The Poolish - Double Chonk Chocolate Cookie Edition, 15 December 2024

We've seen the coming year and it's still all just bad memes

An Announcement About the Future of The Poolish

Hey, how y’all doing? As we close out another year it is tradition for me to take a step back and try to figure out what the hell I’m doing and why I’m doing it. One of the things I’m looking at doing is reevaluating and reconfiguring what this newsletter actually is.

Trying to put out one last edition for 2024 felt like shitting a brick because I was reaching for any news stories that were not Trump news. And friends, I only found four things to write about this month and in retrospect one of them is kind of fucking Trump adjacent.

When I worked in comedy news I got assignments rolled down to me from editorial and having done that in the years post-2015… friends, the idea of running another comedy news thing during a second Trump administration makes me worry that… well, have any of you seen that old Mick Garris anthology horror movie Quicksilver Highway in which a man’s hands literally rebel against him and try to murder him?

The Poolish started life as the paywalled component of my other newsletter, Plato Was a Dick, then split off into a separate hybrid newsletter, but it never gets high engagement, and I’d rather put my energy into something people will read. So while this concept is still in its infancy I’m going to step back now and think about what I’ll actually be publishing under this banner going forward.

One thing I’m leaning heavily toward right now—A few weeks ago I linked to one of my old Cracked articles on Substack Notes just for the hell of it, and it actually got shockingly high engagement. So that might be the kind of thing I start posting here now. You know, interesting pop culture lists. Stuff that doesn’t make you want to drown yourself.

As a result of this re-evaluation, going forward I’m going to stop offering a subscription to The Poolish as a perk for paid subscribers to Plato Was a Dick. But all of you guys who are getting this because of that subscription—you’re grandfathered in. You’ll remain fully comp-subscribed to The Poolish unless you opt out. And thank you, again, for your contribution.

For all of you and everyone else, wait and see. I’ll let you know what I’m doing as soon as I know.

Until then, as usual, here’s the roundup:

Deprived of Libs to Dunk On, Nazis Turn Against the Costco Guys

If you’ve never heard of the Costco Guys, which I think is their official troupe name, then you might want to stop reading now lest your future self five minutes from now may live to bitterly envy your present. If your curiosity outweighs your dread, however: “A.J. and Big Justice” are a father and son TikTok duo who rate fast food according to a dubious “boom” meter and, as far as I can tell, are not officially affiliated with Costco.

It’s not my thing but, look, I don’t hate them. TikTok’s creator rewards program pays these guys like a trillion dollars to say “double chonk chonklate cooookie” again and again because it’s like crack cocaine to a certain demographic, it’ll burn out in three months, and the proceeds are going to more than pay for Big Justice and the Rizzler’s future therapy.

This is a short form post so I’m not even getting into who The Rizzler is. You have Google.

But, in parallel to the rise of comparatively harmless TikTok content, trouble is brewing over on the Klan Konvention formerly known as Twitter. Since the election went overwhelminglyin the new owner’s favour, every user to the left of Pinochet has fled to greener pastures such as Bluesky, Threads, or Outside Their House, leaving the trolls with precious few libs to own.

Twitter or X or whatever we’re supposed to call it is now largely just the overflow bucket of Gab where the most compelling content is internet backwash content like Nate Silver trying feebly to get Taylor Lorenz to dox herself for some reason.

But also there’s a bunch of shit streaming over there in stark defiance of Geneva Convention Article 3 like two of the worst Richards in history discussing the Costco Guys in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche’s untermensch, in the Naziest possible interpretation of the concept.

Richard “No longer a Nazi” Hanania joins his former protege, Richard “Heil Trump Heil Victory” Spencer in the only type of discussion left for these people at what truly is their End of History. Try not to beg for death as you watch Hanania cackle like a lithium overdosing dipshit at Spencer’s Double Chomk Chomplcate Chomp Coookie tirade about the degenerate subhumanity of the Rizzler.

As I said, I’ve always been basically neutral about the Costco Guys but if there’s anything that could drag me all the way over to their team it’s feeling my philosophy degree violently fighting its way out of my body as the arguably worst Richard accuses A.J. and Big Justice of being Jews.

Also it seems they somehow pranked this relatively harmless father and son team into reading out a white supremacy coded script for shits and giggles? I have no idea what’s going on here but the Richards are pretty fuckin’ Five Booms giggled about it.

Anyway, if all this seems pretty depressing let me leave you with a palate cleanser. There’s no bandwidth limit here to feel free to watch this video as many times as it takes to bring the happy back.

Everyone Feeling a Bit Nervous as Right Wing Presidents Start Doing Slightly Crazy Shit

It’s natural to feel a little unnerved sometimes about the world in general kinda lurching toward far right governance lately. This, plus a catastrophic viral pandemic, suspiciously resembles some stuff that happened on Earth almost exactly one hundred years ago.

But we’re living in the end of history now! So we know that even though first world nations the globe over are falling over themselves to install tread-on-me Fash Daddies at the heads of their own governments to restore the rightful price of eggs, it’s not like any kind of weird or crazy stuff is really going to happen in a liberal democracy, right?

So then one day the far right populist president of South Korea randomly and spontaneously declares martial law. There’s some confusion at first as westerners rush to Google to try to brush up on their geopolitics, remembering that there are two Koreas and one of them is America Korea (good guys) and one of them is Communism Korea (evil/meme Korea). They are shocked to discover that the authoritarian military junta coup attempt is actually happening in cool and good K-Pop Korea.

It’s okay, though! It ended after a few hours and now Yoon-Suk Yeol is in a spot of trouble. It’s really embarrassing when a president has to show up for work the day after a failed insurrection and pretend everything is normal. I fully expect his colleagues will be referring to him as “You Suck Yeol” for a while at the very least.

All right, so most people didn’t even realise that South Korea’s current leader is a lil’ Trumpy dude. Yeah, they’ve got a Trumpo guy, just another Trumparino to add to the ominously growing pile of populist far righters that are nom-nom-nomming up elections all across the democratic world.

So yeah, maybe not cause for alarm, exactly, but probably cause for alert when the South Korean president tries to do a thing that is now known, on any date of the year, as a “January 6,” especially after Brazil tried to do a January 6 cheered on by Elon Musk, and then Britain tried to do a January 6 cheered on by Elon Musk, and now Elon Musk is giving $100 million to Nigel Farage to do more January 6s.

At least Musk doesn’t have any clear connection to the Korean event, stating only that it is “concerning” while striking out with Tiffany Fong.

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