patrick.net

but look at those temperatures closely. they’re lower, not higher. it’s not the world that changed, it’s the manner in which the world is being presented. this has long worked to mislead, but this ability is failing, supplanted by a new memetic technology.

memes like the one above are anti-propagandistic gold. their informational density is surreal and they lay plain not only how shabby this trick is but how the trick is done so you can more easily spot the next one. best, they teach away from the provocative image that previously evoked fear or rage and invert it so that the same image in the future now screams “they are manipulating you” instead.

it’s an entire argument, indictment, and informational immune booster in one simple medium.

memes are changing everything.

welcome to the age where you can devastate a whole movement with one well chosen flourish:



for perhaps the first time in history, we have the template to refute big lies more quickly and more comprehensively than they can be told.

the prior impact is effaced and replaced by the new (and yet retains its power). the old images, even unaltered, wind up inverted in significance because the new ones are more compelling, more memorable, and evoke greater meaning.

where once they evoked status, they now cry fraud.

it’s dazzlingly effective and it multiplies and expands to suck in all adjacent energy.




and, let’s face it, this is way more fun.




there is just nowhere to hide from this. the ridicule and linkage is too intense, too fast, and mutates too rapidly consuming everything you try to use against it.

no sooner do you utter the phrase “malign creativity” than there are 200 memes that have adopted it as their own gleefully boomeranging it back at you.

all information is meme-fodder and the jiujitsu of using the power of someone’s own images against them has a wonderful feeling of turnabout being fair play.

and striking back in response to this is difficult.

fighting humor with stridence is a terrible look.

that’s as low status as it gets.

never bring outrage to a meme fight.

they so desperately want to stop this because they cannot compete with it.

for perhaps the first time in history, we have the template to refute big lies more quickly and more comprehensively than they can be told.

I don't know for sure that he's the one who originated it, but writer Matt Walsh has certainly popularized this increasing tendency among online conservatives. Whenever a leftist or progressive revolutionary weighs in on an issue or offers a condemning retort, the response is to quote tweet with the phrase "pronouns in bio."

The point being that someone who fastidiously toes the line of what's-happening-now to the degree that they feel it necessary or even morally responsible to tell everyone what pronouns they use for themselves is not someone in whose wisdom we should place much confidence.

As I said, the trend is catching on, and as much as they pretend it doesn't bother them, it routinely evokes some of the most indignant responses.

HeadSet says

Example to the contrary:

Oh, there are exceptions. Make me laugh, too.

But 99% of Left meme attempts fall flat.

Patrick says

for perhaps the first time in history, we have the template to refute big lies more quickly and more comprehensively than they can be told.

This is why they ban memes in Europe.

Yes. Back before they all collectively went insane. Or were just starting to.

I'll say something that I bet more than 95% of the people here will disagree with. The left was the first to create the art of memes

Rare to see more than 1 conservative sticker on truck. Usually just FJB or trump won or trump 2024 around here. Lefties on other hand plaster their puny cars with tens of stickers.

Really, the cartoonist was AFRAID to put up authentic stickers.

I think the screw up, except for "Trump '20", is that none of those bumper stickers are real.

Rare to see more than 1 conservative sticker on truck. Usually just FJB or trump won or trump 2024 around here. Lefties on other hand plaster their puny cars with tens of stickers.

Proud of you Son!

Years of increasingly deranged cancel culture, of watching as friends that I’d thought to be intelligent, sane, balanced people on the right side of history got mind-jacked by the Skinner box and reduced little by little to little more than bugmen with little souls animated by little ideas about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ that they wielded like daggers against everyone who looked like me ... one day, I thought to myself, these people are insane, everything they say is insane. So I started looking up those people being criticized the most viciously by the people I’d once respected. My introduction was Vox Day, who the science fiction writer Charles Stross was ripping on at the time. Vox’s blog and its comments section provided the entrance to the rabbit hole, and soon enough I’d discovered /pol/, right-wing podcasts, and all the rest. Over a period of weeks I immersed myself in the meme culture of the Alt-Right, and its savage humour ripped away my illusions and burnt away my emotional triggers with an agonizing, glorious catharsis. To enter the wilds of /pol/ in those days, even just to lurk, was akin to shamanic initiation, for it forced you to confront horrors, to face the possibility that everything you’d been taught to treat as sacred and beyond question was nothing more than a lie, that your entire worldview had been carefully constructed from raw falsehood ... and in the midst of this horror, to laugh. ...

The objections of the left, motivated as they are by resentful destructiveness and a hatred of all things beautiful and strong, are of little interest to me. The left merely wishes to emasculate men, to make them soft, pliable, self-effacing, and dependent, for the left feeds on weakness and misery – the weaker and more depressed its male extensions become, the more ferociously powerful the horde. The left is like an entropic vortex. To get sucked into it is to be subjected to a constant harassment of passive-aggressive discouragements that inexorably communicate, in a million different ways, through little comments and body-language and tone of voice, that physically powerful, virile men are to be regarded with suspicion. You don’t want to be one of those people. One of those gym-bros, those frat boys, those meatheads. Everyone knows it’s more important to be intelligent than strong, and being strong means you must also be very stupid. What are you wasting time in the gym for? Here, man, I made pot brownies, let’s talk about the gender spectrum. ...

So perhaps it is not to be wondered at that these objections crop up repeatedly. There is a certain kind of man to whom they appeal, indeed seem quite natural. I know this well, for I used to be just that sort of man. I made the same arguments, and I thought I was very funny and clever to make them. But they were just a cope. An excuse. A defence mechanism, to reassure myself that it was okay, indeed preferable, to be squishy and weak. After all, that meant I wasn’t wasting my time, I wasn’t one of those vain narcissists, I was one of the smart ones. All just cope and nonsense. ...

The dark lords of the World Economic Forum sought to trap us indoors, weakening our spirits as they paralyzed our bodies with the seductions of electronic comforts. The weak of body are weak in spirit, and easily ruled. I responded to this challenge with an inner howl whose intensity only grew over time. You would make me weak? I will become the opposite.