Tall Tales
Lifted from the comments, a spot of anthropology. In which, a progressive woman seeks irritation, some cause for concern – and, with effort, finds it:
What’s amusing about these displays of woke piety is, I think, the eerie uniformity, the contrivance, the same weird psychology.
Ms Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, is not only ostentatiously vexed by an unremarkable expression of politeness and goodwill – such that she feels a need to alert her 134,000 likeminded followers to the imminent Christian Nationalist uprising – but we’re also expected to believe that her account of events is entirely true. That her peculiar disapproval was shared, audibly, by many other passengers, which, frankly, seems unlikely.
Oh, and she’s also revealed in the subsequent thread to be something of a hypocrite, and a repeated user of the same, supposedly offensive term. The latest instance being a mere three days earlier. I’m sure you’re all shocked. Do take a moment to steady yourselves.
As Clam adds in the comments,
It does suggest being accustomed to getting away with it. An expectation of mutual dishonesty, in which no-one pulls at the obvious threads, lest the favour be repaid and their own pronouncements receive an unwelcome scrutiny.
I suppose we could see the dubious story above – in which an innocuous expression of politeness is proof of “creeping Christian nationalism” – as a new spin on the woke eight-year-old phenomenon from 2016, in which countless progressives, including MSNBC “analysts” and editors of leftist magazines – and including Ms Jeffery herself – started tweeting, competitively, about their small children, all aged eight, supposedly saying Oddly Precocious And Terribly Progressive Things:
As I said at the time,
The phenomenon was seemingly contagious and quite bizarre, a collective fit of transparent fabrication, and soon became a mocking meme. But I think we’re seeing much the same psychology. The same telling of tall tales in order to assert status and to fuel some progressive psychodrama.
For grown adults, our supposed moral betters, this is… odd behaviour.
Update, via the comments:
Rafi quips,
The urge to inflate grievances, and indeed to fabricate them, to balance umbrage and chest-puffing on the merest mote, is a progressive credential. Theirs is a hamster-wheel world of competitive indignation. But when you’re very publicly complaining about a flight attendant using the word blessed, as if this one word signalled some impending theocracy – and when you’re using your eight-year-old child as a political ventriloquist’s doll – then we’re in the land of make-believe. And possibly, anti-psychotic medication.
Ms Jeffery seems oblivious to how petty, presumptuous and mean-spirited she sounds. As if complaining about a commonplace word of kindness, a courtesy, and construing it as offensive and vaguely sinister, were what righteous, well-adjusted people do. As if it were something one should boast about, publicly, while waiting for applause.
Ms Jeffery goes on to complain about disrespect – as if she had been violated by someone wishing her well – and she depicts herself as being oppressed by some “dominant culture.” In which flight attendants say nice things to passengers.
Readers are invited to imagine what it must be like to publicly mouth some bizarrely implausible claim, for no discernibly pressing reason, knowing that the bullshit-like properties of your claim, and your own hypocrisy, can easily be discovered, in a matter of seconds, and to mouth it anyway. And then, when challenged, to double down on the implausible and bizarre. Again, it strikes me as an odd compulsion.
Ms Jeffery is now calling those mocking her “so, so, so dumb.”
Heh. I thought that headline/title looked familiar. I was drawn to just the part I quoted because I saw that part buried in an excerpt I read on an Instapundit post and it was that the CareBear thing triggered my memory of the baby food thing. Sometimes I stumble into things that remind me of some long, otherwise forgotten memory. Especially when it’s one that pissed me off at the time. Serenity now, serenity now…
@WTP,
You’d be surprised how much sheer homicidal rage these sorts of things can engender…
Back during the Clinton administration when I was mid-career in the Army, they suddenly came to the conclusion that the latest BS, which they charmingly entitled “Consideration of Others Training”, or COO… Well, they decided that that “training”, in addition to all the already existent Equal Opportunity BS, took priority over everything else. You could be behind on marksmanship, crew drills, driver’s training, and all the rest, but woe unto thee if you hadn’t ticked those boxes on the onerous touchy-feely crap they mandated.
And, to be quite blunt, I don’t think that any of that “training” was of any utility whatsoever, other than highlighting and encouraging enmity between the various “groups”.
I think my issues with blood pressure started back then… You’d be looking at your training status, and realize that you were unable to field properly trained and qualified machine gun teams because “no ammo in the budget”, but even so, you had to spend time and effort doing the COO and EO crap that they mandated from on high.
I loathe that entire realm, and if you put it to me, I’d do away with all of it. I never sae any of it do the least bit of good; it never changed any minds, and continuous emphasis on it all just kept dragging it back into being. You don’t “fix” issues like that through the measures they put in place; all you do is exacerbate them, and make them exponentially worse. I entered the Army sometime in the early 1980s with an open mind and about zero racism. By the time I left some 25 years later, I fear I had become what could be termed a “pragmatic racist”, because of the crap I had to put up with. The Army does not promote on merit; all you have to do to succeed as one of the “right minorities” is exist; you don’t have to perform, you don’t have to even avoid outright criminal conduct, because in order to massage the numbers, they’re going to ignore your transgressions and promote you anyway. If you’re not one of the favored groups, well… Too bad. An exemplary career and hard work will get you precisely nowhere.
It’s no way to run a railroad. Or, much of anything else.
At 11 they held the 1975 nz general election, my parents attended a election party with friends, From memory I choose to sit outside near the fire and watched the stars, I have zero memory of the 1972 elections when I was 8.
On the other hand kids will ask about stuff their teachers talked about.
@Kirk
What you describe was also happening at that same time in the company that I was working for, under the guise of “diversity” and “sexual harassment” training. I didn’t understand why a company, especially one whose CEO was an ex Marine Corps officer, would fall for that stupidity. But now that I think about it in this context, I am sure the Marine Corps background had much to do with it. I just had too much respect for our military back then to see it.
I have a distinct memory of sitting on our front porch with my parents watching a political convention, no idea which, on our small portable tv in the summer of 1968 when I was 6. I started asking questions and suddenly it was my bedtime.
Aside from that, I don’t recall grasping much about politics to even remotely form a coherent opinion about anything until I was about 6th grade when the parochial school that I was attending brought many of those subjects up in the context of religion. At 8 I was more concerned about baseball and such. Though I do recall going into a minor panic when the town my elementary school was in instituted a law requiring us to resister/license our bicycles. The cops came to an assembly at the school and explained it to us. My parents refused to register my bike. For several weeks I was afraid the cops might take my bike away. I think I even walked to school a couple days. I was paranoid whenever I saw a cop when I crossed the city line into that jurisdiction.
Aren’t frontal lobes a prerequisite for the procedure? An amygdalotomy might be more effective.
They pith frogs, don’t they?
But frogs are useful.
Especially those brightly coloured ones handled by the first-year students
Because if they get things wrong there won’t be too much education wasted.
@WTP, who said:
Spent the majority of my adult life in the belly of the beast, around the commissioned officer corps. At some point early on, I realized that my intent to become a member of that corps was founded on ignorance, and further realized that I wasn’t ever going to be “one of them”, no matter what I did. Far better to retain my integrity and do what I liked doing, which was be a soldier. Officers, in all branches, have become exactly what their civilian supervision demanded of them: Politicians.
They’ve also been carefully culled. Witness what happened to Carter Ham, when he was getting spun up to go rescue the poor bastards in Benghazi: He was relieved by other officers at the behest of the National Command Authority, something that happened within minutes of his issuing his orders. This did not get much attention at the time, but it’s a telling point about that event. The NCA had to have known far more about what was going on, and had “other plans” than rescuing the Ambassador, else Ham wouldn’t have gotten relieved. The assholes involved had sufficient view of what was going on to relieve him before he could launch the rapid reaction team, but were studiously otherwise not answering the phone at the White House… This sort of thing does not happen without intent, and you can observe the outlines of something going on in the background which has never been released. Or, signally, investigated.
Anyone looking for rescue or anything other than “regime support” from the military in this country is a fool. Milley’s actions surrounding the Trump administration mark an historical watershed, where the clear indication begins showing that the officer’s corps in this country is captured by and operated on behalf of the usurpers of our republican form of government. I don’t know that we’ll ever recover from that, because it is my belief that once an institution like that is corrupted, it is essentially beyond reform.
YMMV. I dunno. I’ve washed my hands of the affair; the electorate, in my view? They betrayed those of us who served them faithfully the day they elected the Clinton cabal, doubled-down on the betrayal when they re-elected the crooked bastards, and then put the capper on it with the Obama “elections”. Any nation feckless and stupid enough to put those people in charge, and then do nothing about the growing criminal activity in the leadership classes? Deserves whatever it gets, good and hard.
What’s amazed me is how out-in-the-open it has all been. And, how the mass media has dutifully reported it all, absent any hint of the true import of things, or what the implications were. They reported, for example, that Milley “advised” the Chinese that he’d “warn” them about anything that the Trump administration might do, in the way of defending American interests. Last I looked, that’s a clear violation of his many and varied oaths, as well as a betrayal of the Republic.
He was lauded for that. The only people who got outraged were ones like me, who understood what they were seeing: An American military officer of high rank not only disobeying duly elected civilian authority, but actively suborning it. For which he was not even slightly criticized or censured… Indeed, he’s gone on to a high life in the aftermath, sitting on corporate boards and being rewarded just like the other traitors of his ilk, like Mattis and Vindman.
The American electorate is going to get the form of government it deserves for its inattention and sloth, good and hard. The high crimes and treason performed by both the Clinton and the Obama administrations should have been met with trial, findings of guilt, and then executions. None of the last disastrous year would have happened absent the rewards given Iran by the Obama criminals who’re now reaping exactly what they sowed across the entire Middle East. And, I’ll lay you long odds that they’re going to wind up getting away with it, having committed these crimes in broad daylight, because the American electorate is just that stupid and feckless.
I doubt you have any idea how many American citizens have died in the last few decades since the “sainted” Jimmy Carter deliberately gave Iran to the mullahs. A huge number of those deaths came in Iraq, from all the EFP munitions the Iranian regime pumped into that conflict, not to mention all the dead civilians we were trying to protect. Yet, the Obamas gave them billions, and nobody said a word…
I have words for my fellow residents of this space we once called the United States, but they’re all unfit for polite company. They, the idjit class and their unthinking, studiously unaware minions are responsible for the state we’re in: Self-inflicted wounds, bluntly put. It’s been like watching an irresponsible child play with running chainsaws, these last few years… I’ve lost the capacity to either care or be amazed at the stupidity.
@Kirk
Oh, that is very inline with my outside perceptions. I have had very similar feelings in half my career spent in military, LEO, and NASA contract jobs. Especially this part:
I have been trying to explain this to people for decades. Some things can be fixed but once you start eating away at the core values and trust of a society, you’re not getting that toothpaste back in the tube.
Agree. I was holding on to hope but when Obama won a second term I was incredibly demoralized. When Trump won in 2016 and actually started governing, or at least trying to govern, I had renewed hope. But it didn’t take long before it became apparent that they were not going to let him continue.
Milley, there’s your real treason. Yet the screaming about Jan6 persists. The people are so brainwashed and so corrupted that the media can be open about it. Up is down and left is right. It’s a nightmare.
@WTP,
The reality is that there really aren’t two sides in US politics any more. If there actually ever two to begin with… It’s all “the looters” and “the rest of us”.
Most of “the rest of us” are too trusting, and too oblivious to what has been going on. I don’t think the other side is going to like what happens when their overconfidence finally pushes the line past the point of no return; it’s going to be a lot like what happened during the French Revolution, when one day it was all the same as it always was, and the next, they were dragging out the aristos to line up at the guillotine.
Then again, every time I think we’ve hit that point where I’m thinking “They can’t possibly get away with this…”, I turn out to be wrong. “The rest of us” just keep hitting the snooze alarm.
I’m just going to laugh my ass off when it finally does eventuate. The morons think that “January 6” was some kind of big deal, but when the time comes and the actual hard cases come out to play? LOL… They’re going to be sadly surprised at the things which happen next, and the speed with which they happen.
I forget the term for it, but there’s a deal in engineering where a system can be pushed a long ways out of alignment, far past design limits, and still have the system more-or-less work. Then, once a certain point is reached, you get violent transformation akin to having a crystal suddenly create itself in a saturated solution. That’s where we’re at, today: The solution is saturated to the point where something is going to happen, and the idjits just keep adding more and more to it.
I have no plans of participating in or starting anything, but I am going to continue to point out the folly of it all.
Hysteresis?