Stop the Idiocracy: March 2026

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

The Dow Jones sinks to a 2026 low amid renewed inflation anxieties. Do not expect the American people to ever hold Donald Trump to account for it, or anything else

A cinematic digital illustration set on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. In the foreground, a pale young woman with long auburn hair sits barefoot on the polished marble, wrapped loosely in cream satin that slips from her shoulders and pools around her legs. Tears stream down her face as she looks upward with a stricken, searching expression, her arms crossed tightly over herself in a gesture of vulnerability and self-protection. Behind her, blurred traders in dark suits hurry through the vast hall while loose papers drift across the scene. Towering ticker boards glow overhead with falling red numbers and scattered green figures, reinforcing the sense of financial panic. Warm golden light from high windows catches her hair and skin, contrasting with the cold institutional chaos around her.

image generated via ChatGPT

{CNBC 18 March} “Dow tumbles more than 750 points to new closing low for 2026, fueled by inflation woes; Fed holds steady on rates”

Curious how ‘y’all’ are enjoying this beautiful economy that was promised by your orange godking?

No need to ask. So long as grievance remains the organising principle, and the American people – at least, the ruling white trash coalition that comprises the vast majority of the country’s gun owners, law enforcement, military personnel, assorted Christian leaders, trailer park dwellers, conspiracy theorists, dedicated racists, and suburban lay folks of what we used to know as ‘the middle class’ – are granted licence to hate without consequence, no amount of bad news will touch Donald J. Trump. Allegations of sexual misconduct. An attempted coup. Criminal mismanagement of a once-in-a-century medical crisis. We are not even scratching the surface — and still he remains insulated.

All because a culture animated by resentment would rather suffer than surrender its animus. Stop trying to reason with it. When cupboards empty, someone else (be it Joe Biden, or whoever Trump hath anointed as the villain of the day on any given day) will be blamed. It never fails. Hell on Earth.

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

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.

Monday, March 2, 2026

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

A stylised, vintage pin-up illustration depicts five glamorous women in lingerie gathered in a cluttered artist’s studio, laughing and sharing gossip. Two brunettes and three blondes, all with carefully waved hair, bright lipstick, and jewellery, pose in playful groups: one woman leans in to whisper to a redhead in a satin slip, while another sits forward in a black corset and stockings, head thrown back in laughter, holding a wine glass. At the left, a blonde reclines on a table beside scattered sketches, paintbrushes, and a palette; a glass of red wine sits nearby and another appears spilled. In the background, an easel holds a nude painting, with additional figure studies pinned to the wall beneath a hanging lamp’s warm glow.

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

Sunday, March 1, 2026

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

A dramatic, realist illustration shows an Iranian woman standing amid the wreckage of a devastated neighbourhood. She has long dark hair and wears a dusty headscarf and a dirt-streaked grey tunic over loose trousers, her bare feet on broken stone and splintered timber. Bruises and dried blood mark her cheek, and she looks upward with a stunned, searching expression. Behind her, ruined buildings collapse into heaps of rubble; smoke boils into a grey sky and an orange flare burns in the distance. A small flag is faintly visible through the haze. In the foreground, a discarded stuffed rabbit lies on the debris beside a red toy, underscoring the civilian cost of the destruction.

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.