Air Éclair
I'm in the land of empty calories, a true food dessert
Gone with the duckstack
Welcome, readers, new and old, and especially you, the pre-new reader who has yet to be born. I’m glad you’re here. You might not be, of course, but that’s irrelevant to me. If you’re in a torture chamber, reading this in the future at the gunpoint of crazed Duckstack zealots, you might not be totally jazzed about this whole thing, but by that time I will be dead and gone, or at least I will no longer be writing this particular article1. If that’s you, in that torture chamber, surrounded by guns and cannons and rods of god and menacing hooded inhuman growls, I would say, relax. This article has basically nothing to do with you. We’re still going to torture you though
Jannie Centrists
Political Correctness Be Our God
Last week I wrote about how people tend to hold simplistic and reductionist views about God’s interactions with mankind, that everything God touches becomes monocausal. This sort of black and white thinking creates a sort of broad naivete, leading to more or less constant errors that persist because they feel good. You can get a similar effect through piety towards not God but “principles, in abstract”. In my life, I like to look at both sides of issues for accuracy’s sake, but if I ever start smugly refusing to take sides as an ego pump I want you to beat my face in with hammers.
The centrist acknowledges error on both hands, and chooses fear and paralysis. In this way, they are True Liberals- idealists allergic to the slightest compromise. This is of course the opposite of what is implied to normal ears by the label “Centrist”- someone who thoughtfully weighs both sides of an issue to find truth. But there’s a lot more of the former. The whole point of calling yourself a centrist is respect by association, or “stolen valor”. But you need to understand this impulse comes from a sincere desire for destruction, not just wanting to sit at the respectability cool kids table.
Take for example the Prude Right. The highest levels of government have been for decades infested with conservatives who are not just terrified of getting their hands dirty, but terrified to even be associated with the disreputable. Mitt Romney types who spend nearly all of their time trying to pump the brakes not on liberals but conservatives, in a dedication not to principle but a tantrum at being surrounded by the brash and low-class. Trump’s supreme court victory striking down abortion had pro-lifers condemning him nationwide. For all that Trump has done, the Prude Right refuses to vote for him, and refuses to support him, on the grounds of his character and mannerisms. The surface reading is that they want a more principled candidate. The deeper reading is they are unwilling to accept victory while lumped with the uncouth. They call themselves conservatives, but its all the same thing. The Prude Right and the Prude Center are all driven by the same spirit.
Most commonly what animates these people is resentment of people who display courage and initiative. They are jealous of what they can’t be themselves, and more specifically they’re incredibly angry about their ideals getting realized “on the wrong terms”. As is the vice of all idealists, their inability to accept error leads to them never putting in the work to materialize their ideals, so like all idealists they masturbate instead, spinning up impotent echo chambers focused on congratulating each other on their purity.
Centrists will say things like “Racial slurs are morally the same as murder.” This could be an interesting theological question, in a vacuum, but when its real life and there’s actual murders going on its shockingly malicious. And nobody seems to notice, because people, especially women, react strongly to tone. Its a human blindspot that centrists deliberately exploit to farm respectability, and this can and should be repulsive to all honest people.
The ascetic impulse can go in a lot of directions. Its like, look how untouched I am, how above it all. This impulse can even go towards never having opinions, as a matter of piety. This is because centrists tend to believe in civility to the exclusion of all else. As Kevin Dolan says2, conflict is tense and uncomfortable. Always. If you tell people the spirit of truth and light can’t be found in conflict, that all arguments and anything that can be taken as rude is “the spirit of contention”, you will turn people into spineless neurotics. Once you make conflict avoidance a principle of the gospel, you don’t get to have any other principles.
Sexism, racism, x-phobia, etc are not sins & God does not care about them
Pride is a sin, cruelty is a sin
Globo shows you petty cruelty, calls it "racism", & thereby maps your correct moral revulsion to their construct
This is literal mind control
- Kevin Dolan (Twitter 1.0 has since deleted this tweet for hate speech)
The centrist’s guiding star is if you say the right thing in a derogatory way you are just as bad as the rapist or murderer or whatever it is that you’re condemning. You cannot hate evil, you have to respect it and treat it with dignity. I don’t agree with your rapism but I would never ever ever imply that you’re beneath me because of it. Of course these same people gleefully champion catch phrases like “FAFO” and prison rape, its fine when its exported. Where does this madness come from? The civility centrists don’t seem like nice or good people at all, on a subject level. Telling someone to tolerate evil is much more insulting than a mere racial slur. Its far more disrespectful on multiple axis. Its condescending, invasive, manipulative. And it is in the condescension that the key to this puzzle lies. These people are always so condescending.
Its a class thing. Everyone knows blue collar types “cuss like a sailor”. The masses are vulgar and tasteless and simple, there is no reason to deny this. Why did Donald Trump cause such a stir? Because he does not behave as a memeber of the academic intelligencia. To vote for Trump is to concede the simpletons are right. Outspoken prudishness is a class signal.
So the uncommited, unprincipled centrist goes around patrolling from the center, from the place of lukewarm mealy-mouthed dissembling, because they believe their beliefs should give them the right to rule, and they hope if they act like it it will become true3. Their claim to superiority is that they don’t care enough to be mad, and will condemn good people. This hall-monitor behavior makes much more sense in this light. They go around scolding everyone for basically the same reason schoolyard bullies do, but they have found lecturing is much easier to excuse when done with the affect of a kindergarten teacher. They chase the high of being the only adult in the room.
Anyone who tells you their principle is Not Having Hard Opinions is lying. Nobody lacks “buttons”, everyone has things that get them heated. What’s subversive and evil is rather- pretending you aren’t pressing buttons when that’s exactly what you’re doing. The motive of the centrist is not aspiration for holiness, but rather to gain license to insult in a way that’s less legible, as a way of dissasociating from the unwashed masses. Unfortunately, their politics have actual consequences beyond merely serving to set them apart from the “tares”, and they end up constantly making common cause with actual criminals, the worst and most extreme of the destructive and parasitic.
If they’re a Christian, they might say its about loving your enemies. They have to attack the Christian far right, you see, because the left is their enemy and you have to love your enemies so you have to love the left. It sure looks like the Christian far right is your enemy from here! There is no Christian duty to attack those who aren’t as Christian(ish, if we grant4 that Christianity = civility and nothing else) as you, especially not to the exclusion of actual sin. The word for someone who seeks easy targets is opportunist. We are surrounded by moral vultures, in our politics, in our news, in our entertainment. Scavenging itself is not immoral, but you can’t give them power. Anyone who tells you their cowardice is a Terrible Humble Sacrifice is lying.
One way these types endlessly brake pump the productive and vibrant is through advocacy for “nuance”. Demanding greater nuance is a fairly straightforward thing to do. Its difficult to call out as subversive since it can be productive in theory, and it can be played ad nauseum on just about any issue. Since the goal is not accuracy or truth or, especially, pragmatism, it doesn’t come to bear that nuance is subject to a law of exponentially diminishing returns. They do not fall into the camp of people that use words to communicate, but instead find in words all delightful manner of mechanisms to obfuscate and excuse. Whenever you boil out the contradictions what you’re left with is just some babble like “We believe in the platonic ideal of goodness.” Call me a hater. I hate this stuff5. My friend The Golden Moblin said this week “if the sane are not allowed to hate, then only the insane will hate6”. I’ve written about this before, it really worries me that there is such suppression of people willing to get their hands dirty with punishment, confrontations, and violence.
Tying back to last week’s article, people who have never “been in the arena” tend to have naive and binary expectations for how objectives should be accomplished. It is easy to criticize a cop for using too much force when you’ve never had to use force yourself- but even the best baseball player doesn’t have a 1.0007 batting average. In practice things happen fast, and you can’t expect people8 to have perfect thoughts and responses.
Recently someone told me that my comment, “launch academics into the sun”, was unproductive and unhelpful. This person of course has never and would never criticize academics, he’s just bidding for me to play the hypocrite by insisting on my principles. Little did he know that I don’t believe everything needs to be productive and helpful. Although launching academics into the sun surely would be. But actually if you want to learn about anything you have to engage with it, and engaging negatively still counts- insults generate discussion. Nobody can address an issue unless someone throws a spotlight on it- if that spotlight is sloppy its fine. If there’s an actual issue, the more visibility the better. Insults are nearly always preliminary to this. Those who never rock the boat never move it, but to avoid danger and risk some prefer to endlessly theorize about how nice it would be if the boat moved on its own, risk free, guilt free.
Christian scripture does, indeed, talk about love. But it doesn’t talk about feigning love. It doesn’t talk about pretending you have no enemies. Your Christian calling is to forgive, not measure the forgiveness of others. Yet these are the ideas centrists take to heart. It is insulting to expect people to buy feigned love, to play along with your self-righteous fantasies. These people weaponize these fantasies for the express purpose of Accusing their Christian bretheren for not feigning enough love, and not pretending enough to have no enemies. I say this is evil. I say— this is a total power trip. A power trip for the powerless. From such turn away.
Ceiling Fans: A Review
they think they’re so above it all
What is going on. They blow air, but it doesn’t meaningfully affect temperature. They don’t cheer and offer moral support. What’s fan about them? I can’t figure it out. You have to attach a mister or a blowtorch underneath them to even get any utility out. I can’t see any use cases where you wouldn’t be better served sticking a whole chandelier up there, unless you’re a freak who prefers to turn off the lights by pulling a cord in the middle of the room. Ceiling fans excell at this, but so does just sticking a light and a chain in there instead. Additionally, ceiling fan lights go out far more often than regular light bulbs. Have you noticed that? They aren’t wired right or something. The only reasonable conclusion is they are draining the light bulbs in order to feed some central machine in the city, a grand project to resurrect some sort of light bulb demon or something.
2/10
History
All these moments lost, like tears in the rain, which soaked my phone and fried its circuit board so that I can’t easily jot down cute things my kids say9
My phone went swimming so I don’t have as much in-the-moment history written down this week as I would like. Here’s what happened. I was bathing the baby, and when I picked her up she kicked a pile of things next to the toilet, and I flung my free hand out to keep them from eating toilet water, but it turned out my free hand wasn’t actually free and I had just launched my phone at the wall. It caught the towel that I was wrapping the baby in, and the towel gently passed it into the tub. Possibly angels themselves may have intervened to make sure it found its way into the depths of the abyss. Anyway at that moment someone called and it was ringing underwater for like 20 minutes and I got it out and turned it off and it turns out the phone has an “auto-turn on for alarms” function so it rang the whole night too to really grind the moisture into the nooks and crannies. It doesn’t seem to boot past the startup screen now, but its final meal was a bubble bath and I imagine it died happy.
The baby was ripping leaves off of some flowers in our yard and my wife caught her and was like “hey, don’t pick my flowers!” and the baby freezes, and looks down, and slowly picks up the pile of leaves and starts trying to put them back.
The toddler found some old pictures of my wife and I when we were dating. Happily, he told mama, “This is mama, and this is bobdaduck!”, I become my real name rather than dad when I’m in pictures.
My wife asked the toddler if he wants a jetpack, and he told her “No, I do not live in the sky.”
Air Conditioning
Pavlov, eat your heart out
Once upon a time, there was a hungry air. Air eats other air, of course, but its not very filling, especially since air has no fins or anything to swim around or anything. The air was sad, and starving, as all air is, perpetually on the verge of death, eating just enough air to replenish its air supply, but no more.
Well, one day a boy found a diving suit complete with an oxygen tank and everything. He hit the hose wrong with his “Trap Checker Spear” and the suit went crazy spraying air everywhere, like a fire extinguisher, and the boy observed the suit flapping around like crazy. “wow”, he thought, “its dancing.” But by the suit's dancing, the air was filled. It was the most full the air had ever been. The boy (who had a photographic memory, despite having never seen a camera before) decided to write the suit’s movements down, and now his tribe performs this dance to fill the air, sometimes with water. That’s how the rain dance works.
Ducksnax
Seatbelt
I calculate 100% probability of this assuming I manage to publish tonight
I found him saying it at least twice, once in 2019, and once in 2022, so he’s definitely been saying this, its one of his sayings
A decently grounded principle, actually.
for some insane reason. Call it a fit of madness
Shocking, I know, after I have been singing such praises for so many paragraphs
And everyone who hates looks insane, by reputation.
If my knowledge is correct, “one” is a high number in baseball.
Expect people. They are coming. People.
truly nature conspires against The Duckstack. That’s how powerful we are
"Permissiveness comes from cowardace and lack of courage." Destructive things should be spoken against.