Unless posted:

pretty sure “culture” is complex and sustains a society

the online right wing is violent nihilism bent on radicalization to perpetuate a low-intensity race war

croup coughfield posted:

im not sure about that at all op

Centrist Committee posted:

i am

Unless posted:

pretty sure “culture” is complex and sustains a society

the online right wing is violent nihilism bent on radicalization to perpetuate a low-intensity race war

Turtle Watch posted:

Weka posted:

The chuds are eating babies now.

CRAZY KNUCKLES FAN posted:

tristeham posted:

bump

Turtle Watch posted:

Centrist Committee posted:

agreed, tbh

Panfilo posted:

As many know, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and as of late has opened the floodgates for right wing reactionaries who were previously banned to come flooding back into Twitter. This has been seen as a virtual "reprisal" of sorts, where the people who thought they were unjustly kicked off Twitter not only got to come back, but they are reveling in smug glee about leftists getting kicked off/driven out of Twitter.

Not surprisingly the nonexistent moderation and cultural shift in demographics have seen some stark changes on Twitter. Whereas before I'd see some pretty intense back and forth in threads, it's shifted in the direction of Facebook in tone:

There's far more echo chambers now than before. Now I totally get it didn't take Musk taking over Twitter for people to get rape threats, death threats, unsolicited dick pics, etc. But it has gotten even more ridiculously polarized than even before. And much like it's Facebook predecessor it seems to fall into the same disingenuous patterns.

The "I'm not touching you!" discourse" - So one thing people praise SA for among online communities is the understanding that moderation has to have nuance to it. The description people gave to me about this is that even if you have 500 explicit rules for behavior people will deliberately skate around them and rules lawyer their way into trolling. So moderation has to look at intent, and since right wing reactionaries operate in bad faith the only way to really get rid of them is to cut through their bullshit. With the changes to Twitter, it has allowed the proliferation of immense numbers of bad faith posting, but paradoxically it seems like they wouldn't be very well equipped to fight back. You see this quite a bit with arguments about the Colorado Springs shooting in particular. They'll all but directly say that the victims had it coming, but when you call them out on it they'll start sea lioning about you needing to prove they posted something direct about it. Ditto for throwing the "groomer" phrase around. They'll mean it in a very specific way, and when you try to pin them down about it they'll dance away like a bunch of eye floaties in your vision. One thing I've also been observing here is what happens if you do the same thing right back at them. It turns out they are typically unaware of what is going on and get caught in a "loop" when that happens.

The Internet Troll - Right wing social media discourse is by and large driven by trolling, particularly as of late. It's not so much about proving themselves right or coming up with productive solutions but instead "owning the libs". A lot of the toxic masculinity wrapped up in conservatism gets projected online. This manifests as a pattern where caring about others, empathy, vulnerability, uncertainty, etc are seen as weakness and attacked. Currently a common target has been people upset that Musk bought Twitter. These people get portrayed as weak cowards, unjustly protected by Twitter's previous administration and now fair game. I definitely saw this pattern play out early on in SA as well-simply caring about, well anything would get you mercilessly mocked. Strength was associated with both apathy and misanthropy. That said, I find conservatives themselves pretty quick to call others bots and trolls (similar to the NPC meme a while back). They can be surprisingly thin skinned as well. I noticed that being suitably annoying and persistent they can start whining that you are harassing them, and block/mute you.

Pronouns in bio- This is another puzzling and annoying thing I saw happen over the past few years on Twitter. If a person has pronouns listed in their bio there's almost a race to see who can dismiss them for it. It's such a weak, played out dig at someone. Now mind you I'm not shocked at how cruel and crass people can be online but rather... Disappointed in how uncreative they are about it. How do they expect you to respond to this? The same way we respond to a skunk flipping it's tail up menacingly?

Weka posted:

dang fellows, we haven't unpacked right wing online culture and commkunication on social media in ages.

quote:

Researchers who track how the far right in in the US mobilizes, self-promotes and recruits are reporting that women are playing a growing role in the movement.

They often work behind the scenes to advance conspiracy theories through social media and softly attract new women into the fold. But at the same time, in recent years “alt-right” women have also shifted to influential public-facing roles in rightwing media production and far-right national politics.

They have taken prominent roles in events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol, count US congresswomen in their number and have seen the emergence of powerful new groups like Moms for Liberty.

“[Far-right women] have a lot more power than you think,” said Dr Sandra Jeppesen, a professor of media and communications at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

Despite their seemingly understated presence in extremist groups and far-right politics, they can be effective organizers, responsible for bringing thousands of people to the Capitol for the January 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and now mobilizing against inclusive education.

Some women figures on the far-right scene have a lot of money, especially the most prominent ones, said Tracy Llanera, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. The most high-profile far-right conservative women are involved in social media production because they fit the mold of what Llanera calls “the acceptable faces of conservative propaganda”.

They include Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren and Canadian far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern, who produce conservative media and rightwing propaganda, amassing a huge following and millions of dollars.

Even so-called “Tradwives” – such as TikToker Estee Williams, who promotes strict adherence to traditional gender roles – generate income from their social media content. The Global Network on Extremism & Technology recently linked Tradwives to “alt-lite” and “alt-right” ideologies.

“I think women definitely want power,” Jeppesen argued. “I don’t think ‘alt-right’ women go into politics for altruistic reasons.”

Like men in the movement, women commit to far-right politics believing there is a crisis and they have to commit to extraordinary action, she stated. In the days leading up to 6 January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia, paid tens of thousands of dollars for a promoted Parlor post stating the need for a grassroots army and created a Photoshopped image of her and Donald Trump.

The post, used as an election fundraiser for Greene’s campaign, garnered millions of views and played a strong role in mobilizing people to the Capitol, Jeppesen explained.

While Greene’s social media presence attracted insurrectionists to Washington DC, the far-right election-denial group Women for America First ultimately held the permit for the rally outside the White House, helped to coordinate the march that became the January 6 riot, and eventually organized fundraisers for election audits in Georgia and Arizona in 2021, Vice News reported.

Other female insurrectionists played a pivotal role in the riots and spreading election denial conspiracies during and after.

Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keepers member and founder of the Ohio State Regular Militia, arranged for both militias to travel to the Capitol, organizing and communicating on site with the encrypted walkie-talkie-style app Zello. Sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, people such as Watkins are considered political prisoners to members of the far-right movement.

When Ashli Babbit was killed by Capitol Hill police during the January 6 attack, she was promoted as a martyr, with even the former US president Donald Trump calling her parents. “Women make better martyrs in the ‘alt-right’,” Jeppesen said about Babbit’s lingering effect.

Another growing power on the far right is Moms for Liberty, a group that began as a small parents’ rights group but which has spread across the US and is a leading force in promoting book bans.

The group – with a fervent membership of conservative mothers – aims to affect US education, attacking anything that meddles with the far-right view of what is suitable for bringing up children, said Llanera of the University of Connecticut. “Mothers protect their offspring, out of the private sphere where they are most relevant,” she added.

Iowyth Ulthiin, a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University and researcher at Lakehead University, explained that rightwing sects will use a broad appeal to a general issue like children’s safety in order to spread far-right ideas.

“Who doesn’t love children and want them to be safe?” Ulthiin said.

Far-right mothers start building rapport with other parents, using the vulnerability of their children to open the door to QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment.

The far right can take the same recruitment posture online. Ulthiin’s research has seen women in the “mommy blogger aesthetic” on Instagram, known for sharing photos of “lovely, enviable lives”, become subtly political and then escalate rapidly into conspiracy theories.

Most notably, film-maker Sean Donnelly produced an eight-minute documentary, QAmom: Confronting My Mom’s Conspiracy Theories, about his mother’s transformation from a new age Californian to an outright conspiracy theorist who believed well-known celebrities would be arrested for pedophilia.

Ulthiin said that women who fall into the far-right trap often have similar psychological profiles. “It would be a similar crowd to those who are in danger of joining a cult,” they said.

Weka posted:

nice username 'studs n chuds'.

mark immune posted:

that’s a lot to unpack

quote:

Rebecca Weiner learned about catastrophic threats at an early age: She grew up in Santa Fe, N.M., near the cradle of the nuclear bomb.

Her grandfather, a mathematician, fled Poland in 1939, studied at Harvard and then moved to New Mexico in 1943 to help develop atomic weapons. In college, Ms. Weiner studied the ethical questions that Manhattan Project scientists, and their wives, confronted as they devised the bombs that annihilated two Japanese cities, but that they hoped would “end war as we know it,” she said.

Now, Ms. Weiner, 46, has been named the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, commanding about 1,500 people spread throughout the city. The bureau includes dozens of analysts and hundreds of officers and investigators who monitor threats like bomb plots, mass shootings and spontaneous chaos like a social media influencer’s video game giveaway that drew thousands of rowdy teenagers to Union Square this month.

A lawyer and 17-year department veteran, Ms. Weiner is taking over a bureau that includes a counterterrorism unit created after the Sept. 11 attacks. Since its inception, the unit has helped foil a plan to kidnap an American-Iranian journalist and what officials say were dozens of terrorist plots.

It is also a bureau whose work remains shrouded in secrecy and that has been condemned because of its surveillance activities, including in 2011, when the public learned that its officers had been spying on Muslims for years.

The bureau has been most visible when it has violated civil liberties, but Ms. Weiner said in an interview that it had protected them more conscientiously in the past decade. The unit’s focus, now, she said, was on stopping so-called lone wolves like the man who massacred Black residents of Buffalo at a supermarket, the truck driver who mowed down eight people on a Manhattan bike path and the man who stabbed the author Salman Rushdie last August in Chautauqua, N.Y.

In the interview, Ms. Weiner ticked off some of the threats New York City currently faces: the Islamic State, right-wing extremists and accelerationists, a white supremacist movement that advocates overthrowing the government.

“The individual actor has been the biggest concern for a while,” she said, adding that what kept her awake was “the concern that we’ve missed something.”

Ms. Weiner, who was sworn in last month as her two sons, 5 and 8, held a Bible, is the rare top police executive who does not have close personal ties to Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who identifies closely with the force. Rather than walking a neighborhood beat, she joined as a civilian junior analyst with a law degree.

In 2020, during a panel discussion hosted by the Global Security Forum, an annual gathering of experts and officials, the moderator — a woman — asked Ms. Weiner whether she led with “tough love mothering” or by embracing a “flirtatious, more traditional vamp style.”

Ms. Weiner was silent for a moment.

“I hope those aren’t the only two options,” she replied, then burst out laughing.

“I am going to be who I am,” Ms. Weiner told the moderator. “And that’s how I’m going to lead from wherever I am in the organization.”

Reassuring residents of the bureau’s intentions and practices is a crucial task for Ms. Weiner as police departments in general confront “an erosion of trust,” said William J. Bratton, who met her when he returned to lead the department for a second term as commissioner in 2014.
Ms. Weiner’s intellect, humor and approachability should help, Mr. Bratton said.

“One of the reasons she collaborates so well with people is that she makes her points without alienating people,” he said.

Ms. Weiner said that the participation of her grandfather, Stanislaw Ulam, in the most secret military initiative of World War II influenced her career choices.

“I was always interested in national security work, in protecting our country,” she said.

Mr. Ulam, Ms. Weiner said, played memory games with her when she was a child to test how the brain resembled a computer. But she was particularly fascinated by her grandmother, Francoise Aron Ulam, who came to the United States from France and met Mr. Ulam in 1941.

Ms. Ulam spoke three languages, helped write her husband’s memoirs and worked as a “calculator” on the Manhattan Project along with other wives, performing complex mathematics using paper, pencil and slide rules.

Ms. Weiner grew up wanting to learn more about her and the other young women who relocated to Los Alamos so their husbands could work on “the Gadget,” the nickname for the bomb.

“Many of them were really grappling with the same ethical quandaries as their husbands, but without the exhilaration of knowing that they were in charge of the scientific discovery,” Ms. Weiner said.

She helped her grandmother write her own memoirs as a student at Harvard, where she majored in history and literature and met her husband, Drake Bennett, a reporter at Bloomberg News. She earned a law degree at Harvard, then began researching international security as a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

When she joined the Police Department in 2006, she was one of only a few female analysts. She rose through the ranks, becoming director of intelligence analysis in 2012 and assistant commissioner of the intelligence bureau in 2016.

John Miller, who became deputy commissioner of the bureau in 2014, said she had a “remarkable” ability to recognize how security threats were changing.

“Whether it was the shift to Al Qaeda to ISIS, or the shift from sleeper cells to lone wolves to domestic-inspired racism, it was Rebecca and her team of analysts who were always on the cutting edge,” Mr. Miller said.

By the time Ms. Weiner joined the department, the counterterrorism division had developed a secret demographics unit composed of officers whose job was to create a map that showed where different ethnic groups lived. The goal was to learn where terrorist suspects could blend in, but the unit’s tactics shifted into a blanket surveillance of Muslims and developing databases of where they shopped, worked and prayed.

The unit was exposed in 2011 by The Associated Press, prompting lawsuits by Muslim and civil liberties groups, who said the tactics violated the rules that had been established as a result of a 1970s case involving the department’s spying on students, civil rights groups and suspected Communist sympathizers. Known as the Handschu case, the litigation led to federal guidelines prohibiting the Police Department from collecting information about political speech unless it is related to potential terrorism.

Ms. Weiner did not work in the demographics unit, but she helped handle negotiations between the department and lawyers for the plaintiffs in the suits filed after the unit’s tactics were exposed.

“There was a level of mistrust that we had to rectify,” she said.

Jethro Eisenstein, a lawyer for plaintiffs in the Handschu case, said Ms. Weiner had shown a strong regard for civil liberties. During one negotiation session in 2016, Ms. Weiner asked hypothetically whether the bureau should investigate someone who had declared support for ISIS online.

Of course it should, the lawyers replied. Her response was surprising, Mr. Eisenstein recalled.

“‘Really? Just based on that?’” she said.

“She was reviewing a lot of things that people said and then trying to decide whether that warranted a disruption of their lives,” Mr. Eisenstein said. “She was really putting on the brakes.”

Ms. Weiner and other police officials now meet monthly with a civilian representative who reviews the department’s investigations and reports potential wrongdoing to a federal judge. The representative has submitted five reports since 2018. All found the department in compliance with the guidelines.

Naz Ahmad, the acting director of the CLEAR project, one of the organizations that sued the department over the spying program, said the representative had helped police officials consider how their work affects civil liberties. Still, Ms. Ahmad added, the department did not have to detail its online investigations or divulge the race or religion of its targets.

In 2016, the city’s inspector general found that in more than 95 percent of case files, the targets of investigations “were predominantly associated with Muslims” or engaged in political activity associated with Islam.

“We have no insight into whether those numbers have changed,” Ms. Ahmad said.

Ms. Weiner said the bureau did not track the race and ethnicity of people it was investigating, but she said the demographics would be different today, given how the threats had shifted to right-wing extremism.

Often, she said, the threats came from people driven by conflicting ideologies, like Ethan Melzer, a soldier who consumed both ISIS and neo-Nazi propaganda before hatching a plan to kill U.S. service members.

Ibrahim Bechrouri, who teaches surveillance and counterterrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the bureau Ms. Weiner now oversees remains too secretive.

“It still does not have enough oversight,” he said. “We don’t have any transparency on what is happening now when it comes to the use of new technologies.”

Ms. Weiner said the bureau shares information “whenever we can.”

“Ultimately, our job is to protect people,” she said. “We’re not withholding information to benefit us. We want to protect people’s lives.”

Unless posted:

the times has an interesting piece

tristeham posted:

unpack this bitch

🖕

Unless posted:

yep, but it tracks if you follow the thread and its previous incarnations

i’m feeling a definite chill on posting things about unpacking far right stuff as they keep rearing their head on every single echelon of political and business power, but it’s cool to notice it and write about it if you have the kind of legal that can handle the constant onslaught of their weaponized judiciary

…

the times has an interesting piece about the nypd’s new deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism



https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/nyregion/rebecca-weiner-nypd-intelligence-unit.html

mark immune posted:

drat... even more to unpack. but we still haven't unpacked your previous post

Unless posted:

lol @ the part where she says that ISIS, right-wing, and accelerationists are the three biggest threats