(275) Don’t Do Anything Before Coffee
Definitely don’t read before coffee. Particularly if it’s your day off, and you have a particularly short fuse because of the ceaseless waterfall of hypocritical hershey squirts otherwise known as the yeti regime a bunch of you fuckers (*it has dawned on me that none of the lovelies who read my stuff are those fuckers but whatever you get me*) voted for a few months ago.
Here’s the article:
Don’t worry; you don’t even have to click it because here I go:
It was a masterful bit of trolling that admittedly felt a lot more meaningful and exciting when I was younger than it does to me today: We encouraged protests at colleges by sending outraged emails to various activist groups and clubs on campuses where the movie was being screened. We sent fake tips to Gawker, which dutifully ate them up. We created a boycott group on Facebook that acquired thousands of members. We made deliberately offensive ads and ran them on websites where they would be written about by controversy-loving reporters. After I began vandalizing some of our own billboards in Los Angeles, the trend spread across the country, with parties of feminists roving the streets of New York to deface them (with the Village Voice in tow).
So…congratulations on figuring out how to make money whilst being a massive troll? The unsubtle shaming at activists for being so reactive is a common abuse tactic. ‘Well, if you didn’t overreact so easily, then maybe these things wouldn’t happen to you.’ No, fuckstain, the reason these things happen is because you do them. You did this. Here you are, merely pretending to have any ownership for that. Wanna know how I know that ownership is pretend? In the very next paragraph, he gleefully announces, “but my favorite!!!!” He is still the fuck excited about it. He’s got a boner just remembering it. It’s a sad wrinkly unwashed one, but whatever, do want you want in your 43rd pair of nondescript khakis. Zero ownership for shitty behavior. No points scored.
Then he warbles on to explain to all us sad gullible fucks out here about how this is proof that we are just playing the game and giving him (Milo, but why distinguish one shit from another; they all need to be flushed, right?) exactly what he wants. He pivots to concern-trolling within the same goddamn paragraph:
It’s a sad irony for me, since I wrote the book as an explicit warning about how broken our media system was and why it needed to be fixed. As I would say in interviews, the strategies that I used were designed to market books and clothes for companies like American Apparel, but I was exposing how they worked because I worried how others might soon use them to sell something more nefarious.
He’s worried about how the media screws us, y’all. Media manipulators. It’s problematic, these media manipulators. (It’s finger pointing style, because his example of himself as exactly that particular stanky odor of destructive is very much tangential to the subject of his story which is how we’re all stupid for playing the game, shhh PSA don’t forget about how this is all our fault ok.) He includes a link to his book on how he’s a liar as proof of his concern, too. Because, you know, considerate.
Then he gets super sloppy (ahahaha ‘then’. ‘gets’. — never say I’m not generous):
Someone like Milo or Mike Cernovich doesn’t care that you hate them — they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful.
Who the actual fuck wants Grundle Blister the Third to care that they hate him? Who derails a conversation about activism into a personal vendetta? Who confuses the point of activism with confused weeping over what his followers do or don’t think about anything? Activism isn’t about changing the minds of the oppressors. It is about engaging the bystanders. Being louder. Being unrelenting, so that policy change is unavoidable. It’s about taking back the narrative, not convincing those who abuse us that we matter.
Dillybloop then has a few paragraphs about how a) folks like himself don’t want to be normalized because being perpetually provoked cretins is what they need to pull other desperately overlooked cretins to their pus-oozing, mediocrity-tainted side, and b) but also somehow don’t give them the moral high ground because even though dark gross slimy yuckiness at un-prodded center, definitely be worried about giving them the moral high ground.
The vast majority of your friends rush to agree, but your younger cousin has a dark switch in his brain go on for the first time.
…
The last thing you ever want to do is give an opponent the moral high ground — and attempts to suppress, intimidate and revoke constitutional rights do exactly that.
Let’s pretend that shutting down pucker bucket’s talk at UC Berkeley was just about a satchel of words and not about the power behind a racist movement based on hatred and violence. Let’s pretend that spouting hate speech is 100% always just speech and therefore always, 100%, protected by a definitely not fundamentally racist, misogynistic, Constitution. Sure.
Blocking pucker bucket’s speech is still activism, even in our little pretend situation. It is obstructionist. Which is the point. Revoking his constitutional rights would be the entire damn point. The ‘moral high ground’ has not been ceded.
But, here’s the crucial bit about that delicious moral high ground he wants us all to think we gave ole pucker bucket: there is zero morality in oppression. It doesn’t matter if he is polite every second of every day, if he never swears, never yells, always says thank you, donates money to christian schools, and knits sweaters for penguins on alternate Saturdays. He has zero moral ground because he is an oppressive unchecked bully. No one cedes their moral ground by calling out a bully, stopping a bully, and blocking a bully from continuing down their shitlaced path of selective destruction.
The idea that it sets up a bad precedent to prevent a bully from spewing hate speech is based on a false equivalency between free speech and zero repercussions. He has already spewed his hate speech. A lot. The impact from his rhetoric has already happened and is continuing to happen. Now there are repercussions. Pompously claiming that we’re all behaving badly by refusing to allow it to continue is gaslighting based on alt-facts, so like, double gold stars for you, buddy.
Further, as a dear friend so eloquently put it, “I don’t care if that one distant family member gets radicalized. He was gonna be a little fuckwit no matter what.”
Ok so the next paragraph in here is eight verses of kumbaya wedged into six link addled sentences, one of which is Trevor Noah’s Tomi Lahren interview so nooooooope let’s just sidle over that bullshit because I just can’t. There’s also a paragraph that splerps about counterinsurgency and insists that the ‘alt-right’ is fractured because no one can decide how much racism/xenophobia/misogyny is too much and maybe the rest of us should just sit tight and start being moral for christ’s sake. Possibly try bargaining with the ‘alt-right' (which, p.s. and surprise, is a fucking alt term for white nationalist, neo-nazi, or pack of unwashed foreskins). #moral #highground #horseshit
He closes with this:
Look at Tucker — and he’s still a friend, so I don’t mean to conflate him with anyone mentioned here — but when the controversy and outrage about his books dissipated, largely so did the sales. When he published a book of positive advice for guys — which was loved by the mostly female publishing industry and got all sorts of friendly press — it didn’t translate into success. He wasn’t an outlaw anymore. There wasn’t anything to get excited about. And now he’s moved on to other projects.
The old playbook stopped working…until a new generation picked it up again.
Look at Tucker, everyone! Look how far he has fallen since he stopped being one frothing head on a rabid troll hydra! But like, look nicely because he’s still my friend even though he’s all pathetic and moral and shit now. Humph. If only he’d kept being the frantic psychopath liar cunt that let us make him famous.
I can’t decide if the close of this ‘article’ is disappointing enough to be the perfect ending. He’s basically saying our outrage is fueling the ‘alt-right', with maybe best supporting actor going to social media for its accelerant role. The claim is so wholly ignorant and privileged that I’m sad I was sober when I read it.
Because here’s the thing, our outrage fuels us. Our outrage is necessary. Our outrage is late. The current regime, the ‘alt-right’, the GOP, whatever, is doing the same old shitbag garbage they’ve been doing for years. The difference is now more people are involved. Now, more people want in. And anusface wants to stifle that outrage? He wants us to bend a knee for some fuckshit version of moral high ground because freedom of speech and kumbaya bartering? Fuck yet another white dude telling anyone what constitutes oppression.
And of course his tally of what constitutes oppression conveniently sidesteps the most recent disaster mess from the regime he so affectionately insists we must coddle:
He’s up there, screaming about how we shouldn’t yell, how we should ask nicely, and oops the dismantling of POC in our country continues with nary a bump. We’re out here fighting every damn thing because they all matter, but we only get coverage and traction for a select few. And this precious chucklefuck wants to tell us we’re enabling it by being…less moral than the instigators of a racial war? Make no mistake: this siege was planned, and it is what they all, regardless of faction, want. Letting go of our fury for the sake of some mythical conversation with his snowflake ass and all his like-minded mcflurry minions isn’t going to grab attention and put the onus where it needs to go.
But, why bother ranting about a bullshit article, even? Hahaha ok for real, because ranting is verbal cardio when you don’t spend every flaccid second shaming the rage right out of your sphere of emotional experience. That aside, the bullshit in this article is destructive. It isn’t just a shitty article. This article has well meaning liberals piping up all over the place with ‘food for thought’ kumbaya prayers because even the possibility of being seen as close-minded by an actual, self-acclaimed, troll is just too fucking dicey. The hypocrisy in being morally untouchable while allowing dehumanizing behavior and policy to run rampant is a damn plague on the left.
So no. No to this article and no to this fuckshit regime and no to a well intentioned kumbaya. No.
