I also doubt that this 4chan generation is the test lab for the leaders of tomorrow. In fact they are the very definition of followers. That's what being a gamer or an anime fan really is. You're following someone else's code or story line. There's nothing inherently wrong with that in moderation. But as a full time lifestyle? No, what these people are is an easy mark. Anyone that is willing to live their full lives as docile sheep in mom's basement are just primed for manipulation and exploitation. Thousands of years of evolution has made humans a very social species. The more you isolate yourself from real human interactions, the more unstable you will become psychologically. And thus more susceptible to con men who offer that socializing fix through other means. That's what this white nationalism is really all about. A sense of community to people who have trouble belonging to anything ... let alone lead anything.
Do you think if these individuals had had any form of parenting supervision, they wouldn't have learned that trying to bully others, tease them to "trigger" them, and such, is wrong? Back in the 90s, when this whole trolling phenomenon started, those kids were often adamant about being immune because no one was going to punish them. In the mid 90s something strange happened: "trolls" got organized in their own organizations, some of them with over 100 members, where they looked for targets to DDOS or attack in other ways. Their targets were always "Liberal" sites, or sites that promoted diversity, or sites owned by Jews. One of the largest Trolling Organizations is still around: http://goo.gl/iiwOUg But in the mid-90s there was a boom of them, mostly teenagers, rabidly anti-Semitic and racist, who'd DDOS your site if you were an avowed Democrat or immigrant writing about American politics. These people, who are in their early 30s now, are a direct antecedent to what is going on. As I said, I've been observing these movements for a long time --since the times when we used Mosaic and gopher was still a thing, 1992-1995, when these movements started. Some of the first web sites online belonged to KKK/Skinhead groups, back when most people didn't even know how to write HTML they had pages with all the bells and whistles. In particular, the Knights of the White Camellia --a KKK group from Texas-- had a huge web site with a whole section dedicated to Law Enforcement: to enter there, you had to register & prove you were a cop. One of their basic tenets was to push young "racialists" to enter law enforcement. And that was back in 1992. Coding is a passion of mine (not my profession, but my idea of a fun evening is writing some code), and because of that I was part of the hacking community since the 80s. All the elements of the Alt-Right were there already: the hatred of women, the rejection of multiculturalism, the mistrust of the media, the passion for conspiracy theories. I knew it was going to end in this long, long ago. And you folks have some serious misconceptions about these people: 1) They have no leaders. It's really a mob, and they are HUGE. Go against them and you'll know just how HUGE they are. They can bump a site like Democratic Underground offline for weeks --which they did most recently the day before the election; 2) They are, if not educated, at least smart. These are guys who grew up with a computer, they can both dig information & create very credible-looking fake information that anyone would think is legit. They can dox (get private info about) anyone out there too; 3) A lot of them have advanced degrees, often in the sciences and engineering. I work with a couple of people who belong to this movement. They're not at all the "losers" you'd imagine. They're intelligent but socially awkward, have gone all the way (including post-doctorate) in "formal education"; 4) As a rule, and as a consequence of their social awkwardness, these folks tend to have a terrible time finding a "significant other." And it's not just guys, even though men are like 90% of the Alt-Right. There are women out there who agree 100% with the movement and long for their old role as homemaker to some "alpha" dude who makes a good salary --problem is, I'd be hard pressed to call any of these guys "alpha" in any way, even the ones who run their own companies; 5) There is a mass of proles who are followers, but those are not the concern here: they're never going to have the power to cause damage, beyond the power of numbers. However, that power of numbers is not to be dismissed. For example, after Moonlight won the Oscar as best film this year, the whole Alt-Rigthosphere was on fire over the award being given only as a response to last year's #OscarsSoWhite. The result? The movie got over a hundred reviews on the IMDb giving it one star and calling it garbage, to the point the site had to block access to the movie's page (they also got rid of their forums, for a reason); 6) They're everywhere. They're here, too. And they're technically savvy. Now that companies use the Internet to trace your activities, there are more open back doors than ever (if you use Windows, in particular Windows 10) to figure out your IP & location. Also, to flood your network. If you attack them in a place that gets a good number of hits, you better have all your safeties up because they will know about it, and they will bomb you into oblivion; 7) A lot of what the Alt-Right puts out there is partial truths, not lies. Take for example this (there's an obsession with IQ in the Alt-Right, they're often the types to do well in a Wechsler test but fail in life): http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...the-smartest-people-in-the-world-are-all-men/ That's typical Alt-Right stuff: they have the actual studies to back it up, plus the "evidence" you can check for yourself: men outnumber women in technology patents 14 to 1 even today, and basically all the scientific breakthroughs have been made by males. It looks like "case closed" (they do the same with "races," too). The problem with it is that they're basing it all on a single study, while several others have shown no such 5 points difference. Also, the SD spread is not confirmed: a couple of studies show it, several more don't. But the key here, and the reason why in actual science we need peer review and to submit our methodology, is that you don't know who they picked for the study, or what sort of tests were done. Plus, the study could have chosen any variable beyond gender: choose people by height, and you can find IQ differences that would correlate being taller with being smart. It's been done before, and it means nothing because it was never replicated. Further, the whole context of women not being given credit for their discoveries, or being excluded from the sciences and engineerings, is ignored. Even now you won't find a more conservative space than the science. mathematics and engineering departments of universities: they're not just dominated by men, but tend to treat women as intruders (I know, I've been there, I've taught there). Basically, it's data without proper context, which means it's not actual information. But that's the sort of thing they push, because it's easy enough for their young masses to understand, it grabs the attention, and makes the group feel empowered.
It is neither liberal or conservative parents but rather parents who had no understanding or idea what the internet was and is. So they didn't give the idea of parental oversight to their kids going online a second thought. Gosh look at the popular culture's depiction of hacking and the internet in the late 90s and it is no surprise adults who didn't come of age with it understood the importance and dangers that came with the internet. Just wanna plug that people really should watch the documentary on the internet by Werner Herzog, "Lo and Behold". As one of the experts interviewed pointed out, teaching kids today to understand and be able to parse out all the information they have coming at them between what is factual and what is false is probably one of the most important things of the internet age.
There's a lot of disillusion in the personal stories of some of these guys. A lot of "my mummy told me we're all the same but the black kids in my school punked my nerd arse" stuff. From all I know about these guys, that sort of disillusion comes from being raised in a progressive home, then facing reality and not having the mechanisms to cope with it. Also, this is an offshoot of nerd culture. Very self-aware, and as already noted, very much into computers and finding stuff in journal articles. I have a feeling with a bit more self-discipline, some of these guys could have ended as researchers, doing something productive for humanity. They're like the brilliant young soccer player who instead used his gifts to become a fat drunk.
You're vastly overstating that this is strictly a liberal household problem. You need something tangible to prove that claim. Kids not learning life coping mechanisms is an American thing, not a left/right thing. Some of the issues I already mentioned before. Suburban sprawl means that many kids grow up unsocialized. Or whatever socializing they're exposed to is limited to people from their own class and race which is the nature of how we self segregate ourselves in this country. Once you have to go to college or find a job it's inevitable that you have to step outside your safe space, and a lot of kids can't cope. There's other issues here as well that are economic and social. There's an increasing number of kids that are raised in single family homes. As someone raised by a single mom, I can relate to being left alone to fend for myself. It had nothing to do with how liberal or conservative my mom was. It had everything to do with both of us sacrificing a well rounded family environment in order to survive. Even in two parent households we now have both parents needing to work in order to maintain the family. And with the collapse of unions, what used to be a 40 hour work week is now 50-60 hours ... plus longer commutes with more traffic. These are challenges that affect liberal and conservative families.
It turns out the guy calling all of the Jewish Community Centers is an Israeli Jew who was found to be unfit for service in the IDF.
I don't really see that as a progressive or liberal idea, "we are all the same/equal/whatever" more of one that just isn't racist. I completely agree though at some point the ability to cope with being awkward or an outsider was never or incorrectly taught and some of the reasons for that I think were laid out nicely by Boloni86.
He is the Jewish equivalent of the "Muslim terrorists" who were drunken, can't hold a job screw ups who found their calling. Or Tim McVeigh. Or Wayne Williams (dating myself.) As my wife says, broken chromosomes.
An article that links the Ideology of the BJP in India with the far right in the west. The scary part is that Modi and the BJP has been very successful in India. To be fair to Modi he is not an upper cast, his populism is legitly based on helping the poor Hindus, attacking Muslims and secularists is how it gets accomplished. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41757047
I wouldn't be surprised if the Taj Mahal is eventually either destroyed, closed off to visitors or has its history wiped because it was built by a Muslim.
If someone read my joke reference in a Trump thread, "they have all the refs". Fvck, the offside rule and the tackling from behind will not be applied to them... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rise-above-movement-dismissed_n_5cf6d903e4b036433477536b The case against the Rise Above Movement, which was investigated by an FBI agent who specializes in domestic terrorist groups, illustrates the difficulty that federal authorities face in prosecuting domestic extremists. There’s no federal law that broadly outlaws acts of domestic terrorism, though a large majority of Americans think there should be such a law. Federal authorities have more laws they can use against designated international terrorist groups, like the Islamic State, than they do against violent white supremacists at home. Roughly half of the potential domestic terrorist attacks “disrupted” by the FBI end in arrests on state or local charges — and the charges that are brought federally often don’t match the magnitude of the alleged crime. The feds said last year that a “domestic terrorist” was planning to “murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country,” but only brought gun and drug charges. (A federal magistrate judge even granted the individual bail before being overruled by a higher ranking judge.) A white supremacist the feds said discussed a terrorist attack with his cousin faced only a charge of lying to the FBI and recently reached a plea deal that will likely result in a sentence of time served. Another white supremacist who bought a gun from an undercover FBI agent as he plotted an attack in the “spirit of Dylann Roof” received just three years, a sentence much shorter than he likely would have faced if he’d been a supporter of a militant Islamist group. (Roof committed an act of domestic terrorism when he slaughtered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, but he also didn’t face a terrorism-related charge.) And federal prosecutors also failed to secure convictions against several anti-government militia members involved in the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. The dismissal of the indictment against RAM members before trial also offers a stark contrast to how hundreds of cases against the so-called J20 protesters played out. Justice Department prosecutors, through the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (which prosecutes both local and state crimes in the nation’s capital), charged more than 200 people arrested during President Donald Trump’s inauguration with felonies. Several of the cases went to trial, but jurors acquitted the vast majority of defendants, most of whom the government conceded didn’t engage in any actual destruction of property, on all charges (while deadlocking on two cases).
That would be a good addition to the Agenda of the Left. I'm of the belief that the existence are (relatively) numerous groups and individuals threatening violence of the right affects media coverage. It's prominent enough that it's a problem, and the MSM, being the MSM, tends to frame the problem as the left needing to be careful not to anger them. Those "takes" far outnumber the "American conservatives need to clean their own house" takes. That, in turn, is part of the MSM meta-take that only the Democrats and liberals have agency. Conservatives/Republicans are mere prisoners of their base and Trump. This, to me, is among the most pernicious bits of pro-conservative media bias, because it gives GOP politicians an incredible free pass. They never have to defend or explain the brown shirt element within their movement.
At least that item is true, politically speaking. Republican politicians who do not kowtow to Trump/the base do get primaried, and then they mostly lose. Whereas #bothsidesdoit is not only an open invitation for Republicans to behave badly, because #bothsidesdoit never holds anybody accountable, treating every questionable action (arguably bad, kinda bad, bad, truly bad, godawful) with the same hand-waving flutter, but it is patently and openly false. Indeed, #bothsidesdoit can be regarded as an aspect of Trumpism: the ability to whistle while walking past the facts, pretending they are not there.
You and I probably disagree on this. I think a majority of GOPers in Congress don't like Trump. So long as only a handful of them oppose Trump, they get picked off. But if all or almost all of them acted like Corker and Flake and Sanford, they'd be safe.
I'm not sure he killed anybody, but he certainly didn't conduct himself like a sane man during the trial.
Wayne Williams? I think Rick Barry was the only person who could have been on the jury for his trial, because, like, everyone was familiar with the case. I remember there were a bunch of NBA players who were wearing green ribbons on their uniforms as a way to honor the victims. And Barry, who was a TV commentator, thought they were for St. Patrick's Day...
Yeah, they were gonna have to visit small villages in South Asia to find somebody who hadn't been reading/hearing about the case. It was everywhere. I heard a bunch of folks say, "Wayne was Douglass High and SW ATL his whole life- why would he have been doing something that far from his cultural roots?"