How does it feel to be turned into an ethnography, Veeky Forums?

>racist, sexist religion of nihilism

uh...racism, sexism, and religion are mutually exclusive with nihilism

thank you

>To fill the void, the ironist and the shitposter both create a self-image characterised by the freedom to say and do anything, beholden to nothing and to nobody — a freedom that finds expression through transgression, saying things (racist, sexist, etc.) “nobody else” will say — except, of course, for the shitposters. This is how the stories the “alt-right” tells about itself take on a religious quality. They are predicated on a desire for a meaningful narrative of the world that allows for participation.

It was better than expected. What's important to keep in mind about fascism is that it is first and foremost a suicide cult narrative. /pol/ doesn't even believe half the shit they say. They hate themselves, they feel confused and humiliated by our shitty world and the bizarre and contradictory signals they receive 24/7 and are merely looking for a story that gives meaning to their existence, regardless of whether it's true or not.

The author seems to imply the solution is some sort of middle class protestant conventionality, which, like many liberals and even some leftists do, she projects into this fetishised other which functions as an ideal of the authentic, fully autonomous consumer. Alienation is universal. /pol/ is a symptom of the breakdown of conventionality under the pressure of its own contradictions, you can't really separate them from the coastal culture industry, /pol/ is the antithesis. The liberal media classes created an illusory pseudo-utopian world but, in the end, they trapped themselves inside it. Now, destructive forces from the outside are closing in, in some ways, pretty much real.

Maybe I'm letting my biases show, but I wonder if Christianity isn't a path between both options. Authentic Christianity, I mean. Or maybe just authentic religion in general.

People from brown countries are pretty frank about politics and religion and they get upset when I say I'm not an atheist. I think that they would be the most comfortable in a world with no dhimmi: only atheists and Muslims.

I think they've gotten pretty used to Westerners having no strong beliefs of their own.

Looks like something out of Warframe.

people making these sort of characteristics about /pol/ types tend to forget a vital core to this phenomena

you mostly can't make any discrete conclusions about the nature of the individual posters, ironic or sincere (most /pol/ users are of a demographic where their identity hasn't fully formed, has been postponed thanks to millennial conditions, or perhaps never coagulate at all thanks to the hyperaware hyperskepticism of the information age (you also can't know how many of the posts here are bots or augmented users)).

Thanks to the acceleration of history and poster worldviews, even posting itself is less an "act" like the author says and more of a phenomenal soup: the intersection of meme culture with world events is an exchange more akin to how babies babble to their parents to figure out language and social meaning: except there is no authoritative parent anymore and we're all stuck spouting gibberish and parroting the memes that gain phenomenal traction desired...until meaning was actually found.

Kek happens to be the first example of this coagulating. It's even a meta-aware entity: meaning that transcends symbols only came through memetic dialectics as stated previously, from random success of attempt and failure in; Kek is the god of repeating digits among random ones.

Shitty ethnology. Undergrad quote-picking from authors like Geertz instead of applying any actual epistemological framework from anthropology or sociology.

You have such an enormous body of bodies of literature to draw upon here. You have so many options to cut-and-paste existing frameworks in ways that would be revealing, since Veeky Forums's grassroots anonymous collectivism, in an age of alienation like you said, is a genuinely novel subject for the social sciences. You have the social theorist's dream: Your subject matter is interesting enough that you don't have to do sophistic gymnastics at the theoretical level.

But the article never goes beyond the level of platitudes. Every time it starts to get interesting, you only glance off some pastiche of half-insights instead of delving into them.

You have no capacity for real verstehen, Geertzian or otherwise, because you can't submerge yourself in your material. You're doing your job factitiously, putting the cart before the horse by dredging your object's observed behaviors and habits up to meet prefab conclusions, rather than really immersing yourself. You're telling half a story, which as a student of society is worse than telling no story.

There's nothing stopping you from doing real research here. Exciting fieldwork is literally freely available to you, in something that has not been much studied. You could even publish something truly great on it. But all you can see is a shallow opportunity to do shallow journalism for a reader that doesn't or shouldn't exist. Any academic would skim over your article as journalistic and dilettantish. Any amateur reader would be uncomprehending of references to Geertz and Kierkegaard. What are you writing for? Some bourgeois semi-educated faggot with just enough sclerotic knowledge to go "ahhh yes, Geertz, symbols, irony. Indeed." and then turn the page to something equally banal?

Stop padding out your fucking CV and learn to do some real work you stupid fuck, Burton. Do justice to the work or don't do it at all. A subject being obscure, undiscovered country, is not an excuse to do it half-assed because no one can quality check whether your limp-dicked platitudes are any good. Either do the job well or leave it to someone else.

Interesting article.

>even includes a side jab at "fake news"

Nice propaganda piece you got there

5000 word justification for "why I need to feed the trolls even though I know they aren't serious" and "straight white males ruin everything again"

this

>Veeky Forums not Veeky Forums
>Emile not Émile
>Pepe not Pepé
Not terribly professional.

B T FO
T
F
O

>Tara Isabella Burton has written on religion and culture for National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the American Interest, and more. She is finishing a doctorate in theology and literature as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford

>Some bourgeois semi-educated faggot with just enough sclerotic knowledge to go "ahhh yes, Geertz, symbols, irony. Indeed." and then turn the page to something equally banal?
Here, reporting in

>two doctorates to be a culture columnist like a college drop-out

>Pepé

Dank.

>tfw not smart enough to say this.

I liked the article and also liked your post.

>Underestimating the intelligence of people because they say/do controversial things

I thought we'd gotten past this? We will never be able to accurately assess how smart any of the people on *any* Veeky Forums board (except maybe pony or soc) really are because of their propensity to act like retards for fun. In many ways this is what makes Veeky Forums such a powerful force, because it's all shitposting until suddenly people start taking things seriously and put effort into things.

...

>Get liberal arts degree
>Write blogs decrying a cartoon frog

so this..... is the power... of lib arts.... woahhh...

>acting like retards for fun
This is long over, irony is just used as a tool to propel a real agenda nowadays.

>Some bourgeois semi-educated faggot with just enough sclerotic knowledge to go "ahhh yes, Geertz, symbols, irony. Indeed.
There's loads of us you retard.

Yeah I know, we've reached post-irony, where you ironically present an exaggerated view of your real positions, making them seem harmless but at the same time push your underlying, more sinister, viewpoint.

However being post-ironic doesn't negate my point that these people want to be dismissed and act in a way that makes them easy to dismiss, when in reality they are far more capable than you give them credit for. This is literally what Trump did this entire election:

>act like a retard
>other retards support you saying 'he's only playing dumb'
>smart people dismiss you
>meanwhile you manipulate everyone and profit immensely.

>The making of a racist, sexist
Literally stopped reading.

>How does it feel to be relevant?

p. good famaläm

you sound buttblasted

We are actually post-post-ironic. We pick that underlying agenda at random so we have something to be ironic about.

>Sociologically speaking (...) meme magic (...) is real

>Shitposters, (...) are bound by nothing

> But shitposting nonetheless imbues a powerful sense of individual significance.

>When they praise Kek or joke about participation in the “meme wars of 2016,” they are taking part in a collective narrative that is no less powerful than,(...) the no less heady Wagnerian nationalism of the German völkische Bewegung that helped spawn the Nazis.

Holy fucking shit man.

in this article:
middle class white girl writes about something she doesn't understand and tries to shoehorn it into her own frame of reference

...

Eh, isn't that what we all do whenever we look at something not self-generated?

most of us don't then write a tedious essay about it and publish it on a pseud "techno culture" website

we are pretty much proto-nazis tho

always hilarious when normies think channers are actually homophobic and racist because they say nigger and faggot

>that title

What you're essentially saying is that people should either be perfectionists when having discourse or simply not have it at all, which is a really narrow and black and white viewpoint.

I thought the article was shit personally, however, you're not engaging any of the material, merely bitching that it doesn't meet your standards without actually talking about any points.

If I said "Your analysis of that post was shit because you only used one post to talk about it instead of writing an essay after having done a full study." it'd be a rough analog of how you're treating that article.

>implying

Read Nietzsche fag

Christianity's time has long passed

This post sums up my feelings on the matter as well, but have you actually ever gone to /pol/? Some of those fellers are fucked in the head.

Can we end this meme? Only psued redditors pretend like they are 2smart for /pol/ and Pepe

no, we shitpost here because it takes less effort

>not being racist
xD i was just making jokes for that sweet /r/Veeky Forums karma but seriously there is nothing wrong with women, blacks, and gays my fellow 4channers. it's just le ironic xD

Upvote if you like :D

lol'd

>Eh, isn't that what we all do whenever we look at something not self-generated?
>the self-generated
>when marxist crit is the only pragmatic approach to context
REEEEEE

I thought the article worked fine as a general informative peice on Veeky Forums culture. It wasn't meant to be an in depth, university level, academic research paper. It's shallow journalism to inform people who aren't aware of what goes on in /pol/. Nothing wrong with that.

People here genuinely are racist and bigoted. I don't know anyone who can browse /pol/ for a few months without at least becoming vaguely sympathetic to far right politics.

did you actually read the article?

>But the average Veeky Forums alt-righter does not see himself as a “real” racist, nor is racism necessarily what he would regard as his primary motivating factor. His racism is secondary to his understanding of himself as free.

That's her point. They're not 'actually' racist, but they act like it. What's the difference?

Good thread.

Nobody gets hurt by pretend racism on the internet?

People become racists after browsing /pol/. Doesn't matter whether people post pepes dressed in gestapo uniform and black crime statistics "ironically". Their ideals are still spread and understood.These newfound racists might get ballsy enough to commit hate crimes. (unlikely, but this is the authors point)

>If people become racist after browsing /pol/

That would either mean that people are so easily influenced and weak minded that they need to be protected from wrongthink.
Or alternatively that the racism of /pol/ is convincing because it is sound and justified.

Which one is it?

I'm a moral relativist. I don't think the answer to that question matters. It depends on what you think. "reason is a slave to the passions" isn't it?

However I do believe that the alt right has the potential to inspire violent radicals. So it's in the interests of people who are satisfied with the current system to shun wrongthink, yes.

>how does it feel to be turned into an ethnography, Veeky Forums?
i dont know

English is not my first language, is it yours?
The word "real" with quotes don't mean the average Veeky Forums alt-righter is truly a racist but think he is not and do it just for reasons?

/pol/ is not an ideology in the typical sense of the world, but a ritual-based neotribal community founded on a shared sense of alienation/humiliation. Most people have no use for the alt-right narrative, and it is a narrative you have to piece together out of the sea of info out there. It's a process that takes effort. A deliberate process of identity construction. Most /pol/acks are rather young and are only trying on identities to see if they fit, role playing in a semi ironic fashion. Much like men of the literate era had defined identities and occupations, Post literate man has roles. It's useless to ask oneself if they are 'being sincere' or 'ironic' what matters is the role they are playing. Hitler's National Socialists and Mao's redguards were ahead of their time. glimpses of an emergent neotribalism in the rational 20th century. The electronic concioussness has expanded in such a way as to allow for even more radical tribal experiments.

>datpic
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHCr3Np8F3c

I think what he's saying is that you should take the subject matter as a serious scholastic study isntead of staying aloof to it. It's the equivalent of someone standing around at the edge of the rainforest and saying "Look at these savages" versus someone going through the interior and actually learning what the fuck's going on with the people in there.

/pol/acks are not a very complicated people. Shitpost among them for a couple of hours or so and it's all pretty clear

That's a mouthful of gobbledygook. /pol/ is simply a gathering place for the politically nonconformist.

I agree, but to someone that doesn't really know what Veeky Forums is, any board's sense of humor, /pol/'s especially, would come across as polarizing and just fucking weird.

Sam Hyde is actually a prime example of someone with no actual coherent ideology who post ironically took on this role in order to cope with his self loathing and repressed homosexual tendencies. dude's obviously suicidal

>"""repressed""" homosexual tendencies

he fucked a tranny

I disagree, when you strip away the irony most people on /pol/ are quite politically normative, there's a reason why nobody buys the Guardian but its the number one linked paper on Reddit.

>hurr either people are weak or /pol/ is right

Or it means that weak and miserable people gravitate toward strong ideology regardless of what it actually is.

Not OP but you know this is objectively disproved right? physical fitness and right-wing opinions are directly correlated.

you might want to specify that theyre positively correlated

>Men with less upper body strength are more likely to support the welfare state - like Labour leader Ed Miliband

Dear Kek that's funny.

You say hurr, but then you pick one of the two options.

There are more than two options.
The existence of weak people does not imply that the majority of people are weak.

I didn't say that all people are weak

Cool, but no one was talking about physical fitness. Reread the posts.

or a majority even. I only said 'people'.

Assuming you're:
Then I'd argue that the "wrongthink" argument only holds if you believe such weak people to be a plurality of society.
Diversity of thought is a natural disinfectant for extremism. Calling out /pol/ is not an attempt to silence them, but rather an attempt to expose them to other ideas and corrode the absolutism that justifies violence.

Er, to be more concise:
Ideas are only dangerous if left unchallenged

The two options were implications of the post that I have replied to originally. It said that going to /pol/ turns people racist. My post assumed this statement was true for the sake of the argument.

Two possible implications followed from that argument, which both are equally wrong in my opinion. Which is supposed to point out to you that the original assumption must be wrong unless you actually believe in one of the two options.

It seems you actually think that some people will turn racist if they go to /pol/ unsupervised. You are just nitpicking about my wording of this idea. So do you?

Also, I don't see how the line of thought that people need to be protected from wrongthink requires them to be the plurality of the population.

People are indeed so easily influenced and weak minded that they can be lead to believe fabulous untruths. This should be readily apparent from history.
The belief in the fallability of people is not the same thing as believing that people must be protected from mistakes as an absolute. There are various methods by which people change or temper their ideology, many of which have nothing to do with actively protecting them from "wrongthink".
My suggestion is that an open society in which the majority is not radical will naturally depreciate the radicalism of minorities. I'm misusing majority and minority here, but the relevant part is that one is more influental than the other.

I do think some people go to /pol/ and walk away as racists. To my eyes, /pol/ advances a charismatic ideology, and some people will be swayed by it.

Everything is radical from one point of view or another. There is no true "middle ground", only different stances.

That's the beauty of free speech. If all viewpoints are allowed, then there's no chance of disallowing the "correct" one, regardless of whether it exists.

So what would you suggest should be done to solve the /pol/ problem?

Continue expressing your beliefs in the appropriate places, and let nature take its course.
I wandered into a fascinating /pol/ thread the other day. The OP was urging people to identify unlicensed hangouts like the Ghost Ship in Oakland and report them to the relevant authorities for code violations. The stated intent was to protect liberals from another deadly fire.
References were repeatedly made to the idea that the thread was meant to clue in arsonists to potential targets. Some posters denied this, in over-the-top language that suggested (to me) they were insincere.
So to my understanding, a group of /pol/ users were spending their time doing research to abet a hypothetical arsonist while retaining plausible deniability for themselves, for fun.
I don't quite know what to call this phenomenon, but I can't imagine they'll keep up activities like that without results, and I imagine that will dampen the revolutionary spirit of shitposting. Unless someone actually does start their racewar, in which case we're fucked.

Due to the actions of liberals a racewar is inevitable, the question is only when.

>So to my understanding, a group of /pol/ users were spending their time doing research to abet a hypothetical arsonist while retaining plausible deniability for themselves, for fun.

Jesus christ.

Do you think they're just denying it?

>He’s not a Lone Ranger but rather part of a group whose stated fascination with cowboy individualism is at odds with the intense collectivism of internet culture — a culture where likes, reposts, up-votes, hearts, and other expressions of communal acceptance take on outsize importance.

This is the only part that matters...

I'm not very smart. I thought the article was OK but seemed to reach a bit. But maybe because I'm not on the same level as a lot of the posters here. It seemed like the author had a better-than-superficial understanding of her subject.

I think this thread is better at seeing the whole picture. This part seems true I mean, she could have "done research" by actually starting threads or posting in popular threads and harvesting responses and then showing screencaps. It would have been easy and then questions of bias or speculation on her part would have been lessened (although she could have still cherry-picked examples.)

I like how a theme of understanding this self-created online world-view is predicated on the random and the ridiculous. Then the final words on that page are:
>Real Life is made possible by funding from Snapchat, and we operate with editorial independence and without ads.

the whole thing is predicated on the popularity of dick-pics.

As is typical, the author seems unaware that her default world is constructed by the same means she sees employed by her adversaries. In fact this article is symptomatic of it, apparently without irony.

/pol/ isn't Veeky Forums

lol, sure it is

peace be with you, user

>chaos god