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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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leftists are always on the lookout for things to subvert. Because extreme leftists fundamentally cannot create, only destroy

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.

There is no, say, leftist equivalent of Stonetoss, that I know of.

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/

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".

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)

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.

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:

Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ... But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. ...

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:

A tolerant society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant individuals must not be tolerated.

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:

A tolerant(2) society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant(2) individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant(2) individuals must not be tolerated(1).

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.

'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”??

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.

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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