What’s Wrong with the World




Cultural Appropriation

According to La Wik, "cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group...It can include the introduction of forms of dress or personal adornment, music and art, religion, language, or social behavior. These elements, once removed from their indigenous cultural contexts, may take on meanings that are significantly divergent from, or merely less nuanced than, those they originally held."

Case in point:

Flash mob, Antwerp, Belgium, 23rd March 2009:

Flash mob, Kansas City, MO, USA, 10th April, 2010:

Sorry, no way to embed this video - if interested, you'll just have to follow the link. But this will give you the general idea:

(Flash mob, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 22nd March, 2010).

Hat tip to Richard Spencer at Alt.Right.

Comments (7)

Surely we don't think the first one in Antwerp is a real flash mob?! The careful filming and the choreography are pretty obvious, seems to me. It's a film made to appear like a spontaneous eruption of joy, like maybe the best of what a flash mob could, theoretically, be like. If only mob-psychology weren't so heavily dependent on the lowest common denominator, and if only human nature didn't guarantee that any mob of youngsters have several thugs with disgusting thoughts in their minds.

You're definitely right, Tony, about the Belgium example, as far as I can see. But I gather the thug mobs are also pre-planned to some extent, so the term "flash" is maybe a little confusing. In any event, I think it says a lot that one group's idea of staging a spontaneous-appearing group event in the middle of the city is dancing happily and the other group's idea is destruction and mayhem. It makes one hope that one's children will never live in a city, which is unlikely, since people do have to have lives and jobs and can't always live in their quiet home town.

Tony - I think that the very *concept* of a "flash mob" is changing, and changing fast.

Search "flash mob" on YouTube, and what comes up first are funny, harmless things like the Antwerp event, "Frozen Grand Central" (NYC, 1-31-08) and "The T-Mobile Dance (London, 1-16-09).

All carefully planned, choreographed & filmed.

But that was then - while last week's mayhem in Kansas City (my back-yard) is now: "flash mob 2.0," if you will.

Some are predicting much more & worse of the same for this weekend - but I suspect the police will be out in whatever force necessary to prevent that.

btw - it's interesting to note that these sociopathic yoofs are the beneficiaries of one of the most expensive educations in the whole history of the world.


I hope so. Jeff Singer has brought up the flash mob phenomenon on the other thread to suggest the possible need for something akin to Moldbug's dictatorship scenario. Obviously, present laws gives police the powers they need to punish such "youths," the question is, I gather, largely whether they will use those powers and actually arrest people, hopefully acting as a deterrent, and also whether they can _prevent_ the mobbings.

Don't these flash mobs remind anyone of dystrophian science fiction films...Mad Max, perhaps, without the nuclear holocaust or Demolition Man without Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone . This may be one sign that we really have lost it in the world. I fear this generation has seen its better days.

On the other hand, a little EMP every now and again will fix this.

The Chicken

MC, I remember that Larry Niven wrote SF stories that harbored flash mobs. In his stories (written at least 40, maybe 50 years ago), the communication channel was a near-universal media roaming around, with near-universal TV's so everyone saw any event that was an attention getter. Oh, yeah, the other SF component was that we had developed teleportation: people could teleport in to any location that was "hot" within a minute. The mobs could become the size of tens of thousands in moments.

What struck me was the fact that the charming and joyful "flash mob" performance actually begins to break down into something vastly more primitive, aggressive, and unappealing at...oh...about the 2:10 mark of the FIRST video. There's a sort of profundity in the regression that takes place there.

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