the dissident frogman

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We are all familiar, I believe, with the expression “First World problems”.

And with the kind of people who experience them, as well: mostly urban, mostly Left wing, positively privileged and utterly clueless.

From despairing over a mobile phone’s battery life to being outraged that Mommy, Daddy and the rest of the world insist on calling Robert someone who’d rather go by Suzie, the legions of self-absorbed silly sods grow in number with each passing generation—a result of the snowball effect of ignorant idiots teaching and training more and better successors of the same kind.

I was reminded how this miserable carousel keeps spinning ever faster when a less than pertinent search engine answer lead me to this puff piece for the promotion of COVaxxing on a video games website, feebly disguised as a serious contemplation on how the Futility Industry can manage a “post-pandemic” world—complete with the correction that “an earlier version of this story” had someone incorrectly identified with “the wrong pronouns”, though without precising if the mismatch is related to the content of their underpants or the delusion in their mind—and how some people apparently experience The Moral Dilemma of Attending Conventions in 2021. This being the title of the piece, and no kidding.

In the current state of the world, the worst its ever been economically and politically in quite some time—which, without a doubt, is only a prelude to worse—surely a bunch of (chronologically) adult folks for whom attending comic book conventions, music festivals and other “cosplay” mass meetings is cause for a “moral dilemma” calls for some way to rate the decline appropriately.

The ELOI Index

In that spirit, I propose the ELOI Index: for any such “moral dilemma” and other First world problem, assign an Eloi Lack Of Insight ¹ value on a scale of 0 to 100.

100 being: that sorry waste of womb needs to spend six months in the skin of a Chinese peasant at the height of the Great Leap Forward to learn what a moral dilemma really is.

That’s Eloi as described by Dan Simmons in Ilium by the way, not H.G. Wells in The Time Machine (though the latter inspired the former):

The Eloi are technically adept but don’t understand the technology; they regress and unlearn millennia of culture, thought and reason, until they are satisfied with the pleasure of merely existing.

Instagramming “Me, fully COVaxxed, at Comic-Con in my Pinhead costume with my non-binary friend Suzy” from one’s iPhone qualifies, I think.