Fascinating. I was directed here by @Akir. I'm not sure I would have watched this otherwise. So, thanks, @Akir! I thought a couple of points in here were especially notable. I loved the reference...
Fascinating. I was directed here by @Akir. I'm not sure I would have watched this otherwise. So, thanks, @Akir!
I thought a couple of points in here were especially notable.
I loved the reference to "Schrodinger's douchebag". I have met this person many many times. It explains a lot about certain types of online behaviour.
And this summary of alt right folks - "They don't care what they believe, but they know what they hate, and they don't want to think about why they hate it." - was extremely insightful and pithy.
I don’t think it’s unique to alt right folks either. You can see the same dynamic happen with lots of stuff. It’s similar to the dogpiles that used to happen over stuff like “Twilight.” At some...
I don’t think it’s unique to alt right folks either. You can see the same dynamic happen with lots of stuff. It’s similar to the dogpiles that used to happen over stuff like “Twilight.” At some point groups just like coming together to hate on something and bond over that shared enmity.
It used to just be harmless pop culture shit. And a lot of the liberal/activists blogosphere tends to fall into the behavior too. Sites like The Root and Jezebel are just lousy with “outrage porn” and half-assed hot-takes. What the alt right successfully did is kind of weaponized this dynamic to organize people politically. I think one of the key tools they use is ostracism. Even when a Jezebel article goes too far there will always be reasonable commenters who point out that it’s being dumb. That doesn’t happen in a Chan board. If you step out of line you just get inundated with posts telling you to kill yourself. The propensity for threats, violence, and abuse kind of pickles them into this regressive ideology with no countervailing narrative. Downvoting stuff, like Reddit does, accomplishes the same goal.
I had a kind of "first they came for the socialists" moment with this. I don't really remember how, but I got involved with 4chan in high school. I never jumped in the deep end with /pol/ or...
Exemplary
I had a kind of "first they came for the socialists" moment with this.
I don't really remember how, but I got involved with 4chan in high school. I never jumped in the deep end with /pol/ or anything. It was mostly /b/, and on top of that I have always been more of a lurker than anything else. That being said, 4chan is 4chan. I've forgotten most of it now, but I'm certain there were horrible things I laughed along with.
Then I learned about the whole My Little Pony/Brony thing from 4chan. Guys watching a little girl's show? In no time I was making fun of it both on and offline. It was probably a month into that before I decided to actually watch the thing so I could better make an ass of myself. I sat through the first episode, and... I didn't really have any strong feelings about it. The pilot episode was actually split into two episodes, so really I needed to watch the next episode to get the whole picture. Then having seen that one I kind of liked the story's concept, but surely there was something awful later on to back up the hate. Maybe the next episode was where it went bad... so I watched another... and another.
Before it had felt good to belittle others. On top of that it meant being a part of a community that "knew better." Everyone else was wrong. There wasn't even a need to recognize those other people as, well, people. Really, no need to think at all. And, having come around to liking the show I was suddenly on the other side of that unthinking hatred. It was incredibly jarring.
I can't say that I had an instant of understanding, but eventually I realized that the hatred of Bronies, Furries, LGBTQ+, Liberals, and whatever else have you, is far more toxic than anything those communities are capable of putting out. Hatred is just too easy to be a part of; it grows out of control, and then the nature of it leads to the worst.
In High School we actually had practice arguments in Debate Club where we had to learn to defend a position that was, essentially, ridiculous. Just to learn that argumentation done properly didn't...
In High School we actually had practice arguments in Debate Club where we had to learn to defend a position that was, essentially, ridiculous. Just to learn that argumentation done properly didn't even really come down to "having the facts straight". So we'd have debate like "Kitkat vs. Snickers" or "Should this comic book super-villain be locked up or not".
Nobody fully believed the positions we'd have to defend, usually we couldn't even choose which one we wanted. The exercise was purely about being able to appeal to people in such a way that you could convince them of ridiculous premises, and to realize how strangely easy that sometimes could be.
This strangely postmodern notion of "believing whatever is convenient at the time" reminds me of the way I used to interact outside on forums or in games with heavy social component like EVE online: you'd try and goad somebody on "the other team" into angry shouting matches by supporting whatever your "team" (your EVE alliance or console of choice) was using arguments you'd crowdsource from around the internet. The point was never to reach any kind of objective truth, just to score rhetorical points and diss the other guys for fun, and laugh at those who took it seriously.
So I just took a look at this after writing the Roger Stone thing, and it precisely captures one of the larger-scale media techniques of Stone and his team, as well as one of the keystones of...
So I just took a look at this after writing the Roger Stone thing, and it precisely captures one of the larger-scale media techniques of Stone and his team, as well as one of the keystones of Roger Stone's character. The proposition that there is no truth outside of self-interest, that it's all part of a game where winning is the only measure of validity, is foundational.
It's something I see a lot with people who are in positions of power because it's easier to play this game if you already have a solid reserve to fall back on. And everyone in politics, to one...
It's something I see a lot with people who are in positions of power because it's easier to play this game if you already have a solid reserve to fall back on. And everyone in politics, to one extent or another, tends to have to do it, eventually.
The sad reality is that in many cases that kind of unscrupulous attitude can actually get you pretty far before somebody is able to stop you.
People with principles, unfortunately, don’t have what it takes to outdo those who are nakedly ambitious. It’s that old saying about fools being cocksure while the wise are full of doubt. This is...
People with principles, unfortunately, don’t have what it takes to outdo those who are nakedly ambitious. It’s that old saying about fools being cocksure while the wise are full of doubt.
This is basically the central argument of the Bhagavad Gita. It accepts that compassion and non-violence are desirable systems of belief and it rejects the notion that might makes right. But it also explains how “right” still needs might and violence behind it if it is to survive, in the same way that simply living requires us to do violence on the world every time we breathe, eat, or take a step.
The morality lessons we get in school really don’t prepare us to operate as moral agents in the real world. They prepare us to fit into the institutions we join, to work diligently and efficiently without complaint. But they do not train us in how to engage in conflict productively, how to change them or fix them or work against the worst parts of them.
Fascinating. I was directed here by @Akir. I'm not sure I would have watched this otherwise. So, thanks, @Akir!
I thought a couple of points in here were especially notable.
I loved the reference to "Schrodinger's douchebag". I have met this person many many times. It explains a lot about certain types of online behaviour.
And this summary of alt right folks - "They don't care what they believe, but they know what they hate, and they don't want to think about why they hate it." - was extremely insightful and pithy.
I don’t think it’s unique to alt right folks either. You can see the same dynamic happen with lots of stuff. It’s similar to the dogpiles that used to happen over stuff like “Twilight.” At some point groups just like coming together to hate on something and bond over that shared enmity.
It used to just be harmless pop culture shit. And a lot of the liberal/activists blogosphere tends to fall into the behavior too. Sites like The Root and Jezebel are just lousy with “outrage porn” and half-assed hot-takes. What the alt right successfully did is kind of weaponized this dynamic to organize people politically. I think one of the key tools they use is ostracism. Even when a Jezebel article goes too far there will always be reasonable commenters who point out that it’s being dumb. That doesn’t happen in a Chan board. If you step out of line you just get inundated with posts telling you to kill yourself. The propensity for threats, violence, and abuse kind of pickles them into this regressive ideology with no countervailing narrative. Downvoting stuff, like Reddit does, accomplishes the same goal.
I had a kind of "first they came for the socialists" moment with this.
I don't really remember how, but I got involved with 4chan in high school. I never jumped in the deep end with /pol/ or anything. It was mostly /b/, and on top of that I have always been more of a lurker than anything else. That being said, 4chan is 4chan. I've forgotten most of it now, but I'm certain there were horrible things I laughed along with.
Then I learned about the whole My Little Pony/Brony thing from 4chan. Guys watching a little girl's show? In no time I was making fun of it both on and offline. It was probably a month into that before I decided to actually watch the thing so I could better make an ass of myself. I sat through the first episode, and... I didn't really have any strong feelings about it. The pilot episode was actually split into two episodes, so really I needed to watch the next episode to get the whole picture. Then having seen that one I kind of liked the story's concept, but surely there was something awful later on to back up the hate. Maybe the next episode was where it went bad... so I watched another... and another.
Before it had felt good to belittle others. On top of that it meant being a part of a community that "knew better." Everyone else was wrong. There wasn't even a need to recognize those other people as, well, people. Really, no need to think at all. And, having come around to liking the show I was suddenly on the other side of that unthinking hatred. It was incredibly jarring.
I can't say that I had an instant of understanding, but eventually I realized that the hatred of Bronies, Furries, LGBTQ+, Liberals, and whatever else have you, is far more toxic than anything those communities are capable of putting out. Hatred is just too easy to be a part of; it grows out of control, and then the nature of it leads to the worst.
In High School we actually had practice arguments in Debate Club where we had to learn to defend a position that was, essentially, ridiculous. Just to learn that argumentation done properly didn't even really come down to "having the facts straight". So we'd have debate like "Kitkat vs. Snickers" or "Should this comic book super-villain be locked up or not".
Nobody fully believed the positions we'd have to defend, usually we couldn't even choose which one we wanted. The exercise was purely about being able to appeal to people in such a way that you could convince them of ridiculous premises, and to realize how strangely easy that sometimes could be.
This strangely postmodern notion of "believing whatever is convenient at the time" reminds me of the way I used to interact outside on forums or in games with heavy social component like EVE online: you'd try and goad somebody on "the other team" into angry shouting matches by supporting whatever your "team" (your EVE alliance or console of choice) was using arguments you'd crowdsource from around the internet. The point was never to reach any kind of objective truth, just to score rhetorical points and diss the other guys for fun, and laugh at those who took it seriously.
So I just took a look at this after writing the Roger Stone thing, and it precisely captures one of the larger-scale media techniques of Stone and his team, as well as one of the keystones of Roger Stone's character. The proposition that there is no truth outside of self-interest, that it's all part of a game where winning is the only measure of validity, is foundational.
It's something I see a lot with people who are in positions of power because it's easier to play this game if you already have a solid reserve to fall back on. And everyone in politics, to one extent or another, tends to have to do it, eventually.
The sad reality is that in many cases that kind of unscrupulous attitude can actually get you pretty far before somebody is able to stop you.
People with principles, unfortunately, don’t have what it takes to outdo those who are nakedly ambitious. It’s that old saying about fools being cocksure while the wise are full of doubt.
This is basically the central argument of the Bhagavad Gita. It accepts that compassion and non-violence are desirable systems of belief and it rejects the notion that might makes right. But it also explains how “right” still needs might and violence behind it if it is to survive, in the same way that simply living requires us to do violence on the world every time we breathe, eat, or take a step.
The morality lessons we get in school really don’t prepare us to operate as moral agents in the real world. They prepare us to fit into the institutions we join, to work diligently and efficiently without complaint. But they do not train us in how to engage in conflict productively, how to change them or fix them or work against the worst parts of them.