There are people of all political persuasions on 4chan. You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see. No one will ban you.
And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.
If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.
e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.
Learning about opposing viewpoints doesn't count as learning?
Each board has its ridiculous bullshit, groupthink, absurd extremists, edgelords, etc. once you know how to parse that you can quickly navigate to quality posts.
Each board of course has different signal:noise though, somewhere like /lit/ is probably 1:20 whereas /pol/ is probably 1:500-1/1000. But the quality posts are totally different from what you'll find anywhere else. Different users and audience.
And this is ... a good thing?
False dichotomy.
Just because I don't like the same radio station you like - doesn't mean I want to live in a bubble, and only listen to my own music.
Not the portion of people in your immediate vicinity who happen to read/listen to it.
I don't think it's good, that's why I don't go there. But the discussion was never whether it was good.
It's not so much the voting that makes things lopsided but when posts are ordered or deemphasized based on those votes or if the actual moderators are opposed to free speech ideals. I can think of at least two low-moderation forums that do manage to host people of opposing opinions for the Ukraine war and other topics so it's not like 4chan is particularly unnique, just bigger and better known.
Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.
It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.
Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!
As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind.
We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.
“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.”
When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.
You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them.
You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality.
How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?
a lot of them. Nazis in dog costumes are an actual population on the board and get into frequent conflicts with non nazi pornographic content consumers. You just need to check out the 18+ boards and you see it almost immediately.
Edgelords that argue for sport exist of course but they too are people - and might not even believe in whatever ideologies they are meming.
I think isolating white nationalists just makes them congregate on echo chambers more. There should be a balance; you should not talk to racists/people with evil views if you can't maintain boundaries with them. So I don't disagree that you should be uncomfortable
I do not feel that way though.
Sure, they might, but it'd be ridiculous.
Being a white nationalist is a choice someone makes (and continues to make every day) whereas being trans is not.
Further, white nationalism is associated with bigoted actions (including speech) whereas trans is just someone's personal identity that doesn't really affect anyone else. The two aren't remotely comparable.
To what extent beliefs are voluntary or involuntary is a major topic of philosophical dispute: https://iep.utm.edu/doxastic-voluntarism/
No fucking way I am. Reading the above, it seems you lack awareness of how messed up and dangerous certain people out there are.
Unrelated to this topic, but I don't see a logical way around this.
I guess I shouldn't talk to anyone. Almost unironically. Or should disengage from people who push into my boundaries, who would turn me into a worse person. So any white supremacist who keeps trying to "convince" me would be substantially worse than a meat eater who respects my views and doesn't push.
It's not ok to be a white nationalist. /b/ and other 4chan boards do not ban white nationalists.
Only if you ignore the mountain of skulls
It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.
The white nationalist made genocide an efficient industrial process. Just look how little time they needed to nearly eradicate the Jews.
A money quote for those who can't be bothered to read: Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.
And people still want to be communists. Ideology is strange.
It's a "smoking causes cancer" situation. Just because other things also cause cancer doesn't mean that smoking doesn't. Read up on the history, look at each communist country, see what they become. Smoking causes cancer.
There's just still a bunch of communists who deny it because it's uncomfortable. Just like Neo-Nazis are denying the holocaust. If they were proud of it, they wouldn't deny it. They're not, but they'd like to keep the rest of their worldview intact and pretend that it didn't happen. Don't be like that, look at the history.
There are countries that while not communist, successfully enact a blend of socialism and capitalism without any significant violence. I don't think white nationalism has any sort of validly applicable aspects that can be stretched to that effect.
I don't think it does any more than any other form of nationalism does. Are the Baltic countries violent in your eyes? Their nationalism necessarily is hard to distinguish from ethnic nationalism, because they're very homogeneous. All they'd need to do to be white nationalists is to declare so openly. They're a pretty peaceful bunch, unless you invade them (like the Soviets found out in the Winter War).
Communism on the other hand, is necessarily violent, it cannot function without violently suppressing those who do not believe in it, and it will, always and without fail, go on an eradication trip to do so.
White nationalism universally seeks to carve out its own space at the expense of others. It's impossible to engage with the ideology without associating with violence.
However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated.
I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.
Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.
> truly free speech environment
Sounds awful.
/s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfrei
Are doxing, slander, defamation free speech?
At the risk of sounding like I wear a tin foil hat... that's what they want you to think!
I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On websites like Facebook or reddit, you're either screaming into the void or preaching to the choir.