I don’t think she’s going back far enough. The alt-right grew out of the PUA community, and Gamergate was a symptom of that. Naturally, most young, straight, white men who are active on the internet are gamers - being a gamer is a pretty fundamental feature of the early millenial / late Gen-X generation, especially among men. That’s correlation, not causation. The culture as a whole agglomerated a lot of revolutionary or illicit subcultures, but the fundamental strain of norms-breaking, misogynist bands of white geeks goes back way further than any direct interaction with gaming itself. I mean, even the PUA community was just a coalescing of a lot of ideas that had been floating around for a long time – people were gathering in small groups to debate issues like this as far back as the AOL chatroom days, and 4chan has always had a norms-breaking bent, especially when it came to racism and misogyny. You can call that Internet geek culture, but in reality it’s a splinter group from the mainline version of script-kiddie culture. Fight Club was in 1999, and its zeitgeist didn’t come from nowhere.
I’m wearing an antifa hat now now its been quite useful in bringing up some of the arguments Gamergate used and using it against the alt-snowflakes in the online Trumpstaffel/Trump Justice Warriors.
Remember how it was argued that threats on the internet were non-tangible threats? Words aren’t violence? Just about every “Im shaking right now” message would be met with a barrage of claims that it was merely internet hyperbole?
Now they trigger the fuck out at every threat against the Nazis, and all of a sudden everything antifa or The Resistance say against Nazis, Milo or Trump supporters is an actual threat, and that they constantly fear violence against themselves, and that they are oppressed victims. Many of them have literally become their own worst enemies and other than the political side they are on, have adopted vast swathes of the tactics and ideas born from postmodernist socjus. Reminding them of it and using the same language they did to ridicule and mock it hurts more than accusations of *isms and *ists which they revel in.
Dont make the mistake of thinking that the alt right are all white males. When /pol/ is spotted out in the wild its diversity can reflects the region they are from. This lot were trolling Shia Le Beoufs HWNDU thingy.
http://i.imgur.com/yf1NekS.jpg
Nilhilsts, sociopaths, anti-establishment types, all are welcome, being politically on the right, a bigot, racist, misogynist, homophobe or just plain asshole helps but is not exclusive, some are purely single issue (often SJWs)
Support for Trump was also driven by the lure of rebellion, anarchy and a love of chaos, disaster-addicts abound. Many can be easily hurt by reminding them they are now the Establishment and the mainstream. Some of the most virulent racism I’ve seen is from /pol/s Asian posters, and where else would you find a Jew who would vote for turbo-Hitler?
It’s a strange world they inhabit, but to fight it you need to understand it, and identify it correctly.
Neither is the PUA community, or Gamergate. I mean, RooshV is one of the most-prominent crossover activists between PUA & the alt-right. Even the “straight” part isn’t true of everyone there, since, you know, Milo can’t be the only non-straight alt-righter. I didn’t mean to affirm her assumption that the community was all straight white males, just to point out that if most straight white males in their 20s are gamers, any movement that involves a heavy compliment of straight white males in their 20s is going to have a lot of gamers in it and therefore a lot of people active in gamer culture.
I remember all the casual racism being thrown around in WoW chat and such. Lot of anti-semitism. I figured it was 12 year olds being 12 year olds. I wonder if some of that has metastasized into this abomination. Is it possible to embrace evil out of sheer contrarianism? To go Nazi to, in effect, piss off your parents? Maybe the sickly sheen of irony somehow makes it acceptable.
I always cringe when “censorship” gets tossed around because I tend towards the pedantic and to me censorship has to be government-driven, legal restrictions on expression, not some company giving in to stockholder or customer pressure or afraid of bad PR axing something. While local governments have periodically tried to censor stuff (cf. 2 Live Crew and Broward County a ways back, for instance) the feds have generally not. The abortive and often hilarious PMRC stuff and the hearings in DC that Dee Snyder rocked showed how dead-end that angle was in music, and while you can argue that ratings codes and stuff were adopted in different industries to short-circuit potential censorship, what it comes down to is that the only thing limiting what you get in your movies, games, music, or what-not is pretty much some company deciding what will cost it the least and make it the most.
It’s why these folks need to be beat up.
It’s like that tool wearing the nazi hat that Shia Leboeuff yelled at. He was being a snarky little dipshit, because he thought it was cool and edgy.
Should have just beat the fuck out of him off camera. I just finished watching the first season of True Detectives, and it reminds me of Harrelson’s line when he’s talking to the two punks who screwed his daughter.
“A man’s game charges a man’s price.”
In our attempts to be tolerant of everything, which is certainly an admirable goal in abstract, we’ve come to a place where there is no real penalty for being a total fucking dickhead. Whereas perhaps in the past, if you were a nazi dipshit like these tools, you’d be shunned by society… and without the internet, that meant you had no friends and were forced to live a pathetic life of total isolation, even if you didn’t actually get your ass physically beat (which you probably would have).
Now, even if the local community shuns that person, they can still go on the internet and enjoy some sort of social interaction. There’s little social price to pay for being a dickhead… and so being a dickhead is no longer beaten down, physically or emotionally, like it should. We’ve effectively removed the negative reinforcement.
Now, normally, I would reject the use of something like violence, but here we have people who openly want to exterminate other humans. That means they’ve abandoned the responsibilities that come with the rights granted by the social contract. If you do not respect the rights of others, then you cede those rights yourself. And as such, beating the fuck out of such people does not trouble me morally. Doing so does not violate their rights, because they have already voluntarily ceded them.
I even know some women who are in this crowd- though they tend to be on the more moderate side, and none of them support Trump.
Let me pull on my pessimist’s hat and advance the most scary hypothesis I can imagine that explains the current situation.
Please note that the following scenario assumes that what we are witnessing is deliberate and planned and that the people in Trump’s inner circle actually have a coherent objective they are working towards. (I desperately hope that I’m wrong on all counts.)
Here’s the thing: we are looking at an administration that is very clearly being operated on behalf of carbon extraction industries…
…Note that climate change denialism is a flag of convenience for the folks at the top. It’s a loyalty oath and a touchstone: they don’t necessarily believe it, but it’s very convenient to fervently preach it in public if you want to continue to turn a profit.
If you believe in anthropogenic climate change but dare not admit it, you cannot be seen to do anything obvious to remediate it. But there is one remediation tactic you can deploy deniably: genocide…
…I am going to posit that a foreign policy set by white supremacists in support of a carbon extraction regime is going to cleave to certain pseudo-scientific ideas, notably Social Darwinism (which isn’t Darwinian, isn’t social, and is fundamentally flawed as bad science) and Malthusianism (which has been used in the past as an excuse for tactics ranging from the innocuous–improving access to family planning and birth control–to the monstrous–conquest and genocide…
…So here’s what I expect to see if the alt-right get their way globally:
The obvious stuff (the agenda dictated by the fourteen signs of fascism) is a distraction The real plan, in the short term, is to maximize the liquidation of capital investments in the carbon bubble on behalf of the principal shareholders Once the carbon bubble has deflated, the angry and impoverished citizens of the first world will be pointed at a convenient scapegoat--foreigners overseas A clampdown/shutdown on most international travel will ensue (hint: there's a reason Bannon et al hate the EU, and it's not economic: it's all to do with the bit about freedom of movement) Tighter controls on "immigration", enforced out of sight by killer drones, will replace relatively permeable frontiers with exclusion zones enforced by bullets and bombs Climate-change induced famine will replicate the intent of Hitler's "hunger plan", without the need for hands-on involvement by Western soldiers who might be traumatized by the requirement to shoot the surviving "living skeletons" A systematic genocide of the Middle East and the Islamic world (hint: that's where the eliminationist rhetoric of the islamphobes leads if you follow it to its logical conclusion) will reduce Earth's human population by up to 30%: other culls elsewhere will be enforced by containment of would-be migrants and the primary tool of murder will be famine and lethal heat waves. This will be presented to the citizens of the west as a "solution" to anthropogenic climate change for which they should be grateful, and framed as defending us from hordes of dark-skinned alien terrorists and asylum seekers who want to come to our lands and out-breed us and convert us to their weird and scary way of life and enslave our women (and you know the rest of this dismal litany of racism already, so I'll stop here).
Yes, out there as a worst case scenario, but even going partway there is horrific…
Say goodbye to your medical marijuana cancer sufferers.
I suspect (and hope) this won’t be so, once the Trump folks figure out how much of their base either smokes weed in general, or relies on medical marijuana. I also suspect once they figure out how much of a massive fight they’ll have with the states over something like this it will quietly get dropped as they focus on something (equally a waste of the government’s time) else.
Sessions is dreadful, De Vos is incompetent and unqualified, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg for this upcoming cabinet.
The MM thing just pisses me off so much. Doesn’t affect me personally, but for God’s sake. Yes, let’s turn the machinery of the State to criminalizing Grandma because of The Reefer.
(Fuck you, Jeff Sessions. For real.)
The insane war on marijuana is one of the most infuriating examples of a deontological argument run amok that I can think of. The only reason we still waste billions of dollars and ruin thousands of lives each year on this futile crusade is, well, that it IS a crusade. The whole justification, ultimately, is the belief that “marijuana is BAD!” It’s not based on science, evidence, logic, cost-benefit analysis, or anything remotely rational. It’s based solely on the belief that marijuana in and of itself is a symbol and an enabler of liberalism, and signifies and symbolizes the entire package of cultural bogeymen that mostly fundamentalist cultural conservatives loathe and fear.
When pressed to argue in a utilitarian fashion. supporters of the current war on drugs falter, because even their best arguments, about demonstrated negative effects of marijuana and real concerns about enforcing DWI and other laws, are unpersuasive because they always circle back to alcohol and tobacco, which demonstrate exactly the same challenges but which (for good and obvious reasons) are not outlawed. There is a real and completely emotional, visceral even, connection in these folks’ minds between marijuana and everything they fear in society today. It’s a code for “them,” the liberals, the libertine, the free-thinkers, the decadent, the sensuous, the corrupt. It’s not rooted in reality, it isn’t subject to logical argument (really, I mean, anyone who thinks alcohol is safer or causes less problems than weed is, well, smoking something!), and it seems to have a stranglehold on at least half the country.
The fact that these people can actually endorse the increased use of opiates over medical marijuana is proof to me that they have totally lost it.
I’m still pretty annoyed by Obama for not changing it’s classification.
@TheWombat and @ShivaX well put. My thoughts exactly. Which was a big part of why I oppose the GOP. It is, with out doubt, one of their most socially destructive policies.
And that’s saying something, given that all their policies are pretty destructive!
The irony, or idiocy, of that is that is the exact plan Alex Jones has been screaming about for 20 years. NWO globalists plotting a mass culling of the human population to consolidate their control over the world. But in his world view, it is White Christians that will be annihilated, not brown people. If this is true, he’s a huge piece of their propaganda machine right now.
When I go to my dark place, I imagine that the Powers That Be are letting global warming happen because the western world can and will survive it, and the rest of the world will fucking die. Then we have solved the population problem and that pesky resource problem.
Wallapuctus you should read Pyperkub’s post above, in which it is speculated global warming is being used by the white nationalist west as a tool of genocide.
Oh, we’re also seeing a rise of anti-catholic sentiment on the right too, with the elevation of folks like robert jeffress, who literally said that the Catholic Church is run by satan.
And yet there are Catholic GOP folks who are on board with this stuff… but they don’t think the Vicar of Christ really knows what he’s talking about anyway, since he says crazy stuff like:
(be advised, that is a lunatic fuckup site from a guy who also thinks that the catholics are satan worshipers trying to create a world religion)
That’s crazy! No real pope would say that!
Oh wait, that’s been the perspective of the Church since Vatican II:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/CHISTORY/intrejp2.htm
But again, who cares, because the Catholics are really satanists. And for Catholics, they aren’t supposed to actually believe the Pope is divinely selected anyway. Or something. Whatever. Fuck everything.
The official motto of 2017.