Gable Gate
Chesterton's fence. Pascals window. Plato's cave. The perfect home for Hobbits.
My Desert. My Arrakis. My duckstack
Parody Issue as we continue our extended intermission
Welcome to the first ever1 issue of duckstack magazine. We’re going to teach you to be a man2, and we have numerous 50 year old women never married and/or3 been 4+ times divorced lined up as guest speakers for this purpose. But first I would like to acknowledge that this article is written on stolen land, that the internet is the rightful domain of anonymous memelords and trolls, and it is only by the force of militaristic government threat that you can post on Facebook without getting mass flamed into either growing up and donning an anonymous persona and/or killing your self. You may call me “bobdaduck”. So cool bro. Kek. Crashout. Emoji.
This time, we’re changing things up. We’re going to name names. We’re going to spill the tea. We’re going to give the deets. Every dirty secret of the Online Right Will All Be Revealed. Who is sleeping with who. What we think of JD Vance’s Wife’s College Roomate’s choice of dress to the latest speech. Our permanent podcaster has opinions on things in general, and he has 10 followers after 15 years. Here’s his take: the right is cool but the left is So Valid. But enough about politics. Here’s our top ten list of girls with septum piercings to sleep with.
Burning Bridges
Toss the golden gate bridge in the fire pit in the backyard
Many conservatives have a story or two of attempting to maintain relationships with a liberal acquaintance who recently found out you were a conservative, and the liberal responds by telling you what a horrible evil person you are, taking your good natured olive branch to them as a sign that you acknowledge them as your superior and as license to lecture you on your many, many sins, and how you are not good enough to be friends with them. Liberals do this all the time. The common stereotype is that of the wine aunt disowning their family at thanksgiving over their support of Donald Trump or their skepticism towards a vaccine which we now know did very little or over not wanting 9th month abortions or saying trans in women’s sports “goes a bit too far”, but in the real world you will see this most often when reconnecting with someone who was once a friend but who recently got really into left wing politics for whatever reason.
This is a little bit funny, because conservatives are the ones known for purity spiraling and taking standards to the point of unreasonableness. Conservatives really do constantly snipe each other over unpragmatic ideological disagreements. Leftists love to say “let people enjoy things.” Conservatives should start saying “let people be bothered by things.” But I as a conservative cannot even imagine telling someone that I will no longer be talking to them over their opinions. Even people I have come to highly disagree with, friends who have gone off the extreme end, I can’t see myself telling them off under any circumstance. The superiority complex that such an act would require would be staggering, and my superiority complex isn’t small to begin with.
But what we see in leftist disowning is less of true arrogance, and more a sort of morality play which is quite divorced from any real world objectives or outcomes, and I think it is profitable to examine it as a genre4. Unlike neuroses that clearly originate from specific localized echo chambers on the various social media sites, performative disowning appears to be a spontaneous, inherent, emergent behavior originating from liberalism itself, popping up on basically every leftist topic, even leftist circles which have very little formal overlap.
The “Proactive Bridge Burn” is different from the classic “Coming Out Story” that you see portrayed innocently in media such as Frozen, Moana, etc, and maliciously in the almost unwatchably performative owns found in the likes of Brooklynn 99 and the Steve Colbert show. Being on the receiving end of the Bridge Burn does feel very similar to talking to someone who has watched a few too many Hispanic telenovelas, except there’s no one they're performing for- there’s no audience, no context, they are taking this out on you in the format of mere text messages, for no eyes but yours. Then, after they finish their dozen paragraphs screed about what a horrible person they imagine you to be, they stop and look at you like as though they expect you to start clapping.5 Its a most surreal sensation and is more confusing than anything else. Despite the incredibly performative undertones, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that would count as a media trope demonstrating this behavior for them to model after. I can only think of the “dry” form, where people just advise you plainly that you have to disown your family over their insufficient gay allyship or support of “capitalist systems of patriarchal exploitation” or whatever.
Observe: once a person has read dozens of stories on reddit, a website designed by the devil himself, stories of family disavowal accompanied by hundreds of disembodied cheerleaders, then the person starts to develop a dissonance where they expect the same dopamine loop from acting out their personal Bridge Burning Story that they experience merely from reading about people doing so- and so, they are unprepared for reality not behaving the way pornography taught them it would. Online, you read the stories, and the popular pitchfork/applause response, simultaneously. In real life, communication isn’t asynchronous, you act something out and there’s no applause, no hundreds of comments telling you you’re So Justified.
One of the foundational principles of Leftisim is propositional association- any immigrant can be an American, a fetus isn’t a baby until it is desired, your circle of insane social media acquaintances is your real family (even more than your blood relatives are), and so on. Leftists get divorced at a higher rate because they buy the idea that if you have differences in ideology then you stop being a family.
In our age of Media Personalities loyalty is absolutely ephemeral, but especially in cases of former conservatives, loyalty is actually an anti-virtue: centrists and ex-rightists take pride in principled disavowals of people who are otherwise decent, especially when they formerly had relations with the person. The Prude Right loves controversy, because controversy is the only time when they have any principles at all. Liberals get to feel self righteous all the time, and Conservatives get to feel like pariahs all the time, but centrists only get to feel smug when playing the contortionist.
There is something of a desperation for validation in the theatre of disavowal play. As though their frustration had been building up and they finally had to let it out, even though literally nothing had happened and you hadn’t interacted with them in years usually. I had a guy paste me this form letter referencing something I had written nearly a decade prior in a way that didn’t really make sense- as though he hadn’t even read the original, and was in the moment name searching me for ammunition to retroactively justify himself, which reinforced the oddly hollow feeling of his stated “good conscience” in which he could no longer continue our association. And then because he’s a Latter-Day Saint and therefore conflict averse he told me he loves me and thinks I’m a great guy. Lol
The upshot is, clearly he hadn’t been stalking and stewing for nearly a decade, and even if you say something really blatantly offensive in front of liberals they’re more offended that you’re disregarding social norms than having some personal stake in the issue. The private Bridge Burn should (unlike the centrist’s Public Disavowal), therefore be viewed most similarly as a starvation response, a reaction to moral inertness combined with pressure (whether internally driven or internet/socially driven) to “do something”, to reconcile themselves to principles that they do not live6. That’s why it feels so much like being a prop in their morality drama- They’re not really interacting with you, they’re trying to work out, and need a villain for their resistance training. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make it more palatable, it only makes it more sad.
Manly Pictures
Art & Culture
here’s some random shutterstocks. woah. look what culture is going on here. youre being cultured vicariously by images7. youre in the know. hot dang
There’s ceos
they’ve got big business. they’ve got AI. dashboard. Shares = hold
Could the lower class ever? No, they could never.
Holy cow. They are reading books now. I’ve never seen anything like it. This changes everything. And says a lot about society and philosophers in a very upper class way. We know the secret, you and I. Words in books. Socratic.
This guys ready. sore you. your on his level now. nice
Gossip Time
gentlemen of leisure and knowledge love this stuff
Once while conducting a business deal on the coast of Barcelona, I gazed at my loquacious surroundings. the air was humid and the sun was low in the sky, and the women clustered around me, one of whom was Veronica. Veronica and Adam Smithes, whose business was on hard times, and he was asking me for a loan. Not a big loan. It would have been pocket change for me. Unbeknownst to them, I knew their business was failing, and I strung the conversation out, leading them on, dragging the truth out of them. The truth. I could see it was painful, and that Veronica was embarrassed for him, considering she was only with him for the money, a stream of dollars and cents that was only now revealed to be drying up. A modern tragedy. But not for me. His Neiman Marcus suit was growing wilted in the cool ocean air, and his lapel pins were so last year. The air was cool and humid, near the ocean, and the sun was low. Veronica withdrew from her Neiman Marcus handbag bear mace with which she sprayed him, and as he cried on the sand the rest of the women went to play Mikasa volleyball on the natural polymeric ivory sand. He was dead of shame moments later. I raised my Baccarat wine glass and toasted to his misfortune, writing an American Express Cheque to him totally several hundred thousand American dollars, which I dropped on his body, which was growing cold in the stillness of death. Veronica would find his corpse later, and feel no remorse. Was she cold hearted? That was just the way it was.
It was very boring. On my Singapor Airlines First Class flight on my private Boeing 747, I kicked up my Neiman Marcus leather boots on the Neiman Marcus cashmere seating, surrounded by women who I was giving a ride because it was convenient. The cabin air was cool and humid, and the sun was low. I raised my Neiman Marcus wine glass and sipped my Baccarat wine. Adam Smithes would never understand the luxuries of life, but perhaps a Poor like him could be put to rest in a Neiman Marcus gold plated coffin. Its the least he could do, to not offend the rest of us. When I was done, I shooed the women away. I had no time for such frivolity. I pulled out my business Barcelona Laptop from my Cava bag and wired $1,000,000,000,000 to myself. I glanced at my Balenciaga Rolex. It reminded me of my first bar mitzvah party, of which I had several. You can never be too nostalgic in times like these. You learn a lot from them, lessons other people, poor people, never get a chance to learn. That’s when you know you have true power over people. I glanced at my other Singapor Airlines Rolex and wired myself another $1,000,000,000,000 before calling it a night. The air was cool and humid. The sun was low. People never change.
PARENTAL ALERT
As explained last week, we will be trimming our family’s history section as a matter of privacy and respect, and it may be absent entirely some weeks.
We went to a petting zoo. A horse blew a raspberry. The toddler blew a raspberry back.
Toddler had picked up saying “I don’t know”, pronounced “knyo knyo.” For example, we found her chanting “socks, socks, socks” in her bedroom, in a nest of socks she had gotten out and made for herself. “Daughter, what are you doing?” “Knyo knyo.”
New rule: household limit on knock knock jokes
DuckSnax
Dragnet
plus or minus two hundred and fifty
never married women who have been divorced 4+ times is more common than you might think
My Sister In Law Disowned Me And Now I’ve Been Transported Into Another World And Now I’m Saving The Kingdom With Water Magic And Political Philosophy
As opposed to how you are actually going to react, which is somewhat similar to how you might look at a six year old who just confidently told you that imaginary numbers aren’t real. You can’t even validate them by getting indignant about their accusations, because the screed is just so disconnected from reality as to not even be insulting. Obviously you have reasons for what you believe.
You will see a very similar behavior in some divorces, where the initiating partner does this dramatic “we can’t live together” thing but not even referencing real things the other person said or did. Argument From Pipe Dream. He wanted to go be a CEO at Adobe and somehow convinced himself that was incompatible with his marriage. Just wacky stuff. But more common than you think. Because self justification only needs to look good to you, not to others or even the person you’re ostensibly justifying yourself to- so your desires don’t need to connect with reality.
Try screaming this about yourself next time you are scrolling facebook