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A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

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Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#111

Post by majewsky »

woodruffw wrote: post #71
sinxoveretothex wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the example you give is very poignant: the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I do agree with you that this culture war didn't suddenly appear and divide society as a whole ex nihilo, but that's because nothing ever does. Movements start small and expan…

> the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I was responding mostly to the "popular media" claim, but I take your point. The question of a "cultural push" is interesting to me for two reasons: 1. It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape…

> It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape culture as a whole.

It doesn't need to be concerted. An alternative explanation could be that liberals are more likely to pursue creative careers than conservatives, thus shaping the media (e.g. TV shows and movies) that contribute to the major consensus narrative.

Why that is so is not part of my hypothesis. The point is that the behavior of a system is emergent more often than it is concerted (which is also why most conspiracy theories are untrue).

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#112

Post by KirinDave »

gizmo wrote: post #68
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that those are issues that should be addressed, but if you feel that Trump's rise wasn't legitimate, then I urge you to spend some time in an area of the country that voted for him. There are many, many areas of the country where people feel like their quality of life has been on the decline for decades and who have lost faith in normal politicians. The "altright rhetoric" may not be influential to you, but i…

Trump's rise wasn't legitimate because it was essentially a con job. Folks in rural parts of the country have been hurt by 30 years of anti-worker policies and, to an extent, globalization. In part they got neglected by regular politicians, but in part simply because jobs moved as the world changed they got left behind. Trump ran a campaign blaming immigrants and Muslims while promising to bring back coal and renegot…

I'm not sure that predicating your campaign on lies reduces it's legitimacy if you actually hold the popular mandate even as those lies are exposed.

Fortunately, that situation doesn't describe us.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#113

Post by KirinDave »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #73
gizmo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump's rise wasn't legitimate because it was essentially a con job. Folks in rural parts of the country have been hurt by 30 years of anti-worker policies and, to an extent, globalization. In part they got neglected by regular politicians, but in part simply because jobs moved as the world changed they got left behind. Trump ran a campaign blaming immigrants and Muslims while promising to bring back coal and renegot…

> White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump. 1. Blaming outsourcing and illegal immigration is not racist. If American citizens need to compete against people who are willing to work very hard for less than minimum wage, that hurts the wages and quality of life of Americans. Our labor laws exist for a reason. 2. Many people were aware of how non-…

1. Yes. It is. It's not brown people from another country making decisions shaping American employment markets or legislation. That's squarely local business owners who could act in compliance with the law, but since they're (often white and) wealthy we shrug and mumble about invisible hands. Folks would rather lash out at vulnerable aliens near them than the lawmakers and business owners who continue to exploit them. Mostly because the alternative is punishment from those who hold power and a mighty sum of congnitive dissonance. ("Wait, if I voted for you then you did this to me... and then I voted for you again...")

What's more, the intersection between the jobs that illegal immigration fills and what locals can legally work is low and has been shown to be low over and over.

2. Trump awknowledged and embraced fears the American religious extremists have been trying to seed w.r.t Muslims, a process conservatives are complicit in since it's such an easy fear to appeal to. Beyond that... He panned a health care law the Republicans have been sabotaging to tank it so they can say it would surely tank. And... What else?

Again, look at the data. A majority of Trump supporters don't vote around nationalist economics. Separate data had people pro-ACA (where it wasn't sabotaged, for example in Pence's watch) but anti-"Obamacare." You tell me what that suggests.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#114

Post by majewsky »

devmunchies wrote: post #65
maxerickson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you interact with "universities"? Personally I have no idea what the typical atmosphere is on university campuses. Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.

Good point. I guess I don't interact with them anymore, but I'm a conservative who graduated in the arts just a year ago, so its recent history to me. In all of my literature classes, the content was mostly left leaning.

If it's "left-leaning" rather than "extreme left", then I don't quite see the problem. I would expect that students tend to be more progressive (or, more generically speaking, radical) than the population at large. When you're young, you can more easily adjust to changes in society, both on a mental and practical level. As you grow older, you are likely to depend on the existing system more and more (e.g. to support your children, then to pay your pension), and thus more hesitant to turn its knobs.

Moreover, old people are unlikely to support revolutionary changes because revolution always causes some sort of turmoil, and you can likely only begin to reap the benefits of the new order after a long time, e.g. 10-15 years. You're less likely to support such a change if you're going to be dead by the point when its benefits start becoming apparent, or when a significant amount of your remaining time will be spent in the turmoil before that.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#115

Post by sinxoveretothex »

woodruffw wrote: post #71
sinxoveretothex wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the example you give is very poignant: the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I do agree with you that this culture war didn't suddenly appear and divide society as a whole ex nihilo, but that's because nothing ever does. Movements start small and expan…

> the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I was responding mostly to the "popular media" claim, but I take your point. The question of a "cultural push" is interesting to me for two reasons: 1. It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape…

I don't think there needs to be some central authority figure or a weekly meeting for what I'm describing to occur. Like, there is no concerted effort among suburban dwellers to clog up the roads leading to the city every morning, yet it still happens.

Perhaps "push" is the wrong word, yet it's the closest I can think of. I think the issue is more that liberals are overwhelmingly Democrat (that's hardly a controversial claim, I hope) and liberals tend to have certain values that make them care about individuals first rather than about society first.

I agree that it's all fuzzy, kind of like evolution doesn't have an actual goal. In some sense, evolution is about producing more fit individuals, yet it's not like it's a directed effort (various congenital disabilities still occur). It is "sort of" directed by environmental pressures, sort of like the "push" I'm talking about is "sort of" directed by the "progressive lens" if you will.

To me, it's sort of like a problem of bad goal alignment: suppose that the "goal" is to get out of a maze. For some reason, we get a fuzzy signal after each step that allows us to sort of guess whether it was a good move or not. So far, the right way seems to have been: "West, West, North, East". Some people guess that the pattern is that we had to go West for a while but there was a definite shift towards the East, so we have to go Eastward all the way through from now on. Others, see it as more of a clockwise thing and are guessing that the next move is going to be East or South.

At the end of the day, one of them may be right, or neither may be. But even if the next steps are "go North, then Westward all the way", it wouldn't invalidate the steps made before.

In other words, I don't think that the right way is to say "what would the progressive do? Alright, then let's do exactly the opposite". Rather, I think the problem is that the "push" I'm talking about is due to recognizing a pattern that isn't quite the right one.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#117

Post by A_COMPUTER »

woodruffw wrote: post #51
devmunchies wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree to disagree I guess. I wasn't even talking about politics. I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? EDIT: In the past a progressive candidate wouldn't have even stood a chance, now one of them almost won.

> I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. First, I want to note that this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It's flared up again since 2014 or so, but "PC culture" has been the go-to jab against coastal intellectualism since the early 1990s. That isn't to say that valid criticisms of (coastal, collegiate) intellectualism can't be made, just…

>this has been a conservative talking point for a long time.

It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use.

The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it.

I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#118

Post by s_kilk »

makomk wrote: post #91

Extreme left is probably not quite right, "totalitarian left" would probably be closer to the mark. A left that considers all its views and actions beyond question and wields social justice ideas as weapons against dissent. For example, remember how every criticism of Hillary Clinton the neoliberal warmonger was and still is blamed on misogyny? How Sanders and his supporters were smeared as sexists and racists and al…

The thing you're talking about is not Leftism, it's Identitarianism.

Remember, the left-right dichotomy is about how the means of production should be owned and controlled. While the Left does also stand for such progressive causes such as anti-racism and anti-sexism, the contemporary Liberal/Clintonite strain of Identitarianism doesn't have much overlap with actual Leftism.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#119

Post by A_COMPUTER »

woodruffw wrote: post #51
devmunchies wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree to disagree I guess. I wasn't even talking about politics. I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? EDIT: In the past a progressive candidate wouldn't have even stood a chance, now one of them almost won.

> I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. First, I want to note that this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It's flared up again since 2014 or so, but "PC culture" has been the go-to jab against coastal intellectualism since the early 1990s. That isn't to say that valid criticisms of (coastal, collegiate) intellectualism can't be made, just…

By the way, many campus sexual assault protests are very political, the ones that demand removing presumption of innocence, both at the university policy and even at the legal level. That is just about as political as you can get.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#120

Post by A_COMPUTER »

aphextron wrote: post #79
devmunchies wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope its easy to see that the rise of this "cancer" and the alt-right was a natural response to the rise of the extreme left throughout popular media and in society in general. There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism, but when one must keep their conservative views in the closet, and anything conservative (on Reddit, Twitter, or simply at work) is seen as an inferior view point rather than just a differen…

>There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism That's the real tragedy here. Intelligent conservative thought has been completely lost to the rhetorical insanity of our current political climate. For a perfect example of this take a look at what has become of the National Review.

The alt-right is as much a reaction to a complacent, consistently-losing right wing establishment as it is to the rapid leftward shift of american politics in the last 13 or so years.
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