Hate speech can be a good thing. When someone verbalizes hatred, he or she gives us a chance to push back and question underlying prejudices. This is always better than a heckler's veto of racist or sexist ideas. Drowning out the hurtful speech doesn't address the root causes of ignorance, fear and anger.
The Data of Hate
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Re: The Data of Hate
#12Why would anyone register for a site like this? Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move? I guess white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated? Or maybe they just don't care. I sometimes picture a secret room at the FBI with poor clerks running around trying to avoid being buried under ever growing lists of suspicious people being sp…
Why would they fear the authorities? They're white.
Ahahaha ha h... :(
Re: The Data of Hate
#13Love the closing line. That said, I have to be skeptical about this assertion: > The states with the most members per capita are Montana, Alaska and Idaho. These states tend to be overwhelmingly white. Does this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate? ...Probably not. Since those states have a higher proportion of non-Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a group that attacks Jews…
Your thoughts match up with Anders Breivik living in a part of Oslo, a city with a large portion of early-generation immigrants from non-western areas, which was predominantly white.
Re: The Data of Hate
#14Why would anyone register for a site like this? Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move? I guess white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated? Or maybe they just don't care. I sometimes picture a secret room at the FBI with poor clerks running around trying to avoid being buried under ever growing lists of suspicious people being sp…
Why would they fear the authorities? They're white. Ahahaha ha h... :(
A fair point. There probably are a number of off duty police officers among the membership for that matter.
And the same haircut works for both!
Re: The Data of Hate
#15Hate speech can be a good thing. When someone verbalizes hatred, he or she gives us a chance to push back and question underlying prejudices. This is always better than a heckler's veto of racist or sexist ideas. Drowning out the hurtful speech doesn't address the root causes of ignorance, fear and anger.
Although I think you're right, that is definitely not what's happening on Stormfront. There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together.
Re: The Data of Hate
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article itself says white supremacist beliefs and education level are positively correlated. It's a mistake to think that someone who is intelligent is naturally capable of making good or even ethical decisions. Deriving good decisions from our surroundings is much too complex for our rational thought to be working on constantly. This is why we derive most of our decisions not from careful consideration but from…
Read comment below. A paper showing supremacists in the 1920's were more likely to be educated (not intelligent, educated, which makes sense... the KKK was a prominent social organization in some parts of the country at that time and the locally wealthy and movers and shakers who could afford education belonged.) This doesn't tell us much about the intelligence of supremacists today. I am still guessing supremacists…
You know, I think there is an instinct to think of people in these sorts of groups not simply as members of a hate-group, but wholly monstrous, and stupid, and things like that. It seems to be comforting to think of them like that, or (as the article also posits) to think of them as inhabiting a different world from that of you and your friends. But it's far more likely that the world is more complicated.
Besides which, it's generally problematic (and situationally ironic) to ascribe below-average intelligence to a group you disagree with, no matter how wrong or irrational they may be. :P
Re: The Data of Hate
#17I find it really interesting that at a micro level on forums like this there is the same goodness and kindness to one another. People doing each other favors, people encouraging one another, etc. I mean, I guess it makes sense. People are essentially the same no matter what weird, dark beliefs they hold, but it just always boggles my mind that, out of some fundamental goodness and bond with their fellow human, someon…
As it turns out, human beings are generally amazing and wonderful creatures, even when they're members of an unfavored group. (Even when they've selected that group themselves, and the group is unfavored for a damn good reason. Notwithstanding that they're celebrating some very terrible things.)
Primates. Go figure. :P
Re: The Data of Hate
#18I find it really interesting that at a micro level on forums like this there is the same goodness and kindness to one another. People doing each other favors, people encouraging one another, etc. I mean, I guess it makes sense. People are essentially the same no matter what weird, dark beliefs they hold, but it just always boggles my mind that, out of some fundamental goodness and bond with their fellow human, someon…
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Re: The Data of Hate
#19Discussion around this article:
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1051922/
Germany's win today: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1052081/
"Yes. I like Argentina also because they're mostly white, and they sheltered the heroes of our race after the Zionist take-over of Europe. But I was for Germany all the way. I loved how they utterly crushed Brazil in their own house. I don't like that they have to have an African on their team and it's obvious he is there because of affirmative action.. I also don't like how the German team had to hug Merkel and her Zionist lackeys but regardless, I'm happy for the German victory especially right in the house of one of the biggest mongrel countries in the world aka Brazil. It is left unsaid, but it almost feels like a big white hand slapping the face of every white-hating zionist and mongrel out there."
Re: The Data of Hate
#20A shame he didn't go deeper. The analysis here is very superficial, basically consisting of him browsing the forum for a while and doing some number crunching on profile data. A bit disappointing for a NYT article, even if it is just on their website. It would have been much nicer if he did a proper data analysis of forum posts. If we've ruled out social economic class and education, what big factor remains? I suppos…
Hey, thanks for comment. I'm a bit skeptical of the whole linguistic analysis thing, for various reasons. But I could be convinced otherwise (Also this would bias the analysis away from people who just register and lurk) ... Another thing I looked at was Facebook profiles. But this part was cut due to space. Here's what I found:
Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs?
Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends.
Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too.
- Seth