US Politics Thread 2021-24

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

Frankly I really don’t think anyone was whipping people. But it is funny to hear the Democrat rhetoric of doing away with Trump border policy to get elected. Only to reinstate it after things get out of control.

I know what makes my FB-friends going around. When former President did or said something you could bet these friends would post a bulletin on the wall.
I also know they would go berserk if this had happened during Trump term.
Now there's nothing but silence.....

Markus

[Arlo]

The internet forms an important component of ideological radicalization, as it provides a platform for like-minded individuals to communicate in virtual communities like the ‘Chanosphere,’ which in turn allows for extremist groups to develop safe havens of communication and information exchange. Using the case study of a cluster of alt-right terrorist attacks initiated by the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019, this analysis will demonstrate that alt-right memes played a central role in radicalization, in that they acted as vessels of encoded racist ideology which used ‘weaponized irony’ as a means of communicating group identity.

At the outset of this article, it is necessary to consider Gill et al’s assertion that it is difficult to tell where the internet stops as ‘there is no clear dichotomy between online and offline radicalization’. For instance, the impact of memetic visual culture on alt-right radicalization inevitably does not take place in a vacuum and is intertwined with other elements. For the purposes of this analysis, radicalization can be loosely defined as ‘the process of developing extremist ideologies and beliefs which may or may not result in a terrorist attack.

An important part of this radicalization process is the ‘sense of belonging’ that alt-right adherents find online. Bogertz and Fielitz explain that many recent extreme-right terrorists have not been members of political organizations or militias, but participants in ‘digital hate communities’ that have used specialized visual language to communicate ideas. This language often takes the form of memes, which can be defined as ‘cultural units of meaning that develop and spread virally by copying or combining with other units’. Memes can be any easily disseminated textual, visual or auditory item(s) that act as a holder of cultural meaning for an audience.

Key online platforms used for sharing alt-right ideas and memes are ‘Chans’ (e.g. 4Chan, 8Chan, Endchan, Neinchan, among others], anonymous online imageboards frequented by extreme-right meme-posters. The network of Chan sites has created what Baele et al. term the ‘Chanosphere’. Chans allow anons (anonymous contributors) to post memes and captions on the topic threads of different boards (e.g., cartoons, pornography, etc.). The ‘politically incorrect’ board on 4Chan, for example, and its equivalent on 8Chan “8Chan/pol” (now defunct) were central in the 2019 cluster of alt-right terror attacks, with 8chan/pol being used by three of the five attackers to post their manifestos, many of which contained references to memes.

To the untrained eye, extreme right memes are politically incorrect or edgy satire, not potential terrorist content. However, their specialized in-jokes and jargon, which often reference seemingly innocuous pop culture items (e.g. cartoons, films, video games), are often uploaded with the intention of ‘rolling off brazen racism’ as ‘half-joking’. By consequence, the ubiquity of this niche style of humour reinforces the in-group identity of alt-right Chan anons.

To the trained eye, as Perez reiterates, alt-right memes are not ‘merely an invitation to humourous fun, but to white supremacist ideology’. The ‘Pepe the Frog’ cartoon marks an example of an avatar strategically claimed by the extreme-right to disguise racism as irony. The harmless-looking frog, created by cartoonist Matt Furie for the slacker comic Boys Club in 2005, was categorized as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2016. Following its popularization on social media platform Myspace and 4Chan in 2008, the cartoon was adopted by the alt-right in the 2010s, and often stylized as a Nazi, and later as Donald Trump.

In this way, alt-right memes are no longer an internet subculture but have been weaponized in the highest echelons of American politics. In 2015, then-President Donald Trump posted an image on his Twitter page of himself represented as a ‘Pepe the Frog’ humanoid. This served to both legitimize the politically loaded visual language of the alt-right and tacitly validate its ideas.

Moreover, the role of Chan sites and memes on alt-right terrorism in recent times cannot be understated, exemplified by the wave of attacks in 2019 occurring in Christchurch, Poway, El Paso, Bairam, and Halle. The Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, who can be considered a catalyst for the subsequent attacks, encouraged others to make memes shortly before his attack, posting on 8Chan ‘I have provided links to my writings below, please do your part by spreading my message, making memes and sh*tposting as you usually do’. The shooter had also written ‘Remove Kebab’ (a reference to a popular anti-Muslim meme) on one of his rifles, and his manifesto made numerous references to alt-right in-jokes. He live-streamed the attack on Facebook using a helmet-mounted camera and received 4000 views before the video was removed, along with 300,000 reuploads in the first 24 hours.

The widespread broadcast of the video created the conditions for mass meme production and quickly inspired memes comparing the point-of-view footage of the attack with popular ‘first-person shooter games’ like Call of Duty. This marks a further phenomenon on Chan sites, the gamification of violence, where anons compare real-life terror attacks with video games (e.g. the El Paso shooter also referred to as Call of Duty in his manifesto). The Christchurch shooter was portrayed in memes as the martyr ‘Saint Tarrant,’ and has been compared to Jesus in the Chanosphere.

According to Baele et al, the Christchurch shooter’s attack initiated what they termed ‘the Tarrant effect,’ due to the similarities of the attacks that followed. Like Tarrant, all four subsequent attackers posted a manifesto on a Chan site or similar imageboard. Furthermore, shortly before their attack, two live-streamed their attacks, and two attempted to livestream but failed. Three of the four attackers cited Tarrant as an inspiration, and three of the four posted manifestos demonstrating similar ideological dispositions. It is therefore a reasonable assertion that Tarrant influenced both the subsequent attackers as well as the cognitive radicalization of Chan anons by referring to familiar alt-right memes in his manifesto, the inscriptions on his rifle and the ‘in-group’ jokes made at the beginning of his livestream.

The impact of the ‘Chanosphere’ on the radicalization puzzle is inevitably more multifaceted than the scope of this article allows. However, memes have been shown to be important elements of alt-right internet subcultures, as they act as ideologically loaded statements disguised as dark, politically incorrect jokes. Their easy accessibility and ability to be reproduced as ‘units of cultural transmission’ in a closed internet echo chamber can reinforce group identity and ideology that can have deadly consequences in reality. More research is therefore required to investigate the role that memes, and the visual culture of extremist groups more generally, play in driving cognitive radicalization that may result in political violence.



https://thesecuritydistillery.org/al...he-chanosphere

[3catcircus]

to;dr

BLUF: the left can't meme....

Originally Posted by Arlo

The internet forms an important component of ideological radicalization, as it provides a platform for like-minded individuals to communicate in virtual communities like the ‘Chanosphere,’ which in turn allows for extremist groups to develop safe havens of communication and information exchange. Using the case study of a cluster of alt-right terrorist attacks initiated by the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019, this analysis will demonstrate that alt-right memes played a central role in radicalization, in that they acted as vessels of encoded racist ideology which used ‘weaponized irony’ as a means of communicating group identity.

At the outset of this article, it is necessary to consider Gill et al’s assertion that it is difficult to tell where the internet stops as ‘there is no clear dichotomy between online and offline radicalization’. For instance, the impact of memetic visual culture on alt-right radicalization inevitably does not take place in a vacuum and is intertwined with other elements. For the purposes of this analysis, radicalization can be loosely defined as ‘the process of developing extremist ideologies and beliefs which may or may not result in a terrorist attack.

An important part of this radicalization process is the ‘sense of belonging’ that alt-right adherents find online. Bogertz and Fielitz explain that many recent extreme-right terrorists have not been members of political organizations or militias, but participants in ‘digital hate communities’ that have used specialized visual language to communicate ideas. This language often takes the form of memes, which can be defined as ‘cultural units of meaning that develop and spread virally by copying or combining with other units’. Memes can be any easily disseminated textual, visual or auditory item(s) that act as a holder of cultural meaning for an audience.

Key online platforms used for sharing alt-right ideas and memes are ‘Chans’ (e.g. 4Chan, 8Chan, Endchan, Neinchan, among others], anonymous online imageboards frequented by extreme-right meme-posters. The network of Chan sites has created what Baele et al. term the ‘Chanosphere’. Chans allow anons (anonymous contributors) to post memes and captions on the topic threads of different boards (e.g., cartoons, pornography, etc.). The ‘politically incorrect’ board on 4Chan, for example, and its equivalent on 8Chan “8Chan/pol” (now defunct) were central in the 2019 cluster of alt-right terror attacks, with 8chan/pol being used by three of the five attackers to post their manifestos, many of which contained references to memes.

To the untrained eye, extreme right memes are politically incorrect or edgy satire, not potential terrorist content. However, their specialized in-jokes and jargon, which often reference seemingly innocuous pop culture items (e.g. cartoons, films, video games), are often uploaded with the intention of ‘rolling off brazen racism’ as ‘half-joking’. By consequence, the ubiquity of this niche style of humour reinforces the in-group identity of alt-right Chan anons.

To the trained eye, as Perez reiterates, alt-right memes are not ‘merely an invitation to humourous fun, but to white supremacist ideology’. The ‘Pepe the Frog’ cartoon marks an example of an avatar strategically claimed by the extreme-right to disguise racism as irony. The harmless-looking frog, created by cartoonist Matt Furie for the slacker comic Boys Club in 2005, was categorized as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2016. Following its popularization on social media platform Myspace and 4Chan in 2008, the cartoon was adopted by the alt-right in the 2010s, and often stylized as a Nazi, and later as Donald Trump.

In this way, alt-right memes are no longer an internet subculture but have been weaponized in the highest echelons of American politics. In 2015, then-President Donald Trump posted an image on his Twitter page of himself represented as a ‘Pepe the Frog’ humanoid. This served to both legitimize the politically loaded visual language of the alt-right and tacitly validate its ideas.

Moreover, the role of Chan sites and memes on alt-right terrorism in recent times cannot be understated, exemplified by the wave of attacks in 2019 occurring in Christchurch, Poway, El Paso, Bairam, and Halle. The Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, who can be considered a catalyst for the subsequent attacks, encouraged others to make memes shortly before his attack, posting on 8Chan ‘I have provided links to my writings below, please do your part by spreading my message, making memes and sh*tposting as you usually do’. The shooter had also written ‘Remove Kebab’ (a reference to a popular anti-Muslim meme) on one of his rifles, and his manifesto made numerous references to alt-right in-jokes. He live-streamed the attack on Facebook using a helmet-mounted camera and received 4000 views before the video was removed, along with 300,000 reuploads in the first 24 hours.

The widespread broadcast of the video created the conditions for mass meme production and quickly inspired memes comparing the point-of-view footage of the attack with popular ‘first-person shooter games’ like Call of Duty. This marks a further phenomenon on Chan sites, the gamification of violence, where anons compare real-life terror attacks with video games (e.g. the El Paso shooter also referred to as Call of Duty in his manifesto). The Christchurch shooter was portrayed in memes as the martyr ‘Saint Tarrant,’ and has been compared to Jesus in the Chanosphere.

According to Baele et al, the Christchurch shooter’s attack initiated what they termed ‘the Tarrant effect,’ due to the similarities of the attacks that followed. Like Tarrant, all four subsequent attackers posted a manifesto on a Chan site or similar imageboard. Furthermore, shortly before their attack, two live-streamed their attacks, and two attempted to livestream but failed. Three of the four attackers cited Tarrant as an inspiration, and three of the four posted manifestos demonstrating similar ideological dispositions. It is therefore a reasonable assertion that Tarrant influenced both the subsequent attackers as well as the cognitive radicalization of Chan anons by referring to familiar alt-right memes in his manifesto, the inscriptions on his rifle and the ‘in-group’ jokes made at the beginning of his livestream.

The impact of the ‘Chanosphere’ on the radicalization puzzle is inevitably more multifaceted than the scope of this article allows. However, memes have been shown to be important elements of alt-right internet subcultures, as they act as ideologically loaded statements disguised as dark, politically incorrect jokes. Their easy accessibility and ability to be reproduced as ‘units of cultural transmission’ in a closed internet echo chamber can reinforce group identity and ideology that can have deadly consequences in reality. More research is therefore required to investigate the role that memes, and the visual culture of extremist groups more generally, play in driving cognitive radicalization that may result in political violence.



https://thesecuritydistillery.org/al...he-chanosphere

[Otto Harkaman]

You won't get the last post on this forum Arlo!

[Arlo]

Originally Posted by Otto Harkaman

You won't get the last post on this forum Arlo!

What do you meme, chan-baby?

[Otto Harkaman]

[Arlo]

If the plan is to 'meme me to death', well ... ack .... arrrrrgh .... *flop.*

[Arlo]

Tara Dove

This picture was taken a month or two after my abortion. I was 16 and in an incredibly abusive marriage. You see that wrap on my hand? My wrist was sprained because he threw me out of our bed and onto the floor, to "sleep like the dog you are." When I had my abortion, I still had braces on.
When we found out I was pregnant, no one was happy and I felt like dying. There was no question. The pregnancy would be terminated. His parents paid.

We had to cross state lines and he was speeding (he got pulled over and you can bet I was punished for that). At the clinic, he got angry because he wasn't allowed in the back with me. I was punished for that too.

Because I terminated my pregnancy, I was able to leave him and cut all ties later. I was able to get a restraining order. I was able to move, go to college, have a career, and start a family on my own time. Because I terminated my pregnancy, no child was raised with an abusive father.
Also, as I found out with my planned pregnancy some ten years later, I have a clotting disorder that, without medical intervention, has a high chance of killing any child I carry (I've miscarried twice and my daughter's placenta was clotting at 39 weeks) and throwing a clot in me (I've had one DVT already). This would not have been known when I was 16.

Having an abortion saved my life, in more ways than one. I have not and will never regret it.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1050769058643587/

[Otto Harkaman]

AOC bursts into tears as Iron Dome's $1bn funding is OVERWHELMINGLY approved in House 420-9: Rashida Tlaib is accused of anti-Semitism by fellow Dem after she called Israel a 'violent apartheid system'

[Arlo]

I don't think proving me right is having the effect you anticipated. And it's not about 'the last word', chan-dude. It's about actual meaningful ones that don't come off immature.

[Buddahaid]

This is making main stream media look sane.

[Arlo]

[Rockstar]

Those racist white supremacists Trump supporters are at it again. Seems they’re going to start a national uprising in response to vaccine mandates

https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-y...ndates-similar

[Arlo]

[Otto Harkaman]

New emails from Hunter Biden business associates reveal he asked for $2million retainer PLUS 'success fees' to help them unfreeze $30billion in Libyan assets while his father was VP