Week of September 6th, 2020

Hi,

I didn't send one of these last week since I was at home for the long weekend and my time was pretty occupied. It's a shame, too. I could have written a damn essay on Kyle Rittenhouse alone and just be getting started. I don't have nearly as much stuff this week. I'm back in the school grind, but I think my hardest semester is behind me now, and since I already have a job, I'm really just trying not to drop the ball. So it's been pretty chill up here, at least compared to previous semesters.

College COVID Recap

Pessimism wins again; we are fucked. If you'll bear with me, I think it's a good idea to peruse the information, since I think my school serves as a microcosm for all kinds of chaos happening all over the country. After the explosion of cases, they switched to daily updates, so I have a lot more information to work with here.

The number of positive tests since move-in is currently making its way toward 1000. By itself, that's a worrying number, and it has nowhere to go but up, though fortunately the growth doesn't currently look exponential. Also, it's now very obvious that this growth is happening internally rather than being brought in from outside. Far more tests were conducted before three weeks ago than after, since everyone moving into on-campus housing had to get tested, but only a handful of those tests were positive. After that date, there have been far fewer tests, but the number of cases has exploded. My understanding is that the university is now testing people if they feel sick, were exposed to someone who tested positive, were out of town, or who requested a test for some other reason. Of course, the university has a limited ability to perform contact tracing, so they can't really lock down everyone who's been exposed to someone who just tested positive, and most people who are positive haven't gotten test results yet. Luke, the point is that someone is going to die, and it will have been fully preventable. Obviously the dipshit freshmen who don't care about the health of their peers are terrible, but the blame for this falls squarely on administrators who had the resources to predict this possibility.

The school is scrambling, and I don't know how long they'll keep this up before they send us all home. This week, they unceremoniously kicked everyone out of one of the residence halls to make room for more isolation space. No one had any indication this was a possibility, so I can't imagine this was part of the plan. I believe they're moving a number of these kids into a nearby hotel, so have fun walking to class, I guess.

All the primary schools in town have shut down, so you have to imagine that it won't be too long until we meet the same end. Maybe they'll hold out to the tuition refund deadline of October 15th. Hopefully nobody's dead by then. Many students have now been suspended for misconduct, but it's probably not enough.

I've been going pretty hard on the administration in this message, but I don't really believe most of the conspiracies. I think they genuinely thought that students would be more adept at slowing spread and didn't anticipate many of the problems that have arisen. But others are going much harder. Many are pretty much calling the university president a killer. I've seen some socially-distanced protesters about. I think a lot of folks really believe that the administration fully anticipated what has happened and did it anyway to make more money. So tensions are pretty high.

Apocalypse Recap

I think it's not a bad idea to start grouping together all the new apocalyptic events since they just keep coming. I'm sure you've seen it, but California's on fire and the whole west coast is red now.

It'd be a cool aesthetic if it weren't so terrifying.

Someone cut together a Blade Runner video from unedited footage. One of my professors who is teaching remotely from the west coast literally got evacuated from his apartment during a lecture when burning ash started raining down from the sky. At this stage of the apocalypse, why the fuck not? God have mercy on us. One thing I should point out is that this was not caused by a gender reveal party gone wrong, no matter how much Twitter wishes it were. Yes, pyrotechnics at one ridiculous gender reveal party did cause one of the earlier fires, but if it were just that, it wouldn't have gotten like this.

From CNN. The El Dorado gender-reveal fire.

No, most of them were caused by a big dry lightning storm. No tragic irony was involved. It was just God smiting us the good old fashioned way. Okay, there may still be a bit of tragic irony here. We'll be seeing red skies more frequently as the planet gets hotter.

The other apocalyptic thing I saw this week was the Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem, a Republican, is currently using millions of dollars of federal Coronavirus relief aid to fund a marketing campaign for tourism. South Dakota has the second-highest number of new cases per capita of the US states. I'm so fucking done.

Everything Else

I could make this whole email about Shoe0nHead and Chris Ray Gun, but I'm going to try not to. In case you don't know who I'm talking about (though I'm sure you do to at least some degree) they're both left-leaning semi-political YouTubers who gained notoriety from making fun of “SJWs” in the #GamerGate era. They both followed a similar trajectory. They always avoided getting into “save the west” territory and were more focused on comedy. And they're both pretty funny. You'll recall I sent you Shoe's “Hell World” video when the George Floyd protests took off. These two have been through the ringer the last two weeks like you wouldn't believe. It starts when Shoe starts hanging out with leftist streamer Vaush and starts evolving and discussing her leftist political views, particularly on her Twitter. Since her fans are pretty politically diverse, quite a lot of them weren't happy about this. These guys could get so ridiculous that there's now a novelty account dedicated to right-wing Shoe0nHead simps. Chris Ray Gun was also a guest on one of his streams. To be clear, I didn't like any of this either. Vaush is a complete dumbass and a complete commie. He's very polite to people and has an inviting “anti-woke” vibe, but he's really competing for dumbest “Internet leftist,” and there's some tough competition for that title. I also think there's a fighting chance that he's a nonce.

I don't think that he's a good person to be aligning oneself with. But whatever, Shoe0nHead can talk to whomever she pleases. I'm not going to do the whole guilt by association charade.

But then Shoe went on a 24-hour trans rights stream hosted by The Serfs which was probably a mistake given all the commie guests. There's been a number of these trans rights megastreams and they seem to inevitably get out of hand. This one definitely did. After Shoe had left the stream, a bunch of LARPers started discussing what would be done with all the cops after the violent communist revolution. It's cringe. After this stream, her ex-friend fellow “anti-sjw” right-wing YouTuber Sargon of Akkad made a pearl-clutching video attacking Shoe in pretty ridiculous fashion. As evidence that the people she was spending time with were no good, he included a clip of one of the other guests engaging in the “what to do with all the former cops” discourse. But Sargon's single-digit-IQ fans thought that the person talking in the clip was Shoe, and have gone after her aggressively, and then after Chris for defending her among other things. There's this raging mob of people attacking them as communists or concern-trolling about their tragic descent into left-wing politics. Also there's a lot of simps.

But that's hardly the end of it. That'd be too easy. Now that they're trying to engage more in left-wing online politics (well, mostly Shoe. Chris tends to get shit by extension), they're getting scrutinized by the insufferable people in that circle. So while one mob is running around calling them both communists 24/7, an entirely separate group is running around calling them Nazis 24/7 for participating in #GamerGate to purity test leftists who dare speak to them. Chris Ray Gun is a Nazi and a communist at the same time. There was even a group of leftists literally body-shaming Shoe using some kind of pretzel logic.

I can't remember the last time I saw anyone get hammered this hard from the far right and the far left at the same time by no real fault of their own. It has been incredible to watch.

Moving on, The Daily Beast has now published the “more female drone pilots” meme unironically. It really reads like satire. “She kills people from 7,850 miles away.”

In a strange government overreach, Naples has imposed a mandatory DNA registry for all dogs so that they can determine what dog owners don't pick up their dog's shit. You have to imagine that it'd be cheaper to just hire people to clean it up. No, government, you may not have my dog's blood. Jesus Christ.

Okay, finally I want to talk about the movie Cuties, recently released on Netflix. Unlike other people criticizing this film and Netflix's decision to host it, I will not be posting child pornography in this email, so if you really want confirmation that what I say is true, you can look it up on your own or follow a few of the links here. If you haven't heard of Cuties, that's probably a pretty frightening introduction. But it is a fitting one. Cuties is a French film by female director Maïmouna Doucouré about a Muslim girl who winds up split between her conservative upbringing and dance culture when she joins a dance troupe composed exclusively of 11 to 13 year-old girls. Crucially, those are the ages of the actresses. The characters are young kids, they're played by young kids, and they look like young kids. When the film was first released, it was not controversial. It premiered at Sundance to acclaim. The stated purpose of the film is to criticize the hypersexualization of young girls in online culture. Here's the movie's American poster.

But this is not the original poster on Netflix. I will not show you the original poster on Netflix because I consider it to be pornographic. As you might imagine, that poster sparked controversy. Netflix apologized and changed it. I thought that it probably wasn't a good reflection of the film since no one involved in the project had a say in the Netflix marketing, and I was hoping that this controversy would be the end of the Cuties discourse. Then the movie came out. Obviously, I have not watched this movie. I have seen clips. I have seen enough. I don't give a fuck about the artistic intent. These are real kids, and this movie is a pedophile's dream come true. It's hard for me to demonstrate this without showing it, so if you'd really like to have this proven to you, I'd recommend you watch PaymoneyWubby's video about it. But I wouldn't watch it with anyone else in the room. And then I'd probably throw my laptop into a fire when I was done watching and wash my eyes out with dish soap. I don't know if I have a favorite way to criticize the hypersexualization of young women, but it's definitely not filming extended close-up sequences of real scantily-clad 11-year-olds twerking and putting it up on Netflix for all to see. Remember, Netflix has vehemently defended this film.

You'd think people would be able to criticize this regardless of political views, but unfortunately that isn't the case. The outrage has been almost entirely from the right. Conservatives have rightly called out how negative changes in our culture regarding sex positivity have made this kind of soft-core child pornography appear acceptable. This is a case where I agree with the conservative view with zero reservations. Of course, there were also a number of QAnon folks who jumped on this train to call out their elite pedophile cults and whatnot, but that was a minority. It was mostly conservatives being 100% correct and concerned parents cancelling their Netflix accounts. There were a few call-outs across the aisle, but very few. Notably, Congresswoman Gabbard used the #CancelNetflix hashtag.

This resulted in some weird shit. Please try to remember that Congresswoman Gabbard is a Social Democrat at the far left of the Democratic party.

But many people on the left have been defending this filth. Here's an article from The Verge which epitomizes the trope “conservatives pounce.” If your reaction to the obvious sexual exploitation of young kids is to go after Republicans for being too mad about it, you're pretty sick. This isn't about a “harassment campaign” against a “female POC filmmaker.” It's a campaign against the normalization of child pornography. And if rejecting this film makes me a prude or a pearl-clutcher, I'll gladly accept the title.

I think the world might be ending,

Jacob Morris