my hot takes

or, reasons to fight me

Here are a list of my spiciest hot takes. Yes, I will fight you, and, no, I will not explain myself.

No need for a preamble:

James Joyce’s Ulysses is easier to read than Marvel or DC comics.

I would rather not have eyes than have to read manga on my computer. Give me a physical book or don’t recommend these to me ever again, you fools.

For the last ten years, I’ve primarily read on my kindle. At this point, I prefer the experience of reading on my kindle to a physical book. However, I prefer to own physical copies.

That Elon Musk has a revoltingly large fandom to himself is more cyberpunk than Neuromancer.

Social media is the most cyberpunk thing about life. The people who have turned their online lives into a Persona that posts exclusively about one thing but post about that one thing dozens of times a day are the most cyberpunk thing imaginable.

While we’re on the subject: cyberpunk, at this point, is more a fashion style than it is a film or literary genre.

Wokeness is the new boogeyman and it gets blamed for everything anyone dislikes about anything. I’ve even seen it blamed for the Game of Thrones ending!

People obsessively turn the most boring aspect of themselves into their entire personality.

Pianos are better than guitars.

Cellos and violins are best of all.

JRR Tolkien wrote darker fantasy than most authors described as grimdark.

Henryk Gorecki is more metal than Pantera.

Virginia Woolf’s suicide note is better than any love letter any other writer wrote.

Beauty and the Beast is the best Disney movie. Shout out to Jean Cocteau.

Many political problems are not very complicated, but they all require great sacrifice and hard choices that will be unpopular in the short term.

For many liberals, history stopped when Hilary Clinton lost the 2016 election and they’ve spent the last six years blaming everyone but those responsible. Ironically, they’re also the ones most comfortable with not prosecuting the Trump family and Administration, just like they were comfortable with the Obama Administration forgiving George Bush and his Administration.

Most people would prefer to never have an abortion and would prefer for no one to ever have an abortion, but most people are also in favor of providing legal abortion.

Most people in the US, including gun owners and conservatives, are in favor of stricter gun control policies.

Prohibition is only effective when the government targets manufacturers rather than consumers.

The US is a socially conservative country but also in favor of a much more distributive economy.

Surrogacy is socially acceptable organ harvesting. Or, if we’re feeling friendly, we can call it indentured servitude or organ renting.

If you oppose sex work, you should oppose surrogacy for more or less the same reason.

I agree with Noam Chomsky that most US presidents have been war criminals.

The American Left should embrace First Amendment absolutism. That certain segments of the Left have begun to equivocate or even turn their back on Free Speech will be disastrous if this becomes a serious position.

If you believe in a policy like universal healthcare or universal suffrage or free post-secondary education, you need to accept that some amount of people you despise will also benefit from these policies. Including Nazis. The moment you begin to segment off parts of the population from a universal program, that’s the moment it dies.

The best way to address disinformation is through improving the material conditions of people’s lives. It’s remarkable how quickly conspiracy theories lose cultural power when people are not desperate or despairing.

Mass market paperbacks are the best physical package for a novel.

Converting the entire world to renewable energy will not save humanity from ecological collapse. Consumption and land use need to be reduced dramatically. And while C02 is very important, it’s not the only factor in ecological disaster, nor is it the only cause behind the Sixth Extinction.

If your politics are not utopian in scope, you should recuse yourself from politics. Or, to put it more simply: if your response is that nothing can really get better, just shut the fuck up.

Humanity is neither flawed nor improvable.

Art is best when it is not about politics but is political.

Terrible people have made important and incredible art. The reprehensible nature of their actions or statements is reason enough to ignore them, but not a good reason to dismiss them.

There is no moral arc of the universe.

I will oppose every war.

Self-care as it currently exists as a cultural phenomenon is dumb and narcissistic and anti-political.

Obsession with self-identification or the identification and classification of people makes mass politics impossible. As it is currently expressed, it is the opposite of solidarity and will always cause any attempts at mass politics to splinter and fragment into oblivion.

Anime is bad. Even good anime is bad. Often not in a fun way.

The degree to which some people are horny for cartoons lands somewhere between hilarious and horrifying. Or, rather, it is both hilarious and horrifying in equal measure. And, no, I do not want you to tell me about it.

That many writers, editors, and publishers came up as fanfiction writers/readers is profoundly bad for literature of all genres.

Fanfiction can be quite good.

The Wheel of Time is Dune fanfiction.

Dune, perversely, is Wheel of Time fanfiction.

NK Jemisin and George RR Martin are the right kind of fans writing fiction.

Many of the greatest artists of all time did it all on accident.

Boardgames are for adults what couch co-op videogames are for kids.

It makes as much sense to watch someone stream Fortnite as it does to watch any professional sport. In fact, it might make more sense to watch someone stream a videogame.

The Beatles are simultaneously better and worse than anyone says.

Kanye West invented the last 20 years of popmusic in the same way that The Beatles defined the music that followed them for decades (this may be something I write about more someday).

Anyone who fixates on hypotheticals or abstractions is not worth talking to. Don’t even be friends with them, honestly.

Don’t just delete social media apps from your phone, silence all notifications for your phone.

A groupchat is better than any social media. Just put some of your friends in a groupchat and treat it the way you used to treat twitter or facebook a decade ago and watch the hilarity that gets unleashed.