Among the florid complaints in Steve McConkey‘s ever-shifting, morbidly entertaining “expose” of my uncivil behavior is the idea that he has publicly behaved less than charitably toward not only atheists, gays, trans people and non-demented non-Christians generally, but also people of color:
In disputing charges of racism, Steve McConkey sure likes to walk the edge lately. Continue reading ““Black lives matter is a joke,” proclaims Steve McConkey, Christian gag-reel-of-one”
My late-childhood and teenage years, a time when I was in theory developing some awareness of a greater world than my own, coincided with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Critics rightly argue that his administration began the gradual extinction of a meaningful middle class that continues today, and that he welcomed the onset of the religious perversion of the Republican Party, and that he did his best across two terms to pretend AIDS did not exist. But for present purposes, the pertinent fact is that, although he was adored by his party (and respected by most Democrats) and well-protected by various weasels in the intelligence and military communities, none of that would have resulted in his anything besides immediate removal from office by aghast officials before a mortified populace well before the tear-gassing of nonviolent protesters for the sake of insulting an Episcopal Church under the advisement of the U.S. Attorney General. And that ignores three straight years of obstructing justice and other absurdities that Adults In The Room were supposedly going to quash from the outset.
This is absolute madness, and mostly sadness for me and the people around me out of direct harm’s reach, and now falls entirely on a complicit Republican U.S. Congress. All of them are committed weasels now. The current Republican U.S. Senator from Colorado, Cory Gardner, is not a jerk by nature and didn’t begin as one in 2014. He was bipartisan on immigration and other issues. Then he decided his only strategy for re-election in a state rapidly trending blue was to go all-in on Donald Trump, and immediately began saying and doing things that he clearly didn’t want to, because they were embarrassing. But he did them and still does. And in fact, he was probably right about his strategy choice. But because he chose tha route, he now has an indelible stain on him and he is only in his middle forties.
And therein lies the problem. Once people become U.S. senators. their only real motivation is getting re-elected — Democrats and Republicans both. Everyone knows this, and everyone knows it is because these people are not merely bribed or bought by special interest, they are owned by them from the start. This is not a conspiratorial or even contentious idea; even if you were ignorant of politics generally and only knew that certain individuals had tens of billions of dollars more than even the wealthiest member of U.S. Congress, you would immediately recognize who really makes the laws and paus lawmakers their real salaries. It is a literally inevitable consequence of our system. Bernie Sanders is rich as hell, too.
So when you watch Mitch McConnell say that he doesn’t really see a problem, remember that Mitch McConnell started his political career with squat and is now worth $34 million, and Kentucky’s people have only suffered for it. People will publicly debase themselves for money, be it in reality shows where the worst result is a stupid person eating bugs or in the federal government where the result is barely contained violence set against the backdrop of a devastatingly mismanaged viral illness.
George Will, who for at least 120 years has been an arch-conservative (and a lovely wordsmith) wrote this yesterday:
“The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond [Donald Trump’s] removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.
“In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed.”
And writing in Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley underscores the fact that people like Gardner are not prisoners by any means but are actively corrupt, as a failure to get re-elected hardly spells doom for someone in his role:
“The U.S. has a mechanism by which it can remove a president, and all that mechanism currently requires is for 15 or so Republican senators to accept the possibility of losing a primary election sometime between five months and six years from now, a loss that would compel them, at worst, to accept lucrative corporate board of directors jobs and speaking engagements at Mastercard sales conferences. The pressure on these senators should be as intense as possible; for the rest of the government to allow the president to remain in office in this situation would be an admission that it, too, has failed.”
I hope that the next administration deals appropriately with the grip Evangelical Christianity holds on government and the fact that the driver of this concocted brand of Christianity is and always has been white nationalism and across-the-board bigotry. In the past, they weren’t fooling anyone who glanced under the hood of their newfangled form of “faith,” but in recent years and evermore today, they have stopped hiding it.
Steve McConkey, a lifetime gay-basher poorly disguised as an everyday fundamentalist Trumpist, needs no thorough introduction here. I didn’t expect to return to reviewing one of outbursts so soon, but I also didn’t anticipate that the ongoing nationwide riots originating after the murder of a civilian by a police officer in Minneapolis — next door to where McConkey’s son operates a gun dealership and shooting range — would spur him into such a flamboyant display of telling the world exactly who he is and what he is about: Blood lust and hate.
At about 9 p.m. on Thursday night, by which time the Twin Cities protests had turned grisly, he brain-farted this advice onto his public Facebook page:
Poor Joshua, another responsible gun owner who’d like to join the action ASAP but has no earthly idea where his stash might be at the moment.
A few hours later, McConkey chimed in with tips on where to get those guns legally, as well as how to train to use them should you have no previous experience and practice shooting them to gain even more experience. Sales are booming! Remember, he was probably watching violence unfold in real time as he explained these things to a putative audience of 5,000 or so mostly disenfranchised and angry characters.
His next couple of offerings, which arrived in the wee hours of the morning, constituted a syllogism of sorts: Terrorists are shootable people; rioters (including unarmed ones) are terrorists; rioters (including unarmed ones) are therefore shootable people. Preferably, one assumes, with legally purchased firearms. Or maybe a pile of them found wherever Joshua Roberts gets hammered and goes boating.
If you ignore the spastic hyperbole about the Hugest Bomb Ever and the earthquakes it caused, you see that McConkey’s take-home message is that certain people should be shot on sight. Though he uses the example of political terrorists who commit murder, he freely expands this application of justice to “rioters who destroy.”
In case you think I’m misinterpreting his rambling with its various missing articles and prepositions and its circus of subject-verb disagreements, he went on to make it very clear what he meant by doubling down on his previous language. Even better, he did this even when challenged by another Christian — one of his more loyal supporters lately, though there’s a lot of turnover — on how Jesus would see this.
So there it is. Steve McConkey, who with his wife Liz operates a “ministry” called 4 Winds that purports to stand up for Christian athletes, is on record as saying that people who burn, loot or even merely threaten should be shot. And his son owns a shooting range, and he’s recently been unfurling a lot of survivalist chest-puffery about basically going off the grid.
Oh, another thing. Some people felt threatened by the idiots who toted guns to the Michigan State Capitol recently to protest the state’s “closure.” Should they have been “taken out” too? Does anyone even need to ask what McConkey sees as the critical difference?
Despite the “holy hell” of this 3 a.m. rhetoric, McConkey wasn’t quite done. He also tried his hand, not for the first time, at Mike Huckabee-style humor.
He says this stuff in the manner of a grade-school child, clearly certain at some level that it’s both wildly original and wildly funny.
And for the coup de grace to his own shriveled loins, he blamed the tumult, which started with the murder of a black man by a white cop who is now in custody, on the mayor and governor of an unspecified state, implying that it was somehow now open season on vulnerable white folks like McConkey. (McConkey splits his time between Madison, Wisconsin and a place in the woods of that state not far from Minneapolis.)
I would say “just another Evangelical Christian offering the usual garbage with the usual dismal timing,” but in fact, McConkey is on less solid ground even with fellow cross-waving loonies on this one. As in most aspects of his conduct, Steve manages to behave in a more morally decrepit way than even the racists, liars and trolls comprising his commentariat.
You can let Steve or Liz McConkey (or Paul Bawden or Merrill Olson — both of whom McConkey claims are on board with everything he says and does, including his blackmail, harassment and libel — what you think of this Christian athletic ministry.
A donation to 4 Winds is a donation to the promotion of the immediate execution of protesters, be it by police or lawfully armed protesters. (It’s the only way this clown earns money. Tax-free!) It’s like he has no fucking idea what leads to these protests, over and over, and thinks Democratic mayors and governors are somehow more culpable than President Trump’s incendiary rhetoric.
Part of my own unpleasantness involves focusing on especially bad representatives of the species, so that I can more readily write off the entire human circus as some ghoulish combination of greed, stupidity, dishonesty and rude smells. But I was also brought up, without my own full awareness, to expect lying to be punished and liars to be shunned. Especially in the context of boasting — which, even when arguably warranted, was independently frowned upon by a strong 50 percent of my parents. (This is probably why I perceive, say, my fastest running performances, best examples of writing and highest test scores as within a delta of ordinary, data be damned.) And any sort of underhanded behavior, especially the deliberate tricking of others — this might be cutting a running course or promising something you knew you couldn’t deliver — went into the same “proceed at your gravest risk” bin.
How I drew these values from my taciturn-but-particular Midwestern dad while viewing him chiefly as a grimly benevolent statue is a story for another day, as is my obvious failure to implement these values at every turn. But the wingnut flavors of American religion satisfy all of these flaws — lies, boasting and deceit — and that in part probably explains why I have chosen to direct most of my available venom at religious frauds. Or anyone with a personal beef who resorts to lying.
Steve McConkey is a bad person in every demonstrable way that can be determined at a distance. But despite his lack of virtuous accomplishments, he should not be denied at least the recognition of having successfully dedicated himself to bungling his own life beyond all likely frontiers of personal failure, right down to blaming everyone but himself for why he’s only content when he’s trying to play the bully.
When he’s not trying to see gay and transgender people “eliminated” (he really does use that word, and frequently) with lies and hectoring, he’s dribbling racist rumors and other babble on Facebook or at other wingnuts, or complaining that atheists by definition are evil and should be treated accordingly (and that every religion besides the version of Christianity he invented is illegitimate), or mocking overweight people, or trying to defame and doxx his detractors into silence using tactics more evocative of a 9-year-old aspirant to the Alt-Right than of even the most watered-down Jesus acolyte. I’m saving details on that last stuff for later.
But nowhere is the flameout of the last vestiges of Steve McConkey’s presumptive decency more evident than in his eagerness to spread damaging misinformation and predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic. Lots of vocal Evangelicals — who as a ponderous 80-million-strong jelly-headed bloc represent the slowly rotting collective albatross around the neck of American society — have taken the bait and dutifully relayed everything from Fox News to their Facebook pages. But none I know of have done it under the aegis of an epidemiology and biostatistics expert who continually trumpets his intelligence and his mostly false credentials while plainly not knowing a damned thing about anything.
It started on Feb. 28 with this.
This is an example of McConkey’s content appropriation — he copies the majority of an article from a media outlet or hoax-news site and puts it on 4 Winds, then links “his” 4 Winds article to Facebook, essentially presenting it as his own work. This is both typical of McConkey and low, but for present purposes it resulted in an unusually bad decision even for a someone whose unwise choices over a period of decades define the shitty existence he ekes out today.
Steve McConkey, the founder and president of his own fake ministry (4 WINDS, nominally based in Madison, Wisconsin where McConkey lives), is an outlier among fringe characters. In the past three months, he’s uncorked a series of real doozies on his main Facebook page, where he posts and deletes nonsense in an endless cycle of relentless dishonesty and venom. He has yet to accept that he cannot hit “delete” and remove screen shots of his foul postings from the systems of other computer users.
This is a fair summary for the TL;DR crowd, not that anyone reads this kind of shit quickly; you’re either morbidly fascinated with all of it our you’re out like the New England Patriots’ nucleus after a quick skim of the chaos.
In late February, McConkey linked to a Breitbart article that said that there were only 16 U.S. cases, none deadly, and that the whole thing would pass. (Please, please give that one a read and imagine what it would have taken even then to believe it.) Two and a half weeks later, he was still at it, citing the only 42 deaths in Washington State at that point. He was very big in those heady days on referencing the lethality of the “regular flu,” which soon will have killed fewer than half as many Americans in the 2019-2020 season as COVID-19 already has. Then, while lying about an upcoming media appearance a week later, he suddenly decided that it was all over unless God popped his head out of his ass.
This by itself is just a dumb guy with a social media account being stupid. But when you mix in the stuff he’s been claiming about being an epidemiology and stats expert, and the cheering on of Trump’s madness, and much much more, it’s as if he is trying to leave a record of latching on to the worst ideas available at any time. Which is pretty much true, as he’s an Evangelical, and all of those are badly are fucked up in the head.
Remember: That “apocalypse-is-nigh” post was over two months ago. His activity since…well, you’ll see.
This post is really just a teaser, because Steve has been so gloriously defiant, off-the-wall, cruel, unintentionally hilarious, self-contradicting, whiny and destructive in that time frame that in order to cover the subject with the care it deserves, I am going issue weekly or maybe twice-weekly posts about his COVID-19 follies in a series of topical analyses. Topics will include:
All of this stems from McConkey’s demand that I start a Twitter account to argue with him and his refusal to engage me there once I did this. He’s aware of the account and really doesn’t like it. (I can’t say I blame him; it’s all true.)
His cowardice is astounding even by the standards of Internet “Christian” crackpots. (My deeper contention is that Steve McConkey is for practical purposes atheist who wishes he weren’t; that essay will also have to wait.)
He has a lot of problems, with crippling insecurity being the main driver and whatever organic mayhem is going on in his mind serving as an accelerant. What I tend to see as a breathtaking absence of the very sense of time passing (e.g., why would anyone claim only a dozen people were dead in the opening days of any viral pandemic?) is probably just a lack of impulse control. He knows I and a smattering of others harvest his output before he can delete it, and yet he just pours rhetorical acid on his own bare groin every day anyway. It would be one thing if he were immune to this shit, but he hates it. Wait until you see some of what he’s come up with. The guy has absolutely no faith in anything other than the own boiling bile in his head and guts.
Anyhow, think of this one as the prologue and those other categories as chapters.
Steve discovered my post about him and his 4 WINDS “colleagues” within minutes of its appearance online last Friday and quickly revived a Twitter account with 3 followers he started in November at the same time he was threatening to disclose the secret that I have been quite an asshole at times if I didn’t delete posts indicating that Steve is lying, malicious, crazy, incompetent, and most of all a laughingstock 100 percent of the time, and really has no other possible path in life but that of the obnoxious bumblefuck posing as a representative of an imaginary capering celestial clown.
He didn’t address a single thing I wrote in the post, of course; lying and malicious imbeciles like him never do. He just wanted to punish me for saying these things, and decided to give me what for, starting by posting this. The tweet he quoted is from last year and I had since iced my account, so it took me a moment to remember what it was about, even though it obviously didn’t suggest what Steve thought it did. I’m not sure whether he intentionally ignored the tweet before that or whether he just can’t understand simple, if unclever, metaphors.
At any rate, Steve then offered a number of ideas that are obviously discordant with reality, including his insistence that he himself occupies reality; the best of these was perhaps that I’m so homeless that I’m about to be kicked out of even that community. He didn’t actually use the font below or say all of these things without interruption; I was careful to provoke him into being extra-florid. What seemed to piss him off the most was my electronic pay stubs. These loopy idiots have no comprehension of the fact that it doesn’t take all day to write shit about them and that people with modest communication skills and a little resourcefulness can do a lot better than someone with an uncertain number of chromosomes banging away in pidgin English about faggots and atheists on a 14-year-old laptop his kids got him for Christmas during the Bush 43 administration.
The weird thing about his comments about my running is that I am the first person to admit that I was never a very good runner and never expected to be. Maybe that makes people who sucked far worse feel bad, especially when pathological insecurity prompts their every decision and move.
Many of Steve’s misapprehensions are the result of ideas provided to him by Kim Duclos, who, though no stable genius in her own right and relegated to unfurling ever-more-violent fantasies on Reddit about transients and everyone else in Boulder, knew that she was lying or at best hoping to be right about some aspect of my personal misfortunes, and basically threw Steve to the wolves knowing how I would react to these lies. (One thing otherwise brain-dead people like Kim are often adept at is finding folks less mentally competent than themselves and manipulating them into doing things even more misguided than usual. Well played, cunt!)
These people exemplify why the U.S. not only should never adopt a universal healthcare model, but should also dissolve its existing social welfare programs, including the Veterans Administration. “Medicare for None” has a hopeful ring to it. The U.S. probably doesn’t even have one hundred people worth keeping alive, including you, me, and everyone in any way related to the both of us. Coronavirus is a dingleberry dislodged from God’s badly battered anus by the the Chinese, and because God was on the verge of successfully autofellating himself for the first time when the outbreak began, he plans to continue expanding the Chinese model of governance (open heartlessness toward its own people) throughout the world. Any why not? When you get old, sick or both, that’s just biology, via God, telling you that you ether lost the roll of the genetic dice or that you chose the wrong social stratum at birth, and that your time is simply up as result, or will be after you experience weeks or months of optional agony in the form of pointless medical treatments.
Anyway, Steve says he’s not going to read the truth about himself anymore, which is a shame because it’s not going to stop accumulating.
Of course, he immediately started talking about the proper ways for Christians to name-call and claimed that violence was always an option. He has no plans to stop doing anything; he’s not capable of that, as he would rather be humiliated than ignored altogether.
For my part, I am most likely going to keep subjecting Steve to the same things he’s put other people through, most often when I sink into foul moods and need a justifiable target. If Steve could, he would ensure that I really was homeless and had no income and was a HIV-ravaged homo on top of that. Also, Evangelicals as a rule are just thoroughly gross people in every way whose feelings are irrelevant; I find it easy to malign them on that basis, so he gets what he gets. Also, now that the walking miscarriages of hillbilly America have clambered online to explain the world to their betters in their dilapidated terms, and have been joined in systematic lying about basic biology by a nontrivial number unapologetic man-hating opinion writers on the left, it’s time to acknowledge that the United States would be better off as a 3,000-mile-wide toxic mass grave than it is with this many living vermin in it.
The only thing I really wonder these days when I consider my laissez-faire attitude toward my own life — fine at the moment, but clearly not worth defending from illnesses or any challenge of substance– is whether people who feel this way early in life are more inclined to remain childless by constitution, or whether being childless just makes it easier to not give a shit about what a bunch of awful fuckmonkeys we all are. Most parents I know are good parents, but the ones who aren’t have proven more than capable of generating sufficient entropy to render the superstructure worthless, and hopefully we all die soon so I can grumble about those of you who lament the unlamentable.
Steve McConkey probably had a difficult childhood. The ridiculous dye-job and some of the bumps and bruises are products of time and spirited cosmetic choices, but mostly he’s just a typical yokel. Like a lot of primates born in unpleasant-looking, culturally barren, and for the most part forgettable parts of the U.S., where incest is more an unspoken tradition than a solecism, he was never going to find himself in either a Land’s End catalog, which probably doesn’t bother him, or in possession of meaningful status in society, which does; cognitively crippled sorts like Steve are often curiously hell-bent on becoming known for their mangled thoughts.
Steve has also disclosed that, although raised in a Catholic household, he ultimately chose to be a “born again” style of Christian after supposedly giving up drinking at age 20 or so (he reports having totaled at least one car under the influence). You should know if you don’t already that “born-agains” are, without exception, “touched” in a specific way, an unfortunate trait that is usually evident at considerable distances. Usually, the ones who embrace the bloodthirsty, firebrand offerings of Christianity with their authoritarian (actually, totalitarian) power structures are products of the sort of parental abuse wherein “love” is inextricable from punishment. Their whole approach to living in a world occupied by fallible but mostly sane people is too flawed to permit anything resembling either normalcy or contentment, although plenty of people who aren’t nuts occupy these dubious niches, too, and spend their free time writing blogs like these.
Note that this is distinct from the everyday pathology baked into extremist religions. For all of the ghastly psychological traits ascribed to religious cult members such as Evangelical Christians and Mormons, most of them are not loony; while it’s true that mentally troubled people often understandably grasp at mythical forms of rescue (see above), most folks who belong to right-wing religions are simply products of right-wing environment — some rich, most poor. They display some combination of dishonesty, ignorance, and bigotry, with each of these traits purposefully inculcated in children unlucky enough to have parents with these grave religious illnesses. They tend to be unsavory people whether they intend to or not; this is unfortunate, because Christianity as a whole is rapidly dwindling, ECs still make up almost a quarter of the American population.
Christians, when speaking as such, should be ignored when it comes to determining the rules for how society or even individuals should operate. Even leaving out the lack of evidence for their object of fake, forced or threadbare worship and pretending that some silent dick-headed magistrate is in agreement with their whole sick enterprise, all of these people are liars and hypocrites. Steve’s entire beef with me isn’t so much what I say as that he can’t erase it all, as he does his Facebook posts and 4 WINDS outbursts after a couple of weeks. If he’s okay with lying and the panoply of other “sins” he commits just by being himself, he himself doesn’t believe that the deity he asserts doles out metaphysical penalties even exists.
If any of the foregoing sounds worse than merely unkind or insulting, it’s meant to, and if people like Steve and his 4 WINDS cohorts Liz McConkey, Merrill Olson, and Paul Bawden were better and better-known communicators, you’d more easily see that this is the kind of sleazy thing they do by design, because dehumanizing gay people is a guiding principle for this type of ugly human being. They claim to be doing this out of love, which is insane, or because God wants them to, which is dishonest, or both, which is both. Their propaganda and word choices reveal the real, far dirtier story. Continue reading “Steve McConkey and the dehumanization tactics of 4 Winds USA”
The Big Book of A.A. is cleverly written. Its author was very smart and persuasive as well as a shitbag. He was a Born Again Christian, meaning that, even sober, he was not living in reality whether he intended to or not.
The BAC flavor of Christopathy, then and today, is one one of those sects that tolerates nothing other than absolute obeisance to a openly narcissistic cock-slapper of a god, yet couches the whole relationship as mostly collegial rather than strictly abusive. By way of comparison, most Evangelical Christians, while ignorant by definition, are neurotypical, and are merely victims of childhood indoctrination with bad ideas. BACs maintain the basic extremist beliefs of standard ECs, but are virtually always mentally challenged. I don’t think this was nearly as true in Bill W’s day as it is now, but the simple fact is that he felt only those who’s had the kind of “saw God” experience he claimed to have had soon after sobering up (when his central nervous system was frantically bombarding him with the nasty phantasmagoria borne of chronic thiamine deficiency) stood a chance of “making it” in the long term.
This all dovetails into the lie that hardliners today buy into and propagate, 50 or so years after Bill W’s death, useful idiots that they are: The insistence that because people have stayed sober doing everything the Big Book “suggests” with great precision, this is not only the optimal route to sobriety but the only viable one. Continue reading “More bullshit A.A. hardliners preach: the veiled false dilemma”
One theme that invariably emerges when I regularly attend AA meetings — something that happens only when I get bored or lonely enough, which between mid-December and mid-January tends to be more often — is people with at least a couple of years of sobriety describing themselves as doing generally well in life, maybe even better than they expected at the start of the boozeless journey, but unable to settle on a higher power and feeling like they’re failing as a result. All signs are there that quitting drinking and being active about sobriety have been a smashing success for them, but the nature of “the program” compels them to fret needlessly about this “missing” element.
Even to those unaware of the history of the Big Book’s authorship, it should be clear that the chapter to the agnostic is a bald-faced bait-and-switch. It doesn’t really offer a path to working the steps for the godless, but rather unpretentiously cajoles the nonbeliever in the direction of faith. This is because the chapter was only included because a prominent businessman who happened to also be a prominent atheist (rare in those days) insisted on it; the Big Book was essentially Bill W’s sole creation.
The A.A. mantra that a higher power can be “anything you want” was clearly not a part of the worldview of Bill W, himself a full-force Born Again Christian. This is even more evident in the steps themselves; the scheme depends not just on any old “HP,” but one that is capable of not only moral judgment but moral enslavement. The “program” through Bill W’s lens is at least as much about atonement to a critical deity and adherence to its unknowable whims as it is about living well. Any higher power that could function within this scheme would have to possess all of the essential characteristics of the Abrahamic rage-god, even if we’re allowed to nominally declare it something else.
Nothing Bill W wrote suggests he believed that anything other than a “burning bush” moment could produce a lasting spiritual transformation, even if he appears to offer latitude in this area. This is cynical in the extreme and sets people up to fail, because some people have “spiritual experiences” they see as tantamount to a cure, and the next thing you know, they’re living in a van down by the river subsisting on government cheese and MD 20/20 in its whole grotesque range of flavors.
Some people simply aren’t constructed to approach sobriety with the metaphysical demands Bill W’s “suggestions” make on would-be step-completers. In my case I simply gave up and realized that I had managed half-consciously to set up my life over a period of years in such a way that I would basically have a hard time sustaining a return to drinking for more than a couple of hours without someone knowing about it. That’s as close as I can get to the level of absolute accountability the steps seem to demand.
If you are among the people who has been actively or passively convinced you’re cheating somehow by not having a reliable concept of a higher power, maybe just giving up on that part and taking recourse in Tradition Three is sufficient. Also, where I attend meetings, most people are receptive to such viewpoints; when I lived in the Bible Belt, not so much, and you may not have ready access to meetings where you won’t be silently or openly accused of excessive freelancing.
My continuing analysis of Madison, Wisconsin Christian bigot* Steve McConkey, an openly wasteful adventure that to him constitutes harassment because he can neither refute nor erase it, led me to another of Steve’s Christian Newswire specials, or as Steve calls them, worldwide news releases out of Washington, D.C. These are the breathless and unintentionally comical productions that Steve and other credulous yokels for Jesus pay $80 or more to have flung at various Internet inboxes and printed in a different font, with all misspellings and other mistakes left helpfully intact. Some of these florid narratives are picked up by loons of a similar orientation; collectively, these fringe entrepreneurs desperate to reap the rewards of nonstop whining and lying are ignored by bigots of consequence, because most everyday bigots are merely unpleasant and dislike crazies as much as everyone else.
One of these outlets decided to spruce up Steve’s original headline and blast it at readers in all-caps (top part of the image below). You’d swear from this stuff that linebackers and drag queens were lining up together outside conservative churches and smashing in car windshields with bats in the parking lots. Or maybe just pointing at each other’s crotches.
What if everyone who answered a knock at the door to an uninvited envoy for some version of Jesus or another started complaining en masse about being harassed by weirdos? If someone came to your door to ask you to accept that everyone driving a foreign car will be set on fire at some point, you’d have every reason to alert someone with a badge or a net, and that story has no less to back it up than prattle about a dead Jew coming back to life and soaring into the sky like a superhero, but one with with crippling social anxiety based on his track record of not coming back every time someone in the know says he will. He’s 2,000 years late as it is. Continue reading “An example of what Steve McConkey considers discrimination, bullying, harassment, etc.”
Last year, extreme Christian hatemonger Steve McConkey claimed in a public Facebook post that I was “on mental disability.” For those outside the U.S. or unfamiliar with the vernacular, Steve was referring to individuals who receive SSDI benefits for a disabling mental-health condition. As you can see, he was doing this in an attempt to discredit (accurate) statements I had made about him.
This is false and defamatory. If your audience believes that your critic cannot distinguish reality from fiction even if he wants to, you are attempting to substitute a false portrayal of your critic’s mental state for a meaningful rebuttal. That alone is merely slimy, like everything this addled mushmouth does. But it’s more than slimy to knowingly say things like this publicly – it’s against the law.
Did Steve McConkey believe at the time he made the claim that he was operating on credible information? No, he didn’t – and he admitted as much on multiple recent occasions.
Even this from lust the other day is full of inaccuracies so basic that they completely obliterate any credibility Steve would have even if he weren’t a proud liar. For example, look at the cover of Run Strong. What does it say? Also, where is there mention of me ever being a senior writer for Runner’s World? Mind you, these are just the most benign errors/lies.
Steve, as you’ve seen, isn’t just a liar. Sadly, he is also just a garden-variety dimwit, like most Evangelicals. He’s an imbecile. I try not to hate people who exhibit this flaw, but when their character flaws are too flagrant, my sympathy vanishes. Continue reading “Steve McConkey admits to lying (and libel)”
Executive summary: In 2018, I wrote about one Steve McConkey, an unusually crazy and unlovable bigot. Last Friday, he demanded that I remove those posts or else he’d ruin my life by exposing evidence of my sordid legal past, just like he ruined my life last year when he revealed to the world the previously unknown fact that I was once a drunk and even went to jail a few times as a result. I confess that I am deeply afraid of admitting these things as I begin my fourth straight alcohol-free year in a row.
I refused to comply, not kindly, and informed Steve numerous times I’d be publicly posting our exchange unless he immediately directed his energies elsewhere. He didn’t, so here it is. That’s the raw file, available for anyone who might doubt the veracity of the heavily annotated version below. (Obviously I have the real original as well.)
Steve’s mood and level of coherence varied considerably over the weekend, as is characteristic of people who look like the person in the photo above does. On Monday I told Steve I’d be reporting further contact as harassment. Despite not knowing many words or how to use them properly, he craves having the last one, so kept messaging me, even after I forwarded him the e-mail I’d received from the Madison police confirming my report to them. Ultimately, the Boulder Police Department also had to get involved, and warned off this cheerful slice of humanity, much to its immediate anger and throaty dismay. He wrote at least seven different online postings in the next two-plus days about me stalking him, every one of which attempts to portray me as an aggressor. By this morning, he had started deleting these and replacing them with new ones, as is typical for both him and crackpot Internet users in general, and my pointless exercise in discretion concerning whether I would post this ended.
Remember: I have written nothing about Steve McConkey since July 2018, and until last Friday had had no contact with him at all.
This image from last July made it into the e-mail exchange as well, but it’s important to fix it in your mind because it represents an actionable claim — provably false and with the intent to defame. And even though no one of consequence pays attention to what Steve says — including, it seems, his own adult children, bless their hearts — he does have close to 5,000 Facebook friends. (Never mind the substance of the post, which as usual bears little resemblance to the reality experienced by virtually all others.)
I’ve already been told by various lawyers that this would be a slam-dunk lawsuit, and Steve has his dear friend Kim Duclos to thank for that one. But even if I felt like going after him, he doesn’t have any money, and even if he did have worth and I could sue him for free, it’s just a lot less work to periodically knock him into a state of agitation so gripping and extreme that he’s unable to harass anyone else for a spell. I’m announcing this, and he won’t be able to change his behavior anyway. I can already tell you what his next eight steps will be after he reads this.
That’s all you really need to know and represents the most merciful accounting of the events I can command after a number of halfhearted tries at rhetorical restraint. So, if you don’t want to be triggered by unkind descriptions of some of our close primate cousins in the world of Evangelical Christianity, and my various plans to disrupt some of their miserable and pointless lives, don’t read further. You may start bawling hysterically like Steve himself does when people accurately describe the indefatigably misguided maniac he sees leering at him from the mirror. Continue reading “4 Winds “sports ministry” president Steve McConkey attempts blackmail, warned off by police”
Certain people (me, for example) believe that they are basically fuckups at least as often as not when it comes to anything that matters. Whether this is true only or mostly in the hapless, entropy-soaked silt comprising our own thinking apparatus is irrelevant so long as the belief is persistent and powerful. So at the moment, quite apart from those who are currently using substances to escape reality in a manner that could be termed pathological,” it’s not hard to find people who have already tried that route and are instead struggling mightily against the pain of not hurting themselves on purpose, because the means of warding off the significant discomfort that can accompany merely existing in modern society almost always incur a cost.
And that’s really what not submitting to an unwanted craving of any sort is all about: I will refuse to treat this awful rage and irrational madness I have this second by dumping alcohol into my head, because the long-term benefits of resisting outweigh the ultra-short-term “benefits,” and the longer-term costs of ephemeral reassurance from a toxic chemical clearly outweigh the benefits. Or more succinctly, “this too shall pass,” though I avoid invoking even the more innocuous of the Christianity-based slogans that basically define the colossal shityard of terrible ideas Bill Wilson and Bob Smith introduced in the late 1930s known as Alcoholics Anonymous.
There are surely at least 50 million American adults who at this moment are in the grip of a compulsive behavior that will eventually land them in jail, a medical institution, in rehab or something much like it, or on a slab, probably before the age of 50, if it hasn’t already. (One of the joys of blogging for a small audience is that I can make up numbers as long as I admit it, or blow up backing up things I happen to know are true. I spend a great deal of my day harvesting hyperlinks and putting them in Web documents, and this is obviously my time to kick back and discuss how much I enjoy life.) Continue reading “1,000 days and a million heartfelt “recovery” banalities”
There are many compelling reasons to reject the idea that the Christian god is real. Most of these center, properly, on the lack of evidence for God and the undeniable and ever-growing body of evidence against innumerable biblical claims, while others encompass the inconsistencies and myriad logical contradictions within the Bible itself. More circumstantially, it’s impossible to not notice that some of the most ardent believers in the God of the Bible are either under the lash of mental illness, not very intelligent or both; the correlation between slack-jawed inbred yokelism and religiosity in the United States is practically unity. (This makes a certain sense, since the God of the Bible is a psychotically childish dipshit.) And it is undeniably true that no Christian who really believes that Christianity is about moral goodness could possibly support Donald Trump, and in fact should be calling for his death by stoning or whatever means is most convenient. Yet Christians are Trump’s most energetic supporters. They are a shitstain on American society and the world in general, and if all of them were swept up in a tsunami and dashed to pieces screaming against a rocky cliff, the rest of us would be vastly better off.
Often ignored in everyday evaluations of Christian nonsense, however, is the fact that the most ardent supporters of God, Evangelicals, clearly don’t believe in the God of the Bible themselves. Even if they did, it would be incumbent upon reasonable people to either ignore, deride or actively fight their incessant lunacy, depending on the circumstances. I won’t go so far as to say the world would be better off without belief in things that are demonstrably untrue, because, standing alone, fictional narratives (e.g., literature, films) can offer people a great deal of comfort in an uncaring universe. But the would be far better off without religion, and aggressive religious leaders of any faith should be met with proportional derision and their efforts opposed absolutely.
Continue reading “Christians: Why should anyone believe ideas you plainly reject yourself?”
(Edit, 12:42 a.m., Dec. 21: In a development that can only be seen as startling in the eyes of people dumb enough to fork over money to Brian Kolfage, he is evidently a lying sack of shit. I still think all of this is funny because I have no idea if those who donated to the cause will get a refund if the whole enterprise topples. I rather hope they don’t.)
I joked the other day about someone starting a GoFundMe campaign to empower private citizens, specifically fuckups, to fund the border wall. For a host of obvious logistical and political reasons, such a thing would be bursting with the potential for disaster and, thus, schadenfreude.
Therefore, shame on me for not immediately realizing that someone from Florida was already on it.
I went to high school with a guy who is also a triple amputee: His frontal lobe and both temporal lobes disappeared sometime between 1988 and 2016. He was making noises about doing this shortly after Trump took office it and slowly started to dawn on him, like a dog that has been basking in the smell of its own farts for years before the day it finally starts looking suspiciously at its own asshole, that maybe Mexico wasn’t as eager to pay for a border wall as Trump had promised.
The reasoning of the many, many fartbaskers just like this fellow now seems to be:
Continue reading “Who’ll fund my hospital stay after I suffer a hernia from laughing?”
Back in 2004, in the infancy of my own running-centric blogging but more or less at the apex of my overall online rabble-rousing, I was half-jokingly, half-admiringly accused by a friend of being the Rude Pundit, who was himself then part of a new vanguard of uncivil political bloggers. The Rude One was then anonymous, so I suppose it was possible. No matter what my friend — a prominent running author himself at the time — really believed, I was honored by the comparison. I suspect that the Rude Pundit composes his posts in just the same way I used to do my “Bill Eamick” shtick on Letsrun.com: Start by writing a coherent and tactful essay, and then weave in generous amounts of gratuitous profanity and obscene metaphors. Most readers view the result of such a process either a masterful remix or an appalling abandonment of decency. I of course see these as complementary aims, and where appropriate (and often where not), I have done my best to maintain this practice.
Today’s essay by the Rude Pundit takes on a popular idea: If Donald Trump is forced to leave office before his scheduled term ends, a significant fraction of his supernaturally loyal base will rise up in literal rebellion, rampaging about the countryside in an unrestrained show of righteous rage. (The Rude One offers his best gem in his opening sentence with “America’s tallest dipshit, former FBI director James Comey.” Yes, I enjoy life’s simpler pleasures.)
While Trump’s administrative removal from office seems unlikely (the odds that he will suffocate after his flapping jaws misdirect a burger morsel into his trachea appear greater), the notion that his slavish followers would risk anything of real value — be it their very lives or their local moonshine vendor’s Netflix login credentials — to oppose this event is preposterous. Continue reading “I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and then I’ll retire to my bedroom and watch porn”
This is the fifth in a series of posts about a March 14, 2016 court hearing pertaining to reciprocal restraining orders Kim Duclos (now operating as “I_Code _to _Yacht_Rock” on Reddit) and I had recently petitioned for. In addition to lying to the police on Feb. 26, 2016 about a nonexistent episode of harassment to trigger this whole mess and lying on a restraining-order petition the following Monday (Feb. 29, 2016), Kim lied repeatedly before a judge in court at the hearing (I think there’s a word for that) and has been periodically lying about both the nature of the hearing itself and events addressed in the hearing. She has also continued to hector my friends as well as attempt to interfere with my personal and business life. Ergo, this series of posts, which will reveal even more forcefully what a sociopathic and malevolent liar Kim Duclos is.
Moreover, Kim Duclos is a criminal. Lying to the police, on court paperwork, and in a court hearing itself are crimes, especially when you do make up these stories to try to get someone in trouble. As you’ll see throughout these posts, Kim has the personal ethics of a starving, drunken hyena. I want to emphasize this because of Kim’s frantic and throaty insistence that I’m a dangerous scofflaw myself.
The audio clips were generated using Audacity and taken from the official .TRM files supplied to me by Boulder District Court. The audio itself has not been altered in any way. The hearing took place from 1:21 p.m. to 3:39 p.m. MST.
In this portion of Kim’s testimony, she, having already gibbered her way through my fictional heckling of her from a truck on Feb. 26, 2016 and then stammered about a nonexistent foot pursuit of her on some unspecified date at about six months earlier, shifts her strategy from recounting events that were impossible for me to have been a part of to describing actions that no human being could realistically have perpetrated.
This four-minute, 16-second clip starts with Kim’s lawyer asking her about a supposed incident involving me swerving at her from a white Honda Civic, which I apparently did in August of 2015. (Between lying to the cops on 2/26/2016 and lying on her court paperwork three days later, Kim apparently forgot the month in which this “happened.”) It ends with her claiming that I had already tried running her down on Baseline Road in Boulder six months before that, this time in the same gray truck that I supposedly again produced just for the purpose of bothering her one year later.
The germane portion of the police report, followed by the relevant parts of the court paperwork: Continue reading “Adventures in courtroom lying, part 5: Kim Duclos really ought to vet her own stories”
This is the fourth in a series of posts about a March 14, 2016 court hearing pertaining to reciprocal restraining orders Kim Duclos (now operating as “I_Code _to _Yacht_Rock” on Reddit) and I had recently petitioned for. In addition to lying to the police on Feb. 26, 2016 about a nonexistent episode of harassment to trigger this whole mess and lying on a restraining-order petition the following Monday (Feb. 29, 2016), Kim lied repeatedly before a judge in court at the hearing (I think there’s a word for that) and has been periodically lying about both the nature of the hearing itself and events addressed in the hearing. She has also continued to hector my friends as well as attempt to interfere with my personal and business life. Ergo, this series of posts, which will reveal even more forcefully what a sociopathic and malevolent liar Kim Duclos is.
Moreover, Kim Duclos is a criminal. Lying to the police, on court paperwork, and in a court hearing itself are crimes, especially when you do make up these stories to try to get someone in trouble. As you’ll see throughout these posts, Kim has the personal ethics of a starving, drunken hyena. I want to emphasize this because of Kim’s frantic and throaty insistence that I’m a dangerous scofflaw myself.
The audio clips were generated using Audacity and taken from the official .TRM files supplied to me by Boulder District Court. The audio itself has not been altered in any way. The hearing took place from 1:21 p.m. to 3:39 p.m. MST.
Today’s short (1-minute, 49-second) clip picks up the action where the last installment left off. In that gloriously incompetent example of seat-of-the-pants bullshitting, Kim stammered her way through a lie about me attacking her from a truck two weeks earlier. When you fill out a restraining-order petition, it invites you to describe not only the most recent incident that let you to seek the R.O., but as many other examples of your aggressor’s malfeasance as you can fit onto the page — hence this. Kim, who responds to unexpected opportunities to lie about things in roughly the same way ordinary people react to the prospect of a powerful orgasm, obligingly filled the paper with nonsense. Because she knew that everything she was writing wasn’t true, she probably kept details about these non-incidents to a minimum in an effort to look not so much credible but like less of a fabulist. It didn’t work, because she’s a fucking idiot with little imagination and even less composure.
This is the relevant accusation. The most striking thing is that Kim says this incident took place at least six months before the most recent one, yet despite supposedly being somewhere between terrified and troubled, she never reported it to the police or even blogged about it, and later couldn’t remember not only the date but even the month in which it took place.
This is the third in a series of posts about a March 14, 2016 court hearing pertaining to reciprocal restraining orders Kim Duclos (now operating as “I_Code _to _Yacht_Rock” on Reddit) and I had recently petitioned for. In addition to lying to the police on Feb. 26, 2016 about a nonexistent episode of harassment to trigger this whole mess and lying on a restraining-order petition the following Monday (Feb. 29, 2016), Kim lied repeatedly before a judge in court at the hearing (I think there’s a word for that) and has been periodically lying about both the nature of the hearing itself and events addressed in the hearing. She has also continued to hector my friends as well as attempt to interfere with my personal and business life. Ergo, this series of posts, which will reveal even more forcefully what a sociopathic and malevolent liar Kim Duclos is.
Moreover, Kim Duclos is a criminal. Lying to the police, on court paperwork, and in a court hearing itself are crimes, especially when you do make up these stories to try to get someone in trouble. As you’ll see throughout these posts, Kim has the personal ethics of a starving, drunken hyena. I want to emphasize this because of Kim’s frantic and throaty insistence that I’m a dangerous scofflaw myself.
The audio clips were generated using Audacity and taken from the official .TRM files supplied to me by Boulder District Court. The audio itself has not been altered in any way. The hearing took place from 1:21 p.m. to 3:39 p.m. MST.
This installment features Kim Duclos trying to defend the bullshit claim that served as the ultimate catalyst for this court hearing: that on February 26, 2016, I harassed her from a gray pickup truck I was driving near her and her boyfriend Sean’s apartment in Boulder. I’ve covered this here, but listening to Kim — who starts every lie a few points in the hole because she’s too scatterbrained and dumb to fib skillfully — try to simultaneously prop up and desperately modify an obvious falsehood is an exercise any armchair psychologist or fan of schadenfreude should undertake.
In this pitiful shitburst, Kim offers two related but distinct lies: That someone heckled her from a truck while she was running, and that I was the one who did it. I know with 100 percent certainty that the second one is false and I would unhesitatingly bet my life and that of my own mother that the first one is, too. Unless you have mental problems of your own, you’ll soon understand why. Continue reading “Adventures in courtroom lying, part 3: Kim Duclos tries to defend a demonstrably false allegation (audio)”
This is the second in a series of posts about a March 14, 2016 court hearing pertaining to reciprocal restraining orders Kim Duclos (now operating as “I_Code _to _Yacht_Rock” on Reddit) and I had recently petitioned for. In addition to lying to the police on Feb. 26, 2016 about a nonexistent episode of harassment to trigger this whole mess and lying on a restraining-order petition the following Monday (Feb. 29, 2016), Kim lied repeatedly before a judge in court at the hearing (I think there’s a word for that) and has been periodically lying about both the nature of the hearing itself and events addressed in the hearing. She has also continued to hector my friends as well as attempt to interfere with my personal and business life. Ergo, this series of posts, which will reveal even more forcefully what a sociopathic and malevolent liar Kim Duclos is.
Moreover, Kim Duclos is a criminal. Lying to the police, on court paperwork, and in a court hearing itself are crimes, especially when you do make up these stories to try to get someone in trouble. As you’ll see throughout these posts, Kim has the personal ethics of a starving, drunken hyena. I want to emphasize this because of Kim’s frantic and throaty insistence that I’m a dangerous scofflaw myself.
The audio clips were generated using Audacity and taken from the official .TRM files supplied to me by Boulder District Court. The audio itself has not been altered in any way. The hearing took place from 1:21 p.m. to 3:39 p.m. MST.
This picks up where the last installment left off, a little over halfway through the proceeding.
Because Kim Duclos is saddled a with very low level of social awareness, leaving her unable to perceive how her words and actions look to normal people, she made some strange choices in terms of what to present to the court to show that I was supposedly harassing her. Even less helpful were her attempts to refute allegations that she herself was a shit-stirring, lying loon. One of these was was her attempt to explain my website reference to her accusing a New Hampshire runner who was one of my teammates in my CMS days of cheating to win a race that he didn’t even finish. Here are the results.
The link in this passage goes to a screen shot of the public Facebook conversation, which occurred almost a year before Kim’s and my court appearance and was forwarded to me in real time by one of the numerous parties who were already aware of her aggressively off-kilter ways.
At the start of today’s episode of How Do People Get This Fucked Up and Shitty?, an Exhibit 11 was newly under discussion. This item was part of a packet prepared by Kim’s lawyer, who was late to the hearing and came across as some combination of dumb, unmotivated, and under-prepared. The two of them had not actually met before the hearing; I discovered during the proceedings that Kim had e-mailed him a bunch of stuff and he’d entered it all into the record without, in many cases, even knowing why it was there.
Exhibit 11 included a capture of a Facebook message I had recently sent to a quasi-friend of Kim’s (they’re not friends now) plus the screen shot noted above. I’ve magnified that screen shot by breaking it into chunks here. Continue reading “Adventures in courtroom lying, part 2: Kim Duclos falsely accuses a runner of cheating (audio)”
