"INDY WAKE UP!" ABOUT TIKTOK AND ISRAEL.

My genius new meme template.

I have just invented the “Indy Wake Up!,” meme template. When you see this template all over the place later, just remember you heard about it here first, folks. It is based on Indiana Jones and the The Temple of Dune. In the “nightmare” sequence of the movie, Indiana Jones has been hypnotized by a voodoo cult and Short Round enslaved. But when Short Round breaks from his chains he shouts, “Indy wake up!” and ends the spell by burning him with a torch.

The premise of the meme template is Indiana Jones making an incorrect statement that is commonly believed, this could be talking points recently put out by the government or an often repeated falsehood, and then Short Round shouts back and gives him the reality check. It’s a wrong / right formula that has some similarities to the red pill / blue pill meme: you can believe what the Matrix tells you or you can take the red pill and know the truth. The Matrix meme now has a right-wing association but can be used for left-wing ideas as well.

In my top meme Short Round is awakening Indy to the truth about why the government wants to ban TikTok. There’s more to the issue than is covered in the meme, the wheels were turning to ban TikTok before it started educating young people on what is happening in Israel and Gaza, but Israel accelerated the process.

I had included the line “and economic discontent,” because TikTok videos also show how modern young people are being crushed by unchecked capitalism and inflation. This counters the “you’re wrong about inflation and we have stats to prove it,” narrative legacy news is trying to push. This is bad for Biden in the upcoming election and for neoliberalism’s defenders in the general.

This meme did very well on the /latestagecapitalism subreddit with over 3100 likes, 36 comments and 331 shares. It also got 353 likes on /Communismmemes.

Below is a TikTok meme I made when the ban was first introduced last year:

The “Wake Up Indy” meme below is along a similar vein as it involves Israel. But this is from a different angle. The legacy liberal media keeps saying if you don’t vote for Biden democracy will end under Trump’s fascism, and then they play quotes of Trump making inflammatory comments that do have a fascist flare. But we know from living through his presidency that he seldom backs up his hyperbolic rhetoric and his presidency was a shitshow, not a fascist reign.

Under Biden we are experiencing real fascism at work, we have more censorship and digital monitoring of civilians than we did under Bush’s Patriot Act, the media act as if they are state run and wage smear campaigns against people who contradict government narratives; citizens have never had less protection against corporate oppression involving monopolies of real estate, union suppression, and “greed-flation” where inflation is not connected to real market forces.  Neoconservatism, as we see in Ukraine and Israel, has never been stronger.  

Hitler’s name is synonymous with evil because he committed a genocide, now Israel, armed and provided political cover by the US, commits genocide. So making the argument that Biden is the lesser of two evils, when he is enabling the most evil thing humans can do, makes no sense. Now I wouldn’t expect Trump to have a better policy, but that won’t matter when most Gazans have starved to death by January 2025.

And finely we have my last version of the Indy meme. This is on a lighter and more local topic. Leadership in San Francisco, where I resided for many years, decided that it would be good urban planning to reduce traffic congestion and help the environment if it created a down town area that was unfriendly to drivers, with unnecessary one way streets, blocked streets, elimination of parking places and bike lanes that take up half the road. The goal here was to create a healthy population of bicyclists, clean air and light traffic.

But the San Francisco board of supervisors didn’t consider that society is now app dependent and people are lazy. Meaning, as people can’t park downtown, they will just take Uber, not a bike. A bicycle would get stolen when parked in front of a store anyway.  Many middle-class San Franciscans who need their cars for work have had to move out of the city because they cannot afford to pay 400 a month for a parking space. This results in more traffic than ever before. The bicycle lanes are wasted and here comes the greenhouse gasses.

I posted this in /bayarea and I got 0 likes and all negative comments. One wrote “Read the room here, Reddit is pro transit/anti car,” and another guy said I should move to Texas if I love traffic so much. They are intentionally not acknowledging my point that this bit of urban planning has failed and has resulted in more transportation by car than ever. But they must defend this bad policy because they feel their identities are tied to the decisions of the Blue Team.

‘Nuff said.