The giddy circus of pathologised frailty

Modernity is so obsessed with labels because it is terrified of mystery: is anyone else thoroughly sick of these sanctimonious little memes that continually choke our timelines on Facebook, and elsewhere? Who even is producing this bloody drivel!? And why is it always so predictably tethered to some solemn pronouncements about alleged “narcissists”? Somewhere within the last ten to fifteen years, give or take, “narcissism” hath expanded from a specific, scientific descriptor rarely used by the general public into a universal solvent and catch-word buzz-word, dissolving every nuance it touches. I scarcely recall encountering the term in ordinary conversation, real life, before that period; now it is deployed with monotonous certainty to explain virtually everything.

Any personality disorder, any genuine injury or merely imagined affront, any defect that is real, exaggerated, misread, or simply inconvenient gets bundled into the same accusatory category — particularly when the subject is male (women, I’ve gathered, are more often labeled as “hysterical” or “unsafe”; in both cases, the individual is erased). It hath become less a diagnosis than a fashionable epithet: a moral cudgel masquerading as insight. And is it any wonder, under such conditions, that trust has withered — that people approach one another as potential threats rather than imperfect fellow creatures — when this poisonous, pseudo-therapeutic slurry is everywhere, presenting itself as “self-help” while quietly training everyone to interpret human frailty as pathology?

These bloody memes — like the ones in the screenshot with their "early red flags" and "humiliation" tactics — are the aesthetic opposite of glamour. Flat, ugly, and devoid of the nuance that once made human connection beautiful. The word "narcissist" is all too often a shield to avoid the messy work of actually knowing someone. Enough. Full stop to this f**king nonsense! I have had my fill of the whole giddy, self-righteous circus. And if I am a "narcissist" for saying so, oh bloody well! 

"We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." — Anaïs Nin.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Vulnerability: perhaps the single most damning reality of living as a man in this ungrateful and impossible world

image generated via ChatGPT

You women and girls, by and large, are repelled by men who display vulnerability – who admit to fear, or confess to the raw desolation that attends desperation. It is simple biology, dating back to the Stone Age. Yet it is also biology that men, when reduced to their most human extremity, are hardwired to seek comfort and solace from women in precisely such moments. To whom else, in practice, are we expected to turn? Who are the first to comfort us upon entering this world? Biology.

Society, taken as a whole, continues to instruct men that they must swallow everything: bear pain without complaint; transmute anguish into stoicism; and do it all with a happy face, as though suffering were a private eccentricity best concealed for the comfort of others. As if suffering is a virtue. How sick. I hope it is understood by all reading this – women, men, and third parties alike – that we men are caught in an eternal Catch-22 in the realm of feeling and attachment: we are told to be emotionally available, yet punished for emotional need; urged towards honesty, yet tacitly sanctioned only so long as that honesty never becomes inconvenient. It makes living as a man on this planet really, really f**king s**tty – and these are not caveman times; we should be evolving. Instead, given the way everything is going in the world at large, we are heading back towards the caves – though I digress. I shall, mercifully, be dead for that. Still, it would be nice to have a little love back in my life before it all crashes down, and not let biology and ancient prejudices get in the way of anything. #JustSaying

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Bombing Iran is not going to erode Donald Trump’s support in a society that revolves around grievance. After all that hath been said and done, to believe that anything will do so is fool’s gold

Following the attack on Iran, I am yet again watching my fellow Trump detractors, on social media and elsewhere, put far too much faith in the American people as a whole. For years now, something big happens that would ruin any other politician, and they swear this is finally the end for Trump. No — even when he was defeated and sent into exile for four years, he still dominated the headlines and dictated public discourse. They keep underestimating the strength of the hold this one charismatic man hath upon the collective psyche of the country. If the general public is not in revolt now, when it is reasonably obvious that the president committed unspeakable crimes against minors on Epstein’s island — never mind having blatantly orchestrated a coup attempt, grossly mismanaged the worst public-health crisis in a century, attempted to kneecap the world’s largest economy with brain-dead policies, and appointed an anti-vaxxer lunatic to oversee public health — then they are not going to revolt over a conflict on the other side of the world. Not this country. Not these people.

Americans, historically, fall into lockstep the moment a fresh war or conflict breaks out. The Iraq War was massively popular before it was massively unpopular. Isolationism was a default posture for a vast swathe of the public right up to the morning of 7 December 1941 — then, in an instant, it became non-existent. This reflex is not new: the American people, in the aggregate, are sheep. They do what they are told, and they always have.

Roughly sixty to seventy-five per cent of Americans either fervently support Trump; or support him begrudgingly because he is not a Democrat; or possess some personal and/or financial interest in doing so; or—most commonly—do not care and simply look the other way (i.e. they are apolitical). Only about a quarter, at most a third, actively and vocally disapprove of Donald Trump.

So no: if his extreme megalomania and narcissism (I hate to use that grossly overused word, but it fits in his case), his paedophilia, treason, racism, economic malfeasance, felony convictions, and the wider menagerie of criminality and cruelty barely raise an eyebrow with the vast majority of Americans, then bombing Iran is not going to do it either.

And of the roughly thirty per cent or so who eagerly support this regime, they do so for one reason: they are granted licence to hate other Americans. Period. They will bear economic hardship for it—and they already have. They may not like the country being dragged into another foreign conflict, but it is not a dealbreaker. Nothing is a dealbreaker so long as that permission to hate remains intact.

People are really this awful. That is the hardest lesson we have been forced to learn over the past ten years. And we are not getting out of this hellhole any time soon. —Arthur Newhook, 1 March 2026.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

“Trump has tipped the Middle East into a massive war that could last weeks” — or months, or years

Reuters

{Sky News 28 February} US and Israel attack the Iranian capital with the goal of regime change.

The nefarious Iranian regime hath long courted precisely this sort of escalation; yet the orange-stained regime in Washington is scarcely less reckless, and no less morally compromised. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion — more to the point, certainty — that these strikes are being exploited as a convenient diversion for Donald Trump: a spectacle designed to distract the #Murican masses from the fact they are being ruled by a paedophile. And, to that end, it will work: in a country so coarsened and credulous, any resistance in earnest to the laundering of what is beyond grotesque and indefensible is practically non-existent.

Israel’s position is more complex, of course. Its security concerns regarding Iran are real and severe, and long-standing. Twenty years ago, we were talking about the likelihood of a bloody conflict. Even so, it is entirely plausible that Bibi Netanyahu, too, may welcome a crisis that shifts the focus from his internal political troubles, and his reliably deferential posture towards Trump hath been dispiriting to anyone who supports both Israel and democratic, egalitarian governance in this world. Going along with Trump on this is a high-stakes gamble; as I write, reports are emerging that Tehran hath launched retaliatory strikes on Tel Aviv. However one parses it, the outlook is bleak — extremely bleak. And, remember, the Iranian bear nukes. 

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

#Azumeria: a Valentine's Day lament for the most aloof girl I've ever known

#Azumeria Happy Valentine’s Day. Alas, my erstwhile punk rock princess ranks lowly in the annals of girls I’ve loved before. Over the span of nearly twenty years — beginning in that accursed, long-shuttered record shop on the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington, MA, and then intermittently thereafter as thou drifted from one corner of this country to another — thou didst move in and out of my life with restless inconsistency.

When last we spoke, it was during the year of the pandemic. I had resolved to visit thee in Reno, Nevada, clear across the continent. Tickets were purchased; arrangements carefully made. And yet, in thy customary fashion, thou unravelled the plan entirely. And I lost hundreds of dollars on it, which I really could not afford to lose. Still waiting on reimbursement from thee for that.

Thou wast ever among the most distant and inscrutable souls I have known — and I have known a fair number, myself included at many junctures, none too proud to say. In the final reckoning, it amounted to little more than wasted years and misplaced investment.

I can only hope that the little girl thou bore at, what, 42 — and to a baby Daddy barely out of high school, a spoiled little rich boy with a most punchable face that thou meet in the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous (do not even get me started on that cult) — is not suffering unduly. The one I was looking so forward to meeting, but never shall. But, she probably is suffering, and is still quite young. Nothing I can do.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

#Enchantra A Valentine Day's lament for a girl in East Tennessee

#Enchantra Happy Valentine’s Day. Didst thou remember to send a card to the child-raping, nation-killing demagogue whom thou worshippest as Lord and Saviour, whilst giving lip service to Jesus — the one whose name is now bound to scandal, secrecy, and redacted files, and whose Department of Justice hath seen fit to obscure more than it hath revealed?

I lament that thou once possessed a heart of gold, and then didst allow political, familial, and societal pressure to harden it when that orange demagogue emerged and told ‘y’all’ precisely what ‘y’all’ had long been waiting to hear. And somehow, in all of this, thou didst choose to blame me for thy heart and soul turning sour.

Well, I thank thee kindly for wasting more than eight years of my life — eight years invested in someone who surrendered her judgement to a cult of grievance and cruelty, along with the rest of the yahoos living around there. (It was a long-distance affair, though I visited her and her family in East Tennessee and became well acquainted — to say nothing of the countless hours she kept me on the telephone most every night, for years.)

Someday thou shalt fall to thy knees — not in worship, but in reckoning — and plead with God for having held so fast to the support of so obvious a con-man and horrifically evil entity. Someday thou shalt seek my forgiveness, and the forgiveness of every soul oppressed in the name of thy Lord and Saviour, Donald Trump.

Make no mistake: I am not pining for thee, nor do I care much any longer about the private relationship issues we endured; but I am eternally furious that thou wouldst betray every principle thou once upheld in order to support a tyrant — and for what gain? To the contrary, he robs us all of everything. Wake up, grow up, and repent.

—‘Christopher Robin’

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

#Enchantra: a lament for a kind lady lost to the scourge of Trumpism

I remain perpetually angered that the woman with whom I shared more than eight years of my life — let us call her Enchantra, once the gentlest and kindest soul I had ever known — hath now devoted a decade to the cult of Donald Trump, QAnon, and sundry other manifestations of embittered, reactionary dogma. I told her so — plainly and without ornament — as recently as last week. The pallid, evasive reply I received this time sufficed: somewhere in the deep chambers of her conscience, she knows I am right. Yet she holdeth fast.

Part of the problem lieth in her upbringing, the gravitational pull of familial and societal appeasement, the ideological climate in which she dwelleth, limited formal education, years of severe health struggles, and an ever-shifting regimen of medication that inevitably clouded her cognitive equilibrium. Yet these are but tributaries. The primary reason is that she — and the millions similarly poisoned — were granted permission to transmute grievance into identity, to sacralise resentment, and to dwell perpetually in a theatre of persecution and self-pity. I devoted countless hours unto hearing her sorrows — many, it must be acknowledged, not without justification; the manner in which this disabled woman was treated by health professionals and certain of her kin often enraged me. Yet once aggrieved, she possessed an inexhaustible capacity to rehearse and elaborate those injuries at prodigious length. Trust me on that.

She cleaveth to Trumpism with a fervour nigh unto self-deification, insisting upon its righteousness, even its sanctity. What I behold is not merely a political allegiance but a corrosive moral inversion — an ideology that hath disfigured public discourse, estranged friends, families, and lovers, and debased the civic spirit. Such darkness, however entrenched, cannot endure indefinitely; history is unsparing with movements that mistake grievance for virtue and cruelty for strength.

I do not claim to have been a perfect angel in this matter; I did make grievous mistakes, though not nearly so grievous as she would have one believe (she is given to hyperbole in all matters). Nonetheless, damn Donald Trump and every person who hath propped this criminal paedophile up for ten years. Damn you to the pits of Hades. Thou art a destroyer of the lowest order, and our country is unlikely to survive thy treachery. The woman I loved for many years, who once loved me more than any other human being ever hath, is practically unrecognisable. I shall neither forget nor forgive this. Not at the barrel of a gun shall I ever give my assent to this nation-killing madness, not at any price.

—Arthur Newhook (pen name), 13 February 2025.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

A republic without moderation

The GOP hath curdled into a death cult; the Democratic Party, for the sake of the nation itself, cannot afford to permit its own zealots, cranks, and ideological exhibitionists to seize yet greater influence. Yet that is precisely the course upon which we now hasten. The great middle ground of American political life hath all but evaporated: most citizens no longer dwell in ‘the centre’, but have migrated to their respective fringes, and nothing salutary hath issued from this polar flight. On the contrary, it hath begotten a crisis of such magnitude that a full civil war appears inevitable.

Those who decline to ‘pick a side’, desiring only to live unmolested by the madness engulfing them, shall be the first to be devoured. For my part, I want none of this. I have grown beyond weary of most everyone and everything in this diseased society, and I want nothing to do with collectivism in any of its varieties, whether left or right. 

We now stand in a condition akin to that of Weimar Germany: a rabble of Marxists and Nazis—though God forbid one should dare to name them as such—monopolising all the oxygen, rendering common sense and basic decency obsolete. This Mamdani fellow is bad, bad news.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.