Public acts of piety have become a staple in the mass media. It’s hard to watch anything on television because every five minutes, it seems, someone is on screen telling us they are a good thinker in some way. Watch a sporting event and before long they are preaching about women, NAM’s, homosexuals or whatever fad is whirling around the Cult of Modern Liberalism at the moment.
It’s what bad thinkers call “virtue signaling.” You see it everywhere. Someone blunders and utters a truth about the world in public and immediately there is a line of people telling us how they were offended. Then there is a line hooting some form of “burn the witch!” and demanding the heretic grovel. The very act of groveling, the public struggle session, has been ritualized so everyone can sing along with the sinner.
The New Religion, unlike old useful religions, has evolved as an elaborate pat on the head for managerial class types. It’s a mommy religion telling her sweetie pie everything is going to be all right. That means the moral code is just as self-absorbed as the practitioners. After all, even mass murderers have mothers who love them. This story on ESPN is a good example.
Nike terminated its endorsement contract with boxer Manny Pacquiao on Wednesday after he made derogatory remarks about same-sex couples.
“We find Manny Pacquiao’s comments abhorrent,” the company said in a statement. “Nike strongly opposes discrimination of any kind and has a long history of supporting and standing up for the rights of the LGBT community.”
Based on Pacquiao’s comments, a spokesman confirmed that he is no longer on the company’s endorsement roster. Pacquiao, 37, had endorsed Nike for a little more than eight years.
On Thursday, Pacquiao said he respects Nike’s decision to drop him but stood pat on his opposition to same-sex marriage and added that he is happy that “a lot of people were alarmed by the truth.”
Pacquiao’s original remarks were made to a Filipino television station earlier this week
“Have you seen any animal having male-to-male or female-to-female relations?” Pacquiao said. “If you have male-to-male or female-to-female [relationships], then people are worse than animals.”
Pacquiao apologized on Twitter within hours.
“I’m sorry for hurting people by comparing homosexuals to animals,” Pacquiao tweeted. “Please forgive me for those I hurt. God bless!”
You history buffs out there will recognize this as our old friend fascism. It’s been updated to modern tastes so instead of guys in brown shirts dropping by for a chat, it’s guys in Nike gear tweeting their outrage. The Gestapo made a big show of rounding up trouble makers in order to send a message. Our rulers do the same thing, but via social media and mock outrage. Same clowns, different clown car.
The moral inversion is what makes this New Religion a loser in the long run. Nike has no trouble using child labor and slaves to make their sneakers. Nike has no trouble sponsoring rapists and thugs. They were giggling like school girls when famous thugs were wearing Nike hoodies in an attempt to get the “white Hispanic” lynched down in Florida. But they draw the line at hurting the feelings of Filipino homosexuals?
If your moral code requires you to drop everything to defend the local homosexuals, but is silent on your use of child labor and slavery, your religion is barbaric and you are a dangerous lunatic. A world full of boorish guys like this boxer is going to be far more safe for homosexuals than a world run by sociopaths like the people at Nike. The former has empathy, which provides a natural limit on cruelty. The latter sees humans as exploitable resources.
Nike must be concerned that they are now making a very powerful enemy in Pacquiao? He is rich enough to not care whether they pay him anymore. He would do well to expose Nike and some of their awful practices. Plenty would watch. Just a shame that they make such awesome stuff.
Your on a roll ZMan! Another great piece. Don’t stop.
“You history buffs out there will recognize this as our old friend fascism”
Seems more like communism to me. After all, communists invented the idea of “political correctness”. They also invented commissars, whose job was to enforce that political correctness.
“Seems more like communism to me.”
Bingo…
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
– Theodore Dalrymple
Just another example: Amazon removing Confederate flags but still selling Nazi paraphernalia.
Ok, I’ll shout my ignorance, What the hell is a NAM? A quick search came up with ‘The North American Menopause Society’, as well as the ‘National Association of Manufacturers’.
Non-Asian Minority?
The Asian minorities seem to be the only minorities perking along, making even more money than they brought with them, which in the post-Nam era was almost zero. More recent ones brought bundles and are mansionizing our neighborhoods, supporting their local Mercedes and BMW dealers. (Buying the cars, not stealing or hijacking them.) None of them marching in the streets, burning cities down, and so forth.
Great essay, Mr. Z.
Non-Asian minority
Well slap my ass and call me Nancy. All this time I thought it was “Negroes And Mexicans”, which amounts to the same thing really. Kinda like “People Of Color” and “colored people”.
I think it was Mark Steyn who pointed out that things that were unthinkable 10 minutes ago are now what all right-thinking people believe. How long before pedophilia is normalized? Or incest? I’d like to write (well, not really, because I’m too lazy) a book titled “Things That ‘They’ Said Would Never Happen.”
There is also wrapped up in this a warped view of the past- a past in which gangs of thugs roamed the streets looking for homosexuals to beat up, and a past where the retarded ( I know, we are not supposed to use that word anymore) were left to shift for themselves, where every white had nothing on his mind but the degradation of blacks… etc. We are so convinced that we are morally superior to our parents and grandparents- and thus convinced that our ancestral culture is not worth saving. I’m 62 and probably won’t live to see total collapse, but my kids, all in their 20’s probably will. It’s sad, really.
Weird, isn’t it — they’re describing a Marxist caricature of the Gilded Age. Period-ize the diction (and raise the literacy level) and most of the stuff on Daily Kos is indistinguishable from a Eugene Debs campaign speech. It’s like they’ve entirely skipped the 20th century, when Progressives controlled the government for the better part of seven decades. But, as we know, ignorance of history is liberalism’s flux capacitor – it’s what makes faith in socialism possible.
It is purely virtue signalling.
G.K. Chesterton — ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’
My grandfather, who died at 94, used to proclaim, “I just want to live long enough to see how all this turns out.” Now, I’m 68, and feel just about the same way. The problem is, Z, that the people in charge won’t ever admit they’ve screwed up. Look at the Sanders crowd, angry they haven’t received their fair share of the stash. They’re the wave of the future. You keep saying, “We’re doomed.” Care to put a date on it? Do I need more canned goods and ammo, or can I relax and glide to my funeral appointment? I’m serious. Things do not look good and my worry is that when it all lets go, things happen in a rush. I just wonder if the only answer is popcorn and watch the passing of the republic.
I’ll bite — I bet we see a Western European military ordered to fire on its own citizens, in defense of rapefugees, by the end of this summer. A coup attempt will follow shortly. If the country in question has some popular referendum mechanism, or a conveniently timed election, they’ll probably use that… if not, or if there’s monkey business at the polls, then the whole works — parliament houses surrounded by tanks, Merkel (or whomever) frog-marched out by soldiers, etc. How soon we get an actual, uniformed Fascist Party in America will depend on what happens with this election. President Trump might take a while to order up jackboots and armbands for the Uber-GOP; if it’s anyone but him, I’d expect a whole series of Beer Hall Putsches coming soon to a post office near you.
Are then the people who would overthrow the fascist governments of the West also to be described as fascists, or instead anti-fascist, or anti-fascist fascist? It’s a little unclear from your post.
I’ve long thought that Europe would finally lead the way in something that would be of great utility to the citizens of the US (other than illustrating how far we would fall thirty years later), and civil insurrection would be it. So many countries, so many potential ways to choose from.
Tocqueville–Time does not arrest its course for nations any more than for men…When we think things are stationary, it is because we fail to see their movements. The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as one conceives the idea of escape from it.
That’s the problem — Western European governments aren’tFascist. Fascists are nationalists; the current crop in power in the EU is dedicated to wiping out the very concept of national identity. They’ll be nationalists of some sort; the economic arrangements are anyone’s guess when their common currency collapses. Hell, if I were a Hapsburg or a Hohenzollern (I assume there are still a few), I’d think hard about dusting off the family silver and getting into politics.
Severian – the big question is whether those soldiers ordered to fire on their own citizens will do so or not. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991 in the wake of the hardliner communist coup against Gorbachev, the Soviet Interior Ministry forces were ordered to fire on civilian demonstrators. The soldiers refused to do so and the coup attempt quickly fell apart.
In the USA, most people have no doubt that the soldiers would fire.
Suppressing freedom of speech doesn’t stop what people are thinking. No matter how much the cult keeps banging on about ‘modern values’ and ‘equality and fairness’ people privately think what they think, and know what they know. I would even suggest that many of those talking heads on TV shows being all loving towards anything and everyone have other thoughts. But if keeping one’s job relies on mouthing inanities, then inanities will duly be mouthed, though not believed.
That’s one thing the libs and leftys can never understand: what people believe and what they say are not one and the same, and getting them to believe what is ridiculous and false is beyond even the loudest yapping. One can even make huge laws about it, but belief will not be changed.
Getting people say what they don’t believe is the whole point.
Z, How long is the long run? I have my doubts this insanity will end anytime soon, not with the media, academia and Hollywood having brainwashed everyone for the last fifty years. College kids don’t even know where New England is.
That’s a good question. I’ve been working on a post about that, but it is a big topic, probably too big for a blog post, even a lengthy one. That and i’m not clear on my own opinions. We seem to be in a void between the old religion and whatever comes next. Maybe Heinlein had it right in Stranger and one of us is the Martian.
Z, it will take a book, it’s so overarching. Isolate yourself and have at it for six months. I will preorder.