Triggering the soyboy libt*rd cucks by calling them NPCs (Detail from meme found on Reddit)
By David Futrelle
Alt-right trolls have a new insult: NPC, a sort of all-purpose replacement for formerly ubiquitous anti-SJW putdowns like “cuck” and “soyboy,” suggesting that everyone who doesn’t agree with them is a mindless, even soulless, robot, akin to a videogame Non-Player Character who can only respond to stimulus with a small number of preprogrammed lines of dialogue.
As an insult, NPC has been floating around the chans for some time, but it took off in a big way recently after a two-year-old 4chan post resurfaced on social media. In the post, one disaffected anon wrote about how he — I’m assuming it’s a he — had started to look upon most of those he encountered on a daily basis as little more than real-world NPCs,
soulless extra walking flesh piles … who autonomously follow group think and social trends in order to appear convingly [sic] human.
For these NPC “flesh piles”, he continued, politics is literally no more than a collection of handy catchphrases.
If you get in a discussion with them it’s always the same buzzwords and hackneyed arguments. … it’s like in a vidya [game] when you accidentally talk to somebody twice and they give you the exact same lines word for word once more.
As journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio has recently noted in Kotaku, this is literal dehumanization, a way for alt-rightists and their fellow travelers to reduce their “enemies [to] objects, pawns, strawmen, tools.”
But, I would add, it’s also proven to be a great way for the trolls to demonstrate what completely original thinkers they are, and how seldom they resort to meaningless buzzwords.
By the way, did I mention that these guys really hate buzzwords?
Press F to Pay Respects to these brave and original thinkers.
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Augh! Forgive me for using “Wingnut”.
I do try to adhere to the “No ablest language policy” but I slipped with that.
I realize that “Wingnut” is a no-no because of the “Nut” part.
My bad.
@ Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Yikes: I had no idea about all that about Castaneda! Urgh!
He wrote the kind of book I’d sometimes see on the shelves of people older than me (I was born in 1960: a bit late for the hippies but bang on for the punks) and the odd, sometimes rather creepy older guy would sometimes say “Oh you MUST read this, it changed my LIFE!!” kind of thing about it. (Hermann Hesse was another I recall: all those sensitive young men).
I’ve always been a bit allergic to gurus, fortunately: in life and on the page. I read one book of each, and kind of thought “hmmm, this is not very interesting, and where are the women?” about them.
But only recently I’ve started remembering some of the things that troubled me…
@nequam “I wonder if any of them are going to go full solipsist on us?”
– Nice Iain M reference there – very pleasing!
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
I suspect that the various traumas of the 70s, particularly Watergate, led a lot of the Boomer children into thinking that they could no longer place any faith in the institutions they took for granted.
The film Chinatown is probably the symbolic summation of this, as many an analytic essay has pointed out.
New Age Spirituality works best when it embraces balance, altruism and “All Is One”.
Anything that embraces the opposite or emphasizes an “Us vs. Them” mindset or puts a HUGE emphasis on the Leader or unquestioning obedience to the Guru should always be suspect.
The Leader or Guru should merely be a guide, not THE SOURCE OF ALL KNOWLEDGE!
Question everything….even the wisdom of sages….and find your own personal Gnosis.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/trump-s-tariffs-have-already-cost-ford-1b-now-it-n917756
and the trumplings won’t care because… (gimme a sec, here)… because… oh, yeah, they won’t care because those workers are all union cucks….
There is a striking amount of “Don’t Care” among the igno-right. Prolly because their concept of empathy-limited-to-people-like-me is LITERALLY gospel.
Oh? Well, wish I knew what I’d been referencing…
I was 5 at the start of the 80s, I don’t miss that shit.
I guess that explains the “Hippie-To-Yuppie” thing. I guess it’s the ol’ “If ya can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality.
I also think Progressive politics is “trial and error” and the early protesters were too naive and impatient. Many also though waving signs alone would change everything.
They also never considered that you need a SUBSTANTIAL amount in people in general society to be sympathetic to you in order to get everywhere and most Americans just thought the activists were weirdos.
They also never thought that the Govt. would do stuff like COINTELPRO and were unprepared when it came and they didn’t try to provide a good counter to all the propaganda against them.
They seldom tried to appeal to “Joe & Jane Q. American” because they saw them as “The Establishment” and “Don’t trust anyone over 30”. There was a huge Generation Gap back then. The Gene McCarthy campaigners got the right idea (concerning ‘image’ and appealing to the average schmoe) and would almost have been successful had it not been a bunch of circumstances involving Nixon, Watergate, another Progressive named George McGovern and a bunch of stuff.
They had no understanding of Propaganda, Language, Framing, Wedge-Issues, etc.
It was all new and the Left had to learn by losing and then use those lessons to rise again and (hopefully) win.
Today’s USA is ripe for “The Dream” and more open to it and most realize that darker-skinned people are just as normal as white people, LGBTQs aren’t freaks, looser sexual more are freeing and that women can be just as brilliant as men.
Many grew up in diverse neighborhoods and thought nothing of befriending that kid of a different skin-color. They grew up with Sesame Street and numerous Saturday Morning cartoon series with an ethnically-mixed team of kids (Mission Magic, Capt. Planet, Magic Schoolbus, etc.) or non-white protagonists (Fat Albert, The Amazing Chan & The Chan Clan, etc.).
Even if the majority still held unconscious bigotries (or some of the above cartoons still relied on tokenism and stereotypes) they still….at least consciously….were fine with “Being a bigot is bad!”.
@ SpukiKitty:
In his time, Jesus would have been on the short end of MOST of those social ills, and that comes through in the 4 gospels, as well as in many of the Dead Sea Scroll texts
The first of these jerk-people hadda be Paul/Saul of Tarsus who, in spite of the things Jesus is reported to have said in the four gospels, STILL successfully turned the apostate rabbi into a god….
The thing is; I have no problem with the IDEA of “Messianic Judaism” or young “Jesus Freaks”….but the problem is is that they became Trojan Horses to undermine Progressive spirituality and society.
“Messianic Judaism” was invented by the Far-Right to undermine Judaism and the “Hippie Jesus Freaks” turned into another Far-Right Religious Zealot mess.
However; I’d love to see a Jewish-Style Christianity that reclaims Jesus’ Jewishness and have no problem with a synesthetic Progressive but very devout Judaism that acknowledges Jesus as their main Prophet/New Moses….a new Judaism that doesn’t necessarily try to turn Jesus into The Jewish Messiah or YHVH itself.
I’d love to be Liberal, Progressive “Jesus Freaks”. I’d love to see a huge Lefty-Christian revival that takes the religious wind out of the Far-Right’s sales.
I consider myself a Universalist, an Interfaith-type-person, a sex-positive, non-literalist, Pantheist, Qualified Monist, NeoPagan/Shakta Hinduism syncretist and I believe that “Cherrypicking” is okay as long as one chooses the humane teachings over the bigoted nasty ones.
You see; I take the concept of the Gnostic Demiurge non-literally and see the concept as representing “False Oppressive Bigoted Piety”. I apply it to all faiths. In other words; If a teaching in scripture supports any form of bigotry or repression and can’t be reinterpreted or explained away or put in a Progressive light using “historical context”, then it’s “Demiugic” and of “Corrupted Human Invention” and should be ignored.
Progressive people of Faith, in my view, are truly full of “Divine Descernment” and have subconsciously been able to tell what verse is truly “Inspired” and what verse is mere cultural and human-made baggage.
I’d love to see spiritual people apply my ideas concerning “The Demiurge” so they can reclaim faiths for Progressive means and undermine the Religious Frummers. Since Organized Religion isn’t going to die soon and many find solace in it, it’s better to reclaim than try to fight and destroy.
Yes, we cuck soyboy SJW libtard Demonrat snowflake feminazis use buzzwords instead of logic…
These codewords they use are mostly to impress each other, I guess. I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t want to have to use a Tom Mix Decoder Ring to understand these tirades.
I know it is a stupid thing to be annoyed by but fuck them for coming into my hobby(table top rpgs) and stealing the terms.
@Kiwiwriter:
A lot of that probably comes down to ‘using words that we know and those idiots don’t makes us feel smart’. Every group and trade starts developing its internal jargon to avoid having to re-explain ideas when talking amongst each other, but some of these folks seem to have gone from ‘smart people use jargon’ to ‘jargon makes me sound smart’ without quite connecting the dots in between.
@Weird Eddie, Spukikitty:
One of my favourite lines on that sort of subject still comes from The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. Near the end, Train, someone who helped start an environmental movement that has since got out of hand (helped along by various government agent provocateurs who were trying to discredit the movement and just helped things get out of hand even more) has recently come out of hiding. When asked about some of his more violent followers, his reply was “I am no more responsible for those who use my name than Jesus Christ is responsible for those upon whom Paul of Tarsus projected his own personal neuroses.”
@Kimstu:
If you go back to the people who actually seriously study the original works, one of the things they’ll note is that there are actually two words in Greek that both get translated as ‘love’ in English. One is ‘eros’, referring to romantic or erotic love. The other, and the one actually used in the original version of ‘love thy neighbour’ or ‘and god so loved the world’ is ‘agape’, and refers to a more familial or community love, the all-encompassing love and coming together in support. In other words, you’re right, and the fact that you’re right would be more obvious if it weren’t for that poor translation.
That said, the right-wing types have been going for ‘proof-texts’ for so long, just lists of specific verses that they use for various purposes, that they’ve long since lost any sort of context.
(And I say this as another atheist, even if I was brought up Anglican. I’ve had some interesting discussions with my mother who used to be a Sunday school teacher.)
@Kiwiwriter:
A lot of that probably comes down to ‘using words that we know and those idiots don’t makes us feel smart’. Every group and trade starts developing its internal jargon to avoid having to re-explain ideas when talking amongst each other, but some of these folks seem to have gone from ‘smart people use jargon’ to ‘jargon makes me sound smart’ without quite connecting the dots in between.
Jenora, I reckon you’re right…after all, if these guys were REALLY SMART, they wouldn’t be these miserable misogynists in the first place.
It enables them to sound condescending and superior to people who really ARE superior to them. It’s like Lyndon Johnson tartly observed, you can always tell the poorest, stupidest white man that he’s better than the most educated black man, and you’ll get his vote.
@James Hutchings and many others: Pretty much.
@Kiwiwriter Can we hope the unintelligible nature of their ‘code’ will result in fewer fans of it? 😀
@Kiwiwriter Can we hope the unintelligible nature of their ‘code’ will result in fewer fans of it? 😀
Boy, I hope so, Fishy Goat…it astounds me that these jerks will expend vast amounts of mental energy to be stupid, but none to be intelligent.
Someone mentioned the flat-earthers earlier…they have web pages and forums where they sit around and insist that the planet is a pancake, with Antarctica at the edge. My advice to them is to go to the edge of the world, with their Smartphone, lean over the edge, and take photographs.
And let me know if they spot the turtle that’s holding the planet up.
@ SpukiKitty:
I believe the three worst things we ever invented are money, metal weapons, and church.
Not spirituality… church. The difference is this; spirituality is my relationship with ?? (god, spirit, whatever) of my understanding… religion is your relationship with ?? of MY understanding; church is the social power I hold to MANIPULATE your relationship with ?? of my understanding.
Imo, spirituality is always introspective. Not self-loathing, self-knowing, gnostic. It teaches enlightenment, but not arrogance. To go to the top of the mountain, but not to shout at others from the heights about their “lack of”, nor even to shout that they need to come up there, too. To me, it’s MY relationship with ?? as I understand ??….
Religion, through church, has been the tool of power and privilege since… well, since it started, and the most unconscionable acts have been perpetrated in its name.
/s
Tom Lehrer said…
The Catholics Hate the Protestants…
And the Orthodox Hate the Catholics…
And the Hindus Hate the Muslims…
And Everybody Hates the Jews….
I’m on the cusp of millennial and genX and what I’ve noticed is that my peers and I are in that mid thirties to early forties age range in which traditionally we’d be at the point where we become more conservative, but that is not happening. That’s not to say there aren’t conservatives in my age group, there are lots. But they started out that way. Older genX and baby boomers had financial security. They may not have had faith in our institutions, but they had faith that they personally would be all right. I didn’t research this, but I also suspect that they had their group better represented in Washington when they were my age. Money and power is so entrenched now that it’s still mostly people decades older than I in Congress. We may be aging and many of us have spouses and kids and suburban homes, but there’s a lot of reasons for us to identify more with fiery progressive youths than the old white men running everything.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the boomers die off. It’s not going to be the utopia a lot of millenials think it will be. But I think the bootstrapper mentality will go out of favor. At least for awhile. The flip side of this is that the resistance to this change from the millenials indoctrinated into the alt right on social media could terrifying.
@WWTH:
Oops, typo. “Ruining” is spelled with an “i”.
@Weird Eddie:
Heh. I recently finished writing a story that involved a goddess in a sort of urban fantasy world going undercover and getting a bunch of graffiti artists to spraypaint a mural on her own central cathedral while the congregation is inside observing the highest of holy days. (The congregation in this case being mostly the rich families who could afford seats at that particular cathedral, doing their public displays of piety while not really caring about the folks around them in the older quarter of the city.)
When asked at the end why she didn’t just make a miracle and do it herself, she noted that the first time she’d done something like that, a couple of generations later the people she’d saved had decided they had a divine commandment to wage war on the people she’d saved them from. When she tried fixing that with another ‘revelation’, that started a war between the old and new churches that still hadn’t entirely died centuries later, just kept going into ceasefires long enough for people to forget how horrible the internecine war was. So these days she mostly stayed undercover and gave people inspiration but kept things deniable.
Besides, she liked artists, and felt they did better work when given a basic idea and were told ‘have fun’. Even a goddess could like surprises.
Yeah, I might have gone a bit Author Tract at the end.
@ wwth
Something I see happening right now will play large in the next few decades, that being the robbing of the western economies by the mega-wealthy. Particularly so for the white conservatives, who are no longer going to be willing bystanders — they’ll be targets, as the wealthy no longer have anyone else to steal from. The white conservatives’ selfishness and vanity will prevent them from accepting their own responsibility, but it will be too clear that the mega-wealthy are no longer on their side… it’s to be decided if the conservatives will understand that the mega-wealthy NEVER WERE on their side, but once the bottom drops out (and it will…), that point will be moot.
At that time, the “Sons of Trump” will be full-on Nazi. They will blame the mega-wealthy, but likely won’t be able to exact any kind of revenge — if it’s just an economic collapse, the elite will be gone, and holed up in walled cities straight outa “Judge Dredd”, and if its a full-on nuclear war or biosphere collapse, they’ll be dead or refugees.
The Nazis will then… yeah, it’s likely going to get ugly.
Yup; Agreed. Spirituality beats Religion, hands down.
************
As an Gen-Xer born in ’75; I feel the same. I’m 43 but I feel more in tune with the youth than middle-age.
I also see the protest spirit of the best of the Boomers in today’s Progressives. I love it!
Heck; Some 40-somethings don’t even look it. My sister, who’s in her late-40s (and close to 50) could pass for 30.
Come to think of it; Most people are aging slower and 40 is basically 30, now.
I’m aware of the few millennials who’s turned to Far-Right junk as well. No doubt it’s scary. On the upside, they’re a loud minority and some will grow out of it. We should be concerned about those who don’t.
It’s important to reach them before the Spencers, Anglins and Dr. Petersons of the world, do. Time to go whole hog on YouTube and else where and find a way to use the algothrims to boost Progressive voices.
@SpukiKitty
Well, my post doesn’t explain how non-Evangelicals (or, for that matter, non-Americans) also manage to get it so wrong, so I wouldn’t give myself too much credit.
For example, I don’t think Catholics emphasize brokenness anywhere as much (otherwise confession and penance wouldn’t exist).
I’ve been listening to many Marxists, socialists and anarchists lately, and it’s striking how many of them claim to be Christian, in some cases saying their Christian faith is why they’re Marxist/socialist/anarchist. It gets them some befuddled and hostile reactions from both Christian right-wingers and atheist communists. It will be interesting to see if they can get a US equivalent to liberation theology going, and I’d love to see the Christian right collapse before it.
Does anyone else feel weird about ’80s nostalgia? I found it so annoying a decade ago when guys on the internet whined about the shows of their childhoods were the best ever and everything sucks now. The more mainstream nostalgia is more bearable to me, but sometimes I wonder if it’s motivated in part by a desire for a more “politically incorrect” era of Reaganism and a seeming lack of social justice.
@Cindy
It’s a grand old randian tradition, that’s for sure. Everyone who doesn’t embrace seriousnes selfishness as the highest virtue is in fact totally consumed with self loathing and suicidal ideation and wants to take everyone else with them.
@Weird Eddie
Alternatively, he was an asshole with temporal lobe epilepsy who had a fit and the built his own religion using nascent christianity as a foundation. He and his bros wrote most of the new testament, including the bits about how women need to shut up and subjugate themselves.
@ Nequam
Sorry – that’s an example of my own solipsism at work! Too many literary references in my head, so I assume they are also in everyone else’s head.
I was thinking of the Iain M. Banks novel “Against a Dark Background”. It’s a standalone – not one of his Culture novels – set on an isolated star system which has developed numerous religious sects and warring mafia-style business/family concerns.
At one point, the main character is kidnapped by Solipsists, a group of people who decide that everyone else (including other Solipsists) are merely “apparences”. They are heavily armed, know no fear, and react to the deaths of others in their gang by arguing that the disappearance of an “apparence” is a sign that their will is becoming stronger.
One of them literally reacts to an inconvenient presence by putting his fingers in his ears, closing his eyes, and humming.
It seems quite apt.
It also has convincingly humanoid intelligent self-aware androids – a limited number only – many of whom are listed as missing. They have been kidnapped into presumed slavery. As someone explains, they have been kidnapped for the commission of acts which are illegal when inflicted on humans.
So – enslaved sex bots: another bit of the right-wing MRA-bros fantasy world, right there.
@Lumipuna
I can’t even begin to express how wonderful I find this. I’m immediately plunged back into Moominvalley.
*happy sigh*
Nostalgia for the past is endless…the world always looks better in the rear-view mirror.
In the 1970s, there was a wave of nostalgia for the 1950s. Why people would think the era of Joe McCarthy, Red-hunting, nuclear war fears, the Korean War, the horrific violence against civil rights protestors, and the Giants and Dodgers moving to the west coast is something to be nostalgic about, I don’t know.
And in 1940, Time magazine proclaimed American youth to be a “flabby, leftist, pacifist lot.” Today they’re the “Greatest Generation.”
@Kiwiwriter
Nostalgia for the past is a thing because the past is already written. You can ignore all the bad bits and moon over the stuff you like. It’s the present and the future that are uncertain and in flux, and for most people that’s some scary shit.
@Kiwiwriter
That’s the thing: I don’t consider things “better” in the 80s or 90s. Just different more than anything else. Perhaps a little slower. A little simpler. But pretty much the opposite of “better.” I mean, slower and simpler I think is just childhood more than the time period that your childhood took place. There were less people and you had less days to pack into your memory.
That’s part of why I try to practice a more responsible form of nostalgia. For one, I’ve been kind of horrified that so many of my nostalgic memories revolve around brand names. Leafing through the Consumers Distributing Christmas catalogue. Miracle Mart. Bargain Harold’s. Bi-Way. Woolco. Pascals.
There’s a whole YouTube channel that just uploads old Betamax and VHS clips of TV shows and commercials that aired in Ontario in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Watching old news broadcasts, I find that the issues that faced the world were actually quite similar, it’s really only the aesthetics that have changed. There was still murder and international strife in 1985, it’s just that the only place you heard about it was on the radio, on the 6PM news and on the corner newspaper box.
That’s why I’m always skeptical of the filtered nostalgia of pop culture. Ready Player One was particularly notorious on in this regard: sure, the 80s were great if the only thing you remember about it was Back To The Future and Van Halen… but that was also when Willy Pickton’s rampage was in full swing and AIDS was storming across the planet unchecked.
I get a lot more meat of nostalgia out of photos, film clips and news articles from that time than pre-packaged “remember this movie” or “remember that song” reminiscence. Because I will always associate Level 42’s “Something About You” with clothes shopping for Osh Kosh at the Scarborough Town Centre when I was like 5.
Back then, the Town Centre looked like this:
Now it looks like this:
No going back to the way things used to be.
Nostalgia for the past is a thing because the past is already written. You can ignore all the bad bits and moon over the stuff you like. It’s the present and the future that are uncertain and in flux, and for most people that’s some scary shit.
Absolutely right…not to mention that nostalgia for the past involves remembering one’s youth, when you were handsome/pretty, your favorite music was played regularly, you could dance well, and everything was (theoretically) in front of you.
Every generation thinks it’s wiser than the past generation and tougher than present and future generations. Or something like that.
@Katamount:
Consumer’s Distributing, now there’s a blast from the past.
Granted, given that I grew up in B.C. back then, Woodward’s was the big place. (They went bankrupt in 1993 and got sold to Hudson’s Bay.) Just thinking about them puts the ‘Dollar forty-nine day, Woodward’s! Dollar forty-nine day, Tuesday.’ jingle back into my head.
(I usually joke that some people have photographic memories; I have a phonographic memory. Songs and jingles stick around.)
On the other hand, your pictures remind me of the aerial photograph collages I saw in Metro Hall years back, and just how different the city was between the two of them. Especially in Scarborough, which was mostly still wilderness back in the 1950s or so of the first photograph.
Also, yes, people have commented before that for most people, ‘the good music’ is what was created when they were young. Nostalgia for most always seems to focus on the time when they were old enough to be able to do things on their own, and young enough to get away with it.
Which may be part of why so much nostalgia is white-cis-straight-male based, because people who don’t fall into those categories have a lot less of ‘young enough to get away with it’. That’s an interesting idea, that the ability to have nostalgia is dependent on having a certain level of privilege to start with.
all you seem really, really old
@Jenora
Nailed it on the head with that one. If you were young and aboriginal or black or gay in the 80s or 90s, you had to do a lot of growing up and fast to handle the prejudice being thrown at you. Those memories probably aren’t as peachy.
I also think it’s worth going past the time you were born to find out what life was like in decades past. What you find can be very interesting.
Yeah… “NPC” is all goofy and shit, but think of this in terms of what the Alt-Right is now referring to as “Weaponized Autism”…
Referring to someone as an “NPC” is essentially relegating their humanity to nothing more than a computer generated enemy in a video game that can be harmed with not only impunity, but reward…
This meme is harmless and original. You idiots need to stop being paranoid assholes.