I think that technology has brought us some truly marvelous things. But they also enable us to avoid casual social contact while enabling us to withdraw from meaningful social contact.
Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion. But because of other communities' moderation, they likely become one of the bastions of the racists. So even if their ownership never had any interest in hate speech, their platform becomes a de facto mechanism for its spread.
As much problems as anonymity causes I sure don't think that some new Real World Identity driven Internet would be a good idea. But sites with next to no content moderation seem like a bad idea. Not that I can imagine a resolution, really.
~~
I imagine how frustrated I might feel if I didn't have some kind of daily work or creative task to keep me busy and fill me with purpose. If I felt depressed I might be willing to blame it on someone. If everything I read said that in fact there is someone to blame, I wonder: would I be able to see through that? Would I stand up and say 'no, that's wrong: those people aren't the source of our problems'? I like to think I would. But I've definitely caught myself (long after the fact) buying into BS groupthink/hivemind conspiracy hogwash.
“In a Sybil attack, the attacker subverts the reputation system of a peer-to-peer network by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence.”
> I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion
More or less. More so than 4chan.
8chan is like Reddit (and unlike 4chan) in that it allows anyone to set up a subcommunity that they can moderate however they like. Only illegal content (and nude/sexual images of children, and certain spam) isn't allowed at all. Individual boards may be moderated very tightly.
There are all kinds of boards there, even for communists, and for Muslims. They're scrupulous about allowing even things they don't like.
/pol/ is the board where these manifestos keep getting posted. The shootings generally get celebrated there. It's actively moderated, as visible in the moderation log: https://8ch.net/log.php?board=pol
But /pol/ is not just any board. I stopped paying attention after the Christchurch shooting, but at that time, it was the only large global board, a board owned by the administration. Global site volunteers, who are normally only authorized to handle illegal content (aside from roles they have on other boards) were allowed to moderate /pol/. The site owners set the rules and policies for the board and appointed its ordinary (non-global) moderators.
/pol/ became a global board after its previous owner mismanaged it and the administration seized it. The community was already like that, and if the administration tried to change things locally people would just flock to a different more permissive board. But I think 8chan is a little more than just a platform in this case.
> They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.
Reddit used to be like that as far as I know, and though there's plenty to criticize I don't think Reddit was intentionally set up to become a breeding ground for violent racists.
8chan's policy about spam is very different from how a policy against racism would look. What it in practice means is that if someone posts the same suspicious link on a hundred boards they may be hit by a global ban instead of leaving the mess for individual board owners to clean up. Even very principled proponents of free speech usually don't mind that.
There's no guarantee that spam will be cleaned up, it just doesn't get the protection of it being up to the board owner. For a long time 8chan didn't even have a functional anti-spam system. It's a practical matter foremost.
A rule against racism would be much more thornier. It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work and it would be more arbitrary. And it would go against the sensibilities of the original founder, who's a libertarian (I don't know if he's racist).
8chan wasn't created to be a breeding ground for violent racists. It was created to be a make-your-own-forum website with minimalist rules. For the first year, before gamergate drove more people to it, it was just that. In July 2014 an innocent roleplaying board was the most popular: http://web.archive.org/web/20140701141242/https://8chan.co/b...
> It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work
Obviously it would be more work than doing nothing. That's not an argument to do nothing though. There are plenty of topics moderated away (interpreting the age of teens/children in images for example) and yet those get handled with all of the subjectivity just fine. So that's also unrelated to why.
Noone said that 8chan was intentinoally created to be what it's become - what was said was that it has been allowed to become what it has become with no intervention.
And to your final point, even it's original creator says it should be shut down given what it's turned into. If the principled founder says "this has gone too far", maybe it's time to take it seriously.
It's still more work, because some people will get upset that they're not allowed to promote genocide. It still has edge cases (I've seen some hairy examples from Facebook moderation guidelines). It's also still more of a free speech issue than deleting spam is.
That doesn't mean such a ban would be bad, but it is complicated, and someone who doesn't like genocide might still not want it.
Moderating spam is easier. Apparently it's hard to tell between "we should kill these people" and "these people are being killed" due to a language barrier sometimes, and it's hard to automate.
But wow. You all think "let's kill these people" somehow has more value than "buy my shit/here is a malware link", nice. downboat away
The closest such edge cases I found were mixups between enticement and reportage about Syrian war crimes and Rohingya genocide. What edge cases have you seen?
I don't mean banning racism, but enticement for violent action.
Guess what? The world is filled with imperfection.
The line of reasoning "Since I can't come up with a perfect solution, so instead I'll do nothing at all", is a terrible approach.
The courts get things wrong, credit card fraud detection gets things wrong, anti-virus gets things wrong. Tons of things aren't perfect - that's the real world.
The answer of "well I can't come up with a perfect version of those so let's do nothing" is preposterous.
There is also the practical side to be considered. It is very easy to police spam with bots, and racism basically requires human intervention to recognize and moderate.
Some /pol/ members have committed acts of mass murder.
Al Queda is also a loose organization without explicit membership, etc.
I don’t see any difference between the two organizational structures from an anti terror perspective (though Al Queda might sometimes organize humanitarian actions — Many Islamic terrorist groups have a recruiting arm that does this sort of thing, and I can’t keep them straight anymore)
Some U.S. citizens have committed acts of mass murder.
Al Queda is also a loose organization without explicit membership, etc.
I don’t see any difference between the two organizational structures from an anti terror perspective (though Al Queda might sometimes organize humanitarian actions — Many Islamic terrorist groups have a recruiting arm that does this sort of thing, and I can’t keep them straight anymore)
...do you see why your view is absurd? I can paint almost any group with that brush.
Control of territory. Al Queda and/or their associates were effectively a government, while /pol/ can only wish for that sort of power.
(Related to that is the matter of geographic distribution. One of these guys could be your next door neighbor, and the US Military is not allowed to drop bombs in American neighborhoods. That's in the Constitution.)
And as a result, all of the undesirables tend to cluster there. You also see something similar with the tenderloin & soma in SF, the official / unofficial homeless containment zone.
Interesting. Didn’t know Google censored like that. I guess it was a bit naive of me. Any list of known sites censored by Google? I’d be interested in visiting them...
> 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, created the site in response to what he sees as the ongoing and vast loss of free speech on the Internet. On 8chan, “anyone can say what they want and mean,” Brennan told the Daily Dot.
> Brennan now calls 8chan a “free-speech-friendly 4chan alternative.”
> He called 4chan “authoritarian” and accused it of turning into a soulless for-profit venture.
For every attempt at censorship there will be those that bristle at authoritarianism and react. Then there will be those that devolve into accusing free speech supporters as supporters of specific disagreeable speech.
This keeps getting repeated but it's not exactly true, 8chan was started because Fredrick Brennan had a shroom trip where he saw an Ouroboros and came up with the idea to make a 4chan where you could make your own board. People then ended up migrating over during GamerGate because Moot was shutting down discussion of it.
Not only is there no connection between pro-gamergate and threats, it's literally the other way round. And Charlottesville has absolutely nothing to do with this whatsoever
The first item is an opinion piece from the very credible Xennial-in-Chief writing for brokeassstuart.com with no relevant facts.
The second is about one person who is literally the only connection IdentifyEvropa found between the two groups. And what was that connection? He tweeted a few tweets about it.
Never hung around /v/ during those years, but my guess is it there was no censorship, it was just paranoia as usual. If they really cared so much about it, they could post on /b/.
Not only that, the catalyst was the most innocuous GamerGate take of the entire fiasco, which was TotalBiscuit's twitlonger about it, where he categorically condemned harassment, and rather used all the hubbub to talk about actual issues in gaming journalism. Nuking that entire thread might've been one of the biggest blunder in reddit history, alongside the Boston bomber fiasco.
My friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums.
But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younger friends where I see the early signs of hate growing. My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up, making them socially illfit, making them outcasts and making them blame everything on immigrants and so on when they can't find a girlfriend or friends.
I think this is mistaking the symptom for the cause. I'll admit this is largely my ideology, but large civic disengagement along with dire economic issues are the reasons for festering chan culture, not the other way around. It makes people ripe for accepting narratives that blame immigrants, women, muslims, etc.
There's a feedback loop, regardless of whether we find the communities virtuous or not. It's not difficult to see how, for instance, the boardgamegeek forums helped turn a very niche strategy hobby into something that has a nice sized shelf at Target, with a market over a hundred times larger than 20 years ago. You still needed people that could enjoy such social pastimes, and different societal changes will have an effect of how many people are even interested in such things, but the meeting ground sure makes a difference, as it reinforces the interest, and makes it easier for people to dive deeper on it. It just happens to be something that we consider harmless, or even positive.
o while there sure are more desperate people that have antisocial tendencies, just for economic issues, whether they consider those tendencies to be socially acceptable, and whether delving more on them is something that they will do, depends on finding social validation, and nowadays, we do that on the internet pretty easily. This kind of thing could still happen in the past: History tells us so, but the level of disengagement, and depth of the economic reasons required to trigger the radicalization of people, in one form or another, is far lower than before. It doesn't matter if it's people finding support and advice on how to kill themselves, bulimics seeing that their behavior is normal, or just a teenager that finds other people that likes music from the 50s, or goes very deep into pinball. Similar shapes, except some have deadly consequences.
It's easy to blame "economic issues" for all sorts of social problems, but I doubt that has much to do with this one. The 4channer-types I've known were mainly from rather well-off families and with tons of means and opportunity. Perhaps even so much that it'd be easier to correlate the other way.
It’s not about the narrative I don’t think - it’s about people trying to find communities that accept people as they are, and then what starts out as a joke starts to go too far. The commonality between every right wing mass shooter is that there was an online community - I dont think anyone goes straight to a hate community, they go to the first place they feel like they themselves aren’t treated awfully, and then latch onto whatever the culture is there. So it’s not so much the blaming their lives on others, as it is doing a win for their “team”.
I think fundamentally it’s due to the ostracization and lack of any real social support for outcasts in our open society that creates the monsters. We offer nothing and nowhere to go for those who don’t get along, so they end up in the back corners of the internet at the very bottom of the social barrel with nothing to do but fuck with the society that spurned them (or they themselves spurned).
I don't know about father figure specifically, but the dialogue you get from many on xChan sites really just makes me just want to talk to them. For every n playing it up, there must be a few who genuinely have these hateful views.
I've never been that far down the rabbit hole but I can imagine a lack of any human contact playing a role from my experience.
I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees.
But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.
Have you read those manifestos or about shooters themselves? Cause lack of opportunities ain't the issue in specific cases I read about.
Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).
I think it's essentially draws back to the incel/hikkomori phenomenon. You never see young men in relationships doing these kinds of things...whether it's a white right wing mass shooter or an Islamic suicide bombing. People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.
>People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.
It's both. A combination of hopelessness for their future and an ideology that can be seized upon to fill that same void.
50 virgins in the afterlife is the simplest example of this. Whom might such a future appeal to? Not so much the successful family man, I think. But it's not the only ideology that fits the bill. If you can promise any kind of wider purpose to someone's life (e.g. save your race!) that'll inherently appeal to a portion of the people that feel their life lacks meaning. If that group gets bigger AND an ideology gets increasing mind-share, you get the phenomenon we're now experiencing.
If you read about shooters, there are good reasons why girls don't date them. Mostly them being impossible to even speak with for anyone. Or maybe, girls are less likely to date increasingly violent dude. Or dude who refuses to speak to them.
And it has nothing to do with dude "having no prospects". That people in this state then fit greatly into ideological bubble that feeds their delusions is something we can criticize ideological bubble for.
I'm not blaming the incel community. I'm actually essentially taking their side. Our society doesn't help men in that situation very well, and treats them exceptionally poorly.
And sure, counter-examples exist, though that particular one isn't really in the same space as this. Certainly people kill each other, and sometimes crazy people kill random strangers. But that was not a mass killing in the sense that this El Paso situation was, or that 9/11 was.
What does that mean? A lot of people are in therapy and almost everyone could benefit from therapy. Was it some really serious mental illness? Or merely mental health issues when compared to shooting and killing people.
I don't want to spread any more content about him by sharing links or quotes here, but I think it's important to dispel the suggestion that he had a well-functioning social or relationship life.
Media interviews with people who knew of him all indicate that suggestion is false.
Anyway, that's a very poorly written rule. I can only respond to the strongest interpretation I am aware of or can imagine. People read things in different ways. If I had read it the way you apparently did, I would've responded to that.
I didn't attack or demonize. I responded civilly. If he or she had clarified, I would've been happy to accept.
There's got to be room for honest misunderstanding in civil discourse.
I never justified mass shootings or said it wasn't their fault. I was just stating that things are objectively bad for young men in America. Any kind of therapy or "support", proper raising, etc isnt addressing the issue. Have some introspection and look at your response, you attacked me right off the bat. What was so repulsive in my post? Are these men not allowed to recognize that their life sucks and its societies fault?
Well, since I still go to a lot of secret-handshake-style message boards that get a lot of crossposting from the *chan boards and have such guys, my perspective is a bit different. I will not claim you don't and are wrong, but here's my perspective from what I see daily, both personally and professionally (as I offer as much advice as I can to help these guys get out of the spiral they're in)
>...And its societies fault? [sic]
Well, that's the problem as I see it. There is a huge issue where a lot of young men do not have healthy outlets for their frustrations and were sold a dream from the 90's-2010's that just doesn't really work anymore. The traditional path of high school > college > job + family isn't the norm anymore, as it just doesn't work well in a lot of regions of the US anymore (I'm from the US, so I'll focus on the US).
But, the issue I have with the conversation that tends to happen when these message board groups pop up is that it results in a large number of posters completely removing their own agency from their lives and letting some extremely vile groups of persons tell them:
- You're worthless
- No one cares about you
- You're a low-roll of genetics, and forever a failure
- Society values everyone else above you
- Corollary to the above point it's the fault of $minority_group_poster_dislikes that you are devalued
- There's nothing you can do about it
The list goes on. When I do manage to get a chance to talk to some of these guys, when the memes stop and the copy/pasta has run out and you just start getting their own words and responses, you start to realize that what you have is a bunch of people disappointed with themselves, lacking a positive support structure and proper guidance on things that employers, friends, potential partners, and society in general has weird quirks on.
The biggest complaint I see is that "no one will hire me because I'm an adult white male", but when we get past the rhetoric they've been spoon-fed and finally get a look at their resume or do a mock interview, the problem is clear, and not to put the blame squarely on them, but it __is that they don't know how to present themselves__. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and they curl up defensively as a result.
The message of "it's everyone else's fault but mine" is convenient, and again, this isn't to put the blame squarely on the individuals. US society has failed us in a lot of ways. I stupidly took a literature major in University, and midway through went to a few career fairs focusing on how to get a job because I was getting worried on how I would ever convince someone to hire me with a literature degree. The advisor, while quite nice and pleasant, gave me some awful advice about keyword spamming, phrases that are "guaranteed to work", and so on. Talking with actual recruiters and hiring boards later on, I found out that all of that stuff was non-sense, and instead I just needed to learn how to sell myself and show what I could do, without wasting the recruiter/interviewer's time. Now that I handle interviews as one of the main components of my work, I can see how badly in this area we set __all__ young people up for in this respect. I got lucky, because I could see the forest so to speak, figured out quickly how to talk to employers, how to talk to interviewers, and how to up-talk what I've done without coming off as arrogant. Others are not as lucky.
This is just one example, but the core problem is the same; you have a group of young people (men in this case) that just don't know how to both protect (or even have) their own self-identity while still participating in society at large. The communities online that spew this stupid rhetoric and vitriol are the Jim Jones' of the 21st century, and they're just as toxic, and now dangerous apparently.
So yeah, society has some failings, but we also have a group of people who are diving head first into a dark spiral that just reinforces the negative feelings and they give away their agency over themselves willingly to some ass who wants to sell them something, or even worse, just wants to make people miserable.
At some point these people need to realize that they are doing a lot of this to themselves needlessly, and they can learn to handle the crap hand that society gives all of us. We won't all be millionaires, but it's got to be better than being broke and unemployed posting pictures about how miserable and worthless you are while someone feeds gross propaganda into your head.
One problem here is the red queen phenomenon: if people "learn how to sell themselves", then you still have the problem that someone is going to lose. And in all probability, it'll probably be the losers that keep on losing.
What these people need is a status hierarchy that they can feel like they're not at the bottom of, a la "The Melancholy of Subculture Society". Unfortunately, extreme racist ideology makes it too easy - they are eager and able to provide that. The eroding of offline and smaller online communities make these other sorts of places the rare place that actually offers something left.
These sorts of sniping expeditions (as in the OP) at the *chans aren't going to actually fix any of these concerns, this is mainly just in-group backpatting so people can feel good that "we're not like them".
They're already on a path of hatred but in different degrees. I'd say one of them, the leader, drags them down into misery. The girl is a daddy issues 101. I felt she got dragged down the most, perhaps because I resonated with her the most as being clever.
I think part of the problem is software that encourages continuous streams of soon-to-be-discarded information. Procedural/AI content is part culprit here - every piece of information on the Internet comes with a bunch of chaff around it. For all I know, the only human input into modern news articles comes from the computers' entropy collector (/dev/random) picking up on network disturbances caused by human interference.
To quote Mao Zedond, "the streets are littered with dried faggots, ready to be lit aflame". 8chan is like that, being on 8chan turns your mind into that and the software model causes it. Who's "smoking all those faggots"? The OS developers, the browser vendors and the server hosts.
There's a reason we don't burn books!
Reversible computing is underway but we don't have to wait for that. The zero-energy aspect - awesome, but what's much more important is the "no unplanned data loss" aspect - every bit is accounted for.
Right, but this comment thread is clearly talking about a general problem, ”I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed.”, it seems rather uncharitable to ignore the context of the conversation and focus purely on the title.
We could talk about how this is largely a mental health problem. A lot of depressed young men do stupid risky stuff with no concern for their own well-being. I know a few guys who have wrapped their cars around trees. I bet most shooters were just throwing in the towel in a more hateful and dramatic way.
I see the main issue as a marketing problem for psychology. Men are focused on solving problems, and I'd bet they see psychology as a bunch of talk-therapy (like it's portrayed on TV shows and movies). Women might want to talk about their problems to find some kind of scapegoat, but men would often rather solve them. The ironic thing is, modern therapy is often quite problem-solving focused.
A related issue seems to be that a lot of these guys can't talk to women. As in, they can't ask women out. It's rarely their personalities or looks (look at domestic violence perpetrators if you want to see how awful you can be and still find a girlfriend), it's often that no-one wants to tell them how to ask women out (except on certain dark corners of the internet).
Recognising and addressing these kinds of problems means humanising them though. We can humanise Palestinian terrorists and drug dealers, but can we really humanise depressed and nerdy young men? I dunno.
It's not a mental health problem. It's a propaganda problem. These people aren't clinically insane. They are just enveloped in hatred. In particular dehumanization propaganda brainwashed them into seeing others as not even human.
If you go to places with decades long conflicts, you'll see this mentality on display everywhere. So it's not a mental health issue. All these people aren't insane. They are just really convinced that some other people are the enemy and that those other people are not even worthy of existing at all and that their life is worthless.
I can agree that it's not a problem of mental health in the sense of diagnosable conditions like major depression, schizophrenia, etc.
But it is linked to the inability of people to achieve positive life outcomes - i.e., healthy friendships and intimate relationships, satisfying and well-paying jobs, and a sense of community engagement.
This kind of deep hatred only develops after you've spent enough of your life absent of acceptance and love.
There currently isn't an obvious path to a better life for people in this situation.
this is such a bad take on the real issue which is the radicalization of these men by website like the *chans.
saying "this is largely a mental health problem" completely ignores the problem of large scale violence the far-right is committing, and only perpetuates thinking of these people as "lone wolves". they may seem like that from the outside, but seeing how much destruction they've done over the past few years makes it clear they are not. they are organized.
treating fascism and nationalism as a "mental health problem" is a scapegoat so as not to talk about the real issue.
Can you not believe all of these are various inputs linked to the outcome?
There are millions of far right activists and likely a non zero percentage of them have the same views as the shooter. Yet the shooter was the one to break out while the rest of them stood still. Radicalization requires people in poor situations to do its biddings; regular people may fall into the propaganda trap but most people would never sacrifice the comfort of their lives for an abstract political cause.
I believe it is more of an education problem than a mental health. These movements based on the absence of facts and extremely reaching claims could only survive if the people participating do not have the tools to catch the logical snafus and realize they are being tricked. That people do not realize this and continue to fall for these movements tell me that we failed to equip my generation with the skepticism that results in critical thinking skills.
I think that's going a bit far, the MSM can be kinda horrible to everyone. OTOH you'd have to be pretty fringe and controversial to explicitly stick up for young men.
Does anyone have an idea of how big 8chan and 4chan is in terms of users?
Just from the visible activity in there I can see they must be massive.
I think Slate is incorrect in describing them as expression of traditional neo-nazism. To me they are quite their own thing. Born out of Anime culture and gaming-culture becoming a playground for role playing, trash talking, trolling, real-life pranks degenerating into what it is now ...
To me they are very hard to understand. You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?
You start out by making relatively innocent jokes about jews, and notice that certain portions of the anglosphere left and right really respond to this. Not only do they tell you that you can't say that, they also shower you with threats of violence. Successful troll is successful. So you go a bit further, start moving into actual anti-semitic jokes, conspiracies. Still just for the lulz, but it gets an even better reaction. Meanwhile, your image board/irc buddies, the only people in your life who treat you like a real human being, keep egging you, some of them pointing to the reactions you're getting as proof that there's some kind of underlying truth behind the jokes. "Yeah, sure, the protocols of the elders of zion isn't real, but look at the reactions you're getting for what amounts to lazy trolling! And from people with actual power - political power, media power, financial power..."
I think you can see where it goes from here - the road to hell isn't always paved with good intentions, but when turning around means accepting that the people who hate you are right, what are you going to do?
This wasn't really my experience. "Jokes" didn't lead people to becoming racist or white supremacist. What it did do though is make people who were actually white supremacist come in and try to spread their ideologies and win people over to their side, so they could convince a fraction, probably the minority of posters, to actually believing it, and eventually their numbers grew.
The idea that people turned into white supremacists because they made a few jokes is kind of a slipery slope argument.
I agree, I was responding to chvid's specific questions about how you go from jokes to becoming a true believer. I don't think that's something that happens to every joker, troll or shitposter - not even the majority.
I don't think this describes interactions of most people. Most people interactions are completely ignored.
Also, the story relies on somebody intentionally antagonizing people for reaction, but when antagonized people are hostile back the person doubles up because buddies on irc are more friendly. No shit, he is not purposefully antagonizing them. And hostilities or not, person spreads anti-semitic conspiracies making other people believe in anti-semitic conspiracies. But like, if Jews push back, it is their own fault, they should be more passive and let it be.
What you described by the begging is not someone clueless joking. It is literally someone cool with antagonizing Jews in the first place, but not antagonizing irc boys. So like, he gets to socialize with who he is not antagonizing.
I never claimed that this describes the interactions of most, or even many people. I never claimed that Jewish people should "be more passive and let it be". And "clueless joking" are your words, not mine.
I am not endorsing the behaviors of anyone involved, simply doing my best to answer a very specific question.
Yes, these are mine expressions for what I seen in that story. Clueless joking is how the initial situation comes across in that story to me. Someone who just makes a joke but that is not because of antisemitism, but to troll.
The "should be more passive" is how I would sum up the reaction of main character to the part where there is large pushback from initial targets. Each pushback legitimize escalations.
Specific question:
> You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi.
My point here is that the answer to that is more complex. The hardcore push-back to initial joke does not happen, but there is a lot of socialization involving Jew jokes or whatever with no push-back at all - or where push back against it makes you pussy. Initial targets of joking were not random in the first place either.
There also is process by which that person becomes extremist with zero to no interaction from target of hate.
If you think this is all just playing devil's advocate and trolling there is something deeply flawed about your assumptions about how these people(alienated young white men) experience modern culture and politics.
I think it there is a lot of things going on at the same time.
Mental health issues, loneliness, social issues such as homelessness (living with your parents) and unemployment (underemployment, declining living standards), teenagers seeking borders and deliberately going for things that their parents does not approve, people seeking political change by first destroying the existing world.
But still it is hard to understand how it has gotten to the state it is today. This attack, the Christchurch attack are directly related to the chans. If Breivik was 5 years later, he would probably be there as well.
Plus other things are coming out of these boards that seem to start as practical jokes but ends up having major impact: Hyping of various cryptocurrencies, QAnon ...
I think you've stumbled upon one of the most important and difficult cultural questions of our generation. I don't claim to have a robust theory, but I'll throw out an idea:
4chan becomes a place to say edgy racist things in order to get a rise out of people because it's amusing. Most people don't actually believe the racist things they say, but now saying racist things is normalized on the site, and it becomes more attractive to people who want to say racist things because they believe them and not just to get a rise out of people. Now it becomes very hard to tell who's an edgelord and who's a skinhead. When people develop friendships within this community, they aren't able to filter out the skinheads because they are indistinguishable from the edgelords.
First, skinheads' arguments sound a lot more convincing when they're coming from your friend's mouth as genuine professions of belief. Second, no edgelord wants to admit that someone else is too edgy for them, so there's social pressure for everyone in the friend group to adopt the beliefs of the most politically extreme member.
You've got it understandably wrong as it's actually made up of grown adults but acting as if they were 13 year olds. It's an important difference if you think about it.
I wasn’t kidding, it’s truly full of 13 year olds. There are certainly grown adults, but I don’t think people don’t realize how many kids use 4chan. Back when I was a teenager, I thought I was cool as fuck for knowing about 4chan and all my e-friends were just as deluded and 14 as I was.
It's always worked that way. That's why fascistoid ideologies are so dangerous. It gives you a 'humorous' out of a dire situation where the 'humor' is dehumanizing to whoever the ideology deems 'other'.
Very well encapsulated by this Sartre quote:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
1. Most French Intellectuals at the time supported this. You'll have to disvow basically most of Critical Theory if you don't like frenchies who want to remove the age of consent.
2. More importantly, all of this is totally unrelated to the point made by the previous poster.
Could be wrong, but edgy jokes + Poe's Law (sarcasm is uncertain online) would be a strong attractant for actual * ists. They may use it all for plausible deniability cover, but I bet many don't even realize most posts are just joking and think they've discovered an underground movement of people like them. Either way, your outlook changes when you go from the only one with unpopular thoughts that you have to hide to one of an untold multitude in which you can freely express those thoughts and have them validated and reinforced.
What I don't know (and am interested to) is this: do * ists on such sites gain members mostly by other * ists finding the community or by converting trolls? Because those two pathways have very different antidotes.
I suspect it's simply that most jew-hating etc. jokes are unmotivated unless you hate jews. If you don't hate jews you find the jokes unfunny and tedious and stop browsing, and if you do you join in. The origins of 8/4chan barely matter.
There is a certain amount of humor that can be derived from being as offensive as possible, without caring about who you’re offending or why.
It doesn’t require hate, just not giving a shit about people’s feelings.
What happens in an environment like that is that people that _do_ hate start to feel welcome, and eventually drive out the people who were just in it for the lulz. Or radicalizing them as well.
This isn't true, mocking other cultures is very common and accepted in many parts of the world. In Sweden we have entire books full of jokes on how stupid Norwegians are and they have their own about stupid Swedes. And no, we don't hate each other. Anyhow, we stopped joking about Jews because it attracts racists and extremists, not because joking about groups isn't funny.
Rivalry between neighboring countries sounds like diffuse and mild version of anti Semitism. It can easily baloon into a war, in the hands of the "right" agitators.
> You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?
I think that's just a reaction of the mind to repeated exposure. There was an article on the work of Facebook contractors who are responsible for moderating content: one of the interviewees confessed that they ended up unintentionally internalizing/accepting the tin-foil conspiracies they repeatedly saw in the line of duty (it was 9/11 trutherism, IIRC).
My theory is you don't even have to say it jokingly, you just have to see it over and over again, and the mind will learn by rote - using the same underlying hardware as spaced repetition.
> My theory is you don't even have to say it jokingly, you just have to see it over and over again, and the mind will learn by rote - using the same underlying hardware as spaced repetition.
If that were true, all of HN would be Rust evangelists and/or users of pure functional programming languages.
I'd say HN's language on Rust and functional uses far less radical language - no one here call PHP developers sub-human. Nevertheless, my attitude towards both Rust and Haskell has softened over time.
4chan has been mainstream for very long now. Just check Alexa and similar sites for stats. But boards are on subdomain and and also nsfw boards are separated.
I've seen young people so much browsing 4chan in public, also discussing it. I'm talking about school or university environment.
When I was young and actually had time or will to take part if imageboards, I did it at home and secret. No one wanted to admit or mention it in public. Everything has changed now.
>When I was young and actually had time or will to take part if imageboards, I did it at home and secret. No one wanted to admit or mention it in public. Everything has changed now.
Because newfags ruined everything. 4chan used to be amazing, especially /b/ and their memes (I'm talking 2008is)
Also, the tendency of emotional events to imprint more strongly on ones memory than less emotional events.
If I'm with my friends, having a good time and joking about being a Nazi, maybe I remember that more strongly when I think "Nazi." Vs the horrific historical details I only read in a book.
Couple that with escalation of commitment, and you essentially have 8chan in a nutshell.
One feels compelled to point out that, despite 8chan being a breeding ground of hate, threads by mass shooters are typically removed in minutes and threats or manifestos containing identifying information are forwarded to the authorities, with at least one known incident being prevented by them, a planned shooting at Bethel Park High School.
Which, frankly, is the surprising part since I don't know why any sane person would set foot there. I visited once a few weeks after its founding and it had already degenerated to the point most regular users probably deserve to be on some kind of government list. Going there is just asking for trouble and I would urge anyone curious to look for screenshots instead of actually visiting the website.
You need to make a distinction between 8chan as a website and /pol/ board. Imageboards are just places for unmoderated and free discussions, the topics are up to users (especially on 8chan, where they can even create their own boards, which is not possible on 4chan). Most of the discussions there are innocent in nature, it's always the same few boards which create shit like this.
Yeah, and part of the problem is that policy allows the bad boards to stick around so they multiply. In practice the bad policy means it doesn't matter how many good boards there are because there's a board next door hosting child porn or something.
This is a way more complicated topic than it sounds. If there was a board dedicated to planning and carrying out mass shootings, or other violent acts, I'm sure it would get deleted rather quickly. But when the topic of a board is "discussion of politics", it isn't illegal in nature.
It's the same reason why Reddit administrators hasn't deleted /r/the_donald yet, despite many of it's users breaking Reddit rules. It's hard to draw the line where it's acceptable to ban a whole community with "safe topic", because majority of posters are breaking the rules / law.
You know, I don’t necessarily disagree with Cloudlare’s take on “we shouldn’t be the internet police”, but do find it kind of funny that their ideology and approach conveniently aligns with being the absolute cheapest and laziest approach to the problem.
Oh, I'm not saying find a screenshot because it encourages them less, I'm saying find a screenshot because if you go there you risk being mentally scarred, to say nothing if someone sees it in your internet history or you're dumb enough to visit it on a corporate network or work laptop/phone. That would be a well-deserved firing, if not for being a racist then for being a moron.
>Why are we sparing white-nationalist propaganda?
Racist propaganda doesn't violate anyone's rights and is hence protected speech. Imminent threats and specific calls to violence are a different matter.
> Imminent threats and specific calls to violence are a different matter.
That is what I find disturbing. That general threads and calls to violence are ok. That threatening your neighbor is ok meanwhile you do not set a date and a time for the violence.
Finally, if I say that Coca-Cola causes cancer the Coca-Cola Company can sue me for lying. But, if I lie about your race is on because it only affects men, women and children economy, well-being and dignity but no corporation bottom line is hurt.
It seems that free of expression has some intriguing limitation when is convenient for some. Don't you think that racist propaganda may be protected because historical reasons and not any logic or benevolent intention?
> Personal Reasons and Thoughts: My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn't exist. The job of my dreams will likely be automated. (...)
It's only mentioned in passing but this may be the most relevant part for HN to discuss.
Migration, automation, and the meaning of life in the new western world.
Someone should write a book for white males, sadly we keep leaving this discussion to neonazis and white supremacists online instead of having it ourselves in the public realm...
A focus on the mediums through which these shooters express their views misses the forest for the trees, which is that this is fundamentally a political problem.
There is an ascendant political ideology in the United States, and in the West more broadly, that is rooted in a fear that White supremacy is being eroded by immigration and demographic change, and that violence against minority populations is an acceptable response to these changes.
This ideology is promoted by the President and prominent members of the Republican Party and the party-affiliated media; government goon squads are used to harass and ethnically cleanse those populations; and "lone-wolf" paramilitaries terrorize them directly, while allowing their "respectable" enablers and ideological supporters some degree of plausible deniability.
The solution to this problem doesn't lie in technology or communication platforms or mental health awareness or anything like that. It lies in organizing politically to defeat the supporters of this ideology and take power away from its proponents.
- Even if by Sybil attacks that ideology is numerically irrelevant, the media amplifies their message and drowns out other messages. Bernie was attacked by centrists for doing an interview on Fox News, it's not just the Republicans contributing to the current state of affairs.
- For Trump to support neo-nazis he doesn't even need to praise them (even though he does it anyway), just selectively unenforce their actions. Inaction can be a political statement.
The theory seems to be that white supremacists just naturally wish to commit violent hate crimes and that white supremacists use 8chan to indoctrinate more followers.
What if it turns out that white supremacists primary wish is to have their arguments heard by society, but society has instead cast them out and refuses to let them post elsewhere so they can only post on 8chan, and that some of them, mentally unstable, react to being outcast in extreme ways?
I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform. I'm certainly not arguing that any of their actions are justified. But if this second view of the situation is more accurate, it suggests a solution to the problem that the first view completely misses. How could we tell the difference?
I have to admit ignorance though, I have not read any manifestos (the Christchurch one is illegal for me to read) I am quite unfamiliar with 8chan (I've heard people talk of 4chan and checked it out once when researching the supposed "white power" OK hand symbol hoax) and do not live in America presently so perhaps this speculation is offbase, and I'm happy to be corrected.
I said "I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform."
Also, admitting ignorance doesn't mean I have "no idea". I've read a bit of psychology on this topic, and feelings of being rejected by society are very powerful motivators.
Just for the record here: I think it's a good thing when people are willing to admit they're ignorant about certain things. It shows that they are willing to learn and change their minds based on new information.
Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
I hate to invoke HN guidelines, but this accusation violates "Assume good faith".
Here's another source, this time from the National Review:
Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
I found this fascinating so did a bit of research:
Both the National Review article and this piece (https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2012/04/words-and-deeds/) by Flemming Rose credit Alan Borovoy for having been the original author of that passage (in his 1988 book When Freedoms Collide: The Case for Civil Liberties).
The New Yorker article is based on Bob Mankoff interviewing Flemming Rose and it looks like Flemming Rose may have been slightly misquoted in a way that made the attribution less clear: the bit where it says:
> In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
Flemming Rose is attributing both sentences - "pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor" & "As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it." to "a present-day civil-rights campaigner" or Alan Borovoy.
Thanks for the research, I was having trouble figuring out where this came from exactly. I was hoping to find translations of the original laws, but no luck. Somehow I imagine that this info is hard to come by now, unless you visit some European library archives.
I agree! Anyone who talks about “White Privelege” as if they are a uniform group below contempt is just as wrong as Nazis of old railing about “Jewish Conspiracy!” We should not be giving these radical racists a platform! These evil people want to disarm the populace, suppress dissenting speech, and engage in social engineering! We must stop them!
See how that works?
You want to know how to turn someone? Show love, not hate. Daryl Davis has shown just how well that works.
Could you elaborate on this? It sounds awful to me - someone could tell you anything they want about the manifesto and the shooter's motivations, and it would be illegal for you to check if they are lying or not.
> What if it turns out that white supremacists primary wish is to have their arguments heard by society, but society has instead cast them out and refuses to let them post elsewhere so they can only post on 8chan, and that some of them, mentally unstable, react to being outcast in extreme ways?
The thing is, their argument is often not coherent or unfunded and once public, will be shown wrong pretty quickly (sadly not always with the right words or the right ways) and they'll feel attacked because of that.
On theses platforms, that doesn't happen, people are cheering them, they feel right, they feel it's the correct way of thinking. Thus they go there instead because it feel good.
The best example is r/the_donald banning any opposite way of thinking.
They are also slowly self-justifying isolating themselve from others, accusing others of manipulations, of fake news, using conspiration theories to ignore facts, accusing people of "concern trolling", etc...
That's sadly quite hard to fix and you'll need quite a b it of motivation and original thinking to be able to go beyond all theses walls they build arround themselves to protect their hatred and their little communities.
I think if they self-select to group with their own kind they radicalize each other. But there is not much we can do about that because no matter how many forums get shut down another one will pop up. The community itself doesn't go away just because a platform goes away, that just aggravates them.
The best opportunity we have to help normalize them is while they are on public platforms like twitter, youtube and facebook. Unfortunately those platforms have chosen to ban accounts rather than just censor and throttle content (for reasons that make perfect commercial sense). And good-faith statements of bad ideas are not being engaged with because they get censored as well (obviously bad faith trolling and memes don't invite engagement).
IMHO the best response is to engage where engagement is invited (everyone is edified by such discussions), censor where it isn't invited and where it is otherwise necessary to censor, throttle the ability of repeat offenders to post... but never perma-ban accounts.
In summary I guess my point is this: We can't stop them from choosing to go into a dark corner, but we can stop pushing them there.
I think we are all well aware of what motivates these killers by now. Giving them more of a platform and audience won’t reduce their murders - it will bring them more followers.
We have a good idea what motivates them. Here's some quotes from professionals:
From Katherine Newman, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University: "In general their social experience is not one of easy incorporation, ...Rather than wanting to be alone, many mass shooters have a history of struggling to connect. They experience rejection by their peers or they draw back from potential friendships, assuming they'll be rejected if they try. They believe they're perceived as insigificant."
And from Dr James Knoll, forensic psychiatrist with expertise in mass murders:
"The mass murderer is an injustice collector who spends a great deal of time feeling resentful about real or imagined rejections and ruminating on past humiliations. He has a paranoid worldview with chronic feelings of social persecution, envy, and grudge-holding. He is tormented by beliefs that privileged others are enjoying life’s all-you-can-eat buffet, while he must peer through the window, an outside loner always looking in.
"Aggrieved and entitled, he longs for power and revenge to obliterate what he cannot have. Since satisfaction is unobtainable lawfully and realistically, the mass murderer is reduced to violent fantasy and pseudo-power. He creates and enacts an odious screenplay of grandiose and public retribution. Like the child who upends the checkerboard when he does not like the way the game is going, he seeks to destroy others for apparent failures to recognize and meet his needs. Fury, deep despair, and callous selfishness eventually crystalize into fantasies of violent revenge on a scale that will draw attention. The mass murderer typically expects to die and frequently does in what amounts to a mass homicide-personal suicide. He may kill himself or script matters so that he will be killed by the police."
Are we? Because articles such as this seem to blame 8chan and 4chan (they never mention the rest of the site which has stuff from /g which is GNU stuff and the transexual and gay communities on there). Back in the 90s they blamed Doom, Heavy metal and Rap music. In the 1950s and 60s they blamed horror / slasher comics.
As for giving them a platform and an audience bringing more followers, firstly this is terminology used for justify soft censorship. Secondly in the UK back in 2010 Nick Griffin (a notorious anti-semite/racist and leader of the BNP) was allowed to speak on Question Time (a very popular show on the BBC). Afterwards we didn't hear from the BNP again because the ideas were exposed for what they were. The BNP party is effectively dead in the UK.
Almost every-time one of these racists are actually spoken to the vast majority of the population reject their message. Every-time it is repressed these ideas resurface because these people create their own echo-chambers and makes these ideas sexy as they are considered taboo.
Nick Griffin's electoral success was not killed by his appearance on Question Time. In fact, a bunch of minority political positions have had a good deal of political oxygen from BBC appearances: I'm thinking mostly of Farage in the dog days of UKIP's popularity and also the Spiked!/Institute of Ideas collective.
Griffin lost largely because there was factional instability in the BNP and then the rise of UKIP stole the non-fascist right-wing to far-right vote.
Even so, it's very difficult to kill a political movement by logical debate (or even by making them look silly). I had the misfortune to know Mark Collett (another one of the BNPers) at Leeds University. We managed to stop him making much headway in recruitment etc., but he lived for the publicity. Even when he got thrashed at Union AGMs and the like he'd be busy pitching to his potential support in the audience. Didn't work on most (he lost his votes by a landslide) but he wasn't actually trying to win. And I suspect getting his arguments attacked by a bunch of lefties and Jews didn't harm him much in his constituency, either. After all, it's all a conspiracy to stop him talking, isn't it?
Has anyone with an audience actually performed a mass shooting? I thought all of them were basically nobodies, not even their troll forum friends seems to care about them.
There seems to be a misunderstanding that I want to give them a platform. That is not the case. I said "I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform." All I want is to understand their motivations so that we can have a better chance at stopping the next shooting.
The problem though is that numbers aren't really the salient characteristic here. If some gang kills 5 members of another gang, that's not really a "mass killing" in the sense that this El Paso thing was.
Not ideologically, but very much in the sense that the state has lost control of ensuring the safety of its citizens, which is what it boils down to at the end of the day.
There are very straight-forward steps to be taken to reduce both gang violence and the fanatic mass shootings, and they're not being pursued.
Ya sorry. They are definitely in certain senses the same thing. But in others they're not. I think when thinking about causes the random killings are important to consider as a group though.
There has been another mass shooting since this link was posted. In Dayton Oh, in the Oregon District. Near my home town, still waiting to hear from family and friends that they are ok.
Saying that "XYZ media outlet is a normal part of mass shoothing now" is a hypocrisy, because 1. the real problem you should be focusing on is why "Mass shootings are a normal part of the society now", 2. hate can and will be "farmed" in the next outlet, if we ban one.
You could go as far as outlawing anonymous internet access (require identity in all online actions), but people with these intentions would still find a way to congregate and develop/use a specific language to evade detection and control.
We really need to start looking hard at what causes pressure build-ups in our society and start working on alleviation of these, because while the side effects of anti-depression medication may act as the last-mile enabler in these special cases, it's not the core problem and as such will deflect our attention from solving the core problem/problems. (I'm not touching the gun-control issue. E.g. in London or Japan, they will kill you with a knife. Tomorrow it may be a chemical weapon. Etc.)
In my experience the biggest problem is paradoxically the lack of communication from the side of the government to the side of the people. Many controversial programs can be explained in a common language so that an information vacuums aren't created and then filled by "conspiracy theorists". E.g. clearly explain the logic behind immigration policies (democrats), explain the logic behind fiscal policies (the FED, the ECB), the logic behind taxation rates, and so on.
I'm not saying that governments are perfect or that there is zero truth in some conspiracy theories, but I see the lack of information flow be the biggest issue because it causes people's disbelief in their governments' actions and that breeds all sorts of problems.
I can't speak to the accuracy of this, but a quick Google search suggested [0] which linked to [1], which says:
> What is notable is that next to the “Anonymous” user label on some of the posts is a “(You)” marking:
> As it turns out, this text is to let the user know that they are looking at their own posts! This means that Special Agent Rod inadvertently exposed himself as 8chan user ID “8f4812” by including these screenshots as his supporting exhibit.
There was a time that it was difficult for me to understand how it was possible that governments in the middle east were supporting domestic terrorism. It was difficult to imagine how normal people were supporting the killing of fellow citizens.
Now, that I see this same trend unravel in the USA it becomes easier to understand. I have seen for the past decades the shifting of what "conservative" means. Extremists were always there, that I knew. But, it has been scary to see how moving what normality is toward the extreme has happened. News, in USA case Fox News, have validated the extremist's views creating an equivalence between "both sides".
In Europe there are similar movements, but, it has not been televised so much. Except, maybe, for the rise of extremism in the United Kingdom.
As interesting it is from the political perspective, it is dishearting the amount of suffering that it is causing. The political discourse is not used to agree in a way forward for society but as a battleground. And, again, news outlets share its part of fault. Diminishing investment in education probably is even more to blame.
The response is not to be angry, but to be calm and help society to value well-intended discussions over sensationalist posts and news headers.
I hope that it is not too late, the last time that xenophobia was not stoped it cost over 80 million lives, this time it will be way worse.
The reason why extremism is having more trouble taking root in Europe is because there's less inequality there. Where inequality is highest, terrorism is highest.
This probably won't be an unpopular view, but I really think its culture and specifically things like news media.
Watching FOX and even CNN exacerbates me in a way that watching things like the BBC don't. The standards for journalism and discourse are incredibly different.
And its a feedback loop because I don't just blame the media, I blame the people that feed the media and increase the race for ratings and fear mongering.
I agree to a point, but surely the news media can't be where all the signal is coming from, there's too many forums on the internet (like the chans, and now social media sites) with too many users.
I don't see how it's related to inequality. I don't think any of these shooters were poor or went through poverty. For this incident the press showed pictures of a big single family home in suburban Dallas.
It's not necessarily about whether they are/were objectively poor. I believe, (part of) it is about the perception that others/outsiders are getting an unfair advantage at the cost of the tribe the shooter identifies with.
If you meant nativist extremism, I suspect multi-party democracies allow something of a safety valve. AfD and Brexit Party voters can still feel like they’re being heard while identifying as less extreme than NDP or BNP. In the American two-party system, one side is always painting the other as their most extreme example with no credible third parties for contrast, and indeed extremists do sometimes rise to prominence from within either party.
That's the first time I've ever seen the 2011 riots in London called "Right Wing".
I was in London at the time. They were sparked by the police killing of a drug dealer, rightly or wrongly, and were more chaotic and violent than any sort of political.
Whatever the reaction was in the US, that article just calls it wrong.
--edit-- I think it might be you that's read it wrong, the article is just about US right wing media interests using the London riots to further their political goals in the US.
You might want to take that link off your list, it doesn't support your argument.
Many ME terrorists are actually relatively wealthy (Bin Laden being the most famous example), and historically revolutions occur more from a rising middle class rather than from the lowest classes. Inequality can play a role - but many times other factors are far more important.
I doubt it’s that one dimensional. One could point out that making things equal results in (edit) even more terror (as most former communists countries prove). Of course that reasoning would ignore the Scandinavian “exception“.
It is actually that simple, because it is a fundamental part of social psychology. In primitive cultures, when one man amassed too much wealth, he'd give it away for two reasons: one: it brings him prestige as a benefactor, and two: it prevents disgruntled members from killing him.
We're socially wired to keep things "fair", and when very unfair things happen, we have an almost religious feeling of righteous indignation. If someone is cheating society, we want to punish them and set things right. This is why there's a tendency towards lynch mobs, or their modern twitter equivalents.
Equivalently, when someone feels excluded from the basic things he sees others enjoying freely (food, sex, shelter, leisure), he also feels this injustice, and will want to lash out, punish, and bring justice back to his society. If he's excluded for long enough, or to an extreme enough degree, he'll stop associating himself with that society, and possibly even consider replacing it with a better one. Of course, not everyone who feels the bad end of inequality is going to take up a gun and start shooting, but the less emotionally stable you are from your circumstances, the greater the risk. These "manifests" are a last-ditch effort to be listened to, respected, and included. I'm not talking about listening to whatever weird bullshit they're spouting; I'm talking about listening to their pain and humanity.
The sad part is that many justice systems are designed to exclude those convicted of a crime, thus excluding the most vulnerable, who need inclusion the most. It's one reason why you have such high recidivism rates in societies with more vengeful justice systems.
Inequality is a form of exclusion, and we're wired to fight it. Fighting terrorism is fighting the symptom rather than the cause. The harder you hit them, the harder they fight back, because they've got nothing left to lose that they care about, and they have "righteousness" on their side.
That is the most succinct well thought out reasoning on this phenomenon I have ever read. I wish there was a way to stop this rather than have "rich people should share", because that just seems really unlikely :<
All societies drift towards inequality. We can't avoid that because our rules and laws are imperfect, and people will take advantage to control a bigger slice of the pie. That's fine, so long as we have corrections from time to time to redistribute wealth and power (such as the wealth giveaways that primitive societies practiced, or debt jubilees in more complex societies).
Historically, when inequality goes on for too long, social unrest takes root and gradually grows worse, divisive factions and subgroups grow, "little battles" take place, and, if untreated for too long, revolution breaks out.
By Scandinavian “exception” do you mean (1) that Scandinavan countries are more equal than most Western countriea but less oppressive than communist countries, or (2) the high rate (in terms of people killed) of white/extreme-right terrorism in Scandinavian countries (i.e. Brevik)?
Former "communist" countries were not equal. There was corruption, and a pretty large split between normal people and the higher ups in the party. There was lack of basic supplies.
> Imminent threats and specific calls to violence are a different matter.
More equality does not mean communism or everybody gets exactly the same. You position is just a straw man argument.
> Scandinavian
Scandinavian countries are social democracies, like most of Europe, they are not community countries. And are no exception but good examples of implementing good policies.
To add to the possible causes/reasons that people have already replied with, I'd suggest that in countries with mandatory voting, there is a natural tension that keeps parties from straying too far from the centre (i.e. where most of the citizenry sit). In countries with optional voting regimes, those that feel disenfranchised or cynical or apathetic don't vote, while those with extremist views are probably less inclined to let such things get in the way of their vote, resulting in over-representation in the pool of actual voters (vs potential voters). This has led parties to chase the edges more so than pleasing the centre.
In Australia, we have mandatory voting, and while the media is still active and slowly moving the electoral needle, overall, attempts to introduce extremist positions have largely faltered (with a few exceptions). I don't expect this position will last forever though.
As someone that lives in Australia but comes from a similar country with optional voting (NZ), Australia's mandatory voting regime seems very much like choosing a government by chance - if voters don't know enough to vote without it being compulsory, they don't suddenly know any more by making them vote, and forcing a bunch of low information voters to go and vote anyway doesn't seem like it's going to get a good outcome. NZ's turnout is not all that much below AU without compulsory voting (admittedly, we did have John Key for what felt like forever, so it's not like we've got great form either).
While I'm moaning about the electoral system, the lack of a representative system (winner takes all in each electorate, leading to an enormous focus on battleground electorates while the safe seats are largely ignored) is also hugely problematic.
The founding principles of the USA prevent things like compulsory voting laws. It is illiberal, and contrary to the principles. I don't know what the founding principles of Australia are/ were, but I'm pretty sure it was a Commonwealth country until somewhat recently.
The unease from the industrial revolution, 2 world wars, and the Great Depression allowed much of the original American vision to be eroded for expediency. People who fail to understand history, are doomed to repeat it.
> Except, maybe, for the rise of extremism in the United Kingdom
I'd challenge that -- what do you have in mind? I suspect we have far fewer politicians describable as far-right in the UK, where in France for example, RN has some actual power and voting numbers.
For Europe, most of the civilian killings are indeed done by extremists. But we are not allowed to aknowledge or talk about that part, so the extremists of the "other side" start to grow.
you sound more distraught than hopeful, so let me add some perspective. what's amazing is that relative to opportunity, terrorism (and mass shootings as a subset) is extremely rare. many, many things will kill you (or a loved one) before terrorism will (accidental shooting, drowning, overdose, heart attack, car accident, etc.). while we all do have a violent side, we are a remarkably empathetic and social species who largely follow cultural and moral rules for the good of the whole.
on your last point, it wasn't terrorism or just zenophobia that caused genocide, but state actors (and their leadership) lusting for power, notoriety, and wealth. that's rare too, since it took a perfect storm of many bad circumstances and decisions (from what i understand).
that's not to say don't be vigilant or push for change (since rare doesn't mean impossible). just don't feel hopeless or a sense of despair that things are somehow so much worse now.
I'm in the UK, not sure I see much extremism here really. We have the brexit party I suppose, but that's not so much extremist as just weirdly conservative.
> the last time that xenophobia was not stoped it cost over 80 million lives
I assume you are referring to WWII - it is a strong assertion to claim that was a xenophobic war. The Nazis were xenophobic, but one suspects their driving motivations for actually doing something about it were economic. They were expanding because they famously thought they needed more space and resources, and the German economy prior to the war was famously horrible and probably the major contributing factor to the Nazi movement gaining any traction at all.
In fact, I'll assert based on a hunch that aggressive wars powered by xenophobia are vanishingly rare. "[color] people are bad" is a good propaganda slogan for the troops, but nobody is going to stump up the funds to actually deploy them if there isn't some sort of economic justification.
Yeah, the United Arab Republic turned out so well...
For the countries you list, the only time in history that they ever were all in the same country was a brief period during the Abbasid Caliphate, which quickly broke apart. There is a lot of bad blood between Persians and Levantine Arabs that is going to prevent any sort of stable long-term stability.
I think you're just proving my point. Justifications such as you proffer do nothing to convince me otherwise:
We in the West are very xenophobic when it comes to assessing those nations we've destroyed in the last 20 years. We're not really being fair about such propositions as 'long term stability', really, when we do everything we can to make sure the region stays unstable...
If you're trying to project the future of the Middle East based solely off of knowledge of the last 20 years, you are very well out of your depth. The Middle East is a region of immense history--we can count back over 5000 years of recorded history--and people can nurse grievances accumulated over that span of time, especially as they are emphasized and deemphasized in mythmaking.
Ever since the rise of nationalism in the Long 19th Century, and the collapse of the multiethnic empires that ended it, the ability to forge a common national identity has been the key to state survival. There is no hard and fast guideline to how to do so, and so it can be perplexing as to why Languedocs and Bretons can feel affinity in a French state whereas Serbs and Croats cannot feel affinity in a Yugoslav state--especially since, I will note, the first two groups do not speak the same language (at least, pre-French Revolution) but the latter two do!
Surely you must have an idea why the 5-eyes nations have applied their armed forces as a coalition, towards the destruction of the Middle East and parts of Asia?
I mean, you know that Iraq was demolished. Afghanistan too. Libya, Syria .. and now Yemen.
Why do you think the 5-eyes forces are there instead of defending their homelands? Its not xenophobia?
Lebensraum was long, long before the Nazis. It was the goal of Imperial Germany in WW1, and became policy again under the Nazis. Probably dates back to the 19th century. The economics were irrelevant to the policy.
Economics had nothing to do with pursuing the idea of racial purity and a superior race either. Untermensch goes back to the twenties and intertwines with the US eugenics that the Nazis cribbed from heavily.
Can you describe what you mean a bit more in concrete terms? For a second there I thought someone had posted the manifesto here, imagining it is a vague story as well.
What concrete examples do you have of misrepresentation of the situation in the media for example? I believe you when you say that something is wrong, but giving concrete examples will help drive your message home.
According to gunviolencearchive (https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/), there were 251 mass shootings in the USA since the beginning of 2019. I don't know if this number is correct, but I just can't understand why guns are still allowed in USA.
They may be counting gang shootouts and stuff like that.
Guns are still allowed in the US because literally millions of Americans own guns, including semi-automatic rifles, and don't commit crimes with them. Many of them carry a gun concealed every day. Gun owners and concealed carry holders are actually less likely to commit a crime than the general population. In the US, we hold to the old common law idea that people who haven't done anything wrong shouldn't be punished.
Many more people die an "alcohol related" death in the US than in incidents related to guns but this receives nowhere near the attention.
The American right believes that it needs guns to protect itself from the government and is terrified that the left will come to take its guns away.
This has gotten more and more extreme to the point that they are now basically against any gun control laws including restrictions on machine guns or any sort of background checks.
> This has gotten more and more extreme to the point that they are now basically against any gun control laws including restrictions on machine guns or any sort of background checks.
You are aware that ownership of machine guns is both extremely restricted and rather expensive, while almost all legal gun transfers require a background check, right? (The transfers that don't require a background check are private sales in certain states) Or are you saying that people want these restrictions to be rolled back?
> I don't know if this number is correct, but I just can't understand why guns are still allowed in USA.
Lots of reasons. One is that if congress tried to pass a law doing so, the supreme court would probably stop it thanks to the 2nd amendment. And changing the 2nd amendment is politically infeasible for a whole host of reasons (many states don't have the requisite support, AND calling a constitutional convention opens up a ton of other issues). Oh, and there's literally 300,000,000+ guns floating around in the US. How the hell is the government supposed to collect all of those? How of the budget are you willing to spend on that? Europe hasn't exactly had the most luck trying to disarm THEIR citizens, why would it work in the US with less governmental trust? [0]
But aside from the constitutional and practical reasons... "gun ownership" and "homicide rate" are basically uncorrelated worldwide. You'll often hear otherwise, but the two most common sidesteps are to change to "gun violence rate" instead of "homicide rate" (which includes gun suicides but drops murder by other means) or to only include "western" countries which has its own set of issues. Lies, dammed lies, and statistics!
Finally, even if your goal is only to reduce mass murders, restricting guns isn't really a great way to do that. The Nice truck attack [1] with 87 dead, Oklahoma City bombing [2] with 168 dead, and the more recent Kyoto Animation arson attack [3] with 35 dead all show that guns aren't exactly required to kill a bunch of people. (and also completely ignoring 9/11) Forcing people away from guns to other methods might actually increase deaths in such situations.
People seemed to have invented writing to keep track of grain inventories, and to record for all eternity the great moral decline of the world caused by the doings of the author's political enemies, and if only they had the tools to stop the Bad Ideas from spreading, why, we could all live a utopian existence of pure harmony.
4chan and 8chan are cancers upon the internet. The sites themselves and their community members spew toxicity, hate, cynicism, and revulsion wherever they turn up. They revel in trolling, harassment, and offense for the sake of offense. This, as recent events demonstrate, often extends further into deep-seated hatred and racism. I don't know if it's an intrinsic side effect of the 100% anonymous culture or just just the way they developed over time, but there's no denying that they serve as a perfect breeding ground for this kind of indoctrination and degeneration.
They're perfect feedback loops - the more time one spends in such places, the more strongly the mindsets they proclaim become rooted and the harder it is to break away. People go in feeling alienated and rejected and stay stuck there, finding a perverse connection in their inability to connect and interact with the rest of society in a positive manner. As a result of fixating on the things that set them apart and consuming endless torrents of content from people similarly afflicted, it makes it even harder for them to escape the feedback loop. Mental illness is rampant among the users there, and instead of people afflicted with it being helped or guided into acceptable patterns of interaction, they're mocked or worse yet praised for the negative behavior they exhibit.
I've seen this happen to several friends first-hand. One of the most dangerous and destructive things that I've noticed is a disconnection between ideas and reality that comes out of a broken concept of "irony." A common claim is that people started these communities as places where they would "ironically" pretend to be racist or mentally ill, and as a result they attracted actually racist and mentally ill people who ended up taking over the community from within. I think things go a step further: that people who "ironically" take part in hate speech, homophobia, and other bigoted belief systems end up slipping into believing them themselves. Or rather, the line between irony and reality itself dissolves over time after constant exposure, often at the exclusion of all else.
I don't have any ideas for solutions to the problems that these kinds of communities create. Their very design makes eliminating the issues or cutting out bad actors completely next to impossible, and no amount of cleanup work after the fact is going to eliminate what is clearly a deeply-rooted and persistent system. Any attempts to exemplify the sickness of their community will be seen as attacks and just make their beliefs deeper.
It was recently revealed that 8chan is funded primarily by selling sex tourism-themed audio books on Amazon. To my knowledge, Amazon has still not answered requests for comments, nor have they discontinued funding.
Jim Watkins owns a lot of things, including 2channel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel), a pig farm, and a VPS/VPN/webhosting provider. It's unlikely that those audiobooks are the biggest source of income.
This ian't the sort of topic that I normally comment on, but today's events have been particularly disturbing, so I thought I would share what I have experienced.
I have seen two very different people that are very close to me radicalized and turned into full-blown white nationalist, violent tinfoil-hat types.
In the first case, my brother (let's call him Bill) struggled with uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts for his entire life from the getgo. I've been told that that could be linked to a near-suffocation event that happened to him during birth, though I suspect that may be neither here nor there.
Because of his behavioral issues and a terrible juvenile "corrections" system, he spent the majority of his life from the age of twelve through 25 in juvenile detention, jail, and eventually prison. He was in some of the most violent prisons in the United States, and joined a "white power" gang largely for survival. He regularly espoused the exact views detailed in the manifesto on a regular basis whenever he was out. However, after a few years out he sort of naturally came to the conclusion that his whole ideology was bullshit and abandoned it. At present, he no longer holds those views.
In case 2, a friend (who I will call Bob), had never been in trouble, never had any family trouble or any serious trauma, started spouting the exact same stuff as Bill used to. He was about 26 when this started, and it was an enormous surprise to everyone he knew. I, being extremely curious by nature and very close to Bob, spent dozens of hours trying to get to the root of what was going on with him to absolutely no avail.
The important thing with Bob is, his answer to every question about "Where are you getting that?" was a simple "I read it on 4chan/8chan and I believe it." Every. Single. Time.
I realized a couple things. First off, Bob was gone. Every conversation with him was just him repeating *chan talking points over and over again. No amount of appeals to humanity could provoke a novel thought. He kept to his points religiously, and he made it exceedingly clear that he was trying to recruit as much as he could.
Secondly, Bill had originally found himself in his situation through systematic dismantling of his humanity, whereas Bob was doing it purely for uh, internet street cred? Bill was able to face the real world after leaving prison and make his own decisions, but Bob carried something (in my opinion, specifically regarding this issue of radicalization) far more insidious around in his pocket. The approval he craved from the chans was something that had to be sated daily, which made (and continues to make) him a terrifying person to be around.
My point is that from firsthand experience with people from two very different backgrounds that I am very close to, the 4/8/whatever chans are far scarier when it comes to indoctrination than most people could believe without seeing.
TL;DR This issue is far larger and more impactful than nearly anyone would care to admit, and sites like 8chan will likely have an unpredictable and indelible impact on many, many people's lives until it is acknowledged and addressed.
^ This is a really important comment - both of these cases are perfect examples of the issues with places like 4chan and 8chan.
I find the case of Bob particularly important to recognize since people like him - people who are by every definition radicalized by violent, hateful, and destructive ideologies - often don't seem that way from the outside. They can carry out normal, successful lives while still harboring these extreme views and internalizing them very deeply.
I believe the World Wide Web is largely positive, but the results like this is truly inevitable.
> Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. - an HN user previously told me.
The computing pioneers dreamed the Internet would enable the free and fast flow of information, create decentralization, promote democracy, freedom of speech, and liberate us from all the old forms of political control. In the beginning, things were great. The emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove the idealism of the Net. Even today, it still keeps unleashing human creativity. And even when the tech is increasingly used as tools of oppression, arguablly, the Net still significant improved the autonomy of individuals and encouraged free thinking.
One core tenet of personal computing and the Net is empowering individuals, "we the people". The pioneers of the Net were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism in the hacker culture played a positive role. And crucially, the development of the Internet was done in parallel of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism, so there was no major social conflicts as well.
But after 2008-2010, this populist idea started to show its dark side - after (1) all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, (2) a tendency of disintegration of the global economic and political order is coming - the same populism stopped playing the original very-positive role. It has became clear that, any idea can by popularized and supported by a free Internet, or propagated more easily (e.g. flat-Earth, anti-vax, extremism). David Perell called it "the disappearance of the Overton window". Also, all individuals are empowered, including marginalized groups, malicious attackers and psychopaths.
I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.
* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group
Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.
We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.
On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate this thing/person is, the justice needs to be done! Sometimes, it can be a legitimate popular movement and serve the right purpose, e.g. Occupy Movement, but other times, it's just a bunch of angry mobs lynching people. For example, a list of people on Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Especially, when I grasped these points, I found things went pretty stupid when, for example, the mainstream media started reporting Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in 2016. Yes, it has connections to reactionary political movements, but itself is only a symbol of the trolling cultural. When the media reports it, it actually gives it a platform of exposure, and encouraged trolls to use it as a genuinely political symbol, and personally I think it makes the issue worse.
What I'm trying to say is, to solve problems like this, we must study and understand the entire machinery of it, including the underlying social-economical basis of this conflict using sociology and psychology, and to provide social solutions to the problem. However, the only proposal the mainstream media (or us, as online members of online communities) has right now is "Twitter and Facebook should ban hate speech", or "we should not feed the trolls", which hardly touches deeper problems.
Also, when the important argument for Internet freedom is that they bring democracy and equality no longer works, should the Internet be free and open? Should we still protect and promote the freedom speech? I firmly believe the answer must be YES. However, if we left these problems unaddressed and only "ban them", the answer is going to be "no" soon.
Furthermore, I think that stochastic terrorism can not be 100% eliminated without creating a police state, which is more harmful than a few terrorists. Lone-wolf terrorism is a feature in modern life, we can only enhance our understanding of sociology to partially reduce the harm.
P.S: Watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, its plot has a surprising deep discussion of the consequences of a hyperconnected humanity, meme culture and random terrorism is an important theme in the show, and contains great inspirations.
----
Appendix:
David Perell's excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and has a similar argument just like mine.
Also, if you want to understand more about the trolling culture and its mechanism, I recommend "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture", by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press.
In many cases I don't think social media helps young men OR women at all. To summarise a discussion I had with a friend who has teenager kids recently - when we were growing up we had magazines telling us what was 'cool'. Music, movies, clothes. They appeared once a week or month. Television and film 'cool' was behind real life. The Daily Mail was a paper your parents read - that as odious as it may have been - didn't have to space to point out every young actress/model/instagrammer's beach cellulite. You might have been bullied at school for not wearing Nike sneakers, but you could buy _any_ Nike sneakers and largely escape attention.
Now social media blasts kids with "this is what's cool" on an hourly basis. Not got the latest Off-White? Uncool. Jordan Mids? Uncool. Still wearing [brand here]? Uncool. On top of that, everyone promoted is wealthy, beautiful and photoshopped. And on top of that it's all insanely addictive. So not only are you told over and over you're behind with the latest trends, and not only are you made to feel over and over that you're not pretty/wealthy/happy/cultured/whatever enough, but you're addicted to seeing it. And then everyone has a platform to bully you for it 24 hours a day. It's not even like you have that 12 hour respite where you're not at school.
I can't begin to imagine how as a fragile teenager this sort of thing would have affected me. Props to anyone young that keeps their head together.
Couple it with the exaggerated standards for dating, which leads to lonely frustrated/depressed people.
And for some reason it's even harder to make friends today. (Probably because people drift away from each other faster. Better global mobility, you can have a job anywhere, you can study anywhere, your work might include a lots of travel. You switch jobs faster than people used to. There are a lot more things to do even on a budget, so individual differences get an emphasis, but then those things to do don't provide with new friends. You can do yoga, hiking, biking, sailing, paragliding, and whatever for a few months then switch to the next, the years go by, and you haven't formed a lasting connection. Plus add the whole experience industry - you don't have to do the hiking with the local enthusiasts, you can simply pick a guided/organized event every week, and meet new people every week. And there are even more things to do online - which are again not the typical friends making venue.)
Oh, and don't forget those beautiful echo chambers on the Internet. That helps to radicalize people. (Just go to a gun enthusiast site after any/each shooting and look at the comments. Then look at an anti-gun whatever site, maybe HufPo?)
Yet, a great deal of it can be sidestepped by simply avoiding social media. I can empathize and understand, but having trouble sympathizing. “This thing that I voluntarily do makes me unhappy.” Well, stop doing it!
Someone right now could be bullying me on Facebook. Someone might be targeting me with a Facebook ads. They might be sending me links to the latest fashions. None of it affects me or my mental health at all because I have not used Facebook in close to ten years.
It's very hard to find a partner nowadays. In the past, people dated within the local community, so women were limited to their local dating pool. With the advent of online dating, women can afford to be choosy and pick from guys all over the country, if not even all over the world. As a result, many men that would have found someone in the past are going to be lonely nowadays.
Now, the obvious reply to that is "but online dating is for men too, look at all these guys meeting a different girl every day". This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't really get any attention on such websites.
Self-confidence (or lack of it) is at least partially (some might say majorly) an artifact of upbringing and socialization.
Women are more empowered to choose their own partners today than at other times in history, for sure. For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively). You can certainly remark that today things are relatively worse for men (for some narrow definition of worse), but hopefully we can agree that it would be best if everyone enjoyed an equal opportunity to choose their partner regardless of gender.
For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively).
Realistically, no -- parents and family were far more determinative than individual men. The just-so story where men have been free for tens of thousands of years while women were in bondage doesn't hold up. Most people in the middle ages were serfs. Men mostly didn't choose their professions or have preferential access to education because pretty much everyone carried forward the life of their parents and education was not widely available. The "men were free and women were restricted" narrative, in the specifics, compares the rights and privileges of women 500 years ago with those of the men of the 1980s.
I felt this way when I used the standard gamut of dating apps, but as time went on I realized everyone kinda hates it. It's weird that we all sort of unconsciously agreed that this was now the "main" way to meet.
I've found that broadening my horizons and communicating clearly go a long way in this new swipe right world.
> This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't really get any attention on such websites.
I don't know where you live/what dating pool you have experience with, but here are some contrasting anecdotal observations from NYC:
1) Straight women I know here get way more swipes than straight guys, but lots of straight guys will swipe indiscriminately and immediately unmatch, or will send extremely lazy or off-putting, salacious messages a ton of the time. It's not everyone, but it's common enough to be extremely obnoxious and discourage straight women from swiping right on guys or messaging them. They get more swipes, but more of those are noise.
2) Straight guys will get way fewer matches, and straight women will tend not to message them first/respond very often. This encourages some guys to swipe indiscriminately (see above), though my straight guy friends who are more measured have far more success.
3) Attractive/hip people tend to date each other. The hot guys aren't out there dating less attractive women/taking them out of the dating pool for less conventionally-attractive guys.
4) I've seen awkward, conventionally unattractive straight guys get tons of dates online. It seems a bit harder than if they are conventionally attractive, but none of them seem to have any trouble finding dates.
5) Some of my friends have unrealistic standards for their partners, whom they expect to be more attractive, socially graceful, fashionable, intelligent, and/or wealthy than themselves. These friends either reject everyone they might have a chance with on dating sites or complain about their partners.
6) I've seen plenty of really hot women with homely men and vice versa in couples I know. I can't say I've noticed that women have an easier time than men "dating up" in terms of conventional attractiveness. It seems like conventional attractiveness is just a starting point, but good presentation, social graces, and wealth markers can push overall attractiveness arbitrarily far in either direction.
It probably varies a lot from place to place, but in my slice of NYC, it's not particularly dominated by conventional attractiveness, and overall outcomes seem similar across genders (despite the swiping behavior differences noted at first). Standards of conventional attractiveness also vary widely of course.
I don't know how far it generalises, but a lot of my early 30s female friends complain about how hard it is to find a long term relationship.
Dates are easy to get, but explicitly looking for a long term thing puts off a lot of guys because it's just not the expectation. There is pressure to hold off on deep conversations or say you're just looking for fun when that really isn't the case.
'sometimes I just tell the guy on the first date that I'm looking for someone to settle down with. I've never gotten a second after that'
Getting ghosted by mr right for the twentieth time and wondering what is wrong with you seems as self esteem destroying as not being able to get a date at all.
Yeah, people who are completely direct about what they want in both their profile and communications tend to have a much better time on apps. I try to put things in my profile that will be charming to people I might like and alienating to people I wouldn’t, and it works very well. You have to have some standards and filter out obvious bad matches quickly. Since you’re not dating in your social circles, you don’t have the advantage of a pre-vetted dating pool, so you have to just recognize that most of the people you see won’t be a good match at all.
I'm too old and privacy conscious to partake in such activities as Tinder, so I do it the old-fashioned way. Volunteering at the local library and hanging out on my local river trail has been been the best way for me to meet potential partners. Bars were quite effective until my mid-30s, but things change as people age.
Also, I bet the West Slope of Colorado is different, dynamically, than NYC. I live in a town, not a metropolics, so that has to make a difference.
Well yes. The best time for women to find a long term relationship is middle 20s. They're done with education and can look for a partner. Unfortunately many women spend these years on frivolous casual dating. They often wake up in their early 30s looking for someone to settle down with. But there's a problem - why would a man go for a 30s woman, if he can still date 25 year old women instead?
Regarding #1 and #2, I think it's even worse: there are lots of "auto swipe" apps that swipe right on everyone. It's a common hack for guys to buy Tinder Premium, swipe right on everyone in sight and then choose from the match pool.
Tinder is a super lazy product, terrible even. I wouldn't be surprised if they're optimizing for a high number of matches and happy with that outcome.
Oh yeah, by “swipe indiscriminately” i really meant “swipe on literally everybody and then downselect from matches”. It’s a very obnoxious thing to do. Pretty easy, but it discourages people from messaging any guy first when you know there’s a good chance they’ll just unmatch right away.
I don’t think those guys are even close to the majority of straight male users, but since they always swipe right, you have a 100% chance of matching one of them if you swipe right too. So they pollute your match list disproportionately and end up making it worse for everyone. Pretty annoying.
This is the game theory end result of any matching system where one side is far fewer or more selective than the other. It’s why most of us apply to 200 jobs, then select from the few who get back to us.
Supposedly Tinder drops your 'ranking' if you swipe right on everyone. Anyway, no need to use autoswipe apps. Tinder has a webapp so you can just setInterval() that like button.
When a young woman has trouble with life she's given sympathy and resources. When a young man has trouble he's told to stop being such a wimp. Not surprisingly some of them snap.
Yeah. Men are still, to a huge extent, discouraged from sharing and expressing their emotions as much as women (since that behavior is seen as inherently feminine). People still make fun of guys for crying and other healthy ways of expressing distress. The "strong silent type" still seems to be many people's masculine ideal. This is exacerbated on hate-filled sites like 4chan and 8chan, where guys who express feelings nonviolently are regularly mocked as "soyboys" or whatever; putting that sort of rhetoric alongside racist propaganda is, as other people have commented, an effective way to promote racial resentment and, in turn, violent outbursts.
The problem of discouraging men from expressing their emotions nonviolently is definitely not confined to these boards, however. I see tons of characters in media and people in real life who model the idea that anger or violence, while bad, are understandable ways for a man to express feelings (the same sentiment for women is much rarer). It might be bad that a man did something violent, but it doesn't undermine his very identity by eroding his masculinity in the same way that weeping and sobbing and being sensitive might.
I can't count the number of times I saw guys punching walls in movies growing up, often in circumstances where their characters were really feeling sad or hopeless or hurt. Women in movies under the same circumstances would often cry or be consoled. Or to put it another way, in a movie scene with a man and woman under extreme stress in a room together, I've never seen the woman punching holes in her own walls while the man sits on the bed crying. There are tons of other examples of stress reactions that are usually modeled in media along gender lines in this same way.
I think this stuff is self-fulfilling. Guys are discouraged from acknowledging difficult feelings except through stoicism or anger, and in turn people continue to associate that behavior with guys. When men on 8chan start buying into racist ideology and feeling like they can only express their distress through anger and violence, it seems inevitable that things like shootings will follow. The copycat effect with shootings that already happened only encourages it (see how this shooter cited the NZ shooter as inspiration).
I think things are improving, but I think that until guys are trained to express a full spectrum of emotions openly and without shame, and people in general are acclimated to supporting and validating men's feelings, it's going to keep encouraging this sort of snapping behavior.
The moment that sharing weakness actually turns women on and attracts them sexually, is the moment that the societal discouragement of weakness in men will evaporate.
on the contrary, the sexual selections of females reward "toxic" behavior (confident, dominant, selfish, disagreeable), and punish guys who are socially inept toxic little worms (needy, people-pleasing, over-intellectual, "safe").
Who reproduced, the guy capable of killing multiple potential rapists? Or the guy that let's his wife get taken cause he just couldn't engage in violence cause it's 'wrong and bad and toxic'
> When men on 8chan start buying into racist ideology and feeling like they can only express their distress through anger and violence, it seems inevitable that things like shootings will follow.
I agree, but there is even more to this part. The Nazi ideology was not just about superiority, about also about struggle between races for power and need to win that struggle. You have to fight for your own and prove superiority through military conquest and physical domination of other races.
For that to happen, you need certain kind of fighter. Ruthlessness and nazi really seen ruthlessness as virtue.
Empathetic male eager to share emotions is less likely to gain domination through violence. Or through manipulation, backstabbing, lying and all those things that are seen as practical tactic by white supremacists. Less likely to push knowingly for laws that harm minorities or political opponents. Less likely beat or kill opponent. Less likely to force own friends into compliance with own ideas.
By that I want to say that the aggressive masculinity is virtue and something you want males to be, if you have aggressive goals. Hence peer pressuring males to be like that.
Right, yes, That’s what I meant: it’s advantageous for fascist agitators to encourage traditional repressive masculinity for the reasons you outline. Being susceptible to it makes you useful to fascists.
There's a huge wage gap with young women outearning men. The number of poor young men is getting higher. Men are increasingly less educated relatively.
I think part of the problem here is when articles like that like to use titles such as:
"Young women are getting richer, as young men get poorer-
More millennial men are earning less, even with the gender pay gap in their favor, the U.S. Census Bureau reports"
This isn't a men vs women thing. It's a young adult thing, and like you said it's something cultural and societal. The fact that young women are getting educated is a victory for everyone, but MarketWatch would rather use it as social justice bait.
Thats not how I read it at all. It is of course great young women are being educated. However, if you women are more educated than young men then it is possible for the 'average years of education' stat to be going up while the corresponding stat for men is going down.
It would be odd to say that 'young men are less educated than the average young person' because men and women essentially completely partition the space of persons. It is obvious if young men are less educated than the average young person that women would have to be more educated than them.
I just think coming at it from the angle that article did (re: the article title) is framing things the wrong way. The census report they used is more in line with what I think we're both saying here:
That's implying that those same people are being supplanted, and are therefor "losing" because of that. The issue, as I see it, is that society should already have a place for all young adults.
Men are half the population. Many men are poor, have lack of job opportunities, just like poor women. Identity politics that completely ignores economic conditions people face will always be flat and can't explain the depth of complexity different people in society face.
They are more likely to fit into risk factor profile: more likely to have mental disease. They are more likely to be veterans. More likely to be addicted addictions or disabled.
Also more likely to be violent or aggressive and thus kicked from legit places to live. More likely to have criminal record. The whole "on average men take their aggression against others women again themselves" in this aspect hurt men more.
Some of the above are related to each other, obviously.
"Women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder". - Anthony JC, Warner LA, Kessler RC. Comparative epidemiology of dependence on tobacco, alcohol, controlled substances, and inhalants
"But when subsequent surveys asked who struck first, it turned out that women were as likely as men to initiate violence—a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence" - https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
The only wholy true points is that men tend to be more likely veterans, for which accounts for 10% of the homeless, and more likely criminals, but the majority of offenses for which they are arrested are for public intoxication, followed by theft/shoplifting, violation of city ordinances, and burglary.
1.) Interesting that you changed violence to intimate violence. As if there were equal number of women killing people (it is not) or being gang members (nope violent gangs are not dome kind of equality panacea). As if women were equally likely to get into fight in bars, clubs, schools you name it. Whether biological or social, men are more likely to be violent. And they are more likely to cause higher damage due to bigger strength.
2.) Crime record makes it harder to find housing and job and access social services. That includes shoplifting and other similar records.
3.) And of course, you use study that casts addiction so wide, that it is compeletely irrelevant. Smoking is not relevant addiction to homelessness.
Here is study about substances - you used last sentence of paragraph, but it is preceeded by: Men are more likely than women to use almost all types of illicit drugs,13 and illicit drug use is more likely to result in emergency department visits or overdose deaths for men than for women. "Illicit" refers to use of illegal drugs, including marijuana (according to federal law) and misuse of prescription drugs. For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder.
Substance disorder, as practically all studies show, has very little to do with the actually drug being misused. Causes for substance abuse is often cited in research as genetic markers, environmental factors like childhood trauma and a lack of peer and family support, mental health, and stress with low access to stress management.
With crime it should be no surprise that public intoxication and violation of city ordinances is more common for homeless people. If we account for social economical status then theft, burglary, and shoplifting make also sense. If more men than women are homeless than those numbers will correlate accordingly, but say nothing about why people become homeless.
The initial claim is that men were more "violent or aggressive". If you want to make a claim that men are charged more often than women for murder or being in a violent gang then go ahead, but when it comes to initiating aggression or violence both women and men are fundamentally equal. The idea that men are inherently aggressive and violent while women inherently meek and passive is nothing but gender stereotyping, and that may be a reason for difference in homelessness.
> Substance disorder, as practically all studies show, has very little to do with the actually drug being misused.
1.) But like, when it comes to homelessness, you looking like junkie and acting like junkie is what gets you eventually kicked out. Illegal drugs is what matter. Not whether you fall under substance disorder due to smoking.
2.) Non-homeless males are more likely to get criminal record. It is exact reason that makes housing for males with criminal record harder to find.
3.) Third, no it is not just that males are more likely to be charged while kills being the same for both genders. Males kill more people. Males get into fights more often. It does not matter whether it is inherent or something that happens due to socialization.
It does not matter that majority of men are not violent at all and not aggressive. What does matter is that there is subset who are like that and those are more likely to end homeless.
If you think the male suicide rate and mass shootings have anything to do with some kind of "objectively worse" metric you're not thinking about this in the right way...
Its a normal part of me looking up manifestos and videos that other media sites dance around when I want to know what happened.
I'll browse a twitter thread for a good 30 seconds after being made aware of a mass shooting, if everyone is congratulating each other for not saying someone's name and not posting the gopro video I'll just go straight to 4chan or 8chan.
This is so weird for me. This keeps happening and I just don't get it.
The chan* boards are still some of the few places on the internet for people to actually learn something. I went to university, but I feel I only got an education when I started reading and 4chan.org/lit was where I went to learn. This was in my mid-20s - this is where I learned about things like Middlemarch, The Book of Disquiet, If On A Winters Night a Traveler, etc. This (https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/sub) is amazing and can be found nowhere else.
It's also an anonymous board with people who are quite clearly angry and in pain. Since it's anonymous it prevents backlash for hateful ideologies, but it also means that these people can't be found to be reached and helped. But clearly, the solution can't be to allow hate to be public just to help the haters. It's a sad catch-22.
I can relate to what you're describing, 8chan's /tech/ is the reason I picked up C and am dabbling in a bit of Rust and how I learnt about free software and Richard Stallman. You could literally just get rid of /pol/ and 8chan would be measurably better, most non-/pol/acks hate them.
Why does Trump need to be asked before revealing anything?
All this looks like a thinly veiled ploy by Q to try and get free publicity from media. If that doesn't happen, fool people enough to make them think it is some kind of "proof".
edit2: actually you may leave this comment up as an example of how antisemites sound like online - it shows exactly the behaviour described in the quote
1) Of course they will. If they are willing to support terrorist, appearing a bit like an asshole online is not going to be a problem for them.
2) The point about not censoring opinions is not about these opinions being valid, it is about the tools you give the government to decide what should be considered terrorism or not.
In France, after the mass shootings, the government took some anti-terrorist measures and almost immediately used these laws to shut down some ecologists protestors around the COP21 meeting.
I am fine with many outlets deciding that they don't want to publish racist crap but I am also happy that places like 4chan and 8chan are legal. If you go there, you know it is a sewer but total censorship on internet implies very dystopian filtering capabilities. There is nothing governments would like more than the ability to shut down whistleblowers under the pretense of fighting terrorism.
For example, Hackers News filters such things without govt intervention, as do Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to a lesser extent. It has been shown that once you remove a platform, the idea itself dwindles. For example r/fatpeoplehate migrated to Voat but activity has been far far below compared to when it was on Reddit.
It also had been shown that 8chan had been created to discuss Gamergate, which was banned on 4chan, which, in turn, has been created to discuss anime, which was banned on Something Awful.
Reddit is also a big part of it but as long as Steve Huffman aka spez gets the sweet money from Thiel he is fine with having lots of blood on his hands. He probably is one of the godfathers of alt right now.
What is the blood of innocents worth when you can make money? Nothing.
Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion. But because of other communities' moderation, they likely become one of the bastions of the racists. So even if their ownership never had any interest in hate speech, their platform becomes a de facto mechanism for its spread.
As much problems as anonymity causes I sure don't think that some new Real World Identity driven Internet would be a good idea. But sites with next to no content moderation seem like a bad idea. Not that I can imagine a resolution, really.
~~
I imagine how frustrated I might feel if I didn't have some kind of daily work or creative task to keep me busy and fill me with purpose. If I felt depressed I might be willing to blame it on someone. If everything I read said that in fact there is someone to blame, I wonder: would I be able to see through that? Would I stand up and say 'no, that's wrong: those people aren't the source of our problems'? I like to think I would. But I've definitely caught myself (long after the fact) buying into BS groupthink/hivemind conspiracy hogwash.