the alt-right

"fashwave"

https://www.buzzfeed.com/reggieugwu/fashwave?utm_term=.ayklGRxvN#.lcNwBK76R

The conservative wavemaker is refreshingly candid, musing about eugenics in our booth at the achingly hip Washington hot spot, Mavericks. One senses no filter; Duncan refuses to mince words, police his language, or talk directly with Jews. When discussing racial purity, he is unencumbered by the burden of political correctness, and he makes no apologies for it. Then he proceeds to eat the rest of his fries and tuck into a three-bean salad. (“No black beans — I’m ride-or-die garbanzo.”)

Meet the Fashion-Forward Firebrand Making a Svelte Splash in Washington

lol :(

Echoing what we've been talking about in a couple threads now:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/14/if-we-took-gamergate-harassment-seriously-pizzagate-might-never-have-happened/

Tfuck is "Dark Enlightenment", what do they think this is, the Skyrim Asassins Guild or something!?

that is what they think, yes

Seriously. Look up Dave Aurini.

dear god.

Milo Y is a scumbag, pt 5745796: http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/12/milo-yiannopoulos-harassed-a-trans-student-at-uw-milwaukee.html?mid=facebook_nymag

that guy is the most repugnant looking human i've laid eyes upon in a long, long time. how is he not constantly getting his face punched?

Echoing what we've been talking about in a couple threads now:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/14/if-we-took-gamergate-harassment-seriously-pizzagate-might-never-have-happened/

― THE SKURJ OF FAKE NEWS. (kingfish), Thursday, 15 December 2016 20:34 (yesterday) Permalink

I feel like I don't have the depth of understanding of 4chan-type harassment, but it seems very tricky to come up with solutions to this sort of thing that don't violate the first amendment or become overbroad. I mean you have this weird hybrid monster that's part defamation, part violent threats, part harassment but is carried out in this diffuse and difficult to nail down way. Many participants have plausible deniability and some are good at hiding. Somewhere in the whole thing there have to be traceable people who are deliberately planning/encouraging the whole thing, but there's also a bit of a hivemind effect at work. I hate to encourage a scenario that resembles those overly sweeping anti-gang and RICO type laws, but it also seems like there needs to be a deterrent.

I've never been on it but I wish Twitter would close down. Although there is a lot of sharing of important things, it often seems to bring out the worst in people, even people who I think are very good.

Never been a member I mean. Of course I look at it.

Yeah I got on relatively recently and have a love-hate thing with it. I've discovered some really amazing writers and journalists that I wouldn't know about otherwise and I find that my feed is a better way to find news and articles I want to read than facebook or just visiting sites. I also kind of hate that it's becoming more relevant again thanks to DJT.

All the alt-right heads are switching over to Gab though, supposedly. I almost want to set up a profile out of morbid curiosity.

I've never been on it but I wish Twitter would close down. Although there is a lot of sharing of important things, it often seems to bring out the worst in people, even people who I think are very good.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, December 16, 2016 4:57 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's a lot wrong with Twitter but it's still by far my fave social media. If Twitter goes away people will find a way to behave their worst somewhere else. This isn't just on the platform or twitters specific technology. It's mostly ppl' own doing tbh.

Maybe people are just as bad or worse on Facebook, but of all the sites I have access to, people seem to be bigger assholes on twitter, and I mean people in general, not counting troll places like the chan sites or the way trolls and morons act on youtube. Twitter just radiates with cliquish aggression.

2016 was a great year for music but you'd never know it from those brainwashed critics who don't ever talk about how great meghan trainor's singles are.

oh wait, wrong thread. you know what, i'll just leave it here :)

If Twitter goes away people will find a way to behave their worst somewhere else.

Having Twitter right at hand when you are at your worst is a bit like having a loaded gun in the house when you're suicidal. There are insufficient obstacles between the urge and the outcome.

By no means I think Twitter is free of problems, and as its my second home, online, I see this stuff. But there's also so so many positives to it still. Is it my ~filter bubble~ ? I don't think so. I don't know, my experience is different.

cowardly 4chan psychos making a list of queer/poc-friendly diy spaces so they can feel like big men

http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/103101291/diy-right-wing-safety-squads

Twitter is clearly flawed but yes >>>>>>>> FB, by a lot

^^^ crazy talk - you can actually have a nuanced conversation on Facebook without feeling that you're fighting the medium every step of the way (or giving hostages to context).

One thing that's pretty bad about Twitter is the way a RT can lead to a pile-on on some rando. A few times I have deleted tweets because it was like "Why did I just randomly insult some middle-aged no-name grant writer for not being left enough?"

twitter would be more like Facebook if people used it as such, i.e. primarily using privacy settings so randos can't see their updates, and primarily following people they know irl

i've never had a nazi with a pepe avatar share important facts about the revised auschwitz death toll with me on fb but i've had it happen on twitter twice!

Tom Ewing linked to this today and I thought it was really good.

http://reallifemag.com/apocalypse-whatever/

Apocalypse Whatever
The making of a racist, sexist religion of nihilism on 4Chan

Excellent essay. This Benjamin quote the author mentions is always worth returning to:

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin characterized Europe as a society whose “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” But he also warned that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

It's so hard to take any of this Pepe shit seriously, but I guess that makes it effective as an insidious viral meme. Its hard to Condemn something so patently ridiculous. the actual meaning is shrouded in so many layers of sarcastic abstraction as to be indistinguishable from self parody.

Online harassment and firing rifles in pizza places is easy enough to take seriously.

Obviously the 1st amendment is pretty unique in its extent, but our (relatively) liberal western democracy is not radically different from, say, England's or Germany's. And yet, neither of those countries have the same freedom of speech that we have here. For example - and someone correct me if I'm wrong - in England libel laws are nowhere near as generous as they are here, and in both the UK and Germany, hate groups and hate paraphernalia can be or are often outright banned in a way that doesn't (or can't) happen here. The question I have, especially for board Europeans, is have these limitations on speech at all adversely affected life in these countries? Does the press lack the freedom to report, well, freely? Are people unable to speak their mind? Is hate speech punished? How is it punished? If someone marched in full Nazi regalia in Berlin, what would happen to them? And how has the advent of internet anonymity changed things, if at all? I'd love to know what the lack of a protection as extreme as the 1st Amendment means in practice.

Yes, it was a great piece by Tara Isabella Burton. First time in ages I've admired a piece like that. Probably helps that she writes fiction for the sort of ghost story and science fiction magazines I'd read.

Just discovered Laurie Penny writes science fiction but I'm not sure I'd like her.

Well, you could begin by not referring to the UK as England. Libel laws in England, in this case it's appropriate, are set up to make rich people even more richer, that's why oligarchs from every shithole imaginable queue up to use the courts over here.

From the outside looking in, the USA doesn't appear to be appreciably 'freer' than other Western democracies, it might well be, but not so's I've noticed tbh.

xpost Sorry about conflated UK/England. But anyway, you half answer my question. How do libel laws in England make rich people richer, and more pertinently, have they hindered the press?

And we do have freedoms here they lack elsewhere - just this week England banned some neo-Nazi group, which is why it was fore in mind - but I'm not sure how being legally allowed to march with a Nazi flag makes our freedoms any better, which was partly my question.

It certainly can hinder the press. I'm not sure the First Amendment is all that unique in countries with a written constitution - we don't have one.

Libel laws are a pretty terrible way to make yourself richer. Making lawyers richer, yes.

I'm generally in favour of them, though they are open to abuse. On the whole, if the press maliciously or recklessly prints something defamatory about someone that they can not defend in court, there should be a price to pay. The down side is the chilling effect where the cost of defending an action, even if there is a reasonably good chance that you could win, makes journalists more reluctant to print things they may have a reasonable belief are true. That cuts both ways though - most defamatory content is never litigated as it's not worth the risk of bankrupting yourself to fight.

TS: freedom to march down the street with a Nazi flag vs freedom to drink a beer in public

i think our press seems to be doing just fine printing whatever it wants to tbh

Just chiming in that the Apocalypse Whatever thing is indeed excellent

You can't drink a beer in public in Glasgow either fwiw.

OK erm... freedom to cross a street wherever the hell you want to?

lots of UK places won't allow open carry in the city centre at least

which is racist really cos Poles seem to need a can of Tyskie on them at all times

pretty sure you'll go to jail in germany for walking down the street in nazi regalia

yeah, or for putsching in a beerhall

which is racist really cos Poles seem to need a can of Tyskie on them at all times

Na zdrowie!

so that's how you spell that

And we do have freedoms here they lack elsewhere - just this week England banned some neo-Nazi group, which is why it was fore in mind - but I'm not sure how being legally allowed to march with a Nazi flag makes our freedoms any better, which was partly my question.

in theory the idea is that if you have the power to ban A there's a slippery slope that gives you the power to ban B or C which are things that maybe we don't want banned. in practice maybe it's not crazy to say that everything should be legal unless there's a specifically good case to ban it. which is why i've never found holocaust denial laws in places like germany particularly unreasonable - it's not like it's confusing why they've banned the topic, even tho as an american i want to be a free speech radical it's not like the historical circumstances of ww2 germany are therefore going to lead them to ban moon landing denial or whatever. tho even then i mean what if they're like "and bc of our history w/ communism we're banning soviet paraphernalia too." and where do the lines of either of these get drawn - i mean maybe you should be allowed to call for fascism as a system of government as long as you don't link it to the aesthetics of the Nazi party, and similarly for Communism (in this theoretical regime) as long as you're not specifically name-checking Stalin. there are just so many problems that maybe the US is right and it's best to just make it all legal.

tho of course it's not all legal here either cf fires in theaters, fighting words, incitement to violence etc

fwiw I think the neo-Nazi group banned this week was banned due to incitement to violence.