the global "let them eat cake" moment
the self defeating nature of grievance cults reaches the pivot point
the tendency of successful social movements (even and perhaps especially those that may have once had reasonable foundations) to descend into derangement has seemed a prominent feature of late.
i would argue that this is an embedded emergent property of post-modern grievance cultures like CRT and other such intersectional oppression philosophies.
consider:
power and ethical structures that empathize and/or fetishize marginalization and ascribe to it some sort of virtue or entitlement serve to distort this generally undesirable trait into the societal scoreboard used to determine who is winning a contrived sort of aggrievement derby.
intrinsic to such orders is the idea that “marginalized” individuals are therefore owed obeisance and privilege by all those less marginalized.
because such status is inherently relative, this sets up an inevitable competition to become and remain the most marginal.
for this reason, such systems create social movements that can only persist as descents into madness.
any such movements that succeed and gain power and prestige are, by definition, no longer marginalized and thus, by the rules of the very game that lifted them up, they must now be cast down to make room for those still “marginal.”
thus, those who would remain atop the greasy pole of leading such movements must grow ever more marginal to avoid being supplanted as the kings and queens and non-binary whatevers of the downtrodden. the only path to power is over the bodies of your one time fellow travelers. every success must be met with new affectation, adoption, and derangement in order to cast off this new ascription of power and privilege and to once more stand “outside” among the excluded and disempowered. (even and especially when this is nothing like true)
over time this makes the leadership’s identity entirely fluid and pathological. it also makes it psychopathic and machiavellian as you need to throw someone under the bus each in iteration, sacrificing one time allies upon the altar of relative oppression. there is no other path. any who fail to adapt by becoming ever madder and more marginal and more vicious towards any save themselves will be winnowed out and shoved down the slippery slope of privilege rankings by those who would supplant them simply playing the “more disenfranchised than thou” card.
this rapidly selects, in cruelest darwinistic fashion, for only those least stable and most unsound of self-conception or character and for those not only willing to become or at least to ape the most disturbed and marginalized, but aggressive and assaultive enough to impose such will. nothing is crazy enough to remain at the bleeding edge of “excluded peoples” for long because the whole game is to rarify into the ever more exclusionary and that’s a game that gets played for blood.
so long as “marginalized” remains the status marker, it’s an impossible treadmill selecting for the very worst of us. the whole movement becomes a societal scupper for the most deranged of the cluster B personality types and actual no fooling around crazy people.
such a process will ultimately efface any values or justice that such movements may have once contained. it does this selectively and unavoidably because overshooting ethics and devolving into the rule of sans-sanity suzerains constitutes the implacable demon in the design of this idea of ennobling the most marginal and misanthropic. it eventually marginalizes anything and everyhting reasoned or reasonable and elevates in its place the most strident of the miscalibrated fringes.
you can watch the process run over and over.
look what happened with women who simply wanted to play sports as they get shunted aside by men in dresses who invade their locker rooms and podiums using the very same title 9 rules.
look what happened to gay men as their (increasingly successful) movement was conquered by “queer” and “non-conforming gender” and “trans” and “minor attracted individuals” and who knows what else that will inevitably emerge from the need to be yet further from the bright lights of purported privilege and power.
it can go no other way.
look around at all these movements and how they spiral into ever accelerating outrages and assaults. it’s not an accident nor even a strategy, it’s an unavoidable emergent property of rule by moral relativism and misguided empathy and guilt manifesting as deference to the damaged and dangerous.
once you tell people that being reviled by society means status and virtue, you’ve created the most adverse of selectors and the only way to turn it off is to stop lionizing this performative aristocracy of the most addled and performatively demanding.
they won’t get better or mature or learn to heal themselves, these are children who are being given not only cookies but the keys to the kingdom every time they burn the house down.
empathy and elevation does not aid these people. it’s pathology fertilizer.
mistaking this for “helping” is not a mistake a society can long survive.
the good news is that this sort of pathocracy cannot survive either.
past a point, its embedded need to double down over and over again rapidly makes it ostentatiously insane to the point of being unrecognizable to reasonable people and the spell shatters. the perpetrators and aficionados of these debacles rarify to the degree where they have no idea how far gone and how far out of step they have become.
it goes one exponential too far and the whole thing becomes unmistakable garbage, bereft of mission, message, or meaning. it’s just a contest to be the most odious and conspicuous outlier.
and we’re there. right now.
you wake up one day, and this is the opening ceremony for the olympics and suddenly pretty much everyone simply says “nah.”
this is not redeeming or poignant. it’s not even edgy or avant garde. it’s just plain bad, devoid of any redeeming quality whatsoever. the performance and performers were terrible. there was no quality here, just a dog’s breakfast of regurgitated dogma that appeals to basically no one.
whole teams of “intellectuals” and “thought leaders dreamed this up.
and they were so deluded they thought it was on point.
instead, they will be derided into oblivion.
it’s just awful, aesthetically, politically, and culturally awful.
what on earth were they even going for?
did “hey, let’s use an obese DJ and a bunch of hyper-camp drag queens with a side order of leering marie antoinette sung to by a pudgy failure of neptune/posidon to pastiche the last supper” seem like the message of unity to bring the world together for the global athletic games?
wow. just wow.
they actually changed the olympic motto for this.
but mistaking this for “together” is pretty stunning.
it seems calculated to insult virtually everyone.
they literally turned the bad guys from zoolander into an attempt at global unity.
this is self-mockery misapprehended for striking a pose.
they picked a DEI hire to put this on. this is thomas jolly, the apparent male reincarnation of marie antoinette. what’s amazing is they literally featured images of her holding her own head in the pageant.
they seem astonishingly unaware of the fact that they are the ones the revolution is about to come for.
i’m actually all for edgy subculture and personal expression, but the point of subculture is to be subculture. i am not a religious person, but one need not be to realize that “satanic drag puck” is not exactly an icon of global unity.
the whole thing has a feel of “capital city in the hunger games” rather than “olympic games.” it felt less like a celebration than a deliberate dragging and degrading of the beliefs of others. how is that “together”?
the response this is going to get from eastern europe, spain, italy, and south america is going to be remarkable.
“in a show of global coming together we have insulted one of the great global religions.”
one need not hold to such faith to feel outrage over it. this was an attack masquerading as an olive branch, trebly ironic as the olympics were traditionally a time when warring greek states put battles aside to come together in games.
they are really managing to spit in a lot of eyes here.
imagine the sort of overly rarified mental space one would need to inhabit to think this was going to play.
it’s a globally broadcast “let them eat cake” moment, a massive, inescapable jumping of the shark.
even the TV talking heads were struggling to find things to say about the live in living color unfolding own goal.
it seems senseless and absurd until one applies the prism laid out above. this is what the tippy top of the greasy pole of rule by the most marginalized looks like. 10% becomes 1% becomes 0.1% and at that point, you’re way off the edge of the map into some really dark territory so far divorced from any consensus reality, ethics, or comity that they really do believe that the only reason you are not onside with them is that you did not have enough drag queens read you stories when you were little.
and they will move to impose it on you.
and that’s the bridge too far.
i am flat out calling the top.
this is how the world realizes that it is not we who are not out of step, the lunatic so called leadership is.
this is the moment the gaslights flame out.
it always seems worst right as it flips precisely because it is the very act of becoming this catastrophically, unmistakably bad that flips it.
welcome to the wake up call.
i would not press snooze if i were you.
Taken from a comment under another EXCELLENT writeup of this within a group of topics:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/director-squirrel-finds-a-nut-saturday
This is a powerful article from a Minister in Nigeria.
"He wrote: “This gratutious insult on Christianity at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics is unacceptable. Nothing depicts the moral, religious and social degeneration of the West more than this show of shame. If they had insulted Islam in this way Paris would have rightly been on fire by now"..
We’ve reached peak Derelicte (another Zoolander reference), where garbage is trotted out as being fashionable. The opening ceremony of the Olympics reminded me of last year’s Christmas from the Biden White House. 🤮. Trashy LGBTQ-infinity crap. Surprised they weren’t just parading around naked. Sick of all of it.