Fashion Sees Dead People + Phetasy Digest
Mostly Peaceful Shed Bombs | Media Dweebs <3 Terrorists | Epstein Files Moral Panic | Spencer Klavan PHILOSOPHYMAXXING | Clavicular, More Like GAYvicular | Gotta Hate the Media More | Male Kardashians
Paris has been a fashion hub for centuries, since at least the 1400s, then expanding when King Louis XIV popularized luxury clothing and industrialized textile manufacturing, making fashion design an economic staple of French identity. During the French Revolution, clothing became a political tool. Most of the philosophy and sociology on fashion has been written by leftists who have glorified political rebellion through fashion and dress and portrayed bizarre appearance as an act of subversion. The weirder a person looks, the more special they must be. This contrarianism has spiraled so that objective beauty is demonized and demonic ugliness is adored. This (NSFW) clip from Paris Fashion Week went viral, featuring a bare-chested woman in green body paint prowling the catwalk like a low-tier demon seeking a promotion. The global fashion capital is berserk! They’ve fully embraced abjection.
Which is far more worrisome than the Left’s usual theater-kid antics. Philosopher Julia Kristeva discusses the psychology of abjection, our defense mechanism—to recoil, to shriek, to vomit—against things that provoke disgust and horror, our subjective experience of repulsion. The abject is what haunts us, what we despise, hate, and fear, all the symbols and figurations of death—corpses, waste, carrion, spoil. Humans are not supposed to deactivate this innate mechanism. Without distinctions between life and death, humans have no framework for sanity.
Sure, fashion often requires deformation, alteration, and discomfort—but the ornaments and spangles and costumes of good fashion cannot resemble the most grotesque cosplay monsters stomping around Comic-Con. Or worse, ironic satanists who find themselves surrounded by evil. In alternative literature about fashion, right-leaning thinkers, who are far less bombastic and dramatic than the leftists who outnumber them, have examined fashion as a social contagion, an unexplainable fad. Sociologist William Graham Sumner described fashion as a “form of the dominance of the group over the individual, and it is quite as often harmful as beneficial.” Like how the miscreants in Paris, thanks in part to the philosophers who programmed them to deny reality, don’t understand the nature of subversion: They coordinated their ghoulish costumes so that they could all be hideous freaks in unison. Oblivious to the authentic expression of what they call fashion, which holds beauty as an objective and permanent force of life. BASED philosopher Roger Scruton observed, “The first effect of radical skepticism is not to free the mind, but to enslave it to fashion.”
The fashionable elite no longer have the slightest understanding of beauty. They can’t differentiate the beautiful from the terrible. And, look, I can’t be too judgmental: I wrote most of this commentary while wearing an oversized Bucc-ee’s t-shirt, a Halloween edition featuring the beaver as a happy ghost.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #296
Terrorism Has A PR Team - The Mainstream Media
Bridget Phetasy breaks down the “headline surgery” of the New York Times after an attempted terrorist attack in NYC. From renaming pipe bombs to “smoking jars of metal” to the media’s desperate attempt to avoid the “T-word,” Bridget exposes why you don’t hate the media enough.
WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #381
Attention Span is the New Class Divide - Spence Klavan
Spencer Klavan joins Bridget for a fascinating conversation about why Plato’s 2,000-year-old warning about the invention of writing perfectly explains our AI panic, what it’s like to invent an entire language for Daily Wire’s Pendragon Cycle (and how it made him finally understand Tolkien), and why AI can only reproduce the “outer word” while humans alone possess the “inner word.”
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #297
Keeping Up With The Male Kardashians
Bridget Phetasy goes on a journey down the internet’s weirdest rabbit holes so you don’t have to. After seeing the new “Clavicular” trailer, she’s convinced we’ve officially entered the American Psycho era of masculinity. From young men obsessing over bone structure like it’s a full-time job to the rise of the “Male Kardashians,” Bridget explains why most women would still rather date Shane Gillis than a guy who thinks his collarbones are a personality trait.
THE SPECTATOR
The Epstein files and the new Satanic Panic
The Epstein situation is different in one critical respect: Jeffrey Epstein was a real predator. Real crimes were committed. We know that real victims exist. But that kernel of truth is exactly what makes the current panic more dangerous, not less. It gives everyone permission to treat speculation as truth, proximity as proof and a flight log as a conviction. The fact that something terrible actually happened becomes a justification for whatever theory you want to push. “Isn’t it weird, man?” is compelling and it might be true. But it’s not evidence.
Very illuminating article. The first part reminds me of the most astonishing movie about how a leader dominates a populace through their very culture: "The Taking of Power by Louis the XIV" (1966). Highly recommended.