Jordan Peterson is really easy to make fun of -- what with the mystical nonsense and the pseudoscientific evolutionary biology -- but there are millions of (largely white, largely young, largely male) readers who've found his "12 Rules for Life" to be a balm for their souls and a rallying cry for a movement that has legitimized the most murderous strains of toxic masculinity. Read the rest
Right now, the eugenics-happy alt-right are also climate deniers; but climate denial has a short half-life -- its undeniability will only grow, as the world gets hotter, more dangerous, drier, wetter, colder, stormier, more becalmed -- more uninhabitable. Read the rest
The New York Times was just for starters: Something Awful got the real deal from manhood's true savior. Read the rest
No matter what else happens today, I've got enough joy to to see me through the weekend: According to Buzzfeed, professional fascist mouthpiece Richard Spencer has had his racist ass shown the door by GoDaddy. Were you to browse your way to his alt-right website right now, you'd find nothing there waiting for you but a 404 message. I just tried. It's glorious. Apparently, GoDaddy gave Spencer 48 hours to find a new host for his bigoted bullshit before they wiped it from his servers. At the time that this post was written, it seemed that no one else wants to give his site a home. I checked on it, multiple times, to see if the site would load. Nope.
Concerning Spencer's ejection from their servers and the topic of where their business sits on the topic of freedom of speech a GoDaddy representative told Buzzfeed the following:
"In instances where a site goes beyond the mere exercise of these freedoms, however, and crosses over to promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in specific acts of violence against any person, we will take action," GoDaddy's statement read. "It is our determination that altright.com crossed the line and encouraged and promoted violence in a direct and threatening manner.
Kicked to the curb.
That said, it's hard to kill hate. I'm not so naive as to think that the take down of his website will be a serious blow to his efforts to spread his white-power rhetoric and calls to violence. It's only a matter of time until someone with servers in a more permissive part of the world, be it on the dark web or otherwise, will have Spencer and his goons up and running again. Read the rest
Silvio Berlusconi, a misogynist, racist creep-authoritarian who was caught paying a teenager for sex and then lied to cops to get them to stop investigating the case, is banned from holding public office in Italy thanks to a criminal conviction for fraud; but that hasn't kept Italy's media (a large slice of which he controls) from elevating him to the role of political kingmaker in the country's upcoming elections. Read the rest
President Donald Trump has lashed out at Steve Bannon, his former campaign manager and White House strategist, following Bannon's suggestion that a Trump Tower meeting with Russians was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."
Read the rest“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.”
Trump continued, “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.”
Frank Wu writes, "US Congressional candidate (MA-8) Brianna Wu (previously) will be killing virtual Nazis today. Brianna will be doing a playthrough of the new video game Wolfenstein II, whose tagline is 'Make America Nazi-free again.' The playthrough starts today at 5 pm Eastern." Read the rest
A survey by the Military Times found that nearly a quarter of US servicepeople see "white nationalism" among their peers, and believe that the white nationalist agenda is more of a national security threat than "Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan." Read the rest
DeAndre Harris is a 20 year old black man who was subjected to a vicious armed beat-down by Nazis who marched in Charlottesville on August 12. Two of the men who beat him have been charged with "malicious wounding" and are being held without bail; two others have not been arrested yet. Read the rest
"“Who is Responsible for the Crime Wave?” “Reporters Cover Up Evidence of Immigration Crime Wave” “One New Immigrant for Every Two U.S. Births” “One Foreigner Enters by Stealth for Every One Who Is Legally Admitted, Immigration Men Say” Read the rest
Fresh off a decisive victory against a man who used Pepe the Frog in an Islamophobic children's book (previously), artist Matt Furie is fighting alt-right stars for unauthorized use of his Pepe the frog character. Read the rest
The juggalos are marching on DC this weekend, to protest the FBI's classification of the music fandom/subculture as a dangerous gang, placing it on a watchlist alongside the Aryan Nation. Read the rest
This week, microblogging platform Gab became the latest canary in a coal mine over the limits of free speech on the internet, acquiescing to their registrar's demand regarding a post deemed obscene. Read the rest
Tim Squirrell, a researcher at the Alt-Right Open Intelligence Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, used Google's BigQuery to analyze "every Reddit comment ever made—all 3 billion of them." He used the results to identify different alt-right groups and the language they use.
From Quartz:
Focusing on The_Donald, I used a script that lets you see which words are most likely to occur in the same comment. Combining this with a tool that allows you to look at the overlap in commenters between different parts of Reddit, I found that the alt-right isn’t just one voice: It’s made up by distinct constituencies that share different opinions and ways to express them, identifiable by the language they use and the other communities they post in.
In other words, there’s a taxonomy of trolls. So who are they, and what language do they use?
Here are the groups and their favorite words:
4chan shitposters: kek, Pepe, deus vult, tendies, God Emperor Trump
Anti-progressive gamers: SJW, snowflake, pandering, tumblr, feminist, triggering, GamerGate, virtue signalling
Men’s rights activists: females, cuck, bitch, Chad, alpha, beta, omega
Anti-globalists: globalist scum, the establishment, puppets, elites, masters, George Soros, cultural Marxist
White supremacists: Islam, (creeping) Sharia, “deus vult”, “western culture”, various racial slurs
By Anthony Crider - Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally, CC BY 2.0, Link Read the rest
After Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer, hitherto Nazi-friendly internet companies have found their boots and their banhammers. The angry right has for some time anticipated this eventuality, and colonized or established replicas of key services and platforms. 8chan, Voat and Gab are the most well-known examples, respectively resembling 4chan, Reddit and Twitter. Adi Robertson writes that the internet's plumbing, the world of domain name registrars and load mitigation, will be harder to replicate. Why the alt-right can’t build an alt-internet.
Even if such a registrar could ignore bad PR, activists could still lodge complaints with the registries, which ultimately control access to domains. There are ways to bypass ICANN entirely. A site could use an alternative domain name system like Namecoin, for instance. It could advertise a numerical IP address rather than a link. The Daily Stormer set up shop on the free and decentralized Tor network, operating on the so-called dark web. But at that point, you’re not just independent, you’re effectively walled off from the normal internet. ... Far-right sites and services want to be real alternatives to their mainstream counterparts, not just enclaves for true believers.
Whatever is taken from them may also be taken from you. Read the rest
Robert Kuttner is a veteran left-wing reporter who writes for the left-leaning American Prospect; while he was on vacation, Steve Bannon's assistant tracked him down and asked him if he'd talk to Bannon. Read the rest
