Fucking Snowflakes
May 20, 2020
“There are bonfires on a lot of hillsides tonight, the sound of drums and wild hooting, people with serious scores to settle muttering at each other in the darkness. The yahoos are out there, and they think their time has come.” — HST
In 2014, British producer Peter Pomerantsev published a book with a truly great title, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. The book is an engaging and fast read of Peter’s descent into the Russian media/propaganda machine. I suspect that five years ago when I bought it the title was a big reason. It’s fun to say and worked its way into my lexicon whenever I think about something that seems apocalyptically bizarre.
Two quotes from a 2014 review of the book by PublicAffairs seem sadly prescient:
“A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia, where even dictatorship is a reality show.”
“Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.”
We don’t live in a dictatorship. We certainly do live in a reality show. Nothing is true. Everything is possible. Science is all bloodied up. The yahoos think their time has come.
It’s important to remember that most people right now in America are keeping their cool. Most people in polling support cautious opening of businesses. Most people get that what’s going on is scary and tedious and unknown. But if you pay attention to the fringes it’s hard to not feel like exactly what’s happening is a spin from decadence into madness.
This is a real quote from a May 14 Bloomberg article about Michigan: “For the past week, lawmakers have been debating how to safely enable lawmakers to work and vote in session while the state’s laws allow people to bring firearms into the capitol building.”
Calvin Munerlyn had nine kids. He was a security guard at a dollar store in Michigan and he was shot in the head for telling people they have to wear masks. In other news, I have seriously begun to consider the possibility that we’re living in a simulation. It’s less of a bridge to gap than the one that tries to reconcile how fucking stupid, pathetic, and fragile some people are.
And these are the consequences of lowering the median expectation for responsible behavior in a society. Whether it’s due to ignorance or some other thing, we have become a culture that relishes in not knowing shit. Look at the guy we picked as president. It’s really not partisan and shouldn’t be provocative to say it’s funny that Trump recently tweeted an endorsement of a “great new book” — even if it weren’t reported hundreds of times by anyone who works with him that the man doesn’t read shit. How in hell (the last few months) would he have had time to read a book that came out a couple weeks ago?
The dumbest have gotten dumber as we allowed ourselves to spin from decadence. We let our society shit on expertise and neglect science while we stared at Facebook News Feeds and the Kardashians. Perhaps we prized tolerance a little too much. Now these fucking idiots think it’s okay to play out their sick dreams of having power.
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The part about “snowflake” culture that the political right had correct is that we have shifted so far into wanting to legitimize beliefs and practice tolerance that no place in our civil discourse have we been willing to say, qualitatively, “you are right” or “you need to ditch that part of your belief”. The online mobs try to referee the world. But we are so content with content as white noise that we don’t demand quality to win out. We won’t sift through shit to find anything. We’re too busy.
We prize tolerance so much that we edged ourselves into allowing intolerable acts. Like students at a university claiming a dean raising his hands equates aggression. And like people going to the Michigan capital with guns equates freedom of assembly or speech or right to bear arms or whatever. That’s just life now.
It’s so painful that it for some reason needs to even be said to these people but I can’t help but wonder if they actually think they’d be sitting at home saying it was acceptable behavior if an armed militia of black people was at a public building. Or if they actually think their ragtag display of power is going to mean shit when tensions rise, someone without the right training panics, and the armed protestors get rightfully splashed on the windshield of the National Guard in a sad 2020 lesson of inertia and stress and mobs. There will be bloody videos. Nobody will be proud of them. Except maybe Alex Jones. He actually might like that scene. He’s been jonesing for sick, slimy shit ever since he crawled out from under Austin Community College mortified that nobody wanted to frick him.
What these idiots bringing guns to protests don’t realize is that they are the sorriest sacks of snowflakes ever assembled. I thought all those angry Berkeley kids in 2017 were sad. The cons called the libs bet and raised the pot all in.
“Why would we settle for tipping cars? We have automatic weapons. Let’s just head on down to the capital.”
“Alright can we stop at Subway on the way?”
Victimization and helplessness is what the firebrands on the right would have said three years ago is wrong with the snowflakes — what is more taking on an aura of victimization than these right wing protests? We are the victim not just of a pandemic and a shitty international and national responses but of a global conspiracy to lock us up and take our guns!
I’m reminded of that scene in The Other Guys when Allen Gamble pitches an idea about some bad guys being up to tax crimes and immediately Terry Hoitz speculates for no reason that the same bad guys are responsible for the drug trade and human trafficking.
You say coronavirus I say Second Amendment! You say we need to save lives I say well let’s talk about Planned Parenthood!
Hey you flakey fuckers! None of this is about that! Settle!
The snowflakes have also been targetted over the years for their juvenile sensibilities. Is there anything more juvenile and sensitive than being infuriated by the suggestion that you might have to comply with a little bit of authority and social order every now and then? That’s literally what makes young kids mad. Taking their toys and telling them they have to listen.
I would love to see some of the Washington protestors that compared Governor Jay Inslee to King George III take a very basic quiz about the American Revolution. I don’t suspect there are very many intellectuals in the pack. Going to the capital armed doesn’t make you a historic patriotic protector of any amendment. It makes you an asshole. We know that in part because both conservatives and liberals in mass think it. Sean Hannity is even telling you to knock it off.
The masses aren’t stupid or naive for agreeing with each other on this one. Have you ever been in a room with 10 other people and they all said you were an asshole? Your argument that you aren’t has a steep hill to climb.
But this is where we find ourselves. Nothing is real. Everything is possible. The yahoos are running around feeling vindicated because we were too cautious to tell them they were wrong when the edged towards where they are now. By dropping our average resilience and our average engagement we have lowered the basement for where those of us that value these things least will reside.
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The protestors, both armed and unarmed, feel powerful because they are using their voice. They are defending what they think are their rights. Congratulations. The Guardian reported recently that cell phone data suggests the protests themselves have potentially contributed to the coronavirus reaching areas that weren’t previously affected. Which in a rational, less reality show-y world would matter. I don’t suspect here we are dealing with a crowd that has a whole lot of time for what “the data says.”
“This is how Americans now interpret freedom: Not as a political condition in a democratic society, but as a constant chant of ‘you’re not the boss of me.’ This is not freedom, or at least not freedom in any political sense. It’s a child-like understanding of autonomy…This is what happens when people believe that ‘freedom’ means ‘telling everyone no,’…It’s a stage toddlers go through, but they grow out of it. This is permanent childhood…It’s not in any way about citizenship, which is how adults balance group obligation and individual freedom.” — Tom Nichols
He’s right. Freedom in the United States is not supposed to mean freedom to use the flag as an argument for not behaving as part of that society. Reaping the benefits of a prosperous and civil liberty minded nation does not entitle you to divorce from civic duty. Real adult freedom means responsibility.
For some reason the part of the country that more deeply values family/social ties is the part of the country that most aggressively believes “citizenship” is essentially an entitlement to freedom and not a social obligation to the well-being of the group. And when we aren’t sharp about calling out the abuse of these ideas, we entitle the worst of us to slide even further into badness.
We end up being a country where an armed militia rolls into the Michigan capital.
We end up being a country where the nine kids of Calvin Munerlyn have to grow up without a father because fucking idiots are too fragile to be told what to do.
And that’s why this is actually all upsetting. There are people who either actually have to work to survive or who are responsible for the rest of us not dying. And for the sake of those people, our fellow citizens, we should be capable of enduring some discomfort. Which most of us are. But there are some who aren’t. Those people are the fucking worst of us. We either shame them into submission, or we allow the fringes to continue our collective spin into madness.
