Return of Kings, that burning internet dumpster fire of pickup artistry and Trumpian bigotry, has decided to go all grade-school on us this week, posting an essay that is basically an adult, alt-right version of the classic “what I did on my summer vacation” essay assignment.
Like a lot of Americans, whether they’re in 6th grade or in their sixties, RoK contributor Michael Sebastian went to the beach.
And there he saw … a lot of people who weren’t white. In a post with the somber title, “A Summer Beach Trip Shows How Badly America Has Declined” Sebastian reports his dire findings:
The most obvious change is that there has been a dramatic change in the level of diversity. When I was a teenager, the beach was nearly 100% white. The diversity, such as it was, consisted of a handful of blacks. Whites still comprised about two-thirds of the beach goers, but now there were also lots of Hispanics along with smaller numbers of Muslims, Asians, and Indians. Of course, there continued to be a small number of black families.
I can only assume that Sebastian, the author of a self-published book titled Staying Married in a Degenerate Age, showed up at the beach with a little notebook in which to record the presumed ethnicity of all the other beachgoers.
The Hispanics were notable because it was very apparent that they were poor. Many of the families did not have bathing suits—they were in the ocean in their street clothes. It was especially awkward for the women as a blouse and long skirt are less than ideal beachwear. While I am certain there were poor families in the beach in my youth, I don’t recall anyone so poor that they could not purchase a bathing suit.
Maybe Trump will build you a wall around the beach.
The Muslims were also an interesting addition. I noticed several women walking along the beach covered head to ankle in dark clothing walking on the beach in 95-degree heat.
At this point I’m pretty sure that Sebastian is just making things up. How many beaches in America boast such a perfect cross-section of All the People the Readers of Return of Kings Hate?
Sebastian never tells us what beach he allegedly went to, only that he lives in a “large city.” I also live in a large city, one in which white people are a minority. But even in the relatively less-segregated neighborhood that I live in, where most of the people you see out and around are likely to be people of color, I don’t normally see a crowd quite this rainbow-hued.
Sebastian goes on to complain about tattooed women, another Return of Kings bugbear, before informing us that some of the people on this Beach of Terror were on the drugs. Because Sebastian can totally tell.
Extreme diversity and abundant tattoos are one thing, but there is nothing that indicates spiritual bankruptcy like drug abuse. The most disturbing thing that I witnessed was the high number of people who were strung out on something. Everyone that I saw looked like they were intoxicated by something other than alcohol or pot. All of them were young. All of them were white.
Oh, no, not the white people!
I saw one young woman slowly rotating in circles with her hands on her temples in the middle of the day. There were small groups of people who seemed to have no awareness of their surroundings.
To be fair, I sometimes rotate in circles in the middle of the day. It’s fun. You should try it!
Adding insult to imaginary injury, Sebastian reports that while driving his family back home from the beach one night,
a car in the right lane suddenly swerved into my lane almost crashing into our car. My wife glanced over to find out what was happening with the driver. It turned out that it was a middle aged woman who was snapping a selfie as she was going through the tunnel—no doubt to post on Facebook.
This was followed, I imagine, by monkeys flying out of Sebastian’s butt.
Sebastian ends his little screed by comparing present-day America to — yes, you guessed it — the Roman empire in its final days.
With the exception of diversity, which is a weapon used by the elite to divide, conquer, and rule the population, each of the things I saw on my beach vacation indicated that the foundation of America is rotting. Ancient Rome became great because of the vigor and austerity of its people. Once Romans lost their founding virtue, the Empire collapsed. …
Barring some sort of great upheaval, it is likely that the US is headed for the same fate that befell Rome.
WORST. VACATION. EVER.
I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t know Morse code, as that might spoil the ending if they beep out the name of the baddie during the opening.
On the other hand, when programs are good enough I get so involved I pretty much forget everything I’ve heard about it.
150 years of dependencies progressively revolting while the west coast has financial and starvation issues before eventually becoming a puppet state until one of the puppeteers declares himself king of Oregon, and meanwhile the east half of the country continues on as a superpower for another 800 years?
@Scildfreja
There was an episode of Criminal Minds that went into how one’s preferred style(s) of music is formed. Apparently, at ~14, kids are especially susceptible to imprinting music. Something to do with hormones and peer interactions. Don’t know if it’s true. That was the year I began my (at least mostly musical) crush on Beyonce, so it can’t be completely made up 🙂
@kupo
Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT! Arrest em all, throw away the fuckin keys! Violence, or the threat of same, makes you the bad guy. Period! Stop making people feel sorry for scum!
When I want to be surrounded by blindingly white complexions, the first place I head is the beach.
Obviously that was a rhetorical question, but ooh! It’s something I actually know about!
I’m currently working on new ways to measure diversity in the types of offences committed by offenders, and the current most popular method, the “diversity index” (which has various problems) is taken from the biology literature, where it’s used to measure diversity in the number of species in a sampling area. It could totally be applied to measure diversity in ethnicity (of people living in an area or hanging out at a beach), though I’m not terribly sure what you’d do with it once you’d calculated it.
A value of 0 means no diversity, so if you found that then that’d be easily interpretable, but in that case everyone would be of the same ethnicity so you’d already know there was no diversity before you calculated anything. The upper limit, i.e. maximum diversity, depends on how many different ethnicities you group people into, and I guess you could compare against that, but it’s not clear where the cut-offs would be for “high diversity”, “medium diversity”, and “low diversity” (or indeed “acceptable-to-Michael-Sebastian diversity”, if that is in fact nonzero). You could calculate it for two different areas, or for the same area at two different times, and see which was more diverse, except one of the problems with it is that it doesn’t directly allow you to assess significance so you wouldn’t know whether there was a meaningful difference there.
Anyway, the way you calculate it is that you take the proportion in each ethnicity on your beach or wherever, square all those proportions, add them up, and take the result away from 1. I don’t know how to maths in HTML, but if anyone reads LaTeX it’s
1-\sum_i p^2_i
where the sum is over the different ethnicities and p_i is the proportion of people in ethnicity i.
@ Virgin Mary
*snort*
thanks for that 🙂
@ rick
This thread has comprehensively dealt with the silliness of the whole Fall of Rome analogy and soothed my pedantic mind, but your comment is pithy perfection.
@ Moggie
(I love moggies)
Absolutely, yes! Did you not get the memo? Blue collar beach, this way: sand is gritty, water is full of weird slimy things and sharp stones, ice cream guaranteed to fall out of its cone every time … get over here!
I’m now finished trying to address every single person in this thread. Am just enjoying it very much 🙂
@Ouruboros13
It depends. Are you Jewish?
So to summary this article “theres too many brown people and uppity women at the beach and I hate it”
Serious question: Weren’t a few of the Roman Emperors black? (They certainly weren’t all blindingly white)
@Sebastian: Nobody’s *forcing* you to go to the beach, cupcake.
I’m not much of a beach person myself because I would prefer not to have to wash sand out of my hair for days and (as can be expected) if I’m not borderline religious about applying my sunblock I will burn like nobody’s business!
@Zoidberg
Hiya, I’m Axe! Glad you’re here. Welcome package on the right side of the page 🙂
@Neremanth
Rhetorical, cos I knew Seb couldn’t answer it. I was actually super interested tho. Thanks! Now to troll Wikipedia, so I can obsessively calculate the diversity index of… well, everywhere basically
@Tovius
Yep. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there came an Emperor from each conquered territory, TBH.
@Torvus, Handsome Jack
I’m sure the full listing would hit a lot of areas, but off the top of my head Iberia and Illyria both produced some of Rome’s best Emperors.
@Alan:
Inspector Morse? I read almost all the books they released in the US (with the exception of the last, which I think features Morse’s death at the end), plus whatever episodes PBS showed in their Mystery show. (For those not familiar with Mystery, they showed episodes from (what seemed to be) BBC productions. Like, episodes of the Jeremy Britt Sherlock Holmes were shown there, and Inspector Morse, Brother Cadfael, and many others. Fun show, overall.)
One thing I noticed about the books, is that in the earliest ones Morse was the up-and-coming young guy while Sg. Lewis was the older grizzled guy, and drove a totally different car than the Jag. At around book #3, the ages of Morse and Lewis were switched and Morse was suddenly driving the Jag with no explanation. My guess at the time I read them is that was about the time the TV series debuted, and the writer decided he liked the actors chosen for those roles over what he originally wrote.
“Dear Diary,
There were people more tan than me having a good time on the beach than me. This causes me pain and will bring the end to western civilization, just like the Romans. I wish them all dead, forever.
P.S.
]*<€]+]]€}'coiqquejfocosjdc1[¥{€<*]*!~,
Don't try to decode that, that was literally randomly pressed keys.
Off topic, but I just purchased The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Just for the misandry and white genocide! Oh, and it sounds like a good book.
Damn, I wish my area had this much diversity as his.
Although, one time I was delivering flyers for my co-op and an Asian family invited us in for cake because it was someone’s birthday! Like, we didn’t have the time to accept the invitation, but I wish I had
@Lurker
You could have had coconut cake, shredded coconut layered in the cake. Or Mung Bean paste or my personal favorite Lotus Seed drink, lotus seed drinks are wonderful.
If you still want that stuff, just head on over to your local Little Saigon/Tokyo, or Chinatown, there’s always someone serving stuff like that.
@Axe
Also this was a while ago but I can’t believe you remembered when I said I didn’t get nostalgia, until I mentioned Rosario X Vampire. I didn’t even remember typing about nostalgia until now.
I’ve done that before-I had a headache and was waiting for my Tylenol to kick in. He probably just saw a woman with a headache, which he probably caused.
Welcome, Zoidberg!
It’s all gibberish, but let’s try to break it down.
– Diversity is a weapon used by the elite to divide, conquer, and rule the population
– Each of the things he saw on his beach vacation indicated that the foundation of America is rotting but he doesn’t count diversity as one of those things that’s rotting the foundation.
It’s unclear whether he’s saying it’s not part of the rot because he approves of diversity (highly unlikely) or because he thinks it’s a positive thing because it’s used to divide, conquer, and rule the population (more likely).
No, they do not have any awareness.
@Amused
No. But some people were dumb enough to assume I was. After 9/11 my classmates even thought I was Middle Eastern.
This post reminded me of how Robert Moses designed overpasses on the road to Jones Beach in Long Island to be too low for buses to get under, to keep poor/black people off the beach…but now I’m learning via the interwebs that this story that I heard in urban planning school all those years ago may not actually be true.
Buncha dumb fundies. They need to go talk to some people who understand about living in hot climates, and model their clothing on traditional desert cultures, right?
@Neremanth:
That was fascinating, thank you! I really enjoyed that.
@Scildfreja:
@Monzach:
That sounds like a lot of fun!
My favourite Paradox game is probably Victoria 2. That’s partially because Victoria 1 was my first Paradox game, and partially because I love how intricate its web of interdependencies is. It’s an enormous feedback system, which is so fun to play with.
I wouldn’t recommend HOI4 yet. It’s still going through the process of rebalancing and redesign which all Paradox games have to go through after release. Stellaris seems to be the same.
A few years ago I played a succession game of CK2. That’s where you pass the save game around, and each person plays a single monarch’s reign before handing it on to the next player. Over time, your nation ends up being a fascinating combination of the playstyles of each player. It’s enormous fun, especially if it gets documented for bystanders.
If you two feel up for it, that might be an interesting thing to do. The rise of the Von Mammoth dynasty should be glorious.
@EJ(TOO)
Thanks for the compliment. ^_^
I definitely agree with you on the balancing period for any new Paradox titles. I got EUIV a little over a year after first release and there were still some kinks left to be worked on, although new expansions contribute to that sort of thing as well. Basically, any new Paradox title might feel pretty imbalanced for a few weeks or months but things do get better.
A succession game sounds like a lot of fun, for sure. It’s too bad that CKII doesn’t cover the Siberian area, so that we can’t be in our ancestral Mammoth home. 😀