
How White Nationalism Courts Internet Nerd Culture - aeontech
https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/how-white-nationalism-courts-internet-nerd-culture-b4ebad07863d
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slphil
> IQ is a pseudoscience

This is how people trying to oppose the alt right shoot themselves in the
foot. Alt right intellectuals and propagandists immediately capitalize on this
kind of nonsense. (The fact that the author identifies as a communist before
denying the strongest predictor in psychology is somewhat telling as well and
acts as free fuel.)

~~~
chickenfries
Is it non-sense? I've heard many times that there a hell of a lot of
problems/criticisms of IQ and that it's history is intrinsically linked with
eugenics and other kinds of pseudo science. Can you link me to something
supporting your claim that it's " the strongest predictor in psychology"
(predictor of what... I'm not sure)?

~~~
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
IQ is, as far as I know, a pretty strong predictor of success in life (be it
financial, educational, health-wise or longevity).

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dvt
This article is pretty bad and it's kind of annoying that it (somehow) reached
the top of HN. But I'll bite.

1) IQ is _not_ a pseudoscience. Admittedly, IQ is a pretty shitty test for
intelligence (as it's highly culturally-biased), but calling it pseudoscience
is just dumb and shows an inherent misunderstanding of what it's supposed to
do. Yeah, white supremacists are idiots and use it to justify racism, but
that's a different point than what the author is making.

2) Author criticizes Trump's sharing of the "black on black" statistics
arguing that it's fabricated. However, some cursory research shows that it is,
in fact, not as fabricated as one might believe: [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-
in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-
the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-
enforcement/expanded-
homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls)

According to the above, 90% of African American homicides were perpetrated by
African Americans. This can be compared with white homicides which were
perpetrated by 83% whites. Obviously, the numbers are highly skewed in the
infographic shared by POTUS, but to bury your head in the sand and pretend
this isn't a problem in black communities is unfair and does a great social
disservice.

3) It doesn't take some kind of genius to "spot the signs" of Neo-Nazism.
Swastikas are kind of a tell-tale sign.

4) "Deo is a union Millwright and a 12 year member of the Furry Fandom who
spent 6 months infiltrating multiple Alt-Right and neo-Nazi online groups
observing and recording how they recruited, organized, and operated." \--
laughable. "Infiltrating" = joining a few discord servers and posting on
4chan. Got it.

Completely worthless article devoid of any actual real social commentary,
potential solutions, or plans of attack. Medium has been turning into a
soapbox lately.

~~~
slphil
IQ tests are not culturally biased. This is a decades out of date canard. Some
tests, like Raven's Progressive Matrices, don't even require the test giver
and taker to share a language. IQ, as a statistic, washes out almost every
other psychometric in predictive validity -- there are a staggering number of
psychology papers which pointedly do not include IQ because whatever
predictive power their metric purports to have is totally overridden by IQ.
There are many subfields of intelligence and two major categories (fluid and
crystal) so it's true that intelligence can't be defined as a single number,
but this is a strawman since intelligence researchers have never said this.

~~~
sharemywin
Let's assume resources are also important in success and you use IQ "tests" as
a way to allocate resources to candidates. Then, your biasing your results.

~~~
slphil
Yes, this is a legitimate problem because there are both genetic and
environmental contributions to intelligence. We must be wary of eugenic
arguments. After all, the easiest way to raise the average IQ of a society
would be to kill everyone who doesn't meet a specified minimum IQ. A more
politically palatable way would be to allocate resources away from those
groups.

This isn't a matter of biasing results, though, because the metric validity of
intelligence testing doesn't require that we play nice with making sure
everyone has equal access. These are separate problems. Intelligence research
is a scientific problem, and resource allocation is a political one.

We already know that environmental contributions to IQ are important, and a
reasonable and moral person who is literate on intelligence research thinks
that resource allocation to lower-performing people is critically important.

------
grawprog
I don't think I've ever read anyone babbling on about white people being
superior because they invented technology, that's a a new one for me honestly.

The article was pretty rambly and I have to admit I just skipped a bunch of
it. My takeaway was he pretended to be a furry nazi for a while and discovered
a bunch of idiots believing in idiotic shit then had to write a bunch of
idiotic shit about his 'traumatic' experience listening to idiotic shit.

Furry nazis are pretty fucking hilarious though. I wonder if they realize real
nazis would have executed them for their sexual attraction to cartoon animals?

~~~
Toboe
>My takeaway was he pretended to be a furry nazi for a while and discovered a
bunch of idiots believing in idiotic shit then had to write a bunch of idiotic
shit about his 'traumatic' experience listening to idiotic shit.

She said something the nazis didn't like, then there was drama including
threats against her. She didn't back down, and kept her position. She also
read in some of their chats. (If they let her in or someone send her logs)

Then she posted that text about nazis trying to infiltrate nerd cultures like
the Furry fandom (which she is a member of).

So, you completely missed. But at least you tried?

~~~
grawprog
Nah I gotta be honest. I didn't really try at all.

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SolaceQuantum
I think there should be space for all kinds of discussion, even those I don’t
agree with, but in this case what worried me the most was the authors claim
that once a person enters a community to discuss whatever white nationalist
subjects, they are told or manipulated into believing they cannot leave, or
they are made to watch propaganda videos in order to stay in the group. That
crosses the line from communication of ideas to coercion and cult behavior. I
don’t know why people don’t see that they’re being treated in this
manipulative way, though. Even at my most lonely, I was highly suspicious and
dodgy whenever any similar tactic was used on me; I preferred to be lonely.

~~~
slphil
Because a good propagandist does two things:

1\. Ground the argument in some vestige of reality (the reliance on statistics
is very strong). 2\. Point out the opposing denial of reality (magical
thinking, social constructionism, blank slate lunacy) in order to push the
radically opposite perspective without nuance.

This is inherently isolating but also makes the adherents feel very powerful.
Think pieces like this do not oppose but rather support the cause they purport
to be against, since the ideological leanings of the writer are plainly
obvious and their _own_ denials of reality stick out like a sore thumb.

As long as the political left is dominated by social constructionism and other
lunacy, the alt-right will never be exterminated. The task ahead of us is not
trivial.

~~~
fahayekwasright
Social constructionism is lunacy why?

~~~
slphil
Because it's factually wrong. Biology matters, and I'm not trying to bring in
concepts like race (which is a total intellectual disaster, since the term
refers to multiple concepts that mean radically different things). Many
studies do not account for simple heredity, when adoption studies have already
shown that traits like IQ and even personality are heritable to some degree
(1). There are genetic correlations with intelligence, aggression, etc that
are difficult to untangle but undeniably real.

Humans are incredibly unique animals, but you are still a biological machine
and your brain is not a piece of magic pixie dust. Without getting into the
free will debate, biology does not determine behavior but does influence it
heavily.

Edit: I'm not denying the existence of culture or social norms. These matter,
but are also undoubtedly linked to the biological machinery of the human
animal. Human society is an evolutionary result (2).

Second edit: It's very easy to find evidence that the social evolution of
humans is a biological process. Here is one of my favorite papers on the self-
domestication of the human species (3).

1: [https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-
Nature/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-
Nature/dp/0142003344)

2: [https://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-
Ancest...](https://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-
Ancestors/dp/014303832X)

3:
[http://resources.seattlecentral.edu/faculty/jwhorley/Gracili...](http://resources.seattlecentral.edu/faculty/jwhorley/Gracilization.pdf)

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moz-hx
It's incredibly aggravating how aggressively Nazis are attempting to corrupt
internet culture to espouse their hateful ideals. The original mindset that
developed on the internet was about how nobody's identity IRL mattered, and
what you said/did was what proved your worth. Now, a bunch of basement-
dwelling Nazis are trying to turn that meritocracy into their own whites-only
club? Fuck that, that's not what internet culture is about.

I strongly believe that anyone who cares about the internet and its culture of
free ideas will recognize it as a place where people can be judged based on
their skills and the quality of their ideas rather than their race or gender,
and will harshly judge anyone who attempts to exclude others based purely on
such superficial metrics.

~~~
danharaj
There were white supremacists pushing holocaust denial on usenet. What
actually happened is that the social places on the Internet suddenly stopped
moderating themselves which let white supremacists congregate, organize and
normalize.

