Everything is Clickbait
A Demonology of Hot Takes Archive Post #2
The following is an old post from my old Wordpress blog, A Demonology of Hot Takes, which does not exist anymore. It was published on October 10, 2020.
Some girl on Twitter won the internet (if I ever Win The Internet, I’m gonna shut it down for a day, just to see if people notice that it still looks like 2002 outside) yesterday by making a Strong Uncompromising Take on whether Christians should use dirty language. She’s against it, which is uninteresting. But she made it the Hottest of Hot Potato Takes by saying there’s never any circumstances under which a Christian should EVAR use profanity.
EVAR.
Naturally, filled to the brim with the Replies, the Retweets, the Quote Tweets (now an official category), and the Likes. She made a Thread out of it by announcing that Everyone Who Was Bothered by her rhetorical overreach clearly was bothered on an emotional level by their own guilt. You notice, and you disagreed, therefore you are Emotionally Defeated by Caring.
Mission Accomplished.
The subject under discussion doesn’t matter. You could, and have, read similar takes on every subject under the sun. It’s practically a syllogism:
Major Premise: Everyone who is Different from Me is Wrong.
Minor Premise: You tell me how You’re Different From Me, at Great Length
Conclusion: You are Wrong.
This is the result of sending people to college who would have been better suited waitressing or welding. Everyone now thinks they’re educated, when all they read is everyone else’s short-form pseudo-journalism.
Journalism is about pretending that the Unremarkable is New, so the business is exactly about inflating events to Historical Significance. This can only be done by a kind of Learned Amnesia, where every occurrence must be treated like it just arrived from Pluto, rather than by all the epiphenomena reported yesterday. I stopped paying attention to the news years ago. None of it is new; all of it is advertising. At least a Blue Apron ad is upfront that it wants me to buy something.
I realize that there are outfits that go for depth and coverage, but most of them are ideologically devoted, and in any case their signal fades in the noise. The news isn’t controlled by the New York Times; it’s controlled by Teen Vogue, and Teen Vogue is run by angry green-hairs who think the New York Times is a tool of the bourgeoisie (if Teen Vogue is no longer running, just substitute some other fashion glosser or bloggy squeakbox with a name like “The_Emissary” or “Livery31”. You know what I mean).
And of course, I replied. I made nuanced argument. I addressed complications with her sweeping generalization. And as soon as I hit the tweet button, I felt like a moron. She wouldn’t read it, and if she did, she’d treat it like some mini-Rosetta Stone to be translated according to my spiritual/emotional deficits, because that’s what we do now. At best I get a point and laugh with the appropriate Twitter trope such as “Imagine thinking {bastardized version of what I actually said}”. And I would deserve it, for bringing a dueling weapon to a rock fight.
I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer think about, or even believe, that there’s a solution to this. The weight of our collective choices are going to fall to earth, and we will deal with the consequences. The best I can do is to be a monk in a sea of stupidty, keeping the candles lit. Pretentious and cope? Sure. But I find it’s best to keep your expectations low.