an ode to the emotional self-cutters, metric morons and other e-detritus.
Good Article on the Taking of Offense as a Form of Conspicuous-Consumption Status-Signalling
Here is a link.
I've made a similar point for a long time. Look to the Democrat Party, and you see a division between the old-line unionists and the New Left lifestyle liberals. The fact that lifestyle liberals natter on about nothing but ideological wants -- as opposed to more tangible wants -- is a manner of signalling they're of the sort of class that is comfortable enough to not worry terribly about their rent.
(Though in fact that's often untrue -- that sort of liberals include a lot of people living in what's called "genteel poverty," working as barristas and so forth. But taking a job as a barrista is assumed to be a temporary thing while you're Exploring Your Life Options, whereas taking a better-paying job at a factory (if one's anywhere to be found) is an acceptance and confirmation of one's status in the disreputable Working Class. But I digress.)
I've heard it called "Luxurious Concerns." That is, your concerns mark yourself on the social status. If your concerns are about keeping your job, paying your rent, or whether your kids' school is any damn good, you're worried about Big Things, and therefore you are marked as a Struggling Person.
Only those who have really made it -- who are at the top of the economic and social order -- have the luxury of worrying about the Small Things. And if you worry about the Very Small Things, or indeed the Microscopic Things, then, well and truly, you have Arrived.
Many liberals aren't particularly wealthy. However, if you can't afford a Luxury Car, or a Luxury Apartment, you can at least adorn yourself with Luxury Worries.
It's very cheap. Easy, too.
I've described this before as being a sort of connoisseurship of offense. Just as a wine connoisseur is praised for detecting notes and defects on a nearly microscopic level, so too are our modern class of intellectually-insecure social climbers posing as connoisseurs of offensiveness. To detect that a man is racist if he denigrates another race in a racially-charged way -- well, Old Boy, that's easy, isn't it? That shows no skill at all; that's like being able to tell a red from a white. You can hardly expect to epater les galleries with that level of expertise.
But, to have a sensory apparatus of offense, a palette of outrage, so refined as to become frothilly angry if someone refers to someone of ambiguous gender as "he" instead of taking the time to discover that xer's favored pronouns are xer, xers, and xeir -- well, that is a mark of exquisitely fine taste.
Ace of Spades HQ
Taking offense is a kind of conspicuous consumption | Washington Examiner
and...and,
And this is why, for instance, a tearful Theo Hobson tells us that, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Because until “this problematic world” has been purged of all vice and inequity, however unrelated to your own behaviour, a heavy, heavy heart must be worn on the sleeve. How else will people know how superior you are? According to Mr Hobson, if you aren’t ostentatiously fretting about the eating of meat and “affluent lifestyles endangering the planet,” and if you aren’t “anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie” and possibly earning more than some other random person, then there must be something wrong with you. And so you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about things you shouldn’t feel guilty about. It’s the Guardian way.
Which is why the paper’s roster of opinionators is a chorus of improbable, often baffling sorrow, from heteronormative cupcakes and insufficiently considerate spellcheck software to the proletarian horrors of “blokey barbecue chat,” which is “oppressively penetrating.” And who could forget the reliably ludicrous George Monbiot? A man who agonises over the “isolating” effects of disposable income, double glazing and TV remote controls, and who believes that we should imitate the peasants of southern Ethiopia, where homes are made of leaves and packing cases, and where, despite Stone Age sanitation and alarming child mortality, “the fields crackle with laughter.” Or you could heed the wisdom of sociology lecturer Edward Skidelsky, who frets at length about the evils of pre-washed salad, before telling us that the state should “create conditions favourable to simpler, less acquisitive modes of living.”
Economic self-harm is a recurrent theme, the bulb that attracts the moth, and some Guardian regulars have declared their plans to make us “better people” by making us poorer and freeing us from the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.” And if that isn’t sufficiently hardcore, sufficiently wrist-slashing, you could howl at the moon with Guy Dammann - who asks, “Am I fit to breed?” – and the equally pious Alex Renton, who tells us, with just a hint of satisfaction, that, “Fewer British babies would mean a fairer planet.”
davidthompson: Sweet Sorrows
Good Article on the Taking of Offense as a Form of Conspicuous-Consumption Status-Signalling
Here is a link.
I've made a similar point for a long time. Look to the Democrat Party, and you see a division between the old-line unionists and the New Left lifestyle liberals. The fact that lifestyle liberals natter on about nothing but ideological wants -- as opposed to more tangible wants -- is a manner of signalling they're of the sort of class that is comfortable enough to not worry terribly about their rent.
(Though in fact that's often untrue -- that sort of liberals include a lot of people living in what's called "genteel poverty," working as barristas and so forth. But taking a job as a barrista is assumed to be a temporary thing while you're Exploring Your Life Options, whereas taking a better-paying job at a factory (if one's anywhere to be found) is an acceptance and confirmation of one's status in the disreputable Working Class. But I digress.)
I've heard it called "Luxurious Concerns." That is, your concerns mark yourself on the social status. If your concerns are about keeping your job, paying your rent, or whether your kids' school is any damn good, you're worried about Big Things, and therefore you are marked as a Struggling Person.
Only those who have really made it -- who are at the top of the economic and social order -- have the luxury of worrying about the Small Things. And if you worry about the Very Small Things, or indeed the Microscopic Things, then, well and truly, you have Arrived.
Many liberals aren't particularly wealthy. However, if you can't afford a Luxury Car, or a Luxury Apartment, you can at least adorn yourself with Luxury Worries.
It's very cheap. Easy, too.
I've described this before as being a sort of connoisseurship of offense. Just as a wine connoisseur is praised for detecting notes and defects on a nearly microscopic level, so too are our modern class of intellectually-insecure social climbers posing as connoisseurs of offensiveness. To detect that a man is racist if he denigrates another race in a racially-charged way -- well, Old Boy, that's easy, isn't it? That shows no skill at all; that's like being able to tell a red from a white. You can hardly expect to epater les galleries with that level of expertise.
But, to have a sensory apparatus of offense, a palette of outrage, so refined as to become frothilly angry if someone refers to someone of ambiguous gender as "he" instead of taking the time to discover that xer's favored pronouns are xer, xers, and xeir -- well, that is a mark of exquisitely fine taste.
Ace of Spades HQ
Taking offense is a kind of conspicuous consumption | Washington Examiner
and...and,
And this is why, for instance, a tearful Theo Hobson tells us that, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Because until “this problematic world” has been purged of all vice and inequity, however unrelated to your own behaviour, a heavy, heavy heart must be worn on the sleeve. How else will people know how superior you are? According to Mr Hobson, if you aren’t ostentatiously fretting about the eating of meat and “affluent lifestyles endangering the planet,” and if you aren’t “anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie” and possibly earning more than some other random person, then there must be something wrong with you. And so you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about things you shouldn’t feel guilty about. It’s the Guardian way.
Which is why the paper’s roster of opinionators is a chorus of improbable, often baffling sorrow, from heteronormative cupcakes and insufficiently considerate spellcheck software to the proletarian horrors of “blokey barbecue chat,” which is “oppressively penetrating.” And who could forget the reliably ludicrous George Monbiot? A man who agonises over the “isolating” effects of disposable income, double glazing and TV remote controls, and who believes that we should imitate the peasants of southern Ethiopia, where homes are made of leaves and packing cases, and where, despite Stone Age sanitation and alarming child mortality, “the fields crackle with laughter.” Or you could heed the wisdom of sociology lecturer Edward Skidelsky, who frets at length about the evils of pre-washed salad, before telling us that the state should “create conditions favourable to simpler, less acquisitive modes of living.”
Economic self-harm is a recurrent theme, the bulb that attracts the moth, and some Guardian regulars have declared their plans to make us “better people” by making us poorer and freeing us from the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.” And if that isn’t sufficiently hardcore, sufficiently wrist-slashing, you could howl at the moon with Guy Dammann - who asks, “Am I fit to breed?” – and the equally pious Alex Renton, who tells us, with just a hint of satisfaction, that, “Fewer British babies would mean a fairer planet.”
davidthompson: Sweet Sorrows
