
Meet Silicon Valley's Secretive Alt-Right Followers - recycleme
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/silicon-valley-tech-alt-right-racism-misogyny
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DashRattlesnake
> and the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose "Pewdiepie"
> YouTube channel featuring Nazi-themed jokes has 54 million subscribers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it a _single_ joke that got him in
trouble? The article's wording here is pretty slippery, but it seems to be
trying to give the (as I understand it) false impression that "Pewdiepie" was
a Nazi humor site. That doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the
article.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
From the end of the article:

>The gaming vlogger Pewdiepie, whose YouTube channel is the world's largest,
made rape jokes early in his career and sometimes uses the word "slut" as an
insult. Since August, he has made nine videos featuring Nazi imagery or anti-
Semitic humor, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. (He
later apologized but also said the Journal took the remarks out of context.)

And I would read the whole thing, the author did a fair amount of interviews
but obviously needed to "anchor" this article to current events and chose a
poor one in Pewdiepie. The rest is pretty good.

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ng12
> He spoke admiringly of Napoleon, whom he considers to be "kind of the Steve
> Jobs of France."

I think the problem with journalism about the alt-right is it's near
impossible to tell who's sincere, who's joking, and who's half-joking-half-
serious. I've been on 4chan for over a decade and I have trouble telling. It's
even harder to tell who's actually influential in the community (tip: it's
almost never the people who claim they are).

~~~
RoboPlumber
For example, people on the alt-right frequently claim that the Bogdanoffs are
heavily involved in alt-right politics. Is this true? Almost certainly, but
it's impossible to know for sure.

~~~
adiabatty
…the who?

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bryanlarsen
Muslim engineers are also more likely to become extremists than other muslims.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2015/11/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2015/11/17/this-is-the-group-thats-surprisingly-prone-to-violent-
extremism/)

The authors posit a couple of potential reasons. I'd also add a tendency to
see the world in black-and-white.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
I wonder if there's a reason their extremism tends to the conservative. Where
are the radical leftist engineers?

~~~
RoboPlumber
Radical leftists are easy to find. Radical leftist engineers are probably hard
to find because leftist engineers in general are hard to find.

~~~
nsxwolf
... seriously?

~~~
RoboPlumber
Yes, absolutely. The vast majority of engineers are fairly right-leaning.

Some good reading:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-
bia...](http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-
profession-2014-11)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/upshot/your-surgeon-is-
pr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/upshot/your-surgeon-is-probably-a-
republican-your-psychiatrist-probably-a-democrat.html)

[http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/](http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/)

CS is very left-leaning compared to most engineering professions, so if you
include CS it throws the overall numbers towards left-leaning, but I
personally wouldn't consider general CS to be an engineering field. Certain
subfields, certainly, but they're a minority. My uni doesn't even have it in
the same department as engineering, so that my inform my opinion there.

t. MechE/Aero grad student

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HoppedUpMenace
With the way people process the world today, you'd think everyone is living in
their own version of "Man in the High Castle." The extreme left and right
leaning people likely see themselves as comparable to the resistance in the
series, careful to hide their true origins and intentions, orchestrating, in
their minds, the downfall of an oppressive society that would rather see them
fall into a one size fits all policy of obedience.

The public at large, mainly due to time constraints, have no time for critical
thought these days, nor have they ever, so anytime the world looks like its on
fire, people are driven ever more into a fantasy narrative of "tomorrow you
will die if you don't act today", paving the way for normalization of extreme
views of the world and people.

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redsummer
The nerds don't like it when their own - Brendan Eich, Tim Hunt, Richard
Dawkins, DongleGate guy etc - get witch-hunted by the SJWs. So it's no
surprise that they let off steam by supporting people who oppose that stuff.

~~~
nsxwolf
I think this is pretty unfair. Conservatives and libertarians in SV and tech
in general keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They have absolutely
no love for this tiny fringe "alt-right" movement, whatever it actually is.

This article seems like a crass attempt to further squeeze mainstream tech
conservatives by amplifying this tiny group of nobodies.

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moron4hire
I'm worried that the emphasis on the alt-right and their clearly racist and
sexist motivations is overshadowing any deserved scrutiny towards the left.

What ever happened to the "Why I Need Feminism" campaign? I could make a dozen
signs all on my own, for some serious shit my family and I have had to live
through. Yet--according to the attributes that both the left and the right
seem to care about the most--I am nothing more than a white, heterosexual,
cis-gendered man, propped up as a poster-child for what is either wrong (to
the left) or right (to the right) with the world. (But that's the thing about
posters, they're two-dimensional.) I know better than to take some of my worst
experiences with poor excuses for liberals to be indicative of the movement.
Every job has its bad employees. But it's really easy to see how other people
would see the abuse thrown at them and just wash their hands of the entire
situation.

The alt-right is too easy of a target. Let's not let our glee to cut them down
turn us into them.

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denzil_correa
Recently, there was a picture of a young guy with a MAGA Trump cap hate all
over the Internet. Turns out I knew the guy and was one of the brightest chaps
I've met in terms of research. I went to check his posts on Facebook which was
filled with bigotry and rhetoric. I haven't engaged with him but I don't know
how to react.

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nsxwolf
All 3 of them!

