Category: [Important images]

Shittering prize

If we learned nothing else from this week in politics, it’s that there actually is one person with even less capacity for embarrassment than Mushroom Cock, and that person is Maria Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader, seen here giving his majesty her Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his commitment to Venezuela’s oil reserves… er, freedom or something. Yeah, she actually gave him the fucking thing and he’s kept it, BECAUSE OF FUCKING COURSE. What else would the cunt have done? This is all despite the fact that the Nobel committee swears up and down that she can’t actually do that cos the Nobel laureateship can’t be revoked, shared or transferred, and I bet there’s going to be some discussion very soon about changing that first detail if nothing else…

…And this grotestque show of fawning STILL won’t work for her. Trump’s got the prize, which is what he cares about, but Delcy Rodriguez has the leadership of the country and the oil, and that’s even more important. I have seen a conspiracy theory (which I personally find at least somewhat credible) floating about that the whole Maduro business was in fact instigated by Rodriguez and others in the United Socialist Party, that they’ve been working secretly with the US government for months to get the latter to remove Maduro on their behalf and let them take over, with obvious recompense and favours for the US. I think Machado’s going to have to pay Trump a lot more than that if she expects him to install her as his puppet instead.

In any case, the whole stupid affair has started producing memes of people giving Krasnov prizes on social media, and if we have to be stuck with generative AI then let it be used this if nothing else. The most inspired one I’ve seen so far is this little bit of genius:

Milli Donilli: fake singers, fake president

Parenthetically, this is not actually the first time this bullshit with the Nobel Prize has happened; in 1943 Knut Hamsun, famed Norwegian author and, er, Germanophile, shall we say, gave his own Nobel (for literature, awarded in 1920) to Joseph Goebbels in recognition of the Dritte Reich’s efforts to save Norway from itself in the early 1940s. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat but it does rhyme, and that’s kind of what I’m seeing here…

Say everybody have you seen my balls

Someone on Bluesky linked to a really interesting article, came out in April last year but I didn’t see it until late December:

The new right is a great purveyor of images. Our new Secretary of Defense revels in taking off his shirt and displaying his tattooed, muscular chest. Andrew Tate is much the same, but poses with a cigar and a raw steak while he lectures millions of young men about the right way to treat a woman. Meanwhile AI or OnlyFans or Instagram delivers you an endless stream of dewy girls with flowing hair and glossy lips just barely parted at the camera.
The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I’m talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.
I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.
It’s not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I’m just saying what everyone knows. “Hard work and good eating” will only get you so far. And you’ll watch guys who took the “hard work and good eating and mail-order meds” option rocket past you.

It goes on in that sort of vein about how this sort of “reactionary camp” (great term for it) requires taking masculinity and femininity to a sort of excessive extreme, and I meant to post about this about a week ago, but I’m so glad I didn’t cos I think we just got the greatest example of it—assuming that it’s serious—in the form of the photo at the top.

Now, “Man Cereal” is an actual thing, in that there’s a website and an Instagram for it; the extent to which it may or may not be some sort of joke is something I don’t know, but the website indicates that they are serious but also self-aware and there’s quite some degree of irony involved… the question then becomes: how seriously do The Manly Men of the right take this “man product”? Do they get the apparent joke? And how much of a joke is it, really? The person who posted the picture also posted this grab from the website…

…and, well, those are some pink balls. I don’t know what to make of it all, though I can’t say I don’t find the whole thing greatly amusing…

And compensation for it, too

Doggo here seems eminently correct. As one of my Facebook friends noted the other day, he hadn’t seen anyone posting “2026 is going to be My Year” or any of the similar bullshit that people say when the old year is ending and the new one’s about to start once they’ve got over their NYE hangover. Similarly, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone saying what a great year 2025 has been for them personally. Every December 31st I tend to say something about how glad I am to see the back of the old year, and I think this year that is more true than ever, and I just wish I had any confidence whatsoever that 2026 will be an improvement. I’d like to at least be able to say it won’t be any worse than 2025 was, but I fear 2026 will just shout “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!” at me and prove me horribly wrong if I do say that… so I won’t. Just in case.

Anyway, unless something astonishing happens in the afternoon that I simply must comment on, I think this might be my last post for 2025 (getting it in during the wee hours of the 31st), because—and I can barely believe it myself—I might actually be going out. Yes, incomprehensible as it sounds, I’ve decided I might actually Do Something for New Year’s Eve this year, which I can only assume is a sign of baffling desperation or of something being wrong me… I mean, a number of things are wrong with me, including mentally, and I will probably end up with regrets if I do go out (which is dependent on me still feeling up to it on the night and taxis being obtainable if I am)… but anyway, that’s where things stand, so this might be my last word here for 2025. Time for bed and hopefully something approximating to sleep…

On the box…

There are certain things I never, or at least very rarely, post about here because I just have no interest in them. One of those things is sport, particularly boxing which I actually kind of hate, and another is Jake Paul, worthless Youtube scum (though I can never decide if he or his similarly worthless brother Logan is worse). Put both those things together, however…

…and you might just get me interested, especially when it involves him getting seven shades of shit beaten out of him. The fight he did the other day with Anthony Joshua was already over by the time I got up the following day, so I could only marvel at the outcome… as the Wiki piece notes, the match was criticised for being noticeably unbalanced, and I did kind of wonder why Joshua took all of six rounds to knock the tedious prick out, it should’ve been almost immediate… but then I realised Joshua was being very deliberate and toying with him, and it just felt so much better. I mean, look at that face. That is the face of a man with regrets. He is wondering what the fuck he’s done, questioning his life choices, and realising he’s bitten off more than he could chew (and now he can’t chew anything at all).

It was kind of gold if you’re a mean-spirited prick like I can be in cases like this (I like a good bit of Schadenfreude when something like this happens), and, well, it’s also being accused of being less than 100% real. Apparently this accusation has dogged Jake’s whole boxing career, and there’s certainly been questionable aspects of how he’s conducted same (e.g. his choice of fights with people like Mike Tyson that are long past their prime), but… you know, Joshua did break his fucking jaw in two places. That doesn’t seem like something you’d script, I can’t imagine even Jake Paul being thrilled to have that happen to him even for the monstrous amount of money he was apparently being paid for it… yeah, I can’t really get with that idea. Still, there was stupid money involved, so he could probably buy himself a new jaw if it came to that…

Why?

This is… not what I was expecting from the much-delayed vote on the Epstein files. Even considering Mushroom Cock’s abrupt 180 turn on them the other day, I still fully expected the Republicans to vote it down, and the fact that only one of them did astonishes me. Probably he was expecting the same as me. I wonder if Trump was, too. But there you go, the Senate has already promised to pass it which means it more or less goes straight to Krasnov, who’s said he’ll sign it.

Why?

What are they doing this for, and why now?

I don’t think anyone should find this exciting or hopeful, nor should we expect the Republicans to actually handle the situation properly:

Yeah. I think a remarkable number of files will be excluded for legal reasons, an even more remarkable number will have “gone missing”, and whatever we do get will be redacted to buggery. Anyone who thinks they haven’t spent all this time tampering with if not actively destroying the evidence is not being serious, and we shouldn’t trust anything that comes out from this. And we definitely shouldn’t expect justice to come from it either…