So in a way I regard it as beneath my dignity to make a video about Milo Yiannopoulos, but being beneath my dignity has never stopped me from doing anything before, and it certainly isn’t going to now.

I say beneath my dignity because I don’t really think Milo is a serious person. Whereas I am very serious. I’M SERIOUS.

The news calls Milo a “provocateur,” but I’m starting to think that “provocateur” is just a pretentious word for asshole. What Milo really is is a preening, narcissistic, no-face whose main infatuation is his with his own minor celebrity. He’s an opportunist who gained fame by championing GamerGate, although he clearly has nothing but disdain for gamers, who he consistently depicts as beta-male man-babies.

He’s now taking after his friend Ann Coulter in making a career out of saying false and immoral things to generate negative attention from easily-offended liberals, something that any 12-year-old with a Twitter account can do. His articles and speeches blend generic right-wing babble with exaggerated attacks on feminists, Black Lives Matter and transgender and fat people. All of this is plastered over with a thin layer of affected homosexual “glamour,” which in this case means calling feminists “dahling” and dressing like he made his first thousand dollars twelve minutes ago.

When he was banned on Twitter last week for his borderline racist participation in an extremely racist mob attack on Leslie Jones, his poor duped followers who take him seriously Tweeted #FreeMilo and complained about “Orwellian” censorship, while Milo himself bragged about the long-anticipated ban, which he celebrated as the latest great victory in his war against people not paying attention to him.

All of this is pretty typical of the tedious reality-TV type circus that American politics has become. But what I find interesting is that a lot of people seem to really be attracted to Milo, even people who are somewhat sympathetic to social justice, and I’d like to talk about why that is.

I’ve spoken to some Milo fans, and they all tell me that they like him because he’s funny and fabulous and a contrarian. But is he?

His humor mostly seems to consist in the most primitive sort of insults and putdowns. Now, there is a venerable tradition of bitchy gay humor, but Milo really doesn’t belong to that tradition. His sense of humor is mostly that of a straight 13-year-old boy screeching on teamspeak about fatties and bitches and losers.

The guy sometimes talks like he thinks he’s the reincarnation of Quentin Crisp, but he just isn’t.

Great gay humorists like Crisp or David Sedaris use self-deprecation to balance out the bitchiness, and they have a sense of the tragic. It’s the human condition, or the homosexual condition, that’s often the butt of the jokes. It’s a little like Jewish humor in that way, and you know, Milo is also Jewish.

What the hell is going on here? A gay Jew! You’d think he’d be guaranteed to be funny!

But Milo has been seduced by the brutal, Hitlerian charm of Donald Trump, and in consequence his so-called humor is really just self-aggrandizement at other people’s expense.

But despite all that, there is one talking point Milo has that is very interesting to me, and I think it might help explain why people are attracted to him. Again and again Milo suggests that what’s great about him, and about the Republican party he delusionally imagines might be crafted in his image, is that he’s “fun,” and “fabulous,” and “glamorous.” 

His one criticism of the left that I think is genuine is his complaint that they’re joyless and humorless, and that they resent glamour and excess. And you know, as much as I hate to admit it, he actually has a bit of a point.

Now I say this on the basis of my own experience with academic feminism, which in general does tend to be pretty dour and joyless. It sounds like a frivolous objection, but I want to argue that it actually matters.

So, for instance, I sometimes try to put myself in the headspace of the people who just despise Anita Sarkeesian. Honestly, I have no serious beef with Antia. I have a few quibbles about some of the games she chooses as examples, but I agree with most of the substance of what she says. But people really hate this woman. Why?

Well, apart from the obvious misogynist contingent, I guess it’s that work is hard, and life is shit, and gamers don’t want to come home at the end of the day to have this brow-furrowing moralist tell them that their one little solace in life is “problematic.” And, you know, I kind of get that.

To be fair to Anita, she does occasionally say, [enjoy, pernicious], but if you interpret feminism badly you could get the impression that what feminists want is this bleak world where everyone goes around “critiquing” things, and there’s no room left for joy or irony or spontaneity or sex or art. And, though I of course think this is a terrible misunderstanding, sometimes academic feminists are frankly not the best at discouraging it.

My main issue with Anita for example isn’t about what she says but about her style. And I don’t mean how she dresses, I actually think she looks cute, I mean the way she presents her ideas.

You’ve got no style, Anita, no style! Your videos are academic and whiny and boring. You bypass valuable opportunities to make furry jokes; you mispronounce and then translate French clichés. 

See, I can be a bitch. You people think being a bitch is funny? I’ll bitch all over you.

What I’m suggesting is that being on the right side of morality and politics isn’t the only thing that matters in life. Now, I’m about to get very philosophical with this, so you might want to grab your fedora.

I want to propose that there are two principles that contribute to a good life, which I’ll call the moral and the aesthetic. This is similar to a distinction made by another philosopher, but I’m not going to use his terms because they’re too pretentious to say in a YouTube video and because I am a much better philosopher than him.

The moral principle includes things like reason, logic, and judgments about right and wrong.

The aesthetic principle includes things like style, humor, irony and creativity.

Without a balance between the two principles, you can’t really live a full human life. If you’re too dominated by the moral principle you become dry, lifeless, and negative—at worst a kind of Puritan or fanatic.

If you’re too dominated by the aesthetic principle you become shallow, self-centered, hedonistic and empty.

Anita’s public persona has too much of the moralist. Milo is too much of an aesthete.

But note that an aesthete without morality is actually a bad aesthete. Milo thinks he’s Oscar Wilde, but he’s not. He’s fucking Dorian Grey [lolol]. He’s a vain shell of a man because he has no real moral sense.

And there’s something missing in a moralist with no style. There’s something  almost inhumane about it.

What YouTube needs, what humanity needs, is a person who can balance the two opposing principles: moral and aesthetic, light and dark, male and female, drunkenness and robotripping, Daddy and Mommy.

Oh my God. I am the chosen one. It is I who shall bring balance to the force. I am GOD.