May 2019 – If there is something

Media flew too close to Bullshit Mountain…again

The distress call went out back in March when a tough talking, street fighting litigator from Los Angeles, the unlikely hero of the resistance media, found himself cross-examining a pair of handcuffs. Thousands of media stories and pundit prognostications that had previously soared on the wings of this champion of the resistance, suddenly crashed and burned in the dense jungles of Bullshit Mountain. The distress call went unheeded, though. The stories of bravery and heroism in the face of a maniacal king, the tales of a young prince with a law degree defending the besmirched honor of more than one fair maiden, and the adventures of a crusader for truth and justice lay forgotten, swallowed up by the canopy of dense excrement that envelopes Bullshit Mountain.

At the entrance to every cable news studio, there must exist a scanner of some sort, lined with precision quantum magnets, that can detect the remnants of stories that crashed on Bullshit Mountain and extract them from the brains of the show’s hosts and commentators. Like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel, the Spotless Mind 3000 erases a reality they’ve spent months cultivating and promoting, and allows the commentator to move seamlessly onto another topic without acknowledging their culpability in crafting a stunning work of monumental bullshit. What else could explain this sort of nonchalance in the face of what should be a realization that the previous several months of the journalist’s professional life has been a complete waste?

It’s creepy the way they shift gears. How do you watch a narrative you’ve been spinning for months be reduced to ashes and not think to yourself, man, I really suck at my job? For many toiling in the real world, to have failed so miserably would have produced an existential reckoning accompanied by months of depression, and most likely loss of one’s occupation. Granted, when the Mueller Report dropped, some cable news hosts and commentators were either visibly shaken, or mad as hell and unable to take it anymore. (Mueller really should have given them a trigger warning.) However, after having their minds sanitized, many in the resistance media and its broadcast affiliates, CNN and MSNBC, without a moment of self-reflection, moved on from conspiracy and began to focus tremendous brain power on obstruction.

Here is one journalist ruminating admiringly about the then resistance hero back in July of 2018. No need to reveal the journalist’s identity. Let’s just say he’s a very prominent writer for an outfit with a name that starts with a V and ends with an X. “Alternatively, if you’re a smart, young, hard-working lawyer with progressive political convictions, and you also like money going out and winning large verdicts against rich companies that broke the rules, this line of work suggests itself as one of the most ethical ways to get rich.” So our resistance hero, prior to being charged with attempted extortion, bank and wire fraud, and stealing money from his clients, was engaged in one of the most ethical ways to get rich. Really?

Perhaps no one in the media could have known back in July of 2018 that Captain Resistance was nothing less than an honorable crusader for truth, justice, and the American way. But, most likely, they didn’t want to know. Because this was the guy who was going to take down Trump and possibly steal his job. Once again, scores of media hacks bought into a wildly improbable narrative and proceeded to recklessly guide it to it’s inevitable conclusion: that of a steaming forgotten heap, smoldering on the slopes of Bullshit Mountain.

Competing BDSM rallies clash in Portland

Boycott, Divest, Sanction Movement members clashed with Bondage, Dominance, Sadism and Masochism advocates at concurrent rallies in Portland today. No arrests were reported as Portland Police have been instructed not to engage protesters for any reason. Accounts of the incident vary and it is not completely clear how the two groups came to be rallying at the same location.

According to reports, a call went out on Facebook for BDS members to rally at a popular Portland municipal park. Boycott, Divest, Sanction Movement members took that as a cue to collect their protest signs and banners and gather at the park. Simultaneously, Bondage, Dominance, Sadism practitioners rounded up their shackles, chains and leather objects and made their way to the meeting place as well. Many in the group thought the Masochists had been intentionally not invited to the rally as the members are always looking to recruit new masochists of which to shame and humiliate.

Witnesses report when the two groups encountered each other, the BDSM members viewed the relatively docile and compliant BDS Movement members as a fresh batch of submissives of which to dominate, and quickly had them shackled and bound. At least initially, the BDS Movement members went along with charade thinking it dramatized the plight of the oppressed people they represent. However, once the BDS Movement members realized their predicament, they began virtue signalling, shouting “Oh bondage! Up yours!” and directing the full fury of their moral outrage at the BDSM members. Not used to being so ruthlessly shamed and humiliated, the Dominants and Sadists fled like crying bullies who’d just been handed their comeuppance.

Experts believe the posting on Facebook may have been the work of Russian intelligence operatives designed to sow discord among various American political and erotic role playing groups. If it was a Russian psyop, it failed miserably as comments on social media indicate most of the participants viewed the rally as a success and expressed a willingness to conduct further joint exercises by the two groups. Apparently the Russians underestimate the average Americans ability to seamlessly integrate their social justice with their fetishistic role playing.

Vox writer triggered by Bret Easton Ellis’s White

Millennials can be a hard bunch to impress, and Vox writer, Constance Grady, is not going to be impressed by much acclaimed and occasionally maligned author Bret Easton Ellis. When Ellis asserts in his book that Millennials often display an inability to view things in their context, he hadn’t accounted for Constance Grady, who last summer wrote a piece for Vox using the movie Sixteen Candles to provide “important context for the Brett Kavanaugh accusations.” When Grady is looking for some background on eighties rape culture, she knows to go straight to the source for everything eighties: John Hughes movies.

White, according to Vox’s rating system, receives only one V out of a possible five. Expressed as Roman numerals that would be I/V Vs. I guess if you hit a home run with the Vox crew, you score a V/V Vs. That Vox is a sort of Millenial Home Companion, the low rating is not surprising as this book is highly critical of the demographic group. True to Millennial form, Grady has to get the obligatory “racist” and “misogynist” accusations out of the way before the review even begins.

White is not a book about politics. Ellis expresses few political views in the book beyond stating that he didn’t vote for Trump or Clinton. It is a book that contrasts the American culture the author grew up in with our current one. Ellis bemoans the reality that our current culture is so obsessed with politics, at least among the entertainment and media elites on the coasts, and Ellis takes dead aim at the anti-Trump hysteria gripping much of the nation.

In the second paragraph of her review, Grady highlights an Ellis exchange in a New Yorker interview by Isaac Chotiner as a ‘gotcha moment’. It doesn’t need to be quoted here. The whole interview is an embarrassment… for Chotiner. Outrage cranked up to eleven, Chotiner drops all pretense of professionalism and runs down the list of Trump’s most deplorable moments, trying to get Ellis to admit that Trump is the worst scoundrel history has ever manufactured, but fails to get Ellis’s outrage to register above a three. The behavior of the interviewer only serves to illustrate Ellis’s point that many on the left lose all rationality when it comes to talking about Trump.

Grady admonishes Ellis for writing a book about politics when he claims to find politics ridiculous. Curiously, however, several paragraphs later, she claims as a fact “that there is no such thing as non-political art”. According to this line of reasoning, the simple act of a writer putting pen to paper is political. In Grady’s world, how can Ellis write anything that isn’t political?

Ellis’s complaint is that he can’t go out for dinner or drinks without his companions bringing up how Trump stole the election or that he’s a stooge of the Russians; and even in Ellis’s own home, his Millennial partner, distraught over a Trump presidency, has shut himself in, relapsed into addiction and essentially put his life on hold. Ellis’s lament is not political, it’s an argument against permitting politics to rule one’s life and sap all the enjoyment out of it. It is a call to take a deep breath, calm the fuck down, and preserve your sanity. Predictably, Grady’s comeback is to hit the outrage switch by reminding everyone of the “children who are being kept in cages”. This is the inevitable retort whenever anyone calls for rationality, or a more restrained response to Trump’s provocations. Why do Grady and Chotiner think that the appropriate response to Ellis’s criticism of years of anxious liberal hand-wringing over Trump is to try to elicit more of it by rehashing all the outrage inducing talking points? Have they ever considered that maybe Trump is playing them, or that maybe it gives his supporters a boner to watch the so-called liberal elites lose their shit?

Ultimately, Grady concludes that White is simply boring. The Millennial Grady is not impressed with stories of what it’s like to become a famous, best-selling novelist at the age of 23, shortly after graduating college. Stories of cocaine snorting and running with celebrities dull her to death, and she can’t engage with the author’s thoughts on movies or life growing up in the seventies. In other words, she can’t empathize with the experiences of a white, gay middle-aged man. Big surprise.

Millennials like Grady think they’re inventing civilization after generations of human struggle through a primitive dark ages. In her Sixteen Candles piece, she asserts, “In the 1980s, “rape” meant an attack from a stranger in a dark alley, not something that acquaintances did to each other at house parties where everyone knows each other.” This statement is absurd, untrue and reveals an appalling ignorance of the culture she’s attempting to write about, leaving little wonder why she can’t engage with a writer like Ellis. But that’s okay. If you’re ignorant and incurious, just make shit up. Vox will print it anyway.

Concern grows over new child development phenomenon: The terrible twenty-twos

Child development experts are increasingly worried about a new trend they’re witnessing. It is characterized by a child’s desire for independence paired with a reluctance to forgo reliance on adults. Some may think this sounds like the terrible twos, a condition experts have known about for years. However, an increasing number of cases involve young adults, leading some parents and researchers to label this new phenomenon the terrible twenty-twos.

While the condition doesn’t affect all young adults, it seems most prevalent among the most prosperous and privileged of our society. Recently, a group of students at Sarah Lawrence College, an elite institution of higher learning in Yonkers, New York, published a list of demands of college administrators. The list requires the college provide free housing when the school is not in session, and provide access to free food when the dining hall is closed. Apparently these young adults are incapable of feeding themselves in the traditional manner of going to the store, purchasing food items, and preparing them for consumption. Issued under the heading of Food Security and Accessibility, the list also includes demands the crusts be removed from all cafeteria sandwiches and 24 hour access to free juice boxes.

Temper tantrums are a hallmark of the terrible twos. Children will often lay on the floor, scream and cry to challenge the authority of adults. But don’t think just because you’re old enough to vote, get married, serve in the military, or buy alcohol, you can’t throw down an emotional meltdown with the best of them. At Sarah Lawrence roughly 140 students occupied the administration building, sat and lay on the floor, and refused to budge for several days until administrators engaged with their demands. In 2017, a group of Yale University students surrounded a professor, openly wept, and screamed at him to apologize for an email his wife wrote. The email urged school administrators to treat the students more like adults. Apparently, she jumped the gun on that one.

The terrible twenty-twos is also marked by a childish inability to engage with any speech or language with which the individual disagrees, or doesn’t comport with their worldview. The young person will often make irritating noises or scream loudly to disrupt and drown out the offending speech. At Middlebury College, students caused a speaker to flee the stage for his own safety, and assaulted a professor who organized the event. The incident has caused other speakers to be disinvited out of safety concerns. Not all students take such an aggressive approach to stifling speech. Some just stick their fingers in their ears and run to their nurseries…er… safe spaces, where cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play Doh, pillows, blankets, calming music, and videos of playful puppies are waiting to calm their triggered emotions.

Experts are hopeful that, like the the terrible-twos, the terrible twenty-twos is just a phase the afflicted young adult will eventually outgrow. As the individual progresses into adulthood, the hope is they will emerge from their cocoon of narcissistic, coddled privilege transformed into resilient, thoughtful, well-rounded individuals. Or they could just emerge as rich, entitled assholes.