Running from the Facts: "Hypocrisy is a zombie with a titanium head" edition
The longer running's carnival of lying persists, the uglier the lengthening record of malfeasance by its barking participants becomes. Will it ever matter? Doubtful
Three quick hits tonight, one each from the corporate running media, the mainstream media, and influencer-world:
Women’s Running sends out multiple opt-in marketing e-mails per week under the banner of its parent company, Outside, known as Pocket Outdoor Media until its February engulfing of the existing Outside publishing platform and subsequent rebranding. Today’s e-mail announced a partnership with Tracksmith.
This is the same Tracksmith panned by Outside Online in January for a toxic combination of peddling overly pricey gear and ersatz wokeness.
What changed? Well, who the hell cares? This is a business, not a political organization expected to maintain consistent values across the board. Right? Right?
And on that score, at least one of the other partnerships Women’s Running has initiated since the merger-acquisition is with an entity whose own politics are conspicuously misaligned with Wokism, far more so than my own. I’ll leave it to sleuthing readers to determine this association (spoiler/complication: There’s actually more than one such entity).
So I ask you: Why would anyone believe a single editorial sentence supplied by any of these publications that isn’t self-evidently factual? If they vociferously express something as a fundamental and necessary ethical guiding principle, only to breezily contradict it, why put any stock in anything they offer as part of a supposedly society-bettering mission?
What exactly are people who continue to subscribe to these lower-standards-than-the-National-Enquirer publications believe they are paying for? Is the reward of feeling part of a fake goodness-campaign worth it?
Lindsay Crouse—an unusually bold, pathetic and methodical liar and dismal wordsmith who has founded her op-ed career at The New York Times on stealing ideas from recently published work of others and then mangling them so badly that her creative barrenness is masked by the unholy staggering bluntness of her intellect—has published a condemnation of Instagram, where Crouse of course maintains an account of her own, one designed to further elevate her already ghastly personal profile.
Crouse bemoans Instagram and its parent company, Facebook, putting profits over the mental health of its users:
Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both.
Lindsay Crouse actively misleads her readers—almost all of whom can be presumed to be her fellow body-neurotics—into thinking she is someone she is not. She can’t even be bothered with surgery (or if she has, it didn’t take); instead, she just takes a verbal serrating knife to the truth.
On top of that, she throws gas on the soul-consuming fire of every upward-failing American middle-to-upper-class woman in her terrible position: Being at best a 5 or a 6 in every meaningful way—brains, looks, charisma—while maniacally coveting the status of society’s 9s and 10s, all while either not even needing a vocational source of income or being paid to lie.
The real Lindsay Crouse routinely posts and deletes oh-so-helpful-to-women messages like these:
Last week, Crouse heroically grabbed, but avoided looking into, the “YES, you ARE a DIRTBAG!” mirror, angling it instead toward Elizabeth Holmes in another hilariously self-unaware column about dishonest role models:
Of course, by now it’s well known how Elizabeth Holmes ascended. She lied. In addition to all the obvious wrongs she is accused of committing, that’s what feels so deflating about her narrative.
Look, bitch: You fucking LIED, and your fellow self-dealing lowing cows posing as fact-checkers at The New York Times, no longer remotely a news outlet, are happy to let you operate as a fabulist posing as a scholar. Count your blessings!
And on the issue of sacrificing concern for societal and individual well-being at the altar of Cash, well, Crouse might want to have a word with her ultimate employer, whichever jizzwad named Sulzberger (Fifty-Second of His Name) is currently allowing her to operate as an untethered propagandist as he sits in some mansion at the tip of Long Island.
The only secondary ray of light emerging from the surely bleached asshole of this moron is that she clearly knows what she’s doing and how guilty she is of every sin she condemns. That won’t compel a terrible person like her to change, but at least she’ll have to regularly feel miserable about who and what she is.
Latoya Shauntay Snell is in Boston, and she’s pretending to be preparing herself for finishing the marathon on Monday. She is wisely tapering from her 18 miles so far in 2021 (okay, it’s really 18.3). And as a grateful recovering alcoholic, she’s keeping her partying carefully under wraps, as it would be wrong to trigger real addicts.
I was considering establishing some kind of eating-and-drinking game here, one centering on the unearned praise the Boston Marathon announcers are likely to adorn Snell with combined with the excuses she’ll produce after not finishing. But Snell herself already consumes more than enough unnecessary food and drink, every goddamn day, so this plan seems vaguely reminiscent of leaving an empty whiskey bottle on Bon Scott’s grave. So you’re all on your own on Monday with this.
There has been a funny twist, by the way, to Snell’s “I started being an activist because I was heckled for being fat during the New York Marathon” narrative. It turns out it all started before that, when running made her so skinny she resembled a crackhead.
Goddamn, is there anything this pitiable lil’ snowflake can tolerate without complaining—and adding another “PAY ME FOR TOLERATING THIS LIFE!” donation button?
If Snell considers herself legitimately disabled, and wants people outside her circle of brain-dead fans to believe this, then she needs to shun the persona of an athlete. She is using the athlete thing to drive all these freebies, which she then protects by all means necessary by claiming to be disabled. Being an immoral clown and a ravenous junkbox of surgically opportunistic grifting is not technically a disability; it’s the purposeful assembly and weaponization of existing adversarial personality traits.
How bad does poor Snell have it? A psychiatrist by training and polymath by intellectual niche named Scott Siskind (note: the e-mailed version of this post had “Alexander,” Siskind’s middle name, as his surname, an error that in the past Siskind would have greatly appreciated) who operated the blog Slate Star Codex anonymously before, who else, dumb cancelation-oriented cunts at The New York Times decided he needed outing, wrote a post in 2015, titled “How Bad Are Things?”, that remains relevant today no matter how any of the individual numbers in the table below have shifted.
I would guess based on this list that Snell presently has things a lot better than a lot of the people she pretends to be “punching up” at. At least her lying has sympathetic ears waiting at the other end.
I don’t know what level of physical pain Snell experiences as a result of her various maladies, many of which a fatphobe armed with medical knowledge might be tempted to link to her significant and ever-increasing fat mass. But I do know that she lies her ass off with every opportunity, and moreover, she absolutely does not care about anyone else’s pain. Indeed, she enjoys causing it, being an active agent of discomfort, whenever someone gets too noisy about what a sick joke her whole “striving athlete” charade is. She is gobbling up free stuff for as long as a stupefied world continues serving up free stuff to the loudest voices of self-defined oppression.
But like Crouse, this everyday “I’ll get what I want even if I have to act like a pig” self-promoter, while no rocket surgeon, knows that none of this is in reality contingent on anything she herself has done, good or bad, besides run her face-anus as a fat person of color posing as a distance runner. It’s all a matter of how long corporations like Amazon and HOKA decide they need multi-oppressed tokens like her to use as Woke-washing substrate. I don’t blame her for taking everything she can, while she can. But that observation accounts for her already avaricious character; a decent person never would have climbed on this ride and kept filling it with free gas in the first place.
That’s all. Next up: “Ten highly influential events in competitive running spanning ten Olympic Games,” something I can actually get emotionally invested in. It should be a fun long weekend of looking at screens and becoming emotional; not only are there two major marathons to attend to, but there is also a solid chance that the Boston Red Sox will be eliminated from the 2021 Major League Baseball playoffs on Monday evening at Fenway Park, long after Snell has begun celebrating whatever she’ll be calling a courageous effort.