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This won’t be particularly substantive but hopefully it’s enough to avoid a mod-slap. Apparently a group of women customers accosted staff at a Minneapolis yoga chain and berated them for not having some sort of ICE signage up (presumably a “No ICE allowed” sign, as if ICE agents will be stopping in to do yoga).
Here is an article.
Here is a direct link to the viral TikTok in question
The video’s author is Heather Anderson, 51, essentially the archetype of the wine mom, the core demographic of the latest frenzy. She appears to be an elementary school teacher and host of a podcast Belonging in the Classroom which presents itself with this description:
Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?
The incident reminds me almost exactly of scenes that we saw in 2020, like this similar incident you surely remember of diners being surrounded and screamed at for not raising their fists in solidarity with BLM..
There is much endless discussion of peak woke, but to me it feels almost exactly like we are back in 2020, if not for the historic cold weather of the last few weeks and general time of year, I imagine it would be nearly identical.
I traveled up to a nearby city a handful of times last year, and every time I had to drive past one of the popular protest spots. The protestors were interesting. I'd estimate 90% of them were old. Gray hair was the most common shade I saw. The average age was clearly 50+, and may have honestly been 65+. The other thing I noticed was that 75-80% of the protestors were women. Of the men, I'd estimate that three quarters of them were there with their wives, and the men were usually sitting on a stone wall that stood next to the sidewalk rather than holding signs and screaming at cars.
I'd also hazard to guess that most of the protestors were affluent. Each individual piece of clothing they wore probably cost more than my whole outfit. The street where they were protesting was lined with parked BMWs and Audis when it would usually be Fords and Hyundais.
I think all those facts might be related. If you're old enough and wealthy enough that you don't have to work anymore, it can be a shock to your sense of identity. What do you do with those extra 2,000 hours a year? Even if you are still working, your risk profile changes a lot when your "I got fired" strategy is to just move on to a life of leisure.
I think it's the same reason that the HOA busybody and Church lady archetypes are usually older. I think all three might be culture-bound expressions of the same thing.
I can just imagine society finally becoming wealthy enough by 2035 that we could institute a sweet UBI for all, and then by 2037 we have the most brutal civil war because we believe we're the most oppressed people ever.
This would IMO be a great premise for a Star Trek episode. Or maybe a sci-fi novel.
This is the plot of the Terra Ignota series. It's quite good.
I mean... it's not exactly "because we're the most oppressed people ever" but it's about how war arises in an approximately post-scarcity society.
I have mixed feelings about Terra Ignota, because there's a lot of it that's good and interesting, and a lot that's garbage, and a lot that's somewhere in the middle.
In this case I think one of its flaws is that you can't really describe it without being incredibly misleading. You have to describe the setting, and the setting gives the impression that this is a story about what happens in a world where you can choose your nation, or choose what set of laws to live under, or what a world without borders is like but people socially define themselves by household and elective community, or what war looks like in a world that doesn't have geographic nations, or re-learning war in a world that has had no weapons or violent conflicts for a lifetime, or, etc., etc.
And Terra Ignota is not actually about any of that. Sure, it's in a world where there are no nations and instead people join elective 'hives', which define the laws of their society, but the books clearly do not care about that, and have precisely zero interest in interrogating how that system could possibly work. Sure, the story involves the hives going to war and then flailing about in confusion because none of them know what war is (I particularly loved a bit where people dress up in military uniforms and assemble in groups and march up and down in front of each other, and then just kind of look at each other awkwardly and disperse, unsure of what they're supposed to do next), but none of that is relevant to what Terra Ignota is about.
Terra Ignota is a story told by an extremely unreliable narrator, who is at least partly insane, who has a bizarre fetish for 18th century France. The story is about Mycroft, and once you understand that Mycroft is firstly batshit and secondly a LARPing pseudo-intellectual, you notice that the events of the story don't matter that much, and in fact don't even make sense. This is a psychodrama.
I don't know if I learned anything from Terra Ignota, other than "Ada Palmer be weird, yo". But Ada Palmer is definitely weird, yo.
Oh, and Utopia sucks. As far as I can tell responses to Terra Ignota are bifurcated along several axes, and one of the big ones is whether Utopia is the coolest thing ever and a beautiful dream you want to pledge your life towards (somehow Scott is one of these), or whether Utopia is a bunch of incredibly cringeworthy nerds who need to be given swirlies (this is the camp I'm in). There are people who seem to think Terra Ignota is a beautiful small-u utopia, revealed to us by brilliant and inspiring prose, and I do not understand these people at all.
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