Running from the Facts: "Bullshit on a self-amplifying loop" edition
Running from the Facts: "Bullshit on a self-amplifying loop" edition
The failure of the fitness media is just one inevitable result of the ongoing fusion of corporate-supplied "news" and the malign "democratic" government that feeds it
A well-known writer has matter-of-factly described the behavior of Twitter’s high moral priests (e.g., Alyssa Milano), its smattering of influential consensus-capos (e.g., any employee of Slate or Vox), and the hundreds of thousands of blindly and continuously irate followers of these viewpoint-deciders:
Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called ‘herd-poisoning.’ Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.
Alas, this passage, however perfectly it describes those at the vanguard of c. 2022 intellectual discourse, did not emerge from the mind of a living observer. The work from which it was drawn, although describing a society lulled and drugged into a raw dystopia with no serious acknowledgment of its own lethal skid, is Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World.
I have occasionally characterized my disillusionment with the running media’s nosedive as being driven by the far greater upstream problem of a systematically corrupted corporate media environment. Although I don’t watch any news or read anything in newspapers unless directed to an article by someone seeking to correct my baseline hypotension, I spend more time reading breakdowns of the general news by the few reporters I trust than I do scanning what the running media has to offer.
Apart from regularly slamming The New York Times and lamenting that millions of left-leaning people remain sufficiently deluded to trust its output, I haven’t dedicated much space to explicitly justifying this perception. So, today’s edition of this irregular offering includes reviews of many stories unrelated to running. Some of these are darkly interesting on their own, as they are sufficiently far-reaching to affect anyone who still lives on Earth and requires oxygen. But these also illustrate the entire reason the running media can exist in the state it now does—bloodied and broken and with no impetus to even slap a bandage on any of the gaping wounds. It’s just “take a few Vicodin and limp along singing the narrative.”
I often receive lighthearted encouragement to focus more on competitive running itself and less on other observers’ reactions and contributions to the circus. I could respond to that in many ways, including by taking it as an oblique compliment regarding my running wisdom, or by pointing out that the “About” page here has specified the site’s intended focus from the outset. I will instead suggest reading this Freddie DeBoer piece while substituting “the running media” for “Wesleyan University” and pretending I wrote it.
DeBoer describes a 2015 attempt by students at Wesleyan, his alma mater, to defund the student newspaper after it published an op-ed critical of the means (but not the ends) of Black Lives Matter. In the years since, media outlets have not merely refused to admit that the actions of those Wesleyan students were plain wrong and caused lasting damage to the Wesleyan Argus; those outlets have instead complained that American institutions have not perpetrated enough reckless, purging-oriented disruptions. But as a set-to Yale Law School showed last week, plenty of folks continue doing their best to effect meaningful, positive change.
Such episodes, with impressive fidelity, mimic how the running media has behaved in recent years. Its members have been uniformly and demonstrably incorrect about the very things they declare most often and confidently, such as the idea that transfemales have no athletic advantages over females and aren’t stealing wins from them at the highest levels of sport. They have positioned liars and scammers as people to be admired while portraying critics of these clowns as regressive bigots. They have unilaterally ruled that talking about athletes’ bodies (with “women” usually implied) is never okay—except when it is, e.g., when promoting fat bodies as healthy, or when endlessly making someone’s skin tone, sexual preference(s), or whimsical gender identity the very reason for including them in “equity” stories and social-media posts in the first place.
They have trumpeted the need for inclusion and playing nice while unpretentiously violating every one of their own stated moral tenets when anyone suspected of non-Wokism is on the chopping block, especially but not only an older white male. They have decided that the idea way to promote running is to convince anyone who scans one of their publications that the running world is basically one roving Ku Klux Klan parade that pauses now and then so the torch-wavers can gawk at the hottie in lane five.
These are not activists interested in “inclusion.” They are meta-religious zealots demanding that everyone agree with their dogmatic nonsense and exerting whatever forms of speech suppression they have access to on their iPhones to ensure compliance. They are cowards who would never say or do the things in person that they do on Twitter. They are empty intellectual shells whose sense of power disappears the instant they’re offline.
Whenever you have the chance, you should tell them to go fuck themselves. It’s long overdue. Everyone needs to start doing this.
It should not be hard to understand why people like me and DeBoer often remain emotionally or intellectually attached to industries and institutions that petty social arsonists have transformed into bad jokes. It’s why we continue demanding that those industries and institutions operate by sound ethical standards, despite “sound ethics” clashing by definition with their commitment to a Wokish business model.
Lying by journalists will never, ever be acceptable, even if some of running’s most flawed figures are protected from most of the consequences of their nonstop dissembling by the sheer popularity of wrong or hopelessly biased information. And a failure to acknowledge, let alone correct, even honest mistakes in your work that have been pointed out to you counts as lying. Dunce-cap collectors in the running media like Chris Chavez and Erin Strout can get away with this because their followers are as undiscerning and as uncommitted to the deeper roots of the sport as they are.
DeBoer also mentions a new speech controversy, the most insane one yet from the completely disposable left. In brief, the New York Times editorial board expressed disappointment at the cancel-happy ways of today’s “liberals,” comparing their hijinks to Republican efforts to keep certain ideas out of public-school classrooms. Accompanying the piece and supporting its conclusions was a poll showing just how fearful Americans have become of saying what they think. Based on these results, only one in six Americans believes that it’s as easy as it ever was to exercise their First Amendment rights.
The editorial wasn’t very good; it opened by asserting that Americans have “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” which isn’t true, and which the editors of this ex-news source have to know isn’t true but included anyway to spike traffic and chatter.
But the piece also shouldn’t have caused the hysterical blowback it did. In fact, in the minds of any true liberal, it should have set off alarms in the other direction. Yet, as if determined to offer airtight support for the writer’s thesis and validate the responses to the polling questions, blue-check Twitter erupted as if most involved had just seen their own dicks and nipples harden for the first time, a plausible enough scenario. Matt Taibbi dedicated a story to the absurdities, and if you’re not convinced how absolutely devoted to speech suppression “liberals” have become, please read it. It should make you wonder if any of the complainers Taibbi reviews ever interacted with human beings before reaching the age of twenty-one.
I honestly hate living in a world with so many remarkably deranged and stupid assholes like these, and for fomenting a disinformation-based “revolution,” all of them have my blessing to eat shit sandwiches for the rest of their miserable, spineless, and confused lives, and enjoy faceplant after professional faceplant once the Wokish gravy train is finally derailed or slowed. None of these sleaze-projectors is intellectually capable of defending a stance; they’re so used to “winning” debates by screaming, running away, or blocking their interlocutors that they wouldn’t even know how to present a real argument if asked (see: Ibram X. Kendi).
It’s no surprise, though, that fans of the NYT don’t want to hear anything from the reality sector. They are fans of a “news” outlet that now churns out state and corporate propaganda in soothingly familiar terms. Please accept that The New York Times long ago passed the point of shame, with “Russiagate” representing only one of the incredible number of miscues and errors by the paper that morphed into intentionally misleading narratives. I know this is hard to swallow for everyone who rode the early wave of anti-Trump media mania (like I did), but the NYT, CNN, the Washington Post, and MSNBC all decided to become advocates rather than information outlets during Trump’s presidency, and they are just freak shows populated by former CIA spooks and FBI agents. Taibbi and other longtime liberals believe the major liberal outlets are now even less trustworthy than Fox News ever was, which is like saying someone pops more anti-aging supplements than Tom Brady does.
Everyone with a hankering for the truth, even Trump-hating Democrats, has known for months that the allegations against Hunter Biden that emerged in October 2020, shortly before the last U.S. presidential election, are true. The corporate media and even tech giants dismissed the allegations as “Russian disinformation,” with Twitter and Facebook banning the circulation of the New York Post story about Biden’s now-infamous laptop and associated tawdriness. This to me was a shocking move, given its transparent and coordinated aim of swinging the election in favor of Joe Biden (Junior). One can reasonably argue that CNN screwed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 cycle while she was already busy screwing herself, but this was a serious and unwelcome barrier-breaker.
I had two chances to vote for Donald Trump and passed each time, and if he drops dead of a stroke on or before even reaching the head of the 2024 campaign trail, I won’t be scrambling to post a black square anyplace. (My voting record in such elections is incomplete, including over the two most recent cycles.) Nevertheless, even the most ardent Trump haters should have found this wide-open effort to make Trump a one-term president shocking and disturbing. All it requires to get to this position if you’re a liberal, or dislike Trump for whatever reason, is imagine the media perpetrating the same thing to try sway an election against a Democratic president. Just try telling yourself that Facebook and Twitter would continue their apparent loyalty to liberal causes if conservative forces took over control of the American government—which they at some point will.
From the start, displaced-to-Substack liberal reporters such as Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were on top of the effort to keep Hunter Biden’s laptop from becoming news. But only recently did The New York Times own up to its “mistake,” so to many consumers of the newslike bullshit spattering their faces from television screens, the fact that Hunter Biden is every bit the cretinous tornado he was cracked up to be by those suckers for “Russian disinformation” at the New York Post.
Greenwald wrote a story about this grisly chapter in American journalism. It’s long and a little tedious; Greenwald is very thorough and fearless, but he’s not Taibbi style-wise. But the whole thing can be summed up in a meme targeting the increasingly pale and puke-inducing Jen Psaki, now the head of the daily White House flack operation.
Most readers have probably discerned by now that even though Lindsay Crouse is a recklessly dishonest and inept thinker as well as an ugly human being, her job at the NYT is perfectly safe provided she lies about or botches the right things. I cannot imagine being happy with my work or myself if I behaved like Crouse does for even a single day, but I can see exactly how easy it would be to get away with.
I recently realized that I have unconsciously been stratifying the various publications and people I review, and that I see Runner’s World as salvageable in ways that the Outside, Inc. pubs are not. RW has generated its share of stinkers lately, particularly in the area of its choices of cover models, but some of these can be forgiven on the basis of the magazine needing to make money. As long as Sarah Lorge Butler remains editor, I think the magazine will be okay. There is really no one in the business besides perhaps Jon Gault who could be handed a piece of major running news and turn out a better story if given only an hour to do it. It’s become easier for me to see how she has balanced her own convictions, the pressures of Wokism, barking from aggrieved Substackers, and competition from other outlets. And Runner’s World is, after all, an American institution; in name, at least, it’s older than I am. I would hate to see it disappear, honestly. But if SLB departs, expect RW to crash unless it chooses her replacement with great care.
I can’t say any of that about Outside, Inc. Trail Runner and Women’s Running seem engaged in a grim daily battle to see which of them can projectile-vomit most forcefully into the faces of anyone landing anywhere in their respective domains. Outside Online itself usually features better writing, but also goes to more obscene lengths to trouble undeserving people, and displays some of the most brazen hypocrisy in an industry bursting with double moral standards.
Outside Online recently asked, for the fiftieth time since 2019 including slight variations, “When Will We Finally Stop Commenting on Women Athlete’s Bodies?” And yes, that was the exact title of the article when it was posted on March 8. It still is, suggesting that not enough people care about Outside’s suite of Wokeblown publications to even offer basic grammar tips.
The author, Christine Yu, was thrown into psychological spasms by Matthew Futterman of The New York Times (which should be nowhere, and instead remains ubiquitous) describing Olympic skier Jessie Diggins as “a sprite.” Her story is the literary equivalent of one of those chronically under-serviced dog-park turd-barrels people keep lobbing turds at despite the barrel having started to overflow days before. Just when there was no more possible space for another burst of whiny self-contradiction, BLOP! Another turdbag joins the metastatic heap.
As usual with these Wokish articles, the main argument here that Futterman erred is “people on the Internet complained.” All people like Christine Yu do is complain, so that’s a wash.
If Yu wants a serious answer to that question, it’s “never.” For one thing, the Wokish, as already established, fixate to extremes on bodies and how they differ. They are constantly redirecting everyone’s attention to their skin color, size (if large), sexual orientation, and gender identities, many of them ad hoc. They just want people to focus on things about bodies that most normal people prefer not to. For another, you’re never going to stop people from instinctively perceiving some body types as more desirable—to have or to behold. The Wokish are so intent on narrative control that they would cancel people for “hotness” comments made completely in private, even though most of them have made the same kinds of remarks themselves.
Futterman, of course, didn’t come close to sexualizing Diggins. It’s completely relevant that Diggins can generate such power from comparatively little muscle mass. This is the kind of consideration central to coaching and sports physiology that Yu and her ilk are perversely threatened by because someone, somewhere, might not eat enough as a result.
Yu complains here about double standards in journalism when it comes to covering men and women, then goes on to show she has no idea how sports have even been historically covered. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t believe that men’s bodies are described in conjunction with their athletic prowess all the time. It also matters not to her that it’s not the Internet’s job to get pissy on behalf of athletes like Diggins. It’s vitally important that Yu get to express her outrage while taking no responsibility for it whatsoever.
The real gem of Yu’s piece, though, has to be this:
When it comes to media, the tenets of ethical journalism require that journalists report fairly, accurately, and not cause additional harm.
This is from Outside Online, the same outlet that slammed a race director for a non-crime, put "toxic masculinity" in the title of a story with a psycho-cartoon male in the header image, drops the term “white supremacy” as if this is as normal a feature at running events as fluid stations, and regularly commits a dozen other ethical (and apostrophe) violations. Now it has the nerve to publish a piece calling for journalistic ethics? What kind of netherworld is this?
Do these tunnel-vision grievance-miners ever stop to consider that people who disagree with some of their views also have hurtable feelings, and that we're not automatons who were put here to systematically torment the easily butthurt?
Lize Brittin, a world-class mountain runner in her youth who wrote a book about her own experience with anorexia nervosa, reviewed this from the perspective of “The author has a point, but there’s lots of room between ‘avoid mentioning bodies altogether’ and ‘avoid inflicting harm if you can.’” Like me, Lize sometimes pretends we still live in a society in which people calling themselves liberals deal in negotiable ideas and fungible demands instead of engaging in truth-stomping witch-hunts borne of an impossibly fragile hive-ego.
The main driver of this crap is people bedeviled by body-centered neuroses being categorically intolerant of any language or imagery that even appears to flatter the traditionally desirable—sexually, athletically, intellectually. This purposeful attempt to dismantle normative cultural values, with no eye on a concurrent benefit to anyone, is baked into Wokism, which I leave to the reader to investigate—it really is that simple. But body-insecurity existed well before Wokism or “critical theory” began to pervade and them subsume academia and the media, and those in its grip have been swept along in its roaring imperative to celebrate decay and sham achievements while denigrating honest effort and demonstrated excellence.
This crowd is bedeviled by unresolved issues around size and shape, genitals-persona mismatches. semi-random disabilities, and sexual deviance (which same-sex attraction statistically is, even if almost no one alive, including God, cares or even notices anymore—the next Pope is likely to be the ghost of Freddie Mercury). It all adds up to unmanageable levels of insecurity and raging envy. They can't handle those they perceive (usually with pinpoint accuracy) as more attractive or capable. They want their betters displaced. If it confuses you that so many women are supportive of the demolition of female sports via the infusion of ersatz females, consider what it is that their minds, even if subconsciously, are telling them to do, whom to target.
1,001 Instagram ass-wagglers with 5K bests averaging 34 minutes can upload 5,000 photos a day of their nearly nude selves specifically because they know they are attractive. The Wokish can’t stop this circus, because nothing they do can gaslight people’s most fundamental drives or change what their eyes see. But they can do everything in their power to try to rid the media of voices like Futterman’s and their refusal to abide by risible standards of sports journalism.
I'm also tired of the word "gatekeeping,” which appears in the article’s subhead, being used to complain about being or feeling excluded from settings with simple rules they can't follow or criteria they just don't meet—places they are often intent on besmirching anyway. Complaining of gatekeeping a petty response to a demonstration of one's own mediocrity, inadequacy, or basic unsuitability for inclusion in a given activity or organization. People of all sizes and shades and ranges of political and sexual orientations have been not only participating in running for decades, but using it as the very refuge from nonsense that nonsense-factories like Outside Online are now showering them with in the supposed name of doing good. Again, the social arsonist aspect of Wokism inevitably prevails.
I don’t know if Molly Mirhashem, the triumphantly inept, toy-hatchet-swinging deputy digital editor of Outside Online, had a hand in Yu’s story. But either way, she’s doing a wonderful job of taking the focus away from the way people look while exercising.
Latoya Shauntay Snell has been dropping the G-word a lot herself lately in her jiggly dance to keep the focus on her flab instead of her lying, which is where her critics prefer to see it. But it seems like I have hit a word ceiling for now, or maybe I just need to go outside and slap my forehead against a tree 13 times, and call it 25. So she and recent news on a wealth of coronavirus-related deceptions will have to wait, if I survive my own reconditioning. Though this one is good for a dark snicker:
Finally, in the event you haven’t seen the name “Taibbi” enough today, I suggest reading his March piece “Orwell Was Right.” If you’re not familiar with doublethink, or even if you are, you might want to check to see if you may have become a victim of it thanks to the implacable bulldozing of fair information dissemination by the very people most committed, in principle, to providing it.