The exploration of the no-ego ego trip and its relevance to contemporary culture a few weeks back has implications that reach far. The discussion that followed, lively as it was, barely scratched the surface of the subject. This week, before we return to the Situationist movement that set this sequence of posts in motion, we’re going to go a little deeper. In the process, I hope to cast some light on one of the most pressing questions of our time: why can’t the left meme?
Those of my readers who don’t follow internet culture may be wondering what on earth that question even means. Even those who cut their teeth on lolcats and got the joke when I named a band in one of my novels “Smudge and the Memelords” may welcome a review of the history. The word “meme” is older than the internet. It first appeared in biologist Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a term for ideas that replicate themselves through the collective conversation of a time the way genes replicate themselves in a population of living things.
In 1993, when the internet still consisted largely of message boards, author Mike Godwin applied Dawkins’ logic to online phenomena and created the concept of the internet meme. (This is the same person, by the way, who coined Godwin’s Law, the rule that sooner or later every internet debate will drag in references to Adolf Hitler.) The term was still used for a wide range of internet phenomena in those freewheeling days. Then came 4chan.
4chan was one of the earliest of a whole archipelago of imageboards—internet sites set up for the anonymous posting of images and freewheeling discussion. It’s responsible for a lot. I’ve written elsewhere about the improbable impact 4chan’s /pol/ (that is, Politically Incorrect) forum ended up having on the 2016 election. Just over a decade before Kek the Frog God had his astonishing second coming, however, a twist of internet fashion got 4chan habitués posting silly pictures of cats every Saturday (“Caturday”). Adding text to the images was the obvious next step. Put the text in the popular Impact font, add the garbled grammar and spelling for which the internet was already famous, and—ahem—pretty soon somebody wanted a cheeseburger.
This kind of meme, a single image with text, is technically known as an image macro. It remains the standard form for internet memes, though short computer-generated videos and a few other formats have risen up to challenge the marching legions of image macros these days. Image macros, though, turned out to be extraordinarily well suited to politics. The hard limits imposed by the form—a single image, a handful of words, and a fraction of a second to catch the eyes of jaded internet users as they scroll on past—forced meme artists to cut through the masses of verbal fog that blur most political discussion, so they could make their points with all the subtlety of a cold wet towel across the face. At a time when the things most people wanted to discuss in the political sphere were the things no mainstream politician or corporate media outlet was willing to mention, messages amplified via image macros had extraordinary force.
There’s nothing inherently partisan about image macros, or any other form of internet meme popular these days. In theory, it should be possible to create smart, witty, memorable memes promoting any imaginable political agenda. In practice, however, the conservative populism that found its totem in Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of wickedly funny memes while most other political factions were left in the dust. The Democratic mainstream in particular has found it all but impossible to come up with memes that appeal to anybody but its own true believers. That was what generated the question with which we began: why can’t the left meme?
That’s an oversimplification, of course. First of all, it’s not just the left that can’t meme. The country club Republicans who dominated the GOP before the rise of Trump were, if anything, even worse at meming than their Democratic rivals. There were plenty of reasons why such old-line Republicans as Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney were brushed aside so easily by the Trump juggernaut, but a torrent of raucous memes that helped turn voters against them certainly contributed something to it. Nor are these the only conservatives who can’t meme; if anything, libertarians are even worse at it. (Admittedly these days most American libertarians are either potheads or corporate shills, and neither a brain full of business-school platitudes or a bloodstream full of THC is an asset to a meme artist.)
Second, it’s not entirely true that the left can’t meme. There have been some genuinely crisp and funny political memes out of the left; it’s just that there have been so few of them, compared to the competition from the populists. Leftists like to insist that there are lots of good leftist memes, which just aren’t getting the distribution they deserve, but this begs the question. Memes aren’t distributed by any central authority; they spread, or fail to spread, because hundreds of millions of individual social media users glance at them, and either laugh and forward them to their friends, or roll their eyes and scroll on by. Populist conservative memes get the first reaction much more often than memes from any of the leftward factions.
I suppose it could be argued by the left that this shows that the vast majority of people on the internet are goose-stepping fascists aligned with the populist right. That’s not what other measures such as voting behavior show, however. Thus it’s hard to escape the supposition that the difference really is in the quality of the memes—that the populist right really does make better memes than their rivals. The question that follows, then, is why this should be.
What makes this point especially fascinating is that the weight of the humor used to be on the other side. I’m old enough to remember when it was the left that had a virtual monopoly on raucous humor and the right that was stuck in a grim and humorless rut. In those days TV comedy shows such as the Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In mocked the Republican Party into incoherent fury, while attempts by conservatives to respond in kind routinely set new lows in sheer lameness.
That began to slip in the 1970s with the rise of certain currents in second wave feminism. It’s not accidental that the words “That’s not funny,” spoken in a censorious tone and accompanied by an angry glare, were the punch line of a thousand jokes about feminists back in the day. Year by year, the same attitude spread through the left. I remember rather clearly when I first encountered the term “microaggression” among social justice activists. It was applied very broadly on the extreme left, as a label for anything that falls short of the abject cringing obedience that activists expect from the rest of us for their ever-increasing list of demands. Humor, however, is almost always a microaggression—a point that has much to reveal.
At this point it may be helpful to talk about humor itself—its nature, and the reason why it’s always so threatening to some people. The Hungarian-American philosopher Arthur Koestler proposed in his book The Act of Creation that the heart of humor is the collision between incompatible worlds. Puns are the simplest example: you encounter a word that seems to be meant in one sense, and all of a sudden you realize that it’s meant in another sense, and the sudden shock of the collision makes you laugh. Take the first dad joke that comes to mind—say, “I want to be cremated, because it’s my last shot at a smoking hot body.” There’s the set of meanings we usually associate with the concept of cremation, and the set that we usually associate with the phrase “smoking hot body.” Those matrices, to use Koestler’s term for these patterns of meaning, have nothing connecting them—until all of a sudden they do.
To this process of collision between unrelated matrices of meanings, Koestler gave a useful term: bisociation. He saw it not only as the source of humor but as the core of all human creativity. The creative mind takes two or more unrelated matrices and brings them into relationship through an act of bisociation, so each one casts unexpected light on the other. When Isaac Newton realized that the same forces that govern the arc of a tossed stone keep the Moon falling forever around the earth, that was an act of bisociation; when Jane Austen realized that fiction didn’t have to be a vehicle for wish-fulfillment fantasies and could be used instead to explore the dramas of ordinary human experience—the discovery that created the modern novel—that was another. Look into every other significant creative act and you’ll find bisociation at its heart.
Bisociation is risky stuff, though. It’s especially risky when people have strong emotional reasons to want to keep certain matrices of meanings and ideas as far as possible from each other—and that, in turn, lands us in the territory we explored together three weeks ago in the first of these interludes, as we pondered the mysteries of the no-ego ego trip.
The ego, as I noted in that post, is the self’s self-representation. It is how we perceive ourselves, who and what we think we are. That representation can be more or less accurate. It can never be completely accurate, any more than any other representation can, but it can be close enough that the differences don’t threaten our sense of identity. The more inaccurate it is, the wider the gap between who we are and who we think we are, the more threatening the gap is felt to be, and the more energy has to go into defending the false representation against the ongoing assaults of reality. Thus we can arrange egos along a spectrum of greater and lesser accuracy, which can also be labeled “resilient” and “brittle” respectively.
The problem of the brittle ego deserves more attention than it usually gets these days. The more inaccurate somebody’s self-assessment is, the less they can tolerate anything that challenges the lie. That usually expresses itself as anger, for an interesting reason. Anger is a secondary emotion—that is, it’s how we react when we feel a primary emotion that’s too difficult or intense from us, and cover it over with some other emotion that’s less painful to feel. The primary emotions under anger are usually some combination of shame, grief, and fear.
People with brittle egos generally have no shortage of these: shame that they can’t live up to their own self-image, grief over the pain their brittle ego has caused themselves and others, and above all fear that their self-deception will collapse around them and leave the lie exposed once and for all. Those are powerful emotions, difficult to bear, and anger is a convenient way of hiding from them. When you see people reacting with weirdly disproportionate rage, therefore, it’s worth considering the possibility that brittle egos are involved. Any time you see a whole society reacting that way, it’s even more likely that glaringly false self-representations and the inevitable brittle egos have become pandemic in that society.
The obvious next question is why so many egos these days should be so remarkably brittle. That’s not a difficult question to answer, either. Back in the middle years of the 20th century, psychologists noticed that inadequate self-esteem was a source of many emotional difficulties. That was a valid insight, but their proposed cure for the problem turned out to be worse than the disease. They argued that the way to prevent children from having inadequate self-esteem was to shield them from the risk of failure, lower standards so that nobody could fall short of them, and bombard children with a constant stream of oleaginous flattery meant to tell them how precious, wonderful, talented, brilliant, and special every one of them was.
The problem with this is that such treatment doesn’t actually yield self-esteem. Genuine self-esteem is earned by confronting challenges, achieving goals, and learning the strengths and weaknesses of the self; that word “esteem” comes from the same root as “estimate,” after all. There are quite a few terms for the state of mind you reliably generate by making sure that somebody can’t fail and gets flattered all the time, but I prefer an old-fashioned word: vanity.
Vain people don’t have self-esteem: that is, they don’t estimate themselves accurately and recognize their real capacities to rise to challenges, reach their goals, and make change happen in the world. What they have is a severe case of brittle ego. Vain people believe that they are more intelligent, attractive, talented, etc. than they actually are, and have to defend that inaccurate self-assessment against the constant onslaught of reality. That’s why vain people get angry so easily and so often, and why their anger is so often so extreme. They’re not just angry at this or that perceived slight—they’re constantly seething with anger at the entire cosmos because it’s quietly telling them, over and over again, “No, you’re not as wonderful as you want to believe.”
Vain people have another mark that distinguishes them: their capacity for humor is very limited. Some vain people can become very skilled at the sort of waspish, witty putdowns that target the weak spots of their rivals, but there’s always something mean and petty about their wit, and it never earns a belly laugh. Genuine humor always eludes them. Down through the history of humor, from the days of court jesters all the way to the present, comes a simple but ironclad rule: you can never really make fun of anyone else until and unless you can make fun of yourself. This, in turn, vain people can’t do.
Yet there’s one demographic that’s been at least partly sheltered from the noxious effects of the contemporary cult of self-esteem, for a richly ironic reason. Young white men growing up in today’s America get fed the same monotonous diet of flattery as their peers, but they’re also told even more relentlessly that they’re privileged—that is to say, Bad People. Since they’re assigned the status of Bad People, in turn, they’re just as constantly told that their place is to shut up, go sit meekly in the back of society’s bus, and respond to the slaps and kicks dealt out to them by thanking their abusers for helping them to become better allies.
Brutal as all this is, it has had one interesting consequence: it seems to have provided an effective antidote to the cult of self-esteem. Those young white men who don’t crumple under the pressure (as many do, of course; check out the suicide rate among young white men sometime) quite often end up with resilient egos. The proof of this is the simple fact that they can handle mockery, and in fact dish it out to themselves and one another with verve.
The best places to take this in are populist-right forums of the sort where Pepe the Frog is a frequent apparition. You’ll see young white men laughingly calling themselves and one another “faggot” and “retard”—try, just try, to imagine participants in a far-left forum calling themselves and each other “bigot” and “Nazi” in the same merry tone. They love to mock their own autistic tendencies—and it’s an interesting commentary on our times that autistic people are by and large not merely accepted but celebrated by the supposedly intolerant right, while the supposedly tolerant left is redlined as hostile territory by so many of us on the spectrum.
Thus it’s not accidental that this is the same demographic that drove the emergence of memes as a political force in their own right. The 2016 US presidential campaign—the First Meme War, to give it the name many of its veterans used—was fought, like all political campaigns, on the battlegrounds of the collective imagination. That was where torrents of dank memes cracked the aura of inevitability that Hillary Clinton’s propagandists tried to build around her, and turned the absurd idea of a Donald Trump presidency into an option that just enough Americans chose to embrace. Among those who kept the meme cannons roaring during that conflict, in turn, the demographic we’re discussing was massively overrepresented.
What’s more, these same self-proclaimed faggots and retards make fun of the very political leaders they support. They laughed themselves into hiccups a little while back when leftward periodicals posted baffled articles about the explosion of memes doing weird things to J.D. Vance’s face. Did it mean that the right was turning against Vance? Of course it meant nothing of the kind. It was the kind of mocking welcome you can expect when you join a community of young men with resilient egos. Vance passed the test with flying colors, not only laughing at the memes but posting a Halloween picture of himself dressed as one of them. His chances of being swept into the presidency in 2028 by a tsunami of dank memes have gone up accordingly.
The broader political implications of all this are not small, for vanity is a fatal liability in at least three ways. First, vain people consistently overestimate their own abilities, and so take on challenges that are beyond their capacity. Second, in order to sustain their overinflated self-images, vain people just as consistently underestimate the abilities of their rivals, and so get blindsided by preventable defeats. In The Art of War, Sun Tsu noted that a leader who knows his own strength and knows the strength of his enemies will win a hundred victories in a hundred battles. Since vain people cannot attain either of these two essential modes of knowledge, their success rate is rather noticeably lower.
Yet the third liability of the vain is even more dangerous to them: vanity makes you easy to manipulate. Flatter the vain, and they’ll follow you as though you had a rope tied to their septum piercings; mock them, and the blind rage that pops up on cue makes them even easier to herd in whatever direction you want. This isn’t simply a theoretical concern. Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has been backing the Democrats into one losing position after another: all he has to do is favor something and his opponents oppose it. As long as he chooses things that are generally favored by the voters, as he’s done so far, the Democrats’ historically low polling numbers will stay low.
All this has a personal dimension as well as a political one, and many of my readers who grew up being fed the toxic diet of fake self-esteem our culture inflicts on its young will have had to contend with its downsides in their own lives. Yet the thing that interests me most just now is how the cult of vanity I’ve anatomized here intersects with the perspectives I’ve drawn from the Situationists, that obscure movement whose ideas I’ve explored in recent posts. We’ll circle back to that discussion in another two weeks.
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In other news, I’m delighted to announce that a new book of mine is available for preorder. I think most of my readers know that W.B. Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, was also up to his eyeballs in occultism. His occult writings, however, lie scattered through the volumes of his collected work and haven’t previously been brought together in a form convenient for occultists to use.
So, of course, I had to fix that. 😉 The result is The Magical Writings of W.B. Yeats, an anthology that contains his most important occult writings, including the original (and long unavailable) 1925 edition of A Vision, his major work on occult philosophy. It will be out next May, but is available now for preorder, and readers of mine get a 20% discount with the code YEATS20. You can preorder your copy here in the US and here elsewhere.
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 10/20). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Patrick’s mother Christine‘s vital energy be strengthened so she can continue healing at home without need for more surgical operations.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Marko have the awareness and strength to constructively deal with the situation.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May the abcess in JRuss’s left armpit heal quickly.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s left ureter be restored to full function, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May HippieVikings’s baby HV, who was born safely but has had some breathing concerns, be filled with good health and strength.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, continue to respond favorably to treatment; may he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May DJ’s newborn granddaughter Marishka and daughter Taylor be blessed, healed, and protected from danger, and may their situation work out in the best way possible for both of them.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG, Someone recently gave me Phil Knights book ” Shoe Dog” , and I read it cover to cover on a dark rainy day last week. Now, I am no Nike fan boy as, I don’t think making shoes with slave wages in third world countries and tricking Americans of low self esteem in to wearing them with celebrity endorsements is a noble thing.
But what struck me about the book was the collection of men Phil assembled around him starting in the middle 1960’s. They were self depreciating in the absurd and mocked and taunted each other in a way that has not been possible in the workplace for 30 years now. They called each other “buttface” and went on ” buttface retreats”. They even ruthlessly mocked and played tricks on Nike’s number 2 guy, Bob Woodall, who was a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair.
I would guess this bunch would have been good at memeing if it was around then.
What they have is a severe case of brittle ego. Vain people believe that they are more intelligent, attractive, talented, etc. than they actually are, and have to defend that inaccurate self-assessment against the constant onslaught of reality. That’s why vain people get angry so easily and so often, and why their anger is so often so extreme. They’re not just angry at this or that perceived slight—they’re constantly seething with anger at the entire cosmos because it’s quietly telling them, over and over again, “No, you’re not as wonderful as you want to believe.”
Hey, stop talking about me in my early twenties, or else I’m going to get very, very angry! 😉
One reason I would submit for why Democrats can’t meme is because of the ego-discrepancy between what they think they are and what they actually are. They want to think they are the party of “the people” and the downtrodden, yet what they increasingly are as time goes on is the party of the blue-state big-city Professional Managerial Class and their administrative class hangers-on. Not only will they not be able to properly meme in this condition, they will not be able to handle having this pointed out to them!
The Smothers Brothers. My Heroes. I haven’t thought about them in decades.
Mad Magazine (does it still exist?) Pogo. We have lost so much.
But I will be good and not mention Adolf Hitler. Not one word of Adolf Hitler will pass my lips.
My keyboard on the other hand………
oleaginous flattery – Love it. Sounds gelatinous. So is humor, could you say, a gauge of how rooted and balanced someone is? It’s not received enough attention, and yet Ousepensky mentions it, and Henri Bergson has an essay (which I ain’t read) on it as well. Your theorem, btw, explains to me why comedy is a dead art form in America. The right is allowed to use it, and the Left forgot or lost the capability, although they still make the movies, have the shows, etc. I noticed it in spades after 9-11, or thereabouts.
Some of what is deemed funny or not in either side of this debate seems to be based on in-jokes. If you weren’t hanging around the chans, some of that stuff might not be funny. If you didn’t hang out on the chans, likely it is because some of that stuff was downright offensive to a person. Likewise, if you weren’t hanging around some of the places where leftists congregate the things they think are funny, and their own in jokes go flying over the head of others. They are laughed at, but not in the way they think they should be laughed at.
I have noticed a lot of autists that I know don’t get the more subtle side of my verbal humor. It goes over them completely in many cases. I work with several, and am friends with several more, so that is just on the basis of those interactions. That said, it seems that there are plenty of autists on the left as well, and they seem to be the kind who are also trans. I am not the only one who notices a venn diagram with the autism spectrum and people with gender dysphoria. I am probably on the spectrum too, but my attention doesn’t last long enough for me to give much attention to the idea. Maybe that’s a deficit on my part.
I do think the lack of humor in the workplace these days is a direct result of the brittle nature people have in general. It comes from the top down PMC’s… who certainly don’t have humor.
While Vance may be able to meme, Trump’s ego, though not easily bruised, does seem to be brittle in the way he demands attention at all times. Maybe he has a deficit of attention too. Trump also seems to have gotten puffed up quite a bit from his new thought techniques. His own self-esteem issues come to the fore anytime someone is critical or what have you. His scathing attacks on his opponents are the kind you expect from a bully who has to put others down so they can feel good. That’s one way of viewing it anyway.
You have said in the past, that you don’t care for the kind of humor that pokes fun at other people. A fair number of memes do seem to fall into this category. So what has changed there, for you, if anything?
One of the critical areas of true self esteem building has been removed from the life of the young at just the age it is needed. In my town when you reached forth grade you were allowed to go in to the fields and pick crops. For us it was berries, starting with strawberries and ending with boysenberries.
There was no self delusion in this activity. You got for the amount you picked and not amount of puffery, flattery or silver stars would change this. If you got faster and faster as the season went on your paycheck would show it. I think this came at a critical age for the building of good self esteem.
Only a few years later ( in the early 1980’s) child labor was outlawed and this critical activity disappeared for the young. Replaced by camps, and activities that handed out gold stars and made sure everyone was valued. We can see the result today.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Clay, interesting. Yeah, that sounds like typical young male humor from the days before brittle egos.
Mister N, there’s that, certainly! Pretending to be brave heroes defending Middle-earth from the hordes of Sauron when you’re actually just defending your own class privilege by shilling for one of two competing factions of insanely corrupt billionaire kleptocrats will put some brittleness into even the most robust ego.
Annette2, funny. My late wife was a huge Pogo fan, btw — the only person I’ve ever met who knew, and used, Beauregard’s full name. She and I used to address each other now and then using the names that P.T. Bridgeport used for Bun Rab: Caldwilder, Thimscrabble, etc.
Celadon, there are funny people who aren’t very well balanced, but I’ve yet to meet a brittle, unfunny person who didn’t have serious problems.
Cato, that’s valid. As I mentioned in an earlier post in the Situationist sequence, the left has bought into the Marxist notion of collective morality, and so those transpeople who happen to be autistic get a free pass for their verbal gaucheries, since they belong to a category that’s assigned the role of Good People and therefore can do no wrong. It’s those of us who don’t have that advantage that tend to avoid the left, because we’re not good at tracking the endlessly changing rules about what terms you’re supposed to use, etc. As for my own tastes, I can recognize that something’s wickedly funny and effective without finding it personally enjoyable. Much of memetic humor falls into that category for me — though there’s also a good deal of it that embraces a self-deprecating absurdity I find very entertaining.
Clay, that’s an excellent point.
@6 P-Funk
I am an autist, and I don’t easily process verbal humor but can understand written (i.e. Internet) humor. I don’t think many autists can devote much brainpower to social interaction, so we’re taxed by just having a conversation. I can get around that to an extent by internalizing some scripts through repetition until they become automatic, but those scripts are too rigid for subtler humor. (And sometimes I do get jokes but find them lame.)
As for JMG apparently appreciating comedy, I think he doesn’t find it funny for the most part but understands that others do.
Re: Trans autists
Right-wingers claim that the trans/nonbinary movement targets vulnerable autistics by love-bombing them into an “inclusive” community. It seems plausible to me but I’m not in a position to support or attack that narrative with ancedotal experience.
For those who are willing to sit through one of the cringiest videos they have ever seen, here’s a “chef’s kiss” example of what passes for the left being unable to meme effectively. That the tune chosen was from the anthem of the East German’s ruling communist party (“The Party Is Always Right”) is just cringe-icing on the cringe-cake. Holy lack of self-awareness, Batman!
JMG:
Vain people have another mark that distinguishes them: their capacity for humor is very limited. Some vain people can become very skilled at the sort of waspish, witty putdowns that target the weak spots of their rivals, but there’s always something mean and petty about their wit, and it never earns a belly laugh. Genuine humor always eludes them. Down through the history of humor, from the days of court jesters all the way to the present, comes a simple but ironclad rule: you can never really make fun of anyone else until and unless you can make fun of yourself. This, in turn, vain people can’t do.
ME: I have to remember that as people go through either Trump Derangement Syndrome or Zohan Mamdani Derangement Syndrome (MDS). You do have to have a sense of human to laugh at yourself. What I find in either case TDS or MDS, everyone is very petty, very serious, and very sure that we are all going to DDDIIIIIIEEEEEEE!
For me, the hyperfocus is hilarious since it means they are so vain as to think that it is all about them and their pet problems. I had to have my family turn off Steve Bannon who has a severe case of MDS. He is hilarious with those who have TDS, but not when his ox is being gored. Of course, you have to be vain to be Steve Bannon.
I also heard that sarcasm is the protest of weak people.
As for me, I do such silly things, that I am used to people laughing at me. Sort of like Opus the Penguin of Bloom County.
Quote JMG:
“It remains the standard form for internet memes, though short computer-generated videos and a few other formats have risen up to challenge […]”
Fair enough, but sometimes you just wanna autistgasm for four minutes straight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mLzFeqWePo
The one at 1:01 minutes gets me every time. Even better than the one where he is riding the velociraptor at the end… 😉
Hello JMG and commentariat:
I’ve started to read your current online essay with less illusion than your essays about Situationism. However, when you’ve remembered Arthur Koestler ideas I’ve gotten very happy: Koestler is one of my favourite writers and thinkers. Well, he had his dark side like everybody, but I think like you he’s been unfairly forgotten today.
About leftists who can’t meme, I read some days ago a book by a spanish essayist (whose name is Juan Soto Ivars), who explains this lack of humor with a core idea: woke and feminist left hasn’t any humor sense because they have no irony. They’re literalist, like every fundamentalism in History and nowadays. They interpret reality in a only boring form. I think in his book (roughly translated from Spanish as “Battle of Letters”), he grasps a part of woke leftism groupal mind, but his analysis isn’t as complete as you’ve written today in your blog.
Bisociation sounds eerily similar to the Ternary. Maybe that’s why enlightened folk like to laugh a lot.
I never thought of the people who ran around wearing Handmaid costumes were vain. Now that you point it out, I guess they were. Why else would you run around wearing silly clothes and keep a perfectly straight face, proclaiming the patriarchy is out to get us all?
@JMG
About cultivating resilient egos, there’s one way that is pretty common in India – corporal punishment. Of course, the “don’t ever hit a child, speak to him/her” trend has begun here too, but it’s still way more marginal than in the West. I’m 29, and I can confidently say that most people in my generation were beaten by their parents quite liberally as children – for example, I remember being beaten with the rolling-pin, cricket stump and belt in my childhood, and this was quite common, though not an everyday thing, of course. The “spare the rod, spoil the child” attitude that has taken hold in the West (I’m not sure if it holds true for the Asian Tigers though) has likely played a part in this scenario, IMO, and I do genuinely think that a very large number of these people with brittle egos and an overinflated sense of self-entitlement could have been prevented from landing up in this problematic territory, had they been dealt with strictly by their parents, using corporal punishment at times. I know correlation does not automatically imply causation, but when I look around me and see the people who have such problematic attitudes, it strikes me that the vast majority of them have been treated like royalty by their parents, and have never even been slapped in their lives, much less being whacked by a cricket stump or something.
Today, as an adult, I don’t feel any anger or pain or bitterness towards my parents for doing so; in fact, I am grateful to them, as the alternative would have been far worse. While I personally do not intend to have any children, I am fully supportive of the idea that there should be a modicum of a sense of discipline in everyone’s life, and that cultivating such discipline in childhood is greatly facilitated by some stern behaviour on part of the child’s parents, from time to time.
This does not mean, however, that beating children cannot be taken too far – there are very many sad cases where children are brutally thrashed in childhood by their parents beyond any reasonable extent, and many of these children deal with the accumulated trauma by becoming criminals, among other possible scenarios. However, these are statistical outliers, and they do not invalidate the general idea per se – unfortunately, modern culture tends to swing towards extremes even when there’s no need to, and thus you get the “my son is a little prince and he must get whatever he wants” on the one hand, and the “you dropped the glass of water, now just wait and watch, I’ll whack you with my belt till your body aches all over from the beatings”, on the other.
“ First, vain people consistently overestimate their own abilities, and so take on challenges that are beyond their capacity.”
I have been learning about the truth of this statement and the dire consequences of acting out of vanity when engaged in high risk activities from a certain YouTube channel called PilotDebrief, of which this link is a sample:
https://youtu.be/kIA1rcdhDLA?si=5fEp0unpDTHvTezW
It’s compulsive viewing.
Interesting insights on humor. I recall a comedian saying humor had to include truth and pain. I’ve felt this was one reason leftist memes so often fall flat with middle or lower class people. The leftists who are also members or aspirants of the managerial class live in a different reality. So their view of truth is obviously untrue to the populists. Your fragility theory similarly restricts them to meme material guaranteed to be quickly ignored by many people since it just doesn’t fit the populist experience.
“They want to think they are the party of “the people” and the downtrodden, yet what they increasingly are as time goes on is the party of the blue-state big-city Professional Managerial Class and their administrative class hangers-on. Not only will they not be able to properly meme in this condition, they will not be able to handle having this pointed out to them!”
Yep, you can blame Third Way Clinton and New Labour Blair for that, who decided to abandon the working class for the managers and the bureaucrats. And now you see the Teamsters support Trump, and Nigel Farage praising trade unionist Arthur Scargill who lead the miners against Thatcher.
One of the huge problems with todays corporate and public sector bureaucracy is that it in both cases ( public sector is worse) they are filled with these brittle vain personalities, usually women. So that when some else pokes fun at them, often men, they file HR complaints.
Well meaning employee laws preventing sexual harassment and hardcore mental abuse have evolved to provide those of low self esteem a set of weapons to use against their enemies. The smallest remark, humorous comment or god forbid some type of workplace meme can lead to overblown HR investigations. This has stifled the effectiveness of most of these public and private bureaucracies. That is one of the reasons we can’t build new bridges, fight urban fires, or send a man back to the moon.
JMG thanks for your reply.
If “sarcasm is the protest of weak people” as Neptunesdolphin suggests… there is a reason. Gen X is perhaps the most sarcastic and Gen X got screwed, in a lot of ways, by the Boomers. That has put some of us in a “weak” position. As such biting sarcasm and irony were the only way some of us have lived through it.
…funny about the MDS… it is as if two mirrors are aimed at eachother.
Very interesting observations!
One thought I had– in addition to the cult of self-esteem, people in my generation (I’m 42) were treated to an endless harangue about how it was our personal job to save the world.
It wasn’t put that way, of course. Instead, we were, as children, regularly told that the world was in deep trouble, that it needed to be saved, and that it would be up to our generation (as a collective) to save it. I remember being forced, at age 10, to sing a song about this for the school chorus. It went on in several verses in dismal tones about the whales and the rainforest, and then shifted into an upbeat chorus about how “We are the ones who will build the world that can be! We are the hope, we are the ones!”
We were also regularly told that, throughout our lives, we would be told that one person cannot make a difference, one person cannot change the world, and so on, but that under no circumstances were we to believe this. “Never believe that one person cannot change the world– one person can change the world! That’s the only way it’s ever been done!” And of course, we were treated to a litany of One Persons who had changed the world, starting inevitably with Martin Luther King, and with no mention made of the fact that the One Persons in question were simply the public faces of large, organized and well-funded movements. Meanwhile, at no time in my 42 years on this planet has anyone ever told me that “One person can’t make a difference” or any other variation on the subject. Indeed, the only time I’ve heard anything remotely like that said in seriousness in a nonfiction context was when I listened to Michael Levin’s recent speech at the meeting of the Jewish Republican Coalition a few days ago. So no one (except Michael Levin) actually says things like this.
And so we were told that the world needed to be saved, that one person could save it, and, By God, you know who’s one person? I’m one person!
No mention, of course, was made of changing ourselves first, or of developing character through the cultivation of virtuous habits which might then influence others around us. Indeed, you’re the first writer I ever encountered who insisted the importance of changing one’s own lifestyle. No– we were apparently meant to simply badger other people into reforming all of society.
I’m not sure how long this sort of messaging went on, and readers younger than I am can tell me if it lasted beyond the 1990s. But I’m convinced that this accounts for at least some of the neuroticism seen among people my age, and may account for some of the odd behavior of people on the Left in particular.
You can be strict to your children without corporal punishment. Identify what your child is attached to the most and take that away from them as punishment. Make them do more chores. Et cetera. They’ll quickly learn not to do the wrong things. But too many people today don’t even do the mere basics and spoil their children.
Mr. Greer, how delicious this post! I gave a hearty chuckle as the heading materialized on my screen.
Now, after reading through it, I began to peruse some other sites .. one of which is ‘The Quartering’.. whereby, shortly after the requisite lead intro, a short meme video commenced of which I found quite funny. Twas no doubt A.I. altered, but hit the humor spot just fine: it even has a bit of classical piano, and the player is exquisito! Now, I know you don’t generally watch such media, but after reading the above, I have to say that it hit like a rubber arrow piercing straight through a Pythonian Knight’s helm! The short meme vid starts at about the 1:34 mark, just after the rather stupid WallMart one .. which ain’t no meme that I can cypher. Bon appetit, if you dare.
Patrick “Right-wingers claim that the trans/nonbinary movement targets vulnerable autistics by love-bombing them into an “inclusive” community. It seems plausible to me but I’m not in a position to support or attack that narrative with ancedotal experience.”
Another angle to view it from is that autists with gender dysphoria are excluded from right wing autistic social groups because of the kind of very male humor employed. Since many are non-binary this would be a turn off. At the same time the religious arm of the right wing doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of the way some actually feel about their bodies. These trans autists would then get included in the left wing side of things where they are loved bombed by people who have their own hang ups, but whose hang ups dont include as much what people do with their genitals when in private.
Patrick, I’ve heard the same thing, but I have no idea if it’s true or not.
Mister N, at least it’s truth in advertising!
Neptunesdolphins, it’s an interesting case study in competing projections. Too bad Jung isn’t around to write a mordant commentary on both.
Sven, nah, you wanna do that. 😉 I’ll pass on the video, thanks.
Chuaquin, that’s a good point. I may need to make time for a discussion of political, religious, and cultural fundamentalism, and not just because we’ve got so many people in that trap just now. From a neo-Situationist analysis, fundamentalism is the insistence that there can be no difference between Spectacle and reality, and that cannot coexist with irony.
Jon, interesting. I’ll be meditating on that.
Neptunesdolphins, oh, it’s more complex than that. Remember that in current left culture, you can only be a Good Person if you’re oppressed. Thus you get plenty of privileged upper middle class white women who spend their time LARPing as oppressed people, so they can convince themselves they’re Good People.
Viduraawakened, to my mind that’s definitely one of those situations where the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea. My father was beaten brutally and repeatedly by his father, and had the emotional scars from that experience for the rest of his life. (Admittedly it also gave him one of the very few good memories from his teen years — the day when he was fourteen, when his father beat him bloody as usual, and he waited until it was all over and said, in a bleak bored voice, “Are you done yet?” That was the last time his father beat him. He was nearly seventy when he first told me that story, and he had tears in his eyes.)
I was spanked as a child, but only with an open hand, and only when I’d really gone out of my way to deserve it and every other disciplinary measure had failed. I think that’s a reasonable middle ground. But a rolling pin, a cricket stump, a belt? Call it a cultural difference, but from my perspective, that’s child abuse.
CC, I’ll pass on the videos — I’m not a visual media fan — but yeah, high risk activities plus vanity quite often equals at least one corpse.
Clay, yeah, there’s that, definitely.
Daniel, that’s valid — humor has to include at least a sidelong truth. The dad joke I cited gets its edge because we’ve all seen people do the most idiotic things to get “a smoking hot body,” so the idea of getting cremated for that purpose resonates with the absurdities we’ve witnessed. Equally, the comedian’s right that there has to be pain — I might add that this can be rooted in shame, grief, or fear. It might be interesting sometime to analyze some really bad memes from both sides to see whether they lack truth, pain, or both.
Cato, that makes a lot of sense. You won’t find me saying anything to defend my g-g-g-generation, given the way that it’s still clinging to wealth and power at the expense of the generations that follow it.
Steve, good gods. I’m old enough to have escaped this. What a horribly toxic double-bind — not to mention a vicious example of political Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy! You can be sure that the people who told you all this weren’t actually trying to be that one person, after all…
Anonymous, exactly. There’s a world of positive possibilities midway between child abuse and spoiling your kids.
Polecat, I’ll pass on the video, but I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Another challenge to the matter is that to give kids the chance to acquire real self-esteem, you kind of have to… stop all those maladaptive efforts, and you have to do so in the face of parents who grew up Special, so of course their kids are Special, and How Dare You Fail My Kid? It’s difficult to run a campaign with the goal, basically, of “stop protecting kids,” and in certain parts of the country it’s difficult to even parent that way; some busybody will call CPS for “neglect.”
This could be a cyclical thing. Fourth Turning theory would suggest that parenting is peaking towards its most smothering right now – most noteworthy in the ways several state or national governments are trying to pass laws age-gating social media.. (Yes, there are theories that this is a ruse to ultimately tie real identities to pseudonymous accounts, and maybe there’s some truth to that, but realistically, if the government wanted the information, they always were able to get it.)
I feel, though, that resolving this at this point would either require a major shift in how society as a whole approaches child-raising, or would require us to progress(!) far enough into the Long Descent that school as we know it is compelled by circumstances to transform or disappear.
Astrophane (offlist), please save off topic questions for the open post on the 4th Wednesday of each month, or (if it’s an occult question like this one) post it next Monday when I do my regular Magic Monday open post on my Dreamwidth journal:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/
Thank you!
You’ve pointed brittle vain egos, and quickly I’ve associated this term with another one: “safe places”, an expression which has proliferated across the USA since the woke left gained power some years ago, and which has been exported to another countries (with more or less luck), between them the mine. Well, there’s a correlative relation between those two terms, don’t you think it?
Maybe it could be justified in its first times offering these supposedly safe places to people really harassed by another people, but it seems to me the term has been abused a lot until today.
By the way, I’ve also read before my current comment about autistic humor. Well, I’m not authistic, but I’m a mild case of schizoid personality, so I’m next to you in the topic of not understanding very well jokes and pranks, unless I read them in magazines, books or online (I can understand memes, thanks God).
neptunesdolphins @16 .. a short limerick in your honor: ‘Tis true that the unruly strew-out such great memes, whilst those on the Left larp their way through cheap scenes’
I genuinely would like to know how your worldview could be so complete and replete with horrors that you don’t retreat from reality.
Mr. Greer .. when glimpsing that necklace meme, what jumped out was the blu shark’s teeth within the confines of those pearlies..
Also, I will definitely tip my glass beaker.. to Oxygen! As for the um, ‘bagholder’ (in my best Dr. Copper voice, via the movie ‘the THING) : Is that a MAN in there .. or something? ‘;]
JMG,
There is a second way that privileged white women can become the good people other than larping as oppressed people themselves. That second way is to adopt some oppressed group as your ” allies”. This is one of the main purposes that Trans-people, undocumented immigrants and native play. They then can act out various forms of theatre to show support and solidarity for these allies. By doing this they become the good people.
A classic example of this is the ” land recognition” ceremony. In this public officials make a public display of declaring which native tribe once occupied the land that is now occupied by whatever activity is going on that day. In most cases this is not supported by the tribes involved as they see it for the hollow gesture that it is.
I must admit that the title of this weeks post raised my hackles, partly because I see this mythical “left” being used as an all purpose boogeyman, (excuse me, malevelontly inclined person, in case I offended any of the non-binary people who could possibly be reading this,) used as a cudgel against those who they disagree with.
But this post is a masterful exploration of the discourse as it stands today. I agree with a lot of your observations. A lot of this nonsense is an outgrowth of the self esteem solutions I have witnessed in my lifetime. I think this is going to be obliterated by reality, but so much of the US American dream is just that, daydreaming, a “concieve it, believe it, achieve it” mindset that does not comport with reality.
The personal has become political. Play actors espousing viewpoints meant to influence the audience, who pay with their lives. We don’t know any of these people, but the skilled actor can convince you that they are your friend. And what passes for discourse in this world now is pure television.
I grew up on television. I have no patience for it now, even though I’m typing into a tv right now!
Thank you for your writing, John Michael. And to the commentariat here, I value your input so much. Even when I disagree, it makes my thinking go in different directions.
Concerning the meme of JD Vance. Has anyone else noticed that there seems to be an entire genre of memes dedicated to infantilizing Trump and those around him? For some reason the left really like to depict Trump as a baby and more often than not they also include copious amounts of feces and other scat “humor” in these memes. Just last night Gavin Newsom posted several pictures of Trump as a baby in a stroller with himself as a fatherly figure mocking him in response to last night’s election results. It’s a really bizarre phenomenon and I’m curious if there is something more going on here.
Brendhelm, no argument there. I think, though, we’ll see the pendulum swing the other direction in the years ahead. Fashions in raising children veer from one extreme to another over historical time, like fashions in sexuality and relationships.
Chuaquin, that’s a valid point. Safe spaces these days are mostly safe for brittle egos.
Conrad, er, I’m looking across my worldview now, wondering where these horrors are that you mention. I don’t even see so much as a single waving tentacle. 😉 Seriously, what on earth are you talking about?
Polecat, I didn’t notice the shark’s mouth, but you know, you’re right.
Clay, I’m waiting for Native people to show up to one of those land acknowledgment ceremonies and politely but firmly ask the LARPers there to pay rent to the tribe!
John, I’ve used “boogeyperson” more than once with exactly that point in mind. 😉 I know that political labels are quite commonly used as bludgeons these days, but I think it’s worthwhile to explore the major subcultures of today’s society, and labels such as “left” and “right” really do correspond to genuine subcultures — if I mention blue hair and a septum piercing, for example, or a buzz cut and a MAGA hat, those distinguishing marks really do indicate specific cultural orientations. You’re right, of course, that reality bats last and has no patience with a lot of what passes for the American dream these days; it’s not accidental that no small part of my fiction has dealt with the implosion of American society in one way or another, as I think it’s even odds whether there will still be a USA by the time I die. But we’ll see.
Anon, that’s fascinating. I wonder if it has to do with the pervasive tendency on the mainstream left to claim the status of “adults in the room,” especially when they’re acting like spoiled two-year-olds?
@Cato P-Funk
I largely disagree– I think many of those autists are mistaken or confused, but I don’t know if they’re being deliberately targeted by activists.
JMG # 27:
You said fundamentalism (according neo-Situs) cannot differenciate between Spectacle and reality, so I understand it identifies them like the same thing, and there’s too lack of irony. I agree. Woke and a big part of nowadays feminism is indeed fundamentalist in that sense, like the fundamentalists in religions at which they ironically look with scorn…
Ok, so Arthur Koestler was practicing as a druid, whether he knew it or not. Positing that all creativity and humor comes from mashing up two presumedly unrelated or oppositional patterns of meaning so they can end up shedding new light on each other and reveal a different pattern of meaning that was previously overlooked and ignored really does sound like familiar Druidic precept. What Koestler called bisociation modern druids refer to as turning binaries into triunes. You know, I think he might have been on to something important there.
Does the subtle art of memeing involve taking some rigid and unquestioned binary presumption (such as the inevitable coronation of the Hillary over the Jeb), mashing up those two imaginary opposites to reveal unexpected correspondences (such as the complete and total corruption and incompetency pervading both legacy parties), and then guiding the reader towards a different meaning pattern that lies outside the limitations of that now questioned and exploded binary (such as how the Donald could easily clobber both the Hillary and the Jeb with one hand tied behind his back)? That would make the “That’s not funny!” retort to any second-wave-feminist faux-indignation about everyday inequalities we were all perfectly used to into some kind of a pre-internet proto-meme — a verbal tag quickly overlaid onto any brittle posture of easily-offended, pearl-clutching hypocrisy. Now we just do it with pictures and writing instead. My, how we have advanced over the past fifty years — that’s progress for ya!
Thank you for your reply, JMG!
The first time I met a fellow punker dressed up in the uniform indicating allegiance to the subculture, only to find the straight laced rule following jock that was only there to beat people up in the pit, I knew to distrust the costumes. Just listen to what they say, and watch what they do. But, I’ve always been a fringe dweller anyway.
Agree completely, but I’m going to reach your destination by a different avenue. There’s a line from Katsuki Sekida that I just adore – “laughter” he writes. “is the safety valve of the world”. I mean, you can dig into that quote for weeks, but I’m going to be superficial and just focus on the physiological basis for what Sekida is getting at. That deep belly laugh you let out when you find a real dank meme? Those directly stimulates the vagus nerve and engage the parasympathetic nervous system. Laughing literally makes you more relaxed, improves digestion, lowers heart rate, and makes you far less insufferable. That bisociation stuff? The Greeks might have called that catharsis. When Apollo and Dionysus get freaky, the best thing to do after lie back in bed and light up a cigarette. Feels good man.
And this is why I think the far left can’t meme. Their In-der-Welt-sein is characterized by being uptight sniveling little brats of perpetual dissatisfaction. They are intellectually, spiritually, and likely physically constipated. Catharsis is anathema to that. Succumbing to such satisfaction would destroy their entire political philosophy and self image. It would purge them of their pent up righteousness and relieve them of their costive martyrdom. I guess you can say that memes are the laxative of the left.
The best (and only real) magician I have known, an Apache shaman, is also a great guy to talk with…. humorous, self deprecating and believes in the simple life…He found it downright funny that more than half of his clients are in the medical profession……
@Steve T, I’m slightly younger than you, and experienced the exact same thing: adults looking at me and telling me they expected me to save the world. Sometimes individually, and not just as a generation. My stepdad especially, but also teachers and people I’d just met. As I got older I started thinking ‘you’re the adults, you’re the ones with the power right now. Why don’t you do it instead of putting it all on us to save at some point in the future when the problems have gotten even worse? Why is this my responsibility? Also, what if I can’t do it and fail?’
I still went into biology with the intention of doing my best to fix things though, as much as one person can. Then ran headfirst into health issues and nothing really panned out how I, or how the people pushing things on me, had planned.
“And of course, we were treated to a litany of One Persons who had changed the world, starting inevitably with Martin Luther King, and with no mention made of the fact that the One Persons in question were simply the public faces of large, organized and well-funded movements.”
Harry Potter is another example of One Person who had changed the world, despite being merely the public face of one side of a three sided war that stretched back to the early 1970s.
Just wanted to remind people that some autists are female, rather than male or trans, and don’t really fit in either group discussed so far.
Patrick, I think some of them are confused too. But there is some genuine dysphoria happening also. Compassion for both seems a sane response to me. Anyone who is serious about chopping themselves up must be serious. Or seriously confused.
Pygmycory # 44 and Steve T:
Maybe I’m older than you, because I was never told by my parents and teachers with that awful phrase…”People who have to save the world”, what bombastic and heavy words to cope with them since your childhood. I’m surprised by your comments about what I could call “a fine psychological torture”.
Vanity is: 1) believing you should get credit for the cards that you’re dealt (from the beauty suit, the intelligence suit, the athletic suit, etc.); 2) believing that the cards have a higher value than they do; and 3) completely forgetting that what counts is how well you learn to play the cards.
BTW, with the emotional landscape having become a hellscape on the left, I’m not at all surprised if those on the spectrum shy away from it. If emotional interactions were unfamiliar territory, I’d prefer to begin my explorations on friendlier terrain.
Chuaquin, nobody detests a fundamentalist as much as the true believers in some rival fundamentalism! The bitter hatreds between Marxists and believers in conservative religions have their root there, for example.
Christophe, most memes — and I don’t just mean political memes here — make very good use of bisociation in exactly that way. Consider this one:
John, maybe so, but I doubt you’ll find many septum rings at a Trump rally or many MAGA hats at a No Kings protest!
Mark, you know, I think that’s the first time I’ve seen one of Heidegger’s concepts used as the basis for a medical diagnosis. 😉
Pyrrhus, I find that just as funny!
Pygmycory, and of course that’s an important point. Thank you.
Greg, exactly. Me, I prefer to hang out with my fellow autists — we’re very heavily overrepresented in the occult community — but I have an easier time when I venture into rightward contexts than leftward ones.
Mister N (offlist), your first attempt went through — it’s #11 in the thread. You don’t need to keep posting it!
@O’Neil: The esc-center still hasn’t caught on too much yet. Extremism seems to be all the rage, as there is always a boogeyman to beat down on. Someone else to blame. Even if its not really a boogeyman, its hard to know because the labyrinth of mirrors we are catching warped reflections in at every turn. In such a time, stillness seems to be a good course of temporary non- action. A pause in the chaos. But then again, chaos never died.
I think the Esc-Center still holds promise, but then people from each side have to listen and lay off the verbal and visual attacks that bring people so much glee.
But it can still be built.
I wonder should I tell him about Emily Youcis and the Will Stancil Show and the memes from it?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/it-do-be-like-that-mr-stancil
Like I said, you have to have some idea of what will resonate with other minds out there. If you’re so far up your own self, you’re never going to know and if you do put anything out, it won’t resonate, won’t propagate.
There is such a thing as a forced meme, sometimes botting is used, but you can tell (not always but most times) when that’s happening.
That point about vanity preventing a clear self-image or even a clear image of your opponents has wider implications too. I’ve been noticing this more and more lately, that writers on the modern left seems far more likely to misrepresent the arguments made by the right than the other way around. These days, a lot of left-wing rhetoric boils down to “Look at this silly thing Republicans believe? How could anyone believe this? How silly!” and they only manage to prove that they didn’t understand what their opponents were saying in the first place.
Just this week, I saw an article argue something along the lines of “Republicans believe rising health care costs are because of Obamacare, but statistics show otherwise”, but as far as I know, conservatives don’t blame all health care costs on Obamacare, just rising insurance premiums making healthcare less affordable for average Americans, which it is very much responsible for.
Left-wing articles are also frequently the place where “someone will… quote the [opposition]… like this… and [nobody bats] an eye (sic)”. Meanwhile, quite often you find conservatives don’t have to embellish anything, they’ll just take a quote straight from the horse’s mouth and meme on it. They also seem to understand the arguments the left is making much better than the left does the right. They just aren’t convinced by them.
Ironically, the left’s need to see itself as more educated and by extension more intelligent prevents it from forming a coherent argument against their opposition, because they will deliberately misunderstand that opposition in order to feel smarter than them.
I am, of course, speaking in averages.
@JMG, Viduraawakened #17, and others re: corporal punishment
I have some background in psychology so I can speak to this a little bit. According to what I was taught, there’s been a lot of research done on child outcomes and corporal punishment, and it was found that, as one would expect, it very much comes down to the details of execution. On either extreme, you have children who were never ever scolded and spoiled rotten, and of course their life outcomes reflect that upbringing, and on the other extreme you have children who were brutally beaten with no warnings or justifications, and their lives on average turn out as you’d expect. Children who turned out more or less fine generally had a few common factors going for them. The most important to this discussion are:
1. A balance of positive and negative feedback. Generally researchers found that parents that were always coddling their children were just as prone to being resented by them as parents who constantly berated and punished them. Children who respected their parents and felt thankful for their upbringing generally had parents that knew when to praise their children and when to punish them.
2. Clear expectations. There’s a world of difference between being beaten because your parent was in a bad mood that day, or decided on the spot that the thing you just did pissed them off, and a parent that warns you, for example “if I ever catch you smoking I will beat the crap out of you”. In the latter case, the child understands the connection between their behavior and the punishment. In the first case, the parent is seen as wild and unpredictable.
3. Love. Let me be very clear, this is NOT whether the PARENT declares that they are acting out of love. This is whether the CHILD feels and believes that the parent is acting out of love. So long as the child understood that the punishment was being administered for their well-being, it generally had positive, not negative effects on their development.
Beyond this, researchers found that it was mostly unimportant whether parents used physical punishment or more creative, nonphysical punishments (like taking away privileges) when it came to the child’s long-term development. When I say “mostly”, I mean that in either case, the child grows up to be generally successful, no heightened risk of mental disorders compared to the average, and has no criminal record. There are still subtle differences between the parenting styles, mainly that children who were physically punished are more likely to believe in physical punishment for their children. Also, physical punishment was just slightly more effective in chaotic environments (extreme poverty and so on), while nonphysical was slightly better in more stable environments (relative economic stability for example).
So, in summary, it really depends, but in the end it matters less whether you physically punish your children and more whether you create a stable, loving environment for them (which sounds obvious when you put it that way).
Personally, I’m not a parent at this point in time, but I would prefer nonphysical punishments where possible since the research seems to show that there isn’t any extra benefit to physical punishment for the most part.
@Steve T #23
Yeah, just wanted to pitch in the extra data point. I’m a child of the 90s and was very much raised on this kind of rhetoric, well into the 2000s. It took me many years to untangle the internalized guilt I felt before I realized this was the older generation shoving the responsibilities for their failures onto me (and people younger than me). Needless to say, I don’t think kindly of the adults who did this and continue to do it, though it’s clear that they think quite highly of themselves.
JMG, the ease of memeing works in both directions. Brittle vain people have a difficult time coming up with memes ( or any kind of humor) to fight their enemies. But on the other hand brittle, vane and hypocritical people are easier to make fun of than other types of people. As an example, think of yourself as a writer on a comedy show and your boss walks in and tells you to write some jokes about some popular figure or another. Who is it easier to write jokes about, Hillary Clinton or Tucker Carlson. Rachel Zegler or Robert Redford, AOC or Thomas Massey.
@cc
The “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots” saying hides a lot of stupid stuff that goes on. Some of those cases are indeed people with more money than sense. TNFlyGirl is the covergirl for that – https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=kQUS-6SBZzM
But some of them are not exactly what I’d call vanity or hubris but lapses of judgement due to inexperience. Like that professional pilot that took a job that 2 other more experienced pilots turned down and died – https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=W9PVNLEPhGE
And then there’s the two pilots that were pressured into doing an approach by a customer that 4 other pilots had aborted – https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=8-0bPEpyFEY
When flying, the universe does not care how you get the right answer when it asks, just that you do. And there are wrong and right answers. It can’t be intimidated or finger wagged or bullied either. It will kill you effortlessly if you do.
What has happened to you?. Why are you so sneery?. I think you need to channel your wife more. I am a very longtime supporter, but you are way too up yourself for me now.
re: that’s not funny and feminism. Sometimes things really aren’t funny. Like a coworker waving a fish fillet board he’d just bought (larege piece of wood and metal) at two female coworkers barely over half his weight and threatening to ‘make us know our place’ when he was alone with us. This is someone we were doing a field job with and sharing a bedroom with at the time 24/7.
We complained, he said he was joking. Fortunately the higher ups were already annoyed with him because he’d caused major problems for them prior to this, and everyone he had to work with disliked him, and after that we didn’t have to share a bedroom with him and mostly got put on different projects. Though the male coworkers he was then sharing a bedroom with complained about having to deal with him farting.
I still maintain that threats of physical violence accompanied by waving around something that could reasonably be used as a weapon are not funny, whether intended as a joke or not. I felt seriously scared, and was making plans for what I’d do if he did physically attack me.
re having to save the world – after commenting I realized that both Steve T and I are Canadian. as well as being almost the same age. Maybe its a Canadian thing as well as a time thing.
Other Owen, I’m not sure which “him” you have in mind. Granted, memes that focus on current media personalities miss me completely.
Untitled-1, a friend of mine who comes from a long line of con artists and carnival hucksters tells me that nobody’s as easy to con as an intellectual, because intellectuals always think that they’re smarter than other people and so fall victim very easily to quite simple tricks. As for corporal punishment, yes, this seems very sensible to me. As usual, the best option is somewhere in the middle, and handled with intelligence.
Clay, there are good reasons I don’t write comedy. 😉
Nancy, my late wife was much more conservative than I am, as you’d expect from someone who grew up in a farm town like Spokane, WA; for example, she was very deeply in agreement with JK Rowling’s comments on transwomen. As for “sneery,” and I mean this quite seriously, if that’s all you see in the comments I made in this post, you may be one of the people I was talking about. You may want to assess your own ego and see if it’s gotten too brittle.
Pygmycory, granted, but there are jerks of every gender. As for saving the world, all I can say is that I’m glad I didn’t grow up in Canada!
Patrick (10),
I haven’t seen activists specifically targeting autists. What I have seen, however, is the mental health system pushing people to identify as trans. In Canada in the late 2010s, there was additional money available to therapists if their patients transitioned. It was pushed as “they’ll have extra work loads helping their trans patients!”, but the reality is that the extra money was quite lucrative.
I’m not sure about other countries, but I know at least two people who were pushed towards thinking they were trans by therapists aiming to get in on that money.
Steve (23),
I remember that sort of thing from my elementary school days as well; that was in the early-mid 2000s, so I guess it went on for quite a while.
Regarding the comment from Conrad (32) ,
I think I can explain it with reference to my family. Like a lot of people in the self-proclaimed Middle Class for the last few decades, they have been acting in horrific fashion in their desperation to cling to their wealth and power, and in the process have steadily destroyed all beauty, happiness, and everything else of value in their lives and those of everyone around them. This is a very self destructive and evil thing to do, and so they’ve always justified it by insisting that reality has to be utterly horrible. They were, you see, actually acting in a completely sane fashion: there was no such thing as beauty; contented happiness was an illusion; love was nothing more than chemicals in the brain evolved to further reproduction. The only things that are real are material pleasures.
It’s taken me a very long time to dig my way out of the hell that is that world: they forced me to inhabit it as a child, because any other world was a threat to their self-image as reasonable people in an anti-human world. I think a lot of people remain stuck there, and are unable to grasp that reality does not have to be hell. For them, anyone who tries to claim beauty, love, happiness, anything of human value is real must be delusional. Since very few people can actually follow this worldview to where it logically belongs (ex: my parents are still happily married), they like to insist everyone is delusional, and that reality is too horrible for the human mind to ever really understand.
Anonymous (36),
This makes perfect sense to me. Pay attention to the rhetoric from the left, and notice that they insist that anyone who disagrees with them is being childish. No one can actually have a different opinion; it can only be that other people are too immature to understand reality. The fact that the reality they choose to inhabit is utterly repugnant just allows them to claim moral superiority: when healthy people stop living in their delusional hell, they can say “look at all those people running away from reality!”
>Other Owen, I’m not sure which “him” you have in mind.
You, the author of this article. 😛
>Cato, that makes a lot of sense. You won’t find me saying anything to defend my g-g-g-generation, given the way that it’s still clinging to wealth and power at the expense of the generations that follow it.
In other news, the average age of the first time homebuyer has risen now to – 40. There are a lot of people that haven’t been dealt into the status quo and don’t care if it goes up in flames. I hear some guy named Mamdani has won something? I wonder how that will turn out?
Michael Martin (or, as my children know him, Mr. Ether) is just starting a dive into Yeats now! I would love to hear you on the Regeneration show again to shoot the **** and promote the book…
Sigh. I always want to bristle when liberals and democrats are conflated with “the left”. From where I stand, they’re a right wing party that’s hijacked the language of intersectionality for propaganda purposes. I suppose that’s a me problem. Seems as though all of the definitions i grew up with have been upended and flipped on their heads. I guess I no longer fit into my old, “leftist” shoes either, so.. There’s that.
Very good article, as always.
I remember your discussion of Pepe the frog and am curious about what you make of the current liberal attempt at froggery. The thing that began in Portland appears to be spreading a little. I’m not feeling the same intensity of focus and intent that Pepe was driven by, yet it does, curiously exist. What say, sir?
@ pygmycory– As an admirer of your country (and I mean that sincerely, whatever I may think of your current government) I’m flattered, but I’m afraid it isn’t so. I was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania– an odd little place best known for being periodically destroyed by flash floods and for occasionally turning up in Bruce Springsteen songs about poor people–and have never lived outside of the US. I’m sure it must be a generational thing, as the sentiment is very much that of 90s-era liberalism.
@JMG,
I was thinking of the way (problem guy) tried to pass it off a joke, and one of our other male coworkers insisted that we’d be fine, we were worth ten of (problem guy). Not really thinking about the fact problem guy was 180lbs of all muscle to my 103, probably because the ‘you’re fine’ guy was closer to seven feet tall than six, and I doubt he’d been physically afraid of someone stronger than him very often.
Basically, “I was only joking, can’t you take a joke?’ can and is sometimes used to excuse or ignore dangerous situations, and that is a problem. I also tend to be literal minded, and people used that intentionally to bully me as a kid, then went ‘I was only joking, sheesh stop being so sensitive, can’t you take a joke?’ if I complained or an adult noticed any problem . Was I too sensitive? Probably. Did it hurt and was it used on me for others entertainment at my expense? Absolutely.
I get that some people take offense at the slightest thing and are super brittle, and that this is a really big problem right now. I’ve rolled my eyes at plenty of things, including a lot of the ‘me too’ stuff when that was a big thing. Some people were getting others into major trouble over a single mildly offcolor joke no worse than ones I roll my eyes at or ignore and that happened years ago, with no implied or explicit threats or anything else of the kind. That seemed excessive.
I have pretty mixed feelings on this issue: both that I’ve had ‘jokes’ used on me as a weapon of bullying and intimidation, and that there really are a lot of overly-fragile egos making mountains out of molehills for at least the past ten years and its annoying as all get out.
Thank you as always JMG.
Do you (or anyone in the commentariat) know why Democrats at the “No Kings” rallies are all of a sudden wearing frog suits? What is that all about? Are they trying to steal Pepe’s image or gain favor from Kek or what?
In conversation with leftists about comedy I’ve heard them frequently say “Comedy should punch up, not down,” thus right-wing jokes are not real comedy. Well, the problem with that is the same problem you pointed out a while ago about the phrase “Speaking truth to power.” The question is, who is in power? Which way is ‘up’ and which way is ‘down?’
In Tagalog, we have a saying: “ang pikon ay laging talo”; The ‘pikon’ always loses/is always the loser. The word “pikon”, noun or adjective, has subtleties that are hard to translate into English, but it can encompass the following meanings: ‘thin skinned’, can’t take a joke’, ‘sore’ (as in ‘sore loser’), ‘quick to take offense’ That is to say, regardless of (perceived or actual) loss, the ‘pikon’ proves themselves to be a loser.
I myself was very much a ‘pikon’ in my teenage years and maybe until my early-to-mid-twenties. Mellowing and learning to laugh at myself was a skill learned a bit late-in-life for me, in my estimation.
The exact style of meme-culture humor is the same one that are predominant in working-class circles. If you’re with working-class folks, you can’t take yourself too seriously or think yourself too important – you will brutally get cut down to size. Same thing with groups of teenage boys. If they aren’t insulting you, you aren’t their friends! JD Vance gets the joke, given his working-class (and military) background. because I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all that as the leftists abandoned the working classes, they also lost their sense of humor. Elite classes are always at least a bit self-important, but it seems that the Calvinist-influenced American elites (whether it’s the modern democrats, the neocons, or libertarians, all of which you’ve mentioned) are especially prone to not having a sense of humor.
“the Marxist notion of collective morality”
This may be true nowadays and was often true in official propaganda of Marxist states, but I think ordinary Marxists used to be perfectly capable of recognizing when a proletarian was an a******e. The Marxists I knew in the 1960s and 1970s had good senses of humor. So I think the humorless, Calvinistic division into the elect and the damned is more about contemporary culture than about Marxism per se.
@Sven #13, The Warhammer 40K memes (God Emperor) were another big theme during the 2016 election.
@Cato P-Funk #22 Those of us that grew up watching the TV shows “Beavis and Butthead” and “Daria” completely understand dry, sarcastic humor. Also, the only Clinton I want for President is George Clinton.
Some insider terms from the meme war:
1. Sh!tposting- Just posting offensive things or memes to get a rise or reaction out of someone
2. Sh!tlord – Someone who excels at #1, but the term can be disparaging if the posting of sh!t gets tiresome.
3. Edgelord – Someone who takes a meme, joke or comment to the “edge” of acceptable discourse. For example, pointing out a stereotype of a racial group, but not naming the group. Can be disparaging also if the “edginess” gets tiresome or stale.
Maybe it’s just me, but every few years it seems like there’s another push to make autism the cause du jour on the left, and every time it goes away rather quickly. They got some traction in recent years with the “neurodivergent” rebrand, especially among young autistic women, but it still seems to have ended up flopping.
What they don’t get is that we’ve been through this song and dance before and understand that to be a cause is to be a pet. Not to mention how many of us are still holding grudges over some things that happened over the past dozen years…
Greetings JMG!
I’ve enjoyed your writing and commentary for quite some time. Thanks for stimulating my grey matter! I think El Gato is on the same page regarding humor.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/mean-words-and-male-bonding
If you’re looking for a reason why the left was the funny side fifty years ago and now it’s the right, I think a big part of it is that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class. Fifty years ago the backbone of the party was blue collar workers, especially the labor unions. People who are funny enough to make a living at humor are overwhelmingly likely to come from humble backgrounds; a genuinely funny rich kid like Robin Williams is rare. The Smothers brothers (army brats), Dan Rowan (orphaned at 11 and put in a home) and Dick Martin (child of a salesman) were more typical.
But then the Democrats ditched the common people and became the party of the PMC. There’s something inherently brittle about PMC life. I think Matthew B. Crawford captured it in Shop Class as Soulcraft, in the section on working in marketing for a large corporation. There are no objective performance metrics, so nobody knows whether they’re valuable enough for the boss to overlook a little rudeness. There are stories like the one about the middle manager who was fired because his boss noticed that his shirt was a polyester-cotton blend instead of 100% cotton. People at this level are afraid to take the risk of making a joke. From what I remember (as a young person getting it all secondhand) this was the case before feminism became anywhere near mainstream, though of course that first generation of young female managers, daughters of stay-at-home mothers, ignorant of corporate culture and not being mentored by an older colleague the way a young man in their position would be mentored because their very presence was resented, would have been even more anxious and therefore more brittle. No brilliant comedy is going to come out of this environment.
Humor is more effective when one “punches up,” i.e. targets the powerful. It says something that right-wing meme creators see themselves as oppressed.
Memes have a lot in common with cartoons. They don’t have to be single-panel–counterexamples include the “Galaxy Brain,” “What my friends think I do,” all the Wojak ones, and the |Woman Yelling at Cat”).. Mainstream political cartoons are more genteel than this, but cartoons like Stone Toss or Ben Garrison seem to occupy similar niches. “Coffee with Jesus” is an evangelical , non-political comic strip that functions a lot like a meme, e.g. by reusing the same few images in every strip. It too seems designed to be forwarded around.
Back in the day, /b/ was part of the same wider internet trends that gave us Reddit pages devoted to “Fat People Hate” and “the Chimpire” (not about chimps, but black people)–these also featured politically-incorrect photos. /b/ also had a certain degree of overlap with white nationalist circles (or should I say, white nationalists showed up on /b/ because, no one would kick them out) Of course they are all right-wing, but think of all the “Jolly Merchant” memes . Even today, memelords are divided on the Judenfrage, although it is hard to know how much of this is LARPing or irony, (Is Godwin’s Law instantiated if Hitler Did Nothing Wrong?)
I resonate wholeheartedly with Steve and Pygmycory’s comments about being raised to believe it was up to me (or my generation) to save the world. This is essentially the Millennial double-bind: we were set up to either see ourselves as failures, or to see the world around us and all the bad people in it as failures. Either way, the result is depression. As a young adult I was in a long-term emotionally unstable funk because of exactly this dynamic. It was JMG’s writings about the Long Descent and its inevitability that provided the highly salutary antidote (did somebody say ‘ternary’?) that got me, perhaps counter-intuitively, onto a much more empowered track in life.
Another positive influence was Jordan Peterson’s breakout book ’12 Rules For Life’. He begins one chapter with an anecdote about one of his first real jobs working on a railroad construction crew. He was a geeky, intellectual teenager, but he quickly figured out that being mocked by the older guys on the crew was a kind of litmus test to see how resilient his ego was, and later on it was a mark of acceptance and welcome. Another new hire was not so quick on the uptake, tensed up or lashed out whenever someone made a joke at his expense, and thereby made himself a target for ever more mockery.
This is the difference between working class male culture and PMC office culture. The difference is partly class-based, but partly gender-based, since women have completely different testing and welcoming rituals, and PMC workplaces are almost always mixed-gender. In an all-male work environment, it is a great compliment to be the butt of a wickedly funny joke, since the subtext is that the speaker knows your ego is resilient enough to take it. Women (and men raised in PMC environments) completely misunderstand this dynamic, and try to stomp it out whenever they see it.
Of course there is also such a thing as bullying, but once Peterson had explained the difference to me, that knowledge paid dividends when I found myself cast out of the PMC world during Covid and needing to take a summer landscaping job with a bunch of roughnecks. For maybe the first time in my life I felt like I wasn’t a snowflake but ‘one of the guys’. Although I didn’t do so very often, knowing I could dish it out as well as take it while getting the job done was a source of pride. I still look back with fondness on the friendships I made that summer.
Re: Corporal Punishment
Shortly after I moved here, the NZ Parliament passed a bill outlawing all corporal punishment in the country. The rationale. of course. wass to end “child abuse.”
The result? A brief flurry of frivolous prosecutions caused parents throughout the country to abdicate their parental authority, for fear of imprisonment and forcible breakup of families. The results here are similar to what we see in the rest of the Western world.
Has it decreased physical abuse of children? Surely you jest! The statistics for outright child abuse (i.e., hospitalisations, murder, et al.) are through the roof, and far worse than they were before the ban was passed.
Meanwhile, the bill’s originator, Sue Bradford (a schizoid fanatic if I ever saw one), remains unrepentant and unapologetic about all of this.
Speaking of Jordan Peterson…
[If this is going too far off-topic or into choppy waters, feel free to delete it].
One of Peterson’s main arguments against the trans and non-binary movements follows exactly the lines you’ve developed in this post. According to him, the idea that one has the right to force others to use one’s pronouns of choice, despite the obvious fact that those pronouns do not correspond to one’s physiology, is a mark of an extraordinarily brittle ego, precisely because the gap between self-perception and reality is so glaringly wide.
Now Peterson has been wrong about many things, but this argument is persuasive to me, especially since it describes fairly well the trans and non-binary people I have known personally. I am open and willing to be persuaded otherwise, however, since my personal acquaintance does not encompass the whole of existence, and my faculties of judgement are far from perfect!
One counter-example that comes to mind is the character Angel from the musical Rent, a cross-dressing gay man and/or transwoman whom I found quite compelling when I first saw (and loved) the musical. One of the things that’s so compelling about this character is how playful, ironic, and down-to-earth he/she is- quite unlike the deadpan earnestness that one sees so often in left-wing activism today.
Some years ago I heard a news report about a study designed to see whether parental strictness correlated with how much the kids trusted the parents. It found that the most trusted parents were neither the most strict nor the least strict, but instead were the parents who ran the family as what the reporter called a constitutional monarchy in which everybody got their say but with the understanding that the parents would make the final decision. Leaving aside that this reporter clearly didn’t know the meaning of the term “constitutional monarchy”, it seemed to me that what trust in parents correlated with was parental listening. On the low-trust end of the scale were both the strict parents who said no to everything so they didn’t have to listen and the lenient parents who said yes to everything so they didn’t have to listen, while on the high-trust end were the parents who listened, who were trusted because they knew what was going on and made informed decisions.
As for “confronting challenges, achieving goals, and learning the strengths and weaknesses of the self” as the way to build genuine self-esteem, that involves knowing the child well enough to know what kinds of challenges they are ready for. The main complaint of modern parents, from what I can tell, is that they are already exhausted, so I can see why that generation took the easy way out.
I remember watching the Smothers Brothers and Laugh Inn while growing up. I enjoyed them both.
Hi JMG. I very much appreciate your thoughts about the ego as who we’ve come to believe ourselves to be. I think of it as our identity, something we become very invested in until we turn inward and reflect on what we experience internally and how we translate that into behavior.
Where I want to offer another point of view is your take on anger. As a trauma educator here’s how I view it. Any emotion can be a primary emotion (a connected communication to the environment) or a secondary emotion (the emotion we go to very automatically that reinforces our identity and is often regressive). In this frame anger and grief can both be either a primary or a secondary emotion.
As you described above, when someone easily gets angry, underneath that is often heart wrenching grief. Conversely, when someone easily collapses into grief as a secondary emotion, underneath that is often a valid protest, what I think of as healthy aggression, a very primary emotion that serves to communicate healthy needs, boundaries and desires. This establishes healthy separation/ individuation and a felt sense of standing with myself, not in a power over way but in a healthy “this is what’s true for me” way. This process establishes the capacity to differ with another while maintaining connection to self and other, a very compromised capacity in our western culture today. This is all very different than anger expressed as violence (acting out) or self-criticism/self-judgment (acting in)
Our western culture has anger conflated with violence, a behavior that emerges from an inability to contain or relate to our anger. This is one reason why for many people when they notice anger inside themselves, they do all they can not to feel it. When I can sit with my primary anger and uncover what the message is of the healthy aggression, I can tolerate the big energy of anger then I respond (what’s a healthy choice for me) rather than react (acting in/ acting out).
In my experience anger as an emotion is very disowned and misunderstood and I offer here another way to think about this emotion that is an essential expression of our life force and the restoration of healthy relating on all levels.
I remember a university lecturer years ago telling us students about the power of “ternary rhythm”: three-part phrases or slogans, that had a sort of powerful and satisfying rhythm to them – beginning, middle and end. OK, I’ll mention the Nazis’ rallying chant: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer!” And here is a longer example of ternary rhythm from Winston Churchill, after the Allied victory at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”.
In England, the Brexiters had some powerful memes. During the Brexit referendum of 2016, Dominic Cummings, the director of the Vote Leave campaign, invented the powerful three-word slogan, “Take back control !” Then later there was Boris Johnson’s powerful three-word slogan, “Get Brexit done!”, which helped him win the 2019 general election. And after he became prime minister, the pro-Brexiters among the public invented their own pithy three-word retort to the moans of the Remainers (or “re-moaners”): “Get over it!”
Margaret Thatcher’s attempt at slogans could be rather clunky. In 1979, shortly before she became prime minister and during Britain’s strike-ridden “Winter of discontent”, she intoned this cringe-worthy rhyming complaint in a public speech: “Why must the shirkers get the plums, while the workers get the crumbs? !”
Then there was Prime Minister John Major saying in 1995 during a difficult period for the Tories: “When your back is against the wall, there is only one thing to do, and that is turn around and fight.” Which reminded me of the song, “I fought the wall, and the wall won…” Oh dear – did I get that song title wrong? 😉
When you say “the Democrats’ historically low polling numbers will stay low,” that doesn’t seem to comport with the blue wave that swept the nation last night.
I’m still trying to make sense of that. My take is that the ongoing government shutdown (and perhaps to an extent the funding and organization underlying the “No Kings” rallies) is what brought Democrats to the polls.
If the shutdown is the main cause, I think they may have won the battle against Trump but will ultimately lose the war. Because my guess is that the longer this goes on the more the majority of Americans will realize they don’t benefit from the government being up and running.
“The more inaccurate somebody’s self-assessment is, the less they can tolerate anything that challenges the lie. ”
The way you’ve phrased this, it looks like you’re saying that a self-assessment that is too low will be defended as insistently as one that is too high. I had to chew on that one for a bit before I remembered how that looked in my own life: when someone with a more accurate assessment of my capabilities that mine would insist that I perform to a standard higher than I believed myself to be capable of reaching. That hasn’t happened since I was in school many decades ago, but I remember how bitterly angry I was. I remained angry even after my mistakenly low self-assessment had been proven wrong and only gradually corrected my belief about myself.
Hey, Nancy, that one has potential! You should have a T shirt made for Mr. Greer that says, “My name’s Sneery Greery. I’ve got all the wrong opinions, but I don’t care.”
It is of course a well-known fact that Mr. Greer is evil beyond belief. The only trouble is, you can never get anyone to believe it. That’s what Hannibal Lecter told me, anyway. 😉
Not sure if this is pertinent but before /pol/ rise to prominence there was /b/ where “anything goes” and whose denizens referred to each other as b-tards. Deeply ironic and often deeply offensive to anyone left or right, it had no political allegiance except to absolute freedom of expression and the necessary corollary, the sanctity of a free Internet. Campaigns supported The Pirate Bay and blasted the Australian government with thousands of images of small breasted women contributed by the community, of course. Only later did green anon become blue anon the SJW, which imo led to it’s opposite Qanon. Blue anon tried to get people to call each other newfriends instead of newfags and frowned on the word fgt in general which was actually a term of endearment not a slur, as pointed out in the article. Green anon deeply resented exposure of their inner world to the outside, basically ruining it. Random /b/ known for stomach churning gore, ubiquitous nudes and just about anything you could imagine but no shortage of brilliance, for example, exhaustive analysis of the Boston Marathon bombing and of course memes. It earned the moniker “the Id of the Internet” and yes it was deeply cathartic to laugh at at least some of it no matter how inappropriate. A refuge for misfits in a hopelessly insane and cruel world where the only win is to just laugh it off. I don’t remember it being conventionally political until the rise of /pol. It seemed at the time that this was a pendulum swing after the original split of one community into two diverging factions. The first big social justice campaign was against Scientology. They brought it from the virtual community into the real world, with real world consequences for some of them. Then WikiLeaks and Arab Spring. The activist blue faction suffered some police repression and worse in other countries and IRC channels were heavily infiltrated with every letter agency on Earth. A lot of the early lore is chronicled in Encyclopedia Dramatica, which was almost destroyed (for money of course) by one of its founders but heroically rescued by the Internet where (most of) it still abides. I would love to see a future essay explore that earlier origin community and how it evolved. It feels significant in ways that you’ve discussed like new religions on ADR but I don’t have the intellectual clarity to delineate. In retrospect a lot of the community was likely tech bro libertarians and their associates. Also popular among college students. Namefagging and facefagging were a big taboo so when some people had to “come out” to do actions or even have a Twitter account that was an automatic discredit. The reason was philosophical but also practical under the circumstances, and seemed quite sound. It was a fascinating time but the trajectory to inevitable self-destruct became obvious at some point. I’m sure it’s still around but constantly mutating like waves moving forward but not the same molecules that started out.
Other Owen, then the point missed me completely.
Elliot, if you want me on a podcast, please drop me an email if you have my address, or if not, put through a comment marked NOT FOR POSTING with your email address, and I’ll be in touch promptly.
Donkey32, from the standpoint of an old-fashioned reactionary monarchist, Adolf Hitler was on the left. From the standpoint of a Trotskyist, Stalin was on the right. I simply use the terms that people use for themselves. As for the froggery, I have no idea yet — we’ll have to see.
Pygmycory, understood and thank you for bringing this up.
Blue Sun, I wish I knew!
Nephite, exactly. The Democrats are by and large the party of the middle classes, and the populists I’m discussing are either working class by origin or people who fell from the middle class into the working class. Thus a strong case can be made that the right is punching up!
Carlos, thanks for this. I think you’re right that class issues are very much a factor here.
Jessica, we apparently knew different Marxists, then!
Slithy, oh, it’s not just that they want us to be their pets. One of the essentials of the captive-constituency racket both parties play against subcultures and communities is that the captive constituencies get oceans of fawning rhetoric but nothing more substantive, and whatever problems drive them to the political sphere never get solved. Autists are by and large crass enough to notice this.
KMD, interesting. Thank you.
Joan, that makes sense. In effect, they can’t be funny because they’re punching down.
Ambrose, objectively speaking, many right-wing meme creators are oppressed. A good many of them come from working class backgrounds and have suffered, along with others of their class, from the systematic impoverishment and immiseration inflicted on working Americans by the managerial class, the core constituency of the Democrats. Until people on the left recognize and acknowledge their own complicity in this, not to mention the class privilege that many of them have, they’re going to keep on being blindsided.
Dylan, thanks for this. Glad my book helped!
Joan, interesting. Thank you.
Moonwolf8, as did I.
Angelica, thanks for this. The teachings I learned didn’t conflate anger with violence, nor did they assign it any kind of negative valence. A child who’s frightened and turns to anger can benefit from that act, since it can in fact define boundaries and affirm the child’s right to exist. It’s when anger is used to hide from the primary emotion that it becomes toxic — and this is especially the case when the anger is suppressed in its turn. In the teachings in question, depression is a tertiary emotion, which is why it’s so difficult to treat: you have to get past the depression to realize the anger, and then you have to get past the anger to reach down to the primary emotion underlying it. That way of thinking has worked well for me — but of course your mileage may vary, and if the approach you’ve sketched out here works better for you, by all means.
Zemi, I somehow managed to miss that bit by Major. Seriously funny!
Blue Sun, a handful of victories by Democratic candidates in heavily blue states does not equal a blue wave. Here’s a source for the Democrats’ dismal numbers:
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/democratic-party
Joan, that’s exactly what I’m saying, and I also experienced it in my own life.
Zemi, oh, come on. You’ve got to come up with better insults than that!
Sort-of, thanks for this. I only came into contact with the 4chan world during the 2016 Trump campaign, when a handful of commenters on the blog I ran in those days clued me in to what was happening. ED I knew about, though — and it was a minor disappointment to me that as far as I know, I never rated lambasting in its pages.
P. S. “image macro”, I haven’t heard that phrase in a while! I read that and heard dial-up modem handshake noises in my head.
blue sun @ 83, it was a handful of off off year elections, which the out of power party often does win. What did surprise commentators, some of whom have election experience and do know what they are talking about, was the size of margins of victory, especially in the two governor’s races. I believe that came about because of two incidents. First, demolishing the East Wing of the White House did not and is not playing well. Never mind that the East Wing was not part of the original building. No citizens of any country appreciate seeing their historic monuments being trashed, and pictures were all over the internet. The Republicans didn’t used to be so clueless, nor is it apparent why a ballroom would be needed–former presidents got on well without one–or why some other place on the extensive WH grounds could not be found. Next, it was announced on the very eve of the election that SNAP program funds would not be paid. Need I remind anyone here that hungry people become desperate? Also, there are many, like me, who, while we maintain ourselves with no need for public assistance, thank you very much, cannot afford to feed our neighbors. Maybe someone in the Republican Party thinks that SNAP recipients don’t vote, but a lot of us who do will also be affected. When I was voting at City Hall, I suggested to a Common Council member that the city put out a barrel for us to leave off extra cans of beans and such. I read today that the Saturday morning farmer’s market will have a station for collecting small food donations.
I think the most consequential of yesterday’s results took place in Georgia, where two Democrats were elected to the board which regulates utilities by about 63% each. That shows that the Dems and voters are, finally!, paying attention to these boards.
As for the guy who will be NYCs new mayor, I don’t vote there. He has no administrative experience, so a lot will depend on his appointments. He has promised to arrest Bibi Netanyahoo, using the ICC warrant, should that worthy set foot in NYC. He also wants to end the training of NYC police officers in Israel. So, there is that.
Poem #3,974,568 about Hitler
Neither shall I, a vain braggadocio, say a thing about Adolf Hitler.
Hitler.
Hitler.
Hitler.
So there, I didn’t say it. I wrote it.
Adolf Hitler was a good guy.
He was good at sh_téing, speaking, and breathing.
What more could one possibly want?
Respectfully,
💨🙆🏼♂️💨Northwind Grandpa
P.S. Aha, no-one will recognize me. Today, I am Grandpa with a “P.”
“Jessica, we apparently knew different Marxists, then!”
I am pretty sure that we actually did. I am just enough older than you.
In my perception, after the clear fall of the anti-war movement and The Sixties more broadly, much of the little bit that remained started to change in ways that I saw as contrary to what the left had previously stood for. Absent an actual mass base, it turned more toward virtue signaling and became Calvinistic.
This seems to happen fairly often to the remnants of failed movements.
Also, universities, which had been a base for the anti-war movement and the left in general, were purged and as the last of the baby boom left college, competition for academic positions became intense, particularly in the humanities. The weaponization of oppressed status for that competition (and in the rest of society) was where the oppression Olympics got their start and their subsidies.
Meanwhile, the crushing of the US working class removed the largest mass base for the left.
In the “put this in your binary and smoke it” department.
Alexander Dugin has written an article about Guy Debord.
Dugin is often mentioned, not fully correctly, as Putin’s philosopher, and currently criticizes Trump from the right. (He says that the Republican losses on Tuesday were due to Trump spending too much energy on neo-con foreign wars and not enough on the standard of living issues that the majority of voters for both of the billionaire parties care about.)
Hard for me to see the founder of the Situationists, Debord as other than on the radical left. More radical than most supposed radicals.
Your class analysis of who memes best is fascinating and sounds quite plausible.
Oops.
The link for Dugin’s article about Debord (translation into English):
https://www.arktosjournal.com/p/guy-debord-is-dead
I do not find most right-wing memes funny at all, but most left-wing memes I see are so painfully unfunny they are almost like anti-funny. A common format I’ve seen is one depicting Lisa Simpson standing on a stage (ideologically committed leftists are often confused and offended when I point out that Lisa Simpson is the epitome of a grating know-it-all who is intolerable even when she is right, and basically the sort of person reactionaries think leftists are like, and thus undermines any leftist propaganda she appears in), captioned by some baldly stated political or moralizing slogan, often itself couched in bloodless academic language. It is as brutally, bovinely earnest as a Maoist big character poster but fails to even have the emotional impact of a picture of Chairman Mao exhorting people to torture landlords to death. The fact that people post these memes thinking anyone will be moved by them, and get so defensive when it is pointed out that they are totally absurd and self-defeating, genuinely baffles me. There is not even an attempt at a joke, it is just telling you outright what you ought to think.
Regarding brittleness, I have noticed that gay communities used to have a lot more of a sense of humor about themselves until 10 or 12 years ago. The gay hangout megathread on Something Awful (which, BTW, invented the image macro years before 4chan existed) was once called the “Fagoon Megathread” (“goon” originally referring to someone targeted for ridicule by the site’s founder Lowtax denouncing SA users as his “goons”, not the modern sense of the infamous autoerotic practice), but became “Fabgoon” because people stopped tolerating the word even in a space where everyone is gay and gayness is the principle topic of discussion. Of course outsiders using such language were never accepted, but much like in working class black culture with the N word and related expressions like “your black a–“, it used to be pretty acceptable for gay people to use “fag”, “homo”, jokes about anal intercourse, etc. to rib each other with the understanding that the people participating were insiders (though not quite as easily–unlike black folks we can’t instantly determine who is or is not one of us by sight alone!). I think a lot of it has to do with the hijacking of the entire queer movement by trans women, who tend to be very, very brittle in general (I suspect introducing estrogen into a male body and experiencing intense feminine emotions for the first time without any cultural framework or elder female role models exacerbates this, especially when it mixes with deeply entrenched masculine patterns of pride and rage) and sonetimes especially resent gay men who enjoy being men, desiring men, and celebrating their own appreciation for men, male bodies, and man-manly eros. Between them and the sexually deviant straight “allies” (or outright “queer heterosexuals”) who think having a freaky kink is a form of heroism, it feels like gay men are increasingly unwelcome in the movement we started…
Chuaquin–isn’t it ironic that the woke are obsessed with “safe spaces” to protect fragile egos from ideas and words and microaggressions, yet at the same time are complicit in destroying the right of women to spaces that are physically safe from invasion by men who merely have to proclaim themselves trans to be admitted to restrooms, locker rooms, rape crisis centers, etc. Current example is of a black lesbian in California losing her gym membership for complaining that there was a man in the women’s locker room. He wasn’t even making any effort to appear female and in fact, mockingly told her that straight women like dick and would rather look at him than at her.
Rita
Over the last couple of decades, it seems to me that a person’s sense of humor is an excellent personality characteristic for separating the individuals you want to be around and those you want to avoid. The same influences that keep much of our culture polarized around various issues consistently result with the same groups of people on each side of the “humor spectrum”.
In the near term, I don’t see that changing much. As the Long Descent continues and accelerates, those lacking humor and the inability to laugh at themselves and accurately determine reality are going to be far more unpleasant as friends.
JMG # 50:
Yeah, True Believers in Ersatz religion could say: “Don’t believe in that bulls**t of old religions, so believe in our own bulls**t”.
—————————————
I have in my smartphone a few Whassap groups. Wisely, I allow only these groups to not getting myself nuts (because too many groups are nonsense for my brain). Sometimes I get in my phone videos or memes. Well, a friend of mine who’s left tendences send me yesterday a meme in which Trump was depicted as the new Hitler…I could describe you the flaws and half-truths in that comparation, but I won’t do that. I only will tell you the “reductio at Hitlerum” is still very alive online and in the Whassap groups. I’d say also this Trump-Hitler meme shows again leftists can’t indeed meme…Oh, I had forgotten there was another candidates for the Hitler of the jour. Do you remember the special name who had Putin in the Western Ukrainian war narrative since 2022?(“Putler” if I remember it well). So there’s no shortage of Hitlers today cough cough.
@JMG #27: You account of what you father endured reminds me of my own family. My father endured the same thing, and never repeated it with his children, either.
I just read a lovely sermon by a priest in Russia about this kind of situation:
When the Commandment to Honor Your Parents Is Painful – What should I do if my family is a source of suffering?
https://orthochristian.com/173791.html
“It is important to recognize the problem. The first step is to allow yourself to call a spade a spade. Yes, my parent is an alcoholic/tyrant. Yes, he is prone to violence and insults. Yes, he hurt me. We must stop pretending that “everything is fine” or “they didn’t know what they were doing”. They knew. Sin is always a conscious choice.
You will have to distance yourself. It can be physical distancing—moving, limiting contacts, and sometimes completely stopping communication for a while or forever. It can also be emotional distancing—to stop expecting love, acceptance, and apologies from them. Stop investing in a relationship that is a bottomless pit. It’s not a sin—it’s an act of self-preservation. …
Learn to take care of yourself. ‘Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost’ (1 Cor. 6:19). Your task is to protect this temple from destruction. Taking care of your mental and physical health and allowing yourself to be happy is your duty to God.
But how can we honor such parents now? What remains of the commandment? You can honor them from a distance: pray for them, not take revenge, and not wish them ill—all this is honoring your parents too. In a critical situation, if they are in danger, calling an ambulance is a sign of honoring (because you recognize the value of their God–given lives). Being a good person, living with dignity despite their evil influence is the highest form of honoring. You show that their sin has not broken the image of God in you.“
When I was at school in South Wales in the late 1970s, from the age of 14-18 about 10 of us boys formed a fairly close-knit group mostly doing the same classes throughout that time. Of that group a couple went on to be CEOs and Presidents of major companies, a couple became doctors, myself and another became low-middle rank academics and most of the rest also went into middle-class jobs, though we pretty much regarded each other as equals in those days. During that time and until we gradually lost touch with each other in our early twenties, we relentlessly mocked each other while at school, in pubs and bars when we were – more or less! – old enough, on trips and holidays together. I remember those days, especially at school, to be some of the happiest of my life and often laughed until my stomach muscles ached. However, until reading this I must admit I never regarded that experience as having strengthened my character but now realise it might well have done me some good. So thank you for another fascinating piece!
It looks to me like memes are a bit like spells. If one happens to live in the naive materialist camp, where only the measurable stuff counts, the gist of successful memes is hard to get. You can see the effect of the meme, but cannnot perceive the power that makes it move through the society, changing minds on its way.
“Back in the mid-20th century, psychologists noticed that inadequate self-esteem was a source of many emotional difficulties. That was a valid insight, but their proposed cure for the problem turned out to be worse than the disease.”
Actually, the goal of all post-war pedagogy was to prevent the next dictatorship and the next world war. How did they intend to achieve this? By teaching every child to put their ego at the center of the universe. Now we’re left with the wreckage.
I think they actually achieved their goal of preventing a major war because we are no longer capable of collective thinking, and the inflated egos will no longer be willing to go to war. As for preventing a dictatorship, I’m not so sure…
More interesting than the title suggested. 🙂 Thank you for the food for thought, as usual.
“Thus we can arrange egos along a spectrum of greater and lesser accuracy, which can also be labeled “resilient” and “brittle” respectively.”
“A secret of power——
I think it’s another profundity.
Do you want power over something?
Be more nearly real than it. ” – Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
Memes also arose from the same subculture as gaming (that’s where all the affectionate “faggo1” and “retard!” name-calling come from) , and websites like Dail;y Rotten (funny atrocity photos.) and Something Awful. The latter, in combination with /b/ was how Chris Chan got “famous on the internet”–basically people laughing at videos of a mentally-handicapped guy. (Think Star Wars kid, but meaner.) The meme subculture also has a lot of overlap with Inceldom, what with all the cartoony references to “Chads,” “Alphas” and “Betas,” etc. (When I first encountered this, my first impression was that a bunch of frat-boys had been assigned to read Aldous Huxley.)
Joan (no, 79) ‘. Leaving aside that this reporter clearly didn’t know the meaning of the term “constitutional monarchy”…’
My old Greek professor wrote a constitution for his family, based on ancient Greek models. I can’t remember the exact term, but it was not a democracy; he and his wife were dual autocrats.
Whew! I was beginning to get worried… until I got to this:
“you can never really make fun of anyone else until and unless you can make fun of yourself”
The stuff around anger (I always thought it counted as a primary emotion) I will be reflecting on.
(And any other thoughts around that area would be welcome.)
You nailed it with this one.
Just to play devil’s advocate, I made a joke recently, in an alt-right context. It fell quite flat.
The commenter I replied to (a real person who I have very good time for) had approvingly posted a quote in which someone called John Podhoretz (comparing someone called Bari Weiss to someone called John Oliver) said: “Bari Weiss has made something out of nothing.” This sentence struck me as hilariously biblical wording, and so I commented:
“Bari Weiss has made something out of nothing.”
Translation: Bari Weiss is God. 😉
In the alt-right context in which I posted this, it did not go down well. I was chided: “Disingenuous, bad faith comment.”
So, I went away from that conversation, still laughing.
The real joke here is that I have only the faintest idea who John Podhoretz, John Oliver, or Bari Weiss actually are, and very little interest in learning more… to me they are “celebrities” (a class in which I include most politicians and other people whose names appear repeatedly in the public domain), and therefore, to me, of scant interest. I know I will never meet any of these people in person, and that all I can ever “know” about them is what their PR teams (or their anti-PR teams) curate and/or spin into the public domain on their behalf.
I find I can only sustain a genuine interest in real people I can meet and/or talk to (including all the real people actually taking part in the conversation I briefly crashed above). 🙂
1. Calling each other “faggot”, “retard”, “bigot” and “Nazi” isn’t really funny. It is not an expression of wit but of contempt. It is a kind of communication that is common among criminals, mafia and prisons in which such people dominate. What it actually displays is not humor but a lack of appreciation of the other guy, of own self, of all values and ethics in general.
2. Such talk and accompanying attitudes are now also openly displayed by Trump (who recently published a video of himself pouring fecal matter on American citizens) and his administration (examples abound).
3. Pepe the Frog, being the god of chaos, promotes nihilism, that is, negation of all values.
4. Selfishness, egotism, greed, utter lack of solidarity, contempt and distrust of a fellow human being, brutal and pointless violence and so on and so on, all of this permeate the American society so thoroughly that, for all practical purposes, these fake values now count as common sense.
5. It’s not so much that left can’t meme but rather that it can’t get a footing. It has been so thouroghly defeated. Here is a large part of how and why https://jacobin.com/2025/10/mccarthyism-trump-red-scare-robeson-cpusa-khalil
Hi JMG,
This topic is interesting to me because I was one of those 4chan autists in 2012-2016 or so having a good chuckle watching the media class flip their collective lid because some guys on /pol/ convinced them that drinking white milk was racist and a host of other very culture jammer/chaos magick adjacent pranks.
What I find interesting now, over a decade on (Heavens has it really been 10 years?) is how calm politics seems now. Say what you will about the alt-right/populist right, they had a vague vision for society that was, for better or worse, very different than what either mainstream party was offering at the time, and they rightly saw culture war feuding as a distraction from larger issues. There was a distinct tingle of possibility that charged the air back then, meme magic was real.
Now though politics seems very cut and dry and to the best of my knowledge nobody (aside from the pro Chinese Communist Marxists, Hindu nationalists and Libertarian weed smokers/MBAs) is for unrestricted free trade or open borders anymore. Everyone was watching the Spectacle and didn’t notice that a new consensus was quietly forming.
It has a ways to go until all the bumps are hammered out, but in the main the focus seems to be on culture war issues now as those tend to get people extremely heated. I can’t help but wonder if this politicization of pop culture is an avoidance behavior; the long decline from the industrial age is increasingly hard to ignore with food and energy prices all climbing while populations continue their ragged downward trajectory, even in Africa.
But nobody wants to give up on the Great God Progress, and comical things like various techno gimmicks keep bubbling up to keep the stock market inflated. Is Trump, MAGA, the Democrats and all the rest just part of self created spectacle to help us ignore the reality outside?
Cheers,
JZ
” a handful of victories by Democratic candidates in heavily blue states does not equal a blue wave. ”
Maybe so, but it is the spectacle of the optics that matter for influencing the public mind.
Conservative commentator Emily Jashinsky thinks the Democrats swept the election, saying
figures like Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance are urging the GOP to abandon culture-war politics and focus on affordability. From Andrew Cuomo’s defeat by socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani to double-digit losses in Virginia and New Jersey, the results signal the possible end of the Trump “high.”
https://unherd.com/watch-listen/democrats-sweep-the-election/
There’s a parliament in the white house:
George Clinton for President 2028
https://imgflip.com/i/abb2zt
Okay so the Cult of the Unopposed Fingers didn’t work out so well (No-Ego Egos are hard to manage it turns out) so I am officially retiring from the position of Pontifex Gluteus Maximus and accepting the title of Pontifex Gluteus Maximus Emeritus. But fear not! For I am beginning a new venture: The Vanity Project! Our motto? That’s just the way Ego crumbles.
With our brittle Egos combined we shall reignite the humor we all know is there deep down inside (because obviously we’re very funny people who know how to laugh at ourselves) if only we could muster enough self esteem to conjure it! We are accepting donations from brittle billionaires now.
About the frog suits: they are only the most frequently photographed example of the new tactic of people wearing silly costumes to protest. (Somebody in Portland apparently bought a whole case of identical frog costumes and was handing them out for free, which is why they are so common in the protests there.) They are apparently a strategic response to efforts by right-wing news outlets to equate black block protesters with domestic terrorism, to make them seem scary to viewers and make the police seem heroic when they give the black block rough (possibly to the point of illegal) treatment on camera. The costumes conceal identity even more effectively than being part of a black block did plus making them out to be dangerous is far more difficult. And apparently there’s some kind of filter that can be put across the airhole in the costume that will provide some limited degree of protection from tear gas.
Jessica, fair enough. My early encounters with flesh-and-blood Marxists were in the Seattle scene in the late 1970s, where the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Freedom Socialist Party were the big names — I’m not sure either one of them could get a hundred people to show up to a rally. As for Dugin, it makes perfect sense to me that he would cite Debord — it’s quite common for the extreme left and the extreme right to circle around behind the back of the center and come within easy reach of one another. I’d be even less surprised if he cited Vaneigem — I’m rereading The Revolution of Everyday Life right now, and finding it a remarkably reactionary piece.
Tankermottind, I’d seen the Lisa Simpson format, though I’ve never watched The Simpsons and so didn’t have the context — thank you for this. As for the gay community, I suspect the left has never forgiven gay men and lesbians for breaking ranks and actually getting somewhere politically — their assigned role, like that of other captive constituencies, was to sit meekly and vote for Democrats in the vain hope that someday they would get a few crumbs from the tables of their masters. (To be fair, the GOP used to do exactly the same thing to its captive constituencies.) The Democrat focus on trans rights strikes me as a way for the party leadership to punish the gay community for being uppity.
Drhooves, this strikes me as a useful principle.
Chuaquin, I wonder if it’s time to start the Hitler Of The Month Club!
Michael, thanks for this.
Robert M, you’re most welcome.
Kristiina, good. Yes, memes are in fact a form of magic — they cause changes in consciousness in accordance with will — and so you’re doubtless right that materialists don’t get it.
Executed, ouch. Yeah, I could see that.
Daniil, ha! As usual, Fort has good advice.
Ambrose, of course. It’s the same demographic, by and large.
Michael X, I’ll consider a future post on that.
Jason, thank you.
Scotlyn, well, that’s not a good sign! Still, religious fundamentalism is as humor-killing as the secular sort.
Eyrie, I hate to break it to you, but you don’t get to legislate what does and doesn’t count as funny. If all you can see in the joking of young men is contempt and domination, that says much more about you than it does about them.
John, excellent! Yes, though I think the Democrats would go back to open borders and maximum offshoring if they could. Still, you’re right that the real story is going on far below the surface, as the long slow tide of the industrial age ebbs out to sea.
Cato, and if it gets the GOP to refocus on economic issues, that’s a good thing all around. Still, we’ll see.
StarNinja, I’m going to borrow Pontifex Gluteus Maximus; thank you.
Joan, thank you for this. That makes a good deal of sense.
Why do the memes on the left all focus on making Trump into a baby? They all seem to have a level of vinegar and sourness in them. Trump is not a figure of fun, but some sort of monster to slay. Meanwhile, Trump has memed the shutdown with have Jefferies in a sombrero. They didn’t like that.
Tshirt companies have a lot of memes they sell. Like Bigfoot: All time hide and seek champion. My favorite is The Mothman stole my catalytic converter in Port Pleasant, WVA. It shows the Mothman at a gas station stealing the converter. It is hilarious in its misdirection and absurdity.
About blue wave in Virginia. People are affected by the shut down that they blame on Republicans. Most folks are either Federal Government workers or contractors.
—-
About land acknowledgements. The Seneca rents land to Salamanca in New York State. In fact, the town is built on Seneca land. However, the Seneca have complained getting rent from the town is like getting blood from a turnip. So, the land acknowledgements are silly performance art.
—
Getting back to Memes, in both cases I have mentioned, the Left just phones it in. They really are just so serious about their issues that you wonder if they really believe in them or are just performing for their friends.
Of course, the Right has their problems, but they seem to be able to laugh at themselves from time to time.
@ Joan #79
“On the low-trust end of the scale were both the strict parents who said no to everything so they didn’t have to listen and the lenient parents who said yes to everything so they didn’t have to listen, while on the high-trust end were the parents who listened, who were trusted because they knew what was going on and made informed decisions.”
I remember that what struck me forcefully as a young mother hanging out with other young mothers and toddlers, was the “not listening” (or maybe, “listening is hard”) dynamic which often led to scripts where child (trying to get parent’s attention) makes a reasonable request, parent (not really listening) reflexively says “no” (meaning “go away, I’m too busy for you right now”), child works harder at getting the needed attention, and when (eventually) gets it, parent realises the request is reasonable and says “yes”… child goes away. Possibly having learned that persistence can turn a parent’s “no” to “yes”.
It was mainly to short-circuit this script that my husband and I decided that whatever the children asked, if it was not an IMMEDIATE hard “no” (say – “can I go and play in the traffic island”? or “can I get off with not wearing my seatbelt just this once”? or things of that ilk), then, we would say “yes” immediately. We did not want to give our children the impression that a “no” was a soft thing that either of us could be weasled out of. This policy, of course, required US to listen first time, every time (obviously we are human and so I will say we *mostly* but not always succeeded at this), but it also resulted in the fact that we very seldom had to either repeat ourselves when setting genuine limits, or be subject to the kind of abject wheedling that I always hated to see.
Listening IS a critical part of the making of informed decisions. 🙂
JMG # 113:
I like the idea of Hitler of the month! We’re going to have some fresh candidates every month thanks to woke paranoia…(wokesters sometimes should look themselves in a mirror amd see what theoretically they hate so much: fascism).
blue sun@67 – apparently the frogs are tactical frivolity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_frivolity
“As for the gay community, I suspect the left has never forgiven gay men and lesbians for breaking ranks and actually getting somewhere politically — their assigned role, like that of other captive constituencies, was to sit meekly and vote for Democrats in the vain hope that someday they would get a few crumbs from the tables of their masters.”
The day the black community breaks ranks with the Democrats to get somewhere politically is the day that the Democrats flip to being white nationalists.
@JMG, Untitled-1
Thank you for your replies. I would definitely put this down to cultural differences – things indeed seem to be different in the US in this respect – in India, kids being given corporal punishment by their parents is very common (although that is changing, albeit in a very small way), and there are a lot of casual jokes about it. I very, very rarely got hit by my dad – nothing more than a slap on the face with an open palm – but with my mother, it was a different matter altogether. She herself was beaten far more brutally by my maternal grandparents; in fact, her sister almost always got beaten more by them (for example, my aunt was once kicked by my maternal grandfather simply because she failed a 4th-grade school test in mathematics, and the neighbours came to her rescue because even though they did give their children beatings from time to time, they thought this was a step too far), and compared to what she (my mom) got, my brother and I had it far easier.
Does that mean I resent my mother? Actually, no – while I do get annoyed by her short temper, I know that behind the beatings was her love and concern for me and my brother. Yes, as a kid I did resent it, but as an adult, I realise that it was her version of “the kind cruelty of the surgeon’s knife” – while I do believe that I would have received something like 30-40% of the beatings I did had she been able to better control her temper, I also know that she was coming from a very different set of life experiences. Also, as Untitled-1 pointed out about parents’ love for their children being noticed by the latter, I knew my mother has always had the best of intentions for me and my brother, and this is clearly seen by the fact that my parents stood behind me like a rock, to an extent that is extremely rare in Indian society, when I went through a very difficult phase later on, and came out of, something that I would not have been able to do without their support, especially given the taunts and treatment by society aimed at us.
I think that Untitled-1 also correctly said that how the beaten child ends up is one of the metrics to be considered when evaluating the validity of corporal punishment – in my case, I grew up to become an applied mathematician, and was able to cultivate a level of discipline that kept me safely away from degenerate stuff like going to nightclubs, house parties, drinking alcohol, smoking, recreational drugs and other psychedelics, premarital sex, etc., and instead focus on studies, other reading and music; and I’m dead sure that the corporal punishment I got in childhood was one of the important factors leading to this. While I freely accept that I have a long way to go before I cultivate the level of discipline and humility that I have set for myself as achievable targets, I think I have successfully made the first step towards this goal, and that is in part thanks to my upbringing.
JMG,
As Pontifex Gluteus Maximus Emeritus, I hereby declare that the title is yours to do with as you wish.
JMG et al,
As far as the elections on Nov 4 went, I have seen a lot of chatter of this Blue Wave being the Bluest Wave that ever waved. A Rebuke of Trump and MAGA. THE FIRST DOMINO IN THE FALL OF THE FOURTH OR MAYBE FIFTH REICH. Now granted there were some impressive seat flips in Red States. Some counties that went double digits for Trump in 2024 (Morgan County in Georgia went +47 for Trump for example) flipped to Democrats this time around. Heck, Democrats flipped two seats in the Mississippi Senate. Mississippi! Every single county in Virginia swung left. Even Red strongholds got more blue votes this time around. So, yes, some impressive wins in Red States, but nothing like the what the Blue Tsunami folks are saying. My question is, is this election just a flash in the pan reaction by furloughed government employees, SNAP beneficiaries and the losers of the Tariff War or is this the last gasp of the Professional Managerial Class as tries to resist the restructuring of the country?
There is a class of left-wing memes that are genuinely funny, but they’re made by a rare class of leftist, derided by their fellows as “class reductionist”. Also sometimes called the “dirtbag left” though that term has gotten diluted. They’re able to be funny because they’re not hemmed in by fear of identity-based wrongthink, actively aware that all of that is HR speak and not of the proletariat.
A while back– before 2020– that end of the left were going hard with Gritty memes. Gritty, if you missed it, was the Philly Flyers then-new mascot. I’m not going to claim the Gritty memes were to the 2020 election what Pepe the Frog was in 2016, because they absolutely weren’t. In fact, I think they’d gotten burnt out before the election came. They were pretty good, until the rest of the idiots on the cultural/progressive/idpol “left” (as opposed to the economic left) discovered and ruined it. Diddo the “Dark Brandon” memes– there were a few that were genuinely great, but then die partie discovered them, missed the point, and the whole thing got killed before it could get good.
Arguably the stupidpol/dirtbag/class-reductionist anti-identity-politics “left” can’t be counted as “leftist” in North America anymore since they’re excluded from all self-described leftist conversations and spaces. You can be fully-neoliberal in your economics views, totally neocon in foreign policy, and be on “the left” if you wave a rainbow flag, after all. Say one thing considered “transphobic” while actively organizing to seize the means of production, on the other hand, and suddenly you’re not welcome to the revolution anymore. Go figure.
So these few funny left-wing memes are coming from an excluded fringe of the left. You could argue that the best right-wing memes also come from the fringe, which is why Ben Shapiro and his ilk will never post a rare pepe in his life and as the dissident right becomes less fringe, it gets less funny.
@eyrie,
In response to your point 1: You’ve never spent a day around working men in your life, have you?
Casually slinging insults like that is a bonding activity for the deplorably uneducated classes who never learned to code. Even amongst the educated classes, if one ever managed to get the women and overfeminized men out of the room, that’s how guys rib each other to create group bonds. Maybe you need to educate yourself about that misandry and check your privilage.
A note on the Frog Suits,
The inflatable frog suits are more of a happenstance than strategic political thinking. If you go back and look at the ice protests in Portland earlier in the summer you will also see many of the protesters dressed in costumes, but at that time they were the old fashioned ones made from fake fur etc. Like low rent cosplay. This has more to do with the nature of a certain segment of Portland’s population than political calculation. This bunch will dress up for anything. Look up the opening song from the tv show Portlandia on You Tube and you will see what I mean.
The happenstance is that just across the pedestrian bridge from the Ice protest site is an old Portland ” party” store called The Lippman Company. One of the protesters stumbled in one day and found the new selection of Chinese made inflatable costumes. These are a close cousin to the inflatable figures that fill American neighborhoods during halloween now. Compared to real costumes these inflatable ones are cheap. From what I heard the cost $60. They also turned out to be practical as they are water proof, and deflect pepper balls well.
Leftest from all over the country then copied their protest ” heroes” in Portland during the no kings march.
@Mary #89
With regard to the Virginia governor race, you forgot to mention that there are currently who-knows-how-many furloughed or unemployed federal employees living in Virginia who now have time on their hands to go out and vote against Trump‘s party.
@adrian smith #118
OK, yeah, but why FROGS? What is Kek up to?
“If all you can see in the joking of young men is contempt and domination, that says much more about you than it does about them.”
The ex asked me once about the rough male to male humor and I told her to think of it as Ritual Insult. Jeff Foxworthy had a skit about it once.
And one small correction, “The day the black community breaks ranks with the Democrats to get somewhere politically is the day that the Democrats flip to being white nationalists.” should be “The day the black community breaks ranks with the Democrats to get somewhere politically is the day that the Democrats flip Back to being white nationalists.” That’s where they started after all.
JMG,
As I have mentioned at some point, some years ago I made the leap from a laptop class to a proper working class job (electrician and a lineman). Now at my latest stint, I sensed some reserved attitudes towards me from my co-workers as they had somehow learned of my background. They then proceeded to cautiously test me, throwing some curve balls here and there, and when I responded in an appropriate manner, they adopted me as one of their own, even though I came from the suspicious class of laptop wielders.
Part of the dissolution of the suspicions, I suppose, was that right off the bat I announced that I want to get into all tought spots, get the nasty jobs, learn all the hard stuff the best I can and then did my best when given an opportunity. Also I consciously let myself participate in the somewhat rough manner of speech, the back and forth, the near constant jesting and ridiculing, all in good spirits though. It did feel like a pressure valve of sorts. That you COULD, at any time, give feedback if the other did something stupid. You just had to own it, and shoot back when you could. The trick was to get good, since only those with the skill get the access to that kind of talk without getting an unduly rough rebound yourself.
Also, it seemed, that having such culture actually permitted discussing serious emotional matters too, with the fig-leaf of humor. You could, with something like that, also show sympathy and compassion. Though it did take some time getting used to. I knew they had a nickname for me, “the Magister”, behind my back, but that was all in good spirits too.
Though at an earlier place about a year ago I was also subjected to similar kind of jesting, but that was downright abusive. An older and more experienced worker was paired me and he was frustrated with my lack of skill (that I freely admitted). The torrent of abuse was ceaseless. It was made worse by my reactiong of stone cold professionalism. He was unable to provoke a reaction, but he was also not equipped or inclined to make any kind of a connection with me. I do not know if I might have had the opportunity to remedy the situation by shooting back at the same strength, but at that time especially I lacked the ammunition.
I have often pondered that interaction. I have come to the conclusion that it is indeed the competency that is the main currency with which you can make your moves. If you know your shale, you can get away with stuff and also be somewhat safe. But if not, there is often no remedy. There are countless stories at the workplace of those who did not fit in, who were unable to get their act together, who did not learn, who did not dare to do what was required etc. They are common fodder for endless amusing anecdotes. Such, it seems, is the male culture in this class.
Re: Frog costumes
On a recent Magic Monday, it was speculated that the frog costumes are an example of the proverb “what you contemplate, you imitate” at work.
MM thread:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/346539.html?thread=57790891#cmt57790891
@JMG
Do you think the Millennial-Xer-Boomer left will ever be able to get over their Trump obession after his passing, or will they be consuming documentaries of the dark Trump years (like they’re WWII documentaries), remeniscing about their glory days in the Women’s Marches and No Kings protests, and accusing any political figure they don’t like as being the Second Coming of Orange Man until they pass away? (I hope younger leftists are flexible enough in their neuro-circuitry that they can get over their TDS after Trump loses political relevance.)
“inflatable frog suits are more of a happenstance than strategic political thinking”
maybe so but who is to say what the will of the gods are? If Kek is involved it very much might be playing tricks on everyone.
Magic often works through synchronicity and this seems too synchronistic and in line with what has happened before to not take it into account.
Happenstance might be destiny and fate working at angles uncomfortable to the materialist mind.
Canadian blogger Ian Welsh, who has on occasion posted here, has a good article about the Tuesday results.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/mamdani-represents-a-new-era-of-political-conflict/
I am not optimistic that the entrenched Dumb leadership will read the memo which says voters care most about the realities of their daily lives. Putting cost of living ahead of fashionable ideologies! Imagine that! The Dumb leadership, you should excuse the expression, is even now engaged in the vicious takedown of a working class senate candidate in Maine. It seems the guy said some mean things about Israel, like he might vote against funding genocide. Never mind that polling so far suggests he could win; Chuckie Schemer (D Tel Aviv and Wall Street) must, must protect his pro-Israel majority at all costs. Chuckie went out and recruited the aged, retiring governor to lose to Susan Collins so as to preserve that one vote for Israel.
JMG, I take your point about a handful of blue wins in blue states not constituting a wave, but, as the right is forever reminding us, ad infinitum and ad nauseum, elections do have consequences. While I remain unimpressed by the guy in NYC, let’s see if he actually can govern, the two women who won governorships do appear to be capable and non-ideological persons. The lady in Virginia especially does have the look and sound of a pragmatic, take no prisoners, let’s get it done kind of person. The fact that both won their elections by two-digit margins gives them the authority, however temporary, to demand and expect to receive cooperation from their respective state governments. I would be interested to learn if they used the overpaid and underwhelming stable of DC consultants, or if they relied on local, in-house talent to manage their campaigns.
Both of the governors elect gave only the most perfunctory attention to the obligatory ritual of complimenting their opponents. Gov. elect Spanberger of Virginia declined even to mention her opponent by name. I would like to believe, hope springing eternal and all that, that this is a signal that neither lady intends to make upper class or PMC class solidarity a governing priority in policy or appointments. (Spanberger got something like 95% of African-American vote, so she could afford to dismiss “the Lieutenant-Governor” with faint praise.)
JMG, that was a highly appropriate answer. Had to LOL at my own ingrained reaction. Old habits die hard and your response drove the last nail into that coffin.
The American pattern is to vote and regret. Regardless of the candidate or party, regret and reversal is the general 4/2 year pattern. One party will sweep it on the 4 year mark, regret sets in and the other party will gain, 2 years on. At the next 4 year mark (sometimes 8) the pendulum will swing full over. Rinse, wash, repeat.
This, in my opinion, comes from the fact that neither party has any interest in doing the business of “the people” but rather they do the business of their constituents, the rich. Money runs politics, full stop. Politicians will trot out to make noises that appeal to their on-paper demographic. After election, said politician goes to work for the ones who pay the bills. What has always mystified me is how the American people keep playing the same game, decade after decade without learning anything.
Gotta hand it to Trump. He successfully identified some real issues to pay lip service to. I am not a fan (I don’t like either party, nor any politician) but I had to applaud him in both runs for office. Very well played. More recently, his AI video response to the liberal’s No Kings parade had me in stitches, laughing to tears. Crude, pointed and frankly, appropriate.
As to having a sense of humor, I think I agree that the general rule is one of class or personal struggle. Good humor seems to be an important part of a strong survival strategy. Growing up, all my besties lived on the rez. I work there today and can say that my native friends, who know suffering intimately, have the best sense of humor. That humor is hard, often darkly crude, self deprecating and razor sharp. As a european descendant, you know you’re in if they use the N-word on you and when it happens, its also hilarious. Or at least, that has been my experience.
@Michael Martin,
thank you for the article. I wish I had read something like this in my late teens or early twenties.
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the reason certain democrats did very well has to do with 42 million people losing SNAP benefits at least temporarily. That’s a lot of people, and real on the ground harm where it hurts most. While spending large amounts of money on a white house ballroom at the same time… I look at those two in concert and think ‘let them eat cake’.
Seriously, someone who knows how to make memes should do a mashup of Trump and Marie Antoinette.
“As far as the elections on Nov 4 went, I have seen a lot of chatter of this Blue Wave being the Bluest Wave that ever waved. A Rebuke of Trump and MAGA. THE FIRST DOMINO IN THE FALL OF THE FOURTH OR MAYBE FIFTH REICH. Now granted there were some impressive seat flips in Red States. Some counties that went double digits for Trump in 2024 (Morgan County in Georgia went +47 for Trump for example) flipped to Democrats this time around. Heck, Democrats flipped two seats in the Mississippi Senate. Mississippi! Every single county in Virginia swung left. Even Red strongholds got more blue votes this time around. So, yes, some impressive wins in Red States, but nothing like the what the Blue Tsunami folks are saying.”
Lol. These are nothing compared to the tsunamis that Andrew Jackson got in 1836 or that Roosevelt got a century later.
I guess I’ve assumed class and the insulations of money to be reason the left can’t meme. The political right is now more solidly working class (as in exchange of labour for income) and hence more connected to reality then the political left. The PMC left, at least, has hauled up their anchor and floated off to Karl Rove-land where ‘we make our own reality’ and narrative control is an honest to goodness grown up job!
If you are working three customer service jobs to pay your bills then everyone you serve and everyone you work with orientates you towards the world as it actually is. To be funny you need to subvert reality. It’s hard to subvert reality when you don’t even recognise it anymore.
I heard a woman my age used one of the subtle victim class markers yesterday afternoon, she claimed that as she was in a family of 6 children she of course did not get enough attention or that her parents were too hands off. So I gently reminded her that that was not unique to her family or large families, that it was like that for all of our generation. She agreed and said that she remembers alot of it being nice to not be monitored all the time, but then said that disaster could have happened. My bet is that she likes that narrative too much, and even though she realy does intellectually know that her large group of siblings had it about the same as families with one or two children (how boomer generation was raised) she will repeat the incorrect narrative. It is what we would think is expected of us, to have that viewpoint, for a couple reasons, first us later boomers in childhood were fed a steady stream of gloom predictions of over population crisis and how we must have none-2 at the most children. Second current mainstream culture on child raising has alot of fear and says that children must be constantly monitored, so then our being raised with lots of hands-off time is seen as bad, large families are still villified in PMC circles, and of course people are encourage to proclaim their particular victim class status ( Oh no, I was from a large family, sigh, with all those disadvantages) . Nice lady though, just hard in the cultural climate to not fall into those narratives.
As far as the male insults as camaraderie, I have heard of this and we should stop trying to suppress it so much in the schools. For women, it is different.
@Clay Dennis #123
Oh, man, it being happenstance only makes it even more likely that it Kek was involved. As Mycroft Holmes said in the Sherlock series from a decade back, “There is no such thing as coincidence. The universe is rarely so lazy.”
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@Tyler A #122
I think part of what doomed the Gritty memes was that it was largely a forced meme. Pepe was an organic development out of the Chans. Gritty was an attempt to make a left-wing Pepe with of a confused understanding of Pepe’s significance.
—-
@eyrie #107
> 3. Pepe the Frog, being the god of chaos, promotes nihilism, that is, negation of all values.
Correction: Pepe is a cartoon. Kek is the Egyptian god of primordial darkness, and is known as the “raiser up of the light”: he’s the god of order coming out of chaos. He just seems to have a wicked sense of humor.
Neptunesdolphins, I’d wear that tee shirt.
Chuaquin, what you contemplate, you imitate…
Anon, I admit that wouldn’t surprise me.
Viduraawakened, interesting. It’s certainly true that culture has much more to do with psychology than most psychologists like to admit.
StarNinja, that’s the big question, of course. Can the bureaucratic-managerial elite stage an effective pushback against the rising entrepreneurial elite, or will the latter finish the elite replacement cycle in the usual way?
Tyler, I seem to have missed the “dirtbag left.” Can you point me to some examples? They sound worth following.
Clay, thanks for this! That would explain a thing or two.
Siliconguy, historically speaking, of course, you’re right. One of the core platform elements of the original Jacksonian Democrats was changing the voting laws in each state so that all white men, and only white men, could vote — before then, you had to own a certain amount of property to vote, but women and people of color who owned that much property could and did vote in some states. Here’s an overview:
https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/discover/civics/who-voted-in-early-america/
Oskari, many thanks for the data points.
Patrick, good question. Roosevelt Derangement Syndrome was a huge political reality in the 1930s, but quietly got swept aside into odd corners of American public life after FDR died. Lincoln Derangement Syndrome was also huge, of course, but in the wake of the Civil War anybody who expressed it too freely outside the deep South risked serious legal and extralegal problems. Much depends on what happens to Trump in the years ahead. If he dies in office I expect a serious personality cult to spring up around him.
Cato, I’m certainly watching it closely.
Mary, and of course that’s always an issue. We’ll just have to see how things turn out.
Donkey32, I think most Americans treat politics the way they treat football. Since nothing really rides on the outcome — whether the Dems or the GOP win, most people will have their needs and concerns ignored while the politicians keep whoring themselves out to the rich — they can whoop and cheer and then go home and worry about other things. As for Native American humor, agreed — brilliant, often understated, and frequently lethal. I sometimes think the reason they were driven onto reservations is that so many of us wasi’chu can’t stand being the butt of their jokes.
Pygmycory, I’m really surprised nobody’s done that yet.
ArtSmith, that’s certainly also an issue!
Atmospheric, oh good gods, yes. Somebody needs to make Victim Bingo cards so we can keep track of who’s ahead in the Intersectionality Olympics. I even score a few points on that scale and, er, I’m not oppressed.
@JMG
> One of the essentials of the captive-constituency racket both parties play against subcultures and communities is that the captive constituencies get oceans of fawning rhetoric but nothing more substantive, and whatever problems drive them to the political sphere never get solved. Autists are by and large crass enough to notice this.
Oh, no question. I think part of what makes autists stand out is that if you could somehow get us all together and collaborate on a list of things we want as autistic people, the list would consist of items like “Please stop expecting us to guess what you want and just tell us,” and “Please stop demanding we change our hobbies to suit you better” — things that PMC for whatever reason can’t even pretend to be interested in giving us.
Blue Sun, granted, but do notice that Spanberger won outright or came unusually for a Democrat close across the state, in rural as well as urban counties. If she is as pragmatic as I suspect I doubt she has much patience, as in none at all, for folks who spend their time lunching and networking. Her desk is no doubt even now snowed under with resumes highlighting how the undersigned unfairly dismissed piece of office fauna was coordinator of the get out the vote committee in his or her neighborhood. My guess is she already has her key appointments locked in, and the resumes will go from mail office to desk to shredder (or whatever is the equivalent 21stC triple play). BTW, she is not and never has been loved by the left.
Anonymous @ 135, one of the post election commentators-who-did-know-what-he was-talking-about pointed that the last mayor of NYC who did go on to higher office served as mayor during the 19thC.! OTOH, the online Dems I have read hate Mayor Johnson in Chicago, which suggests to me that he must be doing something right.
StarNinja @ 121, not SNAP beneficiaries. You do have to be registered to vote. The announcement of cutoff of funds came on the eve of the election, which in most states is post registration deadline. I suppose the Rs thought they were being clever. What they forgot, if they ever knew, was the existence of voters who are related to beneficiaries, or who live in or near depressed (low-rent) areas, and don’t want our doors kicked in by hungry people who used to be our peaceful neighbors. For the record, I already know you and others here will disagree, I believe public health is a matter of national security and should never have been handed over to private industry, which in farming, medicine and food processing, has shown itself highly irresponsible. If you want to call that sentiment “socialism”, go ahead.
My favorites on the dirtbag left end of things are the cumtown people, especially Andrew Friedman and Nick Mullen. Both very funny, and able to make fun of themselves.
Also, this week’s theme is resonant for me as I dig through some resentments (thanks OSA) that seem to be blocking me. It’s been a while since I admitted that I wasn’t really special, but there’s still a part of me that wants to be special – perhaps it’s that kid who read too many fantasy novels centering around that one special kid destined to great things by some prophecy. I’m not even talking about Harry Potter – I thought that was shlock when it came out, but she really was just rehashing common tropes. Almost all those fantasy books I read in my childhood-preteen years had very similar themes.
@Viduraawakened
Yes, in the US, my understanding of the history is that in the post-WWII period, there was a lot of PTSD, which led to alcoholism, which led to a lot of the kind of indiscriminate beating that does nobody any good. Being a country prone to binary thinking, there was a strong countercultural movement that basically saw the choices as indiscriminate beating on one end, and total permissiveness on the other. Fortunately, many (I would even say most) parents here can see beyond that particular binary, but it’s still pervasive enough that you see this proliferation of spoiled children that you pointed out before.
The jokes are something I’ve heard about, too. A friend of mine who grew up in Singapore said her parents once took her to the store and asked her what color cane she preferred to be beaten with (for those curious, she chose the pink one). The question sounds utterly bizarre and perhaps even a bit disturbing to American ears, but I think that’s a result of the specter of that aforementioned image of the alcoholic parent who beats indiscriminately, which is very strong in the US spectacle. A culture that has normalized such things, where most parents administer physical punishment responsibly, would be able to treat the subject with a bit of levity, that just makes sense to me.
“Responsibly” is doing some heavy lifting there, too. I didn’t mention this in the original post, but the main consideration with corporal punishment that came up in the research is that from the parent’s side, it can easily become self-indulgent if one isn’t careful, because the punishment accomplishes two things: it disciplines the child, but it also releases the frustration of the parent. You mentioned this as well, that there is the persistent danger of going “too far.” In societies where this is normalized, it’s moderated by support from neighbors and extended family, which you gave an example of as well, but in the US where people are fairly disconnected and family ties tend to be weaker, no moderating effect exists. This and other factors probably play into the taboo against corporal punishment here.
But yes, in the end, it sounds like your parents got the important things right. They were loving, they were supportive, and they taught you clearly what was right from what was wrong. There can be cultural disagreements about how best to achieve these things, but those are the goals of pretty much any dedicated parent, and the results in your life speak for themselves.
@Joan #112
So that purchase of a case of frog costumes (presumably by chance) must have been what kicked off the trend!
@Clay #123
Where I am (in the northeast) I have only seen the frog costumes, no others. What a strange coincidence that the inflatable frog turned out to be the most useful for the protestors’ purposes (as you and Joan point out).
I found it kind of shocking, since the frog is already well-established as a right wing mascot, that the group who would reject oxygen once Trump expressed support for it, would pick up the frog as a mascot too.
It makes me wonder what deeper influences are at play, but perhaps I am reading too much into it.
Pygmycory #44
I absolutely agree about adults saying the young people are the hope of the world being unfair, and probably downright lazy.
Being a “Silent”, as we have already established, I am older than most people here and remember as a young teacher hearing various adults saying this. I thought if we can see the problems why aren’t we doing something about it? It seemed wrong to hold up our hands in defeat and leave it to somebody else. The next generation has to mold the world the way it sees fit, not take on our problems.
Maybe you’ll know I don’t like very much Trump, but I also see my country MSM seem too fond of Democrat narratives, even my town most read newspaper, which is (no doubt) Conservative in the national politics. Well, this evening (local time) I’ve opened that mewspaper when I was in a cafeteria and what a surprise…certain American Democrat politician, who has reached his condition of “being of light” by his odf mix of muslim origin and open socialist, has been praised by this newspaper. Well, I think the European elites are even more desperated than Democrat US PMC to find a poster child who wants to be the anti-Trump. However, I wonder what will be thinking of this praised politician the Israeli lobby…
@Mary Bennet
In my state, people with leftover EBT money from October can still use that to purchase food. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen (I work in customer service), only a small percentage of EBT recipients have leftover funds. I hope the Trump administration provides the partial funding it said it would provide for this month.
Mary Bennet,
You can register at the polls, at least here in deep red state.
My kids have found themselves having to do that because of their eighteenth birthdays falling between the cutoff for registration at the courthouse and the next election.
But I also don’t see any reason on earth that SNAP recipients would not be already registered to vote, even if not regular voters. Most states don’t remove people nearly so fast for non-voting as mine does, if they do it at all. Some states register voters when they get state issued ids, and since you are supposed to show your state issued id to sign up for SNAP . . . seems quite likely that in those states they’d just need to show up at the right precinct. Don’t know if the numbers bear that out in those states.
My county had some highly contested city elections and hit 39% turnout. One city has a mayoral runoff next month and the incombent isn’t in the runoff. This is a weird odd year election here, lots of mad voters, and the two largest cities’ mayors both lost.
Pygmycory, of course over here on the right we’ll make a joke about “God made men and women, Sam Colt made them equal.” Hope you have an equalizer if you ever run into that sort of male again. Not perfect, nothing is, but for darn sure it gets me closer to matching 200lbs of testosterone enhanced muscle.
If anyone is interested in investigating the black community’s rightwing side, I think Black Guns Matter is still around and upsettting applecarts, and would be a place to start looking. (I kind of mentally file them with Pink Pistols.)
I do remember all of the headlines in Europe and the US in 2023, or thereabouts… (many, many critical elections were coming up)… to the effect that “elections might threaten democracy”… a bit of an oxymoron there, I thought… 😉
I’m really not sure what to make of the Trump speech I watched in which he (in effect) said that “elections have threatened sovereignty”… but it strikes me as exactly the same brittle type of oxymoron that arises when elites contemplate insubordination from dirtbags…
In his novel Ringworld, author Larry Niven wrote that ‘laughter is an interrupted defense mechanism’. This was the conclusion of the race called Piersons Puppeteers, among who only the insane were capable of humor.
I sort of get what he means, but I can’t put it into words, my understanding is more of a feeling around the edges of it. Maybe another member of the commentariat can explain it better. How does disrupting a defense mechanism equal humor?
And perhaps the left can’t meme because they can’t let the defense mechanism lapse even for a moment?
Can humor help us with understanding the quality of numbers? All this talk of Hitler reminded me of the song:
Hitler, he only has one ball
Goering has two, but very small
Himmler, has something similar,
And Dr Goebbels has no balls at all.
Why bring this up? Because the difference between the Ternary and the Quaternary have always confused me and we see here that the third line is a fake ending, with the real end on the fourth line. Can the fourth, or quaternary be a finality of the ternary? Is the quaternary the implementation of the ternary to create the next union that itself splits into two? Is that why Heh is two and four in the tetragrammaton?
Is humor intrinsic to the universe itself?
Much to conjugate… er, contemplate.
All of this reminds me of the Huey Long quote – “Got to settle, once and for all, which gang of crooks is going to run this country, or else there will be nothing left to steal.” At this point…I’m kind of resigned to the incoming oligarchy, whatever form it takes. Or whether or not we develop a monarchy, devolve to warlords, or manage to patch together some renewed republics. Americans seem supremely indifferent to all of this anyway, except insofar as they are ideologically motivated or menaced. My dad used to say, about Hot Springs, Arkansas, “it was a nice town, when the mob ran it”. Of course, they look positively conservative and traditional by today’s standards. It IS hard to watch them just sell or give the country away, as if it was an estate or fire sale, with the PMC reaping the profits and hoping to stay on top. Thanks for encouraging insight and humor, and getting to the roots of anger! Maybe, we can meme better. To meme, or not to meme…I do like the title of that essay, “Systems which suck less”, you wrote, and it serves a good image to complete a meme. Or, “collapse now and avoid the rush”.
@BoysMom,
I didn’t go in for that kind of equalizer, but I did take up taekwondo for a while after that. Bio field jobs can be very isolated with whoever you’re working with, and you don’t get to pick who they are. It’s a lot more intense that way than 9-5. I’m not working field jobs (other jobs for that matter) anymore or having a string of random room mates coming and going, so it’s much less pressing a worry than it was.
That field job was really rough. Very very physical, plus the social shock of going from coastal BC to small town Utah. I learned a lot that you can’t learn in a classroom, but it was a pretty unpleasant experience overall.
Seems to me, vis-a-vis humor and who can practice it, is that language and perception are in a perpetual dance of meaning. Polyphony, for those who can appreciate it. Musical puns are more likely there, I expect, though such things are quite common in jazz also. What dances into being and out has at times a substantial supernatural element imnsho.
Back when Buddhism more generally engaged in serious questioning and enlightenment was an End, it was said that to understand the flow of karma, one needed to be fully enlightened. Which was a big (well nigh impossible) thing.
Left, right, brittle, flexible, rigid egos, flexible egos, competence, incompetence, and just plain muddling through (my ternary for all of those): I think poetry of yore often served the same function memes do today. Except for Browning perhaps, and similarly ponderous Victorians.
I just attended a class in which we discussed whether YHVH (sometimes imagined as being God) has / had anger management issues. Amusingly, many medieval rabbis intimated that He almost certainly did / does! Which is why that august being needs our prayers and blessings, to help Him moderate His awful temper. This, from a discussion of a bit of the awful, nearly Necronomicon-like Talmud, which those who know nothing about like to use to source all the evilly-evil things the inexplicably all-powerful conspiracy of Jews get up to.
It’s amazing how irony piles on irony piles onto myriad myriads of byzantine threads of mysterious confusion our lives evoke. “Oh, wad the giftie gie, to see irsels the way ithers do!” (Robert Burns). Or, to put it otherwise, –oh, what horrors emerge when we look at ourselves in a mirror carefully.
>He has promised to arrest Bibi Netanyahoo, using the ICC warrant, should that worthy set foot in NYC. He also wants to end the training of NYC police officers in Israel.
Oh my. I hope he doesn’t use a pager or a cordless microphone.
If someone unironically uses the term, “microaggression”, you know with complete certainty that that’s a person who has never been punched in the mouth.
@Jon G,
From Levi:
“The secret of duality leads to the quaternary, or, more precisely, it proceeds from and is resolved by the ternary, which contains the Word of the enigma of the sphinx.”
My understanding is that the ternary is equilibrium. But there *is* no equilibrium in the Cosmos… everything vibrates (1). If the pendulum swings back to equilibrium, it’s going to swing just a little bit more, so past the ternary and to the quaternary. And the quaternary can be seen as two dualities, which necessitates another ternary, and on it goes.
Regarding the tetragrammaton and humor, somewhere along the way I heard a comedian explain how to structure a good comedy show (I believe it was Bill Engvall, but I could be remembering wrong). The individual funny stories were structured like JMG described a good meme (Engvall often did stories that contrasted his and his wife’s perception of the same event, with the outcome being the ternary.) But he said a great show ended with a story that required you to understand and remember a previous story in the show. That made the audience feel that they were part of the “in” crowd, because they recognized the allusion (because if you didn’t, the final punchline didn’t make sense). So in a way, the final punchline was the final Heh of the quaternary.
(1)–Granted, some things vibrate at such a frequency they appear to be two non-vibrating things rather the one vibrating thing… 😉
On microagressions: the way I understand it, the term was originally coined for psychotherapists to be aware of ways in which even small things they say might cause a negative reaction in a patient and how it could set back the course a therapy, and to not react dismissively toward the patient’s overreaction (since the patient is presumably quite sensitive and disturbed).
But of course “therapy” has become a kind of political Cabala in which even the most innocuous notions will be mined for hidden meanings and words of power.
Joan, #79: As for “confronting challenges, achieving goals, and learning the strengths and weaknesses of the self” as the way to build genuine self-esteem, that involves knowing the child well enough to know what kinds of challenges they are ready for.
I had to defend in divorce/custody court my choice to teach my child how to navigate the (very safe) neighborhood to walk to a friend’s house. I recall saying with some asperity to the judge, “It’s my job to teach my kids to be independent adults. How are they supposed to learn that if they never get to practice?” Said judge defaulted reflexively to “A 10 year old can’t possibly walk a quarter mile unsupervised!”
Tyler, #122: Even amongst the educated classes, if one ever managed to get the women… out of the room, that’s how guys rib each other to create group bonds.
I found this to be ever so true while serving as a neurodivergent Naval Aviatrix! The aviators wanted me to toss shale back and forth with them but I only threw shale when I was completely frustrated and angry. I did eventually mature enough to understand this dichotomy but it was very tense and scary for me until I realized this was just how they communicated and they also didn’t understand why I didn’t participate.
@Mary Bennet #141
Au Contraire! I wholeheartedly agree with you about public health, farming, medicine and food processing. And you’re right about SNAP, of course. I forgot that 16 million children are fed by SNAP and obviously they can’t rock the vote. However, the military vets and Walmart greeters that are on SNAP because they don’t make enough probably expressed themselves on the ballots this time around.
And also for the record, I don’t think it’s Socialism, Mary. Not at all. In fact, I feel that every class has a responsibility to every other class top to bottom, back to front. If you’re sick you should be taken care of. If you’re hungry you should be fed. It may sound like Socialism to some or Christian values to others but to me it’s just the right thing to do, plain and simple.
Slithy, oh dear gods, yes. I’d back each of those to the hilt.
Isaac, that sort of aren’t-you-special fantasy was pushed less heavily when I was a kid but it was there. I’m not sure why, but it never appealed to me. The superheroes I respected were the ones who had to work at it — Batman and Green Arrow, especially, who had no superpowers, just passionate intensity and a willingness to sweat:
That was one of the reasons why none of the protagonists in my novels are superhuman — even Jenny Chaudronnier and Sophie Ames, who are as close as I get, are relentlessly human aside from their special talents.
Chuaquin, it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out!
Mother B, there are things about Larry Niven that always seemed pompous and silly to me, and that’s one of them…
Jon, I think you need to take that song as the focus of your meditations until you achieve enlightenment! 😉
Celadon, the mob did a better job of running Rhode Island, too. They may have been violent and corrupt, but at least they were competent!
Clarke, granted, but sometimes the dance of meaning is graceful and sometimes everyone on the dance floor is tripping over their own feet.
Thomas, and there’s a fair chance they deserved it at least once.
Slithy, interesting. Of course then it turned into a competition to see who could be the most absurdly oversensitive at all, in a setting where “You hurt my feelings!” was a crushing retort.