But I thought for a minute - or I wondered for a minute if it were possible - that people were deliberately skewering themselves (or at least manoeuvring themselves into position and arranging the skewering) and then laughing at people who were so dumb that they were believing it to be a real skewering. And I was struggling to see the advantage in that kind of play....
You see, like you I've heard a lot of people talking about four dimensional chess (or more, I'm sure the Donald is up to about twenty dimensions by now) in which these super-geniuses who control our lives think so far outside the box it seems unrelated to the topic which is ostensibly at hand, and naturally they are countless moves ahead too. Now, as I say, I hear about it a lot, but normally the context is that it is used to explain some even more inexplicably moronic action than usual by a politician who is already renowned for being a moron. And the phrase itself is usually being used by the only people dumber than the politico in question, that being his followers. So sadly these examples of 17 dimensional chess turn out to be... not multi-dimensional chess.
But then I thought you, Gus (not a moron). was telling me about some person who worked behind the scenes pulling strings, to arrange for the NYT to write an article about him, and then that this frightening prodigy (as I write this I can feel his glowing megabrain momentarily focus on me and after deciding that I will never advance beyond pawn magnanimously choose not to utterly obliterate me and move on) was manipulating the hapless writer who, unbeknowest to them, was merely a glove puppet being mercilessly but invisibly fisted by this unknown grandmaestro of the secret world and ultimately being used against their will to produce a hatchet job on the very clandestine Carlsen who had them in his pocket. The purpose of this entire system of plans within plans, wheels within wheels, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel was to fool a hitherto unaware public into hating this bloke. And thus being played.
And I was like... fuck, now that is some multi-dimensional chess shit right there, even after it was all explained (and I realised that claiming that phrase was witty, was of course, another red herring - just a bit too implausible that one) I didn't understand it at all - why the fuck did people want to trick the public into hating them? Crazy. But yeah, in the end it was just me being crazy, I'll stick to noughts and crosses from now on.