Stochastic Terrorism and Edgelord Humour

[Darat]

Again, I agree that if you can demonstrate intent then it is fine to prosecute these types of offences, and as with the other example, it seems that the intent has been established and admitted:







That is not the same as jailing someone for their ideology which, as far as I can see, they were not. I would oppose jailing someone just for holding or even promoting neo-Nazi views.

Nazi ideology is to incite people to kill their fellow citizens, it can't be separated from that incitement. Somenof them are sometimes a tad better at disguising what their ideology is about, but if you say you are a Nazi you want to kill me and millionsm of your fellow citizens and want to incite your fellow citizens to do that. You are thinking there is a distinction, there isn't one, which has been shown by several examples in this thread.

 

[Eddie Dane]

I apologise for not knowing how to break up a quote. My responses highlighted.

Other examples include:

Jordan Peterson's freakout over trans people being added to Canada's nondiscrimination law.

JBP should have stayed the hell out of that issue, but his argument was that forcing people by law to use the positively labyrinthian array of pronouns is undoable and should not be criminalised. He is against discrimination of trans people. He can be an idiot, but I'm more annoyed by the left's constant need to build strawmen of his arguments to attack than by JPB's misguided attempts at law and philosophy.
Gamergate's freakout over Anita Saarkesian's videos (they're mad that the newest Animal Crossing let's you select a skin color now);

I'm not a gamer, but I see this as a medium aimed at a demographic. guys like sexy game characters. Sarkeesian strikes me as a for-profit activist looking for an issue to build a following (and probably pretends to be a gamer). This is no different than male activists demanding more realistic men be displayed on the covers of romance novels. If we replaced the required roided-up, oiled-up handsome men on the covers with much more realistic pot-bellied balding men with glasses, the ladies would probably feel that their erotica was being spoiled out of spite by people who don't even read those books.
"Guys, don't do that.";

I'm unaware of this
A majority of "reporting" at Breitbart, Townhall, WorldnetDaily, etc.;

Insidious, toxic propaganda. Agreed.
the wild misunderstanding of the following words: "triggered", "safe space", "Intersectionality" or "whiteness" - and the insistence that "students" are being "indoctrinated" to hate cis straight white men;

I put very large blame for the misunderstanding about those terms on the shoulders of those who coined these terms and then inject them into an emotional debate about identity without explanation. It is a basic rule of communication that it is the fault of the communicator, not the listener if a concept is not properly conveyed. Particularly "whiteness" is a dangerous term that often used in tandem with "destroy". If I walk up to a bunch of black guys and tell them I want to destroy "blackness", I will have ample time in a hospital bed to complain about how they did not grasp the proper sociological meaning of the term.
Most videos by youtubers like Chris Ray Gun, Sargon of Akkad, Thequartering, Steve Crowder, Paul Joseph Watson, and so forth.

Mostly twats, yes. But if you mess with people's media content, they will complain at length. Sargon is mostly a liberal who opposes mass immigration, Steve Crowder is a bad comedian who caters to the right (a way of cheating, like Christian rock bands IMHO), PJW is a nut (so, granted)
Yes, we know, they have an industry centered around telling lonely and angry young white men that "the left" hates them and is out to destroy them. That's exactly the point, they do it regardless if they can. And part of the problem is that "edgelord" humor, often little more than spewing insults and slurs, plays a major role is this remarkably aggrieved and oversensitive group, and looks at what that role is and how to counter it.

 

[angrysoba]

There's immediate and public benefits to those things. There isn't to fascism.



Those who hold extreme viewpoints are those often carrying out the violent acts. You simply need to replace every instance of 'Nazi' with 'ISIS member' to understand the danger of your position.



We lock them up, force them to undergo deprogramming, and then release them when their sentence is up. If the commit another similar crime, we lock them up again.



It's not prematurely though. They have declared their intent.

Not really. There are plenty of people who are Islamists who we do not lock up. And we don't do it because despite their bigoted views, they haven't acted in such a way that crosses the line to encouragement of violence. Similarly, unless the person who follows a fascist ideology has begun to actively call for murder or other crimes, I don't believe they should be locked up and "deprogrammed".

 

[Eddie Dane]

But remember that wasn't real genocide, it was only acts of genocide, if it was real genocide then the international community would have looked on and did nothing but as only acts of genocide it was fine.

"But American officials say that so stark a label could inflame public calls for action the Administration is unwilling to take. Rather than compare the massacre with, for example, the deaths under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the State Department and the National Security Council have drafted guidance instructing spokesmen to say merely that "acts of genocide may have occurred.""

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/10/world/officials-told-to-avoid-calling-rwanda-killings-genocide.html

Rwanda doesn't have oil. Therefore we decided to have a lengthy discussion about whether or not this was a genocide. So lengthy, in fact, that by the time we were done debating the issue, all the Tutsi were dead. Oh well.

 

[angrysoba]

Neo-Nazism is a call to violence, it's inherently violent. Violence against minorities and "undesirables" is a fundamental part of its credo. All you have to do is read the writings of the founders of Nazism to see that. To advocate Nazism is to advocate genocide.

Likewise, to advocate white supremacism is to advocate for the oppression, enslavement, and/or murder of fellow human beings. That's what "white supremacism" means.

I'm not personally comfortable prosecuting and jailing people for "thoughtcrime"; but when neo-Nazis and white supremacists start openly preaching in the streets, openly recruiting on social media sites, openly advocating a worldview that not only invites, but mandates, violence against anyone unlike them, some sort of forceful response is required in any society that values the liberty, safety, and equality of its members.

Maybe we are in agreement. Your "but when" signals the point at which I have made the distinction.

You are not comfortable prosecuting and jailing people for thoughtcrime, which is my position.

You are comfortable with prosecuting and jailing people who encourage violence. As am I.

 

[angrysoba]

Nazi ideology is to incite people to kill their fellow citizens, it can't be separated from that incitement. Somenof them are sometimes a tad better at disguising what their ideology is about, but if you say you are a Nazi you want to kill me and millionsm of your fellow citizens and want to incite your fellow citizens to do that. You are thinking there is a distinction, there isn't one, which has been shown by several examples in this thread.

There is a distinction.

Would we not agree that someone like Nick Griffin is a neo-Nazi?

Yet he has not been prosecuted, as far as I am aware.

However, those who have been prosecuted are those who have advocated, and encouraged terrorism.

I have no problem prosecuting advocates of terror.

The distinction is also clear if you look at Islamism. Hizb-ut-Tahrir is an Islamist organization that aims to create a global caliphate. I expect it advocates a harsh form of Shariah law that would put the death penalty on gay people, apostates and other sinners who refuse to convert (or revert as an Islamist might say). I expect there are strong grounds for saying it is not particularly pro-Semitic as well.

Do we lock up all members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir? I would say no, despite having a hateful doctrine. Why? What is the distinction? The distinction is that it has not been violent or called for violence (AFAIK).

I make the same distinction with Islamists as I do with white supremacists.

 

[wareyin]

"Guys, don't do that.";

I'm unaware of this

I believe this refers to the Rebecca Watson incident, when she apparently made up an story about a guy following her into an elevator at a 5 star hotel and inviting her up to his room for coffee and conversation after she had been drinking alcohol at the hotel bar all night.

 

[Butter!]

I believe this refers to the Rebecca Watson incident, when she apparently made up an story about a guy following her into an elevator at a 5 star hotel and inviting her up to his room for coffee and conversation after she had been drinking alcohol at the hotel bar all night.

She was what? Drinking alcohol? At a BAR? Are you serious?

That is shocking.

 

[d4m10n]

I believe this refers to the Rebecca Watson incident, when she apparently made up an story about a guy following her into an elevator at a 5 star hotel and inviting her up to his room for coffee and conversation after she had been drinking alcohol at the hotel bar all night.

These events eventually led to the terrorist movement known as Gamergate.

 

[wareyin]

She was what? Drinking alcohol? At a BAR? Are you serious?

That is shocking.

The whole incident was quite scandalous! Alcohol, bars, coffee, conversation, everything! eta: [/sarcasm] in case it wasn't obvious!

 

[wareyin]

These events eventually led to the terrorist movement known as Gamergate.

I thought it led to the terrorist movement known as Atheism+ ??

 

[Butter!]

These events eventually led to the terrorist movement known as Gamergate.

Elevatorgate helped open the gate for Gamergate.

Has there been a Gategate yet? (Googles.) Wow, there actually has.

https://www.businessinsider.com/gategate-the-latest-absurd-uk-scandal-2012-9

 

[ponderingturtle]

I apologise for not knowing how to break up a quote. My responses highlighted.

"
JBP should have stayed the hell out of that issue, but his argument was that forcing people by law to use the positively labyrinthian array of pronouns is undoable and should not be criminalised. He is against discrimination of trans people. He can be an idiot, but I'm more annoyed by the left's constant need to build strawmen of his arguments to attack than by JPB's misguided attempts at law and philosophy.
"


Yea like how blacks get all upset when I call all of them charlie and they are like "thats not my name it is ****" and I go all "look I can't possibly be expected to remember this totally labyrinthian amount of names so you are charlie" Charlie is a good name and works for everyone and refusing to use their actual name is no big deal.

 

[luchog]

I apologise for not knowing how to break up a quote. My responses highlighted.

You do it with the quote tags (quote)quoted text(/quote). Substitute brackets for the parentheses.

I'm not a gamer, but I see this as a medium aimed at a demographic. guys like sexy game characters. Sarkeesian strikes me as a for-profit activist looking for an issue to build a following (and probably pretends to be a gamer).

You're clearly unaware of what exactly went on here. Now, I'm hardly a fan of Anita Sarkeesian (although I do agree with a few of her points), I could write (and have done) one of my big wall-o'-text posts on what I find wrong with her criticism and worldview. However, she's not a "for-profit activist, any more than the literally hundreds of other bloggers/vloggers, male or female, who are doing exactly the same thing she did. And she was (and still is as far as I know) a gamer. She was merely at the forefront of the Youtube-based pop-culture criticism movement, before Patreon took over blogosphere funding.

Sarkeesian made the cardinal sin of trying to criticize gaming from a feminist viewpoint, at a time when the Gamergate travesty was heating up. The reaction to her work was... well, to call it "disproportionate" would be a gross understatement. It was vicious, unwarranted, and in a huge number of cases violently misogynistic as well. The entire Gamergate movement was built on a fairly misogynistic foundation, regardless of what apologists try and claim.

This is no different than male activists demanding more realistic men be displayed on the covers of romance novels. If we replaced the required roided-up, oiled-up handsome men on the covers with much more realistic pot-bellied balding men with glasses, the ladies would probably feel that their erotica was being spoiled out of spite by people who don't even read those books.

Yes, it's quite a lot different. For one, the roles are not reversed, the ladies are not the ones making death threats when their pop culture is "threatened".

"Guys, don't do that.";

I'm unaware of this

Look up "Elevatorgate"; another outpouring of sexist white male entitlement attitudes. Again, not a fan of Watson, and I think her remarks were a bit overstated and exaggerated; but in no way did that justify the flood of vitriol and threatened violence that her remarks engendered.

I put very large blame for the misunderstanding about those terms on the shoulders of those who coined these terms and then inject them into an emotional debate about identity without explanation.

Except that isn't what happened. It wasn't the coiners of the terminology who "injected them into an emotional debate". And there was little reason for the debate to have been emotional aside from the persistent over-reaction of entitled white males who panic at anything that threatens the privilege status quo.

Mostly twats, yes. But if you mess with people's media content, they will complain at length. Sargon is mostly a liberal who opposes mass immigration,

Huh? Have you not actually listened to him? Sargon of Akkad was never a liberal. He may have claimed to be at one point, but he has always been in tight with the MRA/Incel crowd, and has more recently been cozying up to "edgelord" white supremacists as well. His work has definitely been an early step in the radicalization pipeline.

 

[Mumbles]

These events eventually led to the terrorist movement known as Gamergate.

Same pattern of behavior - a wild, enraged overreaction to what really could have passed without comment.

Someone doesn't like being trailed and cornered? Well, makes sense to me.

Some jilted ex writes a screed against his one-time GF? Who cares, tell him to move on and quit posting his whiny screed on various message boards.

Some woman offers a feminist critique of various video games? Um, okay, again, who cares? (Frankly, I found most of her videos boring due to the simple fact that they were so...obvious)

But instead, we get a howling flock of mostly white, mostly male pseudofans throwing tantrums.

And we've seen the same pattern over and over since then - SJWs have ruined Ghostbusters/Star Wars/the MCU/comic books/She Ra/whatever, cue howls of outrage and deluge of slurs and rape/death threats.

And are white nationalists using these ragathons to find and recruit maladjusted young white men? Of course they are, these are natural grounds for such people.

 

[luchog]

And are white nationalists using these ragathons to find and recruit maladjusted young white men? Of course they are, these are natural grounds for such people.

That's why Incels and fascists/white nationalists are so closely linked, despite having literally no points of commonality. Disaffected white males with entitlement attitudes are prime recruiting grounds for fascists and anyone else who provides simple answers which justify their bad attitudes and sense of entitlement, and easy scapegoats who can be blamed for all their problems.

 

[catsmate]

Required multiple wars for that to happen, including the American Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812.




Required the American Civil War to abolish slavery politically, numerous violent and non-violent clashes with government forces, piles of legislation and activism. The fight against the attitudes that would like to re-establish slavery is still ongoing to this day.




Required numerous wars in and outside of the US and still has not been fully accomplished. The US is still an imperialist power which directly or indirectly contributes to the oppression of minorities both domestically and worldwide.




Required a world war and millions of deaths to achieve. Their followers still exist and work to re-establish Nazi worldviews and regimes to this day.




Required decades of the Cold War, propaganda efforts, and economic warfare. There are still oppressive communist regimes in the world, and those seeking to establish such regimes in the US to this day.




See the above comments on Slavery. This is still an ongoing problem in the US, from Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights era, and continuing today. Attempting to end Segregation has required piles of legislation, and often violent force to enforce that legislation and prevent segregationist efforts. Efforts which are still taking place in much of the country, and still involve violent force.




None of the problems you listed were "seen off" by "free speech". In each and every case it has been violent force, or the threat of it, often combined with enacting legislation backed with violent force, to address the problem. Which means that if you're insisting on treating edgelord propaganda the same as all of those other problems were treated, then anti-hate-speech legislation, prosecution, and forceful imprisonment would be proportionally justified. Yet you seem to think that proportionate equivalents to the tactics used to resolve or attempt to resolve those other problems don't apply in this specific case. Why is that, I wonder...

Very, very well said. So many people, USAians in particular, don't seem to understand or accept the consequences of "free speech" .

So listen to the sound of marching feet
and the voices of the ghosts of cable street
fists and stones and batons and the gun
with courage we shall beat those blackshirts down

 

[catsmate]

Sigh.

For those who are a bit slow:

Free speech in America was sufficient to rally the people against nazism.

Seriously, this is utter rubbish.

 

[Mumbles]

JBP should have stayed the hell out of that issue, but his argument was that forcing people by law to use the positively labyrinthian array of pronouns is undoable and should not be criminalised. He is against discrimination of trans people. He can be an idiot, but I'm more annoyed by the left's constant need to build strawmen of his arguments to attack than by JPB's misguided attempts at law and philosophy.

To be honest, Peterson is so vague when speaking outside his field of expertise that it's difficult to figure out what he's even trying to say - and when he manages to be clear, he's usually ridiculous.

I put very large blame for the misunderstanding about those terms on the shoulders of those who coined these terms and then inject them into an emotional debate about identity without explanation. It is a basic rule of communication that it is the fault of the communicator, not the listener if a concept is not properly conveyed.
Particularly "whiteness" is a dangerous term that often used in tandem with "destroy".
If I walk up to a bunch of black guys and tell them I want to destroy "blackness", I will have ample time in a hospital bed to complain about how they did not grasp the proper sociological meaning of the term.

Probably not - people have said far worse, and folks just pull out their cell phones and hit "record".

In any event, these ideas are either almost entirely academic (eg. intersectionality), or given an explanation in the same article that introduces them (whiteness - the article introducing it immediately states that it does not refer to white *people*). The issue is that certain people (PJW, Carl Benjamin, Peterson, Limbaugh) "explain" them to their audiences, and mangle them to cause outrage in the process.

Mostly twats, yes. But if you mess with people's media content, they will complain at length. Sargon is mostly a liberal who opposes mass immigration, Steve Crowder is a bad comedian who caters to the right (a way of cheating, like Christian rock bands IMHO), PJW is a nut (so, granted)

To be honest, Crowder's not really a comedian - comedy is actually an art that requires buildup and payoff, callbacks, and the like. Simply calling someone "queer" repeatedly for years isn't comedy, it's just bullying.

I'll concede this - Chris Ray Gun's mimicing of alt-right talking points is mostly due to his absolute ignorance of the subject - it took people weeks to explain to him why he shouldn't be calling for a "white ethnostate" a year or two ago. Sargon, as far as I can tell, was always the standard conservative, "anti-censorship" yet wants to censor "Universities", hates "identity politics" yet wallows in white christian identity politics, etc.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

We lock them up, force them to undergo deprogramming, and then release them when their sentence is up. If the commit another similar crime, we lock them up again.

That sounds like something a dystopian fascist state would do to its subjects. You really don’t see that, do you?