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Published 6 years ago by AdelleChattre with 4 Comments

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  • ohtwenty
    +4

    Ha, I just found this elsewhere and was going to post it to /t/longform, amongst other places, but it looks like you've beaten me to it. Before I read it I'll ask this: what are your thoughts on the article?

  • ohtwenty
    +3

    Thoughts:

    First of all, like most longform articles (this one being a ~45 minute read) it tends to be a lot of prose, so sometimes you have no idea where it's going or what it's getting at. That being said, it's very interesting, and a good look (I think) at why someone like this turns into who they are.

    As I reported this story, Anglin sent his trolls after me, too, and my interactions with them confirmed my suspicions that they were, by and large, lost boys who felt rejected by society and, thanks to the internet, could lash out in new and destructive ways [...] Most imagined they were rising up against an unchecked political correctness that maligned white males. The more the liberal establishment chose to revile them, the more they embraced their role as villains.

    I honestly believe this is part of the problem with a certain brand of feminism/leftist dialogue - if you keep telling someone they're the devil incarnate (they are patriarchy itself, and patriarchy is a weakly defined label that basically means "evil"), they're not going to try to see if you're right, they'll look for the alternative, and often that'll end up being the extreme alternative. In this case, you end up with people choosing a point of view purely because it's the opposing argument to a conversation that has belittled them.

    Some problems with the article:

    But Anglin wasn’t content to troll alone. He wrote instructions for his followers on how to register anonymous email accounts, set up virtual private networks, mask their IP addresses, and forge Twitter and text-message conversations

    but then a bit later on

    That the Russian government wouldn’t know about an American inside its borders publishing a major neo-Nazi website seems improbable.

    So on the one hand he's tech-savvy and can explain masking IPs and VPNs well enough for his users, but on the other hand it's "improbable" that he could escape notice of another government? I mean, the site went down (good read too by the way, with comments by cloudflare on free speech protection). And after a bit of looking around it seems as it's switched through a few domains and is now available only via the TOR network (direct link to Daily Stormer via a surface-web TOR redirector, warnings & here be dragons). The article goes on to make a weak argument that Russia is somehow tied to this (whereas the simpler explanation is that certain Russians will benefit from a wider spread of ideology such as found on the Daily Stormer, so they'll spend some money to spread it).

    lastly

    He and Auernheimer often bragged that it got millions of unique visitors a month, but comScore put the site’s monthly visitors closer to 70,000.

    And then at the end she wraps up with a quick summary on how, which I mentioned earlier, DS was shut down & has been born again, but with smaller numbers and less coherence (i.e. more conspiracy theories), and that's only getting worse/better (less? more? fewer people are visiting!). Two thoughts on this: first of all - this article, I'm assuming, is trying to highlight who the man behind a site that is the most well-known voice for the alt-right, which, I'm assuming the author thinks, especially with the Overton Window comments, is an issue. But then there's that number, which is ridiculously small - it's ranked at #394,283 According to Alexa rankings. So it's portraying this big issue, while at the same time saying it'll stop being an issue soon-ish. Which brings me to...

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    • AdelleChattre (edited 6 years ago)
      +4

      In this case, you end up with people choosing a point of view purely because it's the opposing argument to a conversation that has belittled them.

      We're talking about Nazis. Their persecution fantasies double as their excuse for persecuting others. If there is some 'conversation' that has belittled them, rather than oh say for instance they're angry insecure and troubled, I'd be curious what that is. Because if it's women and people to the political left of literally Hitler, that's nonsense. Talk about a culture of victimhood, eesh.

      So on the one hand he's tech-savvy and can explain masking IPs and VPNs well enough for his users, but on the other hand it's "improbable" that he could escape notice of another government?

      The article's author has his own axes to grind. The most obvious is his overarching point that your privacy, your ability to anonymously use the internet in particular, is the problem. The author's an authoritarian. Glaringly obvious as well is the author's attempt to establish guilt by association between Nazis, which you keep calling the Alt-Right, and Russia. The author's a cold war fanatic, or a Clinton Democrat, they're the same thing.

      It's the inescapable Gypsy curse of 'security' reporting like this, its stock in trade is fear. Fear is what draws its attention to a subject like this, and fear is what it uses to keep your attention. Ultimately it often may not make any more sense, either.

      My point being that it doesn't look like that much has changed.

      Well, apparently Nazis get to rebrand themselves if they toyed with having dreads in high school. So that's new.

      • ohtwenty
        +3

        It's the inescapable Gypsy curse of 'security' reporting like this, its stock in trade is fear. Fear is what draws its attention to a subject like this, and fear is what it uses to keep your attention. Ultimately it often may not make any more sense, either.

        That's an incredible point, imo. I mean, media in its current form greatly benefits from added fear, as their most meaningful measurement for 'success' is how many clicks they get. Fear is one of the things most successful in that area. Like his point in the video you linked: twitter groups by white nationalists have grown since 2012 by 600%. Active twitter users have pretty much doubled in that same amount of time, but what's more, the Daily Stormer didn't even exist then! (let alone the fact that report after report finds out just how many bots are used on twitter to boost numbers & retweets, so this is fairly meaningless as far as utility for measuring political thought). As for

        Their persecution fantasies double as their excuse for persecuting others. If there is some 'conversation' that has belittled them, rather than oh say for instance they're angry insecure and troubled, I'd be curious what that is. Because if it's women and people to the political left of literally Hitler, that's nonsense. Talk about a culture of victimhood, eesh.

        I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile that train of thought, which I think is spot-on, with another post you made, in which they show that for quite some people it might just be about finding a group, no matter how twisted the thoughts of those members.

        Besides that his argument in the video is, like you said, about decreasing anonymity in order to decrease hate. Which is a bit silly. "They grew in the shadows for years" as if the FBI isn't on top of pretty much any 4chan/8ch thread that slightly veers into dangerous territory. I mean the technology already exists, and having conversations out in the open at least allows you to follow what's happening. The Charlottesville riots were discussed openly. If things like this were cracked down upon I think they would just move to private IRC channels, to telegram groups (if those are actually secure, no one knows), and be completely out of sight. But the end effect might still be the same. I don't know, because on top of conflicting thoughts this is also happening in another country, so I'm sure I'm missing a tad of context.

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