Perhaps on the smaller subreddits, but have a look at /r/all on any given day and it's obvious that real people, and diverse backgrounds, it is not. Every single subreddit that goes above a certain activity threshold collapses into the exact same state of astroturfed, mass-produced political slop targeted towards low IQ people.
"The current times" are a direct result of decisions like that of Merkel to throw open the borders of Germany to a million unchecked foreign men. If there's one reason that the AfD is the largest party in Germany today, it's because of that decision Merkel made a whole decade ago. How was that "based in facts, truth and science", or "slow and steady"?
The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
There will always be people that dislike change, but it may ultimately be better to start integrating them earlier rather than later. If you make it through the bad times (e.g. now), at the other end is the outcome you desire.
> The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
The refugee crisis didn't appear to have a significant impact (positive or negative) on the labor market based on a recent study by the IZA and ZEW [0] - "Our estimates suggest that those migrants have not displaced native workers but have themselves struggled to find gainful employment. We find moderate increases in crime, and our analysis further indicates that while at the macro level increased migration was accompanied by increased support for anti-immigrant parties, exposure to asylum seekers at the micro level had a small negative effect." [0]
There are systemic issues with the German economy that aren't related to immigration. A lot of the current malaise can be attributed to the economic slowdowns in Russia (with the Russian Invasion of Ukraine) [1] and China (due to Zero COVID and the subsequent indigenization) [2], due to how tied German industry was with both markets [3].
>The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
How many of those unchecked are women? What's the point of having borders then? Or law enforcement putting criminals in jails, when they could be out there propping up the economy. As long as your illegal activities are putting money into the state coffers, you should be allowed to continue unchecked, screw the laws.
Yeah sure, they might cause some trouble for the lower and middle class living amongst them, but think of the economic gains for the top 1%! Their real estate and stock portfolios have never looked so good. And if people vocally disagree with this you call them fascist and put them in jail for threatening your "democracy".
How does Poland's economy manage to grow faster than Germany's without illegal immigration? Maybe they can send some researchers there to find out.
I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.
The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol, which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some very thin, actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community. To say these terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.
I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.
>actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community
There wasn't any connection. You are running things in reverse. There was an explicit concerted effort to 'take it over'. With celebrations when it succeeded as the media to the bait.
You both are wrong, thee is actually a symbiosis. Media (any kind) need freaks, maniacs, disasters to generate views, and keep common people puzzled, thrilled, and entertained. Anons need lulz. Therefore complete nonsense — “white poodle is a secret way to say Heil Hitler to the ones in the know” — will be reported in hopes that it won't fizzle out, but will become the next media sensation, and immediately there will be threads from totally legit specialists discussing how to breed the whitest dog possible.
You are describing exactly what I said: the media makes up nonsense--or is fed it by activists--and then people think it is funny and play with the idea.
>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
I could be wrong but I don't think 'normie' came from 'normalfag'. I'm somewhat skeptical that 'goyslop' was the first use of 'slop' in this way too. And of course 'based' comes from rapper Lil B.
I think "normalfag" is a backformation from "normie"; at any rate, "normie" is itself 4chan slang that entered norm... ie... usage one way or another. "Based" was coined by Lil B but absolutely entered wide usage via being adopted as a meme by 4chan.
All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't mean they aren't alt-right anymore.
As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
> There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
A lot of influencers in this space are non-whites born outside of the west. The scale of what he’s describing is exaggerated, but the trend is there.
> As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
This might have been true ten years ago. Most of the people in this space became disaffected with Putin after the war began owing to his moves with Dagestan and the Wagner group’s activities in Africa. /pol/ and /k/ are far more supportive of Ukraine than one would expect if your theory held true. There’s reason to suspect this is the result of the same kind of influence campaigns that were being run on the site by Russia during the Syrian Civil War.
> Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement
On 4chan, Nick Fuentes is loudly and routinely criticized as a closeted homosexual who hates women and encourages his impressionable underage followers to also hate women. He's a more active part of the incel pipeline than 4chan these days and is called out for it on 4chan.
(He's also as a federal informant, since he was never thrown in the slammer for plainly inciting J6 activity. The feds had him dead to rights for that and just let him. I mention this not because it's relevant to the point, just for completeness.)
I would still call it one of the epicenters. Yes, many venues that were previously only multlipliers like some prolific streamers / Youtubers / TikTok channels have grown and cultivated their own distinct subcommunities which form new epicenters.
However, from what I can see /pol/ still serves as significant breeding ground where people deeply committed to their views can get together in a "mask-off" manner without fear of moderation, while they have to be more "mask-on" on platforms that are more dissemination-focused like Youtube.
Name anything which doesn't need to be explained by somebody to someone. BTW, "you disagreeing with me is evidence that I am right" is a very 4chan way of arguing.
What caused people to stop using the free service that is MySpace? What caused people stop using the free service that is Digg? Being free isn't particularly novel. Facebook isn't providing this service out of some sense of altruism. It is incredibly profitable.
What about the tariffs would cause people to stop using it? Because they - along with many other of the administrations postulations and policies - are incredibly unpopular and a complete 180 of US foreign trade policy. Because tech is a money printing machine for the US and tech oligarchs who have largely bent the knee to Trump.
Carl Sagan died the year after this quote. With the greatest respect to him as a science communicator, he has not lived to see an entire generation of politics. When he died, the liberal capitalist post-historical consensus was in full swing. World leaders believed that all notions of identity and nationhood would gently fade away, to be replaced by a world of fungible, peaceful shoppers, administered by an all-knowing, all-loving class of technocratic managers.
The election of Trump (especially Trump 2.0) is a ground-up repudiation of this consensus by ordinary people, who have a completely different life experience to the managerial cosmopolitan class (of whom this website largely represents). Trump, and various other right-wing ascendants throughout the world, are a statement by the common people of the belief that a desire for identity, sovereignty and representation does not disappear the moment a McDonald's appears in their home country.
The (understandable!) lamentations of the academic class towards the current actions of the Trump administration have, to my mind, a deficit of self-reflection and theory of mind towards the people supporting these actions. For decades, the stage of "democracy" has been increasingly garnished with explicitly non-democratic embellishments. NGOs, panels of "experts", bureaucratic oversight, international "obligations" and so on.
This is the exact same situation that motivated the people of Britain to vote for Brexit 9 years ago. Michael Gove, while I have very little time for him as a politician, made a point in a news interview that was condemned for years, but that I think was an accurate capture of working-class sentiment in that time. The soundbite form was "Britain has had enough of experts". And he was exactly right.
For decades, academia has been part of an ongoing anti-democratic, elitist movement to effectively take control away from common people. Health matters are deferred to "listening to the experts", and ordinary people were made to feel as if they didn't deserve a say on if they should be allowed to leave their own homes in 2020-21. NGO-funded academic studies serve to tell normal people that despite their own experiences, mass immigration has been an unambiguous good in their lives, and they have no right to express otherwise. This idea of deference to unelected experts peaked when normal people started being told that it was not within their jurisdiction to define for themselves what the words "man" and "woman" mean -- these two words that are foundational to human civilisation and the language spoken in it were to become the domain of a sect of largely self-appointed modern-day clerics, who expected the public to believe that they were completely rational, objective, and blind to ideology.
This is what the conversation on "anti-intellectualism" very often misses, when being discussed by those in the intellectual classes. While criticising the "uneducated" masses for being so unenlightened, they fail to notice that they also have biases, incentives, and ideological motivations, and it is these that the public are pushing back against, not the noble pursuit of objective knowledge.
This is the kind of dishonest motte-and-bailey framing that is all too common in academia, that my post was trying to highlight. There are many aspects and fields of academia that are very obviously ideologically captured, whether that's "studies" in economics and sociology that are obvious attempts to reify the modern consensus of human beings as identical, fungible, latently-liberal economic units. Or it could be well-known physicists being taken to task about how their research on cosmological inflation contributes to the cause of diversity [0].
When such things are rightly levied in criticisms of academic ideological capture, the discussion reverts to the idea that the entire industry is nothing more than "studying things", as you put it, for knowledge and knowledge alone.
>A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.
You could say the same thing about a private-rank soldier, or a party secretary. The relatively low wages of one particular person is incidental to the main issue of the overall power structure, and who it serves.
I just think “elite” has no meaning if you’re just using it as a synonym for “people I don’t like”.
“Elite” is traditionally a synonym for rich white men educated at Ivy League universities working comfortable, high-earning jobs. Those people still exist! Trump is one of them, as is George W Bush, and his father before him.
The contradictions in that definition and its examples indicates to me how outdated it is. Connecting "white men" and Ivy League universities, despite those institutions adopting an ideology explicitly designed to dispossess white men from institutional power. Connecting universities and Trump, despite the Trump administration occupying an opposing faction of power to academia (hence the articles bemoaning this being posted on HN). Connecting Trump to Bush despite Trump existing outside and against the Bush dynasty (to the point that the Democrats took Liz Cheney onboard in their campaign against Trump).
The better definition is simply that the elites of a nation are the ones that hold the most outsized political power, often the kind of intangible power that they are loathe to admit having. Trump is more or less attempting a small-scale revolution in America, being the replacement of one class of elites with another. What the prospective replacement class of elites looks like is harder to say than who they're attempting to replace.
> The election of Trump (especially Trump 2.0) is a ground-up repudiation of this consensus by ordinary people
Or maybe it's just a reaction to the "class of technocratic managers" becoming corrupt and dysfunctional, and attempting to control things that were far outside of the role that the "liberal capitalist post-historical consensus" had defined for them.
Most people in London don't care because they are not English and have no connection with the thousands of years of history the city and country have. Only a third of the population has any connection at all to the London of the 1950s, never mind the 1100s. They are not stakeholders in its heritage, the explanation is as simple as that.
I don't see anything in the article claiming this will damage the efficiency of London's food supply chains; indeed I wouldn't be surprised if it improved them.
Disappointing that a project that should ostensibly care about preserving the open, non-centralised internet takes the time to namedrop and talk about making "compromises" against preserving a well-known, medium-sized clearnet forum legally operated from a US-based LLC. Still-living independent forum sites in this day and age have unrivalled SNR of actual human-to-human communication, there should be no better candidate for archival. It's sad that a self-hosted archival tool has to apologise for any "evil" content it might be used for in the first place. Tape recorders do not require a disclaimer about people saying "hate speech" into them.
Sorry which medium sized forum are you referring to?
I love forums and want them to continue, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I dislike them as a medium. I was just pointing out that public sites in general have started to see some attrition a bit lately for a variety of reasons, and the tooling needs to keep with new mediums as they appear.
I also make no apology for the content, in fact ArchiveBox is explicitly designed to archive the most vile stuff for lawyers and governments to use for long term storage or evidence collection. One of our first prospective clients was the UN wanting to use it to document Syrian war crimes. The point there was that we can save stuff without amplifying it, and that's sometimes useful in niche scenarios.
Lawyers/LE especially don't want to broadcast to the world (or tip off their suspect) that they are investigating or endorsing a particular person, so the ability to capture without publicly announcing/mirroring every capture is vital.
Ahh that makes sense. Well all I can say to that is that it's not up to me what's evil. The point I was trying to make is: sometimes you want to archive something that you don't endorse / don't want to be publicly linked.
You might not want to amplify and broadcast the fact that you're archiving it to the world.
what? I think you have posted in the wrong thread or something...
User A complained about a forum, user B asked what they were talking about, and I guessed as to the meaning of user A's complaint. So why am I acting like anything?
