Sunday, June 27, 2021

Printing Softness

While watching Bad TV*, wife kitteh and I had been seeing ads for an NBC show, Making It. It looked pretty funny. It was about a reality show where contestants crafted various knickknacks while the hosts made bad puns. On Thursday, it came on right after Jeopardy!, so I watched some of it.

It was the worst thing I'd seen in years. Simply horrible. It was like drowning in treacle. Everything was kind and soft and love and compassion and positive and utterly orthodox in its progressivism. I think I made it 15 minutes before I was overcome with nausea. Still, it seemed like an excellent window into the thoughts of the Elites as represented by network TV. Below are some stills from the thing and here's the link to the episode.

Maria was one of the contestants. Note the primary colors adorning her, like she's some kind of child's nursery toy. She'd been a cheerleader and complained that not enough people respected cheerleaders as athletes. After she mentioned that, the hosts went off on a gentle, but woke rant about equity or equality or golf or something.
The set. It looked like a craft studio from an asylum for violent lunatics.
Here, Maria is using wrapping paper, cardboard, a glue gun and probably scissors with a rounded tip to make something from a first grade art class.
She was making an Affirmation Box. It had a mirror so you could see how beautiful you were and a little voice recorder that said you were wonderful when you opened it. I felt like I was watching a class from a school for disturbed children.

As I recoiled in horror, wife kitteh told me that it was just Summer TV and was simply there to fill programming hours. Sadly, it's not. The thing is in its third season.

If you want to know the thoughts of the cast, dig this. Here's a snippet.

Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman ... mess with the format to add even more positivity to a show brimming with joy and wonder. 

"We ultimately want to be the first competition show that never eliminates anyone," jokes Offerman. 

"We always try to take the typical, stressful idea of an 'unscripted show' and turn it on its head," says Poehler. "By watching (contestants) do things, you figure out who they are. You feel more connected to them. You feel less alone. All that good, gooey stuff."

"(We) are going through a brutal upheaval," Offerman adds. "Should we pay attention to science or conspiracy theories? And these are gripping, painful, raw, open debates in our country. We definitely don’t want to turn on the TV and continue that cycle, but instead (we want to) be comforted by people treating each other well." 

That last bit clued me in to what was happening on a much larger scale. The show is a prime example of an effort to make the world softer and softer and softer. It's the same as the safe spaces on campuses, the censoring of speakers, the silencing of social media accounts and the endless fight against "hate."

In the country with the highest standard of living on the planet, the show is a sample of society striving to be more inclusive, affirming and gentle. Nothing can ever be gentle enough.

But life isn't gentle, is it? Reality isn't affirming. If you're morbidly obese, you don't need an Affirmation Box that soothes you, you need to put down the chips and get off the couch. It's all a lie.

Why All The Affirmation?

This is getting too long, so I'll wrap it up with this observation.

By printing money, we've temporarily detached earning from having. There's no need to improve yourself if we can just vote for more goodies. There's no need to assess your weaknesses and address them if we all have rights to free housing, health care, education and more.

Every edge in the world is too sharp. They can all be smoothed to roundness by wishing and printing. Making It is a terrific sampling of this kind of thinking.

Similar Thoughts From The 'Post

Life's Pricing Structure Is Broken

What kind of car would you buy if you could print money? Me, I'd buy a Lotus. You might buy a Ferrari. Why don't you do it now? I don't have a Lotus because it would take me a year to earn it. The Lotus would represent a year of my life. If I could print money in the Catican, the Lotus would represent ... nothing.

With the pricing structure broken, we're stumbling to the inevitable conclusion that we can have not just a Lotus or a Ferrari, but a Lotus and a Ferrari and lots, lots more. We've become spoiled children who have gotten used to mommy and daddy buying them everything they want.

In a world of spoiled children, anyone who asks, "How are we going to pay for that?" is just mean.

When The Cat's Away And Not Coming Back

The general problem really hit me today when I read about Modern Monetary Theory, MMT. MMT holds that any government that can print its own money and whose debt is denominated in that same currency, need not worry about debt. Print all you want until inflation hits. Inflation, not debt, is the critical measure of whether or not you can keep printing.

This is obvious nonsense. If you have mountains of debt, inflation, which leads to higher interest rates, immediately starts a chain reaction of printing and inflation that quickly spirals out of control and wipes out the economy. MMT can't possibly work. See also: Republic, Weimar.

But nonsense is OK, right? Sense is patriarchal or racist or mathematical, which itself is patriarchal and racist.

None of this has been pondered. We have no idea where the end points are or if there are endpoints at all. It doesn't matter whether things make logical sense or if plans work. All that matters is how we feel about ourselves. We haven't quite figured out where that leads, either.

Why We're Not Defending Civilization

 As long as we can just print money and hand it out, there is no real cost to property crimes. That's why we make half-hearted attempts to stop a thief. That's why shoplifters don't do time. That's why shoplifting isn't even reported.

There's no significant, direct cost to any of it.

When you see the bewilderment in the people at the San Francisco Walgreens in that video, you're watching their brains struggle with the knowledge that what's happening is the breakdown of society fighting with the numbing culture of compassion, compassion that's been bought with colored pieces of paper.

* - Bad TV is Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! Wheel of Fortune is the better of the two.

5 comments:

Chuck Pergiel said...

Used to be TV was aimed at 12 year olds. Now I think it's aimed at 6 year olds. Half of what's on YouTube is aimed at 6 year olds. Some of the biggest money makers on YouTube are like ten years old. Media is saturating our society.

K T Cat said...

You make a really good point. It's also evidenced in shorter attention spans. Personally, I notice that I have a shorter one as well. I used to be able to sit and read a book for hours. These days, anything over 30 minutes is agony.

Kelly the little black dog said...

The elites don't watch network broadcast TV. None of this programming is aimed toward them. Given that kids and young adults don't watch broadcast TV either I really don't know who this is intended for.

tim eisele said...

It sounds like you were expecting something more like "Nailed It!" on Netflix

https://www.netflix.com/title/80179138

where people with little or no baking experience try to replicate very fancy professionally-decorated cakes while the hosts crack jokes.

And I agree with Kelly: I don't actually know who watches network TV anymore, and I'm not all that sure the networks do, either.

The only time I ever see network TV is in the dentist's office (this isn't necessarily snobbery on my part. There is only one broadcast TV station that we can even in theory pick up at our house in any case, so we never bothered to put up a TV antenna)

Ohioan@Heart said...

This a bit off topic for this specific post, but I wanted to bring it to your attention:

A below-the-fold headline on the front page of today’s Union Tribune is “Study Says San Diego Lacking ‘Tree Equity’ “.

I am without words...