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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38182 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I'm about a third of the way through reading it myself. It's interesting enough that I think he would have made a better than average Motte contributor. I haven't found anything yet that would seem to justify a terrorist bombing campaign though.

It's just a dream, and the timeline doesn't match of course, but I want to think we could have told him:

It's okay friend, your views are welcome here! We will read them and discuss them with you. You don't have to blow anyone up!

Of course, that might not work. But the greater the extent to which he had the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously and did that anyways, the more he's just a midwit terrorist asshole whose ideas aren't all that interesting.

The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?

No, however much his ideas might resonate with me, his bombing campaign was in no way justified, and he fully deserved to be imprisoned for a very long time. I'm not a huge fan of the death penalty, but if he had been executed I would've found it hard to shed a tear.

The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?

A lot of people seem to have this idea that censoring far-right opinions on social media platforms will just cause the people who hold those opinions to change their minds and embrace woke neoliberal globalism like good little boys and girls (alright, good little boys). There's no evidence that this strategy has ever worked, either in the specific case of social media or in the case of censorship generally (diehard Marxist Freddie deBoer was castigated and tarred as a neo-Nazi simply for pointing this out), and yet the strategy is still doggedly defended by every mainstream platform going. If anything the opposite seems to be true: that censoring even moderately heterodox opinions has the effect of radicalising those who hold them, thereby turning boring neoliberals with one or two unremarkable ideological unorthodoxies into scared and defensive far-right nutters. Pretty sure this is what happened to Count Dankula, for example. The dynamic arguably describes a significant proportion of users on this website, and perhaps even the site's own raison d'être.

Reddit, for all its numerous flaws and heavy-handed censoriousness, does recognise that you need the occasional containment sub. The misfits aren't going to magically become better at fitting in just because you've banned all the spaces in which they can be misfits together to their heart's content. Users post and comment things on /r/4chan which would never fly on a non-grandfathered subreddit. It's plausible that the release of this pressure valve may have helped to prevent a few suicides and/or mass shootings. See also /u/TracingWoodgrains's wonderful article about the gentrification of online communities.

I'm still working on reading through the whole manifesto (has anyone else on this thread actually read the whole thing?), but I just found a paragraph that changes my views a bit (bolding is my own, but the whole paragraph is lifted from the manifesto unchanged):

P96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the press. We certainly don’t mean to knock that right; it is very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.

Ah, so the internet did exist at the time, though not as a society-dominating force, and he decided to do violence because he thought he wasn't getting enough attention. Yeah that's a hard no from me. You don't get to do violence because nobody cares about your viewpoint. If he worked as hard at improving his communication and spreading his views though normal methods as he did at bombing random people and evading law enforcement, he probably would have had a lot more influence. Instead, he did what he did and he got exactly what he deserved.

Honestly, the more I read the less I care for his overall viewpoint. I'm starting to think I could do an effortpost going against his actual viewpoint.

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