The Poolish - Worst People You Know Edition 5 May 2024
The Onion is safe, and more news
Greetings, subscribers old and new. Welcome to The Poolish.
There are some new names on the mailing list today, so I want to start with a little introduction. The Poolish is comedy news and current affairs beats from a former columnist and editor of Cracked.com — S Peter Davis (me).
This began life as bonus content for paying subscribers to my newsletter column Plato Was a Dick. Then I spun this out into its own publication because I’m bad at managing groups of people and kept accidentally sending this to people who didn’t want it. It’s much easier to manage two separate mailing lists.
Now because I still attract only a few paying subscribers I’ve found myself releasing more of this content for free because I like people actually reading my stuff. So here’s the current deal on this always-evolving project:
This is now a mixed free and paywalled blog. Each news piece is published on the front page on the day it’s written. Only the digest editions—like the one you’re reading now—are pushed out via email so you still never miss anything, but if you keep an eye on the landing page you’ll see it sooner. So if you subscribe free you’ll see all the free content and if you upgrade to paid (5 simoleons a month, 50 for a year) you’ll see all the content, which you can do here:
Paid subscribers to Plato Was a Dick get grandfathered into The Poolish. Also, I have a third Substack project because I am insane, called Three Minute Philosophy, and I now offer a payment bundle to unlock all content across all three, if you like.
Because I’m feeling generous for all my new best friends (you) this edition of The Poolish round-up is free for all of you!
Another reason we’re celebrating is of course:
The Onion is Safe For Now
The decades-serving satirical newspaper and website The Onion was recently at risk of being shuttered by the same types of humourless corporate hollow suits who killed Cracked back when I had a paying comedy career. Not the same exact guys, mind you, but same enough that they probably wear the same cologne.
The only humour that’s allowed on the internet now is either aggregators of Reddit threads or one-shot social media zingers like what Cracked turned into (because you don’t need to pay writers if you’re just screenshotting their tweets) or right wing Onion clones like Babylon Bee who manage to tap rich people’s wallets by rewording the same attack helicopter joke over and over.
Thankfully, there’s a very rare happy ending here, as a consortium of True Fans have pooled their money together to put the Onion back in the hands of some people who actually want it to succeed.
Now that I’ve told you some very good news about some very good people, it seems fitting to present some heartbreaking news about the worst people you know:
Puppies: Should We Shoot Them In the Face and Toss Them in a Ditch? Conservatives Debate
The worst people you know are all fighting this week as a revelation from South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s biography reveals that she once killed her family’s pet puppy just because she felt like it, and threw its body in a ditch somewhere. When questioned about what could have led her to do such a thing, she explained that it’s because she’s politically incorrect.
Now sure, that definitely feels like the kind of thing that fits the definition of politically incorrect, as well as the regular kind of incorrect also, but when most people want to broadcast their political incorrectness they just, like, say a slur or something instead of murdering an animal.
But this has caused plenty a stir in Republican influencer space, where pundits, who will often position the canine species somewhere between a Trump voter and a fetus on the “do not kill” scale, can’t agree on whether being edgy or owning the libs is enough of a reason to put a bullet in man’s best friend.
In one corner, there’s catturd and Laura Loomer, who feel this is a terrible waste of life that could have been a gender studies major or BLM protester.
Others, like known sociopath Michael Knowles, admitted that the dog murder only enhanced his respect, because loving anything is gay or something. Also the dog was probably woke.
Interestingly, the same story in which Noem recalls killing the dog also involves her killing a goat—the way she tells it, she was just on a roll and looking for something else to kill. But although #dogkiller trended all day, no conservatives have said a damn thing about the goat, likely because of that weird thing they have about goats and Satan.
Airplane Peanuts Comedian Confused About the Passage of Time
Jerry Seinfeld is in the news once again blaming leftists and woke culture for him not being funny.
You might recognise Jerry Seinfeld as the comedian whose entire persona is not being funny. The “what’s the deal with airplane peanuts” thing that people say as shorthand for an unfunny comedian? That’s Seinfeld. They’re making fun of Seinfeld.
It’s actually kind of difficult to pin down all the things wrong with this 60 second clip, it’s like an Ouroboros of incorrect. He goes on about how they can’t make sitcoms anymore because they would offend leftists, and by way of examples he rattles off half a dozen sitcoms that were on TV when I was in primary school.
It seems like the real woke mind virus killing comedy is just the passage of time? Curiously absent from his list of sitcoms you can’t make nowerdays are the fairly politically incorrect and nevertheless hugely popular sitcoms they are making nowerdays, such as Arrested Development, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. You’d know that last one, Jerry, because it’s by the guy who fucking wrote Seinfeld.
Maybe the problem is that Jerry Seinfeld, the guy famous for not being funny and whose greatest accomplishment outside of that show he did about not being funny was voicing an animated bee, just isn’t very funny? Has he tried being funny?
We all remember when Kramer went anti-woke, after all, and oddly enough it wasn’t very successful. Maybe that’s not the issue here, Jerry. Maybe that’s not “what’s the deal,” Jerry.
Christian Zionists Upset Antisemitism Bill Targets Types of Antisemitism They Like
In the latest episode of America being driven to absolute pants on head lunacy with both major parties arguing over which parts of the First Amendment to sacrifice to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the House has passed the so-called “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” a bipartisan bill that broadens the definition of antisemitism for the purposes of anti-discrimination legislation.
This is both good and bad news for the so-called Christian Zionists.
If you’re not up to date on the convoluted ins and outs of Judeo-Christian intersectional theology it goes something like this: The Christian Zionist Dispensationalists operate in a kind of Groundhog Day dogma in which, if Jesus comes back and sees peace in the Middle East then he crawls back into his burrow and it’s another 2000 years of the world not ending in holy fire. You would think that would be the desired outcome, but it isn’t, because they want that. They want the holy wrath thing because God will let them hold the pitchforks that they stab sinners with.
So, quote-unquote Christian countries like the USA need to keep Jews in Israel and the diaspora all in perpetual conflict, which means funding Israel and also keeping the pressure on protests at home, so they like passing bills that enable authorities to commit state violence against Palestinians and their supporters in America.
With me so far? Unfortunately, the Antisemitism Awareness Act broadens the definition of antisemitism—that which can be deemed unlawful—to include things like, believing Jews are a bunch of Jesus-murdering demonic heathens, which is an adjustment that has Christian Zionists like Marjorie Taylor Greene saying “hey now”
Quite suddenly, the same people who have been extremely in favour of Zionists with brickbats beating the snot out of protesters for vocally opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza are, like flicking a switch, now very concerned about censorship overreach.
To be clear, the usual suspects have somehow managed the type of hypocrisy in which they are wrong about both sides of the issue they’re simultaneously trying to be on, which is fascinating but not wholly unexpected.
Florida Outlaws Lab-Grown Meat Due to Conspiracy Concerns
You know something that would really help humanity in just about every imaginable way you could possibly look at it? If we could manufacture real meat. Just skip the entire middle process that involves an animal. Just make the shit. I’m not talking about Burger King impossible patties, I’m talking goddamn ribeyes. Let’s run down the list shall we:
Ethics vegetarians who suffer psychic damage about craving meat can double fist handfuls of bacon if they want to
One of the global warmingest industries on the planet can just cool it, literally
Don’t need an area the size of Kansas to grow the corn needed to feed the cow that feeds 10 people at one President’s Day barbecue. Use that land for something else, for example literally anything. Maybe feeding people, I don’t know.
Cheaper protein more easily available, feed more people a better diet, universal quality of life improvement
Less risk of animal diseases becoming exotic new people diseases through interspecies germ hopping or brain-eating prions
Let’s not forget the industrial scale animal cruelty that will no longer need to hang over our entire species like a chain-rattling ghost from a Victorian horror fable
PETA, one of the most annoying groups of people on Earth, might go away
What if I told you that we’re close to actually cracking the technology to achieve this on a wide scale? Using biotech to straight-up manufacture meat-
-aaaaand Florida just banned it. With more American states racing to pass legislation to make it illegal.
Why? Because George Soros, of course. And the WEF, and chemtrails, and the wokeness, just that whole thing.
At least, that’s Governer Ron DeSantis’ excuse. That’s right, that’s the actual sane argument, the cover story he’s putting out to try to mask the fact that this is really just about protecting American cattle ranching industries in the same way that they protect the fossil fuel industry.
Republicans know that conspiracy theories about the Illuminati or whatever are more palatable to the American public than “we want to protect rich people’s income” when explaining why they’re moving to use the violence of the state to restrict people from the liberty of choosing what they want to consume. We’re usually all about free market and personal liberty, we’re just protecting you from Bill Gates.
Elon Musk Relaxes Stance on Nick Fuentes, Will Likely Start Bantering With Him Soon
Truly, Elon Musk has the hardest job in the world. He needs to appear vociferously pro-Israel to appease the mainstream Republican conservative Christian Zionists that make up one half of his fanbase, while at the same time, has to avoid offending the 14-word-chanting Replacement Theorist neo-Nazis that make up the other half of his fanbase.
To that end, although he’s just done a whole Holocaust Museum apology tour as penence for agreeing with pro-Hitler comments and calling George Soros “Magneto” Musk has gone ahead and reversed his Twitter account suspension decision for Nick Fuentes, America’s foremost neo-Nazi and insidious antisemitic propagandist.
Musk has cleverly avoided referring to Fuentes as an antisemite despite the fact that that’s literally the only thing that he is known and notorious for, cryptically referring to his political postion as “anti whatever” as he curls his hair plugs into pigtails and feigns ignorance somehow about what this human garbage represents.
This is of course reminiscent of the time Musk reversed his ban on Alex Jones, who he also previously claimed to have visceral indeological disagreements with, but it was about a week before they started bantering like old college buddies and Musk gave Jones his own show on X. So you can take that information however you like.