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Rage math, an invasion of fat mannequins, my man moves to Abu Dhabi, fit models for your fly, getting stranded in Weed Country, the world’s most fun car, chilling effects, surprise parties, Target vs. CVS, an existential crisis over a cute waitress, a weight loss tip you’ve never heard before, making out with beer, Google’s War on Engineers, two-day hangovers, the shame spiral, and the show gets a producer; all that and more this week on The Dick Show!

An invasion of fat mannequins has found its way to your local Target, and the world will never be the same. In this episode, I propose a grim future of hyper-realism where reality is inescapable instead of the reverse, stammering superheroes, a recut of Seinfeld where Kramer takes a shit every five minutes, a Muppet on Sesame Street gets told to shut the fuck up. It’s a beautiful future, because beauty means whatever you want it to, but first…

Google fired engineer James Damore shortly before this episode was recorded for a manifesto he’d written already labeled the Google “Anti-Diversity” memo and already labeled a “manifesto”. In a world where the ability to nickname cutely can win the you presidency, that one is unfortunate. Here is the memo preserved for posterity, diversitymemo.com.

I read it. It was so inoffensive, I can barely remember it.

James Damore is a Harvard graduate who was smart enough to call to fix our Internet plumbing, but now he’s a meme for neuro-typicals to shit all over to distract themselves from being fat mannequins. This whole thing should make me a rage, but it doesn’t. It makes me a sad. Every time it happens, it feels more and more like a form of white-collar suicide-by-cop. It’s a guy who doesn’t know any better, trying to use the same skills he’s been told are valuable his entire life to fix a problem that not everyone can see. That’s his purpose. You might even call it a religion if you had to base a discrimination case on it, but similarly to religion, all of that was a lie. Those engineering skills are not valuable in and of themselves anymore. The Information Economy has become the Signaling Economy, the only skill that matters is your ability to manipulate people’s emotions, and at the hands of a mob, scientific progress goes boink.

Someone who thinks similarly to James Damore is going to invent anti-gravity technology–or anti-aging technology if that’s the flavor of ad you’re looking for. Or else that same guy is going to be fired for performing a differential diagnosis on a verboten topic and mocked until he’s dead by a bunch of fat mannequins on Twitter.

Blaming things on sexism when it isn’t sexism is not a victimless crime, and the cost is complicated and potentially devastating. Gender-based hiring practices are grand social experiments undertaken with dubious motives, real consequences, and with absolutely no caution or control group. For an engineer, that is a reckless nightmare scenario, and that was his whole point. Unfortunately, the ability to understand that is starting to look like the nail that’s been so hard to find.

If only there was some multi-billion dollar complex of technology that could reliably, objectively, and definitively compile all the user internet data, search history, and usage patterns to show what genders seek out online, how media influences our decisions over a lifetime, and the factors at play when it comes to career selection, education, and lifestyle choices. It would be interesting to say the least. It would help everyone make more informed decisions for themselves because that’s really all there is, the self. Well, the good news is that there is a company who can do this, the bad news is that they’re the biggest advertising agency on the planet, and the last thing ad agencies want is you making informed decisions, they just want you to think you are.

I think I’ll do a Dick Ridin this week about it because James Damore and Michelle Carter are very similar to me, a clumsy and violent over-reaction to a reminder that everyone is a fat mannequin.



The Harrison Bergeron reference by alt-right extremist author Kurt Vonnegut.

Outro remix by Mr. Negative.



16-bit super start thumbnail by Brandon of Maximum! Panic.



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