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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.

I dunno, I think he just likes angering people. A high-effort troll but a troll nonetheless. He ran out of alpha on angering left-wing people and has started angering right-wing people for new kinds of dopamine.

What other explanation is there for a post titled "Diversity Really is Our Strength. Immigration destroys social cohesion. Good." He makes a bunch of rather dubious arguments in favour of immigration and destroying social cohesion, ignoring the benefits of the single most important quality for a country. The post straightforwardly argues for what's in the title. But it is undeniably worded in a way to anger a good chunk of its audience.

One of his other tweets went something like 'trads BTFO, look at South Korea with its anti-porn legislation, anti-abortion... and the lowest birth rate in the world bar none'. Now anybody could see the obvious flaws with categorizing South Korea as a patriarchal 'trad' state. For one SK has an extremely large and powerful feminist movement that introduced said anti-porn legislation. It does not exactly belong in the Afghanistan-Saudi Arabia axis of genuinely trad, patriarchal states. South Korea even had a female head-of-state.

I dunno, I think he just likes angering people.

He's said publicly (though I can't dig up a source) that a certain amount of trollishness is a deliberate PR strategy. Clickbait article titles get clicks. Viral edgy-tweeting gets people to follow him on twitter, which he can then follow up with calmer tweets pointing people at articles on his substack. Some percentage of those people will subscribe. (A fairly large percentage of them will later unsubscribe or unfollow -- this strategy tends to attract non-thoughtful angry ideologues -- but enough people stick around.)

I'm not sure to what extent he's just going with this strategy because it works, but it does seem to work.

I don't think the fact that you think there are obvious counter-arguments means he's trolling. They seem like honestly held beliefs to me.

Yeah but he words them in such a way as to anger much of his prospective audience.

South Korea even had a female head-of-state.

So did Pakistan.

South Korea is on the conservative end for a wealthy democracy, but it has a large feminist movement that has been very active in their society. It’s definitely not Pakistan.

Indeed.

But having once had a female head of state is not a signal of that. It's a signal of jack shit.

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