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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I've never really understood the expression, so I'm hoping this thread provides some elucidation.

On imageboards "meme X" has connotations similar to "gimmicky", "not serious", or focusing on shallow viral (and often comedic) appeal. For example Goat Simulator is a famous meme game. It is often insulting, but not always, though it is more likely to be insulting when applied to something that is not obviously a meme. Neko-Arc in the fighting game Melty Blood is universally understood as a meme character whether you like her or not, she has bizarre gameplay elements, is a chibi catgirl, and one of her moves can result in covering the screen with a Twitch overlay while she shows up in front as a streamer, covering up important parts of the screen like the health bars. The Bongcloud is a meme chess opening. Ron Paul was a meme presidential candidate, as were Kayne West, Deez Nuts and Trump, but Trump ended up proving he was more than just a meme. Of course while Trump wasn't a meme candidate in 2020 anymore, he was still a meme president. Anarcho-capitalism and Maoism Third Worldism are meme ideologies.

Some years back, calling things a meme in the above sense as a (often not entirely serious) insult was particularly popular on imageboards. Calling women the "meme gender" was a meme that arose around then. The thread that a screencap was already posted of seems to have been the origin, there were a couple "meme gender" comments before that but they didn't get attention. If you read the replies it looks like someone thought of the more serious "women are more likely to follow social trends" interpretation even then. But the primary meaning is more saying that women are too much of a gimmick, like how it would get old if you made a fighting game with only two characters and one of them was Neko-Arc.

Anarcho-capitalism ... meme ideologies.

You think Bryan Caplan, Michael Huemer, Jason Brennan, the Friedmans, etc. are memers?

By the above 4chan usage many of them would call it a meme ideology, yes. It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality. It is generally justified based on a set of principles that are too strict to fail gracefully if they run into problems and that are major contributors to its appeal as abstract ideas. Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm." The McNuke meme actually predates its modern incarnation by decades, as a child I remember reading Vernor Vinge's The Ungoverned from 1985, and that's a story generally considered sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism. Or the general idea that it deeply matters whether a system of social organization is classified as a government or not. I remember anarcho-captitalists on the internet talking a lot about boycotts and refusal to provide service as an alternative to government, as something that would limit pollution for example. Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular. By analogy Goat Simulator owed its popularity to a few strong ideas, but those ideas didn't have the depth and staying power to remain entertaining under closer and longer inspection, and it had bugs that were often funny in the abstract or the first time but not if you had to deal with them all the time

The Marc Laidlaw novel Dad's Nuke also had privately-owned nukes. (Though contra the Wikipedia article, I think the titular "nuke" referred to a reactor and not a bomb.)

It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality.

I don't understand how a positive policy of restraint, of withdrawing or neutering power, is in any way inherently idealistic. Most Anarcho-capitalists, including me, argue that it is the very pragmatic, consequentialist strain in our thinking and in our politics that should drive us towards promoting voluntary interactions as much as possible and towards beating the swords of the State into plowshares. It is a very quick and, frankly, disingenuous oversimplification, merely a hand-wave, to treat the "ideology" as if it were utopian. It is most decidedly not.

Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm."

The existence of memes within communities that share an ideology says nothing beyond the fact that people like to make and share memes. It's certainly unrelated to any actual assessment of the ideas.

Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular.

None of these examples are in any way dispositive since they are examples, first and foremost, of institutions wielding State power in various ways as their primary means of maintaining market share or even validity. Social disassociation is not an effective strategy against the State, especially the US behemoth. The idea is more apt for discussions about inter-personal and inter-group conflicts within truly private spheres.

In short I don't think you've engaged with anarcho-capitalist thought, but merely noticed some internet phenomena and come to some wry conclusions about some internet strangers.

I don't understand how a positive policy of restraint, of withdrawing or neutering power, is in any way inherently idealistic. Most Anarcho-capitalists, including me, argue that it is the very pragmatic, consequentialist strain in our thinking and in our politics that should drive us towards promoting voluntary interactions as much as possible and towards beating the swords of the State into plowshares. It is a very quick and, frankly, disingenuous oversimplification, merely a hand-wave, to treat the "ideology" as if it were utopian. It is most decidedly not.

I think the point of the quote you were responding to there wasn't about what AnCaps would do, but more the fact that AnCapitalism has never been tried and is unprepared for contact with the real world (see also: communism).

Its more complex that it appears... there's both the "Women are a meme aspect" which is rude, but also taboo, ergo funny...

But there's also the deeper psychological insight that women are consistently vastly more psychologically vulnerable to memes than men... mass hysterias have been disproportionately female since the Devils of Loudon and Salem, women are vastly more vulnerable to social contagion diseases (Anorexia, Cutting, gender dysphoria)...and generally accept socially acceptable memes, even if they're absurd, vastly more readily than men.

Which is all what we'd expect given one of the most heavily gender loaded traits is trait agreeableness.

It's edgelord for "girlz R stoopid."

It does indeed originate from the 4chan thread @KingOfTheBailey posted below. Somehow I find myself explaining dank memes. The world is not right.

The sentiment behind the expression is straightforward: women should not be taken seriously. This is used as a catchall reminder of the various dysfunctions more prevalent among women than men.

Yes, it's straightforwardly sexist, and probably shouldn't be okay to say here.

I think it came from this 4chan thread.

P.S.: I couldn't find this post using DDG, Google, or even Bing. I had to go to Yandex to dig it up, where I found it straight away.

I have absolutely no context on it, and I'm interested to hear what others say, but I thought it might have to do with women being the arbiters of social acceptability, women determine what ideas get passed on what ideas don't. Men tend to look to women for moral guidance on what is okay to think, okay to talk about, okay to do.

I think the idea that women are the arbiters of social acceptability is itself a controversial idea, but it's one that I believe is true, nonetheless.

It's less of a steelman, and more actually sexist than that. Imagine some bit of boomer humor, the sort where the punch line is "Women! Can't live with 'em." And the joke is that you stopped before adding "can't live without 'em". "Meme sex" and "woman moment" are the Zoomer version of the same thing, eyerolling or sneering (depending on how mean-spirited the speaker is being) at an instance of a woman acting in a stereotypical way.

It's kind of hilarious reading all the Mottizens in this thread explain their interpretations of the term that are way more intelligent and charitable than the truth. It just means "women are a meme, lol".

My plain reading of the phrase is that it centers women's "agreeableness". But contextualizes it in terms of women deeply internalizing social narratives. It's tangential to the NPC meme, but less about mindlessly repeating whatever CNN is telling you, and more about how susceptible women are to all info hazards.

That seems like the kind of generalization that would not survive contact with evidence.

Or, more likely, that requires enough qualifiers and hedges to be useless.

Would you consider Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage a point of evidence? Where she digs into how the infohazard of gender identity is convincing the same cohort of young girls and women who easily socialize to eating disorders, cutting, etc to now socialize towards a trans identity?

Or how it's well known among professionals that you need to separate these women from each other on a ward to rehabilitate them? Because if you leave them among themselves, they just socialize around their self harm identity too much.

Nope, never heard of it.

One journalist can write whatever she wants. Though subtitling it "The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" suggests that she might have an angle. You wouldn't be convinced by Kendi arguing that the infohazard of whiteness makes you inherently racist, or take a Trump exposé as proof that Republicans are immoral.

I would consider the mental-health-professionals point as weak evidence, sure. It would be better if there was an actual study, or if it's "well known" that this is only true for women.

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