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It’s been close to two months since the quarantine started. I can no longer stand upright without the use of crutches. I weigh 87 pounds currently. I look like a much handsomer version of Christian Bale in The Machinist.

Not too much has changed since the last post. Things are still boring. I’m still spending way too much time on the internet. I’m also actually missing work for the first time in my entire life.

Perhaps one of the most interesting factors of this pandemic, is how much blatant over-reach certain authorities are exercising. When people have been whipped up into a high enough state of fear, they tend to relax their morals and let authoritarianism creep into their lives. They become more inclined to give up their freedoms for some minuscule sense of security.

We’re inching ever closer to that dystopian form of government wherein authorities use facial-recognition software to single out the “bad apples” and keep people in line. Similar systems are currently employed in China, tied into their glorious social credit score system:

Police forces in numerous countries are currently using drones to check up on people, even going so far as to peep into people’s backyards to make sure the lower classes aren’t gathering in groups. How very 1984:

These authoritarians often create and impose rules on others that they themselves refuse to abide by. The examples from the last month alone would be enough to fill an entire post, so here are two that happened to revolve around personal grooming:

It also turns out that most first world countries handled Covid19 about as incompetently as humanly possible, with very few places having actually taken effective measures. One such place was Taiwan. The same Taiwan whom the World Health Organization decided to actively ignore back in December. Taiwan then proceed to actively ignore the WHO and do things their own way. Here is an explanation as to why Taiwan barely had to employ much of a lockdown and is currently living life normally:

The WHO didn’t take Covid19 very seriously until March 11th, as outlined in my last post. They actively warned against travel bans and consistently downplayed the virus at first. Taiwan ignored all this advice and started treating this like a serious outbreak since the beginning of February. Part of their reasoning had to do with being hit so hard by SARS 15 years ago. They didn’t want to make the same mistakes, so they were extra cautious, and it paid off.

It’s also important to keep in mind that most Asian countries already have a culture of wearing masks in public. Masks work, so these countries already had a layer of protection in effect from the beginning. Meanwhile the “health experts” were providing this information elsewhere:

Who knows how many lives would have been saved if: a) we had an adequate stockpile of mask beforehand, and b) the above misinformation hadn’t been so widespread. Hopefully these mistakes aren’t made again, and more countries are properly prepared the next time this happens.

Finally, before I head out, here is China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department™ calling Covid19 the Wuhan virus, only to start railing against the term a month later:

This change of heart lines up conveniently with the time Mr Zhao starts to push a theory that the coronavirus was brought to China via the U.S. military. The CCP narrative changed from “this is our fault” to “this is their fault”, so he starts using the WHO as a shield to deflect any criticism of the CCP on social media. It’s quite the clever tactic.

Despite the impressive title, this account is seemingly just a means of propaganda propagation. It’s to give the optics that China has an open representative on twitter. The funny thing about this, is that twitter is blocked in China, as are most non-Chinese social media sites (they use Weibo). The CCP doesn’t want its citizens using any platform that it doesn’t have ultimate control over the information on. The average Chinese citizen isn’t seeing anything this guy posts. He’s employed by the CCP to broadcast on China’s behalf on non-Chinese social media.

For all the talk of Russian meddling, and constant accusations from blue state boomers about people being “bots”, I have yet to see any suspicious Russian accounts on twitter. Ever. I’ve definitely looked. Perhaps I need to look harder. Meanwhile, it’s amazing how many accounts like this there are on twitter:

“Kate Carter” here is responding to Mr Zhao’s post about the U.S. Military bringing Covid19 to Wuhan. She also just so happens to “Love Chinese Fantastic Government System”. Seems like a totally legit, organically-created twitter account. It makes me wonder if there are U.S. government officials on Weibo with handles like 中国是最好的 actively spreading American propaganda. There probably are. I’d go looking for some, but Weibo is kind of a nightmare to navigate.

It’s been almost six weeks now. I haven’t seen the sunlight in over a month. Does the sun still exist? Can the sun catch corona virus? I hope the sun is alright.

My muscles are starting to atrophy and I can no longer lift anything heavier than 10 pounds. I’ve been subsisting off a diet of nothing but tap water and chicken flavored ramen. My data usage this month was 85 terabytes.

There’s now speculation that the virus may have had something to do with the infectious diseases laboratory that is about 9 miles away from the wet market it was originally reported that covid19 originated from.

There are hundreds of wet markets all over China, but only 2 biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs there. A BSL-4 laboratory is where aerosol-transmitted agents and diseases with no current vaccines are studied. The Wuhan lab had even been isolating bat coronavirus sequences since 2005. Yet the narrative persisted until now that a random bat being eaten by a random person in a random market right down the road from a coronavirus lab was ground zero for this pandemic. This could just be a coincidence, but it’s a phenomenal coincidence if it’s in fact a coincidence.

Of course, any mention of this laboratory is being brushed off as a “conspiracy theory” by the USA=bad types, like this unhinged weirdo:

It’s also just a theory that the virus came from someone eating a bat. There is another theory that the virus came to China from the US, via soldiers participating in the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in: *drum roll, please* Wuhan! They’re all currently just theories because nobody is 100% certain where the origin was.

Ironically, Ben’s entire post is a conspiracy theory. Ben here thinks that anyone being critical or accusatory of China’s government is merely a bad actor, attempting to bolster an inevitable upcoming war against said country. His twitter feed is full of this conspiratorial nonsense.

Ben is one of those kids who read the Communist Manifesto when he was 15, and now just resorts to calling everyone he disagrees with a “neoliberal” or “imperialist”. If you do a search for these buzzwords or variants on his account, half his post history shows up. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. He can’t comprehend that you can be critical of China, while also being critical of the US. His entire world view is dictated by the US always needing to be the worst by any given metric.

People like this have their reasoning so clouded by this creepy indoctrination that they miss crucial details. Details such as Trump having dozens of tweets like this on his twitter account:

It doesn’t seem like Trump is in a hurry to go to war with China any time soon. The guy practically has a closer relationship to Xi than he does with his own wife. It’s actually a little creepy.

There are also a lot of people attempting to shoot down the Wuhan Institute of Virology centered theory by pointing to this information:

This information merely verifies that the fringe who are pushing the theory about this being a biological weapon are wrong. The virus was not engineered, but is naturally occurring. Naturally occurring coronaviruses are held in that laboratory, and are capable of jumping from animal to human in such an environment as well.

This theory doesn’t need to be predicated on malicious intent. Someone at the lab could have simply messed up in some manner. Mishaps at laboratories happen with surprising regularity. The U.S has had a few incidents involving the mishandling of Anthrax at various labs over the last decade. The Wuhan lab in question also has a bit of a reputation:

To recap so far, there’s a biosafety lab in Wuhan that contained coronaviruses. It had a history of safety and containment issues. The Chinese government declared very early on, seemingly without proof that the virus came from a market 9 miles down the road. A large swath of US media has continued to regurgitate that narrative as fact, even though it too is still a theory.

In a bit of positive news, China looks to have temporarily put a halt on most of its wildlife markets. According to CNN: “Since the virus hit in December,almost 20,000 wildlife farms across seven Chinese provinces have been shut down or put under quarantine…”. However, wet markets were apparently banned in 2003 after the SARS outbreak, and poultry was banned from wet markets after the bird flu. These bans seem to have only lasted a short while after these outbreaks though. We’ll have to wait and see if the current bans actually come with any permanent change or not.

In related news, Trump seems to be hellbent on defunding the World Health Organization:

This is probably a dumb idea. We’re currently still in the middle of a pandemic and the WHO serves some sort of function, even though I’m not exactly sure what that function is. This is evidently a common sentiment, as there are 83 articles titled “What Does The WHO Do” on the internet. Having read a few, I’m still not entirely sure what exactly the WHO does.

Regardless, they do something, and perhaps it’s best to let them do whatever it is that they do until the pandemic passes. Then we can delve into issues of funding and accountability. If the WHO is guilty of some fault, we can probably worry about that down the line.

Evidently the issue here is that the WHO was selectively disregarding information about the virus, based on where it was coming from:

They then proceeded to release inaccurate data coming from potentially dubious sources:

It’s also important to keep in mind that this was the official consensus as of March 3rd, when the following was posted on the WHO’s website:

Covid-19 is both more contagious than the seasonal flu, and is absolutely driven by people who show no symptoms. Eight days after this post, on March 11th, the WHO declared covid-19 a pandemic. Given that the above paragraph was the official data as of 6 weeks ago, it makes sense that perhaps this thing wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been by governors, journalists, and even Captain Trump.

March 11th is when the pandemic became official via the WHO. It was around this time that the shift from “it’s just the flu” to “this is serious” started to take hold in the media and in governments.

Trump pulled this about face in a mere 9 days:

To be fair, practically everybody pulled this about face around the same time. All the New York politicians from my previous post didn’t take the virus seriously until some time on or after March 11th. The mayor of London didn’t take it seriously until then. Vox, The Washington Post, and The New York Times didn’t take it seriously until then. At that point, the consensus was to start taking it seriously and start pointing fingers of blame. That blame more than likely lies with either the CCP or the WHO. Maybe we’ll find out in the next chapter.

It’s day 32 of the Covid-19 social distancing extravaganza. I’m spending way too much time on the internet and potentially developing vitamin-D deficiency. I could just go outside I guess, but that would require leaving my room, so I’ll just deal with the loss of bone density and headaches for now.

Word on the street is the quarantine could end up lasting through the end of April, though I’m already hearing whispers of an extension through May. The first week or two were alright. It felt like being in school again, and having a long break because of a bad snow storm. Now it’s just starting to feel like being on house arrest, but without the ankle monitor and cool story to tell all my friends.

Amazon’s infrastructure obviously wasn’t designed to handle this many people stuck at home, ordering crap online. It used to take about two days to get a delivery in my area, and now it’s taking a week to 10 days on average to get my orders. I don’t think I can go on waiting 10 days every time I want to eat a box of Cookie Crisp™ cereal. This is truly a dystopian nightmare. It’s like I’m living in one of those Blade Runner movies or something.

The virus allegedly originated from someone eating a bat from an animal market in Wuhan. This is like the 19th pandemic that has originated from a bat and/or rat being eaten, so maybe those animals should be crossed off the “Animals to Eat” list for the sake of humanity. Or perhaps some kind of meal preparation regulation should be put in place to prevent pandemics from springing up every 5-10 years without fail. China is the world’s second largest economy. Surely they could form some equivalent of the FDA and institute a standard or two.

Trump initially downplayed the severity of the virus stating that he had things under control:

Currently, the Orange Man Bad brigade are using these tweets to dunk on Trumpy, but they’re somewhat predictably ignoring the fact that these sentiments were quite common among major media outlets and other government officials at the time as well:

Here’s Vox initially downplaying the severity of the virus, before doing damage control and deleting all the offending tweets as Vox often does:

Next up is the Washington Post. Here they are, first downplaying the virus, then pivoting to calling people who downplay the virus “hoaxers”. The journalistic integrity is astounding. *chef’s kiss hand motion*

Here’s the New York Times employing the “it’s racist to enact a travel ban from a Country with a deadly pandemic” approach. Brilliant.

Plenty of credible sources were saying it wasn’t safe to have open travel with China at the time, the CDC and State Department included. This didn’t stop members of our esteemed journalist community from continuously denying this fact. In hindsight, they were more than likely just parroting the World Health Organization’s completely incorrect appraisal.

Here they are early on, spreading false information because they somehow didn’t get the memo that China’s government is corrupt and generally shouldn’t be trusted:

It seems like only a few months ago that China came under fire for both their human rights violations against citizens of Hong Kong, and for that whole rounding up Uyghurs and throwing them in concentration camps thing. But yes, let’s take their government’s word without question.

As of this writing, New York is closing in on almost 200k confirmed Covid19 cases and 9000 deaths. Let’s have a look as to why that might be the case:

Oh, wow. That’s NYC’s health commissioner and the chair of the health committee brazenly suggesting that people mingle about in large crowds during a pandemic. That doesn’t seem very responsible. It was still early February however, so it’s not nearly as bad as these two:

Wait a minute. That’s New York’s gosh darn mayor and his habitually problematic school chancellor. Both of these goofballs were putting people in harm’s way a month ago. New York really needs to do a better job of who it’s electing into office.

It wasn’t only US elected officials who failed their constituents. Here’s London’s mayor pulling a whoopsie:

Whoopsie! And here we have the mayor of Florence attempting to tackle a dangerous statistical reality with hopes, dreams and unicorn farts:

As of this writing, Italy has over 15,000 confirmed deaths. Bravissimo! Maybe next time don’t advocated for hugging strangers during a pandemic there, Mayor meatballs.

Perhaps the greatest irony here, is that while all these officials were seemingly outright denying the reality of China being ground zero in this pandemic, China was a mere month away from doing this:

China’s government has done nothing but lie and divert responsibility over the last 3 months. Now they’re pushing the narrative that the virus came from outside of China, and blaming foreigners. Meanwhile, the U.S. media can’t seem to bootlick enough, even going so far as to write screeds chastizing people calling Covid19 the “Wuhan Virus”. That’s literally where it originated. You’re doing P.R. for China’s corrupt government, and helping them divert responsibility. Congrats on being mediocre.

We’re still lacking in masks and medical equipment, but hey, maybe we should continue to rely on China for quality goods:

Who could have seen that coming? Apparently, while China was lying about the severity of the virus and the numbers affected, they were also busy buying up supplies from other countries. Now those countries desperately need supplies and China is showing that it only looks out for number one.

Who knows how many countries this was taking place in, or just how many plane-fulls of supplies were shipped into China. I’m sure we’ll find out in the coming weeks. Keep in mind, China is still only claiming 3000 deaths from this virus. I’m sure we’ll find out how many zeroes they omitted from that number in the coming weeks as well.

Before I head out, here’s Trump seemingly celebrating the fact that we’re making history with how bad this pandemic is, but still winning, whatever that entails. So uh… sleep tight I guess?

The continent of Australia is currently on fire. Let us not get into the “why” at present time, though I’ll probably write a piece about that in the future as well. It’ll be a harrowing tale involving the prevalent pandemic of cult-like political narratives, and how this regularly clashes with actual concrete scientific data, statistics, and reality. Stay tuned.

So multiple big-ass fires have occurred. Thankfully, people start donating their time and labor to the cause. That’s a very nice thing for humanity to do. But, if you’re going to be charitable, make sure you’re charitable enough. Otherwise, the most entitled cult of human beings on the planet might decide to direct their ire at you.

You see, we live in a dark era, where envy and entitlement have become the cornerstone of certain people’s identities. These types will no doubt deny this assertion, but actions dictate the adjectives that describe an individual, and not their own feelings towards those very words.

In the days following this fire, people started to give to charities and word of these donations spread across social media. Then Jeff Bezos decided to donate.

Jeff donated to a good cause, but made the fatal mistake of not donating “enough”. So of course this caused a torrent of backlash from the self-righteous gatekeepers of charitable donations on social media.

What a well-adjusted, virtuous individual. Feeling entitled to someone else’s money for donations really makes you look like the good guy in this exchange, Hipster McChewingGumFlavor.

Here is a nugget of wisdom from a generic cat avatar twitter user. Brilliant use of punctuation and capitalization. She also doesn’t seem to understand the concept of “net worth”, which isn’t terribly surprising. Net worth and money sitting in a bank account are two very different things. Unless she’s implying Bezos should sell off Amazon or his other business holdings to donate to charity, which I highly doubt.

Someone else who doesn’t understand how net worth works. What a shocker. And apparently $700k wasn’t enough of a donation, but one million dollars would have been sufficient for little miss entitlement here. I also appreciate the irony of someone who doesn’t donate calling someone else who does “greedy” for not donating enough. The absolute lack of self-awareness is magnificent.

She’s perfectly fine with wealthy people as long as they give money to her though. I’m sure when she has all that money, she’ll start donating it to people who need it more. I’m also sure I’m the queen of England.

This is the problem with these types of people. They want to live their own lives doing absolutely nothing to help out anyone else, but retain the right to constantly bitch about other people not doing enough. They want the special privilege of not being held to the same standards they hold others to. They are entitled by definition.

This would be like a group of friends having a potluck, only to have one “friend” show up empty handed, while having the gall to shame the others for not bring more. This entitled freeloader would rightly be regarded as the shitty person among the group, yet this kind of behavior is excused or outright celebrated on social media, and it’s gross.

Luckily this entitlement is called out to some degree:

Nailed it. Great job, sir.

Exactly. Call out that entitlement, king.

Sure it’s a bummer Jeff Bezos didn’t donate more. But it’s simultaneously a bummer that other people absolutely refuse to donate to anything, ever. Those who never donate, yet complain about others not doing enough are objectively the worst kind of people. They rarely get called out for this though, and are given carte blanche to throw around every sorry excuse in the book as to why even a dollar is too much for them. Every little bit legitimately helps. Stop being an entitled leech.

Donate below to help save some kolas, and perhaps even some wallabies:

https://www.wires.org.au/
https://donate.wwf.org.au

Have you met my friend Dan here? He’s an expert in politics. How do I know he’s an expert in politics? Well, he has a political science degree from college™, and anyone who got a degree from college™ is automatically an expert in things. You can’t just pay like $10k a year, barely squeak by with a C average in some topic and not earn the title of expert in your field of study. That’s the way college™ works. Duh.

You gotta love the appeal to authority. That logical fallacy wherein someone proclaims themselves or a third party to be an expert on something simply because of some degree of schooling. Get into any kind of online debate? At some point someone has no doubt pulled out the Appeal to Authority card and proudly slapped it down on the table.

This designation of “expert” is often doled out from a place of bias, i.e. I agree with this person, therefore I’ll deem them an expert to strengthen my own point. That, or it’s a title people are likely to bestow upon themselves in order to assert dominance over someone in a debate. It’s quite a disingenuous tactic, but works quite well on, and is often used by individuals who get into arguments and desperately need an easy upper hand.

Reza Aslan was notably thrust into the spotlight via an interview he took part in on Fox News in 2013. The interview was a train wreck for two reasons. One, the host continually questioned his qualification to write a book about Christianity while being a Muslim, something that should have been a non-issue. Two, his response to his qualifications being questioned was to merely throw out continued appeals to authority. At one point, he literally said “It’s not that I’m just some Muslim writing about Jesus. I am an expert with a PhD in the history of religions.”

*It should be noted that Mr Aslan holds his PhD in theological studies, which is essentially a philosophical study of religious thought and tradition, as opposed to a religious studies PhD, which is a non-biased study of the actual history of religions. He does not in fact hold a “PhD in the history of religions” as stated, but merely a B.A. in that field.

One doesn’t need to be an “expert” on anything to write a book about that topic, mainly because the term “expert” is completely subjective and not an official title. Holding a college degree doesn’t necessarily qualify one as an expert in anything. This is the lie people continually buy into that overstates the value of many college degrees and continually drives the cost of commercial education into the stratosphere. Anyone who has done the requisite amount of research can write a book or become somewhat of an authority on a topic. All it takes, is merely doing the work.

If you were looking for historical data about the US Civil War, who would you deem more of an “expert” in the field: a kid who barely passed a class in college on the subject, but whom has a shiny degree in history from college™, or someone who never went to college™, but is a complete history buff, having read over a thousand books about historical wars? Surely you’d go with the kid, since he has the college™ degree, and therefore is the “expert”, right?

What about autodidacts? Guys like Einstein, who largely taught themselves subjects like math and physics. He did take math and physics in school, but did poorly, largely because he continually skipped class, preferring to work on these subjects on his own time. He received bad grades in math and physics however, therefore he can’t possibly have been an expert in either field. Meanwhile, his teachers with their assorted degrees, more than likely didn’t even make it into the footnotes of those history books that contain Einstein.

How about everybody’s favorite boomer anarchist, Tom Morello? A guy who occasionally makes astonishingly one-dimensional political and sociological hot takes, but continually hides behind the fact that he holds a political science degree from Harvard to deflect criticism:

Sweet appeal to authority there, Thomas. Make sure you whip that piece of paper out whenever possible to trump differing opinions, without ever actually debating ideas. And, look, he graduated from Harvard no less. The school that had a Jewish quota up until the 1960’s and is currently involved in litigation over discriminating against Asians. Sounds like a machine that should probably be raged against.🤔

In short, you should be wary of anyone proclaiming themselves to be an expert on something, because more than likely, their level of expertise is overshadowed by their level of narcissism.

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.