I mean, I think that’s pretty much how /r/The_Donald started. It started out as satire but over time collected a following of people who weren’t quite in on the joke...
They kept posting these really pathetic "gave my last $20 to the Bernie campaign, don't know how I will feed me and my dog this week, still worth it!" celebrations of poverty and faith, and The Donald parodied the shit out of them. It was hilarious but then a week later The Donald was 50 times more prominent as the Bernie subreddit.
I suspect that most subscribers were like me, at first. At some point, the tone of the sub reddit took a dramatic shift. It's hard to explain -- it became so serious and so vitriolic. It went from being a joke, to being "wait... we are joking, right?" to being "oh my god these people are serious," within the span of about 1 month.
I would say, for me, that's when the sort of surrealism of our current politics started.
I think this type of joking around is dangerous for that reason, and it really soured me on the concept of 4ch style "ironic" joking. You're flicking the lighter over and over again, and at some point you might find yourself near gasoline.
DarkShikari, Hacker News, 2009, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498
Regardless, it's a good quip about the consequences of normalizing the devaluing of intellect.
But I think it comes back to the old adage that “there’s a time and place” for it.
I think that forming a community around roleplaying extreme satire has proven problematic and is not the way to carry it out.
The radicalisation on 4chan, was produced by all those external echo chamber snuffing out that little speakers corner for weirdos. Reddit, Tumblr, all that comercial ilk, you serve so gladly, which aggregates people by doing the equivalent of a medieval mob ralley - created this nightmare.
Say it with me: "Its very cost effective, to be a radical in a attention economy. I brought this on society to earn a livelihood, and now want to shift the blame towards those places where the polarization i created, becomes most visible, be it a tavern or a brothel. Im a monster and should be hunted down by the monsters i created if there was justice to this world."
Of course if you would ever admit that, all those "nice, constructive people, wanting only the best for people" while blindly shoving there ideology forwards, no matter what the consequences, would become all edgy.
Yeah, with their things like, "Women get bodily autonomy because it's part of the full spectrum of human rights" and "you can't just fire gay people or say they can't be married because you think it's gross" or "maybe inviting someone who openly says women can't contribute to science because they're better off breeding is a bad look for a science conference."
Boy do they sound unreasonable and controlling. They just want your money, clearly.
> The radicalisation on 4chan, was produced by all those external echo chamber snuffing out that little speakers corner for weirdos. Reddit, Tumblr, all that comercial ilk, you serve so gladly, which aggregates people by doing the equivalent of a medieval mob ralley - created this nightmare.
"Mean liberals and corporations radicalized me," is not really that compelling an argument. If we looked at your youtube play history I suspect we'd find a plurality (if not an outright majority) of your time spent is watching lie-merchant radicalizers like Crowder or "skeptical" material.
> Of course if you would ever admit that, all those "nice, constructive people, wanting only the best for people" while blindly shoving there ideology forwards, no matter what the consequences, would become all edgy.
It's not "blindly", the attempt to de-normalize this behavior by shunning it is pretty tactical. It's the least violent way to proceed. It involves saying, "You're not welcome in my house, you're not welcome at my events, and I'm going to do my best within the bounds of the law to see to it you don't profit from my work."
The fact that this is interpreted as folks losing their careers or having their lives ruined is pretty interesting to me. The shoe is on the other foot now, and suddenly people realize that maybe words and ideas can hurt. Suddenly "free speech" (which is a code for, "forbidding social consequences for bad or unfriendly behavior") is very important to folks, many of which not so long ago said that Occupy was unlawfully assembling on public spaces and weren't worth listening to.
And this post has a positive score as well. So evidently some folks like the style of writing and find it valuable.
Also, it's telling you didn't (and haven't) said this to other non-left points of view on this thread. Nor does a cursory glance of your search history reveal other such interventions.
So perhaps I will take your affected objectivity with a grain of salt until we have interacted more and I can take your positive intentions at face value.
one state moved the age, so all their young partiers moved their binging and drunk driving to neighboring states, who then had to move their drinking ages, until there was national agreement.
if 4chan didn't want all the kicked out weirdos, it should have kicked them out too
His show spanned the afternoon and evening hours, so on some days he would announce a preposterous thing and say to the listeners they should call in with comments in support of this thing and goad those who were not in on the joke to take a stand against this preposterous notion that nobody was ever really for.
Those people who got out work and turned on the radio sure we're in for a surprise.
Tampa Bay market ca. 2001. Check WFLA archives if you're curious about this "shtick".
For the record I have witnessed people flying this flag in my city. There is no denying they were hate filled racists.
The debate could only occur as something like "at what point does this become serious". For example does it take newspapers to say so, or your social circle , or is it independent of external influence. Could all jokes be offensive in that way?
Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?
Regardless, you might not be a hate filled racist. But, a whole lot of hate filled racists use the Kekistan flag as a thinly-veiled symbol of hate filled racism. So, be aware: that's the message conveyed to the world at large when it is shown. Not Egyptian mythology.
I'm disappointed as hell that a secularist wanker like Carl Benjamin successfully co-opted the movement for crass political purposes. But I'm also annoyed that if I tried to re-appropriate the same symbology for the optimistic, metaphysics-exploring group of pranksters that meme'd it to relevance, I'd get called a bigot for associating with the wrong people.
Any group is defined by its lowest common denominators, which is why I and so many people I respect try to seek out smaller subcultures. The trouble I'm seeing is that when a large group like the nationalist right wants to co-opt a smaller but more effective movement, the larger group's rivals refuse to acknowledge any distinction between the different subcomponents, even if those subcomponents disagree on everything that's objectionable about the larger group to begin with. It's bad for the interesting subcultures and it's bad tactics for the larger ones to unite rather than divide their opposition.
Now I'd best go take my own advice and send happy thoughts to those members of the globalist left who like to garden.
Now it's fascinating to see the alt-right and fascist-lite communities, fundametally authority-based philosophies, try to co-opt ideas like chaos and "meme magick".
On one hand, it seems what started as a joke/critique of fascist ideology steeped i heavy irony, has moved on while being picked up unironically. On the other hand, it's getting ever harder to tell the difference between genuine beliefs and those parodying them, once obvious satire has gotten boring, and the only way to get a rise is to make a more convincing charicature of the target.
This has gotten completely insane.
If anyone has followed the Tesla/TESLAQ saga, at one point people on Twitter were decorating their avatars with clowns, mocking Elon. Well it turns out, according to the crazy left, that clowns are symbols for Nazism. Did you know that? I didn't. Tesla fans were literally accusing Tesla doubters of being White Supremacists, because clowns.
Here's your problem. You're following immature overexcited crazies on twitter and trying to extrapolate to "the world at large".
>Well it turns out, according to the crazy left, that clowns are symbols for Nazism.
Context matters. Is the "ok hand" gesture a symbol of white supremacy? Plainly not. But when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in court to the cameras, was it then a symbol of white supremacy? Of course it was. Such nuance is lost on some people (or rather it is not lost, and they know full well what they're meaning but fall back on that lame excuse as a cowardly cover).
>Tesla fans
>Tesla doubters
What is this immature, playground-level shit?
The same arguments appear on these very forums. Of course, you're probably above it.
>Such nuance is lost on some people
Once again, the enlightened ones explaining it to us deplorables. I think the nuance is lost on you: the symbol has become an ironic joke for these people.
>What is this immature, playground-level shit?
Calling people fans and skeptics of a business is "playground-level shit"? Boy, life must be tough when you're intellectually superior to everyone around you.
I don't even know how to reply to you... You didn't address any of my points, and tried to paint my reply as claiming I'm superior to you.
>> Tesla doubters
> What is this immature, playground-level shit?
Twitter.
Note that the person doesn't even have to agree with the politics of National-Socialist Germany or anything close it.
Cause now the one attacked has the burden of proof, otherwise s/he'll forever be known as Nazi.
In a nutshell, that's it.
...Being fascinated in the Kek phenomenon is very different from going to the trouble of obtaining a physical version of the flag of Kekistan and flying it in public. Do you do this?
If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.
>Wouldn't it be preferable to ignore the extremists so they don't get the symbol, and the symbol isn't ruined?
That's not how it works. They're using the symbol anyway, so it gets ruined anyway. Ignoring the Nazis would not have had prevented them from owning the meaning of the swastika in the Western world, to use the obvious example.
This quickly becomes insane, like with the 'OK' handsign, including the decades old 'circle game', neither of which has any connection to racism other than what desperate mainstream media portrays in search of clicks.
4chan trolling never had it so easy.
Those are also all minor blips on the cultural radar no one will care about in a few months time. What matters are the symbols with any cultural weight or staying power.
Because it will have been replaced with another symbol that is now suddenly being portrayed as racist due to click-bait fueled hysteria. Enough already.
This is exactly what these people want. There are campaigns to make the pride rainbow a hate symbol, the communist flag a hate symbol and no doubt numerous others.
You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.
They? You are the one asserting other HN posters making a reasonable observation have 'fallen for it'.
What have I fallen for, exactly? What's the trick?
Some people already consider the pride rainbow and communist flags to be hate symbols. White supremacists do use coded language and shibboleths online. My comment was simply a statement of fact - the meaning of symbols can be affected by cultural and political influence and can change over time.
That some fools have tried to turn that fact into a meme, or that the media can easily be baited into a moral panic, doesn't make it any less true.
If you did understand it, you'd realize trying to stomp out or prevent what is going on is a fool's errand. You can't extinguish the idea; because on each success on your part, a metamorphosis will happen elsewhere, utilizing some other innocuous symbol.
You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.
Which is a rather ugly state of affairs, as it means society as a whole has already lost. It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.
There's a name for ascribing responsibility for one's own emotional states to other people. NEETs aren't inherently right wing, and if this were really a phenomenon involving an oppressed minority, where is the prosocial behavior aiming to evoke solidarity from other minorities? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all and the last 80 years of western history (or 160 for Confederacy LARPers) constitute an elaborate plot to make one group of people worse off is getting into delusional territory.
Undercurrents existed at one point, yet the flames were fanned by the increasing utilization of online media to increase visibility. One will absolutely not stop that.
Furthermore, the phenomena of placing blame on others for current emotional states isn't necessarily that far off. Mental/memetic contagion is a well known phenomena; it seems to be fundamental to how information transfer works.
The issue regarding contagion though, is that there is a model which currently exists with regard to thought and behavior that largely downplays the pliability of individuals and vulnerability to external influences on their reasoning. We see this philosophy in our justice system espoused time after time. X is a bad apple. X can never change. X should be removed from society. Preaching of this model weakens our most vulnerable populations. They end up never developing any sort of memetic immune system, or framework to guard against entirely rhetorical or emotional form of attack or influence.
Of course, that all assumes that there was a solid foothold gained in the first place development wise.
I personally didn't, though. I'm neither naive, nor am I a knee-jerk reactionary. But the underlying context is that idiots on the net pretending to be Nazis want Symbol A to be associated with hate, they're just doing so as a joke.
So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.
And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.
And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.
It's not 2008 anymore.
>You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.
If by "get to the root of," you mean "sympathize with and concede to the agenda of," then no. They are not marginalized, nor is their violence and hate justified.
>It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.
They haven't been pushed to the brink of violence. That narrative sprung, fully formed and fully clothed, as propaganda from the populist movements of the US and Europe, and in particular from the viral efforts around Trump's campaign, but they've always been around, and always been violent, and always been hateful.
You're sure acting like one. Albeit one who actually bothers to try to elucidate their case; which I do appreciate.
>So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.
Given. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with the dynamic aside from the fact you're still falling into the ideological trap I mentioned previously.
>And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.
>And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.
So everyone on the Chan's are psychopaths looking to shoot up mosques? Now who is starting to sound extremist?
>It's not 2008 anymore.
It most certainly isn't. In 2008, no one in their right mind would endorse outright suppressing discourse to the level people do today. I don't see that being the fault of "those crazy kids on the Chans". I see it as a result of an increasingly technologically savvy oppressive majority starting to tighten the noose around populations they consider problematic and not worth trying to rehabilitate/understand/integrate.. But hey, what do I know?
I've just been observing the phenomena in action for the last decade or so, and how whenever the Chan's are brought up by the mainstream media, it's as some sort of internet based cesspool of evil instead of as just what it is; a glorified bulletin board.
And is the letter 'x' really ruined? The swastika wasn't ruined for many Eastern cultures as its original meaning was widely known.
Also, a symbol can be ruined locally and not ruined globally. The swastika wasn't ruined for Eastern cultures, but it was definitely ruined for everyone but Nazis everywhere else. If Buddhists decided to get together to try to "reclaim" the swastika for its original peaceful intent, they would fail utterly, even though they have a perfectly rational and defensible case.
http://images.amcnetworks.com/ifccenter.com/wp-content/uploa...
It didn't work well, both because it was such an obviously forced meme and because they got so carried away that they burned a large number of sockpuppet accounts.
Tptacek's "It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who casually evoke "Kek" and then are shocked to learn people believe them to be white supremacists." made my brain spin in my skull and had me reading sewage-filled Wikipedia pages on a Saturday (of Souls, no less).
Not a bad thing at all, I've just not run into them in so long.
I don't know whether they're hiding or gone, it doesn't seem like a movement that would be big on recruiting so who knows?..
I figured someone just off-by-one'd 'lel' and thought it sounded funny. top kek
In the original Starcraft, the Korean version of "Hahaha" is "ㅋㅋㅋ". Owing to the fact that the English version of the game didn't support Korean text, the represented text of a Korean player saying "ㅋㅋㅋ" was "kekeke."
This became an early meme of sorts and caught on. Blizzard honored that in WoW by adding the kek/lol translation.
Context matters. Are you interested in the flag for those reasons? Then probably not. Are you flying it at a protest, in a faux innocent schoolboy sense of "noo, it's not a nazi flag, see, it's a kek flag, teehee'? Then probably yes.
It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who casually evoke "Kek" and then are shocked to learn people believe them to be white supremacists.
Having been away from the blatant flag waving for so long, it really jumps out at me now when I visit America occasionally. It’s not just that flags are a pride thing, it’s that they’re trying to draw attention to the pride a person has. But why should I care about their pride? Why force me to notice it?
The flag in USA appears to be used for 'brainwashing' (compliance training). "I swear allegiance to the flag" and all that, then they use the flag as the backdrop when politicians talk to you, and use it as a symbol wherever compliance without opposition is required?!
Union Flag flyers in the UK seem to be royalist or fascists; or possibly just sportsmen.
It is slightly evocative of a kind of gentle conservatism which has mild undercurrents of racism/xenophobia for some people because rural England is overwhelmingly white and slightly old fashioned. (People call this "Jam and Jerusalem")
Basically it reminds people of the village council from Hot Fuzz.
(Source: grew up in Dorset)
Completely separately to this is has a recent history (80s) where it can be seen almost like a Confederate Flag in some contexts. It was aggressively adopted by fascists and also the subject of a tabloid conspiracy where they suggested immigrants hated it so people started flying it as an anti immigrant "this is our land" type thing.
This isn't the context you saw it in, but it's impossible to completely disentangle this new meaning, everyone is aware of it.
The people of an area are mostly white and that makes them racist? Do you think black people in mostly-black areas are racist too or is it only racist to be white?
There is no way to get from my comment to your comment without bringing a mountain of your own pet grievances and preconceptions to the table.
As proper flag-based protests in the UK go, it'd be difficult to beat the bizarre sight of Cornish fishing boats and villages being covered with Canadian maple leaves back in the mid 90s when Cornish fishermen backed the Canadian side of a fishing dispute...
It used to mean (80s/90s) that you are on the right of politics and not keen on immigration.
However, because the UK does not have one Soccer team (England/Wales/Scotland/N.Ireland) If there is a major soccer tournament on the red cross is used to represent England team and support for that team - from a wider diverse proportion of the population.
It fluctuates between the two meanings, as things like Brexit ("We will rise up!" and Sport tournaments ("You are currently in England") happen.
People being unified within a nation is a very good thing. And being unified does not mean believing the same thing. There have always been extremely divisive politics in the US. You only need look at our money - the man on the $10 bill was killed by the vice president of the man on the nickel in a duel. But when people start to become mutually exclusive, or when a nation itself goes too far in one direction, or the other, it results in a sharp counter movement in the opposite direction. It's important that people ultimately view themselves as part of a whole, even if they might strongly disagree with one another. A flag is the most fundamental representation of that whole. The alternative tends to trend towards widescale conflict which rarely has a happy ending for anybody.
The Afd came in fourth in the last election (European Parliament, just about a month ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_elect...) with 11%. That's a far cry from taking over the nation, and they seem to be past their peak.
I also don't get the logic how strongly condemning the Holocaust is supposedly a reason for their success. How is your neighbours not loving the flag any justification for hating foreigners, women, and the free press?
Anyway, there are many other countries without Germany's specific history, a long tradition of jingoistic patriotism, and still they have far stronger far-right parties today, i. e. France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, the UK, Finland, Greece etc. etc.
It started with swastikas, but there are other, way more recent examples: Pepe started as a meme, "kek" started as a meme. They didn't stop there, of course, they have a bunch of failed examples: they've tried to own rainbow flags ("each race in its own space"), OK emoji ("it's okay to be white"), the term antifa (appropriated to some imaginary paramilitary group instead of an actual definition of anti-fascists), and even the fucking # (this one is especially dumb).
An OK emoji on its own doesn't mean anything. NZ shooter showing the OK sign in court does: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article14142992.ece/AL...
So, when you look at the example of someone using these signs, you need to search through their history to see the context. They know their views are unacceptable by the general public, their entire deal is to be on the brick of plausible deniability and then laugh at people who call them out. That's why "everyone's a nazi" is a meme. They want the term "nazi" gone. It's not difficult to see why, since "nazi" was always an insult to fascists. Their attempt at appropriation of the term "antifa" is them trying to do the same for the complete opposite. It's also why they tend to have more profiles: one pretty obviously fascist, and multiple profiles in which they pretend that they're someone else (women, people of color, LGBT+ etc.) while spewing fascist talking points and retaining plausible deniability.
Outright banning just the symbols goes in their favor. In their recent crackdown, YouTube decided to remove almost every video showing swastikas. Of course, you'll rarely see a fascist openly using swastikas. It's those debunking them, laughing at them, and looking at their history that had their videos removed, while they go on and on with "YouTube is leftist and no leftist content ever gets removed".
No, the "fashtag" is a great example. The trolls are trying to exploit paranoia about dogwhistles. Their goal is not to make fascists use the hashtag, but to laugh at (hypothetical) people who avoid hashtags because of internet hearsay that it might be a secret nazi symbol.
It takes two to tango - this particular kind of trolling doesn't work (and didn't work in the case of the fashtag) when we relax a little about dogwhistles. I won't let them take away my feelsbadman.jpg.
No, that's exactly when it works. They aren't doing it to laugh at reactions as an end goal, the mockery exists entirely to delegitimize attention paid to racist/fascist dogwhistles, whose whole purpose is to get paid attention to by the target audience but ignored by the wider audience, which doesn't work when the wider audience is sensitized to and vigilant against them.
I think this is the same mechanism as in the euphemism treadmill[1], where it's not clear if it's better to avoid a word or to double down on it (but in a proud/positive way). There doesn't seem to be a consensus about how to deal with the euphemism treadmill either.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
This guy initially tried to play dumb and play it off as maybe-Buddhist but didn't scrub his social media of holocaust memes.
I didn’t interpret it as a claim that all persons who have liked that flag are “hate filled racists”.
You are now aware that this is a copy of a nazi flag. If you decide to raise this flag today, I would have to say yes.
If I told you now there is a secret hand signal white supremacists are using then tomorrow you begin using it, then I would safely be able to assume the same.
> had no idea it was a palette swapped version of a nazi flag
It is not very difficult to see. If your love of this flag is "piss people off" then maybe you are willingly blind.
Genuine question.
And you know this how, exactly?
To the left, everyone with a different opinion is a racist or Nazi. It's losing all meaning.
I met them in person and spoke to them.
#thathappen
They did in fact claim the flag was a joke and that they were flying it out of "irony" and to "piss off liberals". They didn't overtly express racists views. But the language they used and their dress leaves no doubt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97FGbbTzJZ4 (subtitles, Interview from 3:54 onword)
Just assuming everyone with a Kekistanflag is a Nazi is making it to easy on yourself. Sure seeing something as black and white is easy, but if you work under an assumption that isnt correct your aimed result will also naturally be different then expected.
edit: And the reaction is telling. Not trying to understand your enemy is one of the stupid things anyone can do and a core reason why our society goes to shit hard. You assume what they want and they assume what you want. You can act as if they are all Nazis and guess what, after a while they will act that way. I doubt you could have made the far right a better present then the behavior of the past years.
OP described traits they carried and presented to the world, nothing more.
In my case, I wouldn’t consider that kind of person my enemy. I pity them, though. I think it’s sad, and it the traits come out of pain and a life not examined with honesty.
The alt right sells victimhood as a reason to be part of their in group. It’s constantly pushed that white males are under attack. They aren’t.
By now the list of things that can lead to expulsion shaming and isolation grew. And dont get me wrong, I dont think its necessary to discuss about the approach being justified or not. But If you are trying to exclude and shame large parts of the population, the effectiveness of that tactic decreases rapidly. What it does is it creates an ingroup effect among the people at risk of public shaming and it normalizes formerly untouchable topics. It reduced the effectiveness of the tactic massively. You can see it in Trumpvoters and recently the appointment of Kavanaugh as a supreme court judge. Wanna gues for how many being called a bigot, racist, sexist or a Nazi is nothing but a badge of honor? A common phrase is "If xyz means I am a racist, then maybe I am. They called yzx the same." We have large parts of society for which political corectness or social justice are derogatory terms. We have, not just in the US but also in Europe, a rapid rise of far right groups who utilize the approach of isolation and shaming to create ingroup effects. In Europe its manly bound to the refugee crisis a few years ago. Where the far right succeeded in mobilizing around "What you are no longer allowed to say". And what you can witness is people getting suckered in with critique on the lacking organization to deal with the refugee influx and once they are in they easily fall back to the groups far right rhetoric on other issues. Its especially obvious if you look at interviews with people in Pegida rallies in Germany. They answer with their opinion on broad questions why they are here and fall back to the groups rhetoric on topics they havent thought about yet. And once they articulated that stance in front of a camera or towards their friends and family most people feel rightfully committed.
Using the tactic of expulsion and shaming against large parts of society is incredibly dangerous. In Germany we are speaking about 15 to 20% voters for a new far right group, who will likely become the strongest party in many east German states. And I am sorry to remind you, but in the US the group is currently the majority party placing the president. To reiterate on the point, you cant exclude the majority in a country. What you are doing is normalizing racism, sexism and being a straight up Nazis.
The expulsion and shaming tactic was an absolute last resort against people where trying to argue with them was seen as an pointless endeavor. You dont talk to to Nazis, you show up in force on their every last rally and get them fired from their jobs. The oldschool Antifa approach. And its a tactic you have to be very careful in applying. Leaving aside aside a critique on this deeply authoritarian approach, what you are doing is giving up hope to convince these people, you are trying to rear/educate/train them instead by negative feedback. If that is your tactic, you better be sure that you are powerful enough to actually do that. Which isnt the case currently by a large margin. It might work in individual sectors but not with society as a whole. Trying to exclude and shame large parts of society is pushing for a power struggle with the confidence that you are powerful enough to come up on top. Thats simply not the case, quite the contrary. (And the far right is aware of that, simply take a look at the documentary above and Jordan Petersons comment on Identity politics https://youtu.be/97FGbbTzJZ4?t=1593 or more precisely 26:48)The tactic is not just unproductive, its actively counterproductive. You are not just creating a strong coherent group with exactly the attributes you wanted to get rid of, you are also alienating quite a few of potential allies by utilizing this authoritarian and anti free speech approach. Its the whole problem of the urban guerilla again. Focusing on the justification for a tactic and ignoring its real world effect. You simply dont get points for being in the right.
>The alt right sells victimhood as a reason to be part of their in group. It’s constantly pushed that white males are under attack. They aren’t.
Which doesnt matter if they can convince their voterbase that its happening. And a broad approach of exclusion and shaming works to convince these people that exactly this is happening.
And you shouldnt kid yourself, while large parts of "the left" is retreating more and more into echo chambers forgetting how to actually convince people instead of forcing adherence, the far right is out there doing exactly that. You just have to look towards groups like the Identitarian movement who are creating a vast array of easy to access material and discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Hoping to solve that by banning hatespeech is insane.
But that third attitude isn't something distinct from original fascism. One might say the ideas of fascists from the start involved something like "use your illusions".
This is sometimes called a dog whistle. The pitch is too high for humans to hear, but the intended targets do pick up on it.
At the same time, it seems feasible as a concept and quite useful.
Of course, only the enlightened few can pick up on it and explain it to the rest of us goons.
That is the beauty of free speech. The humorous and playful gives cover to the toxic and harmful, which in turn gives cover to undesired truths and the champions of the suppressed.
A pair of jeans that are not faded, and are clean and crisp, have not been lived in. It doesn’t mean that a faded and torn pare of jeans aren’t just a facade. But a community that lacks the undesirable is necessarily one that lacks the freedom to be undesirable. That would be far worse.
There is absolutely nothing beautiful about it and there is negative utility in allowing it to proliferate. It actively causes resource usage and damage that is unnecessary and totally avoidable.
Two ways :
1) Staggeringly rare real-world events are reported frequently -- so a good number of them, by virtue of their rarity in real life, must be false. There are daily threats of wide-scale violence, but only a very small percentage of these threats turn into a real event.
2) The impossible is often reported. These comments can be thrown away at face value by most people -- besides maybe the most dedicated 'researchers' (Alien abduction, magic , general occultism woo).
Now, if you're asking 'How do you know which threats are false?', that's a much more difficult question, and i'd be surprised if there was a generalizable 'answer', aside from full-on mind-reading.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...
For example, there’s occasional moral panics about white supremacist dog-whistles, like Pepe the frog or the hand gesture. Of course, it’s also the hand gesture for a three point shot in basketball, so you have all kinds of sarcastic “Steph Curry is a white supremacist” memes about it. (Dog whistles in general are, 80% of the time, a moral panic anyway.)
I don’t know if this is how that particular gesture got that association, but trolls (who are possibly white supremacists) will sometimes deliberately invent absurdly innocuous dog whistles, like the phrase “it’s OK to be white”, just to provoke the moral panic from the other side and to force them into absurd rhetorical positions. The metagame being that, maybe they actually are white supremacist dog whistles, depending on how ironically the coiners of them adhere to white supremacism.
There’s a similar reaction in some left-wing circles, eg the “misandrist” sphere of Tumblr, which seems partly comprised of feminists who ironically claim the term “misandry” because they are accused of it by their opponents and also partly composed of feminists who unironically hate men.
It’s not just political either. I kind of suspect a lot of the conspiracy or flat earth stuff is just disingenuous trolling or LARPing. I mean, some people are kooks, but other people just pretend to be for fun.
You know, when a kid walks into the house holding a dog turd the details of where they found it or what sort of dog left it there are not very compelling.
For example, SPLC seems to entertain the claim that the association of the “ok” gesture with white nationalism originated as a 4chan hoax to “trigger the libs” (eg not as a genuine white nationalist hand gesture but merely as tomfoolery intended to provoke a moral panic), but may have later been appropriated by some white nationalists. (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white...)
I hope you’re not implying
You’re also missing the larger point
You’re certainly not engaging in anything
It's just the OK hand gesture [made with the left hand?].
Or, perhaps all scuba divers are racist.
The 'It's OK to be white' thing works because they're taking one side of an issue and devolving it into something so basic that it's impossible to refute. By associating something irrefutable like "It's OK to be white" (which only the most blatant racist would argue against) with all their other more controversial positions, they're basically setting a trap that you have to carefully maneuver around instead of being able to just bluntly refute their point with logic or facts.
The misandry thing seems like something else. Like other extreme positions, it's existence benefits the opposition more than the more mild supporters on their side. It's just a low hanging fruit that the opposition can use to snipe more mild supporters by association. Similar to how the left can take potshots at actual Nazis to discredit conservative positions.
I think “it’s OK to be white” is literally just a slogan used to troll people. Developed and reasoned arguments are not the point. The point is the layered irony. Layer 1 is the literal meaning. Layer 2 is this particular slogan being proposed by a white nationalist as a white nationalist slogan. Layer 3 is the notion that the white nationalist himself is merely a prankster inventing the Layer 2 narrative from whole cloth. Hence, you have a perfect troll because people will argue about this slogan and talk past each other because they are on different layers of irony.
Misandry Tumblr has different layers:
1. The author of this Tumblr unironically hates men.
2. Anti-feminists unfairly and hyperbolically accuse feminists of misandry. The author of this feminist Tumblr reclaims the term ironically. (Parallel: “deplorables”.)
So you get some people saying “hey, look, all of those feminists really do hate men!” because they missed the ironic aspect of misandry, while the ironic misandrists reply “none of us actually hate men”, denying and covering for the unironic misandrists. But maybe some of the unironic misandrists are still being ironic, but just excessively committed to never acknowledging the irony in a weird kayfabe sense. That way, they can basically gatekeep the conversation to keep it between people who are hip to the irony. But then the truly unironic misandrists can still slither into the community under assumption of good faith, and end up talking past their own purported allies.
In a sense, I think the “white nationalist dog whistle” troll is another gatekeeping mechanism. If you’re on the level of irony where you’re not a white nationalist but you like tweaking moral panics over white nationalism, you get to have a chuckle at the panicking progressives who take it unironically. If you are a white nationalist, you are almost as much a butt of the joke as the panicking progressive, but you have a similar smokescreen as the unironic Tumblr misandrist. Unless the original joker really was a white nationalist at which point he gets to chuckle at the naive useful idiots who are giving him this free smokescreen.
This is called a "motte and bailey" argument. It's a favorite of bad-faith debaters.
I have yet to see any platform that falls under the scope of "the far right" that hasn't been heavily criticized by every which way, no matter how ironic. What are you referring to exactly?
That's what you want. It's amazingly easy to govern when the radicals self-identify in public.
Just to clarify, 8chan is the one with the /leftypol/ board.
8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here.
Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.
It is hardly fair to say that the left doesn't make up a massive portion of the site.
Its existence tells you a lot about the consistency of the free speech policy, but it tells you little about the political leanings of other boards, particularly /pol/.
I think /leftypol/ is important but I don't think it's very relevant to a claim that /pol/ is populated by the extreme right, which seems to be the context here.
That also applies to /pol/ though.
They're not treated the same, though. Using /pol/ is considered acceptable, but posting as if you're on /pol/ often isn't. Using /leftypol/ at all isn't considered acceptable.
To say that the place is nothing but right-wingers and that any other boards that aren't are anomalies, is unfair. Further it shows you have never actually looked at the site beyond the front page, if that. The overarching philosophy of the site is one of free speech, which attracts people who are interested in odd things from all corners, not just the right.
To the extent the site has an overarching culture, it's right-wing. There are boards outside the overarching culture (I said there were only "few" earlier, but I don't know if that's right).
/tech/ is the largest technology board. It's part of the overarching culture. It has a clear political leaning, even if that leaning is not part of the rules or the stated topic or the moderation policy. If you look at /tech/'s catalog, there's threads like "Stallman Going SJW on us?" and "Apple - FULL ON JEWMODE".
/christian/ has a /christian/pol sticky that encourages people from all parts of the political spectrum to post but seems to have primarily right-wing posters in practice.
/lit/'s second non-sticky is "Race Realism/biological determinism Books".
Not everyone on those boards is right-wing, of course. Being right-wing isn't their defining characteristic. And there are other boards that don't have this.
But boards with a politically neutral moderation policy that get cross-posters from other boards are likely to end up with a culture that's right-wing.
/leftypol/ is explicitly left-wing, so even its cross-posters are left-wing. Some smaller boards mainly get users through other means, so they're decoupled from the site culture. Non-English boards might be insulated as well, but I've never used any of the large ones so I can't tell.
Large boards tend to lean right though.
which is puzzling when considered that 99% of all stand-up comedians are firmly on the left.
So what happened to irony on the left? I think we have outlawed it in Internet forums in exchange for political correctness?
> I don’t know what to do about this, but this is the world we’re living in.
Technology persists where art dies.
But I’ve found that quite often, on the internet, when you think you’ve found a forum of hilarious ironic commenters... a lot of them are very sincere.
Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight.
I don’t know what to do about this, but this is the world we’re living in.