This is so spot on and I think the best we could do to those 8th grader brained edgelords is to simply ignore them.
Like we can’t stop them from manufacturing outrages but if we can react like “huh, what are you talking about?”, I think this is the best way to discourage those behaviors and make swing voters realize they are total wacko.
And also as a Japanese, I apologize we exported 2chan here to create 4chan…
Great post. It's infuriating (I guess that's the point). And I continue to be driven nuts by why this kind of thing sticks on the left but not the right.
I know CHH posted about that recently, and I commented with some additional theories on that. But none of it is particularly satisfactory.
And it seems really bad that relatively normal people who are not super online can be incepted with "liberals need to answer for being mad an Sydney Sweeney!" even when they aren't. While Republicans don't have to answer for actual Nazis that are in their corner and actually, ya know, exist and are even public about being Nazis!
This came up talking to my dad the other night. He's a boomer and left-of-center but moderate. Classic Bill Clinton democrat kinda guy hates Trump and modern GOP with a passion. He has never had a social media account of any kind. Smart guy, grad school educated, reads constantly. Not, broadly speaking "uninformed"
He mentioned, specifically, "man, the Democrats are never going to win again if they keep doing shit like with this blonde chick!"
It made it to him and was convincing; or at least convincing enough!
You all lack introspection to an almost unbelievably extraordinary extent.
The Leftists who say the things that the Right attributes to them are legion, and easily found. Meanwhile, right-wing people who believe what the Left attributes to them cannot be found. The Left straw-mans constantly, the entire worldview is built on straw-men, and somehow you thought it was a good idea to complain that the Right is straw-manning.
Extraordinary lack of introspection.
And self-inflicted, as a product of generations of gleefully curating news feeds and convincing yourselves that it's valid to simply ignore everything that doesn't fit the narrative.
I realize you're either trolling or too stupid to engage with so I am falling into a trap one way or another. But this is just so so obviously not true.
People have looked into the Sydney Sweeney contagion and found that, before right wing accounts raised the salience of the issue, posts about it had been seen by like a few thousand total people are were generated by accounts with relatively tiny following.
The question is not "do some people who self define as on the left have wacky onerous opinions?" They totally do! It's why does that become a question actual Democrats have to answer for while Republicans don't, in kind.
Show me the elected democrat who has said the Sydney Sweeney add is eugenicist. I'll wait.
Meanwhile, on the other side, I will do myself a disservice in the argument. I will not use examples of people on the right who have awful opinions but are merely peope on internet that favor Republicans; as would be the analogy to some liberals on Tik Tok getting bothered by Sweeney.
No, I will only use examples of people either in the government under this Republican administration OR those with close ties/given access by said administration.
First, a cheap one from the top: the actual President, holding broad support from party, has been found guilty of sexual assault (in a state case that would qualify for rape in most other states).
Let me again handicap myself: how do you think right-leaning media would react if a Democratic politician (not THE PRESIDENT) even retweeted someone who had previously said anything pro-sexual assault? Think it would be nothing?
Ok, fine, whatever, that's just the actual President and that's something he did a long time ago, after all! Psh, lame example. It's not like he would ever socialize with someone who has publicly state admiration for Hitler and self-describes as a white supremacist! Oh, shit, he totally did do that! (Nick Fuentes).
Well, ok, at least he didn't like, hire that guy or anything. It was just a dinner, nbd!
Oh, shit, this is awkward, the WH liaison to DHS has publicly expressed anti-semitism (multiple times going back years) and worked with/for and has publicly expressed admiration for Andrew Tate; ya know, the guy who proudly self-titles as a Mysoginist and is currently fleeing charges of rape and human trafficking.
I could keep going, like how the Vice President has praised the ideas of, and claimed influence by a dude who, among other things, thinks the US should be a monarchy, believes in race-science IQ linkages, thinks some races are better suited for slavery (which he has in past also said is maybe optimal rather than something to be loathed and abolished).
Shit, I accidentally threw another one in there. My bad.
Shut the fuck up JD. Go back to infowars you fucking dick bag. This article is right on point. The anti woke has become way more reactionary and obnoxious than the woke ever was. It’s a full on grift now and you know it. The whole Sweeney thing was absolutely over blown by the right. The woke bullshit peaked 4 years ago and it’s you right wing assholes keeping it alive because you have nothing of actual substance to add to the culture. It’s all about owning the libs and you know it.
Your juvenile language reflects an immaturity to match your ignorance.
Your kind desperately exclude as many information sources from your circles as you can because anything you don't tightly control floods you with evidence that everything that you want to believe is a lie.
Here's the thing: You can't win unless we play along.
So go on promoting your party-wide Hamas support and other man-in-a-dress-is-a-woman Orwellianisms. You're only resigning yourselves to the dustbin of history.
The point is valid but so is the original. This is nearly a week after the ad debuted, and the reason it's there is because the Find Angry Libs industrial machine rose the salience of the issue in public consciousness. It's bad that places like MSNBC take the bait, but it started with bait, not the online left actually taking a collective stand against something the way they might take a collective stand against, I dunno, Trump's birthday parade.
I looked for an actual left wing overreaction to the ad and all I could find was some obscure source called "MSNBC". Having said that, I only spent 12 seconds searching so maybe there are other places, too: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna221630
The Sidney Sweeney discourse on the left of center to left was actually pretty healthy. A couple of leftists got hysterical, some of them had big platforms, but the center left was able to push back and say that they were being ridiculous without anyone getting cancelled or shamed into silence. It’s not 2018 anymore on the left and one clickbait headline won’t change that.
I pay as little attention to RW media/socials as I can get away with, and it's a wonder what diligent curating can get you.
I thing I've noticed though is that there's a clamor from a faction of the center-left for angrier liberals. They seem to want denunciations of this or that 'woke' or 'left' individual or tweet or whatever, under the belief that only by our joining in the RW pile-on to ridiculous mad lib stuff, can normies understand that the RW is wrong about us. I am far from convinced by the electoral efficacy of this; it seems more like the Waiting for Johnny Unbeatable fantasy. But if everyone agreed with me, well, we'd have a different world.
I have noticed two bizarre liberal outrage fantasies over the past month or so: 1) feminists will fight you over the right to feed children dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets; and 2) liberals hate air conditioning (the cited source was a story about a debate in France).
A very quick search is telling me these videos started in 2021. I guess we should be thanking Biden for bringing America back after the disaster of the first Trump term. What’s most infuriating is that the people who lap up this bullshit are allowed to vote.
And unless you guys figure out how to move meaningful discourse out of the online outrage machine, your country is doomed. Honestly it’s probably beyond saving at this point — not because of Trump, Trump is a symptom, but because being the Biggest Show on Earth, US federal politics is impacted more strongly by the incentive structures of online discourse than anywhere else.
Jeremiah you more incisively diagnose the problems here than almost anyone else. And it’s a cheap shot to say “so what’s your solution” — there may not be one, or at least not one you think has a chance of working.
So let me ask, what do you think the endgame is? Breakup of the US into more local polities where people can interact offline more easily? Civil war? The Singularity and then we all just “live” in wireheaded hedonism?
This is probably too long of a question to answer in a comments section. But I find people’s plans on how to escape the endgame more interesting these days than further elaboration of a diagnosis that you already cogently made years ago, for anyone intelligent enough to listen.
For a good example of a blog that has pivoted — Jonathan Haidt after publishing The Anxious Generation has shifted his blog to mostly talk about solutions. They look like The Benedict Option — getting your family out of the toxic culture that leads to kids rotting online — but those are the only solutions radical enough to work. And more interesting to read than yet another “hey, the Visigoths have sacked another city, the Roman frontier is in bad shape”.
You seem close to one of my own pet theories, that a lot of right wing "dog whistles" aren't actually coded messages to an extremist cohort, but rather bait for paranoid leftists who close read everything, and who can then be scapegoated to make their whole side seem insane.
This is so spot on and I think the best we could do to those 8th grader brained edgelords is to simply ignore them.
Like we can’t stop them from manufacturing outrages but if we can react like “huh, what are you talking about?”, I think this is the best way to discourage those behaviors and make swing voters realize they are total wacko.
And also as a Japanese, I apologize we exported 2chan here to create 4chan…
Apology accepted, the good anime that comes out of Japan is worth 4chan idiocy.
Great post. It's infuriating (I guess that's the point). And I continue to be driven nuts by why this kind of thing sticks on the left but not the right.
I know CHH posted about that recently, and I commented with some additional theories on that. But none of it is particularly satisfactory.
And it seems really bad that relatively normal people who are not super online can be incepted with "liberals need to answer for being mad an Sydney Sweeney!" even when they aren't. While Republicans don't have to answer for actual Nazis that are in their corner and actually, ya know, exist and are even public about being Nazis!
This came up talking to my dad the other night. He's a boomer and left-of-center but moderate. Classic Bill Clinton democrat kinda guy hates Trump and modern GOP with a passion. He has never had a social media account of any kind. Smart guy, grad school educated, reads constantly. Not, broadly speaking "uninformed"
He mentioned, specifically, "man, the Democrats are never going to win again if they keep doing shit like with this blonde chick!"
It made it to him and was convincing; or at least convincing enough!
You all lack introspection to an almost unbelievably extraordinary extent.
The Leftists who say the things that the Right attributes to them are legion, and easily found. Meanwhile, right-wing people who believe what the Left attributes to them cannot be found. The Left straw-mans constantly, the entire worldview is built on straw-men, and somehow you thought it was a good idea to complain that the Right is straw-manning.
Extraordinary lack of introspection.
And self-inflicted, as a product of generations of gleefully curating news feeds and convincing yourselves that it's valid to simply ignore everything that doesn't fit the narrative.
I realize you're either trolling or too stupid to engage with so I am falling into a trap one way or another. But this is just so so obviously not true.
People have looked into the Sydney Sweeney contagion and found that, before right wing accounts raised the salience of the issue, posts about it had been seen by like a few thousand total people are were generated by accounts with relatively tiny following.
The question is not "do some people who self define as on the left have wacky onerous opinions?" They totally do! It's why does that become a question actual Democrats have to answer for while Republicans don't, in kind.
Show me the elected democrat who has said the Sydney Sweeney add is eugenicist. I'll wait.
Meanwhile, on the other side, I will do myself a disservice in the argument. I will not use examples of people on the right who have awful opinions but are merely peope on internet that favor Republicans; as would be the analogy to some liberals on Tik Tok getting bothered by Sweeney.
No, I will only use examples of people either in the government under this Republican administration OR those with close ties/given access by said administration.
First, a cheap one from the top: the actual President, holding broad support from party, has been found guilty of sexual assault (in a state case that would qualify for rape in most other states).
Let me again handicap myself: how do you think right-leaning media would react if a Democratic politician (not THE PRESIDENT) even retweeted someone who had previously said anything pro-sexual assault? Think it would be nothing?
Ok, fine, whatever, that's just the actual President and that's something he did a long time ago, after all! Psh, lame example. It's not like he would ever socialize with someone who has publicly state admiration for Hitler and self-describes as a white supremacist! Oh, shit, he totally did do that! (Nick Fuentes).
Well, ok, at least he didn't like, hire that guy or anything. It was just a dinner, nbd!
Oh, shit, this is awkward, the WH liaison to DHS has publicly expressed anti-semitism (multiple times going back years) and worked with/for and has publicly expressed admiration for Andrew Tate; ya know, the guy who proudly self-titles as a Mysoginist and is currently fleeing charges of rape and human trafficking.
I could keep going, like how the Vice President has praised the ideas of, and claimed influence by a dude who, among other things, thinks the US should be a monarchy, believes in race-science IQ linkages, thinks some races are better suited for slavery (which he has in past also said is maybe optimal rather than something to be loathed and abolished).
Shit, I accidentally threw another one in there. My bad.
Shut the fuck up JD. Go back to infowars you fucking dick bag. This article is right on point. The anti woke has become way more reactionary and obnoxious than the woke ever was. It’s a full on grift now and you know it. The whole Sweeney thing was absolutely over blown by the right. The woke bullshit peaked 4 years ago and it’s you right wing assholes keeping it alive because you have nothing of actual substance to add to the culture. It’s all about owning the libs and you know it.
Your juvenile language reflects an immaturity to match your ignorance.
Your kind desperately exclude as many information sources from your circles as you can because anything you don't tightly control floods you with evidence that everything that you want to believe is a lie.
Here's the thing: You can't win unless we play along.
So go on promoting your party-wide Hamas support and other man-in-a-dress-is-a-woman Orwellianisms. You're only resigning yourselves to the dustbin of history.
The point is valid but so is the original. This is nearly a week after the ad debuted, and the reason it's there is because the Find Angry Libs industrial machine rose the salience of the issue in public consciousness. It's bad that places like MSNBC take the bait, but it started with bait, not the online left actually taking a collective stand against something the way they might take a collective stand against, I dunno, Trump's birthday parade.
I looked for an actual left wing overreaction to the ad and all I could find was some obscure source called "MSNBC". Having said that, I only spent 12 seconds searching so maybe there are other places, too: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna221630
The Sidney Sweeney discourse on the left of center to left was actually pretty healthy. A couple of leftists got hysterical, some of them had big platforms, but the center left was able to push back and say that they were being ridiculous without anyone getting cancelled or shamed into silence. It’s not 2018 anymore on the left and one clickbait headline won’t change that.
Exactly. I follow the Jewish feminist magazine HeyAlma who stupidly picked this up, but the comments were all saying how silly they were
Nature is healing! We’re never gonna get credit for it, but things have gotten saner.
Exactly. The craziness has to end
No one under the age of 65 gives a fuck about msnbc. That’s such a weak example
I'm curious - how much of this is direct financial incentive and how much is pure love of shitposting?
C’mon SouthPark!! You need an episode on Cartman the Edgelord directing entire swaths of the Trump admin and of MAGA into action.
100%
I pay as little attention to RW media/socials as I can get away with, and it's a wonder what diligent curating can get you.
I thing I've noticed though is that there's a clamor from a faction of the center-left for angrier liberals. They seem to want denunciations of this or that 'woke' or 'left' individual or tweet or whatever, under the belief that only by our joining in the RW pile-on to ridiculous mad lib stuff, can normies understand that the RW is wrong about us. I am far from convinced by the electoral efficacy of this; it seems more like the Waiting for Johnny Unbeatable fantasy. But if everyone agreed with me, well, we'd have a different world.
Libs should start getting "outraged" by things they actually support. Then they could sit back and watch MAGA turn it into policy for them.
Let's work together to make sure it's not the future of American democracy, but just an unfortunate detour into the worst of the discourse.
I have noticed two bizarre liberal outrage fantasies over the past month or so: 1) feminists will fight you over the right to feed children dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets; and 2) liberals hate air conditioning (the cited source was a story about a debate in France).
Are the "feminists" for or against dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets?
They are for them.
A very quick search is telling me these videos started in 2021. I guess we should be thanking Biden for bringing America back after the disaster of the first Trump term. What’s most infuriating is that the people who lap up this bullshit are allowed to vote.
And unless you guys figure out how to move meaningful discourse out of the online outrage machine, your country is doomed. Honestly it’s probably beyond saving at this point — not because of Trump, Trump is a symptom, but because being the Biggest Show on Earth, US federal politics is impacted more strongly by the incentive structures of online discourse than anywhere else.
Jeremiah you more incisively diagnose the problems here than almost anyone else. And it’s a cheap shot to say “so what’s your solution” — there may not be one, or at least not one you think has a chance of working.
So let me ask, what do you think the endgame is? Breakup of the US into more local polities where people can interact offline more easily? Civil war? The Singularity and then we all just “live” in wireheaded hedonism?
This is probably too long of a question to answer in a comments section. But I find people’s plans on how to escape the endgame more interesting these days than further elaboration of a diagnosis that you already cogently made years ago, for anyone intelligent enough to listen.
For a good example of a blog that has pivoted — Jonathan Haidt after publishing The Anxious Generation has shifted his blog to mostly talk about solutions. They look like The Benedict Option — getting your family out of the toxic culture that leads to kids rotting online — but those are the only solutions radical enough to work. And more interesting to read than yet another “hey, the Visigoths have sacked another city, the Roman frontier is in bad shape”.
You seem close to one of my own pet theories, that a lot of right wing "dog whistles" aren't actually coded messages to an extremist cohort, but rather bait for paranoid leftists who close read everything, and who can then be scapegoated to make their whole side seem insane.