It’s Friday, I ain’t got no job, and I ain’t got shit else to do… no, that’s not the opening verse to the Bidenreich’s new and improved national anthem. But it is the reason you’re getting this.

First, via Vox Day, Millennial writing at its finest. Did you know this year marks the WNBA’s 25th anniversary? How on earth haven’t we had a Federal Month of Thanksgiving yet? Anyway, this is why I had to quit teaching:

Let’s start here: my house, a couple of months ago, a good friend over for dinner and the conversation turning toward the article you’ve just started.

The first line, the very first, and already we’re deep in GrrrlWorld. Me me me me me. A couple of months ago it was me, and now it’s me, and the article you’ve just started, which is also all about me, all smashed together in the kind of “syntax” that would make Strunk and White start drinking at 7am. I should probably just post this picture of the authoress and stop here, since it makes my argument better than words ever could:

but I will soldier on. The agonies I endure for you people!

I nodded as my friend spoke. He hit all the expected notes. I don’t watch because they can’t dunk; I don’t watch because they’re like a good boy’s high school team; I don’t watch because, you know, I could probably beat them one-on-one.

Perhaps you even saw your own reasoning reflected in his. At its heart, this reasoning insists that people don’t watch the WNBA because men run faster and jump higher. That is, in fact, true. Most men do run faster and jump higher. And, yes, it’s incredibly exciting when one of those men runs fast and jumps high and we watch, in awe.

Here again you — awful Pale Penis Person that you are — might be tempted to stop reading. I mean, this is supposed to be an article praising the WNBA, and she has just admitted that the WNBA does in fact suck. If I were grading this, I’d write something like “you appear to have undermined your own argument here” in the margins. But wait, there’s more!

Long before Big Business saw the value, the players of the W stood against racial injustice, and for equality, and took the hits—“Every direction we turned, we were walking into a wall,” says WNBA legend Sue Bird—for representing the folks at society’s margins….“And you should want that. We are standing on the shoulders of women who didn’t back down just because casual sports fans didn’t think they were worthy. That’s what makes our league better, because we have faced those hurdles. I can’t think of another league that gets hit with every single last knock, and I don’t see that going away, but we’re not going to let that stop us.”

You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, but I just now ruined a perfectly good monitor by spewing red ink everywhere. This, friends, this is GrrrlWorld, which is the headspace of our entire fucked up “culture” these days. Her “argument” — her paper’s thesis — is buried seven paragraphs deep, and can be summarized as follows: You, a basketball fan, should watch a shitty parody of basketball for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the game of basketball. No, you should watch a shitty parody of basketball — the Not Another Teen Movie of sports franchises —  because it makes Basic College Girls feel good about xzhymselves, and that’s the only important thing.

And it goes on like this, y’all. On and on and on and on, like the authoress was on a page count. And that’s what it’s like “teaching” Basic College Girls. No matter what the topic, every paper you get is page after page of word salad, every paragraph of which can be boiled down to I, I, I, me, me, me. World War II was important, no doubt, but what really matters here is how young Khaleesi feels about it….

From a reader:

Proposition:
▪️The 19th Amendment was a mistake.
▪️It led inevitably to the rise of toxic feminism (toxic for both sexes, btw).
▪️Women in the workforce destroyed traditional family roles, where a man could earn enough to support a family and the woman could be a homemaker.
▪️Women in politics have turned us into a nation of feelz not laws.
▪️If we’re no longer a republic, we’re not a democracy either; we’re fast becoming a gynocracy c.f. Nancy Pelosi and AOC (who is going to be President)

Discuss…

I wish I could, buddy… I wish I could. David Hume once said something about propositions “so absurd, they elude all force of reason.” Female suffrage is like that. My rule of thumb is: The soundness of any new idea can be immediately judged, with nearly 100% accuracy, just by looking at its proponents. In the case of female suffrage, Susan B. Anthony was your typical Yankee lunatic — Quaker, abolitionist, the kind of cause-head that was fanatically eager for the Civil War to start, so that the Yankee war machine could march down South and shoot all the badwhites. Elizabeth Cady Stanton* was similar, and both of them were sane, reasonable moderates compared to the likes of Virginia Woodhull.

Or, you know, you could just look at Friedrich Engels, whose The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State is pretty much the sole source of every even semi-rational-sounding feminist “argument.” Feminism was, from the very beginning, a Marxist conspiracy to destroy society and bring the Revolution. What more needs to be said?

Brit in London writes:

Recently I rediscovered “An Open Letter to an Open Minded Progressive” – something I seem to rediscover once every few years and have a full read.  To me it’s a bit of a modern day classic and a lot of the roots of “our thing” can be found there.  Wonder if you’ve read it and, if so, your thoughts?

I haven’t, though on a quick skim it seems to be the kind of thing I once really liked. Once, because the author is arguing in good faith, and that’s guaranteed to fail. Look, y’all, it’s pretty simple: There’s no such thing as an “open-minded Progressive.” And when I say “no such thing,” I mean it’s a category error. In other words, “open minded” and “Progressive” aren’t two circles on a Venn diagram, that don’t happen to intersect now, but theoretically could. That’s a profound misunderstanding of “Progressivism.” Put simply, but 100% correctly, people get into Progressivism precisely because they’re NOT open-minded, don’t want to be open-minded, never will be open-minded.

Progressives are fanatics. They’re conformist assholes who move in total ideological lockstep, because Progressivism is nothing but social sanction for being the worst person you can possibly be. They’re an entire tribe of Gollums, sitting around in dark caves plotting their revenge on the world, praising each other for how utterly fucking evil they are. They’re cancer.

Dave B asks,

At what point do you think normal people start to say they have had enough, that voting harder is a waster of time, that the whole shitshow needs to come down, and people start hitting the streets?

In my more upbeat moods, I see glimmers of this already happening. In my darker moods — which, not gonna lie, are ever more frequent — I suspect the answer is “never”… or, at least, not until total financial and social collapse, the kind where Mad Max movies look like light escapist fare.

The truth is no doubt somewhere in between, and since I like to keep things light on Fridays, I’ll point out that we here are exceptions. Not just because we’re “dissidents” (or whatever self-dramatizing term we choose to use this week), but because we’re online at all. Something like 3% of Americans are on Twitter, and that’s not a typo; I’m not forgetting a digit. Facebook, it’s true, claims something close to a billion users, but I think I’d trust Fauci’s numbers before I trust Zuckerberg’s. Maybe there are a billion accounts, but I’d bet long money that whatever the real numbers are, 75-90% of them are bots.

In other words, “echo chamber” is rapidly going the way of “fascism,” in that it now means little more than “something the writer doesn’t like”… but there’s a grain of truth to it. I spent the years 2008-2016 hearing about how Obama was going to put us all in FEMA camps… and before that, I spent the years 2000-2008 hearing about how George W. Bush was going to put us all in FEMA camps. Even in wonderful havens of calm rationality (*ahem!!*), the Internet has this tendency to boost the signal… and with boosted signal comes boosted static. I’m not telling you life is great — I personally would be checking my ammo supply, had I not lost all my guns in a tragic boating accident last summer — but it’s not as bad as all that, either.

Urbando asks,

Do you visit [Leftwing, or even just pop culture] sites? Do you even use social media? Do you watch any TV/Netflix/etc.? In short, how do you come by your knowledge? Do you just keep tabs on the Enemy and his devices? Like the Zman actually tracking down Gurl Science abstracts, do you look over the edge into the abyss on a regular basis?

I don’t use social media anymore, but as I’ve written, back when I was trying to carve out a niche for myself in academia I was an early adopter. (People forget how new this stuff is; Facebook only dates from 2004, I think, and Twitter is like 2009). I tried Gab for a time, but I got really fucking sick of (((people))) putting (((parentheses))) around (((words))) — ok, ok, I get it, show me on the doll where Bibi Netanyahu touched you. Just put (((girls))) inside the parentheses and these comments are indistinguishable from the lament of every high-school onanist who got shot down by the head cheerleader… but I digress.

I haven’t watched tv for years. No, seriously, I was cutting the cord long before it was cool, and my favorite band is one you’ve probably never heard of. I do support the, ummm, entrepreneurial spirit of freelance shipowners from the age of sail, though, if you follow me, so on the rare occasion I want to watch something I have lots of options. I rarely watch something just for the sociological insight — life’s too short, you know? — but since even the stuff that looks kinda interesting beats you over the head with it, I end up getting a sociology lesson whether I want one or not. For example, I hear they’ve made another attempt to film the novel Dune, and I’m actually quite looking forward to it — half because it’s a cool story and someone should be able to get it on screen, and half because I’m wondering just how badly they’ll fuck it up with Social Justice. Right now, my money’s on a steamy love scene between Paul and Stilgar…

Mostly I keep in touch with people the semi-old fashioned way, via phone and email and personal visit. I have some family within driving distance — brother-in-law is Normie to the core, while Sis is, sadly, your typical soccer mom (remember that phrase?), which is just a leveled-up BCG. They have kids, so between all of them I get all the Current Year I can stand, and then some, every time I go over there for grill and sportsball.

Well, gang, I think that’s enough rambling from me. Y’all come back now, y’heah?

*Wiki sez: “In her memoir, Eighty Years & More, Stanton said there were three African American menservants in her household when she was young. Researchers have determined that one of them, Peter Teabout, was a slave and probably remained so until all enslaved people in New York state were freed on July 4, 1827. Stanton recalled him fondly, saying that she and her sisters attended the Episcopal church with Teabout and sat with him in the back of the church rather than in front with the white families.”

So, you know, not JUST a slaveholder, but an awful, condescending, paternalist one, too!! #CancelStanton. Be sure to tell all the purple-haired, face-shrapneled feminists in your life.

So I’m confused. Remember back in 2016, when the Left insisted that “Russian hacking” — by which they meant “buying a few hundred thousand bucks’ worth of ads on Facebook” — was literally a cause for war? And Trump was soft, or indeed Putin’s puppet, for not bombing Moscow?

Anyone else remember that? I could swear it was only a few years ago…

Anyhoo, fast forward to a few days ago, and you’ve got actual Russian hacking — the “shutting down major infrastructure and nearly crashing the entire East Coast energy grid” kind of hacking, not the “spending a few shekels on Facebook” kind — and… nothing? Can that be right?

Oh, wait, its not nothing. Biden said “no comment” as to whether or not he encouraged Colonial Pipeline to pay the ransom. And while I’m perfectly willing to believe that Biden honestly doesn’t know whether or not he urged the payoff — since his brain is indistinguishable from week-old tapioca pudding, what with the dementia and all — you’d think this would be exactly the excuse the neoklowns need to finally bring their war-boner to climax…

So make up my mind here, wouldja? Are we gonna do this thing or not?

[N.b. that I am NOT rooting for war, just so that “our” ghetto-faaaabulous “military” can get its high-heeled, gender-nonconforming, no-doubt-already-lubed-up ass kicked. That would be “defeatism,” comrades, and soon they’ll be hanging people for it, so I for one support our totally legitimate, not at all fraudulent president 100%. I’m just tired of all the foreplay. Eventually you’ve got to bust a move, Romeo].

Back around, oh, 1940 or so, the Germans, and to a lesser but still important degree the Japanese, had a rep as brilliant technological innovators. Their industries were just as militarized as their political systems, this feeling went, which were just as militarized as their entire cultures, which meant that everything was committed 100% to building the biggest, baddest, best weapons systems possible.

What the world quickly learned the very, very, very hard way, though, was that this wasn’t true. I’m not knocking the Me-109, or the Zero, far from it. They were world-beaters… in 1940. The problem is, of course, that Germany and Japan, for all their googaws and whizz-bangs of the later years, never moved much past them, technically or doctrinally. There was, as the Marxists say, a dialectical relationship there, and it’s interesting.

The Japanese case is easier for quick exposition, so let’s go with that, keeping in mind that all of this stuff applies, mutatis mutandis, to the Cat Fanciers as well. In the early 1930s (if not before, military history is not my specialty), the Japanese, Army and Navy, went all in on the concept of “out-ranging.” They knew they weren’t capable of sustaining a long industrial war within the likely timeframe of hostilities breaking out, so they, like the Germans, went all-in on the idea of the overwhelming knockout blow. So in weapon design, they sacrificed pretty much everything for range, with a lesser (but still important) emphasis on speed.

The resulting weapons were a wonder to behold. The Zero is a beautiful airplane, and at the time it was a technological marvel. It’s customary at this point to give the technical specs, but they’re irrelevant without context, and the only context that matters is: This thing could appear in the sky at something like a thousand miles further than anyone thought. In the pre-radar age, that was the only thing needed to achieve overwhelming air superiority.

Please note the logical extension of this: The Zero was not, contrary to the later myth, a dogfighting aircraft. The whole point of the Zero was to avoid dogfights, and though it was fearsome for a brief time in the role against the Chinese and their American Mini-Mes in the Flying Tigers, the rule for Japanese pilots was that if you’re getting into a dogfight in your Zero, someone screwed up bigtime. Zeros were supposed to shoot down any opposition aircraft that got off the runway… and if the rest of the air force* was doing its job, there wouldn’t be any.

It was a hell of a concept in the pre-radar age… but oops, radar. Even before the widespread introduction of early warning radar, though, the Allies used “sky watchers” — troops and incredibly brave civilians left behind as the Japanese overran the Pacific islands — to radio in Japanese aircraft movements. Once that happened, all the Air Force’s fancy concepts went from being major advantages to huge hindrances. Bombers taking off from, say, Rabaul  or someplace had to fly a thousand or more nautical miles to bomb, say, Darwin, Australia. They were exhausted by the time they got there, and of course long flying times put exponential mechanical strain on the planes… which then had to fly a thousand miles back.

The Allied aircraft waiting for them, by contrast, might have been technologically inferior, but they had fresh pilots, easy access to ground crews, and all the fuel and ammo in the world, with which to harass the raiders halfway from Rabaul and back. And since the Japanese plane designers had sacrificed stuff like “self-sealing fuel tanks” and “armor protection for pilots” and even “basic defensive armaments” for those extra miles of range (and MPH of speed), the aircraft that actually made it over the target were sitting ducks. One of the most common Japanese bomber types throughout the war was referred to by Allied fighter pilots as “the one-shot cigarette lighter.”

In short, the Japanese, like the Germans, had wonderful planes for a very specific mission, and when that mission changed — as everyone but the German and Japanese high commands foresaw — those planes’ great advantages became insurmountable defects. Whether the Japanese or German aircraft industry was capable of the kind of wholesale retooling that was necessary is above my pay grade… and also irrelevant, because the high command wasn’t capable of the necessary conceptual changes. And that, in turn, stemmed from ideology.

But here’s the really interesting bit: Though the Soviets were every bit as ideological as the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese, they were capable of change at the highest level. See, for example, the Red Army going all-in on on the IL-2 “Shturmovik,” the most-produced military aircraft in history. A sitting duck in the air (the Luftwaffe racked up mind-boggling kill counts against it), it was perfect for the kind of war the Soviets were forced to fight. Knowing the Red Air Force wouldn’t be able to slug it out with the Luftwaffe for a year or two, Stalin ordered up an aircraft that could take tremendous punishment… and was easy to learn, because he was willing to take tremendous losses.

Hitler, meanwhile, wanted to use his fancy new jet fighter — an air superiority platform if ever there was one — as a day bomber, and do you see what I mean?

As fun as this is, though, y’all know I’m not really talking about recondite aspects of aircraft design. I’m really talking about propaganda.

Though both the Germans and the Japanese had every intention of starting major wars, as everyone knows they seemingly put zero thought into what they’d do once they won. I know, I know, the Nerd had his sweaty wet dreams about Wehrbauern on the vast Russian steppes, but all but the most rudimentary post-victory planning seems to have been beyond the Third Reich’s capacity — the Reich Resettlement Office, for instance, was tiny even when the war looked like it would be over by Christmas. The Japanese were, if anything, even dumber — they honestly seemed to believe they could run China, all of it, and even India Manchukuo-style.

The Russians, meanwhile, never stopped playing the long game. While Goebbels made a few token gestures at rapprochement with “the West” (yeah, they called it that), and to sell Nazism to ditto, his heart wasn’t in it, any more than the Japanese’s heart was in their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” hooey. Stalin, by contrast, was always pimping Communism to the West — even in the deepest, darkest days of the war, when it looked like the Wehrmacht was about to march into Moscow, the propaganda directed at the West continued full blast.

Like the German and Japanese aircraft industries, the German propaganda industry was ideologically locked into its core mission: To sell Nazism to Germans. And they were aces at it, no doubt… but then the mission changed. The smart thing for the Germans (and Japanese) to have done with their conquered territories was, in the context of the war, to ease up on the Nazi shit for the duration. The Nazis could’ve had zillions of Ukrainians fighting for them in 1941 just as the Japanese probably could’ve waltzed into India in 1941 had they not been so… well, so Japanese, in the rest of the Pacific rim. Stalin would’ve done it in a heartbeat, had the situation been reversed, and to hell with “authentic” Marxism-Leninism. Win the war first; square the ideology later.

As this is running way long, one example should suffice. Goebbels approached the task of selling Nazism to Germans in the most German way possible: He created the Reich Culture Chamber, which controlled all newspapers, radio broadcasts, film distribution, etc. And it worked, as far as it went — Goebbels deserves his “evil genius” rep — but as we’ve seen, that locked the leadership into an ideological straightjacket. Telling the Wehrmacht to ignore the Commissar Order and buddy up with the Ukrainians would’ve been the smart thing to do, militarily, but it was culturally impossible. Goebbels did his job too well… and then the mission changed.

The Soviets had a similar problem inside the USSR, but — here’s Stalin’s evil genius — they had free reign in propagandizing the West. Goebbels hardly bothered, but the Soviets poured massive resources into it. Forget, as far as you can, everything you think you know about “Nazism” (n.b. for newer readers, this is why we call it “Cat Fancy” around here). Even if you look at it as objectively as possible, it still seems ridiculous, and there’s a simple explanation for that  — it’s not for you. Unless you were a pure blooded Aryan, actually living in Germany (or within Germany’s potential military reach), the Cat Fancy crew couldn’t care less about you. Which made being a “Nazi” in, say, America uniquely pointless — you just look like a bigot at best, a traitorous bigot at worst.

Being a “Communist,” though? That was universal. Indeed, that made you a Smart person, a very very smart person, and morally superior to boot. Why? Because you care so much that you’ve mastered this large body of deliberately esoteric doctrine, comrade…. all straight out of the NKVD playbook. And if actual life as it was lived in the Soviet Union didn’t quite measure up to the promises, well, that’s because they didn’t have the right people — people like YOU — running things. It’s fucking brilliant — a totally ideologically closed, indeed brutal, system at home, presented as the most open-minded, enlightened, tolerant one possible abroad.

Which is why Joey G. needed a huge Reich Culture Chamber that never came close to justifying its budget, and Stalin needed, effectively, nothing. Being so very, very Smart, wannabe “elites” in the West were happy to spread Commie propaganda for free. The NKVD, let alone the Gestapo, ain’t got shit on the Junior Volunteer Thought Police of Twitter and Facebook…

…which forces us to confront the question: Which model of propaganda are our rulers using? Has the one morphed into the other? Is it real, or is it just “German efficiency”?

*the Japanese, being Japanese, had two separate “air forces,” attached to the Army and Navy, which of course didn’t coordinate with each other, or even much with their parent services. The Zero was primarily a Navy plane, and though the Army had a model, too, they had their own ground-based fighter, whose name I forget. To make things even more confusing for the historian, the Zero is the only Japanese plane commonly referred to (by civilians) by its model number (the Mitsubishi A6M2 model 0; still called “the Zero” at the end of the war, though it went through a million model numbers and variations). All others were designated in Allied radio code with girls’ names (bombers) or men’s names (fighters)… which is why non-military historians and other civilians call it the “Zero,” while most people who fought the damn thing called it the “Zeke.” It’s all very confusing (as it was to the Allies at the time) so for clarity we’ll just say “the Japanese Air Force.”

A quick link to The Other McCain. Over in England, they’re #canceling Darwin because “it is alleged [that] his theory of evolution was used to “justify white male supremacy.”

There’s no “justify” about it, comrades. If Darwinism is true — note the crucial qualifier IF; I’d put it in 50 foot blinking neon if WordPress could support it — then White males are obviously superior. The proof of which is that every single element of the contrary assertion — that somehow evolution doesn’t prove this — depends utterly on something invented by White men. The computer on which it’s written, the electricity that powers said computer, the math underlying both of them, the university system itself… all copyright Pale Penis People, Inc. Yep, even the very idea of writing (as the Woke so ostentatiously informed us in the wake of a recent shooting, Syrians — that is, Semitic peoples like the Babylonians — are White).

Furthermore, if Darwinism is true — again, note the huge honking neon-blinking IF — then Social Darwinism is necessarily also true, which means that “scientific racism” is true (see above), which means… well, that the Social Darwinists were right. Is that really the lesson you’d like us to take away from your critique, friends? That the people who believe that Darwinism is true — the people who Fucking Love Science — should, to be consistent, follow Darwin’s conjectures out to their logical conclusion?

It’s been tried, comrade… it’s been tried. It didn’t go well. Remind me why — if Darwinism is true — a society that wishes to propagate its own success (and what else could society possibly be for, if Darwinism is true?), should continue to subsidize, say, a group that’s only 13% of the population, but which commits 50% of the homicides?

Of course, if Darwinism isn’t true, then it falls on our friends at Sheffield to explain the very obvious disparity between “discovered everything that has made human life worthwhile, from the very minute we stopped swinging from the fucking branches” and “discovered nothing of note.” That’s tough to do without, again, hoisting yourselves upon your own petards. Oh, you say Whitey stole it from you? Well, I guess Whitey — who, as you say, believes in Darwinism — was just acting on his beliefs, and if Wakanda was too weak to defend itself from such obvious inferiors…

Logical entailment is tough, I realize, unless of course you’re a Pale Penis Person. But the way I see it, there’s no possible way this argument, either for OR against the truth of Darwinism, ends well for y’all. It’s probably best to just say “Charles Darwin was a man of his time” and leave it at that.

Since I know you’re wondering, for the record: I don’t believe “Darwinism” is true. “Evolution through natural selection” is a rough, ballpark approximation of the mechanism by which new species arise, but by “in the ballpark” I mean “way up in the nosebleed seats in the deepest part of center field.” By contrast, “Darwinism,” as the term was being commonly used well within Charles Darwin’s own lifetime, means something very much like “directly over the plate,” with all the consequences — philosophical, political, social, and military — that McCain notes, plus all the other ones I described above.

If that’s tl;dr for you, let me sum up: My view — that “evolution through natural selection is in the ballpark” is not only perfectly compatible with a Biblical view of the world, it’s actually the official position of the Catholic Church, which — that raging Satanist asshole Bergoglio aside — is still the vehicle of the Truth. I can’t explain to you why “Social Darwinism” — that is to say, eugenics and/or genocide — is wrong, scientifically or logically, IF (big blinking neon IF) the starting premises are true. But I can explain, very easily, why it’s morally wrong, and here’s a free pro tip: If your premises lead, in three steps or less, to mass murder, your premises are plain fucking evil.

Like every American-American (that’s my new hyphenated victim group name for “normal White people”) who has at least one ancestor from The Auld Sod, I have an uncle whose hobby is Irishness. Uncle Paddy, as we’ll call him, can be a real nosebleed about it; I’m still banned from certain family gatherings for having set him off by mentioning a few jejune truths about 19th century European history. Nonetheless, so long as you don’t step too hard on sore toes, Uncle Paddy is loads of fun. He’s easy to shop for at Christmas, at least. In short, he’s the best kind of “Irishman” — the kind who only believes his own blarney when he wants to.* It keeps him occupied in his golden years, and so long as you can keep yourself from laughing whenever he goes into ecstasies over his beloved Fighting Irish football team signing a not-exactly-Hibernian running back with a name like Cthulhuvious Smith III, it’s all harmless…

…but it’s harmless because, and only because, everyone knows where Uncle Paddy’s real loyalties lie. Like every other “Irish” hobbyist I’ve met in America, he has no idea who the political leadership of Ireland are, and the idea that he’d take orders from some gay Pajeet (or whoever the PM is now) is ludicrous. Ditto the Pope — though Uncle Paddy is, of course, the kind of “Irish Catholic” who hangs a photo of JFK meeting St. John XXIII in the kitchen (then remarks how nice it was of His Holiness, to let the Bishop of Rome be in the picture like that), the idea of Uncle Paddy going against one of the family on the orders of that goddamned Marxist Bergoglio is even more laughable.

In other words, I’m going to make one of those seemingly hairsplitting distinctions here that they love in the English Department, but it’s actually important in this case: “Irish Catholic” is important to Uncle Paddy, but it’s not his identity. Rather, it’s a heuristic, or, as they say in the Anguish Department, a narrative. When Uncle Paddy tells his life story to himself, he’s the Heroic Hibernian. But when the chips are down, he’ll side with his family, because that’s his identity. That’s who he IS, and only when the crisis is well past will he write it back into his Heroic Hibernian narrative.

At the risk of beating this into the ground, I’m going to go with one more example. When I first started teaching History, I used a lot of battle narratives. I thought the students would find them interesting. And they did… provided they were from the Vietnam Era. Anything before that, they had no frame of reference. It’s not just that the writers used antiquated language. This stuff isn’t Shakespeare; the language of, say, Good-bye to All That is close enough to the parlance of our times. The difficulty was that the contemporary writers were using a different narrative to process their experience.

For example, almost every British officer who wrote a memoir of WWI — almost to the man — makes a big deal about entering Belgium through the Menin Gate. Now, why they did that is easy enough to explain: These were men — boys, really — fresh out of school, where they all learned Classical Greek. The first words of the Iliad, in Greek, are “menin aeide, thea,” and since the Iliad is all about boys going off to war, the parallelism for them was both obvious and meaningful.

But that’s the thing: Who eve reads the Iliad now, much less spends some significant portion of their life with it, as those young Etonians would’ve? Theirs was a culture in which the Iliad was a real presence, and while none of them marching up to the Ypres Salient with their Enfield rifles would ever mistake themselves for Achilles, they were steeped in those values in a way that makes no sense to us.

Fast forward to the Vietnam memoirs, and now students have no problems. Again, it’s not the language, it’s the narratives, the metaphors. Just as every combatant officer in France in WW1 made some remark about the Menin Gate, so every Vietnam writer kicks off his description of his arrival in-country with “it was just like a war movie” (invariably followed, after the first firefight, by “this is nothing like a war movie”). Even if you’ve read The Iliad, “menin aeide, thea” is still Greek to you, but everyone has seen a war movie. I haven’t read any of them, but I have no doubt that the memoirs of our more recent adventures are dominated by the metaphor of video games (I’ve been told by many combat vets that the way they unwound from patrols, even after firefights, was by playing Call of Duty. Figure out how that’s possible, and you’ll understand something extremely important about the younger generation).

As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, I’m keeping this deliberately apolitical. Let’s continue to do so as I ask you to contemplate: What would happen if the (admittedly somewhat strained and artificial) distinction between identity and narrative failed? What if someone couldn’t distinguish between the two?

It might’ve been better for the Tommies in the Poor Bloody Infantry to have had war movies. They’d still die horribly, pointlessly, but at least they’d have a much better way of understanding what the hell was happening to them, and why the red tabs back at the base were so incompetent. Seigfried Sassoon was a legit war hero, a major league badass who killed more than a few men hand-to-hand, but I know something about war that he doesn’t, though I’ve never fired a shot in anger. Here, look:

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Sassoon was an officer — it was impossible for a man of his social class to not be an officer — but he wasn’t an officer, old sock. He wasn’t privileged with all the regimental tradition and hoo-hah going back to Agincourt — not the way The General was, anyway (when Captain Graves, of the Royal Welch-with-a-C Fusileers, makes a big show in Good-bye of all the regimental history he doesn’t remember, that’s a deliberate slap in the face — a big part of the “all that” he’s bidding goodbye). They — the Generals — were telling themselves different narratives than were the “Kitchener” officers in the trenches. If Seigfried Sassoon had been able to watch Dr. Strangelove before marching off to the trenches, he’d understand it all much better.

Though it still wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to the war’s outcome, and do you see what I mean? The Generals of the Great War weren’t callous bastards. They weren’t trying to get their men killed wholesale. They were doing their duty as they saw it, which, again, was based on narratives going back to Agincourt. Their identity and their narrative were irreconcilably off, but they kept trying to shoehorn the one into the other, because what else could they do?

Meanwhile, the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead… and because their identities and narratives more closely aligned (they give the orders, we follow), they didn’t do the only thing that would’ve saved them. That’s the way it always goes when those things get out of sync, and alas, from my reading there seems to be only one proven way to get them back into line.

*As opposed to the worst kind of real, no-quotation-marks kind of Irishman, who does believe his own blarney. Look at the damage James Joyce did to literature. Dubliners was great, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was at least interesting and had a point… but then he started believing his own blarney. People like Virginia Woolf thought Ulysses was great and Finnegan’s Wake genius, which tells you everything you need to know.

As we’re now a month or more past the first anniversary of “fifteen days to slow the spread,” I’ve been racking my brain, trying to figure out the Covidians’ behavior. The ones who seem to take it seriously, I mean — it’s obvious why grifters and fascists and pudding-brained “presidents” keep pushing it, but what about normal people? In the last post, I brought up an experience that most of the Twenty Readers must be familiar with, the “midlife crisis” — in short, the full, gut-level realization (as opposed to mere mental acceptance) of the fact that you’re going to die.

If the people who carry on like they’re freaked out about COVID, I suggested, really are freaked out by COVID, then they must’ve gone through a “midlife crisis”-type experience. Which should, in turn, have run them through the classic Kubler-Ross stages of grieving…. but that hasn’t happened. Instead, it seems like younger people jumped straight to “depression” — everyone knows how horrible this lockdown bullshit has been for kids — while the older folks seem to be stuck at “bargaining.” If we just get a few extra booster shots, and wear a few more masks, and stand another ten feet away from everyone, the Coof gods will spare us!!

In the comments below, Pickle Rick gave me the answer:

I’d say the closest historical parallel to the Cult of Covid is the flagellant movement during the Black Death. The Kovid Karens are also at the forefront of abasing themselves before Africans, another form of public self flagellation.

They are indeed stuck at a kind of pseudo-bargaining, hence the mask fascism and the foot washing. But the reason they didn’t run through the full “stages of grief” is: They’re not grieving. Remember all that stuff I wrote about “mental middlemen?” This is that. None of this stuff is real to them. Their behavior in the “real world” is the result of the trashy soap opera that’s playing in their heads: Black Death, the Movie.* Or, since we’re up to the third or fourth generation of this series now, they’re cosplaying the video game Resident Evil.

He’s an obnoxious Leftie, of course, and no doubt a Covidian to boot, but there’s a reason The Stand is Stephen King’s best and most enduring work. His vignettes of America collapsing at the start of the book all ring true, because that’s how people really would behave, faced with a real plague. We know this, because, as Pickle Rick points out, we have lots of historical evidence for how people act in that kind of situation. The cultural manifestations change, but the underlying psychology is eternal.

See also: The fact that, while people on social media went nuts trying to find pictures of folks in masks during the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, none of the usual suspects in The Media gave the Spanish Flu any more than the most cursory coverage. Odd, don’t you think? I’d expect massive six-part documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman or some other Numinous Negro as a bare minimum… but there was none of that. Here again, the reason is: Back then, people behaved like people would in a real plague. Lots of bargaining, yeah… but also denial and anger and depression and, ultimately, acceptance. They went on with their lives, taking whatever reasonable precautions they felt were necessary, because life does, in fact, go on… until it doesn’t, and when it’s your time, buddy, it’s just your time. Nothing to be done. Life’s for living, so live it.

Meanwhile, here we are, fifteen months later, still stuck as a society at “bargaining”… without ever having gone through “denial” or “anger,” and no closer to “depression” or, God forbid, “acceptance.” Why? Because those are what real people go through, and we’re not real people anymore. We’re living in a video game, in the Matrix.

Video game protagonists don’t run the Kubler-Ross stages, either. They just pick up a gun and start blasting zombies. But they’re not completely reactive, either, and while some artist somewhere (if such a thing can exist now) might have a hoot making a video game where you just trudge through the years, blasting zombies from your fortified bunker until you’re too old to hold a shotgun anymore, nobody would play it. In video games, the player not only has complete agency — since he’s got the shotgun — but also a goal. It’s progressive. The thought that the plague might never end, that there’s no possible escape from Raccoon City (and nothing left to escape to in any case) simply never registers, because those are the game’s rules.

So pervasive is this video game mentality, it’s infected even the generation that came up before video games. The point I was trying to make, echoing the linked post in “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” is that the Baby Boom generation seems somehow to believe that they can win the Ultimate Boss Fight with death. That’s why they, too, still seem to be stuck at “bargaining.” Guys like Fred Reed and Steve Sailer seem pretty based… until they get that first AARP flyer in the mail, and then they turn into Angela Merkel. No expense — in money, social capital, or liberty — is too great if it gets us that one last round of golf at Sarasota Beach.

Last, but certainly not least, no one ever stops to think about how absurd this all is. Just like in video games, where ammo weighs nothing, you can overcome mortal injuries with a spray bottle, and you get as many chances to clear the level as you need, provided you make it to that typewriter in the safe room. All of that is idiotic, but the game wouldn’t be playable without it, so nobody minds. Same deal out in the “real world.” Who cares if the next generation of kids will be autistic, growing up trying to decipher social cues by reading eyebrows? Who cares if what’s left of the middle class gets gutted? Who cares that you can’t just keep printing money? Those are just the givens, the stuff that makes the game playable…

…and it’s all just a video game.

*There actually IS a movie called Black Death, with Sean Bean. It was ok for a late-night, half-drunk Netflix watch. As I’m sure will come as no surprise to anyone, Bean dies.

Everybody knows the cliche about midlife crises: A guy hits forty, and all of a sudden he buys a sports car, takes up skydiving, starts cheating on his wife with a nineteen year old stripper. If “middle age” ceased to exist tomorrow, entire industries would go out of business. If you’re one of the young folks who hang out here for some reason, trust me: You, too, will one night wake up in a cold sweat, wondering where the hell half your life went, and what it all could possibly have meant. Cliches are cliches because they’re true.

All that stuff — the sports car, the stripper — is a desperate effort to make that cold-sweat feeling go away. The cold-sweat feeling comes on you of itself, the way Kierkegaard or whomever said religious feeling does. You can’t avoid it, because no matter how full a life you’ve led up to then, the thing that wakes you up at three in the morning is nothing less than the certainty that you are going to die.

Most men get over the strippers-and-sports-cars overreaction pretty quickly, generally to be replaced by a new outlook on life. The guys who have come through the midlife crisis are generally a lot better people — more focused, more outgoing, far less materialistic — because they’ve taken up, however briefly, the perspective of Eternity. If you’re religious, you wonder if you’ll merit heaven. If you’re not, you wonder how you’ll be remembered. Either way, you start thinking about the kind of world you want to leave behind you, and what you’re going to do to achieve it with whatever time is left to you.

Which is why I’ve found the COVID overreaction so bizarre. Realizing your own mortality changes things. You can always tell, for instance, when it has happened to a younger person — when they come home, combat vets often act like middle-aged men going through a midlife crisis. Readjustment to civilian life is hard. Read the great war narratives, and it’s clear that none of them ever really “got over it.” Robert Graves and Ernst Junger, for instance, both lived to ripe old ages (90 and 103, respectively), and were titans in fields far removed from battle… and yet, the war WAS their lives, in some way we who haven’t been through it will never understand, and it comes through in every line they wrote.

If the Covidians were really freaking out about COVID, then, I’d expect one of two broad types of reaction: Either party-hearty midlife crisis mode, or a new determination to get on with whatever’s left of life. Obviously neither of those are true, and I just can’t grasp it — these might be your last few weeks on Earth, and that’s how you’re going to spend them? Sitting in your apartment like a sheep, wearing a mask and eating takeout, glued to a computer screen?

If you want a measure of just how feminized our society has become, there you go. Call this misogyny if you must, but it’s an easily observed fact of human nature — indeed, it has been observed, in every time, place, and culture of which we have knowledge — that post-menopausal women go a bit batty. Though a man might know for certain that he dies tomorrow, he can still keep plugging away today, because he’s programmed to find real meaning in his “work” — we are, after all, running our snazzy new mental software over kludgy old caveman hardware.

Women aren’t like that. They have one “job,” just one, and when they can’t do it anymore, they get weird. In much the same way high-end sports cars would cease to exist if middle aged men ceased to exist, so there are entire aspects of culture that don’t make sense in any other way except: These are channels for the energies of post-menopausal, and therefore surplus-to-requirements, women. You could go so far as to say that pretty much everything we call culture — traditions, history, customs — exist for that reason. Women go from being the bearers, to being the custodians, of the tribe’s future.

(An odd sort of misogyny, don’t you think, that gives credit for the persistence of culture to the ladies? But read on before you give me too much credit for my enlightened sexual politics).

But that’s Covidianism, y’all. Instead of shrieking “think of the children!” like Mrs. Lovejoy, the vinegar-drinking shrews who run our culture have decided “to hell with the children.” They themselves don’t have any, and thanks to a girlhood spent riding the carousel, jacked on artificial hormones and with the abortion clinic on speed dial, they never can. So all the energy that would’ve gone into curating the tribe’s future gets channeled into ever more bizarre politics in the here-and-now.

I’m not blaming it all on the ladies, though. The men let them do it. Even in my day, when third wave feminism was well advanced, this ridiculous mask shit would be unenforceable. No kid would’ve complied. There are no better barracks lawyers than high school kids; I can’t even imagine all the stuff we would’ve done with our mandatory masks, but one thing’s certain: We would NOT have marched around the halls in lockstep, gazes held firmly on the floor, wearing our little masks and lining up quietly for our government goop shots. Again, see above: If you’re really faced with your own mortality — if you really believe, if you truly know, way down inside where it matters, that you’re going to die — you don’t turn into quivering little mouse. “Bargaining” and “depression” always follow “Denial” and “anger”… and we’ve seen neither of those.

Something is very wrong here.

This post is mostly to share with y’all another excellent site I just discovered, Soviet Men. In particular, this post has some things worth pondering:

perhaps this gives us a clue as to why we’re so terrified of a virus with a fatality rate we previously would have shrugged off (Asian flu, Hong Kong flu etc.)

We’re not used to death.

Almost everybody now lives to a ripe old age, not just compared to the 1800s but even compared to the 1990s. Very recently, an elderly and frail person dying was considered natural, ‘a good innings’, but now we consider it unacceptable.

We don’t only see this attitude in Covid hysteria. We also see it in over-treatment of terminal illnesses. Few know that doctors, wiser about such matters, tend to decline treatment for themselves when they are gravely ill more often than the average person.

Back in the 1990s, we were not bewailing the terrible state of the world even though average death rates were likely higher than for 2020 (age-adjusted or perhaps even in crude terms). In the 1990s, we still accepted death.

The decay of religious belief is not the only reason for our zero-tolerance policy towards death. We have grown so estranged from the event that some are beginning to unconsciously think that death ought to be eliminated in order to achieve a truly just society.

There it is. Being on life’s back nine myself (although only, perhaps, on the tenth or eleventh or hole), I’m inclined to see someone dying in their seventies as “a good innings,” as Nikolai puts it (I think he’s Australian, so that’s a term from cricket, not baseball). I hope not to face the reaper for many years yet, but when I do, I pray that I can give a good accounting of myself, and face him like a man. If there’s nothing to be done, well, then there’s nothing to be done. If you can spare the morphine, please let me go as painlessly as possible, but if not, then….well…. there it is. I pray for the courage to say “there’s no point in moving heaven and earth to get me a few more months, or even years, when there are young people who need the resources I’m sucking up.”

Which has been my attitude towards COVID, too. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that could justify all this. I don’t want to get it, of course (I’m actually pretty confident I’ve already had it, way back in the early days when it wasn’t officially here but everyone had that awful hacking cough, but that’s neither here nor there). I certainly don’t want my aged granny to get it. But I’m not going to shut my life down for a slight reduction in my chances of getting it, or even a reduction in granny’s chances of getting it, and I’m sure as hell not going to demand that the world shut down for it. People should take whatever personal precautions are appropriate to their station, which for a reasonably young(ish), healthy(ish) fellow like myself, is… pretty much nothing I wasn’t already doing, e.g. washing my hands after going potty. (And why is it we have to remind, indeed beg, people to do that? Nasty bastards).

Death comes for us all, and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens’ claws, as John Donne didn’t say. I’m scared of it, everyone is, but it’s unseemly to go wailing and screaming into that good night. I can’t blame the Boomers who foisted this COVID madness on us for not wanting to die, but I can, and do, blame them for refusing to bow to the inevitable with dignity. Instead, the incalculable damage we’ve done — to our economy, to our culture, to our children’s social development — is just one final “fuck you” from the most narcissistic, disgusting generation in human history.

This started as a reply to Vizzini, below, but it needs to go above the fold.

Vizzini writes:

This reminds me of another pet peeve of mine that comes up in discussions of bravery or cowardice. It seems there’s always someone who says, “You shouldn’t call him a coward. [You/Most people] might not do any better in the same situation.”

My standards of bravery and cowardice are neither situational nor dependent upon my own ability to meet up to them. Sure, I may not behave with the bravery I hope to when I encounter a dangerous situation. That does not mean my standard of bravery was wrong. It means I behaved in a cowardly manner. Defining bravery down as a means of rationalizing away your own cowardice — or potential cowardice — is despicable.

I’d rather have high standards and have to look myself in the mirror knowing I failed to meet them. At least that offers me the hope of doing better in the future.

That’s largely what I was getting at when I said “there are no laws against acting like a man.” Two points here:

First is the one that Vizzini notes, this literally Bolshevik notion that the only “standards” worth having are the ones that you, personally, can live up to 100% of the time. And I mean it, kameraden — that’s a Bolshevik idea. One of the great keys to the Old Left’s success is that they preached the perfectibility of Man. I know, I know, that seems completely backassward, but stick with me:

In practice, the notion of Man’s perfectibility in this world — the qualifier is crucial — becomes, necessarily, the Gospel of the Lowest Common Denominator. Are there heroes in this world? Of course there are, comrade; of course there are. But: are the majority of people in this world heroic? Is “heroism” the default response of the average man? That’s unlikely, comrade, but let’s say that it is — that in the pinch, as Orwell wrote somewhere, the sailors, not just the captain, go down with their ship. Well then… are you, personally, heroic? Have you ever been tested? How do you know?

Chances are, of course, that if you’re listening to me — the balding, goateed, tweedy little devil resting on your Left shoulder, whispering to you from the Book of Marx — you strongly suspect, way down deep in your secret heart, that you’re not heroic. That you are, in fact, a coward. But are you not a man? Are you not, in fact, a better sort of man, because you understand all this? At least you, comrade, are honest with yourself about your lack of courage… and isn’t that, in a very real way, more courageous than those blustering tough guys, who are no doubt cowards too? They must be, just look at them!

No, comrade, the truth is, you’re better than them, because you acknowledge that you’re… well, not a worm, because of course that’s their standard of value — stupid, unenlightened clods that they are. Their standards of value are as false as the rest of their consciousness. The real courage, comrade, is acknowledging that “courage” is a myth. Yes, even the “courage” of “heroes.” What, was Audie Murphy “heroic,” murdering all those working-class draftees? Who benefitted from this? Murphy himself? He was a compulsive gambler, a degenerate, a tax cheat who was arrested on assault charges after shooting at a dog trainer. A dog trainer!!

No, Audie Murphy’s “courage” only benefitted the same people it always benefits — the bourgeoisie, the companies… Capital, comrade, all is capital. Murphy was no “hero;” he was a dupe. But you’re not, because you alone have the intelligence to see it, AND the courage to admit it…

Etc. Apply that sweetly seductive “logic” to all the virtues, and you have the Current Year, straight out of the NKVD playbook. Saying “courage isn’t real, because not everyone is courageous” is exactly like saying “because Peter Dinklage can’t dunk a basketball, it is impossible for a human being to dunk a basketball.” It is not necessary, for society to flourish, that every man be a hero. It is, however, necessary that men acknowledge heroism is possible.

[I could swear that some guy — Dr. Dre, probably — once said something like “Be you therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” And since, Cornelius Janenius notwithstanding, God does not give us impossible commands, it must be the case that the perfection consists precisely in this: That we always and everywhere try, with all our hearts, to be perfect, though we can’t succeed in this world. But, hey, whatever, there’s another tool of bourgeois oppression for ya].

The second point ties in with the first. “Acting like a man” doesn’t mean “mowing down entire battalions of Nazis singlehandedly, Audie Murphy-style.” It doesn’t mean “getting in everyone’s face all the time.” It doesn’t even mean “taking no shit from nobody.” All of those can be expressions of manhood, but reducing “acting like a man” to only that is — you guessed it — another old Bolshie trick. The simplest definition I can think of is “do what’s right, because it’s right… and if there’s no right action to do, stay silent and do nothing.”

Sometimes it’s as simple as telling Johnny from Accounting to his face that he leaves his half-eaten sandwiches in the break room fridge, and asking him to stop. (Chances are he doesn’t even know he’s doing it). Sometimes it’s even simpler — the realization that the bitches complaining about Johnny leaving half-eaten sandwiches around don’t care about Johnny or his sandwiches; they’re just bitches looking for an excuse to bitch, and if you take away their fun by cluing Johnny in, they’ll start doing the same thing to you. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of realizing that you — I, all of us — can simply put the fucking phone down every now and again.

No, really, it’s that simple. John Wayne was 99.8% pure testosterone, but even John Wayne would see his Total Bitch Quotient drop a few points if he got off the goddamn Internet more often.

How does that old joke go? How do you write believable women in fiction? It’s easy: first you think of a man… then you take away reason and accountability.

Ahh, such an innocent time, the turn of the century. Nowadays you’d have to add an entire 762 bullet point checklist. Worse, you’d have to expand the joke to cover “males” — I won’t dishonor the memory of our forefathers by writing “men” — since they’re as catty now as the worst chick ever was back in 1997. The Internet in general, and social media in particular, has turned us into a society of passive-aggressive little bitches.

First data point, via Vox Day: Starbucks is thinking about bailing out on Facebook, because Facebook can’t or won’t censor its users to Starbucks’ satisfaction. My testicles are desperately trying to climb back inside my body as I type this, but for the benefit of future historians, I will soldier on:

‘Anytime they [Starbucks] post (organically) in regards to social issues or their mission & values work (e.g. BLM, LGBTQ, sustainability/climate change, etc.) they are overwhelmed by negative/insensitive, hate speech related comments on their posts.’ …

The Facebook employee said that Starbucks was having problems moderating the avalanche of hate speech, and was unable to disable comments on their page.

Much of the offensive commentary is swiftly removed.

However, the site is filled with people expressing disappointment at Starbucks for weighing in on issues such as Chauvin’s conviction.

‘Just stop it and stick to coffee,’ said one woman.

Another accused the company of ‘dancing over graves for political points.’

So, up top, when I said that Facebook “can’t or won’t” stop this kind of stuff? I lied. There’s no “can’t” about it. It’s “won’t,” for the simple reason that Facebook understands its market and the Daily Mail writers obviously don’t. You’d think that the legendarily trashy British tabloid media would get this — and as I understand it, the Daily Mail is somewhere in the bottom half of the barrel — but Facebook’s market isn’t its users. Not even big companies like Starbucks. Facebook’s market is advertisers, and what they, Facebook, are selling is views. Eyeballs. “Engagement,” I think the Ad Biz term d’art is. In short: It doesn’t matter what the comments are; it matters that the comments are.

Ad company execs are walking into a meeting with a Starbucks-sized company right now. They’re pitching a bold new social media strategy to their clients. And they know it works, these ad men say, because look at all this data from Starbucks. Their posts average so much “engagement” every time, but look, when they post on “social justice” topics, their “engagement” jumps 350%!!

In case you were wondering how all this “social justice” shit keeps appearing in ads, despite the well-known effect of pissing off companies’ established client base, well, there you go — the company execs, being #woke Cloud People,  want to do it anyway, and they’ve got whole binders full of data from the marketing department that prove “social justice” ups social media “engagement” with “the brand” umpteen zillion percent. But that’s not important right now. The important thing is, this kind of thing creates a passive-aggressive feedback loop that’s all to the companies’ benefit.

That’s the hardest thing to grasp about “social media” for us oldsters, and it’s all but impossible for the younger generations: They’re so used to living online, in a Twitter-dominated world, that they can no longer distinguish between “is on Twitter” and “happens in real life.” Indeed, Twitter (etc.) are specifically set up in such a way as to discourage any real-world action. Basically it’s the faculty lounge writ large. If you’ve been to college in the last half-century, you surely noticed that the faculty are Very Very Concerned about all kinds of stuff… but that the stuff they’re Very Very Concerned about is always happening to some obscure group thousands of miles away.

Even when they’re pretending to Care Very Much about, say, “systemic racism” in “America,” it would never occur to them to go down to the ghetto that, in many notorious cases, is literally right next door to do anything about it. They could find out everything they ever wanted to know — and then some!! — about “the Black Experience” by driving down MLK Blvd. at three in the morning, but somehow they never do. The way you win at victim bingo in the ivory tower is you find the most obscure group, the furthest away, to chastise your peers for not caring enough about. If what you say could possibly have any real-world application in the lives of anyone anybody you know had even the possibility of ever meeting, you lose.

Such is Social Media, so it’s no surprise that the Twitterati all fall victim to the biggest Faculty Lounge Fallacy of them all: That saying something is the same as doing something. Or, in other words, and not to put too fine a point about it, they act like passive-aggressive little bitches, like cat ladies around the company water cooler. You could get Johnny from Accounting to stop leaving his half-eaten sandwich in the lunch room fridge by simply asking him to stop… or you can have daily hen parties about it for weeks, months, years, squawking about how some people need to get some common courtesy… and meanwhile Johnny from Accounting goes on doing it, oblivious.

The genius of Facebook, Twitter, etc. — and it IS genius; sick, evil, twisted genius — is that they figured out how to monetize this.

Second data point: both Ace of Spades and Z Man (and I, and everyone else) have mentioned the latest “news” that the “Biden” administration is partnering up with marketing companies to entrap dissidents. Now, I have no doubt that this has actually been discussed — after all, as Z Man says, framing people is about the only thing the FBI actually succeeds at. But knowing how inept the Feeb is, how committed to the Diversity which is Our Strength, and how blatant the market research firms are with their “surveys,” I also have no doubt that their entrapment attempts really will be along the lines of “Hello, fellow Dissidents! You know what would be just super? If we all got together and [obvious incitement]. Whaddaya say?” It’s like COINTELPRO for retards…

But that’s the thing: since social media has made us all into passive-aggressive retards, you don’t actually need a COINTELPRO. Just planting the story is enough (and surely we can all agree that it IS a plant? Everything in the Media is a worked shoot, but some are more obvious than others… and when you’ve got the Washington Post expressing their “concern” with their sadz face, mumbling about “muh prinzibuls,” you know exactly what they’re trying to achieve). The “dissident right” was 99% talk already, and now the Internet Tough Guys — the ones who think they’re really sticking it to Starbucks when they tell Starbucks to “stick to coffee” on their Facebook page — have total sanction to keep on keepin’ on. You’ll never get anything even to the level of an Ace of Spades “moron meetup” again, and the only thing those fags are a danger to is the local bratwurst and charcoal supply.

It’s a work, but it’ll work, because we’re all chicks now.