The social media feed gruel has switched it’s serving of slop from the speculation about the potential outcome of one hundred men versus a gorilla. The content creators who recycle the same shit, because of algorithms and trends now concern themselves with the apparently ‘vile’ imagery of one Pamela Anderson, now in her late fifties, daring to present herself in public with no make up on, and without the assistance of filters. The mostly males from behind their meme accounts are shocked, armies of anime avatars and tradcon bros shriek in outrage. How dare this woman age!

This woman did not remain as she appeared thirty years ago. How dare she not catfish the world, with the use of filters. How dare she stand as a human with intellect rather than a pair of, er, lovely eyes. Pamela Anderson has in her post-sex symbol phase been an ardent advocate for free speech, and peace. In doing so she has drawn the ire from far more sinister and calculating elements than the current outrage mob, who will return to complaining about the casting of the next Disney princess or live action adaption of whatever anime or game they are binge watching. It’s safe to say this uproar does her ego no harm, rather it proves a point.

That point being is that a lot of people crave fake things. The synthetic, they need an artificial orderly presentation to satiate their insecurities or preferences. Nature or natural self is for many of these people, ugly. The imperfections that define us as human beings, and arguably make one beautiful are to be shunned. So, women are to be taught that lip filler, fake tans, layers of make up and other additions are the way. And, I am aware that there is some irony in mentioning body enhancements in a rant about defending Pamela Anderson. But that was the old Pam, well in this case the younger one, that happens to be from an olden times. The current one is embracing the tranquility of natural self.

Being a public figure, whether that means you have sung songs that entertains a lot of people or played make believe convincingly enough, it brings with it a sense of public entitlement. The voyeurs will have elements from within their ranks who have decided to take ownership over you, they may obsess, fantasise about you, boast to their spouse that you are their celebrity pass or they may even conjure up your effigy in hopes of harming you. It’s a strange and dysfunctional relationship that strangers can develop for someone simply because they happen to be entertaining and thus famous. In this regard in the minds of strangers, Pamela Anderson belongs to them.

This means that a celebrity, seldom, if at all can not be a former celebrity. They have been locked into the collective memory of those who watched or listened to them, an inescapable duty to serve and present themselves a certain way, for ever. As they age and deteriorate it becomes a reminder to those who once adored, worshipped and idolised them, that we all get old. To dehumanise someone, so that they remain frozen in a period of history is to deny them the course of ageing.

And the gorilla in the room is that most social media trends and viracy are conjured up by those who are too young to understand the ageing process, or most things for that matter. So through the screen, the world seems to remain static and filtered. This breeds an entitlement and unrealistic expectations all based on the delusional illusions that those online often consume. It can range from fitness inflation, where there is an unrealistic trend of teenagers and twenty somethings to gorge themselves on PEDs, lifting hard for the mirror with no concern of any future repercussions. The discipline of study is long lost in the TikTok age, the blips with a phonk soundtrack washing across the eyes has bred impatience. This married with the frozen moments of history, that are re-circulated from time to time ignore the real world concept of, age. And may even have redefined beauty.

Instead of looking to the elders who are remaining active and ageing gracefully or more appropriately, with dignity. They are shamed and isolated. Individualism and health, truly diverse perspectives and a will to be true to self or principles are attacked, ridiculed and denigrated into slop content by a digital mob of avatars.

Women are allowed to age, men for that matter are as well. It may be uncomfortable for those yet to do so, to consider. Beauty is revered because of it’s subjective scarcity and youth is precious because it goes all too fast. It is an asset that can not last. If one’s only virtue is that they are young, well I have news for you. And it seems that much of the hatred and indignity is an immature struggle to come to term with the human processes found beyond the screen by many who are medicated, insulated and digitally dependent on that realm lost in the screens.

I take notice of the memetardery because it is a concerning fascination as to what is an allowable thing, in a moment. Why is a chicken dance done by so many strangers, then suddenly it’s suddenly ‘cringe’ to do. How did so many kids know that it was marble season, and who decided the market value of each and every marble, which was consistent beyond any one school, in an age before the internet. These trends now happen faster, and take hold over many who are fixated and interested in them, until they are not.

Grok is this true?

“The above post is made by a curmudgeon attempting to come to terms with internet trends, commonly known as memes. The authour is unable to truly articulate their disdain for such a culture of digital community and communication but raises points about human agency and individual determination. It is unlikely and there are no confirmed reports that Pamela Anderson has or will ever fight 100 memetards.”

Now that the community notes have arrived, we can await the still ever confused comments arguing about the religious or racial background of Pamela and if she listened to Ye, thus she may in fact be a Nazi or a troll. It’s all so very enthralling, engaging and informative, I am assuming. The worse part, the slop does not even taste nice, despite being nutritionally empty. Then again, in an age of Edibles Appearing as Foods, it’s no wonder we have so much shit passing for content. The truth of the matter is, Pamela Anderson was a beautiful woman and still is. This is a subjective evaluation. To scream and farm for engagements, that she is not, is more of an indictment on oneself. The trouble is, avatars and screen names have no self, and besides those that are bots, most are human beings that only find courage in their screen persona.

But. It’s all a grift. All of it. The insincere shit exists for all of us, you, me, them. To interact with, share, comment on, like, view. Each single one of us makes them wealthier for it. With that in mind, the internet is dying. It’s not just the bots and marketing bunk that’s killing it. The insincerity and constant rewards to those who conjure up such disingenuous junk. Those who still seek out things, search and look and waft through the memeyards, I applaud you. Those who rely on the feed, let an algorithm infest your eyes and mind with such slop, break free before it’s too late. Let’s not feed the trolls any more. And to answer the question, Sigourney Weaver already made friends with the gorillas, so we are all good.

In the photo essay, Ethiopia : The Scorched Earth, Mary Anne Fitzgerald writes in the caption beneath a photo of a young girl crying, “Tears of hunger are a good sign. During the final stages of malnutrition children are too weak to cry.”

There was Live Aid and U.S.A. For Africa, once for Ethiopia. Millionaire singers, millions of viewers and millions of dollars raised, despite that millions starved. Well meaning intentions moved on once the songs slipped from the charts, the misery inspired single with little lasting impact for those in the place that had inspired it all in the first place. The imagery of a child slumped over, exhausted while the vulture watches is iconic in so far as Western consumption for distant anguish goes. The footage of a malnourished Palestinian girl running after empty water-tank trucks, thirsty, hungry and desperate, is for the moment as tragic, though before the eyes of doomscrolling voyeurs, it is all too soon to become regrettably forgotten.

Celebrities could once go on television and participate phone in fund drive marathons, money donated by people at home interested in giving up cash in the hopes that it could go on to buy aid, food, or anything to prevent another child from collapsing beneath a vulture. Much of that money, filtered through cynical layers never reached those on the ground and what does, still needs to get through. Logistics to remote regions is hard enough, with a full blown military embargo, such as is occurring in Gaza. It’s now impossible.

The Israeli military is moving in, taking and seizing ground. Their spokesmen have promised that they will take over the food and water, now that they are there. What children climb from out of the cement dust and shattered masonry, must open their mouths to the same military that has been for long months starving and exterminating them. If that little girl survives the bombs, snipers and malnutrition in the coming weeks, maybe she will not need to chase another empty water truck.

I had a friend, Ben, who I met through the combat sports, a big man with a bigger smile. Mighty broad shoulders, dark Igbo skin and a keen mind. He had come across Milton Friedman as a young man, from then on dedicating himself to free markets and human liberty. Ben had been born in that brief slither of human history when a nation called Biafra once existed. The Igbo and others sought independence from Nigeria, but with little foreign backers, they fought a desperate war. Starvation, war and the tragedy of human invented horrors led to the death of thousands, if not a million or more. Despite this, Ben was born.

His passport said, Nigerian. Though he never saw himself as Nigerian. It was a nation, like others that arose in the death throes of empire that had come about after Europeans swiped their hands across the map. The modern Middle East is infected by such imperial inventions. Places where the victims of such colonialism tend to know the histories of their regions better than the outsiders who assume that, “this is how it has always been over there.” Savages, uncivilised near-humans fighting one another.

Ben had told me that he and the other Africans he knew had often encountered this, the assumption that they were savages, Nubian throwbacks that needed to be led, otherwise cowards or only preferable as labourers. He once mentioned how the Palestinians, and the then victims of the US invasion of Iraq, were seen by outsiders as “humans weeds to be eradicated to make another man’s garden.” History is a compost heap stacked with such human weeds, cut down by the civilised and savage alike.

If he was still alive, I wonder what he would have thought about the current genocide in Palestine. I am old enough to remember slurs expressed at the expense of the Igbo, in light of their own mass starvation. “He is as skinny as a Biafran” or “A Biafran would have a better chance getting a meal than…” these were remarks thrown about in the 1980s, a decade plus after that war. On TikTok, Israeli and other ‘influncers’ have taken to making slop that ridicules those suffering in Gaza. To the comfortable and wider doom scrolling world, ‘it’s all in good fun’ or maybe ‘in bad taste.’ In a decades time, we may hear expressions lingering, “she’s as skinny as a Gazan.” Or perhaps with a little girl in mind, “as thirsty as one.” The humour’s found in distance. The distance of time and geography. But also, perspective.

Ben was an advocate for free markets, human liberty. He had seen up close the bureaucratic monstrosity of government, the corruption and use of ever expanding laws against the common person. In places like Nigeria they are extreme farces, depressingly comical. Though, often the OCD rendered facade is all that differs, some places have their corruption and exploitation mastered. It’s homogenised. Above all, Ben was anti-war. Not a pacifist, he had quick hands and a faster mind when violence did arise. There is a difference between fighting and waging war, one deals with individuals while the other is collective vulgarity.

War is the end of freedom, the destruction of liberty. It’s where collectivism reigns, it profits a few, glorifies some and destroys many more. A genocide, is the fulfillment of the worse trait of humanity.

It transcends human beings, it’s the reckless carcinogen of anti-life. I once went to a talk held by veteran aid workers, they were discussing their experiences in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Somalia. They had worked for most of their life trying to save lives, they were not wealthy people materially only in dignity, devotion and experience. Atheists to religion and politics, just human beings who did good. In those horrible regions, their existence was mostly respected, at times exploited. They were generally not intentionally targeted, it was still dangerous for them. Techno-voyeruism allows us to now watch many workers being targeted, executed. The most ‘moral military’, has been killing them with impunity in Gaza.

The Biafran war of independence was one of those lost moments during the cold war, a period of endless wars. Outside of writers like Frederick Forsyth, much of the intellectual imagination at the time was focused on the American war on Vietnam. Wars like the Nigerian Civil War are usually dismissed as a conflict between tribes, regional players with modern arms doing as they would otherwise be doing with spears and shields. One caption in a magazine from the period read, “even the Federal soldiers look as savagers(sic) dressed in Western hand me downs.” Above it stood a young Nigerian soldier in a mishmash of Allied World War Two era kit, holding a Sten sub machine gun. At that same time the IDF was going into battle with M3 Half Tracks, Sherman tanks and some of their soldier still carried Mauser bolt action rifles, they too were in a mishmash of foreign kit. That same magazine would praise the blitz like successes of the IDF in the six-day war. Today, media can still be found that praises the IDF’s restraint and morality.

The Israel claim to Palestine, is often reasoned to be found in the bible. An ancient religion determines that a theologically founded State has the right to not merely exist, but to expand. In doing so, it can defy the very international laws that safeguarded it’s own existence and creation, and can commit atrocities that even some of it’s own supporters struggle to ignore. It’s a modern state, Western, and is from all accounts the tip of the spear as far as technology and civilised esteem goes. It seems that funding and technology is what separates the savage from the civilised.

In her essay, The Conspiracy of Silence, June Goodfield said of modern war, “the profile of war has changed. The military machine that marched through history, albeit often breaking rank, has degenerated into a flailing, amoral behemoth that kills without conscience.” I suspect that it mostly always has, we just saw it with a romantic vision and often in the past, the war was just geographically distant to the innocent.

“How strange that there exists no science of peace – no science comparable to the development of armaments and strategies in the science of war,” asks Alice D. Wolf in the book, Peaceful Children, Peaceful World. It is strange indeed. Meanwhile the institutions and entities that justify their very existence, their might, and reasons for them to retain monopoly powers, all grounded in tomes containing many poetic words interwoven by the language of legalese boasting peace, justice and order. In reality they destroy human liberty and dignity and in the end may be the destroyer of worlds. They continue to wage their wars, support others in theirs. Despite their own laws or, supposed values. We watch a little girl run after a water truck. How far we have come, yet how often we stumble. The truck drives on, she remains thirsty. No more trucks are coming. Just soldiers and more bombs.