Dear Readers,
The world faces a humanitarian crisis as many suffer from an outbreak of the dangerous affliction scientists are calling ‘columnist brain’.
Not much is known about ‘columnist brain’ as of yet, but it causes much harm to those afflicted, and even more harm to their readers.
Columnist brain has many variations, with some infected by it thinking that their day to day life is ‘the news’ while others seem to think they need to come up with a ‘new’ stale pseudo-intellectual take on every goddamn issue.
Many ‘columnists’ seem to suffer from a serious lack of self awareness and desperate need for attention no matter the cost to one’s personal health and reputation.
This last week, many in Australia have seen this first hand damage columnist brain causes after a major outbreak at the Fairfax news outlets, a common epicentre for this affliction.
When bands started pulling out of Bluesfest for the principled stance of ‘not wanting to appear at an event openly endorsing violent racist transphobes’, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age started running articles like this:
While some may see this article as a bizarre attempt at ‘culture war’ bullshit which could have been generated by a glitchy version of ChatGPT while it seemingly wants bands to be forced to endorse *alleged* abusers; doctors can reveal that it is an example of the harm having a column can cause to someone.
However Channel 9 papers weren’t going to stop their, with the poster child for columnist brain, Waleed Aly, incapable of not weighing in to give his stupid response:
According to Waleed, bands pulling out of Bluesfest is ‘anti-intellectual cancel culture’ claiming that King Gizzard’s protest isn’t a protest because protests are a movement which requires ‘collective effort’ and don’t start with just one person or group having an idea.
While you might be thinking ‘that’s literally how every single movement starts you fuckwit’ and since 5 other bands had already pulled out following King Gizzard’s lead by the time the article was released proves how insanely wrong he characteristically is; to those with columnist brain being ‘right’ doesn’t matter, as long as they can feel ‘smugly right’.
Although, I do personally sympathise with the Fairfax journos who are worried by precedent that just going ‘well I didn’t hire those dangerous bigots my name appears next to’ isn’t enough of a way to avoid association with said bigots, as that mentality is a direct attack on how they sleep at night.
Of course being an annoying prick isn’t the only ridiculous thing that people with columnist brain mistakenly believe is the news, some go so far as to write entire articles about how they fucked around before complaining that they proceeded to find out:
I can’t wait for next week’s article about how someone robbed a bank and the police were being real party poopers about it.
However, the moment that experts realised that columnist brain and it’s variants have gone too far was when this piece dropped in the UK:
The author of that piece, body-shaming her husband has written multiple pieces about her marriage that led to her husband finding out she wanted a divorce when he read about it on Instagram. Something no-one should be forced to endure.
As you can see, columnist brain takes away traits like empathy, common sense or any understanding how the world works. Plus, you need to remember that most writers (including myself) have no actual skills and that’s why we became writers instead of something more productive to society, like teacher or a meth dealer.
All this is why many experts are simply calling for columnists to be put down humanely as the pain is getting too much to bare while they try come up with a cure. It’s the only way to avoid any further harm to the community.
So please give generously to the fight against columnist brain and hopefully one day soon, they will all just shut the fuck up for good.
— John