We Hunted The Mammoth
The government’s eagerly anticipated report on UFOs came out yesterday — all nine pages of it. And it seems to have been a disappointment to almost everyone reading it. There was no grand alien reveal, jut a bunch of videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena” the government has been unable to explain. It leaves behind many more questions than answers.
Even the least-masterful debater knows you can’t win an argument by simply calling your opponent ugly. That’s not a argument; it’s an insult, an ad hominem.
Here’s a new one. A commenter on the Incels.is forums complains that he doesn’t enjoy video games any more. Not because he’s played all his games to death and he’s sick of them. Not that he’s just lost interest in games in general. No, as he sees it, it’s all about the Chads.
Fox News’ white-men’s rights activist Tucker Carlson has won himself plaudits from white supremacists and others on the racist right for not-so-subtly sneaking their ideas and rhetoric into his nightly monologues.
We live in an age unusually receptive to conspiracy theory — with a veritable army of QAnoners caught up in baroque, sadistic theories of retribution against political and cultural elites; with the vast majority of Republicans believing (or purporting to believe) that, actually, Donald Trump won the election; and with a cohort of Americans convinced that Bill Gates is planning to plant microchips in their bodies with a vaccine shot.
A UCLA student who sometimes called himself “Scuffed Elliot Rodger” online has been nabbed on assorted federal charges for his role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, during which he was photographed sitting in Mike Pence’s seat in the Senate just moments after Pence was evacuated from the room.
Incels, if they think about politics at all, tend to lean right — pretty far right in some cases. But there’s a distinct, if relatively tiny, bunch of incels who claim to be leftists and even Marxists. Let’s just say their version of Marxism bears little resemblance to the original flavor.
Block that metaphor! In the MGTOW subreddit, a fellow called clownworld_pariah tries to explain the alleged degeneracy of contemporary women in the only way he knows how: by comparing them to beer.
Two years ago, the infamous pickup artist Roosh Valizadeh announced that he was giving up his life of sinful fornication and getting himself right with God. Or at least right with a right-wing God, whom he apparently met in person after taking a megadose of ‘shrooms. (No, I’m not kidding.)
