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Notes -
Today I got a response to an old comment in which I'd argued
@desolation objected, noting that leftist activism is fully willing to make people uncomfortable:
In the interest of further discussion, I'm moving my response to the main thread.
I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists. I'm not sure what led you to this month-old post, but it was in response to a theory that "Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced." The OP had constructed a rather elaborate model of left-affiliated communities which portrayed them as hugboxing evangelists. In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?
As for the second, yes and no. Yes, quoting Kendi or otherwise engaging in that flavor of anti-*ism is more socially acceptable than just being *ist. That's exactly why it drives away fewer users. It's both harder to deploy (and thus more rare) and less likely to offend leftists, centrists, or even most right-wingers.
If a community bans slurs, they will exclude some free speech absolutists. So long as there are more of those on the right, that will select for leftists. Banning slurs is a much more popular mod policy than banning "you can't be racist against X," probably because slurs are cheap and easy to deploy anywhere. Case study: Xbox Live. Would banning any discussion of critical race theory have had any impact on the population of 13yo gamers? What about banning the word "retard"? Apply the same conclusion to Discord, and we have a mechanism by which a neutral community adopts some "left-wing" norms merely by picking the rules with the most relevance. Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.
Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.
Honestly, I don't see where mainstream publications come into this at all. The comments section for NYT op-eds is by no means a tight-knit hobbyist community. And while the media's stance on doxxing ranges from sympathetic to enthusiastic, I'm skeptical that such outlets have endorsed using slurs.
Then it's not really a meaningful statement, because what you're emphasising is a transitionary state lasting from about 2 weeks to 2 months, before it ends up being run solely by and for leftist extremists.
It will end up full of leftist entryists seeking to co-opt it and turn it into a leftist extremist space, if that's what you mean (it probably isn't.) Overly permissive and nice groups simply don't have the antibodies necessary to reject leftist appropriation efforts, which is why they're natural targets for them. Most notably, "nerd culture" saw this happen to it, because nerds, being outcasts themselves, were very reluctant to "become bad guys" by banishing anybody, and look where it's got them: shoved out of their own communities and hobbies that they grew from the ground up, and replaced by plasticky faux-nerds with only the basest knowledge of the hobbies who are there to skim influence and money off the communities they parasitise.
Again, the point in time at which you're choosing to look is not the end of the evolution of the community. More leftists get added to the staff over time, and they start enforcing "no slurs" extremely selectively to weed out the people they hate (non-leftists). This completes the degeneration of the community into an extremist leftist enclave where far leftists can openly call for the doxxing and death of anyone even suspected of being right-wing without consequence, but saying "tranny" gets you immediately banned. (See: twitter, reddit)
It's not rare at all. If it can happen to a knitting forum it can happen anywhere, and it will, because leftists are always on the lookout for things to subvert. Because extreme leftists fundamentally cannot create, only destroy. They can't meme and have to steal right-wing memes, they can't come up with original concepts for movies and shows and must resort to perverting existing IPs, and they can't create successful communities, only subvert them. And they never have any kind of actual plan for what happens after their fanciful revolution fantasy, that's always someone else's problem -- they're just in it for the burning down and looting of the existing order. Remember the "what will your job be in the leftist utopia" thread where not one person said labourer? No creation. Only destruction.
Even with the caveat "extreme leftists," this is a little too much boo outgroup. Where's your evidence that "extreme leftists" are just inherently less creative, more destructive, and fundamentally devoted to "subverting" things than "extreme rightists"? It's fine to complain about leftists and "converged" organizations, but do not get too comfortable talking about your outgroup as if it's a given that they are all alien invaders. This is still a place for testing shady thinking and talking as if you want everyone to be included, not for kicking up your feet and shit-talking about how your outgroup is just the worst.
Here's a citation from goofy mail prank man:
"Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred."
What's the point of being a leftist? Change society? Don't you already have the power within yourself to behave with humility and charity to help those you perceive as oppressed?
Isn't the need to change others the expression of a will to power as explained above?
You can write a post expanding on that idea if you like. What you can't do is describe your outgroup in a hostile and uncharitable way as if we all accept as a given that "Yes, they are like that" even if "they" would not agree with your characterization.
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It’s important to remember that the internet is a machine that takes the most hostile and unlikeable things that anybody in our outgroup has done and delivers them to our eyeballs on a daily basis.
So people on the left get a feed of angry Trumpers and religious wackos doing regrettable things in public, meanwhile you are being fed angry protesters and the most extreme things that people in your outgroup have done or said.
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Oh come on this is ridiculous. While leftist entryism seems to be a real phenomenon, blanket stating that leftists are just fundamentally evil like this requires a little justification
I thought I did.
Leftists are not capable of harnessing meme magic, for whatever reason. Most left wing memes are repackaged right wing ones ("snowflake", "NPC", "the right can't meme") or painfully unfunny wall of text screeds. That the left can't meme is an incredibly common sentiment, and I've yet to really see anyone refute it decisively. There is no, say, leftist equivalent of Stonetoss, that I know of.
Leftist-dominated media studios (Amazon, Netflix, most of Hollywood) have been engaged in the cultural vandalism of making politically-distorted remakes and sequels that nobody asked for since, well, the Ghostbusters reboot. Star Wars, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, and so on and so forth. Not one has been even close to the originals. Almost all result in their IP being shuttered into dormancy after their run. Doctor Who has done a spectacular swan dive into the toilet and now looks like its future is uncertain -- more widely, people are refusing to pay the BBC license fee at ever increasing rates each year. The new Saints Row surgically excised all the humour from the game and replaced it with complaining about student loans and look where that's gotten. Where they make any wholly original IP content at all, it swiftly fails or never reaches market. (Crunchyroll's High Guardian Spice as an example.)
As far as communities; SomethingAwful faded from a titan of the internet to internet hugbox after the leftist takeover, antiwork was outed as a clown show on national TV, CHAZ descended into warlordism almost immediately and had a murder rate per capita higher than the deepest darkest shithole you can think of. Kiwifarms documented the insanity of a community called the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch. San Francisco has an app dedicated to reporting actual human excrement on its public pathways. Every communist nation ever has collapsed like an inexpertly made souffle. Purity spiralling is incredibly well known as a characteristic of leftist-dominated communities.
There are plenty of failing or failed right-wing communities, of course, but the difference between the two is that usually the right-wing ones are destroyed by leftist interference (kiwifarms being the obvious example, every sub that's been constricted and banned by reddit on the marching orders of AHS). By comparison leftist communities almost always implode from within, though maybe this is a consequence of nobody being willing to take down websites and subreddits because right-wingers get upset over them.
My impression of xkcd the last few years is basically this. And, like stonetoss, the comics that are low-effort outgroup dunks tend to suck. More generally, I think that partisan media, and generally media that prioritizes sending a message over being good, just tends to suck a bit.
The xkcd Free Speech comic [1] from April 2014 was very influential and memetic - as much so as any Stonetonss comic - on Reddit and Reddit-adjacent parts of the internet back when those websites were much more pro-free-speech than they are today.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1357/
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That's the problem there, IMO: XKCD is a lot more fun when it's just being nerdy. It trying to be anything like Stonetoss is like throwing a vintage CJ Wrangler into a drag race.
I mean stonetoss being stonetoss isn't exactly funnier - here's the most recent one where it's just a low-effort dunk, vs this one, which is a bit funnier (though still low effort and not that funny).
On reflection I'd endorse both "the left can't meme" and "the right can't meme". Though is also possible that it's "nobody can meme in a way that people who don't spend all their time immersed in the same culture find funny".
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This is not really an argument, this is just a list of things you dislike.
It's funny to me when people say that the left can't meme. In one sense I get it: the edginess and nihilism that characterises imageboard meme culture is mostly not compatible enough with progressivism for them to create something like the soyjak. And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade. In memetic warfare terms, that's a victory on the scale of desert storm. A similar argument applies to 'stating ones pronouns' and 'the power plus prejudice definition of racism'. These might not be memes in the same way soyjak is a meme, but they are memetic ideas nonetheless and they have won big time.
P.S. There are a few good leftist memes in a format recognisable to the average reactionary shitposter. 'le pol face' is probably the best example.
P.P.S. All souffles collapse, even expertly made ones.
Maybe it's a difference in the type of meme: the right is oddly good at the kind of meme that compresses information/a message into an easy-to-grasp image, the left is oddly good at changing the informational environment itself.
The left can't meme, but it can take over. That's more useful.
(irony intended. the left meme much better than the right, they're just not funny)
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I hate that that's an actual, real, example, and that it's an even better example of progressive "meme magic" than you seem to have laid out.
Consider the initial, Popperian formulation of the Paradox of Tolerance:
This is a milquetoast, classically liberal statement; tolerance in this sense is to literally tolerate other people, no matter how contrary to good taste (or hateful, or fascist, or communist...) they are. It is to tolerate dissent.
This has been morphed to something like:
It does not take any more than a cursory reading to appreciate that Popperian tolerance(1) and progressive tolerance(2) are essentially different words, and that the progressive version of the "paradox" in fact has no paradox in it, merely a word game where tolerance(2) is implicitly equated with tolerance(1).
(Consider:
If I did not make it clear.)
That the nonsensical lack-of-paradox "paradox" is now the mainstream interpretation is at once disheartening and also an excellent example of successful progressive "meme power" in the Dawkinsean sense of the word.
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'globally enforced rule'
Indeed. Leftist memes are enforced at gun point or delete button point.
Stating one's pronouns is literally supported by a billion dollar DEI industry.
Racism = power + prejudice is not in application otherwise the media wouldn't be so careful handling some cases of racial conflicts.
Isn't racism now understood to be “A collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas”??
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I see plenty of leftist memes in my media bubble. Especially on reddit, look at the rise of antiwork or /r/collapse etc etc. Just because you don't see them often or find them funny doesn't mean they don't exist.
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I agree it's a bit too much, but they don't have to be evil to destroy everything. I think many of them have good (if unexamined) intentions, at least at a surface level. I think they still tend to fundamentally destroy things, rather than make them better.
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No, it is definitely possible for a space to avoid the extremists. I have seen ones last years. The keys to success seem like 1) starting out “apolitical” but left-friendly, and 2) having an actual point to the community. Yes, the moment an admin starts getting political it’s in trouble. Yes, if brigaders make a concerted effort to get on staff they can cause damage. No, that’s not guaranteed.
It’s certainly not some magical property of leftists that makes them looting parasites. I don’t know what fantasy land you’re living in where only your ingroup actually builds anything. I’m sure Ayn Rand would be proud.
This point is underemphasized. The left--including the center-left--has by now "no enemies to the left" as a default setting. Once you combine that with "the personal is the political," the spiral to the left is inevitable, if on a variable timetable.
I used to run something more or less equivalent to a hobbyist group with the rules "no politics," "no racism," and "don't be an asshat." I know for a fact that the political leanings of the other leadership was everything from hard left to hard right, but we were able to stick to a firm "get your political discussion kicks elsewhere." I have zero faith that I'd be able to repeat the experience, because of the number of times I've heard "it's not political, it's just being a decent person."
As for slurs, it doesn't have to be a specific word or phrase. I've heard "white dude" be used with every bit of the venom and contempt that a Klansman might use the n-word. Didn't get moderated.
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Such as? Are you very sure they avoided extremists, or could it be that you were blind to them because you don't see them as extreme due to being one of them? Are you entirely sure you're not standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square and wondering why you can't see London?
I'd like just one example of right-wingers taking over a community and, say, instituting rules that say you must refer to everyone as their birth sex or be banned, then, please.
There’s one in particular I can think of, yeah. It’s studiously dedicated to an indie game and enforces a reasonably strict no-politics rule.
It’s very international, with a strong Singaporean contingent. It’s also very gay, to a level which would probably offend more sensitive right-wingers. Neither of these things precludes the mods banning anyone who wants to monologue about politics, left or right. The best example I saw was someone determined to post “America will nevertheless be tried for war crimes!!1!” But usually bans are reserved for trolls. So I’d call it affably leftist, not militant.
The biggest crisis faced by this server occurred when a certain YouTuber reviewed the game. This resulted in a tide of meme spammers making edgy Holocaust jokes.
Your request for evidence is complicated by the free-speech absolutists, who as much more likely to stick around a right wing space. And of course the old school sensibility of “there are no women on the Internet” makes such an unverifiable rule unlikely. I’d be willingly to bet that you could find neutral-turned-right spaces in gun or survival culture, or perhaps on alternate history fiction boards.
I'll just work on the assumption you're in the furry inflation vore fetish community, since he hasn't reviewed many other indie games lately and it'd fit for the gay thing https://youtube.com/watch?v=VqasJcCUAA8
What about Caves of Qud?
He'd already said it wasn't that in another thread. The part I'm still wondering about is the Singaporean element.
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See I read this and I just thought "wait, Pyrocynical made a game?"
Jfc I can't even tell what that is but I want it to get off my lawn. God damn zoomers.
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Noooooooo comment, lol.
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Okay, but I don't want you to make a bet, I want you to actually find the examples of right-wing entryism triumphant resulting in purges of the left in these communities.
We can point to plenty examples of the reverse! It is not enough for you to merely posit the existence of a counter.
I recall visiting a Russian chan-slash-web-culture wiki recently and seeing the Russian-Ukrainian war covered almost exclusively from a hard pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian stance. That's in a space which I recall as rather irreverent to the powers that be.
I'm skeptical that the Russian chans were neutral or left to begin with, but I have no insight into Russian internet culture, so who can say? I was thinking more the western world, though. The relevant chunks.
It's a mistake to view Russian politics through the binary lens of Dems and Reps in the first place. However, the official position of the state is culturally to the right of the West, and that of most dissidents is to the left of the state. Of course, there are also the "50 Putins" types, particularly visible today, who are pissed that Ukraine isn't nuclear ashes/barren wasteland within Russian borders yet.
Crucially, support for the state was supposed to be rare on chans.
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That does remind me, what about the Russian gachimuchi community/ies?
What about them? If you're asking whether they were right-entried or not - I'm not involved enough and they're too ironic to say from the outside. I don't recall anything blatant like "femboy fascism" though.
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Was the "certain YouTuber" Sseth? I remember there was some drama around Caves of Qud when he released a video about it.
Yup. The Ssethtide. Different game, though; I actually haven't played Qud.
Dude is hilarious.
Ssethtide was SS13, wasn't it?
Yeah, that's one thing, I think there was also some alledged brigading of the CoQ Discord, or at least some sort of freakout there.
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