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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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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.

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.

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, 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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