Are we reaching peak-irony? Everything is so fucking sarcastic all the time. News coverage. Comedy. Discussions.
Why can't we be earnest and talk about our feelings and shit? Why can't we express hopes and dreams and anxieties in a capitalist system without some nerd making fun of everyone?
I'm not sure irony is as potent as a recruiting tool as people on both the Left and the Right think. People need something to believe in.
How can earnestness be cool again?
am I the only one who thought that play sucked ass?
anyway OP I don't feel my indulgence in irony has in any way diminished my capacity for earnest discourse, but maybe that's just me
i do think that the Gawker-era of snark journalism has poisoned the way the American Left expresses itself online. People think we're petty hipster cunts.
That said, funny is funny. I just don't laugh at much of this Irony Left shit anymore, even when I agree.
It's a distraction tactic, we as a society don't want to admit things are extremely fucked. It's just too traumatic to face up to.
Chances are we're gonna be extinct pretty soon.
extinct? really?
It drives me insane too.
Postmodernism was a mistake.
Agreed. Especially in the world of IRL left politics. Everything has to be intersectional 100 percent of the time or it's a bombardment of sarcasm and muh privilege. And then you go online and see the Leftists using the same style of humor. And then you see the Liberals and Alt-Right Nazi cunts using the same style of humor.
exhausting. heartbreaking. makes me feel like an alien.
Yeah, it's very easy to get burned out on politics
Especially on social media. Just full of people trying to out-virtue signal each other and say the most incisive and unique thing possible
And it sucks because if I just say "I'm scared of the world and I want love and I want insane poverty and war to end" usually it will be the liberals making fun of me.
We live in an extremely insincere world, everyone knows it's shit but don't want to do anything meaningful to change it because they're conditioned to the status quo of inaction and non-violence. So people simply escape the alienated world the only way it's permissible, by satirizing it's phoniness, all the while embracing it in its entirety; that's what DFW tried to warn people about when it came to irony, that it's only useful for revealing the contradictions of our beliefs, not for bringing about change. The bourgeois myths have only been deconstructed, their ambiguity remains, so people can only ever relate their analysis back to the foundations of capitalist society, they've only bore witness to the illusions surrounding current society, as that is what myths do, they destroy language by rendering it meaningless, by forcing it to adhere to the ideology of the ruling class. Society has naturalized a large part of our suffering through signs and symbols we encounter every day, the grueling commute, the brief momentary peace of a weekend, etc. Myth doesn't work to hide anything, more than it does to naturalize the relations of exploitation of society. This ensures that myths can never be contradicted or disproved, merely deconstructed of its partial meanings, with new ones taking place of the old. I hope this makes some sense.
Identity politics has become the center of all political and social discourse for the past few decades.
Only some people can handle using Irony without the expense of it taking on their personality.
I think as far as the snarky tv and radio shows, Redacted Tonight is one of the better ones. It's in the formula of the Daily Show, but they're a lot more deep and bi-partisan on their serious bits.
Thank you. This is exactly what i needed to read. It's the constant irony of mocking capitalism while embracing full participation. Like one of those sarcastic soda or fast food commercials. Or the Gawkerification of news sources like NYT and the rise of Buzzfeed porky idpol journalism.
It genuinely feels like most people I know are actively meaner and dumber than they were 4 years ago.
I really don't like that show, I can't nail down exactly what I hate, maybe it seems he's more liberal then leftist or something
It's RT which is also kinda weird.
because we are proud children, or because the bourgeoisie's prime axiom is that appearance = reality, so keep up a happy face
because we might change something. capital had to kill the child-animal in us, domesticate us. we all dream anyway but we are not allowed to actualize them. any detracting 'nerd' is just sad at his own impotence.
also we are not allowed to express hopes and dreams because they might be idiosyncratic. you cannot be abnormal, so on and so on.
Irony is the only thing that lets me cope with the state of the world tbh
Don't fall for the "it's on RT therefore it's weird" thing"
Sure RussaToday is biased toward Russia in it's news, but there's a phenomena in global news, where there is a bias towards the establishment in the home country but more cutting edge journalism outside. This applies to all the big networks.
the fact is Redacted tonight has no US sponsors or whatever, so they can run with basically whatever the producers want. They were among the few to cover how the other media edited Jill Stein's interviews to make her looks silly, for example.
Sarcastic, Ironic, Red Pill
is a device to cope with Painful Truths
You can`t get any more earnest
Irony is literally perfect, don't fucking insult it
I'm actually triggered by this thread
You should come to Australia some time. The banter and sarcasm permeates the air.
Ironic racism or sexism is a way to expand your audience, your words can be interpreted as ironic by those who don't like the literal meaning, and others who identify with the literal meaning can take it literally. Sarcasm and irony is also a way of hedging your bets. When a prediction is right, you can say told you so. When a prediction is wrong, you say it was joking.
This is also true of academia's political science departments. If you want to read an asinine argument by some cunt how the Electoral College is great when electing the US President using "sophisticated" mathematical "proof" (probability of situations with pivotal voters being higher, though it would be much higher if the winner was chosen entirely based on whether the number of voters is even or odd, really gets your noggin joggin' huh?), read yanks. And of course, a US newspaper publishes this "thought-provoking" argument. When writing about electoral systems and the influence of big money in politics in other countries, some of these folks suddenly grow a brain.
Sometimes I consider intentionally taking ironic statements literally as a means to (hopefully) eventually expunge the concept from my conscience.
Maybe I'd force a few other people to drop the mask briefly, if only to explain to the autistic stranger wtf is going on. Or maybe I'd just get some interesting responses.
Hold on, realization time (or maybe not.)
Is this why nearly everything vaguely enjoyable-if-silly is now "cringe" material unless done "ironically"?
Leading invariably to the spiral of tedium that is "I like it genuinely ironically only seriously but still ironically. :^) "
Then how bout this one, user. Looks good.