Your Species Is Scum: A Never-Ending Series

In case you aren't watching the big game (Whether on principle, or because it's a suckfest.) some long-form (O.K., multi-paragraph.) essays on how much & how hard alla youse suck.

Young, Armed, And Prepared To Defend Their Egos

We as a society must honestly ask ourselves how we deal with the danger of a generation of lost men infatuated with violence and lacking the judgment to know when to use it, who are being actively recruited to commit violence against fellow citizens.

Fight or flight? No, it's kill or be killed. Get used to it.

It's hard to know what to do with this. It is strange to know that some of your neighbors are constructing or currently inhabiting a reality in which you, and everyone else, are an urgent threat to their safety. They are in fear of their lives, and as such feel entitled to do whatever they need to do to keep themselves safe from a world that only ever shades further into a state of urgent and omnipresent risk; they melt the enamel off their beings because they believe that's what it means to be informed and aware and engaged. And it is stranger still when you look at how these people act, and what they do with the license that they believe this fear gives them. That duality is what contemporary American conservative politics is. It is about creating a list of enemies, and fantasizing about all the things that might justifiably be done to them, and building the necessary fortifications; about turning on the TV and never turning it off. But also it is about having fun—expressing yourself to the fullest, getting as much as you can of everything you want, never apologizing and never going to bed.

The wreck that this has made of the culture—which is atomized, simultaneously cynical and credulous, blithely predatory and outraged at its perceived victimhood, bottomlessly thirsty and generally too angry and lonesome and scared to think straight—is all around. There are a number of things to say about people who experience the world this way, but one is that their confusion and fear, and the fantasies of retribution and impunity that grow from that, and the fake-it-til-you-make-it recklessness that grows from that, make them not just reactive and jumpy and distractible, but extremely easy marks.

One is born every 30 secs. or so. Enough already!