8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now
slate.com
slate.com
Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion. But because of other communities' moderation, they likely become one of the bastions of the racists. So even if their ownership never had any interest in hate speech, their platform becomes a de facto mechanism for its spread.
As much problems as anonymity causes I sure don't think that some new Real World Identity driven Internet would be a good idea. But sites with next to no content moderation seem like a bad idea. Not that I can imagine a resolution, really.
~~
I imagine how frustrated I might feel if I didn't have some kind of daily work or creative task to keep me busy and fill me with purpose. If I felt depressed I might be willing to blame it on someone. If everything I read said that in fact there is someone to blame, I wonder: would I be able to see through that? Would I stand up and say 'no, that's wrong: those people aren't the source of our problems'? I like to think I would. But I've definitely caught myself (long after the fact) buying into BS groupthink/hivemind conspiracy hogwash.
More or less. More so than 4chan.
8chan is like Reddit (and unlike 4chan) in that it allows anyone to set up a subcommunity that they can moderate however they like. Only illegal content (and nude/sexual images of children, and certain spam) isn't allowed at all. Individual boards may be moderated very tightly.
There are all kinds of boards there, even for communists, and for Muslims. They're scrupulous about allowing even things they don't like.
/pol/ is the board where these manifestos keep getting posted. The shootings generally get celebrated there. It's actively moderated, as visible in the moderation log: https://8ch.net/log.php?board=pol
But /pol/ is not just any board. I stopped paying attention after the Christchurch shooting, but at that time, it was the only large global board, a board owned by the administration. Global site volunteers, who are normally only authorized to handle illegal content (aside from roles they have on other boards) were allowed to moderate /pol/. The site owners set the rules and policies for the board and appointed its ordinary (non-global) moderators.
/pol/ became a global board after its previous owner mismanaged it and the administration seized it. The community was already like that, and if the administration tried to change things locally people would just flock to a different more permissive board. But I think 8chan is a little more than just a platform in this case.
They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.
What type of joke is this? There is no hiding behind it, they intentionally and actively allow it to become a breeding ground for violent racists.
It's like what in the world did you guys imagining Al Qaeda recruiting msg boards l look like.
"No Al Qaeda msg boards have people claiming for death to Americans".
And 8chan boards are also doing the same thing. It's disgusting, but people are desensitized to how absurd it is.
Reddit used to be like that as far as I know, and though there's plenty to criticize I don't think Reddit was intentionally set up to become a breeding ground for violent racists.
8chan's policy about spam is very different from how a policy against racism would look. What it in practice means is that if someone posts the same suspicious link on a hundred boards they may be hit by a global ban instead of leaving the mess for individual board owners to clean up. Even very principled proponents of free speech usually don't mind that.
There's no guarantee that spam will be cleaned up, it just doesn't get the protection of it being up to the board owner. For a long time 8chan didn't even have a functional anti-spam system. It's a practical matter foremost.
A rule against racism would be much more thornier. It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work and it would be more arbitrary. And it would go against the sensibilities of the original founder, who's a libertarian (I don't know if he's racist).
8chan wasn't created to be a breeding ground for violent racists. It was created to be a make-your-own-forum website with minimalist rules. For the first year, before gamergate drove more people to it, it was just that. In July 2014 an innocent roleplaying board was the most popular: http://web.archive.org/web/20140701141242/https://8chan.co/b...
Obviously it would be more work than doing nothing. That's not an argument to do nothing though. There are plenty of topics moderated away (interpreting the age of teens/children in images for example) and yet those get handled with all of the subjectivity just fine. So that's also unrelated to why.
Noone said that 8chan was intentinoally created to be what it's become - what was said was that it has been allowed to become what it has become with no intervention.
And to your final point, even it's original creator says it should be shut down given what it's turned into. If the principled founder says "this has gone too far", maybe it's time to take it seriously.
That doesn't mean such a ban would be bad, but it is complicated, and someone who doesn't like genocide might still not want it.
Moderating spam is easier. Apparently it's hard to tell between "we should kill these people" and "these people are being killed" due to a language barrier sometimes, and it's hard to automate.
But wow. You all think "let's kill these people" somehow has more value than "buy my shit/here is a malware link", nice. downboat away
I don't mean banning racism, but enticement for violent action.
A lot of people on Hacker News gets extremely upset when some site or institution decides to censor genocide advocacy, racism, or anything at all.
Moderating "racist" comments is very far from straightforward. No one can agree what it would be.
Which of the following statements would be racist?
1. Organizations whose members are exclusively white are appropriate.
2. Organizations whose members are exclusively people of color are appropriate.
3. Blacks are a minority but commit a majority of violent crimes in the U.S.
4. Average height varies by race.
5. Average IQ varies by race.
6. Nigeria is a hellhole.
7. South Africa is a hellhole.
8. I prefer not to date blacks.
---
Even Reddit bans spam but not racism.
The line of reasoning "Since I can't come up with a perfect solution, so instead I'll do nothing at all", is a terrible approach.
The courts get things wrong, credit card fraud detection gets things wrong, anti-virus gets things wrong. Tons of things aren't perfect - that's the real world.
The answer of "well I can't come up with a perfect version of those so let's do nothing" is preposterous.
Let me stop you right there...
> 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, created the site in response to what he sees as the ongoing and vast loss of free speech on the Internet. On 8chan, “anyone can say what they want and mean,” Brennan told the Daily Dot.
> Brennan now calls 8chan a “free-speech-friendly 4chan alternative.”
> He called 4chan “authoritarian” and accused it of turning into a soulless for-profit venture.
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/8chan-pedophiles-child-porn-...
But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younger friends where I see the early signs of hate growing. My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up, making them socially illfit, making them outcasts and making them blame everything on immigrants and so on when they can't find a girlfriend or friends.
o while there sure are more desperate people that have antisocial tendencies, just for economic issues, whether they consider those tendencies to be socially acceptable, and whether delving more on them is something that they will do, depends on finding social validation, and nowadays, we do that on the internet pretty easily. This kind of thing could still happen in the past: History tells us so, but the level of disengagement, and depth of the economic reasons required to trigger the radicalization of people, in one form or another, is far lower than before. It doesn't matter if it's people finding support and advice on how to kill themselves, bulimics seeing that their behavior is normal, or just a teenager that finds other people that likes music from the 50s, or goes very deep into pinball. Similar shapes, except some have deadly consequences.
I think fundamentally it’s due to the ostracization and lack of any real social support for outcasts in our open society that creates the monsters. We offer nothing and nowhere to go for those who don’t get along, so they end up in the back corners of the internet at the very bottom of the social barrel with nothing to do but fuck with the society that spurned them (or they themselves spurned).
I've never been that far down the rabbit hole but I can imagine a lack of any human contact playing a role from my experience.
Can't upvote this enough.
But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.
Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).
It's both. A combination of hopelessness for their future and an ideology that can be seized upon to fill that same void.
50 virgins in the afterlife is the simplest example of this. Whom might such a future appeal to? Not so much the successful family man, I think. But it's not the only ideology that fits the bill. If you can promise any kind of wider purpose to someone's life (e.g. save your race!) that'll inherently appeal to a portion of the people that feel their life lacks meaning. If that group gets bigger AND an ideology gets increasing mind-share, you get the phenomenon we're now experiencing.
And it has nothing to do with dude "having no prospects". That people in this state then fit greatly into ideological bubble that feeds their delusions is something we can criticize ideological bubble for.
I don't want to spread any more content about him by sharing links or quotes here, but I think it's important to dispel the suggestion that he had a well-functioning social or relationship life.
Media interviews with people who knew of him all indicate that suggestion is false.
I see the main issue as a marketing problem for psychology. Men are focused on solving problems, and I'd bet they see psychology as a bunch of talk-therapy (like it's portrayed on TV shows and movies). Women might want to talk about their problems to find some kind of scapegoat, but men would often rather solve them. The ironic thing is, modern therapy is often quite problem-solving focused.
A related issue seems to be that a lot of these guys can't talk to women. As in, they can't ask women out. It's rarely their personalities or looks (look at domestic violence perpetrators if you want to see how awful you can be and still find a girlfriend), it's often that no-one wants to tell them how to ask women out (except on certain dark corners of the internet).
Recognising and addressing these kinds of problems means humanising them though. We can humanise Palestinian terrorists and drug dealers, but can we really humanise depressed and nerdy young men? I dunno.
If you go to places with decades long conflicts, you'll see this mentality on display everywhere. So it's not a mental health issue. All these people aren't insane. They are just really convinced that some other people are the enemy and that those other people are not even worthy of existing at all and that their life is worthless.
But it is linked to the inability of people to achieve positive life outcomes - i.e., healthy friendships and intimate relationships, satisfying and well-paying jobs, and a sense of community engagement.
This kind of deep hatred only develops after you've spent enough of your life absent of acceptance and love.
There currently isn't an obvious path to a better life for people in this situation.
saying "this is largely a mental health problem" completely ignores the problem of large scale violence the far-right is committing, and only perpetuates thinking of these people as "lone wolves". they may seem like that from the outside, but seeing how much destruction they've done over the past few years makes it clear they are not. they are organized.
treating fascism and nationalism as a "mental health problem" is a scapegoat so as not to talk about the real issue.
There are millions of far right activists and likely a non zero percentage of them have the same views as the shooter. Yet the shooter was the one to break out while the rest of them stood still. Radicalization requires people in poor situations to do its biddings; regular people may fall into the propaganda trap but most people would never sacrifice the comfort of their lives for an abstract political cause.
I believe it is more of an education problem than a mental health. These movements based on the absence of facts and extremely reaching claims could only survive if the people participating do not have the tools to catch the logical snafus and realize they are being tricked. That people do not realize this and continue to fall for these movements tell me that we failed to equip my generation with the skepticism that results in critical thinking skills.
Just from the visible activity in there I can see they must be massive.
I think Slate is incorrect in describing them as expression of traditional neo-nazism. To me they are quite their own thing. Born out of Anime culture and gaming-culture becoming a playground for role playing, trash talking, trolling, real-life pranks degenerating into what it is now ...
To me they are very hard to understand. You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?
I think you can see where it goes from here - the road to hell isn't always paved with good intentions, but when turning around means accepting that the people who hate you are right, what are you going to do?
The idea that people turned into white supremacists because they made a few jokes is kind of a slipery slope argument.
Also, the story relies on somebody intentionally antagonizing people for reaction, but when antagonized people are hostile back the person doubles up because buddies on irc are more friendly. No shit, he is not purposefully antagonizing them. And hostilities or not, person spreads anti-semitic conspiracies making other people believe in anti-semitic conspiracies. But like, if Jews push back, it is their own fault, they should be more passive and let it be.
What you described by the begging is not someone clueless joking. It is literally someone cool with antagonizing Jews in the first place, but not antagonizing irc boys. So like, he gets to socialize with who he is not antagonizing.
I am not endorsing the behaviors of anyone involved, simply doing my best to answer a very specific question.
The "should be more passive" is how I would sum up the reaction of main character to the part where there is large pushback from initial targets. Each pushback legitimize escalations.
Specific question:
> You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi.
My point here is that the answer to that is more complex. The hardcore push-back to initial joke does not happen, but there is a lot of socialization involving Jew jokes or whatever with no push-back at all - or where push back against it makes you pussy. Initial targets of joking were not random in the first place either.
There also is process by which that person becomes extremist with zero to no interaction from target of hate.
Mental health issues, loneliness, social issues such as homelessness (living with your parents) and unemployment (underemployment, declining living standards), teenagers seeking borders and deliberately going for things that their parents does not approve, people seeking political change by first destroying the existing world.
But still it is hard to understand how it has gotten to the state it is today. This attack, the Christchurch attack are directly related to the chans. If Breivik was 5 years later, he would probably be there as well.
Plus other things are coming out of these boards that seem to start as practical jokes but ends up having major impact: Hyping of various cryptocurrencies, QAnon ...
(Oh, and as anyone who has seen a /pol/ meetup knows, they're not all young white men... alienated, though - yeah, I can see that...
4chan becomes a place to say edgy racist things in order to get a rise out of people because it's amusing. Most people don't actually believe the racist things they say, but now saying racist things is normalized on the site, and it becomes more attractive to people who want to say racist things because they believe them and not just to get a rise out of people. Now it becomes very hard to tell who's an edgelord and who's a skinhead. When people develop friendships within this community, they aren't able to filter out the skinheads because they are indistinguishable from the edgelords.
First, skinheads' arguments sound a lot more convincing when they're coming from your friend's mouth as genuine professions of belief. Second, no edgelord wants to admit that someone else is too edgy for them, so there's social pressure for everyone in the friend group to adopt the beliefs of the most politically extreme member.
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10108/...
Very well encapsulated by this Sartre quote:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
An HN post 3mo back was insightful in this regard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847437
What I don't know (and am interested to) is this: do * ists on such sites gain members mostly by other * ists finding the community or by converting trolls? Because those two pathways have very different antidotes.
It doesn’t require hate, just not giving a shit about people’s feelings.
What happens in an environment like that is that people that _do_ hate start to feel welcome, and eventually drive out the people who were just in it for the lulz. Or radicalizing them as well.
And if you want someone to care about your feelings, the first step is never to tell them they are garbage.
Loving your enemy is a worthwhile strategy.
I think that's just a reaction of the mind to repeated exposure. There was an article on the work of Facebook contractors who are responsible for moderating content: one of the interviewees confessed that they ended up unintentionally internalizing/accepting the tin-foil conspiracies they repeatedly saw in the line of duty (it was 9/11 trutherism, IIRC).
My theory is you don't even have to say it jokingly, you just have to see it over and over again, and the mind will learn by rote - using the same underlying hardware as spaced repetition.
If that were true, all of HN would be Rust evangelists and/or users of pure functional programming languages.
I've seen young people so much browsing 4chan in public, also discussing it. I'm talking about school or university environment.
When I was young and actually had time or will to take part if imageboards, I did it at home and secret. No one wanted to admit or mention it in public. Everything has changed now.
Because newfags ruined everything. 4chan used to be amazing, especially /b/ and their memes (I'm talking 2008is)
SimilarWeb (Alexa competitor) estimates that 4chan has 73M monthly visits (not visitors!), and 8chan has 16M monthly visits:
Confirmation bias.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Also, the tendency of emotional events to imprint more strongly on ones memory than less emotional events.
If I'm with my friends, having a good time and joking about being a Nazi, maybe I remember that more strongly when I think "Nazi." Vs the horrific historical details I only read in a book.
Couple that with escalation of commitment, and you essentially have 8chan in a nutshell.
Which, frankly, is the surprising part since I don't know why any sane person would set foot there. I visited once a few weeks after its founding and it had already degenerated to the point most regular users probably deserve to be on some kind of government list. Going there is just asking for trouble and I would urge anyone curious to look for screenshots instead of actually visiting the website.
It's the same reason why Reddit administrators hasn't deleted /r/the_donald yet, despite many of it's users breaking Reddit rules. It's hard to draw the line where it's acceptable to ban a whole community with "safe topic", because majority of posters are breaking the rules / law.
So, it is ok that people promote and help mass shooters as far as there is no direct connection the day of the attack?
> Going there is just asking for trouble and I would urge anyone curious to look for screenshots instead of actually visiting the website.
Is a screenshot of hate speech promoting hate less than a rendered HTML page?
I will imagine that an Islamic extremist site will be closed within minutes of gaining notoriety. Why are we sparing white-nationalist propaganda?
>Why are we sparing white-nationalist propaganda?
Racist propaganda doesn't violate anyone's rights and is hence protected speech. Imminent threats and specific calls to violence are a different matter.
That is what I find disturbing. That general threads and calls to violence are ok. That threatening your neighbor is ok meanwhile you do not set a date and a time for the violence.
Finally, if I say that Coca-Cola causes cancer the Coca-Cola Company can sue me for lying. But, if I lie about your race is on because it only affects men, women and children economy, well-being and dignity but no corporation bottom line is hurt.
It seems that free of expression has some intriguing limitation when is convenient for some. Don't you think that racist propaganda may be protected because historical reasons and not any logic or benevolent intention?
It's only mentioned in passing but this may be the most relevant part for HN to discuss.
Someone should write a book for white males, sadly we keep leaving this discussion to neonazis and white supremacists online instead of having it ourselves in the public realm...
There is an ascendant political ideology in the United States, and in the West more broadly, that is rooted in a fear that White supremacy is being eroded by immigration and demographic change, and that violence against minority populations is an acceptable response to these changes.
This ideology is promoted by the President and prominent members of the Republican Party and the party-affiliated media; government goon squads are used to harass and ethnically cleanse those populations; and "lone-wolf" paramilitaries terrorize them directly, while allowing their "respectable" enablers and ideological supporters some degree of plausible deniability.
The solution to this problem doesn't lie in technology or communication platforms or mental health awareness or anything like that. It lies in organizing politically to defeat the supporters of this ideology and take power away from its proponents.
- For Trump to support neo-nazis he doesn't even need to praise them (even though he does it anyway), just selectively unenforce their actions. Inaction can be a political statement.
What if it turns out that white supremacists primary wish is to have their arguments heard by society, but society has instead cast them out and refuses to let them post elsewhere so they can only post on 8chan, and that some of them, mentally unstable, react to being outcast in extreme ways?
I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform. I'm certainly not arguing that any of their actions are justified. But if this second view of the situation is more accurate, it suggests a solution to the problem that the first view completely misses. How could we tell the difference?
I'm thinking of something more akin to this: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc....
I have to admit ignorance though, I have not read any manifestos (the Christchurch one is illegal for me to read) I am quite unfamiliar with 8chan (I've heard people talk of 4chan and checked it out once when researching the supposed "white power" OK hand symbol hoax) and do not live in America presently so perhaps this speculation is offbase, and I'm happy to be corrected.
Also, admitting ignorance doesn't mean I have "no idea". I've read a bit of psychology on this topic, and feelings of being rejected by society are very powerful motivators.
From this article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...
Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
So it is not quite as you have claimed.
See how that works?
You want to know how to turn someone? Show love, not hate. Daryl Davis has shown just how well that works.
Could you elaborate on this? It sounds awful to me - someone could tell you anything they want about the manifesto and the shooter's motivations, and it would be illegal for you to check if they are lying or not.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/new-zea...
The thing is, their argument is often not coherent or unfunded and once public, will be shown wrong pretty quickly (sadly not always with the right words or the right ways) and they'll feel attacked because of that.
On theses platforms, that doesn't happen, people are cheering them, they feel right, they feel it's the correct way of thinking. Thus they go there instead because it feel good.
The best example is r/the_donald banning any opposite way of thinking.
They are also slowly self-justifying isolating themselve from others, accusing others of manipulations, of fake news, using conspiration theories to ignore facts, accusing people of "concern trolling", etc...
That's sadly quite hard to fix and you'll need quite a b it of motivation and original thinking to be able to go beyond all theses walls they build arround themselves to protect their hatred and their little communities.
I think if they self-select to group with their own kind they radicalize each other. But there is not much we can do about that because no matter how many forums get shut down another one will pop up. The community itself doesn't go away just because a platform goes away, that just aggravates them.
The best opportunity we have to help normalize them is while they are on public platforms like twitter, youtube and facebook. Unfortunately those platforms have chosen to ban accounts rather than just censor and throttle content (for reasons that make perfect commercial sense). And good-faith statements of bad ideas are not being engaged with because they get censored as well (obviously bad faith trolling and memes don't invite engagement).
IMHO the best response is to engage where engagement is invited (everyone is edified by such discussions), censor where it isn't invited and where it is otherwise necessary to censor, throttle the ability of repeat offenders to post... but never perma-ban accounts.
In summary I guess my point is this: We can't stop them from choosing to go into a dark corner, but we can stop pushing them there.
No one seriously suggests we need to be more respectful of the beliefs of ISIS.
If you do not learn what motivates an extremist you will not be able to prevent other extremists from committing similar acts.
From Katherine Newman, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University: "In general their social experience is not one of easy incorporation, ...Rather than wanting to be alone, many mass shooters have a history of struggling to connect. They experience rejection by their peers or they draw back from potential friendships, assuming they'll be rejected if they try. They believe they're perceived as insigificant."
And from Dr James Knoll, forensic psychiatrist with expertise in mass murders:
"The mass murderer is an injustice collector who spends a great deal of time feeling resentful about real or imagined rejections and ruminating on past humiliations. He has a paranoid worldview with chronic feelings of social persecution, envy, and grudge-holding. He is tormented by beliefs that privileged others are enjoying life’s all-you-can-eat buffet, while he must peer through the window, an outside loner always looking in.
"Aggrieved and entitled, he longs for power and revenge to obliterate what he cannot have. Since satisfaction is unobtainable lawfully and realistically, the mass murderer is reduced to violent fantasy and pseudo-power. He creates and enacts an odious screenplay of grandiose and public retribution. Like the child who upends the checkerboard when he does not like the way the game is going, he seeks to destroy others for apparent failures to recognize and meet his needs. Fury, deep despair, and callous selfishness eventually crystalize into fantasies of violent revenge on a scale that will draw attention. The mass murderer typically expects to die and frequently does in what amounts to a mass homicide-personal suicide. He may kill himself or script matters so that he will be killed by the police."
As for giving them a platform and an audience bringing more followers, firstly this is terminology used for justify soft censorship. Secondly in the UK back in 2010 Nick Griffin (a notorious anti-semite/racist and leader of the BNP) was allowed to speak on Question Time (a very popular show on the BBC). Afterwards we didn't hear from the BNP again because the ideas were exposed for what they were. The BNP party is effectively dead in the UK.
Almost every-time one of these racists are actually spoken to the vast majority of the population reject their message. Every-time it is repressed these ideas resurface because these people create their own echo-chambers and makes these ideas sexy as they are considered taboo.
Deplatforming is the population rejecting their message.
Griffin lost largely because there was factional instability in the BNP and then the rise of UKIP stole the non-fascist right-wing to far-right vote.
The memes we tell eachother about who they are and their motivations are do not match what people who actually try to study it have found.
How many murders in 1980 were of people that the killer did not know personally?
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/03/el-pas...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/12/...
The US is a large company and there are more guns than people. There’s a lot of opportunity for people to snap and go on a rampage, unfortunately.
increasingly
There are very straight-forward steps to be taken to reduce both gang violence and the fanatic mass shootings, and they're not being pursued.
You could go as far as outlawing anonymous internet access (require identity in all online actions), but people with these intentions would still find a way to congregate and develop/use a specific language to evade detection and control.
We really need to start looking hard at what causes pressure build-ups in our society and start working on alleviation of these, because while the side effects of anti-depression medication may act as the last-mile enabler in these special cases, it's not the core problem and as such will deflect our attention from solving the core problem/problems. (I'm not touching the gun-control issue. E.g. in London or Japan, they will kill you with a knife. Tomorrow it may be a chemical weapon. Etc.)
In my experience the biggest problem is paradoxically the lack of communication from the side of the government to the side of the people. Many controversial programs can be explained in a common language so that an information vacuums aren't created and then filled by "conspiracy theorists". E.g. clearly explain the logic behind immigration policies (democrats), explain the logic behind fiscal policies (the FED, the ECB), the logic behind taxation rates, and so on.
I'm not saying that governments are perfect or that there is zero truth in some conspiracy theories, but I see the lack of information flow be the biggest issue because it causes people's disbelief in their governments' actions and that breeds all sorts of problems.
> It was originally posted on 4chan, later to 8chan.
> In each instance, community members denounced the man’s intentions and informed LEO.
> What is notable is that next to the “Anonymous” user label on some of the posts is a “(You)” marking:
> As it turns out, this text is to let the user know that they are looking at their own posts! This means that Special Agent Rod inadvertently exposed himself as 8chan user ID “8f4812” by including these screenshots as his supporting exhibit.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/c1nnsn/fbi_...
Now, that I see this same trend unravel in the USA it becomes easier to understand. I have seen for the past decades the shifting of what "conservative" means. Extremists were always there, that I knew. But, it has been scary to see how moving what normality is toward the extreme has happened. News, in USA case Fox News, have validated the extremist's views creating an equivalence between "both sides".
In Europe there are similar movements, but, it has not been televised so much. Except, maybe, for the rise of extremism in the United Kingdom.
As interesting it is from the political perspective, it is dishearting the amount of suffering that it is causing. The political discourse is not used to agree in a way forward for society but as a battleground. And, again, news outlets share its part of fault. Diminishing investment in education probably is even more to blame.
The response is not to be angry, but to be calm and help society to value well-intended discussions over sensationalist posts and news headers.
I hope that it is not too late, the last time that xenophobia was not stoped it cost over 80 million lives, this time it will be way worse.
Watching FOX and even CNN exacerbates me in a way that watching things like the BBC don't. The standards for journalism and discourse are incredibly different.
And its a feedback loop because I don't just blame the media, I blame the people that feed the media and increase the race for ratings and fear mongering.
The US middle class is shrinking. And it's always dangerous to have lots of young men with no prospects. With no future worth living into.
But seriously, mass shootings are just a sideshow. It's the political implications that are truly frightening.
Are there a lot of parents that won't allow their kin to live with them when the only other option is homelessness?
However they're at a much greater risk of becoming homeless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Berlin_truck_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Arena_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Stockholm_truck_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Strasbourg_attack
If you meant nativist extremism, I suspect multi-party democracies allow something of a safety valve. AfD and Brexit Party voters can still feel like they’re being heard while identifying as less extreme than NDP or BNP. In the American two-party system, one side is always painting the other as their most extreme example with no credible third parties for contrast, and indeed extremists do sometimes rise to prominence from within either party.
The Utøya massacre / bombing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utøya
Jo Cox UK MP assassination: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/europe/jo-cox-briti...
UK right-wing riots: https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/right-wing-media-u...
Attacks on immigrant vendors in Greece: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-greece-crisis-dawn/specia...
Dresden anti-islamist marches: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/15/dresden-police...
I was in London at the time. They were sparked by the police killing of a drug dealer, rightly or wrongly, and were more chaotic and violent than any sort of political.
Whatever the reaction was in the US, that article just calls it wrong.
--edit-- I think it might be you that's read it wrong, the article is just about US right wing media interests using the London riots to further their political goals in the US.
You might want to take that link off your list, it doesn't support your argument.
https://taz.de/taz-Recherche-auf-Englisch/!5558072/
or this
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/world/europe/italy-neo-na...
?
Many ME terrorists are actually relatively wealthy (Bin Laden being the most famous example), and historically revolutions occur more from a rising middle class rather than from the lowest classes. Inequality can play a role - but many times other factors are far more important.
We're socially wired to keep things "fair", and when very unfair things happen, we have an almost religious feeling of righteous indignation. If someone is cheating society, we want to punish them and set things right. This is why there's a tendency towards lynch mobs, or their modern twitter equivalents.
Equivalently, when someone feels excluded from the basic things he sees others enjoying freely (food, sex, shelter, leisure), he also feels this injustice, and will want to lash out, punish, and bring justice back to his society. If he's excluded for long enough, or to an extreme enough degree, he'll stop associating himself with that society, and possibly even consider replacing it with a better one. Of course, not everyone who feels the bad end of inequality is going to take up a gun and start shooting, but the less emotionally stable you are from your circumstances, the greater the risk. These "manifests" are a last-ditch effort to be listened to, respected, and included. I'm not talking about listening to whatever weird bullshit they're spouting; I'm talking about listening to their pain and humanity.
The sad part is that many justice systems are designed to exclude those convicted of a crime, thus excluding the most vulnerable, who need inclusion the most. It's one reason why you have such high recidivism rates in societies with more vengeful justice systems.
Inequality is a form of exclusion, and we're wired to fight it. Fighting terrorism is fighting the symptom rather than the cause. The harder you hit them, the harder they fight back, because they've got nothing left to lose that they care about, and they have "righteousness" on their side.
Historically, when inequality goes on for too long, social unrest takes root and gradually grows worse, divisive factions and subgroups grow, "little battles" take place, and, if untreated for too long, revolution breaks out.
More equality does not mean communism or everybody gets exactly the same. You position is just a straw man argument.
> Scandinavian
Scandinavian countries are social democracies, like most of Europe, they are not community countries. And are no exception but good examples of implementing good policies.
In Australia, we have mandatory voting, and while the media is still active and slowly moving the electoral needle, overall, attempts to introduce extremist positions have largely faltered (with a few exceptions). I don't expect this position will last forever though.
While I'm moaning about the electoral system, the lack of a representative system (winner takes all in each electorate, leading to an enormous focus on battleground electorates while the safe seats are largely ignored) is also hugely problematic.
The unease from the industrial revolution, 2 world wars, and the Great Depression allowed much of the original American vision to be eroded for expediency. People who fail to understand history, are doomed to repeat it.
I'd challenge that -- what do you have in mind? I suspect we have far fewer politicians describable as far-right in the UK, where in France for example, RN has some actual power and voting numbers.
on your last point, it wasn't terrorism or just zenophobia that caused genocide, but state actors (and their leadership) lusting for power, notoriety, and wealth. that's rare too, since it took a perfect storm of many bad circumstances and decisions (from what i understand).
that's not to say don't be vigilant or push for change (since rare doesn't mean impossible). just don't feel hopeless or a sense of despair that things are somehow so much worse now.
I assume you are referring to WWII - it is a strong assertion to claim that was a xenophobic war. The Nazis were xenophobic, but one suspects their driving motivations for actually doing something about it were economic. They were expanding because they famously thought they needed more space and resources, and the German economy prior to the war was famously horrible and probably the major contributing factor to the Nazi movement gaining any traction at all.
In fact, I'll assert based on a hunch that aggressive wars powered by xenophobia are vanishingly rare. "[color] people are bad" is a good propaganda slogan for the troops, but nobody is going to stump up the funds to actually deploy them if there isn't some sort of economic justification.
Economics had nothing to do with pursuing the idea of racial purity and a superior race either. Untermensch goes back to the twenties and intertwines with the US eugenics that the Nazis cribbed from heavily.
Originally from a translation of a 1922 KKK book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch
US eugenics influence on Nazi ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...
What concrete examples do you have of misrepresentation of the situation in the media for example? I believe you when you say that something is wrong, but giving concrete examples will help drive your message home.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
They may be counting gang shootouts and stuff like that.
Guns are still allowed in the US because literally millions of Americans own guns, including semi-automatic rifles, and don't commit crimes with them. Many of them carry a gun concealed every day. Gun owners and concealed carry holders are actually less likely to commit a crime than the general population. In the US, we hold to the old common law idea that people who haven't done anything wrong shouldn't be punished.
Many more people die an "alcohol related" death in the US than in incidents related to guns but this receives nowhere near the attention.
This has gotten more and more extreme to the point that they are now basically against any gun control laws including restrictions on machine guns or any sort of background checks.
You are aware that ownership of machine guns is both extremely restricted and rather expensive, while almost all legal gun transfers require a background check, right? (The transfers that don't require a background check are private sales in certain states) Or are you saying that people want these restrictions to be rolled back?
This.
As far as I am aware, the NRA is now believes people should be able to own fully automatic weapons although that wasn't always their position.
(And they obviously are against restrictions on semiautomatic weapons since their California division had sued the government about them.)
Lots of reasons. One is that if congress tried to pass a law doing so, the supreme court would probably stop it thanks to the 2nd amendment. And changing the 2nd amendment is politically infeasible for a whole host of reasons (many states don't have the requisite support, AND calling a constitutional convention opens up a ton of other issues). Oh, and there's literally 300,000,000+ guns floating around in the US. How the hell is the government supposed to collect all of those? How of the budget are you willing to spend on that? Europe hasn't exactly had the most luck trying to disarm THEIR citizens, why would it work in the US with less governmental trust? [0]
But aside from the constitutional and practical reasons... "gun ownership" and "homicide rate" are basically uncorrelated worldwide. You'll often hear otherwise, but the two most common sidesteps are to change to "gun violence rate" instead of "homicide rate" (which includes gun suicides but drops murder by other means) or to only include "western" countries which has its own set of issues. Lies, dammed lies, and statistics!
Finally, even if your goal is only to reduce mass murders, restricting guns isn't really a great way to do that. The Nice truck attack [1] with 87 dead, Oklahoma City bombing [2] with 168 dead, and the more recent Kyoto Animation arson attack [3] with 35 dead all show that guns aren't exactly required to kill a bunch of people. (and also completely ignoring 9/11) Forcing people away from guns to other methods might actually increase deaths in such situations.
0: https://reason.com/2012/12/22/gun-restrictions-have-always-b...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Animation_arson_attack
For a certain definition of eternity, at any rate.
They're perfect feedback loops - the more time one spends in such places, the more strongly the mindsets they proclaim become rooted and the harder it is to break away. People go in feeling alienated and rejected and stay stuck there, finding a perverse connection in their inability to connect and interact with the rest of society in a positive manner. As a result of fixating on the things that set them apart and consuming endless torrents of content from people similarly afflicted, it makes it even harder for them to escape the feedback loop. Mental illness is rampant among the users there, and instead of people afflicted with it being helped or guided into acceptable patterns of interaction, they're mocked or worse yet praised for the negative behavior they exhibit.
I've seen this happen to several friends first-hand. One of the most dangerous and destructive things that I've noticed is a disconnection between ideas and reality that comes out of a broken concept of "irony." A common claim is that people started these communities as places where they would "ironically" pretend to be racist or mentally ill, and as a result they attracted actually racist and mentally ill people who ended up taking over the community from within. I think things go a step further: that people who "ironically" take part in hate speech, homophobia, and other bigoted belief systems end up slipping into believing them themselves. Or rather, the line between irony and reality itself dissolves over time after constant exposure, often at the exclusion of all else.
I don't have any ideas for solutions to the problems that these kinds of communities create. Their very design makes eliminating the issues or cutting out bad actors completely next to impossible, and no amount of cleanup work after the fact is going to eliminate what is clearly a deeply-rooted and persistent system. Any attempts to exemplify the sickness of their community will be seen as attacks and just make their beliefs deeper.
Here's the article: https://popular.info/p/exclusive-how-money-flows-from-amazon
I have seen two very different people that are very close to me radicalized and turned into full-blown white nationalist, violent tinfoil-hat types.
In the first case, my brother (let's call him Bill) struggled with uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts for his entire life from the getgo. I've been told that that could be linked to a near-suffocation event that happened to him during birth, though I suspect that may be neither here nor there.
Because of his behavioral issues and a terrible juvenile "corrections" system, he spent the majority of his life from the age of twelve through 25 in juvenile detention, jail, and eventually prison. He was in some of the most violent prisons in the United States, and joined a "white power" gang largely for survival. He regularly espoused the exact views detailed in the manifesto on a regular basis whenever he was out. However, after a few years out he sort of naturally came to the conclusion that his whole ideology was bullshit and abandoned it. At present, he no longer holds those views.
In case 2, a friend (who I will call Bob), had never been in trouble, never had any family trouble or any serious trauma, started spouting the exact same stuff as Bill used to. He was about 26 when this started, and it was an enormous surprise to everyone he knew. I, being extremely curious by nature and very close to Bob, spent dozens of hours trying to get to the root of what was going on with him to absolutely no avail.
The important thing with Bob is, his answer to every question about "Where are you getting that?" was a simple "I read it on 4chan/8chan and I believe it." Every. Single. Time.
I realized a couple things. First off, Bob was gone. Every conversation with him was just him repeating *chan talking points over and over again. No amount of appeals to humanity could provoke a novel thought. He kept to his points religiously, and he made it exceedingly clear that he was trying to recruit as much as he could.
Secondly, Bill had originally found himself in his situation through systematic dismantling of his humanity, whereas Bob was doing it purely for uh, internet street cred? Bill was able to face the real world after leaving prison and make his own decisions, but Bob carried something (in my opinion, specifically regarding this issue of radicalization) far more insidious around in his pocket. The approval he craved from the chans was something that had to be sated daily, which made (and continues to make) him a terrifying person to be around.
My point is that from firsthand experience with people from two very different backgrounds that I am very close to, the 4/8/whatever chans are far scarier when it comes to indoctrination than most people could believe without seeing.
TL;DR This issue is far larger and more impactful than nearly anyone would care to admit, and sites like 8chan will likely have an unpredictable and indelible impact on many, many people's lives until it is acknowledged and addressed.
I find the case of Bob particularly important to recognize since people like him - people who are by every definition radicalized by violent, hateful, and destructive ideologies - often don't seem that way from the outside. They can carry out normal, successful lives while still harboring these extreme views and internalizing them very deeply.
> Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. - an HN user previously told me.
The computing pioneers dreamed the Internet would enable the free and fast flow of information, create decentralization, promote democracy, freedom of speech, and liberate us from all the old forms of political control. In the beginning, things were great. The emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove the idealism of the Net. Even today, it still keeps unleashing human creativity. And even when the tech is increasingly used as tools of oppression, arguablly, the Net still significant improved the autonomy of individuals and encouraged free thinking.
One core tenet of personal computing and the Net is empowering individuals, "we the people". The pioneers of the Net were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism in the hacker culture played a positive role. And crucially, the development of the Internet was done in parallel of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism, so there was no major social conflicts as well.
But after 2008-2010, this populist idea started to show its dark side - after (1) all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, (2) a tendency of disintegration of the global economic and political order is coming - the same populism stopped playing the original very-positive role. It has became clear that, any idea can by popularized and supported by a free Internet, or propagated more easily (e.g. flat-Earth, anti-vax, extremism). David Perell called it "the disappearance of the Overton window". Also, all individuals are empowered, including marginalized groups, malicious attackers and psychopaths.
I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.
* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220
* Recommended comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914
Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.
We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.
On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate this thing/person is, the justice needs to be done! Sometimes, it can be a legitimate popular movement and serve the right purpose, e.g. Occupy Movement, but other times, it's just a bunch of angry mobs lynching people. For example, a list of people on Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Especially, when I grasped these points, I found things went pretty stupid when, for example, the mainstream media started reporting Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in 2016. Yes, it has connections to reactionary political movements, but itself is only a symbol of the trolling cultural. When the media reports it, it actually gives it a platform of exposure, and encouraged trolls to use it as a genuinely political symbol, and personally I think it makes the issue worse.
What I'm trying to say is, to solve problems like this, we must study and understand the entire machinery of it, including the underlying social-economical basis of this conflict using sociology and psychology, and to provide social solutions to the problem. However, the only proposal the mainstream media (or us, as online members of online communities) has right now is "Twitter and Facebook should ban hate speech", or "we should not feed the trolls", which hardly touches deeper problems.
Also, when the important argument for Internet freedom is that they bring democracy and equality no longer works, should the Internet be free and open? Should we still protect and promote the freedom speech? I firmly believe the answer must be YES. However, if we left these problems unaddressed and only "ban them", the answer is going to be "no" soon.
Furthermore, I think that stochastic terrorism can not be 100% eliminated without creating a police state, which is more harmful than a few terrorists. Lone-wolf terrorism is a feature in modern life, we can only enhance our understanding of sociology to partially reduce the harm.
P.S: Watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, its plot has a surprising deep discussion of the consequences of a hyperconnected humanity, meme culture and random terrorism is an important theme in the show, and contains great inspirations.
----
Appendix:
David Perell's excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and has a similar argument just like mine.
Also, if you want to understand more about the trolling culture and its mechanism, I recommend "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture", by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press.
Now social media blasts kids with "this is what's cool" on an hourly basis. Not got the latest Off-White? Uncool. Jordan Mids? Uncool. Still wearing [brand here]? Uncool. On top of that, everyone promoted is wealthy, beautiful and photoshopped. And on top of that it's all insanely addictive. So not only are you told over and over you're behind with the latest trends, and not only are you made to feel over and over that you're not pretty/wealthy/happy/cultured/whatever enough, but you're addicted to seeing it. And then everyone has a platform to bully you for it 24 hours a day. It's not even like you have that 12 hour respite where you're not at school.
I can't begin to imagine how as a fragile teenager this sort of thing would have affected me. Props to anyone young that keeps their head together.
Anyway, just my 2c.
And for some reason it's even harder to make friends today. (Probably because people drift away from each other faster. Better global mobility, you can have a job anywhere, you can study anywhere, your work might include a lots of travel. You switch jobs faster than people used to. There are a lot more things to do even on a budget, so individual differences get an emphasis, but then those things to do don't provide with new friends. You can do yoga, hiking, biking, sailing, paragliding, and whatever for a few months then switch to the next, the years go by, and you haven't formed a lasting connection. Plus add the whole experience industry - you don't have to do the hiking with the local enthusiasts, you can simply pick a guided/organized event every week, and meet new people every week. And there are even more things to do online - which are again not the typical friends making venue.)
Oh, and don't forget those beautiful echo chambers on the Internet. That helps to radicalize people. (Just go to a gun enthusiast site after any/each shooting and look at the comments. Then look at an anti-gun whatever site, maybe HufPo?)
Someone right now could be bullying me on Facebook. Someone might be targeting me with a Facebook ads. They might be sending me links to the latest fashions. None of it affects me or my mental health at all because I have not used Facebook in close to ten years.
Now, the obvious reply to that is "but online dating is for men too, look at all these guys meeting a different girl every day". This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't really get any attention on such websites.
Women are more empowered to choose their own partners today than at other times in history, for sure. For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively). You can certainly remark that today things are relatively worse for men (for some narrow definition of worse), but hopefully we can agree that it would be best if everyone enjoyed an equal opportunity to choose their partner regardless of gender.
Realistically, no -- parents and family were far more determinative than individual men. The just-so story where men have been free for tens of thousands of years while women were in bondage doesn't hold up. Most people in the middle ages were serfs. Men mostly didn't choose their professions or have preferential access to education because pretty much everyone carried forward the life of their parents and education was not widely available. The "men were free and women were restricted" narrative, in the specifics, compares the rights and privileges of women 500 years ago with those of the men of the 1980s.
I've found that broadening my horizons and communicating clearly go a long way in this new swipe right world.
I don't know where you live/what dating pool you have experience with, but here are some contrasting anecdotal observations from NYC:
1) Straight women I know here get way more swipes than straight guys, but lots of straight guys will swipe indiscriminately and immediately unmatch, or will send extremely lazy or off-putting, salacious messages a ton of the time. It's not everyone, but it's common enough to be extremely obnoxious and discourage straight women from swiping right on guys or messaging them. They get more swipes, but more of those are noise.
2) Straight guys will get way fewer matches, and straight women will tend not to message them first/respond very often. This encourages some guys to swipe indiscriminately (see above), though my straight guy friends who are more measured have far more success.
3) Attractive/hip people tend to date each other. The hot guys aren't out there dating less attractive women/taking them out of the dating pool for less conventionally-attractive guys.
4) I've seen awkward, conventionally unattractive straight guys get tons of dates online. It seems a bit harder than if they are conventionally attractive, but none of them seem to have any trouble finding dates.
5) Some of my friends have unrealistic standards for their partners, whom they expect to be more attractive, socially graceful, fashionable, intelligent, and/or wealthy than themselves. These friends either reject everyone they might have a chance with on dating sites or complain about their partners.
6) I've seen plenty of really hot women with homely men and vice versa in couples I know. I can't say I've noticed that women have an easier time than men "dating up" in terms of conventional attractiveness. It seems like conventional attractiveness is just a starting point, but good presentation, social graces, and wealth markers can push overall attractiveness arbitrarily far in either direction.
It probably varies a lot from place to place, but in my slice of NYC, it's not particularly dominated by conventional attractiveness, and overall outcomes seem similar across genders (despite the swiping behavior differences noted at first). Standards of conventional attractiveness also vary widely of course.
Dates are easy to get, but explicitly looking for a long term thing puts off a lot of guys because it's just not the expectation. There is pressure to hold off on deep conversations or say you're just looking for fun when that really isn't the case.
'sometimes I just tell the guy on the first date that I'm looking for someone to settle down with. I've never gotten a second after that'
Getting ghosted by mr right for the twentieth time and wondering what is wrong with you seems as self esteem destroying as not being able to get a date at all.
I guess tinder just wrecked dating.
But it's true, most people really go to Tinder expecting only dating and one night stands.
However, when you're upfront and tell guys you want to settle down you're filtering them, so I guess it's working as intended?
Maybe putting that info in your profile would make it harder to get matches, but at least you'll won't have bad surprises.
EDIT: Another choice is to just keep quiet during dates and probe the guys subtly. Works for some people.
Also, I bet the West Slope of Colorado is different, dynamically, than NYC. I live in a town, not a metropolics, so that has to make a difference.
Tinder is a super lazy product, terrible even. I wouldn't be surprised if they're optimizing for a high number of matches and happy with that outcome.
I don’t think those guys are even close to the majority of straight male users, but since they always swipe right, you have a 100% chance of matching one of them if you swipe right too. So they pollute your match list disproportionately and end up making it worse for everyone. Pretty annoying.
The problem of discouraging men from expressing their emotions nonviolently is definitely not confined to these boards, however. I see tons of characters in media and people in real life who model the idea that anger or violence, while bad, are understandable ways for a man to express feelings (the same sentiment for women is much rarer). It might be bad that a man did something violent, but it doesn't undermine his very identity by eroding his masculinity in the same way that weeping and sobbing and being sensitive might.
I can't count the number of times I saw guys punching walls in movies growing up, often in circumstances where their characters were really feeling sad or hopeless or hurt. Women in movies under the same circumstances would often cry or be consoled. Or to put it another way, in a movie scene with a man and woman under extreme stress in a room together, I've never seen the woman punching holes in her own walls while the man sits on the bed crying. There are tons of other examples of stress reactions that are usually modeled in media along gender lines in this same way.
I think this stuff is self-fulfilling. Guys are discouraged from acknowledging difficult feelings except through stoicism or anger, and in turn people continue to associate that behavior with guys. When men on 8chan start buying into racist ideology and feeling like they can only express their distress through anger and violence, it seems inevitable that things like shootings will follow. The copycat effect with shootings that already happened only encourages it (see how this shooter cited the NZ shooter as inspiration).
I think things are improving, but I think that until guys are trained to express a full spectrum of emotions openly and without shame, and people in general are acclimated to supporting and validating men's feelings, it's going to keep encouraging this sort of snapping behavior.
I agree, but there is even more to this part. The Nazi ideology was not just about superiority, about also about struggle between races for power and need to win that struggle. You have to fight for your own and prove superiority through military conquest and physical domination of other races.
For that to happen, you need certain kind of fighter. Ruthlessness and nazi really seen ruthlessness as virtue.
Empathetic male eager to share emotions is less likely to gain domination through violence. Or through manipulation, backstabbing, lying and all those things that are seen as practical tactic by white supremacists. Less likely to push knowingly for laws that harm minorities or political opponents. Less likely beat or kill opponent. Less likely to force own friends into compliance with own ideas.
By that I want to say that the aggressive masculinity is virtue and something you want males to be, if you have aggressive goals. Hence peer pressuring males to be like that.
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/B03E1C0B-B635-456...
Oh and literally everything is mens fault.
Now actually I agree that a lot of this is individual mens faults but theres also something cultural and societal that we need to address as a society
"Young women are getting richer, as young men get poorer-
More millennial men are earning less, even with the gender pay gap in their favor, the U.S. Census Bureau reports"
This isn't a men vs women thing. It's a young adult thing, and like you said it's something cultural and societal. The fact that young women are getting educated is a victory for everyone, but MarketWatch would rather use it as social justice bait.
It would be odd to say that 'young men are less educated than the average young person' because men and women essentially completely partition the space of persons. It is obvious if young men are less educated than the average young person that women would have to be more educated than them.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Sure, for those Women it's a victory, and many others in society.
But for everyone ? I'm sure some people in society do lose from that extra economic competition and the lower status they get.
Also more likely to be violent or aggressive and thus kicked from legit places to live. More likely to have criminal record. The whole "on average men take their aggression against others women again themselves" in this aspect hurt men more.
Some of the above are related to each other, obviously.
"Overall rates of psychiatric disorder are almost identical for men and women" - https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/
"Women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder". - Anthony JC, Warner LA, Kessler RC. Comparative epidemiology of dependence on tobacco, alcohol, controlled substances, and inhalants
"But when subsequent surveys asked who struck first, it turned out that women were as likely as men to initiate violence—a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence" - https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
The only wholy true points is that men tend to be more likely veterans, for which accounts for 10% of the homeless, and more likely criminals, but the majority of offenses for which they are arrested are for public intoxication, followed by theft/shoplifting, violation of city ordinances, and burglary.
"The findings challenge the depiction of homeless men as serious predatory criminals, and suggest a number of theoretical and policy implications." - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3096817?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
2.) Crime record makes it harder to find housing and job and access social services. That includes shoplifting and other similar records.
3.) And of course, you use study that casts addiction so wide, that it is compeletely irrelevant. Smoking is not relevant addiction to homelessness.
Here is study about substances - you used last sentence of paragraph, but it is preceeded by: Men are more likely than women to use almost all types of illicit drugs,13 and illicit drug use is more likely to result in emergency department visits or overdose deaths for men than for women. "Illicit" refers to use of illegal drugs, including marijuana (according to federal law) and misuse of prescription drugs. For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder.
So like, totally.
With crime it should be no surprise that public intoxication and violation of city ordinances is more common for homeless people. If we account for social economical status then theft, burglary, and shoplifting make also sense. If more men than women are homeless than those numbers will correlate accordingly, but say nothing about why people become homeless.
The initial claim is that men were more "violent or aggressive". If you want to make a claim that men are charged more often than women for murder or being in a violent gang then go ahead, but when it comes to initiating aggression or violence both women and men are fundamentally equal. The idea that men are inherently aggressive and violent while women inherently meek and passive is nothing but gender stereotyping, and that may be a reason for difference in homelessness.
"1 in 5 millennials are lonely and have ‘no friends’: survey"
If you want to learn about young man's plight.
While there is no problem in someone going their way but they are doing it a wrong way and some men are going to fall in wrong line of thinking.
I'll browse a twitter thread for a good 30 seconds after being made aware of a mass shooting, if everyone is congratulating each other for not saying someone's name and not posting the gopro video I'll just go straight to 4chan or 8chan.
The chan* boards are still some of the few places on the internet for people to actually learn something. I went to university, but I feel I only got an education when I started reading and 4chan.org/lit was where I went to learn. This was in my mid-20s - this is where I learned about things like Middlemarch, The Book of Disquiet, If On A Winters Night a Traveler, etc. This (https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/sub) is amazing and can be found nowhere else.
It's also an anonymous board with people who are quite clearly angry and in pain. Since it's anonymous it prevents backlash for hateful ideologies, but it also means that these people can't be found to be reached and helped. But clearly, the solution can't be to allow hate to be public just to help the haters. It's a sad catch-22.
What is the blood of innocents worth when you can make money? Nothing.