Sunday, August 21, 2016

Time complains about trolling

Joel Stein writes the current Time mag cover story:
Trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men’s rights and against immigration and may have used the computer from Weird Science to fabricate Donald Trump. Not only does Trump share their attitudes, but he’s got mad trolling skills: he doxxed Republican primary opponent Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out his cell-phone number on TV and indirectly got his Twitter followers to attack GOP political strategist Cheri Jacobus so severely that her lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist order.

The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” Republicans who don’t like Trump are “cuckservatives.” Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t “taken the red pill,” a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix. They derisively call their adversaries “social-justice warriors” and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weakness to gain pity, which allows them to control the levers of power. Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.
Joel Stein says "I'm a straight white male" in the article, but he is Jewish. He has done some trolling on his own, such as this 2010 Time mag article:
I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.
(See pictures of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park.)

I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn't want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai? ...

I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson's 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them. ...

Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians "dot heads." One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to "go home to India." In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.
This humorous article would get him respect from the alt right, except that his employers are dead serious about changing the culture and destroying Americanism. He and Time had to apologize for suggesting that there might be anything wrong with destroying a white American culture.

Internet trolling is the logical consequence of free speech, modern communication networks, and an establishment that attempts to suppress certain truths and extinguish certain cultures.

To me, the real offensive ones are those who constantly badmouthing white Christian males, and name-calling with terms like racist, sexist, Nazi, etc. I see this everyday from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, universities, Hollywood, NY Times, other news media, and Trump haters. If the alt right name-calling increases to being as much as 1% of the liberal name-calling, that would be great.

Sites like the Daily Stormer figure that leftists are going to call them Nazis anyway, so they as might as well embrace the term and use it annoy the leftist name-callers.

Most of the hatred is for immigration restrictions, but a recent poll shows that an overwhelming majority seems to agree with Trump's immigration proposals.

Meanwhile, I expect liberals to cite the Time article as evidence that the alt right should be censored.

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