Idiocracy - because it's 2016!

For whatever reason, the identity politics people - IdPol as I often hear it referred to as, have taken the last few days to go whole hog on the stupid.  Not that they've recommended themselves in the last several years as sources of indepth analysis and nuanced and critical thought, but so far in the month of September 2016, they've really cranked the stupid up to 11.

It starts with an article about another hashtag invented by feminists to mock "toxic masculinity" and to "to highlight what they think would happen if the genders were reversed and men experienced monthly menstruation."  #IfMenHadPeriods, it would be like if men got pregnant.  They would, by definition, be women.  Then they'd invent hashtags that blamed men, all men everywhere, for their unhappiness and all the slights great and small that they suffered on a daily basis, including the oppressive discrimination they suffered at the hands of mother nature.  Or is it women they would blame?  Hard to keep it straight these days.

On a somewhat related note, the article goes on to describe how much fun it all was "until a new wave of Feminists came along.  This new group of Feminists argued that the hashtag was trans-phobic, because it ignores the existence of Trans-men.  According to them, trans men can have periods too, and the idea that only women can have them is "cisnormative."

No, it was not done ironically.  It was not a scene out of an old Monty Python movie.  It was played straight.  By people who doubtlessly think themselves to be quite stoic and resilient, given their certainty that men would not hold up near as well as they themselves would under the terrible burden of menstrual cramps.  I'm grateful to know that they'll fight the Roman oppressor for my right to want to have babies, and menstrual cramps.  The battle for equality is not yet lost!

Then there's this gem, shat out by the New Statesman: "Why I was wrong about men.  You can't hate them all, can you?  Actually I can."  The author observes that, "modern feminism spends most of its life not just bending over backwards, but in a doggy position saying how much it likes men."  As this article clearly exemplifies.  I mean, let's get real here.  How dare any woman who professes to believe in an ideology that defines itself as advocating equality between the sexes actually not hate one of the two genders?  How could she?   The article just goes downhill from there, into an incomprehensible labyrinth of self righteous logical contradictions.  Not that the venerable New Statesman seemed to notice, or care.

Then there were the Black Lives Matter UK protesters who shut down London Airport runways in protest to global warming, which they regarded as racist.  The protesters were eventually removed and arrested.

Lastly, in the interests of fairness and to show that the angry chicks brigade doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of foolishness, MGTOW - "Men Going Their Own Way" decided that they were going to protest Amazonian mastery and the hard lives they have ... by wearing cargo shorts.  Ostensibly for no other reason than that women don't like them.  Because nothing makes it more clear to the SJWs that you're against them than acting just like they do.  This shortly (no pun intended) after several US media outlets ran stories condemning the until recently popular half-pants as unfashionable.  That'll teach the matriarchy!

I'm sure there's plenty I missed.  All in all, just another day in paradise.

So what the hell is really going on here?  The thing that always comes to mind with me reading about stuff like this is just how foolish and self absorbed these kinds of people look.  The only real winners here are the US religious right, who must doubtlessly be grateful that their decades long reign as the public standard bearers for idiocy in the western world has come to an end, and that the torch has been passed to the various shades of identitarians.  Now they can practice their own particular form of abdicating reason and rationality relatively unscrutinized.

Is it some kind of culture-wide death wish?  Are identitarian activists really that oblivious?  Is the YouTuber Sargon of Akkad right when he suggests that autism is a feminist issue?  And not just for feminists?  Has our (not necessarily conscious) morbid fascination with stupidity, and a tabloid-esque click-bait internet media model's willingness to deliver on (and profit from) that fascination brought us to Idiocracy 490 years ahead of schedule?  Or are our media outlets in on the joke, winking at us from behind the headlines, inviting us all to laugh at what a circus their profession has truly become.  I'd laugh too, if there weren't seriously pressing matters that warrant our concern.  Does it simply boil down to the appeal that simple binary narratives pitting victim and oppressor identities against each other have to those looking for easy answers or a short-cut to being a good person?

Who knows.  But the poor aren't getting any further ahead, climate change isn't abating, high level government and corporate isn't getting any cleaner and the world isn't getting any more peaceful either.  Maybe it's time to try to up our game as a species just a bit.