There are some clear boundaries between declaring versus whining. Between delineating versus complaining. Between establishing a boundary versus moaning over how aggrieved you are.
It’s not always clear. But it is mostly clear.
1.) In tone, and
2.) In a clear call for action
I’ve been bettered by an opponent many, many times. But you won’t catch me whining, unless of course I conclude that whining is the most advantageous way forward in some specific isolated situation. That is almost never the case.
It is not fair what they did on November 3 when they stole the election and then to add insult to injury Molly Ball bragged about the coup in Time magazine. It is not fair what they did to lie about the common cold, seize virtually all institutions and to escort communism into America virtually unopposed. It is not fair that the January 6 prisoners are still locked up. It is not fair that the most astute anti-fascists, anti-communists, anti-deep staters are the quickest to be deplatformed. It is not fair that the media AND the FBI AND the intelligence services AND the Bush-beloved Attorney General Barr knew about the Hunter Biden laptop and lied about the laptop. It is just not fair!
Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare whine. Leave that for those with less discernment to do. All is fair in love and war. We are at WAR.
You will catch me observing how effectively they beat me. You will catch me observing how massively I got fooled. You will catch me talking about how I will settle the score if it takes me my whole life. All of that you might get from my mouth. But you will not catch me whining, unless it makes sense to whine.
And that is not what most people do. Most people who whine do so reflexively. It is the only thing that comes out of the mouth of some men in our soft era.
Whining has become the core of leftist politics. Who is the more aggrieved party? Who is the bigger whiner?
It is not isolated on the left, though. If some on the right get their way, “Who is the more aggrieved party?” will be the core of politics across the spectrum in this great country. Gross. Not happening.
Oh how it shrivels my throbbing heart to imagine. America, the land of the bold, diminished to the territory of the whiners.
Can you whine more loudly than your landlord? Okay. Don’t pay your rent. Can you whine more loudly than your spouse? Okay, the spouse goes to jail. Can you whine more loudly than your employer? Okay, employer gets fined.
The moment you see that tendency in anyone around you, the tendency to play the game of who is the bigger victim, it is time to pull back from that relationship. Something is fundamentally wrong with that person. They do not want success in life. They want to aspire for sympathy. Success cares not for sympathy.
Do you think Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg care about whether or not they have your sympathy? No, they hardly care whether you want to take a vaccine, whether you want to vote, or whether you want to perpetually fund their billionaire lifestyle.
The Bigger Victim
He who seeks to be more aggrieved, he who seeks to be a bigger victim, is screaming as loudly as he can, “I am a loser. I am always going to be a loser. If there is ever a serious enough dispute between the two of us, I am going to prove to everyone that I am the bigger loser out of the two of us and deserve sympathy.”
Nonsensical Moral System
“Might makes right,” is immoral but understandable. Meritocracy is moral and understandable. But “Who is the bigger loser?” That is simply a sign of far deeper character flaws and likely mental illness. No matter how disruptive it is to disconnect yourself from such a person, be grateful that a person shows you their true colors before they were able to dig themselves yet deeper into your life.
Every time a person shows their true colors and you are willing enough to recognize that, then upon that is a moment to rejoice that not another moment of life was wasted on building that relationship.
Litmus Tests
And this is where gratitude for 2020 comes into play. There are several litmus tests between contemporary right and left. Eagerness to play the “Who is the biggest loser?” game is generally one of those litmus tests (though this does not exclusive all people on the “right”). They are the same people who wear masks, took the shot, forgot about Covid on command, and hoisted the Ukrainian flag. It is not a perfect delineation between left and right, but it is pretty good one. Also, it is hard to call it left and right. For example, Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Naomi Wolf, Pat Buchanan, Matt Taibbi, Steve Bannon, Glenn Greenwald, and Ron Paul all approximately find themselves politically and intellectually allied on the most pressing issues of the day.
A redrawing of the political boundaries is taking place. Perhaps it is the difference between establishment and non-establishment, or political class and populous.
Newsweek — 1997
In 1998 something special happened. Newsweek spiked a story about the President of the United States and a White House intern. One of the most powerful editors in the country, in one of the most powerful publications in the country, said the equivalent of, “No, we will not report on that. No one in this town will report on that.”
Those times had changed, though. This was a special turning point in the history of this thing we call the Internet. Some nobody out of nowhere with an email newsletter — a little appreciated movie critic in Southern California — announced to his newsletter what Newsweek had done in covering up for the President. That email from that movie critic — Matt Drudge impacted global politics for the rest of the decade and arguably, to this day, as the mainstream media was forced to follow the Monica Lewinsky story. No matter how much of an awful CIA mouthpiece The Drudge Report turns into, Matt Drudge will forever have a special place in my heart for bludgeoning his opponents over the head on that day in 1998 and many times thereafter.
Drudge seems to have a passion for going to WAR.
Whiney Cowardice
The exact opposite of that was on display with the tale of Taylor Lorenz, the front page reporter of the New York Times and more recently Washington Post, a tale best told by Glenn Greenwald in his excellent “Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them.” The Swiss boarding school educated Lorenz pathetically sobs on command for the camera about how oppressed she is.
I would like to believe this was a calculated whine from Lorenz, but it was probably instead habitual. That speaks to a problem with Lorenz. Also, the fact that she felt comfortable speaking on the topic speaks to a problem with her audience as well. She knew there would be an audience for a whiney, wealthy girl, and that she would at least not be laughed at. Laughing out loud at the whiney is the ideal approach.
Greenwald writes in the caption that precedes the meaty article:
“The front-page reporter, Taylor Lorenz, recently of The New York Times and now The Washington Post, uses the skills she learned growing up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut and while being educated at Greenwich High School and absolutely lovely boarding schools in the Swiss Alps to express, on NBC News’ Meet the Press Daily, the trauma and victimization she endures from critics of her journalism: journalism which she has often weaponized to destroy the lives of many powerless people including teenagers, on April 1, 2022 (credit: MSNBC)”
Greenwald, an ardent leftist has declared that he’s had enough of the loser posturing. He tears Lorenz apart. Which is fair seeing that Lorenz has made a career of tearing others apart. The difference is that Greenwald does it from a Substack account, Lorenz does it from the front page of the most powerful newspapers in the world. The massive failure that was the doxxing of LibsOfTikTok is Lorenz’s latest example.
Why Is Glen Greenwald, Founder Of A Media Company Using Substack To Publish?
Why does Greenwald publish from a Substack account? Because the periodical he started in 2014 to combat The New York Times (The Intercept) was co-opted and refused to let him run a piece on the Hunter Biden laptop and the nightmare baggage of Joe Biden in late October 2020.
The article that his own publication would not permit and refused to allow him to publish anywhere else appears here, published on Greenwald’s Substack October 29, 2020. The crown jewel of The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, told his tyrant colleagues to shove it rather than being censored.
Greenwald unabashedly recognizes the WAR we are in and refuses to play otherwise.
Nostalgia Is Usually Whining
In response to this culture of whining, some people may say, “Can’t we go back to 1983 when people of any age who cried in public were called crybabies and not taken seriously for their lack of emotional control?” To paraphrase Alice in Wonderland author, Louis Carroll, “No, We can’t go back to yesterday, for we were different people then.” To paraphrase Allan Stevo “Stop the whining.” Nostalgia is often whining.
Own the reality of the situation you are in and dominate it. Embrace reality as quickly as possible and overcome your opponent. Do not spend a precious moment debating the reality of the situation once that reality is clear beyond all question. Knowing reality is not the great challenge in life. That is the very basic low-hanging fruit. Specifics of reality hardly even have to be understood, only the broadest brush strokes and the most general truths. Imposing your will upon the situation around you is the real work.
And anyone worth his salt knows how to identify his boundaries, communicate his boundaries, and defend his boundaries.
It is sad watching people obsess over details of unchanging reality, while avoiding the behaviors that matter.
Whining As A Strategy
Sometimes people figure out that whining can be a way to impose your will on the world around you.
There is nothing wrong with whining once in a while for effect. And I do not mean a whiny voice. That is never okay. I mean complaining about the guy who just gave you a whooping. It is okay to do that once in a while for effect. It is okay once in a while to get people worked up about grievances being unfair. Once in a while. But if you are not careful it will diminish your character. That is to say it will weaken the vision you have for yourself and the standards you set for yourself. If you are not careful, it will show some onlookers that such behavior is okay. If you are not careful, it will set a standard for how grievances are to be handled in your presence.
The truth is, the guy who whooped you is obviously better than you. “Now what are you going to do about that?” is the question.
There will likely be a time again in America in which aggrieved parties are laughed at. Not because it is funny to pick on the aggrieved, nor because their grievances were not genuinely awful, — but laughed at because it is so pathetic to find a moment in which you failed and to spend the next days, months, or years of your life talking to everyone about what a big loser you were in that moment.
How boring. Don’t you have anything better to communicate to others about yourself? Don’t you have a better contribution to provide the people around you?
Grievances are real. We do ourselves and the world around us a favor when we hold others to high standards and call on them to operate by a sense of decency.
Don’t wear your losses on your sleeve, though. Learn from them. Be motivated by them. Make them part of a future goal of yours if you wish.
But don’t be stuck on the topic of how unfair it all is. Life is not fair. Now move on with it.
Life is not kind. Life can be quite cruel. Now move on with it.
For life’s impact on you is so very dependent on you.
Only with your explicit permission can someone foul up your precious short time on this earth. They cannot ruin it if you do not let them. They can do a few things to you, but they will not be ruining anything.
In response to that reality, some people go around making a wrong committed against them the focus of their life, a victimhood that they never tire of talking about.
In doing so, they give up their life. They trade their precious life for that nonsense.
That is a choice they make.
That is a fitting choice made by someone who already perceives their life as being of little value. They can obtain significance where there was none by dwelling on victimhood. By dwelling on a loss. By dwelling on how unfair it all is.
It takes a pretty pathetic life to throw away for that.
And that would be why a whiner deserves to be laughed at. They see patheticness in their life and rather than making their life a thing to marvel, they latch onto some glimmer of significance and scream about victimhood. Over and over and over.
Again, there may be moments where that may be the best you have. But usually it’s a big failure. At least 999 times out of 1,000 that you feel compelled to do that, it is a failure.
Don’t do that.
Choose instead to make your life about something more.
Be brave. Be bold. Step out. If you still wear masks for any reason, now is the time to stop. For more on how to navigate life maskless, read the bestselling “Face Masks in One Lesson.”
For more on why that is so important to do, read “Face Masks Hurt Kids.”
And for hard hitting emails on this and more, sign up for Allan’s emails at RealStevo.com.
