Everywhere, All The Time
So, I’ve returned from my travels and I have questions. Among them, why is a planet-wide celebration of athleticism and uncommon sporting prowess being introduced with yet another tedious display of cross-dressing, oddly selective sacrilege, and self-satisfied obesity?
Perhaps I’m missing something. By all means, illuminate me in the comments.
Update, via the comments, where dicentra adds,
I was struck more by the tackiness, the tawdriness of the thing. It just looked so inapt, so adolescent and low-rent. Hackneyed to the point of anachronism. It occurred to me that as a snapshot of a collective cultural psyche, a statement of where we are, or where Our Betters are. it doesn’t instil any great confidence. Or – what’s the word? – oh yes, pride.
Sort of,
I suppose the gender-bending and drag bacchanalia could be construed as some kind of comment on the current Olympic rules regarding who may compete in women’s events – i.e., women, not men. At least, not men who have gone through puberty. So, some men. But not as many as some activists and “allies” might wish. Say, ostentatiously “queer” artistic directors of Olympic opening ceremonies. Maybe even this small concession to physical reality – that men and women are different – was deemed a provocation, an outrage, and a basis for retaliation. As if not being allowed to cheat were a form of oppression.
It’s just a thought. Though not, I think, a wildly implausible one.
Also, open thread.
Drag queen quotas.
If any should doubt how real Jesus Christ is, let them see this. Because these people wouldn’t hate Him so much if He wasn’t.
Decapitated corpse talking to us?
Check.
Parody of The Last Supper?
Check.
Death come a-ridin’ in on a pale horse?
Check.
And some for some early morning listening.
I’ve been busy with other matters and I’m not, it has to be said, the world’s foremost sports enthusiast. I was barely aware that the Olympics was happening. Still, in my ignorance, I was expecting the opening ceremony to have some loose but discernible thematic relevance. The Beijing Olympics, as I recall, featured thousands of co-ordinated drummers, itself an impressive physical feat.
But from what I’ve seen, this year’s offering placed a much higher priority on transvestite vamping. The relevance of which escapes me.
I hesitate to say much more, as I didn’t watch the whole thing – and based on what I have seen, I wouldn’t care to. But as a snapshot of a collective cultural psyche, a statement of where we are, or where Our Betters are. it doesn’t instil any great confidence. Or – what’s the word? – oh yes, pride.
Sort of, “Yes, the Chinese put on a dazzling display of thousands of co-ordinated drummers, but hey, WE HAVE DRAG QUEENS, DECAPITATION, AND A FAT SEX-SWAPPED JESUS.”
Perhaps the intention was to demoralise the home teams.
Until last night, I never thought anything could top the rather cringe NHS worship segment of the 2012 Olympics. I was wrong. Frankly, the opening to Paris 2024 felt more like a humiliation ritual than an opening ceremony.
Highly suitable.
Maybe the Olympic Committee subconsciously wants SMOD…or a rain of fire upon New Sodom.
Ah, for the days when French women were typically rail-thin chic clothes horses existing on cigarettes and dry Martinis…
Speaking of athletic events,
Looks like someone didn’t get the memo.
That.
I’ll also take this opportunity to repeat a question I asked a few years ago. Namely, when relatives politely ask what this blog is about, what should I tell them?
Fashionable insanity.
Fashionable insanity.
Speaking of fashion for the insane, it appears these guys are still in business.
The elites are in a race to destroy the fabric of western civilization before enough wake up to destroy them first. Simple math really. The transition from rheostat control to on/off switch gets closer every day.
…when relatives politely ask what this blog is about, what should I tell them?
An online symposium of diverse international thought leaders examining the historiographies and psychosocial developments and ramifications of present and evolving trends and patterns of early 21st century arts, literature, sciences, and politics.
So…my experience last night…Wife looooves the Olympics and the opening ceremonies. I’ve lost interest over the years but still like to catch swimming, gymnastics, some track & field (I will watch virtually any kind of race), etc. After the best opening ceremonies that I remember in Atlanta in ’96 they have gotten more tiresome and overproduced IMNSHO. But she wants to watch and I sat here on my iPad trying not to roll my eyes too loudly. The crap and the PC/woke commentary (seriously, WTF does Peyton Manning have to do with the Olympics?) during the odious torch passing was pushing my patience. I was tempted to post a hostage rescue request on here. But after they lit the big torch I was drawn into it. Not a big Celine Dion fan, though as divas do I kinda like her and even as a Frenchy-ish some of the crap they throw at her is a bit overwrought). Assuming that wasn’t lip sync, her performance was awesome. I wish we had the technology to put the words of that song in English and some way scroll them across the bottom of the screen. Sigh. Maybe one day, should God grant me mercy(?) to live so long, we will have such technology. Anyway, I was feeling a bit bad about being so cynical. Then I saw this crap. F*** people.
Tell them it’s about time, it’s about space. Then show them this video. It won’t help but they likely will stop asking. But should they persist, I have other ideas.
I should add, again, that the relatives doing the enquiring are, I think, generally doing so out of politeness. At best, a mild curiosity. I already have to introduce to them the concept of blogging as a thing one might do. And so far, I’ve managed to escape comparisons with Instagram influencer. A comparison that’s both appalling and quite funny.
Nostalgie de la boue on a civilisational scale is the best I can come up with.
‘Watching others rearrange the deck chairs whilst offering advice’?
Tell them it’s like OnlyFans.
Heh.
YOU UTTER BASTARD.
Not that I’m trying to promote things one way or another but I’ve followed you and Ace, and to some extent Patterico, a few other blogs here and there for what…a dozen years or more. In all those years you and Ace have had some very interesting and/or funny stuff that I shared, providing the source as well. Especially when I was working I was a little nervous one of those many like-minded people might recognize me from the comments, should they bother to read these things as well. Personally I have been somewhat relieved that no one has dug into those and WTP remains a completely disconnected entity from my meatspace life. And yet…a dozen years or more…many reposts…you would think…eventually…
I don’t think he’s trying to chase them away.
Life hack.
*waits for drag queen Mohammed*
Surely they are all familiar with the concept of the newspaper or magazine columnist. What you do is much in that vein, but unconstrained by a publisher’s demands or by limits on length or by strict requirements on publishing dates. And with the added advantages of multimedia and direct links to sources.
Leave that blogging thong in the back of the dresser drawer where it belongs.
I suppose that is a possible outcome, but if they are not frightened, they’ll be fascinated.
Just been informed that The Other Half has ordered squid.
Tonight we shall be dining on tentacles.
A drag queen Last Supper?
How stunning and brave. *yawn*
Seriously, this just feels so hackneyed and trite by now—what a 15-year-old would consider edgy.
Just amateurish twaddle, all the way down.
Fried? Broiled? Au naturel?
Breaded and fried with chillies, I believe.
[ Considers chopsticks, opts for fork. ]
That reminds me of an answer in a Year 7* Science summer exam paper which the teacher who’d marked it passed around the staffroom. The question ran: “How does an amoeba feed?” The pupil’s answer: “The amoeba pushes out its testicles to capture its prey.”
*Equivalent to Grade 6 in American schools.
Took me a second to spot that one.
[ Slides browning, partly-peeled banana to Sue. ]
The purpose of Soviet propaganda is to force the public to repeat obvious lies. There is no more obvious lie than a man can become a woman.
Then stacking anti-Christian obscenities on top, and making the athletes compete under this banner? Somebody is feeling very cocky, dare I say.
If in doubt aways go for the fork.
Just got word that this showed up on my sister-in-law’s radar. She’s puzzled by this. Apparently she’s still a Christian/Catholic (raises eyebrow) and is having trouble understanding why they would do something like this. I’m sure someone who is not me will explain it to her so her in the context of her Narrative her ego won’t be affected. She’s a smart one, you know. Smaaaart.
In my case, adding chopsticks to the mix would risk turning the meal into one of those mechanical-claw arcade games. I have, as you know, many redeeming qualities. Proficiency with chopsticks ain’t one of them.
.
[ Dabs chin with napkin. ]
The squid was pretty good, since you ask.
..
Reportedly authors Larry Niven and and others were dining at a seafood restaurant when Niven suddenly addressed his dinner saying “So, General Gllbrtz, will you now tell us of your troop movements?”
With enough chillies you won’t have to taste the squid.
There was a time when things like this were done just to take the piss. But now…qui sait?
The decline and fall…rien ne me choque!
Someone tried to assassinate a former president and everyone was back to tik tok and insty the next day as if nothing happened. I’m never sure if we’re living in Brave New World or 1984. Perhaps a blend of the two?
It strikes me as just tacky, contrived and adolescent. It involves no obvious and relevant skill, is jarringly at odds with the spirit of the event, and is hackneyed to the point of anachronism.
I mean, my initial response was “That’s it? That’s the best you could do?”
But hey, progress.
It strikes me as just tacky, contrived and adolescent.
We’ve gone so far over the edge that there can be no more edgy.
Actually, conservative, old world, Christian values are now edgy. We are living in Bizarro World.
Squid? Don’t remind me.
Too soon?
“But from what I’ve seen, this year’s offering placed a much higher priority on transvestite vamping. The relevance of which escapes me…”
The purpose is sado-masochistic humiliation, the imposition of the sadist’s will on the unwilling. Therein lies the buzz. There’s a reason for all those S&M bars, and it isn’t the happy hour, everyone with leashes drinks free sales. Followers of the Marquis gravitate toward political movements that glorify power above all else for that specific reason. Karen the expensive wino down the street revels in these displays because standing on her fat, pasty, emasculated husband’s remaining testicle in her spike heels has grown a trifle dull.
You can’t park there, Mohammad.
Red shirt man was begging to be shot.
Related thread.
Don’t think insurance will cover that.
We can just buff that out.
Or run over.
The way he aggressively approached that car with his hand ostentatiously behind his back is the sort of thing that police shoot punks for.
Dinner: seafood devoid of wiggly appendages, unless pasta counts. Lots of garlic, herbs, and butter. And a glass of wine.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the French.
“White men, white women, the Swastika is calling you.”
“When I was about same the age as three of them, I was leading a platoon in a war.”
Perhaps the intention was to demoralise the home teams
Bez. Men. Ov.
I wish we had the technology to put the words of that song in English and some way scroll them across the bottom of the screen
Oh, we absolutely do.
I already have to introduce to them the concept of blogging as a thing one might do
I always liked the term “private informer”, from the Falco series of historical fiction novels before they died of estrogen poisoning.
Tonight we shall be dining on tentacles
Oktapodi toursi – baby octopus marinated in lemon juice and olive oil – is divine.
Life hack.
For some reason he seems to think he’s still living in a world where the police are trustworthy.
Slides browning, partly-peeled banana to Sue
Oi, get orff, that’s mine from last thread.
David’s minions get all the fresh yellow ones.
Bastard.
Traffic management,
Don’t think cone shaped party hats are sufficient, but they’re a start.
I think you’re inferring more than the subject allows for. He said nothing about the police being trustworthy, just the basic steps to avoid being subjected to official violence.
The road to Hell is too well traveled not to require some oversight.
It might be amusing to point out to the frogs that while they fondly imagine themselves all Edgy and Provocative, there’s nothing whatsoever new about this dismal crap — and if they think it’s even slightly original, well, they were doing all that and LOTs more during the Revolution, and that for the benefit of a population that was infinitely more religious and Catholic than the French today. Shows in the public squares with prostitute nuns humping monks, cardinals, popes, donkeys, whatever the flavor of the day… so the current frog “elite” are dismally wanting for any kind of original thought newer than 220plus years ago. So much for epatering le bourgeoisie. What is moderately distressing about this garbage is that it is now state sponsored and very much intended as an INYOURFACE to all those people who are paying the French to be the guests of the French, and getting pissed on courtesy of the French government.
just the basic steps to avoid being subjected to official violence
Keep in mind you’re talking to someone who lives in a soi-disant Western country whose police trampled an elderly woman in a walker without warning or official notice during a peaceful protest. A country where the federal police, on orders from the Prime Minister, burned down the barns of suspected separatist sympathizers.
Here is the bloke who created the opening ceremony aesthetic. He wanted “everyone to feel represented.”
People don’t seem to think this was a mistake.
In contrast, “the real France.”
Though I’m a Christian, I’m not specifically offended by the sacrilege, simply because we’ve been far worse insulted by far better people. Yawn.
That said, the display was deeply ugly, regardless of which painting they parodied. I’m reminded of The Snow Queen (the original), where one of the children gets a shard from an evil mirror in his eye, and it makes him see everything as ugly and distorted.
The display was anti-beauty, anti-art, anti-aesthetic, but I don’t know that the participants knew how awful it looked to everyone else. (Or they did, and they hoped to shock the normies, which is itself an ugly motivation.)
The videos of that part of the ceremony are vanishing from the web as the organizers desperately withdraw the source material. One wonders how many people saw the performance ahead of time and saw nothing wrong with it.
And how many still don’t.
Funny how Harrison Butker and JD Vance have put Our Betters into fits of “HOW DARE YOU” rage.
These leftists, and by leftists I also mean those currently defined as the ever so nice, just-get-along center and center-right as well, are evil. It’s the default for the culture we live in. Hate, mockery, derision for anything remotely perceived as good and decent. Even the words good and decent have been imbued with negative connotations such that they have become virtually unusable.* See also discipline. It’s virtually impossible to use that word without fascism being inferred. These things should not make one angry though. Anger is wrong and weak. Even Butker and Vance might tell you that, I’m fairly sure. At one time anger could be associated with righteousness. But not anymore. It’s wrong. Always, always wrong. Jesus, it sure is funny how these things go!
*Did you know Noam Chomsky is still alive? He’s like 95 years old or something now. You would think he’d be dead by now, but no. Noamy just keeps chugging along.
Some are now speculating that his tights are torn in just that spot, and now that I look at it, I think they may be right.
You would think he’d be dead by now, but no. Noamy just keeps chugging along
Only the good die young. Immortality is reserved for the greatest of evils.
WTP: ‘Assuming that wasn’t lip sync, her performance was awesome.’
Sadly, I dozed off and missed that. I’d like to watch the official vide on YouTube, byt errr, it seems to have disappeared from the official account. .
Here it is, Celine singing.
Hence, one assumes, the hackneyed swipes at Christianity, and the number of comments much like this one:
Inclusiveness, baby.
Well, again, my own reaction was to the tackiness, the tawdriness of the thing. It just looked so inapt, so adolescent and low-rent.
I suppose the drag bacchanalia could be construed as some comment on the Olympic rules regarding who may compete in the women’s events – i.e., women. Not men, at least not men who have gone through puberty. So, some men. But presumably not as many men as some might wish.
Perhaps even this small concession to physical reality was deemed a provocation, an outrage, and a basis for retaliation.
[ Post updated. ]
Hey, if you two want to fight over it, I’m happy to sell tickets.
Satanists, Christian-mockers, and men who like airing out their testicles in public—isn’t that what the Olympics are all about?
Yep, he’s a “big tent” guy for sure.
See also: Chris Rock’s How To Not Get Your Ass Kicked By The Police .
“Everyone” must mean “everyone but the normal people”.
Fashionable insanity
NOT a band name but Italian Grand Opera
Una Pazzia Alla Moda
Here, “joyless” means “does not want to be gang-banged in a San Francisco bathhouse while reading the works of Mao”.
On the “ceremonies”, one of or betters chimes in on the nekulturny between I-95 and I-5.
In the same vein, these people think the people above were “triggered” by Paris just like these people who are clearly “triggered” by Paris.
I will tolerate damn near anything on a pizza. Ham, pineapple, maybe even anchovies if necessary, but ice cream is right out. Just dumb.
However, not to fear, things are going to get more classy
2028, Synchronized Freestyle Car Hood Twerking.
Tonight we shall be dining on tentacles
Perhaps a better alternative to tenterhooks
A single-cell gay exhibitionist?
A traditional Greek food
So…rant-o-rama…I’m seeing a general loser “conservative” consensus forming around boycotting the Olympics. Because of course. The actual games featuring young people, some as young as 15, even less iirc, should pay. They trained starting as far back as many of them can remember. Morning practices before school, after school, through the summer in a sport through which most of your friendships were formed*, let’s just throw all that effort on the scrap heap because the grownups (so called) of the world want to celebrate evil. Hey, somebody gotta pay. Otherwise “conservatives” would have to face their own consciences for letting things get so bloody insane.
No need to make an effort, you know, boycotting the people who created this mess via the products of the big businesses that fund this idiocy and drive the tranny loving culture. Or speaking up about it at these corporations where many (most?) “conservatives” work. Wouldn’t want to inconvenience oneself for weeks or even years making some effort to purchase alternative products. Wouldn’t want to risk social standing at work. No. That would be dumb. And hard. No, spending two weeks not watching something you mostly forget about anyway. Especially something that only occurs every two or four years, depending**. THAT’s the ticket.
*Not saying too much of that is necessarily a good thing but given many of the alternatives…
**Notice that the Winter Olympics athletes on average are a bit more mature. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that they pulled this crap with the summer games.
[ Post updated again. ]
Umm, Webb is in the U.K.
The opening ceremony’s less impressive moments may be made comprehensible, if no more enchanting, by considering the activism surrounding the Olympics and rules about who may or may not compete in women’s events.
This, for instance, caught my eye:
So, the obvious and extensively documented facts about male-female physical differences are waved aside as “inconclusive science,” and apparently we shouldn’t mind men cheating in women’s events because waffle, waffle, waffle.
Or, mentioned elsewhere in the piece, a professor of sociology who insists that “trans girls” will be “marginalised” by athlete sex categories and expectations of fairness in competition. A professor who tells us that a preference for men not cheating in women’s sports will “delegitimise trans identities.”
She goes on to denounce “conservative and fascist movements” – none of which are specified – but which are supposedly “using state power to eliminate all obstacles to the operation of racial capitalism.” Our concerned educator then succumbs to some kind of brain fever, with a tirade about borders, climate change, and the “right-wing” demons that creep about in her dreams.
I’d suggest sentiments like those above, and the sheer woo that accompanies them, may conceivably have played some role in the, er, spectacle on offer.
Umm, Webb is in the U.K
There are other countries that have a Prime Minister – and a federal constitution, for example Australia, so I guess he was not talking about the UK.