Mediaboss Marketing

There are certain books where, as you're reading, you realize your mind is about to change. Reading Kill All Normies is one of those experiences. Written by Angela Nagle, an Irish writer and academic known for articles identifying "The New Man of 4chan," the book is a record of the recent online "culture wars", culminating in the 2016 US election and the triumph of the alt-right. It is also an indictment of the left, pinpointing just how it allowed this to happen.

The book opens with a cultural history, "From Hope to Harambe," outlining the progression from mid-00s pickup artist communities, to overtly anti-feminist "neomasculinity," to Gamergate (here Nagle's narration takes a near-audible sigh), leading to its collusion with 4chan's troll army and its political awakening as the alt-right. Nagle wrote her PhD dissertation on online misogyny, witnessing this evolution in real-time. "There's a sort of broad arch of reactionary politics which moves from anti-feminism to racism," she explains, meeting me in Dublin to talk about the book.

With its promise of a collective identity, the alt-right can seduce and assimilate these groups, lending them a sense of coherent identity.

Nagle approaches the alt-right as a tangle of wayward factions, united in their loathing of the left. Named for Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci who argued that political change follows cultural change, the "Gramscian Alt-Light" are those people you've seen on 4chan threads: creative, angry, unpredictable, but politically vacuous and messy. The "Manosphere" are men threatened by feminists, who they claim augur in civilizational decline and "cucking." They have converted their misogyny into racism, which links them with more old-fashioned far-right bigotry.

What each group shares is a fear of the future, an atomized life spent forever alone. With its promise of a collective identity, the alt-right can seduce and assimilate these groups, lending them a sense of coherent identity.

Among the alt-right's leaders, Nagle sees Richard Spencer as the most influential and the most likely to sustain a political career. "Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern and Milo, all those people are brilliant at media," says Nagle. "They're really good at Twitter, but they're shallow thinkers. Richard Spencer is much smarter. He realizes that conservatism will never be cool, so he's trying to bring in figures from the dissident left."

Essentialist arguments about what it is to "be a man" have evolved to address what it is to be a white man. Nagle cites "Return of Kings" (a "neomasculinity" blog) author Roosh V's transition from pickup artist to alt-right proponent as an example. Overwhelmed by a sexual hierarchy in which they cannot compete, and immersed in anti-immigration rhetoric and talk of "white genocide," the alt-right has coalesced around an aggressive, ultra-conservative version of white masculinity.

Nagle identifies a contradiction at the heart of the alt-right's demands: It might call for a return to old-fashioned values, but it fails to recognize how those same forces that brings it together erode any chance of returning to that lifestyle (the kind lived by people who hardly use the internet in the first place). "I think they want out of their lives, because their own lives are nothing like that," Nagle explains. "They're living the ultimate kind of individualism. They spend their time watching porn and playing video games. They're not part of any greater purpose." Spencer himself alludes to this in speeches, stating that "in a culture which offers video games, endless entertainment, drugs, alcohol, porn, sports, and a thousand other distractions to convince us of another reality, we want to cut all of that away."

This argument for the "real" stretches far beyond the online right: As a generation born far away enough from lifetime monogamy, home ownership, job security and a life without technology, we have little concept of the "normal" we're denied. On the alt-right, this plays out as an irresolvable frustration. "When they talk about 'normies,' explains Nagle, "they're also saying 'I want a normal life. I want a wife and a house and a family.' They're deeply conflicted, because everything they hate in this world is what they are the ultimate example of."

It would be tempting to dismiss this as an attack on easy targets (a group of antisocial teenage boys), but Nagle never dismisses their hopes and frustrations. Instead, she traces where they come from. Nor does she spare the online left: Kill All Normies can be categorized alongside Jarrett's Kobek's 2016 anti-novel I Hate the Internet in that both titles attack the online left from the left. Beside the /b/tards and racists and the Men Going Their Own Way (aka "MGTOW," the anti-feminist group that claims to renounce women and sex entirely), still it is the left who come out looking worst of all.

This is what makes Kill All Normies so troubling, and in other ways so exhilarating to read. Nagle attacks a liberal internet sunk in filter-bubbled complacency, drunk on the relative ease of expressing one's politics in retweets, and obsessed with calling out the right-wing bogeyman.

Nagle links this stagnation to a poverty of thought: "The thing is, you cannot come up with new ideas if the intellectual culture of your movement is totally closed down. Which has been the case for years. That's why the alt-right has been such a shock, because everyone was banking on the fact that everyone now agrees with us."

Nagle's argument finds horrifying validation at the book's conclusion, which leaps forward to January of this year, immediately after the suicide of author and cultural critic Mark Fisher. Rather than mourning his loss, or expressing condolences to his bereaved family, members of the online left gloated and portrayed his untimely death as a victory:

Nagle is damning here, writing that "this response is a fairly typical example of precisely the sour-faced identitarians who undoubtedly drove so many young people to the right during these vicious culture wars."

In the recent past, Fisher came under fire online for his essay "Exiting the Vampire Castle," which argues against the online left's call-out culture as obstructing change, and breeding a further sense of futility among the online left. When I interviewed Fisher two years ago about his Facebook project "Boring Dystopia," he was certain that Facebook, Twitter and their ilk would die away within our lifetimes.

This hasn't yet come to pass. Rather, "online politics" have gone mainstream, and won an election. What went so horribly wrong in online life, that it got this bad? Have we learned to love the filter bubble so much that we've forgotten our own humanity?

More than anything, this book is about the a battle for the real. What is real? Who gets to be a normie?

It is tempting to dream of an end to Twitter, of Facebook imploding and Instagram going offline, to put an end to this culture war. But Nagle isn't convinced it would solve our dilemma: "I think it would be replaced by something that would fulfill the same purpose. I wouldn't want to suggest a technical solution to what is in essence an absence of ideas."

The book ends with the alt-right on the ascendant, spilling off the screen and into real life as riots erupt at American universities. The alt-right has been validated: we have already let them, to paraphrase Ivanka Trump (herself misquoting Ayn Rand). Now, who is going to stop them?

More than anything, this book is about a battle for the real. What is real? Who gets to be a normie? What will we accept as "normal," and what will we stand against? To Nagle, the challenge posed is a moral one: "We think of them as kind of a dirty word, one which reminds of us of reactionary politics, but moral questions are so important. We constantly make moral decisions, whether we want to or not. And the central issue of the alt right is a moral one."

Subscribe to Science Solved It, Motherboard's new show about the greatest mysteries that were solved by science.

See original here:
'Kill All Normies' Is About the Alt-Right But the Left Ends Up Looking Worse - Motherboard

Liberals are continuing to get the better of conservatives on arange of long-running moral debates, according to a new Gallup survey:

Americans continue to express an increasingly liberal outlook on what is morally acceptable, as their views on 10 of 19 moral issues that Gallup measures are the most left-leaning or permissive they have been to date. The percentages of U.S. adults who believe birth control, divorce, sex between unmarried people, gay or lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, doctor-assisted suicide, pornography and polygamy are morally acceptable practices have tied record highs or set new ones this year.

Sometime during the late Obama yearsand especially after the Supreme Courtsame-sexmarriage ruling in Obergefellcommentators (on both sides) began to say with increasing frequency that the culture wars were over and that the liberal side had won. The new Gallup poll shows that, for better or worse, there is a good deal of truth to this.James Davison Hunters authoritative 1992book on the culture wars described a battle between thereligiously orthodox, who prioritized Biblical teachings and natural law, and secular progressivists, whose lodestar was reason and utilitarianism.While tens of millions of Americans still adhere to the moral vision that defined the cultural right in the latter half of the 20th century, the progressivists, aided by the decline of institutional religion, have steadily gained groundon most questions related to sex and the family.

Of course, that doesnt mean that cultural politics is overfar from it. It just means that the key issues defining the culture war, and the coalitionsfighting it, will evolve. We have already seen political correctnessor the increasingly pitched struggle overwhat kind of social sanctions should be attached to offensive speechtake center stage, with the right taking the position of the rebellious counterculture and the left arguing for stricter limits on expression. While debates over the morality ofsame-sex relationships are essentially moot, journalists and academics and policymakersare now debating different kinds of sexual conduct, like affirmative consentand catcalling. And as Peter Beinart has argued,the decline of the religiously-animated conflicts that characterized the old culture warshas brought various forms of ethnic tribalism to the fore in new and unsettling ways.

The liberal coalition has probably won what Pat Buchanan famously called the war for the soul of America that was inaugurated by the 1960s and 1970s social movements. But another war is coming. And we dont yet quite know what it will look like, much less which side will win.

Read the original:
Liberals Won the Culture Wars. What Comes Next? - The American Interest

We hear a lot about the culture wars being fought in this country. That conflict is often described as the struggle between those whose deepest commitments were to God vs. those humans who believed their own value systems evolved through what some describe as steady enlightenment.

These folks conclude for most issues the culture war is receding. For example, public opinion about gay marriage has shifted dramatically. While that is true, I think this crowd misses the boat on some other issues.

Some believe the question Who are we? was at one time about how we defined ourselves morally. Many now seem to favor a different answer that emphasizes how we define ourselves ethnically, racially and linguistically. What a change that is and for me its counter-intuitive as well. This new theory says we should emphasize our differences rather than searching for those things we have in common. For example, the civil rights movement at one time told us we should be blind to racial differences, but now we are told attempting to ignore differences is actually racist micro-aggression is the new term.

Does this mean some Americans celebrate a theory that seems to relegate the concept of morality to a low priority level? Is the concept of morality too old-fashioned to be relevant? Has the concept of having moral absolutes been set aside in favor of making personal decisions? Recall Barack Obamas explanation of sinfulness when asked about his religious and moral foundation. He clearly answered a sin was something he considered to be wrong. Apparently he was making a personal decision with no moral absolute as a basis.

Lets apply this apparent shift in moral standards to the recent presidential campaign. Was a de-emphasis on moral standards somehow reflected in the selection of candidates? Many would answer yes. Most voter complaints related to feelings the candidates had ethical and character issues. Were these two candidates delivered to us because much of the country is becoming more comfortable with ignoring moral standards? Would an emphasis on traditional moral standards have generated better conduct by the candidates and better choices for the voters? Think about it.

I believe a true culture requires some level of philosophical consistency and moral and ethical absolutes. Some seem to celebrate standing in the way of developing or maintaining what I consider important a unique American culture. Many radical progressive elements in our society even contradict the otherwise liberal notion we are moving from an old culture to a new one? I believe some of their goals and actions actually suggest we are moving from the old culture to a condition of no culture.

Steve Bakke is a Courier subscriber living in Fort Myers, Fla. He is a retired CPA and commercial finance executive.

Here is the original post:
Moving from 'old' culture to 'no' culture - Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier

Turkish courts upheld the state ordered ban of Wikipediaon Friday, according to Voice of America. The crowdsourced encyclopedia has been inaccessible in Turkey since the end of April, asThe Washington Post reported, since the administration of Recep Tayyip Erdoandeclared it a threat to national security.

In response, hacktivists have made a copy of Turkish Wikipedia and posted it online using a new way of addressing web content called the InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS. The Turkish government cant block this copy of Wikipedia because the format uses a slew of open source technology to change the way our browsers retrieve data. Its a decentralized system, which allows the same set of data to live in multiple places while still enabling browsers to find any one of them with only a single address.

Turkey was able to block Wikipedia because the site has an address that goes to a real place (that place is a server), so if they block the wires that lead to that place, they can block the site. IPFS doesnt address data with a location, it addresses it by identifying the content itself. The system goes out and finds the nearest copy of that content. Block access to one copy, and it will just find another copy.

In a talk at TEDxSan Francisco, Juan Benet, the originator of IPFS, explains the shortcomings of the current way we address content on the web using the example of a physical library.

Imagine we could only reference books by the physical location of one copy, he says. So, in other words, you want to readTo Kill a Mockingbird. You go to look it up and the file catalog tells you that the only place you can find the book is in one library, in one room, against one wall and at the end of one shelf. When you go there and its not there, youre out of luck.

Of course, you didnt care about reading that exact copy ofTo Kill a Mockingbird.Youd be happy to read any copy. Thats what the IPFS does online. It encourages copies to live on lots of servers, and the internet works better when data doesnt have to retrieved from far away. It also knows how to verify that each copy is exactly the same, that not one bit of data has been changed.

We previously reported on a recent Spotify acquisition, Mediachain, that used similar technology to track the attribution of online content.

Pages change online all the time, but thats fine too. IPFS also knows how to keep track of versions of a file. It can show you the latest updateof a page, but it can also find prior versions. Version control is a critical aspect of how Wikipedia works as well, and it was key when we dug into the whitewashing of the entry concerning a noted 80s banking crook.

It isnt just state actors that can block our access to content. The current addressing system is vulnerable to large scale denial-of-service attacks. Even though most of these attacks arent able to take down sites or cant do it for long, they still end up costing service providers money, costs that they then forward on to us.

In a decentralized system, it would be very complicated to pull off a DDoS attack against every copy of a site, and even if an attacker found every copy, the publisher could just make more. It gives the good guys a way to go on the offensive.

The internet is the planets most important technology, Benet says in his talk, and he believes it can work better. This demonstration with a cached copy of a recent version of Turkish Wikipedia is a good early test.

Find the first copy the IPFS teamposted here. If updated versions are saved, the latest copy can always be found here. There are lots of other ways to find these files right now, though most of the others require some help from technical friends, but software to enhance the systems usability should be in the field very soon.

Moving forward, the IPFS developers hope to create a read/write version of Wikipedia, so the encyclopedia can function on IPFS the same way it does on HTTP now, permitting anyone who finds it to edit its content.

Which would also mean that no one could stop users from editing the site either, making its information nearly impossible to hide.

Visit link:
Turkey Can't Block This Copy of Wikipedia - Observer

Rev. Al Sharpton to return for Wednesday prayer rally

The Rev. Al Sharpton will return to Tulsa on Wednesday for a rally in support of Terence Crutcher.

Sharpton confirmed through his Twitter account that he will be attending the Citywide Prayer and Call for Justice from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Wednesday. The event will be held at the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, 5 S. Boston Ave.

Also expected to attend are Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Crutchers family; Tiffany Crutcher, Terence Crutchers sister; and Etan Thomas, a former Booker T. Washington and NBA basketball player. A flier for the event, which is organized by the Justice4Crutch movement, asks attendees to bring their own signs.

This will be Sharptons second trip to Tulsa since Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby fatally shot an unarmed Crutcher outside his vehicle in September. The reverend first appeared at a National Prayer Call for Justice rally in Tulsa on Sept. 26. He spoke to protesters before leading them on a march from the Greenwood Cultural Center to City Hall in downtown.

Mareo Johnson, pastor at Seeking the Kingdom Ministries in north Tulsa, and a few others representing the local Black Lives Matter movement attended the first day of the Shelby trial. Johnson said he plans to be present as much as he can.

We are here saying that justice should be served, and we believe that justice will be served, he said. Were the voice and eyes for the community, as well.

Johnson has been involved in several rallies and protests since September, including one that occurred outside the courthouse less than a week after Crutcher was fatally shot by Shelby.

All lives should matter, but if black lives mattered, if all lives truly mattered, we wouldnt be here today, he said. An unarmed man wouldnt have been shot dead in the street like a dog if all lives mattered.

A few people wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts were told Monday to turn their shirts inside-out if they wanted to enter the courtroom.

Shelbys attorneys have asked District Judge Doug Drummond to bar people from either side from wearing attire that calls attention to which side they support, as it could improperly influence the jury.

As of April 28, Drummond took the request under advisement and gave his approval Monday.

Black Lives Matter activist Monroe Padillow said he chose to wear the shirt as a way to represent his community and to make the movements presence known to those observing the trial.

Although he questions whether having to turn his shirt inside-out violates his First Amendment rights, Padillow said the request is not worth pressing.

It doesnt bother me, he said. At the end of the day, our presence is known. Our presence is here. Thats whats important to us. Regardless of what were wearing, were still here for the community, and that point is still being made.

There were a lack of demonstrations or protesters outside the courthouse on day one.

Tulsa County Undersheriff George Brown said Sheriffs Office officials assessed the agencys scheduling and increased its presence of uniformed deputies and some plainclothes deputies in and around the courthouse for the duration of the trial.

Were just business as usual, and its our job to secure the courthouse, and were doing that, Brown said.

Because of apparent space constraints, reporters were not allowed in Drummonds fourth-floor courtroom to observe as jurors were sworn-in and received questionnaires. Typically, that process is open to the public.

Among other procedure changes, the area designated for news cameras was adjusted. Tulsa County sheriffs deputies placed blue tape with the words CAMERA LINE in capital letters about 20 feet away from the normal press area. After concerns were expressed about the arrangement, about a half-hour later two deputies removed the barrier and put new blue tape about 10 feet closer to the standard press line.

Authorities also have closed Fifth Street between the courthouse and the Tulsa City-County Library until the trial concludes.

kyle.hinchey @tulsaworld.com

The rest is here:
The Rev. Al Sharpton returning to Tulsa for prayer rally during Betty Shelby trial - Tulsa World