First off, I’d like to state that I don’t have any real opinion of the man. I was never a big fan of martial arts movies to begin with, and I never watched Walker: Texas Ranger. Yeah, he was MAGA, but we have millions of those fuckers and I haven’t heard that he did anything particularly damaging. As far as I know, he’s just another lovable lummox who had his moment in the 80’s.
Here’s the link. Check out the date. 2009. It’s been 17 years, and I’m guessing a lot of the source material dates from much earlier. 17 years to repeat, and repeat, and repeat and repeat and repeat the same goddam zero-effort unfunny joke. Seriously, “we’re continually tongue-bathing pretending this guy is God” is supposed to have any humor value? (And to those who say that he was fine with it: Well, of course an actor whose best days are behind him is happy for the free publicity, what did you fucking expect?)
There has been no pushback. Zero. None. No effort by any party, anywhere, to stamp out this fucking plague of worthless unfunny bullshit. No warnings, no deletions, no bans. Not even the obligatory “All right, we get it, could we have some fresh material, please?” I recall when that six-seven or whatever bullshit began. The blowback was immediate. There was a time when that “Don’t read this! Oh no, you read it, now you’ll have to forward this to a bunch of people or you’ll diiiiieee!” flaming bullshit was rampant on YouTube; they cracked down on it hard. Randomly inserting Justin Bieber into every goddam conversation got the same fate. Not the Chuck Norris Facts, ever. Or rather, the one joke with an ever-growing shitpile of equally unfunny takes.
And yes, there have been numerous unfunny bullshit Internet gags in the past, but the were all finite. Remember “All your base are belong to us”? That actually made it on a street sign. Long gone. The LOLCats and their supposedly wacky sayings, “I can haz cheezburger”. “I took an arrow to the knee.” That dissolving-into-particles foolishness. Tide pod eating. The Ice Bucket Challenge. Fake Adolf Hitler subtitles. All gone. Hell, I don’t even remember the last time I saw “Pepperidge Farm remembers”. Chuck Norris Facts is the one worthless gag that’s allowed to go on and on and on and on, months, years, decades past when it became totally played out. Good goddesses, there are two threads spewing this shit in MPSIMS. Two!
Hey, you know what this reminds me of? Cecil Adams. C’mon, you remember! That mysterious phantom of whom nobody had a picture, video, birthdate, address, or ANY OTHER FUCKING PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF WHATSOEVER…shit, “he” could’ve been an AI program for all I knew…yet everyone knew someone who knew someone who met him in the flesh, and he was 100% real and this brilliant super genius and his word was to be taken over everyone else’s. This was a site dedicated to reason and intelligent discussion, and we were all supposed to buy into this zero evidence fairy tale on faith. Goddesses, I swear there were inanimate objects who had their intelligence insulted. By far the absolute nadir was the clash against Marylin Von Savant over the Monty Hall problem (in which you’ll remember that Cecil, whatever the fuck “he” is, attempted to refute her by inventing facts not present in the problem), a bright, engaging woman with knowledge in a variety of fields, and, more critically, evidence that she actually fucking exists, and numerous posters here sided with Cecil. Never mind how utterly ridiculous that sounds, never mind who’s right here, the important thing is to keep kayfabe!
So inevitably Chuck Norris goes the way of all flesh, we cover it, and guess what? The same moronic, tired jokes, like clockwork! Geez, I swear some of the respondents couldn’t bang them out fast enough! And that’s what’s giving me a very real fear that this is never completely going away, that some people are so utterly wedded to keeping this humor suck going forever that it’s become as integral to them as breathing. You know, when Hugh Hefner passed, I remember some discussion about sexism and mistreated workers; it wasn’t just pretending that the magazine never had any articles for a hundred posts!
Seriously, is this why we can’t have nice things? That any time there’s the tiniest whiff of alternative energy, health care reform, campaign finance reform, fairer tax structures, improving Internet security, restoring the social safety net, and not basing social structures like marriage and family on 2000-year-old cockamamie drivel, it gets completely shot down in a screaming panic? We’re so committed to keeping doing the same moronic things in the same moronic ways over and over that improving anything is impossible?
Fucking book…fucking Internet…