2020 Could Be The Best Year Ever, If We Don't F*** It Up

Jesus fucking Christ, what a year it's been!

We started out with the death of Kobe and what was looking like the start of another war in the Middle East. And then it just got more and more batshit.

We all know what happened. We watched as Covid-19 shut down the country. Then, the majority of Americans watched gobsmacked as a bunch of protesters started demanding that we "reopen the economy". Then, just as the whole Covid situation was starting to look like it was behind us, we watched a cop murder a man by sticking his knee on his neck and suffocating him over a potentially counterfeit $20 bill. Then the protests and uprisings afterward. That's just the really easy to see stuff. Hell, that's not even mentioning the murder hornets. It's been a wild year.

If you look across the internet, we've all been lamenting that "this is the worst year ever!" With everything going on, it feels like we're just getting hit on all sides. This year has felt like an oldies radio station-the hits just keep on coming.

But it's pressure that makes diamonds. And the pressure we're experiencing this year is starting to have the potential for things to get even better.

This is going to be a long post, so let me break it down into parts to make it easier to digest.

Part One: The End of Civilization

Let's start at the Mid-March, the beginning of quarantine. Just before quarantine, the canary in the coal mine was sounded on coronavirus when Tom Hanks said that he became sick with the virus. For most people, myself included, this was the "oh shit" moment when, after hearing sporadic reports about the virus for months, the plague was now upon us. It was right after that, that everything shut down. The world just slowed down to a stand still. Schools were closed. Gyms were closed. It seemed that everything except grocery stores and fast food restaurants has closed.

Leftists first joined the chorus of people that were screaming, "Holy shit! Civilization has collapsed!", but then we got the look of Kevin McAllister when he realized he made his family disappear:

Civilization has collapsed. :D :D :D

Going on social media, and we were looking for ways to help each other. People were making face masks to give away for free or for the cost of materials. We were sharing recipes for making bread, as the first days of the run on grocery stores even had the bread aisles wiped out. There were people on local Facebook groups and the Nextdoor App offering to pick up groceries for disabled or immuno-compromised people. When capitalism shut down, what was left was just people helping people. And even though we were supposed to be six feet away from each other at all times, somehow we found a way.

The first days showed what a sham capitalism is to the world. One of the first articles I saw on the subject listed all of the ways that our capitalist world just turned benevolent in the interest of public safety before saying that all of these malevolent forces that have just been suspended didn't need to be there in the first place. To quote:

In every single one of these cases, it’s not just that most of these practices are accepted as “standard.” It’s that they are a way to punish people, to make lives more difficult, or to make sure that money keeps flowing upward. Up until now, activists and customers have been meant to believe that the powers that be could never change these policies—it would be too expensive, or too unwieldy, or would simply upset the way things are done. But now, faced suddenly with an environment in which we’re all supposed to at least appear to be focused on the common good, the rule-makers have decided it’s OK to suspend them.

We saw a lot of working class solidarity in those beginning days. At least if you were seeing the things that most news wasn't reporting on, at least not often. Rent strikes were starting. Amazon warehouse workers were walking out. Leftist podcasts and pages were talking about gardening tips and building prepper pantries. We weren't about to wait on the state to help us. We had to look out for each other.

For a leftist watching this, it was looking like a bright future might emerge when the dust settled on Covid.

Part Two: The Capitalists Strike Back

Then, seemingly out of nowhere:

For those that follow social media enough, you know that a Facebook group doesn't get 300k followers in a couple of days unless there's a combination of a lot of bots and a lot of money involved. While I'm not sure how many members of MAEQ were bots, I was right about a lot of money being involved.

The entire effort to politicize the quarantine has a whole bunch of big money backing it. A bunch of big money that just so happened to show up when local neighborhoods were developing a sense of solidarity. Where we were learning how to look out for each other and develop mutual aid.

If you're like me, you're with the majority of people that were watching this all unfold. The majority of Americans watched in horror while a small group of Americans were screaming for the economy to be reopened.

Renegade Cut, a YouTuber who uses pop culture to discuss politics, made a video called Misinformation for Fun and Profit that discussed what was going on. While it is easy to make fun of the people and call them "covidiots" (and holy shit, I do a lot), they're really just on the receiving end of a decades long misinformation campaign whose intention is to destroy solidarity among the working class and to manipulate the media. There were over 150 worker walkouts and rent strikes taking place during the height of the quarantine. The media was fixated on the quarantine protesters. The big money backing the protests were also the people that built the Tea Party a decade prior. Their goal is to keep just enough of the working class misinformed so that it will prevent worker solidarity. So while the more sensible of us are pulling our hair out wondering why people would be so goddamn dumb as to protest a fucking quarantine and cause us to be in this mess for even longer, the reality is that the protesters are victims of propaganda.

Admittedly, I should feel bad for making fun of the protesters knowing this. I should feel bad. I don't. Because there's something that feels so satisfying that knowing that these assholes spent years calling us "snowflakes" and telling us that we're soft. We, the "soft, easily offended, #triggered" millennials took quarantine on the chin and hunkered down. We sucked it up, drove on, and even learned how to make bread and shit. These right-wing covidiots couldn't handle things being abnormal for a few weeks before they snapped. They literally begged the government to pretend that things were normal in the middle of a goddamn plague because they couldn't handle shit being abnormal for a few weeks. Fucking soft motherfuckers.

And so it went for a few weeks. Soft ass motherfuckers that were brainwashed by propaganda would protest the quarantine, the rest of us would laugh at them. Until...

Part Three: A New Protest

I'll admit, when I first heard about George Floyd's murder by the Minneapolis police , I was both still so rocked by quarantine and so jaded from all the unjustified deaths of black men by the police before him, that I didn't think anything was going to come from this. I thought it was bad, but hell, we're in a quarantine. WTF are we going to do about any of this right now?

And then:

Holy shit, they set a police station on fire!

Just looking at that image causes my brain to play Sublime's "April 29, 1992" in my head. LET IT BURN, WANNA LET IT BURN, WANNA LET IT BURN, WANNA, WANNA LET IT BUR-URN!

The energy was different over this. Different than it was over Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, or the many other black folks killed by cops or wannabe cops. The protests spilled over into the suburbs. My own, majority white, boring ass Southeast Michigan suburb had two protests over this.

Once again, the future was looking bright if you were an anarchist. A section of Seattle had been claimed by leftists and turned into the Capital Hill Autonomist Zone. There were rumors that anarchist collectives had begun in other cities. Even the suburbs are having BLM rallies.

But then...

Part Four: Liberalism ruins everything

I do have a lot of friends that are liberals, especially on social media. Know that I do like all of you. I, like many on the hard left, was a liberal just five years ago. This isn't a personal attack. But right now there are lives on the line, so if you want things to be better, you need to take an honest look at strategy.

Before we go even further here, I need every one of you to watch this video from HBomberguy. Go watch the whole thing. Just do it already.

If you're a liberal and didn't bother to watch the video from HBomberguy, things look pretty good right now in the advertising world, don't they? A whole bunch of corporations came out and screamed BLACK LIVES MATTER! Progress! Yay!

Well, if you watched the video (and you really should), you'd know that all of these companies and their supposed anti-racist rhetoric has been market researched and quantified. It was made to be as non-threatening as possible. And despite all of that, the racists were still mad about it. And if you watched the video, you'd know that the racist anger generated isn't just some side effect of being a "good, tolerant corporation", but that racist anger had already been built in as part of the marketing strategy. All of these "woke brands" are stoking racial anger to sell their product.

If this had just been the market declaring bigots to be irrelevant, I'd say it's a good sign of progress. But the bigots are far from irrelevant in this marketing strategy. They're necessary. And it's necessary for them to be really loud. That's bad.

That's why I don't really care about the whole Aunt Jemima thing. Yes, it's good that a popular brand is losing a stereotypical image. But it not only doesn't create real change, it makes real change even harder. When we're fighting over Aunt Jemima that's time we're not spending fighting for bail reform, ending the drug war, ending qualified immunity, or many other things that would create better conditions in the criminal justice system.

But can't we fight over systemic changes and symbolic changes at the same time?

No, we really can't.

How much have you heard said about changing systemic issues the past few weeks? Did you see a lot of talk about that, or was it mostly about statues and advertising?

We need to stop spending energy fighting about cosmetic issues, especially ones where racism is part of a marketing strategy.

Part Five: The Goddamn Vampire Castle

I first heard of the phrase "vampire castle" when I went down a BreadTube rabbit hole and found a video from a woman calling herself Angie Speaks. I liked the video, so I subscribed to her channel and decided to search for the article they were referencing.

Exiting the Vampire Castle is an article made by Mark Fisher in 2013. The article discusses a lot of criticisms Mark had of the left and the just barely formed new civil rights movement. He talks about a lot of things that liberals are doing wrong. Unfortunately he was short on solutions on how to do things differently, so a lot of it comes off as cringy.

Still he did some very fair criticisms of liberalism. The main theme of all of the criticisms is that the movement was more concerned with creating divisiveness than creating solidarity. The biggest criticism that Mark had was that liberals do not give a class analysis when speaking about oppression. To quote:

I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.

We need to be discussing not just race, gender, and sexual oppression; we need to be talking about class oppression as well. And not just class oppression separately, but how it's tied into other forms of oppression as well. The class struggle may not be the same as the race struggle, but it is intertwined. Many of the systems that were created to oppress minorities also hurt the white working class. If you're white and working class, you probably know a white person that got caught up in the drug war. You know that a decade after being released from prison they're still working at McDonalds because nobody else hires felons where you live. We know what it's like to struggle financially, and have some rich White asshole tell us it's our fault for struggling. Even if we didn't face violence from the police, we sure as fuck have lived in fear of them. We all worry about getting pulled over and getting a ticket we can't afford. We know they're not ticketing rich people. They target us, because our towns need revenue and the local board doesn't have the guts to raise property taxes because that'll piss off all the landlords and wealthy folks in McMansions. We in the white working class know that the system is shit. The systemic changes that would help the Black poor and working class will help the white poor and working class as well.

The systemic changes are also largely popular. If you look up various issues that have changes in the criminal justice system, income inequality, stronger worker rights, and pretty much any other issue that would fundamentally reduce harm to the black and white working class, they're very popular. But I won't poll all of them (I was going to, but the list of issues is too damn exhaustive). I'll point out one poll that surprised me:

Fifty four percent of Americans approved of the police station in Minneapolis being set on fire.

Just think about how wild that is for a moment. A majority of Americans saw a police station set on fire as a result of an extra-judicial murder, and were good with it! The majority screamed out, "WE DON'T NEED NO WATER LET THAT MOTHERFUCKER BURN!" The white working class knows that the system is shit. You're not getting a majority of Americans to support a police station being set on fire without a whole lot of the white working class being on board with it.

But if all you talk about is class, aren't you ignoring problems caused by racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression?

Well, I wasn't saying that we should only talk about class oppression. There are issues of oppression that are unique to people that aren't cis-gender straight white dudes. Those do need to be discussed, and thankfully, they are being discussed. But we also need a class analysis of those systems of oppression as well. Not just because it's the right thing to do, strategically advantageous, and brings the majority on our side. We need to do it because the right is talking about class oppression.

Many of us have seen this meme, or one like it:

When we talk about systems of oppression that don't involve class, the right will immediately turn it into a class issue. Straight white cis working class men might not understand what it's like to be oppressed for our gender, race, or sexual identity, but we sure as fuck know what class oppression feels like. And so the right capitalizes on liberals not discussing the issue of class. The right uses class to suppress talk about other forms of oppression. Along with memes like the one above, they'll use Asians as the model minority, saying that because Asians have a higher median income than whites, it's proof that racism doesn't exist.

The right has no problem with using the issue of class oppression to divide the working class. We need to use it to bring us together.

Well you're just a cishet white dude. Who gave you the right to speak about this?!

You're right. I'm a straight cishet white guy. I'm so white that the reflection of the sun off my body has been known to blind people. So hey, let's hear from some black folks.

I think Ice-T knows more about racism than I do. Let's see what he has to say:

Ever hear of a guy named Fred Hampton? He founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party back in the 60s. Here's one of his most famous speeches:

We're going to beat racism with solidarity. He said it and he practiced it. The Illinois BPP made alliances with white working class people by going into bars that had the Confederate Flag on the wall and southern whites who were big fans of the stars and bars. They formed an alliance. A very anti-racist, anti-capitalist alliance that scared the shit out of the government so bad that they killed Mr. Hampton. They even co-opted the confederate flag and altered it with an anti-racist message:

They didn't waste time arguing about flags, statues, or cosmetic issues. They fought for real change together.

The meme feels a lot less cringe when you know that story

One of the major examples of divisiveness mentioned in the Vampire Castle article is the use of social media, especially Twitter, to tear people apart for their transgressions. Someone on Twitter finds that someone said or did something cringe, word gets out, and all of left Twitter spends their days dunking on them. There's pages on Facebook dedicated to getting racist assholes fired from their jobs.

Are you saying these people shouldn't be punished for saying racist things on social media?

No, I'm not saying that. At least not in all cases. There are some people on Facebook that say some of truly vile shit, and I don't mind dunking on them and/or making sure they face real world consequences for their actions. Yet, there's also people that just say ignorant shit not out of malice, but because they're just ignorant. They don't know any better. We know these people exist. If you're white, you know damn well there's been shit you've said that you look back on and just think, "Yikes. That was really shitty of me." You didn't know it was shitty at the time. And you certainly don't want to be dunked on by thousands of Twitter handles because you said something that you know now was pretty shitty. You definitely don't want to lose your job over it. For those people that say something out of lack of education and not malice, we should probably try to teach them instead of trying to destroy them.

Ironically, the author of the Vampire Castle article was harassed on Twitter until he deleted his account when he published this article.

We need to talk to people in the real world, instead of just fighting people on social media. On social media, people are predictable and basic. In the real world, most people are complex and don't fall perfectly into the left or right on politics.

I've posted about one of my coworkers before. An old guy that definitely puts the "ok, boomer" in "baby boomer". He loves Trump. Has said some very cringe shit about minorities. If I hadn't preemptively blocked him along with all my coworkers on social media when I started the job, I imagine I'd have torn him a new asshole on a Facebook comment section somewhere. But when you talk about the plight of the working class and the need for labor unions, the man turns into Mother Jones real quick. If we ever decided to unionize our department, I know he'd be leading the way. We'd be on a picket line together.

Another guy I work with is a Black man that supports Trump and refuses to eat anything except organic foods. My favorite co-worker is a Black woman who is liberal in her politics and wonders why I don't care for Joe Biden.  People are complex. Including minorities. White leftists and liberals need to do more than just read books about racism. We need to be talking to people in the real world. Especially people that don't look like us. I'll let Angie Speaks sum it up:

This may be the last blog post I write. I know that for all the work I put into this post, I'm probably going to reach twenty people at best, so I'm probably just screaming into the void. Nobody writes blogs anymore in 2020. But I felt like screaming, anyway.

The Covid epidemic showed us the failure of capitalism and the scope of class oppression. The murder of George Floyd gave Black Lives Matter renewed life. We have the opportunity to create a better world if we don't fuck it up. Please avoid fucking it up. Don't waste time on cosmetic issues that don't bring real change. Fight for real change.

This Decade Was One Wild and Depressing Ride

I decided to sit down to my computer and punch out a summary of this decade. But fuck, where to even begin with this one?

If someone told me in 2010 we'd be ending this decade debating whether or not it's okay to punch a Nazi in the face, I would have thought you were batshit. But here we are.

We started out with The Great Recession. I started unemployed, as I had lost my job doing security at a car plant in December 2009. I was unemployed for a few years after that. Lost my faith in God. Eventually got a job, got pushed into a career I didn't really want but kind of had to take because not too many people were hiring in 2012. Had two kids. Had bariatric surgery. Ran a half-marathon. Started powerlifting. Got old. Pretty much all in that order.

Ten years ago I wrote for a liberal blog and I wrote a post that said, "This Decade Sucked". I complained about the economy and the music. I said that emo shouldn't have become its own genre. It feels weird that I hated emo then.

Now, I'm still going to be complaining about music and the economy. I wish I didn't complain about emo ten years ago, because now rock music isn't even on the top 40 stations. It's completely vanished from them. If you want to hear rock music, you have to listen to the stations specifically designated for rock music. The music industry is treating rock the same way we treated country music the past thirty years. And we're not seeing a lot of new artists, either. That's the scary part for those of us genuinely concerned about the future of the genre. Rock and roll might be on its last legs.

And the economy. Jesus Christ, the economy. If you want to wonder why ideologies on the far sides of the political spectrum got so popular, just look at the shit state of the economy. Fascism and socialism both grew because people are broke, pissed off at being broke, and want someone to blame. And no, I'm not doing a "both sides" bit. The leftists are correct. The rich are to blame. Fascists can eat all the dicks. It's not the fault of immigrants that you can't pay the rent. But I've often mentioned in leftist circles that we probably wouldn't be where we are if we were doing alright under capitalism. I probably wouldn't care so much that I was selling my labor if I was at least getting a decent rate of return on it.

I've talked a lot about depression since starting this blog, and I think that when people look back at this decade, they're going to say that it was a depressing one. One in ten of us has clinical depression. One in three of us will take an antidepressant at some point in our lives. We even have depression memes now, just so we can laugh at our pain.

We're broke. We're lonely. We're tired. We started out the decade that way, and we're finishing it that way.

This decade was depressing.

It's also been a wild ass ride. All throughout the world, people are pissed off and revolting against their governments. We have an actual neofascist in the White House, and he only got there because he was a C-list celebrity who ran on a campaign of shit talking and bigotry. We've had conspiracy theories out the ass. Social media has completely taken over our lives and it's got us in a constant state of sadness and rage!

And the technology! Holy shit, ten years ago it wasn't impossible to watch a t.v. show on a smartphone, but it was really fucking hard. You usually had to illegally download an MP4 from Torrent and then you could only watch it if you had a phone with a large enough screen. Now, television sets seem kind of quaint, and we're in the age of peak t.v. Even refrigerators run on wifi now. How crazy is that? There's rich assholes out there with $4,000 refrigerators that we can literally hack and cause all their food to spoil from a thousand miles away, and that technology will probably be in all our homes soon! 

This decade may have been depressing af, but at least it wasn't boring. It's been one wild and depressing ride.

The Strange Catharsis of 'Ok, Boomer'

Oh yes, I'm writing about this.

I'm not even sure if I'm a millennial or just on the ass end of Generation X. It really depends on who you ask. Growing up, I was told I was too young to be Gen X. Now, I'm told that I just barely made the cut. I don't know. I was born in 1981.

I've long debated politics on the internet for fun. At least fifteen years. But I have noticed that since around 2015, politics got really nasty. Some people that have researched the issue noticed that it happened right around the time that Gamergate started. I'd probably agree with this assessment, since it was about that time that things just got really shitty. Debating politics had always been fairly ugly, at least online, but it was around this time that the right started offending people simply to be offensive. "Go back to your safe space!", "Snowflake!", and "Aww, you triggered?" were common in the discourse. Racist memes started popping up. Talk about participation trophies. And among all of that, was a shit load of trash talking about millennials.

It wasn't just in the comment sections, either. Clickbait articles about how "Millennials are killing the [fill in the blank] industry" had become so common that they turned into a joke. All of it was related to how we weren't spending money. We would explain that it's a little hard to spend money that we don't have, but then we'd just get called "entitled" by some old asshole in the comment section that probably worked a union job and got to retire with a pension.

Yeah, we're called entitled for wanting to work a full time job and not be poor. To want to be educated without being in a mountain of debt. To want to be able to see a doctor without having to fork over large sums of cash. To survive. We want to have the basics to survive while working full time, and for that, we're called entitled.

One of the worst rants about millennials I heard was a guy who said that we can't afford to buy homes because we're spending money on avocado toast. Think about what that really means. We're being told that we can't afford homes because we're spending money on food. They're mad at us for eating! How fucked up does one have to be to think that's a reasonable thing to say?

The right's political discourse hasn't just been mean, but it's mean because they're trying to offend. Making you angry is the goal. If you're offended, they think they won. They're actively trying to be the biggest pieces of shit possible just for the sake of being the biggest piece of shit.

A while back some millennial noticed that most of the nasty things being said online were by old folks. Mostly people over the age of 40, but definitely older than 50. And so, "Shut the fuck up, Boomer!" entered the discourse on the left. The memes have been pretty nice.

It was a couple of weeks ago that the phrase "Ok, boomer", entered the discourse. Millennials can't take the credit on this one. Generation Z started this one with videos on Tik Tok.

And I'm grateful for it. "Shut the fuck up, boomer" was nice, but there's something so...great...about this two-word phrase. It feels good just to say when someone is doing their absolute best to be an asshole simply for the sake of being an asshole.

"What about black on black crime?"
"Ok, boomer."
"Just get a better job!"
"Ok, boomer."
"Your generation is so entitled!"
"Ok, boomer."

Those two words say it all. "Ok, boomer" just says, "Your ideas are old and outdated. You have no idea what today's working class is going through, and you never cared to know. You're being mean simply for the sake of being mean. Fuck you." Or as one meme put it:

Some of my friends on social media have said that they don't want to join in this because they don't want a generational divide and whatnot. That's fine, but I'm still going to do it for a few reasons:

1. The people you use this phrase on were never going to be reached. They are the ones that are mean for the sake of being mean.
2. I never saw it as a generational thing.

Like I regularly explain on social media, baby boomer is an age demographic. Boomer is a mindset. There's plenty of baby boomers that aren't boomers. You'll regularly see them at DSA meetings. They're often ex-hippies. Decent people who care about others. You might not agree on all their politics, but they are at least caring and kind people.

There's also boomers who are not baby boomers. Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro are millennials who are also two of the biggest boomers to ever have boomed. Depending on who you ask, Jacob Wohl might qualify for Generation Z. He's definitely a boomer. Fuck those boomer fucks.

A friend asked me to explain what a boomer mindset is, and I responded by saying:

Boomers are the types of people who see the working poor and just tell them to get a new job. They call the working class lazy and entitled. They say things like "all lives matter" and post minion memes. They think Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino is a role model.

It doesn't matter what your age is, if you do that shit, you're a boomer.

Now the phrase probably wouldn't be as cathartic if all these boomers weren't responding to it so angrily. So, so angrily. And it's making me giddy.

The past few days the internet has been flush with screenshots of tweets saying that "boomer is the n-word for old people!" and other shit like that. I used it against a boomer and he went on a long ass rant about how "MY GENERATION GAVE YOU EVERYTHING!", to which I responded, "Yeah, you gave us the worst recession since the Great Depression, low paying jobs, a crashed housing market, and a student debt crisis." I could've just responded by repeating, "Ok, boomer", and it would have been just as on point.

The same people who for years have been offensive simply for the sake of being offensive, who would tell us to "go back to your safe space" and whined about millennials being offended by everything, are completely losing their shit over two little words! It's glorious!

After years of trying to explain the plight of today's working class to them, only to have them say we're just not working hard enough, or that bigotry isn't real, or any amount of condescending shit that makes you wish you had the power to reach through their computer screen and choke the life force out of them, finding out that two little words can cause them to feel so emasculated and rebuffed feels pretty fucking good. And I am here for it.

On Masculinity, Part Three: The Difference Between Being Strong and Being Mean

A few months ago I was thinking of buying my oldest daughter a Cricket Rifle. For those that don't know, Cricket Rifles are rifles designed explicitly for youth shooting. They're single shot rifles that have multiple safety mechanisms that prevent negligent discharges. I went on YouTube to see reviews of the rifle, and it led me down a rabbit hole of young girls shooting guns. There was one video where a teenage girl was doing an awesome job of hitting targets in a two gun competition. I would link it if I remembered the video, but this was around six months ago, so I don't. However, I do remember one of the smart-ass comments saying something to the effect of, "Where's all the feminists at on this one?"

I replied to that comment. "Feminist dad right here. What now?"

The guy that wrote the OC didn't respond, but hoo-boy, were there many others who did. One of the more laughable ones was some rando that said something to the effect of, "You're a male feminist. That's the weakest thing a man can be." I really don't remember the exact wording. It was something like that. Calling me some "weak pussy" because I have this weird idea that men and women should be treated equally.

I responded to that comment. Once again I'm paraphrasing, but said something to the effect of, "I think it's funny that you're saying I'm weak, when you think the height of masculinity is to insult someone from a keyboard. There's nothing brave or manly about what you're doing. There's nothing manly about insulting someone when you don't have to risk getting your jaw broken. So once again I ask, 'Feminist dad right here. What now?'"

A few weeks ago I wrote an unintended sequel to my post On Masculinity The first post talked about a need for the left to start having a conversation about masculinity. What it means to be a man without the "toxic masculinity". The sequel was just me ranting, more or less, because I found the right's champions of masculinity to be pretty lacking. I didn't plan on making that post. I just did because I saw all of these weak right-wing males having discussions on masculinity when they have no business calling themselves men. These "men" confuse being mean for being strong.

I probably wouldn't have written the sequel if it weren't for that YouTube discussion. All these right-wing champions of masculinity, and they're nothing but boys pretending to be men.

It's no wonder that Trump is their king. Trump will insult grown men all day on Twitter, but to their faces he kisses their ass. Just look at how he is with Kim Jung Un. Loved to insult the man on Twitter all day. When Trump met him, he was as nice as Mr. Rogers. Trump couldn't say to Un's face what he said to him all the time online. And the right thinks that's manly and strong, since they also think the height of strength is to insult people on social media where they don't have to face real world consequences for their actions.

Since writing my first post, I've done my best to research what masculinity means without "toxic masculinity", and I've come up with the conclusion that wholesome masculinity is broken down into two separate groups:

1. Strength
2. Things that are culturally "guy things"

Now before anyone tears me apart on mentioning this, let me tell you that I'm not saying that any of this is exclusive to men. Like I said in my first post on masculinity, this isn't about rigid gender roles. Wholesome masculinity is about how we can express ourselves as men without toxicity. I personally know professional strongwomen who can outlift me. My karate instructor is a woman with a fifth degree black belt that I wouldn't fuck with on my best day. I know that there are plenty of women that are into culturally "guy things" such as sports, guns, cars, and such. While these aren't exclusive to men, they are things that we men love to use to express our masculinity in a wholesome manner.

Let's go over those two groups.

The first one is strength. The right equates strength with meanness. And that's really sad, because being mean is far from being strong. Sure, you can be strong and mean, but you can also be strong and kind. You can bench press 500 pounds and tell people that equal rights is bullshit, that the poor are just lazy, or you can bench press 500 pounds and be a supporter of equal rights and the working class.

Wholesome masculinity says that we use our strength to protect. We are strong men, and we use our strength to protect people weaker than us. I lift weights. I do martial arts. I shoot guns. I use my strength to protect people, and there's nothing that makes me feel more manly than that.

The second is things that are culturally "guy things". Yes, women can also like these things, but we men like to use them to express our masculinity. Things like cars, sports, and such.

Truth is, I don't care much for team sports. I'll root for my local sports team when they make the playoffs and have a decent chance at winning the championship. Otherwise, I don't care much. I never got into cars. I like combat sports like the UFC, but that's about it.

But I have incredibly strong opinions on grills. INCREDIBLY STRONG OPINIONS ON GRILLS.

I could post several rants on gas vs. charcoal grills. Even typing that fills me with a sort of rage. The rage that a man understands. Gas grills are the tool of the bourgeoisie. Real men know how to light up that charcoal. We'll set them coals on fire, wait until the white appears in them, and then cook our meat to perfection! We don't need propane! Hank Hill can fuck all the way off! Fuck you and your "propane and propane accessories", Hank!

Like I said, incredibly strong opinions on grills. Probably sounds unreasonable to a lot of people, but I will die on that hill.

Grilling and barbecuing is one of the ways that I like to express my masculinity. Since learning how to cook a few years back, I bought a couple of charcoal grills. There's something about firing up that charcoal, tossing on a set of baby back ribs, or some burgers, or hell, even hot dogs, that makes me feel manly af. After barbecuing a rack of ribs, I feel like Ozymandias. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

I really think that most of the "men" on the right are a bunch of tryhards that are desperately seeking to compensate for their lack of masculinity. We on the left have a bit of an advantage there, because we're secure enough in our manhood to not be scared of doing or feeling things that might be perceived as feminine. As men, we're human beings, and there are times that we feel vulnerable. We get sad and depressed. We need help sometimes. Sometimes we like things that aren't considered masculine. It's okay to admit that. We on the left have the advantage of being able to admit that.

For example, my love for barbecuing is built out of my love for cooking. Cooking in the kitchen. You know, that thing that's traditionally considered "women's work". Well, my wife is a middle school teacher so she usually gets home late. So when she sees a new recipe she likes, she'll usually show it to me and I'll just tell her, "Just send the recipe to me on messenger. I'll try it out." She does, and I do.

I spent most of my twenties in the military, where we were taught that masculinity meant suppressing our emotions. Now that I'm damn near forty, being able to express my emotions, even the sad, cry-baby ones, feels fucking liberating. I'm a strong man who lifts weights, shoots guns, does martial arts, and can barbecue the fuck out of a rack of ribs. I'm also secure enough in my masculinity to take pride in my abilities as a chef, to admit when I'm not strong enough on my own, and brave enough to admit when I feel weak and need help.

The right doesn't know the difference between being strong and being mean. Between having wholesome masculinity and toxic masculinity. We on the left need to seize the opportunity to teach the difference. We know how to be strong without being mean. We know how to be men without being toxic. And we need to start teaching it.

My New Workout Plan, and Some Criticism of Starting Strength

Well, let me start this entry off by saying that I thought I was supposed to go into work tonight. Turns out that wasn't the case, so after I drove my ass home, I decided I'd get to work on a post about my new workout plan.

You'll probably notice that I haven't written much about fitness lately, and there's a reason for that. A few months ago, I broke one of my big toes in a stress fracture. I could barely walk without intense pain because of it, so I wasn't hitting the gym. I wasn't doing much of anything. Just laying around, waiting for my broken toe to heal up so I could be active again.

Some of you might laugh and say, "Oh, you broke your big toe? How tragic!" Yeah, you can fuck off. I'm not 17 anymore, and I don't heal from a broken toe after a few days. Hell, it still hasn't healed fully and I'm hitting the gym anyway.

Anyway, after sitting on my ass for two months I finally decided to hit the gym again. I also started doing karate again before the injury, so I started going back to the dojo, too. I went back on my old reliable Starting Strength routine to create a baseline for strength before I ended up on my current workout, which I had planned on starting long before my injury.

After about six weeks of being on Starting Strength, I felt like I was starting to max out on the plan well below my previous best lifts. I'm not entirely sure why that happened. I'm guessing that it's because I'm getting older. After being about thirty pounds below each of my best lifts, I started to plateau. Instead of being stubborn and trying to push through until I reached maybe another ten pounds on each lift, I cut my losses and began the new workout routine.

Enter Functional Fitness!

I had heard about functional fitness about two years ago, when Alan Thrall, a YouTube strongman, thoroughly had his ass kicked while trying to do one of those types of workouts with a gym called Real World Tactical. Here's the video on that:

The title says it all. The workout nearly killed him.

So I had wanted to do a functional fitness workout for a while after seeing that, and after doing some searches on The Google, I found this one to be the most gym friendly. It has four days of full body workouts, but the goal is different on each one. The first day is strength, the second is hypertrophy, the third is power, and the fourth is speed.

On week one, I finished day one without much difficulty. The strength workout sort of mirrors what you'd do in Starting Strength. Mostly sets of five reps, although more sets than the average Starting Strength routine. I was sore as fuck afterward, but not more than usual after a good workout.

It was after that that I saw the Hypertrophy plan and said to myself, "Dear God, what have I done?"

I know that screenshot is posting a little light, so if you're having trouble seeing it, hit the link above (it's hyperlinked as "this one") and look at Day Two.

I posted that screenshot to Facebook and my friends were pretty much a big collective of "lol, nope!" on that routine. I don't blame them. I was dreading it myself.

Still, I managed to finish it against all odds, and finished the rest of the workouts during the rest of the week.

I'm now on the fourth week of the program. The program is supposed to last ten weeks. So here's the results so far:

As far as strength goes, I'm not certain as to whether or not that's improved. Because I knew I'd be lifting more reps than the Starting Strength plan, I started off lifting fairly light. I started doing 185 pound squats and 185 pound Romanian deadlifts. I'm now up to 205 on each, even though I've squatted 235 and deadlifted 265 before I began the program.

The biggest results I've seen so far are in my muscular endurance. I've written very briefly on muscular endurance in my post Achieving Greatness (on a Budget). Basically, muscular endurance is your body's ability to take a beating and drive on. On that note, I've improved greatly.

So yeah, my muscular endurance has improved, so where's my criticism of Starting Strength?

Starting Strength has its name for a reason. It's not called "Starting Endurance" or "Starting Speed" for a reason. It's not meant to improve any of those. It's meant to improve your strength.

And for that reason, I'm thankful for the program. Without it, my lifts would all still be in the high 100s and not the 200s or even the 300s (like my best squat and deadlift). I found new strength because of this program.

But as I did that program, I noticed that the other parts of my fitness began to wane. I wasn't able to run as fast I used to. I certainly didn't have the endurance that I once had. I was able to lift more weight in five rep sets, but that was about the only physical improvement I felt.

Starting Strength is called "Starting Strength" for a reason. It's a beginner program, meant to get you to a certain level of strength that you didn't know you were capable of, before you move onto better things. It will make you damn strong. Like, really strong. Stronger than you'd be able to do with your average bodybuilding or weightlifting plan. But it's not good for building any other type of athleticism.

So if you're new or relatively new to the weightlifting game, Starting Strength is fantastic. Once you plateau on that, you'll want to decide where you want your fitness journey to go.

On Masculinity, Part 2

In my last post about masculinity, I warned about the left's reluctance to have a conversation on masculinity, saying:

 This needs to be said, because the right is having this conversation, and if I, a 37 year old feminist man is wondering what it means to be a man without toxic masculinity, I can guarantee that there's 17 year old boys that are asking themselves that. And if Roosh V, Jordan Peterson, and the Proud Boys are the only ones willing to have this conversation, we're going to have another generation of misogynistic, angry, and mentally unhealthy men to contend with.

I said that nearly a year ago, and since then, I've seen the right all too willing to have that conversation. Except, something has changed in that time. And I'm downright mad about it.

A little over a week ago, this pic of a right-wing nutjob by the name of Jacob Wohl started making the rounds on Leftbook:

I think a certain part of me snapped while reading that. Here I am, a 38 year old veteran of two wars, a past member of the United States Army, a man who lifts weights and shoots guns on the regular, who can pound back any liquor that you put in front of him, and this 90 pound pipsqueak has the fucking nerve to lecture me on masculinity?!

Hello, all of the right! Is this your champion? Come pick up your kid from the Wal-Mart service desk!

I did some research on Wohl, and it turns out that he just turned 21 this year. That means that he was just 11 years old in 2009 when I just started facing the Great Recession, and only 8 years old when I returned from Iraq. This fucking child is going to try to lecture me on manliness? LOL!

I know I posted an entry on the need for the left to start talking about masculinity or the right will, but so far the right's champions are fucking lacking in masculinity. I'm mad as hell about this, so I'm going to drag a few of the right's leaders on the subject.

This leads me to the right's next two heroes of masculinity, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. Let's start with the first guy.

Are you kidding me? This is the guy that became famous because he was scared of transgender people, who wrote a book telling boys how to act like men, and he sounds like Ned fucking Flanders when he speaks:

I don't need to take lessons on masculinity from Ned Flanders.

Recently, it became revealed that Peterson had started a diet in which he only eats meat to prove his manliness. For most of us, we know that that's just compensating. Really masculine guys don't need to say that we only eat meat (we don't, vegetables are plenty healthy). Those that claim to do so, we know that they're just scared of us seeing them for the lack of masculinity that they have.

That leaves us with this last asshole. Ben fucking Shapiro.

Look, if I'm ever going to take lessons on masculinity from someone, it's not going to be from someone that argues for a living, and then cries when someone tries to get physical with them. Ben Shapiro wrote an article in 2017 on masculinity in which he said:

But in their effort to eradicate the destructive male tendency, the Left has pushed emasculation as a solution. While they champion the notion that women can do anything they set their minds to (true!), they simultaneously castigate men as the barriers to progress and masculinity as a condition to be avoided. The goal of the Left, therefore, becomes to train boys not to become men. Instead, boys should be feminized; they should never be encouraged to “be a man.” That’s too pressure-filled, too nasty, too mean.

We really haven't. Seriously. I'm a male strong af feminist. AMA, and I'll tell you that I don't push emasculation on anyone.

But Ben Shapiro really isn't someone that should be pushing the ideas of masculinity on anyone. He's a tiny, weak man who writes articles and gives arguments instead of providing examples of what a masculine man would look like. He can't do it because he's a tiny candy ass that doesn't lift. I bet he doesn't even know how to use a charcoal grill. He's not a man. He's a boy in his 30s.

I will write another article on masculinity eventually in which I talk about wholesome masculinity; what it means to be a strong "manly man" without having to be an asshole. But for now, I just really had to call this bullshit out. I'm damn tired of the right raising up as their champions of masculinity those that I can rip apart like paper. If I can tear you in two, I sure as fuck don't want to hear your definitions on masculinity and manliness. Join a gym, assholes.

This Post Talks About Kids and Psychedelic Drugs

Well, we're just about wrapped up on discussing Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections. I still strongly encourage anyone that's been following this series to get the book. If you don't have enough money to buy it, hit up your local library. It's a very good book.

Chapters 13 and 20 will be discussed here. In chapter 13, Hari put two reasons for depression in one chapter. Genetics, and changes in the brain.

If you suffer from depression and anxiety, you've probably asked yourself, "Am I broken?" I've often asked myself that when wondering why I was depressed. I've had friends and family members talk to me about their depression and ask that. What we really mean is, "Am I just genetically predisposed to suffer from depression and anxiety?" And the answer is, well, kind of.

We're not actually broken. As I've written already and as Hari's book discusses in detail, we have perfectly good reasons for being depressed. Very legitimate reasons. Yet there is two factors that can make us more predispositioned for depression and anxiety.

The beginning of Chapter 13 discusses a concept called "neuroplasticity". Neuroplasticity is the brain changing over time as new experiences happen. Hari interviewed a neuroscientist named Marc Lewis about the concept. To quote:

If you look at a brain scan of a depressed or highly anxious person, Marc explained to me, it will look different from the brain scan of somebody without these problems. The areas that relate to feeling unhappy, or to being aware of risk, will be lit up like Christmas tree lights. They will be bigger, and more active.

Basically, if you do suffer from depression and anxiety, your brain is wired for it.

I can relate to this big time. I once told my therapist, "One of the perks of having General Anxiety Disorder is that you're always preparing for the worst case scenario." I said that completely unironically. My wife and I had signed up to National Debt Relief about six months prior because we were in debt up to our eyeballs, and they asked us if we wanted to pay an upcharge to keep a lawyer on retainer in case one of our creditors decided to sue us. Of course I did. I prepared for the worst case scenario. And then one of the creditors did. Good thing we paid for that lawyer, as he got that shit settled quick.

I'm always preparing for the worst case scenario, because having depression and anxiety has my brain hard wired to always be scoping out threats. When you suffer from those, your brain is in constant survival mode. Detect the threat. Prepare to defend against the threat.

It's kind of ironic that in those moments, anxiety feels less like a burden and more like a warm blanket.

The other part of chapter 13 talks about the genetic component of depression. When I saw that there was a genetic link to depression and anxiety, I was, to put it mildly, alarmed. My oldest daughter has shown symptoms of extreme anxiety, and not just in a "kids being kids" way. There's times when she expresses fear in a "this is not normal, even for a six year old" manner. And come to think of it, my parents have suffered from depression. My dad's medicine cabinet is full of pretty much every anti-depressant on the map. From what my parents have told me, my grandparents likely suffered from depression. But it's not that simple. A group of scientists did study the genetic component of depression and anxiety and, to quote:

Years into their work, they found something striking. They discovered that having a variant of a gene called 5-HTT does relate to becoming depressed.                                                                                                                                                                                   Yet there was a catch. We are all born with a genetic inheritance-but your genes are activated by your environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you. And Avshalom [the leader of the team of scientific researchers conducting the study] discovered-as Professor Robert Sapolsky explains-"that if you have a particular flavor of 5-HTT, you have a greatly increased risk of depression, but only in a certain environment." If you carried this gene, the study showed, you were more likely to become depressed-but only if you have experienced a terribly stressful event, or a great deal of childhood trauma.

So there is a mental component to depression, but it's only activated as a result of the perfectly good reasons why you're depressed or anxious.

So how do we deal with this? Well, according to the book, by doing lots and lots of drugs!

I'm kidding, but not really.

Ronald Griffith is a man that rose through the ranks of psychology and has become a veritable god in the field. After trying to find studies on meditation (more on that later), he found that there were studies done in the 50s and 60s on the effect of hallucinogens that caused people to not only be less depressed, but also quit smoking and drinking. The studies ceased after that, because, well, President Nixon. But in the 1990s, Dr. Griffith had enough political clout to try it again. He decided to do experiments with patients under the influence of psilocybin, the chemical in magic mushrooms. The patients were placed in a room under the supervision of a medical professional, and given the drug. The effects were magical.

Like I keep saying, get the fucking book and read it (Lost Connections by Johann Hari, at your local library if you can't afford to buy it, otherwise it's literally anywhere books are sold), because the results were spectacular, and the experiences detailed in the book are far too long for me to quote. Yet the patients had their anxiety replaced by a feeling of deep connection to people and their emotions.

When I read about this, I did look into where I could have this same treatment. Do drugs, end your depression. I found one retreat out in California that cost thousands of dollars to attend, not including travel costs. So that's out.

So what can we do? That's where meditation comes in.

Or I should say, real meditation. Meditation exercises are pretty much everywhere these days, and a lot of it is just bullshit made to collect your money. Back when I worked at the oil refinery, I would listen to a meditation app on my phone that did nothing but have me doing some breathing exercises. For $5.99 a month, some asshole told me to "breathe in, breathe out" for ten minutes a day and it didn't do a thing. I was still depressed and hated my job.

Hari's book mentions two types of meditation. The first is "loving-kindness meditation". If you're the type of person that hates people out of envy, this is a good exercise for you. Just close your eyes, think of someone that you're envious of, and instead of thinking hateful thoughts, focus on thinking positive thoughts about the person. Do it for five minutes at a time, every day. After a while, you'll notice that not only are you happier, but you're also liking people a lot more.

The other is deep meditation, which does mimic the effects of being on magic mushrooms. One of the patients that had taken shrooms in the experiment given by Dr. Griffith ended up becoming a meditation coach because he knew that the psychological effects of taking the drug were temporary, and he wanted to continue having the mental state that he had after doing the experiment.

I've been trying to find a deep meditation coach ever since reading Hari's book, and it's not an easy task. I live in Southeast Michigan, where 2/3rds of the population lives, and finding pretty much any other thing is easy to find here. Yet finding an actual deep meditation coach, as opposed to a bunch of con artists, is hard. I'll still keep looking, though.

Well, this wraps up my series on Lost Connections. I might do a conclusion post in the days ahead to sum up everything in his book and my last few posts. There's also a lot of stuff I really want to write about if I can get the time. Either way, thanks for reading!