the alt-right

it is the emerging reading, and the narrative I got both from friend's FB posts as it unfolded and popularly strengthened by the Shane Bauer twitter feed on saturday. all incredibly distressing.

https://twitter.com/shane_bauer?lang=en

huh. stuff I heard made it seem more like a free-for-all, but I'm not on the facebooks

ugh i hope this shit burns itself out before trump gets replaced, be it at the ballot box in 2020 or before. but i'm probably going to be disappointed. again.

Violent people won a punch-up? Fuck metro 🚋

Autocorrect hilarity

That photo of the Nazi putz kneeling with his carton of milk. Gamergate seemed to weaponise all these desocialised Anime obsessives into rightwing churls, and while part of me feels compelled to laugh, it's really unsettling how quickly they were seduced, and I wonder what larger damage they can cause. They're like laughable villains from a bad dystopian Frank Miller Batman comic, which they've probably read. I wonder if these dudes ever realise that, ever have a Mitchell & Webb-esque "Maybe we're the bad guys?" revelation.

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