Global terrorism thread

There's a quote that neatly explains the far rights free speech absolutism in a nutshell:

"When our enemies say: But we allowed you to freely voice your opinions — yes, you allowed us, but that isn't a reason for us to return the favour. That you let us do as such just proves how stupid you are!"

In other words: Free speech is like a train for them - as soon as they reach their goal, the train gets pulled off the rail.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Mar 16th 2019 at 4:06:01 PM

While I do agree with the troubling effects of far right echo chambers on social media and how they have lead to this horrific attack, I do have to ask, what necessarily makes this very website immune to the same echo chambering from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc?

Please don't take this the wrong way as I am not implying that this place breeds far right extremists. I'm just curious how one renounces other social media while finding this site acceptable.

Edited by Alycus on Mar 16th 2019 at 9:18:38 AM

It's not "immune". The reason we've managed to avoid this issue is mostly due to having moderators who actually give a shit.

That and we're not a particularly popular forum anyway so we don't get much attention.

Like M84 said, we're not immune. It's just that this site is properly moderated.

Same reason Something Awful also doesn't have that problem - they're properly moderated.

Or in simple terms - if someone is running a Social Media site, they should take care to curate and moderate it properly. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter do not do that for a number of reasons, the biggest being money.

Also, this "Free Speech" thing is a uniquely American concept and a pretty big example of Values Dissonance. In many parts of the world, there would be zero argument about ruthlessly shutting down opinions that could cause problems. But since the Internet is heavily influenced by American values, there's this strange belief that First Amendment-style rules should apply to all.

And maybe, just maybe, it's about time that people accepted that not all forms of speech are equal, to be protected or deserving of a podium to be aired. Now, someone may say that leads to tyranny eventually - I say that everything fails in the long term, so the argument is a cowardly one.

Just declare alt-Right ideology illegal and enforce laws against it the same way other forms of Extremism are smacked down. It is unbelievable that it's been allowed to get away with this level of shit for years - mostly because it's a vote-getter among the dumber segments of society.

It's not just money. Content moderation is hard. Facebook had to remove 1.5 million videos of the Christchurch attack within the first 24 hours. You can't stuff a bunch of content moderators into an office room somewhere and expect them to comb through billions of posts per hour for graphic content, risking dangerous traumatic disorders in the process. The work has to go on at all levels; that means that you, the end-user, have to take responsibility for what you post as well.

Thing is, not all of that content is going to reach everybody on the platform. That's why hammering down hate communities is so important. The extremist groups on Facebook and Reddit give this kind of content a steady audience, constantly saturated with the same message without any outside voice to challenge it.

The Internet allows you to curate your own content, so you don't have to worry about making sense to the people around you. When your Afghan Lyft driver takes a wrong turn and messes up your ride, the easiest way to an emotional fix isn't to calmly talk things out with him - it's to log into your favourite subreddit and complain about it, after which some other users would pop out and "helpfully" point you to another subreddit where you can complain about Afghan refugees without being called a racist.

After a while, your worldview hardens. You start mentally dividing up the world into normies who don't "get" you, and memelords who do. Hatred is now part of your identity, and the message boards are where you can be your true self. You don't have to ask yourself it it makes sense. You don't have to explain it in a way that the normies understand. After all, your true family is out there on the Net. They're the one who speak your language. The Christchurch shooter covered his gear in obscure memes for this reason: it's how they signal each other as members of the same family. You too can do this: not only shooting up a bunch of refugees and immigrants, but also playing the Remove Kebab song while you're doing it. And sure enough, another guy just rammed the gates of a mosque near Brisbane. You take down the communities, you take down that perverse kinship, the radicalising culture and the toxic mix of hateful ideas.

While we're on the topic of radicalisation and self-identity: Amanda E. Rogers, an Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies academic formerly of the Georgia State University, wrote a long Twitter thread dissecting the workings of IS propaganda, both towards Muslim recruits and non-Muslims. A lot of radical Islamist propaganda actually appeals to the reader's soft side: 'brothers' advising each other on how to stay on 'the righteous path', fighters crying themselves hoarse in devout prayer, last tea and farewell to their families, suspiciously intact dead bodies locked in a soft smile and smelling of roses. The emphasis is on a certainty that the One Above will take care of everything and grant ultimate victory to the righteous even after their passing. You can sort of see a parallel in the Christchurch manifesto, where the shooter believes that his action will kick off a worldwide uprising that will end in a victory. There's a large dose of magical thinking involved that doesn't really make sense if you're used to looking at these things from a secular, individualistic viewpoint.

There has been a few alt-right tropers that popped up from time to time. Most of them have gotten banned

And yeah I only stick around this forums because most other forums don't give a shit if you someone starts going off with alt-right rhetoric. Infact only one other forum I know had a moderator/game developer tell someone to shut the fuck up or be banned in politer terms.

Sadly that kind of thing with other social media websites is really rare. I do know of a few leftist subreddits that will clamp down on assholes showing up but thats it.

Its kind of hilarious in a sad way. Alt-righters whine and bitch about how everyone else whom disagrees with them is just triggered and a snowflake and that some places are just echochambers and safespaces. Meanwhile they want to turn everything into a echochamber and safespace that caters to them. We gave unepathetic non-self aware children in the bodies of adults a platform and this is sadly what we got for it. A bunch of innocents killed by yet another fascist terrorist radicalized by the internet.

Edited by Wispy on Mar 17th 2019 at 2:47:46 AM

Yeah, this forum is a little bit like a save space where you can discuss complicated social matters - sometimes quite heatedly - without having to deal with any dishonest players and far right trolls. I wish the whole of the net were like this. I think the world would be better for it.

Victim/persecution complex and moral myopia also play a significant part in it. In my country, Indonesia, various Islam fundamentalist groups are in power, the opposite of that happened. Numerous attacks on non-Islam religious places (usually churches) by militant Islamic fundamentalists have happened in recent years.

Unfortunately, the response of a lot of people here isn't the realization that the same thing is pretty much happening here, but to use it as a proof that the real victim of religious attacks in Indonesia is the Muslim and we should protect mosques instead of churches. It's pretty much like those American Christians who claim that they are under attack and oppression.

It's just disheartening and uncomfortable to hear all those comments. Fortunately, it does not seem to be the opinion of the majority so far, but it's still too many for my liking. I'm just afraid this will encourage some idiots here to retaliate by bombing some churches that will naturally motivate some idiots from the other side to retaliate, too, turning the entire thing into a circle of stupidity.

Symbiotic extremism.

As a general note on Tarrant, the ecofascist claim in his manifesto might have far more weight than people realise. People like Pentti Linkola have their following among neo-nazis and there's definitely been an amalgamation of far-right ideas, general nihilism and ecoterror.

Edited by TerminusEst on Mar 17th 2019 at 5:38:38 AM

I think that if anyone treats his manifesto as a joke are suffering from Good Cannot Comprehend Evil. The idiocy of it is not actually that idiotic from the perspective of the people he's trying to appeal to. Manifestos of serial and spree killers are not normal by nature.

As for regulating the internet, I think it's better not to think "free speech is a bad thing" but that hatespeech is an exception. I fully believe that regulating thought is dangerous and disgusting but I also believe that calling for violence as well as abuse are different from the rest of speech.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Mar 17th 2019 at 5:37:52 AM

Spree Killers usually have very warped minds. So, it's unsurprising that a manifesto written by one would be idiotic-spree and serial killers tend to be kind of dumb. There is actual data backing that, too.

Having said that, I would argue that it's very possible he was trolling. Spree Killers want to shock other people and get attention. As such, it's totally plausible a spree killer would deliberately make an infuriatingly stupid or evil cause.

Terrorists usually have very warped minds, but we take their manifestos seriously.

When we deride ISIS’s manifesto as inane ramblings of people out to troll I’ll buy that this isn’t an attempt to dodge cultural responsibility for creating terrorists.

Actually, yes, I would say the stated goals of a group like ISIS are frequently a red herring. This is why you shouldn't negotiate with them, in fact. Their real motive is to hurt people, so there's no way to coexist with them-the only course of action is Kill Em All.

Also, I do think environment and culture do effect these sorts of things, it's not a dodge per se.

Read the thread I linked to again. The goal of IS is not to kill everyone - it's to become a state, with all the trappings that implies. You might not be able to negotiate with the org itself, but it's misguided to think of its membership in absolute black-and-white. A lot of people who are complicit in their crimes are young romantics misguided by their rosier propaganda, or local Iraqis and Syrians who simply didn't have a choice. Making them complicit is a way to break down their innocence and neutrality, to forever make them a part of the group with no chance to get out and redeem themselves. On the other side, you can see the same thing happening with the incel-to-alt-right pipeline, and their tendency to identify themselves with deliberately tacky imagery. The goal, as always, is to isolate the recruits and prevent them from ever getting out.

If your first instinct is to call for every last terror supporter to be droned, you're buying into that propaganda, too. There's no getting out for them if we seal the way out.

And you know which extremist group we didn't beat by killing every last one of its supporters? The Nazis. If that had been the goal, the entire nation of Germany wouldn't exist today; not to mention huge chunks of France, the Netherlands, Norway, and many more. They had their own complicity hammered into their heads over and over until they understood that yes, we were the Nazis, yes, we did these things, and we need to be better. Not revenge. Not extermination.

Because the truth is that the terrorists aren't fundamentally different - they are us, or at least who we would be if we let our base impulses get to our head. They're your uncle who moans about migrant workers at the supermarket, your roommate who watches an IS video once and calls for the whole Middle East to be glassed, your brother who call all women bitches after his break-up and your neighbourhood cop who follows minority folks around. We can talk about killing Nazi supporters all we want, but we don't have the guns and we don't have the guts.

The saving grace is that complicity isn't a black-or-white thing. Your friends and relatives might have their spots of bigotry, but they aren't mass shooters or suicide bombers yet. So learn to talk to them about it. Make them look at how the minorities they hate have been parts of their lives and culture all along. Work to involve people from marginalised backgrounds in your life and let them see their humanity for themselves.

I know that self-care and personal boundaries are trending topics nowadays. You need to keep your distance from the toxicity to stay sane. And it feels horribly unfair for people who are already being targeted to to do the hard work of confronting their attackers. But big problems require big solutions. And this one calls for us all to stare down the demons closest to us first.

To use an incredibly minor example of why this is not the case, we did used to have a "contained" subforum here for all sort of wild debates that quickly became toxic, trollish, probably a little alt-right now that I think about it. And it didn't stay contained. Concentrated toxicity will inevitably spill over to affect everyone else.

The solution was to kill the subforum, and seriously moderate its closest equivalent, OTC. The site is way better for it.

My view on containment is the fact that forums like /pol/ result in people having their opinions normalized. The thing about Quanon and other crazy reddit groups is that it resulted in a bunch of people developing a community versus getting reality checks.

One of the best things to ever happen to me as a young Fundamentalist was encountering a forum of people who told me I was a horrible homophobic bigot. Which I was.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Mar 17th 2019 at 8:18:17 AM

You can't fully contain evil, you have to address it. You also don't want to put too many opponents in one spot so that they can organize and recruit. You especially don't want to keep them in an echo-chamber that actively cultivates those bad ideas.

Right, so in the aftermath of WWII, the Allies had two different approaches on how to deal with the Nazi problem.

The Western Allies originally planned to institute the Morgenthau Plan, which would have ripped out West Germany's industrial capabilities and essentially turn it into a medieval state. After some deliberations, they decided to rebuild the country via the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift and treat their prisoners well, all while screening footage of the concentration camps and spreading word of collective guilt in the newspapers to remind the German people of what they'd done.

The Soviets fenced off East Germany from the outside world and threw hundreds of thousands of its citizens into gulags.

Three guesses on which part of Germany is seeing the biggest far-right resurgence now.

A Russian friend of mine still gets headaches at the fact Neo-Nazis are a thing in Russia.

The Morgenthau plan had already been tossed in the bin before the war ended - the Nazis actually used it in propaganda in the final months of the war.

While this is true, it might be relevant to point out that:

A. The east of Germany also has (one of) the most hardcore antifascist scene of any country in Europe.

B. At least part (I said part, I did not say all) of the resurgence of far-right neo-Nazi bullshit in former East Germany is the result of East German neo-Nazis who moved to the West, and were received and treated there as 'victims of Communism' rather than 'neo-Nazi scum', repatriating to the east of Germany.

/pol/ is a pretty clear exemple of Head In The Sand Menagement. It's having a cancer, but instead of treating with chemo and surgery, you ignore it in the hope it'll just go away.

Now, how does that usually turns out?

Yeah /pol/ is the ultimate example of why "containment boards" don't actually work. If you give the Nazis a place to congregate and proselytize it doesn't actually make them go away, who would have guessed.

Its very good for establishing a record of who they are and who frequent it, though.

too bad usernames aren't used there huh