The NYT characterizes 4chan as a far-right message board, which is ridiculous.
I mean, if giving the finger to pretty much everything is considered far-right, then what's considered far-left? Fundamentalism?
I mean, if giving the finger to pretty much everything is considered far-right, then what's considered far-left? Fundamentalism?
Even /sci/ has changed. You have race IQ intelligence threads all the time compared to 2011. Instead of the daily Putnam problem thread, you get that garbage.
NYT is pretty on the money here.
If this were 2010, I'd disagree with them, but not nowadays.
disclaimer of my own bias: I stopped using 4chan in 2012 because of how much of an alt right mess it became after /r9k/. Didn't have the words to describe it back then. I remember people making endless Dragon Age memes in the pinned thread in /v/ in response to the mass shooting by a particular Anders in 2011. They were celebrating it, and it was the most active live thread on the site in that moment.
Do you think that /pol/ is anything but some bastardization of right wing principles?
Stop using the term alt right. Alt right means neo nazi. Nothing else.
Lumping them together is a cheap tactic to aggravate people, which I think it's dishonest and not very effective.
True, American racists are, for instance, quite often neoconfederates. OTOH, the Confederates were among the direct inspirations for the Nazis, so in a sense that makes those racists Neo-Proto-Nazis.
Is race IQ intelligence discussion really "garbage"? To my knowledge there isn't strong evidence confirming or disproving the theory, but the science on the genetic component of intelligence is pretty solid, and it isn't implausible that certain ethnic groups have genes that confer more intelligence, similar to how certain ethnic groups have genes that make them taller or better runners (see for instance, the olympic winners for sprints).
- East Asians and Jews are intelligent but lack creative thought and individualism (the terms hivemind and "bugmen" will often pop up here).
- I don't need to explain what they think about Black People.
- But White People are juuuuuust right
If anything, they are good evidence for horseshoe theory, or perhaps invalidity of the left-right scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Please elaborate. This is a common claim among "disinformation experts," when what they really mean is they occasionally browse /pol/ while telling themselves it's an academic exercise and they're obviously better than everyone posting on that "cesspool."
If reading /pol/ for hours a day is enough to say you "research far right extremism professionally," then I'd posit that every one of the most active users of /pol/ is more of an expert on it than any pseudo-intellectual making a spurious claim to authority based on their "professional expertise." By that metric, nearly every one of your "research subjects" is more of an expert than you, so if we want a fair assessment of 4chan, we should probably ask someone who uses it genuinely rather than sanctimoniously.
The University of Oslo has a "Center for Research on Extremism" (CRE-X). https://www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/
While their name suggests they might be just as interested in the far-left as the far-right, if you look at their actual publications, they are almost entirely focused on the far-right, and even those rare occasions they do pay any attention to the far-left, it is generally cases of far-right/far-left overlap. So yes, they are an example of people researching far-right extremism for a living.
In fact, there are lots of other university and independent research centres looking into the topic–I cited CRE-X as an example only because they were at the top of my Google search results. It is something government research funders in many countries want to invest in, and there are also various wealthy philanthropists and charity/activist/lobby groups willing to put money towards it. Nothing unbelievable about someone claiming to do it professionally, because people do.
> I cited CRE-X as an example only because they were at the top of my Google search results
C-REX, not CRE-X. And I didn’t just mangle their acronym once, I managed to do it twice
There is no way you are talking about /pol/. I refuse to believe you have spent any amount of time on /pol/ and haven't seen the countless race IQ charts.
If someone is using their own money to host a forum for neo nazis it's very coherent to describe this behavior as, at the very least, supporting neo nazis. If they are also hosting a motorcycle forum with their money, does that cancel out the neo nazi support? Is it reasonable to say either site IS a nazi forum?
What if most but not all members of the motorcycle forum are also nazi forum members? What if only a few of them are? What if they share login systems and comment histories?
There aren't clear boundaries between these things. The nazi forum is definitely a nazi forum. Whether the motorcycle forum is a nazi forum depends on how much userbase and culture and branding they share, and how high your tolerance for nazis is; an individual assessment without an objective answer.
O wait.
4chan. The most notorious boards feel anarchist and were very anti-globalist long before it was fashionable.
But as you implied, 4chan as a whole is not homogenous.
The far right has a number of anti-capitalist. Usually around capitalism undermining social order and traditional bonds.
If we're talking 4chan specifically still, then the idea that capitalism is a jewish plot to... something? (the what varies a lot as far as I can tell) is probably more likely.
Of course, the boogeymen borne of tribalistic (politico-cultural) battlegrounds mean that those on the broad right look leftward and see people calling themselves 'leftists' dragging the classical left tenets toward strange, centrist-ized, often authoritarian lines and assume without further evidence that this applies to the left generally.
I promise you there's still plenty of folks who competently understand the labels they choose to inhabit.
I disagree that, within the left and far-left, the anarchist or anti-globalist segments have recently retreated. OTOH, in the United States, the old (peaking around 1990) overlapping center-right neoliberal globalist faction forming the moderate wings of both major parties has faded in the Republican Party, leading the remaining segment of it – which is the dominant faction of the Democratic Party – to be called “left” (and sometimes “far left”) by Republican partisans.
They mostly keep the communism will win white genocide now stuff behind the paywall though.
Everyone has their uncle or cousin that says "I am not racist I just hate everyone equally"...
It's also a GOP playbook to destroy or disrupt social services and education to then say "look how bad everything is"...