I watched the Vaush community descend from merely cringe into unironically beating the drum for NATO and irony played a huge role in that.
It seemed like some kind of irony-based salami slicing. Labels like “anarcho-bidenism” began as a kind of acknowledgement of “isn’t it weird for anarchists to support the democrats?” justified with “but Trump is worse so… haha funny ironic joke where we acknowledge our contradiction” but then the repetition of the irony normalized it, stripping the phrase of its irony.
It started well before the “anarcho-Bidenism” stuff too, that’s simply one incident I remember for being recent.
There seemed to be some right wing faction, quite probably an semi-organized group, who were pushing it right. They’d make these “ironic” gags about “just pretending to be more right wing” and then anyone who criticized the gag was called a scold. The community was then activated against the scolds and the scolds were ostracized. Meaning the tactic was to salami slice the actually leftist elements by convincing the bulk of the community that “we’re all just having fun, it’s just a joke, we all get it” and over time the left wing elements in that community left and it become more and more right wing.
And then you got “anarcho-NATOism” which was also a gag but they really were supporting NATO and now the gag was that they included “anarcho” there.
Vaush is a very dumb person who craves approval from his fans so he followed each rightward shift with the community being driven by a totally ironic don’t you get the joke right wing element.
I watched the Vaush community descend from merely cringe into unironically beating the drum for NATO and irony played a huge role in that.
It seemed like some kind of irony-based salami slicing. Labels like “anarcho-bidenism” began as a kind of acknowledgement of “isn’t it weird for anarchists to support the democrats?” justified with “but Trump is worse so… haha funny ironic joke where we acknowledge our contradiction” but then the repetition of the irony normalized it, stripping the phrase of its irony.
It started well before the “anarcho-Bidenism” stuff too, that’s simply one incident I remember for being recent.
There seemed to be some right wing faction, quite probably an semi-organized group, who were pushing it right. They’d make these “ironic” gags about “just pretending to be more right wing” and then anyone who criticized the gag was called a scold. The community was then activated against the scolds and the scolds were ostracized. Meaning the tactic was to salami slice the actually leftist elements by convincing the bulk of the community that “we’re all just having fun, it’s just a joke, we all get it” and over time the left wing elements in that community left and it become more and more right wing.
And then you got “anarcho-NATOism” which was also a gag but they really were supporting NATO and now the gag was that they included “anarcho” there.
Vaush is a very dumb person who craves approval from his fans so he followed each rightward shift with the community being driven by a totally ironic don’t you get the joke right wing element.
This community made a good choice today.