As a direct follow-up to my last article, today I’m going to rant about another type of personality I can’t stand. Now, you might think of the old meme, “I hate lazy people,” followed by “why, we didn’t even do anything.” It’s the same with boring people. In both cases, they can make nuisances of themselves by injecting their behaviour into areas where it is not welcome. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but “boring” is not a synonym for “quiet.” Now, while it isn’t necessary to read my last rant to follow along, you should at least read the article that inspired it:
Once again, the important bit:
Traits of the Melancholic personality:
✔Brilliant
✔Analytical
✔Artistic
✔Perfectionist, has high standards
✔Cautious and Introverted
✔Sober and skeptical
✔A detailed planner
❌Depressive
❌Anxious
❌Pessimistic
Fictional Examples: Linus Van Pelt (Peanuts), Pam Beesly (The Office), Professor Snape (Harry Potter), Squidward (SpongeBob SquarePants), Eeyore (Winnie The Pooh)Country example: Russia
Christian example: the Apostle John
Here is where I begin to disagree with the original article, and that is on the “melancholic tint” of New England. I live in Pennsylvania, which has had a fairly significant Russian population going back centuries. In fact, I live a stone’s throw away from a town called Moscow, which was apparently founded in 1812. Why is this relevant? Because I, like many Pennsylvanians, hate New Englanders, not because of their culture, but because they refuse to keep it to themselves. “Don’t New York my Pennsylvania” is a pretty common sentiment here as a way of resisting the import of Empire State policies and corruption, particularly as more and more New Yorkers cross the border to escape exactly that. Fine by us, but don’t bring it with you! And yes, I know New York is not technically part of New England, but it may as well be. The worst part of New England isn’t even named after a place in England, and yet it’s the one to have metastasised throughout the entire region.
Far from having a similar temperament to Russians, New Englanders are absurdly pretentious to the point where they mistake being boring for being mature. I am convinced that whoever came up with the saying “growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional” was just rebelling against stick-in-the-mud New England parents. The truth is that out of all the melancholic traits, New Englanders did not get the “brilliant” or “artistic” bits. I’m not even sure they got the “introverted” bit, as I’ll explain later. New England was founded by Puritans, who disdained art as “worldly” and thus “of the Devil,” were a bunch of paranoid, superstitious busybodies… and still are.
The busybody is the antithesis of “treat others as you would have others treat you,” unless there is an angle that I’m missing. Does the busybody wish to have his neighbours judge and pester him over every little thing as payment for being so judgmental of others? Perhaps he does, it would certainly explain the obsession with “keeping up appearances.” But ultimately, it is self-destructive. The busybody is universally loathed, just to differing degrees. Such a man cannot build a family, only turn the family he is born in into a failed dynasty when his children go their separate ways and refuse to ever speak to each other again. Such a man cannot build a community, only turn an existing community into his own little failed empire, whose edifices will be abandoned and begin to crumble the instant he leaves. I’ve seen examples of both firsthand.
Pennsylvania, by contrast, was founded on the idea of openness, specifically religious tolerance. It’s known, among other things, as “The Quaker State,” given that the Quakers settled there to escape persecution from the Puritans, though the only Quaker I know lives in Idaho. If only there were a fourth chart to explain the phlegmatic temperament, I’d at least be able to tell you if that Quaker fits the pattern.
But back to my rant about New Englanders. I actually know a few people who live there, and aside from the based exceptions I count as friends, they all suck. In fact, I get a chance to expand on this rant, because since publishing the first half on Monday, there was an absolutely hilarious event in Worcester (pronounced “wooster”), Massachusetts. Massachusetts, or as I like to call it, “Taxachusetts,” is the crown jewel of pretention, to the point where even other New Englanders cannot stand people from that state. “Massholes” is their collective nickname. As it so happens, Worcester is “the armpit of Massachusetts,” according to
, a tidbit she regaled us with when she covered a city council meeting being taken over by a bunch of queer activists. If you want the whole story, here it is, four-hour VoD of the livestream included:
However, I would suggest watching the 13th clip, The Holocaust Queer, to get the gist of the whole thing. I don’t know about you, but long videos like this (or livestreams, on the rare instance I actually catch one) are things that I generally listen to in the background while I do something else, like writing, painting miniatures, or sharpening knives. Anyway, back to the rant!
Taxachusetts is hopelessly leftist in terms of its politics, to the point where I genuinely believe California has a better chance of being saved from the communist mind virus. I’ll explain what I mean in my final word on “the left,” breaking down its primary schism: establishment and dissident. In the case of Taxachusetts, even the dissidents are establishment hacks, case in point: my favourite punching bag, who has written several what-I-have-a-hard-time-calling “articles” expressing his envy for
’s favourite CringeStacker, and my running gag is that “Bill Astore’s next-door neighbour Heather Cox Richardson lives rent-free in his head!” Seriously, those two agree on almost everything, but only one is a Substack bestseller. Why? Because one is a professional propagandist employed by the Cathedral in order to spread the gospel of the Correct Opinions™ and the other is brainwashed a true believer in [most of] the Correct Opinions™, albeit without any programming updates in the past five years. But enough about his irrational thirst for Tulsi Gabbard.The worst part is that I know exactly why Taxachusetts is such an irredeemable rubbish heap that it makes California look like it’s actually worth salvaging, and for that, we need to hop across the pond over to Europe. See, the Salem Witch Trials were not an isolated incident, but part of a broader trend throughout Christendom known as “the burning times.” I’ve written extensively about this before, as it coincided with possibly the most convoluted conflict in history: the Thirty Years’ War. In the aftermath of this unusually violent period of time, different cultures had different ways of avoiding this pitfall in the future, some of which work, and some of which don’t. In the case of the Calvinists, of which the Puritans were a subset, the answer was to just trade the dogma of intolerant paranoia for a dogma of “tolerant” paranoia. The Puritans were, in their heyday, much more repressive than all but the most cultish of Southern Baptist churches today, and in their penance, their descendants have overcompensated in the opposite direction. If you know the history of the Puritan migration (a.k.a. Pilgrimage), as well as modern European culture, then you know exactly why I said this:
Most left-leaning Americans wouldn’t want to live in Europe if they knew what it was actually like. Part of that comes down to the educational system.
Level of education and level of intelligence are two different things. In fact, as “education” has become more and more rote, educated people have become less and less intelligent over time. They know lots of facts and figures, which may or may not even be true, but their ability to think is virtually nonexistent. They will accept literally any nonsensical idea as long as it doesn’t directly conflict with their world view, because, as compensation for their dogmatic way of thinking but simultaneously knowing that dogma is bad, their minds are so open their brains have fallen out. While it is important to keep an open mind, it’s also important to maintain a healthy scepticism, in other words, an active mind, which New Englanders do not. Instead, they turn to instruction manuals for everything, including raising children, and then they find themselves in a perpetual state of confusion as to why their “expert parenting advice” doesn’t fucking work. These people should not have children, and thankfully, they tend not to… not because they’ve suddenly realised they’re incompetent to do so, but because they’ve been told there are too many people on the planet. Right, because a New England couple choosing to have no children instead of the usual one is totally going to offset all the Indian ladies having ten children. But then, we are looking at people who make up for their lack of intelligence and creativity by tripling-down on pessimism, believing that the human race will exterminate itself in the next few years… while not seeing the irony in everything else they profess. Internalised collective guilt is one hell of a mental illness.
Because these people are so unintelligent while being convinced of their intellectual superiority, they are unfit to do anything other than activism. They devote their entire life to a cause, in the old days it was religious evangelism, and in the modern day… it’s still religious evangelism, there is a reason we call it “the cult of woke.” The cult mentality in general, regardless of the specific ideology, injects itself into everything, that’s why cultists demand control over people’s hobbies. If they cannot destroy it, they will subvert it. Anything that is not of the cult is “of the Devil,” and thus it should come as no surprise that these people don’t even partake of the hobbies they demand control over. In fact, it’s rare for a bore to have hobbies at all, because that would take time away from the cause.
Now, if you haven’t read my previous rant, TL;DR, I’m like Squidward, I used to have a co-worker named Bob who was exactly like SpongeBob, and while Bob was capable of causing harm through his sheer stupidity, he wasn’t an evil man. However, it doesn’t take much to turn someone like him evil. All one really need do is give him a touch of narcissism. Normally, the SpongeBob is comfortable in his ignorance, but the Evil SpongeBob delights in it. Bob, for example, frequently caught me off guard with his taking of common colloquialisms extremely literally, and I could never tell if he had genuinely been raised in such a sheltered environment that he had never heard these sayings, or he was just messing with me. Contrast that with everyone’s favourite fundamentalist lolcow, Kent Hovind, who has been called a snake oil salesman by his interlocutors over a dozen times, each time pretended that he has no idea why anyone would call him that, seeing as he does not sell snake oil, and each time had it explained to him what exactly the phrase actually means. Hovind’s entire shtick is to play innocent, to hide his malevolence behind cheerful ignorance, and then justify it by saying he deliberately avoids knowledge that might pull him out of his cult. There are a number of terminally online Massholes whom I have had the displeasure of interacting with who do the exact same thing, pretending to not understand pop culture references beyond a single piece of media that defined their youth (much less any of the classics), common colloquialisms that even a non-native English speaker would understand if they spent enough time online, or sarcasm, despite occasionally using these things themselves. However, none of them were religious fundamentalists, but self-described liberals, and we keep hearing that “liberals are open-minded and have broader horizons than conservatives.” Perhaps, but I’m no conservative, and a bore, no matter how much he has travelled the world, lacks the capability to broaden his horizons beyond the capacity of his own neutered mind… but he is capable of lying well enough to fool most people into thinking that he has. In any case, the performative ignorance is nothing more than a manipulation tactic designed specifically to derail any efforts to maintain professional decorum. But enough about why debating cultists is a fool’s errand.
Anyway, rant over. I’m sick of talking about politics, I’m even more sick of politics getting into everything such that it requires being talking about, and while I have a couple more things to say before I stop entirely, Thursday’s article will keep things nice and light and fluffy by talking about mass shootings. I’m kidding, it’s actually going to be about flat Earth, because I enjoy laughing at stupid shit as much as the next person. Na shledanou!
The word "Sesquipedalian" has appeared to me thrice in the last fortnight, so I'm subscribing.
I've been from Maine to California, Florida to Oregon. Most of us are basically Americans.