September 10, 2018

Some thoughts on Alt-right Trolling.

A key component of Trump's rise was his ability to Troll. His staffers, followers, and admirers follow his lead.

For such people - the Milo's and Mike Cernovich's of this world- they live not only to exploit Democratic freedoms to spread fascistic hate but to also trigger the libs and exploit Liberal reasonableness.

In the "freeze peach" wars, when trolls like Milo and Ann Coulter felt they should have access to rarified platforms like Universities, many reasonable liberals agreed, because we're about fairness and when they go low we go high. Many reasonable arguments were laid out citing the freedom of speech, and a slippery slope, and intolerance. Absent from this reasoning is the fact that we are not entitled to rarified spaces or platforms. Newspapers are discriminatory about who gets to write op-eds, TV show hosts exercise discretion over who they invite as guests to their shows. Of all platforms, Universities should exercise great discretion over whom they invite for campus talks.

There is no right to all platforms written anywhere in the constitution. Are there instances where Universities are heavy-handed? Yes, but resistance to controversial invitations to University platforms is nothing new.

I see shades of this same type of manipulation of liberal reasonableness when it comes to Zina Bash. There are now long pieces, both in left leaning and right leaning publications, shaming Liberals-who-are-not-reasonable for assuming that Zina was signaling "white power" at the Kavanaugh hearings. Never mind when she learned of the speculation, she turned it up a notch.

I've used that hand signal to mean something is perfect or good or "A Okay!" But Fascists have a habit of appropriating innocuous, even religious, symbolism for nefarious purposes. See Pepe the Frog or the Swastika.

The defense of Zina Bash is bizarre because she is an acolyte of Stephen Miller - The most Bigoted Edgelord of all bigoted Millennial edgelords. She worked with him on immigration policy. We know Stephen Miller is vile. We know the ethos of this administration is ethnonationalism so it's curious all the confusion. I've seen defenses of Ms Bash claiming her ancestry when she works for Trump. Power is a fact of life, and some human beings don't care who they align with to attain it.

By calling a hand symbol which has been appropriated by alt-righters to wink-nudge their followers "fake news", I believe we're gaslighting ourselves. She is free to use whatever signals she likes, but we don't help when we deny the signaling going on here.

Alt-righters use this hand signal as a way to tell the marginalized and those in the crosshairs of this administration "We're the ones with power now and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. And if you call me racist or fascist for using this hand signal, reasonable people will laugh at you"

They love this chaos because a lot of this type of trolling was born in the toxic mess that was 4chan.

The best description of how elements in 4 chan evolved into the Alt-right is from Morgan Chase, I've condensed her tweets on this in paragraphs: https://twitter.com/morganmpage/status/827725357704953856

As a gamer myself, I couldn't put it better than this:

"So much of the alt-right grew out of online geek culture (GG [Gamergate] is a good example). Which I guess makes sense because it's a group of people who feel like outsiders but are in fact quite privileged (white, male, straight). And we all know what happens when you make white straight men feel even slightly disenfranchised. A layer the media has not picked up on is the gamification of the alt-right.

It is a game played for nihilistic pleasure. Every woman, POC, queer, trans person intimidated - every social justice space 'infiltrated' - scores points for the nerd nazis. Geek culture was perfect breeding ground for this. Like geeks intensely nostalgize the media culture of their youths, so too the alt-right. It became easy to like a nostalgia for media culture to a nostalgia for nationalist culture. Both are reactions to a rapidly changing world. Geek culture is also an intensely male-centric space (despite or perhaps bc of it's slightly effeminate stature in the wider culture).

Reddit and the chans, with their male-centric and game-ified trolling cultures, gave birth to the bastard child that is the alt-right. That nazi-who-gets-punched actually hit on something when he said that neo-Nazis don't like him. We're dealing with a very different demographic. The geek alt-right stuff is not coming from the uneducated rural working-class whites - it is coming from educated white nerds.

These are guys who work in STEM. At least, this was who originally started it (GG, etc.). Now it's snowballed up all kinds of other opportunistic white nationalists. We have a bunch of identifiable groups who previously wouldn't have spoken to each other forming a coalition of awful.

I think that maybe separating out each group we can find strategies best suited to countering their particular brand of terrible. It's fascinating in a way because so much of the geek culture is about resisting fascism. But these men's nostalgia for their uncritical childhood takes ("cool explosions! space travel!&quot blinds them to this.

Of course, it is not all individual geeks. But this subculture is what gave birth to the alt-right. The sneering way the left dismisses the alt-right as uneducated is simply not the case, which I guess is one of the points I'm making here. The Gaters are really the direct antecedents of the current alt-right. The Gate is how they learned to organize, gameify harassment, etc. Gamergate was where this generation of white right-wingers became radicalized. I'm not even sure they're accurately described as rightwing.

Many are essentially apolitical but find it fun to relax into racist tendencies. And I think that's why we have particular difficulty reaching them: we're trying to convince them of politics but they are apolitical. They don't actually care about politics: they're using it as a game and as a tool for lashing out about their feelings of disenfranchisement. A lot of this is classic trauma behaviour also: many of them were bullied as kids and now are getting "revenge of the nerds" via same tactic. But instead of lashing out at the power structures that created their trauma, they're lashing out at the people they think threaten their power. Sarah Schulman's Conflict is Not Abuse is basically a roadmap for how this type of thinking works, if you're interested in learning more.



When we nonchalantly dismiss this phenomenon as nothing we miss the undercurrents at work here.

This is applicable:

September 9, 2018

The "Left Behind" Trump voter has nothing left to tell us.

"Editors are looking for stories on Trump voters who are making do, soldiering on, hanging tough, wishing each other “Merry Christmas” instead of that heathen “Happy Holidays,” and extending the president the benefit of the doubt no matter how many times he does them rotten. Small-town, heartland, blue-collar, bingo-hall, left-behind authentic representatives and descendants of the “Real America” whom hip elitist bi-coastals and technocrat politicians ignore, until their votes bite Democrats in the butt. So where does an enterprising reporter go to bag a focus group of Trump voters in their native habitat? The local diner.

And not just any diner. Definitely not one of those Silver Diners, a chain that offers “Flexitarian” menus, whatever the fancy hell that means, or one of those shiny faux-retro diners in the suburbs catering to Happy Days nostalgia. No, it has to be a diner that still offers a wood-paneled haven steeped in the aroma and kitchen grease of yesteryear, a clientele of rumpled regulars, an old cathode-tube TV in the corner, and voilà . . . “Steven Whitt fires up the coffeepot and flips on the fluorescent sign in the window of the Frosty Freeze, his diner that looks and sounds and smells about the same as it did when it opened a half-century ago. Coffee is 50 cents a cup, refills 25 cents. The pot sits on the counter, and payment is based on the honor system.” So begins a dispatch from Claire Galofaro, an A.P. reporter whose special beat is Trump Country, in a story dated December 28, 2017. The Frosty Freeze is in Elliott County, Kentucky, a region in worsening distress which in 2016, for the first time, broke its string of going Democratic, betting on Trump to be the turnaround guy. Trip Gabriel is The New York Times’s unofficial Trump roving diner correspondent. In “In Iowa, Trump Voters Are Unfazed by Controversies,” Gabriel opened at one diner (“The eight men around a rectangular table, sipping coffee from a hodgepodge of mugs donated by customers, meet daily for breakfasts of French toast, eggs and bacon at Darrell’s diner”), then popped into another, where he quoted a waitress who didn’t vote in the 2016 election because she didn’t like either candidate, not exactly a gem worth extracting. Reuters reporter Tim Reid also drew blanks when he corralled a trio of Trump supporters at a Bob Evans diner in Jackson, Ohio, and asked their opinions on the Russia investigation. “I have never heard anything about it,” imparted Chastity Banks, and neither had the other two Trumpies. At Nana Dee’s Diner, in Mesa, Arizona, CNN interviewed a quartet of Trump supporters over the family-separation policy at the border that was ripping children from their parents. “I think people need to stop constantly bringing up the poor children, the poor children,” complained one old dear. “Quit trying to make us feel teary-eyed for the children.” Yes, that does sound like the heartfelt, cankered voice of a Trumpian.

The journalistic device of converting diner patrons into field studies didn’t originate in the aftermath of Trump’s upset victory. It’s a hoary practice that became a staple in campaign coverage of political caucuses and primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the diner became the go-to spot for getting the ornery lowdown from the red-flannel-plaid set. The deadline laureate of this hunter-gatherer journalism was the Washington Post reporter and columnist David Broder, the “dean” of the Washington press corps, who knocked on doors at dinner hour, interviewed subjects on park benches, and convened impromptu focus groups of diner patrons to get a feel for shifts in sentiment that had eluded correspondents trailing candidates from stop to stop. Broder put in the shoe leather and brought back the goods on his Tocquevillian rounds, but today that approach has become a cliché, a traffic jam, a theatrical genre. The patrons have become self-conscious in their role-playing as Average Americans, trying to finish their cardboard waffles while the politicians go glad-handing from table to table surrounded by a scrum.

t is unusual, however, to keep returning to diners, bars, and American Legion halls to take the temperatures of one sliver of the electorate and gussy up their predictable sound bites with descriptive dabs of short-storyish scene-setting. (The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri did a hilarious send-up of this woebegone naturalism: “In the shadow of the old flag factory, Craig Slabornik sits whittling away on a rusty nail, his only hobby since the plant shut down.”) It not only privileges the attitudes of one subset of voters but it leaves a lopsided impression of the whole mural. “The media is blinded by its obsession with rural white Trump voters,” Ryan Cooper argued forcibly in a column for The Week last December. “Trump does—or did—have unusual levels of blue-collar support, but the actual bulk of Trump support is the same old professional, petty bourgeois, and ultra-wealthy capitalists who have been voting Republican for generations.” And, Cooper notes, this zoom-in on rural whites has “largely ignored the black and brown working class who never fell for Trump’s nonsense.”"

---------------
Every word of this

September 7, 2018

The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History

"It was a perfect sunny summer afternoon in Copenhagen when the world’s largest shipping conglomerate began to lose its mind.

The headquarters of A.P. Møller-Maersk sits beside the breezy, cobblestoned esplanade of Copenhagen’s harbor. A ship’s mast carrying the Danish flag is planted by the building’s northeastern corner, and six stories of blue-tinted windows look out over the water, facing a dock where the Danish royal family parks its yacht. ......
*
Across the street, an IT administrator named Henrik Jensen was working in another part of the Maersk compound, an ornate white-stone building that in previous centuries had served as the royal archive of maritime maps and charts. (Henrik Jensen is not his real name. Like almost every Maersk employee, customer, or partner I interviewed, Jensen feared the consequences of speaking publicly for this story.) Jensen was busy preparing a software update for Maersk’s nearly 80,000 employees when his computer spontaneously restarted.He quietly swore under his breath. Jensen assumed the unplanned reboot was a typically brusque move by Maersk’s central IT department, a little-loved entity in England that oversaw most of the corporate empire, whose eight business units ranged from ports to logistics to oil drilling, in 574 offices in 130 countries around the globe.

Jensen looked up to ask if anyone else in his open-plan office of IT staffers had been so rudely interrupted. And as he craned his head, he watched every other computer screen around the room blink out in rapid succession......“I saw a wave of screens turning black. Black, black, black. Black black black black black,” he says. The PCs, Jensen and his neighbors quickly discovered, were irreversibly locked. Restarting only returned them to the same black screen.

All across Maersk headquarters, the full scale of the crisis was starting to become clear. Within half an hour, Maersk employees were running down hallways, yelling to their colleagues to turn off computers or disconnect them from Maersk’s network before the malicious software could infect them, as it dawned on them that every minute could mean dozens or hundreds more corrupted PCs. Tech workers ran into conference rooms and unplugged machines in the middle of meetings. Soon staffers were hurdling over locked key-card gates, which had been paralyzed by the still-mysterious malware, to spread the warning to other sections of the building.

Disconnecting Maersk’s entire global network took the company’s IT staff more than two panicky hours. By the end of that process, every employee had been ordered to turn off their computer and leave it at their desk. The digital phones at every cubicle, too, had been rendered useless in the emergency network shutdown.Around 3 pm, a Maersk executive walked into the room where Jensen and a dozen or so of his colleagues were anxiously awaiting news and told them to go home. Maersk’s network was so deeply corrupted that even IT staffers were helpless. A few of the company’s more old-school managers told their teams to remain at the office. But many employees—rendered entirely idle without computers, servers, routers, or desk phones—simply left.

Jensen walked out of the building and into the warm air of a late June afternoon. Like the vast majority of Maersk staffers, he had no idea when he might return to work. The maritime giant that employed him, responsible for 76 ports on all sides of the earth and nearly 800 seafaring vessels, including container ships carrying tens of millions of tons of cargo, representing close to a fifth of the entire world’s shipping capacity, was dead in the water."

Crippled ports. Paralyzed corporations. Frozen government agencies. How a single piece of code crashed the world. read more here

September 7, 2018

I am part of the resistance inside Nyarlathotep's Death Cult

this is good.

From:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-am-part-of-the-resistance-inside-nyarlathoteps-death-cult



"Nyarlathotep is now facing one of the greatest threats in Its presidency so far. I should know, I clock in to kneel at Its feet upon the Altar of Despair every day.

In the year-and-a-half since the Black Pharaoh replaced the Oval Office with a literal blood fountain throne, I’ve watched as the hits keep on coming. The executive cabinet is wracked with scandal, ordinary citizens who signed the cultist oath are making good on their grave pacts, and, of course, the entirety of the country’s water supply is now teeming with pulsating eggs from some kind inter-dimensional parasite. It’s easy to look at these kinds of headlines, to read these sorts of leaked stories from the desiccated Capitol Hill, and see an unsustainable administration. Rumors of reversal incantations are beginning to make the rounds, and if our Commander-in-Chief is not careful, It could find Itself cast back among the stars beyond the universe. The past few weeks, in particular, have seen our President certainly live up to our campaign slogan “I See All, and It Shall Burn.”

But it’s important Americans know there are still some of us upholding the tenets envisioned by the original Necro-Party. We are part of a different kind of Resistance, one that still supports the foundations scrawled within the Tome of Infernal Torment, and not the whims of a Mad Anti-God who cares not for the literalist interpretations we hold so blasphemous. We believe the Tome is, was, and will forever be instrumental in wresting reason from the minds of the multitude. It may provide faint solace, but we felt we owe it to our fellow subjugates to let them know all is still very much for naught.

The root of this problem, we believe, is in Nyarlathotep’s very essence. It is a being incapable of viewing Its servants as anything other than playground toys or troublesome fleas. Many may argue that we should have known this to be the case for the Stalker Among the Stars. And that might well prove true, to a point. We summoned the God of a Thousand Forms assuming the weight of responsibility would rein It in slightly, remind It to adhere to the Necronomicon’s nightmare prophesies first and foremost. If it was foolish to assume the Outer God would care so little about this dimension that it wouldn’t even acknowledge the Tome’s existence, well, call us fools. We still believe utter ruin can be brought to the land through the proper rituals and unhallowed traditions, not by this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-tentacles kind of governing.

Don’t get me wrong. We still willingly choose to show up each and every day in order to carry out Nyarlathotep’s sins. Its Administration has produced things we are truly proud of — instituting monthly public desecrations, a complete reform of the tax system now requiring every other family’s firstborn — we still maintain this will eventually benefit Middle America — and increasing the defense budget. The entirety of our armed forces is now morphed into a singular, gargantuan oozing mass of shrieking teeth and eyes. Nyarlathotep campaigned on veterans’ reform, and by golly, we sure got it, if for a price some of us did not anticipate."

September 6, 2018

They salty as fuck right now..

September 6, 2018

Nike: How to Burn Our Products Safely

Nike's Field of Fucks is barren.



(still verifying if this is really from the company)

(I hope they really did ......if so it's monumentally hilarious)

(If not, it's still funny... and Sage advice for Right Wing Nutjobs)

September 5, 2018

Thank goodness pundits took this threat seriously.

Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech two years ago.

Let's take a moment to remember how seriously Pundits heeded her warning that neo nazis were all over Trump like white on rice.



https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gqgvq/what-hillary-clinton-missed-in-her-alt-right-speech

And that's just one example.

Time sure flies.

September 5, 2018

"You can not have a government for and by the people if it is not represented by all of the people"

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1027578499400228864

Congratulations on your win Ayanna!

September 4, 2018

Drone Reveals Auschwitz Inner Horrors

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/drone-reveals-auschwitz.html