9 ms·

The Data of Hate

90 points by _pius 12y ago

line-zero 12y ago
"Why does hate exist?" Good question. I wish we knew so that we could end it.
jqm 12y ago
Why would anyone register for a site like this? Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move? I guess white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated? Or maybe they just don't care. I sometimes picture a secret room at the FBI with poor clerks running around trying to avoid being buried under ever growing lists of suspicious people being spit out of printers with the advent of the internet. With all the druggies, the communist sympathizers, the insurance fraud researching, the radical environmentalists, the anarchists, the bomb curious, the pedo interested, the racial supremacists.... heck, they probably barely have time to watch all the Muslims any more. It was probably a whole lot easier when they only had a few people to keep an eye on.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  You "guess that white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated" but the article explores how that's probably not exactly the case. "[...] Economists Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt found that Ku Klux Klan members were actually better educated than the typical American."
  - jqm 12y ago
    http://www.nber.org/papers/w13417.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w13417.pdf So they were. In the 1920's. Not the people registering on Stormfront. Incidentally... sticking reference to this paper in the article without noting the time period it researched is a bit duplicitous.
- tinco 12y ago
  The article itself says white supremacist beliefs and education level are positively correlated. It's a mistake to think that someone who is intelligent is naturally capable of making good or even ethical decisions. Deriving good decisions from our surroundings is much too complex for our rational thought to be working on constantly. This is why we derive most of our decisions not from careful consideration but from experience, upbringing, instinct and our peers.
  - jqm 12y ago
    Read comment below. A paper showing supremacists in the 1920's were more likely to be educated (not intelligent, educated, which makes sense... the KKK was a prominent social organization in some parts of the country at that time and the locally wealthy and movers and shakers who could afford education belonged.) This doesn't tell us much about the intelligence of supremacists today. I am still guessing supremacists today are less intelligent than average.... because, supremacy is a stupid philosophy. That's my gut feeling. Edit: Response to the below... I guess I should clarify... There are probably a good number of intelligent people who hold racist views. The specific people I'm talking about though are people who would join a supremacist organization or register on stormfront. I believe most of these are probably not particularly intelligent. What you say about feeling that people disagree with you are stupid makes sense. But I maintain most people who overtly hold a supremacist philosophy enough to join a supremacist organization, in this day and age have not carefully considered the issue nor the reality of their situation and are thus probably more emotional, reactionary, and...... less intelligent. I've known people like this and I bet you have too.
    - fennecfoxen 12y ago
      You know, I think there is an instinct to think of people in these sorts of groups not simply as members of a hate-group, but wholly monstrous, and stupid, and things like that. It seems to be comforting to think of them like that, or (as the article also posits) to think of them as inhabiting a different world from that of you and your friends. But it's far more likely that the world is more complicated. Besides which, it's generally problematic (and situationally ironic) to ascribe below-average intelligence to a group you disagree with, no matter how wrong or irrational they may be. :P
- tormeh 12y ago
  Why would they fear the authorities? They're white. Ahahaha ha h... :(
  - jqm 12y ago
    A fair point. There probably are a number of off duty police officers among the membership for that matter. And the same haircut works for both!
- morgante 12y ago
  > Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move? You're being downvoted unfairly. I think this is actually a very legitimate point. In fact, someone in this thread shared links to Stormfront and I refused to visit them out of fear that I'll end up on a list of white supremacists at the FBI.
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    Such lists would be meaningless if they contained anyone who wandered onto the site. I assume they'd have to be more discerning than that (for instance, logging people with an account, or even better, logging people that have an account and post supportive content).
    - morgante 12y ago
      > Such lists would be meaningless if they contained anyone who wandered onto the site. Unfortunately I have no faith in the ability of the government to be discerning in the people it targets as subversive or dangerous. See the terrorist watchlist with over a million names on it.
blendergasket 12y ago
I find it really interesting that at a micro level on forums like this there is the same goodness and kindness to one another. People doing each other favors, people encouraging one another, etc. I mean, I guess it makes sense. People are essentially the same no matter what weird, dark beliefs they hold, but it just always boggles my mind that, out of some fundamental goodness and bond with their fellow human, someone will go out of their way to help someone else find some article or another on why all Jews should be shot or why Anders Breivik was a hero or whathaveyou.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  As it turns out, human beings are generally amazing and wonderful creatures, even when they're members of an unfavored group. (Even when they've selected that group themselves, and the group is unfavored for a damn good reason. Notwithstanding that they're celebrating some very terrible things.) Primates. Go figure. :P
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- msoad 12y ago
  That's very true. They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them. I'm non-White and was in Montana for a while. At first interaction it was obvious some people didn't even like talking to me but when I was breaking the ice and forcing some conversation they were very good people. Even interested in learning about my background.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    > They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them. From the article: > The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience [whites] that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live. The more nonwhites they know, the more likely they are to go to stormfront. They say ignorance is bliss.
danso 12y ago
Love the closing line. That said, I have to be skeptical about this assertion: > The states with the most members per capita are Montana, Alaska and Idaho. These states tend to be overwhelmingly white. Does this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate?...Probably not. Since those states have a higher proportion of non-Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a group that attacks Jews and nonwhites. > > The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live....Among this age group, California, a state with one of the largest minority populations, has a membership rate 25 percent higher than the national average. California is a HUGE state. Just because it's diverse overall doesn't mean that there aren't certain pockets that are very non-diverse...and being close to "The Others", while not mingling with them, may even exacerbate the tendency towards bigotry. I don't think people in New York are naturally more tolerant in some genetic sense...if you're someone with a preoccupying hatred of a certain race or group, your biological stress levels will go haywire, as on any given subway ride, you can pretty much expect to be sitting or standing next to someone of that group. Chances are, you just get over it, especially if your workplace and neighborhood are equally diverse. And if you don't get over it, chances are the city life won't be for you. It's often not so much a conscious choice to be tolerant versus intolerant...if something "scares" you at first, but you see it every day, and most days, your interactions are benign or even net positive, your body/mind is going to logically reason, "Meh, these people aren't bad at all". And if you have a certain fear implanted in you, and never get a chance to confront it on an every day basis? What kind of logical process, absent first-hand, everyday experience, would reverse that fear?
- IvarTJ 12y ago
  Your thoughts match up with Anders Breivik living in a part of Oslo, a city with a large portion of early-generation immigrants from non-western areas, which was predominantly white. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_End_and_West_End_of_Oslo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_End_and_West_End_of_Oslo
  - gwern 12y ago
tinco 12y ago
A shame he didn't go deeper. The analysis here is very superficial, basically consisting of him browsing the forum for a while and doing some number crunching on profile data. A bit disappointing for a NYT article, even if it is just on their website. It would have been much nicer if he did a proper data analysis of forum posts. If we've ruled out social economic class and education, what big factor remains? I suppose it would be friends and family. Perhaps a linguistic analysis could reveal how connected these people are to each other. Perhaps some psychological analysis could reveal something about their personalities other than "a perfectly nice and intelligent young woman". If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it. From my experience, people who post on forums are just the tip of the iceberg of the people who share their opinions and beliefs. For every person who voices an opinion there could be hundreds who share it. Perhaps you could use the linguistic analysis to track their beliefs to key influencers.
- sethsd 12y ago
  Hey, thanks for comment. I'm a bit skeptical of the whole linguistic analysis thing, for various reasons. But I could be convinced otherwise (Also this would bias the analysis away from people who just register and lurk) ... Another thing I looked at was Facebook profiles. But this part was cut due to space. Here's what I found: Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs? Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends. Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too. - Seth
  - henrymercer 12y ago
    "Why do some people feel this way?...And I can honestly offer the following answer: I have no idea." Do you actually not know? Or are you asking rhetorically? The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, not sure why they would be hard to figure out.
hawkharris 12y ago
Hate speech can be a good thing. When someone verbalizes hatred, he or she gives us a chance to push back and question underlying prejudices. This is always better than a heckler's veto of racist or sexist ideas. Drowning out the hurtful speech doesn't address the root causes of ignorance, fear and anger.
- cpa 12y ago
  Although I think you're right, that is definitely not what's happening on Stormfront. There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together.
  - blendergasket 12y ago
    Yeah, I agree with this. On the internet it's so easy to get sucked into an echo chamber and completely cloister oneself in some belief system or another. Then every other perspective is the foolish mainstream media who are only there to feed the sheeple or some agenda of the enemy. I think these echo chambers breed/cater to a sort of messianic paranoia.
    - ryandrake 12y ago
      "On the internet it's so easy to get sucked into an echo chamber and completely cloister oneself in some belief system or another." This being posted on Hacker News is pretty breathtaking :-)
  - bootload 12y ago
    > There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together. Not quite, "... Two weeks ago, the boneheads thought they’d got their man. For a decade, the pseudonym “Andy Fleming” has been troubling Australia’s far right and neo-Nazis – “boneheads” to their opponents – by writing about them. His blog Slack Bastard carries the work of a man who has acquired enormous amounts of intelligence, so much so that it rivals police knowledge. ..." [0] [0] 'Hunting Australia’s neo-Nazis' Martin McKenzie-Murray ~ http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/society/2014/04/05/hunting-australia%E2%80%99s-neo-nazis/1396616400 http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/society/2014/04/05/h...
bhaumik 12y ago
Discussion around this article: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1051922/ https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1051922/ Germany's win today: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1052081/ https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1052081/ "Yes. I like Argentina also because they're mostly white, and they sheltered the heroes of our race after the Zionist take-over of Europe. But I was for Germany all the way. I loved how they utterly crushed Brazil in their own house. I don't like that they have to have an African on their team and it's obvious he is there because of affirmative action.. I also don't like how the German team had to hug Merkel and her Zionist lackeys but regardless, I'm happy for the German victory especially right in the house of one of the biggest mongrel countries in the world aka Brazil. It is left unsaid, but it almost feels like a big white hand slapping the face of every white-hating zionist and mongrel out there."
- hiddentao 12y ago
  And in looking through the discussion around this article (see link in parent) they seem to view separation of ethnicities (into homogenous countries) as the solution to their problems.
  - blendergasket 12y ago
    Yeah. That's interesting. I guess their ancestors shouldn't've formed empires. I imagine it'd be sort of hard to keep a racially separated empire.
  - DonGateley 12y ago
    Interesting. That was precisely Stalin's solution to minimizing threats to his order throughout the Soviet empire and like it or not he was nothing if not rational. (Except, of course, for his assessment of Hitler's ambitions.)
- middleclick 12y ago
  So much hate, wow. How do these people manage to live their lives with all this hate? I am guessing it would be very heavy?
noname123 12y ago
I'm glad an "Internet Developer [in] Jew York City" is one example that the author picked to profile. I personally believe that the current "sensitivity training" and "diversity-based" US K-12/college education based on African American literature, history classes on MLK and slavery is misdirected. Instead I propose a curriculum where we teach our children the dark side of humanity and allow both white, blacks and asians express our racial and other prejudices openly and honestly. Then to encourage and train everyone to come up with a plan of their own to overcome whatever perceived prejudices in athletics, academics or artistic outlets offered in schools. Instead of suppressing the human nature to discriminate and giving people a sense of their own agency to either confront their bullies, or to subvert the majority power or to overcome in a round-bout way the limitations imposed on them, we allow people to feel entitled to an abstract idea of "fairness" and "justice" which never existed in American society. And we end up with one hand, "diversity HR Managers," "social justice campaigners" who resort to the ideals of civil rights to rally people, but are actually oppressing people by feeding them a false sense of moral superiority. On the other hand, the "banally evil" professionals who pay lip service to "go along with it" but actually just operates business as usual. Instead of acting "shocked" and "indignant" every time about racism, we should openly acknowledge it in ourselves and concede that it'll never go away. I believe ironically, the benefit of not suppressing that speech and shaming sites such as Stormfront will help the discriminated people to find power in themselves to overcome than the other way around ("white lady" going into the hood for Teach for America to rescue all the poor inner city kids).
incision 12y ago
The maps alone [1] seems to sum up so much of my experience with prejudice over the years. I grew up in and around and still live near DC which is near/at the bottom of the scale here. First, it wasn't until I found my way onto the Internet regularly and into online games in particular in the second half of the 90s that I witnessed hate for Jews outside of history lessons. Suddenly, mixing in real-time with a not terribly diverse crowd from all the country the very word 'Jew' was an insult and heard regularly. Next, in the early 2000s as my career got underway I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country. At the time, the staff in our group was better than half black with middle management comprised of a black man, hispanic man and an orthodox Jew. We had several people come who were particularly about who they were willing to take direction from and at least one who was sent packing mid-project for his very strong opinions on ethnicity. Finally, as we move through tourist season in DC I've already had my summer dose of tourists talking about how 'wasting money educating negros is killing the country' and Obama's birth certificate. I guess I should be very glad to have been born into such a melting pot. 1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/13/sunday-review/white-bigoted-and-young.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/13/sunday-review/...
- blendergasket 12y ago
  This map reminds me just how split the state I live in, Washington, is. Living in Seattle it's hard to imagine we come in at the second highest category.
- Stratoscope 12y ago
  > ...I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country. As someone who grew up in a cheaper part of the country, I was tempted to be offended by that comment (and particularly by the subsequent suggestion that people from cheaper parts of the country were more likely to be prejudiced). I felt like you were pre-judging me based on where I was born - something I had as little control over as the color of my skin or my religious and cultural background. But then I realized you're probably not always aware of your own prejudices, any more than I am. So no worries, we are all still learning how to get along and respect each other.
jqm 12y ago
I think the eventual solution to racism will be love. OK, maybe not love, but at least lust. We tend to take a very narrow time view of a few hundred years. However I can't but imagine in the US in two or three hundred years it will become increasingly harder to tell races apart. Look at countries like Brazil. Look at the amount of interracial marriage going on right now in the US as opposed to 50 years ago. That I suspect is the future and I don't know how racism survives it.
- lmz 12y ago
  > However I can't but imagine in the US in two or three hundred years it will become increasingly harder to tell races apart. So instead of various diverse races you prefer a single mass of people with no distinct race?
  - thesteamboat 12y ago
    That's more or less what I already believe -- that is I already agree with the statement "race is primarily a social construct". Of course some sub-populations have different genetic factors which may have some handwavey amount of effects, but I'd argue that 1) having multiple distinct "races" is primarily caused by group dynamics among humans rather than genetic variation, and 2) these constructs are generally harmful and we'd be better off not having them.
  - jqm 12y ago
    I don't have a preference. Just stating what will almost certainly happen. It's happened all throughout history before. In fact, I'm guessing most members of stormfront might be a bit surprised if they had a DNA test done. We are all product of generations of rape and pillage and countless secret affairs behind tents. But now we can move about faster and communicate better.
  - wyager 12y ago
    >So instead of various diverse races you prefer a single mass of people with no distinct race? I personally wouldn't mind. Society gains nothing from distinct physical characteristics, except the ability to visually identify individuals.
QuantumChaos 12y ago
Even though they take their views to ridiculous extremes, sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews. Exactly the same people and groups who claim that White people desiring to live among other White people is stupid and immoral, also believe that Israel being a Jewish nation is non-negotiable. Only the far-left (e.g. Norman Finkelstein and Chomsky in some moments) are consistent in criticizing Jewish identity and White identity in the same terms. The mainstream claim that these two concepts are completely distinct and incomparable, and yet there is no obvious difference. The only way that this discrepancy can be seen as something other than hypocrisy, is if either (1) Jewish identity is entirely defensive, i.e. a reaction to prejudice from the society in which Jews happen to live, or (2) Jewishness is an entirely separate category, incomparable to race or ethnicity (I don't include religion because I don't think that the concept of Jewish identity solely as a religious identity stands up to scrutiny). In response to (1), I don't see this as the full picture as Jewishness is allowed to be celebrated in its own right. The idea that Israel should be Jewish merely for the physical protection of Jews, rather than the protection of Jewish identity, is not consistent with how Israelis or their liberal supporters describe Israel. In response to (2), the only way that Jewishness can be rendered incomparable to Whiteness, is to accept that the most extreme views against Whites are true. Namely that (unlike every other cultural or ethnic identity), Whiteness is an identity of racial supremacism and oppresion. Some people (again, on the far left) truly believe this. But I find it a ridiculous assertion, and most people simply are too brow-beaten to dig this deep in to anti-racist discourse.
- morgante 12y ago
  > sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews. No, they don't. Don't legitimize their nonsense. Also, Israel is not meant to be solely Jewish. It's just majority Jewish, just like other nations are majority Christian/white. That's a security measure, not an expression that Jews are inherently superior to other races—most Jews I know (including Israelis) support the inclusion of other people in their communities. Please don't bring Stormfront to HN.
  - QuantumChaos 12y ago
protonfish 12y ago
I don't like how the word "hate" has been co-opted to mean "racist." I hate caraway seeds and bullies and I believe my feelings are justified. (Seriously, why put rock-hard seeds that taste like turpentine into food?) Somebody could be racist without feeling hatred at all. In fact, it is these cold-hearted sociopaths that disturb me the most. Hatred can be a proper, constructive reaction to cruelty and corruption. Don't let racists take that away from us and don't let them hide their true agenda with a normal human emotion.
tokenadult 12y ago
The kind of people who hang out on the Stormfront website are the kind of people who cram all kinds of point-of-view pushing into articles on Wikipedia, "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." Basically, you would be wise to assume that any article on Wikipedia that pertains to any topic related to "race" (broadly construed) or immigration or the history of Fascist or neo-Nazi movements is skewed at present toward the Stormfront point of view,[1] although of course there are Wikipedians who are trying to clean up that mess.[2] People who gain their "knowledge" of the world from websites like Stormfront seem to end up like the unfortunate victims of early lobotomies performed by inserting icepicks into their skulls: permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position. I can only hope that such a toxic website will diminish in influence as people who know better about those issues take care to promote understanding those issues better early and often among all the young people coming up in the next generation. AFTER EDIT: I guess I would learn something if I asked why this was downvoted, not seeing any comment in reply here. I'll note for the record that some of the arguments given in this very thread for why it is a "valid critique" or "human nature to discriminate" as part of thinking about the issues Stormfront brings up get into our HN community from developers and other smart people who haven't studied history or social science much getting their knowledge of these topics from Wikipedia articles that have been subtly corrupted by Stormfront-supporting Wikipedians. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropo...
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  I didn't downvote you. Point of view pushing is inescapable. permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position This is the normal state of affairs. Most intellectually curious people never break out of the first paradigm they are exposed to. Most people never get that far because they're not intellectually curious. At some point you have to trust somebody or something because it fits with what you know of the world, and makes sense. It's a pity some people stop with stormfront but they'll never have any political influence so I'm not too worried. I have to say that coming from you I find this amusing. Anytime you and yummyfajitas have a discussion you not so subtly accuse him of being a racist and pretend you've addressed his points by dumping a list of references on the thread. By the way saying it's "human nature to discriminate" is completely defensible. You may disagree with the connotations, but any introductory social psychology textbook will do. You must know that too, because you're part of that journal reading group at your local university, right?
cookiecaper 12y ago
I've flagged this article because it's not really apropos to HN, but we'll never have a truly sympathetic or constructive discussion with others when we openly editorialize their beliefs as "bigotry" or "hatred". Even if they are wrong, framing the discussion in these terms just ensures that no constructive or beneficial dialogue can occur between the parties. Any time you see words like this used, especially in the abundance used in this article, you should understand that there are likely rhetorical and political forces at work intent on discounting the other side (i.e., this is the language of propaganda, not true journalism). I do have a question in that vein, if anyone is still reading these comments. At what point does a group cross the rubicon such that it's an acceptable implementation of journalistic ethics to slap these kinds of labels on their fundamental beliefs and statements? Isn't journalism supposed to convey events and groups in a neutral context, without favoring one side or the other? I understand almost no organizations like that exist anymore, but hypothetically speaking, I guess. Where is the line of demarcation between a group that still deserves a fair airing of beliefs and the respect of journalistic ethics and a group that doesn't? Newspapers obviously do not have an obligation to publish rants by any and every madman who comes along, but once they start to gather a significantly-sized following, isn't there a duty to archive and catalog the events in a neutral manner, for the accuracy of the historical record if nothing else? Isn't that what journalism is supposed to be about? I'm just curious how this works and is considered within the industry. I'll be honest, from a distance, it seems that the new journalistic ethics are "If it supports your boss's beliefs, run with it and make it positive; if it tears down your boss's opponents, run with it and make it as damning as possible".

90 points by _pius 12y ago

"Why does hate exist?" Good question. I wish we knew so that we could end it.

jqm 12y ago

Why would anyone register for a site like this? Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move? I guess white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated? Or maybe they just don't care. I sometimes picture a secret room at the FBI with poor clerks running around trying to avoid being buried under ever growing lists of suspicious people being spit out of printers with the advent of the internet. With all the druggies, the communist sympathizers, the insurance fraud researching, the radical environmentalists, the anarchists, the bomb curious, the pedo interested, the racial supremacists.... heck, they probably barely have time to watch all the Muslims any more. It was probably a whole lot easier when they only had a few people to keep an eye on.

fennecfoxen 12y ago
You "guess that white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated" but the article explores how that's probably not exactly the case. "[...] Economists Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt found that Ku Klux Klan members were actually better educated than the typical American."
- jqm 12y ago
  http://www.nber.org/papers/w13417.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w13417.pdf So they were. In the 1920's. Not the people registering on Stormfront. Incidentally... sticking reference to this paper in the article without noting the time period it researched is a bit duplicitous.
tinco 12y ago
The article itself says white supremacist beliefs and education level are positively correlated. It's a mistake to think that someone who is intelligent is naturally capable of making good or even ethical decisions. Deriving good decisions from our surroundings is much too complex for our rational thought to be working on constantly. This is why we derive most of our decisions not from careful consideration but from experience, upbringing, instinct and our peers.
- jqm 12y ago
  Read comment below. A paper showing supremacists in the 1920's were more likely to be educated (not intelligent, educated, which makes sense... the KKK was a prominent social organization in some parts of the country at that time and the locally wealthy and movers and shakers who could afford education belonged.) This doesn't tell us much about the intelligence of supremacists today. I am still guessing supremacists today are less intelligent than average.... because, supremacy is a stupid philosophy. That's my gut feeling. Edit: Response to the below... I guess I should clarify... There are probably a good number of intelligent people who hold racist views. The specific people I'm talking about though are people who would join a supremacist organization or register on stormfront. I believe most of these are probably not particularly intelligent. What you say about feeling that people disagree with you are stupid makes sense. But I maintain most people who overtly hold a supremacist philosophy enough to join a supremacist organization, in this day and age have not carefully considered the issue nor the reality of their situation and are thus probably more emotional, reactionary, and...... less intelligent. I've known people like this and I bet you have too.
  - fennecfoxen 12y ago
    You know, I think there is an instinct to think of people in these sorts of groups not simply as members of a hate-group, but wholly monstrous, and stupid, and things like that. It seems to be comforting to think of them like that, or (as the article also posits) to think of them as inhabiting a different world from that of you and your friends. But it's far more likely that the world is more complicated. Besides which, it's generally problematic (and situationally ironic) to ascribe below-average intelligence to a group you disagree with, no matter how wrong or irrational they may be. :P
tormeh 12y ago
Why would they fear the authorities? They're white. Ahahaha ha h... :(
- jqm 12y ago
  A fair point. There probably are a number of off duty police officers among the membership for that matter. And the same haircut works for both!
morgante 12y ago
> Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move? You're being downvoted unfairly. I think this is actually a very legitimate point. In fact, someone in this thread shared links to Stormfront and I refused to visit them out of fear that I'll end up on a list of white supremacists at the FBI.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Such lists would be meaningless if they contained anyone who wandered onto the site. I assume they'd have to be more discerning than that (for instance, logging people with an account, or even better, logging people that have an account and post supportive content).
  - morgante 12y ago
    > Such lists would be meaningless if they contained anyone who wandered onto the site. Unfortunately I have no faith in the ability of the government to be discerning in the people it targets as subversive or dangerous. See the terrorist watchlist with over a million names on it.

blendergasket 12y ago

I find it really interesting that at a micro level on forums like this there is the same goodness and kindness to one another. People doing each other favors, people encouraging one another, etc. I mean, I guess it makes sense. People are essentially the same no matter what weird, dark beliefs they hold, but it just always boggles my mind that, out of some fundamental goodness and bond with their fellow human, someone will go out of their way to help someone else find some article or another on why all Jews should be shot or why Anders Breivik was a hero or whathaveyou.

fennecfoxen 12y ago
As it turns out, human beings are generally amazing and wonderful creatures, even when they're members of an unfavored group. (Even when they've selected that group themselves, and the group is unfavored for a damn good reason. Notwithstanding that they're celebrating some very terrible things.) Primates. Go figure. :P
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
msoad 12y ago
That's very true. They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them. I'm non-White and was in Montana for a while. At first interaction it was obvious some people didn't even like talking to me but when I was breaking the ice and forcing some conversation they were very good people. Even interested in learning about my background.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them. From the article: > The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience [whites] that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live. The more nonwhites they know, the more likely they are to go to stormfront. They say ignorance is bliss.

danso 12y ago

Love the closing line. That said, I have to be skeptical about this assertion: > The states with the most members per capita are Montana, Alaska and Idaho. These states tend to be overwhelmingly white. Does this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate?...Probably not. Since those states have a higher proportion of non-Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a group that attacks Jews and nonwhites. > > The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live....Among this age group, California, a state with one of the largest minority populations, has a membership rate 25 percent higher than the national average. California is a HUGE state. Just because it's diverse overall doesn't mean that there aren't certain pockets that are very non-diverse...and being close to "The Others", while not mingling with them, may even exacerbate the tendency towards bigotry. I don't think people in New York are naturally more tolerant in some genetic sense...if you're someone with a preoccupying hatred of a certain race or group, your biological stress levels will go haywire, as on any given subway ride, you can pretty much expect to be sitting or standing next to someone of that group. Chances are, you just get over it, especially if your workplace and neighborhood are equally diverse. And if you don't get over it, chances are the city life won't be for you. It's often not so much a conscious choice to be tolerant versus intolerant...if something "scares" you at first, but you see it every day, and most days, your interactions are benign or even net positive, your body/mind is going to logically reason, "Meh, these people aren't bad at all". And if you have a certain fear implanted in you, and never get a chance to confront it on an every day basis? What kind of logical process, absent first-hand, everyday experience, would reverse that fear?

IvarTJ 12y ago
Your thoughts match up with Anders Breivik living in a part of Oslo, a city with a large portion of early-generation immigrants from non-western areas, which was predominantly white. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_End_and_West_End_of_Oslo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_End_and_West_End_of_Oslo
- gwern 12y ago

tinco 12y ago

A shame he didn't go deeper. The analysis here is very superficial, basically consisting of him browsing the forum for a while and doing some number crunching on profile data. A bit disappointing for a NYT article, even if it is just on their website. It would have been much nicer if he did a proper data analysis of forum posts. If we've ruled out social economic class and education, what big factor remains? I suppose it would be friends and family. Perhaps a linguistic analysis could reveal how connected these people are to each other. Perhaps some psychological analysis could reveal something about their personalities other than "a perfectly nice and intelligent young woman". If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it. From my experience, people who post on forums are just the tip of the iceberg of the people who share their opinions and beliefs. For every person who voices an opinion there could be hundreds who share it. Perhaps you could use the linguistic analysis to track their beliefs to key influencers.

sethsd 12y ago
Hey, thanks for comment. I'm a bit skeptical of the whole linguistic analysis thing, for various reasons. But I could be convinced otherwise (Also this would bias the analysis away from people who just register and lurk) ... Another thing I looked at was Facebook profiles. But this part was cut due to space. Here's what I found: Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs? Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends. Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too. - Seth
- henrymercer 12y ago
  "Why do some people feel this way?...And I can honestly offer the following answer: I have no idea." Do you actually not know? Or are you asking rhetorically? The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, not sure why they would be hard to figure out.

hawkharris 12y ago

Hate speech can be a good thing. When someone verbalizes hatred, he or she gives us a chance to push back and question underlying prejudices. This is always better than a heckler's veto of racist or sexist ideas. Drowning out the hurtful speech doesn't address the root causes of ignorance, fear and anger.

cpa 12y ago
Although I think you're right, that is definitely not what's happening on Stormfront. There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together.
- blendergasket 12y ago
  Yeah, I agree with this. On the internet it's so easy to get sucked into an echo chamber and completely cloister oneself in some belief system or another. Then every other perspective is the foolish mainstream media who are only there to feed the sheeple or some agenda of the enemy. I think these echo chambers breed/cater to a sort of messianic paranoia.
  - ryandrake 12y ago
    "On the internet it's so easy to get sucked into an echo chamber and completely cloister oneself in some belief system or another." This being posted on Hacker News is pretty breathtaking :-)
- bootload 12y ago
  > There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together. Not quite, "... Two weeks ago, the boneheads thought they’d got their man. For a decade, the pseudonym “Andy Fleming” has been troubling Australia’s far right and neo-Nazis – “boneheads” to their opponents – by writing about them. His blog Slack Bastard carries the work of a man who has acquired enormous amounts of intelligence, so much so that it rivals police knowledge. ..." [0] [0] 'Hunting Australia’s neo-Nazis' Martin McKenzie-Murray ~ http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/society/2014/04/05/hunting-australia%E2%80%99s-neo-nazis/1396616400 http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/society/2014/04/05/h...

bhaumik 12y ago

Discussion around this article: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1051922/ https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1051922/ Germany's win today: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1052081/ https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1052081/ "Yes. I like Argentina also because they're mostly white, and they sheltered the heroes of our race after the Zionist take-over of Europe. But I was for Germany all the way. I loved how they utterly crushed Brazil in their own house. I don't like that they have to have an African on their team and it's obvious he is there because of affirmative action.. I also don't like how the German team had to hug Merkel and her Zionist lackeys but regardless, I'm happy for the German victory especially right in the house of one of the biggest mongrel countries in the world aka Brazil. It is left unsaid, but it almost feels like a big white hand slapping the face of every white-hating zionist and mongrel out there."

hiddentao 12y ago
And in looking through the discussion around this article (see link in parent) they seem to view separation of ethnicities (into homogenous countries) as the solution to their problems.
- blendergasket 12y ago
  Yeah. That's interesting. I guess their ancestors shouldn't've formed empires. I imagine it'd be sort of hard to keep a racially separated empire.
- DonGateley 12y ago
  Interesting. That was precisely Stalin's solution to minimizing threats to his order throughout the Soviet empire and like it or not he was nothing if not rational. (Except, of course, for his assessment of Hitler's ambitions.)
middleclick 12y ago
So much hate, wow. How do these people manage to live their lives with all this hate? I am guessing it would be very heavy?

noname123 12y ago

I'm glad an "Internet Developer [in] Jew York City" is one example that the author picked to profile. I personally believe that the current "sensitivity training" and "diversity-based" US K-12/college education based on African American literature, history classes on MLK and slavery is misdirected. Instead I propose a curriculum where we teach our children the dark side of humanity and allow both white, blacks and asians express our racial and other prejudices openly and honestly. Then to encourage and train everyone to come up with a plan of their own to overcome whatever perceived prejudices in athletics, academics or artistic outlets offered in schools. Instead of suppressing the human nature to discriminate and giving people a sense of their own agency to either confront their bullies, or to subvert the majority power or to overcome in a round-bout way the limitations imposed on them, we allow people to feel entitled to an abstract idea of "fairness" and "justice" which never existed in American society. And we end up with one hand, "diversity HR Managers," "social justice campaigners" who resort to the ideals of civil rights to rally people, but are actually oppressing people by feeding them a false sense of moral superiority. On the other hand, the "banally evil" professionals who pay lip service to "go along with it" but actually just operates business as usual. Instead of acting "shocked" and "indignant" every time about racism, we should openly acknowledge it in ourselves and concede that it'll never go away. I believe ironically, the benefit of not suppressing that speech and shaming sites such as Stormfront will help the discriminated people to find power in themselves to overcome than the other way around ("white lady" going into the hood for Teach for America to rescue all the poor inner city kids).

incision 12y ago

The maps alone [1] seems to sum up so much of my experience with prejudice over the years. I grew up in and around and still live near DC which is near/at the bottom of the scale here. First, it wasn't until I found my way onto the Internet regularly and into online games in particular in the second half of the 90s that I witnessed hate for Jews outside of history lessons. Suddenly, mixing in real-time with a not terribly diverse crowd from all the country the very word 'Jew' was an insult and heard regularly. Next, in the early 2000s as my career got underway I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country. At the time, the staff in our group was better than half black with middle management comprised of a black man, hispanic man and an orthodox Jew. We had several people come who were particularly about who they were willing to take direction from and at least one who was sent packing mid-project for his very strong opinions on ethnicity. Finally, as we move through tourist season in DC I've already had my summer dose of tourists talking about how 'wasting money educating negros is killing the country' and Obama's birth certificate. I guess I should be very glad to have been born into such a melting pot. 1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/13/sunday-review/white-bigoted-and-young.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/13/sunday-review/...

blendergasket 12y ago
This map reminds me just how split the state I live in, Washington, is. Living in Seattle it's hard to imagine we come in at the second highest category.
Stratoscope 12y ago
> ...I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country. As someone who grew up in a cheaper part of the country, I was tempted to be offended by that comment (and particularly by the subsequent suggestion that people from cheaper parts of the country were more likely to be prejudiced). I felt like you were pre-judging me based on where I was born - something I had as little control over as the color of my skin or my religious and cultural background. But then I realized you're probably not always aware of your own prejudices, any more than I am. So no worries, we are all still learning how to get along and respect each other.

jqm 12y ago

I think the eventual solution to racism will be love. OK, maybe not love, but at least lust. We tend to take a very narrow time view of a few hundred years. However I can't but imagine in the US in two or three hundred years it will become increasingly harder to tell races apart. Look at countries like Brazil. Look at the amount of interracial marriage going on right now in the US as opposed to 50 years ago. That I suspect is the future and I don't know how racism survives it.

lmz 12y ago
> However I can't but imagine in the US in two or three hundred years it will become increasingly harder to tell races apart. So instead of various diverse races you prefer a single mass of people with no distinct race?
- thesteamboat 12y ago
  That's more or less what I already believe -- that is I already agree with the statement "race is primarily a social construct". Of course some sub-populations have different genetic factors which may have some handwavey amount of effects, but I'd argue that 1) having multiple distinct "races" is primarily caused by group dynamics among humans rather than genetic variation, and 2) these constructs are generally harmful and we'd be better off not having them.
- jqm 12y ago
  I don't have a preference. Just stating what will almost certainly happen. It's happened all throughout history before. In fact, I'm guessing most members of stormfront might be a bit surprised if they had a DNA test done. We are all product of generations of rape and pillage and countless secret affairs behind tents. But now we can move about faster and communicate better.
- wyager 12y ago
  >So instead of various diverse races you prefer a single mass of people with no distinct race? I personally wouldn't mind. Society gains nothing from distinct physical characteristics, except the ability to visually identify individuals.

QuantumChaos 12y ago

Even though they take their views to ridiculous extremes, sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews. Exactly the same people and groups who claim that White people desiring to live among other White people is stupid and immoral, also believe that Israel being a Jewish nation is non-negotiable. Only the far-left (e.g. Norman Finkelstein and Chomsky in some moments) are consistent in criticizing Jewish identity and White identity in the same terms. The mainstream claim that these two concepts are completely distinct and incomparable, and yet there is no obvious difference. The only way that this discrepancy can be seen as something other than hypocrisy, is if either (1) Jewish identity is entirely defensive, i.e. a reaction to prejudice from the society in which Jews happen to live, or (2) Jewishness is an entirely separate category, incomparable to race or ethnicity (I don't include religion because I don't think that the concept of Jewish identity solely as a religious identity stands up to scrutiny). In response to (1), I don't see this as the full picture as Jewishness is allowed to be celebrated in its own right. The idea that Israel should be Jewish merely for the physical protection of Jews, rather than the protection of Jewish identity, is not consistent with how Israelis or their liberal supporters describe Israel. In response to (2), the only way that Jewishness can be rendered incomparable to Whiteness, is to accept that the most extreme views against Whites are true. Namely that (unlike every other cultural or ethnic identity), Whiteness is an identity of racial supremacism and oppresion. Some people (again, on the far left) truly believe this. But I find it a ridiculous assertion, and most people simply are too brow-beaten to dig this deep in to anti-racist discourse.

morgante 12y ago
> sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews. No, they don't. Don't legitimize their nonsense. Also, Israel is not meant to be solely Jewish. It's just majority Jewish, just like other nations are majority Christian/white. That's a security measure, not an expression that Jews are inherently superior to other races—most Jews I know (including Israelis) support the inclusion of other people in their communities. Please don't bring Stormfront to HN.
- QuantumChaos 12y ago

protonfish 12y ago

I don't like how the word "hate" has been co-opted to mean "racist." I hate caraway seeds and bullies and I believe my feelings are justified. (Seriously, why put rock-hard seeds that taste like turpentine into food?) Somebody could be racist without feeling hatred at all. In fact, it is these cold-hearted sociopaths that disturb me the most. Hatred can be a proper, constructive reaction to cruelty and corruption. Don't let racists take that away from us and don't let them hide their true agenda with a normal human emotion.

tokenadult 12y ago

The kind of people who hang out on the Stormfront website are the kind of people who cram all kinds of point-of-view pushing into articles on Wikipedia, "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." Basically, you would be wise to assume that any article on Wikipedia that pertains to any topic related to "race" (broadly construed) or immigration or the history of Fascist or neo-Nazi movements is skewed at present toward the Stormfront point of view,[1] although of course there are Wikipedians who are trying to clean up that mess.[2] People who gain their "knowledge" of the world from websites like Stormfront seem to end up like the unfortunate victims of early lobotomies performed by inserting icepicks into their skulls: permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position. I can only hope that such a toxic website will diminish in influence as people who know better about those issues take care to promote understanding those issues better early and often among all the young people coming up in the next generation. AFTER EDIT: I guess I would learn something if I asked why this was downvoted, not seeing any comment in reply here. I'll note for the record that some of the arguments given in this very thread for why it is a "valid critique" or "human nature to discriminate" as part of thinking about the issues Stormfront brings up get into our HN community from developers and other smart people who haven't studied history or social science much getting their knowledge of these topics from Wikipedia articles that have been subtly corrupted by Stormfront-supporting Wikipedians. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropo...

barry-cotter 12y ago
I didn't downvote you. Point of view pushing is inescapable. permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position This is the normal state of affairs. Most intellectually curious people never break out of the first paradigm they are exposed to. Most people never get that far because they're not intellectually curious. At some point you have to trust somebody or something because it fits with what you know of the world, and makes sense. It's a pity some people stop with stormfront but they'll never have any political influence so I'm not too worried. I have to say that coming from you I find this amusing. Anytime you and yummyfajitas have a discussion you not so subtly accuse him of being a racist and pretend you've addressed his points by dumping a list of references on the thread. By the way saying it's "human nature to discriminate" is completely defensible. You may disagree with the connotations, but any introductory social psychology textbook will do. You must know that too, because you're part of that journal reading group at your local university, right?

cookiecaper 12y ago

I've flagged this article because it's not really apropos to HN, but we'll never have a truly sympathetic or constructive discussion with others when we openly editorialize their beliefs as "bigotry" or "hatred". Even if they are wrong, framing the discussion in these terms just ensures that no constructive or beneficial dialogue can occur between the parties. Any time you see words like this used, especially in the abundance used in this article, you should understand that there are likely rhetorical and political forces at work intent on discounting the other side (i.e., this is the language of propaganda, not true journalism). I do have a question in that vein, if anyone is still reading these comments. At what point does a group cross the rubicon such that it's an acceptable implementation of journalistic ethics to slap these kinds of labels on their fundamental beliefs and statements? Isn't journalism supposed to convey events and groups in a neutral context, without favoring one side or the other? I understand almost no organizations like that exist anymore, but hypothetically speaking, I guess. Where is the line of demarcation between a group that still deserves a fair airing of beliefs and the respect of journalistic ethics and a group that doesn't? Newspapers obviously do not have an obligation to publish rants by any and every madman who comes along, but once they start to gather a significantly-sized following, isn't there a duty to archive and catalog the events in a neutral manner, for the accuracy of the historical record if nothing else? Isn't that what journalism is supposed to be about? I'm just curious how this works and is considered within the industry. I'll be honest, from a distance, it seems that the new journalistic ethics are "If it supports your boss's beliefs, run with it and make it positive; if it tears down your boss's opponents, run with it and make it as damning as possible".