8chan served with search warrant [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

8chan served with search warrant [pdf]

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218 pointsanigbrowl424 comments

I don't know about 8chan but when it comes to 4chan, there's a certain sport in what people comment in threads. There's countless threads of people claiming to be planning something awful (terrorism, suicide, robbery, eating Taco Bell, etc.) And in the comments you'll see people say all kinds of things, that if taken at face value, are pretty horrible (and maybe even criminal conspiracy.)

But the crux is that these people are not serious (though I'm sure some are), they're just saying it for the sport of calling the bluff of anonymous people they perceive as trolls or brooding teens.

It's like the scene in Futurama where Hermes is threatening to jump off a building to his death and Bender says, "Do a flip!"

This doesn't make it right. And doesn't absolve them of the legal hot water they'd find themselves in. But I hope these individuals, if charged with a crime, get lawyers who will vigorously defend this point.

Edit: I want to re-state that I emphatically do not hold any opinions on this topic. I'm just trying to share a bit about what these image boards can be like.

> But the crux is that these people are not serious (though I'm sure some are),

So which is it? Serious or not? How do we know which is which?

> they're just saying it for the sport of calling the bluff of anonymous people they perceive as trolls or brooding teens.

By what definition of the term is this sport? If anything it's callous, and probably illegal in most jurisdictions.

It's all fun and games until someone gets shot.

Even then, it’s still fun and games if you know where to look these days.

I agree thoroughly with this prudent assessment. One thing I'd like to add is that, after far too much of my life spent on 4chan, I believe the line between a total joke and an expression of a sincere sentiment is much blurrier even than it seems. It's much more subtle than a crowd of irreverent kidders dotted with occasional cold blooded misanthropes.

It’s fundamentally the long-tail problem coupled with the low bandwidth nature of message boards. In real life, pretty much everyone you meet is kidding, and the whackos usually send many additional red flags. On 4chan, you collect the more extreme humor, plus the nuts, minus the additional information that you would use to distinguish them in real life.

The internet has in some ways damaged my sense of humor: I’m so much more prone to taking people’s extreme comments at face value than I used to be, because at some point, the Internet has introduced me to a more extreme view genuinely espoused.

So you thoroughly agree with the parent comment, but add the disclaimer that the line between joke and sincerity is blurry.

It is, therefore, unclear, what exactly, your point is.

Do you agree, or disagree? Is it a reasonable assessment to both agree and disagree?

Their lawyers may try, but if their speech is found to have encouraged law-breaking, they can still be convicted and jailed — regardless that they only did it for sport.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

> In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"

I'm not convinced that's the proper reading of that law. FWIW, I'm not a lower just a person with an appreciation of legal questions. I was under the impression that the word 'imminent' implied you had to reasonably be aware those people were going to commit a crime immediately. For example if you're at the front of a mob of angry people and tell them to go loot a shop. I think it would be hard to convincingly say that on a website where 99% of users are joking that posters were inciting crime directly.

Knowing is a very fuzzy bar here. There are/were people who turned to 4chan's /b/ (or other boards) for a very twisted way of guidance. ("Should I kill myself?", "shoot up the school", do "an hero" etc.)

Of course in these cases the Internet Hate Machine's response is the same, but the intensity and effectiveness varies.

Is any single commenter legally responsible? Probably not. And not because they lacked intent, but because 99.9% of these threads are empty trolling. So they could be almost sure knowing nothing would happen.

However, if someone does this for years in the hopes to participate in a thread that is not a dud, well that's of course a different state of mind, but it'd be hard to prove.

"Encouraging law-breaking" and "inciting imminent lawless action and likely to incite it" are different standards. The former sweeps up a large swath of stuff, everything from "Smash capitalism!" on down. The latter is much more constrained, and requires both immediacy and a likelihood of results.

I don't know about 8chan but

Welp, they're not the same, and /pol/ isn't the same as /b/, or the end of that particular rabbit hole either.

Even /pol/ isn't /pol/. It's a fascinating place in that you can have an openly Neo-Nazi thread right next to the Pro-Zion thread, right next to the Christian thread, followed by the Islam thread. The Yang Gang thread is right next to the MAGA thread which is right next to the Bernies Bros thread.

As much as it is a terrible place, it is also probably the most diverse place in the internet and I sometimes wonder if by exposing each other to diametrically opposed ideas, they temper each other out. I really hope some sort of researcher is archiving it for posterity because I don't think there has ever been an experiment like it.

>I sometimes wonder if by exposing each other to diametrically opposed ideas, they temper each other out.

I mean... you're posting this in a thread about a /pol/ user committing mass murder due to his racist and anti-semitic ideals... and he wasn't even the first to do so.

So... no?

You, can but most of the time you'll have neo-nazi threads next to other neo-nazi threads. Let's look at a sample of the top 50 threads on /pol/ right now (sticky and untitled threads excluded; contains offensive content):

  Dylann Roof's letter to Tucker Carlson
  Who's this Katie Hopkins?
  South Africa
  accept the jews or you will lose
  You're buying cryptocurrency, right anon?
  White men who cant get a white woman should bleach a good looking brown girl.
  Why should we bother?
  DOXX REPORT:ANTIFA MEMBER IN NATIONAL GUARD
  8ch got a search warrant 6 weeks ago (two months)
  Join the marines
  Hungary is BASED
  99 turkroach overflight violations on Greek airspace in a single day.
  /leftypol/ explains why they’re marxists
  Music Video shows White Kids in Cages, Tortured
  /SIG/ Self Improvement General
  Would things be different if America became natsoc instead of Germany? 
  Lesbian NASA Astronaut attack on bus in Camden Town London with her date
  Ontario Anon Goes Shitposting IRL
  homeless anon tip thread
  AJ got framed, again.
  Rockefellers and the Anglo Industrialist Dynasties
  Saint Tarrant pleads NOT guilty!
  RIP Léon Degrelle
  China Cucks to Hong Kong
  Brenton Tarrant Memetic Warfare Thread № XII
  requesting knowledge of the Weimar Republic
  White Victims of Black Crime - Thread #010: Remember lads, subscribe to Pewdiepie
  "Durr Trump is a Jewish sellout!"
  Should the Flyover states just secede From the Union 
  Single Mother Documentary
  New leaked doc shows the USA and trump gets raped by mexican rapists
  The implication of Feminism just being a shittest for society.
  Average jews.
  If We Don't Globally Collapse Within The Next Two Decades, Humanity Is Doomed to Extinction
  Holocaust Is Fake History - 8968
  Paid Shilling Hours
  Druid/pol/ #0032 "Esoteric Operations" edition
  Nick Fuentes sells out to the Jews and tells a Jewish lawyer he denounces anti-semitism
  We lost 4chan
  White males Highest Suicide rates in the Country
  Sol Pais 2nd thread
  Asian hate/redpill thread 2: kill all Asians edition
  Yellow Vests protest for 31st straight week in Paris
  Doctor E.Michael Jones is apparently being blamed for the latest Synagogue Shooting. 
  Was Spanish Caste system the best system
  /ECO GENERAL/ III - Summer Edition
  Trans "rights" are child abuse 
  /pol/ WEBM Thread / MP4 Thread
  /RPG/ Redpill general 
  Antifa wants you to deplatform "fashy farmers"
  On the topic of race and gene editing.

¯\(°_o)/¯

> But the crux is that these people are not serious (though I'm sure some are)

Some of us distinctly remember the SiliconInvestor boards from long ago: Some wag started a topic on "I need to sell a kidney". Naturally, few took him seriously.

Turns out he was completely serious, and shortly after was in the news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_O._Barton

The article you link to is of someone who committed suicide and was considered to be a serial killer who executed his family. The article doesn't mention kidney sales, in fact a search of the text for the term "kidney" yields no hits.

Yeah, the Wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but here's a post from a user named "K44B" on SiliconInvestor circa June 2nd, 1999, and then a bunch of discussion a few months later about it being Mark Barton. Doesn't seem to be any clear proof, but at least it's a rumor that dates from the same year as the murders: https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=10909471

(also holy shit is the UX on this forum awful)

The original thread is here: https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=28684

> and then a bunch of discussion a few months later

I remember the board got taken down, but was restored. The shooting was July 29, 1999, and the SIers were already discussing it on the restored thread Aug 11. The thread message at the top changed a few times, but it was pretty clear by Aug 16. https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=10974409

> (also holy shit is the UX on this forum awful)

Hard to believe it was a giant step forward at the time (do we think people will look back at our current websites in 2039 and think they're beautiful?). SI was quite the daytraders place in its day, and this NYT article from Nov that year captures the spirit pretty well: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine... (Mark Barton is also mentioned in that article, which was published pretty close to the absolute peak of the internet bubble. What a time.)

The best place to hide bigotry is irony.

8chan really got popular when gamergate people were kicked off of 4chan.

I wish more people realized this is what happens when you attack a group - it gets stronger.

You can hardly describe it as "attacking a group". At the time moot got tired of these people crying 24/7 on /v/, the video games board.

moot has frequently exercised his unique power to ban a topic to prevent a single topic from overrunning a board. And, like the other chans before it, those most invested in that topic have a huge persecution complex and believe they are being censored when they are simple being told to take their soapbox elsewhere.

> have a huge persecution complex and believe they are being censored when they are simple being told to take their soapbox elsewhere.

How many places do you have to get kicked out of before your 'belief' that you're being censored becomes true?

Depends.

How many places does it take for you to get kicked out of before you start thinking to yourself 'maybe I'm the asshole?'.

How many places do you have to be accommodated by people that don't want to hear it?

Replying to both you and the sibling comment:

Feel free to claim that they are assholes, or that people shouldn't have to accommodate them. But that doesn't falsify the claim that they're being censored.

It’s not usually what comes to mind when I think of the word “censored”, but I don’t think it’s unrealistic for a forum or conversation to set ground rules on what’s acceptable speech and isn’t.

I have no desire to listen to people I consider to be assholes. I have no problem censuring those people in my life. There is no right to be an asshole. If you're going to be shitty towards other people, you should not expect a positive reaction from them. You should probably expect to be treated shitty in return. That's basically the golden rule.

Instead there is a bunch of people who believe their shitty behavior is completely justified and righteous and then can't comprehend why people don't want to tolerate them. I have no sympathy for that, whatever language you want to use. Call it censorship if you want, but there is no rule nor law that says shitty behavior has to be tolerated and supported.

And I have no desire to be lied to, yet here we are, censoring a group, and claiming they're not being censored.

When faced with the facts, the question is evaded, attempts are made to change the topic, and every slippery, misleading tactic is used to avoid admission.

I can only conclude such people are wholly uninterested in the truth, and are in fact actively opposed to it.

I think a lot of people tie a certain emotional value / weight / bias / power dynamic / etc to the word censor instead of using it in the cold (valid) way you are here. In other words, a forum that bans speech of type X is setting rules and a government that bans speech of type X is censoring, when truly, both are the same action (censorship) but in completely different contexts.

That might account for why it seems many people on this thread are talking past each other. I don't even think, as you imply, that the person you are replying to is purposely using misleading tactics to avoid admission.

I feel like there's this avoidance of using the word censorship because people think it implies something they don't want to imply about their principles. I could be wrong, but this is just something I've seen play out again and again in discussions about this topic.

For instance, my belief that it is fine and in-fact desirable that private forums censor particular topics, behaviors, etc doesn't necessarily mean that on-principle I am across-the-board "pro-censorship" (whatever that means).

So yes, a group is being censored from a private forum and decided to create their own private forum. I still don't see a problem with that, or "admitting" that is what is happening.

> the person you are replying to is purposely using misleading tactics to avoid admission.

I honestly don't think it's on purpose, nor do I think it's limited to the word/act of censorship. It's a simple, subconscious mechanism of

group I dislike is victim of X (justly or unjustly) --> victimhood grants social power --> downplay/diminish/justify their victimization so they do not gain power

Who, exactly, is the 'we' here? Who, exactly, is 'such people' here?

You're talking in vagaries, and including me in them, and I don't particularly care for that.

Bottom line for me is that if you want to call assholes being excluded from some spaces as 'censorship', you're free to do that, but most people are just going to call that 'assholes getting what they deserve'.

If you want to argue that we should be more accommodating towards assholes, then I really look forward to hearing that argument.

I was talking about the general situation (hence the vagaries).

And I'm not arguing for being more accommodating - I'm arguing for calling a spade a spade. To kick a group of people out of almost every discussion forum, then accuse them of having a "persecution complex", is hypocritical in the extreme.

> If you want to argue that we should be more accommodating towards assholes

Not once did I argue that they should not have been excluded, or anything even remotely similar, yet almost everyone who replies insists on putting words in my mouth. Given how straight-forward my posts were, I'm going to assume this misreading was deliberate.

You're admitting to speaking in vagaries and then also calling your posts straight-forward, and then basically accusing me of trolling you.

Sorry I can't read your mind.

Sorry, I should have said 'generalities'. If you can point at which phrase I used that implied we should be more accommodating towards assholes, perhaps I can learn to express myself more clearly in the future.

In reality, when you attack a group, it gets stronger, unless it retains the same strength, or gets weaker. That’s admittedly a less satisfying rule, but at least it’s true.

Seems... tautological.

It's generally believed that it gets weaker (that's the point of attacking someone - to put them down) and my point is that it tends to get stronger. Attacked groups get together and become more active and motivated. They refine their methods and obtain more high ground from the excesses of the attacking parties.

Gamergaters were not victims, they were denounced and derided because of their doxxing and gang stalking activities on the boards. Their actions led to their removal from 4chan.

The video series about women and videogames started a reaction that included what you describe (doxxing and gang stalking activities) among other things. That led to a reaction that included them being "removed" from 4chan. That led to the more radical people to concentrate on 8chan where don't they get called out for being extremists as much. That led to the case in the OP.

Obviously that's simplified, but I think you can see how the dynamic plays out.

The victims aren't gamergaters or feminists or whatever. It's humanity.

gamergate didn't get 'stronger', gamergate has been over for years, it's just the case that the absurd reaction to the movement created an environment extremely hostile to anything considered 'left' which has now spun out of control.

That's exactly my point.

I agree. People fighting for more inclusion in gaming have gotten a lot stronger since they were attacked by gamergate.

I agree it cuts both ways. Groups in both sides have gotten stronger.

False. Deplatforming works. People afraid of it state that it doesn't work because they're afraid.

You are saying that on a story about 8chan's /pol/ board, which is populated by people who have been deplatformed from other places.

Providing an easily monitorable spot for people that should be on watchlists. They're not exactly taking over the world from there, aren't they?

(keep in mind that every time that they have to move, their numbers are diminished along the way)

I really disagree. Some of these groups barely existed 5-10 years ago and now they are everywhere. Violence cases like the one in the story is going to make them lose a lot of credit with the public, but if the other side escalates as well (see antifa[0]) things may get even worse.

I wish we could all accept our differences more civically, but I don't know how we can make that happen.

[0] I fully expect antifa to get stronger after this.

I don't like this, but violence is a proven remedy against fascism, possibly the best one. Engaging them in good faith debate in the marketplace of ideas isn't.

I'm not sure I agree with your argument. People say a lot of things on these boards "for the lolz", or so they say. I don't know how far the defense gets you. Can swatting be for the lolz?

SWAT-ing has an imminent intent to invoke deleterious action; pretty easy to differentiate from simple speech.

>SWAT-ing has an imminent intent to invoke deleterious action

To be fair, if the incidence of escalation to use of lethal force weren't so prevalent as to be an almost guarantee in the states, the results of SWAT'ing wouldn't even be a problem but more of a nuissance, in the first place, yeah?

In other words, if the resultant actions of the police forces - whether believing they were acting in the interests of public safety or not - weren't so haphazardly deleterious to the public at-large (see the baby with burns because of tear gas thrown in it's crib, as an example), this wouldn't have been a viably dangerous exploitation surface to begin with.

Whilst I can understand that such an action (SWAT'ing) is bad and I am not trying to argue against, dissuade, nor assuage the realities of it, I'm merely trying to point out that the realities of the dangers of it's byproduct solely exist due to societial declination; particularly, in the devaluation of human life, as a whole - which has given carte blance, as it were, to the use of lethal force.

In other words, if lethal force weren't such a foreseeable outcome of SWAT'ing, would it even be something considered deleterious or would it be moreso considered merely a waste of time and resources (which, in and of itself, could have secondary or tertiary effects that are possibly damaging [e.g.: we couldn't respond to 'x' critical situation because we were dealing with 'y' critical situation])?

I like where you're coming from, but it doesn't quite work IMO.

Even having the police just knock on your door might be deleterious enough: The point is the outcome is known, expected, likely, and almost certainly has an observable (by third parties that the person ordinarily associates with) negative effect.

Saying something nasty to someone in an online forum, that if ignored will have no effect, is still markedly different; and is readily differentiable.

A first test might be "if I didn't see the speech would it still have an effect".

I’ve found that some people are often much more serious than they let on. These “jokes” provide perfect camouflage.

"In every joke is the seed of truth"

Unless you're a professional, jokes mostly just reveal the things going on in your brain

If you have a soft spot for jokes about dumb women or dumb [race] or encouraging kids to harm themselves, well...

Irony stops being ironic and starts being an honest picture of what you are the moment you start doing it out of habit.

> Edit: I want to re-state that I emphatically do not hold any opinions on this topic.

The most astonishing part of your post is that you consider what you're writing "not an opinion".

Because it is nothing but opinion: it's the theory that thousands of non-antisemites would somehow find pleasure in some sort of "sport" of "pretending" to be vile anti-semites (and racists etc). To repeat this lame excuse is to amplify it, and one wouldn't do so without considering it convincing.

I don't see it is as convincing. I'm just as much not an anti-semite as these people pretend to be, and I see absolutely no mechanism how I would enjoy pretending otherwise.

And even if, somehow, there's a psychological explanation of how spewing insincere hatred provides these people pleasure: would that somehow make this behaviour worthy of public support? Even in the best case of not having any effect on the real world, aren't these people are just stewing in their ("pretend") hatred, wasting whatever time and potential they might have on malevolent low-brow attempts of lame humour?

But of course there are effects on the real world. We've just seen two such tragedies and there have been countless smaller ones. If posters there really are fundamentally of sound mind and not intending to be part of actual harm, can they just continue as before? Doesn't the proof that some people actually do commit violent crimes for fame and lulz somehow destroy this excuse of it all just being an act?

There was this lady that encouraged some weak boy to commit suicide, for the sport as well, and succeeded. It's tricky to find the line between teenage shitposting (hey TSA, my new song is da bomb!) and premediated psychopathic enticement on weak prey to commit something horrible.

With apologies for coarseness:

The Rule of Goats: even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker

—-Popehat

I dunno about now, but back when I browsed on 8chan for a bit the people on there genuinely worried me. There was a board dedicated specifically to doxing and messing with people's lives, there were multiple successful raids on social media websites carried out and the slower pace of the boards meant there was more time for genuine collaboration on things. 4chan people always seemed like they were playing, 8chan people got shit done and many of the things i seen on 8chan actually tended to be more genuine than 4chan.

They really took pride in the hatechan nickname. The place left me with a really bad taste. There was some genuinely nasty people there. Not to mention the fucking pedophiles. So many fucking pedophiles. That place really made me believe there's no hope for people like that.

I have no expertise in the legalities here.

But I’ve found that quite often, on the internet, when you think you’ve found a forum of hilarious ironic commenters... a lot of them are very sincere.

Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight.

I don’t know what to do about this, but this is the world we’re living in.

The problem is that while most of them aren't, some of them are. If you doubt the sincerity, just observe /b/ for a day. It's filled with fiction, but yeah, every so often you see something that looks real.

How do you know? What trains this feedback loop other than your own perception?

>How do you know?

Two ways :

1) Staggeringly rare real-world events are reported frequently -- so a good number of them, by virtue of their rarity in real life, must be false. There are daily threats of wide-scale violence, but only a very small percentage of these threats turn into a real event.

2) The impossible is often reported. These comments can be thrown away at face value by most people -- besides maybe the most dedicated 'researchers' (Alien abduction, magic , general occultism woo).

Now, if you're asking 'How do you know which threats are false?', that's a much more difficult question, and i'd be surprised if there was a generalizable 'answer', aside from full-on mind-reading.

one pretty obvious fact would be the adoption of "chan-slang" by people who have turned entirely serious in their advocacy of those extremist views, with they themselves openly advocating that those were the channels on which they were radicalised. A similar dynamic is playing out on youtube, as a recent ex-member of this subculture attests:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...

>But I’ve found that quite often, on the internet, when you think you’ve found a forum of hilarious ironic commenters... a lot of them are very sincere.

I mean, I think that’s pretty much how /r/The_Donald started. It started out as satire but over time collected a following of people who weren’t quite in on the joke...

I remember when The_Donald first came around in the very early days in the run up to the '16 election. I actually subscribed and thought it was hilarious, because I think Donald Trump is pathetic (and I thought he was insignificant at that point).

I suspect that most subscribers were like me, at first. At some point, the tone of the sub reddit took a dramatic shift. It's hard to explain -- it became so serious and so vitriolic. It went from being a joke, to being "wait... we are joking, right?" to being "oh my god these people are serious," within the span of about 1 month.

I would say, for me, that's when the sort of surrealism of our current politics started.

I think this type of joking around is dangerous for that reason, and it really soured me on the concept of 4ch style "ironic" joking. You're flicking the lighter over and over again, and at some point you might find yourself near gasoline.

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."

DarkShikari, Hacker News, 2009, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498

Wonder if that's the DarkShikari of Eve Online...

Regardless, it's a good quip about the consequences of normalizing the devaluing of intellect.

I believe it was.

OT, but I never knew he was a lead x264 / ffmpeg developer too. Cool!

I wonder what happened to Jason, haven't seen him here or heard from him in ages.

I wonder as well. I did a project with him when I was a teenager and we didn't entirely get along. He was a very talented guy, though, and I wasn't entirely fair to him. I hope he's doing all right.

Even though I didn't know the context of the quote before clicking on the link I knew it had to be about 4chan. It's "fake it till you make it" but towards the negative side.

You see this problem with the 'edge lord' thing, they supposedly don't mean the things they say or the usernames they choose, but it ends up enabling and empowering people who do actually mean those things. It was supposedly all for the lulz, but now it's the actual world we live in.

Then there are the constant pushere for social controll, who claim to do it for for decency and human kindness, but when the situation boils down the ingredients, you find its mostly because controlling other peoples lives, resources and creations is what they really want.

The radicalisation on 4chan, was produced by all those external echo chamber snuffing out that little speakers corner for weirdos. Reddit, Tumblr, all that comercial ilk, you serve so gladly, which aggregates people by doing the equivalent of a medieval mob ralley - created this nightmare.

Say it with me: "Its very cost effective, to be a radical in a attention economy. I brought this on society to earn a livelihood, and now want to shift the blame towards those places where the polarization i created, becomes most visible, be it a tavern or a brothel. Im a monster and should be hunted down by the monsters i created if there was justice to this world."

Of course if you would ever admit that, all those "nice, constructive people, wanting only the best for people" while blindly shoving there ideology forwards, no matter what the consequences, would become all edgy.

> Then there are the constant pushere for social controll, who claim to do it for for decency and human kindness, but when the situation boils down the ingredients, you find its mostly because controlling other peoples lives, resources and creations is what they really want.

Yeah, with their things like, "Women get bodily autonomy because it's part of the full spectrum of human rights" and "you can't just fire gay people or say they can't be married because you think it's gross" or "maybe inviting someone who openly says women can't contribute to science because they're better off breeding is a bad look for a science conference."

Boy do they sound unreasonable and controlling. They just want your money, clearly.

> The radicalisation on 4chan, was produced by all those external echo chamber snuffing out that little speakers corner for weirdos. Reddit, Tumblr, all that comercial ilk, you serve so gladly, which aggregates people by doing the equivalent of a medieval mob ralley - created this nightmare.

"Mean liberals and corporations radicalized me," is not really that compelling an argument. If we looked at your youtube play history I suspect we'd find a plurality (if not an outright majority) of your time spent is watching lie-merchant radicalizers like Crowder or "skeptical" material.

> Of course if you would ever admit that, all those "nice, constructive people, wanting only the best for people" while blindly shoving there ideology forwards, no matter what the consequences, would become all edgy.

It's not "blindly", the attempt to de-normalize this behavior by shunning it is pretty tactical. It's the least violent way to proceed. It involves saying, "You're not welcome in my house, you're not welcome at my events, and I'm going to do my best within the bounds of the law to see to it you don't profit from my work."

The fact that this is interpreted as folks losing their careers or having their lives ruined is pretty interesting to me. The shoe is on the other foot now, and suddenly people realize that maybe words and ideas can hurt. Suddenly "free speech" (which is a code for, "forbidding social consequences for bad or unfriendly behavior") is very important to folks, many of which not so long ago said that Occupy was unlawfully assembling on public spaces and weren't worth listening to.

I think you should leave sarcasm-laden emotional diatribes like this on more mainstream "right vs left" sites like Reddit and Facebook. Responses like this really don't add anything to the conversation and could be said in about 1/5 the volume you used if you omitted the edgy rhetoric.

Well, I've been on HackerNews for a long time and if you look at my karma score, the vast majority of that (at least 80%) is from user comment moderation.

And this post has a positive score as well. So evidently some folks like the style of writing and find it valuable.

Also, it's telling you didn't (and haven't) said this to other non-left points of view on this thread. Nor does a cursory glance of your search history reveal other such interventions.

So perhaps I will take your affected objectivity with a grain of salt until we have interacted more and I can take your positive intentions at face value.

for being on here for such a long time, I'd expect more mature and seasoned responses for dissenting or unpopular opinions.

Rather, I don't feel the need to baby obviously disingenuous arguments. That, more than anything else, is the hallmark of aforementioned pseudo-intellectual discussion sites that insist that ritualistic, feigned ignorance of context is a necessary virtue.

that sounds a lot like why the drinking age is 21 in the states.

one state moved the age, so all their young partiers moved their binging and drunk driving to neighboring states, who then had to move their drinking ages, until there was national agreement.

if 4chan didn't want all the kicked out weirdos, it should have kicked them out too

Placing the blame on a very small but extremely vocal minority is a fallacy. This of course does not absolve them of their share of responsibility, but extreme satire should have a place in our culture.

There should be, I agree.

But I think it comes back to the old adage that “there’s a time and place” for it.

I think that forming a community around roleplaying extreme satire has proven problematic and is not the way to carry it out.

I know, right? I thought mocking male tears and saying KillAllMen was ironic, but now overt lack of empathy for men is normal and encouraged.

Well, a coordinated effort by Russian disinformation agents might have had something to do with that sudden shift.

Do you actually believe that conspiracy theory? The Mueller report was pretty clear that the disinformation was on both political sides, and Reddit was not a part of any of the activity.

AFAIU Muller didn’t even investigate that. His investigation was solely based around the campaign.

Nearly half of his 300 page report was on "Russian interference" in the Presidential race.

There’s nothing theoretical about the Russian disinformation conspiracy. The likelihood that they weren’t involved with what happened on Reddit seems extremely low. https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/mueller-report-ira-interne...

yes Assblaster, I do believe so. The Mueller report was clear but not to you. You should try reading it again to understand what it says.

Agreed, I too used to enjoy this kind of humor but after seeing what /r/The_Donald turned into it is much harder for me to laugh.

It's called democracy man, even when a lot of people disagree with Trump, there are others who agree with him.

You could imagine Stephen Colbert (a long time ago on his other show), where everything was just written. Some part of the readers would understand what was going on and others just would not. It would be dependent on the reader’s own contexts and what they think is going on.

Glenn Beck used to host Radio before he was on TV and one of his gimmicks was a thing he called "The Schlub Club".

His show spanned the afternoon and evening hours, so on some days he would announce a preposterous thing and say to the listeners they should call in with comments in support of this thing and goad those who were not in on the joke to take a stand against this preposterous notion that nobody was ever really for.

Those people who got out work and turned on the radio sure we're in for a surprise.

Tampa Bay market ca. 2001. Check WFLA archives if you're curious about this "shtick".

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

I thought that was an actual deliberate part of his campaign? Some of the stuff I read around the time (don't have links now, sorry) seemed to indicate there was astroturfing, anyway.

There’s no indication that it started out as satire or ironic trolling.

I first checked it out early on. It seemed ironic and genuinely anti-trump at the time.

Except that it did? Or it’s possible that you didn’t pick up on it. Satire can be tricky for some people.

I don't know what the original content in it was but the first few posts to really blow up were satirising the Bernie subreddit.

They kept posting these really pathetic "gave my last $20 to the Bernie campaign, don't know how I will feed me and my dog this week, still worth it!" celebrations of poverty and faith, and The Donald parodied the shit out of them. It was hilarious but then a week later The Donald was 50 times more prominent as the Bernie subreddit.

I thought this was confirmed to be Russian Propaganda

The kekistan flag is a great example. Few people would ironically fly a nazi flag in the real world. But a green version gives them some cover.

For the record I have witnessed people flying this flag in my city. There is no denying they were hate filled racists.

I was actually quite fascinated by the Kek phenomenon for religious reasons - I'm very into alternative/marginal religious movements, so worship of an egyptian chaos god was pretty fascinating to me. I also rather liked the Kekistan flag when it first started, and had no idea it was a palette swapped version of a nazi flag until much later.

Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?

They appear to be talking about the ones which they saw flying that flag where they lived. As in, some specific persons.

I didn’t interpret it as a claim that all persons who have liked that flag are “hate filled racists”.

> Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?

...Being fascinated in the Kek phenomenon is very different from going to the trouble of obtaining a physical version of the flag of Kekistan and flying it in public. Do you do this?

Given that he isn't racist and doesn't consider Kek to be racist, what would be the problem with flying the flag? Look at https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kekistan, it looks like a joke that is being taken way too seriously.

It's meant to look like a joke on the surface. I was a big fan of the "feels good man" comic (Pepe the frog) but I wouldn't deny that it's been co-opted by the far right. Also, kekistan is a way worse joke than "feels good man".

So if extremists start using a symbol, everyone else has to stop using it and let them have it? Wouldn't it be preferable to ignore the extremists so they don't get the symbol, and the symbol isn't ruined?

>So if extremists start using a symbol, everyone else has to stop using it and let them have it?

If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.

>Wouldn't it be preferable to ignore the extremists so they don't get the symbol, and the symbol isn't ruined?

That's not how it works. They're using the symbol anyway, so it gets ruined anyway. Ignoring the Nazis would not have had prevented them from owning the meaning of the swastika in the Western world, to use the obvious example.

Following that example, what if the Nazis used the letter 'x' as their symbol? Some non-Nazis might be associated with them by using the letter, but surely that effect can be diluted if everyone continues to use the letter as normal.

And is the letter 'x' really ruined? The swastika wasn't ruined for many Eastern cultures as its original meaning was widely known.

The letter x as a symbol already has widespread use and an accepted, common meaning in the Western world, but the swastika really didn't until the Nazis appropriated it. Which is why Nazis probably wouldn't appropriate the letter x because its power as a symbol had already been diluted.

Also, a symbol can be ruined locally and not ruined globally. The swastika wasn't ruined for Eastern cultures, but it was definitely ruined for everyone but Nazis everywhere else. If Buddhists decided to get together to try to "reclaim" the swastika for its original peaceful intent, they would fail utterly, even though they have a perfectly rational and defensible case.

It's been done. You just gotta use two 'x's.

http://images.amcnetworks.com/ifccenter.com/wp-content/uploa...

As a matter of fact they recently tried something along those lines by creating a bunch of 'fashtag' memes designed to assert that the # sign was a cryptic Hitler reference, complete with fake warning memes designed to look like they came from the ADL, SPLC, antifa etc. and create the appearance of a backlash, in hopes of drawing media attention to a manufactured controversy.

It didn't work well, both because it was such an obviously forced meme and because they got so carried away that they burned a large number of sockpuppet accounts.

It's probably not too surprising they're not as good at this as Chaplin but at the same time, it does seem to work.

Tptacek's "It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who casually evoke "Kek" and then are shocked to learn people believe them to be white supremacists." made my brain spin in my skull and had me reading sewage-filled Wikipedia pages on a Saturday (of Souls, no less).

>If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.

This quickly becomes insane, like with the 'OK' handsign, including the decades old 'circle game', neither of which has any connection to racism other than what desperate mainstream media portrays in search of clicks.

4chan trolling never had it so easy.

>This quickly becomes insane, like with the 'OK' handsign, including the decades old 'circle game', neither of which has any connection to racism other than what desperate mainstream media portrays in search of clicks.

Those are also all minor blips on the cultural radar no one will care about in a few months time. What matters are the symbols with any cultural weight or staying power.

>no one will care about in a few months time.

Because it will have been replaced with another symbol that is now suddenly being portrayed as racist due to click-bait fueled hysteria. Enough already.

In the world we live in, I don't know that I would make snap calls about what symbols will last more than a few months and which won't. In our current memetic climate things may appear to move faster, but getting to the top (news outlets reporting a meme) has a lot of staying power and reverberation that people should not take for granted.

Neither of which had any connection to racism until hard core racists started using it. 'Trolling' isn't an excuse once a certain level of awareness exists. The Christchurch shooter was making the OK sign in court during his arraignment to signal to his frens on 8ch, to their great delight; yet here you are pretending it is all just a media panic and that there is no particular correlation with the far-right, just because there didn't used to be.

>If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.

This is exactly what these people want. There are campaigns to make the pride rainbow a hate symbol, the communist flag a hate symbol and no doubt numerous others.

You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.

>You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.

What have I fallen for, exactly? What's the trick?

Some people already consider the pride rainbow and communist flags to be hate symbols. White supremacists do use coded language and shibboleths online. My comment was simply a statement of fact - the meaning of symbols can be affected by cultural and political influence and can change over time.

That some fools have tried to turn that fact into a meme, or that the media can easily be baited into a moral panic, doesn't make it any less true.

The trick is that by taking every symbol that had positive influence and making it a hate symbol, it's showing that you're a fool for naively associating Symbol A with hate, and are merely acting as a knee jerk reactionary without understanding the underlying context.

If you did understand it, you'd realize trying to stomp out or prevent what is going on is a fool's errand. You can't extinguish the idea; because on each success on your part, a metamorphosis will happen elsewhere, utilizing some other innocuous symbol.

You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.

Which is a rather ugly state of affairs, as it means society as a whole has already lost. It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.

>The trick is that by taking every symbol that had positive influence and making it a hate symbol, it's showing that you're a fool for naively associating Symbol A with hate, and are merely acting as a knee jerk reactionary without understanding the underlying context.

I personally didn't, though. I'm neither naive, nor am I a knee-jerk reactionary. But the underlying context is that idiots on the net pretending to be Nazis want Symbol A to be associated with hate, they're just doing so as a joke.

So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.

And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.

And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.

It's not 2008 anymore.

>You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.

If by "get to the root of," you mean "sympathize with and concede to the agenda of," then no. They are not marginalized, nor is their violence and hate justified.

>It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.

They haven't been pushed to the brink of violence. That narrative sprung, fully formed and fully clothed, as propaganda from the populist movements of the US and Europe, and in particular from the viral efforts around Trump's campaign, but they've always been around, and always been violent, and always been hateful.

>I personally didn't, though. I'm neither naive, nor am I a knee-jerk reactionary. But the underlying context is that idiots on the net pretending to be Nazis want Symbol A to be associated with hate, they're just doing so as a joke.

You're sure acting like one. Albeit one who actually bothers to try to elucidate their case; which I do appreciate.

>So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.

Given. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with the dynamic aside from the fact you're still falling into the ideological trap I mentioned previously.

>And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.

>And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.

So everyone on the Chan's are psychopaths looking to shoot up mosques? Now who is starting to sound extremist?

>It's not 2008 anymore.

It most certainly isn't. In 2008, no one in their right mind would endorse outright suppressing discourse to the level people do today. I don't see that being the fault of "those crazy kids on the Chans". I see it as a result of an increasingly technologically savvy oppressive majority starting to tighten the noose around populations they consider problematic and not worth trying to rehabilitate/understand/integrate.. But hey, what do I know?

I've just been observing the phenomena in action for the last decade or so, and how whenever the Chan's are brought up by the mainstream media, it's as some sort of internet based cesspool of evil instead of as just what it is; a glorified bulletin board.

a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward

There's a name for ascribing responsibility for one's own emotional states to other people. NEETs aren't inherently right wing, and if this were really a phenomenon involving an oppressed minority, where is the prosocial behavior aiming to evoke solidarity from other minorities? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all and the last 80 years of western history (or 160 for Confederacy LARPers) constitute an elaborate plot to make one group of people worse off is getting into delusional territory.

Even the "wehraboo's" and "Confederate LARPers" aren't what they are on the surface. A sibling poster mentioned 2016'ish being some sort of seminal formation date for them; it isn't hard to realize that in the current day and Age, the net allows for the reach of those with sabotage or ideological undermining to be even wider than ever before.

Undercurrents existed at one point, yet the flames were fanned by the increasing utilization of online media to increase visibility. One will absolutely not stop that.

Furthermore, the phenomena of placing blame on others for current emotional states isn't necessarily that far off. Mental/memetic contagion is a well known phenomena; it seems to be fundamental to how information transfer works.

The issue regarding contagion though, is that there is a model which currently exists with regard to thought and behavior that largely downplays the pliability of individuals and vulnerability to external influences on their reasoning. We see this philosophy in our justice system espoused time after time. X is a bad apple. X can never change. X should be removed from society. Preaching of this model weakens our most vulnerable populations. They end up never developing any sort of memetic immune system, or framework to guard against entirely rhetorical or emotional form of attack or influence.

Of course, that all assumes that there was a solid foothold gained in the first place development wise.

Astute. Although I spend a great deal of tiem railing against certain extremists the underlying problem is our poor understanding of the dynamics of social contagion even as it is being avidly weaponized. Cross platform transference is particularly understudied and hard to study due to the competitive nature of the industry and other factors. Feel free to drop me a line if you're interested in conversing further.

You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.

They? You are the one asserting other HN posters making a reasonable observation have 'fallen for it'.

The swastika is forever ruined. If you fly a swastika in nearly any occasion then "nazi" is going to be the interpretation, not any of the myriad previous meanings.

Symbolism is just another form of communication. And like language I imagine one has to evolve with it or be left out of touch or misunderstood.

That somebody thinks it’s a funny joke doesn’t cancel out somebody else purposefully using it as a hate symbol knowing that other members of their sick cult know what they really mean.

I didn't, but in the early days I might have. There was a real divide at one time between the LN new atheist types who just wanted to score cheap political points and the CN meme magicians who took the whole 'avatar of chaos' thing very seriously. I kind of regret not throwing more of my weight to the side I think would have moved our dialogue forward, but realistically I don't suppose it matters.

Have you heard much from the Discordians lately? You seem like someone who might have intersection with their circles.

Not a bad thing at all, I've just not run into them in so long.

Never met a practising discordian who called themselves that, though I've met Subgenii and chaos magicians. I'm currently reading the Illuminatus! trilogy that supposedly kicked that movement off, but I only know about that through Steve Jackson Games' frequent references.

I don't know whether they're hiding or gone, it doesn't seem like a movement that would be big on recruiting so who knows?..

You are aware that mentioning the god Kek is a post-hoc explanation, right? People care about kek-themed stuff because of World of Warcraft. The tie-in to Egyptian mythology was a convenient coincidence.

Regardless, you might not be a hate filled racist. But, a whole lot of hate filled racists use the Kekistan flag as a thinly-veiled symbol of hate filled racism. So, be aware: that's the message conveyed to the world at large when it is shown. Not Egyptian mythology.

You say convenient, I would say significant. 2016 had an unusually paranormal feel to a lot of people, complete with an actual rain of frogs (Pepe wasn't the only frog meme that year as you might recall). The 'meme magic' group in particular was fascinating to me, as it seemed like an evolution of the '80s 'chaos magic' group which I also find fascinating. Only this time, there was actually a relationship with higher powers. That is where the vitality of the movement was when I encountered it, and that is what I found interesting enough to look into further.

I'm disappointed as hell that a secularist wanker like Carl Benjamin successfully co-opted the movement for crass political purposes. But I'm also annoyed that if I tried to re-appropriate the same symbology for the optimistic, metaphysics-exploring group of pranksters that meme'd it to relevance, I'd get called a bigot for associating with the wrong people.

Any group is defined by its lowest common denominators, which is why I and so many people I respect try to seek out smaller subcultures. The trouble I'm seeing is that when a large group like the nationalist right wants to co-opt a smaller but more effective movement, the larger group's rivals refuse to acknowledge any distinction between the different subcomponents, even if those subcomponents disagree on everything that's objectionable about the larger group to begin with. It's bad for the interesting subcultures and it's bad tactics for the larger ones to unite rather than divide their opposition.

Now I'd best go take my own advice and send happy thoughts to those members of the globalist left who like to garden.

Interesting observation. Globalism includes ideas, as small interesting ideas grow the established more powerful and exploitive ideas can absorb the meme momentum then reassociate the imagery and ideas as their own.

It's a strange turn of events, especially when you consider the long-standing ties between chaos magick culture and strongly left spheres, like the Beat movement, cacophony society, and industrial subculture. Of course the early internet had much of this anarchic influence and hacker culture has been colored by anti-establishment, disruptive and radically progressive ideas, in particular radical free speech. "You can't stop the signal". This is a big part of the background early 4chan spawned from.

Now it's fascinating to see the alt-right and fascist-lite communities, fundametally authority-based philosophies, try to co-opt ideas like chaos and "meme magick".

On one hand, it seems what started as a joke/critique of fascist ideology steeped i heavy irony, has moved on while being picked up unironically. On the other hand, it's getting ever harder to tell the difference between genuine beliefs and those parodying them, once obvious satire has gotten boring, and the only way to get a rise is to make a more convincing charicature of the target.

This tactic of appropriation for political ends is sometimes referred to as entryism, and while it's not confined to any one ideology I think the right is somewhat better at it because it's consonant with the idea of machtpolitik and gaining territory by seizure. Given the difficulty and costs involved in contesting physical territory, securing virtual territory (from dominating a forum to 'owning' a particular word or phrase) is a necessary precursor to control of a larger battle space.

>So, be aware: that's the message conveyed to the world at large when it is shown.

This has gotten completely insane.

If anyone has followed the Tesla/TESLAQ saga, at one point people on Twitter were decorating their avatars with clowns, mocking Elon. Well it turns out, according to the crazy left, that clowns are symbols for Nazism. Did you know that? I didn't. Tesla fans were literally accusing Tesla doubters of being White Supremacists, because clowns.

It's the easiest way to discredit literally any idea or any person. Just mention Nazi Germany or Hitler or SS or anything like that, and you don't need any arguments or anything else afterwards.

Note that the person doesn't even have to agree with the politics of National-Socialist Germany or anything close it.

Cause now the one attacked has the burden of proof, otherwise s/he'll forever be known as Nazi.

In a nutshell, that's it.

>at one point people on Twitter

Here's your problem. You're following immature overexcited crazies on twitter and trying to extrapolate to "the world at large".

>Well it turns out, according to the crazy left, that clowns are symbols for Nazism.

Context matters. Is the "ok hand" gesture a symbol of white supremacy? Plainly not. But when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in court to the cameras, was it then a symbol of white supremacy? Of course it was. Such nuance is lost on some people (or rather it is not lost, and they know full well what they're meaning but fall back on that lame excuse as a cowardly cover).

>Tesla fans

>Tesla doubters

What is this immature, playground-level shit?

>> Tesla fans

>> Tesla doubters

> What is this immature, playground-level shit?

Twitter.

>Here's your problem. You're following immature overexcited crazies on twitter and trying to extrapolate to "the world at large".

The same arguments appear on these very forums. Of course, you're probably above it.

>Such nuance is lost on some people

Once again, the enlightened ones explaining it to us deplorables. I think the nuance is lost on you: the symbol has become an ironic joke for these people.

>What is this immature, playground-level shit?

Calling people fans and skeptics of a business is "playground-level shit"? Boy, life must be tough when you're intellectually superior to everyone around you.

Have you got some sort of inferiority complex? Your three replies are all: "what, you think you're better than me?" No, I don't, and I didn't imply that. What's your point?

I don't even know how to reply to you... You didn't address any of my points, and tried to paint my reply as claiming I'm superior to you.

The swastika also has a fascinating religious history, and has deep meaning to people throughout Asia. You'd have a hard time explaining that as a reason to fly a Nazi flag in the US, and few people would be interested in a complaint about people being close-minded about what the swastika represents. You could display a Buddhist swastika, but you'd have to be very careful of how you presented it and the context in which it was presented.

It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who casually evoke "Kek" and then are shocked to learn people believe them to be white supremacists.

I find the act of displaying a flag publicly to be passive aggressive in itself. I grew up in America where the flag was used as a way to force people to unify (remember post 9/11?) and then I moved to Germany where the only time I’ve seen flags displayed publicly are for sports teams, either local or national, and only for the length of the competition.

Having been away from the blatant flag waving for so long, it really jumps out at me now when I visit America occasionally. It’s not just that flags are a pride thing, it’s that they’re trying to draw attention to the pride a person has. But why should I care about their pride? Why force me to notice it?

I think Germany itself is a perfect answer to your question. One thing you start to see over and over in politics is Newton's Third - for every action there's an equal but opposite reaction. Germany took an an overwhelmingly sharp anti-nationalist turn, and what happened? Now we see things like the AfD (far right/nationalist party for those unaware) going from a niche little party that couldn't even qualify for the electoral threshold to the second most popular party in the nation, the #1 in east Germany. And similar things have been happening throughout Europe.

People being unified within a nation is a very good thing. And being unified does not mean believing the same thing. There have always been extremely divisive politics in the US. You only need look at our money - the man on the $10 bill was killed by the vice president of the man on the nickel in a duel. But when people start to become mutually exclusive, or when a nation itself goes too far in one direction, or the other, it results in a sharp counter movement in the opposite direction. It's important that people ultimately view themselves as part of a whole, even if they might strongly disagree with one another. A flag is the most fundamental representation of that whole. The alternative tends to trend towards widescale conflict which rarely has a happy ending for anybody.

> [...] to the second most popular party in the nation

The Afd came in fourth in the last election (European Parliament, just about a month ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_elect...) with 11%. That's a far cry from taking over the nation, and they seem to be past their peak.

I also don't get the logic how strongly condemning the Holocaust is supposedly a reason for their success. How is your neighbours not loving the flag any justification for hating foreigners, women, and the free press?

Anyway, there are many other countries without Germany's specific history, a long tradition of jingoistic patriotism, and still they have far stronger far-right parties today, i. e. France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, the UK, Finland, Greece etc. etc.

Agreed.

The flag in USA appears to be used for 'brainwashing' (compliance training). "I swear allegiance to the flag" and all that, then they use the flag as the backdrop when politicians talk to you, and use it as a symbol wherever compliance without opposition is required?!

Union Flag flyers in the UK seem to be royalist or fascists; or possibly just sportsmen.

The fash over here just uses the England flag. Often for some reason with ENG LAND written on it (perhaps they're so thick that they need reminding?)

I just got back from my first real trip to the UK, and while I was there (in the Cotswolds and south) I saw a handful of the red-cross-on-white English flags at various places. It wasn't clear, and I'd be curious to know, if that meant "Fuck the union, we will rise up!" or simply "You are currently in England."

It's relatively common for people during important world sporting events to fly the English flag, so it might be for the Women's World Cup which England are tipped to do well in. Of course, outside of important world sporting events the flag is generally seen flown by English nationalists and white supremisists, at least that's what I've generally seen.

Well its complicated....

It used to mean (80s/90s) that you are on the right of politics and not keen on immigration.

However, because the UK does not have one Soccer team (England/Wales/Scotland/N.Ireland) If there is a major soccer tournament on the red cross is used to represent England team and support for that team - from a wider diverse proportion of the population.

It fluctuates between the two meanings, as things like Brexit ("We will rise up!" and Sport tournaments ("You are currently in England") happen.

You're probably overanalysing. Sure, flags of the different parts of the UK are popular with separatists (though English nationalists, unlike Scottish or Welsh ones, tend not to be particularly opposed to the Union) but they're also the "you're currently in England/Scotland/Wales", and the "you can watch the football/rugby in this pub" flags. Probably there were a few county flags or local coats of arms on tourist sites and public buildings too.

As proper flag-based protests in the UK go, it'd be difficult to beat the bizarre sight of Cornish fishing boats and villages being covered with Canadian maple leaves back in the mid 90s when Cornish fishermen backed the Canadian side of a fishing dispute...

In rural England the English flag has almost no political connotations on the part of people that fly it. It basically means the second one. For example almost every village church will fly it. They have probably been doing so in some cases for 500 years and don't give the political implications any thought.

It is slightly evocative of a kind of gentle conservatism which has mild undercurrents of racism/xenophobia for some people because rural England is overwhelmingly white and slightly old fashioned. (People call this "Jam and Jerusalem")

Basically it reminds people of the village council from Hot Fuzz.

(Source: grew up in Dorset)

Completely separately to this is has a recent history (80s) where it can be seen almost like a Confederate Flag in some contexts. It was aggressively adopted by fascists and also the subject of a tabloid conspiracy where they suggested immigrants hated it so people started flying it as an anti immigrant "this is our land" type thing.

This isn't the context you saw it in, but it's impossible to completely disentangle this new meaning, everyone is aware of it.

> mild undercurrents of racism/xenophobia for some people because rural England is overwhelmingly white and slightly old fashioned

The people of an area are mostly white and that makes them racist? Do you think black people in mostly-black areas are racist too or is it only racist to be white?

I don't know, I've never been black or a part of a overwhelmingly black community.

Good to know you only form opinions based on anecdotal evidence.

Is this your first day in human society? A user asked for an explanation of a highly nuanced aspect of rural English culture and I gave an answer based on my actual life lived in that culture.

There is no way to get from my comment to your comment without bringing a mountain of your own pet grievances and preconceptions to the table.

OK, so it's more that you've observed this mostly white area to be mildly racist (which seems reasonable), rather than saying that this area is mostly white and therefore mildly racist (which is how I read your post above.)

It's definitely a signifier of poor taste.

Here in the UK there was a period when the Union Jack was hijacked by the far right (notably the British National Party and the National Front). They made prominent use of the flag in everything they did, so people avoided displaying it in other contexts because doing so would be seen as a coded statement of support for the far right.

Denmark loves flags... 🇩🇰

Flags and pigs:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/560986/ultimate-mudslinger-st...

Funny you should mention that: https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article23149722...

This guy initially tried to play dumb and play it off as maybe-Buddhist but didn't scrub his social media of holocaust memes.

I feel like you're being downvoted for the first sentence, so let me try to elaborate on your point. That's the entire deal of fascists: take something that has no negative connotation and give it one. It's how they make their way to the public space.

It started with swastikas, but there are other, way more recent examples: Pepe started as a meme, "kek" started as a meme. They didn't stop there, of course, they have a bunch of failed examples: they've tried to own rainbow flags ("each race in its own space"), OK emoji ("it's okay to be white"), the term antifa (appropriated to some imaginary paramilitary group instead of an actual definition of anti-fascists), and even the fucking # (this one is especially dumb).

An OK emoji on its own doesn't mean anything. NZ shooter showing the OK sign in court does: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article14142992.ece/AL...

So, when you look at the example of someone using these signs, you need to search through their history to see the context. They know their views are unacceptable by the general public, their entire deal is to be on the brick of plausible deniability and then laugh at people who call them out. That's why "everyone's a nazi" is a meme. They want the term "nazi" gone. It's not difficult to see why, since "nazi" was always an insult to fascists. Their attempt at appropriation of the term "antifa" is them trying to do the same for the complete opposite. It's also why they tend to have more profiles: one pretty obviously fascist, and multiple profiles in which they pretend that they're someone else (women, people of color, LGBT+ etc.) while spewing fascist talking points and retaining plausible deniability.

Outright banning just the symbols goes in their favor. In their recent crackdown, YouTube decided to remove almost every video showing swastikas. Of course, you'll rarely see a fascist openly using swastikas. It's those debunking them, laughing at them, and looking at their history that had their videos removed, while they go on and on with "YouTube is leftist and no leftist content ever gets removed".

> That's the entire deal of fascists: take something that has no negative connotation and give it one. It's how they make their way to the public space. > ... even the fucking # (this one is especially dumb).

No, the "fashtag" is a great example. The trolls are trying to exploit paranoia about dogwhistles. Their goal is not to make fascists use the hashtag, but to laugh at (hypothetical) people who avoid hashtags because of internet hearsay that it might be a secret nazi symbol.

It takes two to tango - this particular kind of trolling doesn't work (and didn't work in the case of the fashtag) when we relax a little about dogwhistles. I won't let them take away my feelsbadman.jpg.

You're absolutely right. I've seen memes about the "fashtag", including the ones that do their best to attach it some meaning, but that meaning was so stupid that I didn't even bother remembering it. It's a dogwhistle for the sake of dogwhistles.

> this particular kind of trolling doesn't work (and didn't work in the case of the fashtag) if we all relax a little about dogwhistles.

No, that's exactly when it works. They aren't doing it to laugh at reactions as an end goal, the mockery exists entirely to delegitimize attention paid to racist/fascist dogwhistles, whose whole purpose is to get paid attention to by the target audience but ignored by the wider audience, which doesn't work when the wider audience is sensitized to and vigilant against them.

To stick with the pepe example: It only works as a dogwhistle now because everyone but Frog Twitter has stopped using it. If the rest of the world had shrugged and kept using it, then it wouldn't be a political symbol now.

I think this is the same mechanism as in the euphemism treadmill[1], where it's not clear if it's better to avoid a word or to double down on it (but in a proud/positive way). There doesn't seem to be a consensus about how to deal with the euphemism treadmill either.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill

Wasn't 'kek' just a riff off of 'lel' which itself was a riff off of 'lol'?

I figured someone just off-by-one'd 'lel' and thought it sounded funny. top kek

In world of Warcraft, if you are an alliance race and a member of the horde is speaking to you in area chat, the text is mangled to simulate the fact that the different factions do not understand each other’s languages. “Kek” is how “lol” showed up in the chat every time. So kek became synonymous with lol.

It has a slightly longer history than WoW.

In the original Starcraft, the Korean version of "Hahaha" is "ㅋㅋㅋ". Owing to the fact that the English version of the game didn't support Korean text, the represented text of a Korean player saying "ㅋㅋㅋ" was "kekeke."

This became an early meme of sorts and caught on. Blizzard honored that in WoW by adding the kek/lol translation.

Related trivia: If you're horde and an alliance player says "lol" it comes across as "bur".

>Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?

Context matters. Are you interested in the flag for those reasons? Then probably not. Are you flying it at a protest, in a faux innocent schoolboy sense of "noo, it's not a nazi flag, see, it's a kek flag, teehee'? Then probably yes.

> Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?

You are now aware that this is a copy of a nazi flag. If you decide to raise this flag today, I would have to say yes.

If I told you now there is a secret hand signal white supremacists are using then tomorrow you begin using it, then I would safely be able to assume the same.

> had no idea it was a palette swapped version of a nazi flag

It is not very difficult to see. If your love of this flag is "piss people off" then maybe you are willingly blind.

My question was, what if I was already using the hand signal in your example and I refused to stop just because I learned white supremicists were doing the same?

Genuine question.

There was a dutch documentary about kekistan, where they interviewed one of the creators. If i remember correctly it was giving a rather nice insight into the phenomena.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97FGbbTzJZ4 (subtitles, Interview from 3:54 onword)

Just assuming everyone with a Kekistanflag is a Nazi is making it to easy on yourself. Sure seeing something as black and white is easy, but if you work under an assumption that isnt correct your aimed result will also naturally be different then expected.

edit: And the reaction is telling. Not trying to understand your enemy is one of the stupid things anyone can do and a core reason why our society goes to shit hard. You assume what they want and they assume what you want. You can act as if they are all Nazis and guess what, after a while they will act that way. I doubt you could have made the far right a better present then the behavior of the past years.

I'd be seriously interested in why this is downvoted so much... I thought, the documentary was quite intresting and balanced.

For one, where is the assumption drawn that OP determined they were his enemy?

OP described traits they carried and presented to the world, nothing more.

In my case, I wouldn’t consider that kind of person my enemy. I pity them, though. I think it’s sad, and it the traits come out of pain and a life not examined with honesty.

Its an edit concerning the downvotes, I wouldnt assume someone not downvoting the initial post would necessarily share that viewpoint. If you find something wrong with the initial post i would be happy about the feedback to see where i can improve.

The notion that when a group or person is accused of being racist/fascist it inevitably makes them then embrace that ideology is just not credible. Denouncing racism is easy enough to do, but they didn’t, or they did insincerely.

The alt right sells victimhood as a reason to be part of their in group. It’s constantly pushed that white males are under attack. They aren’t.

It is a tactical issue. The old approach of exclusion, isolation and public shaming was formerly used against Neonazis in Europe. Against people of the likes of the KKK or simply people who either didnt believe the holocaust happened or found it to be a great idea. And it worked rather well because of the size of the group you are trying to stop is rather small.

By now the list of things that can lead to expulsion shaming and isolation grew. And dont get me wrong, I dont think its necessary to discuss about the approach being justified or not. But If you are trying to exclude and shame large parts of the population, the effectiveness of that tactic decreases rapidly. What it does is it creates an ingroup effect among the people at risk of public shaming and it normalizes formerly untouchable topics. It reduced the effectiveness of the tactic massively. You can see it in Trumpvoters and recently the appointment of Kavanaugh as a supreme court judge. Wanna gues for how many being called a bigot, racist, sexist or a Nazi is nothing but a badge of honor? A common phrase is "If xyz means I am a racist, then maybe I am. They called yzx the same." We have large parts of society for which political corectness or social justice are derogatory terms. We have, not just in the US but also in Europe, a rapid rise of far right groups who utilize the approach of isolation and shaming to create ingroup effects. In Europe its manly bound to the refugee crisis a few years ago. Where the far right succeeded in mobilizing around "What you are no longer allowed to say". And what you can witness is people getting suckered in with critique on the lacking organization to deal with the refugee influx and once they are in they easily fall back to the groups far right rhetoric on other issues. Its especially obvious if you look at interviews with people in Pegida rallies in Germany. They answer with their opinion on broad questions why they are here and fall back to the groups rhetoric on topics they havent thought about yet. And once they articulated that stance in front of a camera or towards their friends and family most people feel rightfully committed.

Using the tactic of expulsion and shaming against large parts of society is incredibly dangerous. In Germany we are speaking about 15 to 20% voters for a new far right group, who will likely become the strongest party in many east German states. And I am sorry to remind you, but in the US the group is currently the majority party placing the president. To reiterate on the point, you cant exclude the majority in a country. What you are doing is normalizing racism, sexism and being a straight up Nazis.

The expulsion and shaming tactic was an absolute last resort against people where trying to argue with them was seen as an pointless endeavor. You dont talk to to Nazis, you show up in force on their every last rally and get them fired from their jobs. The oldschool Antifa approach. And its a tactic you have to be very careful in applying. Leaving aside aside a critique on this deeply authoritarian approach, what you are doing is giving up hope to convince these people, you are trying to rear/educate/train them instead by negative feedback. If that is your tactic, you better be sure that you are powerful enough to actually do that. Which isnt the case currently by a large margin. It might work in individual sectors but not with society as a whole. Trying to exclude and shame large parts of society is pushing for a power struggle with the confidence that you are powerful enough to come up on top. Thats simply not the case, quite the contrary. (And the far right is aware of that, simply take a look at the documentary above and Jordan Petersons comment on Identity politics https://youtu.be/97FGbbTzJZ4?t=1593 or more precisely 26:48)The tactic is not just unproductive, its actively counterproductive. You are not just creating a strong coherent group with exactly the attributes you wanted to get rid of, you are also alienating quite a few of potential allies by utilizing this authoritarian and anti free speech approach. Its the whole problem of the urban guerilla again. Focusing on the justification for a tactic and ignoring its real world effect. You simply dont get points for being in the right.

>The alt right sells victimhood as a reason to be part of their in group. It’s constantly pushed that white males are under attack. They aren’t.

Which doesnt matter if they can convince their voterbase that its happening. And a broad approach of exclusion and shaming works to convince these people that exactly this is happening.

And you shouldnt kid yourself, while large parts of "the left" is retreating more and more into echo chambers forgetting how to actually convince people instead of forcing adherence, the far right is out there doing exactly that. You just have to look towards groups like the Identitarian movement who are creating a vast array of easy to access material and discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Hoping to solve that by banning hatespeech is insane.

It doesn't matter if these things are said and done ironically. If they are perceived as being serious they become serious.

The debate could only occur as something like "at what point does this become serious". For example does it take newspapers to say so, or your social circle , or is it independent of external influence. Could all jokes be offensive in that way?

It reminds me of the french Quenelle invented by a french humorist a few years ago https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/opinion/deciphering-the-q... https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/world/europe/concern-over...

Intent definitely matters. Freedom of speech protects satire, but doesn't protect threats.

>There is no denying they were hate filled racists.

And you know this how, exactly?

To the left, everyone with a different opinion is a racist or Nazi. It's losing all meaning.

> And you know this how, exactly?

I met them in person and spoke to them.

Oh, so you left out the fact that you had a conversation with this group of racists, in which they espoused their racist views to you, yet left that part out of your comment, and instead attributed their obvious racism to a joke flag?

#thathappen

No. It's a little more complex than that.

They did in fact claim the flag was a joke and that they were flying it out of "irony" and to "piss off liberals". They didn't overtly express racists views. But the language they used and their dress leaves no doubt.

It's only a joke till there aren't enough supporters

I would just add that there is a third "aspect" or "color" to this stuff besides "this is the most absurd irony" and "we definitely believe this hatefully bs". That aspect is "we don't necessarily believe this stuff but look, we've discovered dynamite in a bottle." It's something like "trollocracy" - "by believing anything and saying anything, we're amazing influential and we can use that influence in a calculated way."

But that third attitude isn't something distinct from original fascism. One might say the ideas of fascists from the start involved something like "use your illusions".

A lot of it is also old-fashioned trolling.

For example, there’s occasional moral panics about white supremacist dog-whistles, like Pepe the frog or the hand gesture. Of course, it’s also the hand gesture for a three point shot in basketball, so you have all kinds of sarcastic “Steph Curry is a white supremacist” memes about it. (Dog whistles in general are, 80% of the time, a moral panic anyway.)

I don’t know if this is how that particular gesture got that association, but trolls (who are possibly white supremacists) will sometimes deliberately invent absurdly innocuous dog whistles, like the phrase “it’s OK to be white”, just to provoke the moral panic from the other side and to force them into absurd rhetorical positions. The metagame being that, maybe they actually are white supremacist dog whistles, depending on how ironically the coiners of them adhere to white supremacism.

There’s a similar reaction in some left-wing circles, eg the “misandrist” sphere of Tumblr, which seems partly comprised of feminists who ironically claim the term “misandry” because they are accused of it by their opponents and also partly composed of feminists who unironically hate men.

It’s not just political either. I kind of suspect a lot of the conspiracy or flat earth stuff is just disingenuous trolling or LARPing. I mean, some people are kooks, but other people just pretend to be for fun.

Another aspect of trolling is that even the most grounded observations of the popularity and possible import of such dog whistles can be dismissed as 'panic' to shut down reasoned discourse.

I hope you’re not implying I was doing that. I specified that roughly 80% of it was moral panic, which would imply that the other fifth—the proportion that was “the most grounded” and was comprised of “reasoned discourse”—is not moral panic.

Citing the appropriation of Pepe or the hand gesture as moral panics reads as if you're putting those things in the 80% box.

You know, when a kid walks into the house holding a dog turd the details of where they found it or what sort of dog left it there are not very compelling.

You’re also missing the larger point about layered irony. You should find a broader discussion of it in a cousin thread to this one; the broader point is that there is a deliberately cultured ambiguity between actual extremists adopting something as a dog whistle of their own initiative, their opponents having a moral panic about a supposed dog whistle which then leads the extremists to adopt the dog whistle meta-ironically, trolls being trolls, and people somewhere in the middle of the spectrum or outside of it entirely either mocking the controversy or deliberately stoking it for their own amusement.

For example, SPLC seems to entertain the claim that the association of the “ok” gesture with white nationalism originated as a 4chan hoax to “trigger the libs” (eg not as a genuine white nationalist hand gesture but merely as tomfoolery intended to provoke a moral panic), but may have later been appropriated by some white nationalists. (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white...)

Am I.

You’re certainly not engaging in anything I would describe as good faith, grounded observation, or reasoned discourse.

  I hope you’re not implying 
  You’re also missing the larger point 
  You’re certainly not engaging in anything

There seems to be a theme emerging here.

I like the idea but I'm not sure I see the correlation between your two examples?

The 'It's OK to be white' thing works because they're taking one side of an issue and devolving it into something so basic that it's impossible to refute. By associating something irrefutable like "It's OK to be white" (which only the most blatant racist would argue against) with all their other more controversial positions, they're basically setting a trap that you have to carefully maneuver around instead of being able to just bluntly refute their point with logic or facts.

The misandry thing seems like something else. Like other extreme positions, it's existence benefits the opposition more than the more mild supporters on their side. It's just a low hanging fruit that the opposition can use to snipe more mild supporters by association. Similar to how the left can take potshots at actual Nazis to discredit conservative positions.

They’re not really the same thing; I’m just kind of riffing on the kinds of layered irony that these subcultures develop.

I think “it’s OK to be white” is literally just a slogan used to troll people. Developed and reasoned arguments are not the point. The point is the layered irony. Layer 1 is the literal meaning. Layer 2 is this particular slogan being proposed by a white nationalist as a white nationalist slogan. Layer 3 is the notion that the white nationalist himself is merely a prankster inventing the Layer 2 narrative from whole cloth. Hence, you have a perfect troll because people will argue about this slogan and talk past each other because they are on different layers of irony.

Misandry Tumblr has different layers:

1. The author of this Tumblr unironically hates men.

2. Anti-feminists unfairly and hyperbolically accuse feminists of misandry. The author of this feminist Tumblr reclaims the term ironically. (Parallel: “deplorables”.)

So you get some people saying “hey, look, all of those feminists really do hate men!” because they missed the ironic aspect of misandry, while the ironic misandrists reply “none of us actually hate men”, denying and covering for the unironic misandrists. But maybe some of the unironic misandrists are still being ironic, but just excessively committed to never acknowledging the irony in a weird kayfabe sense. That way, they can basically gatekeep the conversation to keep it between people who are hip to the irony. But then the truly unironic misandrists can still slither into the community under assumption of good faith, and end up talking past their own purported allies.

In a sense, I think the “white nationalist dog whistle” troll is another gatekeeping mechanism. If you’re on the level of irony where you’re not a white nationalist but you like tweaking moral panics over white nationalism, you get to have a chuckle at the panicking progressives who take it unironically. If you are a white nationalist, you are almost as much a butt of the joke as the panicking progressive, but you have a similar smokescreen as the unironic Tumblr misandrist. Unless the original joker really was a white nationalist at which point he gets to chuckle at the naive useful idiots who are giving him this free smokescreen.

>By associating something irrefutable... with all their other more controversial positions, they're basically setting a trap

This is called a "motte and bailey" argument. It's a favorite of bad-faith debaters.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

> or the hand gesture. Of course, it’s also the hand gesture for a three point shot in basketball //

It's just the OK hand gesture [made with the left hand?].

Or, perhaps all scuba divers are racist.

Yeah, for some reason HN can’t render Unicode emojis. It’s the index-thumb circle with three extended fingers gesture.

There was also at least one entirely unironic example of someone using a photo of the three-point sign at a baseball match to accuse people of being Nazis. (The one I can find references to involves Kathy Griffin doing it to kids at Covington, but I think there may have been others.)

> They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight.

This is sometimes called a dog whistle. The pitch is too high for humans to hear, but the intended targets do pick up on it.

I suspect that some so called dog whistles are a form of conspiracy theory. "It's not viable in plain sight but take my in depth research on the matter to heart".

It certainly is an attractive idea for the conspiracy minded. Heck, it doesn't even take conspiracy mindedness. Just anyone hoping to see something.

At the same time, it seems feasible as a concept and quite useful.

>I suspect that some so called dog whistles are a form of conspiracy theory.

Of course, only the enlightened few can pick up on it and explain it to the rest of us goons.

Dog whistle examples are not even obscure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys

Well if someone says this and actually provides supporting evidence then what's the problem?

I had similar experience in real life. People who were "just joking", when you knew them long enough and closely enough, turned out to be not really joking.

>While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight.

That's what you want. It's amazingly easy to govern when the radicals self-identify in public.

> Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right.

which is puzzling when considered that 99% of all stand-up comedians are firmly on the left.

So what happened to irony on the left? I think we have outlawed it in Internet forums in exchange for political correctness?

> I don’t know what to do about this, but this is the world we’re living in.

Technology persists where art dies.

> Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight.

I have yet to see any platform that falls under the scope of "the far right" that hasn't been heavily criticized by every which way, no matter how ironic. What are you referring to exactly?

>by the extreme right

Just to clarify, 8chan is the one with the /leftypol/ board.

/pol/ is around five times as active as /leftypol/.

8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here.

Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.

That is an unfair characterization. /leftypol/ may be smaller than /pol/ but it is definitely one of the top 5 largest boards on the entire site (just checked and it is in 6th place right now by a narrow margin). It has a consistently high PPH count and tons of active users (500 right this minute).

It is hardly fair to say that the left doesn't make up a massive portion of the site.

/leftypol/ is insulated. Mentions of it on other boards are usually hostile.

Its existence tells you a lot about the consistency of the free speech policy, but it tells you little about the political leanings of other boards, particularly /pol/.

I think /leftypol/ is important but I don't think it's very relevant to a claim that /pol/ is populated by the extreme right, which seems to be the context here.

What I was trying to push back against is that the overarching culture of the site is right-wing. I don't know that it is, and as someone who uses the site, I don't see that. I would love to hear a real argument for why this is the case. The boards on the site have their own internal owners and moderators and it is those people who are actually crafting the content moderation. There are christian boards, technology boards, literature and philosophy boards, sports boards, islamic theology boards, cyberpunk boards, I can go on and on.

To say that the place is nothing but right-wingers and that any other boards that aren't are anomalies, is unfair. Further it shows you have never actually looked at the site beyond the front page, if that. The overarching philosophy of the site is one of free speech, which attracts people who are interested in odd things from all corners, not just the right.

I didn't put it clearly, and not entirely correctly either. Sorry about that.

To the extent the site has an overarching culture, it's right-wing. There are boards outside the overarching culture (I said there were only "few" earlier, but I don't know if that's right).

/tech/ is the largest technology board. It's part of the overarching culture. It has a clear political leaning, even if that leaning is not part of the rules or the stated topic or the moderation policy. If you look at /tech/'s catalog, there's threads like "Stallman Going SJW on us?" and "Apple - FULL ON JEWMODE".

/christian/ has a /christian/pol sticky that encourages people from all parts of the political spectrum to post but seems to have primarily right-wing posters in practice.

/lit/'s second non-sticky is "Race Realism/biological determinism Books".

Not everyone on those boards is right-wing, of course. Being right-wing isn't their defining characteristic. And there are other boards that don't have this.

But boards with a politically neutral moderation policy that get cross-posters from other boards are likely to end up with a culture that's right-wing.

/leftypol/ is explicitly left-wing, so even its cross-posters are left-wing. Some smaller boards mainly get users through other means, so they're decoupled from the site culture. Non-English boards might be insulated as well, but I've never used any of the large ones so I can't tell.

Large boards tend to lean right though.

Large swaths of the internet are left-leaning zones. It should be no surprise that places without algorithmic controls enforcing viewpoints are going to counter-balance what they could otherwise find on normal sites.

>/leftypol/ is insulated. Mentions of it on other boards are usually hostile.

That also applies to /pol/ though.

That's fair.

They're not treated the same, though. Using /pol/ is considered acceptable, but posting as if you're on /pol/ often isn't. Using /leftypol/ at all isn't considered acceptable.

Why would you ever want to do something about that?

That is the beauty of free speech. The humorous and playful gives cover to the toxic and harmful, which in turn gives cover to undesired truths and the champions of the suppressed.

A pair of jeans that are not faded, and are clean and crisp, have not been lived in. It doesn’t mean that a faded and torn pare of jeans aren’t just a facade. But a community that lacks the undesirable is necessarily one that lacks the freedom to be undesirable. That would be far worse.

>That is the beauty of free speech.

There is absolutely nothing beautiful about it and there is negative utility in allowing it to proliferate. It actively causes resource usage and damage that is unnecessary and totally avoidable.

And that extends to people organizing specific plans to murder others? Because that’s what this warrant says was being done on 8chan

How do you know what people are being sincere and what ones are joking on anonymous forums?

Irony was used by René Descartes against the church / inquisition.

I'm on a forum full of extrem righters and when discussing politics (and assorted subjects) they rarely use any irony. But it can still be hilarious sometime.

Here's the crux of their reasoning & requested information in seeking the warrant, from the linked PDF:

As discussed above, Earnest made a posting in which he thought to draw attention to his forthcoming attack on the Chabad of Poway, share his views through his open letter, and offer people the opportunity to observe the attack itself. Several people responded, both individuals who were taken aback about the posting as well as people who were sympathizers. As a result, some of the individuals may be potential witnesses, co-conspirators and/ or individuals who are inspired by the subject posting. Based on agents' training and experience, following attacks such as those conducted by Earnest, other individuals are inspired by the attacks and may act of their own accord. For example, as described above, Earnest himself was inspired by the Christchurch event in New Zealand.

Regardless of the nature of the comments, the evidence sought to be seized as described in Attachment B is relevant as evidence of Earnest's bias and motivation in committing the hate crimes set forth in Attachment B. Even comments made in response to the subject posting or about it are relevant to Earnest's motivation for his violent attacks to the extent that as explained above, some of the posters may be potential witnesses, co-conspirators and/or individuals who are inspired by the subject posting. As discussed above, Earnest stated in the subject posting, "I've only been lurking for a year and a half, yet, what I've learned here is priceless." This information suggests that Earnest was inspired and/or educated by individuals who commented on his threads.

Based on this information, there is reasonable cause to believe that the information sought, specifically IP address and metadata for all commenters, constitute evidence of his motivation in committing the offenses described herein and are thus relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, information that may be sought by an order issued pursuant to l S U.S.C. § 2703(c) and (d). That is, the information may lead to the identity of individuals who inspired and/or educated Earnest or are aware of his motivation in committing the attacks.

My only qualm is with this portion:

>...and/ or individuals who are inspired by the subject posting

That's a very overarching goal as it would, in theory, require continued surveillance of all subjects to determine inspiration - either in the past, present, or even the future, yeah?

I mean, you can't just take a snapshot of time,

time_t now = time(0); tm *gmtm = gmtime(&now);

and consider that no other people would be "inspired" in the future by this event, yeah?

There should be more discussion about the ridiculously broad nature of this warrant... How are they able to say anyone who commented at all is a potential co-conspirator?

They should be required to have a more clear guideline than someone who just commented. It's basically a drag net.

"In contrast with (my) generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think that they meant it. Except that after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were white supremacists. Was this always how it happened?" Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books, Feb 2019

"Haha I was only pretending to be retarded"

I don't see the value of such broad generalizations.

I agree. The whole citation reads unsavourably. To paraphrase: my generation used said medium to be creative, while that other generation used same medium to express bigotry. That's the kind of statement that puts up a forest of red flags about the author's credibility.

I wonder how true anecdotes like that might be?

For example, what portion of trolls who said [offensive thing] ironically for shock value ended up internalizing that [offensive thing] later on?

And is this like the concern that violent video games normalize violence?

> In contrast with (my) generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs

Patricia Lockwood sounds like she is praising her generation for being holier-than-thou and basically adding to the issue. There is no way this is just limited to the following generation. It's deeper than that and most likely something to do with the human condition.

It's probably more related to the geekier and/or generally more technically productive people that peopled the internet in the pre-smartphone age. It used to be that you had to learn and practice and exercise skills to become proficient to use the internet, now its basically as mindless as television for [probably] most people.

So, the FBI is asking for IPs used to comment in two posts whose authors later committed acts of terrorism. Doesn't surprise me, I had thought they would have done this already.

I'm surprised there's an actual search warrant. I would think these websites get so many requests for IPs that there's not some way the websites hand it over without a warrant.

Websites in the US (which doesn't, I believe, include this one) have to follow the Stored Communications Act, which specifically forbids disclosing customer information just because someone asked.

Maybe for the actual communication, but not IP addresses:

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=d2ca30a5-542c...

I have always thought of 4chan, at least their 'random' board, as akin to a sort of performance art. It reminds me of the experimental film scene in the 70s and 80s in NYC. The theaters were filled with prostitutes, pimps, thugs, drug addicts, etc. The experimental films which were shown were not anything that could be shown to mainstream audiences, things like Andy Warhol's 'films' that were downright pornographic, or just a camera pointed at the Statue of Liberty for 24 hours, just experiments with the medium. Also shown were works by the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and others who went on to create other bizarre cult classics. While the things being done in those theaters had no real place in the mainstream, many of the people in the audience at that time as children or young adults went on to become the most popular directors and influential filmmakers of the 90s through to today. There is no question that they were grimy, deviant, subversive places where crimes of various sorts took place. But they were also important artistic and cultural crucibles, and the experiments that took place there sometimes happened upon techniques or ideas that later enriched our world. It's not always pretty to see how the sausage is made.

The difference is that the New York scene produced Warhol and 4/8chan produced mass murderers. The intent and result matters.

The Factory milieu produced at least one would-be murderer, and probably worse. Not that I agree with the original comparison. Culturally, the Warhol crowd were a stop between the somber, black-clad Existentialists of the 50s and the somber, black-clad ‘goths’ of the 80s.

Mass murderers were live streamed on facebook, why doesn't that get the blame?

Facebook does get the blame. Many people on HN at least do blame Facebook for spreading hateful propaganda and fake news and for fueling acts of genocide. Twitter gets blamed as well.

But the chans are unique in that their culture (ironically or not) actively encourages and demonstrates the beliefs that lead to such violence. The shooter in this case mentioned having been inspired by /pol/ and mentioned the New Zealand shooter, who is being treated as a hero and a martyr by /pol/.

Facebook and other social media get blamed for passively encouraging violence and hate, while the chans get blamed for actively encouraging it as a cynical and ironic piss-take on society.

According to FB, nobody flagged the video during the livestream, and it's not clear how FB could automatically detect the nature of the content as it's being streamed. You might as well blame Subaru for manufacturing the vehicle used by the attacker.

The facebook live stream of murders was the output. White supremacy material is the input.

I'm a little confused why they're going with a search warrant here instead of a subpoena. The only reason they would want to do this usually is if the admin was refusing to comply with a subpoena, but the search warrant says nothing about this AFAICT. This is pretty unusual for FBI evidence gathering procedure.

Only thing I could think of is if he was still facing state charges only at the time it was drafted and served? Then there would be no case to issue it under. I guess they could have done a grand jury subpeona, but that comes with certain secrecy requirements.

Actually you do have a point, looking back over the operational history of 4chan interaction with law enforcement wasn't that unusual; during that canada van attack thing the entire site went down while police collected evidence and the response was basically: https://desuarchive.org/a/thread/171969632/#q171978582.

I don't know why they decided to escalate to a search warrant.

> during that canada van attack thing the entire site went down

This is not true. HTH HAND

Belt & braces. Nobody can argue that you've done it improperly if you've got a warrant even if the subject would willingly comply.

4chan has always been transparently cooperative with law enforcement whenever they ask. They don't demand subpoenas or are obstructive - I imagine 4chan has good relations with various agencies.

8chan is another beast and I'd imagine that site to be as toxic as what goes on. I would imagine no good relations nor prior willingless to play ball. They state they "comply with US law" and are "responding" to the police. Doesn't seem as friendly as 4chan's approach.

Of course in the US it's common to "never talk with the police" so I should affix by saying that I'm a European and have more trust in the law

I hesitate to demonize 8ch solely on the basis that they require legal protocol to be followed. I expect all organizations to require warrants before handing over data to the authorities.

Subpoenas aren't warrants and we are just as legally required to oblige them if they are valid and signed by a judge. One can get thrown in jail for not complying with both of them, so if one is pushing back, they better be really fucking prepared for the consequences of that action. For a subpoena/warrant for legitimate data collection of online extremists, that's not a battle one is likely to win. Like with all things in life, one really need to pick their battles sometimes.

I'm more inclined to believe that this FBI agent is not familiar with standard operating practices, seeing as his biography describes him as spending most of his career working on drug gangs, which is a somewhat different beast than online domestic terrorism work.

Relationships aren't really with the organization (RE the 4chan comment), they're more with the individual agents and pretty decentralized. I've never had the same FBI agent twice, for example.

Your assumptions are disputed by information in the linked search warrant we are discussing (see, e.g., paragraph 32).

The original 8chan thread has been removed, but here is their own follow up thread regarding the investigation: https://8ch.net/pol/res/13196423.html

(Warning: 8chan...)

The comments in there are disgusting, wouldn't have thought that people actually believe and preach this crap.

It's worth noting that this board on 8chan makes it an open policy to permanently ban people who post dissenting opinions with the reason that they are "shills" and coordinating a misinformation/propaganda attack.

An important thing to remember if anyone tries to bring up free speech.

History is overflowing with examples of people, groups, and nation states preaching, and practicing that crap.

As a kid, I heard similar stuff from my classmates and their parents and grandparents, and I was in the suburban Midwest, not a place strongly associated with anti-semitism at the time.

Today's purveyors have just been offered more powerful media to amplify and propagate it.

Well, mass-shootings wouldn't happen if there weren't people who believed it. It turns out that anonymous 'edgy' internet forums are an ideal breeding ground for that sort of ideology.

The absurdly offensive dialog that goes on there is often just an act people put on to fit in with the crowd in a consequence-free environment--most of them are probably just harmless lonely teenagers with nothing better to do. But it would be hard to tell at a glance which posts are serious and which aren't.

Harmless lonely teens who may be play-acting on 8chan are encouraged to become true believers by the rest who are sincere. The shooter involved in this case stated that he’d only been on 8chan for a year and a half and had learned much in that time. At some point the “fun” of it crosses a line for minds that have a strong enough foundation to leave it behind, those that stay become invested in the ethos. They embrace the allure of being the righteous underdog in a battle for the “future of white America”. Empathy and compassion are the enemy.

Crazy, isn't it?

#cancelWhitePeople is now a mainstream view.

tl;dr: The FBI wants the IP addresses of people who commented on an 8chan thread created by the Poway synagogue shooter[1] prior to his attack in an effort to find any co-conspirators.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway_synagogue_shooting

It sort of sounds like they want to put every individual that posted in that thread on a watchlist.

Watchlist? Jail.

Material support to an act of terrorism.

Edit - from the search warrant application: "will be found evidence of violations of federal law, namely, intentional obstruction, by force or threat of force of persons in the free exercise of religious belief, resulting in death, in violation of 1 S U.S.C. § 247(a)(2), willfully causing bodily injury to persons through the use of a firearm because of the actual or perceived religion of said persons, resulting in death, in violation of 1 S U.S.C. § 249(a)(l), and damage to religious property, in violation of lS U.S.C. § 25 247(a)(l )"

Edit 2: Lots of legal eagles on HN today that are upset at the word "material." Sorry? If you read the full search warrant it sounds like he torched a synagogue, and was encouraged to follow up with a shooting.

what material?

Even those saying no and telling him not to do it?

>Even those saying no and telling him not to do it?

Would this be an example of the dry irony the chans are so well known for?

Its unlikely that he read any of the comments given the necessarily short time interval between announcement and perpetration.

As disgusting as it is, it isn't a crime to say you agree with a terrorist's message or like what they're doing. Unlike in New Zealand, you can't be imprisoned for expressing thoughts or spreading information (like the shooter's manifesto).

That said, there's nothing stopping them from putting such people on a watchlist, and if there was anyone deserving of being on a watchlist, it'd definitely be the people on 8chan /pol/ worshiping the shooter (so nearly all of 8chan /pol/).

I think it can become illegal in the US if you are encouraging people to do criminal acts imminently. That's arguably incitement, but I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

case in point, the girl that convinced her boyfriend to commit suicide: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/calls-and-texts-...

It has to be both imminent and likely - if you saw somebody posting something like that, would you think they were actually going to do it? Nah, it'd blend in with all the other larping and shitposts.

"It" did actually happen, shortly after the post, and was therefore both imminent and likely.

This was also the second such incident within just a few weeks. Knowledge about Christchurch should maybe have informed these "shitposters'". Can't really claim it's all just a joke after people have died.

The jokesterism is in response to a joke world. There are innumerable numbers of murders each year but somehow a spree killing is enough to slay irony? 9/11 wasn't enough to slay irony. The reaction to it excaberbated the ironic mode of moderm culture.

> did actually happen...therefore...likely.

That's not how likelihood works.

It's not that hard to tell.

What are you basing that on?

It's been my preoccupation for over a decade.

The standard in the US is much more limited than your wording seems to imply. From the page you linked, the two key requirements are:

> (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action

> (2) is likely to incite or produce such action

That second one is an incredibly high bar. Also see a previous thread where this topic came up following the New Zealand incident (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924352).

How are courts supposed to determine a priori likelihood?

And is it the likelihood pre or post incitement?

Pre, probably based on a hypothetical reasonable person in the defendant's position. For example:

A provocateur is giving a speech to a crowd against someone or something. The crowd is agitated, and armed. The provocateur commands the crowd to go physically attack the target of their rage. A reasonable person would think that's likely to start a riot.

Someone posts on a message board filled with graphic descriptions of violence the posters purportedly intend intend to commit. The poster says they intend to kill [racial slurs] for the good of white people, start a race war, etc.... Another forum member, knowing that only one or two of the tens of thousands of posts of that nature has been connected to actual acts of violence replies "do it!". A reasonable person would not expect the poster actually planned to commit violence, or that their comment would change the outcome.

My intention was to state that it was apparently a possibility under U.S. law, not to imply how likely that charge holding up in court would be.

But he did shoot up a synagogue and light a mosque on fire, so it might not be too far fetched that he was incited to do so.

How was material support provided?

The word material in material support is crucial.

It does sound like that, but it also seems like they would have good reason to do so.

Why not? At least the ones that cheered the shooter on should be put on a watchlist, since there is good reason to believe that one of them might one day attempt something similar.

Don't kid yourself, the feds have already put those people on a watchlist. This is all part of the parallel reconstruction of evidence that will be used against them should the need arise.

The below was from the twitter account of 8chan in regards to Poway and the NZ shooting.

-------------------------------

8chan (8ch.net) ‏Verified account @infinitechan Apr 28 https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/1122494322283167745

The Poway shooter's post on 8chan was taken down NINE minutes after creation. There are only screencaps available and no archives exist since the post was deleted so quickly. The loudest groups publicizing this crime and giving attention to this CRIMINAL are the fake-news media.

-------------------------------

8chan (8ch.net) ‏Verified account @infinitechan Mar 16

The 8chan administration is responding to law enforcement regarding the recent incident where many websites were used by a criminal to publicize his crime. We always comply with US law and won't comment further on this incident so as not to disrupt the ongoing investigation.

=================================

From what I can tell the current 8chan is a fork of https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/infinity

It does seem that the IP addresses are stored with the POSTs if this is the code they are still using or are based on https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/infinity/blob/2bc5b6dbf31af50f...

On a side note, even if the posts were erased from the database, with the salt for the hashing function of the IP addresses known which make the 3 byte ID, the board and thread id, you could recover the IP addresses & aliases and cross-check with the ISPs to see which ones were accessing 8chan at the time.

Here is a code on how the IDs were generated, at least at one point in time:

return substr(sha1(sha1($ip . $config['secure_trip_salt'] . $thread . $board) . $config['secure_trip_salt']), 0, $config['poster_id_length']);

https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/infinity/blob/2bc5b6dbf31af50f...

The fork lives at https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB.

IPs are hashed at https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB/blob/master/inc/functions.p.... Hashing them was part of the point of the fork.

  $identity = crypt($userIP, '$2a$07$' . $hashSalt . '$');

poster_id is probably called with the hashed IP address.

I won't say I didn't miss anything, but it seems that function is used for 3rd parties, and the real ip is still stored in the database anyway at least until deletion of a post

    $query = prepare(sprintf("INSERT INTO ``posts_%s`` VALUES ( NULL, :thread, :subject, :email, :name, :trip, :capcode, :body, :body_nomarkup, :time, :time, :files, :num_files, :filehash, :password, :ip, :range_ip_hash, :sticky, :locked, :cycle, 0, :force_anon, :embed, NULL)", $board['uri']));

>poster_id is probably called with the hashed IP address.

But even if the database was wiped, as far as I can tell, poster_id still uses the old method posted below. So as long as the secure_trip_salt hasn't changed, which probably wouldn't unlike $hashSalt which was meant to rotate, and you could get the threadid and postid from a screenshot or archive, by running the range of ipv4 addresses through the function, you would get due to the uniformity property of sha-1, approximately 256 aliases of which one is from the poster.

So if I was the FBI and 8chan was not able to provide IP addresses, I would ask what the secure_trip_salt was and generate the table and match it to all the posts in that thread or at least the most significant ones, then trim down the matching IPs. After that I would query to isps or other entities who own or monitor the remaining IP addresses, and using the timestamp, get the identity of the person, if they weren't using a secure VPN that does not log and I could not deanonymize.

------------------------------

Poster id still is used as follows:

The files:

templates/post_reply.html templates/post_thread.html

Contain:

    {% include 'post/poster_id.html' %}&nbsp;

And poster_id.html contains:

    {% if config.poster_ids or (mod|hasPermission(config.mod.show_ip_less, board.uri)) %}
     {% if post.ip == config.tor_ip_hash %}
       <span class="poster_id" title="This user is posting via the Tor hidden service.">000000</span>
     {% elseif post.thread %}
       <span class="poster_id">{{ poster_id(post.ip, post.thread, board.uri) }}</span>
     {% else %}
       <span class="poster_id">{{ poster_id(post.ip, post.id, board.uri) }}</span>
     {% endif %}
    {% endif %}

Which still call the poster_id function in https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB/blob/master/inc/functions.p...

which returns:

    return substr(sha1(sha1($ip . $config['secure_trip_salt'] . $thread . $board) . $config['secure_trip_salt']), 0, $config['poster_id_length']);

The "ip" field used to hold the plain IP address, so it's still called that, even though it now holds a hash.

The post() function fills it in like so:

  $query->bindValue(':ip', isset($post['ip']) ? $post['ip'] : $identity);

It's called from https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB/blob/master/post.php#L988, but $post never gets an 'ip' key, so it always uses $identity (which was created using getIdentity(), which currently hashes the IP address).

I think the method you describe for checking whether a post could have come from an IP address would work, if they gave up all the relevant salts. secure_trip_salt isn't supposed to change. hashSalt is also needed, because the IDs are generated using the hashed IP addresses, but it's changed infrequently from what I remember (changing it logs out all moderators because sessions are tied to IP addresses, so it's easy to notice).

Thanks for locating that line. I think between the two of us we've figured out all the relevant parts of the system and assessed what is going on with post ids and ips in the database.

At minimum, from my understanding, ipv4 addresses look 100% recoverable with the database and $hashSalt, and 3 upper octets recoverable as long as you have hashSalt, secure_trip_salt and an archive of the thread.

Of course this is just from the board software perspective, so the next layer in assessing the privacy of the users with regards to what the FBI can get, is the server, hosting, and upstream providers whether intentional or otherwise may have additional identifying information , for example cache or logs that can be correlated with the posts.

The linked search warrant states (cf. paragraph 32) that "... 8ch.net has used data forensics in the past to find information ... including IP addresses and metadata information (although not if the thread or post has been deleted.)"

I'm an early adopter of 8chan. I don't participate in the more racist or extreme boards on 8chan.

I want to argue that there is value in 8chan. For example during the egyptian protests, one of the most popular boards was devoted to egyptian content. I don't know what they were talking about because it was in Arabic but I'm glad that the egyptian people had that forum.

Right now one of the top 50 boards is HKpol. It deals with the protests in hong kong and he content is mostly written in chinese.

Yes we can criticize anonymous free speech forums for their misuse, and I can certainly see how they might be misused. But I think forums for anonymous free speech can also provide a lot of benefit, particularly for people living in parts of the world where they might face persecution for wanting basic freedoms.

Ironic racism is still racism and in my experience the "irony" usually just a flimsy facade for a person's true feelings

So, basically, "I don't understand irony so everyone must be evil"?

It's more so the case that dogwhistling and irony have a very blurry line.

I'm unconvinced that "dog-whistling" is something worth worrying about.

That's ok, reality doesn't require your input.

Despite your rudeness, I'll remind you that the burden of proof that "dog-whistles are worth worrying about" is not on me.

It's an intriguing concept, but the negative impacts of such behavior (as well as if it actually even exists) needs to be proven, not assumed.

There's a ton of research and discussion out there, checkout the Alt Right Playbook video series on YouTube to help you get up to date with everyone else.

I've watched all of the "Alt Right Playbook" videos and don't remember 'research' that went beyond "I've noticed people doing this thing and here is why I think they're doing it".

The actual tangible impact of such behaviors, as far as I'm aware, has not been properly studied.

You must be fun at parties. Jokes are jomes, and irony is humor.

This thread was deleted from 8chan less than ten minutes after it was created - too fast for even any archives to be created - and the poster was instantly condemned as a criminal for carrying out this criminal act. That is an extremely impressive response, especially when compared to anything from Big Tech.

I haven't quite figured out the timelines in the court documents but it's clear that the authorities were in the subsequent discussions and took the screenshots themselves because of the (You) markers next to their comments.

8Chan deletes any threads that contain threats (with the associated logs and details) and then immediately reposts them as images in a different thread. They actively abet heinous acts.

Or the original poster does this themselves after being banned, hence the (You)'s in the screenshots and mods are busy reviewing a hundred other flagged threads while these new threats are reposted. 8chan is user created and managed the mods aren't exactly professional any fool can create a board.

8chan supports for posts via tor. I do wonder how many of the posters there used it, making fbi unable to locate them.

Tor posters are assigned an ID of "000000". I only see two posts with that ID in the screenshots in the document.

I visited 8chan once several years ago shortly after it was founded. What I saw there convinced me it's not a place you want to frequent, especially from your own internet connection. If someone said to me "hey you have just got to see this thing on 8chan" I'd walk somewhere with open wifi first.

I would reconsider if I ever want to have contact with the person suggesting that again.

How many time did they fax those screenshots?

I understand 8chan is like 4chan but with less regulation and more controversy... Why is it registered or operated from the US, instead of, say a company in Tuvalu that rents servers from a company in Pakistan, but the encryption keys are with the company that manages the servers, from South Sudan?

Because of the US free speech laws. The US is the location where the rest of the world usually hosts there problematic content. It is, or was, also rampant with non nude child pornography sites. While illegal in most of Europe (and other countries I assume), the situation in the US seems to be very different. The whole thing came up in Germany when the government used the numbers of chiid pornography sites they couldnt take down to push for a censored internet. Most of those sites were hosted in the US.

If you host your stuff in Sudan or Tuvalu or Pakistan, you simply get removed on the first report. Why should they continue to host you? The same thing happened a while back with a Ukrainian or Russian ISP provider who didnt react to reports, the whole ISP was simply dismantled. Only because the cooperation between the countries governments isnt optimal doesnt mean the local countries will turn a blind eye to abuses from their servers.

The owner is based in the Philippines who also owns one of the largest Japanese imageboards and some of the hosting infrastructure. Not to be confused with Frederick 'Hotwheels' Brennan who used to run it subsequently quit and moved back to the US after selling his interest.

From what I can tell, 'polite' and 'respectable' culture (a.k.a the dominant culture) in America is center-left if not minimally progressive. At least, this is the case for social issues.

In the 90's, the dominant counterculture was some version of leftism. On the fringes, there was vitriol and anger towards the 'polite' and publicly 'respectable' dominant culture of the time - some version of evangelical and catholic right-wing ideology. Atheism was still edgy. Raging against an undefinable machine had artistic meaning.

We can throw in as many other causal factors as we want in an attempt to explain the current socio-political state of the country, but we can't really deny that it looks as if the new counterculture exists somewhere on the right.

----

I remember the days when John Stewart was edgy. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find a mainstream comedian, who focuses on politics (Colbert, Noah, etc.), that isn't clearly center-left. The coastal, cosmopolitan, affluent, center-left culture is practically a monolithic gate keeper of what is and isn't 'respectable'.

>We can throw in as many other causal factors as we want in an attempt to explain the current socio-political state of the country, but we can't really deny that it looks as if the new counterculture exists somewhere on the right.

If you're arguing this in good faith I'm sorry, but this is outright delusion. The political ideology that controls the highest office in the country and half of the legislature is counterculture? Seriously? Can you see how absurd this claim is?

The “alt right is the new punk rock” is one of their marketing pitches. Apparently it works, but only for a certain demographic.

Every political or social collective/group/movement/whatever wants to be seen as hip and cool or whatever. So, the fact that alt-right individuals market themselves this way should come as no surprise. It also never came as a surprise that the center-left labeled themselves #TheResistance when they already had a monopoly on the popular vote and a monopoly on mainstream press and hollywood, which is just shorthand for saying that they marketed themselves as hip and cool and edgy (or whatever) even though they are quite clearly the dominant culture. How many anti-Trump SNL episodes must there be for this to be patently obvious?

What percentage of speakers on college campuses got deplatformed due to being right-wing vs. left-wing in the past decade?

If the right-wing doesn't harbor the counterculture, but rather the left-wing still harbors it, then why were electoral models so blown to bits in 2016 thanks to phenomena like Trump supporters not identifying as such in polls/surveys?

"Nazi Punks Fuck Off"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTs_Q4hEqmA

Political power does not have to be rooted in culture. American culture is overwhelmingly produced by progressives, often with the deliberate intention of furthering progressive values. There are exceptions but the relative paucity and shoddiness of them speaks volumes. Conservatives are by and large treated in art and media as a dubious fringe.

The electoral college is becoming severely strained. With each couple of presidential cycles the country increasingly tests its limits. How many million more votes did Clinton have over Trump in 2016? Trump won the election by ~30K votes spread across two 'blue wall' states and a single rust belt state.

Republican gerrymandering and the agglomeration of left-wing voters in metropolitan corridors goes a long way to explaining the recent Republican monopoly in the Senate.

Now, if you are suggesting that having the White House and half the legislature excludes a party from harboring within its fold a countries counterculture, then explain the 90's. The only rebuttal here is to say that the Clinton administration and the Democrats in Congress during the 90's were not representative of leftist counterculture, but that Trump and the GOP are representative of that part of the right-wing I am labeling as counterculture. The former is perhaps plausible, the latter probably isn't. What goes on on 4chan and 8chan, from what I can tell, is not representative of what goes on in D.C.

Now, for the sake of argument, say we accept this modified argument and agree that Trump and the GOP Congress represents what I am labeling the new counterculture. Can you still not see how center-left politics is the dominant culture? If I watch or read CNN, MSNBC, NBC, Comedy Central, The Economist, The NYT, Washington Post, The Late Shows, The Late Late Shows, pretty much anything coming out of Hollywood, etc. are you suggesting I'll find anti-trump culture to not be predominant within articles and videos I see?

Being anti-Trump doesn't make you center-left. It's not even a question of politics. I can't even articulate all the reasons why he is bad for the country, not in a short comment - the fact that he is right-wing is least among them. Many (most?) Republicans also think this, but are unwilling to publicly undermine "their guy" (particularly at the expense of their careers).

Also, in a society with free media, surely the "dominant culture" is centrist, by definition?

I didn't imply being anti-trump was sufficient for making one center-left. My argument is that a political wing holding the White House and Congress is insufficient evidence for a countries counterculture being precluded from coming from that wing.

The fact that establishment type Republicans (whether in office, writing op-eds and books, or simply voting as normal citizens) are also anti-Trump, strengthens my argument.

----

There seem to be at least five possible candidates for a counterculture today: progressives, center-left (the cosmopolitan, coastal, etc.), centrists, establishment republicans, and the portion of Trump supporters that are 'alt-right'(I assume the alt-right populate 4chan and 8chan quite heavily).

The disagreement here seems to be over whether the fact that Trump is in office and the GOP holds the senate, precludes the alt-right from being the countries counterculture. I can see a number of different ways this could evolve argumentatively.

Regardless, to preclude the alt-right from being the counterculture on the basis that the GOP has the White House and the Senate, requires assuming Trump is alt-right, some non-trivial portion of Congress is alt-right, and that for some additional reason these facts preclude the alt-right from being the counterculture.

I wasn't responding to your argument about counterculture - simply the following pair of sentences:

> Can you still not see how center-left politics is the dominant culture? If I watch or read CNN, MSNBC, NBC, Comedy Central, The Economist, The NYT, Washington Post, The Late Shows, The Late Late Shows, pretty much anything coming out of Hollywood, etc. are you suggesting I'll find anti-trump culture to not be predominant within articles and videos I see?

I'm obviously misinterpreting, but to me that sentence ordering does imply that "anti-Trump = center left".

>How many million more votes did Clinton have over Trump in 2016?

Since the election isn't determined by popular vote, and hence candidates don't campaign with a strategy to earn the most votes, this is irrelevant to the outcome and by no means indication that Clinton would have won.

A consequence of your argument is that most everyone on the left who said the electoral college is becoming unacceptable due to Democrats winning the popular vote but not the White House (Gore and Clinton), in fact had empty arguments and talking points. I'm not sure that's a consequence you'd want to accept.

Regardless, do you think the multiple millions of additional votes Clinton received is not at least minimal evidence that the country is a bit more left-wing than right-wing?

>Regardless, do you think the multiple millions of additional votes Clinton received is not at least minimal evidence that the country is a bit more left-wing than right-wing?

Personally, being as how I don't consider Clinton left-wing, nor Trump right-wing, I can't say for certain.

The point is that "alt-right" is the counter culture. "Alt-right" doesn't control half of the legislature, most of the Republicans are more traditional conservatives. You could argue the President has their support but his actual policies are rather far removed from what members of alt-right movement want.

This touches on an interesting change in the trend of conspiracy theories. To quote an article from The New Yorker:

>“Classic” conspiracy theories, according to Muirhead and Rosenblum, arise in response to real events—the assassination of John F. Kennedy, say, or the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Such theories, they argue, constitute a form of explanation, however inaccurate they may be. What sets theories like QAnon apart is a lack of interest in explanation. Indeed, as with the nonexistent child-trafficking ring being run out of the nonexistent basement, “there is often nothing to explain.” The professors observe, “The new conspiracism sometimes seems to arise out of thin air.”

>The constituency, too, has shifted. Historically, Muirhead and Rosenblum maintain, it’s been out-of-power groups that have been drawn to tales of secret plots. Today, it’s those in power who insist the game is rigged, and no one more insistently than the so-called leader of the free world.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/whats-new-abou...

It's almost like society in the US (mainly) has become so fractured that some in-power-groups actually think they're the underdogs.

>It's almost like society in the US (mainly) has become so fractured that some in-power-groups actually think they're the underdogs.

Well yes. White people believing they're underdogs oppressed by multiculturalism and shifting demographics, Christians believing they're underdogs oppressed by secularism, and men believing they're underdogs oppressed by feminism all form the spiritual and sociological genesis of modern alt-right and anti-progressive identity politics.

The most politically and culturally powerful demographic in human history (the straight white Christian American male) views itself as history's most existentially oppressed minority. When they look at the groups they perceive to be their enemies they see a consistent narrative of power being gained through struggle, and the solidarity that comes from the persecution complex.

Thus, every argument by those enemies is adopted, inverted and weaponized against them. Black people are oppressed by a racist system? No - black people are the oppressors, just look at BLM, they're shooting white people in the streets. Everyone hates white people now, but what's wrong with being white? Why don't all lives matter? Women are oppressed by a sexist, patriarchal society? No - women have gained so much power and control through feminism that the world is now effectively a global matriarchy and men are being oppressed so much that they're being cucked and driven to suicide en masse. LGBT people are being oppressed? No, society is being forced to accept these alternate lifestyles as normative due to the overwhelming influence of the gay agenda and constant pro-gay propaganda in the media pushing it down everyone's throats, and people who support traditional values are having their rights to free speech, association and religion suppressed. And also they're putting chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay. Etc.

Well, most of the people who talk about how the white cis straight men have all the power don't seem to believe it either. They keep on calling for all the supposedly white cis male controlled tech companies to police everyone's speech, and even for the white cis male police and government to step in, confident that all that policing will follow their own supposedly-powerless views and stamp out those of their supposedly far more powerful eneimes. The very idea that it might go the other way is seen as so absurd that only a concern troll trying to help the other side would suggest such a thing.

For the record, while I am a straight white American male, I'm a political nihilist in the epistemological sense that I don't think there is any mind-independent truth to be found in politics. I'm a moral realist, though.

To your point about heterosexual religious white people projecting an identity of oppression: is that the average member of the alt-right?

Also, from the comments in this thread, it seems that being the 'counterculture' is somehow noble, positive, 'on the right side of history', etc. I don't see why anyone should assume that.

Lastly, in relatively free societies like the U.S. currently is (and has been for the past couple decades), whatever the counterculture is, it clearly isn't oppressed. I said Atheism was edgy in the 90's, and suggested it was part of the 90's counterculture. Atheists were clearly not oppressed in the 90's, just like the alt-right is quite clearly not oppressed.

>To your point about heterosexual religious white people projecting an identity of oppression: is that the average member of the alt-right?

Probably not, given that I'm describing an extreme viewpoint. I've encountered alt-right people who reject the white supremacist elements of the movement but still identify for various political reasons.

But the narrative of oppression is still part of the identity politics of these movements, given their reactionary nature. The modern men's rights movement, which includes incels, redpillers, MGTOW, etc (the movement itself being older) isn't merely a criticism of, or alternative to, feminism, but a reaction to the perceived oppression of men by feminists. Anti-progressivism and anti-multiculturalism are reactions to the perceived oppression of conservatives, Christians and white people by leftists and other races and ethnic groups.

This phenomenon was covered in the mainstream media during Trump's campaign - the narrative of his success being portrayed as a successful anti-establishment revolution by the disenfranchised "rural white male" that felt betrayed by globalism and the loss of white majority power.

Be specific. Are you saying that the edgy and vitriolic people who populate places like 4chan and 8chan are currently the in-power-group in America?

If they are in fact the in-power-group, then why isn't David Duke making the rounds on CNN, The Tonight Show, Ellen, and SNL?

Good, serious measures should be taken against these Internet cesspools.

get rid of cesspools and their content might just spill over to your yard.

From a law enforcement perspective, it's better to have them all in one spot.

Strange they don’t have that information already. Could this be a parallel construction sort of a thing where they pretend they don’t have the data already?

Why would it be strange? And what alternative method of obtaining it would they have? It doesn't seem like a stretch to get the warrant approved, so I don't know why they'd go to any great lengths to have gotten the same information in a method that couldn't be used in courts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

The FBI can't just ask the NSA to hack every US company every time they want some information from it. I'm sure they do for the big dogs, as revealed from their collaboration in targeting Tor hidden services, and for anything concerning espionage and national security, but the vast majority of the time they're stuck trudging through the long legal process like every other law enforcement institution (such as your local PD). I doubt 8chan was high on their radar before this attack.

How could 8chan not be on their radar after Christchurch?

Knowing about it and having the multiple kinds of know-how and budget to monitor it are two very different things.

Sorry, I mistakenly thought this warrant was for the Christchurch attack (due to 8chan being a US company). I'm sure they did get on their radar then. And now there are probably meetings just about 8chan.

The FBI doesn't have to ask anyone to do it for them. As the supreme court approved of Rule 41 they now have the authority to get rubber stamped generic search warrants and then hack anyone, anywhere, who is participating on the internet but whom they don't know the name and location of. Being anonymous now makes it legal for the FBI to hack you.

ref: supreme court ruling, https://cryptome.org/2016/04/scotus-frcr16_8mad.pdf , https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/supreme-court-gives-fbi-...

The NSA is not some "magic bullet" and I don't think these wild stories of them knowing everything are necessarily true to the extent implied. At the end of the day, I think most information comes from private companies that give it out.

They might have been collecting metadata, that would tell them what ip addresses accessed 8chan but not what they read or posted on 8chan.

Sometime they are clueless... not saying that it is the case in this case

I've said it many times: 4chan is a hive of degeneracy and 8chan is where people that have been banned from 4chan go.

Unlike 4chan, 8chan isn't a centralized website managed by a single moderation team. Much like on reddit, anyone can create a board on 8chan and there are thousands of them.

Because of that, I don't think it makes sense to treat 8chan as a single community.

But the nature of 8chan's user base isn't being dictated by its design. It's still an overwhelmingly right-wing site that gained its prominence from the Gamergate controversy. As a frequent user of reddit I would openly declare that overall it's an observably left-wing site. People across the political spectrum certainly use it, but it's still a left-wing site. Neither site was designed to cater to a certain types of users. But it seems dishonest to say certain ideologies, sentiments, patterns of speech, etc. don't take prominence on either platform simply because that prominence isn't an intrinsic aspect of the software that these communities use.

>But the nature of 8chan's user base isn't being dictated by its design. It's still an overwhelmingly right-wing site that gained its prominence from the Gamergate controversy. As a frequent user of reddit I would openly declare that overall it's an observably left-wing site.

It's somewhat true, but still, reddit hosts right-wing communities like /r/the_donald, while 8chan hosts, for example, /leftypol/.

Both sites consist of multiple, separate communities.

To be fair, /leftypol/ has many users who'd get banned from more civil leftist communities before they can finish saying "liberals get the bullet too".

You've repeated the same argument except this time with examples.

Why would someone that isn’t part of that culture go off and use 8chan and the branding and it’s culture instead of Slack or IRC or any other option?

The chan format is very different from Slack or IRC. Anonymity by default plus image and animation attachments makes it a unique medium.

Hebe was less dangerous than /pol/

The "oh it was ironic" defense sounds especially weak when OP subsequently shoots up a synagogue. Guess he didn't get the irony? And neither did the Christchurch incel a few weeks earlier? That incident should have maybe informed the community's opinion on the future viability of that particular excuse.

It's also telling that both un-ironic murder sprees resulted in general approval, and no visible signs of regret on these boards. Or, you know, shutting them down.

I have no opinions or expertise on the legal merit of any kind of defense. I'm just sharing what happens and what's going though the minds of most of the people in these threads.

Trolling the trolls is just what you do on /b/

> I'm just sharing what happens and what's going though the minds of most of the people in these threads.

How can you know what's going on in the minds of most people?

Have you conducted surveys? Where's the data?

If we've got data, let's go with the data. If all we've got is opinions, let's go with mine.

You just have to spend some time on 4chan and have common sense.

I won't link it but right now I took a minute to find an example. There's a thread on /b/ where someone claims their mom found their bottle of urine and asked what should they do. Countless people said to basically murder their mother.

So do you think those people are truly encouraging a murder? No. They're going along with the fiction. It's just part of what 4chan does...

> common sense.

Isn't as common as one might think.

> So do you think those people are truly encouraging a murder?

In the general sense, probably not. I'm willing to bet at least some of them are serious some of the time.

> It's just part of what 4chan does...

By that logic, walking in to a synagogue and unloading a clip is just part of what online forums do.

Is that an argument you're prepared to make?

On the other hand, if that person did murder their mother, all the people who told them to do so would be co-conspirators.

We're at the stage in society where if someone says "should I shoot up a synagogue" and you say "yes", you should be prosecuted, because otherwise it's going to keep happening.

I think this quote describes the evolution of imageboard culture pretty well:

>Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.

Edit: apparently this thread is the source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498

Sadly I found the same to be true during my teens and early twenties when it came to relationships talk. A group of guys or gals would sit around bragging about how in control they are in their relationships, what high standards they have, etc. when in reality things were much more even keeled. The problem was that those in the group with little actual relationship experience would believe all this nonsense and try to pattern their relationships off of it. Everyone else knew the talk was all posturing without seeing how it negatively influenced those with little experience into making poor choices.

Ken White’s rule of goats:

“The Rule of Goats applies. Slightly paraphrased — for this family newspaper — the rule states: If you kiss a goat, even if you say you're doing it ironically, you're still a goat-kisser.”

You don’t get off scott-free just because you say “I was only being ironic“.

Let's say I am on a forum talking theoretically about robbing a bank (say I'm a fan of the PayDay series or something). Let's say that someone on that forum ended up robbing a bank, perhaps using information that I provided.

Did I commit a crime? Am I am accomplice?

There's a big difference between planning a real crime and planning a fictitious one, but they can look identical to an outside observer.

As for your quote, I don't think it really applies here. You can say all sorts of trouble things, but I don't think you can accidentally become an accomplice, at the very least need motive.

>There's a big difference between planning a real crime and planning a fictitious one, but they can look identical to an outside observer.

The /pol/ boards on 4chan and 8chan aren't role playing boards. No one there is discussing race war in the context of an ARG or a fictional universe. The people being ironic here know perfectly well they are ironically supporting actual racists who actually sometimes commit violence in the real world.

>The /pol/ boards on 4chan and 8chan aren't role playing boards.

They often are. Lots of threads are about fictitious things. Don't make me go there to find examples.

> The people being ironic here know perfectly well they are ironically supporting actual racists who actually sometimes commit violence in the real world.

That's different.

If you post something racist, that's a general statement and lots of people will see it.

If you post about a story someone is telling, with specific facts, you have no idea if it's connected to reality or not.

>They often are. Lots of threads are about fictitious things. Don't make me go there to find examples.

Not a fictitious setting, which makes the comparison to a game forum inapt. It would be reasonable to assume that someone discussing theft on a GTA forum is not discussing theft in the real world. It would not necessarily be as reasonable to assume that someone posting anti-semitic or racewar content on /pol/ isn't referring to the real world, or to assume insincerity as a default.

It certainly wouldn't be reasonable, if you were that person, to assume everyone else was as insincere as you were, or, if you were a racist, that you weren't talking to a comrade in arms.

There is a difference between being a comrade and a specific scenario being real.

A racist story that cannot proven to be connected to reality is still racist.

Yes, that agrees with my point. If you encourage someone to go to mcdonald's and throw caviar at hispanics, you're saying racist things for real but the actual crime of assault is almost certainly fictional.

Such an encouragement is, again, a terrible idea: not only does it promote racism through implausible fictional story, but it also opens the author to legal risk if someone then implements the implausible story in reality.

“Almost certainly fictional” is a Rule 34 problem: If you can conceive of a belief or outcome, then someone on the Internet will agree so strongly that they will act upon that belief or deliver that outcome.

If a completely different person does it, then they're not the one you told to do it. If I tell one person to drive drunk, I'm not responsible for a million drunk drivers.

I'm not saying it's a good idea to be generically racist, I'm saying it's within your rights and not being an accomplice.

If you post a letter on a telephone pole encouraging one person to commit a crime, could you be prosecuted if many other people then commit that crime?

The answer is likely yes, as simply addressing it to a single person while posting it publicly in view of many others does not act as the “plausible deniability” air cover you assert that it does.

If I post a billboard that instructs “ImaginaryJoe” in how to exploit a weakness of bank security to steal money and encourage “ImaginaryJoe” to do so, and then five other people do so, I will be convicted as an accomplice in all five of the cases against them.

If you are at risk of prosecution for past activities along these lines at forums such as 4chan, I encourage you to consult with a lawyer at your earliest convenience.

> The answer is likely yes, as simply addressing it to a single person while posting it publicly in view of many others does not act as the “plausible deniability” air cover you assert that it does.

I'm not talking about wink-wink-nudge-nudge """addressing""" one person. I mean honestly having a conversation with a single person, but it happens to be in a public place.

If I'm walking down the street talking about bank robbery plans with a friend, and a complete stranger that I didn't even know was listening robs that bank, it's unreasonable to call me an accomplice.

> If I post a billboard that instructs “ImaginaryJoe” in how to exploit a weakness of bank security to steal money and encourage “ImaginaryJoe” to do so, and then five other people do so, I will be convicted as an accomplice in all five of the cases against them.

If the billboard just says "Do a fake invoice scam at every bank, ImaginaryJoe!" there is no way the writer is an accomplice to anyone.

Is unprovoked violence any more tawdry because of racism? Most violence in the world stems from causes other than modern "racism".

Any communication channel, by virtue of human nature, is going to enable assaulters and murderers. If you look at assault and murder, most people are victimized by their own kind.

>Any communication channel, by virtue of human nature, is going to enable assaulters and murderers. If you look at assault and murder, most people are victimized by their own kind.

We're not talking about a purely neutral and general "communication channel" on which violent discussion or reaction occurs, when it does, merely by happenstance wholly unconnected to the nature of the community. We're talking about a channel for which racist and violent expression is an explicit part of its culture, identity and raison dêtre. Not a knitting forum in which one knitter just happened to have assaulted another knitter IRL, but a channel for racists in which one racist decided to shoot up a synagogue, in which said shooter linked his motivations and inspiration to that channel.

Also, given that we're discussing a specific instance of racially motivated violence, I don't know what relevance mentioning the existence or relative prevalence of other forms of violence actually has to the topic at hand.

If someone on that forum says “should I try this IRL” and you say “theoretically, it should work fine” then, yes, you will probably be convicted. If you say “no, that’s illegal” and consistently do so any time you’re asked then you will probably not be convicted. If you say “that’s a great idea” you will be definitely be convicted. If you say “that’s a terrible idea ;)” you will probably be convicted while having angered the judge and jury for assuming they’re idiots.

Whether you are for or against bank robberies at nonspecific banks at nonspecific future dates shouldn't be the deciding factor in whether you're an accomplice. I hope you're not right.

I do indeed strongly encourage not trolling people to do illegal things using the Internet or any other method, as the law does not require the courts to take your motivation for encouraging them into account if they then commit the crime you trolled them to do.

I note that you, in essence, shifted the point from “encouraging a person on a forum to commit bank robbery” to “nonspecifically encouraging bank robbery in general”. You’re on your own for interpreting that latter one.

ps. From elsethread: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

The problem is that for every serious threat there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of unserious ones. The vast majority _are_ unserious. It's obviously wrong to evaluate it as "entirely unserious", but it's not wrong to evaluate the collection as "mostly unserious".

Yes. Which is why I think there's tremendous risk for a bunch of idiots on the Internet to be railroaded because the thread they participated in ended up being a very serious one.

I personally find this view strange. I think there's tremendous risk in breeding a community that promotes this behavior to a degree that it's difficult to discern whether or not someone is _actually_ talking about shooting dozens of jews at a synagogue instead of _joking_ about it.

At some point in time I don't think it's worth picking apart that nuance anymore. Like, it's great they're not committing acts of terrorism daily and are instead only doing so every few weeks, I guess, but there's really no reason to defend the people who are promoting this behavior in order to protect the use of grade-school irony.

> At some point in time I don't think it's worth picking apart that nuance anymore.

Good thing you have nothing to do with the justice system, then.

Sure, and I wouldn't want to be. Judiciously, though, I do not consider these people to be innocent just because they didn't pull the trigger. The number of deaths on this community's hands is non-zero, despite any pedantry surrounding their intentions.

Legal responsibility for murder is apportioned to individuals, not “communities”. And that’s a very good thing.

Right, sure. I don't think that's a worthwhile comment on a discussion about terrorism, though.

It is a worthwhile comment because some people in this thread (including you) are pushing for collective punishment.

You've been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and unfortunately ignoring our requests to stop. Would you mind reviewing and following them when posting to HN? They include:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Don't be snarky."

You don't have to change your views in order to do this, as numerous other comments in this thread demonstrate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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