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If you've browsed alternative politics communities for any period of time, you've noticed that people on supposedly opposite sides tend to use each other's language and terminology "ironically". (IE, "Moid"/"Foid", "Incel", "Chud", "Libtard", "Dudes rock") Likewise, people tend to enjoy the same entertainment media: Strategy games, dialogue heavy RPGs, The Cyberpunk genre and it's associated political themes. Why do supposedly "leftist" subreddits (stupidpol, Redscarepod) get flooded with rightoids when there's a banwave?
I have a theory that many people are actually sort of a meta-fan of the politics fandom. When you're into weird, obscure political philosophers like Julius Evola or Ted Kaczynski or Max Stirner or whoever, you're not actually "more right" or "more left", you're into alternative politics itself.
If you believe that the US government is controlled by a select group of international enthonationalists, it's not that hard to generalize that belief to a class-struggle framework. Likewise, if you believe in class-struggle, it's not crazy to notice that certain upper classes, particularly in Washington DC, have over-representation from certain groups and strong in-group political loyalty to those groups.
Anyone else notice a similar effect? I'm still trying to develop my thesis.
Goodguy's 20th Law of the Internet: Political ideologues fleeing online political persecution will enter any online forum that does not expel them and over time, will try to turn it into a forum that matches their own ideology.
stupidpol and Redscarepod are not right-wing but they tolerate rightoids rather than immediately trying to annihilate them, hence rightoids go there to seek asylum.
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RedScarePod isn’t a “left wing” subreddit, the hosts of the podcast were vaguely connected to the Chapo ecosystem but have drifted rightward over the years, but in any case they’re largely irrelevant - threads about the latest podcast episode get only a handful of comments compared to hundreds on many regular threads daily. There is some generic performative conservatism, but I wouldn’t describe it as a right or a left wing sub. It’s a contrarian subreddit for shitposting by young-but-not-zoomer smart-ish people who understand a decade or more of internet culture references. Reminds me of somewhere else…
The subreddit’s main audience is the same group of people who once posted on /r/drama (in fact, it’s pretty much the same picture, and almost every rdrama.net regular who is still on Reddit is on RSP), ie. very online 25-35 year old urban PMC late millennials who grew up in the early 4chan/SomethingAwful era and whose politics, such as they are, are largely unchanged from those shitposting days. Many of those people are also here, of course. The language is generic very online language (“we’re so back”, [x]cel, “it’s all over for [x]”, -pilled) you see it all the time on Twitter and even elsewhere on Reddit. Whenever a very online term breaks into the actual mainstream on TikTok and generic meme pages (eg. “-ussy” posting, remember those days on /r/drama?) it becomes déclassé and is slowly dropped in most contexts.
I agree that there are people who are meta-fans of politics, but I think they’re more likely to be found on other politics subreddits, on Twitter and on Substack. Richard Hanania, for example, is a politics enthusiast. So is Nate Silver.
Most RSP posts aren’t particularly political, it’s less political than Drama was back in the day even before the mods cracked down under admin pressure. Disliking fat people and an endless series of jokes about borderline personality disorder and being gay don’t map neatly into the American political spectrum. There’s a trans-critical contingent but ‘misgendering’ is usually downvoted. Views on abortion are progressive and the occasionally anti-abortion podcast hosts are clowned on by the subreddit’s users regularly for their stance.
To some extent, Drama, RSP and KiwiFarms (in the last case with caveats) are the last remnants of the pre-Gamergate internet, when politics was a thing and people had stances on these issues but they were not always the central and defining character trait that motivated online discussion.
I was thinking about writing an RSP-explainer effort post some day, and here you've scooped me already.
Eh, I'm sure I can still get mileage out of the baby chiropractor affair.
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It seems like extremely online and not terribly economically successful people just use socialism to refer to whatever changes make them, personally, better off.
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Some phrases are just more memetically fit than others. It’s human nature to pick them up and use them for one’s own ends.
Call it “human byword-diversity.”
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Because they allow serious critique of left-wing idpol they dislike while also being left enough that they're less likely to get banned by admins.
Or they're just overly online and so absorb the language of the overly online. In the past it might have been memes about can has-ing cheeseburgers or jokes about Aalewis and his euphoria or whatever. Now it's incel/FDS/Zoomer lingo, with a lot more existential politics because things have polarized even more.
Yes, I say this above but it’s interesting how much the terminology has shifted even from /r/drama’s heyday (which was what, three years ago? I feel old).
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What is FDS?
Female Dating Strategy.
The bitterness from this group is stunning. Its like fog in the air. Yes, there are all kinds of gripe forums and people nursing their various grievances out there, but they don't even have a coherent ideology. Its just pain and lashing out.
I'm curious, what gripe forums are you comparing it too?
In my mind the most whiny forums are /r/asianmasculinity and its ilk. Though that may just be a personal bias.
Personally I kinda like FDS. If women want something, they should try to get it. Rather than sit and mope.
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In many ways, FDS is but the quiet parts of mainstream Western lipstick feminism said out loud.
Thus, I rather enjoy FDS. At least FDSists acknowledge that men and women are different, with different and often conflicting interests in courtship, relationships, and sexuality. Unlike sexual/gender egalitarians who insist men and women are the same aside from superficial characteristics and possibly the socialization effects from The Patriarchy.
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That's incels you're describing pretty much. What happens is people take their grievances and naturally start weaving them together into ideology in an organic process just by talking to each other.
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There is an ideology. They aren’t explicitly saying so but it exists. What they’re saying is “make sure you get the man you actually want.” Which is sort of the same idea as redpill, just for women.
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I've sometimes theorized that there's a similar "race fandom", ie. people whose position (at least at first) is less like open racism but simply a deep fascination with the concept of race in a sociological sense, and who gravitate towards the online racist communities simply because the only spheres where you can really discuss this stuff deeply are the racist and antiracist ones and they don't feel they can identify with the explicit antiracist mindset to the sufficient and demanded degree.
These are just some of the general cultural markers for current smart and disaffected young males, which would be the group to gravitate towards (extreme) politics.
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Is this just horseshoe effect?
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Counterpoint: Political groups have had no issue taking the supposed insults from their opposition and turning it into a badge of pride, regardless of the format.
'Yankee Doodle' was supposed to be an insult. For a more recent occurrence, 'Keep your Rifle By Your Side' was supposed to be atleast slightly satire, until people listened to it, went 'Holy shit, this song slaps' and started using it unironically.
It's a phenomena that's not really new by any stretch.
In 1948 the father of the British NHS, Labour Minister and paragon of virtue (/s) Aneurin Bevan made a speech denouncing Tories as “lower than vermin”.
Thus, the founding of the Vermin Club.
My favourite example of a British Tory doing this is Norman Tebbit, who was a key early ally of Margaret Thatcher and who would go on to be the main minister responsible for implementing her anti-union policies. Tebbit consistently maintained that the closed shop was a form of fascism, because it required workers to join a union they didn't want to in order to keep their jobs. In 1978, this eventually provoked Michael Foot (who was one of the leaders of the far-left faction within the then-ruling Labour party) to call him a "semi house-trained polecat".
Tebbit's wife was disabled by an IRA bomb in 1984, and he retired from front-line politics in order to care for her. As was then usual for senior politicians who retire while still young enough to contribute, he was made a Lord. This entitled him to a coat of arms - which led to the burning question of what does a heraldic polecat look like? Eventually the College of Arms decided that heraldic polecats were semi-mythical creatures similar to heraldic tygers, and could fly. So Lord Tebbit's shield is held up by winged polecats.
That's great.
Do you have a picture? Wikipedia only shows this. I'm not really up to date on my heraldry, but it doesn't seem to match their own description. And Google just provides news articles about the guy. He's been busy.
The description ("blazon" in heraldry-speak) includes "supporters" - i.e. animals that hold up the shield similar to the lion and unicorn on the royal arms. Not sure why they are not in the picture on wikipedia. I tried to find a picture of the shield with supporters, but my google-fu only found the wikipedia version.
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Reminds me of the "beaver" on the coat of arms of Irkutsk.
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(Does anyone know how to inline links?)
It's markdown.
tl;dr use:
[text](http://link)Cool, thanks :)
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