Weekly Scroll: Reinventing Professional Wrestling
Trans discourse, Looksmaxxer sagas, and NBA burner drama
Welcome back to the Weekly Scroll! This week we’re talking about trans discourse, the continued looksmaxxer saga, a fun anniversary, and NBA burner drama.
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It’s Time For Trans Discourse (Again)
Last week, The Argument published an interesting piece arguing that the public backlash to the trans rights movement is real and significant. They commissioned a poll that showed public support for various transgender-related policies backsliding - as one example, a majority used to oppose ‘bathroom bills’ that would force trans people to use the bathrooms of their biological sex but now a majority support those bills. It’s not just hardcore Trump fans either. A huge chunk of independents and Democrats oppose policies like puberty blockers and surgery for minors, trans women in sports, etc.
Progressives on social media took this post in the way you’d probably anticipate, by attempting to shoot the messenger 10,000 times directly in the face. Activist/poster types on X were angry, and those over in the BlueSky echo chamber were apocalyptic. “Lakshya has always been trash”! “They want to murder me and everyone like me”! “[Lakshya], since we were mutuals for a long time: fuck you, I hope you and your bullshit publication fail.” And those were some of the nicer messages!
Why would they freak out so badly? The article wasn’t arguing against trans rights - it was purely describing the results of a poll. If an issue that’s important to you was deeply unpopular, wouldn’t you want to know?
Long-time readers will recognize this as yet another instance of Arguments As Soldiers:
There are two ways to argue on the internet. One way is to argue at an object level - is this thing true or not? What are the facts? What is the clearest way to interpret this data? You’re trying to reason and debate your way to some version of what the ground-level truth is. This way of arguing is productive, beneficial, and rare.
The more common way to argue is to treat the discussion as a war. The person arguing against you is an enemy combatant, and arguments are soldiers. The purpose of an argument in this paradigm is not to discover the truth or reach some mutual level of understanding. The purpose of an argument is to crush the enemy.
Most people treat political arguments online like a battlefield, and any concession that the other side has anything at all going for them isn’t a sign that you’re being humble and evidence-based in your thinking. It’s a sign that you are a traitor. Admitting that your arguments are unpopular is the same thing as stabbing your own soldiers in the back in a time of war! For Lakshya’s critics, publishing polling that shows left-leaning trans policies are unpopular is akin to giving aid to the enemy. It’s even worse than being an enemy, it’s being a traitor.
Plenty of people did come to Lakshya’s defense, but you’ll rarely see as clean a divide between what Julia Galef calls the Scout Mindset vs Soldier Mindset.
In other trans-related news! Every time there’s a mass shooter now, conservatives rush online to declare the shooter was probably a mentally ill trans person, and progressives rush online to declare the shooter was probably a neo-Nazi Trump supporter. It was probably only a matter of time before we finally had a shooting where the shooter was both a mentally ill trans person AND a neo-Nazi Trump supporter. Welcome to politics in 2026, baby.
Woke 2.0 Has Arrived
A Theory of Clavicular
I want to make an admission here. I’ve written about Clavicular and looksmaxxing memes/drama a few times, but I had kind of assumed this was going to be a flash in the pan. Here today, forgotten tomorrow, the latest in a long line of ephemeral online nonsense. Damn, Daniel but for smashing your face with a hammer.
I was wrong! I was so, so wrong. The chadmaxxing/mogging conversations have continued and even surpassed Clavicular himself. There’s an entire ecosystem of absurd men and they’re the most clippable people on the planet. Remember the ASU frat leader who brutally frame mogged Clavicular? Well an Australian looksmaxxer has sworn to avenge him:
Unfortunately for Androgenic, his status as a TERA-CHAD and his #2 ranking on the Official Chad Leaderboard did not help him when he was brutally exposed as a fraud by a low-tier jester. The video below has no right to be as funny as it is.
Androgenic, may the lord rest his soul, dropped from #2 to #53 (below Piers Morgan????) on the global Chad leaderboard:
The ASU Frat Leader (who is never referred to by his actual name, just ‘ASU Frat Leader’, like he’s an eldritch horror in a bad fantasy novel) has taken this as a sign of total victory. He’s been streaming, clubbing, celebrating and living large ever since he successfully framed mogged Clavicular and saw his rival Androgenic get caught fraudmaxxing his hairline. When ASU Frat Leader rolls up to the club, there are people shooting off fireworks and carrying signs proclaiming his Chad-ness:
I love every part of this. I love the sudden rise and fall of Androgenic. I love that Clavicular is so focused on steroids and hitting his face with a hammer that he’s never heard of Zohran Mamdani. I love that ASU Frat Leader may not even be in a fraternity. I love the way that every single one of these guys looks like an AI-generated male sex doll and talks like their brain is made out of mashed potatoes. I love the way that every cultural or geopolitical event is now described in terms of mogging, maxxing, and cortisol spikes.
But mostly, what I really love is that social media has, at long last, reinvented soap operas and professional wrestling (which are the same thing, just gender-swapped) from first principles. Bizarre looking characters? Dramatic storylines? Weird terminology? Fighting that doesn’t end up being real? We’re hitting all the boxes. But unlike soaps and WWE, which relied on professionally written pre-planned narratives, this is completely distributed storytelling. What’s really driving this are a non-centralized army of clippers who comb through livestreams looking for short videos that can go viral on X, Reddit, and TikTok, and compete to see who can find the weirdest and most viral clips. If there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s creating lore out of random events for no earthly reason at all and then somehow making it incredibly funny and memorable. I can’t wait to see what happens next episode.
12 years since Twitch Beat Pokémon
Speaking of how the internet can create lore out of absolutely ridiculous situations - It’s been 12 years since Twitch played Pokémon.
If you weren’t around back then, I’m so sorry. You missed, without any exaggeration, one of the most magical episodes in the entire history of the internet.
The experiment started in early February 2014, and had a very simple setup. A programmer started a game of Pokémon and streamed it live on Twitch. Rather than using his own inputs, he coded a bot to take whatever button press commands were typed into Twitch chat (up, down, left, right, A, B, Start) and use those to control the game. The concept quickly attracted tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, all inputting commands and trying to control the character simultaneously. It was the gaming equivalent of 10,000 monkeys on 10,000 typewriters trying to write Shakespeare, and exactly as absurd and glorious as you’d think.
This crowd-controlled play style made even the simplest tasks in the game nearly impossible at times. But somehow, the crowd was able to slowly progress through the game. Fans created a ridiculous amount of lore around the incredibly bizarre situations the main character was forced into. Eventually, with a few unbelievably lucky breaks, Twitch chat managed to beat the entire game. This consumed nearly the entire social internet in early 2014. I recall literally calling in sick from work to watch the final few days of this, and I know I wasn’t the only one. It was a moment that probably won’t ever be recreated, but I still get nostalgic remembering it.1
NBA Burner Drama
Kevin Durant is a 16-time NBA All-Star, a 2-time NBA Champion, a former MVP, and one of the 20 or so best basketball players in the history of the sport. He also appears to be an incredibly petty bitch on social media, as evidenced by the fact that he’s been caught talking shit about his teammates on a burner account.
The account, named ‘getoffmydickerson’, has not been definitively proven to be Durant’s. But it’s been an open secret in league circles for years that Durant keeps burner accounts where he talks about hoops, and the account (now protected) only ever interacted with accounts that were mutual followers of Durant’s and exclusively talked about Durant’s teams and teammates. Other NBA accounts would ask Sir Dickerson questions as though he were Durant, and he’d answer them. The leaks include group chats where Durant compared former teammates and coaches to Stalin and Hitler, called a current teammate ‘lowkey retarded’, and joked about sending drones to Gaza.
Perhaps the wildest part is that the group chats aren’t even with other celebrities or famous NBA players. They’re with a collection of his online stan community.
Remember the founding thesis of this blog - posting is the most powerful force in the universe. You really, truly cannot understand the internet unless you internalize this deep in your soul. Durant is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. His net worth is in the hundreds of millions. He’s impossibly famous, rich, and accomplished… and he still has a burning need to talk shit online so he can look cool to random teenagers in a group chat.
Links
This is the first scandal of its kind that I’m aware of - a prominent journalist for The Guardian has been credibly accused of using AI to generate his articles in their entirety.
College students would need to be paid $59 to delete TikTok - but would PAY $28 for someone to force them and all their friends to deactivate it at the same time.
OpenAI has finally discontinued ChatGPT 4o, famously the most ‘boyfriendable’ of all the mainstream chatbots. The AI-relationship community is not taking it well - see a great recap of the drama here.
Welcome to Substack, George W. Bush and Grindr.
Ngl I love the names and the taglines of ppl in the Chad ranking- like “Generic Apex”, “humble Mogger”, “Romulus - where is Remus?” etc lol
I’m not clear on who Clavicular is or why we’re talking about him/it. Can we get a quick explainer on this?