Running from the Facts: "Getting used to the stench of the garbage trucks" edition

2021 was a nonstop display of self-interested whiners pimping a degenerate social movement to reward each other's lies, errors, and other spastic faceplants. Oh, and I was just on a podcast

The Bullshit variant is here to stay, and infects anyone who watches any news at all.

This video and the associated TK News story capture the latest way in which the corporate media has feasted on the public’s worst fears, making an already frightening situation worse by making the Omicron COVID-19 variant sound as Ebola-like as possible.

Why do this? Because unfortunately, fear and anger keep people glued to their screens. Realistically scaled coverage of any sort simply doesn’t keep ratings afloat, because human social behavior in well-fed societies that are generally safe and prosperous has become fundamentally and irreversibly repugnant. (I skipped a few steps involved in that proof for now.)

The average American liberal can be excused for having fallen prey to a vast array of lies about virtually everything, because this person spent many pre-Trump years gathering slanted but essentially reliable information from outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and NBC News. But the time to stop hitting the snooze alarm on this one has passed.

Fenway Park couldn't hold all the media personalities and executives who should be pitched off a cliff for taking part in multiple organized disinformation efforts in recent years, with onlookers in this fantasy-punishment permitted to cast rotten fruit and body fluids and even bursts of gunfire their way from on high as their bodies spiral toward overdue demises—I’m thinking on a deceptively hard pile of half-deflated Tom Brady-brand whoopie cushions arranged on the surface of a middle-finger-shaped swimming pool 2,000 feet below. Rachel Maddow should be the marquee feature in this unique carnival of mass excarceration from the biosphere. These people are just that awful, including a lot of no-name blue-check leftist waterheads who technically qualify as journalists, and who speak and tweet just as floridly and with greater intent of exterminating their cultural enemies.

I mention the greater media climate continually because it is solely responsible for, and inseparable from, the deterioration—the disappearance, if we’re honest—of standards in the running media. This rot runs the spectrum from columns in prestige outlets like The New York Times to multiple grifters being featured on the cover of Runner’s World (still the chief provider of the standard “Couch-to-Influencer plan”) to everything the feeble-minded, craven propagandists at Outside, Inc. have published to doggedly misandrist newsletters to the noxious, greenish-brown audio clouds the most flummoxed podcaster-joggers have excreted with eye-watering dependability. (If you used the same drugs I did, you could occasionally see and smell sounds, too.)

At the start of this year, the corporate running media and legacy outlets were peddling same thesis that had been gathering momentum throughout Donald Trump’s presidency and crystallized with a snap around the killing of George Floyd in April 2020: Citizen running was one more American institution that had symbolically been barring the entry of nonwhite, fat, life-traumatized, non-cisgender, and other “underrepresented” people since the dawn of road racing.

To anyone who’s been running in various parts of the U.S. for a few decades, this was and remains an obvious lie. But the lie was easy enough to overlook given the cultural gravity of the moment, especially the horrifying, endlessly broadcast sight of Floyd’s life draining out of him on the street, coupled to a squashing by the same outlets of the violence and millions of dollars in property damage and destroyed businesses perpetrated on supposed behalf of justice for all.

Proponents of this loveliness decided it made just as much sense to propose that running was infested with regressive mores across the board. If you could claim nonwhite ethnic status, great. But if you were nonthin and woefully nonattractive, had nonsensical ideas about human reproductive biology, and most of all were willing to expel nonstop bullshit, then you could really count on nonethical journalists, podcasters and shoe companies to support you, even as a proven, aggressive liar and an equally aggressive booze-swilling, race-baiting non-exerciser or someone who participated in the effective theft of an academic fellowship worth over $50,000. 2021 promised great advocacy for runners and pretend-runners disempowered by ambient oppression

Has 2021 lived up to this promise? Have brave, upstart joggers of various skin colors and larger sizes no one ever saw at road races before—folks the rest of us must have imagining seeing and talking to throughout the 1980s and 1990s and the first fifteen years of the current century—shown the world that white supremacy, unchecked lechery, weight-shaming, and other evils propagated by ruthless patriarchal powers would no longer reign over the workaday perambulating class? Has the running world become a more welcome and more accessible environment for all?

What exactly has the result of “You can’t separate running from politics” produced since the Wokish commenced their “You will listen or else” campaign other than putting some swag into the living rooms of a few transparent scammers and allowing a few already prosperous mental midgets to gain further acclaim in the face if their own repeated screw-ups and hypocritical posturing and capering and cowardly mudslinging? Have people of color in really poor places been brought into the Kafka-esque running fold by any of this shit perpetrated to well-off, mostly white liberals? I fail to see how, but I am open to dispositive information if it’s there.

For a whole host of self-evident reasons, the answer is “Of course not.” It’s easy enough to carry a false premise like “The whole Whiteness-poisoned institution of running is oppressive” along on no evidence for a while, but reality and what this group of assholes is pushing is and always has been laughably different. The media itself needs a hook, and the weasels writing this stuff need to seem relevant, even more ahead of the social-justice curve than other high-visibility leftists (or whatever they are, but do not call them liberals).

I want to respond further to aspects of this potential dual-dumbass collaboration as well as highlight a few more reasons that some of the more popular or well-circulated names in running are not at all trustworthy, and why it’s plain that people who support their efforts are not supporting anything other than whatever crooked, morbid agenda that person is pushing, be it the stripping of Y-chromosomes from running altogether (DSD athletes and trans women excepted), the yelling about impossible-to-spot oppression, or just making money as an ever-expanding, non-running garbage-factory.

But it’s Monday, when I’m traditionally too angry to allow myself such luxuries, and besides, the uploading today of a podcast by The Juniper Lab in which I was a guest on December 8 gives me a good reason to stop for now. In a wide-ranging conversation lasting about 100 minutes, I go into my background and the reasons I do what I do, which is what podcasts are for.

This production was more of a meet-and-greet, with scattered observations about how running-centric industries have changed along with cultural and communication-technology shifts, than a review of anything in particular. But in the future, Derrick and I plan to do podcasts focusing on some of the individual subjects we touched on here.

The Wokish are not going to stop doing what they are doing for as long as enough of them are wrong, hysterical, stupid, and spineless together, in the same unified dipshit way, any more than a coterie of politicians or a bunch of religious extremists will. And it has never been my intent to seek anyone’s platforming, as chic as such ventures have become and as unidirectional as the extension of that attitude may be. I just want people to be fully aware of what they’re seeing and their real motivation. I can’t stop the spread of stupidity or check its monetization, but I can heckle the bejesus out of its manufacturers, distributors, and street-level vendors. They may not respond to it, but they hate it, even if they refuse to take responsibility for their own reckless behavior.

And if they can learn anything at all, it’s that they will get exactly the same level of respect from me and a growing number of others that they themselves afford the non-Wokish, because I’m not worried about being fired from my job for sounding sensible. I don’t have two kids in, or about to go to, college, and on top of that am not constituted to keep quiet when twats act like twats no matter what the apparent stakes. They can take their dirt-mongering and dodgy cancellation efforts and shove them up their broad, self-hating, gutless, narcissistic selves. And most of all, they can stew over knowing I am right about their crippling array of character deficits. The more honorable in their ranks will admit they have been swept up in a caustic movement and quietly shift their self-promotional strategies, while those constituted to be degenerates in any scenario will keep doing their epileptic-kangaroo version of expressing themselves for as long as fellow bottom-feeders give them clicks and contrived comment love.