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2014-Era Neckbeard Shaming is BACK
"These Guys are Just Weird" is the new ad from pro-Kamala super PAC Won't Pac Down. You really do have to watch it to viscerally understand the impact. I am not gifted enough with words to give it justice. It's not clear if this ad will ever air on tv (seems a bit racy for that), but the internet is where modern elections are won or lost.
As grossly offensive as I find the ad, I cannot deny being impressed. Just a few days ago I pointed out that Democrats need better messaging if they want to persuade voters. This kind of appeal to base instinct is exactly what wins elections. The ethos of "when they go low, we go high," sure sounds good at dinner parties, but it likely cost Dems the 2016 election. In some sense, I truly think they were afraid of the sheer effectiveness of Willie Horton. It took Trump to scare them enough to pull out the stops.
The left accusing the right of being the weird party seems like throwing stones in glass houses. Do they really want to play that game?
Do people really not remember who hired the women's clothing kleptomaniac? Or who brought post-op FTM topless to the White House? Are they banking on the fact that the right will not retaliate because it'd be uncooth to point out just how insane they themselves look to the average person?
Maybe it's my own weird shitposter heritage that speaks this to me, but calling people weird when your coalition it at least partly made up of bioleninists seems like a bad rhetorical move. Neckbeards are so fucking tame and normal compared to how weird people have gotten now.
And this is all especially true if you want to play this for the internet. Maybe decorum will stop the Rs on TV, but Twitter is just going to reply tweet to you with trannyjaks and stills from the Olympics or Eurovision. It's like I'm watching normies go through the meme evolution of the chud/soyjak dyad years too late. And I'm pretty sure the left wing perspective doesn't really win that battle.
The difference is the left being weird is already priced in and has been for centuries, while the right's whole schtick is supposed to be that they're the normal people party defending normal people who just wanna be left alone from degenerate leftist freaks, so the left gets a lot more mileage out of pointing out the tradcath/nazi frog/yarvinite/etc. fringes of the right who want to reverse the French Revolution or whatever. Especially since Trump's VP pick has significantly closer ties to those circles than your average right-wing pol, even if it's overstated for propaganda purposes.
I really wonder if your random normie dem voter is actually familiar with the depravity on display on LoTT all the time.
I doubt my Dad knows who the clothing thief guy is.
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I don't think you can just play the "who is weirder" game. As aesthetically revolting as alphabet people can be, it doesn't push the same disgust buttons as, "these are the people want to be inside you," does to young women.
I think you can. Just start reminding young women of all the transgender athletes in women's sports, trannies in women's spas, trannies raping women in women's restrooms, trannies in prisons impregnating fellow female inmates, phalloplasty forearms, etc.
Hello, and welcome back, I guess.
Please remember that really hating a group doesn’t give you license to skip all the rules about decorum and charity.
I looked over the rules just now. Was it my use of the word "tranny?" If so, I'll avoid using it. Not sure what else it could have been.
We don't really ban specific words per se, but we do ban things like weakmanning in order to show how bad a group is. In this particular case, you might respond "oh but I was just explaining a way to play the game under discussion" but... I guess what I want to say is that I might accept that excuse from a good poster with a long history in the sub, but I certainly wouldn't accept that excuse from a user with your posting history.
Frankly, if I were you and I wanted to continue posting on the Motte in good faith, the first thing I'd do is roll a new account without an openly antagonistic username. We are, I think, mostly tolerant of quirky usernames but, yours is a pretty bold declaration against, uh, the whole ethos of this site.
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I don't know, if we really want to get ugly, I think "these are the people that want to be inside your children" may actually commend stronger feelings.
If anything, I wonder if the ad and its implications are actually playing a game that the right has mastered first?
"The other side are disgusting and sexually depraved and ugly and want to prey on you" is a card that the right has played many times, surely?
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It does, which is why Trump's connections to Epistein are constantly posted and talked about.
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Your last and biggest black pill to take is "no, they literally don't remember anything the TV doesn't remind them of every five minutes"
Good news: it's a suppository.
There won't be any cognitive dissonance because there's no cognition, and there's no use waiting for it to kick in any moment now, even as the propaganda ramps up to new heights of hysteria.
I keep having to remind myself of that one. But it is less well defined than you're making it out to be. The past is forgotten until is is specifically brought back. And in this case we have the Trump campaign fully able to do this. This isn't government propaganda, it's campaigning in an election.
In that context they have to consider what rhetorical weapons they're handing over to the other side by positioning themselves in this way.
So I'm trying to figure out why they're opening themselves up for that. Do they really thing that either Trump won't go for those attacks or did they not even consider it?
You mean Trump was in some kind of a treaty to not use "my opponents are weird and gross" rhetorical superweapons?
The kind of people Trump is needing to convince to vote for him are those who want to know if he's able to act dignified. While Trump is certainly no stranger to unprompted personal attacks against the other side and its supporters, right now he's got the assassination attempt and the lawfare giving him that more dignified aura. He's managed to genuinely appear like a martyr, whose liberty and even his very life is under attack all because he has the courage to stand up for his people.
The Harris campaign is trying to drag him back down to his usual name-calling tactics, but if they exaggerate their case and make their attacks too vicious and too centered on supporters (as opposed to right wing politicians/leaders) then the electorate might give him a free pass to retaliate.
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Because J.D. Vance's weirdness, whether it's banning abortion, attacking childless women, and the various stuff included in Project 2025 and so on is something median voters care about. They don't care about transgender issues or whatever the Culture War issue of the day really is, as the 2022 midterms showed, when even GOP voters put it at the bottom of their concerns.
Transgender issues are very important to Republican's and centrists who still live in deep blue cities or your typical reactionary Christian's who hate all social liberalism, but the median swing voter in Wisconsin doesn't give a damn, whether they do end up voting for Trump or Kamala in the end, and actually, focusing on transgender issues as your comeback will just make you look more weird.
The median voter's view is, "look, I don't get it, but why are you so obsessed with it, weirdo?"
As someone from Wisconsin, who knows my fair share of swing voters, they absolutely do give a damn. There are plenty of people who aren't diehard for one party or the other, but who find transgender stuff to be fairly off-putting.
The inherent disgust reaction is one of the most powerful emotions humans have. For some, it’s triggered by women showing their penises in locker rooms, for others it’s would-be rapists touching women’s bodies with their words.
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Eh leftists always try the “it’s just so weird and creepy you care so much about this. Who even notices the race of characters in Lord of the Rings”? When provably the left notices and cares a whole damn lot about exactly this sort of thing. This is a typical female social shaming tactic.
I've seen a number of people notice this, and prescribe as the counter-argument "then let me win." If it's such a trivial non-issue, if it's so not worth caring about, let alone fighting over, then why not just surrender the point and let the other side get their way?
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So that's it, the gamble is that Trump ignores it and focuses on the economy, so it's a freebie that will warrant no retaliation?
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There's a lot of irony being told "why are you so obsessed with it" by people who rush out to buy each new version of the LGBT-BLM-weird-circle-&-pawprint-now-for-some-reason flag, who wear "protect trans kids" shirts with knife logos, who get their harry potter scar tattoos covered over with devotional slogans like some born-again Aryan Nations member.
But there's no point in pointing out this irony, because the disgusting juvenile sneering isn't a real belief, just self-aware, calculated bullying.
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