This Charming Man

I follow nearly seven hundred people on Twitter. There are thousands more people that I want to follow, but I don't have to, because I see their outbursts retweeted anyway. My timeline fills to a thousand within an hour, and nobody could keep up with that. I've resorted to a mental list of people that interest me the most, and I make it a point to visit their profile and see what they're up to.

One of the persons that interests me a great deal is Milo Yiannopoulos.

Yiannopolous is this wonderful chimera, who by his very existence informs the utter lack of homophobia in the West. Andrew Sullivan wrote about what gay men and straight men have in common:

" ... a need for emotional commitment and stability as well as to get our rocks off from time to time; the desire and will to serve one’s country in the military; the commonalities of sports and drinking and the gym and dirty jokes."

Thus the aching excitement when I learned he was visiting Los Angeles. I wanted to tweet at him to be sure to visit Mijares for the best Mexican food, but I suspected he would be spending most of his time on the West Side.

Imagine my surprise to catch yesterday's live stream from Joe Rogan's Pasadena studio, which featured Yiannopolous's L.A. coming out. He could have walked to Mijares. Just as well, Yiannopolous seems to prefer endive to enchiladas.

Joe Rogan is a stand-up comedian and mixed martial artist/MMA announcer. He is best remembered as host of Fear Factor. Rogan's wheelhouse is the genre of "World's Stupidest Fucks." His interview style borrows from MMA, and though he can be a good listener, he shows very little finesse. Rogan's objective is to wrestle his subject to the ground, then repeatedly punch him in the face. It seemed a curious choice for Yiannopolous to be interviewed by someone so intellectually incurious.

On male circumcision, Rogan described it as "cutting a baby's dick." Straight to the ground. No, meathead, circumcision is trimming a foreskin, and your reflexive condemnation of the practice illustrates your intellectual feminization. Has Rogan never heard of labiaplasty?

Rogan's habit of continually glancing at his producer for validation is pretty grating. And Rogan's dismissal of the inherent morality of religion is obvious. At 44:30 of the podcast, Punchy unloads on religion, saying, "Any of these ancient systems that were established back when the world was completely different, and didn't have the internet, they are no longer valid today." Truth and human nature are eternal, Hammerhead Joe.

I wasn't surprised that Yiannopolous cut through the Newspeak of "Net Neutrality," correctly identifying it as an effort at governmental regulation of the internet. If there is an area where I disagree with him, I've yet to notice. Surely the majority of #GamerGate, so keen on stripping property rights from copyright holders and discouraging new capital investments by ISPs, will part ways with him on this one. That Rogan's distrust of the U.N. does not extend to distrust of his own government is revealing.

Rogan brought up the subject of fracking and contaminated drinking water. He mentioned that there are over a million fracking wells in the United States, as if this fact alone would shame anyone heartless enough to own a pickup truck. Somebody tell Palooka Joe that the EPA studied fracking and water pollution and found none.

Yiannopolous makes a point about how his anti-feminist arguments cannot be dismissed on the grounds of misogyny. "I love women, all my friends are women," he says. Okay, but I've always wondered about the emotional health of women who gravitate toward gay men. And, notice that there is no lesbian counterpart to the "fag hag." Because hetero men know that dykes despise us. I've long believed that gay men invented misogyny, but get along with women because of their common language. Maybe misogyny is another thing that gay men and straight men have in common.

So welcome to L.A., Milo. Where everybody obsesses about gluten even though they have no idea what the fuck gluten is.