TEDxPortland

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Martin Hash
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TEDxPortland

Post by Martin Hash » Sun Apr 10, 2016 10:10 am

My son & his girlfriend, Heath & Jessica, bought my wife, Gwynne, and myself tickets to TEDxPortland. It's an offshoot of the famous TED (“Technology, Entertainment & Design”) feel-good conferences, and we were excited to go, but a little apprehensive that a Portland, Oregon-centric version might be too much self-absorption for normal people. Indeed, TED has always catered to sanctimony but TEDxPortland soared to new heights of blame-immolation, a celebration of guilt, and the we're special, Portland-worship was eye-gouging strong.

The day was beautiful in downtown Portland, and the 3000-seat Keller auditorium was sold-out. We got the farthest seats at topmost level near an exit, anticipating possible escape options from the day-long event. The theme of the show was “Wonderland” and the self-absorptive preoccupation with youth that word evokes explains the people who attend, and the nature of the speakers. Portland is the premiere selfie city: everyone is a “creative,” with lofty aspirations & naïve personal certainty of one's own importance in the world are the norm. It's like Senior year in High School forever.

The first speaker was a balding Old White Guy, fashionably dressed in a denim shirt & slacks, wearing a self-effacing sweater. He switched between uncomfortably proud bragging and unconvincing apologizing for being "entitled,” and I seriously doubted his sincerity. I can't believe the irony of his presentation was lost on the rest of the audience but maybe it was intended to be self-mockery?

There is a connection between smug self-righteousness & casting blame onto others: in the case of Portlandiers & the Social-Network Generation, the culprits are straight old white men, aptly demonstrated by audience applause when their demise was suggested. It's palpable, and it's amplified by political correctness because blame is fashionable, and implying guilt has become a pastime. It's more than an unhealthy preoccupation, it's more of a fascination with, maybe an addiction to, guilt. Blatant hypocritical sexism, racism & open discrimination against one group of people - me.
TEDxPortland 3.jpg
I'd never heard of “Timber Jim,” but his “I'm an alcoholic,” “my daughter was killed in a car accident but I forgive the driver,” “I get angry but I turn it into good” self-aggrandizement fit perfectly into the Portland cult of personal victimhood overcome by magical thinking. He had the whole audience, myself included, standing as a group holding gift scarfs emblazoned with "Spread the Love" high over our heads & chanting - I kid you not. A little aroma therapy & I would have started to do yoga right then. He was followed by the 98-member Portland Gay Men's Choir. Their final song was about a gay orgy. One of the lines was, “I won't be coming home with you tonight.” (Supposedly, you didn't have to be gay to join the choir?)

The obligatory Black female speaker, of course, talked about how Black she was, and how Black her family was, and “where are all the Black people?” She showed pictures of Black people, and didn't find it cynical that there were no White people in any of her pictures, nor her implied condemnation that Oregon in general, and Portland more specifically, were guilty of some kind of racism. Everyone else absolutely swallowed her dreck and asked for seconds but my family, Gwynne especially, was insulted & revolted.

And there was the “hunger” woman: “Oregon was #1 in the whole United States for hungry children,” she announced. Any non-Oregoner could answer why that it: because it was a self-reporting survey, and Portlandiers wallow in victimization: “Oh, yeah, I, like, saw a hungry person once, we're, like, the worst, ya know, and, oh, I've got to cut myself.”

Two of the 12 speakers where kids. There is no child that has enough to say that anyone should be able to capture me in an audience & force-feed hero worship: and their precociousness, ethnicity or attractiveness isn't going to lull me into thinking they're exceptional enough or magical in some way. But the most odiously cult-of-special speaker elevated self-congratulations to a new level; offering recommendations like: women should stand during meetings, a browser plug-in to make women's writing more commanding, and use #High5 more liberally; all the while reveling in her imagined uniqueness of being a minority, short, female & of ambiguous age.
TEDxPortland 2.jpg
University of Oregon football's first Nike-manufactured phenome, Joey Harrington, was easily the best-in-show, maybe the best & most personally resonating speech I've ever heard. He talked about the cult of perfection, and the reality of failure, and he had the personal experiences to back it up. If Joey Harrington was acting, he needs to be in the movies, but if he's showed that emotion at other speaking engagements, I'm going to be severely disappointed.
TEDxPortland.jpg
I couldn't make it though Maurice Conti, the look-at-me-I'm-a-metahuman from Autodesk, so I headed down to start on the hors d'oeuvres. Heath followed soon afterwards. When it comes to swag, TEDxPortland is the clear winner, and I've been bribed by some of the trendiest tradeshows in the world. Everything about everything was pretentious: there was unlimited high-end ice cream, energy drinks, "Stump Town" coffee, backpack, notepad, printed cardboard page book with perforated pages that could be detached to hang on the wall, "Whole Foods" sack lunch, and an open bar. But the best "gift," by far, were the feminine hygiene sanitation pads. Every person in that audience was given a bag, each containing 20 absorbent pads that we were supposed to hand out to homeless women. The whole idea embodies a self-indulgent paternalism beyond anything I've ever experienced outside of Portland, Oregon; breath-taking in its ignorance & arrogance: if homeless women are on the rag, giving 60,000 tampons to an audience of affluent hipsters is downright criminal.
TEDxPortland tampons.jpg
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skankhunt42
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Re: TEDxPortland

Post by skankhunt42 » Fri Dec 02, 2016 7:20 am

I would love to attend one of these one day. Maybe not this theme in particular, but I'd still make a day of it. Sounds awesome Dr. Hash! Great recap.
"just realize that our Welfare states are also propped up by your Warfare. You're not actually defending us from threats, but you are propping us up by fabricating threats to maintain the Perpetual War." - Smitty