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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)?
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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