Your Words Are Weak – written by Jordan Holmes

Your Words Are Weak – written by Jordan Holmes

You can’t swear, so you already lost. You can’t fight back. You can’t fight back against a weapon that you neither have nor understand. You can’t argue with me, because I’m made of weird, wordy weapons. 

What do you have to say that doesn’t deserve the word “fuck” in 2024? So why can’t you say it? 

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What Are You? – written by Jordan Holmes

What Are You? – written by Jordan Holmes

If I do not support you, if I do not agree with you, if I do not vote for Biden, then I am responsible for Trump being elected, correct? And if I am responsible for Trump being elected, I am responsible for his actions, correct? If I am the one to be responsible for his actions if he is elected, what happens if I vote for Biden and he is elected? Am I responsible for the things Trump didn’t do? Or am I responsible for the things Biden did do? 

If you are arguing that for me to fight you tooth and nail, with absolutely no regard for whether I win or lose, because there’s no other option, is to take responsibility for Trump, then for you to fight me, makes you responsible for Biden. 

Here we are. Last election cycle I voted for Biden. Now I am responsible for the Palestinian genocide.

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So You Don’t Have To: The McDonalds Kit Kat Banana Split McFlurry

So You Don’t Have To: The McDonalds Kit Kat Banana Split McFlurry

Ice cream packed with candy bars is an age old tradition. Like baseball. Or Kendrick Lamar ending beefs heroically. And much like Kendrick dropping “Not Like Us” on the Fourth of July, another great American experience has dropped around Independence Day.

I can’t help myself. As a fat, some things just tend to jump out at me. So when I saw the press release for the new frozen concoction from McDonalds, I was immediately intrigued. Dropped on 7/10, the Kit Kat Banana Split McFlurry is a mad libs experiment in things that McDonalds has decided they can get away with dumping into ice cream and having people enjoy. Did I enjoy it? Let’s find out.

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Built The Burn Thee Silver Mt. Zion – written by Jordan Holmes

Built The Burn Thee Silver Mt. Zion – written by Jordan Holmes

I am out to hurt your feelings! I am out here intending to cause you pain! I want you to feel personally attacked by what I am saying because I am also under attack

I am under attack by a deluge of voices telling me where we are in relation to 1930s Germany and then saying, “Uh oh”. UH OH!? Motherfuckers Uh Oh? What in God’s fucking name are we doing here? 

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The Angel, The Devil, and The Bear: examining the new season of the most talked-about show where everyone calls each other “Chef”

The Angel, The Devil, and The Bear: examining the new season of the most talked-about show where everyone calls each other “Chef”

Over the last week, I watched the new season of The Bear (F/X and Hulu) with hesitation. Like most of the world, I have loved the first two seasons, set in a Chicago restaurant. But there seemed to be a growing cloud over this new season, which was decided to release in one installment perfect for mass consumption. People were not happy with the storylines that were given and how the season was told. Look, every show, no matter how good, has a season that is not up to the usual standard of excellence (looking at you, season 4 of Fargo). So I went in expecting to not have the reaction I had with the earlier offerings. Turns out, I had nothing to be worried about.

Season 3 of The Bear fucking rules, you guys.

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My all-time most bizarre comedy experience…

My all-time most bizarre comedy experience…

In general, I have a rule when I am performing comedy: Do not blame the audience if things are not going well. Too often, I have found comedians who have not done well get mad at a crowd and believe it is the fault of the audience when, in reality, they should be shouldering a lot of that responsibility themselves. If a crowd doesn’t laugh at a joke, I’m usually not one to blame the crowd. Maybe it’s not a great joke. Maybe I delivered it poorly that night. Maybe something happened earlier in my set that I failed to pick up on and now I’m seeing the repercussions of that. I find having this mindset (hopefully) makes me a better comedian and performer because it is always making me look at ways to improve my comedy.

There are, of course, notable and obvious exceptions to this rule. Sometimes an audience member has decided they are going to help the show by heckling. Sometimes an audience member is blind drunk. And sometimes a former co-worker tries to get your show cancelled before it even begins.

This story is about that last kind of example.

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Slavery Is Still Legal – written by Jordan Holmes

Slavery Is Still Legal – written by Jordan Holmes

You do not sound reasonable, you sound ridiculous. What is your concept of the present where a “solution” can require decades? Do you not hear the bells of climate change? 1.5 Celsius has come and gone already. Reality says we are out of time. 

And what do you propose? The possibility of slowly pushing and pushing for modest, incremental improvement? And how, in our present, is that any more possible than rewriting the Constitution? What improvements are possible to keep in our current system? For what did decades of women fighting for abortion rights achieve? Decades of people dying to preserve abortion rights, wiped away because of a stolen supreme court judge, a judge stolen because the President backed down in the face of a stupid fucking turtle. 

Or was it wiped away because those in power, those elected by the dying, used it? Because abortion is far more useful as a tool than a right, that’s an undeniable fact. For how many elections has abortion rights been a rallying cry? Why actually legalize abortion? It was technically legal. 

But any change that can be undone is not change. Roe V. Wade wasn’t the legalization of abortion, it was nothing more than a pendulum swing. Abortion, all abortion, whatever the fuck trimester you’re in, should be legal, available, and free. To paraphrase Sian Norris in Bodies Under Siege, women will not be free until abortion is free. 

Regardless of your idea of how the next 30 years will play out if Biden wins, or Trump wins, there is a force in opposition to you that has greater strength. 

Do you believe that by electing Democrats, a group of people elected many times with varying degrees of ability to already have done the thing you want them to do, that we will be able to adapt to climate change, despite the Democrats already having the power to do so? 

Why have they not done this already? If you would prefer not to blame them for squandering whatever power they were given, then you must blame the force in opposition to them. That force is not going away. That force owns the Supreme Court. That force owns at least half of the politicians in Congress. That force owns District Attorneys in Georgia, desperately destroying the forest, a forest. During the current climate crisis. While the Democrats are in power and can stop it.

Do you think, even if you could somehow convince the Democrats to do something they don’t want to do, then convince them to do it – a task they are terrible at achieving even when they want to do it – then what? You think it will be allowed?

Until the force in opposition to your goals is no longer in your way, you will never achieve your goals

Alex Jones will not be held accountable for what he’s done to, shit, the world, despite going through the system that you hold up to me as being real. The man is not guilty of just pain, he’s guilty of any number of crimes. What is being done to stop them? Nothing. And the justice system is dragging its feet for years, because to hold him accountable would be to hold a rich person accountable. Even one so odious as him, that could potentially spiral out of control, what next, holding other rich people accountable? Imagine the thought! Imagine if the executives at Boeing were to go to fucking jail for murdering people!

That’s unreasonable. That’s impossible. But it is no more impossible than the Democrats writing abortion rights into law. There is no hierarchy of impossible; anything impossible is equally impossible. 

When potential solutions are floated – packing the courts (ha!), half-assed carbon taxes, fucking wind farms – they cannot be divorced from the inevitabilities of trying to enact them. There are individuals, with more money and power than you, who do not want these things. We are not all in this together. 

How do you propose to deal with them? Do you have a solution to remove their obstruction? Do you think the cops will use civil asset forfeiture to nationalize Boeing? Fuck it, why not! Do you believe that the system currently licking the boot of every billionaire on the globe can, despite all available evidence, change itself, when there are no real consequences for not doing so, and, in fact, massive rewards for not changing?

I’m not arguing, I’m telling

And that force has proven again and again to be willing to kill to maintain power, and knows that consequences are as unlikely as a lightning strike. 

The Civil War was fought over slavery, over labor, but it was fought by labor. The war was fought for slave owner’s benefit (like every war) and at the end, when the war was “won”, those slave owners – I mean, John Wilkes Booth of the know-nothing party, what amounted to the John Birch Society of its time – assassinated the President, Lincoln was replaced with Johnson, and they got to keep all of their stuff – sometimes including their slaves (although they didn’t call them that anymore)! 

Despite the fact that every slave owner is by definition a rapist, a murderer, and an actual monster. Those slave owners never faced consequences for their actions. Now here we are. Those people have come and gone, but their money has stayed in America, always for the cause of the slave owners. 

Until that money is gone, until the money is taken from them and given to the slaves, it will be in opposition to you, it will be stronger than you, and it will win. 

I don’t know who the executives at Boeing are and I don’t care, it is money that they abuse. If they do not have money, they cannot abuse it. If you replace that executive with another, and pay them the same, they will abuse that money. That is how money works. We know it from all of those sayings about how that is how many works. 

Whatever solution you may present, whatever reasonable ideas you have, as opposed to my insane nonsense, they are not possible until the slave owner’s money is no longer in our way. What is your solution? 

In the current system, we could just take it, you know. That’s legal. What Billionaire hasn’t committed a crime? 

Fuck me, in this system, guess what… if we sent those billionaires to prison… it’s legal to make them slaves!


Jordan Holmes is an author and podcaster. You can listen to him two times a week on the Knowledge Fight podcast, and read his book and other musings here. This essay was reprinted from his site by request of the author.