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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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the right inherently lacks creativity.

This is incredibly false. The meme economy alone disproves this. Leftist memes are meandering walls of text, or straight up transcriptions from video essays. Right wing memes are much funnier and more concise. Leftist versions of, say, Stonetoss, for example, just aren't anywhere near as good.

Btw, what is the left wing version of Stonetoss anyways?

Breadpanes, which is extremely cringe. And also coincidentally and humorously also suffers from walls-o-text.

xkcd and SMBC comics.

I really wouldn't call SMBC left wing. xkcd I agree is left wing, but even he does a lot of tech/nerd stuff rather than political zingers all the time which is Stonetoss's mainstay.

SMBC increases presence women and non-whites relative to real life. What is not left-wing about SMBC?

I agree about latter point: mainly nerd/tech stuff with little politics.

SMBC leans leftwards, but not exclusively. For example, I couldn't see XKCD (or another true left cartoon) make something like determined, that lampooned a leftwing talking point.

See also: heretic (anti-progressive), look-2 (pro-small town), buds (poking fun at LGBT++), pig (anti-sustainability), metrics (anti social science). etc.

EDIT: this one is too perfect to leave out, even if a comic from 2009 is too old to be relevant to the conversation. Radical is pretty perfect too.

It's extremely preoccupied with "REPRESENTATION" and general left leaning things. But I'd grant you its not infected with brainworms level of political toxoplasmosis.

Mostly just edits of Stonetoss.

I guess the blobfish comics count.

99% of memes are apolitical things like this. RW memes are funny, but RW memes are also almost all variations on one core theme (ie the smuggie). Also, plenty of RW memes (ie famous green texts; some collages) are literally walls of text and/or image.

I mean this comment rather proves his point. The vast majority of historians, sociologists, political scientists, musicians, writers, artists etc. etc. are all at least on the centre-left, but that's balanced out because the right demonstrates its sparkling creativity with... memes.

Memes are a much, much more effective way of disseminating your ideas into the population than stuffy academic papers or news articles.

You can expose people to a lot through memes sure, but when push comes to shove most people will place a lot more weight on the words of an authority figure than an anonymous internet poster.

They're good at disseminating ideas into the population, but not into the halls of power.

Memes are evidently not left. But I am not entirely sure if the right can lay claim to them, even if the left can't. Memes seem to be mostly, apolitical or reactionary (4chan), which isn't the boomer dinosaur right wing that most of the right-wing pundits are.

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