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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".
So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.
It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?
One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me (socialised Blue even if reasonably heretical, as evidenced by my presence on here). There's something that registers as blank aggression in the manner of speech - it's the tone of voice that I expect to hear if I pass through a US small-town downtown on a Friday night and a drunk manual labourer stumbles backwards into me, thinks in his drunken stupor that I shoved him and scopes me out for a fight. I can't see myself relaxing and leaving this running in the background, the way I could with a mainstream generic TV announcer voice youtuber. The n-1st time, incidentally, was Lunduke, a right-wing open source youtuber beloved of the Algorithm. Clearly this is not about content, as especially with Lunduke he mostly says things I agree with on topics that are close to my heart.
As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you? Do you actually not get the same "this person is on the brink of engaging in physical violence" feeling from it, or is it agreeable because you figure that it is a topic where wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction, or is it something closer to "the violent vibes are the marker of a particular culture, and that culture is good and precious" (how I figure soypilled left-wingers cope with gangsta rap)?
On one hand I kinda wanted to agree with you after seeing that Klein vs. Coates interview and some panel with Yglesias on it, back to back, on the other hand I don't know if we want to start judging political subcultures by incredibly popular influencers... or do you want to answer some questions about Hassan Piker?
I can't stand the Quartering even on a good day, but I was somewhat surprised by Lunduke being thrown in the same basket. Sure he's an outragemonger, but most of the time I'd read him as jolly rather than angry.
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His manner of speaking doesn't come across as right-wing principaliter to me, it comes across as uncoordinated and aggressive. I think that's where your feelings of "this is like a drunken man" come from. It feels like he's rocking around and can't sit still. It comes across as sketchy to me -- I'm don't know the man, I'm just expressing what my snap judgment of his presentation says.
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average." The feature that distinguishes a lot of the young conservative men I've met is they just feel calmer and pursue traditional milestones (marriage, children, etc). While there are lots of tells that this specific video creator is a right-winger, if you took the hat away I could easily see him being a Democrat, or a Libertarian, or a radical Socialist. He just feels like "angry man with bone to pick", not so much "proud conservative."
Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.
To be clear, I didn't posit it as a general trait of conservatives; rather, it seems to me to be something that conservatives now appreciate in their influencers/thought leaders/talking heads.
For an example that separates the traits I am talking about from "working class markers" (as @OliveTapenade suggested), I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.
Hm, interesting. I get an intense sense of aggression from that stare, far more than I've ever gotten from any other youtube personality I've ever watched.
Hm, I guess you could see that in some of his clips, but I've enjoyed his longform lectures quite a bit, where he just sounds like a confident professor than a scold. Politics are the worst thing that ever happened to Peterson, and he would have been much better off as a person just remaining quiet about Canadian law and being a quirky psychology professor a little bit too into Jungian archetypes. He was much better as an academic than a surrogate father.
I think there are leftists with the same sort of aggression that appeal to young leftist viewers; intensity appeals to politically-inclined people. And I know of a lot of right-wing influencers with a softer style. But just like Twitter rewards clapbacks, the algorithms reward intensity and anger.
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Not a right-winger either, but I have noticed a number of subtle speech habits or audio cues between each wing?
You're right that the generic right-wing affect is a kind of aggression or rage. It's not that they're all shouting all the time, because they're not, but they often speak as if they're about to. They tend to have some visible signs of masculinity or working-class LARP (the baseball caps, the beards, etc.) and their visual style is deliberately un-classy (that guy's video is plastered with garish ads, which for some reason I see a lot among right-wing commentators, but lefties seem to avoid).
By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.
In both cases this is a generalisation and you can find counter-examples on both the right and the left all day.
Does this apply just to left-wing politics youtubers, or to any "generically left-wing" (~anyone who does not register as having the aggressive affect to me)? (What about, say, this prolific tech reviewer, or these two default left-wingers talking to each other about vaguely politics-adjacent things?) Do you have any examples that you would consider typical?
I'm thinking particularly of politics.
For an example... I remember being very struck by this listening to a podcast with Sophie Lewis, a family abolition advocate. Unfortunately the one I'm thinking of as since been taken down, but this kind of conversation. Other examples of the podcast I was originally thinking of have the same kind of high-strung, nervous energy that I was trying to describe. Another way of putting it might be just the way that Robin DiAngelo talks.
Perhaps a linguist would be able to explain this better than I can, but there's a feeling I get somewhere beneath the surface where, say, Steve Turley comes off as wanting to yell. He has the energy or vibe, I suppose, that I associate with having clenched teeth, or wanting to punch someone. I get the opposite feeling from people like Lewis or DiAngelo - not actually crying or having an anxiety attack, no more than Turley is actually laying about himself with a golf club, but a sort of... 10% or 15% concentration of the same ingredient that would, at 100%, lead to those more spectacular breakdowns.
I do think it's gendered - I don't get, for instance, any of the nervous energy I'm talking about from Ezra Klein. He comes off to me as professional and articulate, and I think in general men don't project anxiety as much as women (and when they do, they come off as effeminate and weak and that makes it very hard for them to build a brand). But I think it's fair to say that women are more prominent in the left-wing sphere, and right-wing culture warrior women do more to imitate the angry affect anyway.
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Red triber, not going to watch a bunch of YouTube videos, but lots of blue tribe speech norms just come off as… some combination of effeminate, corpo-speak, and backstabbing. A ‘firm’ tone of voice is what an honest man who’s sûre of what he’s saying uses.
Blue tribers hedge so they can retreat and use tone defense. 'I was never aggressive and I never actually said that thing so your hostility is proof of your intellectual inferiority in being unable to muster a defense on the grounds of discussion'. That is why two liberal debate shows seem like people taking turns to smugly condescend to each other (or to others) rather than two people having an argument on the same topic. Just watch any Ezra Klein video to see that in action.
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Yeah I have to agree with this, both of the examples seem fine and like men who were confident in what they were talking about. Blue tribe men often sound high pitched and fake.
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The really honest one knows how much he still doesn't know and is humble
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I'm actually not a right-wing listener. I'm a victim of the youtube algorithm where in my past I used to get him recommended, when I saw the dewaffle article I went back through my memory and remembered that particular channel as someone on who comments CW things. Two things of note, I'm not English native speaker so I'm not as sensitive the mannerisms and tone in the same way and the second is that I'm a disappointed socialist who abhors what the left has become when post-modern identity politics. I dabble with libertarian and conservative ideas, but I'm not a true believer.
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