10 ms·

There are people of all political persuasions on 4chan. You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see. No one will ban you.

by carom 4y ago

micromacrofoot 4y ago
> You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.
- carom 4y ago
  You can also be a communist. You can also be an open source maximalist. You can also be a gay dog furry. You can also be trans. You can also be extremely autistic. It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    What is it that you feel like you gain from being exposed to white nationalism? Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!
    - carom 4y ago
      Someone might say the same thing about trans people. Should I be extremely uncomfortable talking to a trans person? Of course not. Many people think I should though. As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind. We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        You don't have the opportunity to change their mind that's an illusion that works in their favor: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.
        carom 4y ago
        >But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them. You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality. How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?
        FormerBandmate 4y ago
        Yeah, a bunch of them are. They’re lunatics
        SpaceManNabs 4y ago
        > How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs? a lot of them. Nazis in dog costumes are an actual population on the board and get into frequent conflicts with non nazi pornographic content consumers. You just need to check out the 18+ boards and you see it almost immediately.
    - throwawayf37jg 4y ago
      And you should be uncomfortable talking to someone who is indifferent about supporting industrialized animal torture that is also destroying the climate, just because animals are "lesser" or "created by God for us to eat". But that's like, whatever, not the reprehensible evil in fashion. Unrelated to this topic, but I don't see a logical way around this. I guess I shouldn't talk to anyone. Almost unironically. Or should disengage from people who push into my boundaries, who would turn me into a worse person. So any white supremacist who keeps trying to "convince" me would be substantially worse than a meat eater who respects my views and doesn't push.
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - account42 4y ago
        [flagged]
      - tptacek 4y ago
        No. You can substitute "Black" for "white", because Black is a specific ethnicity, the one the United States created when it kidnapped millions of people from African and forcibly stripped them of their heritage and culture, and subsequently shared the defining experiences of Black culture, including Jim Crow and forcible segregation, which, along with being crimes against humanity, also helped fuse a distinct cultural identity. Saying "It's OK to be Black" is like saying "It's OK to be Polish" or "It's OK to be Irish", which are things you can absolutely say. Part of the legacy of slavery is that for a large number of Black people, it's difficult to declare an affiliation with their origins in Africa: we took their ethnicity from them in a way nobody took my ancestors Irishness. It's not a privilege Black people get; it's perfectly linguistically coherent.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    It's ok to be a communist, it's ok to use open source software, it's ok to be gay, a furry, trans, or autistic. It's not ok to be a white nationalist. /b/ and other 4chan boards do not ban white nationalists.
    - qtzfz 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      >It's ok to be a communist Only if you ignore the mountain of skulls
    - throw__away7391 4y ago
      No, it is NOT ok to be a communist. Communists and white nationalists are morally equivalent, though communism to date has a much higher body count than white nationalism and their methods of execution and torture have on balance been more savage and more brutal.
      - anthk 4y ago
        We stopped white Nationalisms. If not, Communism's death toll would be a joke in comparison.
        Amezarak 4y ago
        This post really illustrates the expansion of terms into meaninglessness. One presumes they're referring to the Allies (who themselves would now be considered extremely racist) stopping the Nazis, who allied with the Japanese and were targeting/killing mostly Jewish and Slavic peoples. The Nazis were specifically pro-German/Aryan and whatever they thought that meant ethnically. They did not see things in today's racial terms. It's absurd to describe them as "white nationalists" because they didn't think that being "white" was good. There were a lot of "bad" "white" people in their worldview. It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.
- beebmam 4y ago
  For what it's worth, you can openly be a white nationalist (or black nationalist, or any other kind of racial nationalist) on most social media, even here on Hacker News. However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated. I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  That's a weird way to frame a truly free speech environment. Yes, speech is more limited to left-leaning speech on most accepted parts of the internet. That doesn't make a board that allows both to be right-leaning. It means that most of the internet is left-leaning. Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.
  - wussboy 4y ago
    Many people confuse "free speech is a good" with "free speech is the highest good". > truly free speech environment Sounds awful.
    - vuln 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - wusssubhuman 4y ago
      [dead]
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      You should rest easy tonight, knowing that nobody has any plans to make you go there.
      - wussboy 4y ago
        If only its toxic effects didn't spill over into the real world, corroding hard-won civilized society.
        vuln 4y ago
        Right without 4chan “spilling over into the “”real”” world” we’d have a utopia with zero hate. /s
        at_a_remove 4y ago
        If your civilization can be toppled by some weeaboos on a Mongolian basket weaving forum, maybe it wasn't that great to begin with.
- shitlord 4y ago
  > Yes but you can do this anywhere I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On websites like Facebook or reddit, you're either screaming into the void or preaching to the choir.
enlyth 4y ago
Yeah you can argue that /pol/ sways far right and you'd be correct, and I don't personally condone most of the opinions that are represented there, but take a look at the general threads, you have a pro-ukraine one and an anti-ukraine one, both with equal representation. I can't think of any other site that has this. Any other website following the classical formula of pseudonyms and upvotes/downvotes, like Reddit, hackernews, and so on, are destined to be an echo chamber. You can feel it here too, even though HN is heavily moderated. And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse. If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.
- velox_neb 4y ago
  Surely at this point half the content on /pol/ is from professional propagandists and LLM-powered bots, trying to create the impression of a "4chan consensus" to sway anyone stupid enough to be taken in by that.
  - gruez 4y ago
    Why would professional propagandists care to influence a mongolian basket weaving forum? Even if they do succeed, their audience is going to be largely social outcasts with very little power or influence in society.
    - corbulo 4y ago
      Respectfully, meme magic says otherwise
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago

There are people of all political persuasions on 4chan. You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see. No one will ban you.

by carom 4y ago

There are people of all political persuasions on 4chan. You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see. No one will ban you.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

> You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.

carom 4y ago
You can also be a communist. You can also be an open source maximalist. You can also be a gay dog furry. You can also be trans. You can also be extremely autistic. It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  What is it that you feel like you gain from being exposed to white nationalism? Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!
  - carom 4y ago
    Someone might say the same thing about trans people. Should I be extremely uncomfortable talking to a trans person? Of course not. Many people think I should though. As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind. We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      You don't have the opportunity to change their mind that's an illusion that works in their favor: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.
      - carom 4y ago
        >But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them. You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality. How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?
        FormerBandmate 4y ago
        Yeah, a bunch of them are. They’re lunatics
        SpaceManNabs 4y ago
        > How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs? a lot of them. Nazis in dog costumes are an actual population on the board and get into frequent conflicts with non nazi pornographic content consumers. You just need to check out the 18+ boards and you see it almost immediately.
  - throwawayf37jg 4y ago
    And you should be uncomfortable talking to someone who is indifferent about supporting industrialized animal torture that is also destroying the climate, just because animals are "lesser" or "created by God for us to eat". But that's like, whatever, not the reprehensible evil in fashion. Unrelated to this topic, but I don't see a logical way around this. I guess I shouldn't talk to anyone. Almost unironically. Or should disengage from people who push into my boundaries, who would turn me into a worse person. So any white supremacist who keeps trying to "convince" me would be substantially worse than a meat eater who respects my views and doesn't push.
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - account42 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - tptacek 4y ago
      No. You can substitute "Black" for "white", because Black is a specific ethnicity, the one the United States created when it kidnapped millions of people from African and forcibly stripped them of their heritage and culture, and subsequently shared the defining experiences of Black culture, including Jim Crow and forcible segregation, which, along with being crimes against humanity, also helped fuse a distinct cultural identity. Saying "It's OK to be Black" is like saying "It's OK to be Polish" or "It's OK to be Irish", which are things you can absolutely say. Part of the legacy of slavery is that for a large number of Black people, it's difficult to declare an affiliation with their origins in Africa: we took their ethnicity from them in a way nobody took my ancestors Irishness. It's not a privilege Black people get; it's perfectly linguistically coherent.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  It's ok to be a communist, it's ok to use open source software, it's ok to be gay, a furry, trans, or autistic. It's not ok to be a white nationalist. /b/ and other 4chan boards do not ban white nationalists.
  - qtzfz 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    >It's ok to be a communist Only if you ignore the mountain of skulls
  - throw__away7391 4y ago
    No, it is NOT ok to be a communist. Communists and white nationalists are morally equivalent, though communism to date has a much higher body count than white nationalism and their methods of execution and torture have on balance been more savage and more brutal.
    - anthk 4y ago
      We stopped white Nationalisms. If not, Communism's death toll would be a joke in comparison.
      - Amezarak 4y ago
        This post really illustrates the expansion of terms into meaninglessness. One presumes they're referring to the Allies (who themselves would now be considered extremely racist) stopping the Nazis, who allied with the Japanese and were targeting/killing mostly Jewish and Slavic peoples. The Nazis were specifically pro-German/Aryan and whatever they thought that meant ethnically. They did not see things in today's racial terms. It's absurd to describe them as "white nationalists" because they didn't think that being "white" was good. There were a lot of "bad" "white" people in their worldview. It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.
beebmam 4y ago
For what it's worth, you can openly be a white nationalist (or black nationalist, or any other kind of racial nationalist) on most social media, even here on Hacker News. However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated. I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
That's a weird way to frame a truly free speech environment. Yes, speech is more limited to left-leaning speech on most accepted parts of the internet. That doesn't make a board that allows both to be right-leaning. It means that most of the internet is left-leaning. Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.
- wussboy 4y ago
  Many people confuse "free speech is a good" with "free speech is the highest good". > truly free speech environment Sounds awful.
  - vuln 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - wusssubhuman 4y ago
    [dead]
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    You should rest easy tonight, knowing that nobody has any plans to make you go there.
    - wussboy 4y ago
      If only its toxic effects didn't spill over into the real world, corroding hard-won civilized society.
      - vuln 4y ago
        Right without 4chan “spilling over into the “”real”” world” we’d have a utopia with zero hate. /s
      - at_a_remove 4y ago
        If your civilization can be toppled by some weeaboos on a Mongolian basket weaving forum, maybe it wasn't that great to begin with.
shitlord 4y ago
> Yes but you can do this anywhere I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On websites like Facebook or reddit, you're either screaming into the void or preaching to the choir.

enlyth 4y ago

Yeah you can argue that /pol/ sways far right and you'd be correct, and I don't personally condone most of the opinions that are represented there, but take a look at the general threads, you have a pro-ukraine one and an anti-ukraine one, both with equal representation. I can't think of any other site that has this. Any other website following the classical formula of pseudonyms and upvotes/downvotes, like Reddit, hackernews, and so on, are destined to be an echo chamber. You can feel it here too, even though HN is heavily moderated. And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse. If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.

velox_neb 4y ago
Surely at this point half the content on /pol/ is from professional propagandists and LLM-powered bots, trying to create the impression of a "4chan consensus" to sway anyone stupid enough to be taken in by that.
- gruez 4y ago
  Why would professional propagandists care to influence a mongolian basket weaving forum? Even if they do succeed, their audience is going to be largely social outcasts with very little power or influence in society.
  - corbulo 4y ago
    Respectfully, meme magic says otherwise
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
4y ago