News Stories Which Highlight the Structure of the System

[altered]

I had suspected that there was some serious racist bullshit driving it due to how it was used, but didn't know the backstory. Thanks for confirming.

[Faust]

"Suscribe to Pewdiepie" is a phrase product of an ongoing suscriber war for being the channel with most suscribers.

Hes competing against an Indian channel called "T-Series".

In one sense its a competition between legitimate suscribers (Pewdiepie) with illegitimate "T-Series" suscribers, because a lot of electronic devices such as tablets and phones ive heard have the suscription done automatically and by default to "T-Series".

But theres other competition which im sure you can all infer... a suscriber race war: indians versus the global gamer collective.

So to me, in most cases like that, "suscribe to pewdiepie" is racist coded language, not just random nonsense.

That makes sense for it to be coopted that way. It was also used to deface a war memorial, a banner for shitbags.

[Fujikoma]

I gotta agree with Faust. I don't watch Pewdiepie, I refuse to indulge in any kind of popular culture so much as to know their fucking names. Who wins "Game of Thrones"? The fuckers with the copyrights, of fucking course... but, what little I do know points in the direction of edgy innocence, and not outright hateful OMG LETS KILL JEWS...

Faust has the right of this, it's not all cut and dried, there is no black and white, and Discordians are expected to know it's never black and white.

[altered]

You weren't paying attention.

I'm not saying "He's clearly a neo-Nazi!" I'm saying that he acts indistinguishable from an "ironic" neo-Nazi, which is most of them you'll meet these days. He may or may not be one of those, and I honestly lean toward "not". This is utterly irrelevant to the fact that /what he does/ is /what they do/.

Consider Discordians versus cabbages. Consider two groups of Discordians: one very large group speaks entirely in meaningless pineal nonsense. Another, very small group has a highly specialized lingo, much like we do, that is actually tackling very thoughtful and high-level concepts. The problem is, from the exterior, that lingo looks exactly like meaningless pineal nonsense.

The cabbages are going to assume /both groups are saying meaningless pineal nonsense/. The small group can whine about it all they want, but it is the rare case where a stereotyping heuristic is actually /very/ likely to be true. If every Discordian you are ever likely to meet who talks like that has nothing important to say, the one singular exception is pointless to try to factor in.

Other useful heuristics of this sort include: A mother bear will tear your goddamn head off. Don't walk into a wall of smoke, because smoke comes from fire. A man pointing a gun at you will fucking shoot you. Someone talking on their phone while driving is a road hazard. Someone who makes ironic Nazi jokes is a Nazi.

The exceptions to these rules do not make the rules any less useful to rely on, because the exceptions are incredibly rare. The danger of the situations involved with these latter, non-metaphorical rules makes it very important to be able to identify them quickly. It's life or death, so you need a clear cut black-and-white decision process to avoid the "death" side.

Hence, I can't blame the media for assuming PewDiePie is a neo-Nazi, because surface-level, he looks indistinguishable. You have to /pay attention/ to him to begin to make a guess, and while I hate to cast doubt on Faust's people-reading abilities, I genuinely don't think you can do better than 60% certainty with PewDiePie, barely better than chance.

This is specifically because if he /is/ a Nazi, he's playing by a set of rules specifically designed to disguise Nazis as edgy ironic idiots instead of hateful genocidal bastards, which would mean our views of him as not a Nazi would mean nothing except that /he isn't failing/. And if he /isn't/ a Nazi, he's the mask that many actual Nazis are hiding behind. Either way, he blends into a teeming mass of fascist idiots and making a mistake as to whether he's one of them or not is to be expected. Hell, it's /the entire goddamned point/.

[Fujikoma]

And you're so very sure you're always in the right so you can make these distinctions? I'm not criticising you, I'm not fit to do so, but you seem very, very sure of yourself and, that's exactly what the tiki torch club does.

EDIT: I should add, I know I'm an idiot, it's pretty obvious, even to me. That said, I do have my moments where I have to seriously ask questions, this is one of those. I'd like to say "we" but really, this is about "you", or in your case, "I", and you want to be right, and rub the puppy's nose in the stink it left on the carpet. I can understand that desire, honestly, but it really doesn't solve much. The question isn't whether Pewdepie or whoever the fuck was Hitler in a past life, the question is, what are we doing to prevent it? As long as you indulge your "feels-good sense of justice" you'll never get anywhere near the goal of stopping it.

[altered]

You aren't reading my posts at all or you'd realize you're accusing me of doing the exact fucking opposite of what I'm actually doing, you fuckhead.

ETA:
Maybe I'm being a little unfair to you. Big posts, lot of words.

Here's the plain and simple:

I do not believe that PewDiePie is a Nazi. I have stated this in every post I made on the subject, so thanks for not reading a single word.
I believe that it is very difficult to be sure of that.

The reason I believe it is very difficult to be sure of that is the combination of two things.
1: PewDiePie is a jackass white man. This should not be up for debate, someone who drops slurs and uses anti-Semitic memes is a bad person.
2: The current crop of Nazis is hiding behind a facade of edgy, ironic, detached joking around about this sort of shit.

You yourself used the word "edgy" in reference to him.
It is a fact that he stated himself it was a joke.
Ergo, it is possible to describe him as an edgy, ironic jokester when it comes to bigotry and fascist sympathies.

Thus, when you have a group pretending to be edgy ironic jokesters when it comes to bigotry and fascist sympathies, it stands to reason that if they are any good at pretending, they could fool people into thinking they actually were edgy ironic jokesters when it comes to bigotry and fascist sympathies.

In conclusion, if you think someone is an edgy, ironic jokester when it comes to bigotry and fascist sympathies, you stand a chance /of being wrong/.

Thus, it should surprise nobody that newsrooms keeping up with a shit tsunami from all the hate groups around the world would make the determination that he is in fact a Nazi pretending to be an edgy ironic jokester when it comes to bigotry and fascist sympathies.

Furthermore, it is difficult to believe anyone but the person in question could be certain that he is in fact an edgy ironic jokester when it comes to bigotry and fascist sympathies, rather than a Nazi pretending to be etc., etc.

[The Johnny]

You weren't paying attention.

I'm not saying "He's clearly a neo-Nazi!" I'm saying that he acts indistinguishable from an "ironic" neo-Nazi, which is most of them you'll meet these days. He may or may not be one of those, and I honestly lean toward "not". This is utterly irrelevant to the fact that /what he does/ is /what they do/.

Consider Discordians versus cabbages. Consider two groups of Discordians: one very large group speaks entirely in meaningless pineal nonsense. Another, very small group has a highly specialized lingo, much like we do, that is actually tackling very thoughtful and high-level concepts. The problem is, from the exterior, that lingo looks exactly like meaningless pineal nonsense.

The cabbages are going to assume /both groups are saying meaningless pineal nonsense/. The small group can whine about it all they want, but it is the rare case where a stereotyping heuristic is actually /very/ likely to be true. If every Discordian you are ever likely to meet who talks like that has nothing important to say, the one singular exception is pointless to try to factor in.

Other useful heuristics of this sort include: A mother bear will tear your goddamn head off. Don't walk into a wall of smoke, because smoke comes from fire. A man pointing a gun at you will fucking shoot you. Someone talking on their phone while driving is a road hazard. Someone who makes ironic Nazi jokes is a Nazi.

The exceptions to these rules do not make the rules any less useful to rely on, because the exceptions are incredibly rare. The danger of the situations involved with these latter, non-metaphorical rules makes it very important to be able to identify them quickly. It's life or death, so you need a clear cut black-and-white decision process to avoid the "death" side.

Hence, I can't blame the media for assuming PewDiePie is a neo-Nazi, because surface-level, he looks indistinguishable. You have to /pay attention/ to him to begin to make a guess, and while I hate to cast doubt on Faust's people-reading abilities, I genuinely don't think you can do better than 60% certainty with PewDiePie, barely better than chance.

This is specifically because if he /is/ a Nazi, he's playing by a set of rules specifically designed to disguise Nazis as edgy ironic idiots instead of hateful genocidal bastards, which would mean our views of him as not a Nazi would mean nothing except that /he isn't failing/. And if he /isn't/ a Nazi, he's the mask that many actual Nazis are hiding behind. Either way, he blends into a teeming mass of fascist idiots and making a mistake as to whether he's one of them or not is to be expected. Hell, it's /the entire goddamned point/.

Your arguments sound to me like what feminists had to explain when they ran into the "#NOTALLMEN" meme.

People can be so obnoxious, like, as if every unempathic and unsympathetic edgelord deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I cant be assed to make a metapsychological explanation of jokes and humour, but theres a profound reason why someone finds something as funny or not, so despite the common misconception, it usually doesnt actually matter if someone is joking or being serious to infer what is going on.

Its like that trashbag Jake Paul or whatever his name is, walked into the Japanese Suicide Forest, filming and "having fun" with the corpses... so its like giving zero fucks about the person that not long ago hung himself, nor his family/friends, or japanese culture for that matter... showing zero respect as if he was in a zoo or an amusement park - in an indirect manner thats xenophobic, not in the literal sense that its fear of the foreign or the strange, but a manifestation of hatred or disregard of other cultures thru degrading them unapologetically. If hes actually as edgy and free of taboos, or whatever reasoning he came up with, and not just a racist fuck, he shouldve walked into say, Arlington cemetary jumping around "having fun" and screaming "WHOA BRO" at whichever funeral service he happened to run into.

[altered]

Aokigahara (that suicide forest) has counterparts in the Pacific Northwest, Italy, Russia, and I think? Estonia. If you wanted the specific fun of a haunted forest full of dead people, there are plenty of Western options. But I doubt his choice was racist, Aokigahara is the best known one and he seems too stupid to do real research.

I would go so far as to say he probably wasn't consciously xenophobic, even. In that dim, vague sense that it would be "weird" to crash a Western funeral, maybe. But that's a different thing.

That said, without doing the research, how could you know? And, while you can offer the benefit of the doubt... if someone is already doing terrible things, and these things are indistinguishable from things an even worse group of people would do, why take the chance of letting them off easy?

If they want to be public figures, they should know how they are received by the rest of the planet.

[Al Qədic]

Debatably worse about Logan's trip to animeland was how he acted like a white vlogging douche not just on his own time, but in the middle of sidewalks and foot traffic. There are videos of it still up on YouTube I'm sure, but some key actions included, if my memory serves me right; throwing a pokeball plush at policemen, random strangers, and a moving car, getting on someone else's bike/rickshaw for a ride totally unprovoked, and shouting and stomping his way downtown in a gaudy kimono. I feel like this video best sums up just how royally he fucked up: https://youtu.be/jkROPxg3V4E

God I kind of hope he got/will get banned from entering the country.

[Faust]

He is worse then pdp in a lot of ways, both are abject narcissists, but Paul is also aggressive, he comes across as someone who will eventually snap and attack someone. I would also disagree with the public figure public responsibility thing, that's not what youtube was back in the day, if anything its appeal was how intimate and small it felt, a personal connection to the creator, and pdp has even said that, he hasn't enjoyed youtube as much since the days where he had a small group of people following his youtube video. He's not a political channel and he's not responsible for someone killing people and namedropping him.

This is a lot more discussion of this then I was expecting. I think pewdiepie is a turd but for different reasons. The core point was enabling the alt-right and indulging their violent fantasies led to this weird mish mash of pop internet culture to far right real world extremism. I'd have the same creeped out feelings if the NZ shooter had spray painted a pepe face on his rampage.

[LMNO]

Hey Null, can your point be summarized as "whether or not person X is a WS or just an ironic joker, they are functionally behaving as a WS, and therefore while nuance between the two may exist, there is no real difference in their actions."

[Faust]

Hey Null, can your point be summarized as "whether or not person X is a WS or just an ironic joker, they are functionally behaving as a WS, and therefore while nuance between the two may exist, there is no real difference in their actions."

This applies to the "Kill all jews sign" and was irresponsible and encourages the racist contingent that follow him, he acknowledged that.
"Subscribe to pewdie" was genuinely just dumb fun competing between the two biggest channels, but I can see that based on that first mistake, the horse has already bolted, it could well have been seen as banner for bigots.

[Fujikoma]

Thanks for breaking it down for me, Nullified. I agree with that, as well.

[altered]

Hey Null, can your point be summarized as "whether or not person X is a WS or just an ironic joker, they are functionally behaving as a WS, and therefore while nuance between the two may exist, there is no real difference in their actions."

Little bit different. I think the ironic joker is less likely to be intentionally and aggressively malicious, well, ever.

It's more on the lines of, say, extremely realistic airsoft guns. If you are carrying a realistic airsoft gun, it is not functionally identical to a real gun (if you shoot someone they will go "ouch" and chase you with sticks rather than dying) but people will be unable to tell the difference on the fly. It is heuristically indistinguishable, but not functionally identical.

It's a bit harder in the case of Bigot Jokes, because the fact they exist lowers the bar for Actual Bigots, and increases general acceptance of Bigotry.

But if a person who has only said some transphobic shit in their past apologizes and moves on to a less assholish stage of their life, I can accept that apology and can even interact with that person.

If a TERF tried to apologize and move on, the best they can hope for from me is a sad shake of the head and complete avoidance of them. I won't necessarily want to fuck their day up anymore but I definitely don't want to be around them. The damage they have done is far greater, more intentional, and they need to do a lot more than say sorry and try not to be actively shitty before I can ever trust them.

[altered]

I did some research into this, and it's going beyond the New Zealand thing. Apparently the recent shooter in California said PewDiePie had funded him.

New theory: neo-Nazis are trying to craft a narrative that involves white men being unfairly targeted by governments around the world, using an idiot white man gamer as their rallying cry because he is a public figure and has already made himself a target by being an insensitive pile of dung.

It's interesting googling "pewdiepie white supremacy", as almost all of the articles and such are from the past couple months. There's two competing narratives going on (and a third just starting) and I think they do a great job illustrating the issue of telling "what he is".

First, you have the "unfairly targeted" narrative. Such luminaries as Infowars are the ones pushing this the loudest. It colors public perception by associating defense of him with fascist goons.

Second, you have the "burn him at the stake" narrative. What is interesting about this is who is pushing this one the loudest once you get past media outlets. It's mostly parents, worried because YouTube's recommendation algorithms have strapped racist bullshit to anyone who watches gaming focused videos.

Third, and literally brand spanking new: PewDiePie is a well meaning idiot. He publicly canceled the "subscribe" meme and specifically attached his action to the shootings in Christchurch. He is very, very, very slow to react to this stuff, but he's doing it.

Apparently he made music videos about the subscriber war and dropped some racist shit into those too. This is important because of two things: they got blocked by the Indian Supreme Court for the racism, and he said he was not going to contest this.

Yes, he still did the "I wasn't meaning to be racist, it was a joke" shit. But he made a decision which, while not the best decision (best decision would be to contest the block, get them unblocked, then remove them), is certainly a hell of a lot better than raising hell over him being so put upon by those liberals or SJWs or whatever.

Specifically, it shows he is capable of now expanding his understanding of how this shit is connected to white supremacist nonsense to other things he has done, and that might mean not fucking doing it anymore!

This is exactly what I was talking about in my response to LMNO, by the way. An actual Nazi wouldn't be worth the effort to change my mind on them. They chose to set themselves outside the human species, they can rot there, IMO. But this isn't the act of an ironic Nazi, this is the act of a dumb but well meaning fool. And I can respect him on that level now that he's showing a glimmer of self-awareness.