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The trilogy is complete.
This is the third time in my life that a professional pundit has made a shocking political transformation, I found out about it after the fact, and I'm left wondering how it happened. You'd think there'd be some drama YouTuber recapping these stories in a well-edited highlights reel, but it's all just spread out over many, many hours of streams.
First, it was shoe0nhead. I stopped paying attention to her completely after her feud with ShortFatOtaku, and then I heard about her getting involved with BreadTube (yuck) through Sargon of Akkad, and now she's... making really based tweets about current events that keep finding their way to me? I asked what happened, and people say she's not a socialist anymore and has a trad right boyfriend. I'd love to know how that last shift happened, because I've never seen someone go that far left and then pull back.
Then, it was Red Scare. I never paid attention to Red Scare, but I knew they were a sister act to Chapo Trap House and that prominent celebrities listened to the show, and I knew about the "Sailor Socialist" incident where the InfoWars reporter rudely accosted Dascha but asked totally reasonable questions, which Dascha responded to with dismissive quips, which meant she won in the eyes of the internet. Now the hosts are tradcaths, one of them got kicked off an HBO drama for being anti-woke, and they're doing right-wing tribal signalling. I don't know when or how that happened.
But now I just found out about the MOST INSANE one of all.
I remember the groyper wars from four years ago. The one good thing Nick Fuentes ever did. But the groypers lost, right? Covid killed all their momentum. This year, AFPAC died because Fuentes lost all his fans. Even the Kanye West bump didn't save him.
But today, on Twitter, I saw Charlie Kirk (rightfully) defending Elon Musks's statements on Da Jooze. In the replies, someone pointed out that over a month ago, he interviewed Steve Sailer on his podcast.
For one thing, I'm shocked that I didn't hear about this immediately when it happened. But also, HOW did it happen? Kirk's organization was blacklisting people who got near Unz or VDare.. heck, people who just admitted to reading them! He's part of Con Inc! Now he's okay with it? What changed? How did this happen? I thought the groypers lost! Was this a downstream effect of Musk taking over Twitter? How the heck???
Looking over at this post, I spent too much of this post talking about show and Red Scare. The reason I'm posting tonight is because I want to know if anyone understands why Kirk is suddenly breaking bread with the people who were his enemies just yesterday.
Hold on. Even when she was involved with BreadTube, she didn't really go pro-woke (she toned down her criticism for a while, and then went "aah, fuck it"). She still is socialist as far as I can tell, and anyone claiming that her trad-right husband moved her away from it, doesn't know what they're talking about, because the dude is one of those Catholic economic-left types. You could nationalize all the Fortune 500 companies, and he'd shrug or maybe quibble about some technical details.
So she's not doing streams with Vaush anymore? Is she part of any specific YouTube niche now?
I don't watch Vaush, so I don't know, but if he couldn't hold on to his BFF relationship with Destiny, I doubt he could handle Shoe.
I think she kind of hangs out with anyone. She made a few haha-only-serious jokes about the key to her survival in Cancel Culture being having a fanbase consisting of 3-4 ideologically opposed groups that hate each other, so I think she deliberately avoid falling into a neiche.
How are you guys aware of any of this? I googled and it appears you're talking about literal teenage girls. 'shoeonhead' is literally a teenage girl who looks like a titty streamer. 'Destiny' is literally a fat beardo gamer kid. Is this really the forefront of public discourse now? If so, is there anything left to save? Nick Land was right.
I watch her videos and read her tweets, they're funny. I'll go so far as to say she's a better comedic writer than any hack hired at SNL, John Oliver's, Steven Colbert's, and the rest of the John Stuart Industrial Complex.
We apperantly now have literally teenage 32 year old women. As far as I can tell, she never used her body, in the way you describe, to get attention on the internet.
That one admittedly is a guilty pleasure, and I only check him out when he gets into some big drama with someone.
No. I have no idea how you even came to the come conclusion that this is anywhere close to what I believe.
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Ah ha, this is my take. I expect to not know about stuff on the internet, but as you say, is this the level large sections of the online world are involved with? It sounds like celebrity gossip and petty rivalries of the most lurid reality tv type serial.
If there is lineage, as someone suggested, from 4chan, then this would explain a lot. Nothing good can grow from nihilism. Is internet just no good for popular communities to develop that actually lead to meaning-making as opposed to cynical audience appeal (and subsequent audience capture).
Is larping, hot-takes and terminally online self-referencing not wearing itself out by now?
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They're one of the more popular youtubers/streamers that focuses on political content. If you only read news/articles you probably don't encounter these people, but they're prevalent on youtube/twitch/tiktok. Watch a few political videos and they start showing up on your recommended page. It's where a lot of young people get their political opinions and news from nowadays, since they aren't watching television news channels as much.
The Israel/Hamas conflict has actually been getting Destiny a ton of traction since he has a middle of the road take, and a lot of the political left-leaning streamers have a pro-Hamas take, so there's tons of videos/clips of arguments around the Israel/Hamas situation. Honestly not worth your time for anything but entertainment since it's incredible just how poorly informed and horrible some of their takes are. You can ignore them and not miss much, but it is a bit worrying that many people are getting their political opinions from people that are in no way qualified to be speaking about these kinds of situations.
As opposed to what, the infallibly virtuous philosopher kings who ran the media in previous generations? At least these people aren't pontificating from atop a heap of fraudulently-acquired positive affect.
At least there used to be some sort of journalistic standard, and it was a major scandal when major news publications pushed outright lies. Opinion pieces were always a thing, but normally major news stories would at least have sources and there was an attempt to at least present the facts, even if it's in a dishonest manner.
You could argue these streamers also "pontificate from atop a heap of fraudulently-acquired positive effect" since you know, a lot of them create echo chambers by banning all dissidents, they tend to only promote other people that agree with them politically, and they present themselves as experts and speak in an authoritative manner on subjects they know nothing about. Having nuance actually outcasts you from the community. Destiny is a great example of someone who because he is willing to show some nuance on the Israel/Palestine situation gets shit on by a lot of far-left leaning political streamers.
You seem to be saying that these political streamers are superior sources of news than traditional mainstream media. There may be some standouts, but you can't seriously be telling me someone like Hasan Piker is a better source of news and a role model for political opinions than the mainstream news media.
If you have to compare her to someone, it should be comedic political commentary shows like the Daily Show. If you think they spell our doom as well, fair enough, but the "journalistic standard" died decades ago.
Yeah, but it's damning with faintt praise.
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I think I understand what you mean by a "journalistic standard", but it seems to me that this standard does nothing to prevent deceit on the part of journalists, and only exists to insulate them from the necessary consequences of that deceit. It does not impede them from routinely deceiving their audience, but only codifies a method to enact that deceit with perfect legal and social cover. It seems to me that such standards are actively harmful to the public at large; we would be better with no standards at all, and a concomitant increase in public skepticism.
To me, the term "major scandal" means an incident that causes or at least threatens severe consequences for the people involved. I can think of lots of times when the media has been caught pushing outright lies, many of them resulting in dire real-world consequences. I can't think of a single time when this evident malfeasance resulted or even plausibly threatened severe consequences for even a single media organization, or even an individual journalist. It seems to me that a "major scandal" for the media means that they may have to publish a news story about how they've totally fixed the problem and it can't possibly happen again, they swear, and even this level of consequence is a rarity compared to the base rate of naked deception.
The fact that you possess this attitude toward Hasan Piker is exactly why I would prefer people generally to get their information from Hasan Piker and others like him. Your assessment of his credibility seems reasonably correlated to his actual credibility, so it seems unlikely that he could successfully lie to you, and very unlikely that he could do so in a highly consequential way. Even his most diehard fans are not going to presume that his credibility, impartiality and correctness are common knowledge society-wide. He does not have the power of "sure it's true, I saw it on TV".
Legacy media, by contrast, have also created echo chambers by banning all dissidents, only promote people who agree with them politically, and present themselves as experts on subjects they know nothing about, and routinely eschew the very concept of nuance and balance. In addition, they are deeply integrated into our centers of social and political power, and they secretly coordinate their reporting to maximize partisan control over and political advantage within those centers. Their record of mendacity is appalling, as are the accumulated consequences of their lies. Piker is, at worst, an amateur liar. Journalists are professional liars, working in an industry optimized from the ground up to produce precision falsehood on an industrial scale.
The above would be bad enough, but most people assume whatever they say is true, with the result that they have a considerable degree of control over the conversations it's possible to have, even among those who know they are not trustworthy. The New York Times really does set the nation's agenda, even for those of us entirely aware that they're fundamentally, murderously untrustworthy. That is what a "heap of fraudulently-acquired positive affect" looks like. By comparison, the Hasan Pikers of new media are working off old pennies they found in the couch cushions.
If you measure "honesty" in Lawyer-speak, journalists are reasonably honest. If you measure "honesty" by the variance between the plain facts of a matter and the impression the author intentionally conveys to the reader, Journalists are one of the most dishonest groups of people living.
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Pretty sure she's in her 30s.
We have not yet begun to defile ourselves.
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