The Anti-Nazi DNP Pledge

@rainbowdash42  
Im not saying it doesn’t happen, simply that I trust a vast majority of people are smart enough to not go out to start up the 4th reich because of a cartoon horse. Moreso, going scorched earth on an entire category of drawings because some may have been created with malicious intent is a gross overreaction far beyond the scope of the problem. As I said earlier, this same logic could be applied with tags like foalcon. Who’s to say some weren’t drawn by groomers using the well worn tactic of mixing adult content with children’s media to entice potentially underaged users who sure as hell lie about their ages when they disable the filters into their orbit. The way around it is to identify individuals causing problems and take appropriate action, not ban all the content in a set of tags. ‘Don’t like it, filter it’ has been the policy for most of the last decade around here and, to the best of my knowledge, no one around here’s ever went out and committed a hate crime based on something they saw here.

@Background Pony #CCFF  
Also yeah, this. Where does it prove that the screencapped people are actually neo-nazis, and not, for example, falsification from the author of the article or were immediately laughed out? Desuarchive (regular boards) and 4plebs (/pol/ & company) exist. There are only two reasons not to link to the very threads the post was screencapped (cherrypicked) from: the article-maker is incompetent at research and doesn’t know to provide sources, or article-maker is attempting to lie and sources would reveal said lie.  
And what proves that those tactics are any more effective at recruiting? They’re completely disconnected from “neo-nazi” point, you might as well just interact with people in a completely normal and ordinary manner while being a real neo-nazi/communist/islamist/BLMer/etc to become friends and hence bring them in touch with more neo-nazis/etc, and there’s no way to magically prevent that.

@SomeDerpibooruUser  
Let’s just think about this for a second.
 
If I’m a biased journalist who wants to get people to stop being Nazis, what am I more likely to do?  
a) Fabricate proof of ways that the alt-right recruits people to get them to clutch their pearls and say “oh the humanity!”  
b) Actually figure out how they’re recruiting people so I can do whatever I can to stop it from happening?
 
I feel like (b) would be significantly more effective in achieving my goals.
 
But anyway, if you don’t like this source, I have another (which is arguably a much more compelling argument, but a somewhat drier read): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4325810-Writers.html#document/p1 . This is the ‘style guide’ for The Daily Stormer, a far right, Holocaust-denying “”“news””” site.
 
The whole thing is an informative read, but the particularly relevant bits start at page 10, under “Morals and Dogma”. They have a section called “Lulz”, where they explain that the “tone should be light” because “the unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we’re joking or not”. But they’re perfectly clear that “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas k***s.” (Or is that just for the lulz too? Aren’t they all such fun, nice people?)
 
They go on and on about these kinds of tactics. It’s no secret that these are the tactics they use. The goal of the tactics is to make us question whether or not they’re serious, and to always give them plausible deniability.
 
@Background Pony #CCFF  
See above for another source.
 
@Barhandar  
I don’t know of any! Do you?
 
Also, nice job on the whataboutism there. You guys are doing a good job proving that these tactics are viral ;)

@rainbowdash42  
Well, i guess the only way forward is to ban lighthearted conversations online. Everything must now be brutally sober and serious. If no one enjoys talking to other people online, no one will be interested in whatever nonsense the other person is trying to sell them. Who knows what sinister intentions those lulz could entail. It could be a nazi, isis or even a child abductor telling those jokes.

I think I may get what the disconnect with what future policy should be between some users. This is a site based around a tv show for an american toy company based on one of their popular franchises that’s proven to be very popular with its home audience. And its in english so it makes sense a good chunk of users around here are american. However, this site is hosted by, has a mod team staffed by a number of, and counts as a sizable chunk of its userbase, europeans. Americans are known to be very anti censorship and letting people say what they wish, as best exemplified by our first consititutional amendment. Europeans, on the other hand, do not share the same attitudes about speech. Hate speech is a crime in most european countries so it makes sense that a european user would be more open to outright banning of certain topics when such a thing is the norm in their countries concerning controversial speech like most things nazi related. Americans are more in favor of letting people express their opinions at the risk of others becoming offended by said speech while europeans are more in favor of preventing certain speech from being dissemintated and offending groups of people at the cost of limiting certain expression. This isn’t the full divide and there is certainly some crossover between the groups but the cultural differences when it comes to dealing with controversial speech/art certainly may help explain the ideological divide around here.

@rainbowdash42  

Then I don’t exist.  

A. If you hadn’t realized yet despite this entire thread, Nazism is a boogeyman to the “lefties”. It means whatever you want it to mean.  
The goal of the article is to make people come to the “left” by getting them scared of “nazis”, and make it easier to manipulate people through labelling arbitrary things “nazis”, by making them think completely ordinary things are things only/specifically nazists do. Basically, “Hitler talked with people, therefore talking with people is a neo-nazi ploy” if you reduce it to absurdity.  

Oh no, people will totally all become confused by something literally as old as speech, namely, lying.
 
@Background Pony #30B4  
It’s however compensated by European anti-censors being much more noticeable specifically because America has free speech (people are used to it) while Europe doesn’t (and some people get really angry at this).

@Background Pony #30B4  
Yeah. That’s definitely what I’m looking for, and not a really poorly constructed strawman at all.
 
And for what it’s worth, I’m from the US.

@rainbowdash42  
It’s reduction to absurdity, because, again, there’s no difference whatsoever between a neo-nazi and [insert LITERALLY ANY IDEOLOGY] telling normie-palatable jokes to attract people. It’s literally “someone wants to make acquaintances/friends, THEY ARE A NEO NAZI REEEE”.  
Yes, both good and bad people try to become friends with other people, and the red flags are the same for any subversive ideology and clique. Unless you really think someone’s playing 5d chess about it, in which case there’s nothing you can do.

@rainbowdash42  
My post got unread because it’s at the bottom of the last page.
 

 
You’re making the assumption that journalists actually want to “get people to stop being Nazis.” Journalists are rather disingenuous and their interest is usually less about making meaningful change or sharing facts and more about getting clicks so they feel more important. They’re essentially social media users with exclusive accounts. Why else do you think they would go after a pony site with a tiny minority of Nazi-themed pictures, almost all of which can’t even be construed as “propaganda”? See this article: https://quillette.com/2020/06/27/is-the-my-little-pony-fan-community-really-full-of-nazis/
 
Also I’d say that if journalists actually, legitimately wanted people to stop being Nazis, they would stop making articles trashing white people, but that’s neither here nor there.
 
Are you really saying that the Daily Stormer is effective in making people into Nazis? If you’re reading that either you’ve gone there out of curiosity for its media-driven infamy or you’re already a Nazi yourself. A person telling another to go read the Daily Stormer is a terrible recruiter because of how blatantly obvious it is. It’s no more “subtle” than the Daily Worker that inspired it.

@SomeDerpibooruUser  
Small reminder that /pol/ means “politically incorrect”, not “internet nazi center”.  
You can easly find nazis, communists, ancaps, anarcho-communists, anarchist and more!  
The only reason why it may appear as “rightwing extermist only” board is because leftwingers are more inclined to censorship (including self-censorship) and most of them run away when “politically incorrect” people even exist on the same board!  
The one that stay have enough brainmatter to engage with different people instead of running away to “reddit hugboxes”.  
/pol/ lefties have my RESPECT because of that.

@rainbowdash42  
Journalists have lost all credibility in my opinion. They ABSOLUTELY do lie and try to mislead people. There’s a reason the public’s trust of them is at an all time low.  
And reading that document, I still don’t see what that has to do with this site. Rule #0 protects against attacking, antagonizing or demeaning groups, even under the guise of a joke. Drawing a Nazi horse is not attacking anyone.

@Armagedonus  
That’s actually a good point too, a board like /pol/ is going to have very few attack on derpi-style screeching authoritarians specifically because they can’t tolerate being somewhere they can’t control - and where vast majority of people see through their bullshit instantly.
 
That also explains why TSP hates and doesn’t understand 4chan actually (check around 12th disaster thread for caps). He can exercise no control whatsoever over it and must argue his points like everyone else, and… he’s not very good at it and used to easy solutions of strong-arming people.

“Whataboutisms” always gets me.
 
It’s like the people who complain about whataboutisms legitimately don’t understand that lines of thinking don’t just exist in a vacuum, but actually have implications beyond a single topic, and that those implications can expose flaws in that line of thinking.
 
Like, normal adults with working brains can go:
 
“I think X.”  
“But what about when X applies to Y?”  
“Hmm. You know, I hadn’t considered that. Clearly I need to think about this more.”
 
We have reached a point where asking someone to think critically about the implications of their own worldview is treated as a recruitment tactic for neo-nazis.

@DerpyFast  
I blame Twitter for that. The lack of characters in each tweet prevents any user to think rationally and with a calmer mindset. Everything can become really extreme at any moment over there.
 
Also the auto-suggestion feature that makes its users live inside an artificial bubble. Barhandar and Skoon know way more about this topic than me but what you have said doesn’t happen on Twitter because that site encourages you to act fast without any critical thinking,while slowly consuming your brain in a sea of negativity and ego,seeking for followers and likes all the time.

@DerpyFast  
I like it when you point out double standards some people scream “whataboutism” XD  
Like “Hey now, you cannot point out I am a hypocrite! That is a whataboutism!”  
It is a new favourite dogwhistle of disingenious people XD

@DerpyFast  
Am I wrong, or is accusing something someone said of being a whataboutism, a whataboutism itself?
 
If so, I don’t think that was intentional on rainbowdash42’s part, but it would be quite ironic.

@Barhandar  
Hey,you cited a source, right on. typically when I have these sorts of discussions people will ask the other side of the argument to substantiate their claims with evidence while simultaneously providing zero evidence for their own claims as of they are self-evident.  
My goal in asking for cited sources wasn’t really any sort of “whataboutism”, but just to test the waters and see if both aisles of this argument were being hypocritical. If I was still invested in this debate, I’d read over that whole study, do my own research to find out if ResearchGate was a credible source, and discuss the merits of a single study when determining a trend, but I just can’t, I’m tired, I just want Derpibooru to go back to being… comfortable. I’m very sorry for inciting a discussion and not having the spirit to follow through.

@Marima  

 
ResearchGate is not a source in itself, it’s an online community for scholars like LinkedIn is for professionals. People upload their research there and some of it is highly credible, other papers less-so.

@DerpyFast  
Complete dismissal of whataboutism gets me . The idea that flawed logic applied to a different but analogous set of facts may still be flawed isn’t meaningless. If a blanket ban on aryanne and other images containing nazi imagery or ‘hate speech’, its not wrong for a critic of said plan to apply the same logic to other concepts in the same controversial light. Ergo, if you’re going to ban hate speech because it may encourage people to hate, its not illogical to then ban foalcon because it may encourage the much more controversial topic of pedophilia. Same with rape, abuse, etc. The point is to apply the same logic to sometinf analogous to the topic of discussion where the actor acts opposite their action in the matter at hand to present their hypocrisy or to forewarn of where such logic may lead. The mods aren’t likely to ban foalcon or any of the aforementioned tags anytime soon despite the fact that one can make the same criticisms of those tags/images that they can make of the tags/images in that bought this all about so why try to ban the images/topics they were trying to in the first place?

@Background Pony #30B4  

That’s what he said. You two are in agreement, with the difference being he uses abstract point and harder to understand language.  

It’s rhetorical but the answer is pretty simple: because the ban isn’t motivated by reason and logic, it’s motivated by emotions and agenda.

@Background Pony #1733  
I also blame CinemaSins. Why think critically about something when you can list off superficial nitpicks that may or may not impact the overall work.
 
You wanna know what keeps me up at night? I think if you asked the average person to explain why racism is bad, they wouldn’t be able to do it. They don’t understand how to make an objective argument against racism. They just think it’s bad because of guilt and victim narratives.
 
So what happens when you have a bunch of white people who can’t think critically, see the world entirely in terms race and victim narratives, and are sick of feeling guilty and want something to believe in? You create buyers for what neo-nazis are selling. It’s worth remembering that Nazi Germany was based on a victim narrative; the idea that Germany was getting screwed over by the rest of the world (which they were: see The Versailles Treaty) and some nebulous jewish boogeyman.
 
Fortunately, I actually do understand why racism is bad, so the neo-nazis have nothing to sell me. To this day, I still think “Bridle Gossip” did an amazing job exploring the topic. Racism isn’t bad because “they were mean to the brown person”, it’s bad because everyone has something to offer, and they shouldn’t be prevented from offering it and achieving self-actualization due to factors that aren’t relevant to it, such as race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.
 
@Barhandar  
Yeah, I should probably use more casual language.

@DerpyFast  

 
You might want educate yourself about people who tried to do “communist revolution” in Germany between world wars.  
Or who supported antifa and other radical groups in the same period of time.  
Or even who barred Hitler from attendind art school XD  
Lots of coincidences if you ask me. (and no, I am not saying “all jews are evil” or anything like that)
 
Also you do know that racism is just a “political tribalism” in democratic societies? There is a reason why democrats wink at black people and republicans wink at confederates.

@DerpyFast  

Because it’s an entertainment channel and anyone who argues from the assumption it’s not is terribly mistaken.  

At least your avatar is 100% appropriate.  

Translation from Sunburstese to English: racism is bad because it misrepresents what someone can actually do. Whether in negative (anti-X) or positive (supremacism) direction. This also means “blacks on average are better at running and handling sunlight exposure but worse at handling cold” isn’t racist - it doesn’t misrepresent what that race can do, though it’s tautological.

Jesus.
 
Can we all agree that neo-Nazi ideology is, y’know, bad? Like, maybe that can be a baseline we can start from.
 
Because when I hear “no difference whatsoever between a neo-nazi and [insert LITERALLY ANY IDEOLOGY] telling normie-palatable jokes to attract people”, as much as this sentence is technically correct, I can’t help but think “but Nazis are the people whose entire ideology revolves around killing or removing people based on race”. I don’t think that’s just some side issue we can ignore here.
 
I’m solidly on the economic left in the US. Assume I live in a gated community (I don’t). If someone was walking around outside my home handing out pamphlets about how taxes are theft or whatever, maybe I’ll stop and have a chat with them or something. See what their views are; see if I can’t change their mind peacefully. In all likelihood, though, I’d probably just ignore them and head on my way. Good for them for engaging in civics, despite my disagreement.
 
If someone was walking around outside my home handing out pamphlets advertising the local KKK chapter… maybe what they’re doing is legal, but it darn sure is not moral, and if I can stop it by contacting the head of my community, I absolutely would. If I can stop it from happening in the future by gathering my community and pressuring them to create new rules prohibiting this behavior, I absolutely would.
 
I have zero interest in getting rid of anything on this site that isn’t linked to a real, hateful ideology, where “hateful ideology” is to the extent of, like, genocide or mass murder. Fascism and totalitarianism in any specific form applies, so I don’t want to hear “what about the Soviet Union” or whatever – ban stuff minimizing their brutalities, too. Other political views, and any other legal, non-political content, I don’t care about one whit. No slippery slope here.
 
And get out of here with that “Nazis are whatever the left doesn’t like”. I grant that ‘Nazi’ has become shorthand for ‘neo-Nazi’, but given that a lot of actual neo-Nazis are quite aligned with Hitler’s ideas, I don’t think it’s all that inaccurate. A small number of people may indeed be stretching the definition, but the reality of the matter is that neo-Nazis do exist, and they overlap quite significantly with the alt-right, which holds political power in my country.
 
And regarding whataboutisms. The point I was responding to was @Barhandar ‘s comment about “this thing that has so far EVERY SINGLE TIME resulted in mass deaths is just a socioeconomic theory”. Sure, maybe communism is bad. That does not change the fact that Nazism is bad. It is completely and fundamentally irrelevant, because I can agree or disagree with that argument with zero bearing on the conversation at hand. I refuse to be derailed by arguments like that.
 
Come at me with an actual argument, displaying evidence that you’ve read my argument, responding to the actual points I’m making with logical argumentation, and I’m happy to discuss.
 
In that spirit, since I missed the post before by Barhandar with actual evidence, here’s a quick response:
 
Hey! I remember seeing someone post that Propaganda 2.0 paper a week ago or so. I’m inclined to say that the paper doesn’t quite say what you think it’s saying quite as strongly as you say it is, but let’s proceed under the assumption that it does. I don’t know where you live, but from what I’ve seen living in the US my entire life, I would not be surprised if a solid 25% or so of the population is primed enough to see Blacks as an inferior race. Growing up in a middle class, center-left, white family in a solidly blue city, I find myself having unconscious and subconscious bias. And I went to school with people of all different races! So what does that say about the priming that other folks might have, who may never have met a Black person in their lives, and whose families may have been outright racist?
 
As for the Reddit/Voat thing, I would be interested to see that study, but let’s again assume that it’s true. Firstly, fatshaming != Nazism. It might make you into a miserable person to be around, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t encourage, like, murdering fat people. But even assuming that the results are the same… I just looked on the front page of Voat, and no post has even 500 points. Most don’t even hit 100. And if you start looking at the actual content, the vast majority is unmistakably mid-to-far right wing; I don’t see it terribly likely that the first steps of recruitment would happen here, at least not in the same ways. In fact, I can see it being used as a good example of what can happen if completely unlimited free speech in a private, anonymous space goes too far.
 
Yes, alternative platforms do appear to fill the gap. But these alternative platforms pale in comparison, and usually have less breadth and depth of content. Users aren’t motivated to stay, unless they’re there for the ‘bad’ stuff, in which case it was imo too late for the platform to effectively deradicalize them anyway (barring some massive change in social media policies that I doubt will ever happen). Deplatforming cuts off the supply of new users to the undesirable content, and forces existing users of the undesirable content to have a worse user experience in order to continue consuming it.
 
Folks, I’ve got to get some work done. And sleep. It’s late, and I didn’t expect to be bombarded by posts from like five different people in rapid succession. (Though I should have predicted it – number 5, with the caveat that I think you’re all acting in good faith.) I’m sure by the time I get back this conversation will have moved on and y’all will have forgotten about me while making roughly the same arguments, so y’all can consider this this 5v1 a win if it gives you the good feels.

@Armagedonus  

Alois Hitler, followed by Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (can’t be bothered finding who exactly and Wikipedia is being stupid about this) because he didn’t have credentials - as his father was a dick and sent him to technical school instead of arts - followed by him living in antisemitic places (while actually selling his artworks just fine).
 
If Adolf’s dad wasn’t a dick, we could’ve had a different party try to take control over Germany and lead to WW2.