Extremism on Imageboards

What happened? Compared to years ago even smaller imageboards like this one have been saturated by political extremists. What turned anons towards political extremism? A decade ago there was always open discussions on things like gender dysphoria on places like /b/ with little trolling and now even science boards have antivax and conspiracy discussion that seems to overshadow discussion from anons who know mathematics, engineering, etc Is it outside influence? Is it the economic situation?

>extremism >now even science boards have antivax and conspiracy People simply didnt label someone doubting if a vacc makes sense as antivaxx 10 years ago. Its a freshly trained reflex. If anything its the labeling thats extremist as it puts all people against the wall as soon as they say something negative even if they largely take all their vaccs and just dont trust a single one. Conspiracy talk is even older. 9/11 was full of it same day it happened. How do you arrive at the conclusion its new?

>>39853 A decade ago vaccine conspiracy was considered on the level of autism miracle cures but it appears that the geometry of the internet has boosted fringe ideas into something resembling legitimacy There is something to be said about what makes something legitimate or not, but the level of vitrial and anger is palatable on smaller imageboards now - 4chan was always a negative place on a few of it's boards but hatred of certain groups has become pronounced on even the smallest imageboards

The focus on minorities in popular politics contributes to a sense of disenfranchisement in the common man. "Democracy" isn't working for the majority. It's very easy to feel that the establishment is against you in this state. This causes frustration which is expressed as anger towards minorities, rejection of establishment and distrust for authorities.

>>39855 You wouldnt even label distrust in new products as conspiracy a decade ago. Its common sense for older people due to historical record of incidents like the fallout from first sleeping pills. This kind of labeling is already smearing.

Aging happened. In the late 00s and in early 2010s young people (teenagers and college-aged) were the majority of imageboards' audience. That's not the case anymore and it's why imageboards have become so boring. People generally lose their creativity as they age, the content they create becomes less interesting and as the content becomes less interesting the truly interesting people are less likely to contribute as well. It's a death spiral. What you're left with are extremists, mentally ill, boring people with status quo ideas, marketers and propagandists.

>>39851 Subversion through the education system and media.

>>39974 I agree with this, but I would also throw a little bit of blame on the very existence of the Internet, as I think that it has turned into a corrosive entity to creative minds over the years as a result of its superfluous abundance of content to consume. There has to be a little bit of lack or idle, "empty" time in order for new ideas to emerge, but now it seems that people are filling those gaps with mindless feed-scrollings to avert boredom, instead of dedicating themselves to learning new skills (I know, because I'm guilty of it too). Maybe the concept itself doesn't differ very much from the times of "Internet surfin'", but the structures (how content is presented and interacted with) and the content on the major platforms are significantly different from the olden times'. We aren't talking about metric tons of black text on a white background with a couple of links to other walls of texts and 10 second long videos anymore. The very possibility of livestreamings spanning thousands of hours and 10+ hour videos with 1080p resolution is just staggering in comparison to how things were back in the day. A plain, but thought-out essay on science, philosophy or politics can't compete with an audio-visual spectacle with easily-digestible message or lyrics that appeal to you emotionally. Such media is guaranteed to infect you with an earworm (at the time of writing this, all I can hear and see in my mind is some clown with fûcked up teeth screaming "GUCCI GANG GUCCI GANG GUCCI GANG!!" over and over again). When it comes to stupidity, the reptile always wins.

>>39851 I feel like you're being disingenuous with this question, because the world has been going to soykaf, and you're complaining about the only people who are sincerely trying to fix things. You perceive it as extreme, but the solution doesn't exist in isolation from the problem. Problem and Solution are intrinsically tied. If one is extreme, so is the other. Maybe you're turning a blind eye to the problems.

>>39986 >the only people who are sincerely trying to fix things and they just so happen to market themselves to your sensibilities! Wowie!

>>39987 >and they just so happen to market themselves to your sensibilities! Wowie! I don't know what your sensibilities are. I also don't want money in exchange for products. I think the side you're talking about owns Hollywood and the newspapers and the publishing houses and the academic institutions and the art and theater galleries and the record labels and the consumer products. I'm just drawing my lines in the sand and saying it's up to you if you've got anything compelling to budge me from here. Which you don't have and can't do. Unless you expose me to some kind of new explanation or new reality, then my mind's already made up. Lains are smart but I'd say they're actually fairly young and a lot of their theories of/for the world are under-cooked.

Psyops and infiltration of imageboard administration. There is no accountability on imageboards, so you can just run any astroturfed campaign as you'd like. Storm users have been raiding 4chan since the 2010 and it paid off.

>>39993 This. It was interference to remove the culture from existence.

>>39855 Said "certain groups" have absolutely torn places down when they converge in notable numbers. I didn't use it, but it happened with 4/r9k/, it's happening with wizchan, and it happens in a lot more places. When everyone is complaining about your behavior, maybe they're not the problem.

>>39993 >muh nazis are raiding my safe space! The reason why there are so many reactionaries is that leftists are extremely invasive and every aspect of modern culture is being reshaped to fit the new narrative. Of course people will become polarized, there's basically a transformative war going on over every single aspect of life that stands in the way of the orwellian nightmare end goal.

>>39993 Where is all the nazishit if this is true then? Kinda lacking aint it? >>40012 This is closer to my experience. What got constantly attention is raids from various subreddits and laterly resetera because all it took was to read their site to confirm it. Most hilarious one was a communist subreddit who thought they could spread communism on chan. Might as well try to convert them to strict catholism.

>>40015 He said on 4chan. Which is 100% true. Stormfront users astroturfed /new/ for years. They then moved to 4chon's /new/ and came back to /p*l/ - making 4chon a really chill imageboard for a while. There's still a guy on /pnd/ that spams "the mantra" >reddit is full of liberal retards no soykaf fren. their entire site functions around attention-seeking. they thrive of narcissistic behavior which snarky weird-twitter / something awful brand liberalism attracts sociopaths and narcissists. also here's a link to an archived stormfront thread where they use a copypasta aggregator called BUGS Buddy to spam 'mini-mantras' on forums, 4chan was one of those sites they targeted: https://web.archive.org/web/20170219154135/https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t856144/?t=856144 And what do you know, it's in 2011 - right around the time people started taking "hitler did nothing wrong" seriously.

As much as id agree im guilty. I was a pseudo extreme left, spent about two years in early highschool on the extreme right, and am now a more formed extreme left. its not economic at all unless you mean a product of our economic system, thats a discussion we could have but as far as it being the state of the economy I think theres not a chance. As for me in a whats in front of me kind of way when I was right extreme I was unaware I was depressed and self centered, clearly in my head at the time either it was the fault of someone else that I was so down, and if it was me it was purely I wasnt compatible with society and the right painted itself as the alternative. My shift back to a more concrete extreme leftism was a result of me finding things in common and making friends with a very diverse group of people. Suddenly it was "we" are suffering, and my beliefs shifted in ways that looked out for them. It started with the incel soykaf breeding in the alt right, I got along and felt safe around girls far more than boys and so the disillusionment started there and now here I am, I see every threat towards black people, trans people, non binary people whatever as a direct threat to my immediate circle and so I only become more extreme. As the mainstream left pushes towards this "shut up and be happy with what you have" rhetoric and incredibly low standards it just pushed me more extreme, now liberals are "the enemy" and the right id be fine to just ignore. so thats whats going on for me. I realized theres no way id know whats best for the entire world, and so instead i only concern myself with whats best to those around me. And that creates extreme beliefs and strong reactions to other peoples beliefs when they are meant for a whole country or even the world because usually on either side that involves ignoring or actively sabotaging the various minority groups my friends belong to . Not to be conceited though but I think my reasonings arent the normal, in fact I know it because most extremists do have desire to convert, and to gain more people, and have grand imaginary plans. One thing I know for a fact is a cause is science and reason being pushed as the only unbiased beacons of hope and light for us. Lets take an oft discussed statistic about how black men commit crime at higher rates. That statistic says nothing on its own, but its science! math! statistics! reason! so I take this statistic and say black men are genetically just more likely to commit crimes, another person takes it and says the justice system is clearly broken, another says its the black family dynamics, another says its a fault of education, another says its evidence that police target black crime. All these things are conflated with the statistic itself and presented as fact. Other things like gender, mental health, things specifically within the realm of psychology, many extremists wont even accept psychology because it isnt science!!!! and because of avoidance of getting help. When the reality is how could a human brain thats full of entirely subjective experiences and ways of looking at things be analyzed in any productive way with epic facts and logic. the whole "you arent oppressed!" ben shapiro is such a great example of how asinine it is. if you hit me and it hurts but you just say i didnt even hit you that hard and your just too sensitive its not like it didnt hurt all of a sudden. And most of these political things at their core will never be answered by any kind of facts or studies or some link you found about george soros or alternatively some thinkpiece about how north korea actually isnt a dictatorship and its all american propaganda. Because most of its subjective differences. But a failure to recognize them, as a result of being brought up told that science and reason were like god (and "reason" basically is in the christian tradition), means that everyones just sucking themselves off as to who is more objectively right when youd be better off focusing on subjective needs and wants and views of many people. or whatever im irritated just writing this and kind of gave up.

>>40017 tl:dr people are utterly convinced right now there is factually a correct and objective way to move politically, and some of these "rational" things funnily enough hurt far more people than help, but that isnt seen as important because FACTS > ur subjective experience and feelings even though catering to everyones subjective experiences and feelings is politics practically. These people just think their subjective love of say eugenics to lead to a super race is somehow objectively more important than other subjective values.

>>39993 It's imageboard owners and site culture are really lax compared to the other side of the web. Users also sort of tolerated them since having pet nazis on a tight leash still scared off the mainstream and that fed into the site's rep. 4chan has been called a terror hub by the mainstream for over a decade and some anons embraced the media's condemnation because that was just funny. Unfortunately many unironic chuds took that as an invitation to spread 89IQ takes and leads to regular idiots like >>40012 who almost sound like bots advertising their own culture war. Some of them make it a mission to inject rants about politics into soykaf like anime discussion, making them as bad as Tumblr's bastard children.

>>40016 i guess we had a difference experience due to using different boards. Never used /new/ and my p0l experience is limited to hearing it was specifically made for them so i dont consider it an overtake since its their intended containment board. From my view they didnt take the site over because they didnt flood all boards, they simply got accommodated into their own board.

No one ever considers the fact that imageboards are easy as hell to astroturf on. They're anonymous. There are no accounts to vet. There's no post counts or join dates to tell you if someone is an established user sharing their honest opinion, or an outsider trying to start something. Combine that with the fact that politicians, media outlets, etc. need a boogeyman. They need someone to look better than by comparison and to give them leverage for whatever policies/propaganda/marketing they want to push. They also know what imageboards are. So why not astroturf on them, promoting ideas that will validate your boogeyman? Or hell, you don't even need to do that. People on imageboards will be edgy for the sake of it, parading around the swastika and hammer-and-sickle just to be an ass. Of course, they're only doing it ironically, but remember: "any group that gets their laughs by pretending to be idiots will be flooded with actual idiots thinking they're in good company" descartes didn't say that btw This effect can be amplified by pointing at the ironic posters and acting like they're being serious. Maybe make a few posts yourself since, hell, it's anonymous. Nobody's going to know you made them. Then the people who seriously believe it will go over there, espouse their bullshit, bring their buddies, and overall play into the hands of the people who wanted their enemy to be real.

>>40029 I bet you won't explain how >>40012 is wrong, though. Not because you "don't want to" but because you simply can't. >be me, "gamer" / "hacker " >depressed with IRL, but very happy in my communities and friends >get chased out of nearly every one of my communities because I am a white male and refuse to acknowledge race/gender because I wanted to treat everyone equally while we play video games together. >everyone else who didn't "bend the knee" left with me >stayed in contact but none of us really go near game communties anymore. >fast foward to now >None of us play video games anymore >I hack alone, no idea what happened to anyone in those communties >All. Literally all of my old friends that I have kept in touch with are at the very least sympathetic towards key concepts of natsoc and other "far right" beliefs, if not outright embody them and I don't mean "wignats". I mean well groomed, well read, physically fit men who anyone could easily get along with until they found out their views. This is not just my experience. People mention very similar events playing out this way for them. I'm just a normal guy. I wanted to make and play video games, dick around with ndswrapper and my consoles. Its not all bad, but the world would be less vile if they hadn't pushed people like me out of where we belonged.

>>40040 I think that a great deal of extremism is that people want a community to belong to. This isn't just a preference, it is a biological drive. Much like how MSM presents mas shooters as some sort of anti-hero whom others will inevitably idolize, the presentation of "extremists" as some sort of all powerful boogymen gives people with no sense of belonging a rallying cry. At a minimum, it gives people a sense of belonging which is had to find. Nationalism is kill by brand loyalty, sports loyalty, and social media interest groups. Think of it like this >Be a anon >Not respected or liked >No peers around your IRL >No common interests >Watch the TV >TV says the menace of "whites" >But I am white, anon says >I am not a menace, perhaps {other people} are trying to get me >I dont want to be alone, these other people must not be so bad >They said other people are like me (i.e. race, socioeconomic group) >Anon now associates with extremist circles out of lack of social fulfillment or sense of belonging, and no alternative groups who will stand up for him >You are here The problem is that gangs and extremist groups prosper under these sorts of conditions. Where people are welcomed into slightly different social groups, people rarely turn to extremism. Part of de-radicalisng youth is giving them a sense of belonging and normalizing interactions with people who are different, exactly the opposite of what social media and mainstream media do.

>>39851 Why do people use anonymous imageboards? 1) They like anonymity because it means a post gets judged as a post, without any context of a attached account. 2) They can't express their views somewheren else. On reddit you avoid downvotes by going along with the hivemind. On twitter you shut up to avoid being canceled. Right-wing Political extremists and tinfoil hatters get derezzed on twitter, facebook, reddit, tumblr and basically anywhere else. That means they are forced to turn to places like this and as more get derezzed they slowly dilate the user pool. The worst part is when it reaches critical mass and the people that where there due to reason 1 largely leave. This place isn't there yet, probably beacuse the bans are more focussed on the right and this place is pretty anarchist.

>>40052 I get derezzed even on chans and lainchan though.

>>40052 The bans are not based on political nonsense. Mods are big time enlightened. They are focused on people who break the rules and preventing flame wars.

>>39851 >What turned anons towards political extremism? Because people involved in the chan raid culture have moved on to run troll farms.

>>39851 More teens online trying to out-edge each other. The more the internet grows, the worse it gets.

Come to think of it, I've been here since the start. I never start these debate threads. This thread's another one of them. I think leftards start them. All I do is finish them. Kiddies are coming in from the indoctrination schools looking to validate their leftward beliefs. But then they get BTFO on the debate floor with nae any exceptions. So complaining threads like this one come up. Yet another debate. >>40012 tells it exactly how it is for us. He gets told he's a mouthbreathing retard or something. It doesn't matter. Start yet another thread and get thoroughly TOLD in the next one. Imagine doing all of the pushing and then being outraged when others push back... That is how it seems. And you'll take this for bait or an insult too. I'm not even mad at you. I don't really think less of you. I'm just not fussed by what you think is the correct kind of discourse.

>>40073 wow anon, your debate skills are impeccable! I'm a girl, want to meet up some time and you can tell me all your perfectly rational opinions?

>extremism >leftists >libtards >nazis >conspiracy >mainstream media is somebody playing buzzword bingo?

>>40073 >the debate floor What are you doing on the floor?

>What turned anons towards political extremism? $1000 worth of facebook ads, aka muh russians

>>39851 Being skeptical about a vaccine isn't wrong. Skepticism is what science is about, and denouncing others for not wanting to be guinea pigs due to low societal trust only strengthens it. >What turned anons towards political extremism? It's exactly what >>40011 and >>40012 wrote. Everyone can be happy, and then some people start writing how things must change to fit new sensibilities, and some people must leave, and that creates strife. See this post for what happened to /mlp/ last year: >>>/r/18704 It started with banning anything positive about Aryanne, criticizing was fine, and was going to go into a purity spiral banning ever more things until nothing was left. It resulted in the creation of a large chunk of current Aryanne artwork, new websites, and boosted her into new popularity, when she'd been waning. What does it say when the evil nazis are the ones standing up against censorship: https://www.marenheit451.com So comics, video games, hacking, and now masturbating to ponies isn't safe from this obvious virus that's been trying to cover the entire planet. I'll continue to fight back.

I'm not an "extremist" but I'm sure there are normal users or plebbitors who would classify me as such if I told them how I felt about current year. I simply had a lot of sjw type of encounters in real life that led to me seeking out answers to what was happening in real life. I can green text the major ones that come to mind. >girls i dates in high school going to one semester of state university and coming back completely different people >dating an sjw (i didn't know what an sjw was at the time, was like 2013) >move to chicago and see how black people conduct themselves in everyday situations >get fired from job because a black woman who had shown interest in me multiple times told the company I said something horrible to her (i didn't, and the job never told me what she told them i said and gave me no chance to defend myself) >join military because fuarrrk this soykaf >get put in charge of the dumb little platoon you're in before actually starting training (i don't actually do anything just relay information) >low iq dindu see's white boy in position of power and chimps out on me >tells the entire company i'm racist and i'm hated by many for the entirety of training because of him >my only friend in basic training is a recruit from africa who got his citizenship by joining us military >manage to do okay through rest of military but had multiple similar situations like that happen whenever i seemed to be attracting positive attention >get out >go to college >professors can't go an entire class without bringing up how evil white males are even in stem and programming classes >notice how much young kids are eating up id politics like this sorry for blog but i just wanted to point out that I didn't just read a bunch of soykaf on the internet and decide "wow i don't like X!". i saw repeatedly what is happening on the ground level and was disgusted by it. the result; >generally don't like american born blacks >don't feel bad when some dindu gets shot for pulling a gun >generally believe the US should be considered a white country (but that it should still be good to minorities that are here) >have no patience for leftist sjw talking points >won't be shamed into being a self-hating retard >genuinely believe that jews are disproportionately in control of things and have an anti-white agenda (don't advocate for violence or anything though, i just think their power should be stripped) so yeah a lot of people would think i'm extreme i'm sure, but the thing that i cling to is that my positions were a reaction to them becoming more extreme. it sounds petty but i was pretty much the most compliant, feel-good, liberal "love everybody" type before this decade fuarrrked everyone in the head.

>>OP Anonymity plus astroturfing without proper resistance, resulting in infamy and encouragement. Newf­ags bring friends, it's exponential. Somneone already mentioned the Stormfront astroturfing turning /p­o­l/ into /p­o­l/itics. People were aware at the time. Mods didn't do soykaf, Gamergate (then 2016 US election) catalysed and the containment board is now the #1 board on the site. meanwhile the old site of /news/ refugees is almost totally center-left. co is love I'm starting to see resistance on fringe imageboards. /p­ol/tards are the new bronies and furries, infesting boards and derailing them. Actually, they're the new redditors; that link between imageboards and the mainstream. >>40079 >What does it say when the evil nazis are the ones standing up against censorship: Nothing lol. Hard-authoritarians temporarily fighting for their own speech is opportunism. If it didn't affect them, they wouldn't support it. Simple. Most (not all) 'free-speech' sites aren't that at all, especially political ones like Gab and Parlor. It's the same soykaf for a different community.

>Hard-authoritarians temporarily fighting for their own speech is opportunism. If it didn't affect them, they wouldn't support it. Simple. This is the issue with current "liberals". Appeal to inclusion got dropped in favor of cancel culture as soon as they got power. Its not surprising that all the people who got hit by that now side with the enemy camp against the common enemy.

>Hard-authoritarians temporarily fighting for their own speech is opportunism. If it didn't affect them they wouldn't support it. It's like that for every group though. Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: >"It's OK when I do it" >"Everything for me, none for thee" The BBC News is pro- free speech. For themselves. Not for you.

I've spent like 30 minutes trying to post replies to this thread and then getting various errors like "post discarded" and "post filtered" for just wanting to express my opinion. What the hell is happening to this site? >>40017 >As much as id agree im guilty. I was a pseudo extreme left, spent about two years in early highschool on the extreme right, and am now a more formed extreme left. High School When I was in High School I knew next to nothing about politics, let a lone any extreme ideologies. That alone should be a red flag that something is wrong, especially if you were in high school in the early 2010s for example, where this phenomenon seems to have started. I can't read the rest of your post, I don't have that kind of attention span anymore. >>40040 Sounds like you are a twenty or thirty something that at one point had friends and relationships and now don't. Welcome to life, you're not the only one here. The problem is the difficulty (or impossibility) of gaining new relationships, in a society that hates you. It seems like you (and many others) are trying to use politics as a social club, which is a horrible idea as that is part of the reason we have an extremism schism right now. I have no idea what "hacking" means in this context. There are many definitions of that term, but if you mean "illegal activities", I generally don't support anything like that. >>40073 > Come to think of it, I've been here sincethe start. I never start these debate threads. This thread's another one of them. I think leftards start them. All I do is finish them. "People I don't like start the arguments I don't like". Except they don't. Some people create threads (for various motives, mainly attention) some people don't create threads, but reply in them because they feel they have something to say (or they're just bored). Once again, putting politically charged words in a discussion that doesn't really need them. > indoctrination schools Schools indoctrinate, but not in the way you're talking about. There is no grand conspiracy. Schools are basically daycare so parents don't have to pay attention to their children for 8 (or more) hours a day. And yes, this applies into college/university too. College aged people frequently still have childish mindsets as the brain doesn't stop developing until you're 25 or something. I have more comments but my post is too long as it is. I've put way too much effort into this post

>>40100 schools raised nazis, mao minions , soviet kids who willingly rebelled against their parents. New ideologies arent widely adopted by old people. They are spread by indoctrinating the new generation which then replaces the old.

>>40100 > It seems like you (and many others) are trying to use politics as a social club, which is a horrible idea as that is part of the reason we have an extremism schism right now. I am >>40012 This is a very ironic take because the reason why people are using politics as a social club is that almost all formerly non-political things have become infested with leftist politics. Just go on any hobbyist community that is somewhat young in demographic and you'll see a ton of idpol gender/race stuff, tons and tons of political posts about orange man being bad, etc. If you do not want to have to do with this you have to change community, because it's almost impossible right now to have a community that is purely about the subject it's suppose to be about. Join a writing community? People will write about race and gender and advertise themselves as being LGBTQ+ or a capital B Black writer, for clout of course, and they will push literature that talks about... guess what, idpol and being LGBTQ+ and capital B Black. Comics, videogames? Same. They will make it very clear that they're about idpol, and unless one of the two parties zips their mouth and ignores each other there will be attrition. And this will never happen because true diversity of expression does not work. You cannot have a hardcore communist pansexual trigender otherkin and a practicing Catholic in the same chatroom and expect them to get along, they have almost diametrically opposite values. So what do you do if you don't enjoy idpol wars? Considering that people as of now are shaped mostly by what they consume? Given that every hobby is not a hobby divorced from context any longer but a political advertising ground, it is understandable that people (not me btw) will find refuge in political outlets that AT LEAST do not push the flavor of idpol they dislike.

>>40101 Schools don't do this, social media does this. Parents do this. Local culture does this. And yes, institutions absolutely do indoctrinate older generations. See the spread of the joke that is Qanon. >>40102 I mainly ignore political rhetoric, especially any political rhetoric with any kind of authoritarian leaning. We really don't have any control over this kind of indoctrination anyways. It really sounds like you are consuming the wrong kind of media, like you actually followed all of the trad hugbox stuff a few years ago (I'm talking about the fake Youtube intellectuals, bloodsports and /cow/ soykaf). The only thing to get out of that movement is that the people producing the content know their market really well, which allows grifters like Tim Pool to continue siphoning money off of the poor fools that eat his content up.

>>40103 Which of the 3 examples had social media? In contrast its public knowledge that all 3 thought their ideology to kids in school. You should learn to argue beyond just saying no. Also qanon is social media. There no fuarrrking gov institution teaching qanon.

>>40104 Man, all I have to tell you is that you must have had a radically different upbringing than I did. I had no school indoctrination growing up. There was no extremism politics pushed in any school I went to (either grade school or two universities), unless for some reason you are offended by the fact that we were taught evolution in grade school or something inane like that. I did have a huge issue with the fact that history classes were very western-centric with a heavy focus on Christendom, to the point where schools would only teach American or Western European adjacent history, unless it was adjacent to the biblical narrative (e.g. Sumer, Ancient Egypt, and the early Roman Empire).

>>40106 Whatever you grow up in is normal to you. Its only from an outsider perspective that it may look extreme so i wouldn't be so quick to say there was no nonsense during your education as its hard to self reflect on that. Consider the broader scope, not just your school or country. Its easy to spot when working with foreigners as the culture clash is in essence just a clash of indoctrinated values. Personally im an immigrant who switched countries so its easy for me to see the gap between what i was taught and whats norm here.

I used to be an internet arguer type of the lefty persuasion. I still have the same opinions for the most part, but you could say I've been "blackpilled". The Left is a disorganized clusterfuck run by idiots and scam artists. These days I consider myself an anarchist, and I have morals instead of political principles. >why is extremism on imageboards? Groupthink is strong on large imageboards. We don't like talking about it but it's true just as much as on reddit. Memes and cultural norms become highly regimented to account for the fact that it is very difficult to communicate with a faceless mob otherwise. It's much less pronounced here because, I think, there are really only 20-30 frequent posters who all have fairly distinct writing styles, and the mods tend to prune excessive brewing soykaf. For instance, there's that one lain who always mistakes me for someone else and calls me a fascist, or that other lain who posts retarded infographics, or that pair of lains that constantly derail threads to talk about how the coronavirus vaccine is going to kill us all. So, anyway, in that climate, young people are having great fun saying inflammatory stuff. It's fine, we all said horrible soykaf when we were kids because we knew we weren't supposed to. Now consider this: you're some kid whose particularly vulnerable. Maybe you have no friends, or all your friends also browse 4chan. Maybe your home life is a mess, idk. In any case, you fully immerse yourself in this madhouse, and you start to actually internalize these memes along with stuff that random astroturfers say. You notice that life is like kicking dead whales down the beach and you see serious posts blaming it on das joos or das homos. You start to want women and you see serious posts blaming your lack of ability to get a date on leftists or whatever. It doesn't help that when you try to leave your shell and interact with people outside this social stratum, you are rejected for being "weird" or "right wing". Maybe a leftie yells at you because they think you're a menace to society. This creates a feedback loop, you get sucked deeper into the recruitment pipeline. The YouTube algorithm starts noticing you like extremist political videos and recommends you new ones. And all the while, you continue to post on imageboards with the same inflammatory memes, but now, you seriously believe them, you're astroturfing other boards, you're organizing with anons to go to political rallies, etc. This is just my theory. I know a few people who were edgy 4chan fascists in high school and never really took it seriously, but you got to figure maybe 1/10 or 1/20 does actually take it seriously. This also doesn't at all explain the rise of QAnon and the anti-vax/5G stuff, which I think is separate, or the rise of twitter leftism or its counterpart corporate "social justice", which I'm still not quite sure about (it reminds me of how punk was turned into a social scene and commodified). >Is it outside influence? Is it the economic situation? A little of both. When things are soykaf (as they are now) people start to want answers and they start to want action. Historically, that is the perfect time for dictators to rapidly gain popular support by either promising to restore people to past glory or promising to bring people forward to a bright and shining future nothing like the past. This always involves massively simplifying the view of reality until people are completely deluded.

>>40110 A lot of it is due to what >>40110 mentions in regards to groupthink and the fact you have the the types that are taken in easily because of their own vulnerabilities and self esteem issues. They look for easy solutions to their complex problems and tend to easily blame groups(only exception is the race and crime statistics) for their problems or lazily post images and regurgitate information across all the image boards in hopes someone will fight their own battles for them. I call it slacktivism and unironically the same thing as the devout social justice types we all know too well on the left in regards of feigned outrage to try and score pussy all the while censoring anything they perceive as offensive. The only exception is i am noticing the same on the right as well over time in regards to moral policing in terms of porn, drugs and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the problems of society right now. In fact i would argue the Social Justice Right is just as annoying as the Social Justice Left only because of their moral policing and thinking they have the moral superiority to tell others how to think and what they should be allowed to see and express themselves is everywhere on imageboards, the social justice left is on social media and the normalfagsphere. Both do not respect cultures and groups. They wish to infect everyone with their disease of justice and fighting against a bunch of phantoms than to really do anything on their own.

>>40114 I meant to respond to >>39851 My bad.

>>40110 >or the rise of twitter leftism or its counterpart corporate "social justice", which I'm still not quite sure about i believe you can root it in the creation of gender studies. I dont remember anymore if it was the 60s or 70s but somewhere there universities in us considered opening up new faculties. So anyone who could come up with a new field got free money. People who had no business with academia scammed their way in creating gender studies. This created a new group of people with degrees that provided no real value. So what do you do? You create a problem to create demand for your degree. Social justice pops into existence.

>>40090 I am thankful someone else calls out the hypocrisy. There is no good people in politics, just opportunists who wish to control and shape narratives and speech while grandstanding on some abstract notion of moral superiority to gain absolute power. Besides why is Gab called the most free speech version of Twitter yet bans anyone who posts lollicon or any 2D lewd drawing calling it porn? Why is it that you can not have fun but it must be about politics all the time? I know Twitter is guilty of this but only in the political sense, everything else is unironically more free speech than Gab. Seems like false advertising on their end.