A round-up of general foolishness

On Global Running Day, look who's spreading the message "Don't run!"

It’s helpful to bear in mind that the set of people most vocal about distance running online share little overlap with the set of people who respect distance running and regard it as a sport, and that the first group is tiny compared the second. Were this not the case, we* wouldn’t see a single running event on national television, because the first group is laden with whiners, clout-chasers, shut-ins, and dupes, while the second includes people who regularly run if they still physically can, can validate or rule out basic cause-and-effect relationships, understand simple arithmetic, and work with runners themselves on the ground. Dummies and liars are incapable of keeping any broad enterprise such as a sport going for long, especially when it seems like they want to wreck it anyway. The only known exception is the United States Government.

Because running is a small sport and its most electronically energetic bozos regularly circulate the same set of bad ideas, it’s easy to catch up on the latest whining-campaigns and virtue-signaling efforts by scanning a select handful of Twitter timelines, with most of the cast members familiar to regular readers.

Yesterday was Global Running Day, when it’s traditional for people in the first group to remind each other that it’s not compulsory to run on a day dedicated specifically to running, while people in the second group simply go running, often without the knowledge that it’s even a “holiday.” Here’s a throwback to 2022:

I feel like reminding the folks in the first group that recreational running is by definition never compulsory, and that many of them demonstrate that they know this by taking most days of the year off from exercising.

Even those with no environmental or other external reason to avoiding running themselves are happy to spread the message to runners thousands of miles away that running is a bad idea. Here’s Erin Strout telling the entire East Coast, from Arizona, to (honestly! Really, really!) not run outside and hunting for others on Team Languish to coach into inactivity, forming important social connections in the process:

Strout associates with other insecure ninnies who manage to treat the “act” of not running as evocative of moral superiority. While this strikes normies as bizarre, it makes sense to insecure bozos. These people continually broadcast what great humans they are, so they assume that people who do things like run in challenging conditions are also trying to establish superiority of character. They cannot conceive of communicating ideas or engaging in behaviors in ways not aimed solely at in-group status gains, so it often appears they would rather appear inept to the world at large than look bad to fellow goobers.

Someone should ask Fast Women’s Alison Wade and her crew of neurotic suburbanite harridans how staying inside when it’s smoky outdoors translates into active stewardship of the environment. Wade is equating the New York Road Runners’ call to literal inaction with “taking care of our planet.” (Overall, that tweet by Wade has a hard-to-beat privileged-dimwit factor, as it mentions both the NYRR and The New York Times. Anyone who treats either entity as anything by viciously immoral is themselves immoral as well as an inevitable source of damaging nonsense.)

The same folks are also big advocates of following all CDC guidelines pertaining to covid, including loading up on as much experimental dynamic mRNA sludge as possible. Following The Science is important, as is ignoring every obvious sign around them that The Science is unscientific.

Speaking of Science, Wade’s “don’t run, fight climate change” isn’t even her least scientific outburst lately.

“It bugs me” is one of Wade’s more common ways of expressing a need to bitch for no good reason at all.

First, Wade has no standing to even refer to research on women in sports, because Alison Wade thinks women can have penises and testicles. And were she to deny this claim, she would be lying, because anyone who thinks boys should be able to compete “as girls” is saying that they are girls. It gets no more explicit than “trans women are women.”

You don’t get to make the claim that trans women are women and then try to selectively bar every reality that is attached to that claim.

Second, the “not enough research in women” trope is yet another bleat unsupported by evidence. Most published, peer-reviewed research is actually garbage anyway (anyone who regularly publishes in scientific journals will admit this in private), but what is it that’s missing? Yelling “Women have periods and stuff, we need to study that!” is not identifying a knowledge gap in need of filling.

If your foundational piece of evidence that a certain kind of research is lacking is “Fewer than half of research studies are women,” you should offer to participate in any studies that include brain MRIs to see if you actually have anything inside your skull. This gripe is an indirect concession that the complaint has no, or at least unproven, merits.

But one more time: Anyone who rejects the very concept of binary sex—and the rare exceptions are aberrations resulting from mistakes in embryonic development, not merely evolutionarily selected alternatives to the male or female organisms nature “seeks to” create— has as much reason to comment on biomedical research as a Flat Earth Society member has to offer to help with NASA’s budget.

There is almost no misinformation or disinformation being cranked out by the mainstream media that Strout doesn’t “know.” If bullshit had the same value as knowledge on an IQ test, Strout would probably score close to 160. She is the Marilyn vos Savant of inverse intelligence.

Imagine asking Strout to explain exactly how climate change is causing a decline in the mental health of teenage girls. She wouldn’t be able to do anything except helplessly refer to a graph about sea-level rise she doesn’t understand or link to a propaganda piece on a site like NBC News.

Or let’s say she does have evidence climate change is suddenly making teen girls more depressed. Is that evidence stronger than the evidence that lockdowns—which she was a fan of before and will be when they’re announced again—crushed kids nationwide? The fact that she manages to identify isolation as a causative factor in these girls’ woes yet is clueless about its obvious cause is honestly unbelievable. I’m amazed she can even function in life at all.

Just today, the Concord Monitor, my hometown newspaper and my place of work for a short spell in the late 1990s, published a story about trans participation in New Hampshire high-school sports. It relies on quotes from some remarkably clueless sources in positions of authority,

A reminder to the intractable fuckheads who inevitably wind up here: A boy claiming to be a girl still has a track or cross-country team to compete on even if he can’t do so as a girl. This is exquisitely simple to remember, but routinely dismissed by craven or malevolent administrators who operate from the failed “We need to find a place these kids can call home” nonsense-premise.

This came from Chris Corkery, the principal of John Stark High School:

“No kid is going to say, ‘Wear a skirt this month and go by Mary and we’ll win the championship,’ ” said John Stark Regional High School Principal Chris Corkery. “That’s just not going to happen.”

If Corkery followed swimming, he might be aware that this is almost exactly the path Will Thomas took into and through NCAA women’s athletics. Or maybe Corkery is not a moron but a coward. He appears to be both, like almost every school administrator who hasn’t retired or been pushed out owing to Wokism, and the Monitor story proves he has ample company in that broken demographic.

Levitt’s timeline is a pearl, because he loves the art of the humblebrag but is far too artless to pull it off.

What Levitt is pretending to be concerned about is others. But what he wants you to see is that he runs with fast runners and wants to help those who can’t keep up.

Levitt has barely broken three hours in the marathon. That makes him a jogger, especially compared to Olympic Trials qualifiers, with the U.S. women’s standard being 2:37:00. He looks like a jogger, he runs like a jogger, yet within his own cloud of high-flown libtard-blather, he somehow doesn’t recognize himself as one. 4

He has no business training with marathoners a minute a mile or more faster than himself. If anyone needs help finding an ability-appropriate running group—and this really isn’t that hard—it’s Levitt himself.

I had no idea who this feeble-minded clown even was until he claimed his seat on the “So what if it’s true, it’s still wrong to say” short-bus (which has paradoxically grown quite gigantic, with a horribly strained suspension).

Had Levitt not made this one tweet, I might never have noticed him or at least not focused on what a tool he is. But my distaste for condescending ignoramuses who scurry-scramble like pussies when challenged will never wane. Swapping covid lies, platforming cheaters, and denying biology in ways that adversely affect normies are traits that sum to a pathetic shitweasel existence, especially among the financially complacent.

I’ve since, however, become used to the number of flat-out useless, noisy people in this sector even if I don’t like it. Sometimes they can’t help but agree with me and are too dumb to hide it. Ellie Pell, like Levitt a recent transplant to Boulder who showed up in that buuuut whhyyyy thread to insult my gender and age before moving here, observed yesterday that a piece of David Roche advice makes no sense, though Pell was too gutless to say where she read it.

As you can see, I tried to help her out by linking to an article I wrote addressing the very thing she noticed, but so far, Pell, who looks and tweets like Olive Oyl on crystal meth, hasn’t offered to take me to dinner or even thanked me for stepping out, reaching out, and extending the hand of caring.

Here’s some stuff that exemplifies Citius Mag ‘s status as an unconditional low-information cheerleader, the various yutzes who serve its sites interested in nothing more than gaining clicks.

So Ryan Crouser, who’s been out of college for seven or eight years, used his engineering background to invent a totally new technique, while Sha’Carri Richardson hasn’t improved in four years but deserves a holler anyway because she’s running her mouth about being great instead.

Those who block or mute me, including almost everyone I’ve gathered here into this humble post today, don’t do this because I’m mean. They do it out of a combination of shame (no one without a cable-news job enjoys routinely being widely exposed as brain-dead, dishonest, or both) and not wanting anyone or anything to interfere with whatever formal grifts they’re running.

The only part this shit that really annoys me is the “don’t share that person’s thought” and a refusal to engage critics and criticism. This is another dumb collective move, because filtering out annoying people is only effective when you’re really famous, which no one in running is. When you’re not famous and others start writing things about you, those results rapidly achieve high visibility in search engines. And when people continue to hide, I continue to write about them, and…well, normies can see how this all goes over time.

I didn’t set out to Google-bomb anyone, but I’ll take it as a pleasing side effect because I know how much it upsets the cretinous to see true but unruly things about them online and be unable to do anything about it besides gnash their twats.