Good Morning, Heaving Pukes

August 11th, 2016

I Miss Newspapers

I really have to quit checking the news as soon as I wake up.

Today I awoke and checked Drudge. I found a link to a story containing another link to a 2015 Milo Yiannopoulous story (I don’t even care if I spelled that right) about the destruction of the Nick Denton online empire. I went through a typical daisy chain of links, from one story to the next. By the time it was over, I felt sick to my stomach.

I’m not one of those people who say they feel sick to their stomachs when they really don’t. I mean I felt physical nausea.

Nick Denton created a site called Fleshbot. It was a porn site. I have certainly looked at porn, but I don’t know much about Fleshbot, except that it was very successful. Porn dealers are like drug dealers; their audiences can’t control themselves, so they keep showing up. It’s not hard to get rich selling something people can’t turn down.

Denton went on to create a bunch of oddly named sites that did well: Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, Jalopnik, and Wonkette (possibly the most famous fake blog in history) are among them.

I’m not positive Fleshbot came first. You can check.

Anyway, the Denton conglomerate was (and is) a very sleazy operation. It exudes slime.

As everyone knows, Hulk Hogan killed the Nick Denton cancer. Hogan was videotaped committing adultery, and Gawker either published or linked to the video. Gay billionaire Peter Thiel, who had been outed by Denton, backed a lawsuit. Hogan won, and Denton was handed a fatal multimillion-dollar judgment, which is being enforced.

I’m going to check this time…I was right…YIANNOPOULOS made a list of people who should also sue Denton. It’s quite impressive.

Denton’s crew published a story about a man named Geithner–not a public figure, according to…Mr. Y….and suggested he hired a gay prostitute. They accused actor James Franco of raping a man. They helped leak a Quentin Tarantino script before the movie was produced. They published a lot of nude celebrity photos obtained from criminals. They published voyeur photos of the genitals of male athletes, without the consent of the athletes. Imagine how their wives and kids must feel.

The Internet tends to make people feel invincible, and it brings out their cruelty and arrogance. Denton’s lackeys developed a pattern of tormenting people online, for amusement as well as money, and as far as I know, the Denton apparatus has never expressed significant regret or a serious inclination to examine itself and make corrections.

The Yiannopoulos story appeared on the Breitbart site (Breitbart, himself, was no paragon of dignity or kindness), and the Breitbart site contains links to disturbing social media posts. It’s also full of poisonous comments from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I kept clicking, and I ended up reading a Slate story which was so mean-spirited I decided it should be my final destination for the morning.

The Slate article’s title: “The Heaving Pukes Who Write Gawker and Wonkette.”

This is public discourse in 2016. Slate is not a Blogspot site written by a tipsy anonymous accountant who likes to knock a few back after a ten-hour workday. It’s not a tabloid site. It’s the 2016 equivalent of a 1985 magazine you might have found in supermarkets.

“Heaving Pukes.”

The amazing conclusion I drew from my few minutes of websurfing was that I had underestimated the vileness of the Internet.

That makes sense, when I think about it. The godless leftist side of the Internet, which makes up maybe 80% of the bandwidth these days, is much more vile than the rest of the web. I have never been inclined to spend time on leftist sites. Even when I was behaving badly myself, I was put off by the astounding obscenity and cruelty of the leftist Internet. That means I didn’t get a representative sample of the Internet’s content. As bad as my experience was, it was filtered.

Many people have spent more time reading godless garbage than I have, and a lot of them don’t mind it. They don’t mind when a lesbian crazy threatens to sexually mutilate a conservative writer with her teeth. It doesn’t bother them when someone threatens to have sex with another person’s dead skull. Cruelty and filth bring them pleasure. They titter and smirk.

That’s what America is good at these days; tittering and smirking. We are losing our manufacturing capacity, but we have the Internet, The Family Guy, South Park, Deadpool, and The Hangover.

Man, this place is sick. And of course, I used to contribute to the sickness. I sowed; now I’m reaping.

People need to step back and think about what they’re making of themselves. This is not going to end well. And even if there were no lawsuits or other worldly repercussions to think about, what about the inward cost? What about the penalty of simply being the kind of person who swims gladly in a world of vomit?

To Shakespeare, the worst price a villain paid was to be a villain. People don’t understand that concept. Do you really want to wake up at the age of 60, hung over, in a bed that smells like cigarette ashes, with no real friends and nothing to show for yourself except herpes and a monument built from congealed bile? That’s the future for Internet denizens who love hate.

Unless you’re mentally ill–maybe even then–you can’t hate other people habitually without coming to hate yourself. Hate is a habit that operates without your conscious consent, and when you don’t give it a target, it will find one for itself. When you’re not ideating about cruelty to others, you will find yourself inwardly contemning and ridiculing the creature you have made of yourself.

You will be right.

America is like a hate slingshot. With the help of the Internet, we have been building up hate energy. We have been embracing, approving, and feeding our cruelty. We have outed ourselves as cruel, the way gays out themselves as gay, and like gays, we’re proud of what we are. We are pulling the slingshot pouch back. One day we’re going to release it without the buffers of keyboards and monitors. We will act directly, with our hands and feet, not just our words. We are being turned into the kind of people who can put other people in gulags and death camps.

Where do you turn when the world rains burning sulfur? Earth didn’t come with an escape pod. There is no natural shelter. When America turns into a killing field, there will be no other America to flee to. This was the last refuge. You better give yourself to God and find his protection while you still can. You’re not going to develop that kind of relationship with him overnight. It’s time to get started. It may be too late to get everything you need.

I feel like turning the Internet off and going to live in a hole, but the hate culture has penetrated TV and daily life, so it wouldn’t protect me completely. Increasingly, the world is an extension of the Internet. What do you see when you turn on the news now? Tweets, Facebook posts, and Internet videos. You might as well plug into the Matrix and stop eating solid food.

America is not going to change for the better, but you are not America. You can take measures that will affect yourself and your family. I plan to keep moving forward. What’s behind me is not worth the trouble of turning around.

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