lol

And twitter. And mastodon. And lemmy ffs, we’re not immune. (I’m doing it right now, in fact.)

Am I wrong in thinking the original tweet was a joke? Adding the mac speech bubble is just saying “no, fuck your joke, this is my joke now”

After reading the caption I had to look at the picture several times to convince myself it was not, in fact, Ben Shapiro in a garfield costume

why not just let lose of this crippling desire to align ourselves with some historical identity

Fair enough. Counterpoint: It doesn’t freaking matter what word we use. No matter what the word is, the right will attempt to poison it and stir hatred of it and assign meanings to it that aren’t real. Look at what happened to “woke”. It will keep happening, because the modern right is Fascism, and poisoning language is a fascist tactic that goes back to the very beginning. You call yourself an Anarchist; where on Earth do you live that nobody has negative associations with “Anarchist”.

Use whatever word you want, just use it consistently. Don’t expect it to stay free of propaganda, because they do that to our words on purpose.

Not the plant you think, though.

That’s why they call me Dollar Bill. Because I have one.

This is exactly how I’m tryna be (I live alone in my house with my dog and my $0.003M fortune)

Pretty rare to see a swastika that’s drawn well enough to do this

The person who made this is either a troll or a fascist, and to me it doesn’t really matter which. Poisoning the meanings of words and theories is an old, old fascist trick and that’s all that’s happening here.

OK, the Paradox of Tolerance is a Karl Popper social theory about how society should feel about its subgroups, and made recently famous again in a comic, although I don’t think the comic context is relevant to this meme.

The basic idea is that if we tolerate absolutely every subgroup, then we are logically also tolerating the existence of fascists and other types of subgroups that want or promote intolerance. If one of these groups (let’s say, Nazis) is tolerated by society, it may gain control–indeed, to Popper, this is inevitable–and society becomes intolerant again. So paradoxically, tolerating everything led to the collapse of tolerance itself.

His remedy is that we must not tolerate the intolerant, we must extinguish groups like that through various means. To be clear, Popper is NOT saying we must kill or commit violence against the members of those groups, just that we must make sure the group structure itself is dismantled as it’s being built in every case. And here we get to the rather terrible point being made by the meme. “Minorities”, as the meme puts it, would be the Nazi group from the earlier example, because their viewpoint is a minority. And Popper isn’t promoting violence against them, unless you consider the enforcement of laws to be inherently violent. (A valid point of view, but very far from what the meme is suggesting.)

The Baby War of 2020 touched all aspects of our lives.

You went as cringe?

I’m really not saying “everyone should know this is parody”, because it’s possible for smart people to miss the point of anything sometimes. The clues here are pretty obvious, but if you’re skimming, you might miss them and just think this is normal BenG shit. (My main clue that stopped me from scrolling is that this doesn’t quite look like his art style.)

What I do think, however, is that people should apply a filter before jumping into the comments with stuff like “this is beyond parody”. No, this is actually parody. Someone thought about the fact that it might be parody but was so committed to their first impression that they didn’t scratch any deeper.

I wish this was the top comment, I’m so tired of lemmy users falling for obvious parody. Admittedly this one is less obvious than most, given Ben Garrison’s whole thing.

When you consider abortion, consider this: What if this baby could have grown up to throw a brick at a cop?

Jesus Christ you dumb-dumbs, she’s not actually a Meta employee of any kind. She’s a tech writer. It’s a bit.

I think I could get that without getting caught in the trap. I’m gonna try