My personal anecdotal life experience has been that many liberals are “conservative” with themselves (working hard, limiting their resource use, always learning new skills) but liberal towards others, to the extent you indicated of not pushing for improvement or strengthening.
And many conservatives are liberal towards themselves and only themselves, insisting they got a hit when they were born on base, but pitching a fit at any indication that the games rules might change.
I don’t really view Rogan as a true right winger. He strikes me as a very insecure person who knows very little.
Rogan is just like… the most basic bro. The modal taste profile of the American man. He’s not an ideologue, he’s not even that smart. He has some interests. He likes talking and smoking pot and speculating about nonsense.
If he is why someone turns right instead of left, then the left really does need to do a better job illustrating why they’re not the crazies (and the MAGA idiots are).
Yep. He's a shitty comic too. A lot of Liberals act like he's talking politics all of the time, he's usually just saying offhand things that turn into weird tangents. He's not a deep guy, he just gained in popularity because he was willing to talk about anything in the early days of the pod, including conspiracy theories and aliens, which was interesting to people.
You nailed it! Very good observation about liberals being conservative (and vice versa) in their own lives. I see nothing wrong with encouraging people to improve themselves . . . I mean, we can all improve. Why should some people be encouraged to wallow in their misery? Let's encourage healthy minds, bodies, and a shared vision for a better future for all.
I think you nailed it pretty well with the first section. The left has "put its chips" on the idea that your group identity defines you AND your opportunities, so that "it isn't your fault" if you're in a crappy situation. And it very well may NOT be your fault -- but the options when you find yourself in a crappy situation are 1) cry about it and do nothing 2) try to dig your way out of it.
But 2) runs against the whole "there's nothing you can do about it" vibe the left is leaning into -- and that vibe encompasses both economic health AND physical health.
This was obviously a mistake for reason you pointed out above - dysfunctional people can't run functional systems. We need COMPETENCE, but the value system on the left right now is IDENTITY-based.
If we saw more competence come out of the party (from ANY identity), maybe their arguments would be more convincing. But nobody wants their town to be the next Portland. Or Chicago. Or Baltimore. Or Seattle. Or Detroit...........
Okay, but my question is what do you think a leftist version of competance in government looks like? This is not a "gotcha," I'm generally curious about what you/the general public think are wrong with those cities and how to fix them.
The problem with Portland and most progressive cities, at least on the west coast, is that the special interests are running everything. One example -- The city spends hundreds of millions on "homelessness", but everything they actually do PROMOTES homelessness -- because otherwise the "non-profits" would cease to exist. Police are disheartened and quitting in droves because they're not allowed to actually punish the rioters running amok in downtown, etc etc.
It's not ACTUALLY difficult to fix the problems -- the laws are still on the books -- it's only POLITICALLY difficult because today's Portland continues to try to out-progressive last week's Portland. So we have to be "compassionate" to our "unhoused neighbors" as they chase everybody away from a downtown that now reeks of piss.
You managed to evade their question. They asked you what an alternative would look like and you just further criticized the existing thing rather than offering a vision of an alternative.
don't talk about a Chicago you know nothing about. Don't talk about chicago. Don't presume a goddamned thing about chicago, you fucking dipshit naysayer asshole. Chicago is the best world class city in the United States and one of the cleanest and most prosperous and safe cities anywhere and to state otherwise is to admit you're a naysaying armchair QB that believes the propaganda of a loser godhead who hates and smears the good name of the town once called home by his sworn enemy; which also happens to be the same town (the ONLY town) that organized and mobilized so effectively that he had to cancel his rally here. I don't want to hear your bullshit statistics or your cherry picked examples of Johnson's agenda leading to the modern media equivalent of the knockout game, I want you to shut up and get in line behind a beautiful and welcoming beacon of a city or to shut the fuck up.
I've been to plenty of cities in the United States and Canada and Mexico this year, and last year, and every year for the last thirty. You're trying to throw Chicago into the same category as Detroit and Baltimore and somehow throw Seattle into that same category too as if it's not a shithole for WILDLY different reasons than those plaguing the two aforementioned collapsed industry cities, eh?
Well, before you (I presume here, so forgive me if I'm off base) use your data terrorist numbers to back up your casual bullshit dismissal and point out that in fact I'm living in a dream and here are the numbers to back it up, maybe reread this. I'm not saying this as a person who just has a gut feeling. I've been boots on the ground living and working in pretty much every US city at least once every 2-3 years for the last thirty...so I'm not reacting theoretically here. Chicago is livable and safe in a real tangible day-in-day-out kind of way, regardless of what numbers may or may not indicate (full disclosure: I am not looking at a data wall as I type this).
While I know you can dismiss what I'm saying as anecdotal and biased (or just the ravings of an unintelligent trolling rube from a proud yet shitty town), numbers lie (how many statistics about chicago are actually statistics about the illinois/indiana "Region" (capital R) and therefore the issues of exurban sprawl and ineffective parochial isolationist local governments and not at all, in fact, reflective of what living in the city of chicago is like at all.
and finally, I don't care about any rebuttals to this rant. I live here. I AM biased. Know why? Because I tend to be biased towards the best stuff. I've just returned from LA and I saw a city in revolting disfunction (I'm not trying to talk shit here...I love Los Angeles), with huge homeless and underhoused encampments surrounded by beautiful neighborhoods that have armed their waste receptacles spikes and "anti rummaging" mechanisms and (in one case that I witnessed) armed guards keeping people from dumpstering perfectly good food passed it's "sell by" date. That shit is dysfunctional on a basic human level. When we'd rather protect trash than let hungry people eat, we've lost our way. That's scary.
In all my years I've never seen anti human policy like that in action. Are the cops racist? Aren't they all? I'd rather be pulled over in Chicago than in any city south of here any day.
I'll stop. Shut the fuck up about Chicago. In conclusion, eat shit
Oh, one more thing: Hey Jason, big fan and have been for quite a while. thanks for this. As usual. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go get some hookers and blow and drive around with my lights off til someone flashes me with theirs and then follow them home and kill them.
But whenever competence is demonstrated on the left and those candidates get prominent enough, there will be some sort of smear campaign (or financial lobbying) to stop that person coming to power. It happens all the time.
The problem is more that the left are beholden to a ruleset (including moral consistency) that the right absolutely don’t play by - the right can generally do and say whatever they want, then be forgiven for it. The left tend to hold people (including their own) accountable, even for small transgressions.
The left’s problem isn't weakness or a lack of competency, it’s: in-fighting and playing by a rulebook their opponents ignore entirely (or only use when convenient for their own gains)
There is a fundamental truth in so much of what you are saying but I feel like there is one area I wish you could touch on more because you were so close to doing so.
Mainly, the untapped benefits of the left’s unique position to roll out a masculine expression and aggressive achievement standard that is rooted not just in a unified community but in the foundation of a unified self. And how much stronger that is. You began to show this with your examples of President Moose Man McBigSchlong, but there is such a deep well of untapped material here that I wish more people (who weren’t me—a female) would dive into.
There is such a misunderstanding on the extremist right and in toxic masculinity circles in general that to be capable of “masculine work” or “hardcore effort” you need to shut off and compartmentalize all aspects of yourself and deny aspects of yourself—and that this act is somehow proof of inner “strength.”
I was a wellness coach for over a decade at in a highly competitive corporate engineering office. Type A’s everywhere.
And let me tell you. This whole “compartmentalized man” bullshit is so far from the key to strength that it is viscerally enraging for me to hear anyone try to sell the idea. Real men broke trying to uphold this “ideal,” both while working at a desk and while working out in the field.
You want to know who managed to NOT have a mental breakdown when things came down to the wire? Who stayed calm under fire? Was it the guy who denied himself constantly? Sure. Maybe once.
But you want that guy to do that more than that? Good fucking luck.
You get two, maybe three massive project fails max before big man is out with burnout or down permanently from a heart attack.
The people that lasted? They didn’t shy away from shit. They didn’t block shit off-conflict, emotions, family, vices, community, health. They found balance and practiced flexibility within themselves and with their own desires, needs, and faults. THAT is resilience. You don’t pretend problems don’t exist and put up a wall. You fucking face them and either put up a wall with a DOOR together or make it unnecessary.
You don’t take a bullet and pretend you aren’t bleeding until you collapse if you want to win a war.
You take a bullet, and then strategize when, where, how, and why you are going to deal with it and you hope you know yourself well enough to choose which option will let you keep advancing for longer. The left is better equipped to provide that.
They got all that “woo-woo” EQ support and know how that when balanced PROPERLY actually bolsters men and masculine expression in a way that makes it long-sustaining, and yet still allows for the conscious choice, physical capacity, and mental discipline to go nuclear (and recover) if the situation requires.
The extreme right requires everyone to run on the dice-roll of black and white thinking: go nuclear or you are weak.
I wish more people would recognize that the masculine and feminine natures are just that, natures. The expression of BOTH of these natures is essential for every human and should be in balance and capable of being in flow so that it can be drawn and shifted to different ratios to meet the needs of whatever situation is at hand.
Anyhow. I liked your article a lot. It just made me think of these things. I fucking hate posts without nuance and was so happy to find yours had loads of it, so thank you for being awesome like that.
This is so so so good an important. It reminds me of something I saw a long time ago, a jokey conversation between a hyper-masculine patriarch and an alien:
Dude: "I have to protect my family!"
Alien: "Ah, so you make sure everything in the house is clean to protect them from disease?"
Dude: "No, I never clean."
Alien: "Oh, you cook healthy meals to protect them from malnutrition?"
Dude: "Nah, that's wife stuff."
Alien: "Ah, so you must build relationships with your neighbors to ensure your family is part of a safe community."
There's at least one comment on this post's link on Facebook saying "the left is the one with all the mental illness," and your point is really applicable to that. Sure, liberal spaces are where you'd go to talk openly about mental health, and sure, that makes it seem like "depressed liberal" really is the archetype, but to your point... isn't that who you'd turn to for advice?
I'm totally on board with advice like "Forget your sadness, just do lumberjack shit in the forest," because I don't have chronic depression and that stuff actually works for me, I find chopping wood to be fun. But that (and prayer) seems to be the tools in the R's toolkit, because anything else is... gay? I don't know, I guess the simplicity is the appeal.
I mean sure, some people are playing up their symptoms on social media for clout or sympathy--which is gross--but it's easy to make a liberal strawman out of that and claim everyone is passive when the majority of people are in those spaces specifically because they actively want to manage it better. Isnt that who you'd want to talk to? (Or a therapist, I guess, if you can afford one).
I'm glad you took the time to expand this thought from the original shorter video I saw on the same topic. I don't have any grand insights, I'm just glad you wrote it, same as I'm glad you wrote "How Half Of America Lost Its Fucking Mind" in 2016. Anyone else who's left-leaning and smart enough to properly assess the problem is also smart enough to avoid making Self-Improvement their primary brand because they know it won't be well received.
Ahh damn, the smartest most talented fucker in the world tells us we gotta step up and be hard to win, then finished his essay refusing to do that because he “doesn’t like people”
He's saying he's not the liberal Joe Rogan, but he's being the whatever-his-politics Jason Parquin. But I'm glad the comments could turn into a typical circular firing squad.
Where is the hypocrisy? Jason is a successful writer who got his start entirely from self-publishing, edited of the major entertainment website for a decade, became a Tik-Tok superstar in his late 40s through his sheer skill, records multiple podcasts each month, is happily married and owns a house.
He is already successful! It's most other people that need to step up their game.
Yeah? That's nice but he's a human with occasional terrible takes. I say this as someone who's been a fan of his since Cracked.com and helped push his novels and movie on friends. I also get to hear from all of them how out of touch he increasingly sounds on Instagram like a judgment on me because I enjoy his content. I'm still here because I hope he is just in an artistic funk and melancholy and not just being a holier-than-thou oldie but here we are watching him farm content and ragebait which he admits up top. We also live on an Internet where I'm only 60% sure you aren't just Jason himself or an AI he got someone to run to make him look nice because I don't remember asking about his success, I talked about his poor choice of content as he shills to Tik Tok Tweens
The money must be good but don't tell me I'm the problem from your ivory tower like some kind of garbage rendition of a ghost of the Father who left you for cigarettes
Would ChatGPT be able to tell you to go cockgurble cumgutter dickfucks?
But seriously, I too have been following Jason's content post-Cracked and his *opinions* may sound out of touch, but they also accurately describe and predict reality, so they must be at least in some ways correct.
I'm assuming you're american? If so, you _still_ have some of the best living standards in the world despite all of the very real issues that you have. Most people in the past would give everything to live as you do, and so would billions of other people in other countries right now.
Because the online discourse requires us to exaggerate everything, online left tend to take real, factual problems and twist them into absurd hyperbolas with no connection to reality. Yes, climate change is real and generally very bad. No, the planet's oceans will not boil away nor will most people die by year 2050. Just one example.
I appreciate that you took the time to say "online discourse requires us to exaggerate everything" and then proceeded to exaggerate leftists' takes on climate change.
I can't tell if that's a brilliant piece of satire or just hideously incorrect. I'm going to pretend like it's the former.
It could because my Hermes3 model asks me to delete it because I'm too "fucking fecund and illiterate" to teach how to read, plus there is a market on substack for AI ad shills, but your point has been made. I am American but my issue with Jason and his posts lately have been purely with his attitude of sitting on a porch like a shaking old man telling a bunch of troubled youths to fix the world while they try not to get hit by cars playing hopscotch. I don't mind and often agree with most of his reasoning and logic up to the point where he talks about human interaction because he openly states you should run from people who are bummers because they're "a waste of time to save". He can be multiple things but a guy who would ditch you if you feel a bit too sad because you're too much of a bummer shouldn't be the guy you take bootstraps and endurance advice from.
He's not wrong though. There is only so much mental and emotional energy any person can spare, and if your efforts to help another bear no fruit, it's best to walk away.
Up to about 10 years ago, I also surrounded myself with friends with mental issues. Intelligent people with a lot of potential, but tragically held back by their depression and low self-esteem. One friend in particular was quite bad in that regard: no hygiene, living in filth, smoking all day, the toilet bowl in his apartment would make the one from Trainspotting whistle in appreciation, then wondering why he was unable to get a date or keep a relationship going past the point where she visited his place. Both me and another friend tried to help him out, teaching him to cook and take care of himself, present himself better to the world. But nothing stuck. He simply expected us to take care of him with minimal effort on his part at best. And worse: he was dragging everyone down with his constant self-pity over his self-inflicted situation (not that he saw it that way, because of course it was "society" that "misunderstood" him). That became very clear to me after we had a fallout at some point, and I didn't see him for a couple of years. Suddenly my own depression cleared up, and I was able to accomplish things I wouldn't have thought possible before.
So yeah, it's a lot more nuanced than you portray. Of course you don't drop friends because they're going through a rough patch in their lives. But you also don't have an obligation to keep putting effort into helping those that don't want to be helped, undermining your own mental well-being in the process, to the point where you yourself join the ranks of those in need of help. Instead, focus your efforts where they have a positive impact, which will reward you with the warm and fuzzies that give you the energy to help even more people in need. "We need to help everyone" is a nice idea, but reality is you can't. Best allocate your resources wisely.
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking back to a year or so ago when a tankie on Twitter posted something like "staying strong and healthy for the cause is praxis, actually" and he got dogpiled by the Very Online Left, all of them trying to to top each other with how many chronic illnesses/mental conditions/bad life cards they had, so most of this rings very true. "How DARE you say I can do more mutual aid if I make more money when I'm autistic and BPD and have Epstein-Roseanne-Barre syndrome and hate capitalism!"
But IRL I honestly can't tell if progressive dudes simply stay out of the gym/dragstrip/management community, or if they're there and afraid to show their colors. And if the latter, are they more afraid of the conservatives in these spaces, or their lefty peers who find out they lift weights, race cars, like pretty girls, and pursue what a decent salary can buy?
One problem Liberals and the Left has is everyone has to have the same opinion on every damn thing. Republicans will gripe about this and that, but in the end almost all of them voted for Trump again. I actually thought Biden did a good job, but all the Lefty Tanky types who listen to True Anon think he is the worst person ever. You can't have a Joe Rogan of the Left because there's too much diversity of opinion. Everyone would just call you a ghoul.
A major problem Jason also had talked about. You can agree with Generic Leftist on 99% of the issues, but just find that 1% you disagree on and you'll be called actual slurs: "elitist", "animal-killer, "shill", "ableist", "genocide supporter", "white colonizer". Any attempt to explain that I'm actually on your side are facing a brick wall.
Just like those warring rebels from Andor Season 2.
One really important thing to note here is that Andrew Tate didn't get ahead because of the cars and babes. Mountains of influencers do that. It was the realisation that pickup artist techniques are incredibly effective on young boys and that in addition to using them as the financial base of his pyramid scheme he could also use them as a force for gaming the various algorithms that would allow him to expand his influence.
I think it was more luck and being there at the exact right moment in time than anything about him specifically, people have been bullying their fans into sharing their content forever, but figuring out he could say the most attention grabbing inflammatory stuff imaginable and then simply have his fans post his content when he got banned was a game changer. The loss of direct platform access was a perfectly acceptable trade-off to expand his cult membership. Getting them to pay him was easier than getting the platforms to pay him anyway.
A kick-ass post, one that I would have been happy to write, word for word. If you’re progressive, then (i) stop complaining, (ii) stop fighting your allies, (iii) stop doing/saying things that make politically disinterested people hate or laugh at you, (iv) help amass real political/financial power, and (v) motivate people to seriously improve their lives in ways that they find highly attractive even though the improvement is hard to achieve.
The sad part is, the left (I'll leave it up to you if you want to consider them progressive or regressive) had the political power. But they took it too far, made a farce of their own belief system by walking it to its logical conclusion (conveniently ignoring certain facts along the way), until it came full circle and they started spewing the same intolerant nonsense they accuse the far right of. Just in the opposite direction.
And that's a shame, because they started from a good core: empathy, acceptance, and being decent to your fellow man, regardless of their differences. Those are values most people will stand behind and are not controversial in any way.
I like covering a left wing Joe Rogan. Since the left wing already had a Joe Rogan; his name was Joe Rogan. The feeling I get today when I talk to outspoken liberals is the same feelings I got from speaking to outspoken conservative Christians from the 90s.
It may not be the same, but it feels the same. My current moral panic guardians wear blue t-shirts instead of red and say insane, off the wall things that mirror the same style of rhetoric used by televangelist, fire and brimstone, preachers of days past.
And yeah, Jason said it, we can see the people who talk about saving America speaking out of both sides of their mouths. We see that DEI initiatives did not in fact support minorities. We see the DNC as they spend $20+ million to learn to “talk to young men” and still fail to simply talk to men.
Bettering yourself should not only belong to one political spectrum. And quite frankly, it’s empowering to take responsibility for yourself and what you bring into the world.
I'm a normie Lib, and people on the Far Left won't admit the amount of anti-Semitism that has been popping up on Bluesky lately. If I wanted to see that shit everyday, I would have stayed on Twitter.
Have you heard of the extensive moderation tools Bluesky has? Labellers, moderation lists etc. These are not there just for your personal comfort, they shape the community and the discourse. They cause bad actors to lose engagement instead of gaining it.
Nailed it. Another subtle (maybe related?) thing here is, how many people on the left actually spend time around young men. Just understanding why they find Trump charismatic is a step in the right direction, because Trump/the right lets them be them. It's extremely obvious if you spend 2 minutes at a bar with one.
Two other trends on the left that I see related to this. One, the endless analysis of issues, but never focusing on a plan of action. Two, and this second one plays into the habit of disengagement from right wing ideas that you have pointed out before, is the moral absolutism. The idea that a person is forever tainted by a belief or action.
This second point is likely why the right does better. The right has a common redemption narrative along the lines of "Everyone is terrible, including you. You know how terrible you are, but no matter how terrible you are today, through hard-work/religion/my-self-help-system you don't have to stay terrible." I don't think I've ever seen something like that from the left.
I think I hear you saying we need a better Left and I certainly agree with that but the unspoken question I see here is this:
We’ve had roughly 20 years of the Left with far reaching and barely challenged power in politics, news, education, and media and most people hate the world that has given us, so does the Left actually have any solutions to give?
You did not. The people who were in power before Trump and who are his political opponents now would be classified as center or center-right in most other countries.
The actual leftist ideas in the US are absurdly marginalized in both their representation in power and in their broad public support.
“We’ve had roughly 20 years of the Left with far reaching and barely challenged power in politics, news, education, and media…”
Hard disagree. Do I even need to go into detail? Maybe so on (sole subsets of) education, but in politics I don’t think we’ve controlled SCOTUS once in the last 20 years, the WH is just barely above 50/50. The media is pretty debatable outside of the opinions of right-wingers.
I don't want to spam up our gracious host's comments section so early in our relationship, but if you search my 'Stack for "Portland", you'll see a whole mess of articles about the decline of the city and who's responsible for it.
Disclaimer: I'm not an US-Citizen, nor I live in the USA, so I'm going to write about you from my perspective (South America).
A couple notes: your "left" is not really organized, and acts more like a moral sentiment rather than material politics. Historically there was a push to crash down left-wing organizations that were capable of mobilizing people against the economic system (Black Panthers, as an example), and the anti-communist sentiment grew stronger and stronger because of the Cold War. You have also been misled into thinking that consumption is a political or moral act. Your political system also does not really help, providing a false dichotomy between ""progressive""neoliberalism and neoliberalism with alt right intentions. The result is a mob of impoverished angry people that believe being right wing is revolutionary, and a mass of people who disagrees, but doesn't do anything against the mob. They win based on inertia, because only a small minority is organized in real world political actions.
I hope you see this is not only a problem in the USA. Where I live, we also have the same problem regarding "doomerism" among young leftists, and a spike in reactionary beliefs among young men, but some movements started to organize on this basis. People are angry, and they should be! But they should be angry at the right target (the alt right always tricks people into picking the wrong targets so they stay docile against the capital) and also organized to act and do something about the real problems.
My personal anecdotal life experience has been that many liberals are “conservative” with themselves (working hard, limiting their resource use, always learning new skills) but liberal towards others, to the extent you indicated of not pushing for improvement or strengthening.
And many conservatives are liberal towards themselves and only themselves, insisting they got a hit when they were born on base, but pitching a fit at any indication that the games rules might change.
I don’t really view Rogan as a true right winger. He strikes me as a very insecure person who knows very little.
Rogan is just like… the most basic bro. The modal taste profile of the American man. He’s not an ideologue, he’s not even that smart. He has some interests. He likes talking and smoking pot and speculating about nonsense.
If he is why someone turns right instead of left, then the left really does need to do a better job illustrating why they’re not the crazies (and the MAGA idiots are).
Yep. He's a shitty comic too. A lot of Liberals act like he's talking politics all of the time, he's usually just saying offhand things that turn into weird tangents. He's not a deep guy, he just gained in popularity because he was willing to talk about anything in the early days of the pod, including conspiracy theories and aliens, which was interesting to people.
You nailed it! Very good observation about liberals being conservative (and vice versa) in their own lives. I see nothing wrong with encouraging people to improve themselves . . . I mean, we can all improve. Why should some people be encouraged to wallow in their misery? Let's encourage healthy minds, bodies, and a shared vision for a better future for all.
I think you nailed it pretty well with the first section. The left has "put its chips" on the idea that your group identity defines you AND your opportunities, so that "it isn't your fault" if you're in a crappy situation. And it very well may NOT be your fault -- but the options when you find yourself in a crappy situation are 1) cry about it and do nothing 2) try to dig your way out of it.
But 2) runs against the whole "there's nothing you can do about it" vibe the left is leaning into -- and that vibe encompasses both economic health AND physical health.
This was obviously a mistake for reason you pointed out above - dysfunctional people can't run functional systems. We need COMPETENCE, but the value system on the left right now is IDENTITY-based.
If we saw more competence come out of the party (from ANY identity), maybe their arguments would be more convincing. But nobody wants their town to be the next Portland. Or Chicago. Or Baltimore. Or Seattle. Or Detroit...........
Okay, but my question is what do you think a leftist version of competance in government looks like? This is not a "gotcha," I'm generally curious about what you/the general public think are wrong with those cities and how to fix them.
The problem with Portland and most progressive cities, at least on the west coast, is that the special interests are running everything. One example -- The city spends hundreds of millions on "homelessness", but everything they actually do PROMOTES homelessness -- because otherwise the "non-profits" would cease to exist. Police are disheartened and quitting in droves because they're not allowed to actually punish the rioters running amok in downtown, etc etc.
It's not ACTUALLY difficult to fix the problems -- the laws are still on the books -- it's only POLITICALLY difficult because today's Portland continues to try to out-progressive last week's Portland. So we have to be "compassionate" to our "unhoused neighbors" as they chase everybody away from a downtown that now reeks of piss.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/portland-takes-a-step-back-with-ngo
You managed to evade their question. They asked you what an alternative would look like and you just further criticized the existing thing rather than offering a vision of an alternative.
don't talk about a Chicago you know nothing about. Don't talk about chicago. Don't presume a goddamned thing about chicago, you fucking dipshit naysayer asshole. Chicago is the best world class city in the United States and one of the cleanest and most prosperous and safe cities anywhere and to state otherwise is to admit you're a naysaying armchair QB that believes the propaganda of a loser godhead who hates and smears the good name of the town once called home by his sworn enemy; which also happens to be the same town (the ONLY town) that organized and mobilized so effectively that he had to cancel his rally here. I don't want to hear your bullshit statistics or your cherry picked examples of Johnson's agenda leading to the modern media equivalent of the knockout game, I want you to shut up and get in line behind a beautiful and welcoming beacon of a city or to shut the fuck up.
I've been to plenty of cities in the United States and Canada and Mexico this year, and last year, and every year for the last thirty. You're trying to throw Chicago into the same category as Detroit and Baltimore and somehow throw Seattle into that same category too as if it's not a shithole for WILDLY different reasons than those plaguing the two aforementioned collapsed industry cities, eh?
Well, before you (I presume here, so forgive me if I'm off base) use your data terrorist numbers to back up your casual bullshit dismissal and point out that in fact I'm living in a dream and here are the numbers to back it up, maybe reread this. I'm not saying this as a person who just has a gut feeling. I've been boots on the ground living and working in pretty much every US city at least once every 2-3 years for the last thirty...so I'm not reacting theoretically here. Chicago is livable and safe in a real tangible day-in-day-out kind of way, regardless of what numbers may or may not indicate (full disclosure: I am not looking at a data wall as I type this).
While I know you can dismiss what I'm saying as anecdotal and biased (or just the ravings of an unintelligent trolling rube from a proud yet shitty town), numbers lie (how many statistics about chicago are actually statistics about the illinois/indiana "Region" (capital R) and therefore the issues of exurban sprawl and ineffective parochial isolationist local governments and not at all, in fact, reflective of what living in the city of chicago is like at all.
and finally, I don't care about any rebuttals to this rant. I live here. I AM biased. Know why? Because I tend to be biased towards the best stuff. I've just returned from LA and I saw a city in revolting disfunction (I'm not trying to talk shit here...I love Los Angeles), with huge homeless and underhoused encampments surrounded by beautiful neighborhoods that have armed their waste receptacles spikes and "anti rummaging" mechanisms and (in one case that I witnessed) armed guards keeping people from dumpstering perfectly good food passed it's "sell by" date. That shit is dysfunctional on a basic human level. When we'd rather protect trash than let hungry people eat, we've lost our way. That's scary.
In all my years I've never seen anti human policy like that in action. Are the cops racist? Aren't they all? I'd rather be pulled over in Chicago than in any city south of here any day.
I'll stop. Shut the fuck up about Chicago. In conclusion, eat shit
Oh, one more thing: Hey Jason, big fan and have been for quite a while. thanks for this. As usual. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go get some hookers and blow and drive around with my lights off til someone flashes me with theirs and then follow them home and kill them.
Hey, it's a living.
But whenever competence is demonstrated on the left and those candidates get prominent enough, there will be some sort of smear campaign (or financial lobbying) to stop that person coming to power. It happens all the time.
The problem is more that the left are beholden to a ruleset (including moral consistency) that the right absolutely don’t play by - the right can generally do and say whatever they want, then be forgiven for it. The left tend to hold people (including their own) accountable, even for small transgressions.
The left’s problem isn't weakness or a lack of competency, it’s: in-fighting and playing by a rulebook their opponents ignore entirely (or only use when convenient for their own gains)
Yes, we all remember the moral left beholden to their internal rules the last decade.
There is a fundamental truth in so much of what you are saying but I feel like there is one area I wish you could touch on more because you were so close to doing so.
Mainly, the untapped benefits of the left’s unique position to roll out a masculine expression and aggressive achievement standard that is rooted not just in a unified community but in the foundation of a unified self. And how much stronger that is. You began to show this with your examples of President Moose Man McBigSchlong, but there is such a deep well of untapped material here that I wish more people (who weren’t me—a female) would dive into.
There is such a misunderstanding on the extremist right and in toxic masculinity circles in general that to be capable of “masculine work” or “hardcore effort” you need to shut off and compartmentalize all aspects of yourself and deny aspects of yourself—and that this act is somehow proof of inner “strength.”
I was a wellness coach for over a decade at in a highly competitive corporate engineering office. Type A’s everywhere.
And let me tell you. This whole “compartmentalized man” bullshit is so far from the key to strength that it is viscerally enraging for me to hear anyone try to sell the idea. Real men broke trying to uphold this “ideal,” both while working at a desk and while working out in the field.
You want to know who managed to NOT have a mental breakdown when things came down to the wire? Who stayed calm under fire? Was it the guy who denied himself constantly? Sure. Maybe once.
But you want that guy to do that more than that? Good fucking luck.
You get two, maybe three massive project fails max before big man is out with burnout or down permanently from a heart attack.
The people that lasted? They didn’t shy away from shit. They didn’t block shit off-conflict, emotions, family, vices, community, health. They found balance and practiced flexibility within themselves and with their own desires, needs, and faults. THAT is resilience. You don’t pretend problems don’t exist and put up a wall. You fucking face them and either put up a wall with a DOOR together or make it unnecessary.
You don’t take a bullet and pretend you aren’t bleeding until you collapse if you want to win a war.
You take a bullet, and then strategize when, where, how, and why you are going to deal with it and you hope you know yourself well enough to choose which option will let you keep advancing for longer. The left is better equipped to provide that.
They got all that “woo-woo” EQ support and know how that when balanced PROPERLY actually bolsters men and masculine expression in a way that makes it long-sustaining, and yet still allows for the conscious choice, physical capacity, and mental discipline to go nuclear (and recover) if the situation requires.
The extreme right requires everyone to run on the dice-roll of black and white thinking: go nuclear or you are weak.
I wish more people would recognize that the masculine and feminine natures are just that, natures. The expression of BOTH of these natures is essential for every human and should be in balance and capable of being in flow so that it can be drawn and shifted to different ratios to meet the needs of whatever situation is at hand.
Anyhow. I liked your article a lot. It just made me think of these things. I fucking hate posts without nuance and was so happy to find yours had loads of it, so thank you for being awesome like that.
Sorry for my ranty tangent.
This is so so so good an important. It reminds me of something I saw a long time ago, a jokey conversation between a hyper-masculine patriarch and an alien:
Dude: "I have to protect my family!"
Alien: "Ah, so you make sure everything in the house is clean to protect them from disease?"
Dude: "No, I never clean."
Alien: "Oh, you cook healthy meals to protect them from malnutrition?"
Dude: "Nah, that's wife stuff."
Alien: "Ah, so you must build relationships with your neighbors to ensure your family is part of a safe community."
Dude: "No I just have a lot of guns."
There's at least one comment on this post's link on Facebook saying "the left is the one with all the mental illness," and your point is really applicable to that. Sure, liberal spaces are where you'd go to talk openly about mental health, and sure, that makes it seem like "depressed liberal" really is the archetype, but to your point... isn't that who you'd turn to for advice?
I'm totally on board with advice like "Forget your sadness, just do lumberjack shit in the forest," because I don't have chronic depression and that stuff actually works for me, I find chopping wood to be fun. But that (and prayer) seems to be the tools in the R's toolkit, because anything else is... gay? I don't know, I guess the simplicity is the appeal.
I mean sure, some people are playing up their symptoms on social media for clout or sympathy--which is gross--but it's easy to make a liberal strawman out of that and claim everyone is passive when the majority of people are in those spaces specifically because they actively want to manage it better. Isnt that who you'd want to talk to? (Or a therapist, I guess, if you can afford one).
I'm glad you took the time to expand this thought from the original shorter video I saw on the same topic. I don't have any grand insights, I'm just glad you wrote it, same as I'm glad you wrote "How Half Of America Lost Its Fucking Mind" in 2016. Anyone else who's left-leaning and smart enough to properly assess the problem is also smart enough to avoid making Self-Improvement their primary brand because they know it won't be well received.
Where can I find the people willing to pay millions for a "Liberal Joe Rogan?" I'll gladly shave my head and tell people to clean their rooms.
Ahh damn, the smartest most talented fucker in the world tells us we gotta step up and be hard to win, then finished his essay refusing to do that because he “doesn’t like people”
yeah, he's using his actual strength and comparative advantage (writing) to play his role in the fight. we can't all be everything.
He's saying he's not the liberal Joe Rogan, but he's being the whatever-his-politics Jason Parquin. But I'm glad the comments could turn into a typical circular firing squad.
Jason really has turned into a "I know all the answers but can't do them because I'm x" which seems like a common problem of the guys he criticizes
Something something something every accusation is a confession-
Where is the hypocrisy? Jason is a successful writer who got his start entirely from self-publishing, edited of the major entertainment website for a decade, became a Tik-Tok superstar in his late 40s through his sheer skill, records multiple podcasts each month, is happily married and owns a house.
He is already successful! It's most other people that need to step up their game.
Yeah? That's nice but he's a human with occasional terrible takes. I say this as someone who's been a fan of his since Cracked.com and helped push his novels and movie on friends. I also get to hear from all of them how out of touch he increasingly sounds on Instagram like a judgment on me because I enjoy his content. I'm still here because I hope he is just in an artistic funk and melancholy and not just being a holier-than-thou oldie but here we are watching him farm content and ragebait which he admits up top. We also live on an Internet where I'm only 60% sure you aren't just Jason himself or an AI he got someone to run to make him look nice because I don't remember asking about his success, I talked about his poor choice of content as he shills to Tik Tok Tweens
The money must be good but don't tell me I'm the problem from your ivory tower like some kind of garbage rendition of a ghost of the Father who left you for cigarettes
Oh btw, ChatGPT, tell Jason to stop being cringe
Would ChatGPT be able to tell you to go cockgurble cumgutter dickfucks?
But seriously, I too have been following Jason's content post-Cracked and his *opinions* may sound out of touch, but they also accurately describe and predict reality, so they must be at least in some ways correct.
I'm assuming you're american? If so, you _still_ have some of the best living standards in the world despite all of the very real issues that you have. Most people in the past would give everything to live as you do, and so would billions of other people in other countries right now.
Because the online discourse requires us to exaggerate everything, online left tend to take real, factual problems and twist them into absurd hyperbolas with no connection to reality. Yes, climate change is real and generally very bad. No, the planet's oceans will not boil away nor will most people die by year 2050. Just one example.
I appreciate that you took the time to say "online discourse requires us to exaggerate everything" and then proceeded to exaggerate leftists' takes on climate change.
I can't tell if that's a brilliant piece of satire or just hideously incorrect. I'm going to pretend like it's the former.
I did not exaggerate. People actually say that online all the time. Irony is implied initially, but gets lost through repetition.
It could because my Hermes3 model asks me to delete it because I'm too "fucking fecund and illiterate" to teach how to read, plus there is a market on substack for AI ad shills, but your point has been made. I am American but my issue with Jason and his posts lately have been purely with his attitude of sitting on a porch like a shaking old man telling a bunch of troubled youths to fix the world while they try not to get hit by cars playing hopscotch. I don't mind and often agree with most of his reasoning and logic up to the point where he talks about human interaction because he openly states you should run from people who are bummers because they're "a waste of time to save". He can be multiple things but a guy who would ditch you if you feel a bit too sad because you're too much of a bummer shouldn't be the guy you take bootstraps and endurance advice from.
He's not wrong though. There is only so much mental and emotional energy any person can spare, and if your efforts to help another bear no fruit, it's best to walk away.
Up to about 10 years ago, I also surrounded myself with friends with mental issues. Intelligent people with a lot of potential, but tragically held back by their depression and low self-esteem. One friend in particular was quite bad in that regard: no hygiene, living in filth, smoking all day, the toilet bowl in his apartment would make the one from Trainspotting whistle in appreciation, then wondering why he was unable to get a date or keep a relationship going past the point where she visited his place. Both me and another friend tried to help him out, teaching him to cook and take care of himself, present himself better to the world. But nothing stuck. He simply expected us to take care of him with minimal effort on his part at best. And worse: he was dragging everyone down with his constant self-pity over his self-inflicted situation (not that he saw it that way, because of course it was "society" that "misunderstood" him). That became very clear to me after we had a fallout at some point, and I didn't see him for a couple of years. Suddenly my own depression cleared up, and I was able to accomplish things I wouldn't have thought possible before.
So yeah, it's a lot more nuanced than you portray. Of course you don't drop friends because they're going through a rough patch in their lives. But you also don't have an obligation to keep putting effort into helping those that don't want to be helped, undermining your own mental well-being in the process, to the point where you yourself join the ranks of those in need of help. Instead, focus your efforts where they have a positive impact, which will reward you with the warm and fuzzies that give you the energy to help even more people in need. "We need to help everyone" is a nice idea, but reality is you can't. Best allocate your resources wisely.
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking back to a year or so ago when a tankie on Twitter posted something like "staying strong and healthy for the cause is praxis, actually" and he got dogpiled by the Very Online Left, all of them trying to to top each other with how many chronic illnesses/mental conditions/bad life cards they had, so most of this rings very true. "How DARE you say I can do more mutual aid if I make more money when I'm autistic and BPD and have Epstein-Roseanne-Barre syndrome and hate capitalism!"
But IRL I honestly can't tell if progressive dudes simply stay out of the gym/dragstrip/management community, or if they're there and afraid to show their colors. And if the latter, are they more afraid of the conservatives in these spaces, or their lefty peers who find out they lift weights, race cars, like pretty girls, and pursue what a decent salary can buy?
One problem Liberals and the Left has is everyone has to have the same opinion on every damn thing. Republicans will gripe about this and that, but in the end almost all of them voted for Trump again. I actually thought Biden did a good job, but all the Lefty Tanky types who listen to True Anon think he is the worst person ever. You can't have a Joe Rogan of the Left because there's too much diversity of opinion. Everyone would just call you a ghoul.
A major problem Jason also had talked about. You can agree with Generic Leftist on 99% of the issues, but just find that 1% you disagree on and you'll be called actual slurs: "elitist", "animal-killer, "shill", "ableist", "genocide supporter", "white colonizer". Any attempt to explain that I'm actually on your side are facing a brick wall.
Just like those warring rebels from Andor Season 2.
Because you're hanging out talking politics in comments sections and on Twitter. It's like basing my opinion of the right on XBOX Live interactions.
One really important thing to note here is that Andrew Tate didn't get ahead because of the cars and babes. Mountains of influencers do that. It was the realisation that pickup artist techniques are incredibly effective on young boys and that in addition to using them as the financial base of his pyramid scheme he could also use them as a force for gaming the various algorithms that would allow him to expand his influence.
I think it was more luck and being there at the exact right moment in time than anything about him specifically, people have been bullying their fans into sharing their content forever, but figuring out he could say the most attention grabbing inflammatory stuff imaginable and then simply have his fans post his content when he got banned was a game changer. The loss of direct platform access was a perfectly acceptable trade-off to expand his cult membership. Getting them to pay him was easier than getting the platforms to pay him anyway.
A kick-ass post, one that I would have been happy to write, word for word. If you’re progressive, then (i) stop complaining, (ii) stop fighting your allies, (iii) stop doing/saying things that make politically disinterested people hate or laugh at you, (iv) help amass real political/financial power, and (v) motivate people to seriously improve their lives in ways that they find highly attractive even though the improvement is hard to achieve.
The sad part is, the left (I'll leave it up to you if you want to consider them progressive or regressive) had the political power. But they took it too far, made a farce of their own belief system by walking it to its logical conclusion (conveniently ignoring certain facts along the way), until it came full circle and they started spewing the same intolerant nonsense they accuse the far right of. Just in the opposite direction.
And that's a shame, because they started from a good core: empathy, acceptance, and being decent to your fellow man, regardless of their differences. Those are values most people will stand behind and are not controversial in any way.
I like covering a left wing Joe Rogan. Since the left wing already had a Joe Rogan; his name was Joe Rogan. The feeling I get today when I talk to outspoken liberals is the same feelings I got from speaking to outspoken conservative Christians from the 90s.
It may not be the same, but it feels the same. My current moral panic guardians wear blue t-shirts instead of red and say insane, off the wall things that mirror the same style of rhetoric used by televangelist, fire and brimstone, preachers of days past.
And yeah, Jason said it, we can see the people who talk about saving America speaking out of both sides of their mouths. We see that DEI initiatives did not in fact support minorities. We see the DNC as they spend $20+ million to learn to “talk to young men” and still fail to simply talk to men.
Bettering yourself should not only belong to one political spectrum. And quite frankly, it’s empowering to take responsibility for yourself and what you bring into the world.
I'm a normie Lib, and people on the Far Left won't admit the amount of anti-Semitism that has been popping up on Bluesky lately. If I wanted to see that shit everyday, I would have stayed on Twitter.
Have you heard of the extensive moderation tools Bluesky has? Labellers, moderation lists etc. These are not there just for your personal comfort, they shape the community and the discourse. They cause bad actors to lose engagement instead of gaining it.
Nailed it. Another subtle (maybe related?) thing here is, how many people on the left actually spend time around young men. Just understanding why they find Trump charismatic is a step in the right direction, because Trump/the right lets them be them. It's extremely obvious if you spend 2 minutes at a bar with one.
Two other trends on the left that I see related to this. One, the endless analysis of issues, but never focusing on a plan of action. Two, and this second one plays into the habit of disengagement from right wing ideas that you have pointed out before, is the moral absolutism. The idea that a person is forever tainted by a belief or action.
This second point is likely why the right does better. The right has a common redemption narrative along the lines of "Everyone is terrible, including you. You know how terrible you are, but no matter how terrible you are today, through hard-work/religion/my-self-help-system you don't have to stay terrible." I don't think I've ever seen something like that from the left.
I think I hear you saying we need a better Left and I certainly agree with that but the unspoken question I see here is this:
We’ve had roughly 20 years of the Left with far reaching and barely challenged power in politics, news, education, and media and most people hate the world that has given us, so does the Left actually have any solutions to give?
You did not. The people who were in power before Trump and who are his political opponents now would be classified as center or center-right in most other countries.
The actual leftist ideas in the US are absurdly marginalized in both their representation in power and in their broad public support.
😂
> We’ve had roughly 20 years of the Left with far reaching and barely challenged power in politics, news, education, and media
No we haven't. This isn't true at all.
> most people hate the world
Why? 21st century America is an amazing place.
“We’ve had roughly 20 years of the Left with far reaching and barely challenged power in politics, news, education, and media…”
Hard disagree. Do I even need to go into detail? Maybe so on (sole subsets of) education, but in politics I don’t think we’ve controlled SCOTUS once in the last 20 years, the WH is just barely above 50/50. The media is pretty debatable outside of the opinions of right-wingers.
You don't want the solutions they've been giving to us in Portland.
I’ve been to Portland. Going there and to the West Coast in general was a big influence on my thinking about the Left’s policies.
I don't want to spam up our gracious host's comments section so early in our relationship, but if you search my 'Stack for "Portland", you'll see a whole mess of articles about the decline of the city and who's responsible for it.
Disclaimer: I'm not an US-Citizen, nor I live in the USA, so I'm going to write about you from my perspective (South America).
A couple notes: your "left" is not really organized, and acts more like a moral sentiment rather than material politics. Historically there was a push to crash down left-wing organizations that were capable of mobilizing people against the economic system (Black Panthers, as an example), and the anti-communist sentiment grew stronger and stronger because of the Cold War. You have also been misled into thinking that consumption is a political or moral act. Your political system also does not really help, providing a false dichotomy between ""progressive""neoliberalism and neoliberalism with alt right intentions. The result is a mob of impoverished angry people that believe being right wing is revolutionary, and a mass of people who disagrees, but doesn't do anything against the mob. They win based on inertia, because only a small minority is organized in real world political actions.
I hope you see this is not only a problem in the USA. Where I live, we also have the same problem regarding "doomerism" among young leftists, and a spike in reactionary beliefs among young men, but some movements started to organize on this basis. People are angry, and they should be! But they should be angry at the right target (the alt right always tricks people into picking the wrong targets so they stay docile against the capital) and also organized to act and do something about the real problems.