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…
I don't think ignoring it and trying to be "above it" is a good idea. They are changing votes with this stuff and expanding their coalition. These delusions are what people actually think your average Democratic voter is like now. Just letting that fantasy stand actually effects electoral politics.
All that said, the left would do well to own up to it when they've engaged in much the same behavior. The whole entitled white supremacist teenaged boy smirks at tribal person incident comes to mind, and there were similar examples from back in the heyday of such things. Being above it means admitting and standing against it when one's own side engages in similar exaggerated social media pile-ons, and not letting such lies and nonsense just run wild when it's done by the right, IMO.
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!
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.
It’s crazy how the left has become so accustomed to their worldview being the dominant narrative parroted back to them by every powerful media institution, corporation, and political organization in the country, that the moment the conversation tilts even the slightest bit back towards milquetoast ‘conservatism’ (I.e. still liberalism) they perceive it as a grift more extreme than the ultimate, perpetual grift that is modern leftism/progressivism. You guys really are total mental slaves to the ruling regime. When asked to describe the motivations of the average right wing person you literally can not conceptualize any of their motivations besides some kind of cartoonishly evil pathology, like every right winger is some kind of supervillain from a kids tv show 😂 the level of self awareness you guys have is absolute zero, and there’s no future timeline where you guys are NOT left behind in the dustbin of history within the next 10 years. Your worldview straight up does not line up with lived reality on the ground for 99.99% of normal people
Really ? Mental slaves to the ruling regime? What year are you living in? Trump and MAGA are the ruling regime and all these powerful institutions are bending the knee to Trump. Those institutions have never been really left wing. They are all a grift too.
So what do YOU think is the motivation of the average right wing person? And how do those motivations track with what is coming out of the White House?
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.
Bluntly- and I'll admit this is an expression of my own failure- it is hard for me to see anyone who orients their politics around making the libs angry in this way as fully human. It kind of sounds like a parable written by C.S. Lewis or the Brothers Grimm, where you start with a human and gradually descend into a gibbering, guttural swamp harpy, cackling to see themselves covered in filth, unwilling to leave the swamp with their desperate friends and family, who just want them to go back to their old selves.
Of course, they are human, which makes this all the more tragic and frightening. They deserved better than this.
It makes me think they’re twelve year old boys who don’t yet understand the dangers of what they say/do or just plain don’t care. Kind of like sociopathic trolls who get off on pissing people off. I must say there are an awful lot of them, though.
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’m furious almost all the time lately; the rest of the time I’m despondent. But every time I read another story about liberal outrage I just get even more crazed. “THAT’S NOT WHAT I AM ANGRY ABOUT!” I scream at nothing and no one.
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.
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”.
The US has gone through turmoil in the past. These things have a tendency to regress to the mean. Look into historical cycles theory.
(I agree that proposing solutions is good, I'm just pushing back against generic fatalism that has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Another way to frame this problem is: What sort of reforms can we seize the moment in order to implement now, which will then work to mitigate the next turmoil cycle, 50-100 years from now?
Oh, another point: Just convincing more people of the diagnosis, as Jeremiah does, can itself be a solution if it causes fewer people to take the circus seriously.
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 of course, liberals really did eventually get mad about the Sidney Sweeney ad on a large scale. It wasn't "just" manufactured outrage.
How about a third post, which synthesizes these two posts, and switches from "descriptive" mode to "prescriptive" mode -- what is the actual best response to creeping autocracy?
Personally, I would suggest a sort of calm, sober seriousness that aims to actually persuade Trump supporters and draw them away from the regime. Instead of saying "this is your fault! you voted for this!", liberals should point out ways in which Trump is *not* what his supporters voted for.
Something like: "Trump fired the head of the BLS when he didn't like the unemployment numbers. You didn't vote for the US to become a banana republic. You didn't vote for a recession." Give people a chance to change their mind, instead of a reason to dig their heels in. Let them know that you will forgive them if they implicitly acknowledge they made a mistake, and you won't gloat over it.
I always find it interesting that to the right protecting their ego is more important than admitting the truth or avoiding the negative outcomes of not doing so.
I think the author makes some valid points here. Social media rewards people for amplifying stupid stuff. Yet, why don’t we see a bunch of conservatives sitting in their car screaming and crying about some outrage?
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.
I don't think ignoring it and trying to be "above it" is a good idea. They are changing votes with this stuff and expanding their coalition. These delusions are what people actually think your average Democratic voter is like now. Just letting that fantasy stand actually effects electoral politics.
All that said, the left would do well to own up to it when they've engaged in much the same behavior. The whole entitled white supremacist teenaged boy smirks at tribal person incident comes to mind, and there were similar examples from back in the heyday of such things. Being above it means admitting and standing against it when one's own side engages in similar exaggerated social media pile-ons, and not letting such lies and nonsense just run wild when it's done by the right, IMO.
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!
What the fuck are you even talking about ? You just have dipshit maga talking points disguised as fancy wordsmith writing. Dustbin of history ?
Legion?
How’s this one? You are a guy with a big hat and no cattle. Fucking snowflake
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.
The far left had a small moment in time and even that was as mostly an online mirage. You didn’t wingers are still living off it.
It’s crazy how the left has become so accustomed to their worldview being the dominant narrative parroted back to them by every powerful media institution, corporation, and political organization in the country, that the moment the conversation tilts even the slightest bit back towards milquetoast ‘conservatism’ (I.e. still liberalism) they perceive it as a grift more extreme than the ultimate, perpetual grift that is modern leftism/progressivism. You guys really are total mental slaves to the ruling regime. When asked to describe the motivations of the average right wing person you literally can not conceptualize any of their motivations besides some kind of cartoonishly evil pathology, like every right winger is some kind of supervillain from a kids tv show 😂 the level of self awareness you guys have is absolute zero, and there’s no future timeline where you guys are NOT left behind in the dustbin of history within the next 10 years. Your worldview straight up does not line up with lived reality on the ground for 99.99% of normal people
Really ? Mental slaves to the ruling regime? What year are you living in? Trump and MAGA are the ruling regime and all these powerful institutions are bending the knee to Trump. Those institutions have never been really left wing. They are all a grift too.
So what do YOU think is the motivation of the average right wing person? And how do those motivations track with what is coming out of the White House?
awwww is da widdle baby mad that someone said swearwords to them? need a bottle? need to find mommy so that you can tell on them?
get thicker skin you snowflake.
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
Not to mention the impassioned essay in the New Yorker....
No one under the age of 65 gives a fuck about msnbc. That’s such a weak example
You sound like a cranky p.o.s. I am so going to mute and block your ass.
Bluntly- and I'll admit this is an expression of my own failure- it is hard for me to see anyone who orients their politics around making the libs angry in this way as fully human. It kind of sounds like a parable written by C.S. Lewis or the Brothers Grimm, where you start with a human and gradually descend into a gibbering, guttural swamp harpy, cackling to see themselves covered in filth, unwilling to leave the swamp with their desperate friends and family, who just want them to go back to their old selves.
Of course, they are human, which makes this all the more tragic and frightening. They deserved better than this.
It makes me think they’re twelve year old boys who don’t yet understand the dangers of what they say/do or just plain don’t care. Kind of like sociopathic trolls who get off on pissing people off. I must say there are an awful lot of them, though.
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.
Libs should start getting "outraged" by things they actually support. Then they could sit back and watch MAGA turn it into policy for them.
C’mon SouthPark!! You need an episode on Cartman the Edgelord directing entire swaths of the Trump admin and of MAGA into action.
I’m furious almost all the time lately; the rest of the time I’m despondent. But every time I read another story about liberal outrage I just get even more crazed. “THAT’S NOT WHAT I AM ANGRY ABOUT!” I scream at nothing and no one.
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.
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”.
The US has gone through turmoil in the past. These things have a tendency to regress to the mean. Look into historical cycles theory.
(I agree that proposing solutions is good, I'm just pushing back against generic fatalism that has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Another way to frame this problem is: What sort of reforms can we seize the moment in order to implement now, which will then work to mitigate the next turmoil cycle, 50-100 years from now?
Oh, another point: Just convincing more people of the diagnosis, as Jeremiah does, can itself be a solution if it causes fewer people to take the circus seriously.
I'm curious - how much of this is direct financial incentive and how much is pure love of shitposting?
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.
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.
You just recently wrote this post which implies we *should* be angry in certain contexts, e.g. DHS tweet:
https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/stop-inventing-nazis-when-the-real
And of course, liberals really did eventually get mad about the Sidney Sweeney ad on a large scale. It wasn't "just" manufactured outrage.
How about a third post, which synthesizes these two posts, and switches from "descriptive" mode to "prescriptive" mode -- what is the actual best response to creeping autocracy?
Personally, I would suggest a sort of calm, sober seriousness that aims to actually persuade Trump supporters and draw them away from the regime. Instead of saying "this is your fault! you voted for this!", liberals should point out ways in which Trump is *not* what his supporters voted for.
Something like: "Trump fired the head of the BLS when he didn't like the unemployment numbers. You didn't vote for the US to become a banana republic. You didn't vote for a recession." Give people a chance to change their mind, instead of a reason to dig their heels in. Let them know that you will forgive them if they implicitly acknowledge they made a mistake, and you won't gloat over it.
I always find it interesting that to the right protecting their ego is more important than admitting the truth or avoiding the negative outcomes of not doing so.
That's just human nature.
I think the author makes some valid points here. Social media rewards people for amplifying stupid stuff. Yet, why don’t we see a bunch of conservatives sitting in their car screaming and crying about some outrage?
...we do?
We do: Cracker Barrel logo change, male cheerleaders.