The J.K. Rowling to Bette Midler TERF Pipeline

Eat steak together at night

What does it mean when Andrew McCutchen tweets “Furries?” Did it mean something different in 2014 or 2019 than it does in 2022? What did it mean when Bob Uecker said:

“They kind of gather in a huge fur ball. You can’t really see the leader, he’s in the middle. You can hear him mumbling and talking, trying to talk, kind of like a—swing and a foul by Braun—kind of like a mom with a cubby, trying to keep it warm.”

How do furries smell? Was it different in 2009 than it is today, when “the technology has allowed them to have cooling gear?” David Roth wrestled with these and other such Camusian questions of existence in Defector.

But the tabs hold ever more questions. Like why did everyone start saying “Ultra-MAGA?” Or as Kevin Fox Jr. wondered in Blood Knife, “Does Batman have to be copaganda?” The gist of his argument is:

…Batman cannot help but perpetuate an ideology that upholds police as necessary to preserve a social order—one that is, apparently, the best we can do, even if the stories can also highlight conflicts of interest. The premise of nearly all Batman stories relies on a city suffering moral ruin, and in need of a savior; again and again, in movies like The Dark Knight and The Batman, in comics like Batman: Year One and Batman: White Knight, storytellers posit a relationship between those conditions and a greedy ruling class.

In other words we keep rebooting Batman because recreating the same conditions of social cruelty and failure that require his existence to fix them is all Batman is ontologically capable of doing. Now replace “Batman” with “capitalism.”

Why is Times Opinion publishing a guessay that contains the biologically nonsensical phrase “delivering a baby who is ectopic?” And how much damage did transphobic hack Pamela Paul, currently Just Asking Questions on her OnlyTERFs page, do to publishing in her nine years as the head of the Times Book Review? Now that she’s just another rich white lady columnist with an Opinion page sinecure moving bad ideas along the J.K. Rowling to Bette Midler TERF pipeline, the stories about her era at NYTBR are starting to leak. Is it ok for the Times to have a section head with an enemies list? How many of them currently have one?

I didn’t have any questions about Nathan Fielder because my real life is already too full of awkward personal interactions to get much enjoyment out of watching more of them on TV. But Lila Shapiro’s Vulture profile of Fielder won me over with her analysis of how different “Nathan For You” bits function. Is there any point to continuing a protest if no one is paying attention? Crosby, Stills and Nash say no, returning their music to Spotify now that it’s clear no one will do anything about Joe Rogan. But Neil Young does not compromise. Why, and I take no pleasure in asking this, is Radio Shack horny on Twitter now? Look, it’s some crypto nonsense. Chris Stokel-Walker gives the horny new Shack spokesbro a lot of space to shape the narrative here but it’s crypto nonsense. Speaking of which, even CoinDesk (who to their credit, publish a lot of objective, non-boosterish crypto reporting) has Frances Coppola saying that this crypto crash is going to be different:

After all, bitcoin was originally intended to replace the dollar, and some people still think it eventually will. What better time to buy and HODL the world’s future currency than the start of the inflationary Armageddon that will bring about the demise of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency?

But most of those invested in cryptocurrency now don’t want to replace the dollar. Indeed, they fear its replacement. What they want is to get rich in dollar terms.

Not getting rich in dollar terms recently: anyone with money in Vauld, CoinLoan, Voyager Digital, and many more cross-linked be-fi1 ponzis. Also Chevrolet, who couldn’t attract a single bid on an NFT that came with a free Corvette, robbing the world of the chance to find out what it would be like if there were a muscle car that could actively repel chicks.

Today’s Song: quinnie, “Touch Tank”

~There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of tabs~

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