How Do You Mainstream Online Troll Communities?

[Dmytry]

Right, because dictionary definitions cover the pragmatics of a word...

Again, that you are preparing to quote a dictionary in order to ignore pragmatics is pretty much an admission that you are either dumb or playing dumb.

...or that I'm unwilling to buy the argument that pragmatics are the *only* definition, which is reasonable IMO. I'm not trying to list all possible definitions of racism, just point out that a commonly accepted one covers my usage.

And I am merely pointing out that for your usage to match her words, you have to ignore the pragmatics of her words. Namely, when quoting someone out of context, it doesn't matter much what you claim they were meaning, you have already changed their meaning by changing the context. You are claiming that 'because the semantics of her comments were racist she must be talking about race', in spite of the context of said comments implying that she was talking about racism rather than race. In so doing, you change the nature of what she did.

To be clear, this isn't a "black people can't be racist" argument, it is a "the meaning of parody is contained in its pragmatics and not its semantics" argument. To intentionally ignore the pragmatics of a parodistic statement is to misconstrue that statement.

I honestly think it's just how he defines racist tweets. Those twits don't have to try to limit opportunities or incite discrimination, don't have to incite violence, not even have to offend anyone (which would be the broadest net you could throw at it), it doesn't even matter if it's perhaps an ill thought out attempt to show racists what racism would look like if directed at them. All it has to do is match some word pattern, and blam, it's racism by definition (here's dictionary). And if we don't care, it must be because we are willing to ignore those word patterns out of some kind of liberal hypocrisy.

That being said it is obviously a pretty bad idea to make statements matching such word patterns, especially on twitter of all places. But this hyperventilation over anti-white racism is a pretty recent phenomenon, so how could anyone have known? At this rate in 5..10 years posts that responded to a swastika with a hammer and sickle may be brought up as "responding to hate with hate", who knows.

 

[ZnU]

To add context to this sidebar, it's worth noting that this is now the (by my count) third or fourth thread that ZnU has derailed via disingenuous pivots to strawman intersectionalist criticism. Anyone who cares to can dig up the old threads; I think the interested and objective third-party observer will reliably conclude that ZnU argues in bad faith. FWIW.

What's happening here is that discussions in which different people evaluate object-level claims through different frameworks are evolving into discussions about the validity of those frameworks as people question each other's assumptions. This is an expected outcome, and it's ludicrous to attribute it to bad faith on one side. If it annoys you, you can probably find a forum that bans non-intersectionalists. Personally, I can't see the attraction of a political forum in which everyone approaches issues from the same perspective.

(1) I don't think "identitarian" is a coherent (let alone useful) category. The criteria for calling something "identitarian" lie in the observer's biases, not in an intrinsic property of the concept under discussion.

This is basically a "What do word mean?" deflection. There's a clear distinction between a sort of politics organized around the interests of groups to which people are assigned due to their immutable characteristics, and a sort that isn't.

(2) There is a direct conflict between [a] and . Given a fact F, I merely need 1 person to claim F as part of their identity, whence I'm "forced" to update all my opinions to be F-blind. Making F off-limits for downstream evaluations is just as ideological as distorting or mischaracterizing the facts themselves.

Concretely: imagine we wanted to craft a rubric for how acceptable (scale of 1 to 10) usage of the n-word was in different contexts. An unbiased judge would have a wealth of factual background to draw from: the history of racial subjugation in the speakers' nations, linguistic patterns in their place of birth, present day culture and venue, the intended (and unintended!) audiences, the flow of conversation up to the point of usage, artistic license, and so forth. However, if the judge learned that some of his potential subjects considered "blackness" part of their identity, then the ZnU Rules would force him to discard most of this context in pursuit of black-blindness. The so-called "universalist" rubric would be certain to lose fidelity and nuance around usage in the black community, and adds a nonzero risk of flagrantly violating social norms against white usage.

Make no mistake, the choice to dumb down our moral reasoning capacity with such rules is an ideological choice.

You're implicitly treating identity categories as infinitely mutable, such that [a] can be trivially exploited by anyone who wants to assert some new identity. In the real world, the identity categories we're concerned about are generally derived from immutable characteristics, after thousands of years of history we've got a pretty good idea of which of those humans might plausibly build into political identities, and we're not going to take a single individual suddenly asserting some new axis of identity seriously.

Also, the argument you're making here generalizes into an argument against rule of law. Having codified, uniformly applied laws is, in some sense, inferior to having individuals continuously apply consequentialist reasoning over all their possible actions. It's not hard to see that some instances of theft, murder, etc. would leave the world better off. Step back though, and it becomes extremely obvious that, given the reality of limited human cognitive capacity (and the myriad of cognitive biases from which humans suffer), it would be disastrous to trust individuals to make these determinations on a one-off basis. So we encode rules that produce better outcomes on average and we're pretty serious about not letting people say "But this time it was good!" when they violate them. The same logic applies here.

I for one am sure Jehos' concern for a recent example of someone on the left easily labeled a racist while not being nearly so worried about the racism from . . . almost every single elected official on the right is entirely honest and not remotely in bad faith.

Keeping the left sane is so important precisely because the right is already lost.

On the issue of race in particular, the right has zero interest in solving anything, so making sure the left's solutions are productive is essentially the only chance we have of making progress.

 

[RisingTide]

I for one am sure Jehos' concern for a recent example of someone on the left easily labeled a racist while not being nearly so worried about the racism from . . . almost every single elected official on the right is entirely honest and not remotely in bad faith.

I for one think it's just flat out concern trolling, but he'll get a pass.

 

[Lt_Storm]

Right, because dictionary definitions cover the pragmatics of a word...

Again, that you are preparing to quote a dictionary in order to ignore pragmatics is pretty much an admission that you are either dumb or playing dumb.

...or that I'm unwilling to buy the argument that pragmatics are the *only* definition, which is reasonable IMO. I'm not trying to list all possible definitions of racism, just point out that a commonly accepted one covers my usage.

And I am merely pointing out that for your usage to match her words, you have to ignore the pragmatics of her words. Namely, when quoting someone out of context, it doesn't matter much what you claim they were meaning, you have already changed their meaning by changing the context. You are claiming that 'because the semantics of her comments were racist she must be talking about race', in spite of the context of said comments implying that she was talking about racism rather than race. In so doing, you change the nature of what she did.

To be clear, this isn't a "black people can't be racist" argument, it is a "the meaning of parody is contained in its pragmatics and not its semantics" argument. To intentionally ignore the pragmatics of a parodistic statement is to misconstrue that statement.

I honestly think it's just how he defines racist tweets. Those twits don't have to try to limit opportunities or incite discrimination, don't have to incite violence, not even have to offend anyone (which would be the broadest net you could throw at it), it doesn't even matter if it's perhaps an ill thought out attempt to show racists what racism would look like if directed at them. All it has to do is match some word pattern, and blam, it's racism by definition (here's dictionary). And if we don't care, it must be because we are willing to ignore those patterns out of some kind of liberal hypocrisy.

That being said it is obviously a pretty bad idea to make statements matching such word patterns, especially on twitter of all places.

Or, to put that in linguistic terms: he is arguing semantics while ignoring pragmatics, even though he ostensibly understand pragmatics. After all, he is a smart boy.

 

[Dmytry]

Well online is a wide and diverse place I think for nearly everything that people normally do with an ulterior motive there's someone who's doing that in the earnest and sincerely.

People defining things via word patterns is certainly an actual phenomenon that I think actually exists even in politically neutral subjects. It's almost hard not to fall for that in abstract topics such as science.

It does come off as awful in anything political though because usually people do that selectively and for a reason.

 

[Nekojin]

If you don't like other racists, you shouldn't like her.

Non sequitur. While right wingers may be moral midgets incapable of distinguishing cartoon graphs from gas chambers, I have no such limitations.

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Keep the personal attacks out of it.

 

[Ecmaster76]

Also, the argument you're making here generalizes into an argument against rule of law. Having codified, uniformly applied laws is, in some sense, inferior to having individuals continuously apply consequentialist reasoning over all their possible actions. It's not hard to see that some instances of theft, murder, etc. would leave the world better off. Step back though, and it becomes extremely obvious that, given the reality of limited human cognitive capacity (and the myriad of cognitive biases from which humans suffer), it would be disastrous to trust individuals to make these determinations on a one-off basis. So we encode rules that produce better outcomes on average and we're pretty serious about not letting people say "But this time it was good!" when they violate them. The same logic applies here.

Thank you
Way too many people here seem to operate on the basis of the ends justifying the means. Its pretty frightening since its exactly that behavior that leads to 'final solutions' if left unchecked. Teamball makes people blind to being part of the problem because if the 'good' side thinks that crap is OK then the 'bad' side definitely wont back down

 

[ATP]

As I noted in another thread, 57% of blacks and 47% of Hispanics say race shouldn't be a factor in college admissions, which is probably a decent proxy for this sort of belief. I've never seen any systematic data, but my impression is that the main proponents of the intersectional program are left-elite whites.

I'll note that as far as I can tell, there is no response to the rough question of "how would a race-blind system actually work at eliminating bias?". I do however, have to address this sentence, as the conclusion doesn't follow from the data. Two things to note: 1) race not being a factor could just as well be to avoid being discriminated against. 2) When East Asians started getting into schools like Harvard at a higher relative percentage than whites due to academics, suddenly "affirmative action" for whites seemed like a great idea.

All systems are permeated by bias. The very premises you start with to inform the system likely contain bias. For example, in various scary pre-crime systems which are currently being tested, criminal history is used as a relevant input to determine who is likely to commit a crime in the future. However, because policing is filled with bias, minorities have a higher chance of actually getting a criminal record (as opposed to being let off with a warning, for example, which will generally not leave a paper trail). This type of input into a system which is supposed to predict criminality will lead to lopsided policing, which will likely just lead to further biased enforcement. How do you eliminate racial bias from this type of system?

 

[U-99]

Seriously read the tweets in context..

Yeah, that didn't really help any. Embedding racism in social commentary doesn't make it less racist. All you're doing here is defending the racism you agree with.

I don't see any racism there. She's calling attention to the contrast between the white privilege that allowed this man to reach SCOTUS and win while minorities with less incriminating cases ended up in jail.

 

[Lt_Storm]

You're implicitly treating identity categories as infinitely mutable, such that [a] can be trivially exploited by anyone who wants to assert some new identity. In the real world, the identity categories we're concerned about are generally derived from immutable characteristics, after thousands of years of history we've got a pretty good idea of which of those humans might plausibly build into political identities, and we're not going to take a single individual suddenly asserting some new axis of identity seriously.

I am sorry, but no. First of all, the very identity categories we are discussing have themselves changed through history. For instance, historically speaking, an Irish man was not white, today, they are. This implies that the very categories themselves are incredibly malleable. Moreover, while I could probably be described as 'white' I don't identify as such. I identify as a geek, a computer scientist, and a dancer. None of these tribes are a result of anything immutable, and it thoroughly pisses me off when other members of these, my tribes, are discriminated against based on something irrelevant such as the color of their skin. Moreover, the most important political identities in our society such as being a Democrat isn't really a political identity which anyone would argue is based on anything immutable.

Also, the argument you're making here generalizes into an argument against rule of law. Having codified, uniformly applied laws is, in some sense, inferior to having individuals continuously apply consequentialist reasoning over all their possible actions. It's not hard to see that some instances of theft, murder, etc. would leave the world better off. Step back though, and it becomes extremely obvious that, given the reality of limited human cognitive capacity (and the myriad of cognitive biases from which humans suffer), it would be disastrous to trust individuals to make these determinations on a one-off basis. So we encode rules that produce better outcomes on average and we're pretty serious about not letting people say "But this time it was good!" when they violate them. The same logic applies here.

But those rules do take consequentialist reasoning into account. For instance, there is a legal difference between manslaughter, murder, first degree murder, and first degree murder as a hate crime. We encode the things we care about into the law, and to the degree that we care about equality of opportunity, we encode things like affirmative action into the law. There is nothing lawless about this kind of practice. It is simply a matter of creating the kind of rules which result in the kinds of outcomes we desire.

I for one am sure Jehos' concern for a recent example of someone on the left easily labeled a racist while not being nearly so worried about the racism from . . . almost every single elected official on the right is entirely honest and not remotely in bad faith.

Keeping the left sane is so important precisely because the right is already lost.

On the issue of race in particular, the right has zero interest in solving anything, so making sure the left's solutions are productive is essentially the only chance we have of making progress.

Now that is a good point. Though, to be frank, if we are going to move forward as a society, we have to figure out some way to return sanity to the right. That means discussing things that the right doesn't want to discuss, and it means not allowing them to pretend that different thins are the same.

 

[Green_Machine]

Given the evident controversy even on a left-leaning forum regarding whether there's an unintuitive double standard when it comes to racism, it's easy to believe that the hypothetical would-be progressive folks referenced in The Economist article probably do have a basis in reality.

It might not be a perspective many people here agree with, but it's certainly possible to hold that perspective in good faith. I didn't agree with people who thought that algebra was hard, but I didn't insist that they were intellectually dishonest for not getting A's in the subject.

 

[Dmytry]

Given the evident controversy even on a left-leaning forum regarding whether there's an unintuitive double standard when it comes to racism, it's easy to believe that the hypothetical would-be progressive folks referenced in The Economist article probably do have a basis in reality.

It might not be a perspective many people here agree with, but it's certainly possible to hold that perspective in good faith. I didn't agree with people who thought that algebra was hard, but I didn't insist that they were intellectually dishonest for not getting A's in the subject.

Well I see a general consensus with some usual-suspect dissent, like in other threads of this nature. I think some of it is good ol nerdism, especially when it comes to hypothetical word substitutions, but most of it is generally either bad faith or some people "catching" a bad faith argument due to some internal consistency and simplicity.

A curious thing about anti-white racism is that when it actually occurs, white racists cite it as an example to imitate, with a certain admiration (see anything alt-right writes about Japan. They're practically creaming their pants over how much they think Japan is racially pure and not easy for foreigners).

Drawing intentionally shitty graphs in mspaint/gimp/etc and making us chuckle with the underground living & sunburn joke is obviously offensive to alt-right because it's making a mockery of what they think is a legitimate position.

If some Japanese guy (has to be a guy though, and has to be Japanese, or else they won't take it seriously) was to start tweeting actual earnest anti white racist drivel, the alt-right would be taking notes and linking to it in admiration, while usual suspects would be saying how "he got a point". Except said Japanese guy would never do that in English.

It's also possible that the usual suspects would have no interest in such subject because with it being clear cut there's nothing to have a controversy about, nothing to one-up others when it comes to virtues of "not having double standards".

edit: also it's weird how a thread about mainstreaming of online troll communities has devolved into basically a mainstream online community having gotten trolled from the outside by an alt-right originating controversy.

 

[+Griz]

Given the evident controversy even on a left-leaning forum regarding whether there's an unintuitive double standard when it comes to racism, it's easy to believe that the hypothetical would-be progressive folks referenced in The Economist article probably do have a basis in reality.

this "controversy" exists entirely because white supremacists have discovered that they can get leftists fired/banned over years-old bad-taste jokes if they make enough noise, even though their most prominent supporters are clearly arguing in bad faith despite their own viewpoints being far more offensive and entirely serious.

Sarah Jeong's "offensive" tweet was a direct response to one of Andrew Sullivan's repeated postings of race/IQ dogshit one day after. no one really said anything then, but now 3.5 years later Sullivan brings it up without mentioning any of the context in an obvious attempt to get her fired.

12/22/14: Sully defends running infamous race/IQ essay
12/23/14: Jeong parodies his "both sides" logic on Twitter
8/03/18: Sully sees that old tweet, doesn't realize it's making fun of him, calls her a racist.

https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1025484876278112261

if these people are so concerned about racism, where were they when Bret Stephens got hired by NYT? this is a guy who got published in major newspapers saying that "Palestinians have a “blood fetish” and anti-Semitism is “a problem of the Arab mind” and Black Lives Matter is a “big lie” and “nonstop conspiracy”" and so on

I don't have the energy to write any more about this right now so here's Sarah Jones from TNR:

Jeong’s sentiments are similarly distinct from comments made by Kevin D. Williamson, who lost a job at The Atlantic for repeatedly suggesting that women who have abortions be hanged and comparing a black teen to a “primate” and “three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg.” ... Jeong, meanwhile, cracked some jokes about a racial demographic that dominates her industry, the industry she covers, and the country she inhabits. Distinguishing between those situations isn’t an eccentricity exclusive to a mythical self-serving left: It’s the moral distinction behind an entire genre of literature. The word societies for centuries have used for punching up is satire. The word we generally use for punching down is bigotry.

https://newrepublic.com/article/150404/ ... r-neo-nazi

 

[Dmytry]

Yeah exactly as I said it was even though I didn't look at the context. When I see a whiteness-awful diagram drawn by hand in a painting app, it's so obviously an attack on the usual race-IQ shit, that it absolutely boggles my mind someone would single it out as a star exhibit of someone's anti white racism.

I'm not exaggerating when I say to me this is as absurd as someone making a controversy over someone who responded to a swastika with unicode hammer and sickle character or a swastika inside red prohibit circle or anything else of that kind. (Drawing a hammer and sickle over some memorial of the deaths due to Stalin's regime would in fact be a hate crime. Responding to a swastika with it would be whatever, but the way things are heading may not be a future proof thing to do).

 

[Lt_Storm]

edit: also it's weird how a thread about mainstreaming of online troll communities has devolved into basically a mainstream online community having gotten trolled from the outside by an alt-right originating controversy.

I may have helped with that a little bit, after all, when trolls show up to argue, we get to demonstrate the subject in practice. I believe the way that you mainstream trolls is to teach people to recognize how trolls argue, and how to respond civilly in a way that undermines the trolls goals. Overall, what eventually breaks trolls away from troll communities is cognitive dissonance: when they encounter the person who they are supposed to hate, and find that said person doesn't match the description for why they should be hated, it generates cognitive dissonance. Eventually, the cognitive dissonance generated by this friendly demeanor and continued insistence that hate isn't ok causes them to experience a crisis of belief. At this moment, all of their beliefs can suddenly change, allowing them to rejoin society as a whole.

 

[FreeRadical*]

I tried a small experiment here based on feedback I've gotten on how to be assertive. Making "I" statements is suppose to be more assertive than criticizing other people's positions where you are essentially telling them what they think, but in your own words and from your perspective. It is suppose to be a more respectful method of discourse.

I started responding to Jehos by asking questions about his position as I saw them from my perspective however many people were already raising similar points and I've never cared for dogpiling even when it is inadvertent. That's why I decided to write a bunch of "I" statements. When you make "I" statements in a hostile environment you often run the risk of personal attacks and distortions of your position. I think I've been in Jehos position where I respond to specific unfair criticism and start to lose sight of what I originally wanted to say. When your in a defensive stance and it seems like everyone is attacking you, it can be difficult to distinguish between friend and foe. I wonder if that was how Jehos was feeling AND how Sarah Jeong was feeling when she made those tweets.

I recommend doing a search on Jehos and the N-word to see his old posts where he and others use the word. He seems pretty consistent in his position which from my perspective is that not responding to racist incitement is the best response to it. He appears to consistently characterize racism and incitement as bad. I think if you were serious about an honest conversation that you would use his consistent statements on these topics as givens and not try to question his motives or assign more sinister attitudes to him.

Giving a good faith effort to understand the actual position of a person might be the best way to get "online troll communities" to participate in "mainstream" discussions following the boundaries established for those conversations.

 

[Dmytry]

Well you got to realize, that whiteness - awful chart is just far far too obviously mocking the race-IQ stuff that it's genuinely very hard to see how any outrage over it being racist can possibly be in good faith. (Sure, satire may be misunderstood, but it was explained by others.)

And it isn't, Jehos may well be arguing in good faith but the only reason that he's arguing is that some actual racists kept pretending at outrage to get someone fired, not for being racist, but for mocking their racist viewpoint. Good faith arguing of bad faith originating points is really walking the line of being impossible to discern from the original.

It's surreal, it's like arguing whether Chapelle's "Law and Order" skit is racist (note how badly treated that white guy is!) and finer points of how it's not justified to respond to racism with racism etc.

It's like everything shifted to the right over 4 years so much that some forms of critique of racism became unacceptable now, not just to the right, but to the left as well.

 

[Green_Machine]

Not easy to persuade someone when your default assumption is that anyone who seems to disagree with you is either actually lying about their real position or is too stupid and evil to understand yours.

 

[DanaR]

Not easy to persuade someone when your default assumption is that anyone who seems to disagree with you is either actually lying about their real position or is too stupid and evil to understand yours.

It's even harder when they're actually lying about their real position and too stupid and evil to understand yours.

 

[thunderous_funker]

Jesus Christ, if you want thread about fucking Jeong go start one.

No number of racist trolls employed at the NYT has any bearing whatsoever on our current predicament that Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, Oath Keepers and countless other groups are on-line radicalizing North Americans at a rate that has ISIS turgid with envy.

We are literally watching reddit trolls made flesh and take to the streets. Actual riots with actual violence is happening.

So anyone want to discuss HOW we do something about on-line radicalization of White Nationalism and Misogyny?

Shame has always been a tactic, but the results in the current climate are decidedly mixed. Shame pushed them to the dark corners of the web, but that seems to have radicalized it into something much worse. I still believe that tacit or vocal support of White Nationalist ideas has to be vigorously challenged, but that challenge cannot just be to label them racists or nazis and smugly call it a day.

Particularly insidious is the fact that many of the most prominently active groups are being very coy about their White Nationalist underpinnings. Milo got to say all kinds of hateful shit under the guise of "it's ok for ME to say it" and he publicly distanced himself from nazis. But journalists uncovered that he was knowingly stoking white nationalism deliberately to get people to provide support and cover for nazis. Joey Gibson is biracial. He disavows white nationalists, but they keep showing up at his rallies.

Antifa and others are taking a "no platform" approach. Activists in Charleston are refusing to do interviews if they learn that alt-right organizers are going to be interviewed for the same story. (Can't find the link...)

On the one hand, I agree that journalists are doing a shit job of normalizing radicals and given them a platform that treats their viewpoint as "equal" as the SJW who are working to oppose them. But how can we unmask the inevitable violence and toxicity of their "we're just Americans who want..blah blah" nonsense without showing the country at large what these ideas actually lead to.

We keep calling them nazis and i'm not sure everyone believes us. Now we have the Alt-Light which appears to be a total 5th column tactic or front for the same white nationalists.

Seriously. We have real problems and the NTY editorial board isn't it.

 

[U-99]

/// OFFICIAL MODERATION NOTICE ///

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Sarah Jeong discussion definitely has enough legs for it's own thread. It's off the table for this discussion. Similarly, general criticism of social justice proponents that doesn't relate to radicalizing online trolls belongs elsewhere.

 

[Me I'm Counting]

Not easy to persuade someone when your default assumption is that anyone who seems to disagree with you is either actually lying about their real position or is too stupid and evil to understand yours.

Did that happen here somewhere?
Moderation.

 

[Green_Machine]

We are literally watching reddit trolls made flesh and take to the streets. Actual riots with actual violence is happening.

So anyone want to discuss HOW we do something about on-line radicalization of White Nationalism and Misogyny?

What kind of ideas are you hoping to get from this forum? I think the thread so far has thoroughly demonstrated that you're not going to get ideas out of this group for doing something about it through civil discourse -- we don't believe it's at all possible. The alt-right can't be persuaded. You can arrest them, but only when they're breaking laws; most of their offenses boil down to protected speech. So I guess we move on to suggesting our preferred methods of vigilante execution? I think lynching or gassing would be the most ironic choices.

Honestly if U-99 had demanded that people post on-topic the thread wouldn't have broken the second page. Not much interest here for any ideas about redeeming or rehabilitating even apolitical trolls rolling with the alt-right for the luls, let alone the political out-group.

 

[Ecmaster76]

I though some people had actually managed to read the article linked in the OP and comment on how frequently "mainstream" communities tend towards being exclusionary and thus ineffective as tools for discourse

 

[thekaj]

Well I'll repeat what I said in the first page, before it became a train wreck. There are three types of trolls: the open sociopaths, who are pretty much beyond help. The closet sociopaths, who might choose to stop what they're doing if their double-life is exposed, but could just become open sociopaths. And then there are the arrested development types. Guys (and maybe some women) who, for a variety of reasons, haven't figured out the normal rules of society and interacting with people IRL, so they find their outlet online where they're encouraged by others with the same issue, to act out inappropriately, as it gets them attention, even if it's negative. Without intervention, I think these people end up becoming unreachable open sociopaths. But if you can get to them in their late teens, early 20's, and help them with their IRL interactions, they might be convinced to pull back away from the abyss.

I'm not too optimistic though, as we seem to be heading in the direction of creating more of these types, rather than fewer of them. The trajectory is towards encouraging kids towards less face-to-face interactions, which only stunts their ability to know how to act socially in real life. I don't have any data on this, and I'm certainly not saying this is the only, or even primary cause of these things, but I think it's one of the causes behind the significant reductions in Millennials and the younger generation doing the "adult" things like moving out of their parents' house, getting career jobs, getting married, and having kids. Again, CERTAINLY there are much more influential economic causes for these things. But I can't help but think that we've got generations growing up that interact vastly more with their screens than they do with their friends and family, which is contributing to their inability to fundamentally function in the real world.

Then again, I'm willing to bet that when the telephone was seeing rapid deployment, people my age and older of the time were predicting the same doom and gloom for the future generations who wouldn't be forced to go speak to someone face-to-face, and could instead just speak to a disembodied voice on this newfangled devil machine. If you'll excuse me, there are kids on my lawn that I need to chase off with a hose.

 

[thunderous_funker]

We are literally watching reddit trolls made flesh and take to the streets. Actual riots with actual violence is happening.

So anyone want to discuss HOW we do something about on-line radicalization of White Nationalism and Misogyny?

What kind of ideas are you hoping to get from this forum? I think the thread so far has thoroughly demonstrated that you're not going to get ideas out of this group for doing something about it through civil discourse -- we don't believe it's at all possible. The alt-right can't be persuaded. You can arrest them, but only when they're breaking laws; most of their offenses boil down to protected speech. So I guess we move on to suggesting our preferred methods of vigilante execution? I think lynching or gassing would be the most ironic choices.

Honestly if U-99 had demanded that people post on-topic the thread wouldn't have broken the second page. Not much interest here for any ideas about redeeming or rehabilitating even apolitical trolls rolling with the alt-right for the luls, let alone the political out-group.

No, civil discourse won't keep the nazis from kicking down your door. That isn't my contention.

My intent was to steer the conversation towards what gaps in social capital account for the radicalization of these groups. Just saying "well, they're just nazis and that can't be helped" strikes me as fatalistic.

Alienated, atomized, porn-addicted, over-medicated, nihilists might actually be a more accurate framework for recognizing the pathology of individuals who are suddenly finding solidarity, socialization and meaning in all the wrong places. It also might account for the the attraction to fascist politics and tactics without actually adopting White Nationalism. Very few of these groups strike me as monolithic in their acceptance of White Nationalism.

What we know for certain is that they have completely abandoned modern liberalism and they blame it for the social, political and economic failings that are completely hollowing out large parts of the country. And they blame "establishment" politicians on the Right and Left for it.

 

[Lt_Storm]

We are literally watching reddit trolls made flesh and take to the streets. Actual riots with actual violence is happening.

So anyone want to discuss HOW we do something about on-line radicalization of White Nationalism and Misogyny?

What kind of ideas are you hoping to get from this forum? I think the thread so far has thoroughly demonstrated that you're not going to get ideas out of this group for doing something about it through civil discourse -- we don't believe it's at all possible. The alt-right can't be persuaded. You can arrest them, but only when they're breaking laws; most of their offenses boil down to protected speech. So I guess we move on to suggesting our preferred methods of vigilante execution? I think lynching or gassing would be the most ironic choices.

Honestly if U-99 had demanded that people post on-topic the thread wouldn't have broken the second page. Not much interest here for any ideas about redeeming or rehabilitating even apolitical trolls rolling with the alt-right for the luls, let alone the political out-group.

But that isn't really true, after all, charities like life after hate exist and people come to them for help leaving various hate groups. So, it is certainly possible to convince someone that the alt-right is wrong. The thing is that it takes time and isn't easy. Therefore, the objective when engaging with them is multifold. First, you want to be as polite as you can manage while also not tolerating bullshit. Treating them as human beings is something which they don't expect, and it helps create cognitive dissonance. After they learn that the people they were taught to hate aren't what they were taught they are, the spell tends to break.

The second objective in engaging with an alt-right troll is to disarm their message. After all, they are trying to talk to someone. To convince that someone to join the alt-right trollfest. You want to make sure that that person has reason to hesitate. This is why being polite and civil is so important. Jehos is right about one thing: to the degree that you reply to racist vitriol with something that can be interpreted as racist vitriol (as Mrs. Jeoung did) you will lose them. Nobody who disagrees with you will be able to even hear what you have said. (In this thread, I pushed this line a bit. I did so to demonstrate pragmatics, but frankly, it was risky, possibly rude, and may have undermined my entire message. I sure hope that I didn't offend you Jehos, and to the degree that I did, I regret it.)

As for why they do what they do: because they have accepted a false conspiratorial view of the world in response to the many lies which the media has to tell us (such as about how romance works). Part of the practice of deradicalizing them involves providing them with alternate explanations for how people work. Explanations of things like linguistics, psychology, etc. all give the radicalized an opportunity to look at something and see that maybe something else causes it. This helps generate that essential cognitive dissonance which is what actually leads someone out of their hatred.

Now, of course, when the radical horde comes to kick down your door (or to march in your city), the appropriate strategies are somewhat different. Nonviolent take-a-beating counterprotest is a useful tool for undermining their movement. That march they had in Charleston last year did more damage to the alt-right cause than most anything else could have.

 

[Lt_Storm]

Speaking of, the New York Times has an interesting, if somewhat depressing, article on this very subject. It has some interesting advice:

Other than that [reporting spam], don’t take web comments at face value. Mr. Kao said the lesson he learned was to always try to view comments in a wider context. Look at a commenter’s history of past posts, or fact-check any dubious claims or endorsements elsewhere on the web, he said.

But otherwise, it is somewhat fatalistic, arguing that only the tech companies can fix the problem.

 

[U-99]

I'm mobile and can't comment at length but I think it's useful to distinguish between different components of the alt-right. Some are just ignorant, parroting talking points about people and places they have never met and never seen. They may be potentially redeemed through exposure and education. The left-behind online trolls doing all this "for the lulz" can be enticed into a "normie" life. Those consumed with hate will often be a lost cause, but we have survived with them at the fringes of society for decades and do not need to move them to break the back of the alt-right.

While you might find these people distasteful they are still people who respond to incentives and stimuli. Developing tools to reach them now is better than waiting until automation gives us a larger body of unemployed and disenchanted Americans.

 

[thekaj]

Speaking of, the New York Times has an interesting, if somewhat depressing, article on this very subject. It has some interesting advice:

Other than that [reporting spam], don’t take web comments at face value. Mr. Kao said the lesson he learned was to always try to view comments in a wider context. Look at a commenter’s history of past posts, or fact-check any dubious claims or endorsements elsewhere on the web, he said.

But otherwise, it is somewhat fatalistic, arguing that only the tech companies can fix the problem.

They could also do what a lot of news sites do, and turn off comments. Rarely do I ever see constructive discussions there. Even when they're moderated for ad hom attacks. Although there was a rather dubiously reasoned editorial on the Washington Post today, arguing that there really aren't victims of insider trading, and the vast number of comments rips the argument to shreds, despite the author engaging in a defense of her claims.

I have to say that my blood pressure has probably dropped significantly after Facebook removed their news feed. It used to be a way that I read articles from sites I wouldn't ordinarily go to, and then engage in a "discussion" with other commentators. Doubtful it changed any minds, and really only itched a "I want to get into a ideological fight" scratch. With the feed gone, I don't get into nearly as many arguments online, and feel better for it.

 

[Jehos]

But that isn't really true, after all, charities like life after hate exist and people come to them for help leaving various hate groups. So, it is certainly possible to convince someone that the alt-right is wrong. The thing is that it takes time and isn't easy. Therefore, the objective when engaging with them is multifold. First, you want to be as polite as you can manage while also not tolerating bullshit. Treating them as human beings is something which they don't expect, and it helps create cognitive dissonance. After they learn that the people they were taught to hate aren't what they were taught they are, the spell tends to break.

This is exactly hug-a-racist. It goes over like a lead balloon with most posters here, with responses falling into one of two categories:

1. It's not my job to make rando internet racists feel good about themselves.
2. Fuck those fucking fucks, and fuck you for even mentioning it. Are you sure you aren't alt-right too, you fucking troll?

Hugging racists is hard, it's inherently one-on-one, and it only takes them running into one person in the #2 category to undo the work.

(In this thread, I pushed this line a bit. I did so to demonstrate pragmatics, but frankly, it was risky, possibly rude, and may have undermined my entire message. I sure hope that I didn't offend you Jehos, and to the degree that I did, I regret it.)

Don't sweat it, we're good. My blood pressure only goes up for the #2 category people above. We had a fundamental disagreement about what racism is, but it takes waaaay more than that to offend me.

 

[thunderous_funker]

But that isn't really true, after all, charities like life after hate exist and people come to them for help leaving various hate groups. So, it is certainly possible to convince someone that the alt-right is wrong. The thing is that it takes time and isn't easy. Therefore, the objective when engaging with them is multifold. First, you want to be as polite as you can manage while also not tolerating bullshit. Treating them as human beings is something which they don't expect, and it helps create cognitive dissonance. After they learn that the people they were taught to hate aren't what they were taught they are, the spell tends to break.

This is exactly hug-a-racist. It goes over like a lead balloon with most posters here, with responses falling into one of two categories:

1. It's not my job to make rando internet racists feel good about themselves.
2. Fuck those fucking fucks, and fuck you for even mentioning it. Are you sure you aren't alt-right too, you fucking troll?

Hugging racists is hard, it's inherently one-on-one, and it only takes them running into one person in the #2 category to undo the work.

(In this thread, I pushed this line a bit. I did so to demonstrate pragmatics, but frankly, it was risky, possibly rude, and may have undermined my entire message. I sure hope that I didn't offend you Jehos, and to the degree that I did, I regret it.)

Don't sweat it, we're good. My blood pressure only goes up for the #2 category people above. We had a fundamental disagreement about what racism is, but it takes waaaay more than that to offend me.

I don't see a need to rehash that here. There are plenty of strategies and employing one doesn't necessarily invalidate any other since these are, essentially, human connections we are talking about.

I think there is space to talk about the very real conditions that breed alienated, atomized and nihilistic people before we go back to disagreeing with how to engage them politically after they've already bought the Polo Shirt and tiki torch.

I don't see nazis as the root cause. I see the rise of the alt-right and alt-light as symptoms of deeper social sickness. People being shitty "for the lulz" predates people being white nationalists "ironically".

I also don't see the internet as simply giving a forum to what was already there. I consider internet anonymity as an accelerant on the process of alienation and atomization. We are breeding sociopaths at an alarming rate, it seems. Sociopaths weren't merely dormant and waiting for a Twitter to be invented.

 

[Dmytry]

I think the beliefs form a bit of a hierarchy, with incel type crap as the most deeply held core. Deriving from it, you get MRA/antifeminism, with racism being propagandised in purposefully by the likes of Bannon, but being less innate to those groups than incel type stuff.

Over time members who manage to "get a life" leave, and the community is left with people who hold the most counter-productive beliefs (which are spread to the newly joining members). Self pity for example is quite counter productive. Envy, too. Extreme envy towards women, often (see GG controversy, which opened Bannon's eyes to the phenomenon).

It doesn't help that there may well be an increase in cultural narcissism. The thing about narcissism, it has essentially nothing with self admiration and everything to do with extreme selfishness and in some cases an utterly crippling "it's never my fault" approach to problem solving. To try hard would be to admit you're not perfect.

There's another issue, too. These are often just plain not good people, if they are to start interacting with others, others have to suffer. There's a joke that "she suffers from narcissism: her husband is a narcissist".

 

[Richard Berg]

This is basically a "What do word mean?" deflection. There's a clear distinction between a sort of politics organized around the interests of groups to which people are assigned due to their immutable characteristics, and a sort that isn't.

This distinction is only coherent if approached from a POV that believes Normal Default Politics are the ones a theorem-proving bot can deduce from first principles, while Weird Other People Politics are the kind derived from experience and context.

To people who don't hold that bias, the bot's baked-in restriction on the types of permitted political reasoning is the exceptional/defining case, while the rest of the political world looks vast and diverse, such that grouping all identity-permitting politics under one umbrella makes no sense. Imagine if we grouped Christianity, Hinduism, and Atheism under "Anti-Spaghetti-Monsterism". The distinction may be clear, in the sense that people can agree where the boundaries lie**, but that doesn't make it a useful category to anyone outside of His Noodly embrace. Labels like "identitarian" look equally ridiculous outside the IDW bubble.

**I'm not even sure this is true. One could argue that most "universalists" are actually closeted "identitarians" who don't want to trumpet their male identity too overtly, just as most FSMers are actually atheists who use the alternative framing to make a Very Clever Point about the contours of religious identity.

You're implicitly treating identity categories as infinitely mutable, such that [a] can be trivially exploited by anyone who wants to assert some new identity. In the real world, the identity categories we're concerned about are generally derived from immutable characteristics, after thousands of years of history we've got a pretty good idea of which of those humans might plausibly build into political identities, and we're not going to take a single individual suddenly asserting some new axis of identity seriously.

First, no I'm not. Even if identity categories were fixed in stone, that wouldn't make intentional ignorance of said categories "rational". One category suffices to demonstrate the inherent conflict between "facts first" and "no identity plz". I even took pains to craft an example using a category that everyone could agree on. (Surely you don't dispute that "Black American" is a recognized identity?)

Second, new axes of identity spring up all the time. Lt_Storm alluded to the evolution of whiteness. When we look beyond skin color, even more examples abound. For example, Random_slacker cited the construction of a elite / globalist identity that superceded race (or so they believed). Gender has undergone rapid flux just in our lifetime; in particular, multi-modal identities like "AMAB non-binary-presenting femmequeer" are a largely 21st century invention.

Also, the argument you're making here generalizes into an argument against rule of law. Having codified, uniformly applied laws is, in some sense, inferior to having individuals continuously apply consequentialist reasoning over all their possible actions. It's not hard to see that some instances of theft, murder, etc. would leave the world better off. Step back though, and it becomes extremely obvious that, given the reality of limited human cognitive capacity (and the myriad of cognitive biases from which humans suffer), it would be disastrous to trust individuals to make these determinations on a one-off basis. So we encode rules that produce better outcomes on average and we're pretty serious about not letting people say "But this time it was good!" when they violate them. The same logic applies here.

Backtracking to legalism does you no favors here. From a legal standpoint, the picture is utterly boring: online trolling is protected by the 1st Amendment, period.

For what it's worth, I dispute your reductionist view of legal reasoning as naive rule-following. The law is more fluid than that. It's always been the case that human judges weigh the totality of context, and retain the power to sentence thieves who steal for food to different punishments than thieves who steal for lulz. The human element is not always a force for justice -- it magnifies preexisting biases, including racist ones -- but that's hardly an argument for removing judicial discretion entirely. Places that try to (e.g. with mandatory minimums) merely end up amplifying the injustices found in other parts of their criminal system, rather than curing it.

Back to your argument: you've completely missed the reason why laws prioritize clarity and equal protection over situational factors. Laws are an imposition of state power. We grant the state a monopoly on that use of force in return for carefully circumscribed limits -- in theory, the bare minimum limits on freedom it needs to carry out collective goals. While important, such interactions with the criminal system are a tiny part of what makes our society tick. One can (and I have) argue that similar guidelines should apply to non-state actors wielding similarly monopolistic levels of power (e.g. Google's power over search results), but on the whole, these are yet more exceptions. The general case -- that is, many-to-many interactions between peers -- needs no such limitations.

In short, I am free to draw on racial and gendered facts for my SoapBox arguments in ways that might be inappropriate for a DA arguing to a jury. The latter holds a defendant's life & death in her hands, so we've erected a wide range of artificial handicaps, of which identity-blind statutory elements are one small part (along with rules of evidence, presumption of innocence, etc). No such constraints apply to me, nor to online trolls for that matter. We can apply moral reasoning and nuance to SJ issues and also codify murder in uniform terms.

 

[Shavano]

But that isn't really true, after all, charities like life after hate exist and people come to them for help leaving various hate groups. So, it is certainly possible to convince someone that the alt-right is wrong. The thing is that it takes time and isn't easy. Therefore, the objective when engaging with them is multifold. First, you want to be as polite as you can manage while also not tolerating bullshit. Treating them as human beings is something which they don't expect, and it helps create cognitive dissonance. After they learn that the people they were taught to hate aren't what they were taught they are, the spell tends to break.

This is exactly hug-a-racist. It goes over like a lead balloon with most posters here, with responses falling into one of two categories:

1. It's not my job to make rando internet racists feel good about themselves.
2. Fuck those fucking fucks, and fuck you for even mentioning it. Are you sure you aren't alt-right too, you fucking troll?

Hugging racists is hard, it's inherently one-on-one, and it only takes them running into one person in the #2 category to undo the work.

(In this thread, I pushed this line a bit. I did so to demonstrate pragmatics, but frankly, it was risky, possibly rude, and may have undermined my entire message. I sure hope that I didn't offend you Jehos, and to the degree that I did, I regret it.)

Don't sweat it, we're good. My blood pressure only goes up for the #2 category people above. We had a fundamental disagreement about what racism is, but it takes waaaay more than that to offend me.

We're not going to make these people or these groups of people go away as a social phenomenon by any means. And while I admire the work of those who can single out individuals that can be converted into non-hateful persons I don't kid myself that either
(a) I'm cut out for that kind of work or
(b) that there is a large proportion of them that salvageable.

Rather, I think most of us in no way have either the thick skin or the patience needed to deal with one of these people even if they're amenable to change, and identifying which ones might be salvageable is in itself hard work and doomed to more disappointment than success.

I think the #2 "fuck this fucking fuck" attitude is the default response of people who aren't filled with hate to people who are. It is after all the response that hate groups and internet trolls are trying to elicit and, with no apologies, fuck them for having that attitude.

 

[papadage]

I think the beliefs form a bit of a hierarchy, with incel type crap as the most deeply held core. Deriving from it, you get MRA/antifeminism, with racism being propagandised in purposefully by the likes of Bannon, but being less innate to those groups than incel type stuff.

Over time members who manage to "get a life" leave, and the community is left with people who hold the most counter-productive beliefs (which are spread to the newly joining members). Self pity for example is quite counter productive. Envy, too. Extreme envy towards women, often (see GG controversy, which opened Bannon's eyes to the phenomenon).

It doesn't help that there may well be an increase in cultural narcissism. The thing about narcissism, it has essentially nothing with self admiration and everything to do with extreme selfishness and in some cases an utterly crippling "it's never my fault" approach to problem solving. To try hard would be to admit you're not perfect.

There's another issue, too. These are often just plain not good people, if they are to start interacting with others, others have to suffer. There's a joke that "she suffers from narcissism: her husband is a narcissist".

I think you are hitting close to the target.

Look at this article and profile on Jason Kessler, of Unite the Right infamy.

He started out as left, but socially awkward and developed misogynist, and then racist, beliefs as he found a home among the other incels on the Internet.

 

[Dmytry]

So, this thread inspired me to actually try get more empirical info by reading post histories of folks whose opinions I detest, on reddit.

Subject 1. An apparent law and order I work hard for this country why should they get something without paying taxes, anti illegal immigration guy. With somewhat shitty writing quality.

Well the background of posts was most unexpected. It was not a TD poster, it was not an incel poster, it was most certainly not a Russian operative, it was, as, going by the post history in drug related subreddits, an illegal drug user, and I'm not talking limited to MJ in a state where it's illegal, I'm talking hard drugs, the kind that gets manufactured in mexico and central/south America. Also some school shooting conspiracy theorizing posts to top it off.

So for the hug a racist and try to de-radicalize, how do you possibly approach something like that? Rehab for drug addiction first?

I never thought about that, but US has high enough prevalence of drug addiction that when you see some complete derangement it is not at all unreasonable to suspect drugs as being a non negligible contributor.

It still just blows my mind. Even those folks who are addicted to illegal drugs and procure their drugs illegally have no problem with posing as this legalist type which is just opposed to illegality.

 

[bluloo]

So, this thread inspired me to actually try get more empirical info by reading post histories of folks whose opinions I detest, on reddit.

Subject 1. An apparent law and order I work hard for this country why should they get something without paying taxes, anti illegal immigration guy. With somewhat shitty writing quality.

Well the background of posts was most unexpected. It was not a TD poster, it was not an incel poster, it was most certainly not a Russian operative, it was, as, going by the post history in drug related subreddits, an illegal drug user, and I'm not talking limited to MJ in a state where it's illegal, I'm talking hard drugs, the kind that gets manufactured in mexico and central/south America. Also some school shooting conspiracy theorizing posts to top it off.

So for the hug a racist and try to de-radicalize, how do you possibly approach something like that? Rehab for drug addiction first?

I never thought about that, but US has high enough prevalence of drug addiction that when you see some complete derangement it is not at all unreasonable to suspect drugs as being a non negligible contributor.

It still just blows my mind. Even those folks who are addicted to illegal drugs and procure their drugs illegally have no problem with posing as this legalist type which is just opposed to illegality.

Interesting.
I don't want to get into a bunch of Freudian BS (or get into a silly arm-chair psychology discussion), but here's something to consider, in the broader brush strokes.

Sometimes the outward behavior of individuals can be motivated by what they're lacking (or believe is lacking) internally. For example, I've known people who were extremely hard working, well-regarded professionals, exemplars in their fields, and by all outward estimates, very well adjusted and rational. Inside, the same people felt that they were largely unworthy/unloved as human beings - based on early relationships with one or more caregivers. So the lack of an internal measure of "worthiness" meant that those needs had to be constantly reinforced/validated with their external behavior - and guess what? Despite our conversations and the realization of what motivated them, that hole was never filled. Hence you have the perpetual workaholic, a near-perfectionist, who may the envy of peers who can't seem to "crack their formula for success".

So, in this case, perhaps the hard-drug user lacks the internal discipline to mitigate addictive behavior he know is morally "wrong", and self-destructive. They partially project their moral failings onto the world, wherever they happen to find a home, as well as secondarily punishing themselves for their inability to break the "immoral addiction".

People who tend to gravitate toward conspiracy or fringe theories, also tend to feel socially marginalized in some way, whether it's something more obvious, or is related to their personal, private experiences in life.
Also, for whatever reasons, some of us turn to an external locus of control on some issues, and some internal (meaning that two hypothetical drug users may have seemingly disparate social views on the same topic, though their lives and behaviors are, for all intent and purpose, mirror one another for example).

 

[demultiplexer]

One of the biggest traps you will fall in is to try and reason with an unreasonable person. People generally just aren't good at thinking logically - and I mean this in the absolute broadest possible sense. Even defining terms to people will generally not land. There is this big divide between the kinds of people who have any analytical/logical skills at all, and the rest of people.

So in order to even start to get through to most people, you can't rely on logical arguments or even simple things like causal progressions and inference. You HAVE to combine personal experience with anecdotal evidence, the two most basic, fallacious, horrible argumentation tactics.

This is why, in the end, the only real way to improve society at large is to teach everybody from a young age to use logic and form coherent arguments. It's going to take generations, but it's the only way to be able to even communicate among humans.

 

[Shavano]

One of the biggest traps you will fall in is to try and reason with an unreasonable person. People generally just aren't good at thinking logically - and I mean this in the absolute broadest possible sense. Even defining terms to people will generally not land. There is this big divide between the kinds of people who have any analytical/logical skills at all, and the rest of people.

So in order to even start to get through to most people, you can't rely on logical arguments or even simple things like causal progressions and inference. You HAVE to combine personal experience with anecdotal evidence, the two most basic, fallacious, horrible argumentation tactics.

This is why, in the end, the only real way to improve society at large is to teach everybody from a young age to use logic and form coherent arguments. It's going to take generations, but it's the only way to be able to even communicate among humans.

Even those who have such skills often only have the ability to apply them in a narrow area. For example I know a number of engineers who have the most backward, illogical views in areas other than engineering. But within their field, they're able to reason out how to design something, how to interpret evidence from experiments and to solve quality problems. But ask them about taxation, public regulation, the economy, race, religion or politics or even physics outside their immediate area of expertise and all kinds of complete nonsense clouds their thinking.