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When I think of the last 40 years of neoliberalism, I think of a game of musical chairs, in which the music's tempo steadily increases, the number of chairs rapidly decreases, and the penalties for not having a chair become more ever-more cruel.
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Movements for racial, gender and gender identity justice are a source of panic for the most precarious chair-chasers, because these movements increase the number of people who get to compete for chairs - but don't increase the number of chairs in play.
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The wealthiest, most powerful people could mobilize their fortunes to secure chairs and for a long time, the game served them: the increasing desperation for chairs on the part of everyone else translated into ready access to toadies, jesters, bodyservants and courtesans.
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But we're at the endgame. The number of chairs is trending to single digits. The world will soon boast one or more trillionaires. You can't amass a trillion dollars solely by raiding the pathetic reserves of poor people - you've gotta pauperize some billionaires.
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The 2019 Varsity Blues scandal revealed the desperation of the chair-habituated mid-upper echelon, who had participated and benefited from the maintenance of a wildly unequal society but now saw that their kids would have no place in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_scandal
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_scandal
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It turns out that the Varsity Blues parents were amateurs. The real pros don't cheat their kids into sports-based elite college admissions - they DESTROY their kids to get sports-based elite college admissions.
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Ruth S Barrett's feature in the current issue of @TheAtlantic exposes the jaw-dropping world of ultra-rich families' tormented children and their desperate, moneyball gambits to buy their way into sports scholarships.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-lacrosse-niche-sports-ivy-league-admissions/616474/
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-lacrosse-niche-sports-ivy-league-admissions/616474/
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It's a longread and worth your time, but here's a quick tldr: you've got kids whose parents move Olympians into their guest-cottages to train them in squash or fencing in private gymnasia on their sprawling estates.
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They spend vast fortunes flying them around the country and the world competing. Children are exhorted by professional athletes to stab each other with fencing foils until they are at the point of collapse.
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Then they're given a break to eat dinner out of a cooler toted by nannies who bark math problems at them. Their parents argue about whether to disclose their kids' multiple concussions to new coaches, and the kids grow up with long-term chronic sports-related disabilities.
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And the thing is, the Ivies and Big Ten schools were already seeing through all of this before the pandemic. Even schools that really wanted to have a top lacrosse or water-polo team were savvy enough to understand that these kids had already peaked.
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If you're 18 and performing in the 94th percentile after being trained for a DECADE by Olympians, nothing the school does will make you any better. How could they? If you want to find prodigies, pick undertrained kids who still perform competitively and polish THEM.
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What's more, these kids are basket cases. They arrive at university with no grip on reality, no capacity for self-management or self-actualization. They spiral into substance abuse and mental health crises.
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These sports admission programs often have their roots in an attempt to provide space at elite schools for poorer kids, especially kids of color (that was definitely the case with the USC football team when I taught there).
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But the chair-having motherfuckers figured out how to buy these seats, too.
And why? Why destroy your kids' health and their sanity? Why watch as your adolescent daughter gets STABBED IN THE THROAT in a fencing competition and then re-enroll her in fencing?
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And why? Why destroy your kids' health and their sanity? Why watch as your adolescent daughter gets STABBED IN THE THROAT in a fencing competition and then re-enroll her in fencing?
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Because the number of chairs trends to single digits. That's why you pay nannies to do oppo research on the kids your offspring competes against; it's why you pay dirty tricksters to bombard admission departments with dirt on kids competing with yours for a spot on the team.
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All that was BEFORE covid: parents waking up and realizing that they were destroying their kids' life for a gambit that would probably fail, but doing it anyway because they knew that a world of trillionaires would leave the chairless grubbing for roots and insects.
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And now the elite schools are simply getting rid of the teams these children have been optimized to play for, in a process that recognizes that they were just a way for the wealthiest, whitest plutes to buy their way in.
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Hilariously, billionaire parents have responded by starting "urban" leagues for elite sports to create the appearance (if not the reality) that your fencing team might not be a back-door for the ex-CEO of American Express's progeny to attend an ivy.
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While others are promising second-tier colleges that starting a water polo team will bring in a bunch of full-tuition kids who've been honed from birth to simulate one another's death by drowning. It ain't gonna work. Here's a telling quote:
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"Sorry, but there’s no way in hell. What parent wants to have a child who’s going to be playing for a bottom-tier school with bottom-tier academics in the armpit of the United States? I want to be polite. But there’s no way in hell." -Water-polo mom from Stamford.
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In Capital in the 21st Century, @PikettyLeMonde describes how the Age of Colonization ended primogeniture, whereby great fortunes were kept intact by passing inheritances solely to the eldest son, while other kids became spouses or clerics.
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Colonial looting made it possible for the Great Families to bud off new fortunes for each of their offspring, for two or three generations. When they exhausted the world's supply of brown people to enslave and rob, that ended.
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Plutes whose parents and grandparents' cohorts had each started a new fortune had to tell their own kids that the ride was over. But any system that has been in place since your grandad was a kid is effectively eternal and it was unthinkable that the eternal would end.
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So the plutes decided that it wouldn't end. They would all get new fortunes, and since they'd exhausted the world's supply of poor people, they turned on each other. We call that fight World War I.
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For 40 years, the world's wealth has been gathered into fewer and fewer hands, as oligarchy's musical chairs game has run faster and more vicious. Now, the chairs are tending to single digits.
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Plutes are desperate. The idea that their kids would lead worse lives than theirs - an idea the rest of us have been expected to swallow for a quarter-century - is unthinkable.
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So they're not accepting it. They are destroying their own kids in a bid to acquire one of the final chairs. Most of those kids will not get a chair, and the ones that do will be broken and shriveled things, stunted by a lifetime of abuse.
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But it's not them I'm worried about. I'm worried about the kids that DON'T get a chair. Their parents were willing to torture their own kids FROM BIRTH to get them a chair. When that fails, what will Plan B look like?
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