I’ve just discovered via r/swoletariat this absolutely fucking unreal 2018 Guardian editorial from Zoe Williams
Do you boast about your fitness? Watch out – you’ll unavoidably become rightwing
Great start there. Bit rich coming from a person whose editorial board posts transphobic shit and Israel apartheaid apologism
Yesterday was Fitness Day. Sorry, let me give that its proper title: #FitnessDay. The space bar is always the first casualty of a manufactured social media movement.
Sweet, hot take! It’s not like hashtags are the most basic way of linking together commentary on a topic in our modern age. Hypertext is based on linked documents, Zoe.
Do too much, and the self-love develops a carapace of self-sufficiency. This is especially a problem for cyclists, who come to think of themselves as an off-grid warrior class, having performed their commute drawing on no more resources than their own glutes, and maybe a sports drink. Unavoidably, over time, this makes you more rightwing, as you descend into an aerobics-powered moral universe where only the weak need each other, and all the strong need is a waterpouch in their backpack that pipes straight into their mouths.
Bit of a fucking leap there imho. How does that work? I enjoy exercise for a variety of spiritual and physical reasons. Not once have I ever thought of myself as self-sufficient, a “warrior” (in a non day-dreamy / roleplay sense). I also don’t own a water pouch. Rude.
How heroic do you find the armed forces? And is that just those in active combat, or also the ones who fix army IT and count parachutes? I found the questions on YouGov’s recent poll peculiar, but I often do when they ask us to make qualitative judgments about one another (do benefit claimants want to work? Are migrants ambitious? – there is no possible answer beyond “I’d have to take this on a case-by-case basis”).
So we’ve tried to draw a straight line from liking exercise to soldier-hero worship? Sweet. No problem there at all.
From the people who brought you the Ostrich Pillow – which lets you nap anywhere, the next best thing to being a baby – comes the three-way hood: you can wear it as a hood, or as a snood, but its unique selling point is “eclipse mode”, where you pull it right over your face and that alerts people to the fact that you don’t want to talk to them. So, someone has just reinvented a pillow case, for a generation of people who have forgotten how to deploy a simple, offputting grumpy face. It’s the hood that says hell-in-a-handcart.
Wait what? This is the conclusion of the article. I’m really confused now. What has this to do with anything? Are we just trying to glue together random pieces of “individualism bad”? I get the sentiment; rugged individualism is misconceived at best and outright fascist propaganda at worst. But as mentioned before we’re hardly the voice of solidarity are we The Guardian. That concluding paragraph indicates that this is nothing more than a strung-together vitriolic ramble. What the hell?
Don’t fucking read The Guardian folks. It’s centrist tripe.