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Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.
Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.
As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.
Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.
And to think that this all happened because Scott platformed Mencius Moldbug back in 2013. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
I wouldn’t really mind Elon becoming techno-monarch tbh, but I don’t trust Trump with absolute power.
I don't agree with your first sentence. As cliche as it might seem, I am coming around to thinking that it all kicked off with GamerGate, when lots of people started noticing that something was off.
I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.
There was a period where people were claiming memes got Trump elected (or at least selected in the primary). This obviously wasn't the case except in the most trivial sense. It wasn't God Emperor Trump memes or the_donald, those were all riding on existing enthusiasm for the guy who broke with the learned helplessness strategy on a few issues central to the base.
It's just overly online people over-estimating the impact of the things they care about.
I'm probably above the 90th percentile of grass deficiency here. I was actually still reading IGN and other games sites for reviews and even I couldn't be fucked to drill through the tangle of claims that was Gamergate. It was just another populist vs journalist flashpoint AFAICT.
I'm sure there were people saying memes got Trump elected, like people saw him shopped as God emperor and were overcome with the need to vote for him, because the internet is hilarious. But there is a defensible version of that claim I think, which is that Trump's meme game won him the election. But by that I mean his intuitive understanding of the zeitgeist and the various thoughts and emotions that were being ignored by the establishment.
I mean, sure. He has good political instincts for where the base is (not that it was unclear immigration was an issue voters cared about). So did Obama.
But, if we're going with that older definition of meme, then the mainstream media would arguably be more responsible for "memeing" him into existence. Both in terms of the free advertising/transmission and by condemning him so much.
Something they've never psychologically recovered from.
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What makes a meme funny is in part the truth communicated by it. It is just a form of satire
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