Wednesday Racing/Open Thread

Open to all subscribers, focusing on Japanese GP and a profoundly odd Wall Street Journal article

the hospital is full of car crash victims, some groups are trying to pull them out

Your humble author didn’t get to pay too much attention to the F1 weekend; my crew and I were trying to get my Radical SR8 to stop upshifting at random, especially when braking for turns. It didn’t help that I was driving the car in a PCA “advanced” group where everyone else in their GT2RSes and whatnot managed to be literally slower around the course at “full tilt” than I was driving the SR8 in just 5th and 6th gear. In the end we had to throw in the towel and start sending error logs from the ECU to Radical in the UK. On Sunday night I finally caught up with Suzuka, however, so let’s get to it!

Max lied; he said he’d win by 20 seconds, and it was only 19.4

Compared to the remarkable Singapore GP, the Suzuka weekend was fairly straightforward. Observations below:

• Red Bull is apparently too cowardly to take the necessary step… of putting Liam Lawson in the RB20 and sending Checo back home to “South America”, as Helmut Marko infamously noted. Seriously. Lawson looks almost superheroic in the AlphaTauri, bearding Tsunoda in his own den and running a supremely cool-headed second half of the race. Perez looks like a man in the middle of a nervous breakdown. It’s time for everyone to admit that he’s not up to the job. Either the car is too hard to drive, or the team is too fully-coalesced around Max, or he’s just not capable. Meanwhile, the announcement that Danny Ric has somehow been gifted a seat in the AT car for 2024 is so obviously marketing-centric that I can hear Will Buxton’s dimwitted ass telling a camera, “If… you are offered a chance to drive a car… then you will drive that car.” Cue the Netflix logo and a pitstop, viewed from overhead. The smart thing to do is to give Lawson the Red Bull. Either he won’t keep up with Max or he will. Based on recent evidence, however, I doubt he will end up retiring from the same race twice.

• George Russell should look for another job, and not because he runs into the occasional wall: F1 is a business as much as it is a sport. Possibly more. Which is why we have Danny Ric in a seat with a “young driver team”, and it’s why Princess George continually finds himself eating leftovers at Mercedes. Weekend after weekend, Sir Lewis gets the better strategy. Having been deliberately undercut by Hamilton yet again, Russell managed to one-stop his way to the front of the field. When Lewis caught up to him, Russell suggested doing a DRS train. “They are using my trick against me!” Sainz wailed. It didn’t last. Lewis wanted the position. Someone literally got Toto Wolff out of surgery (or so rumor has it) to issue a direct “Valtteri, it’s James” team order. Here’s the problem. Russell is faster than Lewis. He’s just not better in the race. But as long as he has to play second fiddle, he won’t get better. And every year that Toto can retain and pamper Lewis is worth doing, even at the cost of points, because Lewis is sui generis as a black F1 driver and therefore brings real money wherever he goes. F1 wants him in the sport because it helps obscure some of their other (cough Saudi Arabia cough) ethical decisions. George is disposable, but Lewis is irreplaceable. He’s now been racing in F1 for 16 years. During that time, has the sport had any credible prospect who wasn’t either ethnically European or Asian? This sort of thing really matters. It makes a genuine difference to F1 and its teams. Russell should bail. Because they won’t let him win a championship as long as it can be given to Lewis.

• Piastri starting to look worthwhile. I was flabbergasted by all the maneuvering around Oscar Piastri last year — but he is starting to look like the real deal. Admittedly at the end of the second-most-lopsided teammate qualifying stat, Oscar is gaining ground, driving smart, and looking like a potential winner. Speaking of the other lopsided qualifier…

• Poor Fernando. Nobody has gotten less out of more effort and talent this year. Aston simply can’t develop the car. But where could Alonso go to finish his career? Nowhere else.

• Yeah, it’s the fastest car, but Max is also the fastest driver. The manner in which he beat both the McLarens on left and right at the green despite an indifferent reaction time and the RB19’s known deficiencies at starts? That is what Senna would have done, or (whisper it) more that what Senna would have done. We are witnessing something truly special. When was the last time the best driver was in the best car? Schumacher’s early championships after the death of his primary rival? Alonso in the Renault? Certainly not during the winning years of Sebastian Vettel or Lewis Hamilton, both of whom occasionally made heavy weather of easy seasons in vastly superior equipment.

Men Better Not Go Their Own Way

From an ACF reader comes this improbable tale in the Wall Street Journal about Diverting Hate, a PR firm that claims to “intercept and combat the radicalization of gender-based violence and hatred on [social media] platforms.” They’re sitting on $700k of funding from Homeland Security, of all places. Enjoy this following sentence from the WSJ:

Diverting Hate developed a digital advertising plan and began cataloging accounts focused on incels, on tactics for picking up women, and on the “men going their own way” movement, which promotes the idea that men can live fulfilling lives without women.

Emphasis is mine.

Let’s put all the cards on the table. The dating world has changed quite a bit over the past twenty years. I’d say that the changes have harmed both women and men. From the perspective of a man, however, things look pretty bleak. This goes double, ten times, a thousand times, if you are a generally unremarkable divorced man in your forties or above. Faced with that cold reality, some of those fellows developed the MGTOW ideology, which rejects the influence of women on their lives.

I don’t personally follow the MGTOW ideology, and I don’t enjoy interacting with it, but for a lot of men I think it makes some sense — as does the Generation Z counterpart, “NPNW”. Why spend your whole life in pursuit of, and dominated by the thoughts of, something you’re not going to get? We don’t tell short kids they can be the next Slam Dunk contest winner, just because there was one short guy who ended up winning that title. If you’re not attractive or interesting to women, why not focus on another area of your life where you can produce positive results?

It’s easy to understand why MGTOW are considered subversive or even terrorist-adjacent; they literally advocate for an unflinching examination of one’s core assumptions about everything. That implicitly threatens the power structure, because even if said structure is utterly benign and totally correct, some percentage of self-examination would result in mistaken resistance to it. So yeah, $700k doesn’t buy you one shift at a TSA station nowadays, why not throw it at some loonies who are gonna reprogram the manosphere? After all, you might have a chance to work with one of those grifters once you re-enter the private sectors.

More annoying to me, however, is the pearl-clutching tone of the WSJ at the idea that men can live fulfilling lives without women. Who do they think they are, to feign terror or concern about that? How does that harm anyone else? I mean… we all know how, at least subconsciously. It’s no fun to put your boot on a neck unless that neck has agreed to be humiliated and injured by said footwear. A lot of women, and a lot of “male allys (sic)”, take a perverse pride in being cruel to men whom they deem unworthy of sexual attention. That pride, pleasure, and leverage ceases to exist if the “incels” in question aren’t sensitive to it.

In order for the spice to flow, therefore, the MGTOWs (MsGTOW?) must remain both unfuckable and constantly in agony that they are unfuckable. That’s how power is maintained and enjoyed. If enough men “go their own way”, they might decide to stop participating in society altogether. Since an embarrassing amount of the world’s actual and useful work is done by unfuckable men who are potential MGTOWs, rather than by the sparkling rainbow of blue-haired women and handsome young men who pretend to do those jobs on television, the MGTOW ideology has to be treated with more horror than that of the Taliban. Because it could do a lot more harm.

Bold prediction: Mentioning this movement in the pages of the WSJ probably got it more potential participants than $60,000 of targeted ads (directed by $640,000 worth of liberals-arts graduates) could ever dissuade.