Running from the Facts: "Only harpies and lechers are entitled to free speech" edition
If Twitter imposed consistent ethical and epistemological standards, the Wokish would be toast. And a Tesla just might be driving those standards
The ways in which today’s frankly illiberal “liberals" discourage people from puncturing holes in their nonsense-balloons reach insidiously beyond simply preventing the appearance of sharp objects—e.g., blocking people on social-media platforms and deleting their comments, often with an intent to “deplatform” them (that is, ruin their lives). Because these people are cowards pushing rampant, damaging lies, they’ll use any coercive strategies they can to try to silence opposing voices. And invariably, their muddle-minded squawking is peppered with cheerfully unironic violations of their own increasingly draconian dicta.
David Melly, a flesh-and-blood meme with reasonably solid personal bests, offered a splendid example of this by reminding professional runners that having the nerve to speak truthfully about the sport’s insane transgender policies could get them axed, at least if he had any say in it.
Melly used the words “stop running your damn mouths”; although he hosts a podcast called “Run Your Mouth,” I’m not convinced he was being cheekily self-referential, because—and I mean this in the nicest of ways—he appears to lack the brainpower for that. That makes sense, because “Run Your Mouth” is part of the Citius Mag empire of pundits who were either routinely beaten over the head with tire irons as children or are eager to pretend they were. If running fans could be segmented into groups based on their television viewing preferences, Citius Mag’s followers would have programs like Jerry Springer or Desperate Housewives of Lower Chautauqua on their can’t-miss lists.
Because this man is Wokish and therefore a coward, he didn’t say exactly who needs to shut up. That was one of the few smart things about his tweet, because I’m not sure he has any grasp on how many professional runners —already feeling as if needing to meet too many off-the-track expectations just to protect feeble and flammable contracts—are upset by this kind of finger-wagging from Retardville. Any they can’t even properly tell him so, at least not in the jerkoff kingdom of Twitter.
Melly also provides an example of how merely enjoying the taste of dick can open whole new doors in terms of the permissibility of ideas. I have no desire to comment publicly on what women track runners—unfamiliar to me and otherwise—I think are hot. I also don’t really care, myself, that Melly openly sexualizes athletes on a public platform. But pretending with a howl that consistency still carries any weight: What if all male podcasters in the running world started commenting fondly on their random, fast-moving objects of sexual interest? And where are all the Alison Wade types with the chloroform-soaked rags to shove in his kisser?
And may I, as a member of the cishet male community to which Melly is foreign, climb onto a soapbox and cry foul over all the times I too was leered at by penis-having people? (In my apparent salad days in the early 1990s, when I first gave A.A. a try, I would routinely be offered “sponsorship” from men who later turned out to have other motives, one even joking that he had long been known as “the town fag.” I could say it was a reason I stopped going, but I stopped going because I had untold gallons of ethanol to dump down my throat in the subsequent years and was intent on doing it whether I knew it or not, which I didn’t.)
All of this can be condensed into a form tailored to this site’s new “images only” series, although the “panels” don’t neatly interrelate.
And speaking of Ms. Wade (whose own followership evokes shows like The View and E! News) she continues to determinedly try to exclude people from conversations about young women’s running despite her own continual—hell, almost continuous—deep-dives into this very topic. Her newsletter this week was titled “High schooler Natalie Cook runs 15:25.”
For years, Wade has been trumpeting the dangers of putting too much pressure on young female runners, claiming this can lead to ruined or prematurely truncated careers. The problem with this “concern” is that not only has Wade been giving virtual ink to teenage girls for years, she’s been doing it more and more while also complaining about its alleged hazards more and more. If you plumb the Fast-Women newsletter archive, you’ll find all sorts of coverage of speedy high-school girls, each time coupled to the same fraying joke of a disclaimer, warning, or whatever it is.
(This reminds me of a bit by Louis CK in which the widely beloved comedian talks about never, ever, ever taking psychoactive drugs, so that one the rare occasions he does, he enjoys their effects more.)
Apart from Wade contradicting herself, she seems to have not noticed something: In the many years she’s been doing this, a lot of teenage girls have come through the high-school running mill, during the current social-media-poisoned iteration of the Internet, and survived media publicity and even their own Instagram accounts to thrive as athletes well into adulthood. So maybe what she thinks applies to teenage girls as a whole really only applies to, say, women like Alison Wade recalling their own teenage sports experiences less than fondly. And a lot of other men and women who were cross-country and track kids in the 1980s and early 1990s had bad—some combination of abusive, uncaring, domineering, and ignorant—high-school coaches. I didn’t; I had to wait for college to enjoy that experience.
There are also practical issues: Does Wade believe that people will just not comment on things like a 15:25 5,000 meters by an American high-school girl if she and others bitch loudly and often enough, even if commenting on such things is those people’s job?
This is why I reject the idea I occasionally get from readers that Wade really wants to promote running in any healthy or stable way. She clearly has a legitimate interest in running, but it’s not what animates her now. If you happen to be a mole in her Facebook group, you know well the sense of morbid, hysterical depression that envelops you every time you hold your nose and prepare for another grimacing sortie into a virtual forest of hairy legs thrashing about and aiming to disrupt things.
The reason I am often more of a jerk than is perhaps required for the writing role is because I am beyond tired of the speech repression coupled to the dissemination of falsehoods. Online mobs are ugly even when they are right about things; when they’re constantly wrong, not owning their mistakes, driven by crude emotional impulses and personal resentments, refusing to even acknowledge critical aspects of serious issues, and bent on shutting up others, any inclination I retain to not toss jagged rhetorical throwing stars every which way dissolves.
Wade almost never claims meaningful opinions as her own, preferring to hand her schnauzer-like followers sticks of dynamite, torches, and implicit instructions to go tear stuff up themselves. What’s below isn’t incendiary in that manner, but it’s bizarre in that Wade is trying to gatekeep who should even be paying attention to certain runners. And for someone who writes a newsletter for a living, she could do a lot better than not defining what “invested in,” “unhealthy,” and “some sort of connection” even mean here.
I could offer Wade a long list of adults with no connection to any high-school kids who are completely and vocally invested in the athletic careers of high-school kids. One of them she probably knows—Erin Strout. Every time Strout has pushed for the inclusion of trans “girls” on girls’ teams, she has served to do nothing but meddle, always omitting critical information. And as far as anyone can tell, she barely does any running, and she sure as hell isn’t a coach (give it time, though, give it time). And don’t tell me she gets to claim a special interest as a “journalist,” because that’s circular reasoning.
Strout writes like a teenager, but that’s not what makes her meddling okay is it? Naw, it’s okay for people to “get invested” even if they’re not runners or running fans if they’re willing to help swing the wrecking ball at whatever’s left of all-female athletics across age groups and ability spectra.
What’s perhaps most fucked up is that Wade receives support for this newsletter from companies like Tracksmith despite it occasionally containing not just biased slurry but calls to cancel people like Gary Lazarus for doing nothing at all. She, like everyone who makes a living from yapping about running or at least follows the sport nonstop, has also chosen to ignore the reality of doping and its pervasive impact. She also transparently aims her work only at readers with far-left politics. True, she also includes a bunch of race results, but this is basically just data anyone can read anywhere.
As I’m sure she knows, however, she could actually do a far worse job—and slide even further toward unpretentious misandry and unfettered personal projection when it comes to how and how much she thinks the sport should be publicized—and still get Tracksmith and other companies to chip in, because they have to. Wade puts out the only newsletter I know if dedicated to women’s (and girls’, even if she denies it) running. Women’s Running basically doesn’t exist at all at this stage, having entered some post quasi-staff-purging period of pretending one or two people are not propping up 95 percent of the shambling website themselves. If the sole women’s running newsletter didn’t get corporate help, despite Wade having a raft of Patreon supporters, the roaring would not stop until the companies started ringing the virtual doorbell.
My condensed message for these waterheads is: Say what you want, contradict yourselves nonstop, make up science, promote gibbering 300-pound cheating racist goons, agitate for the uncontrolled growth meta-genders, bark about climate change from the driver’s seat of a Cadillac Escalade, and be diaper-slinging crybabies about everything imaginable in the parodic extreme (and yes, I am teetering close to the self-parodic edge myself). But stop using “phobic” to dodge arguments and dismiss legitimate points, and stop telling the world who can say what. This would be bad enough if any of you had a single good and workable idea, but none of you have anything but noise.
Hence Newton’s Third Law of Internet “bullies” in action.
(Bonus item: The breathless response by the media to Elon Musk dumping $3 billion into Twitter and landing on its board of directors is worth a look.
They are basically acting with all the sophistication of children now, yelling about how an obvious free-speech guy plans to upend the “free speech” standards of a laughably biased, censorious platform.)