Thursday, July 6, 2017

The Meme Wars

The culture wars are over.  The progressive wars are ongoing, but slowing down and morphing into a number of distinct battles.  For instance, they've split into tactically distinct strategically linked campaigns like:

  • Immigration
  • Trump impeachment / marginalization
  • BDS (Israel boycott), anti-BDS 
  • Gay inclusion vs gay political purity (i.e. Chicago dyke rally & Gays for Trump bans)
  • Post-secondary progressive cults (i.e. Evergreen & post-modernist religious extremism)
  • Main stream media over-the-top punditry vs. fake media
  • etc.
In the midst of this comes an example of the "Right" adopting the "Left's" long held arms advantage with respect to "hate speech".  In most cases, hate speech is simply any type of heresay against major progressive values.  It ranges from actual attacks based upon identifiable group characteristics to micro-aggressions to any non-supportive stance against intersectionally disadvantaged.  But a good example of the meme wars is the current brouha-ha over Linda Sarsour's Jihad comments (for those unfamiliar with her she fills a Milo Yiannapoulos like niche for the left.

Here's some anti Sarsour stuff


the money quote

And the context which indicates she is using Jihad in its moderate sense as any struggle against evil.



The interesting thing, is of course not the polemical battle ranging, but rather the obvious attempt to normalize / re-appropriate "Jihad" and the even more obvious attempt to hate-speech it like both N words.

In terms of the meme wars, this is a pretty big shift.  Up to now the right has usually been at a substantial disadvantage in linguistical re-appropriation tactics.  It is a prime reason the culture wars ended up as such a rout.  The "rights" obvious tactic is to prevent any normalization of jihad, or presumably many other Islamic in-group terms.  Thus it would seem there is a reaction to fully "other" the intersection of progressivism and Islam.

In terms of battle lines, this probably makes sense.  On the cultural evolution front it is interesting to see how both sides are becoming so structurally similar - at least on the tactics & weapons fronts....

No comments:

Post a Comment