The 2023 World Champs are a lot more interesting if you pretend that Women's Running's daily updates are accurate
It gets harder and harder to assign incompetence more weight than sabotage when it comes to Runner's World and the inglorious Internet messes created by Outside, Inc.
I like to think that some of the composite-style images I create to expose the frailties and hypocrisies of running-associated persons are sufficient on their own—no context needed—to establish that the subject is some combination of hopeless fool, shameless liar, and persistent bigot, and that based on the first two of these traits alone nothing he or she writes or says should be trusted.
For example, you shouldn’t need to be a runner, or for that matter really even awake, to glean from the image below that Emilia Benton is a clown. In the top left panel, she takes indirect credit for being a genuine journalist whose work is published in credible outlets, while the rest of the image establishes that Benton is a dimwitted clickbait-princess—a taint-leakage and twat-slime expert so bogglingly meat-headed, eager for bylines, or both that she was willing declare that trying to improve running fitness during “the pandemic” was a bad idea.
The material in the top left panel is from a Facebook thread from nearly three years ago, and the person Benton was criticizing and declaring a non-journalist was me, though this analysis would have proceeded in a radically different way had I been “present.”
The notable aspect of this isn’t me being a target of criticism; low-wattage, unattractive women with prickly personas have never liked me much anyway, and yet somehow I get by without their allegiance. Nor is it even the fact that no one in that Facebook thread identified one specific error or unfounded hypothesis in the post they were derogating, instead just roaring different versions of “Don’t read anything that guy writes! Substack is websight for fakers!!!” The notable aspect, at least for today, is Benton declaring the outlets willing to publish her trash to be credible by definition. These outlets have included Runner’s World, which is debased beyond conventional description, and multiple Outside, Inc. offerings, including Women’s Running. All of publications Benton has been allowed to write for—running-related or not—are now all edited by folks who may as well have stopped reading at age 14 and are about as concerned with factual accuracy as the Pentagon’s public-relations team.
Women’s Running is providing e-mail summaries of the action at the 2023 World Athletics Championships, which began on Saturday. (For U.S.-based non-runners, “track and field” is known as “athletics” almost everywhere else.) Today is day three of the nine-day event. Benton is not writing these summaries, although she is clearly dumb enough for the task, and the person who is has been doing such an astonishingly sloppy job that I refuse to identify her by name. I pity her, even if she’s being paid.
These e-mails, which I assume will continue for the next seven days including today, all lead to the same page on the Women’s Running site. I’m not sure myself why I decided to use different colors in the image below for different kinds of mistakes, but I stopped well short of identifying them all. (The text is clear enough if you click on the image, although if you’re using a phone or a tablet you may still need to enlarge it.)
Women’s Running has had well over one full day to at least correct the absurd (and imprecise) semifinal-heat time listed for Kipyegon, which is equivalent to around 3:50 mile. It was still up there at of 4 p.m. U.S. Mountain Daylight Time on Day 3 of the Championships.
Doing my best to remove myself and any role I have had from all of this, how goshdarned fucking funny is it that Benton and people like her can drone on about not only their own expertise, but also the reliability of the outlets that pay them for their ghastly attempts at journalism? Is this not dadgum fucking hilarious to literally everyone who isn’t either a low-wattage, unattractive woman with a prickly persona or one of their sad-sack soy husbands, companions, suitors, or stalkers?
And not all of the consequences of these doltic harpies being allowed to play journalist are as harmless as classifying Faith Kipyegon as 3:33 1,500-meter runner. For example, in a piece for Women’s Running in November 2021 about returning to racing “after covid,” Benton wrote:
The pandemic certainly isn’t over, but many parts of the country have returned to some level of normalcy with increased vaccination rates.
Leave aside that this is just shitty, unclear writing. By mid-November of 2021, it evident to everyone willing to admit as much that the various potions advertised as mRNA shots and essentially forced on everyone in the U.S. were not working. It was also evident to many of us that the shots were also dangerous. It appears that some of us, for whatever reason, are simply a lot better than others at tracking down accurate information, especially when those others are low-wattage, cosmetically challenged “liberals” with adversarial personalities.
And it’s possible that Benton still doesn’t actually know how much of a clown she truly is, simply because similarly blinkered bimbos like Trail Runner editor-in-chief Zoe Rom are still giving her assignments and her eye-searing, fact-starved prose keeps putting money in her bank account. But if it hadn’t at least dawned on this numbskull that I’ve now been absolutely owning her rambling, cowardly ass time and again here, then she wouldn’t have blocked me so quickly. She’s like any other howling “liberal” with a brown-colored or synthetic clitoris: a bastion of bravado until one of the white guys she’s unloading on actually shows up and asks to have a word. Then it’s instant vulvospasm and “Eeeek! AHHHH!” and the virtual equivalent if the fastest 100-meter dash ever run by a mentally disabled person.
Social-media platforms should require users who employ blocking or muting tools against people who expose them as idiots or liars to answer one question—”Is this because you’re a gutless retard?”— before any block takes effect. I acknowledge how inaccurate any data collected as a result of this policy would be, because gutless retards don’t typically embrace concepts such as integrity or self-betterment. People like Benton don’t admit to their mistakes even to friendly audiences, so they’re never going to own up to having been wrong to someone who has consistently demonstrated their failures as writers, thinkers, and human beings.
So, we* need to start finding more ways to humiliate gutless retards into silence via brute-force shaming, since nothing else seems capable of preventing them from lying or otherwise serving as self-immolating bullhorns of unchecked nonsense—even if some of the nonsense is just…well, in its own way, some of it is just awesome to behold.
