“Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left…

Snowflake has the weirdest provinance. It was used in Fight Club as a metaphor for individual uniqueness, but because the people who thought Tyler Durden was the coolest thing ever identified with his followers. When Tyler said "You are not snowflakes" they took it to be a positive statement. Snowflake got reinterpreted as a metaphor for fragility.

Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.

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n4r9 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.

> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.

> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-less-lovely-sid...

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latexr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.

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Lerc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>There must be a name for this type of character influence.

Well you can spot them with a Rorschach test, perhaps.

	▲	randallsquared 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		We could all stand to think about this a little Moore.

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voganmother42 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The torment nexus, not the torrent nexus(torrent nexus sounds kinda fun)

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nwatson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The term is: antihero

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Lerc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That's the term for the character. I think they were seeking a term to describe those who perceive antiheroes to be heroes.

	▲	latexr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Correct. I wouldn’t really call them anti-heroes, however, as those are still meant to be sympathetic. To put it less ambiguously, I’m looking for a term for a character which is written to be repulsive but a number of people in the real world misinterpret as a role model.

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> “Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left

Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

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oliculipolicula 5 hours ago | parent [-]

OK. The framing has shifted, though.

These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".

(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham

But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")

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wood_spirit 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(What stuff is happening to the center left in Sweden right now?)

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nyargh 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.

The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.

This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]

There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]

The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.

Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.

1. https://arbetet.se/2026/09/21/sjukforsakringen-forklarar-var...

2. https://www.thelocal.se/20261012/beer-strike-and-contract-br...

	▲	cbolton 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
	▲	wood_spirit 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now). I would say the center party is center-right.

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JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> centrism

I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.

And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.

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oliculipolicula 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure. All instances of "centrist" in the #Modern portion of that wiki could be replaced by "institutionalist".. but it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)

	▲	JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform Why? Status quo is the default in any state.

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gwd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, and it's being used ironically here. The people who pointed and laughed at those who wanted "safe spaces" and overly sensitive, are overly sensitive about people not like them getting any help. "You called us snowflakes, but you're the ones who have the fragile ego."

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slater 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

every accusation, confession, etc.