the alt-right

something up in east London

from feb, the ld50 art gallery hosts a lot of far right ish, gets protests

https://nytimes.com/2017/02/25/arts/design/london-gallery-ld50-alt-right-show-protest.html

same group of protesters call for dismissal of Nick Land from the New Centre for Research & Practice

https://shutdownld50.tumblr.com/post/158928600961/no-platform-for-land-on-nick-lands-racist

...according to this post by a Peruvian student of his, it happened

https://medium.com/@gcarloms/crapitulation-on-the-new-centres-sacking-of-nick-land-330b1dc0c6f5

xpost

a lot of the left/right narratives shuffle themselves around a bit as you crawl through the interviews of moderate, minority pro-Trump supporters Bauer posted on his feed. I don't know what some of them would say about having chosen to stand on the side of the (numerous) guys throwing sieg heils, I don't know what the guys who brought 2 liter milk cartons to swig from make of having substantial Black / Latino support for Trump & free speech; but it shouldn't be too surprising that they all get on well enough so that by the end, after the militant fascists have chased away antifa, everyone left (the people who came to support the free speech rally) all get on well enough to do a few rounds around MLK park, KPFA & Shattuck BART all chanting USA. that is something you don't see every day.

I am a tiny bit frustrated with some of Bauer's 140-character takeaways summing up the whole struggle as being fascists against anti-fascists. on one level, totally fair, the actual core beatdowns undoubtedly were precisely that, and yes I was not there and I am grateful he was. but too many of the interviews he posted get at something more heartbroken. passionate people who really are trying to navigate patriotism and the ongoing free speech experiment in 2017, who didn't come to fight.

after having rewatched the entirety of the videos on Bauer's feed though... it would be extremely naive not to admit that the core of that crowd did explicitly show for a fight, and got exactly the fight they wanted.

If US politics ever comes down to whichever group can win a street brawl, I'm not going to be of any further political use.

If US politics ever comes down to whichever group can win a street brawl, I'm not going to be of any further political use.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless)

when politics comes down to who can win a street brawl- which, multiple times in the past, it has- the prognosis for governance is generally not good.

That's pretty much the history of the South until the 1960's...

...

Please don't bother enlightening us anymore on that, Fred.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9fKdvhXUAAjNyZ.jpg

At age 62 my street brawling skills have pretty much faded away. That's more of a young person's game. Ditto for my smartphone video recoding skills.

have spent the better part of the day so far fighting with two or three dimwits on a friend's FB timeline who kept declaring that Antifa was in the wrong in Berkeley and how the left are all violent free speech suppressors, while giving a pass to Identity Evropa et all who actually planned the fight ("I don't know that that group was there; I don't know that they actually did 'seig heil' signs, those pictures are fake; BLM and Antifa are equal to the KKK and these are all terrorist groups, etc"). Got nowhere, wound up just blocking some shitheads.

2017: blockin shitheads

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/04/18/the-man-behind-the-neo-nazi-daily-stormer-website-is-being-sued-by-one-of-his-troll-storm-targets/

had a similar experience with someone like that, they were completely unable to engage with me in good faith so i gave up and ya blocked them xxp

Had a chat yesterday with a friend who's not big on internet culture and it's still a challenge to explain any of this shit.

i saw a link to something recently that advertised the journalist as something like "she visits 4chan so you don't have to" but i don't remember who wrote it (laurie penny maybe?) or where it was published. this is such a shot in the dark but does anyone know what article i'm talking about?

You might be thinking of Angela Nagle--could be this one ("The New Man of 4chan") or this one ("Paleocons for Porn").

kill all normies

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/beyond-alt-understanding-the-new-far-right.html

looking fwd to maureen o'connor's contribs especially

a lengthy and drier version of much of this same info was put together here:

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/01/20/ctrl-alt-delete-report-on-the-alternative-right/

https://soundcloud.com/deadpundits/ep-9-exiting-the-culture-warrior-clusterfck-w-angela-nagle

hesitate to recommend this bc i find the interviewer/host kind of an unbearable prick but the interview itself is really good- in-depth and thought-provoking even when i didn't find myself entirely agreeing.

lol i listened to his interview with freddie deboer a few weeks ago and it was truly next level douchebaggery

his interview subjects are generally good but he's definitely doing a lot of damage by being a walking brocialist stereotype.

Do we think... Angela Nagle isn't doing herself any favours being interviewed by a brocialist douche? Almost like... Angela Nagl lol thanks I;m here all weak

https://thesportsavenue.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/refyellowcard.jpg

Does that mean I'm suspended for the next alt-right thread

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=gazza+tears&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi42Iv-itHTAhUPb1AKHaw2A1IQ_AUICigB&biw=1409&bih=770#imgrc=ZFzhtY42FoscVM:

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/564459/thumbs/r-GAZZA-large570.jpg?4

i don't make the rules, i only enforce them

Been thinking about how up until recent years the crank philosophy versions of misogyny were completely unfamiliar to me. My first awareness of masculinist/MRA stuff was Tom Cruise in Magnolia. Nearest thing I'd seen in Britain was a romantic comedy I can't remember the name of and Jim Davidson going on a rant about properly hating women, which were shockingly weird but it didn't seem to have all that crank ideology behind it.

Before the internet was this a familiar type of person in America? I still find a lot of this stuff deeply alien and all the bizarre fetishism that comes with it seems like an elaborate hoax.

Everybody knows about crazy evangelical Christians and conspiracy theorists in America but the only type of cranks that seem familiar around me are stoner conspiracy theorists, George Galloway types, hari krishna people, freeman (is that what they're called?) people and some varieties of spiritualists and occultists.
Don't really know how what our conspiracy theorists were like before the internet and I don't know if British nationalists really got that far into the really wacky stuff.

I know some people who're into conspiracy theories, haven't really spoke to them recently but I'm kind of worried they could have been sucked into right wing stuff online.
I know someone who's been sort of radicalized by American Christian television.

Has Paul Joseph Watson always pandered to the American right wing side of conspiracy theorists?

It's probably a bad sign but I get excited when American right wing science fiction authors get up to their shenanigans. There's something really fascinating about this stuff, like studying and cataloguing a rare species.

Summed up question to people from anywhere: what were your cranks, hardcore misogynists and racists like before and after the internet and is there a big American influence?

Don't really know how what our conspiracy theorists were like before the internet

i suppose it depends on how far back you want to go "before the internet". i've been reading primary documentation from the witch hunts. for hundreds of years it was seen as a globalist conspiracy to destroy civilization. pre-medieval era the common practice was to throw the accused to wild animals. once the Inquisition came down in earnest they had to change that to burning at the stake because so many witches were women. this is where western civilization comes from.

Everybody knows about crazy evangelical Christians and conspiracy theorists in America but the only type of cranks that seem familiar around me are stoner conspiracy theorists, George Galloway types, hari krishna people, freeman (is that what they're called?) people and some varieties of spiritualists and occultists.

I used to be friends on FB with a 40something rave promoter, don't even remember how I got there. Anyway his posts were mostly of the innocous pics of the family/Bob Marley quotes variety but as brexit dawned there was a big discussion on his profile where he and his mates agreed that Leave would never win because the illuminati would never allow it to happen. Felt tempted to post something like "looks like yer worldwide conspiracy fucked this one up proper eh?" after the vote but unfriended instead.

I guess that counts as "stoner conspiracy theorist" but with an unexpected right-wing bent.

Aren't there a lot of lefties who were leavers and talk about illuminati stuff?

I mean there's leftie leavers and leftie illuminati crazies, I dunno if there's much of a crossover between them. But that certainly didn't seem to be the tone there.

Huge crossover there, some of which is very anti-Semitic.

So, alt-right watchers: did they break out the bud light after the vote this week too?

milk and bud lite cocktails all around

RIP Pepe

anti-semites for bernie, that's kind of a weird thing

death of pepe long overdue

Well the alt-right version will certainly live on and the original is definitely preferable.

what a supreme headfuck for Matt Furie

article about alt-right talking points cropping up on Chinese social media

https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/chenchen-zhang/curious-rise-of-white-left-as-chinese-internet-insult

Seen from the perspective of international relations, the anti-baizuo discourse can be understood as part of what William A. Callahan calls ‘negative soft power’, that is, constructing the Chinese self through ‘the deliberate creation and then exclusion’ of Others as ‘barbarians’ or otherwise inferior. Criticisms of the ‘white left’ against the background of the European refugee crisis fit especially well with the ‘rising China’ versus ‘Europe in decline’ narrative. According to Baidu Trends, one of the most related keywords to baizuo was huimie: “to destroy”. Articles with titles such as ‘the white left are destroying Europe’ were widely circulated.

http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/torch-wielding-protesters-gather-at-lee-park/article_201dc390-384d-11e7-bf16-fb43de0f5d38.html

I kinda love how the various non-Spencer statue supporters are all 'we reject hate and white supremacy, no really'

Not really that surprising that ethnic nationalist ideas would find a home in the PRC

i want to say something about baizuo.

nationalistic far left (far left in the chinese context = chinese identity, territorial integrity, love the party, reform has ruined the country) thinking isn't rare on the chinese internet.
and this fits with much of pretty mainstream chinese political thought
ie.
- reforms from the left are the road to disaster (whether it's prague in 1968 or shenzhen in 1992 or washington in 2016),
- maybe william a. callahan is right but the west is decadent has been a frequent theme in crackdowns like the anti-spiritual pollution campaign that began in 1982 (there was criticism then too of focusing on "human rights" as something that could be disconnected from marxist-leninist economic thought, anti-baizuo is 2016 zhao ziyang) + the most recent party line banning textbooks and teaching that promotes “western values."

in 1982 and 2016-17 getting the people to get out against foreign decadence and reforms of capitalism from the left were related to political games/factions within the party fighting it out.

i think something like anti-baizuo is mostly the above with the added influence of online gaming shit talk and weaponized memes from alt right from the u.s.a./netto uyoku from japan. but nothing new really, i don't think. also kind of the same as frederick b.'s love of talking shit about american politics from northern europe, it's just a bit of internet fun.

that baizuo article was fascinating, glad to see it popped up here

In an academic-style essay that was retweeted more than 7000 times on Weibo, a user named ‘fantasy lover Mr. Liu’ ‘reviewed’ European philosophy from Voltaire and Marx to Adorno and Foucault, concluding that the ‘white left’ as a 'spiritual epidemic' is on its way to self-destruction. He then stated that Trump’s win was only “a small victory over this spiritual epidemic of humankind”, but “western civilization is still far from its self-redemption”. However ridiculous it may appear, the post is illustrative of how a demonized Other is projected onto seemingly objective or academic criticisms of the ‘white left’. Ultimately, the more the ‘white left’ – whatever it means – represent the fatal weakness of democracy, the more institutional and normative security the Chinese regime enjoys. The grassroots campaign against the ‘white left’ thus echoes the officially-sanctioned campaign against ‘universal values’, providing a negative evidence for the superiority of the Chinese self.

if this interp is correct, it's pretty fashy to me

grotesque or just seamless trolling?

Rhododendron • 2 days ago
I don't think you go far enough. I'm a Chinese-American, born and raised in the west, well versed in western culture and free from China's cultural climate. I despise liberal democracy, equality, and other retrograde values that the west seems to love.

The "white left" describes a phenomenon that goes beyond cultural barriers. People around the world have noticed that whites, at least northern/western Europeans, have a problematic level of compassion that overcomes rationality. This is why they believe that equality is a good thing, or that empathy is a substitute for actual politics.

One does not need to actually live in western society to realize that hierarchy and social inequity are the hallmarks of higher civilization, and that undue sympathy for the "little guy" is inherently damaging to the core (i.e. privileged) demographics that make up a nation.

Your criticism of the anti-baizuo movement is therefore lacking in global and historical context. Your assumption that racism or bigotry is a bad thing without further examination is surreal, and indicative of your own disconnect from the rest of humanity. The Chinese critics are right. The west is not a legitimate standard. It is not at all superior, morally or intellectually. The idea that people are/should be equals is a profound form of ignorance. Their ideas need to be challenged, undermined, and replaced.

Liberal democracy, and its accompanying values represent a small bubble created by the minds of white men. It is not normal, and rightly criticized by non-whites as the dangerous, backwards, emotionally incontinent ideology that it is. Its critics in China simply articulate it better than others.

As Chinese, you and I have a responsibility to change western countries from within so that they match the experiences of humanity in general. We should be pushing for moral and cultural reforms to normalize their countries, not buying into their failed ideas just because they "sound nice".