The rub here is "skilled workers". Just after Brexit, the Boris Johnson Tory government adjusted immigration rules for "skilled" workers, and caused a civilisation-altering number of people (now known as the "Boriswave") to immigrate to the country, mostly from India, Africa, and other less developed areas. It's now known that almost every pay level and skill (or lack thereof) of job was eligible under the new rules, with some countries of origin, like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC. The same story has played out in the US with the "skilled" H1B visa scheme. People have lost all trust in governments to architect immigration laws in the interest of the natives, rather than giving big business carte blanche to import their own replacement workforce who will do any available job for the national minimum wage.
> like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC
Some developed countries have terrible demographics and need fresh kids.
I am expecting that sometime soon New Zealand will start accepting unskilled immigrants if they have >2 healthy kids under 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise me if the dept of internal affairs already has a soft rule to encourage that.
At some point many countries with shitty demographics are going to have to start competing to import kids.
"Skilled" sounds nice because it sounds like "doctors, educated" but the only real SAFE way to ensure it's actually skilled is make the dollar amounts so high that no company will want to use it to import cheap near-slave labor.
US immigration policy was explicitly racist from its founding up until the Hart Cellar act of 1965. Assuming that the 2016 election of Donald Trump is your benchmark for when immigration policy became determined by racists again, then the US's immigration policy was non-racist for 51 of the last 251 (and counting) years, or 20% of its history.
Safe to say that the 1990s "End of History" theory has been proven wrong. It may be that the ~1960s-2010s "post-national" political consensus was actually just a historical aberration that is still in the process of being unwound.
Do you appreciate that, in the wider historical context, this position is an exceptionally radical one? You seem to not understand how there could even exist a difference of opinion on this, but I'm confident that this outlook of humans as being completely fungible, transactional economic units would appear unthinkable to anyone throughout 99% of human history. Just the suggestion that a nation's population should be restocked by swapping it out with another nation's population would be tantamount to treason any time prior to the revolution of the 1960s.
Perhaps on the smaller subreddits, but have a look at /r/all on any given day and it's obvious that real people, and diverse backgrounds, it is not. Every single subreddit that goes above a certain activity threshold collapses into the exact same state of astroturfed, mass-produced political slop targeted towards low IQ people.
"The current times" are a direct result of decisions like that of Merkel to throw open the borders of Germany to a million unchecked foreign men. If there's one reason that the AfD is the largest party in Germany today, it's because of that decision Merkel made a whole decade ago. How was that "based in facts, truth and science", or "slow and steady"?
The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
There will always be people that dislike change, but it may ultimately be better to start integrating them earlier rather than later. If you make it through the bad times (e.g. now), at the other end is the outcome you desire.
> The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
The refugee crisis didn't appear to have a significant impact (positive or negative) on the labor market based on a recent study by the IZA and ZEW [0] - "Our estimates suggest that those migrants have not displaced native workers but have themselves struggled to find gainful employment. We find moderate increases in crime, and our analysis further indicates that while at the macro level increased migration was accompanied by increased support for anti-immigrant parties, exposure to asylum seekers at the micro level had a small negative effect." [0]
There are systemic issues with the German economy that aren't related to immigration. A lot of the current malaise can be attributed to the economic slowdowns in Russia (with the Russian Invasion of Ukraine) [1] and China (due to Zero COVID and the subsequent indigenization) [2], due to how tied German industry was with both markets [3].
>The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
How many of those unchecked are women? What's the point of having borders then? Or law enforcement putting criminals in jails, when they could be out there propping up the economy. As long as your illegal activities are putting money into the state coffers, you should be allowed to continue unchecked, screw the laws.
Yeah sure, they might cause some trouble for the lower and middle class living amongst them, but think of the economic gains for the top 1%! Their real estate and stock portfolios have never looked so good. And if people vocally disagree with this you call them fascist and put them in jail for threatening your "democracy".
How does Poland's economy manage to grow faster than Germany's without illegal immigration? Maybe they can send some researchers there to find out.
I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.
The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol, which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some very thin, actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community. To say these terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.
I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.
>actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community
There wasn't any connection. You are running things in reverse. There was an explicit concerted effort to 'take it over'. With celebrations when it succeeded as the media to the bait.
You both are wrong, thee is actually a symbiosis. Media (any kind) need freaks, maniacs, disasters to generate views, and keep common people puzzled, thrilled, and entertained. Anons need lulz. Therefore complete nonsense — “white poodle is a secret way to say Heil Hitler to the ones in the know” — will be reported in hopes that it won't fizzle out, but will become the next media sensation, and immediately there will be threads from totally legit specialists discussing how to breed the whitest dog possible.
You are describing exactly what I said: the media makes up nonsense--or is fed it by activists--and then people think it is funny and play with the idea.
>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
I could be wrong but I don't think 'normie' came from 'normalfag'. I'm somewhat skeptical that 'goyslop' was the first use of 'slop' in this way too. And of course 'based' comes from rapper Lil B.
I think "normalfag" is a backformation from "normie"; at any rate, "normie" is itself 4chan slang that entered norm... ie... usage one way or another. "Based" was coined by Lil B but absolutely entered wide usage via being adopted as a meme by 4chan.
All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't mean they aren't alt-right anymore.
As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
> There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
A lot of influencers in this space are non-whites born outside of the west. The scale of what he’s describing is exaggerated, but the trend is there.
> As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
This might have been true ten years ago. Most of the people in this space became disaffected with Putin after the war began owing to his moves with Dagestan and the Wagner group’s activities in Africa. /pol/ and /k/ are far more supportive of Ukraine than one would expect if your theory held true. There’s reason to suspect this is the result of the same kind of influence campaigns that were being run on the site by Russia during the Syrian Civil War.
> Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement
On 4chan, Nick Fuentes is loudly and routinely criticized as a closeted homosexual who hates women and encourages his impressionable underage followers to also hate women. He's a more active part of the incel pipeline than 4chan these days and is called out for it on 4chan.
(He's also as a federal informant, since he was never thrown in the slammer for plainly inciting J6 activity. The feds had him dead to rights for that and just let him. I mention this not because it's relevant to the point, just for completeness.)
I would still call it one of the epicenters. Yes, many venues that were previously only multlipliers like some prolific streamers / Youtubers / TikTok channels have grown and cultivated their own distinct subcommunities which form new epicenters.
However, from what I can see /pol/ still serves as significant breeding ground where people deeply committed to their views can get together in a "mask-off" manner without fear of moderation, while they have to be more "mask-on" on platforms that are more dissemination-focused like Youtube.
Name anything which doesn't need to be explained by somebody to someone. BTW, "you disagreeing with me is evidence that I am right" is a very 4chan way of arguing.
What caused people to stop using the free service that is MySpace? What caused people stop using the free service that is Digg? Being free isn't particularly novel. Facebook isn't providing this service out of some sense of altruism. It is incredibly profitable.
What about the tariffs would cause people to stop using it? Because they - along with many other of the administrations postulations and policies - are incredibly unpopular and a complete 180 of US foreign trade policy. Because tech is a money printing machine for the US and tech oligarchs who have largely bent the knee to Trump.
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