Today I'm going to talk about the left's response to something actually popular instead of Canadian politics, so you have your chance to stop reading now should you choose to do so.
Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke are two people who currently have extremely boring hit songs on the radio. At the MTV Video Music Awards this week, Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke performed a mashup of their boring songs, and at one point during the performance Miley Cyrus rubbed her butt on Robin Thicke's genitals. This caused the entire Internet to explode into a million offended pieces. As I write this, nobody is not offended by Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke's performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Left-leaning people on the Internet are super-dee-duper offended. They were already kind of offended at the two songs separately. Robin Thicke's boring song has a video where models dance topless and features lyrics about women being animals and men not being able to tell whether women are good girls or if they really want "it." Miley Cyrus's boring song has a video where she "twerks"- a type of jigglybutt dance that is practiced by and apparently reserved exclusively for women of African descent. The fact that Miley Cyrus, a white woman, did this in her video is problematic because it constitutes "cultural appropriation", which is basically the idea that people are not supposed to dress like, talk like, dance like, or do anything that is done by another culture without express permission.
So taking these two and putting them together onstage was like provoking a fistfight between two nuclear explosions. First people attacked Cyrus for being trashy onstage. Then people attacked the people attacking Cyrus for not calling Robin Thicke out for his own raunchiness. Then people attacked those people for focusing on sexism and ignoring how racist the entire spectacle was. Before long, everyone was just calling each other racists and sexists and slut-shamers. It was a 137-car pileup of identity-politics players. It got to the point where left leaning people wrote entirely serious articles about how it was good that everyone was so offended, but how it was bad that those people were offended about the wrong things.
(This is totally unrelated, but leftists use the word literally a lot when they complain. Have you ever noticed that?)
As a result of this kerfuffle, the performance was literally all anyone could talk about. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, and every online magazine are awash in talkity talk about Miley Cyrus rubbing her butt on Robin Thicke's genitals. I don't know what "media hits" are, but I bet this performance has an awful lot of them.
Having viewed the assault on rights and dignity that was Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke at the MTV Music Awards and having, as a movement, sworn Never Again, the left might have decided to completely disappoint the evil corporaciopatriarchists who- bereft of conscience- designed this orgy of privilege, calculated down to the last detail to cause maximum hurtfeels and to generate an ever increasing embarrassment of riches for the invisible empire of sin that rules us all by.....ignoring it entirely. No pileup of outrage means no "media hits" and therefore no incentive to wait a few years and then do the whole thing again and make another boatload of cash.
Instead, those who viewed that performance as a sexist, racist, slut-shaming crime against humanity that exposes any number of secret agendas are busily making sure that this grows into the biggest news story ever by complaining ever more loudly about the performance and how people are offended by the wrong aspects of the performance and how that offends them even more. Whoopsy-doodle!
Back in the day, savvy promoters could always count on the Right to get offended at their pushing the envelope and do half their work for them. When the Christians started talking about how Janet Jackson's boob being exposed by Justin Timberlake at the Super Bowl was bringing the family down, they knew they had made it, baby. Now they have something even better- angry leftists on Tumblr fighting each other about which ways this performance reinforced systematic oppression.
None of these unbought and unbossed lefties would ever dream that they are making the rich richer with their combatting of all of the oppression. Every one of these people believe themselves to be on the cutting edge, and yet they are played against one another so easily that it's almost not fair.
They build their own prison, and then they rail against The Man for putting them there against their will.
I bring you this very silly example to show, once again, that it is possible to play these factions against one another by exploiting the fault lines between them. But we here in Ontario don't want to do that.
Well in Quebec we have a woman cabinet minister asking the federal government to block two Muslim speakers at a Muslim youth congress in Montreal. She wants them to be blocked because of their ideas about women's role.
ReplyDeleteI find this hilarious because Quebec has systematically encourage immigration from Muslim countries because these countries often have French as one of their languages. So they want the French-speaking immigrants, but they don't want their culture.
Yup. They know what they don't like, but they don't know what they want.
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