The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training social media warriors

sorry

Had to shorten the title a little

https://www.motherjones.com/politic...young-conservatives-to-win-the-next-meme-war/

A couple of things stand out

It is not about Trump or ideology or even ethics it is about “winning”. It is as if the two political sides have become a team sport instead of being a serious contest as to who will best run a country and influence world politics. The problem with that is once people have given loyalty to a “team” it is hard to change them because their identity becomes entangled in the team identity.

But maybe they are on to something with the memes. It has long been known that the best way to turn a group off learning something is load lots of information onto each PowerPoint page. First thing you learn is to try and keep each PowerPoint less than 25 words and add pictures, much like a meme.

Perhaps one way to win the fight is to start a meme war........

 

Wow, this whole time i thought it was just the Russians !

 

Sure, but the left will loose that war I'm afraid.

 

Nope! Seems like a lot of people got into the act

Ps thanks for the bump!

 

Memes??? It doesn't come naturally to the left. Of course, memes are nothing more than, how do you put it, replace the argument with something else and then make fun of that.

 

You do not want to start a meme war. You're missing the entire point of the addage "the left can't meme". Ya'll are REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY bad at it, to the point where it becomes counterproductive.

 

One of the reasons “the left” are bad at memes is

1) truth matters more to the left than to the right
2) more people on the left realise that the world is too complex to distill into 10 words
3) accuracy matters to the left
4) when was the last time you saw someone on “the left” swallow a nutjob conspiracy theory hook line and sinker?

 

1) lol no it doesnt.
2) if you cant distill it to basics with a visual aid, you're not going to be able to do so in a list or other format. It shows a lack of facility at communication of ideas.
3) memes can be rather accurate.
4) o my God. You're serious.

 

!) yes it does - just look at the memes on this board and I will bet you a $50 donation to the board that you will find more factual errors in the right wing memes than the left - besides if you had read the link......
2) if you think the world’s problems can be distilled into 140 characters then you are definitively a fan of Trump
3) CAN - but are they usually??? My favourite is the one about the Clinton and Trump Charities claiming the Clinton charity was not on the level and since then of course Trump can not longer run a charity his was found to be so crooked
4) Nutjob conspiracy theories abound on the right - Qannon, Pizzagate, Google is out to get us. Don’t wear a MAGA hat or you will be beaten to death by Antifa, All T shirts with Trump on them will be ripped from your quivering backs by “lefties” and then there is my favourite Trumps obvious idiocy is just a leftist plot to show us we are wrong

 

1) you'll have to come up with a better definition than right and left dearie. And most memes are made for mockery, not sophisticated discussion. The left cant meme because it doesn't understand this and posts tldr screeds instead of a meme.

2) again no one is trying to distill all the world's problems into a single meme (not a tweet hun, a meme. You know with the top text and bottom text on a photo or gif?), and you cant even keep yourself from moving the goalposts from memes to tweets and from a single idea or concept at a time to all the world's problems. This is why you have trouble with memes.

3) have you never see the occupy Democrats page?

4) Clinton by a landslide. Trump is finished and will be impeached any day now. There were no scandals in Barack Obama's presidency. Bill didnt rape juanita broaddrick. Q: not followed by even a significantly sized minority, you watch too much TV. Pizzagate: same. Google: has actually admitted to some rather pronounced bias against conservatives.
Antifa: do you want me to post all the videos or do you already feel silly enough?
The 4d chess is the only hit you landed and even that isnt as widespread as the ones I noted.

 

I think that if the left can't meme is simply because meme are humor.
Humor is first about transgression. We're in a time were morality is first said by the left (you should be nice to gay, trans, poc) when some decades ago, it was more something dictacted by religion.

It's very harsh to be a priest and a humorist in the same time.

 

Just proved you do not understand hypocrisy or the underpinning psychology of memes as described in the link in the OP
Memes because they appeal to emotion do appeal to the right as it has been proven that the right activate the Amygdala when thinking politics
and

Didn’t read the link did you? And you did not look up the meaning of the word meme

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Ah! Backs off slowly as she realises that someone has been watching Infowars

 

Oh! I don’t know I find this hilarious

 

And it is your supposition that only "right" people can become emotional during an argument? That's precious. Please give me more amusing gems like that, I'm having my morning coffee and just spit it across the room I laughed so hard. Woke my wife up and everything. You should do this professionally.

I read the link I just dont agree. One of the reasons a meme is so effective is it uses imagery and humans are visual based. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say. When I get to my office, I'll post a few illustrating the concept.

Its gay frogs and I gotta buy the supermalevitality!!!!! Actually no, i read the news. Again, I'll post some links when I get to the office.

 

[Sorry a mistake]

 

I'm perfectly content with being part of a group that falls behind in the meme category. For one group of Americans to be so determined to 'own' another by making fun of them and laughing at the division that is ever widening is a very sad turn in the nation's history.

 

Agreed

It is one thing to make fun of politicians and public figures it is quite another thing to make fun of those who support them. One shows you are not too invested in worshiping them just because they have achieved something (yeah Aussie we call that tall poppy syndrome) the other divides the country into “team players” with all that that implies

 

Damn the links did not work

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/memes

 

Not my supposition

It is researched fact

Red brain blue brain.

The right think with the Amygdala and the left with the insula

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970

 

< One of mine. It references a song by the wutang clan and is making a point about the need for forthright discussion instead of using weasel language, generally, and more specifically as it regards torture during interrogation.

< Not mine. Rather sophisticated reference to the embezzlement scandal of Wayne La Pierre. That's the intern there he spent like 30k on clothes 20k on a driver paid 5k in rent a month etc for. The implication is obvious.

< Here we have an assange meme. If you've seen how he looked when they brought him out you get it. Its also subtly calling him a *****. Not one of mine, just illustrative of the depth of communication in these things even if they're mostly for mockery.

< A favorite of mine. This is what I would consider a right wing meme as the left isn't in to gun rights.

< Again why I have problems with the simplistic right left paradigm. This is a libertarian meme that more fully embraces actual constitutional rights than the right or left does.

< Dogging on the commies for starving their people with bone deep stupid policies? Classic.

< Perfectly encapsulates an entire school of thought if you've seen that episode.

< Really hitting multiple levels here. This is a quote by LBJ about J Edger Hoover and why he kept him as head of the FBI. But notice the figure is trump. LBJ was a dem (and a ****ing scumbag), Trump is ostensibly a republican (and a ****ing scumbag), there's all kinds of messaging there.

< Not really either, just felt it was appropriate to close with.

 

Do you read your own studies?

"In the context of risk-taking decision-making, the amygdala is thought to be important for the processing of affective attributes involved in decision making [16]–[18]. The insular cortex is involved in the representation of internal bodily cues crucial for subjective feeling states and in signaling potential changes in interoceptive state to possible decision-related outcomes"

"Republicans more strongly activate their right amygdala, associated with orienting attention to external cues. Democrats have higher activity in their left posterior insula, associated with perceptions of internal physiological states"
^ So this say Republicans drew from external information to try to solve the problem or figure it out to take a risky decision, and Dems queried how they felt about it to make a risky decision.

Also your study has holes in it a mile wide "Ideally, we would have also directly inquired about the individuals’ ideological self-identification and attitudes about a set of political issues. However, we were not able to re-contact the participants. "
^ They didn't ask the participants about their actual attitudes etc. They just checked records and called that right or left when politics and voting patterns are far more nuanced than that. To be clear: THEY DIDN"T EVEN ASK EACH PARTICIPANT "do you think you're right or left".

 

I certainly understand and respect differing political views. What I can't seem to wrap my brain around is the absolute glee felt by those whose lives seem to be guided by 'us' and 'them' - and their determination to further it on a daily basis.

 

Some of it Russian interference, and it is still happening, despite what many think. The real agenda was not to get Trump elected but to sow discord.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

There are those who seem determined to widen this gap and who suspiciously Outside what would be daylight hours in the USA

 

I do and I am far more familiar with it having read more than this one paper

I will post more tomorrow

 

I have been trying to work out where you cherry picked those quotes from because the paper is FAR more involved that your quotes suggested and as I thought it is from one illustration in the paper and the footnote to that illustration rather than the text of the paper itself which states in part

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970

However this is onoy one paper. NPR has a good overview called “Red Brain Blue Brain Hidden Brain
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/03/654127241/nature-nurture-and-your-politics