Stop the Presses - 5 August 2022
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Stop the Presses - 5 August 2022
Yet another bullet post, hooray
MILD RECESSION IS OVER: Republicans were as eager to blame President Biden as he was to redefine the word “recession.” Never mind, though, because instead of mass unemployment, people quit their jobs, and now those people have found new jobs, so growth is on the rebound. For now. Who knows.
Poor Republicans, they will have nothing to talk about until the November elections except for Lia Thomas, Rachel Levine, men in women’s prisons, puberty blockers in children, and 80-year old women getting banned from the YMCA pool for refusing to shower or change in front of a man.
AND THE GLITTER BAND PLAYED ON: California state senator Scott Wiener, sponsor of the bill which has allowed rapists and murderers to claim transgender identities and get re-housed in women’s prisons, has come out in opposition to closing gay bathhouses for the monkeypox virus, denouncing such sensible measures as “sex shaming gay men.” I have heard this sort of talk before somewhere, hmm, can’t quite put my finger on it
THE TIDE IS TURNING: In the UK, Tavistock whistleblower David Bell says that the pediatric gender program in Scotland is so much like the GIDS program that it should also be shut down. The Times aired his concerns that homophobia has driven too many juvenile transitions.
He added: “There are quite a lot of studies showing if these children are helped in a different way, with expert attention and gender neutrality, they give up their wish.
“A lot emerge as gay and lesbian young people. We want to celebrate gender fluidity, so people can keep their sex body but express their gender how they wish to.”
Bell, who has previously addressed the Scottish parliament on gender issues, said the Sandyford clinic “should be closed down immediately” and insisted there “should not be a national service”.
Sadly, the United States will be slower on the uptake. Thousands of American gay and lesbian and autistic children will end up as de-sexed adults with all sorts of medical complications.
THE NORTH REMEMBERS: Everyone who pushed puberty blockers on kids must be held to account. If tobacco companies can be held responsible for Joe Camel, a cable channel can be held liable for the living nightmare of Jazz Jennings.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT: Children learn how to be smartasses by the third grade, and that isn’t going to change just because the teacher is woke.
I AM HERE IF YOU NEED TO TALK: Progressive issue activism spaces have always attracted people with mental illness, which is not necessarily a criticism of inclusion. Rather, radical groups sometimes take on the worst attributes of their most disordered members. The most unproductive “street protests” are generally the result of these small groups being more creative than sensible.
Add the dopamine-hit architecture of social media, and you get Libs of Tik Tok:
Algorithmic scopic social media, especially TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, where amplification of visual footage can reach viral transmission with remarkable celerity, is an especially efficient social portal or spread vector that selects for this behavioral signature of emotional lability and provocative affect—‘performative resistance art’—, which inherently serves to focus the viewer’s attention. One might view it as an incubator for personality psychopathology…
GO WOKE, GO BROKE: Have you ever seen a film get almost-entirely made, and then not get released at all? I can only think of one other example, The Day The Clown Cried. So how bad is Batgirl that we don’t even get to see it? Worse than Jerry Lewis as a clown in a Nazi death camp? More boring and bland than Catwoman? All the people involved are patting each other on the back and saying they did nothing wrong. Happy assurances in the media tell us it was a business decision, that Warner Brothers and HBO Max are going separate ways.
But I smell a stinker, and the stink is of woke storytelling.
A CULT LEADER WITH PRONOUNS? NO WAYYYY: Speaking of Hollywood canceling films already in the can, it looks like that long-awaited Ezra Miller (they/them) performance as The Flash is getting canceled, too. The grooming of underage girls and the toddlers sucking on bullets gave Warner Brothers pause, but the story that he stunk up Iceland in a flophouse straight out of Helter Skelter is probably going to tip the balance.
One woman who visited the house for a day in March 2020 recalled several mattresses spread out on the floor and compared the house to a "commune." She was struck by how enamored guests seemed to be of Miller, hanging on their every word and seeming unfazed by Miller's mood swings. "I felt like everyone was hypnotized," she said.
Between Miller's makeshift commune, their monologues on spirituality, and their emotional outbursts, rumors began to circulate in Reykjavík that the star was running a cult.
Or maybe he was just studying for the role of Charles Manson? See, this is why we aren’t doing the whole pronoun silliness here at The Distance. One day, it’s going to make a whole lot of writers read like members of the Manson cult.
THIS IS TOXIC MASCULINITY: Andrew Tate, serial con artist and Twitch stream guru, is still teaching adolescent boys to be rapists from his new home in Romania, where he is safe from the sexual assualt charges filed against him in the UK.
GENDER IS THE NEW ELITE-SPEAK: Batya Ungar-Sargon explains Genderism as the new esoteric marker of belonging to the ruling class. When members of the elite say that “trans women are women,” they are claiming a secret knowledge unavailable to lesser minds from lower social strata, as in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. If you want to rise in status, you must “educate yourself” in the invisible, ineffable metaphysics of “gender” and declare the emperor’s clothes really do exist.
BEING CRAZY IS EXPENSIVE: I was on the receiving end of the paranoid insanity and outright lies of Alex Jones long before Comet Pizza or Sandy Hook, so this plot twist inspires a measure of personal satisfaction.
IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE: George R.R. Martin has announced his intentions for the final volume of his acclaimed Game of Thrones series.
CANDYGRAM: How long do we have before they evolve to knock on our doors and pretend to be delivery drivers?
