Get Off My Lawn Podcast #98 | Being permanently suspended from Twitter is good for your mental health
After being permanently banned from Twitter (and Facebook and Instagram and everything else) I’ve noticed my IQ went up and my stress level has gone way down. Something about checking in on celebrities, feminists, and politically correct comedians several times a day really chips away at your soul. Kicking out conservatives like Milo, Loomer, Owen Benjamin, Alex Jones etc. has only made the bubble worse. See ya! With my new super brain, we check in on academia and discover it’s way worse than we thought and nothing they say makes any sense at all. Sending your kids to college has officially become child abuse. Copyright CRTV. All rights reserved.
Being permanently suspended from Twitter is good for your mental health.
One thing I've learned from it all is that I'm a 48 year old and I'm reading the musings and missives of children.
Like all these, you know, female comedy writers who got affirmative action to some job at SNL or something and you're reading their opinions of Trump.
That's not normal.
A dad, you think of your dad, right?
He'd be with people he worked with, he'd have lunch with a client or something, and then he'd go, maybe on the way home, he'd stop by the pub, if he had no men's clubs, and have a drink with maybe some blue-collar guys or guys that didn't exactly have his same job.
I'm talking about my dad, which, who was middle class, although he grew up working class.
So, the biggest variance you'd have wouldn't even be male-female.
It would be middle class, working class.
Like a working class guy might, on his way home, go to a pub and then there's some suit there and then they talk for a little bit.
So that was your range.
And same age.
It would be maybe 35.
You wouldn't really go by 35 if you were my age.
And you can go up, really, you can go up to infinity at my age, right?
I had beers with a 90 year old the other day.
And that's a normal, healthy range.
He wouldn't be sitting in a room of gaggling babysitters going, that's bullshit.
Or comedians, for that matter.
You know, these beta male drama club kids who grew up, you know, doing musicals.
Your dad would never talk to them.
But Twitter, that's the demographic.
And even the stories that they choose Have this incredible bias.
And that's not normal for a dad.
So, I was basically hanging out at a daycare for the past, I don't know what it's been, six years?
And now that I'm... I'm out, I'm having more intellectual thoughts.
And more grown-up thoughts.
More thoughts that I was supposed to be having instead of going, no, that's wrong.
No, that's not true.
No, no.
No.
Oh, God.
No.
It was sort of like being a teacher in a special ed class.
Where you're just constantly...
Checking people's homework and noticing their mistakes.
For example, let me just scroll through it here.
I still have my friend's phone and I can go through it.
So, men are now marrying up.
New York Daily News.
The city has few statues of women.
Here comes Shirley Chisholm.
When would your dad come across an article like that?
And this is just the moments I'm going through.
New York Daily News.
Again, incredibly biased.
There's like four New York Daily News.
These are the popular articles.
New York Daily News, which is like the New York Post, but for lefties.
So basically for teachers, moms, teachers.
New York Daily News, New York Times, New York Post.
Oh, we got a Post.
And then back to New York Times.
And then the truth out.
Michael Cohen tears down Trump's tower of Russia lies.
Do you know how gay this whole thing is?
See, this is what a grown-up knows.
A grown-up dad, who's with his other dad friends, goes, can you believe this shit about Michael Cohen?
They think they've got a smoking gun here.
Let me just tell you youngsters what the Michael Cohen story is.
Trump was going to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
He builds them all over the world.
I just passed one the other day out in the burbs.
It's perfectly normal.
They're everywhere.
It's a very successful real estate mogul, which is why people elected him.
Any hizzles.
I think they sort of went, let's just forget it.
This is getting too complex.
The optics are weird.
Let's not, let's not build a thing here.
And Michael Cohen said, I think we can that around June 2016.
And then later they go, and the FBI does this all the time.
They ask you about sketchy details.
You get it wrong.
And then they go, you lied to us.
So they go, it was January.
You decided that they're abandoning the Trump Tower thing.
By the way, building a Trump Tower in Moscow is not remotely illegal.
Yeah, but there's so much money for Putin in it.
Yeah, Putin needs money.
If there's one thing Russian oligarchs need, it's another billion dollars.
So they come back and they go, um, no, it's January.
You said June.
Oh yeah, I did.
So you lied to us.
Uh, I mean, I guess technically, yeah.
Okay, then you're going to jail.
Everyone lies to Congress, to the FBI.
It's called making- and those are willful lies that everyone does.
There's been like six people in the past 60 years that have been prosecuted for this.
And it happens on a daily basis.
But the detail thing is a different story.
That's a- A trick that lots of people do in Authority, and there's, who is this guy?
West Point?
I had him on my show.
Trent Cromartie, and he's the director of the Title IX Equity Project for SAVE, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments.
It's like a MEN2 kind of a thing.
Um, not that they get molested, but that they get falsely accused.
So, the way he got in trouble at West Point is he goes in there, and, uh, they investigate, they say, this woman says you sexually assaulted her, you were making out with her against her will, he goes, that's not true, I have evidence, blah, blah, blah.
We went to this bar on June 6th, and we were there with these people, and they saw me, and they saw us making out, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I don't know the exact details on what his proof was, but he was exonerated.
Then he goes back the next day, and he goes, oh wait, sorry, I said June 6th, I meant June 10th.
June 10th.
And they go, oh, so you lied.
You lied to us.
Well, no, not really.
Well, you made a false statement about this sexual assault.
Uh, I guess, yeah, you're out.
He's done.
You're no longer at West Point.
So now he's touring with Betsy DeVos saying, uh, we need to fucking take it easy here.
So anyway, that's the same thing with Michael Cohen.
He got a date wrong.
And the left is just so excited about this scalp they got.
And you go, it's not a scalp, dudes.
And that level of news I shouldn't be exposed to.
I shouldn't be exposed to the New York Daily News.
I mean, oh my god, it's like 80% New York Daily News in the popular articles.
What the hay?
Maybe I was clicking the wrong button.
But then how world leaders met Saudi Crown Prince in the wake of Khashoggi killing.
I didn't want to get all newsy on this.
So let me go through the what's happening.
It's just boring news stories.
And then you go to stand up comedians, right?
Jerry Seinfeld clarifies his PC culture comments on Ricky Gervais.
Oh good, so he's backpedaling on saying that political correctness is a problem.
Gary Goleman is saying he's doing something.
We got some podcast announcements.
Oh, there's an actual joke.
Kumal Nanji, very legal and very cool.
I guess he's talking about the indictment there.
I don't know why he's talking about that.
That's not funny.
How long until someone runs on the platform of food stamps for all?
If healthcare is a right, is food a right?
That's Thomas Massey, he's a congressman.
So the comedians take, and this is exactly what I'm talking about, this was just random, I just pulled it up.
You got me, congressman.
I do in fact think that all Americans in the wealthiest nation on earth deserve to have food.
You have exposed the absurdity of the progressive platform, anti-starvation, brilliantly argued.
And that, of course, is a comedian named Ken Tremendous that I've never heard of, but he's got a blue checkmark and lots of followers.
Food is not a right, by the way.
We don't have... We don't have... I think people don't understand what rights are.
Free speech was a right in America.
That's been taken away.
And this sort of myth that everyone's starving... I met this guy Uh, in Times Square, I was doing my MOS, and he's doing push-ups to stop bullying, and his contention is that, um, that kids in school bully because they're hungry, and if they had free lunch programs, or free breakfast programs, sometimes that's the only meal they get.
And I think, yeah, sometimes it is the only meal I get, because their mom is too lazy to make them breakfast.
I did an article about this on Tackymag.
Lunch is $1.78 a day.
Bums can squander up $10 a day.
Bums can squander up $10 a day.
We got bigger problems than your hungry son.
We got your lazy mom.
What else do we got here?
Oh, this is always rough.
Actors and actresses.
Mark Ruffalo is one of the worst.
He was the guy who was waving the giant flag before the elections going, this is me saying goodbye to the patriarchy.
You've got to check out Mark Ruffalo's Twitter feed if you really want to punish yourself.
He has things like, New York, let's work together and help.
I lost my backpack in a cab and I have no way of finding it.
It's blue and he has a picture of it from like the catalog.
He goes, let's work together, New York.
Yeah, New Yorkers, we can do this together.
Let's find Mark Ruffalo's backpack.
This is the guy that ended fracking in upstate New York, where I used to live near him.
And there's no money there.
There's no nothing.
And there hasn't been for a long time in that part of the Catskills.
When you go to dig a hole, like if I was going to plant a tree, I would sometimes not even bring a shovel.
It's so rocky there that I'd bring a pickaxe, lift the rocks out, and the little bit of dirt I'd have I could just pick up with my hands.
So, there's nothing but rock.
There's not really a lumber industry.
It's so impoverished up where he is that when a corrections officer walks into a restaurant, he's like a rapper.
Like, people wait on him hand and foot, and there's people being super polite, and, you know, he gets his food before everyone else, and... Because he's one of the only jobs there.
That's one of the only money sources.
They're the max of the area.
There's two jobs up there.
Crime and corrections officer.
And there's fucking opioids!
I saw a dead body on the side of the road.
And I said to a cop up there, we were talking about it, this is years and years ago when the opioid crisis was only beginning.
I said to a cop up there, what kind of fucking moron drags a body from his house to the side of the road?
And he goes, actually it's pretty effective.
You can avoid a lot of charges that way.
You can say that he fell and it's kind of a smart thing to do.
If you're looking to avoid some serious charges.
So that's the environment there.
And then Mark Ruffalo's takeaway is, we don't want to risk poisoning the water.
Even though 90% of our gas comes from fracking all over America.
But he's worried about his water supply.
So to make sure his water supply is 101% guaranteed, he punishes all these poor people in that area and says, no, you can't have an industry up here.
You can't have fracking.
Back to opioids, kids.
Anyway, that's Mark Ruffalo.
But so I'm just telling you how vapid Twitter is and what a waste of time I was.
It was in that poisonous hole.
And now that all the conservatives are gone and all the fun people like me and Milo, it is particularly egregious.
And there's all these rules out now, like you can't compliment Proud Boys, for example, or I think Milo, or that gets shut down.
So even if you say, I'm a liberal, but I don't know, they should get a break, you're shut down.
So now the echo chamber is quadruplified.
And you end up with a lot of weird anti-Semitism, like Laura Loomer yesterday.
She handcuffed herself to the front of the building and yes, it was bombastic and a little bit clumsy at times, but at least she's out there doing something.
What are you doing?
So much of Twitter is people literally sitting on their asses telling other people that they're a joke.
The more, the less you accomplish, the more you trivialize others' accomplishments.
And, through the silliness of it all, it was pretty effective.
She was the number one story on Twitter, and then the number two story on world Twitter.
So, number one story in America, in all of Twitter, on a platform she's banned on.
And her contention was, uh, this is kind of anti-Semitic, the way you let Hamas on, and you let, um, Farrakhan on, and you censor Jews when they seem a little grumpy about Islam.
And, um, boy, this app's getting real political.
And then, above her head, one of Sabo's guys built this big sign that said, that had her last two tweets, and it said, not banned for hate speech.
Banned for hate speech.
And the not banned, by the way, he cut off the top of his finger when he was putting this up, because they tried to open the door, and then he tried to shove the door, and then they slammed it shut, and his finger was in there.
So the tip of his finger is hanging by a thread.
He might lose it.
So anyway, he puts up this billboard, and it's two tweets, and the first tweet was Farrakhan, and it said, I'm not an anti-Semite, I'm an anti-termite.
Okay?
What do you want to do to termites?
What's the... When someone finds out that they have termites, what's the first thing they want to do?
They want to wipe them out.
And then we have...
Laura Loomer's last tweet, which was, isn't it ironic how the Twitter moment used to celebrate quote-unquote women LGBT and minorities is a picture of Ilan Omar?
Ilan is a pro-sharia.
Sorry.
Ilan is pro-Sharia.
Ilan is pro-female genital mutilation.
Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed and killed.
Women are abused and forced to wear the hijab.
Ilan is anti-Jewish.
So she said all that.
And you could argue, well, she's just pro-Sharia.
She never said she's anti-Jewish.
But Laura's contention would be, no, no.
Sharia itself is anti-Jewish.
It's so weird when you see these Muslims at women's marches with pro-choice signs.
You can't have a hijab on and be pro-choice.
that weird hijab on when they have a hijab on you can't have a hijab on and be pro-choice that's not the religion that's not how it works You might as well be a Hasidic Jew and carrying a big sign that says, I like cheating on my wife.
That goes out of the religion's rules.
Isn't it amazing, by the way, that Ilhan Omar won, and she's the first Muslim in Congress or something, and they go, who'd she lose to?
Oh, another Muslim, Keith Ellison, who pictured himself carrying the Antifa handbook, smiling, and beat the crap, allegedly, out of his girlfriend.
But that didn't go anywhere, by the way, because he's DNC and it wasn't a juicy story.
That wouldn't make it to the Twitter moments.
But the only way that that woman was up against probably the worst candidate, you could have an anarchist wife-beater.
And I think she won because she's Somalian and they have, what, 80,000 Somalians in Michigan?
Anyway, so I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition.
And people can laugh at her, but it became the number one story in the country.
And then what she did that was smart is she sat down and did a very reasoned periscope.
And the laughs end.
And I realized, by the way, when I was looking at the laughs, I'm looking at a bunch of liberals and kids and babysitters and fucking children and comedy writers and stand-up comedians.
And I'm getting their take on anti-Semitism and the threat of Islam.
And they're all in LA.
They have no idea what's going on in the real world.
And I'm listening to their opinion.
And then you start reading, like, Dave Rubin's take on it, and Michelle Malkin, and people, you know, within my realm.
And I go, oh yeah, that's who I should be talking to.
Why am I fucking scratching my, ripping my hair out reading all these little children's views?
I should be reading adults who have been doing this for a long time.
Yeah, but that's a bubble too, Gav.
There's a difference between a bubble and not wasting your time with children.
Anyway, so actors and actresses, Mark Ruffalo.
So Mark Lamont Hill was talking about how awesome Palestine is and it's just a wonderful place.
You should go there and hang out for a week.
And while he was talking about the importance of Israel, he mentioned from sea to sea or something like that.
And that is common vernacular that Palestinians use when they're talking about wiping out Israel.
They're not looking for a two-state solution.
They're looking for a wipeout.
So, Mark Ruffalo, like, why am I checking in on the guy who played the Hulk?
Criticizing the actions of Israel is not anti-Semitism.
Since one is advocating for human rights, a fireable offense, join us in standing in solidarity with Dr. Mark Lamont Hill.
And then we have Kathy Griffin, who assumes that Dr. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is frowning because she's in the same picture as Brett Kavanaugh.
No evidence of that whatsoever, but that's the way they rule.
And then we have Ron Howard taking a big break from holiday shopping.
You know what's funny?
I bumped into him once in Paris, and he was holiday shopping.
That guy does a lot of holiday shopping.
Okay, here's another thing celebrities do, and comedians, and all the babysitters I was talking about before.
Donald Trump will say something, and then they'll go, oh yeah, and you and your sick lifestyle will go to hell, and blah blah blah.
Like they're talking to him?
Like they're talking to the president?
He's not gonna respond, George Takei.
He just sees it as an announcement.
It's a town crier thing.
So Donald Trump goes, when will this illegal Joseph McCarthy-style witch hunt, one that has shattered so many innocent lives, ever end?
Or will it just go on forever?
After wasting more than 40 million, is that possible?
It has proven only one thing.
There was no collusion with Russia.
So ridiculous.
Then George Takai has to... George Takai, by the way, has 2.8 million followers.
Yes, it will end.
And badly for you, your son, your advisors, and your business.
The moral arc of the universe is long, but not as long as your sentences will be.
Like, why is that in my life?
And that, when you're on Twitter, you inevitably come across these.
And you just go... A normal dad would not say, what about the gay Japanese guy from Star Trek?
How does he feel about the Russia investigation and what it'll do to Trump?
He'd never fucking check in!
What are you doing on Twitter?
There's so many better places to get your news.
And by the way, speaking of bubbles, I cannot recommend the app News Voice enough.
It has the same sort of Twitter moments that Twitter has, right?
But you click on a story like Me Too has been misrepresented as a vindictive plot against men.
So you click on that and you go, that's BBC.
They're obviously left.
But then it says, it gives you another one.
Another category about that is Europe.
So that's probably a bad example.
Let me see, Trump.
Trump meets Z, right?
President Z. Um, no?
Maybe Putin at the G20 Summit?
So then we have, it has all the different links, and it says CBS News, and then below that it says Left.
And then there's another one from USA Today, and then the icon is center.
And then there's a mic drop.
Trump ditches headset after technical difficulties.
RT.
That logo is Russia.
So not only do they give you a bunch of different versions of the story, but they tell you left, Europe, center, Russia.
That's what a grown man should be doing.
Not tuning in on Jess Dweck and Jared Holt.
What does Jared Holt have to say?
Jesus Christ, these people, they're not even political beings.
You'll notice when you look at, you see some article about, you know, white nationalists taking over and you click on that guy's caveat, his canon, not caveat, his canon, and you just see like 500 articles, um, all about the exact same thing.
Sometimes they're all about the exact same person, but you think you just have your little niche and you just go to work.
You're almost like you make fun of the working class, but you're a factory worker.
You just keep churning out the same article again and again and again.
Anyway, um, so on a more intellectual and adult note, I thought I'd check in on academia.
And holy mothballs does my heart go out to young men and young women, sane young women, in college today.
Holy, like it was bad when I was there.
When I was there, our philosophy professor Marvin Glass was the head of the Canadian Communist Party, but um, He also told us that it was okay to have an abortion up until a year after the baby's born.
Sounds good.
So, if your baby's 11 months old, just smash him in the head with a ball-peen hammer, and that's perfectly legit.
It's not a human.
Because, you see, a monkey, anything you say that you would define as human, like, oh, it can recognize people, it can love, it can do this, a monkey can do that up until around 11 months, 12 months, then the baby starts being better than a monkey.
Okay, now you're human.
But if a monkey can do all the same tricks as you, then you're not a human.
Wait, can't computers do all the same shit we can?
Doesn't, hasn't AI got to the point where it's basically as good as humans?
Does that mean we can all die now, according to the communists?
Another thing I remember he said was, um, he said, uh, we're, we're going to start this class.
It was feminist.
I took a lot of feminist classes in class, believe it or not, like the singer, the fucked up, but it wasn't because, um, I was interested in feminism.
It's cause it was the only thing that was sort of like controversial and interesting and they wanted to debate.
So I ended up there.
In women's studies.
But one of the women's studies classes, he said, all right, feminism is predicated on the assumption that women are systematically and seriously oppressed.
If you don't believe that, then you can't be in this class.
And, um...
I thought, I just accepted it back then.
To be in full disclosure, I was a total sycophant.
I worshipped the ground Marvin Glass walked on and I even had a picture of him in my wallet.
I was a radical anarchist communist when I was 18.
18 by the way.
I went to college early because I fast-tracked through high school because I hated high school so much I took summer courses.
I actually almost failed because I was too sycophantic and not giving him enough pushback.
But I did in feminism, or at least I thought I did.
But why didn't I question that thing where he said, you have to recognize that women are systematically and seriously oppressed?
I'll recognize that in the East.
I'll recognize that in India.
I'll recognize that in, um, in Southeast Asia, but it's not a given.
And I remember someone had bigger balls than me and they brought that up and they said, I don't see evidence.
And then he got all pissed off and he maybe even kicked him out of the class.
I remember there was another time in class, he was talking about how porn is wrong, which I now agree with, but, um, he showed some to the class and it wasn't too graphic, but you could tell, you know, they're about to get down to it.
And some chick in the class, This is how young you are when you're in college, how totally naive you are.
And this is why you shouldn't be on Twitter, because it's girls like this.
She said, I don't know if that's really the best example, like, maybe if they were good-looking, like, you had some, like, greasy faggot up there.
She called the guy a greasy faggot.
In class!
And so he lost it and everyone was mad.
And she goes, no, no, I didn't mean it like gay.
And, uh, she said, I meant it like, and he goes, Oh, what did you mean it like as a teacup?
I'll never forget that.
That was in 1988.
Which reminds me of something, by the way.
A little off topic here.
I was arguing with a friend about Lena Dunham.
Remember my Lena Dunham thing?
And I was saying, they talked about hipster racism.
And this woman's living in LA now.
16 candles.
And she goes, it was hipster racism.
And I go, what?
And she goes, yeah.
And she goes, look, Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles is a funny character, but it's not inclusive.
And I don't think you should do comedy like that.
And I go, Long Duck Dong?
Do you remember him?
He was the Chinese guy in the movie Sixteen Candles.
And I go, I don't really see him as racist.
He was a foreign exchange student.
Yes, he did Japanese, Chinese stereotypes, or actually just Japanese and Chinese combined.
I guess that's the racist part.
But, um, what was technically wrong with it?
And she goes, are you fucking serious?
Every time he appeared in the movie, there was a giant gong.
And I'm like, it is a comedy.
You know, I'm like, maybe I am nuts, but I think a lot of people just go, that's fucking evil.
Like, like blackface.
That's evil.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dressing up in blackface, making fun of blacks is obviously wrong.
But there's a whole swath of European blackface, like Black Pete, or at Santa's Helper, or there was the minstrel show, the great black and white minstrel show that was on TV in Europe and Britain up until the 80s.
It was not sophisticated, but I don't think it was like, haha, these black people are losers.
So we're very unscientific about this.
Like, we just go Asian person, gong, boom.
But I could see Chinese people finding this funny.
Like, I mean, in China.
Not one's worse than this.
Let me see if I can play it for you.
What's happening, hot stuff?
So they're all staring at him.
He's being very Chinese.
I guess he's Japanese?
And then he laughs.
Is that derogatory?
I mean, he's staying at their house.
They're feeding him quiche.
And yeah, there's a there's a gong.
But what if it was like a cowboy?
A redneck.
And every time he walked in the room, it was like, down, down, down, down, down, down.
He's like, hey, everybody, what's going on?
And he was like the line dancing guy.
And they said, what the hell you got here?
Big pie with all kinds of yellow fixings in her?
And they go, it's called quiche.
Quiche?
That don't sound like man food.
Well, don't worry about being a man when you're hungry.
Eat up, homo.
And then everyone laughs together.
God, we're so worried about other people's feelings.
Half the time they're not even offended.
And how many times have you heard of that, by the way?
Like with HR complaints, where someone else complains on behalf of two people, and the two people didn't mind.
That happened to my dad once, where he was dancing with this friend of his, like a secretary, and he said, women love bald men!
It reminds them of a penis!
And the woman laughs, and then someone else files an HR complaint.
And the woman barely remembered the joke, and she goes, yeah, that sounds funny.
I probably laughed.
Did I laugh?
Yeah.
I don't care.
I'm not filing a complaint.
Okay, well, I'm filing it then.
I've heard of that more than once.
Where other people over here, a male and a female, having some fun banter, and they get in trouble, even though both of them are totally happy with this scenario.
You know, at Rebel I had no, there was no HR for the longest time, and it was men, free to prey on women with no recourse outside of the law.
And guess what we did?
We laughed our fucking balls off and made tons of really good jokes.
One of them I did, which is probably sexual harassment, I would undo my pants, my belt and everything, and then I would walk by and I would just drop them and go, oh god damn it, this belt!
And then awkwardly pull out my pants like I was super embarrassed.
That always got a laugh.
And it wasn't sexual, it's not like I pulled out my pants in front of an employee and went, you like that?
There's plenty more where that came from.
It's called Slapstick.
It's actually classic British slapstick.
Loosely based on the hit show Some Mothers Do Avem.
Um, yeah, when humans are left free to roam, it's not Lord of the Flies.
It's Lord of the Guys.
And the guys are down for some fun.
I was talking about that on my show with Anthony, Anthony Cumia.
He said, he used to do CBS Radio, and he said there's all these sexual harassment allegations coming out 16 years later.
And he goes, I was there.
It was a fucking party.
And the worst thing that was happening to women back then is they were laughing so hard mascara was streaming down their face.
We were drinking in the day, we were doing stunts, we were renting big buses, going on parties, going out all night, doing coke.
He didn't say coke, but I assume if you're going out all night, you need some nose beers.
Or as they call it in Austin, space food.
Because it's a powder that after you eat, you're not hungry anymore.
Or snort.
Um, so yeah, all of this monitoring and this don't do this joke and get this person kicked off Twitter and it just, it makes everything less colorful, less fun.
And less intellectual.
So let's get intellectual here.
I checked in on academia.
And it reminded me of when I was in school, but in a totally different way.
When I was in school, my dad said he'd help me out, he'd pay half or something, which is stupid because it was only $3,000 a year in Canada, and I had a job, but I took the $1,500, and he said he'd pay half if I take math.
So I took Calculus and Algebra in college.
Dude, it's like being a professional boxer if you don't box.
You just sit up there and get battered with numbers.
And if you're not a math person, which I'm not, it's just hell on earth.
Like every sentence It is a slog.
And I just have my hand up, my hand up, my hand up.
I don't get that.
What do you mean by that?
What do you mean by that?
Until the guy wanted to kill me.
And even then I get it like a 55.
University level, like second year algebra in college is grueling!
Sometimes our tests, our exams, would be one question.
Find 3x plus y squared split about the z-axis, the surface area.
And you're like, okay, come back in three hours when I've written 15 pages of this one question.
I don't even fucking know what calculus is.
And every time my dad visits, he tries to explain it to me, and I have no idea what he's talking about.
I know what algebra is.
Algebra is 3x plus 1 equals 13.
X must be 4.
Got it.
It's a little placeholder while you figure out how you got there, and then you can go back and fill in the placeholder.
Easy peas.
What the fuck is calculus, dad?
It's the rate of change.
What?
He was just down here visiting and the guy is just, he gets, like, it's like old men are like chicks in that you're drinking with them, everything's going fine, and then something sets them off and you just go, uh-oh, this isn't going well.
Like, we're in one bar and they're blaring really loud American Ninja, you know, the obstacle course, and there's a kid in it.
It's a kid's American Ninja, so it's for around 10-year-olds.
He goes, what the fuck is this?
Why is this on?
And I go, Dad, one of the girls in the thing is on the show.
So the whole family's here, like cousins, relatives, they're all here to celebrate, eat some fries, and watch their little girl do this super hard obstacle course.
Ugh!
I don't think children should be doing this kind of entertainment!
Well, it's not like a... We're not watching Nickelodeon.
She's not doing a little movie where she's being exploited.
It's just sports.
How is it different from my son's soccer or baseball?
Ugh.
And then he said his favorite new word.
Pathetic.
Pathetic.
And he goes, I'm beginning, and I'm like, can you fucking keep it down, please?
I'm beginning to think people are getting stupider.
Dude, it's not a bunch of fucking yokels who come and go, we want to watch a little kiddie show where they do an obstacle course.
What are you, you're fucking dumb if you think that.
It's families who want to see their daughter and celebrate and you're ruining it if you don't fucking keep it down.
And I'm trying to give him this look, because I don't want to yell, because that's just as bad.
But, you know, I'm in my neighborhood.
I'm going, just fucking keep it down, old man.
Our roles have reversed in the late age, where now I scold him when he's a bad boy and give him timeouts.
God, he would walk around the house nude sometimes, and I said, Dad, don't subject me to your naked body.
You're a hundred years old.
And he goes, Constantly coughing.
He goes, you know, we were away at a hunting vacation, a hunting camp and I got up, you know, they were drinking till the late wee hours and I got up in the middle of the night and I was walking past everyone and you know I sleep in the nude.
75 year old body by the way.
The front looks like a naked lady.
There's no ass there, it's just like a hairless vagina.
And then there's age spots everywhere.
And the skin is just hanging.
The skin looks like someone's wearing a coat.
And he goes, um, they looked at me and said, oh look, it's a wine bag.
and it's still got the tap on the front.
But I guess it was good having him there, watching him play Sudoku for five hours, and then watch really loud rebel videos that woke up the whole house.
Thank you.
I guess that was pleasant.
Anyway, sorry, I've been trying to get to this since the very beginning.
I was supposed to say, hey, Twitter was diluting my IQ, and now I'm smart again, and we're going to talk about academia.
Meanwhile, this podcast is almost over.
All right.
So there's this scandal going on with the NYU prof, and her name is Alvital Ronal.
And she was the mentor to this graduate student named Nimrod Reitman.
Nimrod, I think, is an Israeli name.
I think in the Quran, I think in the Torah, it's a cool guy, but sorry, I grew up in Canada.
Nimrod means dork to me.
Anyway, Evita Ronel, she is a feminist literary theorist who studied under Jacques Derrida.
I thought Jacques Derrida was from way long ago.
And now, she's a Jacques Derrida professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.
Can you imagine the kind of shit these people talk?
She also, by the way, back at NYU, she headed the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies Program.
I mean, just reading these people's job doesn't make any sense.
What in the Sam Peckinpah hell is transdisciplinary studies?
Does that mean you take different types of trans classes, like trans math and trans English, and then you combine them all?
Isn't that intersectionality?
Alright, so, this woman, this lesbian, theorist, trans, whatever, was molesting her mentor, I mean her mentee, this gay dude, Nimrod.
And I think it took place at NYU and she'd be lying on her back and she'd grab his hands and put it on her breast.
She's 66 years old, he's in his 20s and gay.
Lady, what did you think was gonna go down?
They're not known for their overwhelming lust.
For their old female lesbian boss.
But, I'm reading into the scandal, right?
And then, uh, I find this... Everyone's defending her, of course.
And there's this feminist scholar, Judith Butler.
And so I look up Judas Butler.
I looked up all of these people and the more I would look at their work, the more I'd realize that they've just invented Klingon.
They've invented a kooky language.
They've invented a crazy language and they just teach it to kids and then kids go $200,000 in debt learning this crazy language.
It's not even English.
And they go into the real world and they say, Hi, I'm here to talk about the didactic hegemony of a homologous visaporation.
And their boss goes, You're not hired.
I'm sorry, this is only English speaking people.
And I don't, that sounded kind of English, but what was that?
Oh, that's Icelandic mixed with barf.
So Here's a random example, and they all write like this.
All the people.
Fuck the scandal.
I don't really care about some lesbian grabbing a guy's hand and putting it on her tit.
Poor baby.
Get over it.
What I care about is the lack of sanity in academia.
And so, I just sort of threw a dart at these names, and I ended up focusing more on Judith Butler.
She's a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley.
She's admired as perhaps one of the smartest ten people on the planet!
Uh, Jesus Christ.
Okay.
Check out this sentence.
This is from a scholarly journal post she did in 1997.
It's called, Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time.
Oh, that sounds interesting.
That sounds easy to understand.
You ready for this one?
This is what I've been trying to get to the whole entire show.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and re-articulation brought the question of temporality.
into the thinking of structure and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural identities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Any questions?
What?
I have one question.
What the fuck?
So I sat for about an hour trying to go through, because I had to look up almost every single word, for about an hour trying to figure out what the hell this lunatic was saying.
And I think I kind of got a part of it.
So we'll take it, bear with me here.
And this, imagine a student having to do this.
So that's just a paragraph.
That took me like 10 seconds.
It takes about an hour to understand 10 seconds.
So you basically have to be dead and a ghost and have a million years to get a degree that makes any kind of sense, or even just to understand them.
And I bet if you did an essay with that and you didn't have their same jargon and you just said, I think that black people are poor because of systemic racism.
I mean, that's me trying to be normal.
And, uh, I bet they'd go, you sound- you talk like a fag and your shit's all retarded.
You have to use my fancy words.
Okay.
Let's start with just the fir- by the way, that was all one sentence, that paragraph, with barely any commas, so I didn't really know when to stop.
The move from a structuralist Now, I had to look that up.
Half of these words don't appear in the normal dictionary, so you have to look it up on Google.
Okay.
"Structuralism is the methodology that implies "elements of human culture must be understand "by way of their relationship to a broader, "overreaching blah, blah, blah." Okay, structuralist just means societal.
So the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations, what she means there is that basically, like let's say New York, Blacks are poor up in Harlem and the Upper West Side is rich because of structuralism, which means systemic racism, basically.
So, rich people stay rich, poor people stay poor.
And then she goes, in relatively homologous ways.
What?
Have you ever heard the word homologous before?
It doesn't mean anything.
I looked it up.
It means similar in position, structure, and evolutionary origin, but not necessarily in function.
And then she says, to a view of hegemony.
Hegemony means leadership, dominance, especially in one country or social group over there.
Okay, so this whole first part, the move from a structuralist account, capitals, understood social relations, to a view of hegemony, in which relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and re-articulation, all of that crap just means the rich stay rich and the poor get poor and it's structural.
It's not organic.
It's not cultural.
It's not, she's saying it's, it's not their fault.
Okay.
And then she goes, it brought the question of temporality.
That's the state of existing.
Even the definitions, I don't understand.
So temporality means the state of existing within or having some relationship with time.
Doesn't everyone have a relationship with time?
You're in a state where you're having a relationship with time.
Yes.
That's like that Johnny Rotten song we did with Afrika Bambaataa.
The Eve destruction is causing a sensation.
The human race is becoming a disgrace.
And then the chorus is like Afrika Bambaataa is playing the keyboards and it's like... And John Lydon's going, I'm in a time zone.
I'm in a time zone.
Of course you're in a fucking time zone, John.
You're in the state of existing within or having some relationship with time.
What?
You don't need a word for that.
Into the thinking of structure and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory.
I had to look him up.
He's apparently some Marxist professor from France that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one.
This is where I give up.
So I think all of this, up until structural totalities, means we're oppressing the poor in this horrible system.
And you've got a point with that, I guess, if that's what you're going for.
I think the idea of welfare encourages single moms, says, you don't need a dad, gets the dad out of the house.
Kids grow up without a dad.
There's a predilection for crime when you don't have fatherly discipline.
Then there's the jail.
Then you end up in jail.
And then because you're in jail, there's no more dads around.
And that even further propagates.
The idea of fatherlessness and it's this horrible cycle and the incarceration rate is a form of slavery.
I can get pretty left-wing with you on that one.
But then the last 800 words of the sentence take structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure.
What the fuck is a contingent possibility of structure?
Theoretical insights inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony.
Oh, I think I got this.
So we see all this around us, right?
With poor blacks in Harlem and rich whites in the Upper West Side.
And that renews this myth of hegemony where the rich people deserve to be rich and the poor people deserve to be poor.
And then I guess that is bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the re-articulation of power.
So, okay, I think I might have it.
We see this oppression.
We see the poor blacks in Harlem and the rich whites in the Upper West Side.
And someone says, we should re-articulate these strategies of power.
And we go, no, because look, they suck.
There's crime there.
They're inferior.
They're garbage.
And then she would go, no, that's the structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways.
Okay.
Judith Butler, whatever your name is.
Here's what you were trying to say.
The problem with inequality is we see it, we see these structures that repeat themselves.
I don't necessarily agree with this, by the way.
I think we live in the most pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture in the world.
And my dad's a great example of that.
He grew up with no fucking shoes.
And, uh, when you see this inequality, it ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy where people go, well, we can't put money or structure into the hood because they'll just waste it.
And we're better at this kind of thing.
It's actually an anti-communist thing.
In a way.
Because communists think they should control everything, and Marxists believe they should control everything.
They should dole out the money as they see fit, because they're smarter than everyone.
They're the intellectuals.
Marx is an intellectual.
Althusserian.
Professor Althusserian is an intellectual.
God.
Alright, here's one more.
Now this is a, um... This is a professor of English at the University of Chicago.
His name is Omi K. Baba.
This one is much easier to digest, but it is still fucking total and utter jargon and deserves an F. If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline,
Soon, the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudoscientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to normalize, italic formally, the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
Guess what that means?
It means I'm an asshole.
I don't fucking understand a word of what you just said.
The ruse of desire?
Desire's a ruse now?
Is this when you live in a relationship with time?
Like, this is fucking LSD Willy Wonka shit.
If you send your kids to that, it's child abuse.
Why would you send your kid to a school where everyone appears to be high on their mind on MDMA?
And this is how people talk on meth.
Hey man, you got the uses of discipline, student repetition, and guilt.
We have justifications, pseudo-scientific theories, superstitions, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as a desperate attempt to normalize, formerly the disturbance of discourse, of splitting that violates the rational and enlightened claims of the Annunciatory Modality.
I mean, I've seen, when they had that show, what was it called?
Intervention.
You'd see them on meth.
That really hot chick who looked Indian, Native American, had blonde hair and no eyebrows, remember her?
And she would say stuff like that.
She'd be doing math all day.
She said, but how can two negatives be a positive?
A negative and a positive end up being a negative.
Shouldn't two positives be a positive?
Oh, I finally got that off my chest.
But I had just, I am in awe of the quality of education.
And I think words like structuralism and all this, it's another example of Political correctness and the far left, they don't really want truth.
They want to control your thoughts and tell you how to speak and make up their own fancy little fucking language.
I remember when my daughter was about six, there was this bratty kid whose parents were getting divorced and she called herself the Queen.
And, uh, everyone else that hung around them was the servants.
And they did whatever she wanted.
Her parents were getting divorced, by the way, and she was only three, so... That's how you make brats, folks.
And, uh, I didn't like that.
And I said, so are you a servant to my daughter?
She was maybe five or six.
And she goes, yeah, we're all servants.
She's the queen.
And I go, yeah, we're not doing that.
And, uh, I said, you tell her that McInnes's don't follow rules and you're nobody's servant.
She's like, she seemed kind of bummed.
And then about a week later, I was talking to one of her other friends and I said, and then did you, was, was my daughter there?
And they go, Oh no, she doesn't.
She's not allowed out because, uh, she said she's a McInnes and she's not a servant.
So now she's, she sits alone.
And I went, way to go, me.
Way to get involved in a child's life.
Maybe it was just a joke.
And there I was enforcing some dumb joke.
Oh, my heart sinks just thinking about it.
Meddling with your kid's lives.
And parents always want to do that, too.
Like, they find out there's a bully and they want to go contact the parent.
Dude, you're just gonna make it worse.
You have to train kids to handle their own problems.
I meddled and I fucked up.
But, it looks like school gets even worse when you get into your 20s.
Alright, that's all I gotta say.
I like you more than a friend and try quitting Twitter for just two days and tell me if you don't feel your IQ sore and your stress level plummet.
Bye.
Whenever it rains, it's hard not to think about the folks right here in our community who have no roofs over their heads.
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