/pol/ humor thread

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Most /pol/ humor is crap that has been reposted a dozen times. But I did laugh at this regular show edit
 
>/pol/ humor
Most funny shit attributed to /pol/ was either stolen from /int/ and other boards, or is so fucking ancient that it was still /new/. Regular hours have always been a humorless maelstrom of schizoposting, seething and doomfaggotry. The board was only ever great during happenings and events like the elections.

1502212972719.png

I still really miss the fun of the Zimzam trial tbh
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I like the idea of turning soyjack jokes back on Rightists (it breaks circlejerks and forces them to try to be better), but I do think that the soy part specifically doesn't work real well. There has to be an element of truth to the insult for it to hurt.

What about corn syrup? It's in a ton of American junk food, and while the Leftist eats it too, you could easily work with the symbolism of corn farming (staple crop in the Great Plains, South, Appalachia) and the connection of American junk food = white trash = obesity. The fat trashy Trumpist vs. the effete faggoty Leftist. It's a great contrast.
Click to expand...
You're overthinking it. The reason soyjack memes work is because of the ridiculous push for effeminization towards men on heavily left-leaning news websites and communities like Reddit. Even if you personally think those are stupid and don't apply to you, they apply to the people who made themselves the face of the modern left.

The first equivalency I can think of that you could use against the heavily right-leaning would be how so many of their talking heads push dodgy supplements. Then simplify that down to a meme where right wing guys chug boner pills because Mike Cernovich told them to.
 
Chive Turkey said:
>/pol/ humor
Most funny shit attributed to /pol/ was either stolen from /int/ and other boards, or is so fucking ancient that it was still /new/. Regular hours have always been a humorless maelstrom of schizoposting, seething and doomfaggotry. The board was only ever great during happenings and events like the elections.

View attachment 1238164
I still really miss the fun of the Zimzam trial tbh
Click to expand...
Honestly the board went to fucking shit after 2016. It's been a shithole ever since Durban to nu-/pol/ fags being "based black man!" In every thread. Also don't forget that the /pol/ jannies are literal domestic terrorists as well.

Pissmaster said:
You're overthinking it. The reason soyjack memes work is because of the ridiculous push for effeminization towards men on heavily left-leaning news websites and communities like Reddit. Even if you personally think those are stupid and don't apply to you, they apply to the people who made themselves the face of the modern left.

The first equivalency I can think of that you could use against the heavily right-leaning would be how so many of their talking heads push dodgy supplements. Then simplify that down to a meme where right wing guys chug boner pills because Mike Cernovich told them to.
Click to expand...
Im thinking of Probably a other meme calling out the ludicrousness of the whole sigefag/wignat at community, however I'm not too sure what meme could Ben used against them.
 
Pissmaster said:
You're overthinking it. The reason soyjack memes work is because of the ridiculous push for effeminization towards men on heavily left-leaning news websites and communities like Reddit. Even if you personally think those are stupid and don't apply to you, they apply to the people who made themselves the face of the modern left.

The first equivalency I can think of that you could use against the heavily right-leaning would be how so many of their talking heads push dodgy supplements. Then simplify that down to a meme where right wing guys chug boner pills because Mike Cernovich told them to.
Click to expand...

I think you misunderstood my whole point. Like you said, it applies to people who make themselves the face of the modern left. Not people who make themselves the face of the modern right.

And the closest equivalent to soy for Middle America, for purposes of "lol I don't like what you eat lol," is corn syrup products.
 
The general pattern with any given community is that more intelligent users with better prospects in life find more productive things to do with their time. Obviously, shitposting doesn't pay, so you're going to need to dedicate your life to a career or something that'll keep you on top of your living expenses. As more people with promise flee a given site, they leave behind frustrated, unsuccessful individuals with a tenuous grip on reality. Imageboards also change because of the next generation of edgy teenagers arrive and displace the ones who matured and moved on. Keep in mind this phenomenon is far from unprecedented. People have been bitching about the state of the internet since Usenet, hence the ominous phrase "Eternal September". There really isn't a single explanation for why every imageboard is so radically different now than they were then, but let me run this by you.

Imagine you're at the movies with your friends. You have some in-jokes and you rib each other for fun. Then, someone approaches your group with the Encyclopedia Yourfriendsica (or Encyclopedia Dramatica). This complete stranger claims to have studied the banter, pretending to be one of your crew all along. No matter how hard you try to tell him otherwise, there he stands, using all your in-jokes, often incorrectly. When someone makes a joke, this guy corrects him with the textbook definition of your in-joke and all you can do is stare at him funny. Eventually, more of them join your group and start to displace others who could've continued the spirit of your core group. Disgusted and defeated, your friends leave, and the group becomes a group of people impersonating your group of friends. The cycle continues indefinitely until the theater goes out of business because nobody wants to associate with these losers.

This is precisely why Encyclopedia Dramatica was very controversial between 2007 - 2009. That site was singlehandedly blamed for creating newfags who in turn spread their cancer just about everywhere until the moderators pushed back by banning them. Despite their best efforts, the damage had already been done. By the time sites like Know Your Meme and the like cropped up, the mainstreaming of imageboard culture was complete, and ED looked underground by comparison. Eventually, bitching about newfags became tiring even among those who hated them with a passion because such conversations were decidedly unproductive.

The old ethos was shaped by the 2000s culture wars under Bush. In general, users were left-leaning liberals or right libertarian but contemptuous of any kind of liberal puritanism or progressive piety. Even if you hated racism, you also hated political correctness. If you were an obvious grievance monger over racism, sexism, homophobia, et cetera, you were promptly told to fuck off. Conversely, there were a few genuine Nazis, but they were generally a noisy minority of the board's population and told to return to their respective echo chambers if they got too vocal.

Then the Obama years came and the culture wars shifted dramatically. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the rise of the SJWs (who really just took progressive ideas and followed them to their logical conclusion much to the chagrin of older liberals) also influenced this new generation of users. The big black hope turned out to be little more than Bush with a fetish for insurance companies. Instead of hope and change, people got more the same. And then, the shooting of Trayvon Martin happened, and race relations take a dive, plunging to depths unseen since the 1992 Los Angeles race riots.

My own theory for the /pol/ explosion:
  • A significant swath of imageboard users are a) socially awkward, b) unsuccessful with women, c) white, d) instinctively opposed to mainstream pious liberalism, e) isolated enough from mainstream society that conventional social pressures and taboos have no effect on them. Almost all are male
  • As they get older, they grow bitter over their social failures, especially with women. This gradually turns into deep-seated misogyny and contempt for liberalism which exalts women while letting others mock socially awkward white male virgins as the last acceptable punching bag. Couple this with figures in legacy media openly shitting on people (especially men) simply for being white and you've churned up some deep-seated resentments based on identity.
  • Actual Nazis appear on /new/ and /pol/. In real life, these voices are immediately shut down, but you can't be banned on imageboards for anything but illegal content, and the main demographic of 4chan is isolated from social conditioning. They're primed to accept reactionary politics: they hate women, casually use racial slurs almost daily, instinctively hate liberal society and have entered the stage of their life where men start looking for a cause to champion. They believe their disenfranchisement is a stain upon the natural order of the universe and they deserve more by virtue of being white and male.
  • Armed with a vast list of carefully prepared talking points, they're now confident and spread to other places with lax moderation. These Nazis can now hold their own when told to leave by resident liberals and even embarrass those unprepared to respond to them. At this rate, the non-Nazis leave as the percentage of Nazis grows.
  • The 2016 election causes /pol/ to explode, and a whole new generation of edgy teens flock to 4chan, typically through /pol/, a link to which now appears next to the main site if you just google "4chan". They immediately adopt the /pol/ ethos, even if for most it runs no deeper as an ideology than the vague anarcho-libertarianism of 2003 4chan did among its users, but a huge swath become dedicated Nazis, and the rest at least remain open to it because it's been steadfastly normalized.

There is no single theory, but this is a good summary as to what happened between 2003 to today.
 
RichardMongler said:
  • A significant swath of imageboard users are a) socially awkward, b) unsuccessful with women, c) white, d) instinctively opposed to mainstream pious liberalism, e) isolated enough from mainstream society that conventional social pressures and taboos have no effect on them. Almost all are male

There is no single theory, but this is a good summary as to what happened between 2003 to today.
Click to expand...

I've had arguments with family about the Alt-Right and one misconception they have is that it's the same trailer trash types that it was back when they were young. They don't get (and it's not like that it matters if they do or not, but it comes up when talking about the news) that the modern far right extremists in the news are mostly nerds, leaving aside the Trad Worker's Party (which does seem to basically be one giant trailer party orgy).

And the reason is exactly what you said here. The nerd (or at least the kind we're talking about) doesn't give a fuck about social respectability in the first place.

I've also noticed that there's a real big overlap in humor between the modern Rightist nerd and the redneck for the same reason. The redneck will say n'igger whenever he wants because he just doesn't care and he exists at such a low level in the hierarchy that it doesn't matter; no factory is going to lay him off for it. But middle-class professionals live in terror, constantly worrying about what other people think of them.

It's like the Party structure in 1984. The people at the top have freedom from the rules because they're in power. The people at the bottom have freedom because they're too lowly to be worth policing. The people in the middle are the ones who get crushed the most. Just, speaking on the matter of taboos and being insulated from them.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
They don't get (and it's not like that it matters if they do or not, but it comes up when talking about the news) that the modern far right extremists in the news are mostly nerds, leaving aside the Trad Worker's Party (which does seem to basically be one giant trailer party orgy).
Click to expand...

Even Matt Heimbach looks pretty frickin' nerdy:
 
RichardMongler said:
The general pattern with any given community is that more intelligent users with better prospects in life find more productive things to do with their time. Obviously, shitposting doesn't pay, so you're going to need to dedicate your life to a career or something that'll keep you on top of your living expenses. As more people with promise flee a given site, they leave behind frustrated, unsuccessful individuals with a tenuous grip on reality. Imageboards also change because of the next generation of edgy teenagers arrive and displace the ones who matured and moved on. Keep in mind this phenomenon is far from unprecedented. People have been bitching about the state of the internet since Usenet, hence the ominous phrase "Eternal September". There really isn't a single explanation for why every imageboard is so radically different now than they were then, but let me run this by you.

Imagine you're at the movies with your friends. You have some in-jokes and you rib each other for fun. Then, someone approaches your group with the Encyclopedia Yourfriendsica (or Encyclopedia Dramatica). This complete stranger claims to have studied the banter, pretending to be one of your crew all along. No matter how hard you try to tell him otherwise, there he stands, using all your in-jokes, often incorrectly. When someone makes a joke, this guy corrects him with the textbook definition of your in-joke and all you can do is stare at him funny. Eventually, more of them join your group and start to displace others who could've continued the spirit of your core group. Disgusted and defeated, your friends leave, and the group becomes a group of people impersonating your group of friends. The cycle continues indefinitely until the theater goes out of business because nobody wants to associate with these losers.

This is precisely why Encyclopedia Dramatica was very controversial between 2007 - 2009. That site was singlehandedly blamed for creating newfags who in turn spread their cancer just about everywhere until the moderators pushed back by banning them. Despite their best efforts, the damage had already been done. By the time sites like Know Your Meme and the like cropped up, the mainstreaming of imageboard culture was complete, and ED looked underground by comparison. Eventually, bitching about newfags became tiring even among those who hated them with a passion because such conversations were decidedly unproductive.

The old ethos was shaped by the 2000s culture wars under Bush. In general, users were left-leaning liberals or right libertarian but contemptuous of any kind of liberal puritanism or progressive piety. Even if you hated racism, you also hated political correctness. If you were an obvious grievance monger over racism, sexism, homophobia, et cetera, you were promptly told to fuck off. Conversely, there were a few genuine Nazis, but they were generally a noisy minority of the board's population and told to return to their respective echo chambers if they got too vocal.

Then the Obama years came and the culture wars shifted dramatically. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the rise of the SJWs (who really just took progressive ideas and followed them to their logical conclusion much to the chagrin of older liberals) also influenced this new generation of users. The big black hope turned out to be little more than Bush with a fetish for insurance companies. Instead of hope and change, people got more the same. And then, the shooting of Trayvon Martin happened, and race relations take a dive, plunging to depths unseen since the 1992 Los Angeles race riots.

My own theory for the /pol/ explosion:
  • A significant swath of imageboard users are a) socially awkward, b) unsuccessful with women, c) white, d) instinctively opposed to mainstream pious liberalism, e) isolated enough from mainstream society that conventional social pressures and taboos have no effect on them. Almost all are male
  • As they get older, they grow bitter over their social failures, especially with women. This gradually turns into deep-seated misogyny and contempt for liberalism which exalts women while letting others mock socially awkward white male virgins as the last acceptable punching bag. Couple this with figures in legacy media openly shitting on people (especially men) simply for being white and you've churned up some deep-seated resentments based on identity.
  • Actual Nazis appear on /new/ and /pol/. In real life, these voices are immediately shut down, but you can't be banned on imageboards for anything but illegal content, and the main demographic of 4chan is isolated from social conditioning. They're primed to accept reactionary politics: they hate women, casually use racial slurs almost daily, instinctively hate liberal society and have entered the stage of their life where men start looking for a cause to champion. They believe their disenfranchisement is a stain upon the natural order of the universe and they deserve more by virtue of being white and male.
  • Armed with a vast list of carefully prepared talking points, they're now confident and spread to other places with lax moderation. These Nazis can now hold their own when told to leave by resident liberals and even embarrass those unprepared to respond to them. At this rate, the non-Nazis leave as the percentage of Nazis grows.
  • The 2016 election causes /pol/ to explode, and a whole new generation of edgy teens flock to 4chan, typically through /pol/, a link to which now appears next to the main site if you just google "4chan". They immediately adopt the /pol/ ethos, even if for most it runs no deeper as an ideology than the vague anarcho-libertarianism of 2003 4chan did among its users, but a huge swath become dedicated Nazis, and the rest at least remain open to it because it's been steadfastly normalized.

There is no single theory, but this is a good summary as to what happened between 2003 to today.
Click to expand...
So the alt-right pipeline IS REAL?
 
RichardMongler said:
The general pattern with any given community is that more intelligent users with better prospects in life find more productive things to do with their time. Obviously, shitposting doesn't pay, so you're going to need to dedicate your life to a career or something that'll keep you on top of your living expenses. As more people with promise flee a given site, they leave behind frustrated, unsuccessful individuals with a tenuous grip on reality. Imageboards also change because of the next generation of edgy teenagers arrive and displace the ones who matured and moved on. Keep in mind this phenomenon is far from unprecedented. People have been bitching about the state of the internet since Usenet, hence the ominous phrase "Eternal September". There really isn't a single explanation for why every imageboard is so radically different now than they were then, but let me run this by you.

Imagine you're at the movies with your friends. You have some in-jokes and you rib each other for fun. Then, someone approaches your group with the Encyclopedia Yourfriendsica (or Encyclopedia Dramatica). This complete stranger claims to have studied the banter, pretending to be one of your crew all along. No matter how hard you try to tell him otherwise, there he stands, using all your in-jokes, often incorrectly. When someone makes a joke, this guy corrects him with the textbook definition of your in-joke and all you can do is stare at him funny. Eventually, more of them join your group and start to displace others who could've continued the spirit of your core group. Disgusted and defeated, your friends leave, and the group becomes a group of people impersonating your group of friends. The cycle continues indefinitely until the theater goes out of business because nobody wants to associate with these losers.

This is precisely why Encyclopedia Dramatica was very controversial between 2007 - 2009. That site was singlehandedly blamed for creating newfags who in turn spread their cancer just about everywhere until the moderators pushed back by banning them. Despite their best efforts, the damage had already been done. By the time sites like Know Your Meme and the like cropped up, the mainstreaming of imageboard culture was complete, and ED looked underground by comparison. Eventually, bitching about newfags became tiring even among those who hated them with a passion because such conversations were decidedly unproductive.

The old ethos was shaped by the 2000s culture wars under Bush. In general, users were left-leaning liberals or right libertarian but contemptuous of any kind of liberal puritanism or progressive piety. Even if you hated racism, you also hated political correctness. If you were an obvious grievance monger over racism, sexism, homophobia, et cetera, you were promptly told to fuck off. Conversely, there were a few genuine Nazis, but they were generally a noisy minority of the board's population and told to return to their respective echo chambers if they got too vocal.

Then the Obama years came and the culture wars shifted dramatically. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the rise of the SJWs (who really just took progressive ideas and followed them to their logical conclusion much to the chagrin of older liberals) also influenced this new generation of users. The big black hope turned out to be little more than Bush with a fetish for insurance companies. Instead of hope and change, people got more the same. And then, the shooting of Trayvon Martin happened, and race relations take a dive, plunging to depths unseen since the 1992 Los Angeles race riots.

My own theory for the /pol/ explosion:
  • A significant swath of imageboard users are a) socially awkward, b) unsuccessful with women, c) white, d) instinctively opposed to mainstream pious liberalism, e) isolated enough from mainstream society that conventional social pressures and taboos have no effect on them. Almost all are male
  • As they get older, they grow bitter over their social failures, especially with women. This gradually turns into deep-seated misogyny and contempt for liberalism which exalts women while letting others mock socially awkward white male virgins as the last acceptable punching bag. Couple this with figures in legacy media openly shitting on people (especially men) simply for being white and you've churned up some deep-seated resentments based on identity.
  • Actual Nazis appear on /new/ and /pol/. In real life, these voices are immediately shut down, but you can't be banned on imageboards for anything but illegal content, and the main demographic of 4chan is isolated from social conditioning. They're primed to accept reactionary politics: they hate women, casually use racial slurs almost daily, instinctively hate liberal society and have entered the stage of their life where men start looking for a cause to champion. They believe their disenfranchisement is a stain upon the natural order of the universe and they deserve more by virtue of being white and male.
  • Armed with a vast list of carefully prepared talking points, they're now confident and spread to other places with lax moderation. These Nazis can now hold their own when told to leave by resident liberals and even embarrass those unprepared to respond to them. At this rate, the non-Nazis leave as the percentage of Nazis grows.
  • The 2016 election causes /pol/ to explode, and a whole new generation of edgy teens flock to 4chan, typically through /pol/, a link to which now appears next to the main site if you just google "4chan". They immediately adopt the /pol/ ethos, even if for most it runs no deeper as an ideology than the vague anarcho-libertarianism of 2003 4chan did among its users, but a huge swath become dedicated Nazis, and the rest at least remain open to it because it's been steadfastly normalized.

There is no single theory, but this is a good summary as to what happened between 2003 to today.
Click to expand...

Pretty good, except /pol/ isn't that white.

It's the most diverse white nationalist group you'd ever see.
 
@RichardMongler

I agree with all this, with the exception of one major factor that I think you discounted. The imageboards were always ironically very racist and sexist. Not out of any sense of malice, but out of the archetypal "/b/-humor" which tries to be as offensive as possible because /b/ was pretty much entirely underage b& for the first half-decade or so. Everyone was as offensive as possible because that's the epitome of humor for fourteen year olds. Because of the long shadow /b/ casts /b/-humor became imageboard-humor in general. But just as any community that gets its kicks by pretending to be idiots will be invaded by actual idiots mistakenly believing they're in good company, any imageboard that gets its kicks by pretending to be stormfront will eventually be invaded by actual stormfront mistakenly believing they're in good company. This, combined with what you detailed above led to a gradual shift in the userbase that was unfortunately exacerbated by the simple, well-documented phenomenon of repetition. When everyone's constantly saying "niggers", ironically or earnestly it naturally becomes easier and even natural to say "niggers" and then internalize all that comes with that. This is also a big part of why kekistanis and other such newfriends that entered imageboards from the /pol/-side tend to think the other side is hypocritical. Ye olde racism was mostly humor/shock-first, malice-last or basically bantz, while this brave new world's racism is malice/redpill-first, humor-last-or-never. In short, everyone was ironically and humorously offensive until suddenly it wasn't ironic or humorous anymore, and no one could tell when it had changed. For someone who wasn't part of the culture in the old days it can be very tough to tell how it was different back then. Whatever the case, as you articulated in your analogy the userbase changed to a racist flavor and the old guard that refused to change with it has been alienated and driven away.
 

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