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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.

I've long thought that while the thrust of the criticism "The Left Can't Meme" is true, the smug certainty of that criticism has become overblown. When the Left memes, people listen, even if they, like ContraPoints, aren't funny.

I'm starting to accept that there just isn't a place for people like me who think the left has to be opposed strongly and swiftly from within mainstream politics. From the reception of my previous comment, I'm gathering that people here don't tend to believe that Trump can be that person in mainstream politics. If not Trump, then who? If all of the shenanigans pulled by Biden et al over the past three years can't be held to account then where are we as a culture?

I guess I'm feeling defeated. Once again the establishment gets to tell the story exactly the way they want to tell it.

If not Trump, then who?

That's a terrible line of thought. «If not Putin then who?!» for 20 years straight is how Russia got into this mess. Authoritarians like to exploit the sense of existential anxiety, the limbic, system-1 dread: it makes the electorate desperate to hold tight to the closest semi-viable thing they can feel, let it even be a straw; and then the aspiring Führer's only remaining task is to always be close. It's not a hard one too. The second part of Putin's formula is «never swap horses while crossing the stream». The stream never ends.

Trump's no Putin or Xi or Erdogan or even Orban, but he's certainly circling the same attractor.

I'm sure there was some advocate of secular dictatorship in 1790s France who remained staunchly opposed to Napoleon all the way through 1815 because "Well not like that"

You only live once and you if you wait on principle you'll come to your grave having spent your life waiting. You dance with the girl at the ball.

I'll grant that you only live once [citation needed], however Americans have presidential elections every four years, with dozens of grifters to choose from in the primaries, and there is such a thing as the optimal stopping theorem. Stopping too early can be catastrophic.

I understand the desperation. Trump was the only one in a long while who threw the right-wingers a bone. But 2016 anti-establishment sentiment, roused by decades of cruder deceit, was demanding meatier concessions.

The thing is, the regular state of those elections is choosing between red puppet and blue puppet.

Trump and populists in general represent an alternative to that. The possibility of a drainage of the swamp, if you will.

Those are not supposed to be available in "democracy". By design. So people will cling to the rare opportunity, however doomed it was from the start

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