Tea at Trianon: The Sad and Sterile World of Tinder

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 12, 2026

The Sad and Sterile World of Tinder

From Chronicles:

If one wanted to get a crash course in the deterioration of the contemporary American urban collective consciousness, this visual sociology lesson would be a good place to start. The images reveal, in stark and unmistakable terms, how far the assault on our normative standards of good and evil has advanced in our cities. They depict a world in which reproductive heterosexuality is extinct, and all expressions of sexuality deviate from established baselines of biological and cultural patterns. The basic theme is the hatred for and desired destruction of everything normal or wholesome and the embrace of the freakish to replace these things.

One immediately notes in these images the complete absence of any normal-looking people. Everyone appears to be from a distant planet on which garish plumage, like something you’d see on the monstrous birds of a nightmare, is standard. In the dream world of Tinder, everyone has orange hair and is gender-nonspecific. Similarly, they dress as though they are either attending a rave or are working as extras on a science-fiction movie set in a post-apocalyptic megacity.

In addition to the images, each ad was adorned with a trite phrase. These bits of text say much about the culture of the people who are the target consumer group for this service.
Consider “Comfortable Silences.” In this image two (apparently) women are driving in a pink convertible through a desert. Silence. The desert. Cactuses and shrub grass. These are supposed to be the images of “love” in our culture. Warm, human, and verbal communication is apparently no longer the goal. No, the perfect relationship is one in which you are not required to interact in a substantive way with your “partner,” but can instead continue to live an alienated life, but now alone “together” with another alienated alone person to whom you do not speak or even look at. Desolation and emotional isolation, all while sitting in physical contact with another human being, is the message of the image. (Read more.)