Parallel Between What Zizek is Talking about and the Alt-Right/Troll Culture?

Apologies if this reads like dogshit I'm a terrible writer.

But I recently watched this lecture youtube.com/watch?v=kugiufHh800&t=5100s and I was particularly fascinated by this idea of treating your ideology as a joke but still following it and reinforcing it. Could it be claimed that the perfect example of this is the marriage of troll culture and far-right politics? The culture of trolling allows one to embrace taboo topics "as a joke". You can do and say horrible things if your only expressed goal is"to be funny" or "to make people mad". It's a culture that allows one to embrace the very real fascist, sexist, racist, classist, sociopathic, nihilistic, narcissistic, Machiavellian ideologies that the Left has fought so hard against for centuries, without ever having to confess to it being anything more than a game being played on the internet.

It's as if this entire election can be summed up by repression, where the Left (well, liberals) tries to hide its naked radical aspects, i.e. antinationalism (refugees and immigration), anticapitalism (Bernie Sanders), the freedom to artistically express one's self with no restrictions (reminder: the alt-right's most popular stereotype of a leftist is a woman (sometimes a trans woman) with piercings, alt-fashion, dyed hair etc). The Left was continually forced to repress these things because it had to defend them on principle, they could not be explained away. The Right, on the other hand, found a way out of this by using humor. By claiming their only interest in openly fascist, racist, sexist ideas was the humorous shock value of such ideas (they were turned into a rebellious game of "triggering"), they were able to detach themselves from said ideas while still becoming active allies of them.

Other urls found in this thread:

mynationalistpony.tumblr.com
ponies-against-degeneracy-blog.tumblr.com
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

I can't comment much, but I do agree that treating your views as a joke is a dishonest way of simultaneously expressing controversial and extreme positions while protecting yourself from criticism or attack.

I remember in another conference Zizek explained that fascism offers a form of reliefe from social standards… I forgot what was the conclusion but it was very different from yours

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." - german beard dude

The point is to not fall for your own bullshit.

If you think of your current beliefs/ideology/viewpoint/etc. as a Serious-Business / its-vital-everyone-accepts-this-truth-or-else-the-apocolapse-will-happen / Im-right-theyre-wrong /etc, then you are setting yourself up for pain. The pain of being wrong, being stubborn, being unable and unwilling to change your views when the evidence demands it.

To immunise oneself from being this type of useful idiot one much have the tools of scepticism and open-mindedness to change your views (views: the models you use to understand the world, make sense of the evidence, and to predict the future).
And this means to see your current ideology as a game, a having of fun, a philosophic joke, a "what if".

That assumes there isn't any world problems that are potentially catastrophic if ignored or mismanaged, and that political action isn't necessary to mitigate the risk
*Climate change* cough*

There are those problems, and one would miss them if one were stuck in one's ideology that denied them.
If one's denial is playful, one would have the ability to adjust ideology into the reality and address them.

The 4chan troll culture predates everything, the idea of doing it for the lulz, the troll does not actually believe in anything, they have no identity, they have no leaders, it is the purist form of nihilism.
And well you take that, and you put it in the obama years, the liberals increasingly becoming authoritarian word police, telling people how to act, how to feel, what to do.

And so the roles were reversed, the right wing became the funny rebel meme'ers, the left wing became the uptight faggots.

When Obama was running they were making memes of him too, you know.

Liberals are all of those with no irony and more warmongering. Scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds.

You simply can't be radical when you are the orthodoxy and at the beck and call of Porky. Hence Shillary doing everything in her power not to present herself as radical in any way, shape, or form.

If anything that right there has far more to do with imageboard culture than liberals.

Google white dreadlocks.

Which wouldn't have happened if liberals didn't go out of their way to make sure their opposition would become the champions of free speech, and the latter's Voltairean prayer ("Make my enemies ridiculous") a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Clinton's loss has far more to do with countryside vs city than image boards vs non-image boards. Trolls are insignificant, many don't even have the right to vote or won't exercise it.

Liberals lose because of their obedience and stupidity, they deserve it.

lel more like reformism

Trolling was and still is good whenever politics is not the actual underlying goal of trolling.
Fuck me, even South Park picked up on this…

That's a good way to put it.

I guess but I can't figure out what "side" he's talking about is having their prayers answered. It could be either. Look at Trump ffs.

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Now right is becoming uptight faggots and left still remains uptight faggots

I guess I meant that behind every liberal policy there's a radical equivalent.


yes, exactly my point. everyone thought sam hyde was a troll until he revealed he was a registered republican.

do you guys ever NOT talk about Zizek

I see 10x more Zizek than Marx here

Zizek is the master of the dialectic. Understanding his understanding will allow us to finally achieve global proletarian revolution. His every word, every pronouncement, must be ceaselessly gone over in order to glean every pearl of Hegelian wisdom from his utterance.

Have you fist fucked your Big Significant Other today?

This picture is from tumblr and it was made in 2014.

I think being able to laugh at and see the flaws of your own system or idea is a pretty decent trait and makes you, and by extension your ideas, more likeable.

Add "weeaboos" to the "bronies" set and it's more accurate

I swear these guys are the new pseudo nerds

To talk about Zizek is to talk about Marx which is to talk about Hegel.

Do you even dialectics?

No.

If you regard it all as jokes, then you are immunized from ever having to change your views. A troll can spout absolute garbage, and if someone wastes their time trying to prove the troll wrong, they can fall back to their last line of "u mad bro lol" or "triggered" or whatever the modern synonym happens to be.

Only by taking the matter seriously can you place yourself in position to have been wrong, and thus have to change your views (after you get over the initial being mad phase).

shit meme tbh fam

Troll culture is about shutting down the opposition through doxing, swatting, harrassment, raiding, etc, and Trump's free speech credentials ended when he started suing everyone who said something mean about him, promising to pass laws that will collar the media who are critical of him, praising Putin's assasination of dissendent reporters, etc.

I don't know a single weeb or brony who is into Dark Enlightment, they tend to be lolbertarians or the worst, most ignorant, kind of nazis

"Joking" about being a communist is big on reddit too. It's not exclusive to the alt right, it has more to do with how our generation are broken down post-modernists who can't express sincere feelings.

This to me is why troll culture is fundamentally birthed from the same insecurity and anxiety as hipsterdom. Hipsters also cling to a single cheap rhetorical technique as an all-purpose backpedal to abandon ship when a conversation isn't going they way, except instead of flippancy, it's irony. "Ha ha I didn't really mean it, joke's on you for not picking up on that" has been the defense mechanism du jour of internet culture for at least a decade, and it's seriously obstructing real discussions of real issues.

>mynationalistpony.tumblr.com
>ponies-against-degeneracy-blog.tumblr.com

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Holla Forums is full of contrarians and sectarianism as it is. While there are those who cling to a specific ideology tends to be edgy molotov throwing anarkiddies and holodomor apologizing stalinbabbies, most of the userbase seems to recognize that 20th century theory and praxis is, while a good jumping off point, by itself inadequate for a future transition to socialism.

Yes. It's called post-irony.

But this is genuinely true for some beliefs.