SOMEONE IS JOKING ABOUT SACRED TOPICS AGAIN

It's the cowardice, humorlessness, and idea-suppression of Wokish people, not their lies and bad ideas, that most effectively inspire and ensure crudity and meanness from inhabitants of reality

Trail Brothers began operating in October, or at least its news arm did. Whoever runs the site supports it with merchandise sales, a practice I admire because it takes more work and offers a more customized support experience than this does:

The site’s most recent story offers tips for increasing the running component of your social-credit score. It’s set up in a user-friendly, color-coded way for ease of mental consumption by the simpletons who embrace Wokism.

It’s hard to effectively satirize Wokism for the same reason it’s an easy target of criticism: It already represents such a flamboyant and maudlin abuse of reality that it’s challenging to find newly humorous angles. Trail Brothers does this cleverly, and not from a place of spite. It’s just funny.

The problem with humor, especially anything irony-based such as satire, is that it utterly eludes Wokesters. They make glib and snarky comments about white men, but this comes from spite, not an honest appraisal of the weirdness of the range of the human condition. They make tepid in-jokes from time to time, but people who lie and cry victim and try to eliminate all signs of their critics are constitutive neurotics, barring them from finding anything beyond the purely superficial funny. And when they do laugh, they always make sure they’ve been given tacit or explicit permission by someone in the (physically dispersed but electronically linked) group.

I almost miss the fundamentalist Christians I used to argue with on blogs during the latter George W. Bush years. As is usually the case when a Republican remains U.S. president for two terms, they were agitating to replace creationism with evolution and trying to cancel things like porn and Family Guy.

The fundies will be back in online force one day, maybe once crypto-mania and other novel and shiny cultural objects of the day subside. But the Wokish stand today as their far uglier, meaner, and more powerful successors. And anyone who thinks I dislike liberals is lost, because I still am one. That’s why I oppose censorship and the sanctioning of falsehoods wherever they appear and regardless of who’s president. Those of you who think you’ve maintained consistent principles after years of watching hours of cable news a day are deluded. So is anyone who looks to other corporate-run media.

Most of the fundies of fifteen years ago were willing to have discussions, even if they all went nowhere, and took as many punches as they threw (and often many more). And they had usually senses of humor, which, again, is verboten in Wokism. The reason humor is banned from this movement is that Wokism and far-right Christianity are vastly different bad religions.

Most Bible-literalist Christians developed their beliefs at a young age, and without their consent. It strikes me as wildly goofy that anyone can view Genesis as a historical account, but for the most part, the people who rail against radioisotope dating, the cosmic microwave background, and other inconveniences to the LORD are dead earnest. If I'd had Baptist parents, I would have believed the same things, at least until I murdered them and started a dogged hunt for the truth.

As a result, while Genesis is obviously a mythical (and largely purloined) account, calling Christians themselves dumb just for believing what they do is itself dumb. Since it's basically an identity assigned at birth, people across the intelligence and educational spectrum raise Christian kids. Many are brazen hypocrites, but few of them contradict themselves as flagrantly the standard Wokish agent, and this isn’t an indicator of stupidity anyway.

While it's easy to pick out the real goobers in any cadre of devoted Bible-boppers, there are literalist Christians whose apologetics, while unconvincing, are brilliantly constructed. There are some extremely bright theologians (and crazy but brilliant Jesuits). Wokism is different because people gravitate toward it voluntarily. (Some young kids now are being steeped in it, but this is new.)

It also selects for the frankly and irritatingly unintelligent. The only smart people or at least educated people braying Wokish tropes have ulterior motives and are faking their allegiances (e.g., the Roches). Whether this makes them more morally culpable for the spreading sins of Wokism than true believers is a matter of taste.

Bible literalists reject aspects of biology, geology, and cosmology. Wokish people go much further, rejecting all science and coupling this with the audacity to plant signs on their lawns trumpeting the value of science. You almost couldn’t look dumber than someone who couples a BLM lawn sign to a Ukrainian window flag. And the FOLLOW THE SCIENCE people got their asses handed to them in an enormous hat by the supposed MAGA rubes railing about masks and the ineffectiveness of the covid vaccines. That most of them staked out this position politically rather than scientifically is immaterial, because they were right and the dingbats amplifying government narratives and sporting blue checks on Twitter were cataclysmically wrong. And they still won’t quit. They’re hopeless.

Mix in stuff like the results of recent polling, and people who call themselves liberals and science fans and still claim strong allegiance to Democrats have a great deal of explaining to do, because they are even more anti-scientific than creationists.

And I’m not pretending that Republicans or anyone else will save the day. Those of us over a certain age understand that Western society used to be different, or at least was founded on more tenable illusions of free choice, and has now unpretentiously entered its unstable twilight.

There's another important difference between Wokism and literalist Christianity, possibly not organic. I don't remember many Christian blog-brawlers trying to ruin anyone's life over philosophical disagreements. This may be solely because social media were nascent or nonexistent, but I doubt it. The Wokish are just nastier than anyone by boastful and inglorious design.

There would also be a stark difference between any swimsuit-themed calendars aimed at straight men and lesbians provided by Christian and Wokish organizations. This is not entirely irrelevant, since white Wokish women are bound to politics of resentment.

The take-home is that when a very liberal atheist friend who worked as a professor told me c. 2015 that a leftist religion was developing whose totalitarianism and lunacy would dwarf right-wing Christianity's, I didn't believe him.

Oh well. He tried.

I bring this up now because David Roche published “10 of The Best Running-Related Things of 2022” today on Trail Runner, in which Roche says he’s seeing “a general pattern of the world seeing through the facade of people trying to present themselves as courageous truth-tellers, when they are actually just pompous assholes.”

Since Roche and his acolytes are complete pussies—people who block and threaten stories exposing the insanity of Wokism rather than engage criticism, thereby confirming what their interlocutors already believe— it’s unclear who he’s talking about. But the painful reality is that facts don’t care about the pomposity of those who present them or the facade of niceness those who deny them like Roche occasionally offer.

Very few Roche supporters have argued against a single point I have made about something he’s written. Occasionally, someone will leave an anonymous drive-by comment, but that’s about it. And what can they really say? Someone who tweets a long thread set off by this claim and then deletes it almost a year later can’t blame other people for his basic refusal to defend a dumb thing he said.

“Inclusion” is just code for “screw fairness, we want in.” The proper response is to tell people like this to eat a dick, but this is easier said than done for most because if the brutal tactics these deviants employ.

While I understand that the frequency with which I return to this theme implies a sense of great personal urgency or hurt, that’s not true. I’m repeating myself simply because I refuse to adapt to the norm of people just spouting nonsense and then hiding from it when someone has the audacity to point out that what they have said is stupid.

If you write something stupid on a social-media site, people have the right to criticize it, but no one really blinks when someone blocks an obvious buzzard from commenting further. But if you are paid to write for an official publication and complain that criticism itself is unfair, then you’re unfit for your post. A real journalist, or idea-disseminator, understands that he or she must at times tolerate extremely off-base criticism, never mind the stuff that lands.

And with Roche, it’s hard to miss. I’m not going to examine the entire piece from today, but this one’s great:

When the Nike Vaporfly debuted on roads a few years ago, the entire sport was turned on its axis. The average athlete saw their running economy improve by 4% with the high-performance clown shoes, but it was more complex than that. Some athletes saw even bigger jumps!

A science guy should know that an average is computed by summing all the values in a set and dividing by the number of values in that set. If these values did not vary, there would be no need to compute an average. And I’m not sure why he could call footwear he’s gushing over “clown shoes,” though maybe it’s in the name.

Over two years ago, when I started complaining that members of the running media had gone off the rails and were trying to cancel innocent people like Gary Cantrell based on the actions of a few lunatic troublemakers, Erin Strout complained to the editor of the now-defunct Podium Runner that I was being mean, and that coward, for whom I’d written ten pieces in the previous year or so and had worked with for two decades, told me I was done writing for the publication, and also that what I was doing was a bad idea. He or someone at Podium Runner later deleted those ten articles from the site, the ultimate hollow “up yours” since I’d already been paid and Podium Runner was willingly dispensing of some ad revenue.

I wonder if he can look around and still convince himself that my choice of topics was ill-advised, if he even did at the time. It’s ill-advised if you want to stay on good terms with dummies or people who have checked their cognitive capabilities at the door of sham social justice.

Had I been anything more than a freelancer on a modest tear, adding to his monthly income by a whopping $200 a month, this might have been materially consequential. That it was not wasn’t enough to keep me from being upset at what was clearly a growing trend: Absolute fools spewing nonsense and with axes to grind against men like Strout could write whatever garbage they wanted unchallenged—and spout stuff on social media at least as mean as my most dubious polemics—and could also just shut down opposing input, however clearly true. And this has gone on in every single official running publication that still exists, as well as on whatever one chooses to label the agglomeration of pro-doping, hysterical jabber emanating from the various Adderall-loaded pockets of Citius Mag.

Nevertheless, the decay of the running media and the popularization of anti-reality narratives by histrionic Zillennial slime-buckets by itself is not enough to push anyone over the edge. Sure, I wrote for the running public when it was a more earnest endeavor, but who cares? It’s all still accessible, and the kind of idiots flocking to the Roche’s swindlefest for waterheads with cash to burn were never in my target audience anyway.

My apparent rage over all this really is just simmering frustration, and it comes from the heat of the far larger more threatening flames that have permitted the dissolution of meaningful information-sharing over the last half-dozen or so years. The fact that a bunch of imperfect people who will never understand my perspective has no bearing on my running, my writing, or my participation in life. But the complete government intrusion into every single sizable media and tech company for purposes of frank censorship does, because one of my few aims in life is to have the freedom to express ideas without my bank accounts shrinking or disappearing.

The stuff PayPal pulled this year and various moves toward Kanye West (who broke no laws and has threatened no one with any physical harm) are obvious stalking-horses, part of the aim of being able to close the same pincers on anyone. It’s the very same formula as “We got rid of Alex Jones and everyone supported it, so now we can ban doctors who say accurate things about covid.”

And whether you believe it or not, it affects you too. And if you think it’s no problem that the CIA is completely steering what you think if you watch cable news, and that all you have to do to stay out of trouble is color within “free-speech” lines, then you have no clue what you’ve already surrendered and my only significant emotion toward you is pity.

I’ll be expanding more on that theme soon. But I think it bears pointing out that the reason I focus on this crap in the running world is because it’s familiar territory. I could find the same disposal of sane standard in literally every mode of Western cultural thought. It’s a tremendous sickness. The stuff Wokish people say and do in running is a fairly accurate window into any of these other modes, although running may be worse because of the number of people it attracts who are battling body-shame and other personal peccadilloes.

If I sound like a nut myself, then I suggest you read this in its entirety (it’s updated with every new contribution), as it’s where I’ll be going in this space soon. Just bear in mind how many cancelled or shunned “conspiracy nuts” are starting to lose the label with the ongoing spill of the Twitter Files despite the efforts of, perversely and predictably, the mainstream media.