the alt-right

my fellow liberal cucktards and white-genocide lesbians! the deplorables have risen, and what are we gonna do about it?

cf men's rights thread, that's racist thread, batshit cartoons thread, donald trump thread etc

fwiw https://www.rt.com/viral/361510-alt-right-cheat-sheet-racist/

feel free to use 'hitlers' and 'deplorables' interchangeably itt

"Hitlers" gives them the power they want. We don't want any of these people to start the Siege of Leningrad.

what can they really besiege though, it'll be shit like Green Room from here on out, unless they seize power of a whole country (ahem)

actually Green Room feels like the first film of the resistance to this shit

Ressentiment can tear a society apart. Absurd as these cuckmasters seem, I don't feel sanguine about the threat they pose.
Con

how are they alt though?

They have the courage to actually say what everyone's thinking, unlike what-used-to-be-mainstream PC cuckservatives?

They use new forms of dehumanizing slang -- not just old fashioned slurs -- which is pretty alt.

what gets me is - what is their culture? what is their art? what do they even like?

They're an alternative to US right wing consensus - instead of being pro free markets, pro Christian morality or pro strong defense they are just pro white nationalism. This obviously isn't /new/ but it is untraditional in the US and has (and continues?) to be a marginal movement. Their culture is on /b/ and maybe idk theredpill. It's memes, vidya, anime, gore pics, creepypasta, cruel lolz, cringe, and tons and tons of pr0n.

a marginal movement

Um, isn't their candidate the Republican nominee for President?

do they not like music, to paraphrase achewood

I mean, it does feel like the logical endpoint of 4chan, but warped to such a putridity of feeling that I fail to see how these creatures can function in anything approaching society

also, have Anonymous declared war on them yet, or is there overlap?

you're so warped by being a cucked sjw that you can't see that their vision of society is the right one, maaaaan

They have a music board you can check out. They like vaporwave. Re Trump he is their candidate but not exclusively idk it's hard to gauge.

i think there is some overlap

xp

there's an alt right sketch comedy show on Adult Swim now, Million Dollar Extreme, created by this guy:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ca5Sg3NUsAENTlG.png

their legitimation on adult swim is deeply unsurprising

their liking of vaporwave makes a weird sort of sense. they are the death eaters

i'd like to take this opportunity to big up my favourite alt-right dipshit davis aurini: ostentatious whisky drinker, skull enthusiast, publicly-funded kung-fu movie auteur, and three-time winner of the international skeleton from superted lookalike contest

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ix1Xr8QHpRw/maxresdefault.jpg

just look at his lil' face!

These guys are just adorable

I forgot to cf rolling fedora

i've been watching million dollar extreme. sometimes it is really really funny, and sometimes it is ideologically okay (like the sketch about our shitty drinking water) and then they just say something openly misogynistic or racist or the sketch is just brutally uncomfortable. idk i'd like to discuss it but i don't have much to say. it's clearly unique, and sam is clearly v smart + funny, and also i'm disappointed in adult swim for giving them a platform.

i don't think fedora is entirely linked. there may be associations/links between fedora/brony culture and the alt-right but generally speaking i think fedoras are more likely to show up in cringe threads than be worn by hardcore white supremacists.

where is the alt-right music board?

I forgot to cf rolling fedora

― imago, Thursday, October 6, 2016 10:18 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

xxp counterpoint:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t4AcWFogD60/maxresdefault.jpg

http://boards.4chan.org/mu/

nb that i don't think 4chan is 100% alt-right but i think broadly speaking a lot of the aesthetic comes from there and there's lots of crossover. i wouldn't consider st0rmfr4nt alt-right - that seems more traditionally racist to me.

some of these shitheads are throwing a pro-trump art festival in my borough, i read on the hardening thread.

I looked at that /mu/ for one minute and some poor schmuck started a thread about how Esperanza Spalding, a black female artist, is really good (which she is) - devoured in seconds

I don't think Million Dollar Extreme is really a part of this

sam for sure is and mde board on reddit certainly believes it is

MDE absolutely is

They're an alternative to US right wing consensus - instead of being pro free markets, pro Christian morality or pro strong defense they are just pro white nationalism. This obviously isn't /new/ but it is untraditional in the US and has (and continues?) to be a marginal movement.

i would just like to point out that i wrote about these guys 4 years ago

Milo isn't alt-right. He's an alt-right wannabe / fellow traveller.

Oh, I thought he was a quasi-leader. I'm probably on way the wrong page, then.

sam for sure is and mde board on reddit certainly believes it is

my impression of MDE is that it's an elaborate troll on anything and everything, I'm guessing the alt-right probably has claimed him but I dunno if Sam has any real political views besides "lol"

politics for various alt-righters probably differ but on those topics i'd guess the majority are pro-protectionism anti-immigration agnostic on Christian morality (and in many cases ideologically opposed to religious faith) isolationist or in some cases extreme hawkism (drop nukes on the middle east). and of course the central component is defending the race against #whitegenocide. also jew-hating.

frogbs you've seen this? https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-alt-right-has-its-own-comedy-tv-show-on-a-time-warner-ne

Wait hold on, Breitbart is core alt-right.

i think the key attribute marking the "alt" (a p fraught and dumb prefix imo) is determinism.

xp

I dunno if Sam has any real political views besides "lol"

― frogbs, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:54 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god knows if i can or want to find it again but there are forum posts out there by him that are the now-standard post-libertarian line, like: "i used to be apolitical and in favor of freedom, but now i see that america has been ruined since the civil rights movement and feminism, it needs to be purged" etc

Wait hold on, Breitbart is core alt-right.

― Andrew Farrell, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:57 AM (twenty-eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they are johnny come latelies

it's really not. it jumped on the alt-right bandwagon thru Milo but he started as just an observer and tho the alt-right will pretty much accept any celebrity legitimacy they can get, he remains a controversial figure in the movement (bc he's gay and jewish). he wrote this around the time breitbart began embracing the alt-right: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ - where you can see that he's interacting w/ them more as an anthropologist than a participant. xxp

didn't realise that Yiannopoulos had jewish heritage

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/203888/donald-trumps-little-boy

frogbs you've seen this? https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-alt-right-has-its-own-comedy-tv-show-on-a-time-warner-ne

― Mordy, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:56 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess I never really followed the persona behind it too closely. I read a lot of that stuff as a parody of the alt-right, though I suppose at this point, what's the difference

goole you always amaze/scare me with your knowledge of this stuff

Dark Enlightenment feeds into this, right?

i guess my knowledge of this stuff is just unsurprising :p

dark enlightenment seems v tenuously related i don't think alt-righters are reading yudowsky or less wrong

k3v: yeah i still don't know what to think of it all

weirdly i can trace how i found this shit back to ilx! sort of. to simon reynolds, to marxist anglo music bloggers like k-punk, to the weird end of critical theory -- some of those people 'switched sides' politically, drove what ended up being called the "dark enlightenment"

xp it's bigger now that it used to be, lots of factions and true scotsman stuff, but i think "DE" is def part of it

this is the first ive heard of dark enlightenment

i want to know more but i aint googling it

cybernazis

Does Dark Enlightenment = neo-Reactionaries, i.e. people who are 'conservatives' in the 18th century sense (oppose democracy and egalitarianism, want to return to monarchy and aristocracy and explicit patriarchy)?

Because if so, that's actually kind of cool (as long as they don't gain any real power).

to the weird end of critical theory -- some of those people 'switched sides' politically, drove what ended up being called the "dark enlightenment"

who are these people?

yup

like i said about determinism, the 'enlightenment' part i guess is their justifications are scientific, not solely (or blended with) tradition and religion

xp ogmor: key guy is nick land

it's just a couple of angry media studies lecturers trying to blow minds with their edgy racism

Do any of them go so far as to fully embrace feudalism or do they still want to somehow preserve capitalism and the market?

re DE/NrX people

xxp the Spiked crew are part of that side of things, right?

this is a good thing from moldbug that goes into the DE ideology:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

we discussed it a bit on the political philosophy thread maybe a year or so ago?

also these Slatestarcodex pieces are good:
(apparently the website is down but when it comes back up)

slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/

i feel like with a lot of the dark enlightenment stuff there are good critiques of contemporary liberal society but rather than follow them to a reasonable place of like participatory dissent they move into this insane territory of 'well if things aren't perfect today that means we should all become monarchists' which is pretty dumb. i also don't think it's v related to the alt-right i don't think your average white supremacist alt-right 4-chan do-it-for-the-lolz poster is thinking very deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of his ideas. like you might think that DE is giving intellectual cover for bigots but i don't think those bigots want or need that cover.

Goddamn, that Unqualified Reservations thing is long and I haven't got to an interesting point yet.

oh god *deep breath* yeah there are still some (how many?) throne and altar european right wingers out there. or weirdo catholic sedevecantist types. that all precedes and doesn't really relate to what we're talking about here, but their basic beliefs about the world look identical to me. because of the internet there's a ton of crossover now i guess. the energy of an election season has run a lot of it together too.

an uhh illustrative example (and god forgive me, as many whacko blog posts i may have read, i don't know all the details) is a dude name mike anissimov, who worked for a transhumanist/AI think tank, then had some kind of scheme to set up a settlement in idaho to reestablish feudal hierachy after the US collapses, i think? so you have the tech nerd economy and D&D fantasy royalist stuff tied together with white power and antisemitism

At what point does he stop making dumbass red-state/blue-state stereotypes and generalizations and get to DE ideology?

xp

it's like 8 or 9 articles. i like when he talks about colonialism and the third world and the meaning of liberation/nationalism etc. there are productive contradictions embedded in left-wing post-cold war ideologies (like third world nationalism v. globalization secularism) of course you don't need moldbug to tell you that but he imo makes some provocative points. xxp

um - end of first letter beginning of second iirc? he spends a lot of time making spurious conclusions about crime in victorian england which is a bummer that scott addresses in his anti-reactionary faq.

goole: Wow

oh god *deep breath* yeah there are still some (how many?) throne and altar european right wingers out there. or weirdo catholic sedevecantist types. that all precedes and doesn't really relate to what we're talking about here,

i think like current poland + russia are aspirational models for some of these white americans

been a while since i went through nick land / moldbug and may have this wrong but there seems to be a strain in deep techbro dark enlightenment where we literally rebuild god (as inhuman synthetic intelligence born of global capitalism itself) so we can kneel properly? (to god, but also to his deserving priests?)

i haven't heard anything like that - seems crazy (not like mainstream DE isn't)

I dunno if Sam has any real political views besides "lol"

have u noticed a pattern wrt this claim

That moldbug guy makes a pretty terrible argument.

could swear that's in nick land somewhere but maybe it's just my own cult-of-moloch fanfic xxp

been a while since i went through nick land / moldbug and may have this wrong but there seems to be a strain in deep techbro dark enlightenment where we literally rebuild god (as inhuman synthetic intelligence born of global capitalism itself) so we can kneel properly? (to god, but also to his deserving priests?)

― florence foster wallace (difficult listening hour), Thursday, October 6, 2016 10:53 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh i would read the shit out of a novel about this

it sounds close to the concept of this Dilbert cartoon from 1996:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQqnskzW8AAfFzo.jpg

It is a terrible article, in a terrible tone - intentionally rather than accidentally Donald Sutherland when he's just playing with you, before he turns steely.

weird soap opera detail: nick land is jeremy greenspan's (junior boys) brother in law

i am wrong in notable ways. from this thing about him by robin mackay:

Digital technology, according to Land, unveiled a side of numbers that subtracted them completely from the power-structures of meaning and signification that made language a prison-house for thought; it even removed numbers from the stratified realms of mathematics, into a pure, flat plane of immanent materiality inhabited only by ‘tics.’ Accelerating ‘in-silico’ Capital’s planetary experiment of ‘tacking’ human culture onto these tic-numbers so as to tear it apart, Land believed, would allow him to complete what deconstruction could only gesture at in its endless cycles of philosophical titillation: It would dismantle the power institutionalized in language and sense, and open up a reliable communication line with something unknown – a pure material dispersion not preprocessed by models derived from the past.

...

For Land, such theoretical propositions were also machines for excitation, devices to meld with and accelerate the planetary intensification that would finally allow the ‘body without organs’ to shed its human skin. If Philosophy thereby becomes a species of hype (or ‘hyperstition,’ according to the CCRU’s neologism) then are Land’s detractors (now, as then) right to say that his outlook is ultimately indistinguishable from a passive acceptance of a ‘neoconservative’ agenda – that his theoretical advocacy of the ‘acceleration’ of the capitalist process, in practice, simply endorses the maintenance of capitalist power structures rather than their dismantling (whether revolutionary or ameliorative)?

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

[...]

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level 2?

so the way i described the human hierarchy in such a world is tres old-world. humans and humanity are shed. in this piece land's potential "neoconservativism" afaict relies on this divine birth/radical deconstruction not happening -- or at least not happening yet? i might think that chasing such an apotheosis of capital is going to create a prison-world even if it's successful tho? idk?

(second quote block there -- "nothing human makes it out" etc -- is land not mackay)

yeah afaict land's thing is we (or 'intelligence') have to escape this planet, and we can't do that if democracy doesn't fall, because it makes people stupid and gives power to the wrong ones. basically the singularity and a return to 19th century heroic/intellectual/colonial values are by nature the same. or something

funny he was such a cheney-ist pro war kind of guy when bush was in office. which makes his turn away from neoconservatism and towards austrian economics, the old right and racism look pretty cynical after all that fell apart -- after obama, after the housing crash.

xp and if you wanna read land tie the capitalist-genetic singularity fetish thing in with just reams and reams of hot takes on trayvon martin and john darbyshire (+ with moldbug's aesthetic stroke of subbing in the evocative word Cathedral anyplace nixon would have said Establishment) here u go

hah i didn't know that website existed

Probably not a good idea to stare directly at the Moldbug

ilx policy is actually to ban anyone who talks about moldbug in order to prevent the possibility of bringing him into being

hey so goole/dlh --- since you guys seem to make the occasional foray onto these guys' home turf: do you ever get the sense that they're out there reading the equivalent lefty literature/writing? maybe this is just too much time on ilx, but i do get the sense that a lot of ppl here actually go out there and read the horrible primary sources of the right, whereas i've never really thought that the right does likewise

Probably some of them are reading left-accelerationist material so they can argue against it?

I don't get the impression that they're reading left wing media like counterpunch or jacobin but yes NYT WPost as emblematic of "liberalism" - they are opposed to mainstream liberalism not to far left radicalism which is only on their radar insofar as they conflate it w the mainstream.

well we are all totally immersed in the ridiculous lie that is the progressive worldview, the virus that ate america when jefferson's continent-of-monticellos didn't happen, so they would prob say that they are exposed to the equivalent just by going to school/talking to anyone. but no they prob don't read jacobin or whatever? xp hah yeah what mordy said.

This is a little off topic but I've noticed a big talking point on the right is that BLM has endorsed Hillary. They have trouble distinguishing between moderate liberalism and further left groups and get confused when you explain that such orgs are freq opposed to Dem "neoliberalism" and will likely vote 3rd party.

(otoh land as a philosophy prof in the 90s was presumably better-acquainted w the state-of-the-art than i am xp)

the jewish right-wing has a similar issue. like they keep conflating the anti-israel flag burners outside the DNC with the DNC itself - missing the point that they were outside the convention hall bc they are not a part of the Dem coalition.

gotcha, that makes sense

mostly curious because it seems like lefties here (myself included) have a certain grotesque fascination with the alt-right (hence this thread), and i've never seen the equivalent (unless it's someone who abandoned the radical left and made an about face)

They have trouble distinguishing between moderate liberalism and further left groups

yeah this as you say is a problem all over the right -- from now-squishy old-guard stuff like NRO to hardcore trump fans/demon-summoners. feels weird to keep mentioning nixon as he wasn't a "political philosopher" or anything but he more than anyone else is who i think of when i read this stuff. the perception that everyone to your left, from the wapo to mao, is smooshed into a big malevolent world-dominating ball of wrongness and perversity.

idk at least in a social media sense there's some contact between the irony rude left and the bizarro right, at least the more self-aware people in it (not clowns like milo or the hapless pickup guys).

anti-hillary and anti-centrist writers, vice's michael tracey as an example, get a lot of traction over there. that said i'm not certain what mtracey's politics are...

Isn't Glenn Beck obsessed with Marxism and Fabian socialism? He had the leader of a minor socialist third party on his show once.

He preferred him to Obama because at least he was honest about his socialism.

Holy shit, the Dave Aurini dude wrote a book! It is naturally set in post-apoc Ontario

http://www.castaliahouse.com/review-as-i-walk-these-broken-roads-by-d-m-j-aurini/

And this is a stolen joke, but somebody elsewhere pointed out that post-apoc = SKULLZ

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNn-M8TUAAAPg3U.png

https://mobile.twitter.com/shoe0nhead/status/637820321526095872

idk at least in a social media sense there's some contact between the irony rude left and the bizarro right, at least the more self-aware people in it

this is interesting; my understanding of modern vanguard politics is prob totally crippled by not being on twitter tbh. are anti-neoliberal leftists sometimes considered as fellow critics of the cathedral? or like of parts of it? or

when useful i've even seen st0rmfr4nt posters quote the intercept approvingly

goole doing quality work here as usual

cf https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=theintercept.com+stormfront.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#safe=off&q=theintercept+site:stormfront.org (would link to sf direct but idk if this thread is deindexed yet?)

gonna take yr word for it

it's not a difficult thing to google

a) this is not the best conclusion to draw imo
b) check those likes

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/783994097912741888

a couple rouge billionaires

thought he was orange

Split the diff, call him a sickly salmon hue?

gotcha, that makes sense

mostly curious because it seems like lefties here (myself included) have a certain grotesque fascination with the alt-right (hence this thread), and i've never seen the equivalent (unless it's someone who abandoned the radical left and made an about face)

― jason waterfalls (gbx), Thursday, October 6, 2016 12:44 PM (thirty-six minutes ago)

might be a bit biased but i tend to think people on the left are a bit more intellectually curious than those on the far right

plus we're cucks

i tried to read that moldbug DE blogpost and it was utterly insane and incomprehensible. i'm an ex-catholic, and he started out making his case by making up completely nonsense gibberish about catholicism. ok, maybe it's dated badly, the "pope" he's talking about is benedict and progressives are MUCH more favorably disposed towards francis than they were towards benedict, but even if i mentally displace francis as "pope" in my head with benedict, it's nonsense. he's trying to convince me that he understands progressivism by failing to understand the catholic church.

my sense is that many in the alt-right - and not exclusively the alt-right - are highly creative lunatics. you know, when i was growing up the lunatics were, well, pretty boring people. they would talk to you about how rock and roll was the devil's music, about fluoridation, about communism.

and the alt-right are not like this in that they can come up with a new bizarre thought pattern every five minutes. this is REWARDED. this is CREATIVITY. reminds me of henry ford and his anti-semitism. a guy like oculus rift guy, he gets rich for "thinking outside the box", and he has no incentive to ever stop doing it.

and i can relate to them because, ok, i say some pretty crazy shit, though i've learned to stop saying most of it on the internet. i think some pretty crazy shit. how do you argue with me when i'm saying crazy shit like that? you can't. it's a weird kind of reactionary ideology in that it's post-rational. once you start believing in the singularity or the matrix or whatever, your little brain can come up with all kinds of fevered delusions, and "talking sense" into them is not an option.

we're afraid of them, they're afraid of women and non-whites

they're also afraid of not being the best ones

I don't think I've come across this. Good to know before I accidentally hate-punctuated something, although they really shouldn't be allowed to get away with taking punctuation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses

"For non-antisemitic punctuation marks, see bracket."

who uses triple parentheses in the course of normal punctuation?

Lisp programmers?

SSC website appears to be back up in case anyone wants to check out the links above

maybe this is just too much time on ilx, but i do get the sense that a lot of ppl here actually go out there and read the horrible primary sources of the right, whereas i've never really thought that the right does likewise

tumblrinaction

SSC's summary of NRx turns out to be more readable than the Moldbug original.

i think it's important to keep in mind that the relationship between reactionary philosophy and the alt-right is super tenuous and i'm more inclined to say that they share a similar nouveau right-wing flavor bc they're both emerging in this 21st century western milieu but i don't think 4channers are reading these guys and getting really turned onto neo-reactionarism. if anything i think probably the same things animating the 4chan right-wingers are animating ppl like moldbug but they're smart enough to come up with an intellectual veneer to justify it to themselves. it's not comparable to - for eg in another 'hip' right-wing ideology - libertarians who read ayn rand and that was formative. red pillism is kind of DE lite in that they both are awakening you to the cultural tyranny of liberal mainstream institutions but honestly you don't need either to get there - hating these orgs was the formative bit, not the metaphor used to explain why.

also kinda interesting phenomenon is the alt-left. not as it's generally used to - i think - mean the 'regressive left' (or if you google 'alt left' the entire Democratic party bc of the aforementioned ideological compression by the right), but leftists like platypus who probably share a lot of the same values or inclinations of people like moldbug in terms of preserving western culture but where mb sees the enlightenment as the source of corruption they see it as the thing worth protecting against the hordes of anti-enlightenment non-westerners. they both have a lot of the same enemies - post-colonialists, islamists and PC liberals. ultimately you are trying to justify why the west must resist alternative cultural memes, and more practically why you need to oppress 'fifth-columnists' or limit immigration.

highly creative lunatics

they seem to me like people who were way into d&d in the 80s and matured with the intellectual/social fashions (kind of the way, elsewhere on the social landscape, food became a thing, music stopped being cool, ppl are enthusiastic to the point of value-identification about 'netflixing' i.e. watching tv, grown adults wearing cartoon costumes in public is a thing, etc.) into trying their hand at running ~a far more real kind of campaign~

like, being juiced by the phenomenon of the internet into the belief that social reality is much more alterable than a politico/philosopher-king of yore would have ever wished, they're frenzied into treating the socioeconomic affairs of common life as if they were a matter of creating character sheets and designing maps of dragons' lairs, doing all that 'world-engineering' work via a bizzaro-world version of enlightenment-era 'rational debate', republic of letters, etc.

where mb sees the enlightenment as the source of corruption they see it as the thing worth protecting against the hordes of anti-enlightenment non-westerners

Isn't this a more mainstream right-wing view, though? I thought this is basically Yiannopoulos's position.

no mention of gamer gate yet? this was a core moment for the alt-right imo..

I remember reading all the coverage when it started and thought to myself 'if the GOP is smart they would be using this as a route to get to young people'.

at the very least paying lip service to it i think you're right xp

gamergate is also when milo went from fringe breitbart writer to cult of personality

he turned into "jared leto getting into character for the joker" so gradually we hardly even noticed

was hardly alone in this but the moment gamergate started i thought "oh god this is it" -- white male nerd culture had been toxic and resentful for ages by then, just a big lock awaiting a big fascist key

He fears Islam because it is homophobic, anti-freedom, etc.
xps

specifically remember going to a bar in 2007ish w some old high school lan party friends and thinking what is happening to these people

(nb #notalllanpartyfriends and even some of those specific people really pulled out of it with time)

I mean, "they hate our freedoms" is basically expressing this idea, I would think:

where mb sees the enlightenment as the source of corruption they see it as the thing worth protecting against the hordes of anti-enlightenment non-westerners

Hard to see what is "alt" or "left" (except maybe in the 18th century sense) about this.

He fears Islam because it is homophobic, anti-freedom, etc.

i think the trouble w/ the right-wing and the enlightenment is that they're prepared to jettison all kinds of essential elements of it to 'save it.'

sorry re alt left i left out some important bits - obv if that alone constituted their political identity they would just be conservatives but they are marxists

Ah, I get you. So they are, um, nationalist socialists?

No I wouldn't say so. They're in a clear real Marxist tradition in their writing and there isn't an obvious nationalist or racial component as much as a general pro West one. Also pretty sure they're anti fascist and probably more socially liberal at least when it comes to ppl we shouldn't lock out of the gates

i think it's important to keep in mind that the relationship between reactionary philosophy and the alt-right is super tenuous and i'm more inclined to say that they share a similar nouveau right-wing flavor bc they're both emerging in this 21st century western milieu but i don't think 4channers are reading these guys and getting really turned onto neo-reactionarism. if anything i think probably the same things animating the 4chan right-wingers are animating ppl like moldbug but they're smart enough to come up with an intellectual veneer to justify it to themselves.

I think this is broadly right but I'd say thin or tenuous rather than super-tenuous - I get the sense there's a chain of reddits mediating between them - also it's early, like you can see Moldbug/Land hardening into Canon as alt-right becomes an accepted position. But yeah, I don't think they're causal. 'same things animating' is true I think - & probably why the aesthetics all fit together if you squint- horror seems like a primary genre for this stuff, above all Lovecraft.

Land's recent fiction seems to be in that vein, w/ a dash of technothriller, but fucked if I'm going to read it.

what gets me is - what is their culture? what is their art? what do they even like?

― imago, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:49 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've encountered a lot of people like this on the internet, and not only recently - it's the debating style honed on 4chan of course, and I once read a very interesting article about the internal logic behind it, but can't seem to find it now.

Anyway, whenever I've asked "so what do you actually like then?" the response has always been something along the lines of "ha, I'm not fooling for that one, whatever I say you'll just say it's shit" - which is wrong (I am actually interested and wouldn't just say it was shit. of course.) but also very telling about their fear of being seen to sincerely love something.

which is weird for me because i feel like peak sarcasm was, like, three years ago. maybe with them it never stopped.

also kinda interesting phenomenon is the alt-left. not as it's generally used to - i think - mean the 'regressive left' (or if you google 'alt left' the entire Democratic party bc of the aforementioned ideological compression by the right), but leftists like platypus who probably share a lot of the same values or inclinations of people like moldbug in terms of preserving western culture but where mb sees the enlightenment as the source of corruption they see it as the thing worth protecting against the hordes of anti-enlightenment non-westerners. they both have a lot of the same enemies - post-colonialists, islamists and PC liberals. ultimately you are trying to justify why the west must resist alternative cultural memes, and more practically why you need to oppress 'fifth-columnists' or limit immigration.

― Mordy, Thursday, October 6, 2016 5:00 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'll admit i'm not familiar at all with 'platypus society' -- a quick google shows it's some kind of marxist reading group? -- but the rest of these terms like 'alt-left' and 'regressive left' are so recent and fraught and borne of social media conflicts, that, idk man you lost me

"alt-left": a non-conservative who doesn't like hillary clinton and isn't above a little twitter trolling
"regressive left": what you say when you realize calling someone an SJW makes you sound like a dipshit

i'll look into platypus tho. is it some kind of laschian class/econ left + social right kind of thing?

i said this above but didn't really elaborate on it: the tension between enlightenment and hierarchy is p easy to square if you share their determinism -- this is where all that bell curve and (code phrase) "human biodiversity" shit comes in, ie only people who are by their "nature" intelligent and industrious are capable of bearing or enjoying liberty. everyone else gets the whip.

weirdly i can trace how i found this shit back to ilx! sort of. to simon reynolds, to marxist anglo music bloggers like k-punk, to the weird end of critical theory

holy shit i had no idea until right now that one of old c.c.r.u. dudes was a major alt-right figurehead.

one minute you're reading kodwo eshun, the next you're lamenting that william wilberforce wasn't hanged for treason

i'll look into platypus tho. is it some kind of laschian class/econ left + social right kind of thing?

social right in effect but i do think there's a meaningful difference between 'cultural memes' and 'human biodiversity' even tho i realize most ppl feel the former is just a more acceptable wrapper for the same stuff the latter is doing

Alt-right now, baby, it's the alt-right now

Can we label the pricks at Spiked!/LM the alt-left? Because they are still very much around, and use many of the same tactics as the alt-right.

Spiked are left-wing now?

the alt-left is a pretty big movement though - in essence (imo) they're lefties (usually full communists) who hate safe spaces and *hate* gender politics and really don't have time for identity politics of any kind except class. think this has been covered upthread though

Isn't that just the orthodox Marxist left tho

Like paleo-Left

i guess, but willing to believe there's a significant wing of them that loves the internet and all it can be used for

read that as "the pricks of Spiked!/ILM". I don't think that anyone outside of that group really thinks of the Furedists as being part of the left anymore, and even when Brendan O'Neill describes himself as a marxist it seems to mainly be for trolling purposes or nostalgia for youthful radicalism afaict?

weird thing about them suposedly being marxists is that the Spiked online people generally have little or nothing to say about economics from what I've seen, it's all culture wars stuff

Their economic take is supposedly "support extreme version of free market -> encourage hyperinflation -> capitalism collapses -> le socialist revolution", but they're as keen to talk about it as Scientologists are to chat about Xenu, so who knows.

just looked at Spiked for the first time in ages to check if their "ppl who are offended by Trump's 'grab them by the pussy' comments are reactionary misanthropic prudes" thinkpiece has gone live yet, but there seems to be some unaccountable delay.

holy shit i had no idea until right now that one of old c.c.r.u. dudes was a major alt-right figurehead.

― a basset hound (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Friday, October 7, 2016 7:25 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Who does this allude to?

Nick Land, presumably?

Oh I see, gotcha

SSC's summary of NRx turns out to be more readable than the Moldbug original.

The way he presents it, the argument seems riddled with holes, though, even the critique of progressive hegemony part (although I acknowledge that he's not an actual NRx guy himself). The Noam Chomsky example is odd since (unlike e.g. Milton Friedman or Henry Kissinger) Chomsky did not get a professorship or 'get rich' because of his social/political commentary (which is essentially done in his free time) but for his work in linguistics. His influence on actual governments in the world is probably negligible compared to the other two examples, who are not progressives, or are at the least not as progressive. Even Philippe Rushton enjoyed a successful academic career arguing explicitly racist views in the actual academic work he was paid to do. And if we assume that Chomsky is indulged because he says "we need to be more liberal/progressive/democratic", reinforcing the progressive tendencies of post-Enlightenment Western society, surely someone in the Stalinist USSR who published the equivalent, i.e. articles saying "Stalin isn't a real Communist! We need to be much more truly Communist" would not have been indulged. This is more or less what the Plastic People of the Universe did in 70s Czechoslovakia and they were imprisoned and censored. #toomuchtimeonmyhands

Bot for the lolz:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/7/13202794/arguetron-twitter-bot-alt-right-internet-bigots-4chan-sarah-nyberg

I watched some MDE and apart from a bit of liberal baiting, theres nothing obv right wing about it. kind of going for that dark sinister surrealism thats adult swim's stock in trade but MDE isnt all that funny

maybe you didn't watch enough if you didn't notice anything right wing about it

yeah maybe. its godawful either way

Bot for the lolz:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/7/13202794/arguetron-twitter-bot-alt-right-internet-bigots-4chan-sarah-nyberg

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, October 8, 2016 2:50 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lololol @ "dreamcast was the best console"

A Facebook friend I met backpacking around a decade ago. He seemed moreorless alright at the time. This is his (cropped) current profile picture. Should I unfriend or do I wait around for insights into the deplorables?

http://i.imgur.com/2t6vZ5I.jpg

That facial hair is unacceptable on its own.

you get off facebook forever imo

I've heard that the alt-right is increasingly turning against Milo for being too Jewish.

I've got a theory that they are actually part of the main audience for cuckold porn, with the racism, the staggering insecurity about their masculinity, women as either cheating ice queen megabitches or vulnerable property to be degraded.

http://www.inquisitr.com/3572882/milo-yiannopoulos-buying-4chan-alt-right-superstar-plans-to-make-offer-that-could-save-image-sharing-board-from-closing-down/

surely if 4chan folds it will be because of the will of free markets?

Unnamed "wealthy financier" = Martin Shkreli? 4chan dream team

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/09/call-me-a-racist-but-dont-say-im-a-buddhist-meet-the-alt-right

why are the guardian always telling me to meet people

v intolerant of u to not want some alt-right pals

i have some philosophy pals who are in regular contact with nick land, not about his lovely 'hyperracism' stuff but it's nevertheless an odd and worrying thing when reasonable and nice people still think he's an acceptable person to be engaging with and promoting

I've got a theory that they are actually part of the main audience for cuckold porn, with the racism, the staggering insecurity about their masculinity, women as either cheating ice queen megabitches or vulnerable property to be degraded.

I just assumed this was the case. I need a US map with overlay of cuckold porn popularity stat.

Cuckold not featured but it's amazing that the most popular are either incest, cartoons or not involving men.

http://cdn1b.static.pornhub.phncdn.com/insights-static//wp-content/uploads/2016/02/pornhub-insights-us-top-search-terms-map.png

why are the guardian always telling me to meet people

― Har-@-Iago (wins), Sunday, 9 October 2016 12:42 (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They're worried about you, are you eating right

Xp that is a srsly boring map tbh I mean lesbian porn, rly, entrylev

I wonder if Trump has inspired greater interest in incest porn, or if the American taste for incest porn explains Trump. Questions.

Maybe to generalize it more, the American ethic of power exploitation wearing the veneer of family and love. America as a country, the mother/father, exploiting its own sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, offering a hand that says love, but wants something else. /trenchant

>I've heard that the alt-right is increasingly turning against Milo for being too Jewish.

The alt right never totally accepted Milo, it's the other way around. He's piggybacking on it. The right is gaining countercultural currency (the left = the new soccermoms) and Milo sees a market in that.

But at the end of the day he's principally a cultural libertarian. His politics are really just garden-variety "right on maaaan" level stuff, except unlike most libs he's not a hypocrite and takes it to its logical conclusion and rejects extreme conservative ideologies like Islam (as Islam works in execution anywhere it gains a foothold).

But he's a liberal. The alt-right is at core NOT liberal. Like any loud new movement the alt-right's message is foggy but at its core there's this rejection modernity and egalitarianism that's radical and heretical to contemporary culture way beyond Milo's most "offensive" statements. Milo doesn't wanna go back to pre-Enlightenment thinking, a big chunk of the alt-right does. They'll use each other while it's convenient but one of these days they'll see each other for what they really are, bitter enemies.

>I've got a theory that they are actually part of the main audience for cuckold porn, with the racism, the staggering insecurity about their masculinity, women as either cheating ice queen megabitches or vulnerable property to be degraded.

I think it's more benign than that. What we're seeing is the first generation of men to try to reclaim masculinity--years ago, DENYING masculinity was an act of rebellion, now it's the other way around--but it's an alien thing to these sheltered young men raised by single parents and they've kinda got sea legs. So they overcompensate, fake it until they make it. The more nauseating/cringey elements of the culture, like the whole MRA/redpill world, are a symptom of that.

http://inthesetimes.com/images/BreitbartAltRight.jpg

i found that image on in these times but apparently it comes from breitbart. they've been basically "at war" with the GOP for a while so people shouldn't have been surprised at trump's actions today.

Sry punksishippies masculinity is poison and needs to be demolished.

The Intellectuals
These, according to Breitbart, are what separates the alt-right “above all else” from “from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared)”: They “are a much smarter group of people … They’re dangerously bright.”

First noted among these geniuses is Richard Spencer, whose AlternativeRight.com website is described as hosting “an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” The hategroup-tracking Southern Poverty Law Center describes him as “one of the country’s most successful young white nationalist leaders,” who’s prone to saying things like, “Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans.” He rejects the word “racist” because it’s “pejorative,” but “the notion that these people can be equal is not a scientific way of looking at it.”

holy shit

yup, old image--the republicans were looking for a chance to disavow Trump and the pussygrab tape was as good of an excuse as any.

Forgot to add this to earlier ramblings:
The long and short of it is: the majority of them are just white guys who, in the absence of any socially acceptable way to do the normal teenage thing and dip their toes into self-empowerment (cuz they’re ~fucking white males~ obvs), have latched onto the first one to gain a little bit of traction. I mean it's so fucking inevitable, it blows my mind anyone is surprised. Like most people who play around with edgy ideas early in life, the bulk of them will retain anything healthy they get out of it, discard the rest, grow up and come out more mature (and the small percentage that doesn't will turn into the male equivalent of cat ladies). They'll grow up, maybe less left-leaning than some of you would like, but oh well, the pendulum is swinging back.

no one should be allowed on the internet until the age of 21

like, it's bad that these maladjusted adolescents, experiencing romantic frustrations for the first time etc, can so easily get swept up in the redpill world. there has always been misogyny around -- it's always been a thing teen white males would sometimes indulge in, as a phase -- but this ideological misogyny is like, weaponized and it scares me. i'm scared of a lot of things though.

(cuz they’re ~fucking white males~ obvs)

Are you posting from the dystopian feminazi future? What's the coffee like?

didn't realise punksishippies is tyler durden, it makes a lot more sense now

just white guys who, in the absence of any socially acceptable way to do the normal teenage thing and dip their toes into self-empowerment (cuz they’re ~fucking white males~ obvs),

I don't get it, what is it about being a white male that means they can't do the 'normal teenage thing'? Like they can't take drugs because of fussy parents or something?

I am not going to claim any understanding of how to operate in the contemporary world.

But the privileged straight white males in my social circle? Myself included? We got WAY more action by performing SNAGness (wearing flowery shirts, reading Sylvia Plath, listening to the Smiths, giving backrubs) than we would have through machismo.

Is that route no longer open to young men? Or have they considered and rejected it?

Hey, just a heads up. Punksishippies has in a few short months defended Trump from being a racist, along with defences of Varg Vikernes and now Milo, and has complained that nazi music is too difficult to buy. I don't think anyone needs to take him particularly seriously.

no one should be allowed on the internet until the age of 21

Says someone I assumed was 16.

hey punkishippies what's your take on the whole #cancelbella situation

this seems like a valuable moment to interview / chat w/ someone who is clearly sympathetic to the movement if not a member themselves it would suck if ilx did its whole burn the witch thing esp since the poster is being quite polite and laying out their perspective

but yes i'd also like to hear his take on #cancelbella

yes you guys are carrying out important anthropology right now

let's not make fun of the guy who blames the alt-right on contemporary society not allowing white males to live!

u can do what you want but he's being polite so why not just ask him questions + not be rude. we all know that alt-right + sympathizers are probably drek of the earth no one needs to convince anyone of that here and he's not a beloved poster so you don't need to convince him to think correctly. just enjoy the ride.

i'd like to know if all alt-right true believers look like nerds in fedoras irl (like that in-and-out pic suggests) bc that seems like a pretty depressing self-clowning version of masculinity and doesn't have any of the tropes of masculinity you'd think they'd want to revive like athleticism or manual labor or casanovaness etc. it's like they've reinvented the male and he's a 14yo pimply gamer who looks at porn on 4chan.

otm, both posts

this seems like a valuable moment to interview / chat w/ someone who is clearly sympathetic to the movement if not a member themselves it would suck if ilx did its whole burn the witch thing esp since the poster is being quite polite and laying out their perspective

― Mordy

be my guest, but personally i don't feel like alt-righters have exactly been shrinking violets when it comes to expressing themselves. god knows i've tried in the past but i just don't have a lot of skill in talking to ascians.

I don't get why some of these guys are so down on exhibitionist Twitch (a game playing streaming service where you see the player on camera) girls when the guys are so into fanservice in animation, comics and games? Is it the whole "fake geek girl" thing they had with cosplayers?

doesn't have any of the tropes of masculinity you'd think they'd want to revive like athleticism or manual labor or casanovaness etc.

― Mordy, Wednesday, 12 October 2016 17:51

That would require quite a bit more effort.

i didn't know they were. that's weird. here's another alt-right trope i don't get - when they complain that SJW's are ruining television + video games. television and video games are afaict the best they've ever been in my lifetime so how can anyone claim w/ a straight face that they're being ruined? like even if your own metric was ideological and not gameplay related there are so many indie games atm that there are probably more alt-right friendly games than ever before in history. xp

same reason as a section of "music fans" seem to get more worked up about the existence of stuff they don't like than stuff they do?

except unlike most libs he's not a hypocrite and takes it to its logical conclusion

They'll use each other while it's convenient but one of these days they'll see each other for what they really are, bitter enemies.

― punksishippies, Wednesday, 12 October 2016 03:55

I think you might be right about that last part. I could see Milo regretting all his bigging up the alt-right.
But I don't think he's that liberal. He's said that he wants gays to stay outsiders (just not to the extent of the middle east).
I think he's dishonest so it wouldn't surprise me if he's been a hypocrite. He completely changed his tune on gamers and deleted previous tweets when he realised he could use gamergate.

i didn't know they were. that's weird. here's another alt-right trope i don't get - when they complain that SJW's are ruining television + video games.
― Mordy, Wednesday, October 12, 2016 12:02 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe it's because they got older and video games aren't as fun for them anymore and they want to continue being man children

I thought this run down of some of Yiannopoulos' pre-gamergate exploits was interesting

https://maxdunbar.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/milo-yiannopoulous-and-the-kernel/

television and video games are afaict the best they've ever been in my lifetime so how can anyone claim w/ a straight face that they're being ruined?

Because GIRLS are playing them too now. Duh.

"Thanks for ruining shell art!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA

I think it's a good thing for games to be for everyone but when people were complaining about Wii and Nintendo DS ruining everything, there was a small part of me saying "PlayStation made games lamestream, if you're not going to play King Of Fighters, Metal Slug, Secret Of Mana and Castlevania with us you can get the fuck out. Take Call Of Duty, Tombraider, Grand Theft Auto and sports series games and shove them up your ass when you're leaving".
But the whole core vs mainstream/casual arguments never really held up to scrutiny.

lmao @ this turning into a video game thread, of course

I always picture a lot of alt-right guys as a bit jocky. Have the jocks and right wing geeks joined forces?

watched a prescient daria ep last night where jane was dating a "retro" guy who dressed in meticulously accurate '40s wear (inc fedora) and had a bunch of friends who did the same, and daria didn't like the guy because he never shut up about how much more elegant and classy the postwar era was than the filthy and debased present (jane pretended not to like sick sad world for him -- v sad), and when on a double date (retro guy driving) daria finally dropped the "what about segregation" bomb the guy blew up about how she should just wait in the car for "the p.c. police" and went out to do the lindy hop w his weird closet white nationalist 4chan friends, and daria said to her date "i wish the p.c. police WERE here. i bet THEY'D give us a ride." quality lol imo

xp feel like it's specifically not jocks who are probably right-wing in more conventional ways i'm guessing? it seems more like an internet phenomenon

are jocks even a thing any more?

I'm not American but is "jock" only an insult? Can a really nice guy be described as one?

I don't know about jocks, but meatheads are still a thing.

jock is a real high school kinda thing. i think people use "jock" as a way to describe athlete asshole dudes from high school or maybe college. most of them, politically, seem relatively quaint and innocent in their conservatism. based on my rural IL upbringing, at least. the alt-right is a lot different. i don't think jocks are nearly as stunted emotionally as a lot of the alt-right dudes.

w/ the caveat that my entire knowledge of american high schools comes from television + film my impression is that jocks are a caste of athletic male students, particularly in team sports, who have high class status and are v popular. i'm guessing like there are ranks there and being QB is better than being an OL. i think jocks can be nice or jerks.

i love high school movies but they all seem to be taking place on an entirely different planet. v much liked my handful of football-team friends in high school and they did not seem to enjoy any awesome status. girls maybe tended to prefer them to my computer lab friends but this seemed neither mysterious nor unjust. subsequent political developments have not complicated this view.

the internet proved nerds are worse than jocks when given a chance

^^^^^

Yes and, a key 80s nerd fantasy was that in later life, you would be like a jillionaire running a company or whatever, and you'd have the power to, like, fire the dumb jocks who bullied you.

And you'd finally get the cheerleader.

Looked up "jock" for definition and gay porn and gay dating sites was the main result. Also insulting definitions of the stereotype but I've definitely heard people being called a "nice jock". Like Kevin in Daria I guess.

I despise geek/nerd culture but I really don't think there is a trend of them being nasty in the majority. Most of them are okay.

i dunno man i'm pretty sure the majority of super-villains are nerds so

I was going to say something about how teen movie stereotypes can't be mapped onto real-world politics but then realised that the handful of male Trump supporters on my FB friends list are all hyper-athletic gym-dwellers. (One went to uni in the US to play hockey.) So hm.

jock in my neck of the woods meant someone athletic who is not too bright, overly stereotypically masculine, rough/aggressive/boorish/loutish, insensitive, and loud. they definitely existed in my schools. there were always one or two who were the more sensible ones, though

getting your info from high school movies is probably not the best idea, especially if they're hollywood movies. they are caricatures of real people and cliques appear much more divided. characters are one-sided, simplistic and extremist for the most part, because people want to be entertained and love a "good story"

i rarely if ever saw jocks bullying nerds at my schools. nerds were getting picked on by morons who were not jocks. the jock mantra was "pick on someone your own size." the only thing i remember clearly is once a white dude, who was bigger than average but not athletic/jock big, and who had mostly popular jock friends (a few of them dressed like cowboys) pushed a black-looking mexican music nerd, who had a smaller frame, out of his way and told him he would tie him up to the back of his truck and take him for a spin. but white dude carried a cowboy complex and dressed as one a lot. clearly motivated by white cowboy's racism more than anything else, though. he didn't bother the real nerds

also nerds may do bad things on the internet, but it's because it's easier and seemingly more "anonymous." in real life, nerds do bad things by passively resisting any action and just smirking, but i've never seen them physically do something harmful. i'm talking math and science nerds here, though, not weirdo semi-antisocial ilx pop culture nerds

I was going to say something about how teen movie stereotypes can't be mapped onto real-world politics but then realised that the handful of male Trump supporters on my FB friends list are all hyper-athletic gym-dwellers. (One went to uni in the US to play hockey.) So hm.

Then, I might only know that these guys are Trump supporters because they post about it loudly and aggressively. I could have quieter non-jock Trump-loving FB friends. (Actually, I'm pretty sure one guy is, who was a geek in middle school and teaches English in Taiwan.)

What are we calling geeks who play loads of sport btw

depends what you're calling a geek. someone who is obsessed with a particular thing/hobbie?

What are we calling geeks who play loads of sport btw

― imago

british

(Actually, I'm pretty sure one guy is, who was a geek in middle school and teaches English in Taiwan.)
― Spiritual Hat Minimalism (Sund4r), Wednesday, October 12, 2016 2:33 PM (five seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I taught abroad and this is definitely an archetype of a certain group of expats

i rarely if ever saw jocks bullying nerds at my schools. nerds were getting picked on by morons who were not jocks.

Bears reposting

academic nerds who play loads of sport go to stanford, iirc

geeks (in the obsessive hobbyist sense) who play loads of sport end up on ultimate frisbee teams

never

they just sound like sport nerds to me. i know a couple people who geek out over sports who are harmless and have suppressed their inner jock inclinations, because they can't get away with it in the real world. but they tend to be passive aggressive to non-jocks

'sport nerds' is an unfamiliar concept to me

To me too. The only thing that brings to mind is maybe people who don't actually play but obsessively study hockey statistics. Not sure anyone calls them "sports nerds' though.

http://www.theonion.com/article/walking-sports-database-scorns-walking-sci-fi-data-1442

that's true

i guess what i'm getting at is people who play lots of sports as a hobby are probably not good at anything so they just like the idea of sport and talking about it on a theoretical level, while pretending that they know about it from practising it, but surely if you play lots of sports, you probably haven't had time to study a single one deeply enough

I can never stay awake through sports OR most sci-fi. I am obv a failure at relating to my fellow man.

there's totally sports nerds in high school, like dudes who ended up as stat keeper or managers etc, also there's literally a whole industry of analytics built around sports nerds

A friend posted this the other day, it was put up at a university in my home town where he works:
http://i.imgur.com/kFcxtEo.jpg

1. This is at a heavily engineering school in the middle of nowhere in the midwest.

2. It's like 3:1 male to female

3. If you ignore the ~15% who are international students (primarily from China and India), the student body is probably 95% white. There's not really any significant non-white population for at least 4 hours in any direction.

4. The undergrad population is super heavy with LARPer / gamer / neckbeard / fedora types. The kind of place where is almost always at least one guy on campus who goes about his daily business in a Gandalf cloak and staff

5. A good number of the rest are libertarian good old boys who love guns and trucks and such.

6. The logo really looks like a KKK hood

7. The funniest(?) part is that the area is chock-full of descendants of Finnish immigrants and I have never been anywhere with as much (non-racist) pride in people's European heritage. There are stores full of Finnish pride related shirts and hats and bumper stickers and "parking for Finns only" signs and shit like that.

I never really thought of most sports as macho. There's boxing, American football, soccer and maybe basketball but most of the rest don't seem that way to me.

xp sure, but the way it was being used here made me think it was referring to some wider & more archetypal band than just 'dude who reads sabermetrics blogs and gets way too invested in the office fantasy football league'

Hockey dudes can be p damn macho.

north american hockey is way more aggressive and faster

european hockey is pretty tame, so i can see the confusion

can see why rugby wouldn't make the macho sports list over football

I always forget rugby exists, even though people at my school did it.

With all the exposure we have to Japanese culture, it's weird sumo wrestling is never mentioned.

joygoat: MTU?

yes indeed

How many members of the alt right describe themselves as opposed to the "enlightenment"

I wonder if there's anything to the idea that some geeks watch genre movies (fantasy and sci-fi in the main) / tv/games/comics and get so wrapped up in them that, aside from dressing up as the characters, or doing other traditional geek culture things, they end up thinking the simplified ethics and/or philosophy in these tv shows and movies are substantial, and would/should work in real life? And if this has anything to do with this alt-right movement?

A plump, curly-haired woman took a step out from the others. Her round face was red with anger as she screamed. "Stop the hate! No war! Stop the hate! No war!"

"Move or die!" Richard yelled as he picked up speed.

The red-faced woman shook her fleshy fist at Richard and his men, leading an angry chant. "Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!"

On his way past her, gritting his teeth as he screamed with the fury of the attack begun, Richard took a powerful swing, lopping off the woman's head and upraised arm. Strings of blood and gore splashed across the faces behind her even as some still chanted their empty words. The head and loose arm tumbled through the crowd. A man mad the mistake of reaching for Richard's weapon, and took the full weight of a charging thrust.

Men behind Richard hit the line of evil's guardians with unrestrained violence. People armed only with their hatred for moral clarity fell bloodied, terribly injured, and dead.

^ Terry Goodkind right? Even where the author isn't a Randian, that style is pretty common - mooks being mown down by heroes, etc. Meanwhile the 'proper', 'serious' films and books are boring because they don't have swordfights and spaceships. So the hypothetical geek goes looking for more of the same sugar rush, they end up living on a diet of it, it ends up informing their perceptions of real life, idk? Especially if they don't see any violence in real life to get a reality check.

+ being part of a small core of 'fans' might lead naturally to liking the idea of a small elite who know what's up versus the blinkered masses?

The problem with all this is that last night I watched and enjoyed Predator and Predator 2 and as usual it's the old 'when I enjoy this stuff I know I'm indulging in silly sadistic jouissance but when they watch it ...'

I wonder if there's anything to the idea that some geeks watch genre movies (fantasy and sci-fi in the main) / tv/games/comics and get so wrapped up in them that, aside from dressing up as the characters, or doing other traditional geek culture things, they end up thinking the simplified ethics and/or philosophy in these tv shows and movies are substantial, and would/should work in real life? And if this has anything to do with this alt-right movement?

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Wednesday, 12 October 2016 23:35

I don't know if it's much different than regular action, war and cowboy films and games. Barring Kaiju and disaster films I've seen more superhero stories than anything that show cities being wrecked as if it's nothing.

True, although does it matter that action, war and cowboy movies don't have quite the same 'fan club' in-group thing going on that seems to come with sci-fi and fantasy? They strike me as more 'standard issue', common cultural touchstones I guess. No less wacky and prone to shoving right-wing ideas in your face, but they'll do it in a significantly different way?

(The other problem with all this is just how widespread the love for sci fi and games and all the rest of it really is, compared to how narrow it's traditionally assumed to be. That really does seem like a relic now considering the viewer figures for GoT and various genre blockbusters? Just because there's a self-identified geek culture which views itself as a weird minority doesn't mean it actually is.)

There are a lot of arguments that superheroes are more of a troubling construct and a lot of fantasy and science fiction can have similarly fascistic or entitled worldviews while war and cowboys are based on real situations, but you can probably present them just as badly. There's vigilante films which can be pretty nasty.
I heard the newest Mel Gibson film called "dadsploitation", the best genre name I've heard in years.

Cowboy stories do seem more politically self aware for decades though.

The kind of place where is almost always at least one guy on campus who goes about his daily business in a Gandalf cloak and staff

Going to go out on a limb and say it's not this guy. In fact, I'm bemused by eg Gamergate because these people are just not very good geeks - the usual morals of geek media is co-operation, working together, tolerance - the idea that it's all power fantasies is weird and/or out of date.

i think RAG is right that these "gamers" aren't real gamers. they're AAA gamers who think they're gamers. real gamers love all the recent indie stuff - even if a particular game isn't their bag no real gamer would complain that games are ruined atm.

aren't there like 5 threads about this already? i feel like this isn't a "real thread" about the "real alt-right"

no you're right no more gaming talk from me only neo-nazi meme talk from now on

i think RAG is right that these "gamers" aren't real gamers. they're AAA gamers who think they're gamers. real gamers love all the recent indie stuff - even if a particular game isn't their bag no real gamer would complain that games are ruined atm.

― Mordy

oh come on their position is that they're the _only_ real gamers and everybody else are "filthy casuals".

and tbh i think kickstarter is doing some pretty serious damage to games right now

I know this is getting off-topic but I'd like to hear about why kickstarter is damaging.

And I think some gamergaters are weeaboos and pretty hardcore into games.

pretty easy to make an argument that the bulk of indie games aren't serious/real games

not making that argument, but it's makeable

I know this is getting off-topic but I'd like to hear about why kickstarter is damaging.

― Robert Adam Gilmour

used to be you would make a game and then sell it. now you come up with a pitch and then you sell that, and you don't bother to actually finish making the game. i know most players don't get past the first couple hours of a game anyway, but even if i don't finish a game (i usually don't) i like to know that the game in question at least is finishable (if it's that kind of game).

I kinda like that this mixture of wild over-ambition, hucksterism and genuine craft exists but yeah most of it is not gonna be looked back on fondly

back towards the topic- one of the things that puzzles me about the alt-right is its hostility towards the existence of games they weren't going to play in the first place.

like, when that twin peaks ripoff game came out a couple weeks ago, a lot of people got super mad about it (or a few people got mad about it super loudly, hard to tell these days) because the pc was a black woman. this is ridiculous. is there anybody outside the margin of error who honestly enjoys playing "walking simulators" but simultaneously insists that their player character only ever be a white male?

I think they may have a "domino effect" concern, that's the nicest construction you could put on it.

asking for logic from these guys is a fool's errand tbh, but yeah as nv says their fear is basically that any game which isn't about bald white space marines shooting stuff helps the games industry get one step closer to producing nothing but entirely conflict-and-challenge-free games starring disabled black transgender socialists

gears of war 5: ceasefire

Save the Whales III

dude ecco the dolphin ruled and these dweebs need to stfu

CuckQuest 8: Trigger Happy

Now that I think about it there aren't many video games that star or feature libhomo characters or have libhomo themes.

though I guess "libfag" would probably be the proper alt right term

The entire concept of "real gamers" IS THE PROBLEM DUMMIES

There's no such thing

true

real gamers vote in the 90s pc gaming poll

unless they are not into 90s pc games, that is also of course cool

I think kickstarter has done some good things for games. A lot of developers have their heads up their asses and completely ignore the audience that made them big in the first place. A few of these high profile kickstarter games are basically like "capcom and konami won't pay for this but their old fans will"

Re: Spiked et al., O'Neill did write this recent piece critical of the alt right: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/hounding-leslie-jones-anti-pc-gone-mad/

kickstarter talk going a bit off topic yeah but i do think video games are relevant here since gamergate was such a major mobilizing moment for these ppl

I think kickstarter has done some good things for games. A lot of developers have their heads up their asses and completely ignore the audience that made them big in the first place. A few of these high profile kickstarter games are basically like "capcom and konami won't pay for this but their old fans will"

― Robert Adam Gilmour

i don't know i don't think "mighty no. 9" isn't exactly a vindication of this way of thinking.

and even if igavania turns out to be good, is it really a great triumph for kickstarter to provide funding for cookie-cutter sequels-in-all-but-name to formulaic game franchises? (note that i love the igavania games and if his new game is good i will probably buy it and play it.)

It's something good. It's better that they exist. There probably are far more innovative games but I don't know about them.

Kickstarter usually has to tap into an existing audience so most things will be quite familiar.

i also think that the kickstarter model has been very misleading to plenty of people who have pledged, and for a lot of us pledging has been a misleading and disappointing experience. we love terraria and pledged to starbound, because we were suckered by the advertising copy and caught up in the mass excitement the kickstarter generated. theoretically this game has been "successful" in that it's delivered more or less what it's promised, but the game isn't very well balanced and, consequently, isn't very much fun to play.

individual gamers just don't have good enough judgment to determine whether a game is worth funding or not, and by collecting the money directly from gamers before making the game the people who run these kickstarters are actually losing out on quality feedback on how to make the game better. i'm not saying that process always works in big gaming companies - one need only look at the barely mitigated disaster that has been the sonic series for most of the last 25 years - but the process isn't, in most cases, producing better games or more innovative games than the AAA industry, and is making many gamers disillusioned and more selective about what gaming risks they're willing to take. i don't see that as a good thing.

It's early days still and there's hundreds of them. I'm sure plenty of them are fine but most are very low budget.

Just explained the meaning of cuckservative to some idiot Orthodox Jew on fb who clearly did not get the memo on who alt righters are referring to when they say the country has been sold out. His brother in law texted me to thank me. Not the first person to text me this election season for sonning their moron relatives.

i could not imagine how to carry on such a conversation.

Ha, getting email is certainly a validating reaction.

Also, back to an earlier point, Kickstarter isn't the reason for games not being finished; that shit is entirely due to Early Access*

*excepting whatever Star Citizen is now considered.

is vaporware still a term in use?

Not as much, due to the similar -sounding musical genre gaining popularity

Do you guys read We Hunted the Mammoth? It's where I get my daily alt-right hatefeed tempered with a bit of levity so I don't actually kill myself.

My wife reads it faithfully. She loves to keep tabs on what these pieces of shit are up to l. She first told me about the whole red pill thing like 3 years ago.

That site also spun-off the similarly amusing Tumblr feed Confused Cats Against Feminism

http://confusedcatsagainstfeminism.tumblr.com

A few of these high profile kickstarter games are basically like "capcom and konami won't pay for this but their old fans will"

Aye but as rushomancy says, Capcom and Konami are right here.

There's definitely a thread in Gamergate of "Hi there X we understand that you are a professional in your job but as a collection of straight white men we are an unparalleled resource of objectivity and we are concerned that you have overlooked this" - X is usually journalists or police or the FBI investigating Anita Sarkeesian's harassment but "games developers who want to make something other than what we want them to" fits as well.

It's tied up with Real Gamers as well - they don't actually exist except as an idea of who games are made for - some people like to identify with them as a cultural force (larger than Hollywood, you know) and then get massively entitled about their assumed power.

Both these points extend pretty smoothly out from GG to the thread's topic, of course.

do you guys get recommended racist crap when watching completely random videos on youtube? like i was watching some videos about old EM pinball machines and all of a sudden youtube is recommending that i watch videos that will "tell me the truth about the jews". is it just that youtube can't handle recommendations based on videos with low view counts or something?

it's based on your past views iirc

it's a combination of the video you're watching now and your past views- some are based on that particular video and some are from the "recommended for you" pile. so on a given video i'll get recommended twelve klaus schulze videos and a 1978 burger king ad, you know, only one of those things is based on my viewing history. i think this particular recommendation was based on the video.

i saw the opening sketch of a MDE World Peace episode that was pretty brilliant, it was like half a dozen people cackling in a generic high rise apartment drinking wine, and then this guy trips sam hyde's wife and she falls into a glass table and is lying there totally mangled, and the guy says he didn't trip her and they replay the shot and the opacity is turned way down. it was this really disturbing thing on gaslighting and a certain type of white ppl in their 30s dinner party(??) i was totally bowled over by it.

then the next sketch is the fucking most unfunny tim and eric weirdo bullshit ripoff of sam hyde drinking milk in a gym and being flamboyant and obnoxious. i really hate how widespread tim and eric's influence is, their aesthetic is lingering everywhere and it's so stale, pretty soon NO ONE is going to remember what the fuck "public access television" was.

The new shits ripping on YouTube aesthetic

What's this thread ostensibly about again

what is youtube aesthetic? vaporwave?

There's probably gonna be ASMR roleplay on prime time within two years

valuable new poster

Oh joy; Heat St had an exchange/convo between Vix Day and Louise Mensch about Conservative feminism back in May, but I'm not linking to it here

Aye but as rushomancy says, Capcom and Konami are right here.

There's definitely a thread in Gamergate of "Hi there X we understand that you are a professional in your job but as a collection of straight white men we are an unparalleled resource of objectivity and we are concerned that you have overlooked this" - X is usually journalists or police or the FBI investigating Anita Sarkeesian's harassment but "games developers who want to make something other than what we want them to" fits as well.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 14 October 2016 02:22

Capcom and Konami are correct in not making these games? Plenty of Japanese developers would like to make them and a substantial amount of gamers want them (very very far from being just white guys or gamergate types) but sometimes they're just risky enough and the resources are harder to find* and the Japanese business is probably hurting right now.
I'm not very in the know about their fortunes right now so I don't know what reasonable expectations would be.

Konami is slowly moving away from games and willing to cancel what might have been a hit so maybe they don't need games anymore.
Lots of gamers are overly entitled shits** but fan feedback and wishlisting is an important part of how games are made.
I think it's better that franchises end and people just make similar games elsewhere (hopefully with more control). Lots of gamers have been waiting for some sort of successor in the Final Fight/Streets Of Rage style and I'm surprised it's never really happened apart from Godhand (which is similar) and a bunch of things that never worked that well.
There's dozens of genres that could be revitalized, lots of people who want to make them and play them and keeping up the demand might help them get made.

* The Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics guy had a kickstarter and most of the team is American if I recall correctly.
I think a lot of fans know now that pretty good 2d graphics, never mind state of the art 2d graphics are extremely expensive and therefore a big risk. Vanillaware is one of the few still plugging away at this and they don't release many games.

** I bet most of the fuckers who kept saying Iga ruined Castlevania are grateful in retrospect how long he kept it going and they probably funded Bloodstained too.

why can't we all just play katamari damacy and be happy

I wonder if there's anything to the idea that some geeks watch genre movies (fantasy and sci-fi in the main) / tv/games/comics and get so wrapped up in them that, aside from dressing up as the characters, or doing other traditional geek culture things, they end up thinking the simplified ethics and/or philosophy in these tv shows and movies are substantial, and would/should work in real life? And if this has anything to do with this alt-right movement?

Ever since reading David Brin's Star Wars vs. Star Trek analysis I've been suspicious of anyone identifying as Jedi, cosplaying as a stormtrooper, and so on.

at some point i became the sort of person who mistakenly refers to "star wars" as "star trek" and vice versa. i know the difference, i just can't keep the words straight in my head. you know, it's star... something.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/14/nazi-facebook-group-alt-right-execution-jews-black-people-colorado-students-expelled

Of course, then there's this piece of work:

http://furredreichblog.com/2016/08/25/put-your-tolerance-cap-on-furry-fandom-the-alt-right-is-here-to-stay/

"Put Your ‘Tolerance’ Cap on, Furry Fandom. The Alt-Right Is Here To Stay"

Banger's youtube channel, LOCK HORNS: Sexism in Metal Panel Discussion
379 thumbs up, 1k thumbs down

I remember people saying metalgate never taken off because metalheads generally didn't give a toss but I wonder if anything has changed.

xp this is quite something and i can't imagine how you found it

From here:

http://theworstthingsforsale.com/2016/10/16/the-furred-reich/

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514sKZZ6u5L.jpg

Really missing out on literalizing "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" but that's none of my business.

This is good, about the defection of the son of the founder of Stormfront to the other side - Iggy & The Stooges - https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-derek-black/2016/10/15/ed5f906a-8f3b-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html

Iggy & The Stooges have nothing to do with the alt-right, I pasted two things by accident

AFAIK

@Elvis Telecom - yeah, adult Star Wars fandom is probably a key example? The lure of being a manchild that still just thinks things are either boring or awesoooooome + imagery straight from Triumph of the Will + that universe has literal good and bad guys predetermined by supernatural forces or biology = strong possibility of some of these guys getting a bit confused about politics and ending up in some weird places politically

xp crazy, huh. i wouldn't have believed that story as fiction!

@Elvis Telecom - yeah, adult Star Wars fandom is probably a key example? The lure of being a manchild that still just thinks things are either boring or awesoooooome + imagery straight from Triumph of the Will + that universe has literal good and bad guys predetermined by supernatural forces or biology = strong possibility of some of these guys getting a bit confused about politics and ending up in some weird places politically

― Never changed username before (cardamon)

i think i saw those movies once, and i don't remember any of the stuff you're talking about. the movie i saw was about some loser farm kid and a space hermit teaming up with a smuggler to fight space nazis. there were goofy supernatural forces but they didn't seem to actually determine anything, some people chose to be good and some people chose to be evil.

Yeah it's probably not that strong a case, and whatever might be in the movie, it's obvs a bit of a giant leap from that to being an alt-right white nationalist

In a novel bit related to this, the Chapo Trap House has on Matthew Karp, author of The Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.

They have good fun digging into the weird-ass Antebellum racial science and proto-eugenic justifications of a lot of Confederate culture, and how a lot of travels down and rings thru the online white supremacist shit today, "race realism" and all.

https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-50-akp-50th-episode-ergenekon-extravaganza-101716

remember that in the old days of usenet "alt" used to stand for "anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists"

Is the trans woman Blaire White considered a part of this?

alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die

My next-door neighbour is a full-on alt-right person - he blogs, podcasts and endlessly links on social media to Brietbart, Takimag and so on, calls people "cucks" and start sentences like: "By now it should be abundantly clear to everyone except the self-deluded...".

The thing is that he is an English guy who moved to Canada about 6 years ago. His two best pals are also British and hold similar views (but express them less forcefully). They all have a background in slam poetry or stand-up and seem to have moved to this because you get to rant in public without having to think up jokes. Never lived in the USA and rarely even visited as far as I can tell. Yet completely preoccupied with US politics. Never even mentions Canadian politics except to maybe toss a few insults at Trudeau about being too femme. His hero is English alt-right wanker Paul Joseph Watson.

There seems to be quit a few if these non-Americans participating in this US-centric political movement? They have no stake in it, are uninvolved with the real politics in the place they live or come from. I wonder if it's a continuation of the obsession that a lot of Brits have with the US. Except instead of cowboys and Chuck Berry it's cucks and Alex Jones.

Not sure where I'm going with this other than to say that in the three years I've known him, his activities seem almost entirely non-political and more about having a way of publicly expressing a huge bitter chip on his shoulder. Mocking his (almost imaginary) enemies or just by apparently memorizing huge chunks of alt-right rhetoric which he'll spout in what feels like a public performance rather than as part of a conversation. As I said - it's almost like stand-up comedy without any jokes.

Milo is hilarious but a real one trick pony, i'm bored of him now

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.food.waffle-house

it's not like English expats to be right wing

Oh yeah, I had forgotten that Google bought Deja/Deja News

In a novel bit related to this, the Chapo Trap House has on Matthew Karp, author of The Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.

They have good fun digging into the weird-ass Antebellum racial science and proto-eugenic justifications of a lot of Confederate culture, and how a lot of travels down and rings thru the online white supremacist shit today, "race realism" and all.

https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-50-akp-50th-episode-ergenekon-extravaganza-101716

― (rocketcat) 🚀🐱 👑🐟 (kingfish), Wednesday, October 19, 2016 11:48 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was a really good episode.

There seems to be quit a few if these non-Americans participating in this US-centric political movement?

There are at least a few Americans participating in this Russia-centric political movement.

"There seems to be quit a few if these non-Americans participating in this US-centric political movement? They have no stake in it, are uninvolved with the real politics in the place they live or come from. I wonder if it's a continuation of the obsession that a lot of Brits have with the US. Except instead of cowboys and Chuck Berry it's cucks and Alex Jones."

based on my brief, harrowing forays into The _Donald over at reddit, there does some to be a lot of non-Americans participating (at least based on the lil flag icons they have next to their usernames). doesn't make any sense to me.

I know someone a bit like that but instead it's the more old fashioned Christian Republican stuff he gets from watching UK Christian channels, which overwhelmingly shows American content, with lots of American political news.

Back in February we had a provincial by-election in our riding and my alt-right neighbour was posting a whole bunch of Donald Trump stuff. I asked him why he is posting about a guy who was not even the nominee yet, for foreign election which is 10 months away and he replies "because it's literally the only thing happening in politics right now". I'm like "dude, there's an election in OUR OWN riding TODAY! Why don't you do something about that?" His reply? "Distractions, just distractions. This is the real story".

They all have a background in slam poetry

wow i didn't know BIG HOOS was several British-Canadian Trump supporters

More Scott Adams/Dilbert adjusting:

https://mobile.twitter.com/alexandraerin/status/788868007560880128

ive noticed the weird thing of brits and canadians being obsessed with alt-right and american right-wing stuff while being disinterested in their local political news. like for a few years now you see idiots on social media or comment threads on the guardian or whatever calling people "liberals" pejoratively despite being from surrey, criticizing black lives matter though they live in rural saskatchewan, tweeting incessantly about Trump though their twitter profile says something like "proud canadian, kelowna b.c.".

otoh ive noticed the inverse on my facebook feed. canadian and scottish left-wing people who, by their posting habits, seem way more interested in american racism and police brutality, BLM, the presidential election, etc. than they are about brexit, idle no more, truth and reconciliation, the police brutality and racism in their own countries. i have one canadian facebook friend who is indigenous and, naturally, concerned with indigenous issues in canada, yet her facebook links are probably 90% about american racism against black people and 10% indigenous issues.

I never really understood Canadians who take more of an interest in US politics and can barely name their MP (or explain what an MP is). I should say "until now" because I've been way more engrossed in the US primaries and election than in what's currently happening in Canadian politics. I give myself something of a pass because i) I'm living in the US and ii) this American election has been pretty, um, exceptional.

Worst is when Canadians talk about their own politics as if we have a Presidential/Congressional system, e.g. I've heard someone talk about 'voting straight-ticket'.

lol clemenza to thread

it's weird when Europeans get heatedly involved and self-righteous about US politics, luckily i can't think of any examples on ILX

based on my brief, harrowing forays into The _Donald over at reddit, there does some to be a lot of non-Americans participating (at least based on the lil flag icons they have next to their usernames). doesn't make any sense to me.

Makes sense in the way that they're probably also rooting for their local version of Trump (I can vouch for the Marine Le Pen fans in France being big Trump fans), and a Trump victory would validate their cause and boost their base.

UK media is saturated with US news and culture, huge amounts of discourse is borrowed from the US (who ofc encourage it) so its hardly surprising that ppl focus on it, the whole arena of modern political coverage and discourse is v strongly american

otoh ive noticed the inverse on my facebook feed. canadian and scottish left-wing people who, by their posting habits, seem way more interested in american racism and police brutality, BLM, the presidential election, etc. than they are about brexit, idle no more, truth and reconciliation, the police brutality and racism in their own countries. i have one canadian facebook friend who is indigenous and, naturally, concerned with indigenous issues in canada, yet her facebook links are probably 90% about american racism against black people and 10% indigenous issues.

― *-* (jim in vancouver), Thursday, 20 October 2016 03:56

While it is silly for some non-Americans to see everything through the lens of American politics, and people are probably ignoring a lot of important things that directly concern them, I don't think it's that bad to be more interested in what's going on in America right now. It's easier to find all this news and discussion too.
Perhaps some people with no heritage from Philippines are mostly posting about there right now?

I agree that citizens of the Empire should take some interest in what's happening in Rome but still

the bias is absurd but it's a huge systemic issue & that's what facilitates the particular eccentricities of individuals

it's weird when Europeans get heatedly involved and self-righteous about US politics, luckily i can't think of any examples on ILX

― nom de grrrrr (Noodle Vague), donderdag 20 oktober 2016 8:04 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

løl

I think a lot of non-Americans here follow the election very closely because there's enough reason to believe the presidential race is a forebearer of things to come over here. Populists are on the rise all over Europe and most of them embrace not just Trump, but his ways, too. He's breaking ground with a next level fact-free approach, and manages to get away with murder almost. Populist leaders here are full of admiration and you can bet on it they will copy many of his ways.
That is mostly why I am invested in the US-race this time around. Not so much because it's about "the new leader of the free world" (sad lol) but because with Brexit, Wilders, the new extreme right on the rise in Europe, Trump and his avant-politics fits in perfectly. And I've no doubt his idiotic ways will be copy-pasted on this side of the ocean very quickly.

Populists are on the rise all over Europe

― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 20 October 2016 12:50

Isn't it bigger than that? I've heard that this sort of populism and anti-immigration is gaining momentum in Asia. Maybe an international thing?

I've heard that this sort of populism and anti-immigration is gaining momentum in Asia.

It's probably inappropriate for me to overgeneralize while sitting in the first world. But I think I can tentatively say this: Many Asian nations have less-than-exemplary records on racial integration, ethnic inclusiveness, and social justice.

I would not hold up the way that Dubai (for example) treats foreign workers as a model. Japan, while a very dynamic economy and vibrant society, is not exactly an ethnic melting pot. This is a bit of a can of worms though.

Politically, a lot of right wing and what i'd loosely describe as 'technocratic nationalist' governments have wanted to follow the path of Singapore and Taiwan - central planning and one-party dominance aligned with free market principles.

There's also an underlying fear of Chinese dominance on the UK / US right - the idea that Europe can never compete with China as China refuses to 'play by the normal rules'. Part of Trump's appeal is that idea that he can scam / deregulate his way to parity imo.

The socialist in me wants to believe the rising populism is a backlash against austerity, but I know that's only partially true. Especially since the US didn't engage in the same level of austerity as Europe (although certain individual states did, e.g. Kansas).

Isn't it bigger than that? I've heard that this sort of populism and anti-immigration is gaining momentum in Asia. Maybe an international thing?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, donderdag 20 oktober 2016 15:23 (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Probably, but I was only speaking from what I actually know to be the case.

I'm from the UK, but have spent most of the last 15 years living abroad, before moving back at the start of 2016 with an immigrant wife and two mixed-race children. Right now I find it hard to find any angle on UK politics which isn't a variation on despair. I sometimes try to post things on social media about how immigrants are a good thing and how we should be generally much kinder to the disadvantaged, but there's no point - half the people I know agree with me, but have nothing further to say, the other half will say nothing - maybe they agree, maybe they don't, but either way they are not going to be persuaded. With US politics, at least plenty of people are ready to engage with stuff - sometimes in an appalling way, yes, but at least there is an argument to be had instead of this fucking tutting and mumbling about "electability" or "genuine concerns".

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump

late to the canadians following us politics more than their own country's discussion but...

surrey, criticizing black lives matter though they live in rural saskatchewan, tweeting incessantly about Trump though their twitter profile says something like "proud canadian, kelowna b.c.".

otoh ive noticed the inverse on my facebook feed. canadian and scottish left-wing people who, by their posting habits, seem way more interested in american racism and police brutality, BLM, the presidential election, etc. than they are about brexit, idle no more, truth and reconciliation, the police brutality and racism in their own countries. i have one canadian facebook friend who is indigenous and, naturally, concerned with indigenous issues in canada, yet her facebook links are probably 90% about american racism against black people and 10% indigenous issues.

― *-* (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, October 19, 2016 7:56 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this isn't too far from the truth though. step outside the lower mainland and go to abby (see racist incident recently), kelowna, or anywhere rural or in the interior, and you'll see far more conservative canadians, real rednecks

your facebook feed is just the people you attract and befriend based on your own opinions and worldview

most of my friends are leftists to centrists. one was a closet conservative until i pressured him into talking about (canadian) politics, because he would always stay quiet or didn't talk about it. he was born and raised in west van. but his core circle of friends votes ndp or liberal

i've met canadians that believe the only way to real change in canada is if the us changes, because canada always follows whatever the states says. i don't agree with that, but there are some key issues that canada will just follow the us's lead on, but that's why chretien was so popular

Worst is when Canadians talk about their own politics as if we have a Presidential/Congressional system, e.g. I've heard someone talk about 'voting straight-ticket'.

― Spiritual Hat Minimalism (Sund4r), Wednesday, October 19, 2016 8:32 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is just unacceptable. i'm not permanently in vancouver anymore so i've forgotten a few things and have been following the us election closer, but this is basic information canadians should know! people are spending too much time watching american tv and not enough on interacting with the town/city/people around them

of course that piece of human garbage in the newyorker link above is a PUA almuni

Hadn't heard the idea that Hillary had murdered people by herself. That's hilarious.

...and gamergate hanger-on

xp

He suggested talking points for his followers to deploy, such as “If the alt-right is racist, is Israel racist, too?”

this is a stupid thought bc engaging w/ these ppl on any level is a waste of time but it's maybe amusing to note that if the US guaranteed immigration to religious compatriots like they do in israel they'd basically be opening the border to mexico. feel like maybe they haven't thought this analogy through.

maybe he meant, "really interested in current developments in antisemitism"

of course that piece of human garbage in the newyorker link above is a PUA almuni

Yeah, and as google mentioned, assoc. w/ GamerGate.

All these guys came out of that swill of PUA/Men's Rights/RedPill/GamerGate shit, where their strongest political motivation is borne from their own fucked-up psychosexual pathology.

As much of the Chapo guys & others make fun of these schmucks for only being incel keyboard kommando schmucks(which they are and deserved to be mocked for), the problem is that they also need to be kept an eye on, because of what they can lay the groundwork for. Dave Neiwert's been righting about this stuff for years, about how enough white nationalist shitheads have been moving to parts of Idaho to start having an affect on local politics.

Similarly, you had the militia movement decades ago being just a bunch of guys playing army in the woods and exchanging copies of the Turner Diaries until some of them organized to the point of doing the Oklahoma City bombing. I remember this part clearly since one of their associates(Mike from Michigan, I think) wound up being a janitor in my freshman year dorm in Ann Arbor.

(Ann Arbor being only about 40-50 mins S of Brighton, where the Klan HQ was rumored to have relocated)

Hadn't heard the idea that Hillary had murdered people by herself.

And rolled his body up in a White House carpet and carried it out to a park! People have forgotten just how insane much of the 90s was.

Cernovich thinks of himself as a trendsetter - he says, "What they don’t realize is that someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate." - but is he actually doing anything but amplifying back to his audience the beliefs and ideas they already want? he couldn't, for eg, tell them tmmrw something diametrically opposed to their worldview and maintain his credibility. he's not the new walter cronkite - no one's trusts him. they just trust him to tell them what they already want to hear.

if cernovich came out tomorrow and said, you know i think i was wrong on this point about women in gaming, he'd be a "cuck" instantly

The piece calls the McInnes show alt-right but in a run down of right wing groups McInnes said he felt uncomfortable around the alt-right's racism and he dismissed gamergate. But the few people on the list I knew that he seemed to approve of were no good.

McInnes is an out-and-out white supremacist so i don't know what he dislikes about the alt-right except maybe that they're more vulgar than he'd like

I think he said something like "I have a mixed race wife and they're too into racial purity for my liking".

Can't believe McInnes is the same guy who hung around with alt-comix guys like Dave Cooper and Pat McEown.

So in other words McInnes is one of these guys distressed by the tone of the discourse

http://www.zumcomics.info/Archive/zum!10/pqr.html

Can you imagine Julie Doucet and James Kochalka praising him today?

Has he always been an out and out white supremacist? If he's the so-called godfather of hipsters and managed to surround himself with lefty cartoonists and comedians it's hard to imagine he hasn't changed a bit.

I don't think pat and Dave would have put up with that kind of thing. I remember them sort of talking about him in those days the way you talk about your annoying but beloved buddy. (Knew pat and dave at the time but never met gavin)

i guess he doesn't use the term 'white supremacist' about himself- but he loves talking about the bell curve and black on white violence and all the things self-described white supremacists also like to talk about. but maybe he likes the jews and asians more than your average st0rmfr0nt3r?

He definitely blossomed into a full shitbag at some point

apparently he loves amy schumer which surprises me. i guess he's kinda iconoclastic? still a douchebag no doubt but i like him lecturing stupid taki commenters

"The Trump-supporting American alt-right media believes Ed Miliband was a ‘hit-man and fixer’ for Hillary Clinton"

http://evolvepolitics.com/the-trump-media-have-outed-ed-miliband-as-a-fixer-and-hit-man-for-hillary-clinton/

This is so brilliant. I can imagine British guys sympathetic to alt-righters being unable to swallow this.

loooool

this seems relevant? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/01/the-ruthlessly-effective-rebranding-of-europes-new-far-right

It's a bit more subtle than that article, some of the parties, like the Sweden Democrats, has a neo-nazi past, while others, such as Danish Peoples Party, come from old populist movements, specifically anti-tax movements. Also, I honestly don't believe the populists will transform politics. The article says Nasser Khader was wrong when he said 'influence' would weaken DPP, but that's a quirk. It's not influence that the populists can't deal with, it's responsibility. In Norway, the populists (called Fremskridtspartiet) are on the retreat, after having went into government as one of the first populist parties, and done a shit job of it. At the last election, by all rights, the DPP should have had the post of prime minister, they were the biggest party on the right, but they didn't even want to get into government. They wanted to stand aside, get anti-immigration measures passed, and basically not have to deal with complex economic questions. That's been impossible, though, as the right-wing coalition now includes some very rabid libertarians, who wants to pass austerity measures and save up for tax cuts for the rich, which the DPP agreed to in the past, back when they were minor partners, but can't agree to now without losing their socialist credentials. So they're already in trouble, and on top of that they've just been caught in a giant EU scandal concerning millions of kroner that has been misspent. The problem is they're lying hypocrites, and that will eventually be exposed.

I'm not sure the alt-right is all that relevant to what's happening in much of Europe. Possibly more so to Raheem Kassam's abortive attempt to take over UKIP - he's closer to the contrarian, young, meninist, @PepeHimmer1488 demographic than most and i have a feeling that he wouldn't have won even if he was white. He is the direction Arron Banks, the main donor to UKIP, wants to go in, but the party is largely made up of weird old conservatives who don't particularly get it.

The FN has quite a lot of the youth vote but, as the article says, has been trying to campaign more to the disaffected on the myth of economic competence than in the past. Like UKIP, it has a weak base and, if the reports of the party being bankrupt and scratching around for loans in the UAE are to be believed, close to no financial backing. As Frederik says, the biggest problem a lot of the parties have is that, beyond one or two vaguely credible figureheads, they're mostly eccentrics and incompetents who can't actually deliver anything when in positions of authority.

The big risk is that more serious libertarian figures - your Peter Thiels rather than Arron Bankses - start piling enough money in to the parties to enable them to pivot away from protest votes and fig-leaf conservatism and towards an ostensibly competent technocratic fascism but i think they're probably happy enough with the status quo for now.

https://s11.postimg.org/isojehuw3/Cw_Hwm_Z9_XYAE12_Mk.jpg

lol

This has been brought up a few times but someone here must have an idea. How does the alt right manage to get onto everyone's youtube recommendations? What are they doing that every other group desperate to send a message isn't doing?

Newest such video on my youtube front page is "Varg says it best again: how to deal with muslim terrorists" from a channel called "Alt Right Finland".

If you watch a Varg video, it's too late to bolt the door; he'll infest your recommendations forever

I watched some of those men's rights videos with the bald guy and the skulls and my youtube recommendations were littered with that for over a year, no matter how many times I clicked on "not interested" or whatever. Currently nothing in my recommended like that, but it was like a plague for a while.

xxp - I had that, but with Bill Burr videos. I don't remember ever even clicking on a Bill Burr video and no amount of 'I don't want to see this' would stop the recs.

I don't get much Burzum music recommendations somehow but I'm sure I'll get many more alt right videos quoting Varg

Been watching a lot of Burr videos on youtube recently, enjoying a lot of it. The way some of his fans label his videos you can tell they want (NEED) him to be far more prejudiced and conspiracy crazy than he is. They do this with Chapelle too and probably a lot of other comedians. Like you have a 10 minute video and the title is something like "comedian explains why women are worthless and totally DESTROYS them" and there's just one brief joke about women in the whole thing. Now those fans are calling him a traitor for making fun of conspiracy nuts and racists.
I did hear him say he used to be into conspiracy stuff though.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 20 September 2016 12:47 (one month ago)

From a stand-up comedy thread.

Burr keeps mocking Trump and calling him a sex offender with bigot supporters yet people are still making videos with titles as if he's a Trump supporter. A new one with a title states Burr supporting Trump but in the video he's doing the opposite.

i wonder if that's an attempt to troll trumpers?

I don't know but it seems like an awful lot of people somehow feel betrayed and utterly shocked that Joe Rogan, Sam Harris and Bill Burr hate Trump.

Sam Harris hates Trump?

oh wait nm i knew that. i was thinking of sam hyde

jesus actual christ

https://twitter.com/TheRickyVaughn/status/793614382538317824

legit surprised rogan is antitrump

ah yes famous alt righer MRA poster child and serial murderer elliot rogers at the bottom

This has been brought up a few times but someone here must have an idea. How does the alt right manage to get onto everyone's youtube recommendations? What are they doing that every other group desperate to send a message isn't doing?

Newest such video on my youtube front page is "Varg says it best again: how to deal with muslim terrorists" from a channel called "Alt Right Finland".

― Robert Adam Gilmour

i'm not sure, but they're definitely gaming the youtube recs system hard. i wish youtube would either fix it or let me turn off their recommendation engine. i watch sam bee, italian film soundtrack videos, and metroid speedruns and from that my recommendations are flooded with alt-right bullshit. (it's probably the metroid speedruns.)

they also have reddits algorithm found out which is why /r/the_donald is always dominating. that and redditors are into that shit.

It's weird how some things just don't get recommended at all. I watch loads of old film trailers but never get them recommended.

i watch sam bee, italian film soundtrack videos, and metroid speedruns and from that my recommendations are flooded with alt-right bullshit. (it's probably the metroid speedruns.)

― xiphoid beetlebum (rushomancy), Wednesday, November 2, 2016 1:36 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha was gonna say no mystery at all

youtube can probably live with not fixing their algorithms because there's enough good content on there that i'm not going to flee the site (though if someone wrote a plugin that blocked youtube's recommendation engine in-browser i'd sure as hell install it), but i have pretty much abandoned reddit. if your site doesn't regulate hate speech, it turns into a hate speech site.

reddit, outside of the_donald and the MRA subs (and metacanada – the canadian the_donald) seems p universally appalled by the_donald to me. there's been a few discussions making it to the top about how they must have some up-vote bots rigged and on overdrive for that sub.

i'm now thinking about how tough it might be to build a custom youtube recommendation plugin. i have the same thing happening with anti-liberal stuff during the last election – for some reason if you were watching a liberal party vid, it would start recommending all these nazi/hitler videos. really fucking weird.

when i've cruised through that cesspool i've seen links recommending that the 'centipedes' screw with search results...somehow. like, GIS 'rapist' and it'll come up bill clinton or whatever. i have no idea how this actually works irl

reddit, outside of the_donald and the MRA subs (and metacanada – the canadian the_donald) seems p universally appalled by the_donald to me. there's been a few discussions making it to the top about how they must have some up-vote bots rigged and on overdrive for that sub.

― Mad Piratical (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall)

yes, most of them are more Richard Russell types

ok i figured out how to get it running. it's here:

https://youtube.adblockplus.me/

this is an adblock plus script, but it also works on ublock origin (which you should be using instead of adblock plus anyway). it blocks recommended videos, comments, the whole shebang. whew.

but comments are half the fun

^ alt-right

Not 100% on-topic but this seems like the better place for it:

Trump fans on my FB feed KEEP posting memes like this that supposedly expose the Clintons or Obamas as hypocrites because they might listen to or have some association with Jay-Z or Beyonce. Like, I'm up for talking about sexism in popular music lyrics but this is the best political argument you can make, guys?

They might also pick an example of sexism in popular music lyrics?

Yeah, that particular meme is especially weird that way.

Like it's an inborne and tribally reinforced inability to differentiate sexism from sexually explicit

What happened with that Ed Miliband thing? Did they backpedal once they realised who he is/what he's like?

lol like these idiots have any interest in self-reflection or correcting errors

It's just one of my favourite political related things this year and part of me wants them to be humiliated by this, part of me wants them to keep going and insist he's this assassin who keeps getting away with it.

Yeah, it'll live on in a 40-source imgur, the url for which will be pasted into other imgurs unto eternity.

Which reminds me that I haven't heard much about the medical handler with the epipen - I think Clinton being clearly in good health for the first debate probably cleared a certain amount of that out?

Been reading a bunch about these creeps lately, seems like it moved from "new masculinity" to PUA to MRA to Reaction to alt-right in a pretty speedy succession. IMO these guys are dangerous, because they're spreading a dangerous memeplex more than because they're a serious threat in their own right (like, most of them probably don't leave their basements much but their ideas lean so readily to Nazi-like conclusions that I worry about the ideas getting normalized). Like the Slate Star Codex guy, I find the philosophy kind of fascinating if creepy. It's all a bit cult-like & with the US election results & unrest in Europe... I dunno. Just wanted to keep this thread alive.

Was reminded of the Neo-Victorians that featured in some Neal Stephenson book (was it The Diamond Age?) & how at the time I read it, I was like, "yeah, of course there's going to be a generation that gets tired of dressing like slobs and misses strict gender and class roles & formality & tries to bring that back." Hadn't really imagined what that would look like outside of a fashion subculture, though, like bringing back all the race-superiority and sex-normativity of a bygone era so essentially shitty that we spent the whole 20th century trying to escape its shackles.

the alt-right enters the white house

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump on Sunday chose Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a loyal campaign adviser, to be his White House chief of staff, turning to a Washington insider whose friendship with the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, could help secure early legislative victories.

In selecting Mr. Priebus, Mr. Trump passed over Stephen K. Bannon, a right-wing media provocateur. But the president-elect named Mr. Bannon his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist, signaling an embrace of the fringe ideology long advanced by Mr. Bannon and of a continuing disdain for the Republican establishment.

The dual appointments — with Mr. Bannon given top billing in the official announcement — instantly created rival centers of power in the Trump White House.

Mr. Bannon’s selection demonstrated the power of grass-roots activists who backed Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Some of them have long traded in the conspiracy theories and sometimes racist messages of Breitbart News, the website that Mr. Bannon ran for much of the past decade.

The site has accused President Obama of “importing more hating Muslims”; compared Planned Parenthood’s work to the Holocaust; called the conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew”; and advised female victims of online harassment to “just log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that point with a picture of a crying child.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/us/politics/reince-priebus-chief-of-staff-donald-trump.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Someone on another forum I go to was linking to The Daily Sheeple and it says that there's paedophile codewords in Hillary and Podesta's emails, about a satanic sex ring cult. I didn't click on the link but is it a parody site or something?

I was a overcautious because I thought it might be a virus trap or something.

A great local pizza place in DC got harassed over that crazy shit just because Podesta frequents it.

Hadn't really imagined what that would look like outside of a fashion subculture, though, like bringing back all the race-superiority and sex-normativity of a bygone era so essentially shitty that we spent the whole 20th century trying to escape its shackles.

They don't seem particularly anti-LGBT as far as I can tell, as long as nothing scares the horses - but the Republican party will be happy to pick up the slack.

I am not sure whether the satanic sex cult ring came from the Marina Abramović Spirit Dinner stuff or was knocking around beforehand - /r/the_donald was in a froth about it all in the last few days before the election (I haven't been back since, which is probably doing me some good)

They're pretty anti-T.

xps yeah, Comet Ping Pong, that was so weird

Was thinking a lot lately about the convergence of PUA culture, MRA and the alt-right. Sexual access to women, or perceived lack thereof, as fuel for a political force.

remember the polygamy causes terrorism meme?

yeah I do vaguely remember that

I've seen surprising people pick up some ideas associated with alt-right. It's like Body Snatchers. There must be a huge amount of variety and crossover. How often do leftie conspiracy nuts rub shoulders with them? Are there many feminist conspiracy nuts?

someone in toronto made some posters

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/toronto-white-person-alt-right-posters?utm_term=.fryb5ZVkv#.avxen6r35

They don't seem particularly anti-LGBT as far as I can tell, as long as nothing scares the horses

Maybe not with homosexual sex (same as it has ever been with the far right) but anything undermining cultural norms - 'acting gay' much less the entire T part - is anathema.

There's definitely overlap with the "art of manliness"/artisanal knives culture where unreconstructed white bros who're susceptible to whatever's floating around in the culture are gonna pick up on alt-right ideas, where if the culture had just continued its leftward drift they'd be more getting down with genderfuckery and I dunno Syrian cuisine or whatever. Things that militate against that, tho:
1) some of the alt-right's power does stem from its "alt"ness, so as naff people pick it up, it loses appeal to real hipsters
2) as the emboldened nazi shits go full-on explicitly racist in public, that will actually be a turn-off for a bunch of folks (whereas if they'd turned up the heat slowly, the bros would have found they'd become boiled frogs).

are there organisations fighting this sort of thing yet? i prob sound v naive/feckless/earnest/dim but i would gladly donate to/volunteer for an org that was trying to counter this stuff. I've started donating to (britisher) amnesty and reprieve but it feels like they're more about countering abuse by states than masses of individuals...

like is there an equivalent to the southern poverty law center operating in the UK? or maybe since this all playing out on the internet the geographic thing is not so important anyway? idk

1) some of the alt-right's power does stem from its "alt"ness, so as naff people pick it up, it loses appeal to real hipsters

this is interesting, I think some of its power does stem from the fact that its like a secret language, and the people that their trolling don't "get" it. From a UK perspective, I've started seeing quite a few UKIP supporting truelad.com types using basic versions of alt-right memes and talking points, and they seem very different from the 4chan/ten-levels-of-irony guys

Plus there is nowhere for eg /r/the_donald to go but down - the god emperor can't help but disappoint them, it'll probably not be more than a month until the first "have we been tricked?" thread.

See, we think that, and we may be right, but then there's Scott Adams Adamsplaining to us that what their god-emperor does is not shifting but rather "pacing and leading."

Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading. Trump “paces” the public – meaning he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. He does that with his extreme responses on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest bad-ass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump look scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency.

I think Scott Adams is, in the end, more interested in the Cult of Scott Adams than he is the alt-right. Like there's a lot of overlap but I don't think the alt right is taking its cues from an office humour cartoonist.

Of course I hate them both and I hate them all, but it might - MIGHT - be a kinda accurate description of the workings of rightwingnut opinion. The Orange One has not disappointed them - yet - because what he's done so far is meet them where they are. Once they glommed onto his hideous visage they've followed whither he went. Whether it's by accident or design doesn't ultimately matter. No they're not taking their cues from an office humour cartoonist, but this may be an accurate description of the dynamic.

Given how demonstrably shitty most of us were at saying what was going to happen only a week ago, I'm not putting a lot of trust in my own powers of prediction. Speaking only for myself there.

From now on, if the topic is political culture, and I begin a sentence with something to the effect of "here's what I think is going to happen," everyone around me is authorized to shoot to kill.

Haha yeah, same. I just think that a huge part of the post-4chan edgelord alt right shtick is a complete allergy to any kind of compromise, so those dudes have a lot of disappointment in store for them. More "respectable" fringes may very well end up at the same position as Scott Adams, yeah, and I think the actual majority of people who voted Trump will be easily distracted by other cultural wars and spin that Trump comes up with.

For all I know, Trump could come out tomorrow in favor of single-payer health care and open borders, and after a moment's thought the alt-right doodz would be like FUCK YEAH!

I suspect they just want to be on the side that's meeting their juvenile emotional middle-finger-raising needs, and the specifics are secondary. It's tribal rather than ideological.

But as noted, feel free to prepend everything I write about this with an unspoken disclaimer like "Clearly I know nothing about anything, because a week ago, I sincerely thought this whole phenomenon was a last hot flareup of a doomed worldview."

Plus there is nowhere for eg /r/the_donald to go but down - the god emperor can't help but disappoint them, it'll probably not be more than a month until the first "have we been tricked?" thread.

― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 15 November 2016 14:17 (forty-five minutes ago) Permalink

Watching these gimps get Ernst Roehm'd is going to be one of the consolations of the next few years

Plus there is nowhere for eg /r/the_donald to go but down - the god emperor can't help but disappoint them, it'll probably not be more than a month until the first "have we been tricked?" thread.

believe me when i say - his hardcore supporters are not going to admit to, or reflect on, anything. i lived through 4 years of rob ford in Toronto (i've noticed an endless chain in similarities in the support for both these men), and i saw his supporters make excuses for literally all of his behaviour. his soft support could melt away quick enough – but there will be 25-30% of people that will make excuses for anything. whatever it takes to not have to admit they are wrong. what will be more likely with these people is they will just double down on all their preconceived notions and prejudices. and there will be no shortage of people to blame for whatever goes wrong for trump. liberals, the media, minorities, unions, "elites", bureaucrats, judges, scientists, "SJW" – all people easily and readily thrown under the bus in order to excuse trumps failures and their own.

I think you're right. The alt-right and the parodies of them are almost impossible to tell apart right now. I wonder if you'd be able to make a parody site and have these guys follow any ludicrous thing you say.
But there's probably lots of different types of alt-right who believe in very different things.

I heard something a while ago about Elon Musk drinking blood at ceremonies, I couldn't tell if it was a joke. What would they have against him?

Lol @ "pacing and leading" aka "pandering and bullshit".

We are talking about a movement founded to a large extent by dudes whose qualifications are limited to saying "yeah, I fucked her."

least they have a qualifications framework so

Someone's been putting up recruitment posters in Toronto: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/11/14/racist-alt-right-posters-toronto-school_n_12963366.html

Probably telling that my first reaction is "These fringe lunatics are never going to get anywhere in Canada." Denial is sooo much more pleasant than accepting that these people are organizing in my area.

they did seem to get taken down p fast and the consensus (at least from people speaking up about them) seems to be that they were repulsive.

There was another Scott Adams interview a couple days ago where he described Trump's pattern of advancing then backing off from extreme positions as "A/B testing," indicative of a "business approach."

He doesn't also criticize Clinton for flip-flopping and having public and private positions, does he?

has anyone asked scott adams why he thinks a guy who lost a billion dollars in one year and has bankrupted businesses multiple times is a actually good businessman?

the political equivalent of that level of fuckuppery could start wars ffs

xp Because he can recast him as secretly smart in a way that only Scott Adams can see.

xps I mean yeah they're repulsive and they're at least making the news and being described as repulsive, but I truly don't think that would have happened a month ago.

scott adams is not alt-right. he's a gullible knowitall, which is close.

if being a gullible knowitall made you alt-right we could just take /r/the_donald's traffic

Scott Adams has always had shitty MRA-type views so it's not surprising that the alt-right gravitated to him. I don't necessarily think he's a part of that movement but he's definitely pandering to them and telling them what they want to hear.

Do have to laugh at his lessons about "pacing and leading" and "A/B testing" which is a funny way of saying "indecisive and doesn't really know what the president does"

so my wife went to the high school where current head of breitbart went and someone decided to post on their alumni group about the 'elephant in the room'. his wife posted this response:

As someone who has personal experience with Steve, I can tell you he is a brilliant patriot who has an impressive resume including naval officer, investment banker, Hollywood producer, and media mogul. He helped turn a long-shot candidacy into an electoral victory. Whether or not you agree with him on policy, you must admit he's effective. I'm well aware of the media talking points on why we're all supposed to hate him, but I think a lot of people are getting fooled. The comments regarding his children came from his divorce proceedings! Are you really going to define a man's life over one comment alleged in a bitter divorce?

I realize that many news outlets are running with the idea that he is racist, but these are the same media outlets that misled you about the election and the voters. By so casually accusing people of racism and anti-Semitism with little or no evidence, you are cheapening the meaning of these words. The Democrats do this to Republicans every election. Here's what Coretta Scott King said about Reagan in 1980: “I am scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party." Donald Trump has a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren. Do you really think he'd appoint an anti-Semite as his top advisor? The premise is absurd!

I challenge you to read Breitbart News for a few weeks and to listen to SiriusXM Patriot 125 6-9am EST. Their headlines are provocative, but the articles themselves are mostly straightforward facts. The media is cherry-picking a few headlines from opinion pieces (many of which are satire!) and suggesting they are representative of the entire website. Read the articles and explain why you disagree, don't just dismiss them because you don't like the opinion stated in the headline.
As far as the "alt-right" branding, it's a media buzz word with an unclear definition. Some use it to describe fringe KKK groups and others merely use it to describe constituents who are fed up with the establishment Republican Party. Breitbart is certainly not a platform for white supremacists and in fact, has been BOYCOTTED by far right groups because it has openly gay writers. Not to mention, it has an entire section (Breitbart Jerusalem) that defends Israel, the world's lone Jewish state. Steve is credited with launching this section personally.

My husband, Alexander Marlow, was Andrew Breitbart’s first employee and is now editor in chief of Breitbart News, which has 40+ million monthly readers because it reports the news that no other outlets have the courage to report. This election has made it very clear that America is divided and that mainstream media is completely out of touch with at least half of the nation. I humbly suggest that you not repeat old mistakes and seek out diverse points of view!

she uses milo as a shield!

explicitly patriarchal gender views are only one leg of the stool, and probably the most popular, it's true

a commitment to racial hierarchy (if not "race science") is the other, but a lot of people have that too -- the alts were open and explicit about it while your average tcot type likes blue lives and tendentious MLK memes. anti-semitism used to be the key dividing between alt and regular-GOP right, but that membrane is breaking down imo.

back when these guys were getting going, hostility to democratic government was the last and most important: celebrate monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, whatever. lee yuan kew, pinochet and uhh the stuarts were big heroes. now that donald has won and the alt-right is officially A Thing (thanks, hillary) this part has been obscured and forgotten

there was a moment when the more highbrow "NRx" type people disdained old-school nazism as just communism for whites. it dovetails with the general tendency of nerds to fetishize 'intelligence' for its own sake and all the resentments carried with it (why can't the smart people just be in charge and be sexy and respected); adam's style certainly overlaps with that

now that donald has won and the alt-right is officially A Thing (thanks, hillary) this part has been obscured and forgotten

has it so quickly? the stuarts are one thing but idk if admiration for authoritarians like pinochet or lee kuan yew is off the table. (putin obviously isn't.) incidentally my mom who grew up in late-colonial/early-post-colonial singapore seems on the balance to greatly admire lee kuan yew despite her fairly public parents having been under frequent threat of lawsuit or delicensing from him for oppositional speech and id rly k how to feel abt it. i think zizek once said the 21c would build statues of him in every country. lky, not zizek.

Adams' style is also all about explaining things. THIS is what is true and THIS is what is not, and if you believe that other thing you've been hypnotized. I know, because I took a class in hypnotism. In fact I'm hypnotizing you right now. You're going to wake up tomorrow and realize you've been living in a matriarchy all along.

that facebook post about breitbart I copied and pasted upthread made the 'news'

https://www.buzzfeed.com/salvadorhernandez/ties-to-trump-and-breitbart-divide-exclusive-los-angeles-sch

marlow's wife not only deleted her post but her entire facebook account

Before I knew what the "alt-right" was, I spent some time on a message board that had a strong alt-right contingent, though it had other contingents as well (not 4-chan or reddit). I have to admit that sometimes I found the some of the alt-right posting very funny, because it took the piss out of the intense self-seriousness of some parts of the left. I've found Rush Limbaugh funny at times in the same way without ever agreeing with him on any substance. I think it would be wise to recognize that there's an element of the "backlash" here that's really about oversocialization, about politeness to the point of feeling inauthentic and unable to express darker emotions.

Rush is old news, it's all about Tomi Lahren now

the alt-right is funnier than the uptight-left

http://heatst.com/entertainment/if-ghostbusters-was-just-a-little-better-it-could-have-defeated-donald-trump/

milo will have been loving all of this

http://www.influxpress.com/blog/2016/11/17/open-letter-objecting-to-the-invitation-of-milo-yiannopolous-to-speak-at-simon-langton

it's a nice letter though

the "uptight left" is usually just liberals. The dirtbag left is funny.

the sexed-up coverage of the alt-right in a bunch of mainstream outlets lately has been distressing, especially Mother Jones.

http://www.vice.com/read/heil-trump-this-is-the-alternative-right

the sexed-up coverage of the alt-right in a bunch of mainstream outlets lately has been distressing, especially Mother Jones.

Yeah, there's something that goes into this like the journo/blogger need to focus on a thing and publicize the hell out of it, feeding in the provocative nature more than any contemplative. It's like Isis or some shit, which the coverage goes hyperbolic and they get built up into being Cobra.

Feel like the generic public still doesn't know about the alt-right. The coverage is justified considering Steve Bannon's new place in the world

Yeah the particular way it has been done though has been very bad. MJ originally had a headline along the lines of "Meet the dapper new leader of the white nationalist movement" or something, deleted it.

Milo is speaking at the school I work at next month. I feel a bunch of lefty academics protesting and yelling is exactly what he would thrive so I really want to organize some sort of response where a bunch of people get tickets, show up, and totally ignore him by knitting, doing homework, napping, reading, etc. I also want to avoid racist assholes threatening to firebomb my house so not sure how to go about this.

would think nobody protesting, nobody getting tickets is probably the best response

is there any reason to call these people "alt-right" when "neo-nazi" would suffice?

XP ...or an audience completely made up of women and POCs with fixed death stares.

Arent a lot of the socalled alt-right people just bascially trolls, anyway? Not so much the big players but the followers. They think the reactions they get are FUNNY. Wouldnt matter what side it was, as long as its women and weak-assed pansy cucks, they'd say anything shitty to get a rise.

Things can arise from the lulz - I'm reading a 'biography' of Anyonymous at the moment from 2013 and it's clear that trollishness can definitely exist alongside emerging politicisation (though wow it's an uncomfortable read this year).

Trolling is def an important part of the alt-right's DNA (and not just the followers, Milo always seems to me to be saying and doing things to get a rise out of people as much as furthering any "philosophy") but there's not "just" trolls about it - the temptation to dismiss them as "just" trolls, to conceptualise trolling itself as inherently ignorable or harmless, is where the danger also is.

And it sort of does matter which side it is because, well, they're the ones who picked the nazi side.

is there any reason to call these people "alt-right" when "neo-nazi" would suffice?

― k3vin k., Monday, November 21, 2016 11:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I've been reading the arguments on this and I can definitely see why some think "alt-right" is a dangerous shiny rebranding that makes them more acceptable - I don't think it should ever be in any doubt that "alt-right" is a subset of "neo-Nazi" and not a brand new thing or a break from it. "Alt-right" seems useful in terms of describing their aesthetic and methods though - the radicalisation of white male frustration online, the very "dapperness" that makes an aesthetic break from unreconstructed skinheads and to me, seems necessary in capturing why their appeal is particularly dangerous now.

the whole "european" thing is some weird semantic thing - have they all agreed to call themselves that or something?

this fucking guy in his nazi colour scheme, what vile creeps:

https://vice-images.vice.com/images/content-images/2016/11/21/heil-trump-this-is-the-alternative-right-body-image-1479752283.jpg

is there any reason to call these people "alt-right" when "neo-nazi" would suffice?

― k3vin k., Monday, November 21, 2016 5:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've personally flipped that switch already. Fuck whatever media-friendly label they prefer.

I really want to organize some sort of response where a bunch of people get tickets, show up, and totally ignore him by knitting, doing homework, napping, reading, etc

Was thinking about something similar when Channel 4 interviewed him last week - by all means, get him on the show, just ask him as inane questions as possible, e.g. "who's your favourite Beatle", "what's yr golf handicap" "have you ever tried homemade cream cheese" etc

Arent a lot of the socalled alt-right people just bascially trolls, anyway? Not so much the big players but the followers. They think the reactions they get are FUNNY. Wouldnt matter what side it was, as long as its women and weak-assed pansy cucks, they'd say anything shitty to get a rise.

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Monday, November 21, 2016 9:28 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Partly this; partly keeping "I was just being funny" as a defense if they might face consequences for their words and/or deeds. In which case they then smear their targets for not having a sense of humor and/or not knowing better than to feed the trolls.

"I was just kidding" is a refrain I'm very familiar with hearing from the people I've known who suffer from personality disorders.

There was a Danish news-parody show that once had an interview with a young guy from the populist right, who'd started a group protesting left-wing bias in the media. The first question was 'Can you tell me about your new group, you right-wing asshole?'

Not for nothing are Danes known worldwide as the kings of comedy.

Anyway, ThinkProgress says they won't be using "alt-right" anymore: https://thinkprogress.org/thinkprogress-alt-right-policy-b04fd141d8d4

There was a Danish news-parody show that once had an interview with a young guy from the populist right, who'd started a group protesting left-wing bias in the media. The first question was 'Can you tell me about your new group, you right-wing asshole?'

― Frederik B, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 11:07 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is the B for Basic?

is there any reason to call these people "alt-right" when "neo-nazi" would suffice?

― k3vin k., Monday, November 21, 2016 5:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've personally flipped that switch already. Fuck whatever media-friendly label they prefer.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Tuesday, November 22, 2016 8:30 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I like to think of them as Trunk Club Fascists

I'm not sure what to make of some of the labelling. Many people including myself were using alt-right to refer to a much wider array of modern right wing bigotry, including non-whites who use some of the same ideas as the white nationalists and repurpose them to suit their own prejudices.

"I was just kidding" is a refrain I'm very familiar with hearing from the people I've known who suffer from personality disorders.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Tuesday, November 22, 2016 2:11 PM (four hours ago)

Er, wtf Old Lunch?

I think the reason why I've used 'alt-right' as a term rather than neo-nazi is similar to what RAG is saying. It was something that encompassed a lot of online spheres, from PUAs to st0rmerz to channers to whoever else was being a fucking dickhead. Now that the entire real world is crumbling, though, I'm with people who want to call them what they are.

afaics, the whole "alt-right" label is just a rebranding of plain old white supremacy and neo-Nazism, for the same reason Comcast is trying to rebrand as Xfinity, because the old brand is hated and reviled. Using this new friendlier brand name just obscures their connection with white supremacy, which benefits the neo-nazis and no one else. The news media should be flayed for playing into the hands of these deplorable people. God, what a world we live in now.

they're mostly just entitled white-terrorist fuckhead dweebs and should be treated like any other terrorism suspects

except with more waterboarding

I'm kidding, they should be treated like Breivik their Viking lord, allowed to study for a degree from the comfort of prison

I don't even know. Put them and Isis in a big pit then check back forty years on, see if they've forged a new society together

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3954508/The-worrying-rise-Britain-s-modern-day-Hitler-youth-Neo-Nazi-referrals-Government-s-deradicalisation-programme-overtaking-Islamist-extremism-cases-parts-UK.html

really though what the western world needs is an overhaul of education systems, mental health access, employment law and much, much besides

in the meantime, wage fucking cultural hell upon these cunts until they don't exist as a movement

We've got our own little tinpot Breivik here in the UK.

That article's headline should read 'SUCCESS! Our xenophobic hate-campaign reaches YOUR CHILDREN!'

Of the Mail, I mean

And I don't care how trenchant that is

... the Mail and all the others.

xps @Aimless, that's a great point, Clear Channel did the same thing - I didn't realize they were iHeartRadio until fairly recently.

Thing is though, don't some people who aren't white nationalists refer to themselves as "alt-right"? Like "I'm not white or racist, I just hate political correctness and women.

When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Donald Trump knows the word 'disavow'

Thing is though, don't some people who aren't white nationalists refer to themselves as "alt-right"? Like "I'm not white or racist, I just hate political correctness and women.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 2:16 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nazi-adjacent
Nazi allies

"I was just kidding" is a refrain I'm very familiar with hearing from the people I've known who suffer from personality disorders.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Tuesday, November 22, 2016 2:11 PM (four hours ago)

Er, wtf Old Lunch?

― emil.y, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 12:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, I was referring to PARTICULAR (and pointedly not ALL) NPD/BPD suffers I've known who didn't take personal responsibility for their actions or mental health and whose behavior reminded me of what j.lu described. That particular defense just hits a little close to home. It certainly wasn't meant as a blanket assessment, though, so I apologize if I caused offense.

ok deep breath.

there's specific recent history to these terms as well as overlap as well as slippery definitions of each.

the term 'alt-right' is not entirely generic; richard spencer ran (runs?) a website about white nationalist concerns called "alternative right" and has done so since the late bush years iirc? the idea that it was about old-right or explicitly white-right ideas that then-dominant bush-era neocon or theocon politics had kicked out

"white nationalist" is probably the best catch-all term but it doesn't encompass everything and everyone. "nationalist" does etymologically contain "natal" ie questions of birth, lineage and belonging which are the key obsessions that mainstream american conservatism keeps out of sight.

the high-toned term "neoreactionary" was bandied about a few years ago (with catchy web-contraction NRx), largely for people coalescing around blogger 'mencius moldbug.' this scene is much nerdier and less 'nazi'

quite a number of years ago john derbyshire suggested the term 'dissident right' to mean roughly all this stuff but it never took off

not sure how it's resonating elsewhere but at least insofar as the_d0nald is concerned at least one thread exists where ppl are either really upset or just certain that it's a long game being played re: trumps announcement not to prosecute Clinton when he comes into office.

i am interested to see how these communities react to some of the more obvious walk-backs trump takes on his variously insane campaign promises

i like the term fascist, but in an american context a lot of these people are old-right/libertarian descended -- ie it's not the totalized state but the totalized anti-state as utopia

I'm sticking with "radical white terrorists"

Hey, as long as they consort with neo-Nazis, I'm comfortable tagging them all with that label.

as long as actual neo-nazis are using this label to try and buff up their image/play down their murderous race fantasies i think it's probably good to use a label that brings out the real nature of their "ideas", and let the non-nazi alt-rightists work it out for themselves

sorry for same post as Old Lunch

xps sadly i don't think Trump will get any significant blowback from his most diehard supporters for broken promises. it'll get blamed on someone else.

yeah i agree with that totally.

xp NV i mean

Yes, NV's is a perfect unpacking of my perspective.

yes. OTMFM. All those "non-nazi" alt-righters are free to create some other space for themselves and distance themselves from literal nazis.

i think successful political nicknames are typically loose, simple, ideologically useless and openly derogatory. something like 'wingnut right' but you'd want a specific new coinage. these sensible or technical labels just legitimize, whereas it's better to be dismissive.

also the rise of the Hitler state was achieved thru a broad coalition of right wing interests. i'm sure there were scumbags who thought anti-semitism was a meaningless sideshow who were backing him right thru into WWII

http://www.whitepages.com/name/Richard-B-Spencer/Whitefish-MT/8fqyxgh

just saying.

lol
thx man

postcard campaign.

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Built in 2006
Value: $2.43M

The other side of that is that you're massively inflating the number of Neo-Nazis, which is not an act without side-effects.

yeah how many americans are there that identifies with being alt-right? do we have an estimate?

scott alexander made an estimate (ymmv obv):

The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board.

The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.

Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.

4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.

Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.

so it is still very marginal.

That Steve Bannon performative bit of evil reads so much like Davis Aurini:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kprBSlFRCv0/maxresdefault.jpg

bannon obv successful enough that his grandiose notions about power are not just youtube larping

yeah but his success not fully dependant on being the king of the alt-right or so. might be obvious to people like you who have (rightfully) studied the movement, but reading the news it's hard to really get the scale of the movement.

identifying how racism operates is #1 priority when it comes to finding solutions to fight it, focusing a lot on 4chan seems misguided to me rn (only accusing some media institutions here, no one in the thread).

this twitter is run by, if i've read it correctly and he's not a complete fabulist, old-line republican staffer on the senate foreign relations committee. (i found his blog during the iraq war, written pseudonymously as a rolling horror document of what was happening.)

https://twitter.com/DrLeoStrauss/status/801135190806503424

Well known GOP op/pundit to me- “white genes superior to blacks ala VDARE, Franco USA over dealing with ethnics” Writes w/Bannon @ Breitbart

take it all with a big grain of salt, but he's said shit like this numerous times over the years -- that the staffers and on-the-ground operatives of the conservative movement, even back in the reagan days, had beliefs identical to the alt-right hidden just a scratch below the surface.

i think analyses like scott alexander's (AS USUAL) miss the point totally by adding up numbers online. these ideas are everywhere. that the trump moment, or the internet, or whatever it is we're living through, has shown us a bloc of young men willing to espouse them loudly if semi-anonymously in public should indicate some greater multiple of people who are nodding along.

Any 'alt-right' folks who are uncomfortable with being referred to as neo-Nazis are free and welcome to denounce any white supremacist or antisemitic beliefs they've been wrongly accused of harboring. But I'll just comfortably continue making my assumptions about those who run with that pack and keep shtum.

I suspect most alt-right people don't care what we call them - or if they do care it's because they find it amusing. A big piece of the alt-right is about irreverence for traditional taboos in American civil culture like the Holocaust or slavery. If they felt any kind of disassociation from the term Neo-Nazi it's probably in that they see it as an ironic moniker.

I'm still going with 'Vanilla Isis'.

It is kinda the same as people calling ISIS Daesh. Does anyone think ISIS gives af if you use one over the other?

There's a strong performative wannabe edgelord aspect to much of it, which makes online estimates really off, since you can't tell who really means it and who's just an asshole 14-yr-old tryna rile up scaredypants media types.

Not that teenage nihilism necessarily leads to this shit, but more like you how much of it is mere teenage nihilism. Hell, two decades ago, some of these assholes would be find just acquiring & trying out the Anarchists Cookbook.

It is kinda the same as people calling ISIS Daesh. Does anyone think ISIS gives af if you use one over the other?

I always took this to be a move to deny the idea of them as actual statehood movement, rather than just a regional non-state army. Names have power, obv.

iirc it's supposedly bc daesh sounds like some other Arab word that means 'crushing underfoot' or something so it's like a pseudo-homophonic critique

https://www.google.com/amp/www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/amp/paris-attacks-what-does-daesh-mean-why-does-isis-hate-n463551?client=safari

Apparently it also means "bigot," and they hate that part

like i'm sure people who believe in chopping off the heads of infidels yezidi adults and selling their kids into slavery are v concerned about being called bigots

I don't know about that, these sorts of wankers tend to be pretty thin skinned.

ok but they don't have diversity and open-mindedness as their purported aspirations

What I've been seeing on american friend's facebook walls is that, post-Bannon apointment, the Trump voter's in people's lives are now very invested in a narrative where the media is smearing the alt-right and, yeah, they're very adamant that the alt-right is NOT neo-nazi/racist. Mind you I mostly doubt that the people putting forth that argument are "from" the alt-right; more likely generic Trump supporters who'd never heard of it and now have swallowed the party line on the term.

Is the attitude that names are names, but Breitbart is supported by the right people (IE Trump clearly trusts its owner) and attacked by the wrong people?

Calling the 'alt-right' neo-Nazis isn't about trying to get their goat but rather stripping the glossy finish off of their media-friendly moniker of choice. Stories about the 'alt-right' grant them an air of legitimacy, like they're just another perspective that's as valid as all the others. Beetbort is just a publication, in the words of our president-elect. Calling them neo-Nazis will hopefully dissuade some people from even dipping a toe in those shit-filled waters.

... how?

like when people get called racist and they go "ooooops what was I thinking sorry!!!!"

like i'm sure people who believe in chopping off the heads of infidels yezidi adults and selling their kids into slavery are v concerned about being called bigots

― Mordy

people who do that kind of stuff have a really, really strong need to justify themselves and get very defensive if you suggest that maybe they aren't good people. you're not talking about a bunch of '82 metallica types going out there saying "Fuck yeah, I'm evil!" ('82 metallica a good example here, actually- changed up the four horsemen of the apocalypse because they didn't want people to think they liked war. Death, plague, and famine, on the other hand...)

people who do that kind of stuff have a really, really strong need to justify themselves and get very defensive if you suggest that maybe they aren't good people.

tbh

xp good people yes but their definition of good ppl isn't our definition and their definition doesn't include tolerance for divergent lifestyles

we would like the use of the word nazi to emphasize how fucked up the person/idea the label is being applied to is, but in reality it is just a license to ignore the person applying the label

... how?

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, November 23, 2016 8:12 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You don't honestly think that the general populace are less likely to explore news outlets and political movements if they've been branded with the label 'neo-Nazi' as opposed to 'alt-right'? Granted, I'm more cynical about that assertion than I would've been a year ago but I still think it holds water.

Listened to Richard Spencer's speech and its fantastical projections of "unity" among white people, and was thinking that the great irony is that it was liberalism that allowed the creation of a "white" race that included irish people, germans, slavic people, anglo-saxons, etc., basically completely flying in the face of everything that Nazi ideology was about. Maybe Spencer thinks the horse has left the barn on that one, but his absurd concept of a "white empire" in North America struck me as, above all, childish. Diversity is messy and complicated and there are tensions, but that's just reality. There is no unified ethnostate on the planet. Middle Eastern countries are in the midst of civil wars. Israel is divided between religious and secular, mizrahi and ashkenazi. China and India have dozens of ethnic groups and languages. Diversity and tolerance aren't always easy, it's just that the alternatives are always worse.

You don't honestly think that the general populace are less likely to explore news outlets and political movements if they've been branded with the label 'neo-Nazi' as opposed to 'alt-right'? Granted, I'm more cynical about that assertion than I would've been a year ago but I still think it holds water.il

Well, the populace have already heard that the alt-right is a thing, so no, I don't think that - I think there's a lot of people who will hear EG "Gamergate are neo-Nazis" and when they investigate and find out that Gamergate are not in fact neo-Nazis, they will be told "See, the media is out to tar us all with the same brush". Speaking purely from the point of view of "There are a lot of people out there with some fucked up views, let's not radicalise any more of them than we have to", I don't think alt-right = neo-Nazi is helpful.

The guy who coined the phrase "alt-right" and started a publication with that name is a literal neo-nazi Andrew.

He just gave a speech in which he quoted nazi propaganda in german, called for creation of a white empire in North America, referred to whites as a "conquering people," and had an audience full of people doing nazi salutes. What is your criteria for calling someone a neonazi?

Those meet my criteria - you're aware that the term has drifted a bit since then?

I was reading something recently where someone in a White Power fan group did one of those hokey genetic background things and found that they were significantly genetically "Eastern European" and someone else was like, "LOL UR NOT EVEN WITE" so................ o_O

Divisions are inevitable. If they actually somehow "cleansed" the United States of everyone not "white" by the arbitrary new standard I'm sure that you'd see an increase in tensions between eastern and western european descent, between catholic and protestant, etc.

slate says alt-right still the right term to use:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2016/11/22/is_alt_right_still_all_right.html

'deplorables' might be even better tbh, really brings out the fact they're the enemies of decency

nope nope nope

"deplorables" was one of the biggest disasters of the campaign please never utter it again

Listened to Richard Spencer's speech and its fantastical projections of "unity" among white people, and was thinking that the great irony is that it was liberalism that allowed the creation of a "white" race that included irish people, germans, slavic people, anglo-saxons, etc., basically completely flying in the face of everything that Nazi ideology was about.

Some of those where included with open arms, some less enthusiastically.

"deplorables" was one of the biggest disasters of the campaign

yeah should've gone harder

Why not just call them fascists if alt-right is too mealy-mouthed and neo-nazi makes people roll their eyes?

*goes back to lurking*

bc they're not all authoritarians. some of them are libertarians.

Okay, okay, I'm willing to surrender 'neo-Nazis' if we can all agree to start calling them 'low-T betas' instead.

Insult them on a level where they actually feel insulted.

Re: ThinkProgress vs. Slate.

From long-term perspective, its really the risk of normalizing white supremacists vs. the opportunity of tying the entire conservative movement to this anchor in the minds of an entire generation.

One thing about the "alt right" is that they try to soften their rhetoric to bring in more suckers. Like "nationalism" instead of "white nationalism". I lurk on sites like Yahoo and I would estimate, from the language, that more than a quarter of the ideas floating around are really "alt right". Not very many conservative opinions in comment sections are moderately conservative - they're hysterical, paranoid and hateful.
And the alt-right generates memes for these people.

sadly old lunch otm

They loved deplorables. They probably wouldn't like incompetents, inferiors or impotents but such names would never catch on. But I very much doubt that kind of name calling is going to make things better.

This is science fiction writer Eric Flint on the culture wars within the genre but I think it goes for all this alt-right stuff

What is it about right-wingers, anyway? They keep accusing everyone else of being victim-mongerers obsessed with identity politics but they’re the ones who prattle endlessly about their supposed persecution [“victims are littered across the SFF community”] and nobody generates identity-labels like they do. Start with the term “identitarians” itself—did I mention the clumsy prose?—and move on to “social justice warriors,” “SJWs,” “CHORFs”, oh, it goes on and on.

Those lousy social justice warrior identitarian cliquist holier-than-thou obnoxious reactionary liberal fanatics keep trying to reduce people to categories…

Ah…yeah. Right.

I think that Slate article is right about how "neo-nazi" will backfire.

my exp with "chiraq" is that saying "dont call it the alt right" just changes the name from "alt right" to "dont call it the alt right"

bc they're not all authoritarians. some of them are libertarians.

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 23, 2016 12:58 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this distinction flips around on itself pretty quickly in this country

i guess if Nazi just means someone we don't like then call them Nazis. if it means a particular racially-based authoritarian political ideology that fetishizes the 3rd Reich then there are def Nazis in the alt-right but they do not make up the entire alt-right.

ha by my reckoning they have a racially-based authoritarian political ideology with, like, really ~insightful critiques~ about what didn't work about national socialism

Insult them on a level where they actually feel insulted.

This. Call them cucks or cuckservatives.

https://twitter.com/colincampbell/status/801629493345583104

Inceletarians?

This. Call them cucks or cuckservatives.

Yeah, maybe not

what's the downside of "white nationalists"? the fear that you legitimize white nationalism? because it's already pretty fucking legitimate. when you have half of a country who thinks it's "racist" to say that black lives matter, i mean... what the hell can you do with that?

for me the important thing is to deny people the delusion of middle ground. to establish that, for instance, mark zuckerberg is a white nationalist sympathizer.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/new-google-chrome-extension-guarantees-users-will-never-see-phrase-alt-right-again-1048086777

I've got a theory that they are actually part of the main audience for cuckold porn, with the racism, the staggering insecurity about their masculinity, women as either cheating ice queen megabitches or vulnerable property to be degraded.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 9 October 2016 02:27

I just assumed this was the case. I need a US map with overlay of cuckold porn popularity stat.

― "raw buttin' these toilet seats" (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Wednesday, 12 October 2016 01:06

Are they embarrassed about fantasizing about being the thing they insult others for? Are they secretive about it? If the porn industry stopped making this stuff to stop being racist, would they get angry and complain about political correctness?

Call them cuckold porn fans?

Where's Wilhelm Reich when you need him?

Reminds me of that racist guy in Boardwalk Empire who forces Purnsley at gunpoint to have sex with his girlfriend, then Purnsley kills him.

If the porn industry stopped making this stuff to stop being racist, would they get angry and complain about political correctness?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, 24 November 2016 11:44

And if it happens would they make Cucked By The Cucks: SJWs Fucked My Wife?

I don't get it 'cos the Trump administration is likely to be anti-porn, anti-civil liberties.

Anyway, I hate read RAMZPAUL. https://twitter.com/ramzpaul It gives you a good idea of where the alt-right are at. Like, he complains about "Hollywood Nazis" and thinks that a lot of them are FBI informants. Then he talks a lot about how great 1930's Germany was.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/gist/2016/11/ben_shapiro_on_steve_bannon_the_alt_right_and_why_the_left_needs_to_turn.html

Thx for that Mordy, interesting.

And that doesn’t mean that Breitbart itself has been anti-Israel—it hasn’t been. It’s a very right-wing site when it comes to Israel.

Yes. Interesting.

The danger of equating Israel exclusively with Judaism is that people miss the nuance that one can easily be pro-israel and still anti Jew.