Worst of 2013

2013 was a marvellous year for idiocy, medstore poor logic and the ongoing failure of capitalism. I celebrate some of the best worst moments in a list that may be expanded if you send me substantial gifts and write sycophantic things about my Wildean wit in the comments. Thanks. By which we mean, medications if you don’t like me, piss off to another bit of the internet.

5. Playing the Man

I begin this Countdown of Crap with the news that my personal 2013 was pretty good, fuck you very much. I do this not because I want you to know that my boyfriend is much younger and taller than yours. Although, you know, he is plus he reads books. I do this because I have found that in 2013, argumentum ad hominem became the new crochet. So I had better convince you that I am happy

<img src = “My Boyfriend’s Huge Wang.jpg”>

because unhappy people can’t make good arguments. Nor can immoral or nasty or lazy ones. And I am probably wrong about everything because I don’t volunteer at a vegan soup kitchen.

This year, the substance of one’s argument became secondary to one’s character and real-life actions. In Australian politics, we saw careers and legacies buoyed and busted by this appeal to authority; or its opposite.

Published opinions are now read less like argument than they are a biography; most political careers are understood the same way. It is not policy or principle that is at issue so much as it is personality. Less important than the question ‘Is this argument good?” is ‘Is she a bitch or is he a homo?”


lol woof .
These arguments all appeared in traditional and social media:

Julia Gillard cannot make good policy because she is a woman. Christopher Pyne makes bad policy because he is somewhat like a woman. Julia Gillard makes good policy because she is a woman. Christopher Pyne makes good policy because the Left said he was somewhat like a woman.

There are one thousand ways to applaud Gillard’s stewardship of the nation. Most of them have to do with a calculator and none of them have to do with her gender. There are a million ways to decry Pyne’s education policy and none of them have to with her gender.

You fucker. You laughed.

4. Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs

Jobs is to The Social Network as my morning stool is to Songs of Innocence and Experience. While it is true that turning a meanie like Jobs into a sympathetic subject for cinema is about as tough as polishing aforesaid turd, no one predicted he could ever be this boring.

We can imagine Demi high-fiving her newest companion as she sees her ex turn to nothing on screen with a numb force that made her own performance in GI Jane seem perky and inspirational.

Apple-Inc-humor-Android-funny-logos
Could no one represent for the fanboys of a company that even this holdout—so stubborn she actually purchased Windows 8—must admit transformed the western world?

Apparently not. I dislike the proprietary culture of Apple a good deal but fuck me, couldn’t they sue Ashton for jailbreaking a man’s legacy?

3. Cyrus the Virus

More ‘discourse’ has been written in the service of this modest talent in 2013 than I’ve performed abortions. Why? Because the ‘slut-shaming’ of Miley Cyrus is an important matter We As Women must address lest this noxious ill reproduce itself in real life? No. Because Miley Cyrus keeps taking her dacks off and gets great SEO.

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Bloggers and ‘writers’ and purveyors of pop-sociology might feel they’re doing society a good turn by analysing sexist critique. But, really they’re just providing an elaborate rationale to show pictures of that Tennessee teen’s vagina AGAIN while expecting that the world of high-sales pop culture and justice ever had any kind of contract with each other.

Bitches will try to reform capitalism. Good luck with that. As Jean Baudrillard said to Keanu Reeves at the VMAs, ‘And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game.’

2. Prize Winning Literature

Why the piddle are people still writing pretend stories? And, more to the point, why are you still reading them? Surely now that truth is dead, we can do away with fiction.

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I would expand on my loathing for the dead weight of the novel but I really don’t think I have to when you can just go and look at the Man Booker long-list; a document less remarkable for the richness of ideas to which it refers than as a lesson in brand management.

The nineteenth century is over and so are novels and your refusal to let things with stupid titles like ‘The Gastrointestinal Disorder of Mr Bashir’ or ‘The Memory of Chocolate’ or ‘The Gallery of Compost’ go is embarrassing us both.

If you want some cultural capital, buy a shitload of spelt sourdough. Stop supporting the poison industry of fiction.

1. Food Trucks

Look. I for one am very fucking happy not to have been born in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free Interpretation of Food Hygiene Standards. In Australia, we like our wages reasonable and our repasts at a table. What the heck we are doing pretending fried things taste better because they come out of a truck is beyond me.petes van

In 2013, every sad little shitter from an Australian innercity burb saw themselves through a Tarantino lens and spent way too much on a soggy taco made by an ‘artisan’ who went to Geelong Grammar and is now using your money to snort Uncle Charlie off a model’s arsehole in Brazil.

Fuck food trucks. Unless they are at a Royal Agricultural Show and sell unironic dagwood dogs. In which case, fuck those, too. I would never eat that shit.

 

Clearly, this is a hasty list and does not represent my truest fears for the world of human enterprise. If it did, it would include the re-emergence of identity politics re-branded as ‘intersectionality’, the emasculation by white journalists of Mandela and my fondness for carbohydrates.

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