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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44950 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Did the Right lose the terminally online by emphasizing consuming rather than communing?

Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced. You find this on Twitter and Discord. While there’s a fair amount of complaining typical of online spaces, leftist spaces are unique in saturating their mutuals in compliments and praise. There’s an oversaturation of positive feedback, and negative feedback is seen with suspicion. Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons. While this oversaturation leads to an over-sensitivity, not to mention some bad behaviors and creations, it also means that the online community forms strong bonds and is only associated with positive emotions.

In contrast, Right-oriented spaces are less keen on compliments and engage in more stressful catastrophization. They consume too much news and complain too much about the news. Culturally right online spaces are more socially stressful and have less bonding. They are critical of the liberal-coded heaping of compliments and empathy, and consequently miss out on a lot of the power and energy that’s present in Leftist spaces. There’s also an optimism deferential, with Leftist spaces generally more optimistic despite performative lamentation, and Right spaces more pessimistic, at least since ~2018.

This is a poor example, but imagine watching Contrapoints versus Jordan Peterson. This is a poor example by necessity — the Right does not have any counterpart to Contrapoints. You can watch Contrapoints and come away without any argument or evidence — but then you would be missing the point; the point is that you’re having an endearing and charming parasocial relationship with the person, and the outfit changes and odd social contextual changes simply work to increase the emotional affect, like a dozen playdates in video format.

There’s a phenomenon online where hobby spaces get “taken over” by more progressive mod teams in a variety of domains but especially terminally online spaces (video game modding, illustrations, speedrunning, etc). We see this on Reddit too. One possible reason for this is the uniquely reinforcing culture of online Leftist spaces. Someone becoming a mod on an otherwise unknown speedrunning discord community is something that would be praised in these communities and an earnest mark of reputation. And maybe they are right to do so — in any case the effect is that these small positional advancements can be a source of continual reward for the Leftist enjoying their quasi-lovebombing, while at the same time advancing the cause day after day.

You are conveniently forgetting Q and all that sphere exists. Or the entire edifice of religions and various right wing ideologies which are still around and well.

I don't blame you, the platforms do everything to show you contra and not the competition but it's there.

You're right in that the right is correctly identifying they are under attack and losing, and signing up to that cause isn't fun, so it doesn't attract the people who do it for those reasons. But what's there to do? The fun tactics of the right (a little trolling) are met with strong repression and getting banned from everything everywhere.

Q is a stressful, antisocial phenomena and was from the get-go IMO. It didn’t promote bonding, praise, or positive emotion. It promoted rabbit holes, paranoia, and subscriptions to Q analysis. I actually considered some years ago that it was an Intel-job specifically to neuter the activism of the Right, because it prevented pretty much anything but conspiratorial rabbit-holling and conjecture. I suppose there is something to be said about the belief that you’re one of the chosen supporters who knows the real truth, but this is of modest benefit compared to the alternatives of community participation.

I don’t think winning or losing factors in to this so much, I mean you have MAPs trying to make the same community as Transgenders, and MAPs are going to lose no matter what. I also don’t think the Christian Right has communities as vehemently positive as Leftist communities, at least I haven’t heard of them.

The Christian Right has a lot of communities that are incredibly positive. They’re just IRL. And far right wingers mostly going to irl for their bonding and community needs explains a lot of the difference, honestly.

new age Q-ists are pretty big about bonding, praise and positive emotion. Lots of yoga teachers and what not.

Lots of people had bonding and praise in Q threads. They were originally excited and would heap liberal praise on those who interpreted the various cryptic clues and symbols.

You could say the same for scientology.

I don't think it is necessarily one or the other. There are still anti-vax rallies every now and then here despite many of us now going months at a time without thinking of COVID any more. It may be conspiratorial, catastrophising, and paranoid, sure, but also a lot these people just like being a part of something, formed a bit of a social group they find meaningful and just want to keep the vibe going (even if it seems a bit anachronistic to the rest of us). The protest is less about the protest qua policy influence than the chance to see all your like-minded friends.

My uncle fell hook line and sinker for it. He is a nuclear scientist for GE. He is all about new reactor designs. But god damn he has become a full Q, space laser retard.

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