the alt-right

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