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I have no expertise in the legalities here. But I’ve found that quite often, on the internet, when you think you’ve found a forum of hilarious ironic commenter

by neilk 7y ago

I have no expertise in the legalities here. But I’ve found that quite often, on the internet, when you think you’ve found a forum of hilarious ironic commenters... a lot of them are very sincere. Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight. I don’t know what to do about this, but this is the world we’re living in.

Waterluvian 7y ago
The problem is that while most of them aren't, some of them are. If you doubt the sincerity, just observe /b/ for a day. It's filled with fiction, but yeah, every so often you see something that looks real.
- mulmen 7y ago
  How do you know? What trains this feedback loop other than your own perception?
  - serf 7y ago
    >How do you know? Two ways : 1) Staggeringly rare real-world events are reported frequently -- so a good number of them, by virtue of their rarity in real life, must be false. There are daily threats of wide-scale violence, but only a very small percentage of these threats turn into a real event. 2) The impossible is often reported. These comments can be thrown away at face value by most people -- besides maybe the most dedicated 'researchers' (Alien abduction, magic , general occultism woo). Now, if you're asking 'How do you know which threats are false?', that's a much more difficult question, and i'd be surprised if there was a generalizable 'answer', aside from full-on mind-reading.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    one pretty obvious fact would be the adoption of "chan-slang" by people who have turned entirely serious in their advocacy of those extremist views, with they themselves openly advocating that those were the channels on which they were radicalised. A similar dynamic is playing out on youtube, as a recent ex-member of this subculture attests: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...
cycrutchfield 7y ago
>But I’ve found that quite often, on the internet, when you think you’ve found a forum of hilarious ironic commenters... a lot of them are very sincere. I mean, I think that’s pretty much how /r/The_Donald started. It started out as satire but over time collected a following of people who weren’t quite in on the joke...
- rland 7y ago
  I remember when The_Donald first came around in the very early days in the run up to the '16 election. I actually subscribed and thought it was hilarious, because I think Donald Trump is pathetic (and I thought he was insignificant at that point). I suspect that most subscribers were like me, at first. At some point, the tone of the sub reddit took a dramatic shift. It's hard to explain -- it became so serious and so vitriolic. It went from being a joke, to being "wait... we are joking, right?" to being "oh my god these people are serious," within the span of about 1 month. I would say, for me, that's when the sort of surrealism of our current politics started. I think this type of joking around is dangerous for that reason, and it really soured me on the concept of 4ch style "ironic" joking. You're flicking the lighter over and over again, and at some point you might find yourself near gasoline.
  - mindcandy 7y ago
    "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." DarkShikari, Hacker News, 2009, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Wonder if that's the DarkShikari of Eve Online... Regardless, it's a good quip about the consequences of normalizing the devaluing of intellect.
      - ry_ry 7y ago
sixothree 7y ago
The kekistan flag is a great example. Few people would ironically fly a nazi flag in the real world. But a green version gives them some cover. For the record I have witnessed people flying this flag in my city. There is no denying they were hate filled racists.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I was actually quite fascinated by the Kek phenomenon for religious reasons - I'm very into alternative/marginal religious movements, so worship of an egyptian chaos god was pretty fascinating to me. I also rather liked the Kekistan flag when it first started, and had no idea it was a palette swapped version of a nazi flag until much later. Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?
  - drdeca 7y ago
    They appear to be talking about the ones which they saw flying that flag where they lived. As in, some specific persons. I didn’t interpret it as a claim that all persons who have liked that flag are “hate filled racists”.
  - EForEndeavour 7y ago
    > Do you think I'm a hate filled racist? ...Being fascinated in the Kek phenomenon is very different from going to the trouble of obtaining a physical version of the flag of Kekistan and flying it in public. Do you do this?
    - jeromic 7y ago
      Given that he isn't racist and doesn't consider Kek to be racist, what would be the problem with flying the flag? Look at https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kekistan https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kekistan, it looks like a joke that is being taken way too seriously.
      - jsjolen 7y ago
        It's meant to look like a joke on the surface. I was a big fan of the "feels good man" comic (Pepe the frog) but I wouldn't deny that it's been co-opted by the far right. Also, kekistan is a way worse joke than "feels good man".
joe_the_user 7y ago
I would just add that there is a third "aspect" or "color" to this stuff besides "this is the most absurd irony" and "we definitely believe this hatefully bs". That aspect is "we don't necessarily believe this stuff but look, we've discovered dynamite in a bottle." It's something like "trollocracy" - "by believing anything and saying anything, we're amazing influential and we can use that influence in a calculated way." But that third attitude isn't something distinct from original fascism. One might say the ideas of fascists from the start involved something like "use your illusions".
philwelch 7y ago
A lot of it is also old-fashioned trolling. For example, there’s occasional moral panics about white supremacist dog-whistles, like Pepe the frog or the hand gesture. Of course, it’s also the hand gesture for a three point shot in basketball, so you have all kinds of sarcastic “Steph Curry is a white supremacist” memes about it. (Dog whistles in general are, 80% of the time, a moral panic anyway.) I don’t know if this is how that particular gesture got that association, but trolls (who are possibly white supremacists) will sometimes deliberately invent absurdly innocuous dog whistles, like the phrase “it’s OK to be white”, just to provoke the moral panic from the other side and to force them into absurd rhetorical positions. The metagame being that, maybe they actually are white supremacist dog whistles, depending on how ironically the coiners of them adhere to white supremacism. There’s a similar reaction in some left-wing circles, eg the “misandrist” sphere of Tumblr, which seems partly comprised of feminists who ironically claim the term “misandry” because they are accused of it by their opponents and also partly composed of feminists who unironically hate men. It’s not just political either. I kind of suspect a lot of the conspiracy or flat earth stuff is just disingenuous trolling or LARPing. I mean, some people are kooks, but other people just pretend to be for fun.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Another aspect of trolling is that even the most grounded observations of the popularity and possible import of such dog whistles can be dismissed as 'panic' to shut down reasoned discourse.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    I hope you’re not implying I was doing that. I specified that roughly 80% of it was moral panic, which would imply that the other fifth—the proportion that was “the most grounded” and was comprised of “reasoned discourse”—is not moral panic.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      Citing the appropriation of Pepe or the hand gesture as moral panics reads as if you're putting those things in the 80% box. You know, when a kid walks into the house holding a dog turd the details of where they found it or what sort of dog left it there are not very compelling.
rocqua 7y ago
> They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight. This is sometimes called a dog whistle. The pitch is too high for humans to hear, but the intended targets do pick up on it.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  I suspect that some so called dog whistles are a form of conspiracy theory. "It's not viable in plain sight but take my in depth research on the matter to heart".
  - rocqua 7y ago
    It certainly is an attractive idea for the conspiracy minded. Heck, it doesn't even take conspiracy mindedness. Just anyone hoping to see something. At the same time, it seems feasible as a concept and quite useful.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >I suspect that some so called dog whistles are a form of conspiracy theory. Of course, only the enlightened few can pick up on it and explain it to the rest of us goons.
  - licebmi__at__ 7y ago
    Dog whistle examples are not even obscure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Well if someone says this and actually provides supporting evidence then what's the problem?
watwut 7y ago
I had similar experience in real life. People who were "just joking", when you knew them long enough and closely enough, turned out to be not really joking.
friendlybus 7y ago
>While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight. That's what you want. It's amazingly easy to govern when the radicals self-identify in public.
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
> Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. which is puzzling when considered that 99% of all stand-up comedians are firmly on the left. So what happened to irony on the left? I think we have outlawed it in Internet forums in exchange for political correctness? > I don’t know what to do about this, but this is the world we’re living in. Technology persists where art dies.
defertoreptar 7y ago
> Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight. I have yet to see any platform that falls under the scope of "the far right" that hasn't been heavily criticized by every which way, no matter how ironic. What are you referring to exactly?
swebs 7y ago
>by the extreme right Just to clarify, 8chan is the one with the /leftypol/ board.
- irvwash 7y ago
  /pol/ is around five times as active as /leftypol/. 8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here. Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.
  - threwawasy1228 7y ago
    That is an unfair characterization. /leftypol/ may be smaller than /pol/ but it is definitely one of the top 5 largest boards on the entire site (just checked and it is in 6th place right now by a narrow margin). It has a consistently high PPH count and tons of active users (500 right this minute). It is hardly fair to say that the left doesn't make up a massive portion of the site.
    - irvwash 7y ago
      /leftypol/ is insulated. Mentions of it on other boards are usually hostile. Its existence tells you a lot about the consistency of the free speech policy, but it tells you little about the political leanings of other boards, particularly /pol/. I think /leftypol/ is important but I don't think it's very relevant to a claim that /pol/ is populated by the extreme right, which seems to be the context here.
      - threwawasy1228 7y ago
        What I was trying to push back against is that the overarching culture of the site is right-wing. I don't know that it is, and as someone who uses the site, I don't see that. I would love to hear a real argument for why this is the case. The boards on the site have their own internal owners and moderators and it is those people who are actually crafting the content moderation. There are christian boards, technology boards, literature and philosophy boards, sports boards, islamic theology boards, cyberpunk boards, I can go on and on. To say that the place is nothing but right-wingers and that any other boards that aren't are anomalies, is unfair. Further it shows you have never actually looked at the site beyond the front page, if that. The overarching philosophy of the site is one of free speech, which attracts people who are interested in odd things from all corners, not just the right.
ndowlfjd 7y ago
Why would you ever want to do something about that? That is the beauty of free speech. The humorous and playful gives cover to the toxic and harmful, which in turn gives cover to undesired truths and the champions of the suppressed. A pair of jeans that are not faded, and are clean and crisp, have not been lived in. It doesn’t mean that a faded and torn pare of jeans aren’t just a facade. But a community that lacks the undesirable is necessarily one that lacks the freedom to be undesirable. That would be far worse.
- kadendogthing 7y ago
  >That is the beauty of free speech. There is absolutely nothing beautiful about it and there is negative utility in allowing it to proliferate. It actively causes resource usage and damage that is unnecessary and totally avoidable.
- elil17 7y ago
  And that extends to people organizing specific plans to murder others? Because that’s what this warrant says was being done on 8chan
collyw 7y ago
How do you know what people are being sincere and what ones are joking on anonymous forums?
doomjunky 7y ago
Irony was used by René Descartes against the church / inquisition.
baud147258 7y ago
I'm on a forum full of extrem righters and when discussing politics (and assorted subjects) they rarely use any irony. But it can still be hilarious sometime.

by neilk 7y ago

Waterluvian 7y ago

The problem is that while most of them aren't, some of them are. If you doubt the sincerity, just observe /b/ for a day. It's filled with fiction, but yeah, every so often you see something that looks real.

mulmen 7y ago
How do you know? What trains this feedback loop other than your own perception?
- serf 7y ago
  >How do you know? Two ways : 1) Staggeringly rare real-world events are reported frequently -- so a good number of them, by virtue of their rarity in real life, must be false. There are daily threats of wide-scale violence, but only a very small percentage of these threats turn into a real event. 2) The impossible is often reported. These comments can be thrown away at face value by most people -- besides maybe the most dedicated 'researchers' (Alien abduction, magic , general occultism woo). Now, if you're asking 'How do you know which threats are false?', that's a much more difficult question, and i'd be surprised if there was a generalizable 'answer', aside from full-on mind-reading.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  one pretty obvious fact would be the adoption of "chan-slang" by people who have turned entirely serious in their advocacy of those extremist views, with they themselves openly advocating that those were the channels on which they were radicalised. A similar dynamic is playing out on youtube, as a recent ex-member of this subculture attests: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...

cycrutchfield 7y ago

>But I’ve found that quite often, on the internet, when you think you’ve found a forum of hilarious ironic commenters... a lot of them are very sincere. I mean, I think that’s pretty much how /r/The_Donald started. It started out as satire but over time collected a following of people who weren’t quite in on the joke...

rland 7y ago
I remember when The_Donald first came around in the very early days in the run up to the '16 election. I actually subscribed and thought it was hilarious, because I think Donald Trump is pathetic (and I thought he was insignificant at that point). I suspect that most subscribers were like me, at first. At some point, the tone of the sub reddit took a dramatic shift. It's hard to explain -- it became so serious and so vitriolic. It went from being a joke, to being "wait... we are joking, right?" to being "oh my god these people are serious," within the span of about 1 month. I would say, for me, that's when the sort of surrealism of our current politics started. I think this type of joking around is dangerous for that reason, and it really soured me on the concept of 4ch style "ironic" joking. You're flicking the lighter over and over again, and at some point you might find yourself near gasoline.
- mindcandy 7y ago
  "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." DarkShikari, Hacker News, 2009, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Wonder if that's the DarkShikari of Eve Online... Regardless, it's a good quip about the consequences of normalizing the devaluing of intellect.
    - ry_ry 7y ago

sixothree 7y ago

The kekistan flag is a great example. Few people would ironically fly a nazi flag in the real world. But a green version gives them some cover. For the record I have witnessed people flying this flag in my city. There is no denying they were hate filled racists.

SuoDuanDao 7y ago
I was actually quite fascinated by the Kek phenomenon for religious reasons - I'm very into alternative/marginal religious movements, so worship of an egyptian chaos god was pretty fascinating to me. I also rather liked the Kekistan flag when it first started, and had no idea it was a palette swapped version of a nazi flag until much later. Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?
- drdeca 7y ago
  They appear to be talking about the ones which they saw flying that flag where they lived. As in, some specific persons. I didn’t interpret it as a claim that all persons who have liked that flag are “hate filled racists”.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  > Do you think I'm a hate filled racist? ...Being fascinated in the Kek phenomenon is very different from going to the trouble of obtaining a physical version of the flag of Kekistan and flying it in public. Do you do this?
  - jeromic 7y ago
    Given that he isn't racist and doesn't consider Kek to be racist, what would be the problem with flying the flag? Look at https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kekistan https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kekistan, it looks like a joke that is being taken way too seriously.
    - jsjolen 7y ago
      It's meant to look like a joke on the surface. I was a big fan of the "feels good man" comic (Pepe the frog) but I wouldn't deny that it's been co-opted by the far right. Also, kekistan is a way worse joke than "feels good man".

joe_the_user 7y ago

I would just add that there is a third "aspect" or "color" to this stuff besides "this is the most absurd irony" and "we definitely believe this hatefully bs". That aspect is "we don't necessarily believe this stuff but look, we've discovered dynamite in a bottle." It's something like "trollocracy" - "by believing anything and saying anything, we're amazing influential and we can use that influence in a calculated way." But that third attitude isn't something distinct from original fascism. One might say the ideas of fascists from the start involved something like "use your illusions".

philwelch 7y ago

A lot of it is also old-fashioned trolling. For example, there’s occasional moral panics about white supremacist dog-whistles, like Pepe the frog or the hand gesture. Of course, it’s also the hand gesture for a three point shot in basketball, so you have all kinds of sarcastic “Steph Curry is a white supremacist” memes about it. (Dog whistles in general are, 80% of the time, a moral panic anyway.) I don’t know if this is how that particular gesture got that association, but trolls (who are possibly white supremacists) will sometimes deliberately invent absurdly innocuous dog whistles, like the phrase “it’s OK to be white”, just to provoke the moral panic from the other side and to force them into absurd rhetorical positions. The metagame being that, maybe they actually are white supremacist dog whistles, depending on how ironically the coiners of them adhere to white supremacism. There’s a similar reaction in some left-wing circles, eg the “misandrist” sphere of Tumblr, which seems partly comprised of feminists who ironically claim the term “misandry” because they are accused of it by their opponents and also partly composed of feminists who unironically hate men. It’s not just political either. I kind of suspect a lot of the conspiracy or flat earth stuff is just disingenuous trolling or LARPing. I mean, some people are kooks, but other people just pretend to be for fun.

anigbrowl 7y ago
Another aspect of trolling is that even the most grounded observations of the popularity and possible import of such dog whistles can be dismissed as 'panic' to shut down reasoned discourse.
- philwelch 7y ago
  I hope you’re not implying I was doing that. I specified that roughly 80% of it was moral panic, which would imply that the other fifth—the proportion that was “the most grounded” and was comprised of “reasoned discourse”—is not moral panic.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Citing the appropriation of Pepe or the hand gesture as moral panics reads as if you're putting those things in the 80% box. You know, when a kid walks into the house holding a dog turd the details of where they found it or what sort of dog left it there are not very compelling.

rocqua 7y ago

> They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight. This is sometimes called a dog whistle. The pitch is too high for humans to hear, but the intended targets do pick up on it.

thinkingemote 7y ago
I suspect that some so called dog whistles are a form of conspiracy theory. "It's not viable in plain sight but take my in depth research on the matter to heart".
- rocqua 7y ago
  It certainly is an attractive idea for the conspiracy minded. Heck, it doesn't even take conspiracy mindedness. Just anyone hoping to see something. At the same time, it seems feasible as a concept and quite useful.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >I suspect that some so called dog whistles are a form of conspiracy theory. Of course, only the enlightened few can pick up on it and explain it to the rest of us goons.
- licebmi__at__ 7y ago
  Dog whistle examples are not even obscure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Well if someone says this and actually provides supporting evidence then what's the problem?

watwut 7y ago

I had similar experience in real life. People who were "just joking", when you knew them long enough and closely enough, turned out to be not really joking.

friendlybus 7y ago

>While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight. That's what you want. It's amazingly easy to govern when the radicals self-identify in public.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

> Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. which is puzzling when considered that 99% of all stand-up comedians are firmly on the left. So what happened to irony on the left? I think we have outlawed it in Internet forums in exchange for political correctness? > I don’t know what to do about this, but this is the world we’re living in. Technology persists where art dies.

defertoreptar 7y ago

> Irony is currently used as a conscious strategy by the extreme right. They know that it gets a pass from ordinary people. While permitting the sincere to organize in plain sight. I have yet to see any platform that falls under the scope of "the far right" that hasn't been heavily criticized by every which way, no matter how ironic. What are you referring to exactly?

swebs 7y ago

>by the extreme right Just to clarify, 8chan is the one with the /leftypol/ board.

irvwash 7y ago
/pol/ is around five times as active as /leftypol/. 8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here. Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.
- threwawasy1228 7y ago
  That is an unfair characterization. /leftypol/ may be smaller than /pol/ but it is definitely one of the top 5 largest boards on the entire site (just checked and it is in 6th place right now by a narrow margin). It has a consistently high PPH count and tons of active users (500 right this minute). It is hardly fair to say that the left doesn't make up a massive portion of the site.
  - irvwash 7y ago
    /leftypol/ is insulated. Mentions of it on other boards are usually hostile. Its existence tells you a lot about the consistency of the free speech policy, but it tells you little about the political leanings of other boards, particularly /pol/. I think /leftypol/ is important but I don't think it's very relevant to a claim that /pol/ is populated by the extreme right, which seems to be the context here.
    - threwawasy1228 7y ago
      What I was trying to push back against is that the overarching culture of the site is right-wing. I don't know that it is, and as someone who uses the site, I don't see that. I would love to hear a real argument for why this is the case. The boards on the site have their own internal owners and moderators and it is those people who are actually crafting the content moderation. There are christian boards, technology boards, literature and philosophy boards, sports boards, islamic theology boards, cyberpunk boards, I can go on and on. To say that the place is nothing but right-wingers and that any other boards that aren't are anomalies, is unfair. Further it shows you have never actually looked at the site beyond the front page, if that. The overarching philosophy of the site is one of free speech, which attracts people who are interested in odd things from all corners, not just the right.

ndowlfjd 7y ago

Why would you ever want to do something about that? That is the beauty of free speech. The humorous and playful gives cover to the toxic and harmful, which in turn gives cover to undesired truths and the champions of the suppressed. A pair of jeans that are not faded, and are clean and crisp, have not been lived in. It doesn’t mean that a faded and torn pare of jeans aren’t just a facade. But a community that lacks the undesirable is necessarily one that lacks the freedom to be undesirable. That would be far worse.

kadendogthing 7y ago
>That is the beauty of free speech. There is absolutely nothing beautiful about it and there is negative utility in allowing it to proliferate. It actively causes resource usage and damage that is unnecessary and totally avoidable.
elil17 7y ago
And that extends to people organizing specific plans to murder others? Because that’s what this warrant says was being done on 8chan

collyw 7y ago

How do you know what people are being sincere and what ones are joking on anonymous forums?

doomjunky 7y ago

Irony was used by René Descartes against the church / inquisition.

baud147258 7y ago

I'm on a forum full of extrem righters and when discussing politics (and assorted subjects) they rarely use any irony. But it can still be hilarious sometime.