Toxic masculinity is everywhere, and running for president

Joe Rogan dreams of being Billy Bush. Aim high, Joe, aim high! And now he’s found the ridiculously rich (but probably not as rich as he claims he is) presidential aspirant to leech off of and sycophantically praise for his raunchiness. It’s not Trump, though. It’s Dan Bilzerian.

If you’re like me, you said “who?”, but apparently Dan Bilzerian is huge on instagram, with millions of followers. His specialty is looking masculine while hanging out with expensive cars, big guns, and naked women. He’s filthy rich because he inherited huge sums from his criminal father, and, he says, from winning at poker. He sounds like a truly horrible person. Sadly, that seems to be a path to fame, and also sure enough, he is running for president of the US.

But Joe Rogan is even more pathetic. He did a three hour interview with Bilzerian in which he’s practically drooling over him and openly saying that he wants to be just like him. The sycophancy is gross.

I wasn’t able to cope with more than a few minutes of the interview, but someone wrote to me with an annotated breakdown of key moments. Thank you! I could not have made it through the whole thing, nor do I want to. So I’ll just put it all right here.

First Joe Rogan Defending Donald Trumps attack on the Miss Universe shaming her for being fat https://youtu.be/sywnldE9YIA?t=59 That’s not why I wrote you. It’s for the Podcast he did With Dan Bilzerian. This Is so bad, and yet no one has said anything against this monster. If you listen to nothing else just got to link 8. As a mother this broke my heart.

This is the perfect example of 2 white man, essentially promoting rape culture. People where surprised at Billy Bushes behavior, being the sycophant that he is. I was not surprised because as a woman I have seen the bro culture as it is now referred too my whole life. In a recent Joe Rogan podcast,
Joe talks a Dan Bilzerian who markets himself as a playboy He 40 million followers on intagram and facebook https://www.instagram.com/danbilzerian/?hl=en Notice all the groping in the photos.

The whole conversation they spend talking about women as objects being refereed to only as bitches and pussy.

1 Here is Joe Rogan emulating Billy Bush https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=3 @20 second he calls woman bitches.

2 Here, Bilzerian refers to woman as pussy https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=96

3 Here again Bilzerian braging about sleeping with woman even though he didn’t want, and Joe Rogan doing he best interpretation as BIlly Bush. https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=279

4 Here they go on a long rant about woman being gold diggers. https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=1451 Women are almost always talked about in the context of being evil whores that want to steal rich guys money.

5 In Bilzerian calls someone a cocksucker https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=2063
I see you often talk about Donald Trump, and wonder how he could become president. Here is you answer, this behavior is so normalized, that men like this look up to Trump. This and no one in the mainstream speaks up against this type of interaction. 50 Million people take these seriously.

6 They talk about fame and again women only being attracted to money. Listen to Joe refer to it as Balling. This is a 49 year old man https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=2887

7 This is the saddest part. I genuinely feel sorry for his wife and daughters who one day will listen to this. Joe Rogan laments that he has a wife and kids. He says it as if his family are a burden. https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=2901 TO say this publicly is just monstrous. I would not be happy if my husband said this about me.

8 famous for being a baller, https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=2922 Joe loses his dignity here. Look at Bilzerian’s face here, even he feels awkward with Joe Rogans ass kissing. https://youtu.be/RX5Iw-XsWu4?t=2949

If Bilzerian were at some point to get serious about running for the presidency (I don’t think he will, but I’d have said the same thing about Trump), the opposition research has already begun. I have to say though, that I don’t envy the people who have to go through the sludge of youtube and other media sources. It does help when you’ve got point sources like Rogan who revel in the slime.

Keep in mind, though, that there are millions of people who admire these two assholes.

Neither stigmatize nor celebrate mental illness

One of the odd things about NerdCon is the focus on John and Hank Green, an interest I do not share at all, but there were people there who were only attending to see a Green. They write books that I haven’t read, and I’ve seen a few of their videos, but the cult following is baffling to an outsider like me. I didn’t attend any of the Green events while I was there.

But maybe I should have. John Green posted the text of a talk he gave this weekend, and it’s quite good. It was about his battles with mental illness, and the myths around such illnesses.

In the end, I feel that romanticizing mental illness is dangerous and destructive just as stigmatizing it is. So I want to say that, yes, I am mentally ill. I’m not embarrassed about it. And I have written my best work not when flirting with the brink, but when treating my chronic health problem with consistency and care.

Now if only we had a society that believed in consistency and care…

How about that big storm, Seattle?

wastorm

I have friends and family in the Seattle area, so I’ve been following the news about the impending doom-storm that was supposed to strike the Pacific Northwest with some interest. There was a little worry, but mainly I figured it would give my mom something exciting to talk about on the phone. At least I heard about all the pre-storm rush to stock up on candles and flashlight batteries and food, and how Fred Meyer shelves were getting cleaned out; I told them it wasn’t anything to worry about until they were selling out of big sheets of plywood.

And then it just fizzled out. I hear that all you Seattleites got was some gusty blustery rainfall, and then it was over.

How can weather forecasting fail so badly? Here’s a helpful summary of how the models got tricked. Weather is still pretty darned complicated.

It also includes my favorite meme for the non-event.

graysharborstrong

Of course, it could have been much, much worse — the consequences are far more dire if a major storm materializes that was not predicted. Read this account of the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940 to get some perspective — hundreds of people died because back then, they didn’t have the tools to predict the weather as well as we do today, so people went cheerfully off to hunt ducks and walked and boated their way right into catastrophe.

It is easy to forget that there was a time — not so very long ago, really — when there was no Gore-Tex, no Thinsulate, no neoprene, and no polypropylene. There was a time when outboard motors, far from the sleek and powerful marvels of today, were crude, cumbersome beasts, unreliable under the best circumstances and all but useless under the worst. There was a time when there were no cell phones, no emergency beacons, no Flight for Life helicopters.

There was a time, too, when there were no weather satellites, no telemetry to provide data that could be plugged into sophisticated formulas and fed into supercomputers for timely forecasts. Indeed, that the weather could be predicted with any degree of accuracy then — November, 1940, to be precise — seems almost miraculous, meteorology in those days being one part science and two parts the divination of omens, signs, and portents.

I think a few false alarms are an OK price to pay.

The honest-to-god truth finally comes out

I woke up this morning to learn that Donald Trump has totally destroyed the credibility of all of those WOMEN who have been accusing him of sexual harassment and assault. He has proof that WOMEN have been lying.

And that proof is a MAN.

Case closed. Donald Trump has a witness who as an 18 year old British BOY was flying first class on a domestic American flight, and HE had his eyes locked on the WOMAN who claims Trump was pawing at her, and HE swears it was actually the WOMAN who was pawing HIM.

HE has no evidence that HE was even there, but you should believe HIM because HE said so, and HE also said HE has a photographic memory, and also was clearly witnessing the scene through eyes made of cells containing Y chromosomes, and perceiving it with a MALE brain.

The person who was being pawed and might be expected to retain a more vivid recollection than a random passenger on the flight was, well, a WOMAN, and bitchez be lyin’, am I right, fellas?

Of course, Anthony Gilberthorpe also claims to have procured rent-boys for the Thatcher cabinet, that he was engaged to a beautiful American woman who doesn’t exist (is this like the Canadian girlfriend trope, only for the British it’s their American fiance?), and he fed a story that he had AIDS to the newspapers so he could sue them for defamation. HE is not exactly a source with a great reputation for probity, but HE says what the Trump Campaign wants to hear, and HE is a MAN, which adds +10 to all reliability rolls.

That Trump accepts this MAN as a credible source, by the way, adds another oily, repulsive sheen to his trusted television surrogates, Corey Lewandowski, Kayleigh McEnany, Jeffrey Lord, and Scottie Nell Hughes. That isn’t the reek of cadaverine and hydrogen sulfide coming from those people, it is the scent of sanctity and the aroma of veracity, soon to be bottled and sold under the Trump™ brand as the perfume, Honestly.

Two expressions I’ve come to detest

As the Trump campaign steadily sinks deeper into the swamp of racism, misogyny, and anti-semitism, there are a couple of phrases I hear over and over, in multiple variations, and it just needs to stop.

“We didn’t know he was this bad”. I usually hear this one from Republicans. It’s a lie. We’ve all known that he was a colossal boor since at least the 1990s, and he hasn’t gotten worse — this is the same jerk we’ve known for about 30 years. There is absolutely no surprise in his behavior or his record, but people have just always looked the other way. You probably know assholes like this right now, and we’ve always just rolled our eyes, shaken our head, and walked away.

“And now he’s running for President of the United States,” usually said by Democrats with a note of horror. The high office he is running for should not make the slightest difference. Would this be acceptable if he were merely a real estate tycoon, or a ditch digger? Is there some kind of invisible class line such that if you’re below it, it’s expected that you will call women pigs, but once you’re above it, only then does it become rude?

What prompts my irritation is that a friend of mine, a woman, a feminist, and a prominent atheist, has been receiving a flood of hateful comments on facebook that aren’t really that different from what Trump says. We all take this for granted as the normal state of affairs. But I have to wonder…these petty vulgarians have friends — I should say enablers — who retain their associations with them even as they call women “ugly”, “fat”, and “pieces of shit”. They are not shunned. They have their own little communities of hatred. They thrive. They get healthy sums of money from their patreon accounts. They have turned the atheist movement into an embarrassing crap heap.

What I’m learning from Trump is that we can’t expect to see them condemned until a) they’ve been at it for 30 years, or b) they decide to run for president. And until then, the only people we’re going to scorn are the ones who dare to call them out before either of those eventualities are reached.