cat corner: morality playlists

a quick thought

apple TV was going to launch a show called “the savant.” it was supposed to be about “a savant” who used her mighty brain power to help catch bad guys. (right wing, domestic terror threat bad guys)

the show (pre launch) became such an extreme and funny meme that the whole internet was flooded with it for 3 days. it was like 80% of @X pixels by weight.

the theme was always the same: baffled savant experiences “right wing” or “male” behaviors and is confused by high trust high inclusion ecosystems or the fact that 10 men would stand around talking about a really cool stick they found.

it was, frankly, hilarious and i doubt that apple liked it much.

it rapidly became a full blown dragging and leftist lampoon about the delusion of their world.

and i suspect this worldview collapsed in real time, at least from a network executive’s perspective.

this was not going to be a “nice” show, it was going to be a harangue about “far right terror as the biggest threat to america” and another culture war saturation effort.

and they just decided to pull it off the air pre-launch.

predictably, outlets like “variety” are shrieking about how this is all trump’s fault and how we need this show right now. they speak of “fear of pressure” while kimmel goes back on the air.

frankly, they sound kind of unhinged.

now, i am just an internet cat and it’s not like i’m siskel and ebert or anything, but i’d bet a whole bowl of friskies against a wooden nickel that the reason they canceled this is that the plotline involved “right wing/christian nationalist extremists doing talks at colleges and radicalizing students” or some other permutation of similar messaging.

i knd of wish they had chosen to broadcast it. it would have been cultural seppuku because far too few are still onside and it would have shown true colors of a sort that you cannot come back from, colors that clash too badly with reality to integrate.

if they aired this, it would wind up being the exact opposite morality play to the one they had planned…

and what’s important here is that, for once, they knew it.

realization is dawning that they need to get away from this messaging and that the political vanguards and echo chamber cathedral screen writers who simp for them bone deep assured that assured that they are the both moral and the majority are dangerously, ostentatiously out of step.

“variety” may not get it, but apple TV (who generally run a bit left of hugo chavez) did.

the feedback must have been outlandish to get them there.

because that’s not generally how this gang operates.

kitten beloved had a great take here:

this has 1000% been my experience. i have never in my life had a supermarket cashier harangue me about their right wing political beliefs and demands much less assume that i must, obviously and of necessity, share them. but the left does it all the time. it’s this incredible, bone deep presumption of being in the right and possessing the right to rule and to dictate culture.

and even those who have led the movement and played to its devotees and bleacher bums are realizing that they just cannot do this anymore.

i think a lot about this “nice lady” and her convictions.

i wonder a lot about where she is now, what she is thinking, what the day after the election was like for her.

there is much about her fate and current state about which i do not know.

but one thing i do know is this:

as the rest of the nation, the vast, tacit middle who just tried to put up with this and went along to get along finds its voice and rises in a chorus of “i do not agree with you and your immoral minority,” her time and that of those like her is ending.

the presumption, even the attempt to dictate disappears.

it’s just too obviously ineffective.

it’s self-harm so clear that even they can see it.

their stridence and insular vehemence and ostentatious factual departure becomes self-indictment.

and the age of the cancel kulture karen comes to a close.