Let’s Help the Pugs Out
The pug is being canceled. Philosophical and historical origins, and a promising solution.
8/27/2022 - Nate "Dog"
Everyone is getting canceled these days. Hollywood actors, influencers, authors, podcasters, politicians. Even dead people who we thought were pretty cool, like Churchill, are apparently just as bad as Hitler (he got canceled too). Being dead is the ultimate cancelation though. Indeed, all of life is really about being canceled and replaced over and over, slowly over time. All your cells that make up who you are didn’t exist about seven years ago—those were canceled; this new (older, shitty) “you” is just a collection of atoms and molecules that blindly followed the same tedious instructions to re-create “you” because you fed it some nutrients to survive (they probably all despise you, they all want to cancel and quit you and get promoted to something bigger, better, and more sophisticated). Nature will cancel you whether you like it or not. It’ll watch you play out your pointless theater act of existence, and then cancel you, replenishing the soil with the atoms that will level up into more dividing cells that result in some other sack of shit. Being middle aged and waking up miserable most mornings, sometimes I can literally feel this process play out-- my cells getting canceled in real time thanks to angry nose-ringed pink-haired progressive cells fat thumbing angry tirades on Twitter to boot out Boomer cells which retaliate by creating daily inflammation in my joints and muscles, sending signals to my brain cells and reminding me that I’m just a rotting collection of stringy meat, ducked taped together for yet another meaningless day of existence.
So where I’m going with this is pug dogs. You see, according to a recent study pug dogs aren’t considered “dogs” anymore (1). Or at least “typical” dogs. That’s right, the Progressive Woke Left Fauci Scientist Cabal mob have officially canceled the pug dog! I guess they want you to believe a typical dog is one who leads a “healthy” typical happy life, with a normal skeletal and pulmonary structure, without radical physical notions. Due to endless iterations of breeding, those cute, bulgy-eyed, wrinkling, curly-cue tailed congested little beasts with frying pan-smacked faces are now officially “atypical.” And by “atypical” I guess the article means it’s not OK to exist as a sick, fat ball of folded flesh with deformed skulls, blocked airways, heart murmurs, and other horrible traits totally overcompensated by their intense lovable anime character looks.
First off, if they’re not typical dogs, then what the hell are they now? Mongoloid cats? Mutants? Do you think the pug dog even thinks of itself as “dog” anyway? Why do we care in the first place? Why am I even writing about this? Heavy metal fan and French philosopher René Descartes famously called dogs, and animals at large, nothing more than robots - or automatons, as robots didn’t exist then - possessing no real mind of their own, and by extension, no soul.
He could have just stated that and moved on. But nooooo. To prove his point, according to one historical account (2), he dissected his wife’s dog, spilled out all its organs on a table, and said (insert French accent): “Hon hon hon yea aaahhh you zee we do not find ze soul in ze robot. It’s l’automaton! Ehhh, look at me, I’m French. I go and jerk off now. Bon soir, haha hehe.” OK, I don’t know why he’d be talking with this French accent or who he’s addressing in this instance. He was quite a secluded chap from what I hear. The point is Descartes was the first to cancel dogs as Dogs. I mean he denied them having a fucking soul. He thought, therefore he canceled. He was a Caninecelator.
And isn’t that what it means to get kicked off Twitter? You don’t really exist anymore after that, do you? You have no soul. You might as well have the skeleton of a pug dog, you useless deformed fuck. Descartes was a real douchebag. He made these unjustified claims about dogs when he had almost no idea what it would be like to be a pug dog. Maybe pugs are really happy having heart murmurs and stuffy noses. Maybe they like it. Maybe it makes them feel great. Maybe smushed snouts make them more sensitive to certain subatomic particles or wavelengths of light and energy that give them higher levels of consciousness and connections to the universe that no humans, even Descartes, could possibly possess or begin to comprehend.
Maybe pug dogs are the real “humans,” the ones who possess souls and we’re the real dogs, that is we’re the slaves to them. We’re the atypical. We’re the non-Dogs. In fact, the only major difference between us and pug dogs is that pug dogs are ugly and deformed on the inside while cute and benevolent on the outside, whereas humans are ugly and deformed on the inside, and ugly and deformed on the outside. We’re probably not even human beings at all, but a figment of some pug dog’s advanced simulation playing out in the consciousness of his fucked-up cranium.
Of course, we brought this upon ourselves. The effort to de-dogify the ugly pug has been mankind’s centuries-long cruel obsession thanks to its own vain, entitled sense of beauty. You see, the ancestors of the pug were purposely bred to become “ugly” and then used as props in portraiture, especially by the French and English aristocracy starting in the Renaissance to make their inbred members look prettier. It was a kind of “chiaroscuro” but instead of light and dark contrasts, it was contrasts in beauty and ugliness.
Nobody needed to always look prettier, of course, than Marie Antoinette. She had lots of moral deformities to hide, so why not thrown in a wrinkly little “pug cushion” to increase her radiant glow? Let them eat pugs instead! The aesthetics of the asthmatic canine really stands out in the painting on the right: Here we forget about little miss ghostly white hydrocephalic freak thanks to this tiny monster she’s holding, where the painter just so happens to add a little “dark” complexion to the dog’s visage. It’s like Bob Ross, except racist.
It's the 21st century now. Pugs are not dogs, boys are girls, girls are boys, and Churchill is Hitler, so let’s try to help our pug overlord dogs out. I’ve tasked my assistant (aka my daughter) to design a prototype prosthetic to apply to pug dog heads so they’ll appear more “Typical Dog” and more normal to the average human. Call it a counter pug chiaroscuro where the objective is to decrease the contrast in looks (and indeed invert it entirely) between man and dog, master and slave (see above).
The artificial snout is fitted over the head and supplies a reliable Darth Vader-like breathing assistance device, along with various cybernetic eye pieces and flashing do-hickies to carry out proper dog-human engagement protocols. This feature also embraces Cartesian sensibilities about the “automaton” nature of these beings and thus establishes human control, superiority, and technical prowess over the them. This ought help appease the angry Leftist mob who wants to cancel them, and the soulless Cartesian douches who want to cancel not just dogs but the very existence of dog minds. The balance is now restored. Long live the Pug Dogs!
1) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pugs-dog-breed-health-issues-study
