The last 5 years made me as distrustful of the left as the 2010-2015 alt-right years made me distrustful of the right.
And like with the alt-right the media and culture moves at a glacial pace, taking years before even acknowledging the issue. I used to be exclusively scared of my friends falling for far right ideas from imageboards and I'm now feeling that same fear with my friends repeating the most illiberal irrational stuff straight from twitter.
Ideally, anything that advocates sectarianism a priori should automatically be suspect, if not rejected out of hand. Creating internal conflict was probably the first job of the first spy in human history, and today it's a lower-risk gambit than ever before. No matter what your nutty uncle on Facebook says, no matter how "traditional" or "woke" you think you are, you have infinitely more in common with a BLM protester than you do with anyone from Eastern Europe or China. We're Americans first, and someone who insists otherwise should be super sus.
Complication: there's so many bad faith communicators that it's increasingly hard to justify giving everyone an open channel. Thus we ignore some voices before they open their mouths, violating the above paragraph. I suppose you could rely on some meta to see if the individual voice has history of bad faith communications, make a sliding scale based on that. Somewhat humorously, the NL-generating so-called "AI" systems are more or less perfect machines for generating bad faith communications, and you can burn each ID with every message.
I wish I had a solution for this, but I don't, I don't even see a way out of it.
Perhaps platforms similar to Ground are trying to address this, so that consumers can see the history of the person who is communicating. But that won't help you on X/Twitter/Facebook/UnclePulltab/AuntPurplehair. Maybe the best advice for a literate citizenry is the age-old internet advice: "Don't read the comments". That's kinda funny given the venue I am writing in right now.
I'm not American or live in a western country. I wish I did.
I don't agree I have more in common with a BLM protesters than someone from China or Eastern Europe. That's probably true for most people on these samples but surely not all.
I despise the Chinese government. I despise most Eastern European governments, I don't know them all by heart. A lot of people under their governments do too.
I agree with your ideals, those should be the rule, but they aren't. It's been quite some time since Obama's "when they go low we go high".
I agree talking on the internet is mostly a mistake.
Whites deserve violent retribution for slavery discourse. Cultural appropriation. Denial of bad things done under socialist governments or those useful for the left. Race traitor discourse (if you're a racial minority but don't subscribe to radicalism). Discourse of whites being genetically inferior. Apology and support for racially motivated terrorism against white people. Virulent antisemitism.
Where are you getting any of this? This is the alt-rights idea of the left, I see essentially none of this in my hard left circles and when some idiot shows up spewing any of it they're ostracized quickly. Meanwhile, I keep close tabs on the mutterings of the right and this is word for word the things we're supposedly saying.
Yep, OP should point to a single prominent Democrat who says things like this. In the meantime, the right is electing a repugnant criminal who wants to pardon himself, become dictator, and enact retribution on his enemies.
Some random school board member says some dumb stuff: who really cares? There’s always been oddballs on the local level, but all my congressional “leftist” representatives seem like reasonable people. Meanwhile, we’re nearly 50-50 on the next president actually upending democracy in the US. If you prioritize anti-wokeness above that, you will soon wake up in a country you no longer recognize.
FWIW, I don’t like the rhetoric you cite, but I find that it ultimately has little impact on politics.
And what the hell even is this “virulent antisemitism”? Is this your way of framing Israel/Palestine? That is just insane. I guess Bernie is a virulent antisemite in your eyes as well?
I care because it's been increasingly impossible to say these "oddballs" are being extremely shitty people and should stop. The message they get and the message they have been getting is they are "agents of change". There has been a few terrorist events with this kind of radicalism (Audrey Hale being the worst case) but the left is still allergic to criticizing this. Just how bad do things need to get?
I agree the republican party is worse than democrats. I'm not American, I don't live in a first world country but I would vote for them. I think electing Trump was horrible.
I don't think Bernie is an antisemite, I think the people on the left who hate Bernie for having empathy for kidnapped, tortured Israelis are, of which there are many.
Gamergate and the alt right were fringe until Trump. The media and culture moved at a glacial pace before it started seeing them as a problem. Will we see the same thing happen on the left? A president that supports terrorism and violence against the "opressor" race and talks of guillotines? I think that's an improbable nightmare scenario but so was Trump at gamergate times.
Again you went from "this never happens" to "of course it sometimes happens, but it doesn't matter".
All Ivy League representatives in congress calling defending the eradication of Jews not hate speech?
No instance of antisemitism on the left at all?
This is why I'm suspicious of oddballs not mattering. They don't matter until they do and when they do they're correct and me and others are being insane.
This boundary pushing of violence and bigotry is exactly how we got Trump and I really wish there was only one group of stupid violent demogogues running around to deal with, not two.
Epik, the host in question, is run by Rob Monster, which is either a chosen name or evidence we are living in a poorly written simulation. Truthfully, I'm not sure there's a difference.
What does Monster mean in Dutch? It means the same, right?
Once, I worked with a guy whose surname was Den Beste. When I asked him about it, he told me that the Dutch didn't have surnames until the occupying French did a census that required each person to have a surname. He said that, to mock the occupiers, many of the Dutch chose their new surnames sarcastically, as did his ancestors, whose name means "the best." He told me "but that is nothing. Another Dutch name means something like 'little pieces of poop.'" This article lists a few more such: https://netherlandsbynumbers.com/2013/06/05/14-dutch-surname...
Not to discount your point. There's a whole world, indeed!
The Dutch word "monster" means "specimen" in English. This is actually of Latin origin, and plenty of English words come from the same latin root (monstrum) like "demonstrate".
Likely as not, though, the surname "Monster" just reflects a family origin in the Dutch town of Monster, near the coast southwest of The Hague.
So if we extrapolate from that, his ancestors when immigrating to America probably had to put a "last name" on the immigration form, maybe being from the Dutch town Monster or even from the now German city Münster. So maybe they put "van der Monster" as their last name = "from Monster". Which later became just "Monster".
Indeed that is what I understood to be one of the most common origins of surnames in the Western world generally. Given that, it was the intentional sarcasm in surname choice among some Dutch families in occupied Netherlands, circa 1811, that I found novel, humorous, and interesting.
The Wikipedia entry on the person in question makes it clear that his parents were born in the Netherlands and already had the Monster surname there. But since a town there has that name, I'm happy to assume that the family took the name from the town, as is very common in the West, rather than by an intentionally sarcastic choice.
> Epik.com has been for years the go-to domain registrar for websites that other companies refuse to do business with. Sites dedicated to white nationalism, QAnon conspiracy theories, and harassing transgender people were all welcomed by Epik.
As a foreigner, this confuses me. We are told the US is systemically racist and white supremacist, rife with white hetero-patriarchy etc.. but Wired claims white nationalist websites have trouble even finding a registrar to take their business?
Because it's neither. It's like wherever you are from -- there are some diehard racists, a lot of people who are vehemently not racist, but everyone else is just going with the flow.
The white nationalists are, by definition, ignorant AF. Also, it seems you don't know the difference between systemic racism (baked into institutions) and individual racism or lack thereof -- the individuals making decisions opt against the ignorant AF white nationalists when their racism is pointed out. Apparently there are only enough white nationalists who are not ignorant AF to make up a single registrar.
> you don't know the difference between systemic racism (baked into institutions) and individual racism
This does confuse me, yes. How can institutions or the system be systemically racist, yet strive to suppress white nationalism? Isn't that the definition of anti-racism?
"Systemic racism" is about the quiet, daily, "small" racisms that most people don't notice or pay any attention to.
As an example, consider the ban on affirmative action programs, while leaving in place things like legacy admissions. The latter isn't isn't explicitly racist, and yet it tends to benefit the people who come from families admitted at a time when they were explicitly racist.
That's just one of countless possibilities. Each one is, potentially, easily dismissed as unimportant. But there are a lot of things that, collectively, add up to serious problems for people who have been historically disadvantaged on the account of their race.
It's sometimes called "racism without racists", because it disadvantages some people even without conscious dislike of them. We started talking about anti-racism a decade ago or so, when the swastika-wearing white nationalists were excluded from practically all polite society, but that systemic racism was still causing a lot of problems. It was different from merely being not-racist, but seeking out the hidden causes of disproportionate effects.
Since then, just plain white nationalism has had a stronger resurgence. And a lot of people who consider themselves not-racist have a tendency to say, "Well, they've got their right to be racist as long as they're not being violent", ignoring the ways that threats are hard to prosecute but still have consequences. They get to consider themselves non-racist because at least they're not actively wearing white robes and using racist slurs.
A lot of people still don't want to do business with explicit racists, and they scream bloody murder about it, even though it's exactly the same kind of free-association that the racists are relying on that somebody will support them.
The effect is that we're dealing with both explicit racism and systemic racism at the same time. They're different and sometimes opposed, even though they also bolster each other.
> As an example, consider the ban on affirmative action programs, while leaving in place things like legacy admissions. The latter isn't isn't explicitly racist, and yet it tends to benefit the people who come from families admitted at a time when they were explicitly racist.
Now I'm even more confused. Legacy admissions would seemingly benefit whites the most (I guess it depends how many generations back you look), who are also the most under-represented group in the Ivy league [1]. Did you mis-speak, and meant to use legacy admissions as another example of anti-racism?
The current admissions to Ivy League schools were influenced by affirmative action policies, which boosted black numbers. Whites are not under-represented because of black students, but because of Asian students, who have a much stronger cultural push to academic achievement.
In the future, the number of black students will likely fall. Whites will still likely be under-represented because of over-representation of Asians, but that's a cultural matter. Whites do still benefit from legacy admissions; it's just not sufficient to overcome the cultural push.
I'll admit I'm suspicious that you couldn't figure it out for yourself. Surely my point was clear: a program that benefited blacks was canceled, while leaving in place one that benefits non-blacks. It's the conflict between the two that exemplifies the example of systemic racism.
The systemic racism in the public and private economic sectors of American society is of a subtler character than the individual racism promoted by the kinds of people who run explicitly pro-fascist websites. Unlike those people, most US companies and government agencies are deeply concerned with appearing to not be racist, because racism is very unpopular with most American consumers and voters.
Systematic racism manifests in more of a statistical manner. You might not recognize it because the parties involved can interact without much friction. But policies will adversely affect one group of people more than others. But the racism being described here is outright and overt.
Yes, it is. You seem to be conflating "literal NAZIs wearing swastikas can't register a website" with "black names are less likely to get an interview with the exact same resume".
Leftist radicals calling for violent retribution say that stuff largely unopposed by censoring. Weirdly enough I don't think Elon changed anything just opened the game for bigots.
It's not the same. Apart from twitter it's much easier to get far right content banned than far left.
The far right builds independent Websites because of censorship, otherwise normal social media would suffice. When LGBT used to be a bad word on the corporate world sites like Susan's Place did the same.
Far left places like leftypol are pretty abandoned.
The article described the content as "white nationalism, QAnon conspiracy theories, and harassing transgender people". I think it is appropriate to label that kind of content "far right".
That kind of content would be far-right. However Wired and others seem to include sites that questions anything about the current transgender movement as harassing transgender people.
The article does give details that the site is full of scam companies and other such, so it possibly does host QAnon sites and other unsavory sites.
I’ve just lost trust in objectiveness of Wired or even sites like Scientific American that’d I would’ve not considered being political and somewhat technical in previous years. I reckon it’s more fallout of the polarization of American politics. I’ve seen the same with folks on the “right” as well.
