there's something i can't quite articulate about how the nation's elite have led such pedestrian, stifled lives that they're captivated by boring, gutter racists and misogynists who know a few three syllable words, like, this is the *actual* decadence, not whatever shit douthat drones on about - ThreadSky

golikehellmachine.com • 8 days ago

there's something i can't quite articulate about how the nation's elite have led such pedestrian, stifled lives that they're captivated by boring, gutter racists and misogynists who know a few three syllable words, like, this is the *actual* decadence, not whatever shit douthat drones on about

Reposted from BeijingPalmer

the leadership of the new york times desperately wants white nationalists and fascists to be quirky contrarian intellectuals they can invite to dinner parties

Comments

lawnerd.bsky.social•8 days ago

The nepo baby “elites” straining to make dipshit edgelords cool have soft hands. They’ve never had to work for anything. So they don’t really know what effort even is. They’re alienated from so much as the concept of struggle. Not pathetic, contemptible.

dangbeetle.bsky.social•8 days ago

They find it titillating. They claim it has some intellectual appeal because they don’t want to admit it makes them feel good to entertain gutter racism and misogyny.

friendatarms.bsky.social•8 days ago

It's all just those rich guys from *The Great Gatsby* having party conversations about how "the white race will be submerged by the colored empires". And then getting martini-drunk and running over pedestrians.

davidcolborne.bsky.social•8 days ago

It's not just the nation's elite. You can basically explain 2015-present as a series of escalating novelty seeking behaviors and mood affiliations, all driven by a cultural ecosystem that now only rewards attention.

The good news is Nazis will get boring. The bad news is what will replace them.

yastreblyansky.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yer getting there. Keep working at it.

cbal84.bsky.social•8 days ago

Decadence is exactly right, everywhere we look.

ravenmcampbell.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yep, these guys are the real decadence, not the polycule of enbies and furries that lives in a rental house in rose city park.

silkscreenfiend.bsky.social•8 days ago

Those polycule people aren't decadent at all! Just unconventional. We've gotten it all so twisted.

charlesdeguava.bsky.social•8 days ago

A-students who had everything handed to them from birth combined with a safe (physically and economically too) culture of liberal milieu they take for granted. They’re obsessed with Ivy League campuses in the same way your dumb cousin still obsessed with their high school football team

charlesdeguava.bsky.social•8 days ago

And media not being an actual industry anymore means it’s just a dumping ground for these people who are otherwise useless, but want to think of themselves in the mold of 20th century thinkers/writers. But those people were interesting (and smarter) in part because they weren’t all homogenous

charlesdeguava.bsky.social•8 days ago

don’t totally have the words to describe it, but America culture writ large has totally given up on the idea of a genuine intellectual culture and its a human centipede of feedback between elites themselves and the unwashed masses

mallorybytes.bsky.social•8 days ago

Not to provide an unsolicited 'same as it ever was', but like, is MLK, Jr. an intellectual? Is GOLIKEHELLMACHINE? Are we not the change we wish to see in the world?

missylissa.bsky.social•8 days ago

Entire industries that exist just to tell rich people "turns out all your priors are correct and you don't need to apply critical analysis to your own ideas because those are the good ones".

davealbertson.bsky.social•8 days ago

Guys like Keeperman potentially going mainstream has a Time Machine-like allure to them. People tend to remember most fondly that era when they were 10-15 years old. For guys like Ross, that tracks to when “shut up fag” was an acceptable retort for shutting down an argument.

spaceds8008s.bsky.social•8 days ago

You usually can't get to be that wealthy and be curious\fun. It HAS to be stifled and uptight to maintain itself. Anything too exciting might rock the boat make them realize they float upon a sea of blood in a boat made of bodies...

roland00.bsky.social•8 days ago

my brain was warped by Westworld in 2016 (october so the election was happening 🗳️)

so I tap the language sign for we as humans are often not aware of words with where they come from

one of the themes of the hyper-reality show about “games” and “fantasies”

roland00.bsky.social•8 days ago

notice allude in image 1 and ludicrous in image 4

feels important with these fascists and polite society conversation

betsythemuffin.bsky.social•8 days ago

like why don't they get hobbies???? Agility-train some dachshunds. Replicate Mendel's genetics experiments with potted plants. Speedrun Pokemon. Go camping. IDEK.

dburbach.bsky.social•8 days ago

I suppose I'm low-tier elite and god knows lead a pedestrian life but I'll have no truck with fascists, or just general assholes. I absolutely can not wrap my head around the NYT set.

amdiamanti.bsky.social•8 days ago

It’s exhausting to maintain the respectable mask over bigotry that you need in their elite circles. They admire the mask off crew and want to integrate them in.

andrewtheblueskier.bsky.social•8 days ago

These folks believe politics as such is over and their responsibility is just to sweep through idea space. The idea any of this could affect the rest of the nation and world, and dangerously, does not occur to them because if it did the romp wouldn't be fun anymore

n3th3re.bsky.social•8 days ago

Or they figured out that “thought leader” was a scam (since it clearly requires no thought), and totally wanted in on it

crispychickn.bsky.social•8 days ago

They’re united through sexpestdom. Fundamentally, they believe they should be praised for subjugating their employees.

crispychickn.bsky.social•8 days ago

It’s not enough for Conservatives to get what they want, they also need to be praised for it. That’s why people disliking them is such a problem for them, they need to be loved.

startarally.bsky.social•8 days ago

It’s not just sexpestdom.

It’s the belief that they should never face consequences for anything they say or do.

It’s nepo baby entitlement that ties the NYTs to Trump to Elon, etc.

krogerfoot.bsky.social•8 days ago

This is absolutely correct

raclpss.bsky.social•8 days ago

The mirror image of old-time 'radical chic'?

rhysneedham.bsky.social•8 days ago

Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic are now right-wing?

dhinrio.bsky.social•8 days ago

Douthat treating Marc Andreessen's paranoid ranting about younger employees all being Marxists who wanted to overthrow capitalism as some sort of insightful observation was a clear sign that he has disappeared up his own rectum.

acerbicotter.bsky.social•8 days ago

back in the old days (or how I imagined them), the "elite" were actually interesting in that they did stuff like found art museums or do historical preservation of old buildings...Now they're just weird groyperish types

caramia5.bsky.social•8 days ago

Adding insult to injury, truly. The most boring, vulgar, incurious people regurgitating age old bigotry and pretending it’s new somehow … the entire Trump white house and navel-gazing punditry apparatus and tech billionaire gang. They made space travel boring and tacky ffs

cshannonpdx.bsky.social•8 days ago

When they did with with Richard Spencer 8 years ago, I could at least understand how they got tricked because that dude could dress, but this latest round of goons are slobs. They clearly are chasing a ghost here.

golikehellmachine.com•8 days ago

musk is like this, too, guy who wanders around with hair transplants and a leather jacket, stoned out of his gourd on therapist-administered pharmaceutical ketamine and has like 230 children via IVF

krogerfoot.bsky.social•8 days ago

This is something that gets me and makes me marvel that we haven’t slammed the brakes on the whole contraption already. This is a guy who pays women to be impregnated with his sponge. Pitchfork-wielding mobs should be massing around the gates of his lair

krogerfoot.bsky.social•8 days ago

* with his spooge goddammit, I know what I am saying. Though I guess a sponge is employed at some point

mallorybytes.bsky.social•8 days ago

he's really the alpha and omega of the archetype - IOW, Trump without the fetish self-preservation via legal representation (hence "pedo guy" lawsuit and the overpaying for Twitter)

golikehellmachine.com•8 days ago

every time you see this kind of shit, you're reminded that people like douthat and sulzberger can't fuck, they can't dance, they can't rock, they can't roll, their entire lives are just bound together by privilege and mediocrity and they know it

friendatarms.bsky.social•8 days ago

I mean, hey, I can't do any of those things either. But somehow even I managed to avoid...[gestures at the people you're talking about]...*that*.

venomousgoat.bsky.social•8 days ago

People who've never sat around a campfire listening to a cook high out of his mind trying to work out what it means to live a good life. Fundamentally boring people who can't make their peace with that being the trade off for a life of wealth and comfort

venomousgoat.bsky.social•8 days ago

You don't need that experience specifically, but you need to be willing to step into places messier than they are to open yourself up to that kind of thing

mallorybytes.bsky.social•8 days ago

"A good cook changes his knife once a year-because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month-because he hacks. I've had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I've cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone."Zhuangzi

nickel76.bsky.social•8 days ago

Can’t think

the-last-heron.bsky.social•8 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/the-last-heron.bsky.social/post/3llv7u5feek2m

nowondvd.bsky.social•8 days ago

If you’re going to be a petty resentful elite, at least channel that into like sponsoring an art gallery or something

nowondvd.bsky.social•8 days ago

Will you know anything about the art? No. Will you appreciate it? Doubtful. Will the museum have to put your name on the wing entrance and invite you to parties? Yes!

lizamazel.bsky.social•8 days ago

not good enough for them anymore. they'd rather burn down the museum and celebrate their pwn on their own personal internet litterbox

silverboots.bsky.social•8 days ago

They are profoundly dull & normal people are repulsed by them, and they *don’t* seem to know that

darthbart.bsky.social•8 days ago

I truly cannot fathom how much they simultaneously love art and culture and loathe it so deeply that they are forcing themselves beyond death of the author and into "The author is one of us"

golikehellmachine.com•8 days ago

describing this gets kind of fraught, because when you start rambling about elites and decadence and degeneracy, you perk up the ears of a whole bunch of people you absolutely do not want hanging around, but i'm not sure what else you call it

nparikh.org•8 days ago

There is a similar but different thing in SV where they get so obsessed with contrarianism for its own sake and as a kind of personality that they actually end up adopting clearly dumb and/or bad views. And I mean both, some aren’t immoral, just very dumb.

nparikh.org•8 days ago

They are like AI systems that start to act perversely due to “reward hacking” (it’s a formal thing but what it sounds like), but one of their rewards is that people especially what they think of as intellectual elites or left are mad at them, especially for those who went to B tier fancy schools

nparikh.org•8 days ago

I remember meeting a founder of YouTube when I started at Stanford and he warned me that it takes a lot of these guys like six weeks after making the money to start think they were 100% self made and got help from no luck, govt, institution, etc. There’s some NYT opinion analogue here too.

scriban.bsky.social•8 days ago

Nobody wants to admit that the bulk of their personal success generally comes down to a few lucky breaks.

nparikh.org•8 days ago

It’s extra childish because if you really are successful, it’s not like you’re some lotto winner. You can say you worked hard, are capable, etc, and also acknowledge that there is always a bunch of luck too. You’re not even losing anything by being honest.

lizamazel.bsky.social•8 days ago

"simpering lickspittles, fawning courtiers"

moneybaggmanyo.bsky.social•8 days ago

Another term could be vanity.

lizamazel.bsky.social•8 days ago

narcissism

nclud.bsky.social•8 days ago

But those are the words I use to summon my old friends from the Goth Bongage clubs I used to go to. We're older now, so mostly we just meet up at Renn Faire

silkscreenfiend.bsky.social•8 days ago

No, it is decadence. These people ought to be ashamed of themselves. What's needed is fire and brimstone and contrition and repentance, but it's very hard for secular, democratic liberals to think and talk that way.

lizamazel.bsky.social•8 days ago

Oh, I can do it. I volunteer as tribute. Even if it's just running a playlist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH3Fx41Jpl4

silkscreenfiend.bsky.social•8 days ago

Hell yeah.

lizamazel.bsky.social•8 days ago

not quite as fire and brimstone, but another I've got on repeat lately.

gotta redo the whole thing. gotta do it right this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IueqU0JMkdI

lizamazel.bsky.social•8 days ago

got another

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKXoGEAW3XY

mconcagh.bsky.social•8 days ago

Fascism is the politics of decadence, “every accusation is a confession” is a cliche because it’s true

friendatarms.bsky.social•8 days ago

"So, life is disappointing? Forget it! We have no troubles here! Here life is beautiful...the girls are beautiful...even the orchestra is beautiful!"

neilpostman.bsky.social•8 days ago

It's not decadence, it's spite. Decadence requires affluence of desire. NYT people are cash poor when it comes to what they truly want, which is respect from their "lessers". This is spite because they do not have that and they cannot admit that the Libs were right all along.

rosc.bsky.social•8 days ago

My experience here in the northeast is that these people are only captivated because they were already on the same wavelength and they’re glad that someone is being the shock troops for the beliefs they have, but were smart enough to know not to say publicly

ravenonthill.bsky.social•8 days ago

They can do anything they want, study anything they want, anything that's possible to them they could have. And yet this is what they want.

tredain.bsky.social•8 days ago

I honestly believe it's in part a fascination with 'taboo', that we've been raised all our lives that these were the forbidden words and thoughts, rightly because only the scummiest fucking dickheads use them, but to these beige worms it's the thrill of disobeying mom and dad.

siebznet.bsky.social•8 days ago

I grew up among America's "meritocratic" elite in a shit-eating lawyer suburb of Boston and like...Ross' schtick was tired in 2007

lenorajoon.bsky.social•8 days ago

ditto and Big Time

infoscientists.bsky.social•8 days ago

The move to return us to 1900 via Russell Vought seems like the greatest culture of fear in my lifetime. I want the 1960s Paris student riots May 68 with no violence, but it would have to be all secure US citizens with resources for lawyers at this time.

libraryephemera.bsky.social•8 days ago

Like just go work at any retail/warehouse/food service job and you'll meet a ton of ideosyncratic and interesting (both likeable and repellent) people.

kaiasdad.bsky.social•8 days ago

Professional students who spent their whole lives in AP classes end up yearning to know and befriend the guys who were in detention every day

goaskalis.bsky.social•7 days ago

*titters* "Let's do a racism Bunny"

micarlson.bsky.social•8 days ago

Cant the Times just bring in a few more tame ones from the WSJ?

maxdubler.com•8 days ago

This is the level of cultural criticism we are dealing with here.

charlesdeguava.bsky.social•8 days ago

This is what you get when you have people who are occupying elite media spaces, but don’t actually have to know anything, even pretend, to be elite

raenpayne.bsky.social•8 days ago

The idea that Girls was somehow right-wing 😂

dhinrio.bsky.social•8 days ago

"Girls was a fine show but its politics were a bit iffy. Would've been way better if at the end Hannah turned to the camera and said "I am a fascist now" & then specified she's the exact kind of fascist I am".

tcbullfrog.bsky.social•8 days ago

.... This is bizarre

clearwind.bsky.social•8 days ago

"The real life hero of Z was fairly conservative, therefore Costa-Gavras was a right-winger and fan of the junta" level of analysis

michanconnor.bsky.social•8 days ago

Sucking up to a c-grade fascist is such loser shit

vituperativeerb.bsky.social•8 days ago

My nose is a little crooked because it got broke scrapping with a neo-Nazi at a party, this shit is annoying not “forbidden” or whatever

vituperativeerb.bsky.social•8 days ago

These people are just dipshits with personality disorders

piggenres.bsky.social•8 days ago

newspaper reporters used to smoke cigarettes and drink well whiskey at the local dive. Losing that sense of realism has been awful for the industry.

theblainetruth.bsky.social•8 days ago

Maybe everyone has that college friend who droned about Ezra Pound, then lectured as Libertarian about monetary systems, THEN jumped into tech cuz being smarter than everyone else made him rich. Wife’s water broke at her baby shower: Burning Man pals “Bitch” and “Mayor” didn’t know how to call 911.

charlesdainoff.bsky.social•8 days ago

They’re SUCH fun at parties. Simply SCANDELOUS.

teknonym.bsky.social•8 days ago

You don't think it's because they're secretly a bit racist themselves do you?

sammysmoot1212.bsky.social•8 days ago

Secretly is doing some heavy lifting.

dpickettny.bsky.social•8 days ago

Sulzberger is the failson nepobaby of a failson nepobaby. He’s never faced an actual consequence in his narrow, sheltered life. He just assumes that whatever happens to the country won’t ever touch him.

tangibullah.bsky.social•8 days ago

I think this is a good question - rich, entitled people are bored with their lives, and need something exciting to fill the gap. What they probably need is meaning, not more ways to oppress The Other, but...

Giving them a meaningful job might do the trick.

eaglebeaverman.bsky.social•8 days ago

I never thought I’d see a group of people get so collectively bored they become racist to pass the time but like, that’s genuinely where we’re at.

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