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Comment by gurumeditations | Hacker News Reader

So clearly from that list, the proliferation of social media is what has led to the radicalization of the right wing.

Clearly? That's quite a big logical leap you took there. I don't think it's clear at all.

Seems pretty clear to me. Breitbart is an official Facebook news partner last time I checked, what have you seen that contradicts what OP said?

Correlation != Causation

Not a terribly strong argument against why hosting and platforming reactionary rightwing rags can lead to more radicalization. To quote: "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

White supremacist propganda and neonazi recruiting is what causes radicalization. Deplatforming those people is a good idea, yes.

Unlike what leftwing youtube and a few researchers from liberal universities would like you to believe though, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux and conservative news sites are not radicalising people. There's no evidence for that.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.08313

I know, that's a terrible study. Their final metric was very carefully chosen.

It's not an argument against or for anything, it's a simple logical fact. Two things lining up logically doesn't mean there is causation, as there can be other things that also line up that could be an equally valid explanation. Finding causation requires actually looking for it, and doing some statistical studies. Of which I'm betting many do exist!

It's likely responsible for radicalization of both sides. I really doubt it's a coincidence pressure for social movements intensified more between 2009-2020 than it has for any time prior.

More like radicalization in general. Left wing got similarly radicalized, if not more so. When everybody lives in their own bubble people get pushed to the extremes :-(

There are no communist activist violent groups, so no not to the same extent. At least none visibly active anywhere reported. That argues that the radicalisation has been predominantly right wing, as there are many active violent fascist groups now, and weren't a few years ago.

Have you not heard of Antifa somehow? It's a communist activist violent group.

Just to clarify, antifa became an issue after trump started quoting a twitter antifa account, which was run by a right wing, white supremacy guy.

It is a good example of social media being used to radicalise the right wing, in fact.

That was very recent and people have been talking about antifa for years. Not to suggest it was the first false flag or whatever. But I distinctly remember people ranting about them around the time of the Virginia protests.

I vaguely remember a story a few years ago about a guy receiving a blow to the head from a bike lock and requiring therapy for potential brain damage from said blow.

I vaguely remember the leftists cheering, too.

Let's be clear, that sucks, but it's nowhere near the radicalization we've seen on the right. Boogaloos shooting cops, neo-nazis responsible for numerous synagogue / church / mosque shootings, driving cars into crowds, etc. aren't really comparable to a bike lock to the head.

The Jewish deli shooting, the Dallas cop shooter... the list goes on.

In what way does anti-fascism imply anything other than anti-authoritarian, least of all pro-communism? This guy I linked below when trying to understand your comment even questions if it can be considered a "group" at all ( "I also question whether antifa can be considered to constitute a “group” at this point in time"), and I agree. Either way, equating far-right violence (which was responsible for every extremist death in 2018) and violence associated with antifa, for example against people like those at Charlottesville, Neo-Nazis, Neo-fascists, and white supremacists, just seems deeply disingenuous to the point of trolling.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-018-0246-x

You don't really understand what this is about. The original antifascist movement was about using communism to fight fascism (also known as national socialism, BTW). That is, communist totalitarianism vs capitalist totalitarianism. It was a Stalinist movement. The current "Antifa" pretty much quote The Internationale [1] as their position, without even knowing what it is, or that they are quoting it. This ignorance would be humorous, were it not so dangerous.

To quote wikipedia: Antifa (German: [ˈantifaː]), was a militant anti-fascist organisation in Weimar Republic started by members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that existed from 1932 to 1933. They flew hammer and sickle over their headquarters too [2]. Many of the current members are commies also.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Bundesar...

Can you point out where this purported capitalized Antifa posts their updates? Because right now it seems like you have so many "understandings" about capitalized Antifa that it would be easiest to just get the fundamental things like exactly who you're speaking of instead of asking you to necessarily have to explain it all here.

Also: Here is an account of anti-communist anti-authoritarians singing The Internationale in 1989 when in police custody. Odd they would sing that when you characterized the song as a singularly communist anthem. One possibility is that every anti-authoritarian member of Capitalized Antifa isn't a communist after all.

https://books.google.com/books?id=so474D6P9LsC&pg=PA22&lpg=P...

Yes, there are people who subscribe to it without understanding what it really means. I think I pointed this out a couple of posts upward. Such people are often called "useful idiots" by those who really understand what's going on and have an actual goal. 1917 revolution in Russia was mostly carried out by useful idiots, tens of millions of whom have died afterwards of famine and repressions.

So only the people who "have an actual goal" is who Antifa consists of? Or just Antifa "leadership" I'm just not totally understanding why anti-X necessarily has to shoot past center to pro-Y.

"So" followed by a completely made up version of what you think I was saying is a tell for cognitive dissonance. It's pointless to engage after this point.

Certainly not, it's that if one follows your tenuous logic down it's path it falls apart badly without you being willing to clarify the things I asked. My guess is just that you're so deeply anti-communist and pro-capitalism, that even anti-fascism is offensive to you. Just looks like indoctrination to me, but again I do welcome you to point me to wherever the capitalized Antifa violent communist group is posting. That would clear everything up.

Just to be very klear: ze current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States) is NOT ze paramilitary wing of a german communist party! we germans have nothing to do wiz your innenpolitikal troubles!

Anti-fascist action has a strong tradition all the way back to 1936 when the fascist getting punched was Oswald Mosely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street

It's not exactly recent, but it is pretty much purely reactive.

You mean guys like this?

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/11/santa-cruz-and-oaklan...

Are you equally concerned about left-wing activist lawyers trying to murder four cops with a molotov cocktail?

Yes. And I'm glad that it was only an attempt and not a success. Even if I agreed with their motivation, it's a tactic for dipshits.

Given the history of "antifa" as a movement, I would argue that against them being radicalized even so in recent times. What I do think is that antifa has become more relevant because of the rise of radical right wing in social media as a bogeyman.

It wasn’t right wing extremists who were burning churches and police stations and taking over city blocks.

But they sure as shit were shooting up black churches. Or do we not want to talk about it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylann_Roof

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

^Also a racially motivated murder that people don't like to confront "Muhammad's goal in Phase One was to kill six white people a day for 30 days (180 per month).". The media is partially responsible for these attacks by stoking racial divisions in the US.

The media suddenly becomes super interested in racial divisiveness and pandering to racists who exclusively vote for Democrats around June of a Presidential election year.

you mean protesting local government not being responsive to the fact people are literally being killed by cops? I don't see any issue with that.

its just a building. rebuild it later once you fix the problems.

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

Red Guards, MRB and "Defend our Hoodz" in my area alone.

Not based on the list shown in the article. The closest to a radical left article is the lowest ranked; and it's about a petition to declare the KKK a terrorist group, which is hardly an exclusively left-wing position.

Show me the mass murders by leftists in this decade. Because that's what we're seeing on the right. If not mass murders, what's the substance behind your "if not more so"?

Your leap from radicalization to "show me the mass murders" is strange.

Upthread context:

> More like radicalization in general. Left wing got similarly radicalized, if not more so.

This is radicalization on the right:

https://www.businessinsider.com/extremist-killings-links-rig...

In this thread, the violence I'm seeing attributed to the left is a nonlethal assault, a dude who killed a bunch of cops but didn't demonstrate any specific political motivation, and some attempted firebombings.

The claim is "similar if not moreso." I'm not absolving or supporting any of this violence, but bothsideism doesn't appear to be supported by the data.

Seeing lotsa downvotes, no actual rebuttals. Where's this dangerously radical left that everybody is so afraid of?

This doesn’t survive challenging- the American, and for that matter global right wing Has been indoctrinated For a long time. In America, The left has only Started coming online since the trump admin.

America went through the founding of Fox News, creationism (religion over science victory), the birth to the tea party because the children born of slanted news reporting thought the republicans weren’t extreme enough, all the way down to the Trump election. Breitbart, Steve Bannon, Roger aisles are avowed propaganda outlets aimed at converting people.

For the right, science and reason themselves are a threat. They’ve been at war a lot longer than the left even realized how deep the rift was.

Around the world, the Fox News playbook has been copied and reason/science based approaches are being pushed back.

America’s left wing isn’t even that far left, the emergence of Bernie and like minded politicians is only recent. Antifa was just the past few years.

The left has always been reacting, weakly, to the mainstream radicalization and Grass roots organization on the right.

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