On Saturday, May 6, 2023 at 11:15:45 AM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
Old timers might remember Sean Pittman and his claim that the emperor
didn't have any clothes, but whatever he claimed the emperor was missing
his own emperor never had it on to begin with.
Influencers have come up lately on TO as being some danger to the constitution. The news has an article up on Dupes. Influencers are
making it a fad to wear counterfeit clothing that are knockoffs of
designer brand name products. Dupes has a double meaning in this case.
The clothing may be referred to as a duplicate, but the dupes-rubes play
a part in actually wearing the fake junk. It is more of an economic and social stupidity than political or religious, but the parallels to the
ID scam shouldn't be ignored. In most cases the rube-dupes that fell
for the ID scam and tried to wear it knew that it was fake and
counterfeit, but they wore the junk anyway in the hopes of fooling
enough people to make the ruse matter.
There seems to be something cultural about being able to lie to yourself
in order to feel like you are wearing the real thing as long as it looks good enough to fool others.
Ron Okimoto
I'm not sure the analogy with clothing knock-offs really works. I think the "fake junk" is the brand name clothing which is marked up because of a logo. When I lived in SE Asia, near lots of clothing factories you could see that the very same clothes
were going out the front door with the designer label, and out the back door, where they'd be sold at barely above cost and where you could get any logo you wanted sewn onto the clothes. The scam is the idea that the logo adds value, and the rubes are
the people who are willing to pay top dollar for the "real thing" in order to display their wealth. It's pointless conspicuous consumption. [Although in a Darwinian sense maybe it means "Hey, I'm so fit (rich) that I can pay $200 for a shirt with a logo
instead of $20 for the identical shirt without the logo, so come mate with me."]
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