Who wants to be America’s next thirst trap?

Name-calling, sex, intergenerational warfare, and the politics of lifting

Punimtography.

Back when I was working in corporate/normie world, around 2014-2017, I heard the word millennial getting kicked around a lot . I specifically remember one of my bosses having some kind of palsy with it, overusing it as though she had some unique insight into this specific generation that either no one else had or there was something about this generation that made her want to talk about it way more than, say, the Silents or whoever was neglecting them during the Roaring 20’s. This boss of mine was very image-conscious and had a skinny waist, fake boobs, big butt, blonde dye job along with manicure/pedicure, and blowout. She had a tiny powder puff designer dog named Gigi and wore designer clothes. Sometimes she ran home to do costume-changes if she thought she needed to show more skin to get her numbers up (despite the fact that I always outwrote her while having acne and wearing dirty cutoffs).

The way I remember her self-consciousness really showing itself was her desire to use words she thought made her sound smart. It betrayed itself most as she expanded her vocabulary by reaching for somewhat exotic SAT-words and jamming them into sentences where they didn’t quite belong. A particular favorite, sourced from her shrink was agita. For instance, one’s family life growing up could be a source of agita but so could a waiter misunderstanding your order, which makes enough sense once you understand that shrinks make money whether you are the product of incest or just grappling with minor inconveniences. Now and then a certain low-level, easy-to-understand, distinctly not-SAT word would worry its way in there, a sure sign of its buzz-worthiness and desirability. Maybe you’d encounter a catchphrase like emotional intelligence, creeping in. Every now and then a story about an actual aerial dogfight would be repackaged to teach a lesson about corporate leadership or lead management which would be delivered to you by a woman who got her vagina waxed like clockwork every three weeks. Jocko Wilhelmina at your service, if you will.

Back then, when millennial made its rhetorical cameo, dancing off the MAC on her lips, you could hear how deliberate it was, the way you strain to pronounce a difficult last name so as not to offend anyone or sound like a rube. A non-reader, she was clearly repeating what someone who outranked her had said in a meeting somewhere that sounded like the type of word you were supposed to repeat. The problem is she was Gen X and getting her hot tips and buzzwords from someone even older than her, someone with kids, and a mortgage, and back pain, who saw us as people to be managed, which as her employees is fair, but condescended to, which is at minimum harmful to one’s leadership abilities. In fact, she exclusively used the word to describe the socialization and consumption habits of people who largely coincided with the demographic at hand, my demographic but most of our coworkers’ too. We were not even the people off of whose backs she made her money. We were market research she could explain away even if it meant doing so to the market research itself.

We were alternately depicted as quirked up Tamagotchis you could feed cold brew and salad for extra productivity, but also reasonable scapegoats for the pain of one’s mortgage or sacroiliac joint, whatever was going wrong in the world despite not controlling much of it. We were meant to handle both the demand-side of consumption and the supply-side of labor along with the complaints that one was merely the stock of an inferior generation.

Sometimes you don’t want to touch their hair.

The lesson here is not that Gen X or girlbosses are bad. The lesson is that, when you hear someone summarizing the habits of another group in unflattering terms, you shouldn’t get offended that they’re racist, sexist, homophobic etc. You should imagine them as a well-coiffed upper middle class manager coming in to break down esoteric knowledge for you with all the charisma of a D.A.R.E. advocate at your school. Just kicking the straight dope to you the way Michelle Pfeiffer kicked through AAVE to teach kids poetry in Dangerous Minds.

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Sharon Tate serving Mao along with tasteful amounts of arm hair.

Enter Hasan Piker and Tim Walz. I have been trying to abstain from poasting reactions to clickbait and rage-slop but I am a social creature and my colleague

Rohan Ghostwind

recently poasted a good piece about what I will call the Hasan Piker Dreamboat Article in The New York Times last week. It’s a slow news week with BTC up and a lack of hairdressers getting sent to Salvadoran labor camps and so, while I never do this, I have made an agreement with myself to poast take on the beefecakiness of Hasan Piker.

Not to fear. One of the ways I can make peace talking about Hasan is by teaching my esteemed readers like you my own SAT word, exonym.

From Google:

An exonym is a name for a place, group of people, language, or individual that is used by people of other places and languages, but not by those who are native to that place, group, or language. It's essentially a non-native or external name. The opposite of an exonym is an endonym, which is the name a place, group, language, or individual uses for themselves.

Examples:

"Japan" is an exonym for the country known as "

Nippon" in Japanese.

English speakers use "Japan" to refer to the country, while Japanese speakers use "Nippon".

"Germany" is an exonym for the country known as "

Deutschland" in German.

English speakers use "Germany" to refer to the country, while German speakers use "Deutschland".

"Ho Chi Minh City" is an exonym for the city known as "

Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh" in Vietnamese.

English speakers use "Ho Chi Minh City" to refer to the city, while Vietnamese speakers use "Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh".

While it’s true many of us call ourselves millennial or retarded as a means of being cheeky or self-deprecating, both terms began as exonyms because, like retarded people, millennials are primarily tolerated by the people who call them such. Boomer wasn’t used as a derisive until millennial was first used as a descriptor. The term Millennial already had malice baked into it so younger generations never thought twice about using boomer to mean antiquated, out-of-touch, entitlement recipient. The default settings for millennial already coded negative. But BIPOC- and EHC- enjoyers beware, the best type of insult is an ad hom that formerly served as an endonym.

The situation is thus: In the year 2025, Tim Walz and Hasan Piker find themselves wittingly or unwittingly thrown into contention for Leader of the White Men when the real losers are white men who must be consigned to stewardship of a Turk or a boomer when we would gladly settle for Marshall Mae Rogan or a nude Tulsi Gabbard. All the world is a staging ground for another White Dudes for Harris campaign but records show all the Harris supporters conspicuously desire white guys’ votes but never seem to show up at midget wrestling. Everyone wants Joe Rogan fame, money, and golden retriever status but don’t nobody want to do Joe Rogan shit like develop a new industry on extremely shitty tech, tirelessly for decades.

To quote Rohan’s original piece, Gym Kampf — fast twitch fascism, and the unnecessary politicization of fitness:

Piker is the nephew of Cenk Uyger, another political commentator for The Young Turks. From a very young age Hasan has had an uncommon degree of access to the political and media ecosystem.

To be clear, I don’t blame Piker for being a child of nepotism; the fact that he remained relevant is a testament to his own skills. Yet, to try and make him into the next Joe Rogan is to misunderstand why Joe Rogan got so popular in the first place.

I haven’t listened to Rogan’s podcast in a very long time, nor do I find his comedy funny. But there is an undeniably impressive aspect about him; despite coming from a working class background, he was able to conquer podcasting — all the while being a UFC commentator, the fear factor guy, and a legitimately impressive martial artist.

For Low Human Capital™ like myself, people like Rogan are an inspiring testament to the things that you can achieve through time and perseverance, even when you don’t have the approval of traditional institutions, or a great degree of intelligence.

The issue here, contra some people’s sincere horniness to be the smartest on the internet (article above unrelated), is not so much that the right doesn’t value intelligence. It’s that it values intelligence less than the left because it values intelligence among a greater number of qualities. Things like mechanical knowhow, absolute strength, marksmanship, agriculture, religion but yes, also midget wrestling. In fact, sometimes women will complain that men do not value them for their intelligence or work product but, as my friend said when his mother told him he should date a smart girl with a PhD, “Is she going to do my math homework?”

As Jonathan Haidt explains of expressly moral foundations in his book The Righteous Mind, the left cares about fewer things with more intensity than the right who care about a greater number of virtues while their concern for each spreads more evenly. It is easy to feel that, in only caring about a few things, it means one’s political enemies don’t care about your thing at all. The left really, really values intelligence highly which is why its adherents don’t like anyone pointing out group-averages in intelligence across their many constituencies. It’s the same reason they don’t like it when someone calls anyone else a retard. They think intelligence is the most important virtue but they can’t admit they sort themselves away from those they find less intelligent than themselves (everyone they’re supposed to represent, the people they allegedly care for).

Jane Fonda doing revolution.

The Times will keep pumping out schlock like its latest Hanoi Jane treatment of Hasan not because they think Hasan is so smart but because they think you’re just a retarded millennial.