Author: buzafazoo

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Louis CK And Progressive Puritanism

Louis CK is in the news again, and no, it doesn’t involve his penis. He performed a set, which an audience member at the club recorded and uploaded to Youtube, which is great news to those with a sense of humor, and even better news to the disingenuous, pearl-clutching opportunists within modern progressive circles who don’t seem to understand how jokes work.

The 50 minute set consisted of exactly what you’d expect if you were even remotely familiar with Louis CK’s comedy. It’s bitter, pessimistic, edgy, and “inappropriate”. It’s also quite hilarious at times, at least to those who aren’t in the perpetually-offended camp.

As to be expected though, the journalist activists of the world saw a perfect opportunity to showboat just how righteous and virtuous they are, while managing to come across as even more puritan than the conservative Christians who picket Marilyn Manson concerts.

As of writing this, the following articles have been expediently vomited out for clicks:

Slate: Louis The Reactionary (originally titled: Leaked Louis Ck Comedy Act is Not Even Funny)
Slate: It’s Like Louis CK Is Not Even Trying To Win Back His Audience (originally titled Louis CK’s New Stand Up Material Is Angry and Bigoted)
Boston Globe: Louis CK’s Spectacular Return to Unfunny
CNN: Louis CK’s Parkland Joke Is What Happens When Comedy Fails. (hot take alert)
Out Magazine: Louis CK Is Just Fully Doing Transphobic Comedy Now
Harpers Bazaar: Why Can’t Men Like Louis CK Accept Their Ideas Are Outdated

What’s the running theme between all these articles? All of them were written by people who aren’t fans of Louis CK’s comedy who also can’t seem to comprehend that they aren’t entitled to personal apologies for things that didn’t involve them, or jokes catered to their personal sensibilities.

These people aren’t Louis CK’s target demographic. Their opinions hold absolutely no weight with anyone who actually is a fan, and looking for a nuanced critique. It’s like caring what an 87-year-old white guy from Tennessee thinks about Hip Hop music. These activist types like applause-break comedy. Their brand of comedy is someone making a joke about how orange Donald Trump is, to which a crowd obediently claps and hoots in unison. They like jokes that appeal to Boomers who drive Priuses with Obama bumper stickers, and there’s absolutely nothing edgy about anyone driving a Prius with an Obama bumper sticker. Louis CK obviously isn’t going to appeal to these types. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

So who was coming out in defense of Louis CK’s jokes? Actual comedians. The ones who write jokes for a living and understand that comedy is subjective. The ones who understand that you can make a joke about pronouns without it being “transphobic” (see Out Magazine article). The ones who realize you can make jokes about race without it being “bigoted” (see most of the above articles). The ones who aren’t in the business of writing disingenuous, agenda-driven articles to further their own pathetic careers.

The fact of the matter is that there’s a bit of a problem currently with progressive types who feel entitled to destroying and silencing people because they disagree with them in some manner. Most of the publications that publish these types of articles are largely staffed by, and cater to people who fit this definition. Activists who fancy themselves journalists, who write for people incapable of thinking for themselves, prone to mob-like behavior.

The inconvenient truth is that the people who become incensed by jokes are a very vocal minority, despite the fact that they feel they speak for all of society. The leaked Louis set already has over a million views in a few days, and the guy will literally be able to sell out venues when he has a new act ready. That is, unless the outrage mobs are successful in deplatforming him. You can not like the guy, and not find him funny, but that doesn’t change the fact that plenty of people do like his comedy.

The perpetually offended will merely find a new target to direct their ire at. They always do. They operate on the same level as goldfish. The second anyone else in the public eye slips up and does something the cult deems wrong-think, there will be a new batch of hastily written articles for easy clicks and ad-revenue, as they completely forget what and who they were angry about previously. The cycle will continue in perpetuity.

These types of people tend to exhibit an almost comedic level of denial about their own implicit authoritarian tendencies. They feel that people should be banned for saying things, wearing things, thinking things, enjoying things, even joking about things they don’t agree with. They are more than happy to make appeals to authority to meet their goals of ridding the world of things they don’t personally agree with, all the while making pathetic excuses to justify their shitty behavior. You see this a lot with job lynch mobs and collective efforts to de-platform people. Joke policing is just another branch of this authoritarianism.

The argument you’ll likely receive upon calling out these authoritarian tendencies it something like “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences”. Ok. What consequences are we talking about here? Your being angry and voicing your dislike of a comedian is perfectly fine. You are entitled to an opinion. Your engaging in concerted efforts to prevent someone from performing or having a platform isn’t protected by a Constitutional amendment however. It’s just douche bag behavior.

“What are you talking about. *drool* Nobody is preventing anyone from performing. *fart* Don’t be crazy.”

In response to this all too common trite response, I would probably bring up the following case. In December, Nimesh Patel was prevented from performing at Columbia University. Prevented, as in his performance was literally stopped, and he was asked to leave the stage because certain children in the crowd felt offended by the content of his jokes. In this case, people’s opinions weren’t merely expressed in response to his content, but he was prevented from doing his job due to a repressive appeal to authority. Should we even bother postulating on the political leanings of the guilty parties?

Colleges have become the canaries in the coalmine for society’s continued downward trajectory towards censorious authoritarianism. Comedians regularly have to deal with deciding to either sign “behavioral agreements” (actual things) , which dictate exactly what topics they are allowed to cover, or merely decide to not play campuses. Most comedians tend to opt for the latter, and have stopped performing at college campuses altogether.

As Chris Rock put it:

“…I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative. Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Unfortunately, the kids raised in these safe space environments grow up to be safe space adults who then write articles language policing everybody. Hence the 2 dozen articles chastising Louis CK for topics he chose to make jokes about, or arguing whether he’s allowed to make jokes at all. Every single one of these authors could have just as easily not listened to his set and gone about their lives. They all had that choice. But obviously, they wouldn’t have then had the opportunity to write self-righteous stink pieces.

We also need to address the issue of why Louis CK in particular is the target of these people’s ire.

Louis CK had a habit of masturbating in front of women. He did so consensually despite what all the hit pieces desperately trying to paint him as Bill Cosby 2.0 would like you to believe. Because consensual masturbation and outright rape are the exact same thing if we employ the brilliant logic of current year brains. Keep in mind, Sarah Silverman actually came out and said Louis masturbated in front of her and that she liked it, which she was then pressured into apologizing for because it tainted the victimization/predatory narrative that was being pushed.

The general consensus was then adopted that the acts were still inappropriate because Louis CK was in a position power, and ladies would have been less likely to say no since he was the guy who wrote and directed the Oscar award winning film Pootie Tang.

Regardless, he eventually apologized for his actions in a written statement, and had apparently already apologized in the past to the other people involved. Predictably, this hasn’t stopped the disingenuous types from continuing to paint Louis CK in the same light as a Harvey Weinstein. Never let a false equivalency get in the way of one’s activism.

These disingenuous comparisons are necessary however. They allow these self-righteous types to completely ignore the fact that Louis had already apologized to those he needed to make amends with. As touched upon earlier, these types of people feel entitled to personal atonement. They can’t grasp that if person A wrongs person B, person C, who was not part of the equation, is not entitled to any sort of apology. Louis CK hasn’t groveled to them personally and been granted their forgiveness, therefore he is still a sinner in their eyes. If the Church of Progressive Activism, hasn’t pardoned him, he still has to do time. It’s all very ideologically driven.

You start to realize this when you actually engage individuals who think this way. People had a problem with his return to stage in late August of last year. “He hasn’t taken enough time off” was a common refrain. Because an arbitrary passage of time obviously changes things. We already established that he had both apologized publicly, and to those he had apparently wronged. So what is the problem here? Why are these people still upset? Once again, they feel entitled to a personal apology for transgressions that didn’t even involve them. Grovel at the feet of the God of Entitlement for forgiveness.

If you don’t find a comedians brand of humor funny, fine. Move on. I find Michelle Wolf about as funny as childhood cancer, but it’s never crossed my mind to write an entire article chock full of butt-hurt over her. I’m also not an entitled 23 year-old recent college graduate writing articles for click-bait trash media, so maybe I’m just out of touch.

It’s painfully obviously that many of these articles ultimately aren’t about the jokes. They’re very thinly-veiled attempts at trying to ruin someone whom the authors feel needs to be destroyed. People deeply invested in the #MeToo movement (most of these articles were written by left-leaning millennial women) see Louis CK’s inappropriate jokes as the perfect scapegoat to try to convince society that’s he’s an evil force who needs to be excommunicated. The jokes are just a convenient red herring for writing an article condemning him as a person and to attack his character.

“[These kids] are just boring. Fucking telling us ‘you shouldn’t say that’. What are you, an old lady? What the fuck are you doing? ‘That’s not appropriate.’ Fuck you, you’re a child. Why aren’t you finger fucking each other and doing jello shots?”

If Patton Oswalt had gotten on stage at a comedy club and delivered a joke of this type, there wouldn’t be countless articles written condemning him, and attempts to de-platform him. Perhaps a few angry tweets would have been penned before people moved on. Patton Oswalt also hasn’t had a #MeToo moment (yet). This is about activism, not jokes.

Keep in mind that this type of joke isn’t new for Louis CK. He’s been delivering material in this vein for the last decade. None of these people saw fit to write articles about his content until after he became a pariah. There is a very clear line in the sand between the pre-MeToo and post-MeToo eras, and the existence of articles seemingly taking issue with the content of his material.

If you’re writing disingenuous hit pieces calling out his comedy because you have an ulterior motive, at least be honest about your intentions. Be honest about that fact that you don’t feel he should have a platform any more, regardless of what topics he chooses to cover in his comedy. Because it’s obvious this whole concerted media effort isn’t really about his making a few edgy jokes about school shootings.

Whether Louis CK gets blacklisted from comedy clubs or not due to this mob mentality isn’t the biggest issue here. The dishonest focus on the content of his jokes as a means to de-platform him for completely different reasons just serves to usher in further authoritarianism. Now, the next comic who gets up on stage is beholden to this over-reaching joke policing. Clubs will be less likely to let any “edgy” comics perform, because they don’t want to deal with the inevitable wave of puritan mobs. We’ll be living in a world of knock-knock jokes before we know it. Vomit.

The great irony here is that Authoritarianism is illiberal by definition, meaning the liberals so prone to authoritarianism aren’t liberal by definition, despite the fact that they continue to view and label themselves as liberal. They are essentially puritans without those pesky religious beliefs.

puritan (noun): someone who has strict moral or religious principles, and does not approve of pleasure, for example in sexual activity, entertainment, or eating and drinking.

They justify this puritanism with weak morality arguments. It’s “not nice” to joke about this, “it’s inappropriate” to joke about that. Comedy should always be squeaky clean and “appropriate” to a puritan. They then make the assertion that all of society is in tune with their personal views and tastes to justify said puritanism, like this micro-brain:

Translation: I’m fine with deplatforming this individual because they don’t think like I do. They don’t have the same sense of humor I do. This person’s beliefs are not “universal”, i.e. they don’t believe the same things I personally believe, therefore fuck ’em, they shouldn’t have the same rights.

MY, HOW LIBERAL.

liberal (adjective): open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.

These delusional junior authoritarians are unfortunately a dime a dozen on twitter. Roughly half the non-ironic #Resistance crowd (the above account included) are cut from this cloth. Because #Resisting evidently entails constantly accusing others of being authoritarian and controlling, all the while attempting to exert your own authoritarianism and control over people. How enlightened, rational, and not ironic in the least bit.

Exactly how entitled does a human being have to be to feel that only things that either a) represent their only sensibilities, or b) they personally find funny/entertaining have a right to exist. Very entitled is the correct answer. Astonishingly entitled.

As a final point, you can’t use your own personal morality as an argument as to whether something should be allowed. Keep in mind that whatever you personally believe, there is someone out there who believes the exact opposite. Neither one of you thinks you’re wrong and the other one is right. You’re in an eternal morality stalemate. To use a Stefan Molyneux meme: morality is “not an argument”.

People who are against gays use morality arguments. People who think marijuana should be illegal employ morality arguments. People who engaged in genocides used morality arguments to justify those acts. A morality argument can be made for anything, regardless of how heinous, including deplatforming people. If your whole argument is predicated on your morality being more moral than someone else’s morality, you don’t really have much of an argument, do you?

Stop trying to deplatform people over jokes, you dipshits.

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Terrible Politicians Birth Terrible Bills.

A bill was recently proposed in New York that is so stupid, that even people well aware with how stupid New York’s government officials are might do a double take. This is the very same state that just elected a woman to the House of Representatives who literally doesn’t know what the 3 branches of government are or how unemployment rates work. I give it about 3 more decades before New York actually turns into a John Carpenter movie.

The dumb bill in question (because there are many) proposes that anyone looking to buy a new gun, or renew their current permit, must legally allow the government to snoop through three years (I’m sure we can trust them to stop at just three) of their personal online data. This includes things like social media accounts and online histories. Holy absolutely unconstitutional authoritarian overreach, Batman.

What are our benevolent overlords in the government going to be looking for? Threats to the safety of others, intentions to commit terrorism, profane slurs, or biased language pertaining to race, color, origin, gender, religion, age, disabilities, or sexual orientation.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Jokingly call your friend a retard on facebook? The New York Gestapo might see this as “biased language” disparaging the handy-capable. No guns for you.

What about if you threatened to kill another person on twitter in jest. You know, like Kathy Griffin and countless other blue checkmarks have done to President Trump and members of his family. Sorry folks, but no gun rights for you any more.

How about if you voice sentiments critical of Israel on your myspace page? Well that could be (and quite often is) misconstrued as antisemitic speech. Congratulations! You’re possibly guilty of biased language pertaining to matters of race, origin, and religion. That’s a three-hit wrong-think combo. The second Amendment no longer exists for you.

The fact that there are actually people who think a proposal like this is a good idea is beyond depressing. This is ironically similar to the stop-and-frisk policies (also a New York staple) that liberals absolutely hate and conservatives foolishly justify by saying “well, if you don’t do anything wrong you have nothing to worry about”. Except now it’ll be the conservatives complaining about government overreach, and liberals taking the brilliant “don’t say something wrong, you have nothing to worry about” stance.

It’s also quite ironic that the people so vehemently outspoken against George W Bush’s NSA overreach (though most remain pro-Obama, even though he was a far worse violator of privacy rights(irony²)) seem to be the ones backing this gross violation, because what even is moral consistency?

The bill currently violates the first (freedom of speech), second (right to bear arms), fourth (unreasonable search and seizure), fifth (due process), and fourteenth (forbids states from passing unconstitutional laws) amendments. That has to be some sort of new record for legislative incompetence. Good job, Kevin Parker, you simple human being.

This bill is a problem for the same reason no-fly lists being a factor in firearm eligibility is a problem. It would be great if we lived in a utopian world full of rainbows and unicorns, wherein some magic list existed that provides the easily-digestible answers to every issue. This is far from the reality we live in though. In reality, the U.S. government tends to be far from efficient, and not very capable of balancing a budget, let alone maintaining any kind of valid list.

As it turns out, people have ended up on no-fly lists before, with no way of knowing why they were on said list, or how to get off of it. It’s like some twisted Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment mixed with a dash of complete bureaucratic incompetency.

People have ended up on no-fly lists due to name mix-ups, random human errors, mere speculation, and outright political discrimination. When you combine this with a complete lack of due process, you end up with people being unfairly screwed over, and prevented from flying due to no fault of their own. To further start stripping these people of their constitutional rights on top of that is a recipe for disaster. The ACLU, for all their numerous faults, have actually rightly protested these no-fly lists.

Allowing the government to root through people’s personal data takes the terrible idea inherent in no-fly lists to the next level. Who exactly is going to be the final arbiter of what’s intended as a joke, and what’s serious? Is the government going to ask you whether you said something in jest, or do they simply get to assume the context behind a statement regardless of the intent? This opens the door for rampant abuse of power.

Keep in mind, a man (Mark Meechan) was prosecuted in Scotland for uploading a video in which he taught his pug to do a Nazi salute. At the beginning of the video, he mentions that he is doing so as a joke, and that he was going to “turn [the dog] into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi.”

Yet somehow, the fact that the video was intended as a joke was outright disregarded, as the government decided that they, and not Mr. Meechan, would get to be the ones to determine the intent of the video. The government ultimately decided that he intended the video to be pro-Nazi propaganda, and not the joke it was in fact created to be.

The person who made the joke didn’t get to decide his intent, the government did. That is dystopian, and that is what an absolutely idiotic bill like S9191 would be ushering in within the U.S. judicial system.

A bill like this is just another shiny object created by the government to distract everyone from that fact that most high profile shootings could be prevented if our government was simply less incompetent. Law enforcement and the FBI fail time and time again to enforce laws that exist, and properly conduct investigations pertaining to those laws. Look into practically any mass shooting, from Nikolas Cruz, to San Bernardino, to The Pulse Night Club, and you’ll see that just about every one of them could have been prevented if the local police or FBI had done their jobs correctly.

Either the authorities were notified about the individual numerous times and never followed the proper course of action, or the FBI investigated, but never took the necessary steps to prevent the shooter from making a legal gun purchase. All three of the above shootings involved people the FBI had already been investigating, but for whatever reason never followed through on, ultimately allowing 80 deaths to occur.

But hey, lets just strip people of their constitutional rights, instead of holding people whose salaries we pay to any kind of standard as far as actually doing their jobs. That’s the far better alternative, obviously.

 

Wall Street Journal article on bureaucratic incompetency:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-parkland-fail-1519255068

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GoFundMe and the Well-Intentioned Idiot

“A fool and his money are soon parted” – somebody

I’m not sure where this phrase originated, but whoever uttered it first must have seen GoFundMe coming from a mile away.

The site provides a good way for people who actually need assistance to get help with stuff like medical bills, but it’s also a great way for financially irresponsible weenies to blow their hard earned money by making already rich people even richer. I guess sometimes sticking it to the liberals/conservatives is far more important than paying one’s own bills, saving for the kid’s college, etc.

Below are some of the absolute worst GoFundMe campaigns that have shown up recently.

Michael Cohen

In the last month, people have donated $176,573 to Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen was formerly Trump’s lawyer, until Trump fired him in the wake of the Stormy Daniels fiasco, at which point the lefties suddenly started to (predictably) love him. Mr. Cohen isn’t the hero here however, despite the GoFundMe’s dubious claim that “Michael decided to put his family and his country first. Now Michael needs your financial help”.

Michael is exactly the type of scumbag that liberals usually rally against and insist that we either “eat” or hold to paying their “fair share”. My how quickly those values get pushed to the wayside when tribalism and partisan politics enter the picture.

Let us do a little research into Michael Cohen.

He has a net worth of somewhere between 20 and 100 million dollars, though it’s hard to pinpoint his actual net worth because of all the shady deals he’s been involved in. He flips real estate and has sold buildings for tens of millions of dollars at a time to unknown buyers. He also used to represent people who would rent vehicles and crash them to defraud insurance companies. Whoopsies.

Then there are the seven tax warrants filed against him in 2017 due to unpaid taxes to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. There are also the five counts of tax evasion from 2012 to 2016 he pleaded guilty to, totally 1.5 million that he will end up needing to pay the IRS. People are willing giving their money to help this guy out, by the way.

He’s the quintessential scumbag lawyer, which is probably why Trump was drawn to him. Trump himself has a long history of shady business dealings and tax evasion. Birds of a feather, after all.

Peter Strzok

Old Petey here was formerly an agent with the FBI. He’s notable for having worked on the high-profile investigations into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of private email servers, and whether or not Trump colluded with Russia leading up to the 2016 US Presidential election. He’s also the recipient of roughly $450,000 through crowdfunding.

Peter was fired over a supposed conflict of interest regarding how fit he was to perform his job. E-mail exchanges were released wherein he made statements like: “No he won’t. We’ll stop him”, in regards to Trump potentially winning the upcoming election. An election that involved both Clinton and Trump, one of whom he had investigated, and one whom he would go on to investigate.

It’s obviously fine to have personal political opinions, but this definitely represented a conflict of interest in his handling of his job. The FBI is supposed to be a non-partisan entity, free of affiliation with any political party. You can’t objectively investigate someone while simultaneous wanting to “stop them” in some manner. Any affiliation makes one unfit to work within this capacity for the FBI. Strzok was unfit to do the job he was being paid taxpayer money to perform.

But because he was fired by Trump, people were willing to start throwing their money at a guy whose salary they were already paying in tax dollars to the tune of 6 figures a year. Never mind the fact that had he professed to “stop” Obama, he most likely would have been fired during the last administration instead. Orange man bad, therefore I give my credit card info to GoFundMe.

He also just so happened to use his personal email account to send confidential FBI documents while investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for sending classified documents. The guy who was investigating a crime was guilty of that very same crime. Keep up the great work, FBI!

Andrew McCabe

Here we have another wealthy government worker racking in those big bucks from people looking to spite the Orange Emperor. He’s also another guy who worked for the non-partisan FBI, while having numerous conflicts of interest within his personal life. Glen Greenwald wrote a detailed article on theintercept.com chronicling many of them.

The biggest perhaps was his having been part of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server misuse a mere three months after his wife had actively run as a Democratic candidate for the Virginia State Senate. Evidently this wasn’t considered a conflict of interest because he was taken off the Clinton investigation while his wife ran for political office, only to resume oversight after his wife’s run was unsuccessful. How this wasn’t considered a conflict of interest is confounding.

This was like Dick Cheney stepping down as chairman and CEO of Halliburton prior to becoming Vice President, while still remaining a stock holder in the company as it raked in record profits from overseas contracts that resulted from decisions he made as Vice President. Technicalities and loopholes don’t exclude things from being obvious conflicts of interest.

Even though McCabe was legally in the right, and was more than likely at least partially fired due to some spite on Trumps part, the fact remains that he made over $500,000 in donations. This despite the fact that had made over $150,000 a year in taxpayer-funded salary as an FBI agent, and had a net worth of over 10 million dollars.

People that complain about how much money CEOs make and constantly rage against the 1%, who then turn around and willingly donate money to millionaires, are operating on a level of buffoonery that I can’t even comprehend.

Stormy Daniels

Of all the GoFundMe campaigns listed here, this is perhaps the scummiest one yet.

Stormy Daniels is a porn star who had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006. In 2016, just prior to the Presidential election, she was offered $130,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement pertaining to the affair. She signed the NDA and took the $130,000.

She literally hadn’t even made it a month after signing the NDA before she started telling third parties about the affair and subsequently attempting to capitalize on this hot gossip by selling her story to numerous publications. Ultimately, she couldn’t profit off these opportunities due to that pesky NDA she has signed.

Fast forward to early 2018. By this point, Stormy Daniels had no doubt realized just how lucrative a business venture sticking it to Trump could be (see the above GoFundMe campaigns). She decided to violate the NDA she willingly signed yet again, and proceeded to file a lawsuit claiming that the NDA wasn’t valid because Trump hadn’t signed it. The problem is, she had taken the $130k (which she could have turned down), and both parties signatures aren’t always needed in certain cases and jurisdictions. Regardless, her acceptance of the money implied that she had agreed to a contract that she was now breaking.

Unfortunately, Mrs Daniels didn’t exactly have great council on the matter, otherwise she would have had it explained to her that the risk of litigation didn’t exactly work out in her favor here. Turns out she had managed to bag Michael Avenatti as a lawyer, who is such a comically over-the-top narcissist and opportunist, that he makes Trump look like a rather humble, down-to-Earth guy by comparison. The guy spent most of his tenure as her lawyer making countless t.v. appearances, grandstanding, and getting into arguments with people on twitter. It’s not surprising that he wasn’t a competent enough lawyer to actually win this dubious case, and Trump ultimately won out.

It all worked out well for Stormy though, as she bagged roughly $600,000 from well-intentioned simpletons, and now gets to gleefully disregard that irksome NDA, as she peddles her upcoming book and becomes a media darling for the remainder of her 15 minutes. She’ll end up needing to pay Trump to the tune of $250k-300k however, but her net gain from this whole stunt will be more than that initial $130,000, so I’m sure she’ll sleep well at night.

Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford

I’ll avoid going into the specifics of this train-wreck of a legal case, but on the surface what it represented was just another case like countless others involving an accusation/denial of assault/harassment between two parties.

What it turned into however, was an opportunity for the narcissists of the world to showboat all over social media, pontificating on a trial that very few of them actively followed, let alone knew a fraction of the details to. It became yet another platform for people to grandstand about how virtuous they were, in all their partisan-driven, tribalistic glory.

The fact of the matter is that neither of the individuals involved in this case gave a particularly water-tight case. Perhaps this was to be expected, given that the events had transpired over 30 years ago. Testimonies were full of contradictions and many of the accusations turned out to be categorically false. A few of the witnesses were deemed to be outright unreliable, or admitted to complete fabrications. In any other non-politicized case, no rational individual would have continued to back such a flimsy court case, and we all would have moved on.

Nobody fielding their opinions about this case on facebook has any inkling about what events transpired between these two. It’s beyond arrogant to think you could possibly know. If you had a strong opinion either way, it’s more than likely because you were merely wrapped up in your own politically-driven bias, fueled on by those around you. The facts didn’t provide a conclusive answer in either direction.

Regardless of how the hearing started, it eventually devolved into a politically motivated dog and pony show, because this is evidently the state of U.S. politics now. This was evidenced by that fact that as the case rapidly fell apart, the goalpost was moved to questioning Kavanaugh’s temperament and fitness to be a judge, neither of which seemed to be an issue for most prior to this circus of a hearing, and neither of which were relevant to the actual trial. I don’t care whether Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court judge or not, but politically motivated, agenda driven hit jobs are gross, regardless of who they target. Mob mentality is disgusting and destructive.

So of course two GoFundMe campaigns were created. The Kavanaugh fundraiser bringing in nearly $550,000, and the Ford fundraisers (there were two) brought in about $210,000 and $630,000.

As you can probably guess, neither of the recipients of all this money are in desperate need of it. Kavanaugh has the lowest net worth of anyone on this list at roughly $1 million, but will be making $250,000 a year in the Supreme Court. Ford has a net worth of millions, and her lawyer was working pro-bono.

Sorry about you, starving kids in Africa. Maybe you should have been millionaires who either vehemently hated or loved Trump, then maybe we would have showered you with millions of dollars you didn’t even need, merely to own those evil [insert political party here].

 

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James Gunn And Outrage Double Standards

James Gunn was recently fired from the 3rd Guardians of the Galaxy film by Disney, over old tweets he made involving pedophilia and rape jokes. Granted, these tweets were 6-10 years old, and obviously just stupid jokes, but we currently live in the job lynch mob era, so he needs to be crucified and banished from society.

Gunn is merely the latest in a long line of people who have had their careers affected because of disingenuous, politically-driven witch-hunts, and he will by no means be the last either.

It’s a fairly common occurrence nowadays for people’s livelihoods to be jeopardized because of these self-righteous, politically-motivated hit jobs. Somebody will dig up dirt on someone else, broadcast it to the world and all of a sudden there’s a partisan us-vs-them battle raging on over whether the individual should lose their job/sponsorship or not.

This mob justice happens on a regular basis. Sometimes it’s justified, i.e. the tweet was a call to violence (although Twitter and Facebook are quite selective insofar as when they punish people for this), but other times people face repercussions from merely making jokes that were in bad taste.

There was Justine Sacco, who was fired after a twitter mob disapproved of an ebola joke she made from a plane on her way to Africa in 2013.

There was also Katie Rich, the SNL writer who tweeted out a joke last year about how Barron Trump will be the country’s first school shooter. She was suspended after the resulting backlash.

Don’t forget about Colin Moriarty, who tweeted out the dad-joke “Ah. Peace and quite.” in response to the #ADayWithoutAWoman hashtag. This crime against humanity stirred up so much righteous indignation, that he was backed into leaving his job at Kinda Funny.

Not even high-profile celebrities are off limits to the online career lynch-mobs.

In the wake of the 2011 earthquake in Japan, Gilbert Gottfried made a series of tsunami-related jokes on Twitter that led to backlash, and his being dropped as the spokesperson for Aflac insurance.

Steven Colbert has been in the cross hairs twice over jokes he has made. In 2014, he made a joke on his show satirizing Redskin’s owner Daniel Snyder’s Native American charity with his own “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever”. When the joke was later posted to Twitter, out of context, backlash ensued. Then, in 2017, he came under fire again, for what was perceived as a homophobic joke involving Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The hashtags #CancelColbert and #FireColbert were the results of both of these digital lynch mobs.

This selective outrage was in effect long before Twitter as well.

Sarah Silverman was regularly the target of outrage over the politically incorrect humor that was often the basis of her comedy. She made jokes at the expense of the civil rights movement, jokes about pedophilia, jokes about rape, and jokes about the Holocaust among other taboo topics.

She received the most heat for a joke about trying to get out of jury duty by writing something inappropriate on the submission form. In the joke, she initially writes “I hate chinks”, but doesn’t want anyone to misjudge her as a racist, so she changes it to “I love chinks” instead. End scene.

Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together can at least see the humor in this misguided attempt to not seem racist, but still saying something racist anyway (the specific racial epithet used in the joke is ultimately irrelevant). It doesn’t matter whether you personally find the joke funny or not. You can still recognize it as a joke, and understand the premise behind it.

This didn’t stop the outrage. It also didn’t stop her from eventually disavowing the edgy comedy that made her famous, and dipping her toe into “applause break comedy”, wherein you don’t push boundaries, but rather say the right buzzwords and state the correct opinions to an audience who claps, rather than legitimately laughs. It’s less comedy, and more of a televangelist event, or TED talk.

The point of this post isn’t to decide who is a legitimate comic, and who isn’t however. It’s to decry the practice wherein people act like comedy isn’t subjective, and engage in the authoritarian exercise of trying to censor that which they don’t personally find funny.

There is no socially agreed upon line for what is considered funny and what isn’t. There never will be. Humor is completely subjective, changes from person to person, and involves taking context into account. Unfortunately, people are all too willing to let their own personal views and entitlements dictate whether or not they find something offensive and worthy of condemnation. You commonly see this when someone gets outraged at a joke because it deals with a topic that involves them personally. (e.g. 9/11 jokes are off-limits because my neighbor died in 9/11) The joke hits too close to home, isn’t funny to them, so they try to make jokes about that subject off limits. This is entitlement.

It’s also not uncommon to see someone denounce a public figure for a bad joke, then turn around and engage in some sort of mental Judo that allows them to simultaneously defend somebody else for the exact same offense. There is a word for this behavior.

 

Hypocrisy (noun) – the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform.

 

For example, when publications like Fast Company and Paste Magazine publish articles like: “Mike Cernovich’s Campaign Against Comedians is Bound to Fail”, and “Far Right Trolls Disingenuously Target Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and More Over Twitter Jokes”, they are either being hypocrites, or painfully dense at very least.

Both of these articles (and many more like them) merely make poorly veiled attempts to pin the concept of job lynch mobbing on “The Far Right”. The term Far Right in this context essentially serves as an amorphous boogeyman. Kind of like how certain people are prone to calling everyone they argue with on social media a “bot”, blame Russian hackers for everything that doesn’t work out in their favor politically, or call everyone they disagree with a Nazi (even Jews and non-whites) in hopes of discrediting them. Both of these articles also conveniently omit the fact this sort of job lynch mobbing was happening long before “The Far Right” was even a thing.

The authors of these articles even cleverly try to differentiate comedians from non-comedians, as if Patton Oswalt should somehow be granted more leeway to make a distasteful joke than some unknown individual on twitter. Either jokes should be held to different standards than outright proclamations, or they shouldn’t. You don’t get to decide who gets a pass on making a bad joke, and who doesn’t. You certainly don’t get to decide which comedians get a pass, and which don’t based on whether their politics align with yours or not. This is both hypocritical, and entitled.

This is precisely how these people operate though. Both the authors of these articles, as well as Mike Cernovich himself are guilty here. You can’t prop up these double standards wherein you consider an offense to be ok in certain circumstances, but not ok in others. It’s completely disingenuous.

It’s been quite something to see people who are prone to this outrage torch-mob behavior suddenly having a problem with it being implemented in ways that they don’t personally agree with.

I posted a tweet saying something along the lines of “Maybe if all the James Gunn defenders had been against job lynch mobs before now, we wouldn’t be in this boat right now”. I got a response from a gentleman that merely bolstered the point I was trying to make. He claimed that it was different in the James Gunn scenario because the tweets happened years ago, and Mr Gunn had apologized for posting them. He was essentially saying that there’s a statute of limitations on how long someone can be held accountable for tweets, and that merely apologizing should relieve one of all accountability. Neither of these rules has ever held true in any of other instance of these job lynch mobs however. He had simply made them up for the purpose of protecting someone he had a vested interest in.

“No, this case is different” seems to be the most common response you’ll get when calling out these hypocrisies. People are unwilling to accept that fact that they hold these egregious double-standards, so they see nothing wrong with trying to move the goal post to remain on the right side of the argument. Time and time again, when people make this “no, it’s different” argument, they’re doing so out of entitlement. They’re personally invested in the accused, and are willing to bend the rules of job lynch mobbing to create a one-off scenario that conveniently pardons the guilty. As it turns out, this gentleman who had replied to my tweet had a profile full of Marvel-related posts. He had a vested interest in the accused, so he had no problem attempting to move the goalposts.

The fact of the matter is that James Gunn had tweeted out numerous jokes about pedophilia (though nowhere near the 10,000 tweet figure that certain people are dishonestly parroting), and was employed by Disney, a company that largely caters to children. This didn’t look good from a P.R. standpoint. Companies ultimately have the right to dissociate from individuals who are bad for their image.

The same thing happened when Cartoon Network decided not to renew Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace when a BuzzFeed writer wrote a hit piece containing buzzwords like “alt-right” after developing a personal vendetta against one of the show’s creators. It never really matters whether the accusations are true or not. No company wants the bad publicity these witch-hunts bring with them, so they are often quick to fire the accused party.

I don’t agree with people maliciously digging through other people’s online histories and trying to get them fired, but either you fight to end this kind of behavior, or you learn to deal with the consequences of the game you’ve chosen to play. Creating double standards will never be the answer. Creating “but this time it’s different” scenarios isn’t going to work.

Anyone who isn’t opposed to this kind of behavior when it’s used against “the other side” is just as guilty as the ones digging up the dirt. You don’t get to help build the guillotine, then turn around and whine about people being beheaded with what you helped create.

In the past it would have been the humorless ultra-Christians who would take offense to anything deemed “not nice” in comedy, but now the humorless ultra-Progressives are in on the regressive morality policing too. Now we have two ideologies double-teaming rationality in a race to send us back into the stone-age. Good work, you dummies.

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Spotify And The Triumphant Return of Morality Policing

Great news, everybody. Popular streaming service Spotify just opened the Pandora’s box of horrible ideas. For whatever reason, they’ve decided it would be a great idea to start policing the music on their platform. Guess the CEO is intent on having the company go under so that he can collect insurance, or whatever it is you collect after your incompetent decision making causes your company to tank.

Not only are they policing their own music libraries, but they are inviting in numerous organizations to handle this task for them. They are partnering with GLADD, The Anti-Defamation League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center among others.

What this means is that GLADD could likely flag any songs that are “homophobic”, i.e. any songs (hip-hop will overwhelmingly be affected) that contain words like fag or faggot, regardless of context. Muslim Advocates might flag any song that doesn’t portray Islam in a squeaky clean manner, or questions the sanctity of organized religion. Then the SPLC is going to arbitrarily flag things as things they are not, as the SPLC is wont to do.

Spotify forming a relationship with the Southern Poverty Law Center is the news that should be the most worrisome here. These other organizations may have decent track records of acting rationally, but the SPLC has an absolutely horrendous track record of doing its job even functionally. For example, they’ve included author and activist Maajid Nawaz on a their list of anti-Muslim extremists. The problem there is that he’s a Muslim who used to be an Islamist (an advocate or supporter of Islamic militancy or fundamentalism), who now speaks out against extremism and terrorism. He’s an anti-extremist Muslim on an anti-Muslim extremist list. It’s almost like the SPLC did zero research into the guy before putting him on a extremist list. This is one of the organizations Spotify is working with to police it’s music library. What could possibly go wrong?

The SPLC has also included the likes of Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, and Christina Hoff Summers among others on it various “hate group” lists. The organization often relies on guilt by association, or taking content out on context to justify these additions. Anyone with an internet connection can Google search countless articles about the problems with this organization. Spotify evidently couldn’t be bothered to do the same however.

In short, the organization is a joke driven by a complete lack of objectivity and a penchant for smear campaigns and raking in money, all the while pretending to be a non-profit with noble intentions. That’s what happens when an organization who used to fight the KKK no longer has that fight to fight due to legit white supremacy all but drying up. They had to change their business model to justify keeping their doors open and people employed.

So why is it harmful for a company to start outsourcing it’s content verification to outside sources? Beyond the fact that the company in question obviously didn’t research all of the organizations it chose to handle this task, is the fact that we’ve been here before an not much benefit came of it.

This whole situation brings to mind the moral crusades of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the mid eighties. The committee, formed by four pearl-clutching house wives, including Tipper Gore, set out to police the depraved music industry. Tipper Gore, of course, being a good ole progressive Democrat, and not one of those evil conservative Christians who generally get pegged with having the market cornered on being out-of-touch puritans.

The committee only succeeded in having the iconic “Parental Advisory” sticker affixed to offending musical works, but their actual aim was much higher. They wanted albums with explicit lyrics hidden away under the counters. They wanted television and radio to bar songs the committee deemed offensive. They even wanted record labels to “re-assess” the contracts of artists who wrote offensive music.

Keep in mind, anything deemed explicit or offensive for the entire music industry was to be determined by the small staff of the PMRC alone. Their goal was borderline authoritarian, and at the very least completely censorious.

Luckily a group of well known musicians from different musical backgrounds stepped up to combat this moral overreach. Dee Snider, Frank Zappa, and John Denver all testified against the potential harm that could come from this form of blatant censorship, pointing out that what is considered explicit and offensive is completely subjective.

Ultimately, the Parental Advisory stickers were willingly adopted by the RIAA, albeit in a lessened form. Interestingly enough, the Zappa album Jazz From Hell was deemed explicit enough to carry a Parental Advisory stick, despite being an instrumental album, which illustrates the overreach and completely subjective nature of these stickers, and the competency of the PMRC as a whole.

This is all just history repeating itself again and again though. In 1963, The Kingmen’s version of the song Louie Louie was the subject of an FBI investigation that lasted over 2 years due to its alleged obscene lyrics. The lyrics are about as innocuous as can be, but that didn’t stop the song from being banned from play on numerous radio stations across the U.S.

Now here we are in [current year], once again needing to deal with art being policed by the corporations and puritans of the world.

In a turn of events that should be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the sideshow that is moral outrage, a women’s group called Ultraviolet is already trying to abuse this power that Spotify foolishly granted. They’re trying to get Spotify to remove the music of Chris Brown, Eminem, and R Kelly among others whom they feel are anti-woman.

R Kelly and Chris Brown’s lyrics contain nothing misogynistic, mind you. This woman’s group is trying to get a music service to dissociate themselves from these artists because of things the artists have done in their personal lives. This completely undermines the entire reason Spotify brought these groups on board in the first place.

The goal was to police the content of the songs, not to let artist’s personal lives become the focus of scrutiny, and the moral gauge of whether of not they deserve to be on the platform or not.

It’s literally been four days since Spotify announced their ill-advised moral policing initiative, and already the thing is being abused. All this just serves to illustrate the problem with implementing well-intentioned, but poorly conceived proposals such as this. The second you open the door to self-righteous individuals having a say in how your company is operated, the complaints will literally not stop coming. Give someone an inch, and they’ll take it a mile, as the idiom goes. Before Spotify knows it, there will be no music left in their library, because anyone can take issue with absolutely anything for absolutely any reason.

Wait a minute. I just realized that Spotify is a Swedish company. The most satirical country in all of Europe. The country whose newspaper headlines regularly read like over-the-top Onion articles. All of a sudden, absolutely none of this story is surprising in the least. Forget ever reading this article and go about your life. Good day.

 

Edit (5/23/18):
The Southern Poverty Law Center has proven my point in spectacular fashion yet again. In light of the White House referring to the gang MS-13 as “animals”, the SPLC has taken a hard-nosed stance in calling out the “racism” and… I can’t believe I’m actually typing this… “dehumanization” of this act.

It could easily be argued that an official release from the White House shouldn’t use crude wording like “animals”, but to go on a moral crusade with indictments of racism is borderline buffoonish. Especially as a means to white knight a gang with a long history of human trafficking, arms trafficking, murder of women and children, and child prostitution, among countless other illegal activities that probably shouldn’t be “humanized”. There’s a reason MS-13 is regularly considered one of the world’s most violent gangs.

And yet the SPLC thought it would be a good look to go to bat for an actual gang.

With all the injustice in the world today, the fact that the SPLC chooses this as their battle speaks volumes as to the integrity of the organization. It’s depressing to me that people actually give their hard-earned money to this pointless joke of an organization.

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The Unending Struggle of Being Virtuous

I was standing in line at a Walgreens™ the other day, waiting to buy some groceries when I suddenly had the urge to flip a table. You see, I was next in line to check out, when a virtuous woman decided it was a great time to show the store just how virtuous she really was.

This Walgreens™ has those cash registers that automatically shoot the change out of a little coin slide over to the side so that the cashier doesn’t need to do any math beyond that which the average 6-year-old can do. Basically, the job is 85% done by computers already, but Walgreens™ hasn’t pulled the trigger on completely automating the whole checkout process yet because they don’t want to deal with the bad optics of “destroying jobs”.

Regardless, whoever was before this virtuous woman in front of me forgot to take their change out of the do-most-of-the-cashiers-job cup, so when she was rung up, her change intermingled with a stranger’s change.

This wouldn’t be a problem for most normal human beings, but we’re dealing with a virtuous person here, so she proceeds to do what any supremely virtuous person would do. She refuses to take her change out of the dispenser because it also contains some long since departed customer’s 27 cents.

The poor guy at the register, who’s a young foreign chap, doesn’t know how to handle this virtuous overload. He has a bit of a deer in the headlights thing going on, because he no doubt comes from a country where people aren’t so overtly virtuous that they become downright obnoxious and pretentious.

All the while, I’m trying to stay patient, secretly wishing a rogue car veers off the street,careens through the front of this store, and takes this virtuous pain-in-the-ass out, to the cheers of everybody in line.

She finally stops virtuously wasting the time of the cashier and everyone in line, and leaves the premises to go be a royal annoyance somewhere else no doubt. I get checked out in about 25 seconds flat, grab my change out of the machine, along with the change of the virtuous nuisance, and the change of whomever was before her, and go about my day.

So, to recap, a woman tried to be virtuous by refusing to take a few coins that weren’t hers, at the expense of inconveniencing and wasting the time of about 6 people. She created undo stress on a retail employee because of something that wasn’t his fault. She ended up leaving the change anyway, which she could have taken and given to a hobo, of which there are numerous in the general area, and would have actually constituted a virtuous act. All this, so that she could experience the minor dopamine hit of broadcasting to a small group of people, and in her mind, probably the entire cosmos, as to how great of a human being she was for not taking an insignificant amount of change.

Please don’t be this woman.

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The Continued Integrity Spiral Of The Media.

In this weeks installment of “is this satire, or reality”, media has officially lost the last bit of credibility it may have had left.

The media has officially:

LostMind

They went on quite the tear yesterday, practically bending over backwards to praise North Korea, specifically the first lady of tyranny Kim Yo-jong, with tweets like this:

CNNProNorthKoreaWhy exactly is this “problematic”?

Well for starters, North Korea is practically one giant human rights violation. The country currently has over 100,000 of its own citizens contained within prison camps, that have catchy names like Camp 14, Camp 15, and Camp 16. In addition to hard labor, other activities that regularly take place within these camps include fun things like torture, starvation, rape, and outright murder.

North Korea employs “Three Generations of Punishment”. This means that if a citizen were to be convicted of a crime, not only do they receive the punishment, but three generations of their family do as well. What better way to prevent citizens from stepping out of line than to hurt the ones they love. What a progressive and welcoming country, deserving of the western media’s affection and accolades.

Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim Jong-un, is the vice director of North Korea’s Workers Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. That isn’t a satirical title. She is literally in charge of state-sponsored propaganda, including maintaining the cult of personality that surrounds Kim Jong-un. The media praising her is like if the media had praised Eva Braun during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Of course this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the media’s increasingly loose moral compass. What with the complete fabrication of events to push narratives, constant pushing of conspiracy theories, and outright romanticization of murderous dictator types (see Castro, Guevara, etc).

This is the very same media who increasingly glamorizes Communism in droves, like the gaggle of edgy, poorly educated children so many of them are increasingly turning out to be. Mind you, this is the same Communism responsible for levels of death, oppression, and human tragedy that far outnumber those of the Holocaust and slavery combined. We’re talking magnitudes of difference here.

Human dumpster fire and dumb person’s intellectual Jeet Heer posted the tweet below, before arrogantly disparaging all who took issue with it, and attempting to justify his idiocy with a 14 tweet barrage of damage control.

JeetHeerThis tweet is fairly par for the course in Jeet’s world though. The guy’s entire career is predicated on writing sensationalized, hyperbolic anti-Trump articles and tweets. Unfortunately, nothing Trump or Pence could possibly do will ever make Kim Jong-un or his family look good in comparison. Not even Jeet’s Trump-fueled hate boner will change this fact.

Champion of the wealthy privileged class masquerading as blue collar savior Michael Moore had this to say:

MichaelMooreThat sure is a hot take there, Captain Cholesterol. A murderous (communist) regime awkwardly unifies (strictly as a PR move) with its free capitalist counterpart to the south, and all you can see through those grease-soaked goggles is an anti-Trump event. Never mind the fact that the Koreas didn’t “come together”, so much as the south was merely being diplomatic in letting the nuisance to the north share in the Olympics (North Korea tried to have a joint Olympics in 1988 in Seoul, but were denied). Also, never mind that in spite of the hippy hug-fest John Lennon karaoke, that after the Olympics are over, North Koreans will still not have the freedoms that any other country at the Olympics get to enjoy.

Those are just two arrogant loud-mouths opining on the events however. Let’s look at some of the brilliant commentary that the actual media was laying down.

ABCNorthKoreaMatching outfits and synchronized chants? How cute! Except they didn’t get together and pick matching outfits and work out a routine to look cute. It’s unlikely that any of these women even had a say in whether they were to be at these events or not. Everything about their visit would have been dictated and controlled by the North Korean government. Their entire presence was a carefully orchestrated P.R. move, the headmaster of that propaganda being the aforementioned Kim Yo-jong.

Those whimsical masks are of a young Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. The man responsible for establishing North Korea’s current prison-state and lovely policies like the three generations of punishment. Every North Korean is legally required to display and maintain a picture of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il within their homes. These masks are akin to China showing up with Mao masks, or Italians wearing Mussolini masks. There’s nothing remotely cute about it.

NewYorkTimesKoreaWhere to even begin with this one.

For starters, it’s obvious whoever wrote this tweet had both a deep hatred of Pence and a complete ignorance of Kim. Pence is guilty of having antiquated views on homosexuality. Kim is guilty of helping run a murderous prison-state. The two aren’t even remotely comparable by any metric. Frankly, only a complete dipshit would consider anyone in the Kim family to be more diplomatic than any sitting or former U.S. president or vice president. Based on the response-to-like ratio on this tweet, most people were rational enough to feel the same way.

Keep in mind, that perhaps the reason Pence didn’t act “diplomatic” towards anyone from North Korea might be due to the fact that only eight month ago, a U.S. citizen (Otto Warmbier) was killed by Kim’s regime.

ReutersNorthKoreaReuters apparently didn’t want to be left out of the stupid tweet club. Once again, North Korea is a murderous, fascist regime, and there is absolutely nothing remotely diplomatic about them. If anything, South Korea were the diplomatic ones for letting a country implicit in the kidnapping of hundred of its citizens join them in their hosting of the Olympics.

CanadaNorthKoreaHey guys! It’s me, Canada! Let me get in on this tone-deaf posturing too!

Alright, North Mexico. What do you have to add?

North Korea sure is diplomatic!

Did you just cheat off Reuter’s homework, Canada?

No.

Are you sure, Canada?

Look over there! Trudeau’s hair looks really nice today!

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Dunkirk Was Horseshit

I recently got back from visiting the family for Christmas holiday vacation, i.e. sitting in a guest room watching movies on cable for 2 weeks. It’s the only time of the year I really watch movies, so I try to catch all the acclaimed and big name flicks in that brief window.

Evidently the last year and a half was a terrible period for movies, or so the reviews would lead me to believe. You see, of all the films I watched, most that won awards and acclaim were rather lackluster.

La La Land was a musical that couldn’t decide what the hell genre it ultimately wanted to be, and had a forgettable soundtrack (not a great attribute for a musical). Get Out was a middle-of-the-road horror movie that awkwardly crammed in racial elements to the thrill of a Hollywood eager to flagellate itself over not being “black” enough. Jackie was an hour and a half of a camera following Natalie Portman while she sulks around the White House doing a deaf Marilyn Monroe impression. Suicide Squad was a superhero movie that had too many characters, the primary one consisting of Will Smith doing the same sarcastic Fresh Prince character he’s done for half his career. Granted Suicide Squad wasn’t acclaimed by any stretch, but I needed to call out Will Smith for being an overrated actor.

Then there was Dunkirk. Jesus Christ. What a mess.

The Miracle of Dunkirk was an event wherein roughly 340,000 allied soldiers were evacuated from north France in 1940. The movie Dunkirk is about a guy in a plane missing targets over and over, an old guy and his son piloting a boat between England and France, and a bunch of guys hiding out in a beached fishing boat.

*SPOILER ALERT*

The movie starts with some kids running while being shot at. One kid escapes death, only to walk to the beach and take a dump in the sand. This movie is off to a great start already.

Dunkirk then does a mildly serviceable job of illustrating the scope of the massive evacuation. We see docks full of soldiers standing around waiting for ships to ferry them away from having been surrounded by German troops. Granted, they collectively give off the vibe of a bunch of holiday travelers standing around the airport, waiting for their group to be called to begin boarding. The attempt was made however, and that’s what counts.

Then we follow an old guy, his son, and a friend as they pilot a boat through the water. They rescue a stranded soldier from a sunken vessel, he spergs out once he realizes they’re going towards France, then accidentally knocks one of the kids down a staircase on the boat, rendering the kid instantaneously blind. No, this isn’t Days of Our Lives. This is Dunkirk: The Movie.

A pilot gets shot down, and the boat people rescue him in the nick of time before he drowns. This part was actually engaging and entertaining. As long as you ignore the fact that the pilot hits the glass on his jet 4,157 times in a row with the butt of a flare gun after the canopy won’t open, never trying another means of escaping. Also ignore the fact that the glass didn’t break upon being hit 4,157 times in a row with the butt of a flare gun. As long as you ignore those two things that actually happened in Dunkirk, the scene is good.

Next up, is the crowning achievement of 21st century cinema. Get prepared for this scene. This scene is so well written, you won’t be able to enjoy another movie as long as you live.

*DOUBLE SPOILER ALERT*

Get this… So these soldiers are walking along the beach and see an abandoned boat beached up on the shore during low tide. They crawl inside so that they can sail off into the sunset when the tide rises. Then some Germans off in the distance start shooting at the boat for target practice. This is a fairly good moment of tense drama we got going on here. Don’t worry though. Shitty writing is about to ruin it.

What do these soldier do while enclosed inside a boat that’s being shot it. Well, to start, one of them peeks out one of the bullet holes to see where they’re being shot from… and totally gets shot. DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING FROM 150 METERS AWAY.

So now we have guys trapped in a boat full of bullet holes, and the boat is quickly taking on water because of those 56 bullet holes in the side. You’re never going to guess what happens next. Go ahead and guess. Give up? I’ll tell you what happens next.

Ready for it?

These guys… get into a conversation… about somebody getting off the boat to lighten the load. The boat that is now half-filled with water and full of holes. Lemme run that by you again. They stand around deciding who should leave the sinking boat to lighten the load. So that the boat will sink slower I guess?

Maybe everyone should get the frick off the gosh-darn boat that is sinking? Are they deciding who gets to live by not drowning in a sinking boat?

To be honest, I’m not sure how this scene eventually resolved itself, because I was so dumbfounded that the guy who wrote Memento, The Prestige, and Inception somehow also wrote this complete and utter horseshit, that I had to get up and take a breather.

THEY ARGUED ABOUT WHO WOULD HAVE TO LEAVE A SINKING BOAT, TO LIGHTEN THE LOAD ON THE BOAT, WHICH IS SINKING, AND THE GUY THEY WERE TRYING TO KICK OFF WASN’T JUST LIKE “ALRIGHT. PEACE, BITCHES. HAVE A GOOD TIME DYING ON THIS SINKING BOAT.”

Sorry for the excessive caps lock.

A few other things happen, but it really doesn’t matter by this point in the film. The fishing boat scene happened, and nothing in the film from this point on could have possibly redeemed it.

For whatever reason, critics couldn’t drop trou fast enough to furiously wank over how great this movie was.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded the film five out of five and called it “Nolan’s best to date”. Uh.. did you watch any of his other films, Peter? Interstellar just came out 3 years ago. His movie with the retarded fishing boat scene was his best to date? Ok.

Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A”, calling it the best of 2017. Despite my above statement that this year was a weak year for movies, there were a lot of great looking movies I still have to see. From Okja, to Blade Runner 2049, The Shape of Water, Baby Driver, Logan, Mother, and John Wick 2 among others. Yet somehow a movie light on substance and heavy on forced drama was the best of 2017. Me thinks you have low standards for when things are “the best”, Chris.

A bunch of other critics said a bunch of other hyperbolic things, but I’m dragging this bitch-fest out a little too long as is.

As a last note though, I’ve seen a lot of people state that the movie “needed to be seen in theaters”. It was a great movie as a theater experience, evidently.

Well, in my opinion, a great movie should still hold up outside of the theater. How’s that for a divisive statement?

A musician could write fairly shit music, but it’s probably going to sound good in an arena with a dazzling light show, through a sound system blasting away at 120 decibels. The spectacle is great and all, but it shouldn’t cover for lackluster art.

I’ve enjoyed most of Nolan’s movies from the comfort of my home. Those movies held up just fine on their own merit, without the necessity of theatrical bombast. Dunkirk should as well. Unfortunately it didn’t. Hence, it is horseshit.

Feel free to disagree, but you are incorrect.

Good day, sir and/or madam.