askchapo

"Adults in the room" is an old phrase, but I think the tide began to turn from self-congratulatory to derisive when Yanis Varoufakis made it the title of his book about the Troika condemning Greece to austerity. It's popular here because we have a unified loathing for West Wing-style liberalism that congratulates itself for making "tough choices" that inevitably and exclusively harm the working class.

A week ago I thought the Hexbear dialect was fully incomprehensible

This week I am saying "brainworms" and "treats must flow" out loud

Please help.

Bazinga is Sheldon's catchphrase in The Big Bang Theory--it's emblematic of the "I fucking love science" crowd who value dubious technological achievements over actual political solutions

Slop: don't know the history of this one, but it fits with the pig theme

Treat: also not sure about the origin, but (as someone who has listened to like two episodes of Chapo Trap House) this feels very Matt Christman, but it could also be some Twitter thing which I am blissfully unaware of

Adults in the room doing hard decisions: this isn't a Hexbear coinage, but something liberals have actually said without a hint of irony (just search the Washington Post or the New York Times and you'll surface countless articles about supposed "adults in the room" like Mattis or Tillerson). It was used a lot to describe people in Trump's administration who the media deemed worthy stewards of empire who would steer the administration in the right direction, and is also used to describe the "mature" civil Democrats in contrast to the "childish" unseemly GOP.

A bit of in-group slang is extremely normal for communities. The proliferation of ideograms here is way more interesting

I am not 100% on it but I'm pretty sure "Treat" discourse comes from Matt Christman, Slop originally started as the "Slop in my trough, my snout descends" bit from r/CTH referring to when a new podcast episode dropped (that I'm pretty sure has it's roots in being called little piggies by Will and Amber at one point), and you got plenty of answers for Bazinga/AitR.

Much of our dialect comes from the tale of brave Ulysses, whose long imprisonment in the mind palaces of the snide and thoughtless taught him to hone words of derision that could cut through the pillars of the homo economicus worldview. In time he departed for another adventure, but we still wield the words he forged us.

This is bait for ulysses simps

reads ulysses post once

Hexbear Standard English

I think a lot of these expressions are from the great @UlyssesT@hexbear.net and his protracted peoples war on on the bazingas, wine cave warriors, and treat defenders.

to a real one

pretty sure "Adults in the room doing hard decisions" was just Ulysses brute forcing similar rants a dozen times per day lol. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone else say it

Nobody decided, or kinda we all decided on aggregate, I guess. It's normal cultural development of a community. Hexbear is a bit like an island, sheltered from the most extreme currents of the interwinds but always in dialogue with them. Sometimes a new term gets carried here, and sometimes that term has more staying-power here than elsewhere, so it sticks. It might also shift in meaning, relative to more common definitions. Bazinga brain could be a hexbear original, but I'm not sure, really.

Can we just have a dictionary in one of the comms? I think it would help a lot of newcomers acclimate to definitions here, both site-generated and in the context of leftist theory. For example, 'liberalism' defined by the average US citizen is very different from the one used in the rest of the world.

Most of this lingo was imported from r/cth, Twitter, and maybe some pods. I think bazinga and bazinga-brain may be native to Hexbear, but slop certainly predates it as a perjovative for a long time. Not sure about treat discourse, but probably left-Twitter.

category A: chapo trap house & cumtown bullshit, i'm not even sure what exactly comes from these, but tons of people here are big fans even if the posting doesn't often indicate as such. i'm pretty sure "Treats" is from chapo

category B: "adults in the room" and similar is just repetition/shorthand of liberal rhetoric, done mockingly. Citations Needed's verbiage have been copped in some cases 'thought terminating cliche' but i'm sure a lot of it is organic from people reading the same bullshit in 100 newspapers for years

category C: Domestic Products, from the Power Posters; "Bazinga-Brain"... but don't forget stuff like "we may have to start making excuses for the terror" or commonly recalled taglines (and joking about taglines lol)

The guy who killed Kissinger did

You forgot “PMC Karens”, which I believe is a BlackMoldFutures original

bazinga comes from the "young sheldon" tv show. it's used here to refer to liberal technocrats who believe the problems of the world can be solved with sufficiently advanced algorithms, that humans are simply waiting for someone smart enough to come along to invent solutions to the problem caused by capitalism.

the treat discourse is a slowly simmering struggle session about how leftists in the imperial core should interact with the treat economy, whereby behavior is incentivized by access to treats: minor luxuries, tasty but not very nutritious food and snacks, the carrot of capitalism's carrot and stick. "slop" is hog feed and we're the hogs, demanding content, entertainment, and treats.

"adults in the room making/doing hard decisions" is just making fun of neoliberals and centrists who see themselves as mature, responsible, logical, rational, capable of setting aside their emotional reactions to atrocities around the world in order to wisely compromise with the people committing those atrocities and benefit materially from them.

there are a few users who use these terms more, but i don't think any one person was responsible for coining them.

I coined them. I'm witty, that's what.

That's just language in general, people together create lects like dialects, sociolects, etc. Just like how a group of friends have inside jokes only they know. Or memes emerge online to serve as symbols and references for communication.

Hexbear is an independent online social space, so of course we'd eventually see our own slang and lects! We even have our own lore, but I don't get it too much either tbh

We've been around each other for ar least 3 years now.

I don't think anyone really makes a decision about stuff like this, the position of everything (atomic, subatomic whatever) is predetermined by cause and effect (including the stuff in your brain that causes "thoughts" and the hallucination of free will)

What are you gonna use bourgeois english?
I'm saying this unironically. There are so many ways in which capitalism and colonialism oppress, and concepts which are subject to chilling effects when we try to communicate them, that we really do have to make up our own words for them as we come to understand them. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory when you're confronted with them for the first time if you've been thinking about these things for a while. Now that you've condensed these concepts into snappy words or phrases you can do a higher level of analysis on them, and communicate your ideas more easily. The humor attached to them even helps you remember them more easily.

The girl reading this