I would like to draw a distinction between meme as dunking on person vs idea, I love diogenes’s criticism of plato’s definition of human, it’s to the point, similarly for alexander.
I am on the other hand not that big fan of the dunk on bentham because I don’t find those kind of dunks funny much rather the insider joke is about a stereotype, which may not even be accurate. Like it’s just laughing upon a picture of a random dude but now I do understand the role as you have highlighted since the person doing the dunk just didn’t want to engage, so it acts a semantic stopsign even though bad intentioned one.
I meanwhile find Politicalcompassmemes enjoyable since they’re archetypical representation of a ideology and quite funny when the convergence happens in real life, because the strawman versions often exist in politics. They broadly cover the various political clusters, and ideologies which are in zietgeist, albeit a bit oversimplified yet informative.
I think your distinction makes a lot of sense here. IIRC Kitten argued somewhere else that the dunk was self-evident—taking morality too literally leads you to strange places and unintuitive conclusions, which I don’t necessarily agree with—but I agree with you in that it was more of a semantic stopsign (what a nice term) than a proper laconic takedown of an idea (which is really hard to do).
Funnily enough, politicalcompassmemes is the literally epitome of Scott’s bingo card idea, but it hasn’t seemed to result in the full Ostrich effect “head in sand” phenomenon he was worried about. Instead, it’s sort of fragmented into an inside joke community, which was sort of my point about memes serving the purpose of communicating humor/in-jokes.
I would like to draw a distinction between meme as dunking on person vs idea, I love diogenes’s criticism of plato’s definition of human, it’s to the point, similarly for alexander.
I am on the other hand not that big fan of the dunk on bentham because I don’t find those kind of dunks funny much rather the insider joke is about a stereotype, which may not even be accurate. Like it’s just laughing upon a picture of a random dude but now I do understand the role as you have highlighted since the person doing the dunk just didn’t want to engage, so it acts a semantic stopsign even though bad intentioned one.
I meanwhile find Politicalcompassmemes enjoyable since they’re archetypical representation of a ideology and quite funny when the convergence happens in real life, because the strawman versions often exist in politics. They broadly cover the various political clusters, and ideologies which are in zietgeist, albeit a bit oversimplified yet informative.
I think your distinction makes a lot of sense here. IIRC Kitten argued somewhere else that the dunk was self-evident—taking morality too literally leads you to strange places and unintuitive conclusions, which I don’t necessarily agree with—but I agree with you in that it was more of a semantic stopsign (what a nice term) than a proper laconic takedown of an idea (which is really hard to do).
Funnily enough, politicalcompassmemes is the literally epitome of Scott’s bingo card idea, but it hasn’t seemed to result in the full Ostrich effect “head in sand” phenomenon he was worried about. Instead, it’s sort of fragmented into an inside joke community, which was sort of my point about memes serving the purpose of communicating humor/in-jokes.