Smug Internet Leftists
On leftist smarm
Leftists are often smug in a way that is both irritating and counterproductive. While right-wingers, at their worst, display feats of immorality that are hard to rival, left-wingers have a way of illustrating such profound smarm that it alienates allies and makes you want to disagree with them.
Right-wing misbehavior generally takes the form of expressing extreme apathy to others’ misfortunes. For example, a right-winger might respond to PEPFAR disruptions that cause lots of innocent children to die in the following way:
Deeply repulsive stuff. With regard to sheer immorality, this is much worse than being a very annoying leftist. It’s worse to be evil than irritating. But nonetheless, smug leftists manage to be very irritating.
Here is the basic smug Twitter leftist approach: make some snarky comment about a complicated and contested political issue. Act like it’s completely obvious to anyone with a functioning brain what the right answer is, and like the people who disagree lack basic reading comprehension.
Ideally maintain a tone of such withering contempt that even being asked to explain why your critics are wrong is beneath you. It’s not 👏your 👏job👏 to👏 educate someone so infantile that they think you could possibly be wrong.
Leftist Twitch streamers take this to particularly exotic extremes. Vaush, for example, has seemingly never encountered a complex issue in his life. In his debate with Tomas Bogardus, he at one point suggested that water doesn’t fill lakes and rivers because “all you have to do is cross the Mexican border, and over there it’s aqua.” (In fact, it is “agua”!)
This was a particularly amusing instance of the general pattern of behavior. Vaush uttered this line with complete self-confidence, as if Bogardus was so silly as to overlook the obvious objection that water doesn’t fill lakes and rivers. He was wrong about the Spanish. He was deeply confused about philosophy of language (people drink water in Mexico, even if they don’t call it water). He also suggested shortly thereafter “things that are true have constructed premises that lead necessarily to an outcome, a resolution. But a definition is applied presuppositionally,” which may be the most confused sentence ever uttered in the history of the species.
An alternative smug Twitter leftist technique involves making an obvious point and acting like it settles the issue. For example, when I suggested that it doesn’t make much sense for Greta Thunberg to transition from climate activism to Gaza protesting if she thinks climate change will kill everyone, I got responses like these.
Ah yes, I am deeply confused about effects being downstream of causes. Obviously none of these responses addressed my point. But they were all suitably glib and sarcastic, allowing one to feel superior without having to address what the other side says. Often it seems that the aim is to establish that a view is low status, not that it’s wrong. Such claims might be accompanied by “yikes, not a good look.”
Other times, the comments in question involve egregious misrepresentation. For example, when Scott Aaronson complained about having many years in the past been near-suicidal due to deep terror about accidentally coming off as creepy, it was paraphrased as “MIT Professor Explains The Real Oppression Is Having To Talk To Women.” Doesn’t seem quite what he was saying! Or alternatively:
These comments are also often bizarrely violent or sexual. When I wrote an article criticizing left-wing insanity in debate, one of my critics said my article made a “number of mischaracterizations that I can only interpret as a weird sexual dance related to his clear kink for humiliation.” Very strange! Similarly:
Other times, people will act like by disagreeing with them, you’re revealing how obsessed you are with them. They’ll brag about living rent-free in your head. If you correct their errors, then it’s weird that you’re so obsessed with them, yikes, yikes, not a good look chief.
Alternatively, this game will often involve trying to prove that you have said things that one’s leftist friends would all sneer at, rather than that you said something false. For example, when criticizing effective altruism, Emile Torres often mentions that Nick Beckstead’s Ph.D thesis includes the following segment:
Torres has never bothered to explain why the logic is wrong. Instead, Torres merely notes that the conclusion that it might be better to save lives in wealthy countries all else equal sounds bad, and acts as if it’s immediately disqualified. Note additionally that Beckstead’s view is much more moderate than the views of most of the public. Most people think saving lives in their own country is better than saving lives of foreigners, even if it doesn’t have any desirable ripple effects—they simply think we have stronger duties to people in our own country.
And Beckstead thinks in the real world that if you’re giving to global health, you should give overseas, because doing so can save lives more cheaply. So Torres’s view is that the fact that Nick Beckstead expressed a non-action-guiding view much more moderate than the views of most Americans in a Ph.D thesis that most Longtermists have never read is in some way discrediting of Longtermism. Insane.
The world is a complicated place. The right answer is rarely obvious, and it’s even rarer for the answer to be so blindingly obvious that any person with a functioning brain will inevitably agree with you. All of these snide remarks paper over the complexity of the world, as if politics were a simple battle of good vs. evil, where your political opponents are demented gremlins hellbent on destruction. That’s neither accurate nor productive.
Another thing that all of these antics have in common: they only work if you’re in an echo chamber. If you’re on Bluesky, your dunks where you claim that it’s creepy that Jesse Singal is so obsessed with trans kids will be liked to the moon. If you’re having a debate with Singal, then your snarky insubstantial one-line evidence-free zingers won’t go as far.
These are good tactics for preaching to the choir, but utterly cancerous for any sort of persuasion. While maybe if you gather a critical mass of people, you’ll be able to browbeat your critics into submission, you won’t actually persuade them. For a while, the browbeating worked, but it eventually failed. Hegemony of deeply unpopular and unpersuasive views can only hold for so long. While there was a time in 2020 when the gambit was working, the dam has broken, and the water has come rushing in. The world no longer has to pretend to agree with the views of crazy internet leftists. The era of successful shaming, cancellation, and browbeating is largely over, outside of the remaining small, insular, leftist niches.
> the dam has broken, and the water has come rushing in
The *aqua* has come rushing in, if you will
I am reminded of Orwell's book "The Road to Wigan Pier" which, after spending the first half showing the conditions of the working class and advocating for socialism, turns to describing all the obnoxious personalities and behaviors among socialists that cause the working man, whose interest lies in socialism, to be repelled from the movement. Even in the 30s the left was alienating support by being smarmy, obnoxious, and unpalatable to the common man.