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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I don't find it uncanny at all. In ecosystems, one species tends to dominate a given niche. The internet created a giant shared memetic ecosystem that almost all young westerners inhabit together, and wokeness is the perfect meme to dominate its given niche -- the group this blog describes, more or less. It either outcompeted or absorbed rival memes like internet atheism, internet stoicism, internet communism, etc etc.

A similar process is taking place on the right for underemployed undersexed downward mobile males, outcompeting or absorbing rival memes like internet collapse, internet reaction, internet men's rights, internet trumpism, internet gaming fandom, etc etc. But it doesn't have a name yet.

It’s interesting that if you ask woke people to name their movement, they usually won’t have a name in mind, or they’ll say something general like “I support human rights for everyone” or “I believe in basic human decency.” If you’re not woke it’s easy to recognize the woke movement and its adherents, but a woke person is reluctant to apply the label because it has derogatory connotations.

I think we’re seeing sort of the same thing in reverse with the movement on the right for low status males that you describe. Its adherents don’t really have a name for it, but its critics are not shy about labeling it using terms like “incel,” “fascist,” or “semi-fascist.” I don’t know what term will ultimately stick, but I suspect it will be some kind of sneer term, similar to how “woke” is a sneer term.

I think both cases are more artifacts of outgroup homogeneity bias. The proverbial low-status man doesn’t need a label to go hit on some girls out of his league—but those girls find it useful to talk about his category. Likewise for political discussion, which almost demands category words.

Signaling tribal allegiance with a self label is kind of gauche, too, so outside labels/sneers get a leg up.

Is "men going their own way" the same group as incels? Because I've known someone from that particular culture, and he had no problems describing himself as such to me and his other coworkers. Probably because it is vaguely positive, in the "I'm making a choice" sense.

As I recall, both "Woke" and "Social Justice Warrior" originated as indonyms, and were dropped as soon as the Memedom realized their adversaries were using them as insults. The same could well be the case with these various disillusioned young male counterparts.

Whenever this topic comes up, I think of a (likely apocryphal - I've never once been able to find where the name actually came from) story about "heroin," that famously addicting opioid. The story goes that when heroin was invented, existing opioids had a bad reputation for being extremely addicting, and so the drug makers gave it a name that was a homonym of a word that meant a woman with brave and admirable qualities. Unfortunately, the intrinsic qualities of this drug - being extremely addicting, sometimes to great detriment to the user - made it so that the term "heroin" now mostly has negative connotations.

The terms "social justice warrior" and "woke" strike me as quite obviously positive terms when read literally, though I doubt they were purposefully engineered to be as such as in the above story. Perhaps the "warrior" part has some negative connotations about being violent, but being violent for the sake of justice is mostly seen as a good thing in most contexts. And "woke" is meant to invoke a sense of being "awake" in contrast to being "asleep," i.e. actually aware of the reality around them instead of blissfully ignorant in one's slumber.

However, inevitably, the intrinsic qualities of the ideas and people these labels were put upon won out, and so they became terms of insult.

The term "red pill" I think is an almost perfect mirror-image analogue to "woke" in the right-wing.

From what I understand, Woke was either an African-American Vernacular English term for "aware", or a severe corruption of the old "wake up" conspiracy theorist term, as in the meme "wake up sheeple".

No, incels haven't had it and want it. MGTOW mostly seem to have had it, gotten burned, and decided they don't want it anymore.

There's more overlap than that description allows, though. If you looked at subreddits by shared users, you'd have found (at least before banning) that MGTOW and various incel subs shared a much higher proportion of users than you'd expect even by random chance, let alone by descriptions that would seem to exclude each other.

In principle, MGTOW is about a man embracing his agency to lead his best life without chasing women's approval, while inceldom lays claim to an identity of victimhood by women. One is clearly a better basis for life than the other. In practice, though, most men who identify as MGTOW focus a lot of their energy, mostly negatively, toward women. Inceldom at least is honestly dedicated, through and through, to its core identity of victimhood.

I suspect that overlap has a particular direction. I would expect, especially if Nybbler's account is true, that incels would be interested in reading MGTOW more than vice versa. Maybe I give them too much credit, but MGTOW feels to me like Men, but incels are pretty much just boys. If MGTOWs spend too much time on incel forums I'd probably laugh at them.

Fuzzy political movements are almost named for their opponents' sneer term. In the English Civil War, "Roundhead", "Cavalier", "Leveller" were all insults. To themselves, they were sensible people acting rightly. Fortunately, in that case we can depoliticize it with different labels (eg Parliamentarian, Monarchist, Proto-Republican). But there's not enough clarity on what our modern groups are. I think "Identarian" is a solid first stab for the group people call 'woke'.

"Whig" and "Tory" were both originally sneers as well. "Whiggamores" were obnoxious Scottish puritans. "Toruighes" were Irish Catholic bandits.

Identitarian is taken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement

"Woke" is at least quite often a sneer-term, but I thought it started off as a self-identifier?

You are right, in the same way incel was simply a description of a person's circumstances. The fact that we can put venom behind the word is a product of the status-based nature of insults; incel and woke are both undesirable traits for their respective insult-flingers and thus become insults as a result.

True, but “incel” started as a self-identifier too.

So goes the euphemism treadmill. The undesirable is dressed up in respectable clothing, until the clothing itself takes on the aspect of undesirability and is exchanged for a new one.

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