unsuitable girl, or go meditate in a Himalayan cave for a decade?” But frankly I’m always short of material. I’m almost entirely a “reactive” kind of blogger. Which isn’t bad, but since I can’t stand trolling the internet for “news” I generally don’t have much to react to, except other bloggers, and I’m tired of being Z Man’s cut-rate also-ran Mini Me. So if you’ve got ’em, send ’em, or else I’ll have to do another 10,000 words on Conan the Barbarian or something.

Anyway, the question:

Saw this piece about how the 90s were the best decade/cultural zenith.

https://www.thedoe.com/narratives/why-the-90s-was-best-decade-ever-a-nostalgic-love-letter

You’ve said many times the 90s were the worst decade. I was just wondering if you’d write a piece specifically about why you think they were the worst?

Let’s fisk this Larry Correia-style… nah, who am I kidding, that guy’s inimitable. Click here, skim down to “fisks,” and prepare to lose a few hours reading… also to laugh yourself into a hernia. I’ve tried reading a few of his books, and they don’t really do it for me, but I bought the books, because damn, I owe the man at least that much for such high quality entertainment as his “fisking” posts. As homage to the master, the original article will appear in italics, and my responses in bold.

Stone Cold Steve Austin. Sega Genesis. AOL Instant Messenger.

Jesus, the first “sentence” and we’re already in trouble. One pop culture figure and two pieces of technology, which adds up to three ephemera. Quick, ask the Boomers what was so great about The Sixties ™. I hope you’ve got a few months to spare, but if you boil it all down, it’s “the spirit.” They really thought they were fundamentally transforming the world, and may God have mercy on all our souls, they were right. Same thing with the WWII generation, the Progressive Era, whatever. Even those who wax nostalgic for the 80s will talk about the feeling of the age — “the last golden Indian summer of America,” as someone quoted in the comments yesterday, and doesn’t it break your heart? 

Not to get all Classical Rhetoric up in here, but for prior generations, things like “The Beatles” are synecdoche. They’ll go to their graves insisting that The Beatles were “the greatest band ever,” but if you press them on it, most of them are honest enough to admit that Ringo et al weren’t such great shakes, musically. At their best, The Beatles’ songs are musically simplistic and lyrically gibberish; at their worst, they’re “Rocky Raccoon.” The Beatles are “great” because they were innovators, not so much musically but because they were so goddamn pretentious. They wanted to be not mere entertainers, but artistes, and we indulged them, and that combo — pretentiousness and indulgence — became The Spirit of the Sixties. 

Thus if you answer “The Beatles” to the question “What’s so great about The Sixties ™?”, it’s a synechdoche for “the spirit of the age.” So let’s ask our 90s kid up there what’s so great about the Sega Genesis or AOL Instant Messenger. What larger trend do they embody, that was unique to the 90s? Recall that “video games” and “instant communication” were common as dirt in the 1980s. We called them by different names — “Nintendo” and “the telephone,” respectively — but they were there. Sega had better graphics than the old Nintendo, no question, but that’s like basic cable expanding from 3 channels to 20 (one of the reasons the 90s was the worst decade ever, we’ll get there) — it’s not fundamentally different, just more. 

In the ’90s, it felt like everyone got along. Buddy cop movies starring a Black guy and a white guy were so common it became a trope: Beverly Hills Cop III, Lethal Weapon 3 and 4, even Men in Black (a buddy cop film at heart, with some aliens in the mix).

Do I really need to point out the problems with your era-defining cultural products having Roman numerals after them? The movies that really defined the 90s were Scream and The Matrix — don’t worry, we’ll get there.

Another part of why so many are wistful for the ’90s vibe is because men were men and women were celebrated for their beauty. Masculinity was popular, with action stars, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, ruling the box office by virtue of strong physiques and capable, dominating personas. Baywatch was beloved because of beautiful women like Pamela Anderson and Carmen Electra. Those same women would be reviled today for somehow portraying women in a negative light by displaying their beauty.

See above. Schwarzenegger and Stallone were in steep decline in the early 90s, punchlines by the end. Yeah, Terminator 2 — there are those Roman numerals again!! — but for every T2, I’ll raise you a Last Action Hero, and as for Sly… what, exactly, did he do in the 90s? Ah yes, Demolition Man, aka Taco Bell: The Movie. See where this is going? “Over-the-hill muscleman inadvertently pitches consumer products.” That’s very 90s, I agree, but not in the way our author intends.

Meanwhile, behold the real face and body of 1990s “masculinity:”

Exactly no one was trying to look like Stallone or Schwarzenegger in the 90s. You’d have a hard time even finding a gym that had free weights in it. But everyone was running around wearing flannel and jean shorts and thrift store sweaters. And as for the Baywatch gals, well… go re-read the last two sentences. I know why I watched Baywatch, and it wasn’t because Carmen Electra and Pam Anderson were beautiful. It was because I had a crush on David Hassel… haha, just kidding, it was because of the boobs.

I’ve also heard that boobs are still at least marginally popular on screen to-day, as we old geezers put it. Witness Game of Thrones — when that thing started, the kind of person who’d heard of the source material was getting stuffed into lockers by the kind of person who ended up being the show’s biggest fans, and the reason they became such die hard fans was: Tits. Acres and scads and fathoms and furlongs of tits, as far as the eye could see.

The whole American culture was marinating in itself, too. Movies and music were building on past successes, while today’s culture attempts to clone yesterday’s hits and delivers results that look like a freak lab experiment.

It’s not that Spinal Tap’s losing popularity, it’s just that their appeal is becoming more selective.

Artists are not allowed to be free. The corporations now are in total control.

Yeah, man, I remember the huge victory party thrown by Pearl Jam — the cash cow of Epic Records, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Entertainment America, a wholly-owned subsidiary of one of the largest corporations on the planet — when they won that lawsuit against Ticketmaster. But Pearl Jam is scheduled to play that giant super-spreader event Obama is throwing for himself next week, so they get to keep their indie street cred.

But in the ’90s, the human spirit was alive and free. And that’s the vibe that resonates with me.

This is what the French call le horse pucky. If we may be so bold as to speak of “the human spirit” — which is pretty heavy for a column starting with a professional wrestler — the 90s killed it stone cold dead. The human spirit can flourish in the most awful situations, but one indispensable requirement is: Sincerity. You just can’t be snarky about the “Ode to Joy” or ironic about the Sistine Chapel. If you do, then there really is no difference between Beethoven and MC Funetik Spelyn, nothing to choose between Michelangelo and a dog turd on the sidewalk — someone placed them there intentionally, which is the only distinguishing characteristic of “art” possible in a world overrun by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists.

And since we’re getting into the “just me” portion of the floor exercises, I’ll drop the bold typerface. You want to know why the 90s were so awful? That’s why. The 90s were when “weapons grade philosophy,” as our very own contrarian Dutchman, contrariandutchman, so pithily put it, finally broke containment.

Remember The Matrix? It spawned a zillion pop-academic books with titles like The Matrix and Philosophy, and for once it wasn’t just a marketing gimmick. I doubt the filmmakers intended this — given that at least one of the Wachowski Brothers is now a trannie, I suppose their intended message was “let your freak flag fly, because that makes you Secret Jesus” — but all that Baudrillard stuff that inevitably attaches itself to a movie about virtual reality was actually kinda true.

Consider that if we really do live in a computer simulation, then everything the #wokesters are always going on about is actually true. Everything really IS a “social construction,” because “society” was literally constructed. All that stuff about “systemic racism” is true, too, because again, we’re dealing with a design. Nothing evolves organically inside The Matrix, because there’s nothing organic in there at all. It’s ALL on purpose….

…and you, #wokester, are the only one who can see it. Unlike Karl Marx, who was able to see beyond his class situation enough to say that no one can see beyond his class situation, because reasons, you, #wokester, can do it because you’re Neo. That, too, is built into the system. It’s an endless recursion… but one that entails that you, and you alone, are special, on purpose.

That, kameraden, was the 1990s. Even those movies our author mentioned — Beverly Hills Cop III, Lethal Weapons 3 and 4 — weren’t just copies of copies, they were ironic, snarky commentaries on copies of copies. See also Scream, which was a “deconstruction” of every slasher picture ever made. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em… but since both beating ’em and joining ’em entail making a sincere effort and sincerity is forbidden, all you can do is mock ’em. That’s what “deconstruction” is, one long polysyllabic mockery of the very idea of excellence. It’s the perfect philosophy for people who know themselves to be mediocre but have been told from day one that they’re special.

See also the tv show Friends, where five ludicrously attractive people and David Schwimmer all pretend to be just normal folks (who happen to live in 3,000 square foot apartments in Manhattan) — each episode is “the one that’s just like The Brady Bunch, but snarky.” Or Seinfeld, which was deliberately designed to be a grating mockery of stuff like The Odd Couple. All snarky mockeries of the very concept of sincerity.

See what I mean? That’s normal now, which is why the 90s must be dragged into an alley and shot, for Western Civ’s sake.

Since a discussion on nihilism is bound to get heavy, here’s something for balance:

Back in the days, my social circle included a woman who worked as a veterinary technician. She was great with animals — far better than you’d expect from even someone who worked with them all day, I mean. We used to call her “The Beastmaster.” Part of it was gentle mockery (she was a pretty girl with terrible taste in men), but a much bigger part of it was admiration — I’m pretty sure this gal could’ve stopped a charging rhino by holding up a hand and saying “hush now.”

Anyway, that got me thinking about the 1982 film The Beastmaster, and why The Current Year should be a golden age of fantasy / sci fi cinema.

For the benefit of younger readers, or older readers, or readers who are exactly my age but were far less dorky as kids, the unexpected success of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian (also 1982) kicked off a minor revival of the “sword and sorcery” picture. Maybe it was Clash of the Titans, not Conan, that kicked off the trend, since that list makes it look like The Beastmaster actually came out before Conan, but whatever, the point is, there were a lot of them back then.

Anyway, the eponymous Beastmaster was played by Marc Singer, one of a zillion low-rent musclemen kicking around Hollywood back in those days. He looked like Kevin Bacon had a baby with Gold’s Gym, or maybe an alternate-universe John Cougar Mellencamp where the “cougar” actually meant something, but again, whatever, the point is: as hard as it is to believe in the Current Year, when every prettyboy in Hollywood is an anabolic wonder, this

was once considered pretty buff. Nonetheless, he’s no Schwarzenegger, whose physique alone was a selling point; you could put out a cattle call and have fifty Marc Singers lined up outside the casting agent’s office by noon. Singer got the job, I hypothesize, because he was one of the few guys willing to work with real animals.

These days, of course, he’d be “the Green Screen Master,” and we’ve finally arrived at the point. Those sword and sorcery pictures — yes, most definitely including my beloved Conan — were pretty cheesy, effects-wise. They had to be, and please note that I don’t mean “cheesy by modern standards;” they were pretty cheesy back then, too. Ironically, the one Arnold movie that doesn’t require massive suspension of disbelief vis-a-vis his ridiculous accent* is the one that requires the most suspension of disbelief about everything else. Snake gods! That super hot naked sorta-vampire sorceress! And so forth. If you stop to think about it, even for a second, Conan the Barbarian is just ridiculous, from the opening montage (I’ve written probably 5,000 words about that Nietzsche epigraph) to the final fade-out.

There was one specific cultural moment, in other words, where all of that somehow worked. That moment ran from 1981 (Clash of the Titans) to 1983 (Flashdance, in which a female steelworker becomes a ballerina, any element of which is far more fantastic than everything in Conan and The Beastmaster combined). Miss that window, and you’d better have either killer FX (Star Wars) or play it as something other than straight SF/F (e.g. Brazil, 1985).

But now “killer FX” can be produced with an off-the-shelf laptop. Hell, it was probably fifteen years ago now that those million-dollars-a-second-in-1991 “liquid metal” effects from Terminator 2 started showing up in car wax ads. Throw in the aforementioned “everyone’s on the juice” thespian aesthetic, and you could shoot a pretty good remake of The Beastmaster with a community theater cast and a quick trip to Best Buy.

Given that, why aren’t we in the midst of a F/SF cinematic golden age?

The other thing F/SF has going for it is, since suspension of disbelief is a given, those are the only flicks in which 95 lb girls throwing 220 lb men around because karate isn’t ludicrous, because sorcery. Or because space — zero g is the great equalizer, I’d imagine, and indeed being smaller seems to be a real advantage, since you’re less of a target.** On Planet Portlandia, everyone‘s a tranny, so why not let your freak flag fly, screenwriters?

This is where Hollywood inadvertently gives the Satanic Pedo Pizza Plot crowd some credibility. Because that’s a rhetorical question. We all know why not: Because by stating outright “this 95 lb. woman can throw this 225 lb. man around because space,” we’re acknowledging that the physical sciences are a thing that exists. Meaning, we implicitly admit that back on Earth, the land of gravity and sex hormones, that 95 lb. girl couldn’t throw that 225 lb. man around like a rag doll…..

….and we won’t be having that. Unless any righteous shitlord guerrilla filmmaker wants to take a crack at The Beastmaster? It’s no Conan the Barbarian, I’ll grant you, but it at least beats that old tv cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian….

*Though of course they didn’t even bother trying, because the 80s were a different time. So instead you’ve got Conan’s Dad and James Earl Jones intoning like Cotton Mather reading Moby-Dick, while Valeria speaks Californian (the guy who played Subutai does some kind of accent, though he was literally a professional surfer); Max von Sydow does British(-ish) for some reason, and so on. It’s just a glorious mess, because 1980s.

**How fucked up is our culture, that with all the complaints over Ender’s Game — the author of the source material offended Teh Sacred Gays!!! — nobody said a word about the central plot point of sending children into combat?

Z Man has a good post today about Edmund Burke. His last podcast, on the flavors of Leftoids, was also worth a listen. You don’t need those to follow this column, but that’s the background.

As Z notes, the “right” (for convenience) has a process fetish. Though he doesn’t put it quite this way, that’s the one thing “conservatives” have actually conserved: The process; the outward show. It’s the Roman Senate “debating” while the Goths rampage through the streets (or what it must’ve been like to have Incitatus as a consul, depending on whether or not AOC deigns to drop by the House this session), but nonetheless the old forms are being obeyed — there really is a Senate, and they really do have debates, pass resolutions, and so forth. The show must go on.

Expanding on that, let’s note that all sets of humans, save one, are innately conservative — no quotation marks this time — about institutions. The only difference is the time frame. The Brethren of the Free Spirit and Mikhail Bakunin would probably end up on opposite poles if we were forced to shoehorn them into the old Left/Right spectrum, but their goal was exactly the same: A return to paradise via the return of the oldest human institutions. Bakunin called himself a more radical Leftist than even Lenin, but while Lenin dreamed of huge factories belching smoke all across the steppe, from the Urals to Vladivostok, Bakunin yearned for what amounted to Neolithic farming communities.

So, too, with the Jacobins and all the rest — what passed itself off as the hottest and newest and most radical was actually the oldest, the Rousseauvist dream that has been a part of the human condition since at least The Epic of Gilgamesh: A casting off of all civilization’s shackles; a “return to nature” in which we all freely cooperate to get our basic sustenance and nothing more. No literature, no art, no religion, no government, no trade, no thought. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to recognize infantile narcissism when it’s sending you to the guillotine or shipping you off to a slave labor camp… and yet, here we are.

That’s the fundamental reason so many even in Our Thing, to say nothing of Normie, can’t grok the Left. Being inherently conservative about institutions, we wonder what the hell politicians and academics and judges and #woke CEOs are smoking. You guys control everything. You’ve run every institution that matters for going on three quarters of a century now, and yet you act like Mr. Moneybags and the Ghost of Ronald Reagan still rule the world. What gives?

It doesn’t help that the Left, at least the Old New Left, is every bit as conservative about their institutions. As Z Man notes in his podcast, all these guys — the Greens, the Bernie Bros, the “Working Families Party,” even the PoMos (in their ironic, hipster, heavily footnoted and utterly snarky way) — all still sound like it’s 1932 and that dreamy young stud muffin FDR has some hot new ideas on how to combat the Depression. I always loved teaching the second half of US survey every time Bernie Sanders made a presidential run; I could read off Eugene V. Debs’ list of radical demands circa 1904 and all the dumbass college kids thought I was on the bleeding edge of #woke Progressivism. If they ever really existed, we surely haven’t had a “proletariat,” let alone a “bourgeoisie,” since about 1952…. and yet, here we are.

It’s that natural conservatism that blinds us all, “left” and “right” alike, to the truth about the #woke: They’re just shit-flinging nihilists. What do they really want? See above: No art, no culture, no government, no trade, no speech, no thought, no nothing, nihil, zip, nada, burn the motherfucker down. ALL of it. It’s the inchoate rage of a baby whose binkie has fallen on the floor. The world must bend to my will, and if the world doesn’t, then the world has got to go.

I once saw an interview with basketball player Charles Barkley, in which he discussed his retirement. Barkley was a Hall of Fame player, and like most of those guys, he hung on a few seasons too long. Even having lost a step or three, Sir Charles was still a decent player, but that’s all he was — a decent player, but getting paid like a superstar and with a superstar’s reputation. A few seasons after retiring, he admitted as much. He said something like (from memory) “I’d guard a guy and think, ‘this is going to be easy, this guy is terrible.’ And then he’d beat me, and I’d realize I just got beat by some guy who’s terrible, and then I knew it was time to hang it up.”

One thing chicks of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to genders don’t realize these days is how competitive men — actual biological males — are hardwired to be. Things like World of Warcraft and fantasy football only exist because the genius who invented those figured out a way to tap into that heretofore-unexpressed male competitiveness. And indeed, it’s the guy who’d never even dream of putting on shoulder pads who’s the most insanely competitive guy in a fantasy football league or (I’m certain) a whatever-they’re-called in World of Warcraft. Even the uber-dorks in the Math Club and the Speech and Debate Society went after each other like Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. It’s just how guys are…

…or, at least, how guys used to be. The writing was on the wall back in the days, and if I were half the sage I sometimes pretend to be, I’d have seen it the minute the first woman asked to be in our office fantasy football league. She was only doing it because she heard we needed another player (she said), and since she was already dating one of the guys, why not? We thought it was kinda funny, so we said sure. It was even funnier when she did typical chick things like starting the Giants’ defense because she thought Jason Sehorn was cute. Haha, silly girl.

But the joke was on us, because now the NFL has pink shit all over the field for what feels like three months of the season, women make up something close to half of the viewing audience, and — crucially — pretty much all of the marketing audience. I told y’all I got to know an uppity-up (insofar as there are such things) in a very minor league club near College Town. I once asked him why he spent so much time advertising there. Don’t you know that on campus, even the guys are lesbians? They have at most 1.2 designer children, half of which are adopted Mystery Meats, and the other half have Assburgers? Plus they all make a big fetish out of hating “sportsball.” They’ll never buy a ticket.

His reply was instructive: Lesson #1 in the sports marketing manual, apparently, is that women with young kids are “the demo,” the source from which all serious revenue flows. It turns out that when guys want to go watch a game, what they really want to do is get drunk with their buddies. Which in general means they’ll go to the bar, where the beer is cheaper and the game is better, plus there’s a much better chance of meeting chicks. Live sporting event attendance is almost entirely female-driven. He knew he’d never get the professors, but at even the smallest colleges the support staff outnumber the faculty 10 to 1. At Flyover State, with its five-digit student body, it was probably 20 or 30 to 1, and that’s just actual college employees. Throw in the college-adjacent service sector, and that’s a lot of potential butts in seats.

[Needless to say, my buddy the low-minors GM was right and I was wrong. I’m still just some doofus with a blog, and he’s now a much bigger wheel with a much less minor league club].

Which brings us to the ongoing discussion of Simone Biles, below. Men who grew up under the old dispensation, or within its penumbra at least, have an entirely different definition of “competitor” than the newer, more androgynous generations. Charles Barkley up there was a competitor in the old sense. He just couldn’t let it go, because that’s who he was. I don’t just mean “he was a professional athlete;” I mean he was Charles Barkley, Hall of Fame power forward. His name had to be in the discussion for “Best Player Ever” at his position. He just couldn’t let that go, because he’d put his entire life into getting there.

That’s the thing chicks of both sexes and all genders don’t really get — the insane amount of work it takes, not to be a professional, but simply to find out if there’s a possibility of you going pro. Since we started with basketball, let’s look at Michael Jordan. Jordan had more testosterone in his toenails than most “men” today have in their entire bodies. He was an insane competitor whom even other insanely competitive guys like Kevin Garnett thought was over-the-top. So when he “retired” at age thirty because of his legendary gambling problem he’d accomplished all there was to do in his first sport, he just couldn’t hang up his jock and hit the showers, not when he still had an ounce left in the tank. So he tried to go be a professional baseball player.

There was precedent for this: Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders were both NFL and MLB players, Kenny Lofton was an outstanding college basketball player who might’ve gone pro, I think I’m forgetting a few. But the crucial factor is: All of those guys played baseball continuously from a young age. It doesn’t matter how great a natural athlete a guy is. To even get a sense that you might have professional-level skills at a certain sport, you need a certain number of repetitions of that sport’s basic skills. In Jordan’s case, some Bill James type ran the numbers: A professional baseball player who was still playing at age 30 — that is, who’d been playing baseball continuously — had seen something like 50,000 curve balls pitched at him.* Jordan had seen at most half that number, and, crucially, the last time he’d seen one was back in high school, when he had an entirely different body.**

That’s a hole not even the greatest athlete can crawl out of. It’s not a talent gap, necessarily, it’s an experience gap. Maybe Jordan could’ve been a great hitter had he focused exclusively on baseball, but the best he could do at age 30 was look like a major leaguer.

Speaking of “looking like,” at the risk of going too far afield in order to really drive the point home, consider boxing. “Sports Guy” Bill Simmons used to quip that the only reason boxing movies exist is because they’re catnip to actors of a certain age — they get to work themselves into sick shape and hang out with real fighters, all of whom are contractually obligated to say “oh yeah, [Pretty Boy] totally could’ve gone pro.” Except they couldn’t, not necessarily because they don’t know how to throw a punch (Marky Mark looked great as the aforementioned Mickey Ward), but because they don’t know how to take one. Even though Marky Mark apparently didn’t use stunt doubles, and thus took some “real” punches, he was in the same situation in the ring as Michael Jordan was at the plate — a fighter Ward’s age would’ve taken umpteen zillion punches by then; Marky Mark took a few hundred.***

In other words, Marky Mark was hundreds of thousands of punches away from even being able to realistically evaluate his chances of turning pro, much less actually doing it….

…or, at least, that’s how it seems to us geezers. To persyns raised under the new dispensation, it seems, it’s enough that Marky Mark look great with his shirt off, or for Michael Jordan to look menacing at the plate.

When it comes right down to it, that’s why men of a certain age simply don’t get “women’s sports.” Few will be as crustily chauvinistic as yer ‘umble narrator, and come right out and say it, but here goes: Women’s “sports” are just a shoddy knockoff of the real thing, because women just aren’t wired that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitive women, or athletic women — obviously there are, some very athletic and very competitive — but the female of the species just isn’t wired to put in the work the way males are. When faced with the prospect of three straight hours in the batting cage, swinging at curve after curve until your blisters have blisters and your shoulders feel like they’re falling out of their sockets, most women will quite sensibly ask “why bother?” Competition-for-competition’s-sake, even when it’s only against yourself in those long, long, looooong hours in the cage, just doesn’t motivate them the way it does us.

Which is why a person’s reaction to Simone Biles, or the USA Women’s soccer team, or the WNBA, or what have you is an almost perfect predictor of their age, not just their “gender.” I judge sports as sports. I don’t care about soccer, but if I did, I’d care about it as soccer — meaning, I’d want to see the best possible players, playing at the highest possible level. Women’s Olympic teams — that is to say, all star teams, the very best players — routinely get smoked by teams of 15 year old boys. Sir Charles is pushing sixty, but he could dominate the WNBA right now, in street clothes. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Pee Wee or rec leagues, but if you’re going to take a paycheck for doing it, then I want to see exactly what I paid for.

In estrogen-drenched, synchronized-ovulation Clown World, it’s all about appearances. Sure, she let her team down and wussed out (while still talking up how great she is), but can’t you see that it gave her the sadz? Sure, Megan Rapinoe et al keep getting smoked by 14 year old boys, then choking in international competition, but can’t you see her out there, with her pink hair and her tats and her Strong, Confident Empowerment? The “competition,” such as it is, is an excuse for the display. Michael Jordan ought to give baseball another shot. We know he can cry. These days, that’d get him a first-class ticket to Cooperstown.

*That’s an ass-pulled number, but I trust you take my point.

**Seriously. Image search “Michael Jordan 1981,” then “Michael Jordan 1994.” If you really feel like having fun, image search “Barry Bonds” at similar points in his career, then speculate on the limits of what even the most athletic of men can achieve on their own, bodily development-wise, even given world-class workout facilities and hours a day in which to use them.

*** I’m sure I’m being really generous there. And especially so in comparison to the real Mickey Ward, who was a classic “take three to give one” kind of fighter. Forget hiring a boxing trainer; Marky Mark would’ve needed to hire an entire road crew and let them run their jackhammers over his face every day for six weeks to really mimic the kind of pounding Ward took in his career.

I just checked my contract, and I guess I’m obligated to do one of these, so here it is:

I’ve never cared much about the Olympics, in any but the vaguest “go USA!” kind of way. That was true even when the USA was a real country. For one thing, most of the events just don’t interest me. I’m not suddenly going to pretend to be interested in the shotput or the high hurdles or cross-country skiing just because it’s in the Olympics. I could die perfectly content not knowing who the world’s greatest fencer is (as opposed to the world’s most notorious fencer*). And that’s before you get to all the what-the-fuck? “sports” they’ve added in (I guess) an effort to get more tv ratings — snowboarding and whatnot. Dude, the Olympics are now Xztreeeem!

And then there’s the professionalization. Not that I’m under any delusions about how amateur our “amateur” athletes really were back in the Cold War, but if I wanted to watch two teams of professionals playing each other in a revenue sport, well, there’s this new thing called “basic cable.” I mean, it’s great that places like Lithuania and Turkmenistan and South Korea have professional basketball (etc.) leagues, but a) half the guys playing in them are washed-up or not-quite-pro-level Americans anyway, and b) of the ones who aren’t, the best come and play in America, so, you know, USA vs. Slovenia is five NBA guys taking on one NBA guy and a bunch of also-rans. If we wanted to watch Luka Doncic and four D-leaguers play five NBA guys, it’s be a lot easier, not to mention more profitable, tv-wise, to pitch it as “the Luka Doncic challenge” and have it on ESPN 8, the Ocho, as Satan intended.**

And then there’s the weird schizophrenia of it all. I mean, as Nikolai put it the other day, half the time you want “your” countrypersyns to lose, to deny them the opportunity to wipe xzheyr asses with the flag on the podium… and half the time you want them to win, precisely because you know they’d wipe their asses with the flag on the podium, thus giving the CivNats in the audience (who are probably the only ones watching) a good, long, hard look at what civic nationalism hath wrought. The idea that I’d cheer for any of them for the old fashioned reason of “one American supporting another” is a sick joke — this is Clown World; xzhey are citizens of Clownlandia; xzhey are NOT AMERICANS, whatever it might say on their official government paperwork.

Finally, if we needed any more evidence that Clown World is the land of synchronized ovulation, look at the reactions to Whatzerface quitting on the gymnastics team. I know, I know, it’s all been coordinated on the JournoList (pace Z Man, sometimes it really IS coordinated, there needs to be “the JournoList codicil” to Gell-Mann Amnesia, somehow we all keep forgetting about that; see also the widespread suspicion, which I for one believe wholeheartedly, that England lost the World Cup because the coach planned out his penalty kick (or whatever it is) lineup specifically to have Numinous Negroes score the winning goal). Nonetheless, y’all, women really believe that shit. Even the based ones.

I had an argument with one the other day. Now, this lady was in her youth the beau ideal we’ve been discussing in the comments below — homey (but certainly not homely), staunch Christian, thinks homeschooling is her life’s work, and so on. And yet, she still insists that crybaby was brave and heroic for quitting. Trust me, gang, the words “mental health” are chick crack, more potent that “six foot four” and “drives a high end Beemer” combined. It’s pathetic, but here in this, the most estrogen-soaked of all possible worlds, muh feelz trumps everything….

UPDATE: I suppose I should add that I’m sure the Media coverage of this Olympiad is off-the-charts hilarious. I don’t need any more convincing, but hearing the tortured locutions of the “sports” broadcasters — who are generally dim even by teevee’s woefully low standards — might be a wakeup call in itself. I saw a piece on Ace of Normies about the Twitter bluehairs criticizing the network bluehairs for “misgendering” a snowboarder or something (can’t have been snowboard, unless that’s a summer sport somehow, but hey, if a man in a dress is really a woman, so 90 degrees and 95 percent humidity is really winter if it gets the sadz over it, I guess).

It’s especially hilarious hearing American commentators talking about dusky foreigners. As I’ve said, I’d rather watch paint dry than watch the Olympics, but I used to watch boxing back in the days, so I remember well the American coverage of heavyweight champ Lennox Lewis. Lewis is black, and at the time he looked all Joggered out — dreadlocks and whatnot — but he’s British, so he sounds like an extra in a Guy Ritchie movie. Moreover, he seems to be a legitimately bright guy. But he was also an extremely lazy fighter. That’s not a “racial dog whistle;” that’s a 100% accurate description of a guy who was a good fighter almost despite himself. The Media tied themselves in Gordian knots trying to talk about Lennox Lewis — they were obviously raring to go with “Racial Grievance Narrative #303,” but then the guy had to go and open his mouth and ruin it…

*that’s bronze medal-level Cat Fancy trivia, for those playing at home

**I don’t follow basketball — indeed, I hate basketball — but I know who Doncic is, largely because people on This Side keep pointing out how hilarious the sports media’s coverage of him is. You can google up a million supercuts of Doncic absolutely clowning the Vibrants game after game, and the Vibrants getting just suuuuuuper pissed about getting clowned by this so-White-he’s-flourescent dude, but somehow the jock-sniffers on ESPN never seem to notice. It’s surreal.

I ain’t got no job and so forth.

Just one question this week, from Jennifer7084, who wonders

what is the best way to deal with these people [the borg]? I’ve said in a past comment I use the “Jesus approach” of asking questions to lead them to their own conclusions, which is also a tactic of cult deprogrammers.

But the reality is even if we win-BOOM-culture war is over and somehow we’ve won. What do we do with these people? What do we do with a large segment of the population whose minds can’t be changed?

This pertains to both politics and covid.

As with so much, there’s a long answer and a short answer, a black pill take and a…slightly more grayish take. The shortest answer is also the blackest (henceforth, the Muggsy Bogues* of answers): It’ll never come up, since there’s no such thing as magic and the only solution possible in this world is going to involve a lot of pain… the kind of pain that, by definition, most members of the Community-Based Reality won’t survive. Nature has an uncanny way of restoring the balance.

On the other hand, “most” is not “all,” and we all heard back in the 80s that only cockroaches would survive a total nuclear war, so we have to figure that at least a few of these terminally broken people will survive the Return to Normalcy. What is to be done with them?

Well, I guess it depends on which way the culture shifts. Oddly enough, the trannie madness offers us a ray of hope. In The Book of the New Sun, the classic sci-fi / fantasy series from which I took my stupid nom de blog**, there are “people” called zooanthrops, who, though only appearing as foils for a brief action scene, nonetheless work great as set dressing — few things give such an immediate sense of a culture with very different values from our own, than a group of folks who have undergone voluntary lobotomies. As Severian (the protagonist) explains it to a young child traveling with him, there are some people to whom the burden of thought is simply too much to bear, so they volunteer to be lobotomized and dumped in the woods…

As everyone in Our Thing knows, Leftists hate themselves. Hell, Igor Shafarevich was calling Socialism a suicide cult back in the Seventies, and he’d know, having been born in the Soviet Union in 1923 (meaning, he witnessed all the worst horrors of Stalinism firsthand, and hit adulthood just as the NKVD were at their absolute worst). As Hoffer writes in The True Believer, the only goal of anyone joining a mass movement is to subsume their hated personal identity into the larger group identity, which is why all mass movements are basically the same. Hating yourself requires self-reflection, which requires the ability to self-reflect….

Take it from there. Though the Left’s intellectual appeal rests on an entirely mechanical view of the universe — there is “History,” comrade, and it is inexorable, and Marxism can decipher it — its emotional appeal is, and always has been, radical personal autonomy. Totally free will, unshackled from any traditions, any standards of morality or decency or even reason or Reality itself. Total freedom of the will, to be total, must entail the freedom to totally negate the will. Which is actually, physically possible, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine. And if they’re willing to cut their own dicks off….

If post-Return to Normalcy culture remains anything like Western Civ, though, the only humane answer is to keep them as busy as possible, thus freeing them from the burden of thought the old fashioned way. Which sounds an awful lot like the stated rationale for places like Dachau and Kolyma — second time as farce, remember? — but I for one don’t have it in me to sentence anyone to that, so… I dunno. David Thompson has a few pieces on rich, latte-sipping SWPL gals who go off for a weekend in the forest, to pretend that they’re really living the Neanderthal life or something. Australia seems desperate to turn itself back into a penal colony; why not exile all of them there, put in a really robust blockade, and let them get back in touch with nature the old fashioned way?

[If you’re asking what I, personally, would do, in my own little life that I’m just trying to live as best I can, being as decent a person as I can, with no power or influence beyond a blog with twenty readers… just love them as best you can, buddy. They’re children of God, too, and though it’s a cop out to lay it all on Him, He’s the only one who can really fix them. In the meantime, just love them as best you can… but for pete’s sake, keep them away from sharp objects, and never let them within a mile of any position that might conceivably have influence over your children].

Speaking of God, let’s keep one of the Twenty, Kirk Forlatt, in our prayers (if that’s your bag). Last I heard from him, he was having a rough go, which a glance at his blog — not updated since December — seems to confirm. I sent him an email the other day but haven’t heard back. It’s quite possible, of course, that he just fell out of the Regular Readership. Lord knows commenting on blogs is a time suck that not everyone can afford. And the good Lord certainly knows more than one former reader has told me several times that they didn’t like my kind, ’cause I’m a bit too leisurely (which is by far the least of my sins as a writer, which those folks took great pains to detail). Maybe he’s just gone elsewhere, and if so, vaya con Dios. But let’s all pour one out for him anyway — it can’t hurt, and if he’s really in the soup, it can only help.

Last but not least, in keeping with the ongoing discussions of “situational hotness” for both sexes, and the utility, or not, of “Game,” let’s do the young people a favor and put together some advice. It most likely won’t do a damn bit of good — I’m pretty sure everyone who comments here is on life’s back nine, and as Snoop Dogg once said, si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. Nonetheless, it’s the old guy’s duty, privilege, and pleasure to offer unheeded (because unheedable (it’s a word)) advice to the young, so… have at it. What would you tell a young person, of either sex, dipping xzheyr toe in the shark-infested waters of modern “romance”?

That’s all for this week, gang. Keep your guard up, stay off the ropes, and remember to work the jab.

*I really liked Muggsy back when I watched basketball (which, since he retired after the 2001 season, should tell you how long ago it was that I watched basketball). The kid was a scrapper with crazy skills; if he’d been 6’3″ instead of 5’3″ he’d be a legit Hall of Fame player. I also once had the weird pleasure of seeing him and Manute Bol — all 7’7″ of him, and in this one case the roster wasn’t lying about his height — on the same court at the same time. Muggsy could’ve driven to the basket between Manute’s legs. It was surreal.

** Which I don’t even like that much, not being a reader of much fiction in general, or of fantasy / sci fi in particular. I just needed a handle way back in the prehistoric days of the Internet, and The Shadow of the Torturer just happened to be the first thing my eye landed on when scanning my bookshelves, and… yeah, there it is. If I’d known I’d be stuck with it for 30 years and counting, I would’ve had another think, but whaddaya gonna do?