Comment by ajross
4 years ago
> I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better,
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
> You're going to need to cite them better then.
There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...
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I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
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r/196 is more or less a general-purpose meme discord and about the spiciest thing I’ve seen is people dumping on landlords.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
Leftypol anyone?