Maybe They Should Give Out Awards for the Dumbest Reason to Vote for Someone
He said he likes Gabbard because he used to live in Hawaii…
So. Jeffrey Epstein, huh?
Occam's Razor's feeling pretty dull on this one. I could understand if it happened after he went to trial and was convicted and his appeals failed and he wanted to duck out on spending the rest of his life in prison, but a dude with billions of dollars who could hire the best lawyers on the planet killing himself before all the evidence had even been gathered?
Oh and funnily enough, he was taken off suicide watch despite having ‘attempted suicide’ a week prior and despite being an extremely high-profile criminal who could potentially take down dozens of other extremely high-profile people.
Oh and fancy that, the cameras broke.
Oh and wouldn't you know it, the guards both ‘fell asleep’ and then faked records to cover up their fuckup.
Oh and what a coincidence, turns out his hyoid bone is broken, which is far more common in strangulation murders than suicides.
It’s all speculation and we’ll probably never get any real answers about what happened, but I don’t know, man. I’m normally skeptical about conspiracy theories and I think they’re the evolution of religion (a subject of a future newsletter) but this whole thing is just too much of a convenient mess for too many motivated and powerful people. His flight logs are packed full of well-connected influential monsters who've devoted their lives to insulating themselves from any negative consequences, and who've expressed no qualms at all about amassing their fortunes and their power through tremendous abuse and exploitation of the masses resulting in considerable aggregate suffering and death, and I'm supposed to believe that these same people wouldn't do everything in their power to murder their sex-trafficking pedophile friend before he has a chance to rat them out?
Eh whatever, it's not like anything's going to happen. All the terrible fuckers who've thus far gotten away with each and every one of the terrible things they’ve already done will continue to be terrible with zero repercussions. Just look at Trump and all the awful shit he's done in his life, and how he and his entire garbage family have all somehow been like Teflon for consequences.
Ground-State Thinking
The other day someone posted some screenshot from a magazine or newspaper or something interviewing The Everyman™ about politics, and it was excruciatingly vapid and pointless—the same vapid pointless bullshit that I remember during the 2004 election when a bunch of people were talking about how they were picking Bush over Gore because they said Bush was the kind of guy they felt they could grab a beer with.
Which, I mean, 460,000 dead Iraqis and 4,400 dead Americans later, I sure hope it was worth it to vote based on some idiotic fantasy about knocking back a cold one with a Yale multimillionaire who would buy and sell your family if there weren't laws against it and he could make a couple bucks.
Then again, Democrats are about as bad as Republicans when it comes to hawkish foreign policy and American imperialism, so who knows—maybe we also would have ended up invading Iraq for no reason with Gore as President too. What a world.
Anyway, what I realized is that the shit these people say sounds like if someone finally successfully managed to invent a collar that translates dogs' barks into english. "I voted for Trump last time and this time I was leaning toward John Delaney but after watching the debate I think I'm going to vote for Biden because he seems like the candidate most likely to sneak me a strip of bacon under the table when nobody is looking."
I mean okay, that's an exaggeration but not by a whole lot.
If you're going to vote for someone based on whether or not they were in the military, many of America's most notorious serial killers and terrorists were in the military, so that seems like a really shitty criteria for whether someone's worthy for office.
And as far as "eloquence", there are some very pretty ways of saying some very shitty things, so maybe try focusing on the content of a message rather than its form. Like, if you advocate genocide through the world’s most beautiful-sounding poem, that doesn’t mean we should commit genocide.
It's exhausting to see people thinking like this but it's not exhausting to think like this, so that's part of why it’s so prevalent. It takes so much more energy to shovel that shit than it does to make it, and the path of least resistance almost always prevails. Already you and I have thought about what they said way more than they did.
That's why so many people focus on superficial shit like "eloquence" and "civility"—because it's an intellectually lazy filter they can use to make quick decisions about people without having to use too much brainpower. It's no coincidence that "eloquence" is used far more often to describe non-white candidates, specifically black ones (oh look—there’s Biden being racist again): it's because racism is another extremely superficial way of thinking, and in the brains of people who opt for the lowest cognitive energy level, these superficial markers are the ways they categorize and filter and make judgments. (I’ll have more on the language and (often racist) implicit contrasts of political discourse in some future newsletter.)
Ultimately, thinking takes way more energy than just tripping over the first stupid stop along a journey of ignorance and planting yourself stubbornly there forever. And the introspection—the reflective meta-analysis of thinking about thinking—required to recognize your ignorance and work to remedy it requires some of the most cognitive energy of all. Which is why it’s so unfortunately rare.
But it’s well worth the effort, worth struggling through the challenge and the discomfort. Especially since there are so many Ground-State Ideas that, if too prevalent in aggregate among the population, will kill us all. Tulsi Gabbard’s birthplace or Kamala Harris’s eloquence or Donald Trump’s beer-date-worthiness won’t stop Global Climate Change, or guarantee healthcare to the thousands who die from preventable illnesses each year.
That’ll Do, Pig
Twitter was actually fun, briefly, for the first time in like probably two years. A guy made a dumb, extremely specific comment about feral hogs and everyone jumped on it with some choice jokes. That's how things used to be, back in like 2011, before everyone just started yelling at each other all the time.
Anyway, here are a few of my own best riffs, which I’m listing here because I doubt we’ll ever have as much fun or feel as much comedy catharsis on Twitter again for a while.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye
I was on vacation last week—which for me means that instead of doing my actual job I just spend all my time working on a bunch of side projects and/or feeling extremely guilty if I don’t—and ended up composing a bunch of new music. I’ve only uploaded a couple of the new tracks so far but I’ll put the rest up soon.
Exposed Wiring - Imagine some 1980s superhero origin story about someone getting electrocuted by experimental technology and having it somehow affect their biochemistry. Sort of like getting bitten by a radioactive spider, but, y’know… more like getting shocked by a radioactive computer?
It’s Your Funeral - You’re walking through a foggy graveyard and you hear the sound of an approaching funeral march. You follow the sound to a bunch of familiar faces crowded around a fresh grave with your own name on it. (Sort of a sibling track to The Old Graveyard but not as haunting.)
Stuff I'm Into
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t - A dude with a thick Chicagoan accent makes nature videos. He went viral for a video where he tried to save a coyote pup he found in a field.
Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty
Weapons-Grade - A near-future dystopia where war machines can think for themselves. When one of them suffers a sudden existential crisis, it sets off a chain of events that threatens the very survival of humanity.
Seinfelt - Anthology of surreal/existential horror synopses and short stories set in the Seinfeld universe. Jerry loses all his teeth in the middle of a show. George wakes up one morning suddenly unable to feel hot water. Kramer finds a hair in his belly button that keeps getting longer the more he tries to pull it out. Elaine falls asleep at the salon and wakes up with live snakes for hair.
Co-authored with T. R. Appleton.
Waiting Room - A Twin Peaks-inspired iOS app that lets you record and reverse audio and video. Learn to speak phonetically backwards and record videos of yourself as though you're in the Black Lodge.
Music - Check out some of the music I’ve composed. Please buy some tracks you like if you want to help support my ongoing musical creative endeavors.
Video Game Streams - Do you appreciate video games as a form of entertainment but you don’t really feel like playing them yourself? Come check out my stream! I play all sorts of games while talking to a camera. Put it on while you’re falling asleep at night!
Thanks!
As always, thank you for reading.
If you've enjoyed this newsletter or have gotten anything out of it, please subscribe (if you haven't already) and tell your friends.
Until next time! Stay strong.