Support NeoGAF

[Erheller]

Searched, couldn't find a thread on this.

The alt-right is often dismissed as white supremacist Trump supporters with Twitter accounts, and they are certainly that. But spend some time talking to key players and reading the movement's central texts, as I did, and you'll find it's more than a simple rebranding of the white nationalist movement. It's the product of the intersection of a longstanding, long-marginalized part of the conservative movement with both the most high-minded and the basest elements of internet culture. It's a mutated revival of a monster William F. Buckley thought he killed in the early 1990s, given new energy by the web.

And it's making its impact felt in a big way this election. In the past, when mainstream conservatives have gone up against racialist, conspiratorial elements on the right, they have emerged the victors. Buckley successively marginalized the John Birch Society in the 1950s, and then Pat Buchanan and his followers in the 1990s. People like Continetti and Young are trying to do the same thing to the alt-right. But with huge amounts of online energy behind the movement, and Trump likely to become the GOP nominee, it's not clear that this time the mainstream will win.

On neoreactionaries

"Democracy is — as most writers before the 19th century agreed — an ineffective and destructive system of government," Moldbug writes. Moldbug doesn't actually like the term "democracy." He prefers "demotism," or rule of the people, a label under which he sweeps modern-day developed democracies like the US or Western Europe but also the former Soviet bloc, Nazism, and fascism. "Universalist lawful democracy is the least demotist of demotisms, Demotism Lite if you will," he writes. "Compared to Communism and Nazism, there's much to be said for it. But this is a rather low bar."

The purpose of government, in the view of neoreactionaries, isn't to represent the will of the people. It's to govern well, full stop. "From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government but what the government does," Moldbug explains. "Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does."

And democratic government, the neoreactionaries insist, is not effective, lawful government. Because the will of the people is arbitrary and varying, it cannot have the consistency of real, durable law, and it creates incentives for wasteful and, worse still, left-wing government. Moldbug started as an Austrian-school libertarian, and most neoreactionaries have general small-government sympathies and express a fear that democracy inevitably leads to ever greater taxation and redistribution, and otherwise encroaches on individual liberty.

On paleocons

The term "paleoconservatism" is a retronym coined in the 1980s to characterize a brand of conservatism that was by then going extinct, a brand exemplified by Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and legendary isolationist who lost the 1952 Republican nomination to Dwight Eisenhower, and by Pat Buchanan in his 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential runs.

Paleocons agree with mainstream conservatism on social issues — they tend to be stridently anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, pro-school prayer, and disproportionately traditionalist Catholic — and on the evils of the welfare state, but part ways on international affairs, including immigration, trade, and warfare.

Paleocons are largely isolationist, warning America against foreign entanglements and dismissing neocon attempts at democracy promotion as hubristic and doomed to failure. They were overwhelmingly against the Iraq War, and tend to be heavily critical of Israel. They're also more fervently nationalist than mainstream Republicans. That translates into a very negative view of immigration, both due to its perceived economic harm to Americans and because of the "damage" it does to American culture, and into more support for tariffs and trade protection.

On 4chan

But in recent years, a vocal right-wing contingent has popped up. As New York magazine's Brian Feldman explains, part of this is an artifact of 4chan gaining popularity and its popular catchall board — /b/ — losing ground to alternatives, notably /pol/, or the "Politically Incorrect" chat board. "To the extent that there is a shared political ideology across /pol/, it’s a heavily ironic mix of garden-variety white supremacy and neo-reactionary movements," Feldman writes.

"Most days," the Daily Beast's Jacob Siegel writes, "/pol/ resembles nothing so much as [white supremacist blog] The Daily Stormer with the signal to noise dial turned only slightly." The Southern Poverty Law Center has taken notice, with fellow Keegan Hankes telling Siegel, "You can’t understate 4chan’s role. I constantly see 4chan being mentioned by the more Internet- and tech-savvy guys in the white nationalist movement. They’re getting their content from 4chan."

Hankes has noticed this trend on Reddit as well, noting in a Gawker essay that "Reddit increasingly is providing a home for anti-black racists — and some of the most virulent and violent propaganda around."

This branch of the alt-right has also played an important role in the Gamergate movement, an ongoing effort to harass women in the video game industry until they shut up about equality and representation. Yiannopoulos, who before the controversy called gamers "pungent beta male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year-olds," jumped on it as a cause with reactionary potential. "GamerGate is remarkable — and attracts the interest of people like me — because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators," he wrote in late 2014.

The affinity between gamers and right politics makes sense. "It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks," Klint Finley writes in his excellent explainer on neoreaction. "It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed."

"While GamerGate started off as a very diverse, vocal opponent to what they saw was unethical journalism (before it was debunked), many of the anonymous /pol/ rightists would take advantage of its anti-left character by creating sock-puppets," an anonymous 4channer and ex-Gamergater wrote last year. "Today it is hard to find a 4chan user that doesn’t have an attachment to far right politics."

And this enthusiasm for far-right politics has bled into Trumpism. JaredTSwift, an alt-righter who got his start on 4chan, gushed to Motherboard's Oliver Lee, "Trump was meme-able and entertaining, and something like a ban on Muslim immigration would never have been considered before him."

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained

Much, much more at the link. It's a fascinating look at some of the right-wing elements out there.

It's far too easy to immerse yourself in an echo chamber and pretend that right-wingers are all the same. I know I'm guilty of this. There are certainly common threads running through each of the alt-right ideologies, but it's important to recognize that the right in the US, just like the left, is deeply divided.

Turn into paleothread if old.

 

[Team Alucard]

“Most of them are childless single men who masturbate to anime. They’re not real political players. These are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity.”

 

[captive]

Im not sure i would call the right "deeply divided" part of the right wing mostly speaks in dog whistle coded language, the "trump" part is just blatant about it.

are there non racists republicans? Sure, but they are a minority.

 

[richiek]

4chan is an internet cesspool? Who would have guessed?

 

[The Technomancer]

And democratic government, the neoreactionaries insist, is not effective, lawful government. Because the will of the people is arbitrary and varying, it cannot have the consistency of real, durable law, and it creates incentives for wasteful and, worse still, left-wing government. Moldbug started as an Austrian-school libertarian, and most neoreactionaries have general small-government sympathies and express a fear that democracy inevitably leads to ever greater taxation and redistribution, and otherwise encroaches on individual liberty.

There is so much to unpack here. I almost wish someone would argue with me about it

 

[sphagnum]

Everything about Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin just exudes a sense of being a reactionary dweeb who thinks himself better than everyone.

edit: Its movements like these that always make me roll my eyes at people who laugh off internet activism as if it means nothing. /pol/ and 8chan have done an amazing job spreading their ideological influence, ruining people's lives (see: GamerGate), getting their message out there, etc. with younger disaffected white conservative males who otherwise may have just stuck with the usual Reaganesque ideology. Likewise, platforms like Tumblr have done a ton to spread/propagate leftist ideology among college aged liberals. They're not sufficient in and of themselves to cause change but they allow ideologies that were otherwise forgotten to have new life with a new audience. I can't recall how many times I've seen people say there were radicalized by LF or redpilled (blech) by Moldbug.

 

[The Technomancer]

Yiannopoulos (✔), who before the controversy

Can't have a proper discussion without him of course

 

[Bronx-Man]

4chan is an internet cesspool? Who would have guessed?

.

 

[aeolist]

There is so much to unpack here. I almost wish someone would argue with me about it

it's interesting that they think their ideal dictator will somehow promote competition and individual liberty

because dictators are known for their inclination to restrict governmental overreach

 

[Abstrusity]

I resent the accusation that all of 4chan is right-wing, or even all of 4chan is to be abhored. It's reductive and plays into the hands of the stormfront populous that also uses /pol/ and /b/ as fertive seeding grounds -- mostly because you can simply say whatever you want without being shouted down or get your posts deleted.Unfettered freedom of speech lets these kinds of people thrive, but it also lets the satire thereof thrive, and I, as one of those so-called channers, believe strongly that these are, indeed, satirists, working from Poe's Law to be as similiar to the crazies they're saddled with otherwise.

 

[DrGonzo615]

Its a Vox editorial....take what you read with a grain of salt.

 

[aeolist]

I resent the accusation that all of 4chan is right-wing, or even all of 4chan is to be abhored. It's reductive and plays into the hands of the stormfront populous that also uses /pol/ and /b/ as fertive seeding grounds -- mostly because you can simply say whatever you want without being shouted down or get your posts deleted.Unfettered freedom of speech lets these kinds of people thrive, but it also lets the satire thereof thrive, and I, as one of those so-called channers, believe strongly that these are, indeed, satirists, working from Poe's Law to be as similiar to the crazies they're saddled with otherwise.

i wouldn't say i'm a channer at all but i've browsed some of its boards off and on over the years, and it seems to me that while 4chan (like everywhere else) isn't a uniform hivemind there is a lot more unironic open bigotry infecting non-pol boards these days

 

[collige]

I wish people would stop conflating /b/ and /pol/ with all of 4chan

There is so much to unpack here. I almost wish someone would argue with me about it

It really is a remarkable quote. It made a decent amount sense right up until the "worse still" part.

 

[yanipheonu]

Tldr, white people be trippin

 

[partyphone]

i wouldn't say i'm a channer at all but i've browsed some of its boards off and on over the years, and it seems to me that while 4chan (like everywhere else) isn't a uniform hivemind there is a lot more unironic open bigotry infecting non-pol boards these days

and there's no difference between ironic and unironic racism when it escapes the bounds of 4chan.

 

[n00bsauce87]

Hate them as much as you can.

Their vote counts as much as the next Bernie Sanders supporter.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

4chan has always been about finding the buttons that get the biggest reaction from the media then hammering on them until they break.

 

[ApharmdX]

I think someone posted this in PoliGAF yesterday? It's a really good read. The alt-right is a lot of broken people, getting together to do harm to others, I think. God help us if they ever become a legitimate political force in the US.

“Most of them are childless single men who masturbate to anime. They’re not real political players. These are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity.”

GOAT quote.

 

[NoblesseOblige]

4chan is less right-wing, more edgy teenagers (and those who never leave that phase) which honestly is just as bad.

 

[studyguy]

Its a Vox editorial....take what you read with a grain of salt.

I mean hopping around social media, it's not exactly hard to disagree breh.
They're not exactly stating anything radical here.

 

[hobozero]

"Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does."

OK, someone help me out here, this is batshit nuts right?

Right off the bat, government makes laws (with a mandate from the voters ideally), so how can they act unlawfully? I'm not talking Nixonian "If the president does it that means it not illegal' shady-shit, but outside of outright illegality isn't all government lawful government, by definition?

Second, he says government should not rule by will of the people (since that can vary), but in a way that is 'effective'. Effective at what, and in what direction? Is he saying there is some moral absolute that government can aspire to? Isn't what's 'moral' in a culture already dictated by it's society a.k.a. the people?

I feel like either he argued in circles, or I missed some cogent point he mail when I wasn't looking.

 

[aeolist]

OK, someone help me out here, this is batshit nuts right?

Right off the bat, government makes laws (with a mandate from the voters ideally), so how can they act unlawfully? I'm not talking Nixonian "If the president does it that means it not illegal' shady-shit, but outside of outright illegality isn't all government lawful government, by definition?

Second, he says government should not rule by will of the people (since that can vary), but in a way that is 'effective'. Effective at what, and in what direction? Is he saying there is some moral absolute that government can aspire to? Isn't what's 'moral' in a culture already dictated by it's society a.k.a. the people?

I feel like either he argued in circles, or I missed some cogent point he mail when I wasn't looking.

it's about your perspective. to these people the current government abridges individual liberty (taxes, civil rights laws, etc) and selectively enforces legislation (their go-to is likely immigration law, but all governments do this all the time). thus lawlessness.

and yeah, they're moral absolutists. some of then are techno-libertarian and think the world should be run like a silicon valley startup.

 

[Mr.Mike]

OK, someone help me out here, this is batshit nuts right?

Right off the bat, government makes laws (with a mandate from the voters ideally), so how can they act unlawfully? I'm not talking Nixonian "If the president does it that means it not illegal' shady-shit, but outside of outright illegality isn't all government lawful government, by definition?

Second, he says government should not rule by will of the people (since that can vary), but in a way that is 'effective'. Effective at what, and in what direction? Is he saying there is some moral absolute that government can aspire to? Isn't what's 'moral' in a culture already dictated by it's society a.k.a. the people?

I feel like either he argued in circles, or I missed some cogent point he mail when I wasn't looking.

I think they do believe in some absolute moral law.

 

[Risette]

OK, someone help me out here, this is batshit nuts right?

yes, definitely.

now imagine an entire movement formed around half-baked ideas like that. scary, isn't it?

 

[Abstrusity]

There is so much to unpack here. I almost wish someone would argue with me about it

Well, at its face, it's right. Government by the people, for the people, is a naive fantasy, mostly because people are always going to have an "other" to hate, and tyranny of the majority can render their rights stripped or otherwise not granted. See the anti-transgender bills passed in state houses over he last couple months. Most people actually AGREE with those bills in those states, because they buy into transpanic fear mongering, built around decades of media influence, from news, to videos.Media op-eds and specials don't paint a pretty picture, so it's something to FEAR, and fear is the biggest emotion capitalized upon. It's how you get small government conservatives and big government, normally pro-privacy adherent democrats to vote for something like the Patriot Act.

People in general are ignorant, but not really stupid. They don't know what's best for them, they don't know how a country is run, they don't know the best way to run one, so they really shouldn't have much of a say in it at all. Similarly, most politicians don't know much about science, technology, or economics, so they REALLY shouldn't be the ones ultimately deciding how we should tackle global warming, or if we should at all, or recessions with deflationary pressure...or if we should at all. A parliamentary system helps address this by at least limiting the potential for rights violations by splitting up those that earnestly believe X is bad from those who really don't have an opinion on it.

But the current system is a shitshow, dominated by money, marketing, and fear mongering, with outsized pressure from minority viewpoints being overplayed in a vain attempt to capture as much of a shrinking population as possible, with the extra benefit of a fear of change

 

[sohois]

I'm not sure these groups really warrant being lumped together under the alt-right term. Neoreactionaries are pretty far away from paleocons from what I've read and I don't think they would fit in any kind of party system whatsoever - given that one of the central tenets of their philosophy is being anti-democracy.

Further reading for anyone interested:
What is neoreaction?
And here you have an extremely lengthy takedown: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/

Can you even assign anything to an entire board like /pol/? It's thousands of users, trolls, lunatics and assorted others. It's not a hivemind.

 

[KenzinFive]

i wouldn't say i'm a channer at all but i've browsed some of its boards off and on over the years, and it seems to me that while 4chan (like everywhere else) isn't a uniform hivemind there is a lot more unironic open bigotry infecting non-pol boards these days

Precisely. I've gone on /co/ for years and it's completely insufferable now that nearly EVERY thread has to have at least one or two posters chiming in with /pol/-related/anti-SJW stuff. /pol/ and the alt-right people it has attracted have unquestionably made 4chan worse, on top of the site already being pretty damn unsavory. I know anywhere from 60-90% of it is just trolling, but it's seriously gotten worse.

 

[explodet]

I, as one of those so-called channers, believe strongly that these are, indeed, satirists, working from Poe's Law to be as similiar to the crazies they're saddled with otherwise.

Poe's Law:

it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism

So it doesn't matter if it's a parody or not. There will always be people out there who won't get the joke.

 

[aeolist]

I'm not sure these groups really warrant being lumped together under the alt-right term. Neoreactionaries are pretty far away from paleocons from what I've read and I don't think they would fit in any kind of party system whatsoever - given that one of the central tenets of their philosophy is being anti-democracy.

Further reading for anyone interested:
What is neoreaction?
And here you have an extremely lengthy takedown: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/

Can you even assign anything to an entire board like /pol/? It's thousands of users, trolls, lunatics and assorted others. It's not a hivemind.

the left-right model of politics doesn't refer to the form of government. fascism, for example, is generally considered to be far right politically and is obviously anti-democratic.

alt-right is a deliberately loose term for a wide array of nutty beliefs that generally fall into the right wing of the political spectrum. also your second link was cited in the vox article.

 

[Dennis]

People think 4chan isn't 90%+ trolling for the lulz?

 

[Ekai]

A Vox article that isn't about how awesome Hillary is/how much Bernie sucks and wants to rob you of your money? I'm surprised they could actually write something on point for once.

 

[Slayven]

Thank god they have little reach outside of the internet.

 

[KenzinFive]

People think 4chan isn't 90%+ trolling for the lulz?

At some point in the past few years, there was a definite change in people who were just trolling and people who actually believed what they were posting. It's not a complete change, but I can definitely see it. There's a whole lot more unironically racist people on there now. I think that there's some people who, when they were teens, took the trolling as legit, and it started to influence their actual opinions. The trolling made it a safe haven for people to post actual despicable shit as oppose to just stuff for lulz. The problem is that it looks almost identical to troll posts because it's so asinine and stupid.

 

[explodet]

Poe's Law, man. Poe's Law.

On a slightly related note, I'm enjoyed reading the Buzzfeed theory that Yiannopoulos is actually 44 4chan interns.

 

[Abstrusity]

At some point in the past few years, there was a definite change in people who were just trolling and people who actually believed what they were posting. It's not a complete change, but I can definitely see it. There's a whole lot more unironically racist people on there now. I think that there's some people who, when they were teens, took the trolling as legit, and it started to influence their actual opinions. The trolling made it a safe haven for people to post actual despicable shit as oppose to just stuff for lulz. The problem is that it looks almost identical to troll posts because it's so asinine and stupid.

It's followed the same general trend as /pol/ predecessors did. For a while, it's trolling. Idiots and stormfront, zero hedge, etc., wander in, thinking they have a place where they can let loose, and broadcast their signal into the sea of noise. The numbers keep on growing ntil the board is deleted, then it leaks into the site otherwise for a while, people get banned, sometimes IP range banned, and they never really cared enough about the site itself to go around them.

The problem here is that now, mootykins isn't running it, the moderator force is diminished. Fewer people get banned, the board isn't being deleted and reinstated as a reset button. This has been the way it worked since 2005, but it needs a reset again and it's not in the cards.

 

[dapperbandit]

There's a kind of nihilistic intellectual string to some of the alt-right stuff I've seen and read that goes beyond the memes.

To me their views represent the logical conclusion of right wing politics if you go ahead and slaughter all the sacred cows like egalitarianism. It's why they are so dismissive of mainstream conservatives (or cuckservatives as they would say): the way they see it conservatives get rings run round them by liberals because conservatives still subscribe to the liberal principles the alt-right rejects.

But right now they are more of a nebulous mass so while they can abuse people on twitter and occasionally get articles like this (which are essentially advertisement) they don't have much influence. I do believe they may become the face of anti-establishment politics on the right in the near future however.

 

[Sub_Level]

The Moot Who Sold The World

 

[Lime]

It's also quite worrying that these people are so young. We have to endure their chemtrails fascism for many, many years to come. And then imagine how they'll be when they'll get older.

And it's almost impossible to form a discourse with them. Their rhetoric is so militant and toxic and premised on a mount everest of bullshit fabrications that it only ends up destroying yourself if you engage with them.

It just shows how society or the family/friends/media/people around them have failed them by making them into these hateful and irrational people.

 

[params7]

/pol/ has already influenced this election to some extent. Can't Stump The Trump is their baby and they output memes like crazy which then get recycled through the rest of the internet. They don't fully relate to White Nationalist causes but definitely Nationalism and highly anti-current left.

Their Syria Generals are great though. Recently, /pol/ figured out coordinates of rebels in Syria, delivered them to Russia's military via twitter and then Russia successfully carried that strike.

 

[aeolist]

Their Syria Generals are great though. Recently, /pol/ figured out coordinates of rebels in Syria, delivered them to Russia's military via twitter and then Russia successfully carried that strike.

4chan is giving the russian air force strike targets?

this is maybe the scariest thing i've ever seen

 

[Sober]

Their Syria Generals are great though. Recently, /pol/ figured out coordinates of rebels in Syria, delivered them to Russia's military via twitter and then Russia successfully carried that strike.

WTF am I reading? There is no way that is true.

 

[Jebusman]

Their Syria Generals are great though. Recently, /pol/ figured out coordinates of rebels in Syria, delivered them to Russia's military via twitter and then Russia successfully carried that strike.

/pol/ couldn't find their own ass even if you gave them a map to it, so I do question this a bit. But the sentiment that they would want to do so is not entirely unbelievable.

 

[Lime]

This piece by Klint Finley from 2013 is also linked in the Vox article and calls out the whole gaming & tech culture's affinity with this type of ideology:

And this interest just happens to coincide with growing media attention being paid to the problems of the tech industry, from sexism in video games to “bro culture” in the tech industry to gentrification in the Bay Area.

And many professionals, rather than admit to their role in gentrification, wealth disparity and job displacement, are casting themselves as victims. This sense of persecution leads us to our next neoreactionary theme.

The Cathedral
Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the Overton window, in other words.

This is the exact same mechanism that these people are doing when it comes to games media. Anything that resembles "the Cathedral" is a feminist/sjw/unethical institution and part of a larger conspiracy against so-called "Gamers"

 

[Dennis]

Their Syria Generals are great though. Recently, /pol/ figured out coordinates of rebels in Syria, delivered them to Russia's military via twitter and then Russia successfully carried that strike.

welp

next-level swatting here we come

 

[Abstrusity]

It's also quite worrying that these people are so young. We have to endure their chemtrails fascism for many, many years to come. And then imagine how they'll be when they'll get older.

And it's almost impossible to form a discourse with them. Their rhetoric is so militant and toxic and premised on a mount everest of bullshit fabrications that it only ends up destroying yourself if you engage with them.

It just shows how society or the family/friends/media/people around them have failed them by making them into these hateful and irrational people.

Well, this is what happens when you ostracize otherwise normal, if socially inept people. I lay the blame for this sort of thing SQUARELY on a poor reaction to this ostracization, mostly during high school, while ALSO normalizing the very things they were being ostracized for. They took to refuges like gaming or comics, and then the very same type of people who treated them like garbage for liking them started also liking them. When you've already got a tenuous grasp on socialization, it feels like they are intruding. And when they want to change things, it feels like they are attacking. That's why Gamergate got so big. It's easy to assume that they've always been like this, but the cause, at least to me, is clear.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Well, this is what happens when you ostracize otherwise normal, if socially inept people. I lay the blame for this sort of thing SQUARELY on a poor reaction to this ostracization, mostly during high school, while ALSO normalizing the very things they were being ostracized for. They took to refuges like gaming or comics, and then the very same type of people who treated them like garbage for liking them started also liking them. When you've already got a tenuous grasp on socialization, it feels like they are intruding. And when they want to change things, it feels like they are attacking. That's why Gamergate got so big. It's easy to assume that they've always been like this, but the cause, at least to me, is clear.

...................................................

No, I'm pretty sure that racism and misogyny are not caused by (likely other white men) making fun of them.

Racism and misogyny have existed since the beginning of time, not just since video games were created.

These are just racists who like video games a lot.

 

[Abstrusity]

...................................................

No, I'm pretty sure that racism and misogyny are not caused by (likely other white men) making fun of them.

Racism and misogyny have existed since the beginning of time, not just since video games were created.

These are just racists who like video games a lot.

No, not the racism and misogyny itself, the 'putting it into a movement that actually gained traction' part of it. That sort of thing only really happens when people all feel the same, and irrational actors gonna be irrational.

 

[aeolist]

Well, this is what happens when you ostracize otherwise normal, if socially inept people. I lay the blame for this sort of thing SQUARELY on a poor reaction to this ostracization, mostly during high school, while ALSO normalizing the very things they were being ostracized for. They took to refuges like gaming or comics, and then the very same type of people who treated them like garbage for liking them started also liking them. When you've already got a tenuous grasp on socialization, it feels like they are intruding. And when they want to change things, it feels like they are attacking. That's why Gamergate got so big. It's easy to assume that they've always been like this, but the cause, at least to me, is clear.

the bolded is revisionary bullshit.

racial/gender/etc minorities have always been part of the nerd space and nerd media has always contained social justice themes. you may not agree with gamergate but you're uncritically passing along their propaganda.

 

[dapperbandit]

WTF am I reading? There is no way that is true.

/pol/ couldn't find their own ass even if you gave them a map to it, so I do question this a bit. But the sentiment that they would want to do so is not entirely unbelievable.

welp

next-level swatting here we come

For the record this is what params7 is referring to:

http://i.imgur.com/N7DwWP1.jpg

 

[Abstrusity]

the bolded is revisionary bullshit.

racial/gender/etc minorities have always been part of the nerd space and nerd media has always contained social justice themes. you may not agree with gamergate but you're uncritically passing along their propaganda.

I'm saying that the reason that this is propaganda, the very reason people talk like this, and THINK THESE THINGS, is that they legitimately believe it, whether it's t rue or not. It's still irrational, it's still mostly wrong, it's still a problem, but they're not exactly cream of the crop mentally stable. There really is no other suitable explanation for why it had so many people, disaffected as they were, rallied around a common cause.