January 23, 2023

Spokescandies — one more item for my list of things I'd never heard of until I heard they were going away.

What did they do wrong? I feel uneasy, because these imaginary beings embody only rejection. Rejection by whom and for what reason? It's free-floating anxiety in candy form. Yeah, the M&Ms company is "tricking" me into doing viral marketing for them.

According to The Daily Beast, Tucker Carlson is responsible for the polarization over the candy's shoes. See for yourself:

91 comments:

Kai Akker said...

---That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity…

The periods in which the national distribution of wealth (different from income, although not drastically so) closed the gap between top and middle- to lower quintiles were the 1930s and the 1970s.

IOW, when stocks go down. And they went down a long way in those periods. So, if Equity is what you want, root for bear markets and Depressions.

Kai Akker said...

And THEN buy stocks.

RideSpaceMountain said...

I'm sure this has something to do with gender, which is ridiculous because the M&Ms are about as sexually hermaphroditic and unambiguous as you can get.

21st century gender wars are kinda like a box of chocolates apparently...you never know which M&M's got the nuts.

0_0 said...

Tucker is only responsible for showing us what M&M/ Mars did.

WK said...

I, for one, am glad that we can all agree on the beloved Maya Rudolph…….

WK said...

Maybe Maya will be barefoot In all the advertisements to avoid polarizing people…..

Owen said...

The only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity. So, yes, Ann, you are doing viral marketing for M&Ms. I hope they send you a jumbo box in appreciation.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

It wasn't Tucker who was complaining about "sexist gogo boots." Come ON. Fucking naked candies and feminazis have to bitch about fucking boots. Nice. When I was sugar addicted I liked those little guys.

Ampersand said...

Tucker is a skilled controversialist. Our public square would be greatly diminished without him.

Gusty Winds said...

Let's just be thankful the Grateful Dead's rainbow colorful dancing bears were barefoot.

Wince said...

"A spokesperson America can agree on...the beloved Maya Rudolph."

Easy 'cause you're beautiful?

wendybar said...


HILARIOUS!!!


The Babylon Bee
@TheBabylonBee
M&M's Introduce First Trans Character Who Identifies As A Skittle


https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1617575278703960064?

Quayle said...

Oh, the horror - the horror - of the modern era! I pine for the better days when my beloved chocolate centers only dove into swimming pools of candy coating, and didn't defile themselves by wearing shoes, indicative of a declining civilization. The swimming pools, of course, helped us claim clean hands. (Do shoes even melt anywhere, mouth or hands? That's what worries me.)

Jim at said...

Is there anything - anything that all - that you leftists won't fuck with?

Food. Sports. Entertainment. The weather. Genders.
The list goes on and on and on.

Name one thing you haven't politicized. Just one.

wendybar said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Amadeus 48 said...

Sometimes paranoia is just having all the facts.

--William S. Burroughs.

rrsafety said...

I'm not a Tucker fan, but he certainly hit the nail on the head.

n.n said...

DIE

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

What a weird set-up to use Tucker as a Republicans Pounce object of scorn. He would have had nothing to laugh at if progressive scolds weren't already bitching to M&M about CGI spokescandies not being CGIed the way the scolds want them rendered. It is worthy of scorn.

Not a Maya fan, although her crapping in the street in a wedding dress scene in Bridesmaids is hilarious. Didn't like her mom either. It's just taste. I'd like to see some brave company remake their image by hiring a white guy, just to see whose head explodes when Tucker pounces on that reaction.

Rabel said...

They've been around for a while.

stutefish said...

Tucker Carlson has emerged as the worst possible spokes-jackass for a sociopolitical value system (conservatism) that really needs the best possible representation right now.

robother said...

Mars embues candies with the power of speech and then muzzles them. High heel shoes are a form of cruelty imposed on female candies by cisheteromaledibles. Tucker was right to protest.

Inga said...

Doesn’t F.Carlson have more important things to kvetch about?

Pillage Idiot said...

The only way for all of the poppies to be made equal - is to cut down the tall poppies.

Wokeness only tears things down, it never appears to create new opportunities where none existed before. (Except by force or diktat.)

PM said...

Hope no one ever sees the old Abba Zaba wrapper.

Kate said...

In "The Wedding Singer" the limo driver shows his skills by going fast through a slalom course of traffic cones, knocking many over. He's told: You just ran over some wedding guests. The driver's response: THEY WERE CONES.

tim in vermont said...

Remember all of the funny jokes mocking Trump that Maya Rudolph used to tell on SNL and at awards shows?

I wasn't going to boycott M&Ms, I eat maybe one pack every few months, but now I think I will.

tim in vermont said...

This reminds me of when Subway, a working class brand if ever there was one, decided to have a Trump bashing, America bashing harpy as their spokesperson. The franchises got in an uproar over it, and I just got out of the habit of going to Subway, I don't think about it, I don't say "Oh there's subway, I can get a quick sandwich there, but I won't." It's just gone from my brain.

Jim Gust said...

I always find it creepy when the "spokes logo" turns out to be the product being consumed. Like when there is a cartoon pig at a barbecue place, effectively inviting me to come on in and eat him. (That's why Chic-fil-a uses cartoon cows, saying "Eat more chiken.")

So the M&M talking candies always stuck me as a bit perverse. Putting them in high heels, well, it does not increase my desire to buy them.

But that's just me.

Readering said...

You try putting out an hour of TV weeknights while coming up with different stuff from Hannity.

Gk1 said...

Typical, passive aggressive, non apology by Mars. "Sorry if we offended you babies, sheesh".

If I had to guess it was overseas markets that were responding to their sexually out and proud M&M characters and we know they turn on a dime if $$$ is involved. I can imagine asian and middle eastern countries aren't down with "gay candies".

Patrick said...

He's worried about shoes on a cartoon M &M?

tim maguire said...

It couldn't be that they made the spokescandies political, now could it? Why can't talking M&Ms just be talking M&Ms? Because corporations lack the courage to resist the woke crowd and stand outside politics, refusing the insult 50% (or in this case, 90%) of their audience.

No, it must be Tucker Carlson's fault. He made M&M thrust its candy into the culture wars just so he could make fun of them for it. It's all his fault.

Well said, Daily Beast.

Gk1 said...

The purple M&M character wearing the doc martins: “Mars is thrilled to debut the newest member of the M&M’S cast of characters to the world. There is so much about our new spokescandy that people can relate to and appreciate, including her willingness to embrace her true self – our new character reminds us to celebrate what makes us unique,” said Jane Hwang of Mars Wrigley.

The latest “spokescandy,” Mars said, was “designed to represent acceptance and inclusivity.”

Hey, here's an idea. If you don't want a culture war, stop launching it at every opportunity. Just a thought. Shut up and make some candy. Jeebus.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/10/mms-introduces-new-purple-candy-character-conservatives-already-suggesting-shes-transgender/

Leland said...

What O_O said at 2:42pm. Here's an article on the topic from Market Watch, which includes this:
The old look “was kind of a male version of what women are,” says Kathy Kelada, a fashion-conscious life coach and author of the book “Be the Shoe.” Now, she says, the mascots speak to a more contemporary ideal of femininity. “It’s a step in the right direction,” she says.

Easier to blame Tucker than feminist, I guess. I suspect someone might have been reading Rolling Stone, which had two interesting items:
It all started last year, when the brand announced that it would be revamping its classic sexy Green M&M by giving her sensible shoes and reducing the appearance of her eyelashes, as a way of making the mascot more “inclusive.” This sent many news outlets — such as this one — into an uproar, with many bemoaning the erasure of the Green M&M’s Hot Slut identity in favor of a blander look.
RS notes that got into an uproar about something unimportant, but the very next sentence, they blame Tucker. I guess because Tucker has a bigger audience than Rolling Stone could hope to have?
Later:
Given that Rudolph is a Jewish woman of color and a self-avowed feminist, it’s unclear exactly how un-polarizing of a choice she is for the group of consumers M&Ms is apparently trying to cater to.
Rolling Stone continues to cast shade on M&M's, feminist, BIPOC, and Jews. Wonder who they'll blame for this shade later? Geez, Rolling Stone, pump the brakes on the hate.

Kay said...

Have a drink with them??

MikeR said...

This is why we can't have nice things. Or something.

M said...

Yeah, they tried to make the M&Ms more gender neutral and gay. Homosexual trannie candies selling junk food to little kids. That’s what we need in today’s America. Or something. Never heard of this Maya person but looking her up she is not very attractive for a showbiz type. So that means she is a Leftist and likely a child of Showbiz lefties. Not interested. I don’t eat cheap chocolate anyway. They know their preferred audience. Trash.

Creola Soul said...

Go woke, go broke.

takirks said...

The woke idiots that felt it was a great idea to force-feed their little perversions on the rest of us via normalizing their bizarre fetishes are going to suffer a lot of unfortunate backblast from their efforts. I think it's likely to end with a lot of people deciding that the LGBTWTFBBQ types really should have been kept in the closet, all along, and that they need to get stuffed back into them.

The M&M candy characters were amusing advertising contrivances. I don't think anyone but a deranged pervert ever really assigned them a gender in the first place. Until the sex-freaks decided they had to have a lesbian and a gay and... Yeah. Now it's not amusing. Guess what that means? Decades of stored goodwill and all the rest of the stuff invested in brand identity just evaporated in the night, all because some sex-pest freaks decided they wanted "representation".

There's going to be recoil on this, and it won't end well. People are going to remember this crap, couple it with those two "activist gay dads" who were selling their adopted kids out for pedophiles, and the whole thing is going to get conflated in the public mind. Followed by the public mind deciding that all gays, all lesbians, and all such annoying sexually-obsessed people have something profoundly wrong with them, and that what needs to be done with them is to push them back out of the public sphere.

The LGBTWTFBBQ coalition needs to realize something: They managed to push the envelope and move the Overton Window so as to make their perversions of normalcy acceptable. However, comma, that ain't the natural state of human affairs. The movement in American culture was not an organic thing; it was the result of a propaganda/public relations effort dating back to the 1970s, one that was entirely artificial.

Know what happens when artificial things like that run up against cold, hard realities? They get pushed back, and bad things happen to the proponents.

It won't end well. Not at all. Every period of history where we've had this great movement towards libertinism and license, there's been a backswing. One is coming, and it's going to wipe out a lot of people who think they're unassailable and safe. Likely take a lot of mostly innocent types along with it, but it will be coming. Assholes like those two pedophiles in Georgia are going to be what drive that happening, and the more they try to hide things like that, the worse it's going to get when the backswing gets going.

One of the biggest things that the gay community denies is the amount of pedophilia they have feeding in at the roots. The percentage is arguable, but it is there. Denying that feature of gay sexuality is only going to lead to tragedy, because when people start in on the pogroms, the only gays they're going to remember are the ones like those two in Georgia. That is, unfortunately, how these things work. License is always, always followed by repression. The more license, the worse the following repression. Weimar was followed by Nazism, and a lot of that was driven by the public desire for virtue in the public sphere. This BS we have going on right now is going to get a response, and it won't be the one we expect or want; I personally wouldn't be a bit surprised to see something like an Islamic fundamentalist sect making huge inroads with a lot of Americans, simply because it would offer an alternative to all this public sexual deviancy and "acceptance".

Yancey Ward said...

This was taking Carlson completely out of context.

Yancey Ward said...

In short, the woke crowd wouldn't have been happy with the newest M&M "spokescandies" until they were sodomizing each other in an ad.

Narr said...

Tucker is, at his level and for his cohort, the same as Libs of Tik Tok--he merely publicizes what the pervs and morons do and say so proudly.

That always offends the pervs and morons. Go figure.

Quaestor said...

Carlson, eh? Well, then hip-hip-hurrah! for Tucker Carlson, the victorious general in the war on childhood obesity and diabetes!

Saint Croix said...

M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous.

ha ha ha

marketing people at the Mars corporation, discussing their M&M characters...

"Do we need to add a vagina?"

"What if we give her a pussy hat?"

"Maybe we should take a look at Mr. Potato Head."

"Did he have a cock? I don't think he had a cock."

"We'll get in trouble if we add a cock."

"Okay, I got a memo right here from management. No cocks and no pussies."

"I knew that."

"Yeah, that's obvious!"

"Maybe a skirt."

Gospace said...

Lots of products have imaginary cartoon like spokescharacters. M&Ms isn’t alone in that. The one I recall most easily is the Trix rabbit, source of the punchline of a favorite joke: “Silly Rabbi, kicks are for Trids.”

This brouhaha reminds me somewhat of Stalin and the disappearing comrades. A team of photo specialists would wipe any trace of purged officials from photos where they were standing next to Stalin. And one way or another it’s liberals who make non-persons out of spokespeople and spokescharacters. When was the last time you saw the Frito Bandito appear?

There’s even a phoneme of it. I’m commenting on my phone, so to difficult to provide a link. But it’s a 4 photo photomeme IIRC. The Quaker Oats guy, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land o’ Lakes Indian maiden in the first photo. One by one they disappear, and only the old white guy with the blue eyes and ruddy cheeks remains visible, still selling you Quaker Oats. And us white people were buying those products with the minority representation. But they’ve been driven from public life by racist liberals.

I don’t watch broadcast television so I haven’t seen the new advertisements. Also been awhile since I’ve been the movies, last time pre-covidiocy and I’m not likely to return- ever. But I recall some pretty clever ads featuring the M&M characters appearing before the main feature.

Saint Croix said...

ha ha ha

just watching the Tucker clip now

it makes me want to fuck candy

that chocolate bitch, she's got me randy

cross your arms!

I can read body signals

that just makes me want to fuck you more

hard-to-get chocolate

whoa

that shit's from Belgium or the Swiss

sassy black Swiss chocolate

you don't need high heels, baby

you fine in those flat shoes

and did I mention

baby got back

Laurel said...

I’ll just second “takirks”. I’ve said for several years: The closet WAS the compromise. The depraved won’t like the other options.

Saint Croix said...

randy for candy

Joe Smith said...

M&Ms can bite me.

Ironic, I know...

Joe Smith said...

Rich people's problems.

We have become soooo soft as a nation.

I welcome our Chinese overlords...

PM said...

Also, the M&Ms characters were always stupid, not because of their shoes or identity - just because they were lame. imo.

Saint Croix said...

I suspect Althouse highlighted this clip because it's funny.

There's a deep layer of humor on the conservative side that Althouse gets. When she listened to Rush, she heard his humor. She saw Trump's funny side before I did. Among her other great skills is her ability to get what people are trying to say and listening closely.

Obviously there are serious points that people like Rush, Trump, and Tucker all want to make. You can see people on this thread talking about the Woke and how crazy they are.

But the way these conservative thinkers succeed in our media culture is by having humor in the show and making people laugh.

(Reagan did it all the time -- he was the master at it).

It's the difference between Goldwater losing the whole country and Reagan winning the whole country.

Humor!

PM said...

And yet - nothing about SUGAR?!

n.n said...

Where is the dark chocolate? Diversitism.

Where is the white chocolate? Albinophobia.

This an example of Politically Congruent ("=") candy, perhaps a rabid sample of Confectionism. Color supremacy, indeed.

n.n said...

hip-hip-hurrah! for Tucker Carlson, the victorious general in the war on childhood obesity and diabetes!

Yes, his broadcast was a public health service. In our quest for NetZero Covid-19/20/21/22, too.

The Daily Beast is a brayer of Tuckerphobia and transviability.

Saint Croix said...

I don't watch commercials anymore so this controversy passed me right on by.

Anyway, here's a run-down (from San Francisco!) on all the woke shit Mars was doing.

All female candy bars!

Lesbian candy!

Upside-down lesbian candy!

Even if they have a woke agenda, it's still funny as shit. Damn if I'm going to get mad if Coca-Cola decides to bring back the sexy woman bottle.

Coke, I'm thinking 36-24-39. That's just me.

(I remember asking my first girlfriend what her measurements were, and she informed me that measurements are stupid, it's all about the cup size).

Anyway, now I'm thinking of buying some upside-down lesbian candy before they go out of sale. Shit's going to be valuable one day!

But how am I going to keep it in mint condition?

Maybe freeze it?

Like Walt Disney?

Gemna said...

I'd says it's a distraction to avoid scrutiny over cocoa farmed by child slaves, but that would imply people would care enough to demand change. Its apparently much more important to be climate pledge friendly.

bobby said...

There are some people here who do not realize that the tranny campaign is attempting to steal the power and accomplishments of the gay community.

The gay community was mostly quite happy that they had become boring and normal. That was their goal.

Gays Against Groomers is getting bigger every day.

Maynard said...

Doesn’t F.Carlson have more important things to kvetch about?

Now do Inga.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Correct me if I'm wrong - because I do not care.
Some woke leftist delicate whiny peon fault-finding losers complained about sexy M&Ms... and the M&M company responded by groveling and promising change.

Tucker mocked it all.

the collective left are now upset and whiny that Tucker mocked it all.

Do I have this right?

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Tucker mocks woke scolds...

Woke scolds bitch and moan.

effinayright said...

takirks said:

I personally wouldn't be a bit surprised to see something like an Islamic fundamentalist sect making huge inroads with a lot of Americans, simply because it would offer an alternative to all this public sexual deviancy and "acceptance".
****************************

Mainstream Moslems worldwide are appalled and disgusted by what they see on the internet, movies and TV presented as "normal" LGBTQwertyuioup behavior. To them, America is indeed deep into full-blown Satanism.

They're not far wrong.

Even Disney has sunk into moral degradation.





wildswan said...

I ate M&M's as a kid and "I'll always loooooove you", as Whitney Houston sang. But I don't think that the Saturday Night Live 'comedian' pictured on the Net could have sold anything to me as a kid and I wonder if she can sell to kids now. Or is M&M's like Disney and transitioning away from family to selling to non-family?

Rollo said...

Well, now we have a word for what Jen Psaki and KJP are: spokescandies.

I really hated Minnie Riperton's song, but there's a thin line between love and hate. That, and Minnie's early death, makes me well-disposed towards her daughter, or at least neutral about her.

john burger said...

Call me a philistine, but why is Maya Rudolph "beloved"? She's funny and all, but beloved?

jvb

Known Unknown said...

Several of the male M&Ms are complete dopes, but does anyone give a shit about that?

Drago said...

takirks: "The LGBTWTFBBQ coalition needs to realize something: They managed to push the envelope and move the Overton Window so as to make their perversions of normalcy acceptable. However, comma, that ain't the natural state of human affairs. The movement in American culture was not an organic thing; it was the result of a propaganda/public relations effort dating back to the 1970s, one that was entirely artificial."

The LGB's, en masse, would be well advised to kick all the other letters to the curb otherwise they will get dragged down with the psychos.

Drago said...

Readering: "You try putting out an hour of TV weeknights while coming up with different stuff from Hannity."

Did you really think an effort as pathetic and transparently false as that would really work?

Yes, I suppose you did.

Drago said...

Russia Collusion Truther and Hillary/FBI Hoax Dossier Dead Ender Inga: "Doesn’t F.Carlson have more important things to kvetch about?"

If your lefty heroes, the ones that just voted almost unanimously to deny life saving measures to babies that survive your abortionists scalpels and chemical warfare, hadn't kvetched first-est and most-est and loud-est in order to get Mars to make a big deal of this, then no.

It's simply another front in the culture war like opposition to Team Dem's groomer actions.

Drago said...

rrsafety: "I'm not a Tucker fan, but he certainly hit the nail on the head."

That's why the Usual Suspects are squealing like stuck pigs.

Rt41Rebel said...

It's not that difficult. The M&Ms with the nuts are male, and the M&Ms without nuts are female.

Bunkypotatohead said...

Maya's 50 years old. If MARS wants to sell shitty chocolate to the gullible, they need to get a 20 something social media influencer.

Aggie said...

I hate it when I accidentally mis-gender my chocolates.

Now this has got me wondering whether chocolate feet hurt after a tough day in high heels.

Narayanan said...

more to come

Jerry said...

This is what happens when your marketing department starts doing cocaine. Or meth.

"Damn, this is such a good idea!"

And people complain.

"We just didn't go far enough!"

And people complain when they go further.

"We'll go even further!"

And people complain they've gone way too far.

"We'll dump them completely and use a human!"

And people complain because it's not what they want to see.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US!!!!!"

To not have messed with it in the first place. You had a brand and spokescandies that worked - why did you let the complainers destroy it? You can NEVER please the Woke, no matter what you do you'll have to do more. And at a certain point - you take what you had and throw it away trying to please them.

It shouldn't be more than a year or two until the candies come back... once the marketing department gets fired for a completely abysmal approach to something that should be fun.

But to the Woke - there's no such thing as fun. Best you can do is ignore the humorless scolds.

Tina Trent said...

Lets give some credit to Maya Rudolph. She starred in Idiocracy, a beloved conservative film.

She sang an amazing tribute to her opera and pop singer mom who died at 30 of breast cancer when Maya was a child, on one old SNL Mother's Day shows.

You can't watch that and think the woman doesn't have that ineffable thing.

Ann Althouse said...

For the record, I have been familiar with the M&M figures that have arms, legs, and faces. That's been around since I was a child. What I'd never heard of was the name "Spokescandies" — which suggests they were expressing opinions beyond the realm of we're good candy.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Now Maya will dutifully turn the candy into woke democrat party propagandists.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Live from New York... It's Saturday Night Democrat Party Propaganda.
where we only mock the Other party.

Michael Ryan said...

Pretty sure making the green candy a female figure was always "problematic". Even back in the 70's the campus joke (well, at least where I was) was the green ones will make you horny.

iowan2 said...

Yea this was blaming the messenger, but they are off target.
Its the wokesters that complained about the genders.
Tucker just exposed those doing the complaining.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

They melt in your mouth not in your hands.

wendybar said...

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
They melt in your mouth not in your hands.

1/24/23, 8:07 AM

Another lie. Hold some in your hands for a few minutes.

hstad said...

"A spokesperson America can agree on...the beloved Maya Rudolph."

Sorry AA, I had to look up Maya's name on Wiki to know who she was?

It's a real stretch, na, 'Marketing Hype', to make a statement like "....America can agree on ... the beloved Maya Rudolph.." Bet you, 90% of the people in the USA says, 'who's Maya Rudolph?

takirks said...

I think there is an essential conflict at the root of these things. If you read enough history and examine things from the standpoint of what is tolerable and what works in a society, the one thing that you note is that there is a constant ongoing seesaw battle between what I term "license" and "control". On the one hand, Weimar; on the other, the Puritans or the Victorians.

Sanity belongs somewhere in the middle, because when either of those two dueling mentalities go to the extremes they tend to, the public sphere becomes intolerable, leading to the inevitable reaction/counter-reaction. Every period of excess within human history, in whatever sphere, inevitably leads to a bunch of people on the other side of it all getting angry enough at the abuses of excess to sweep back over the middle-lines of it all, and take over. Rarely followed by any form of sanity; they tend to proceed in putting their own form of extremism in charge, and that's what you really have to look out for, with dread.

A lot of the insanity of the French Revolution may be laid at the door of the repression of the Royalists and the aristocracy before the Revolution. Same-same with the Russian Revolution, and the takeover by the Nazis from Weimar. Every single time one of these "free love" and "liberty unchained" cultural movements takes over and goes too far, well... Yeah. Bang, zoom, ya have your Communist commissars coming out and enforcing the repressive social mores that are then seen as more acceptable than what the aristos were formerly supposedly getting up to, never mind that they rarely allowed the abuses countenanced by the commissar types on the general public. If you found yourself in Siberia under the Tsars, you generally did something to get the attention. Under the Communists, all you had to do was exist and be the wrong social class or ethnicity. Same-same with the French Revolution; if you ever want a horrifying read, go back and look at what happened in the Vendee region of France.

The real enemy in any of this is excess; we're now in a period of "excessive license", awaiting the inevitable and undoubtedly ugly counter-reaction to all of this crap, because it isn't normal. The norm is weighted towards the center, always; when you have something less than 3% of the population (that which is typically the LGBTWTFBBQ percentage) trying to wag the dog from the tail-end of things? It won't last; it can't. Whatever source their mental confusion and dysfunction springs from, that does not enable them to do much more than entertain the rest of us.

Crazy, it turns out (oddly enough...), doesn't do a very good job at running things or getting things done. The teacher obsessed with teaching his/her/its sexual dysfunctions to the young doesn't do a very effective job of teaching those kids to function well in society... Or, for that matter, to read, write, or figure.

(cont)

takirks said...

There's a Newtonian logic to it all. For every social action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Unfortunately, there's a bit of non-Newtonian to the whole thing, because "People". None of what the French Revolution got up to with the Terror and the excesses of the Vendee were justified or effective; they rather served to de-legitimize the parties of behind the Revolution. Just as they did in Nazi Germany and in the former Soviet Union.

One thing to consider with all of this is the question of "Just who is it that is pushing for all of this, and to what end...?" Those of us in the middle gain nothing; the people who do gain are out there on the ends, and they're usually using the extremists of both sides of the "libertine" vs. "responsibility" line for their own benefit.

I'd prefer to set a pox on both houses of extremists, and live comfortably in the middle. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be able to manage that, so here we are. Expect a future filled with Puritans after we get done re-discovering why libertines shouldn't be put in charge of the public sphere. Just like we can expect a period of libertine excess after all the repressive types get done with running our lives, and discovering that they're no better at it than the luvvies of the Left are.

Come to think of it, there's a good case to be made that a lot of the actual problem really consists of the control freaks alternating between approaches. There's not a razor's blade of difference between the leftoid freaks infesting our public sphere today and the same sort of controlling "we know better" types who ran the Puritan social order and ran witch trials back in the day. I rather suspect that our current "Cancel Culture" BS is going to be seen eventually as being all of a piece with the Salem Witch Trials... An era of social madness that overtook reason in the public sphere. And, the same sort of people are running it all; I'd wager good money that were you to look at it, the same sort of personality type ran the witch trials as runs the modern equivalent.

Perhaps the whole thing is more down to an alternating sine wave of nuttery; in one era, the nutters are all libertines, then in the next, they glom onto an idea of "virtue" as being something to grasp in order to rebel against the libertine.

The key connecting feature is, I suspect, the act of rebellion/transgression itself.

I rather suspect that there is a considerable segment of the populations of these groups that would happily go along with whatever is au courant, so long as they get that frisson of being anti-establishment and can wave their knickers in front of mommy and daddy's faces.

PM said...

Don't knock Maya. She married the smartest man in the world who also became President.

Saint Croix said...

Narayanan at 11:47

that's pretty amazing



Penguins loose said...

Hidden under all that fruit they wear, one of those Fruit of the Loom guys is a crossdresser. I just know it.