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8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

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101–110 of 378 posts

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#101
post #23

I think that technology has brought us some truly marvelous things. But they also enable us to avoid casual social contact while enabling us to withdraw from meaningful social contact. Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe i…

Yep - 8chan was started because even 4chan wasn't odious enough for them.

Or rather, the speech wasn’t “free” enough.

> 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, created the site in response to what he sees as the ongoing and vast loss of free speech on the Internet. On 8chan, “anyone can say what they want and mean,” Brennan told the Daily Dot.

> Brennan now calls 8chan a “free-speech-friendly 4chan alternative.”

> He called 4chan “authoritarian” and accused it of turning into a soulless for-profit venture.

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/8chan-pedophiles-child-porn-...

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#102

I think that technology has brought us some truly marvelous things. But they also enable us to avoid casual social contact while enabling us to withdraw from meaningful social contact. Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe i…

The red light district effect

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth considering the varying definitions of mass shooting can inflate the count beyond what people may think of when they read “mass shooting”. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/12/... The US is a large company and there are more guns than people. There’s a lot of opportunity for people to snap and go on a rampage, unfortunately.

Even if they consider "3" to be "mass" it's a bit alarming.

The problem though is that numbers aren't really the salient characteristic here. If some gang kills 5 members of another gang, that's not really a "mass killing" in the sense that this El Paso thing was.

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them Don't go there. Don't say mass shooters aren't at fault. The thing is, you don't need to. Both things can be true -- life is hard and unfair for certain people in certain ways, and that in the aggregate is bound to lead to more mass killings and other negative effects like suicide.. and the ones who decide to kill inno…

I never justified mass shootings or said it wasn't their fault. I was just stating that things are objectively bad for young men in America. Any kind of therapy or "support", proper raising, etc isnt addressing the issue. Have some introspection and look at your response, you attacked me right off the bat. What was so repulsive in my post? Are these men not allowed to recognize that their life sucks and its societies…

Well, since I still go to a lot of secret-handshake-style message boards that get a lot of crossposting from the *chan boards and have such guys, my perspective is a bit different. I will not claim you don't and are wrong, but here's my perspective from what I see daily, both personally and professionally (as I offer as much advice as I can to help these guys get out of the spiral they're in)

>...And its societies fault? [sic]

Well, that's the problem as I see it. There is a huge issue where a lot of young men do not have healthy outlets for their frustrations and were sold a dream from the 90's-2010's that just doesn't really work anymore. The traditional path of high school > college > job + family isn't the norm anymore, as it just doesn't work well in a lot of regions of the US anymore (I'm from the US, so I'll focus on the US).

But, the issue I have with the conversation that tends to happen when these message board groups pop up is that it results in a large number of posters completely removing their own agency from their lives and letting some extremely vile groups of persons tell them:

- You're worthless

- No one cares about you

- You're a low-roll of genetics, and forever a failure

- Society values everyone else above you

- Corollary to the above point it's the fault of $minority_group_poster_dislikes that you are devalued

- There's nothing you can do about it

The list goes on. When I do manage to get a chance to talk to some of these guys, when the memes stop and the copy/pasta has run out and you just start getting their own words and responses, you start to realize that what you have is a bunch of people disappointed with themselves, lacking a positive support structure and proper guidance on things that employers, friends, potential partners, and society in general has weird quirks on.

The biggest complaint I see is that "no one will hire me because I'm an adult white male", but when we get past the rhetoric they've been spoon-fed and finally get a look at their resume or do a mock interview, the problem is clear, and not to put the blame squarely on them, but it __is that they don't know how to present themselves__. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and they curl up defensively as a result.

The message of "it's everyone else's fault but mine" is convenient, and again, this isn't to put the blame squarely on the individuals. US society has failed us in a lot of ways. I stupidly took a literature major in University, and midway through went to a few career fairs focusing on how to get a job because I was getting worried on how I would ever convince someone to hire me with a literature degree. The advisor, while quite nice and pleasant, gave me some awful advice about keyword spamming, phrases that are "guaranteed to work", and so on. Talking with actual recruiters and hiring boards later on, I found out that all of that stuff was non-sense, and instead I just needed to learn how to sell myself and show what I could do, without wasting the recruiter/interviewer's time. Now that I handle interviews as one of the main components of my work, I can see how badly in this area we set __all__ young people up for in this respect. I got lucky, because I could see the forest so to speak, figured out quickly how to talk to employers, how to talk to interviewers, and how to up-talk what I've done without coming off as arrogant. Others are not as lucky.

This is just one example, but the core problem is the same; you have a group of young people (men in this case) that just don't know how to both protect (or even have) their own self-identity while still participating in society at large. The communities online that spew this stupid rhetoric and vitriol are the Jim Jones' of the 21st century, and they're just as toxic, and now dangerous apparently.

So yeah, society has some failings, but we also have a group of people who are diving head first into a dark spiral that just reinforces the negative feelings and they give away their agency over themselves willingly to some ass who wants to sell them something, or even worse, just wants to make people miserable.

At some point these people need to realize that they are doing a lot of this to themselves needlessly, and they can learn to handle the crap hand that society gives all of us. We won't all be millionaires, but it's got to be better than being broke and unemployed posting pictures about how miserable and worthless you are while someone feeds gross propaganda into your head.

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#106

My friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums. But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younge…

I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees. But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, an…

Have you read those manifestos or about shooters themselves? Cause lack of opportunities ain't the issue in specific cases I read about.

Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#107
post #15

Does anyone have an idea of how big 8chan and 4chan is in terms of users? Just from the visible activity in there I can see they must be massive. I think Slate is incorrect in describing them as expression of traditional neo-nazism. To me they are quite their own thing. Born out of Anime culture and gaming-culture becoming a playground for role playing, trash talking, trolling, real-life pranks degenerating into what…

It's always worked that way. That's why fascistoid ideologies are so dangerous. It gives you a 'humorous' out of a dire situation where the 'humor' is dehumanizing to whoever the ideology deems 'other'.

Very well encapsulated by this Sartre quote:

“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.”

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#108

My friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums. But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younge…

I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees. But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, an…

[flagged]

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#109
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Of course they will. If they are willing to support terrorist, appearing a bit like an asshole online is not going to be a problem for them. 2) The point about not censoring opinions is not about these opinions being valid, it is about the tools you give the government to decide what should be considered terrorism or not. In France, after the mass shootings, the government took some anti-terrorist measures and alm…

Why has this to be done by the govt? For example, Hackers News filters such things without govt intervention, as do Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to a lesser extent. It has been shown that once you remove a platform, the idea itself dwindles. For example r/fatpeoplehate migrated to Voat but activity has been far far below compared to when it was on Reddit.

Exactly. There is no need for govt censorship if marginalization happens naturally.

Re: 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

#110
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep - 8chan was started because even 4chan wasn't odious enough for them.

This keeps getting repeated but it's not exactly true, 8chan was started because Fredrick Brennan had a shroom trip where he saw an Ouroboros and came up with the idea to make a 4chan where you could make your own board. People then ended up migrating over during GamerGate because Moot was shutting down discussion of it.

Never hung around /v/ during those years, but my guess is it there was no censorship, it was just paranoia as usual. If they really cared so much about it, they could post on /b/.
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