Comical Descent / Allegedly Serious Discussion

We’re sophisticated. Our way of life is just better than the way the horrible MAGA people want to live. That’s why Los Angeles is so good. Decades of progressive, Democrat-supermajority government have produced an enlightened, high-status outcome.

Comical. Pathetic. The action/depiction divide has become obviously insane: high-status symbol performance, drug addicts shitting in the street. At some level, everyone knows this. Even the people who don’t choose to allow themselves to know this actually do know it, which is the source of considerable brittleness and a great deal of forced condescension.

In a recent mayoral debate, the candidate Spencer Pratt openly talked about far-right extremist themes like not having drug addicts living in tents all over the city and using neighborhoods where children play as a toilet, after which the (impressively repellent) Democratic Socialists of America candidate Nithya Raman blasted him for offering a loathsome MAGA vision for the place. The politics of left and right, the discourse between the choices as they’re framed in media and conventional discussion, has become the Bald Soprano: a bunch of the characters are babbling non-sequiturs. Should drug addicts shit in the playgrounds / Stop being a Trump person. It’s not a debate. It’s a cacophony, dumb as dirt.

The wall of noise covers a bunch of not-really-hidden cronyist extraction, and the bold new program in California in which a state-funded NGO will give free diapers to every family of a newborn happens, by the most remarkable coincidence, to deliver that large new state giveaway through a non-profit run by close friends of Jennifer Siegel Newsom. They’re…not really trying, anymore. It’s just naked pillaging.

Obvious thing is obvious:

This is it. This is it. The absurd course has hit the wall. If “progressive” culture can’t see and change course, the decline locks in, hard and sure. There’s no more room for discussion, and in any case there’s no discussion underway. All of the defenses have become pathetic beyond the possibility of describing or characterizing the stupidity.

Know a dead end when you’re in one.