Was part of it. As somebody who has been trapped there since 2004, I'd say it evolved into a part of the normal internet between 2010 and 2016 (i.e. it had already fully transformed before Trump's first term), where "normal internet" means being infested with uncle-on-Facebook-tier political posts, "jokes" where the punchline is "I hate my political enemies", etc. Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.
Mostly because, as more people came online, they mistook offensive humor for conservatism; and thought "counter-culture" meant "being opposed to the political party currently in power", rather than "being opposed to political parties".
>Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.
I’d suggest taking off those glasses as they are a bit too rose-tinted.
I was there, just like you, and the humor was way more “childishness” than “creative irreverence” well before 2010.
Considering that the people posting this "creative irreverence" were the same guys calling you a "stupid f*gg*t n*gger piece of sh*t" on Halo 2/3 and CS when they got noscoped from across the map or whatever, "It's just a joke" has always been somewhat suspect. It would be wrong to say that there was no element of tongue-in-cheek-iness and hyperbole, of course. It just wasn't completely innocent, broadly speaking.
Of course, in a post-Bioshock Infinite world, there's really no excuse for not grokking how time and distance from the origins of a cultural behavior pattern can warp even well-meaning notions that aren't regularly re-examined and tuned to align the intention with the zeitgeist. If the Sarah Silverman-esque posters ever looked up and realized, "Oh, they don't know it's a joke, they're ACTUALLY Nazis," it was too late to shift things back. (Unless you were in a Boondocks thread on /co/, in which case correction was freely forthcoming.)
Probably didn't help that at least one mod wanted 4chan to become more racist, on purpose.
Something happened in the post-2010 times along with the Tea Party, and offensive humor - especially overt racism - became a mainstream part of conservativism, all the way to the White House.
> "jokes" where the punchline is "I hate my political enemies"
Hence the laughter in the White House at refusing to follow the court order to return their political enemies from the overseas prison.
4chan may have died, but Trump is more the first 4chan President than Howard Dean was the first "internet candidate", and especially Musk the Twitter Presidential Vizir is the heir to this culture.
Secondary to the primary horror of Trump's current attempts to apply this to citizens: It is also a direct attack on one of the other key points of societal failure, which is trust in police. Yes, yes, we were already way below where we need to be, but it was still the case that when an innocent non-black person encountered police, the majority of the time the feelings they might have ranged from trust to simple nervousness. An enormous caveat to law enforcement is that we trust officers with the power to order people to do things. If a cop orders me to come with them without a great explanation, I'm going to verbally protest, ask to see their badge, whatever - but I'm going to physically comply, because we agree to give cops this power, and, crucially, because there could be a legitimate reason, or an innocent mistake, and even absent that, I have a general feeling about the ceiling on the worst things that could realistically happen to me (since I'm a citizen, white, etc).
But now, a bright line has been crossed. Anybody in a group that Trump supporters hate has to consider that there is a non-zero chance an encounter with the wrong type of law enforcement could end with being tortured in a foreign prison. In a nation governed by fear, my mind is not nearly as clear on priorities and risk assessment when the cop asks me to come with him without a rock solid explanation. That's dangerous, for everybody, including the police.
If we're trying to define bands of shared values in the wealth strata, there are more than three, and your first two, while mutually distant, still have more in common with each other than with any other bands.
> first two, while mutually distant, still have more in common with each other than with any other bands
Not really. People in the oligarch sphere have unimaginable power. If they need a law they buy it through politicians and lobbyists. If they need a law ignored just for them, same deal.
Working class people who've toiled 25+ years and accumulated a few million are still just working class people, with nicer cars and slightly bigger house. But zero political influence and no ability to shape laws or enforcement in their favor.
Why $20m? Some back-of-the-envelope maths: if you got a decent salary, say $250K, for 40 years and made some smart investments with it, offsetting your tax and living expenses, you'd have $10m. Double that for elbow room and that gives the extreme upper limit of what someone could reasonably get to by just working for a living. You could earn more, sure, but you'd be in the top 0.1% of earners if you did and we can safely exclude you as an extreme outlier.
It's also enough money to do pretty much anything you want to do: sail a yacht around the world? sure. Never work again and live in luxury? Obviously. Make a difference to other people's lives in a good way? Achievable.
But it's not enough money to upset entire political economies or buy power at the scale we've seen recently.
If I had to implement a wealth tax, and I think we should, then that's the cutoff I'd put it at.
You’re asking the wrong question. The department of justice should have stepped in so you would not have to ask, but they’re in it for good. Judges would be responsible for answering, but they have been warned to not interfere with the presidents agenda, or face personal consequences.
So there is nobody left to answer it.
>Leave your maga hats as wel as your pronouns at home, and enjoy your trip.
It's hard not to point out how desperately sad the state of affairs is when wearing a political slogan and using a pronoun (I'm assuming there is an implicit premise you're leaving out) are on the same level of "being political". Shall we also leave our race and gender at home? How?
> Shall we also leave our race and gender at home? How?
“I don’t want a Black History Month. Black History is American History. I’ll stop calling you a white man if you stop calling me a black man.”
— Morgan Freeman
You can leave race and gender at home if you stop talking about it all the damn time. Whatever passes these days for racial equality is anything but. I don’t hear people making so much fuss about including the correct quota of green eyes people in movies and work teams.
It's the reverse direction which always warrants us fulfilling a causal chain. If we see something then we should be able to talk about it, even if there's an army of meta-commentators producing downstream effects. For example, we should be able to talk about an ongoing bank run even if it tilts the outcome, just as we should be able to talk about the plain observations of race in front of our faces.
I’m not calling for censorship. I’m just saying that until we stop focusing so much on race, we are still favouring one colour over another and creating inequality and resentment.
As an aside, every time I open Reddit, I cringe that two of the most popular and promoted subs are WhitePeopleTwitter and BlackPeopleTwitter. The American model of integration often just feels like a positive, corporate-friendly spin on apartheid.
First of all: You're preaching (ranting) to the choir. I 100% agree with your Morgan Freeman quote. But it's an intractable problem. Imagine if a president legally abolished Black History Month or something like that - the impression would be unavoidably hateful and antagonistic. Changes that are ostensibly positive suffer the ratchet effect.
So yes, it would be nice if everybody just somehow agreed to "stop", but once a society has cultural distinctions along a racial line with any negative connotations, there is no path to "stop focusing on it" aside from letting time pass.
E.g. my elderly friends and many of the people on the social internet aren't going to stop encouraging hatred of black people and encouraging beating or killing them for non-violent crimes, because of a call to "stop focusing so much on race"; and likewise other people aren't going to stop reacting to that hideous part of their own society (various reactions, that aren't all reasonable!) because of a call to "stop focusing so much on race".
It's not a "just stop doing it" problem. Only centuries of patience and luck can evolve a society past such a stark divide (both sides think there are decades-scale forced fixes, and they're both wrong).
Second of all: Your reply to me was tangential to the criticism I was making of the previous parent. You can and should choose not to rant about race/gender/sexuality abroad. You can't leave your own pronouns at home, like you can a hat. And even if you could, it would still be twisted and unfair to use it as an example of being "political" in direct comparison to wearing a political slogan hat - not to mention it being the slogan of one of the most politically antagonistic figures in the world's living memory. The comparison is emblematic of exactly the target of your rant: Misapplied focus.
We have to choose between two worlds: a world where nobody cares about our differences, or a world where we celebrate everyone's differences.
The mid-century American civil rights movement was based on the former. The modern movement seems to want the latter. The problem is that these two positions are subtly in conflict with each other. The former erases identities, the latter reinforces them.
The both have similar goals, but they present very different ways of living and very different social norms, which is why I see them both as potentially high-conflict norms when visiting other cultures.
We certainly do not have to choose between those two extremes.
More importantly, you said:
- One side wants nobody to care about our differences, and that erases identity.
- The other side wants to celebrate everyone's differences, and that reinforces identity.
This seems unrealistic, and the wording is starkly one-sided (in terms of painting one side as "wrong" and the other as "right"). You're splitting on the right metric, but the wrong dimension.
One side wants nobody to care about our differences in negative contexts ("X people are bad in some way", "Y people are better than X people"), and wants to celebrate our differences in positive contexts (cultural exposure, diversity, etc). However, some of the details are often unrealistically idealistic.
The other side wants to neither ignore nor celebrate differences. This side is simpler, and has real benefits, but makes more room for the human tendency to express difference-based negativity, which ranges from understandable to horrifying. However, it doesn't suffer from as much of the complication of idealism.
Again, I would argue that we do have to choose. I also think that the tension between these positions is what is causing quite a bit of conflict in American politics right now.
There is an essentialism inherent with these contexts. Just like French"ness" or British"ness", we have white"ness" or black"ness", and it can be applied to any race, sexual preference, or gender identity, etc., etc. This view has practical limits, and where those are drawn is important, because we run into trouble with the "green eyes"-ness brought up by the previous poster. And, there is ultimately a conflict that comes from this.
Non-essentialists would argue that the attributes that make up these differences are effectively accidental, so eliminating the differences is arbitrary, and perfectly reasonable. This means that nothing is lost when one context is adopted by the other. Different people have different views on this though. This also means that for the non-essentialist, negative-based differences must also be accidental, which is an important difference, and while essentialists may want to eliminate the negative-based differences, there is a sense in which the essentialist view endorses the idea that they must exist.
Practically speaking though, when we have people participating outside of their context, does the essentialism evaporate? Should it? That is to say, if white people start moving into a Chinatown, does it ever stop being an "Asian neighborhood"? At what point does it stop? Should we try to preserve it? If we do, is it right to discriminate in doing that?
This is the conflict between acculturation, assimilation, and amalgamation? Essentialist views often see mass adoption as acculturation. Non-essentialists see it as amalgamation. These are subtle differences, but they yield vastly different policy prescriptions.
No, of course not. You come with the whole package but we do not care.
We do not care of you support black live matters or trump or abortion. This is your thing and except if you are with people who want to discuss this you let keep it to yourself. There are plenty of people that are Ken to discuss, we are not prude.
This is so obvious to me that I feel I must be missing something.
Both draw a line, and often the purveyor is trying to adopt a "with me or against me" stance.
My amateur and unpracticed use of the French language has probably mis-pronouned plenty of folk across Europe and West Africa. Luckily everyone understood my motives and took it in stride.
You gave a response in the format of "what could you be referring to?", but there is a whole blog post under the headline explaining the premise of the question (a premise which you may reasonably disagree with).
More specifically it is a travois, but a travois is a vehicle, and most people are going to have no clue what a travois is when casually reading a headline. They should know what a vehicle is. It is a common word.
The top article on HN right now is in the same situation: "Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?" What kind of cheese? Parmigiano Reggiano, it turns out. For the sake of the headline, did it really matter what kind of cheese, though? Not really. Cheese is fine.
And vehicle is a perfectly fine word to describe what it is without getting too deep into jargon as well. What would you have selected instead?
>I'd love to see quotes around "vehicle", or a different word.
I question why you, and so many others here, are so hung up the use of the word vehicle. Even if you weren't aware of the usage of drag type vehicles in the early Americas, you would at least envision something like a wagon, right? Or do you automatically assume vehicle is only self-propelled things like modern cars?
This is uncharitable, to put it lightly. The parent is describing behavior commonly associated in the popular consciousness with fascism. And yes, your examples do fall into that category (assuming your framing is honest, called into question by your framing of Trump's actions). That may be inaccurate from an academic or historic perspective, but they are not simply "calling things we don’t like fascism", which is of course a real and common crime in political discourse, and which you are misapplying in turn, I believe.
Mostly because, as more people came online, they mistook offensive humor for conservatism; and thought "counter-culture" meant "being opposed to the political party currently in power", rather than "being opposed to political parties".
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