The Far Right's Favorite Web Host Has a Shadowy New Owner
wired.com
wired.com
And like with the alt-right the media and culture moves at a glacial pace, taking years before even acknowledging the issue. I used to be exclusively scared of my friends falling for far right ideas from imageboards and I'm now feeling that same fear with my friends repeating the most illiberal irrational stuff straight from twitter.
Complication: there's so many bad faith communicators that it's increasingly hard to justify giving everyone an open channel. Thus we ignore some voices before they open their mouths, violating the above paragraph. I suppose you could rely on some meta to see if the individual voice has history of bad faith communications, make a sliding scale based on that. Somewhat humorously, the NL-generating so-called "AI" systems are more or less perfect machines for generating bad faith communications, and you can burn each ID with every message.
I wish I had a solution for this, but I don't, I don't even see a way out of it.
Perhaps platforms similar to Ground are trying to address this, so that consumers can see the history of the person who is communicating. But that won't help you on X/Twitter/Facebook/UnclePulltab/AuntPurplehair. Maybe the best advice for a literate citizenry is the age-old internet advice: "Don't read the comments". That's kinda funny given the venue I am writing in right now.
I don't agree I have more in common with a BLM protesters than someone from China or Eastern Europe. That's probably true for most people on these samples but surely not all.
I despise the Chinese government. I despise most Eastern European governments, I don't know them all by heart. A lot of people under their governments do too.
I agree with your ideals, those should be the rule, but they aren't. It's been quite some time since Obama's "when they go low we go high".
I agree talking on the internet is mostly a mistake.
School board member claims on twitter whites are more dangerous than animals and is hailed by some as "an agent of change".
https://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/2023/01/whiteness-remarks...
I've been a part of leftist circles since 2012, I envy that you can go by without seeing this stuff.
Again, on mainstream social media.
FWIW, I don’t like the rhetoric you cite, but I find that it ultimately has little impact on politics.
And what the hell even is this “virulent antisemitism”? Is this your way of framing Israel/Palestine? That is just insane. I guess Bernie is a virulent antisemite in your eyes as well?
I agree the republican party is worse than democrats. I'm not American, I don't live in a first world country but I would vote for them. I think electing Trump was horrible.
I don't think Bernie is an antisemite, I think the people on the left who hate Bernie for having empathy for kidnapped, tortured Israelis are, of which there are many.
Gamergate and the alt right were fringe until Trump. The media and culture moved at a glacial pace before it started seeing them as a problem. Will we see the same thing happen on the left? A president that supports terrorism and violence against the "opressor" race and talks of guillotines? I think that's an improbable nightmare scenario but so was Trump at gamergate times.
Again you went from "this never happens" to "of course it sometimes happens, but it doesn't matter".
All Ivy League representatives in congress calling defending the eradication of Jews not hate speech?
No instance of antisemitism on the left at all?
This is why I'm suspicious of oddballs not mattering. They don't matter until they do and when they do they're correct and me and others are being insane.
This boundary pushing of violence and bigotry is exactly how we got Trump and I really wish there was only one group of stupid violent demogogues running around to deal with, not two.
Epik, the host in question, is run by Rob Monster, which is either a chosen name or evidence we are living in a poorly written simulation. Truthfully, I'm not sure there's a difference.
Once, I worked with a guy whose surname was Den Beste. When I asked him about it, he told me that the Dutch didn't have surnames until the occupying French did a census that required each person to have a surname. He said that, to mock the occupiers, many of the Dutch chose their new surnames sarcastically, as did his ancestors, whose name means "the best." He told me "but that is nothing. Another Dutch name means something like 'little pieces of poop.'" This article lists a few more such: https://netherlandsbynumbers.com/2013/06/05/14-dutch-surname...
Not to discount your point. There's a whole world, indeed!
Likely as not, though, the surname "Monster" just reflects a family origin in the Dutch town of Monster, near the coast southwest of The Hague.
And thanks to your Latin lesson, now I know that monster in English means specimen too! (I prefer to understand words in terms of their roots.)
The Wikipedia entry on the person in question makes it clear that his parents were born in the Netherlands and already had the Monster surname there. But since a town there has that name, I'm happy to assume that the family took the name from the town, as is very common in the West, rather than by an intentionally sarcastic choice.
As a foreigner, this confuses me. We are told the US is systemically racist and white supremacist, rife with white hetero-patriarchy etc.. but Wired claims white nationalist websites have trouble even finding a registrar to take their business?
Something doesn't add up.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20nationali...
Ignorant fuckwits, by definition.
This does confuse me, yes. How can institutions or the system be systemically racist, yet strive to suppress white nationalism? Isn't that the definition of anti-racism?
As an example, consider the ban on affirmative action programs, while leaving in place things like legacy admissions. The latter isn't isn't explicitly racist, and yet it tends to benefit the people who come from families admitted at a time when they were explicitly racist.
That's just one of countless possibilities. Each one is, potentially, easily dismissed as unimportant. But there are a lot of things that, collectively, add up to serious problems for people who have been historically disadvantaged on the account of their race.
It's sometimes called "racism without racists", because it disadvantages some people even without conscious dislike of them. We started talking about anti-racism a decade ago or so, when the swastika-wearing white nationalists were excluded from practically all polite society, but that systemic racism was still causing a lot of problems. It was different from merely being not-racist, but seeking out the hidden causes of disproportionate effects.
Since then, just plain white nationalism has had a stronger resurgence. And a lot of people who consider themselves not-racist have a tendency to say, "Well, they've got their right to be racist as long as they're not being violent", ignoring the ways that threats are hard to prosecute but still have consequences. They get to consider themselves non-racist because at least they're not actively wearing white robes and using racist slurs.
A lot of people still don't want to do business with explicit racists, and they scream bloody murder about it, even though it's exactly the same kind of free-association that the racists are relying on that somebody will support them.
The effect is that we're dealing with both explicit racism and systemic racism at the same time. They're different and sometimes opposed, even though they also bolster each other.
Now I'm even more confused. Legacy admissions would seemingly benefit whites the most (I guess it depends how many generations back you look), who are also the most under-represented group in the Ivy league [1]. Did you mis-speak, and meant to use legacy admissions as another example of anti-racism?
In the future, the number of black students will likely fall. Whites will still likely be under-represented because of over-representation of Asians, but that's a cultural matter. Whites do still benefit from legacy admissions; it's just not sufficient to overcome the cultural push.
I'll admit I'm suspicious that you couldn't figure it out for yourself. Surely my point was clear: a program that benefited blacks was canceled, while leaving in place one that benefits non-blacks. It's the conflict between the two that exemplifies the example of systemic racism.
Yes, it is. You seem to be conflating "literal NAZIs wearing swastikas can't register a website" with "black names are less likely to get an interview with the exact same resume".