The Toxicity of Luxury Beliefs and the Liberal Elite in 21st Century America

[Ludicus]

the American situation. I am sure it has its own ideosyncracies..

Indeed.

Wealth and education tend to align with progressive views

Not exactly...one thing is sure, in the paper Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right Piketty shows that the right-wing allegiance of the wealthy is as universal as it is uncontroversial. Now and before.

In his paper Piketty shows that in the early postwar decades, social democratic and affiliated parties represented the low-education and the low-income electorates, whereas conservative and affiliated parties represented high-education and high-income voters. These party systems have gradually evolved toward "multiconflictual” or "multi-elite" party systems in most Western democracies, in which higher-educated voters vote for the “left,” whereas high-income voters still vote for the "right"

Difference in political parties’ vote share between top 10% of voters
(most-educated or highest-earning) and bottom 90%

[Lord Thesaurian]

A growing number of “family friendly” drag queen story hours and dance performances open to children are becoming a mainstay of June pride month celebrations.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...ents-children/

The trend isn’t just another example of being so open minded the brain falls out. It’s also an indication of the toxicity of luxury beliefs and the way they function.

We feel pressure to display our status in new ways. This is why fashionable clothing always changes. But as trendy clothes and other products become more accessible and affordable, there is increasingly less status attached to luxury goods.

The upper classes have found a clever solution to this problem: luxury beliefs. These are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.

It’s possible that [people] don’t always agree with their own luxury beliefs, or at least have doubts. Maybe they don’t like the ideological fur coat they’re wearing. But if their peers punish them for not sporting it all over town, they will never leave the house without it again.

https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury...ich-americans/

If one were to ask the average parent whether they’d be ok taking their child to see a bunch of half naked men perform sexually suggestive dances in front of a sign reading “it’s not gonna lick itself,” the answer would probably be no. One might even suppose any parent subjecting their child to that sort of thing ought to be jailed. But a bunch of drag queens doing the same thing? Well, we’re not bigots, after all - right? If you’re not a homophobe, you’re not just ok with that, you celebrate it, right? Brag about it on social media so everyone can applaud such dizzying heights of progressive enlightenment…..

Sexualization as defined by the American Psychological Association is “the inappropriate imposition of sexuality… through objectification, overvaluing or emphasizing appearance and/or sexual behavior,” regardless of the presence of physical sexual assault. As the number of sexual incidents involving children grew alongside popularized sexual imagery, the quiet taboo against voicing detrimental effects of sexualization began to melt under the burning scrutiny of researchers, feminists, and politicians. Although research conclusively linking sexual content exposure to harm is limited due to restrictions on conducting experiments with young subjects, there is solid evidence for mental health harm caused by early sexualization.

https://hir.harvard.edu/all-about-se...and-education/

Wealthy parents won’t have trouble affording psychological treatment for children deliberately exposed, up close and personal, to this kind of wanton degeneracy. They’ll have more resources to mitigate the consequences of any negative behaviors that might result. But poorer households whom the liberal elite have socially pressured or conditioned to participate in this farce aren’t so lucky. It doesn’t matter. The moral purity spiral demands acquiescence on pain of being branded a bigot or worse. After all, it’s pride month. Get with the times.

[Lord Thesaurian]

The latest fur coat of compelled speech from the liberal elite: The Flagellants are back.

George Brown College, a public institution in Toronto, recently required students and faculty joining a Zoom meeting to agree to a long mea culpa: “This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat, Mississaugas, Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee. . . . As settlers . . . we benefit from the colonization and genocide of the Indigenous peoples of this land. . . . It is imperative we constantly engage in acts of awareness and decolonization.”

Another common theme involves pseudo-pagan tributes to the tribes’ functioning in the natural order. My own university’s statement begins by giving “greetings and thanksgiving to these Potomac River life sources,” an oddly spiritual incantation in the overwhelmingly secular atmosphere of the university. Native tribes are commonly called “caretakers” or “stewards” of the land, fetishizing Native Americans more than any athletic mascot could.

It’s no coincidence that these land acknowledgments are proliferating at formal ceremonies, even as such patriotic rituals as the Pledge of Allegiance and the playing of the national anthem are under attack. They replace a concise affirmation of national pride with a dense confession of national original sin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/land-ac...rs-11654876804

It does seem things are accelerating:

I suspect that deep down, most know that none of this catechism makes any sense. Less obvious is that it was not even composed with logic in mind. The self-contradiction of these tenets is crucial, in revealing that Third Wave Antiracism is not a philosophy but a religion.

A white version of this would be blithely dismissed as racist. I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by a certain crowd…America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic; what it is to educate a child; what it is to foster justice; what is to express oneself properly; what it is to be a nation—all is being refounded upon a religion.

However, there is nothing correct about the essence of American thought and culture being transplanted into the soil of a religious faith. Some will go as far as to own up to it being a religion, and wonder why we can’t just accept it as our new national creed. The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes.

[Cope]

Here's some more interesting polling related to the themes being discussed:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Journalists significantly overestimate their own performance relative to the public perception.

[Heathen Hammer]

Its not as much about elite being separated from society, but about quality of elite itself.
If something happened to Romanovs or Hapsburgs in 1700s, world would have lost a huge chunk of civilization. Modern elites? If all of the western elites were one today, world would just move on. They don't matter that much and their existence is inconsequential.
Modern western elites are garbage from every perspective. its mainly rich privileged litter of elites from past century, sclerotic and mentally stuck in mid-Cold War years. One half of West is ruled by literal vegetables like Biden, another ruled by smarmy sociopaths like Trudeau and Macron, all of which are curated by international capital and corporate lobbies.
They no longer believe in enlightenment values the nations they took over were formed upon. Western elites are quite literally nothing more then parasites that live off the Western people without adding or improving anything.

[Cope]

Only 1% of Havard's faculty are conservative. 0% are very conservative.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2...tical-leaning/

[Lord Thesaurian]

How appropriate that one of the most cogent critiques of clown world should come from a comedian, with a little something for everyone. Spoiler for hurty words.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yqeuS43-69E

[We’re nearing peak insanity…] We’re close to it. I do believe with the way things are going, you’re looking at some really crazy trends. I don’t know when they come to a conclusion or if they do, without something, a war, something violent or whatever. We’re living in a time when we know everything’s ed but we’re powerless to change it, and that’s when societies start to decay, past a point. Everyone just sits back and watches it like a show….but it feels like we’re kinda at that point. That’s why I’m glad we lived in an era when we did…..because it’s not getting better.

Our society will go down, and nothing will ever be funnier. America will come apart in one of the funniest ways. All these grifters, circling the wagons, the Caitlyn Jenners, the Donald Trumps…it’ll be funny, you’ll literally die laughing. It will be the most absurd and insane thing out of a dystopian horror movie. It won’t be funnier than America because we’re a crazy country with crazy people….I mean I’d love to be wrong, but if your idea is that the population is gonna get smarter, healthier, and more adept at problem solving, you’re on ing crack.

It will collapse to a degree….and you’ll sit there and they’ll feed you poison and you’ll watch TV….a few people will riot, but very few, because most people will be pacified by the goodies which they’ll probably still have….And you won’t remember when you were free and most people will be fine with that. You and I will have experienced the best of it and remember when you could get in a car without a tracking device, and when you didn’t have a tracking device attached to you at all times, and when you could say wtf you want and no one really cared and it wasn’t on Twitter. People didn’t have a record of what you did and what you said and where you were and everything else.

We’re one of the last groups of people to actually be free and we should all thank God for that, because the hellscape that’s about to be created is going to be so bad, they won’t even know how bad it is, and it won’t even feel like prison….There’ll be a few people who remember freedom, and then they’ll take all the books about it and burn the out of them because well, those aren’t good because racism…homophobia… burn, burn, burn. And people will forget when you were free and they’ll just kinda create a society based on goodies and little rewards and the addiction to celebrity. Our leaders will all be celebrities who will tell you on CC TV how good things are going, and you’ll go, “Good, thanks.”

[Heathen Hammer]

I doubt the dystopia that our "elites" want will actually happen.
Any system that's based on nothing, but materialistic greed and hedonism can't exist for too long.
Western-style "representative liberal democracy" is just a form of oligarchy, and oligarchies, historically, have shortest lifespans compared to other political systems.
Humanity has an inherent lust for something of higher order, some form of spirituality. Dead-eyed materialism of the modern west fails in that regard and it will be the reason why powers that embrace it shall fall despite the unlimited financial resources at their disposal.

[Pontifex Maximus]

Well, based on that logic I would give our empire a decade. At most.

[Heathen Hammer]

Well, based on that logic I would give our empire a decade. At most.

I also tend to think that 10 years or so is the ballpark. Unless a Caesarian figure emerges out of nowhere and causes some "revolution from within" that would help recycle the current "elites", West is boned.

[Pontifex Maximus]

A certain orange man with a suspicious haircut comes to mind. We are in the loot the treasury phase, though we may be entitled to some last gasps of luxury. Hell, the 3rd century was a total series of disasters but the Romans held on for a while. If there's one lesson we should have learned and not repeated it is the continual devaluation of our currency and in a bit more of a nuanced analysis (though not sophisticated) is to further undermine the petrodollar. I'm sure the Russians and Chinese are salivating over the prospect of replacing the dollar with the ruble.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Trump might have believed himself to be Sulla but he’s no Aurelian.

[Pontifex Maximus]

Sulla wasn't exactly a populist...

[Muizer]

Meh, the global context for the near future is one of increased pressure on dwindling resources, mostly due to accelerating climate change. The short sighted probably won't notice it as such. They'll just notice whatever ad-hoc populist rhetoric is employed to justify the next move in the increasingly fierce competition between the rich nations as they try to defend their prosperity against the inexorable encroachment of misery, like gated communities surrounded by slums. A slow descent into dystopia. Not an environment conducive to liberal democracy for sure.

[Heathen Hammer]

We already have safe and effective nuclear power technology to render the existing emissions negligent, so all the talk of "climate change" is nothing more then above mentioned ad-hoc elitist rhetoric aimed to distract the short-sighted segment of population from real factors, such as archaic and outdated financial/banking system or the corruption, nepotism and crime within de-facto unaccountable ruling classes.

[Sir Adrian]

Reducing current emission is just one very small step on a long road. The problem is much deeper than simply cutting all CO2. For example this year we reached the consumption quota in July 27th. This means that in 8 months we consumed all the resources this planet can regenerate in a single year.

[Pontifex Maximus]

According to whom, the globalist elite who consume the average person's CO2 usage in one week on their private flights to Zurich? CO2 is tree food. We should produce more of it and ignore the bad faith globalist whiners predicting Armageddon every eight years.

[Heathen Hammer]

Its especially funny to watch trudeau or other globalist cleptocrats bloviate about "everyone doing their part" when they create more CO2 with their private jets then any of their citizens, all while they could have just a zoom meeting instead of expensive "climate galas" that certainly come out of taxpayers pocket.

[conon394]

is to further undermine the petrodollar. I'm sure the Russians and Chinese are salivating over the prospect of replacing the dollar with the ruble.

Its pretty hard to undermine a myth. In any case the Russian economy is large enough to sustain being the primary monetary unit for trading oil and China would be harming itself to have the its currency fill that spot.

[Heathen Hammer]

Well, US did illegally invade several countries over their crime of undermining petrodollar, so it is definitely not a myth. Iraqi WMDs and the whole "war on terror" narrative, however, is a myth, since those WMDs were never found, while American government spent more money and time helping and creating terror then stopping it.