Madness

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Not that kind of bonfire of the vanities

Hoo boy, is that Lena Dunham a laugh riot or what? The lifelong paragon of wholesome living has upped the ante of revealing Millennial self-expression with her latest round of oversharing buried within the pages of her latest offering, Not That Kind of Girl.

The novel at first appeared to underwhelm expectations and strain the sweet $3.7 million deal extended by its proud publisher, Random House. Dulledbut encouraging!reviews floated with little fanfare upon its September release before some good old-fashioned class war redirected observers’ attentions to the more pressing injustice of Dunham’s mercilessly exploitative book tour labor practices. But the favorable comparisons to fellow Great New Yorker Woody Allen quickly proved unfortunate.

Somehow, the celebrated cultural critics of the New York literary world missed the learned Dunham’s candid confessions of bawdry youthful predation. While her trendy regret-sex-cum-“rape” by a mustachioed Oberlin College Republican detailed in Chapter 6 stimulated a flurry of vicarious clucking from the sisters of perpetual grievance, disturbing passages in which Dunham describes a strange, manipulative obsession with her six-year-younger sister, Grace, received no mention in the mainstream press.  It took the muckracking of unsavory radical right-wing fringe outfits like the National Review to bring these intimate disclosures to public light.

Lest the Dunham family lawyer sees fit to threaten this humble blogger with a taste of Yankee justice, as is apparently the proper practice of the day, I’ll let the self-appointed voice of our generation speak for herself:

“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.

“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.”

I looked at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.

“Does her vagina look like mine?”

“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist, and when I saw what was inside I shrieked. “My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”

My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things that I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.

Don’t act like you didn’t regularly plan elaborate pranks by inserting fun surprises into your precious cavities at the tender age of one, you Judgy Judys. Their mother was supervising, it’s cool.

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Gay marriage is no surprise; the divorce rate shows not even straight people respect the institution

To much surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court recently refrained from taking up cases involving gay marriage bans in five different states. As it stands, same-sex nuptials will remain legal in at least 30 states. There’s little doubt the rest of the country will eventually follow.

Gay marriage is coming in full force. Whatever remnants of traditional marriage remain have been vanquished by the grinding march toward “equality.” It’s now considered counter-culture to believe marriage is reserved for one man and one woman.

As the nation debates the virtue of same-sex matrimony, the divorce rate continues to inch upward. After a rise following the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the number of divorces filed flattened during the Reagan years. Since then, it has continued to climb, in concurrence with a culture that is becoming more liberal – even libertarian – in almost every way.

Changing family dynamics have even forced Pope Francis to convene a synod to discuss the church’s role in familial matters – including communion for divorcees who remarry.

The fight over gay marriage has largely distracted from the divorce trend. It’s gotten to the point where divorce – the splitting of a sacred bond – is done blithely, as if it’s the severing of a business relationship. Contracts can be nulled for a fee that’s less than a student loan payment.

Couples are making the decision to split based mostly on feelings of passion. When the flame dies, so does the marriage. The unfulfilled promise left in its wake has broader implications than just that of children raised outside a two-parent household. It helps drive society away from the idea of everlasting commitment.

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GamerGate and the incentives of threats

The GamerGate fiasco has brought with it the ugly phenomenon of internet threats. If we are to take our assumptions from the media narrative, then the side that is correct at the end is the one that received the most threats, and has capitalized best on these threats.

The incentives to make threats are literally less than zero. There are only disincentives. Anyone with reasoning abilities can see this, particularly based on the proportion of anti-GG coverage devoted to the threats.

Progressives simultaneously understand and do not understand this. There have been a number of blunders where “threats” turned out to be bogus, with obvious intent to stir up public hatred for GamerGate and initiate a spiral of silence by making #GamerGate feel dirty on the tongue of most.

There are astronomical incentives to appear to be a victim of threats. This truth has been leveraged many times in the form of fake threats.
fake threats

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Intellectual bankruptcy, gaming, and schmuckbait

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s possible to create a schmuckbait-to-thinkpiece conversion ratio. It plays to both sides of the cultural political debate: Just find one thing that triggers a person, and they write some longform piece that is all about “THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING.” Sometimes, they even throw in some intellectual criticism as though to settle the score in a smart way. It’s fun, fascinating, and you can probably make a drinking game or bingo or both about whatever cultural tragedy du jour is a meme. And really, that’s what memes that trigger emotions are: Schmuckbait. We’ll be getting to our colleague and latest victim to this in a moment.

Given that I’ve recently acquired a Nintendo DS and have been playing the Zelda games on there with some enthusiasm after having been consoleless since 2007, you might think I have some opinions on #GamerGate/#GameOverGate/Zoe Quinn. I actually don’t, really. Been too busy living off Twitter lately (though a rebirth is in order). But more importantly, I’ve come to understand that once you bring gamers into an argument, you might as well take your ball and go play elsewhere before they start calling you a faggot who likes to be fudgepacked by niggers in the ass (redundancy intentional) or a camwhore slut who deserves to be raped and murdered (and lord help you if you’re non-white or TG). Why? Simple:

A group gathering on the Internet + anonymity and/or lack of consequences = High chance someone’s going to act like a fuckwad.

We who have had enough experience in the gaming business refer to this as the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or the GIFT. Supposedly devised either by Jerry Holkins or Mike Krahuliak (I think the former, since the latter just seems to have intellectual Tourette’s), it explains why most Internet discourse ends up turning into a shitstorm, more than anything else.  Gamers just happen to be specialists at this because, well, hormones + competitiveness + overstimulation = mental vomit. While this matter has long been limited to the forums and other dank locations of the Internet, Twitter and Tumblr and other social outlets have caused the GIFT to be amplified by 1800 decibels. It’s enough to punch out a black hole the size of the Solar System. Why? Our inane propensity to share things as though they were shiny. Even if it’s our own dick pix.

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