Addendum to yesterday's post

The willful misunderstandings are again in full flight

Thanks to a post on the Marathon Investigation Facebook page linking to my entry from yesterday, I got a relative inundation of new sign-ups and a few new subscribers, so thanks to all who were involved. I prefer to build a readership of people who actively choose to read what’s here by finding it on their own, rather than aggressively evangelize on social media or fight with anonymous trolls.

As an additional and predictable result of the link and its appearance in a Facebook group, a minority of folks decided to completely ignore what I wrote—including lots of praise—in favor of latching on to the ever-convenient “old white guy who feels threated by diversity and relies on a thesaurus” narrative. As an bonus, they supplemented their non-reading of the post with mind-reading about what fueled the words they either didn’t see or lack the wiring to understand.

I was tempted to engage people directly in the thread, in which none other than Ben Chan unfurled the full flavor of his relentless insanity in support of a fellow gaslighter, but I resolved some time ago to avoid meta-discussions about my posts on Facebook pages, even at the expense of publicity-at-any-cost and some drama enjoyable to others. People who spout opinions about these posts off-site are rarely mentioning, even obliquely, what’s in the posts, and that goes for some of the complimentary ones. It’s painfully obvious when people are not responding to matters raised in a piece of writing. and are instead using a far broader, upstream or unrelated topic than what that writing addresses as an excuse to declaim about their personal agonies.

I think it’s time to bring out the Gimp.

This looks like the result of a sugar-charged a eight-year-old with an unusually robust vocabulary being asked to serve as the attorney for someone charged with fraud. There’s no point in arguing with someone who’s this much of an asshole. If I thought he could cite anything I’ve written that suggests I’m “uncomfortable with diversity,” I’d challenge him, but I may as well ask him for proof of his height and weight. He even says I long for something in the past he refuses to define.

This is a next-level doofus whose flights of scattershot, wheezing ideas have gained traction. None of this upsets me the way a real attack might; I almost feel bad for him. Almost. If he didn’t have an army of leftist dupes and agitators cheering him on, he’d probably have been institutionalized by now. Instead, I feel bad that citizen running is in such a state that coverage of morally challenged disruptors like Chan and Snell, whose actual running is less than an afterthought, now require coverage to keep industry publications interesting or at least solvent. (Big news yesterday on that front; more to come from here.)

Beyond such overtly bizarre mental processes, there also continues to be a remarkably high positive correlation between those who believe I’m against social justice in every form and those who think I can’t write for shit. Close to 1.0. I’d say. And this sect also hates not just the content, but the very fact of anyone even sharing it, and tries to bully sharers into silence:

Well, if it’s so poorly written as to be unreadable, who cares how many people share it? And if so many other people seem to have no trouble digesting it even if it doesn’t sit altogether well in some of their innards, what does this say about the people who can’t? At some point, folks are just begging to identify themselves as slack-jawed and squint-eyed, when they’d probably look better just admitting they’re upset, lack the means to formulate a focused or remotely meaningful response, and are shooting the messenger by way of throwing their hands in the air.

All of these supposed adults strike me as never having progressed past some point of psychological development that permits them to tolerate the slightest level of mental discomfort, coupled to an insatiable need to be made uncomfortable by things they could simply avoid. People like this are extraordinarily feeble.

I’ll address a few of the comments, or their underpinnings, with a extended response to this one:

Actually, no. I doubt she’s as disagreeable in person as she seems to me in her online persona, but the point is that it’s hard to despise the entirety of a person I have never met based solely on what they present in theatrical form as part of an Internet money-grab. And not all of Snell’s efforts can be for ill if they're getting people out running, whatever the ultimate basis of those efforts.

What I do hate, unconditionally and without reservation, is people lying and cheating for profit, to damage the livelihood others, or both. When you've been on the receiving end of aggressive gaslighting, you learn to vehemently reject it wherever it comes from. And that's absolutely, unquestionably the case with Latoya Shauntay Snell. I barely scratched the surface of her far-flung efforts to squash rightful, accurate criticism of her capering in my previous post.

My few detractors in the thread either cannot or refuse to read for comprehension, have an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, or are supportive of lying because they're liars themselves. Ben Chan is apparently all three. I’m not saying this makes every observation I make correct, but until someone explains why it’s wrong to question a very questionable editorial choice, I have no impetus to believe otherwise.

But there seems to be legitimate confusion about how I define "SJW," or “social justice warriors.” Regular readers have seen this, but I’ll review it for the haters: By my definition, which I did not invent, SJWs are insincere. They're typically in the mix for some combination of renown and personal gain, which are of course intertwined. This helps explain their propensity for lying as well as endless uncouth scrambling to prevent those lies from becoming apparent. This is also why so many of the leading voices of this crap are white women who have none of the needs that people in struggling classes are wanting for, and therefore don’t care whether their advocacy is genuine as long as it metastasizes.

I dedicated an entire paragraph to clearing up the difference between an SJW. I know that my critics can see it and probably read it. If you follow this link and count distinct text blocks, it’s all in the fifth one. I also know they couldn’t care less if I can back up posts like mine because they have bought into a delusional worldview in which every source of personal angst can be traced to group identity and its members’ ongoing persecution from above, which is both supremely stupid and a ghastly way to live. That’s why they respond the same way, all the time, either uncaring about or oblivious to the colossal irony: He’s doing that because of flaws in his being related to his time of birth, sex, skin color, and other immutable traits.

So do better, crybabies. At a minimum, live with the fact that people are going to share opinions you dislike, and that you’ll continue to be frustrated when all you do in response is say “DON’T SHARE THAT ON YOUR OWN PAGE!” and fling cowardly, off-topic nonsense. It would be easier to admit that lying and cheating are losing and deplorable strategies and leave you no better as a person than the one most of you—and me—wanted booted from the Oval Office for exhibiting just that sort of purposeful malevolence.

It’s simply not okay—ever—for anyone to respond to getting caught in a fib the way Snell responded. But this shouldn’t even be a discussion, because Snell long ago adopted the mantle of “influencer” as has done quite well failing upward to now. How is some blogger exposing the deviant conduct of a supposedly admired figure punching down? No shoe company sponsors this blog, and I have neither the willingness nor the follower capital to direct thousands of people to try to rip someone apart.

But my experiences in life have me confident in not being on the wrong side of history with this stuff. Look, I’m perfectly welcoming of shifting societal norms; my life is far better for the diversity I’ve experienced, which has blossomed in concert with that of American society through experiences as wonderful as living briefly with world-class African runners and as devastating as basically winding up on the street. And as a firm believer in body autonomy, I donated to Planned Parenthood for years and have the receipts to prove it, but with that organization’s leap onto the SJW train and an array of defensible excuses for relieving myself of all concern for anyone besides my family and friends, those ended in 2020 and seem over for good.

But I doubt deceit in any form will ever became a championed societal value, even if it will never go away; if it does, I’ll be perfectly happy to exit the production and leave everyone to their fabricated, chronically unsettled netherworld of narcissistic, antagonistic bullshit.