By David Futrelle
Great headlines — like the New York Post’s legendary page-one shocker, “Headless Body in Topless Bar” — grab the reader’s attention instantly but leave enough unsaid that hapless news junkies feel compelled to click the link or buy the tabloid because they need to know the rest of the story.
Internet garbage site Return of Kings has gotten pretty good at the clickbaity headlines. But one memorable headline on the front page of the site today, while certainly attention grabbing, falls just short of greatness because, well, it’s pretty obvious that the real story can’t possibly live up to whatever story you make up in your own head about it.
This is the headline:
But however much I might cherish the story I came up with in this particular instance — which involves a blonde Ruth Buzzi lookalike hitting a tophatted, velvet-clad PUA with her purse — it’s my job to click on these links so you don’t have to. The good news is that the real story is nearly as good as my imaginary one, if somewhat less dramatic. And by “good” I mean awful.
So it seems that Return of Kings writer William Adams went drinking with his girlfriend and some of his friends one recent evening in Stockholm. Alas, his girlfriend had a little too much of the drink and wanted to return home around midnight. As Adams, who is apparently always right about everything, explains,
I made a quick calculation and decided that the wisest choice was to take the metro, which is located just outside the bar. I know that traffic can get congested, especially where we were at that time, and even short taxi rides are very expensive in Stockholm, where we live. Of course I can afford a taxi ride or twenty but in this case it was the proper decision to not do it, especially after taking travel duration in to consideration.
But she was afraid of throwing up on the train and insisted on taking a cab, even though this was objectively the wrong thing to do.
We did, and as expected it took much longer time and costed me almost the equivalent of 50 US dollars. … Because of construction work we also had to walk about 300 meters to our home, and she was wearing a dress, rubbing her arms a bit to showcase the low outside temperature relative to her choice of clothing.
She then consequently asserted that she wanted to borrow my (stylish) jacket, but I was annoyed and didn’t want to lend it to her in that particular situation.
Naturally, Adams insisted on informing her that he had been right all along about the cab thing. Apparently this required him to yell at her a little bit.
I thought that if she occasionally associates with my male friends, then she should talk to us on more equal terms and not be afraid of some realtalk. So while listening to her complaints I raised my voice and semi-yelled that if she would have listened to me in the first place we would not have to walk outside and would already be home by now.
ENTER ELDERLY SWEDISH WOMAN
WHO TURNS OUT TO NOT ACTUALLY BE ELDERLY EXCEPT MAYBE TO THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO READ RETURN OF KINGS
Meeting us on the sidewalk, then about 200 meters from home, a middle-aged woman suddenly shows up. She stops next to me and starts yelling directly in my face. Although she looks normal, she unhesitatingly manifests her dislike for my behavior.
And the fight of the century is on!
My girl has started to cry a bit, not atypical behavior for her subspecies. …
The 50-something bitch sees this and engages in another attack, after I have tried to walk past her in an attempt to ignore and move on. She threatens to “wrestle me to the ground” and calls me an “ass hat,” all while standing two inches from me, looking hostile.
The “elderly woman” then ups the ante by not actually trying to wrestle Adams to the ground.
She refrains from doing so but does not listen when I stress that it is neither her nor anyone else’s business, and the entire situation is taken out of context too for that matter.
Presumably the “context” is that he is always right about everything and he was just pointing this out to his freezing girlfriend very loudly.
After that she also starts a lecture on the ABC of Cultural Marxism. She is so tired of white males who use their privilege bla bla bla.
Ah, yes, Cultural Marxism, that totally real thing that normal people bring up all the time while having arguments on the street at 1 AM and that isn’t an antisemitic alt-right conspiracy theory or anything.
A white knight, perhaps a male feminist – although on a bicycle instead of a noble steed – shows up and asks if there is a problem. Well, that is great, I quietly sigh. I try to calm him down and say that the screaming woman is crazy. Luckily for me he hears the bitch calling me an ass hat again and decides to leave. At least there is some level of rationality left among cucked Swedes. Perhaps he reads ROK in his leisure time.
This is really quite the dramatic story! First we have an attack that turns out not to be an attack, by an elderly woman who turns out not to be elderly, and now a white knight who doesn’t actually do any white knighting.
The “conversation” continues for another five to ten minutes …
In other words, thirty seconds.
… and like Gandhi I stoically remain calm. She gabbles her last feminist tenets, hugs my girlfriend, and suggests that she should leave me. Her mission is almost completed. The woman then adds that there is still something good in me and I do not have to be an ass hat. I can change. Then she left.
BOY WHAT A SAVAGE ATTACK HE ENDURED HERE. HE IS TRULY LIKE GANDHI. GIVE THIS BOY A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.
Amazingly, this experience seems to have taught our hero a few lessons, which he spells out in his conclusion.
If there is anything to learn from this minor debacle it is that non-violence is the only available strategy for a masculine man in many situations where he is confronted. Of course it would be more than pathetic to beat a woman, but many might consider doing it to give someone disrespectful like that a lesson. Think again. In fact, even speech can be considered violence in our current radical left-leaning societies, and to avoid rough talk and a raised voice near women is the way to go.
Wait, so you shouldn’t beat women who annoy you? WHO KNEW. Mind blown.
The fact that this human trash can get a girlfriend in the first place is deeply depressing to me beyond words…but besides that, what was that baffling nonsense about the guy on the bike? First he calls him a white knight male feminist, then he praises his rationality and accuses him of reading RoK (not fuckin likely with that piddly site’s weak ass traffic).
Not only that, but he claims the whole thing is taken out of contact, when even the damn headline says he was putting his girlfriend “in her place”, which is exactly the context that magical “elderly” 50 year old was talking about!
The way he contradicts himself from sentence to sentence, sounds like he picked up a thing or two from his hero President Pumpkin.
@Victorious Parasol
Love the hair!
shitthatneverhappened.txt
“not atypical behavior for her subspecies”
Oh god, I think I just barfed up my own liver trying to process the poison in that statement. Bleah.
The headline alone says all that needs to be known about this man. Never try to convince me that a white man who uses the phrase “put someone in their place” (especially as it pertains to women and minorities) is not an out-and-proud abuser and certified shitty person, as the usage of it suggests that 1) you know you hold power over someone else, and 2) you’re OK with abusing that power to put someone else down.
A desire and willingness to “establish dominance” over someone else when you already have more social power than they is indicative of an abusive personality, and it’s the mark of a bully. This is why I stop hanging out with guys who are rude and condescending to people working in customer service. And why I hope these kinds of people never have children, as they will inevitably view children as their extensions and property; instead of caring and supporting the little human beings they helped bring into this world, they’re going to be more concerned with making sure they “respect” him.
Because everything, everything will always be about him. Everything in those snippets are framed exclusively through his lens, and he never gives a moment’s thought to others, except as either obstacles or enablers to getting what he wants. Which is all that matters.
I, too, am disappointed that this wasn’t nearly as awesome of a story as I thought might be. I’m inclined towards the view that the absolute skeleton of the story might well be non-fictional (asshat arrogantly mistreats hopefully-temporary girlfriend, gets called on it by passers-by), which is depressing but unsurprising. If he was going to put in so much bullshit embellishment, he could have at least gone for some awesome spin-kicks to an attacking elf-witch or detailed the incredible obstacle course he had to skateboard through to reach his apartment (with girlfriend teleporting next to him after it’s completed). Really own the stupidity.
So he was drunk and shouting in the middle of the night on the street. I have neighbors like this and they really suck. He is lucky no one called the Polism.
@victorious
Your hair is awesome! Can I be in your club with my rainbow hair or is it blue hair only? There’s some blue in mine ^_^
As for the story, I believe some of it but it’s so reframed and embellished. He leads with all his excuses for ultimately ending up screaming at his girlfriend and then exaggerates the “attack” from the other woman.
And this is where the ROK “philosophy” hurts women. Because people can say that they’re just writing terrible things online but this is the end result of that thinking. Yelling at someone for being nauseous and cold. I hope she leaves him.
@Alan
Didn’t I tell you that story a while back? :p
@David
The woman in the photo did end up committing suicide, reportedly at least in part due to the sharing of this photo.
Sorry. I hadn’t read all the comments when I posted my previous one.
@WWTH
Yeah, this was exactly my first thought.
My Otter and I have a mutual understanding that she will often not dress warmly enough, but she will bring a purse. Thus, I can lend her some clothing if she gets cold, and in exchange I can put my power bank in her purse. :p
Sadly, because of misandry, sometimes this works out as “ughhh, I don’t want to carry your stuff, FINE, I’ll just be cold then”. At which point I usually end up having to carry the purse myself. And I still have to give up the jacket! Unbelievable.
@Alan & David
Found it.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/05/03/trumplords-celebrate-the-donalds-big-victory-by-yelling-about-cucks-on-twitter/comment-page-2/#comment-799560
This was only 16 months ago, Alan. :p
Having read through my old comment in the link, I did some research to see if I could find out what’s happened with the statue since it was rejected by the city. (Centrist and right wing politicians argued that the statue promotes violence rather than peaceful protest. Seems quite relevant at this point in time, huh?) However, there don’t seem to be any updates to the story. The owner of the statue said he’d probably put it up in his own yard, so presumably he did.
The 2012 Eurovision Song Contest winner, Loreen, competed in 2017 with the song Statements, the stage show of which contained a reference to Danuta Danielsson, against the wishes of Danuta’s son. The sequence can be seen at ~1:50 into this performance:
I wake up to more compliments about my hair. What a great start to a Saturday. 🙂
NicolaLuna, you are welcome to join the club. So is everybody else who thinks people can dye their hair for whatever reason.
I know it’s incredibly minor compared to the rest of ass-hat’s dumbfuckery, but:
The past tense of the verb “to cost” is “cost”; “costed” is how a 4-year-old says it. I found it so jarring, the lack of an appropriate article earlier in the sentence barely bothered me.
Dude has such pretensions of superiority dripping from every faux-intellectual syllable, and he can’t even conjugate like a big boy….
So his complicated manly STEM calculation of the optimal method of conveyance home factored in cost, traffic congestion, and time, but *not* the probability of his girlfriend throwing up on train. Very sciencey of him.
This is why their stupid attempts to reduce social interactions to equations always fail. They cut the other person completely out.
“…but I’m still going to complain bitterly about the cost! Which I totally can afford, no sweat, but suddenly it’s a heavy financial cross to bear when it’s being spent on my sick girlfriend.”
He reminds me of the dude who was featured at WHTM awhile back who went out to breakfast with his girlfriend after hitting the gym, and wrote a huge whiny post carping about the expense because she had ordered pancakes (he, of course, had steak, so it wasn’t about the cost). He felt she hadn’t earned anything as extravagant as pancakes.
“Showcase”? What is she, Vanna White? People rub their arms because they’re cold, not because they’re trying to play up the situation and manipulate others. It’s obvious he’s trying to rationalize away any tiny sparks of guilt by turning her into the bad guy. After all, she was rubbing her arms at him!
So glad that crucial detail was included in this (horrendously) written (self-aggrandizing) field report. Wouldn’t want people thinking that his girlfriend deserved anything more than a cruddy thrift store jacket.
What a selfish, useless fucker. If he found someone lying by the side of the road dying of thirst, he’d refuse them water. “No way, I paid two bucks for this Evian. And don’t touch my designer slacks. You’ll wreck the crease.”
Wtf. She sounds like a lab specimen, not a girlfriend. ROK writers are forever unintentionally revealing that they’ve never been around women for any significant length of time and have no clue how to interact with them. “She manifested moisture in her visual input apparatus. Unsure what this means.”
Yes, that’s what middle-aged women do when they see a crying, distressed, freezing girl being yelled at in the street at 2 am. They immediately start indoctrinating.
“A is for Anita Sarkeesian and Antifa,
T is for Tired of white male privilege bla bla bla.”
@Victorious Parasol
Here’s another person who thinks your hair looks wonderful. I’m tempted to throw all caution to the winds, and dye my own hair rose gold.
@Dormousing_it
My stylist’s boss tried rose gold on my hair a few months ago. It didn’t quite come out like that though. Hope yours works out. 🙂
Does anyone else get the impression he intentionally got her drunker than she wanted? I mean this is ROK after all, isn’t that one of the ways they try to get women to sleep with them? I just know I’m having flashbacks to an ex who would always make me suuuper sick by mixing the drinks to his preferred level of alcohol and I could not handle as much as him. So it’s not so much that the ex was intentionally getting me drunker than I wanted, but the man refused to even try to think of how his actions affect other people.
Anyway, this girl getting really sick from drinking too much really reminds me of how awful it felt when I unknowingly drank way more than I could handle.
I agree, kupo. A man who doesn’t care about his date’s comfort level isn’t worth dating. (Same goes for all other genders, dur.)
Hi, about the picture: whether or not to use it is of course up to you, but whatever her or her relatives wishes it is too established as a symbol. Not necessarily a symbol of active resistance, but rather of civic courage. Here in Sweden i havent never heard of the argument that she was embarrased about the picture. Not saying she were not, but the reason the statue wasn’t put up was, as stated before, that centrists and right wingers opposed the promotion of violence. Funnily enough they don’t seem to mind cannons, statue of Charles XII or foreign wars, but whatever.
In short, I really think the picture is too rooted amongst swedish antifascists for it too disappear here at least.
@Victorious Parasol
Oh my gosh, that is such a lovely color. It is very becoming on you. Thank you for sharing the pic. I was hoping you would.
RE: Dyed hair.
A couple months back, I dyed mine an auburn color. I really really like it and need to touch it up, hopefully BEFORE Irma hits.
On topic:
Yay, women standing up for women! If anything in this story is true, it is this: A woman saw another woman who seemed to be in trouble, and intervened, pissing off the man who was the reason the second woman was in trouble.
I don’t date men, as a general…well, an iron-clad rule, but I’ve spent time with some.
For some reason, this is reminding me of the man who introduced himself to me by putting his hand between my legs, the one who grabbed my boobs while he left the show early (I was checking IDs for a thing we were doing), the one who threatened me with violence if I didn’t blow him, the half dozen or so who’ve attempted to grab my skirt, the ones who cat-called me, the one who asked if I “wanted skittles to go with that skirt”, the one who made me engage with him in front of the dozen other men he was with, the one who got me drugged and used me because he wasn’t going down on his partner, oh no, and also the one who kept touching a friend of mine as she moved away until she finally yelled at him.
Also the one who insultingly called me by my dead name a few dozen times, and continued doing it while I called him by the wrong names and got a few others to do it, and kept right on doing it until I genuinely yelled at him in front of the director and a good ten other cast members about it.
And every single one of these men I’m sure didn’t think they did anything wrong. Men consider violence against women to be completely normal. I wonder how they’d write any of this online?
“Fascist bitch can’t take a joke, yells at me the first time I call him by its real name” “Frigid whore slaps me in the face, it’s rocky, you’re supposed to be sexual” ugh. We cannot trust any aspect of his story or indeed any story where a man claims to be the victim of unprovoked meanness from a woman or women, except that he was abusing his girlfriend, two bystanders intervened, one left when he saw the situation was under control.
Why do all their stories read like a Dear Penthouse you’ll never believe what happened to me…?
It reminded me of when I lived in my old house which was on a main street so lots of people walked past regularly. I was getting home from work and saw a man and woman arguing just outside my front gate. She had a little girl with her. As I got near, the man spat in the woman’s face so when I walked past I grabbed the woman and the little girl by the hand said “come with me” and took them into my house.
But it makes me wonder – if men like that (including the ROK writer) feel they can act that way in public, how awful must they be at home? He obviously doesn’t even see her as a person so why would he treat her well?
@Nicolaluna
Exactly this. Most people find their actions constrained when they’re in public. In private, it probably looks a lot more like shoving people against walls and stuff.