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.
@Alan Robertshaw
Wait, it wasn’t because of Millennials? And here I was so sure Pokemon Go had something to do with it.
FINALLY SOMEONE EXPLAINED THAT WORD IN A WAY I UNDERSTAND!!!!!! seriously, thank you. I always see it but forget to Google it and when I remember, days later, I can’t spell it.
Can someone really sweet explain what’s poe’s law, and what does it mean when you say “this guy has to be a poe”? I never understand if it means ” this guy is so extreme he has to be fake”, or “this guy is an example of how all groups have extreme members” or “as described by poe’s law, the most extreme members of the groups must not represent the whole. This is an example.”, and I don’t understand Google’s explanations. Maybe I met a bunch of people who used it wrong, Idon’t know.
@Chiomara – the term comes from ‘Poe’s Law’, an Internet ‘law’ stating that it is often impossible to tell whether someone I’d expounding a view, from someone who is satirising that view.
A ‘Poe’ by extension is a person who is trolling by pretending to hold an objectionable opinion.
Well it started in 2005 when Nathan Poe on a christian forum were posters were talking about creationists. Poe replied to the poster that remarked that if another poster didn’t have a “;)” emoji he couldn’t tell if that poster was serious or not.
Poe remarked “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.”
Poe’s Law then is meant to cover times when you can’t tell a parody of an extremist groups’ opinions from the real thing. Usually the post has to either be so over the top to the point where it’s either a really good parody, or real genuine opinion.
To say that a person is a Poe, means that you think that person is so extreme that it’s probably a parody, or more often used because you can’t believe someone would genuinely hold those thoughts.
Then there’s the rare cases where the extremist speaks his views such an over exaggerated manner you think he’s taking a shot at his own beliefs, or the rarer case acting like too much of a try hard to fit in.
I’ll take a minute to second that this comment section is the best. You taught me so much, even me being a shy (tee hee!) silent reader half of the time.
You see, before I was here, the other feminist spaces I was in were pretty harsh (which I comprehend). It was great for me to learn that my opinion is not always precious and worth saying, that I should be quiet and listen when people are speaking about problems that are not mine, that truly recognizing mistakes and apologizing makes you a better human in all senses, that I am not entitled to get to places and demanding to be spoon fed information, that I am not entitled to, when someone else is talking about their oppression, talking about a marginally related problem of mine to shift the focus to me.
TL;DR: I learned to be humble and speak and rationalize differently from the trolls that come here.
But at the same time I was always afraid to search for psychological reassurance, and to say “I know nothing about this and I think that since you research on that for a long time, maybe you could provide me more guidance than just a Google search? Please? If you want to.”, which I feel safe to do here. And you even get to the absurd of saying “pfff, girl, stop saying sorry for just speaking”, which is amazing. Thank you for this all, and if you ever feel I am growing too entitled and stealing people’s spaces or voices, please do tell me.
Off the top of my head I can remember you made me FINALLY comprehend the Valerie Solanas thing, I learned a bunch about ableism, a lot about international feminism, you made me interested in philosophy and basic understanding of fallacies, about how biases work and are inherent to the human brain, which improved my way of thinking and talking endlessly, how not thinking emotionally is impossible and knowing your emotions is important. Not to mention less feministy things such as grammar and general history.
Entertainment wise, you convinced me to get interested to read Atlas Shrugged. I THINK ITS THE FUNNIEST THING I HAVE EVER READ, it gets me crying, seriously. The funniest part is someone wrote that with a serious face and people talk about it as something thoughtful.
You made me get interested in Fallout 4 and Portal, and I LOVED THEM with all my heart, which is rare for video games
You presented me to some pretty cool little RPGs
I can’t remember anymore, but there are more things. You rock, guys, and have excellent taste.
And today you are talking about this EUIV thing? I Googled it and it looks like the game I dream with every since my childhood. The concept and functions seem so freaking awesome. I tried some games of this sort in my cellphone but they… They were mostly crap. What little strategy one of them has doesn’t include logistics such as economic development over time. I hope that game is affordable to me and my poor stone age pc can run it.
Sigh, I love this place. Your tastes are so much like mine.
Ps: Go preparing yourselves because I soon will ask you for reading material on politics and economy, so I can understand everything better. I want to understand political and economic strategies, their history, their pros and cons, which countries apply them. I don’t really know how to begin. I tried to read the communist manifest but I feel I don’t have the background to comprehend and judge it. So if some very smart people would be kind enough to gather me some sources, that would be lovely. Not today, though, take your time.
ETA: Oogly and BG:
Ooooooooooh! Thaaaank you! You’re the best!!!!
I do love the knowledge-sharing that takes place here – on social issues, plus just on stuff folks happen to know about! (Also, a personal bugbear (unless it’s just a hobby horse) – people saying “just google it” when asked for information… about something that’s obviously subjective, and there’s no saying whether the search results would be ones they’d agree with, if there were any results at all! As we’ve seen here, when someone’s looking for a good up-to-date 101 resource, well, there isn’t always one available.)
Re: Rome: at this point I think it’s safe to say “the Roman Empire fell because it was an incredibly big, incredibly big political institution, and took a lot of ridiculous risks over the centuries it operated, and eventually it just couldn’t stay what passed for stable anymore and other political institutions took over.” I mean, seriously – you’ve got expanding borders, shifting capitals, different leaders and groups assassinating each other every ten minutes, changing state churches, colonialist economics… no-one can keep all those plates in the air indefinitely!
@Oogly
I have a long memory. It’s not precise, the details fall thru the cracks rather easily, but it goes way back. Doesn’t hurt that the nostalgia convo was a precursor to having respect (which I still don’t quite feel, but I think I understand) explained to me. And, just to show how basic I am, Pokemon and Yugioh are my childhood anime. Don’t worry, I’ve since expanded my horizons 🙂
@Ouroboros13:
You are from Eastern Europe and you don’t know how this works? Okay, here is the rule. If you look Jewish, you are Jewish. You say you aren’t, but that’s exactly what a Jew WOULD say, isn’t it? And when you go to the beach, it’s all part of your nefarious Hebrew agenda to something something unleash plagues on the world. It’s all there in the Protocols.
@ redsilkphoenix
In the books Morse drives a Lancia. It was John Thaw who wanted the Jag in the TV series. I wonder if it’s a throwback to his time on the Sweeney. In that, the villains always drove a MK2 Jag (judging by the number plate, all crooks in London used to share it).
ETA: Heh, I can still remember the number plate for the Sweeney’s car NHK295M. And they say kids aren’t influenced by TV.
Aw, @Chiomara <3 Your posts always brighten my day. I'm really glad you're here. I feel exactly the same about this place as you do – it's really helped me understand feminism and compassionate social justice so much better, has taught me a lot about myself, given me language for so many things I've felt and couldn't properly express, and on the way I've learned so much about so many things. Everyone here, keep being awesome!
EUIV, CK2 and the other Paradox games are wonderful and don't require much in the way of graphics – they just basically need to display a map and some icons, after all. They can eat up a lot of computing power in running the simulation, though. I’ll dig up the minimum requirements for you:
Europa Universalis IV & Crusader Kings 2:
OS: Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8
Processor: Intel® Pentium® IV 2.4 GHz eller AMD 3500+
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce 8800 or ATI Radeon® X1900, 512mb video memory required
DirectX®: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 2 GB HD space
Sound: Direct X- compatible soundcard
Other Requirements: Broadband Internet connection
The games can be sort of pricey, but if you watch them on Steam, they typically go on sale for something like 75% to 80% off during sales, so you can pick’em up for super cheap then. The entire Crusader Kings 2 library is around $200 Canadian, but it drops to around $45 during a sale. Very worth it! Even though a lot of the DLC is silly flag and unit packs, they’re very cheap individually and add so much (in my opinion). The music is *especially* worth it. The game even automatically detects if you’re playing around Christmas, and mixes a Christmas version of its theme into the playlist!
I think it’d be a lot of fun to play a dynasty game of some sort. CK2 is good for that – rulers live for a period of time, and then when they die you play their successor, so at that point it can be passed on to another player. EUIV doesn’t really have that, but we could each play a set period of time, maybe 20 to 50 years, before passing the game along.
I have no preference of which nation to play! They’re all neat.
(We would also have to decide on which expansions to use, but we can talk about that later :o)
I don’t know if any of the emperors of Rome would have read as black to a modern eye, but the Severans were North African through Septimius’s mother. Now, there’s a dramatic food fight to be had about what that means, which I am not really qualified to enter, but they probably didn’t look like the white English actors who play Romans in movies. Then again, very few of the emperors looked like that, I imagine.
The problem with Googling ‘black Roman emperors’ is that on one hand you get Stormfront and Apricity, and on the other, you get various poorly researched Afrocentric sites, insisting that Augustus was also black, so it’s hard for someone like me, who has limited knowledge of Roman history, to figure out what is real, and what is just modern narrishkeit about race.
@Scildfreja
If we end up playing EUIV I’d definitely be interested in joining. I would recommend playing with a European power, though, as the rest of the world can be a dangerous place for a new player. Although if we start with more experienced players taking their turns first, well then the sky’s the limit, basically. 😀
@ podkayne
Emporer Vespaspian famously said that his official state portrait (as used on coins and statues) made it look like he “was taking a dump”.
He then went on to praise its accuracy.
What stuns and saddens me is the fact that someone was desperate enough to marry Sebastian.
@Chiomara
I agree with you. I’ve learned a ton from the commenters here. There are so many knowledgeable folks from different walks of life sharing here. I have also found myself googling games or blogs suggested in the comments.
@Diptych
I agree about the just google it thing. I am a librarian and one of the hardest things to do is to figure out how to ask the “right” question to get the answer you need. Also, I edit on Wikipedia and my friends there who work in different countries and states have noticed you get different Google results based on location. Very frustrating.
For every possible opinion you can hold, right or wrong, there’s a google search that will bring back results to reinforce your opinions
<3 librarians
@LGB – That Arabic Orthodox chant is lovely. For further bigot headsploding, might I recommend Sister Marie Keyrouz, who is Lebanese, a nun (Maronite Christian, iirc) and sings Christian music in Arabic? She has an exquisite voice. I have a recording of her singing Easter chants which I listen to during Lent.
I attempted to link to a video of her singing the Magnificat in Arabic, with traditional Arabic instrumentation, but my tablet isn’t cooperating.
video
@Alan @Scildfreja
*big grin and happy dance*
@the Real Cie: not so much “desperate” as “broken,” I imagine.Can you imagine a situation so bad that marriage to someone like that would be preferable to it, once you’ve ruled out the idea that she is a refugee from somewhere absolutely unbearable?
“… and we ‘aven’t had any dinner.”
The best things about Life on Mars were how they used-but-not-just-imitated things from The Sweeney and The Professionals 🙂
“…come out with your hands up, you’re surrounded by armed bastards.”
@Alan
I’ve got a soft spot for Vespasian, but given that most of what I know about him is through the medium of Lindsey Davis’ Falco novels, I doubt I’m getting the most historically accurate of pictures. That does sound like something Davis’ version would say, though.
@Megalibrarygirl : “by location” ? More like by person. Google do adapt its search to the information he have on you. It’s not the worse offender, but it’s sometime very noticeable.
“diversity, which is a weapon used by the elite to divide, conquer, and rule the population”
Im sorry, fucking what?
“diversity, which is a weapon used by the elite to divide, conquer, and rule the population”
seriously?
“diversity, which is a weapon used by the elite to divide, conquer, and rule the population”
like, the actual fucking existance of people who arent all one uniform gray blob like that one episode of Fairly Odd Parents…… is a CONSPIRACY!!?!!
HOW?!
@ opposable thumbs
I’m having hoops.