Category Archives: Regressive Leftism

Looks Like the Trannifesto Is Delayed, Again

Last week, social media lit up with the news that the manifesto of the Covenant school shooter, Audrey Hale, would finally be released to the public.

Great, we finally get to read it, right? Well, we got an update just this week:

It’s disappointing that we can’t yet read the words of the deviant behind the shooting, as doing so would allow us to better understand the motive behind the act, and put us in a better position to understand the nature of the deviancy that is plunging our society into moral decline.

But let’s be honest, here. None of us are likely to be surprised by the contents of the manifesto. The motives of the shooter are obvious on their face, just by the nature of the shooter, and her chosen target.

A tranny flipped out, and decided to attack a Christian school. The fact that the trans community has something against Christians is not a secret, especially considering that Christians are usually outspoken about the trans movement.

Even from a philosophical perspective, uncorrupted Christianity is incompatible with the trans movement, as both movements are characterized by a different paradigm of mind.

A central tenet of Christianity is its call to repentance, which carries with it the implication that, because a person may be wrong about their outlook, there is a reality outside of one’s own understanding, and that a person can and should change their thinking to be better in touch with the reality which exists independent of whatever a person may perceive it to be.

Such thinking is at direct odds with the notion that one’s mind determines one’s own reality and one’s own truth, which is a characteristic of the post-truth mindset that supposes that the reality of a matter is determined by one’s perceptions, and therefore any successful self-deception successfully creates a new reality. Transsexuals tend to ascribe to a kind of magical thinking where they determine their own reality, which they can change through force of will.

Audrey Hale targeted a Christian school. For one thing, it’s evident that her sick mind perceived a child as a valid target, and could not allow them to simply be innocent. But it’s also obvious that she hated the fact that Christians voice opinions that challenge her worldview, which intrinsically challenge the magical thinking that is a characteristic of her movement.

What’s more, she likely also hated the fact that Christian thinking had an impact on public policy. Just prior to the shooting, her state of Tennessee has passed legislation that protects minors from some of the more egregious excesses of trans culture, joining the growing number of states that are doing the same. If Audrey thought like the typical extremist of her movement (and the fact that she was willing to murder over it shows that she did), she viewed this legislation as a form of persecution, or even genocide, as the more radical among them often do, and therefore saw her behavior as justified.

In the absence of more information, we can speculate as to why the trannifesto is being kept from the public’s eyes. It’s likely the case that someone is using lawfare in an attempt to keep it from people’s sight, because it’s hard to imagine that it could do anything besides damage the trans movement. The language in the tweet above would seem to suggest that this is the case.

Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone were to leak it. That seems to be how it goes with this kind of thing, nowadays.

Bud Light Debacle Intensifies: Alissa Heinerscheid On The Way Out

The debacle with Bud Light since hiring Dylan Mulvaney to represent their brand is 100 times worse than you know. On Friday, their VP of marketing around which this controversy has been swirling is on leave.

In times past, when there was an announcement that an entity grudgingly had to report, it was made on Friday. This was because it was the end of the work week for many people, when people preferred to wind down, and any announcement would likely be buried by the weekend itself. Thus, Friday was once considered the time where news stories went to die.

But that’s not the age we live in, anymore. In this connected world, the people can be well-informed, regardless of when an announcement is made.

The VP of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, Alissa Heinerscheid, is on leave. We all know what that means, because the same language was used by Project Veritas with James O’Keefe, before he quit and went on to form O’Keefe Media Group.

Only, because Alissa Heinerscheid is only a household name for the wrong reasons, if at all, she’s being processed into unemployment.

We know how it is with companies like Anheuser-Busch: They have shareholders, with whom they want to project confidence. It’s because of this that if you were to ask anyone representing Anheuser-Busch in any official capacity, they’re going to insist that “Everything’s fine, everything is just fine, why do you ask?” even as they’re bleeding out all over the market, and distributors are struggling to find shelves willing to take any more of their product.

If you remember, this whole mess started when TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney announced that he had been hired by Anheuser-Busch to represent their Bud Light product line, a move which alienated typical beer drinkers.

Since then, a video featuring Anheuser-Busch VP of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid has surfaced, explaining her personal belief that she had a “mandate” to change the Bud Light brand from the image she had of its current base, which she described as being “fratty” and “out-of-touch”, and replace that same base with younger drinkers. Images of her college adventures have surfaced, showing her to have been fratty in some of the worst ways, which includes at least one picture of Alissa drinking out of a rubber.

I’m no marketer, but I suspect that one thing a marketer should never say under any circumstances is that a product’s established user base needs to be replaced with a new user base. After all, these are the people who have demonstrated a loyalty to the brand, and it’s usually this customer base that a company would rely on for its continued success. To attempt to throw them out in order to roll the dice on a hypothetical new base would seem an unacceptable gamble, as such a move would demonstrate disloyalty to the established base, and any hypothetical new base would have a low expectation of loyalty towards them, considering the loyalty that the company demonstrated towards their previous base.

Or, at least don’t upset your customers. Oldie, but goodie.

I know that some people are looking for an apology from Anheuser-Busch. Such an apology might be an admission of wrongdoing, and a commitment to do better going forward. But I don’t have my hopes up.

Besides, even if Anheuser-Busch and its ex-CIA chief were to apologize, I doubt that the Bud Light (Bud Lick, LOL) brand would actually recover. It’s gotten to the point that no one wants to be caught drinking a Bud Light, or they’ll be made fun of, with the guys asking them when they plan on getting their “bottom surgery”. No one wants to risk that kind of embarrassment, so no one wants to drink a Bud Light.

But for a moment, can we appreciate the kind of power that Dylan Mulvaney has in his creepy hands? As much as we may hate to admit it, he has the power to destroy brands, costing them billions of dollars (if they even have that kind of money to lose), by just endorsing them. That’s a terrifying thought.

In any case, with ESG losing ground, it’s hard to imagine that Anheuser-Busch has very many options for reducing the damage done. The fact is, they need to push product in order to be worth anything as a company. And with stores not buying many cases, it’s going to be interesting to see the sales numbers when those come.

I know that not everyone out there takes pleasure when someone reaps the rewards of stupidity, but I think that there’s comfort to be had in a predictable universe that still operates according to the principles of natural law, and of cause and effect. Especially when someone has deliberately chosen to malign those who effectively provided for them. We don’t always get to see the out-of-touch city dweller who makes fun of the people who makes his food for him go without. It’s more amusing still when it comes upon a corporate type who can’t identify with the typical working man. There is mirth to be found in this.

I think an appropriate accompaniment to such mirth would be with a nice cocktail, like an Old Fashioned, or a Gin and Tonic. Or maybe a Pina Colada if you’re feeling particularly festive. There are lots of choices as far as cocktails go. And if a hard liquor goes woke, it’s easy to replace.

Buzzfeed To Shut Down

The internet is about to become far less cancerous. BuzzFeed News is going in the dustbin.

BuzzFeed was a website that drew in tons of traffic through SEO optimization, gaming algorithms, and lots and lots of plagiarism.

It was originally a listicle website that posted braindead articles, like “12 Cat Pics to Get You Through Your Wednesday“, “6 Signs That You Are Like Raphael From the Ninja Turtles“, and “8 Lifehacks That Haven’t Been Working For You Because You’ve Been Doing Them DEAD WRONG!

If you’ve been to Buzzfeed, you probably thought that those were actual headlines from their site, because they were stupid enough to belong. Fact is, I just made them up. But if those same headlines were in their site somewhere verbatim, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Many of their articles were bereft of words, largely consisting of pictures. Much of what’s on their site was lifted directly from other websites, often without attribution. In other words, it was like the Cracked.com articles that were written by the users. However, the MIT grad operator of the website knew how to turn the site into a money printer through SEO optimization.

But then they discovered rage-bait, and how that could draw in traffic. That garbage drew in mountains of rage-clicks that allowed the site to rake in a ton of money.

Eventually, they got into journalism, and no prize for guessing that they were lacking in ethics. They pretty much took a political side, and made things to appeal to their tribe. While just about every news outlet does this, Buzzfeed was noteworthy in doing less than most others to hide their bias.

Remember the guy who made the news for getting into a fight and getting killed over a chicken sandwich? That story originated from BuzzFeed. In reality, the fight wasn’t over a chicken sandwich, it was over a place in line. At the time, people memed over chicken sandwiches. So BuzzFeed, determined to game the algorithms for attention as they usually do, decided to season their coverage with bullshit.

Then there’s their tendency to push zombies into their stories wherever they can fit them in. It should be obvious why. Millions of dinguses are coping with their slow decent into mediocrity by fantasizing about how they’d survive a zombie apocalypse, and daydream about a hypothetical scenario where their video game knowledge actually makes them supermen. Because BuzzFeed knows the potential for clicks from the zombie crowd, they’ll randomly mention zombies here and there. Idiot clicks are still clicks.

BuzzFeed knows the potential for rage-clicks from injustices concerning racism and sexism, which is why they look for racism and sexism anywhere they could find it.

BuzzFeed has fried the minds of millions of gullible cretins, so you can imagine how much better the world of journalism has become now that BuzzFeed is shutting down.

Apparently, their bullshit isn’t profitable anymore. I suspect that there’s more to it, such as that venture capital running dry, and ESG is beginning to putter out. The company still has Huffington Post, which is another news site that few people actually take seriously. Hopefully, that one isn’t long out of the grave, either.

In any case, this is yet another sign that the culture war is turning around. I suspect that we’re going to be seeing a lot more like this in the days to come.

Twitter Quietly Drops Prohibition On Correct Gender Pronouns For Transgender Individuals

I’ve pointed out before that when dealing with horse-puckey of great magnitude it helps to have at least one foot in reality. If you agree, then I have great news for you today: Twitter has quietly dropped its prohibition against use of biologically correct pronouns when referring to transgender individuals from its hateful content policy!

291 replies to 163 likes. What a ratio.

In addition to use of biologically correct pronouns, users may also refer to transgender individuals with the names that they were given at birth, an action called “deadnaming” by transgender individuals who decide to change their names as part of the pretense of being someone they are not.

The majority has never at any point agreed with the transgender insanity. However, the fraction-of-one-percent who have furthered the movement have recently held disproportionate influence over institutions, appealing mainly to the political left who present the issue as a matter of social justice.

However, as the transgender movement continues towards extremes, such as exposure of children to the transgender ideology and actions such as of the deadly mass-shooter Audrey Hale, the public conversation continues to turn against it.

For a short while there, to speak against self-delusion and sexual perversity was to speak truth to power. But with Twitter coming around and becoming stronger as a free-speech platform, the public is enabled to honestly and earnestly discuss the matter, and the flow of the era continues to turn against the sexual deviants.

Personally, I suspect that the perverts are going to turn more towards extremes, particularly the dead-enders who understand that they’ve taken positions that will result in them becoming pariahs at a point when they’ll have lost the ability to influence public policy, and a lasting record of their deviance will remain on the internet for ages to come.

The side of the truth has always been the safest side to be on. For those who got on the side of the trans insanity, their best bet would be to jump ship and pretend that they’ve never been a part of it, wipe their social media as needed, and hope that no one remembers that they once pushed tranny bullshit.

Because at this point, the trans movement doesn’t have much of a bright future ahead of it.

A Few Thoughts About the Bud Light Debacle From Someone Who Doesn’t Drink the Stuff

If you’re in marketing, it’s your job to read the room. You have a customer base that you have to appeal to, and to understand their sensibilities comes with the position.

Beer is one of the most ancient beverages still consumed today. What’s more, it has a certain image associated with it. Today, it’s viewed as daddy’s drink, and you can have some once you’ve grown up.

Considering this, it’s understandable why a corporate beer brand wouldn’t hire an effeminate, shrill charlatan who pretends to be a little girl to be a spokesperson for their brand. Such a move would be entirely self-defeating, especially considering that the delusion that the guy represents goes against the values that the typical working-class beer drinker would be expected to hold.

Understanding all this, it should follow that the backlash against Anheuser Busch for hiring make-believe-girl Dylan Mulvaney as a spokeswhatever for their Bud Light brand would prove to be catastrophic for both the company and the brand. It just follows.

It gets even worse in light of a recently-surfaced video of their own VP of Marketing stating her desire to replace Bud Light’s existing customer base with a newer, younger base, as brought up during this boomer news spot:

Getting younger people on alcohol? What an interesting take. But considering that we live in a society that tolerates companies that want young people addicted to cigarettes and fast food, it’s not altogether surprising.

As much as the diversity hire hates Bud Light’s frat image, she seemed to be rather okay with frat behavior, as revealed in a batch of images of her partying in college, among which is a picture of her drinking out of a rubber. But hey, we all do stupid stuff in college, right? Right?

What kind of colleges are these clowns going to? I remember that when I was in college, most of the students studied hard because they were concerned with their grades, myself included. It’s bad enough that bullshit colleges will give their drunkass students passing grades, it’s a spit in society’s eye that they’ll have six-figure salaries to look forward to after they graduate.

Personally, I have little trouble avoiding Bud Light, because I seldom drink beer. I’m a bit of a fitness enthusiast, so I have trouble fitting a beer in when I’m counting calories. When I do go for one, I usually prefer an IPA, or something less corporate, like something from a smaller, more local brewery.

When I want something alcoholic, I usually go for a cocktail. Those are great, because you know what’s going into them, provided you make them yourself. Also, if a hard liquor goes woke, replacing it with a different one is a snap.

I’m not going to pretend that I have a thorough comprehension of the bar scene. I mainly went to bars because a friend of mine wanted to go. But I do know well enough that they tend to have a certain culture, where you don’t want to stand out for doing weird shit. Considering this, to have Dylan Mulvaney, a man known for pretending to be a little girl, as a spokeswhatever for a beer brand seems like an act of sabotage. Granted, not every bar is the same.

Again, if you’re in marketing, you have a job to read the room. You certainly don’t have a mandate to replace a brand’s existing customer base with the kind that you might prefer.

Anheuser Busch has one move which would be more effective than any other to reduce the damage done to their brand. No, it’s not to hope the problem goes away on its own. No, it’s not to release some smarmy advertising spot in the hopes that their original base ignores the fact that they didn’t back down.

It would be to issue an apology. To acknowledge that what they did was wrong, denounce the same wrong that was committed, and resolve to do better going forward.

And the best part is, it doesn’t take a team of marketers or PR consultants. All it takes is a few minutes on Twitter. And it’s free.

They might take a hit to their ESG score, but with major companies like Vanguard already dropping ESG, they’d be ahead of the game.

Or they can continue to writhe while pretending that everything is okay. Either way, I’m getting what I want.

Dylan Mulvaney Would Benefit From An Intervention

I know I’m not the first to say it, so I’ll just add to the noise. Dylan Mulvaney is not right in the head.

Here is a video of him pretending to be a 6-year-old girl:

As the pendulum continues to build momentum as it shifts from left to right, Dylan Mulvaney is going to be one hell of a loser.

Wokeness May Be Destroying the Global Economy, But Economic Hardship May Destroy Wokeness

The insolvency of Silicon Valley Bank has resulted in a run on the banks, which has resulted in more insolvent banks. The Red Pill community has pointed to SVB’s prioritization of DEI initiatives as being a significant factor in the bank’s collapse, and note with a sense of irony that wokeness may have knocked over the first dominoes that may result in a collapse of the global economy.

Of course, it’s also pointed out that SVB may have been targeted by Uncle Sam for having been friendlier to the crypto market. That sounds kinda conspiracy-theoryish, but if that’s the case, I’d say that that effort backfired, considering that Bitcoin shot way, way up in response to the SVB collapse.

More banks have since collapsed due to bank runs, and I’m seeing the more Red Pill types celebrating the accelerated collapse of the woke movement. While I can get behind that, it’s a little disturbing that there are people who seem to be cheering on the destruction of the global economy. It’s enough for me for the institutions to come to the realization that the woke movement is of no benefit for them to get behind. But considering how much harder it would be for everyone if the global economy were to collapse, I wonder what benefit it would be to anyone if things came to that.

Perhaps there would be some benefit, if only to slap more people awake to the true nature of the woke movement, and if people as a whole were to ditch the crutch of the victim mentality in favor of living on one’s merits. Which they may end up doing out of necessity, if things get difficult.

My foresight is not great. If I had better foresight, I would have understood the true nature of the global economy before majoring in Electronics. Live and learn, and all that.

But still, I can see what would come about if economic difficulty were to necessitate meritocratic living. It would mean that ideas such as wokeness would be viewed in terms of its virtues, which wouldn’t be much outside of its ability to manipulate algorithms. Even now, entertainment companies are slowly coming to the realization that woke messaging negatively impacts the quality of their products, which is part of the reason why viewers are starting to turn against subscription-based streaming services. And now, we’re seeing banks collapse after investing in numerous DEI startups.

While the pendulum is already shifting against wokeness, economic uncertainty would further push the general public into meritocracy as they seek out a way of life that actually, you know, pays the bills. Projecting victimhood seldom does as much, and is becoming increasingly evident as being the sport of the interpersonally manipulative.

When matters are difficult, people turn to merit to get by. It’s when motivated by survival that people look at themselves and other people in terms of what they have to offer. That’s the most practical course in challenging times. Because men tend to have greater upper-body strength than women, and the physiology that lends them more towards physically-involved labor, men tend more towards more dangerous jobs that usually pay better than clerical jobs. This means women would tend towards management of resources and maintaining relationships, in part because their relative lack of physical endurance would mean that this would be the safer option for them, but also because women tend to have minds that are better suited to such things. While feminists wouldn’t like it, more women would return to the trad wife life, even if only out of necessity and in consideration of what they’d have to offer in consideration of their innate attributes.

Considering this, what the woke movement shouldn’t want is challenging times, as woke pet causes tend to thrive more in the prosperous conditions that allow for the luxury of societal experimentation, erroneous philosophies, and the inflexibility of thinking that would result from the rigidness that is characteristic of the woke cult.

Yet, challenging times is just what one can expect, considering that it is the natural consequence of experimenting with ideologies such as wokeness.

New York City Teacher Does TikTok Presentation About Sexualities of Nintendo Characters, Says She Was Only Kidding

What New York calls an educator.

There’s a teacher in New York by the name of Remy Elliott (certified as Jeremy William Elliott) who decided that it would be a good idea to do a video on her TikTok account in which she assigned various gender identities to Nintendo characters, such as Mario and Princess Peach.

According to her TikTok presentation, “Mario came out so long ago most people forgot”. Not only that, she claimed that Luigi is demisexual, Princess Daisy is bisexual and polyamorous, Toad is ready to come out as a trans-girl, and Yoshi completed transition to a male, complete with breast-removal surgery that left no scars.

As I read about this, it became apparent to me that the presentation was a joke, which was something that Remy did assert. But even so, to make a presentation like this when representing your school district as an educator seems like an insanely bad move.

But just in case you doubt where this piece of work stands in the culture war, Remy claims to have a trans flag, a bisexual flag, and a non-binary flag on her desk at her work, which would be at school. She did this to show just how accepting she was of these things.

The only reservation she had concerning what she shared with her students concerned her polyamory, because that “is not in the conversation”. But she did confer with administrators, who agreed that it would be appropriate with her to speak with students about her relationships.

I disagree. A teacher’s job is to teach, preferably on the topic of the class in question. It’s certainly no place for any educator to bring up personal matters, especially not personal matters of a sexual nature, and certainly not with students who are still minors. What’s even more vexing is that the school district’s administration, after hearing of Remy’s polyamory, approved the teacher to speak of it, rather than immediately shooting it down for the repugnant idea that it was, or at least recognizing the potential for controversy and bad press.

She said: ‘This is not a conversation that conservatives are having at all. They’ve decided… like, you can’t do this at all, there’s no place for it. 

So, now we know what a depraved half-wit does when she ignores any voice of reason. She’ll upload a presentation to TikTok which bullshits about the sexual identities of Nintendo characters.

‘And that just shows such a lack of thought and care. They’re not understanding of the people. They’re children as people and where they’re at.’

And, no surprise, she’s of a mind that determines that it’s ageist to say that it’s wrong to introduce sexual deviancy to children.

Notice how she’s registered under the name “Jeremy William Elliott”? She is actually a he.

So yeah, we have yet another case of a man identifying as a woman, likely in an attempt to make it easier to approach children about sexual matters.

She added: ‘It’s also strange to point out that they have genders and sexualities, as being a cisgender heterosexual man is in fact a gender and sexual orientation.’

How he arrived at the conclusion does not follow. The fact that Mario is apparently straight does not make it unusual to talk about the genders and sexualities of Nintendo characters. In fact, there are some cases where mature, adult fans may prefer to speculate about this topic, to the end of coming to a better understanding of the characters in question. Putting aside, of course, the fact that the characters in question are seldom, if ever, sexualized in the official materials. What makes the matter unusual in Remy’s case is that he wished to publicly have the conversation as an educator, with dozens of ninth-graders presumably involved.

‘As part of my DOE employment, despite being primarily hired as an English Teacher, teaching our established and vetted sex education curriculum was not only something I was hired for, it was something I was trained and qualified in.’

That was a shitty move on the DOE’s part. After all, Remy can’t be counted on to present the sexualities of Nintendo characters in good faith. I’ve been a Nintendo fan for decades, so I can take issue with many of the claims that Remy makes.

For one thing, Mario and Luigi are evidently straight. This is presumably one of the reasons behind why they go after princesses Peach and Daisy. They want some of that vertical smile. For Toad to transition to a girl would be redundant for his franchise, because his sister Toadette is already a character in those games. Then there’s Remy’s assertion that Yoshi had “top surgery”. Yoshi is a reptile. Reptiles don’t have mammaries.

She added that she only ever spoke of her personal life ‘within reasonable limits.’ 

It’s great to know that Remy is willing to draw the line somewhere, even if that line should have been placed well before telling minors that Princess Daisy is “hella bisexual”. But, who knows? Maybe Remy will do another installment where she points at Samus Aran as being trans, and Link as being a closet fairy. Yoshio Sakamoto and Shigeru Miyamoto don’t seem to be in any hurry to represent the perversity of the moment, so perhaps Remy will step forward to help them out?

Sawyer Hackett Does Not Get the Homelessness Crisis.

The left seems to have no problem with throwing money at problems, as long as the money is not their own. And they’ll happily do so, with little respect for the underlying causes of those problems.

Here’s yet another precious moment:

There’s a reason why the left tends to swing more for younger voters, and that’s because they don’t think younger voters have the insight needed to recognize the left’s platitudes as being as naive and vacuous as they are.

Oftentimes, you’ll hear one of them say that there are N number of homeless people and M number of houses (where N < M), and therefore solving the homelessness problem is as easy as putting one in the other. This sounds appealing if you don’t understand the nuances of the matter, which might be the ignorance that they are banking on.

The fact is, people who are homeless are usually homeless for some compelling reasons, and unless the underlying reasons for their homelessness are solved, the act of scooping them up from off the streets and dropping them off in a vacant home will probably only solve their problem for about a week.

For one thing, people become homeless because they struggle with drug addiction. That’s being generous, of course, as in many cases, it’s not so much a struggle as it is a full-on embrace, to the point that a person deems them more important than anything else, including having a roof over their head.

And that makes it more interesting that California is actually providing homeless drug addicts with the free drugs that they’d need to continue their addictions.

Another problem has to do with mental health. Some people have a difficult time holding down a home by reason of mental illness. While these people could be institutionalized and therefore treated, mental clinicians in the western world are largely dependent on voluntary committals. This is made unlikely in cases where one’s paranoid delusions result in them distrusting the professionals who could otherwise help them.

How does one go about solving this problem? I don’t know, but it’s one major underlying problem behind the homelessness crisis.

Perhaps it’s the case that Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett is truly unaware of the nuances behind the homelessness problem. But it’s hard to dismiss the possibility that he’s aware that the problem is more difficult to solve than just dropping homeless people into empty houses, and he’s counting on you not having the insight to question him about it.

In either case, it’s not a good look.

Western Comics Getting Gutted By Manga and Webtoons

I grew up with the likes of Batman, so it kinda saddens me to see how things are going for the Dark Knight, and his compatriots in western comic books. But at the same time, I don’t want to see Batman succeed for the wrong reasons. And with DC and Marvel comics having become full-on woke rags, it’s pretty much necessary for those comic companies to tumble, if it means that they’ll learn a few things as it happens.

If you’ve been following along, you already know that manga has been killing the hell out of western comics. As I’ve already covered, manga sales in the year 2020 were three times that of DC and Marvel sales combined. As pointed out by Deb Aoki on Twitter, EuropeComics has posted a graph which visualizes just how much hell is being killed out of western comics:

To further highlight the mayhem:

The first four publishers on that list are manga publishers, and each one of them outsells both Marvel and DC combined, with Marvel and DC placing numbers 7 and 8 behind Korean webtoon publishers.

It looks like no one is buying western comic books anymore, and I wonder why?

Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s because Marvel and DC have gone full-on woke, with DC having started a yearly publication starring characters whose sexual preferences are the most front-facing aspects of their personalities.

Did DC really publish this with the expectation that anyone reading it would feel like they’re being taken seriously?

Now, I get it. Your boomer parents and grandparents grew up with Hanna Barbara bullshit like Hong Kong Phooey, and would therefore feel threatened by anything from across the ocean that might challenge them, which has a lot to do with why they’re among the few left who are currently providing Marvel and DC as much support as they have. I also get that they grew up in an age where it was rare for cartoons to be made for anyone besides children. Even so, the idea that children don’t deserve better products just because they’re children is just an excuse to produce inferior products, which in turn conditions children into becoming adults willing to settle for mediocrity.

Seriously.

I read manga because manga takes me seriously enough to present me with entertainment without beating me over the head with the blunt end of whatever misguided moral that the publisher wanted to push, as though they couldn’t trust me to think for myself.

If the story is about a golden-haired dude battling it out with a galactic tyrant on an exploding planet, the comic doesn’t need to do anything to further justify itself. If some cook is facing off against his dad because of some deep-seated grudge, we don’t need a PSA telling us not to pick on people who like buttsecks. If some deranged scientist performs horrific vivisections just to enhance his capacity to explore come caverns, he’s plainly the bad guy, it’s not necessary to make him a Nazi, as well.

If western comic book heroes are to succeed again at some point in the future, they’re going to have to go back to being, you know, heroes. It’s going to take a whole lot of swallowing to down all the pride needed for Batman and the Avengers to come back up from where they currently are.

But in the time it takes for them to do it, I’ve got plenty of other things to read.