The jokeyness has been a hallmark of each of these Very Online cultures. Maybe it's an effective recruiting technique online? I have read multiple first-person articles that say "I thought it was all fun and games until I found myself the leader of my local white supremacist troop."
Let SP be the first to mention.
I posted that link, too. Forget which thread, though, and don't know how to find it.
The jokey-ness of the Boogs is because they are in large part an outgrowth of one of 4chan, especially /k/.
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"Know when to walk away from the table."
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The underlying joke about Electric Boogaloo is everywhere, including my comments here. I never heard of the movement until after this round of protests started.
I did actually mean to link the previous comments - I knew I'd originally heard about them here...
The Ku Klux Klan had an ancient history of being being jokey, starting with the misspelling in the name and the absurd costumes and ranks ("grand cyclops" etc.). Humor is a good way to bring in recruits. It's also more difficult to prosecute a conspiracy when the undercover agents can't tell if everyone's just joking around.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/what-we-can-learn-from-white-supremacists-long-history-of-carefully-cultivating-their-own-aesthetic.html
Huh, I wonder if the jokiness of the Very Online Cultures is a directly inherited trait from the KKK.
I'm mad that these assholes are wearing aloha shirts because I've got a closet full of aloha shirts and now I can't wear them.
This is the exact same rationale of Charles Manson btw.
Per SP's link in the last thread, it's mildly interesting that they're from a channel that discourages political discussion and include a few non-rightist gun enthusiasts. But regardless, yeah, mostly a new iteration of far-right goons.
Someone should do a Virgin Boogaloo vs Chad Manson meme
Also its too bad they went with "Electric Boogaloo" instead of "Havana Nights."
How does Manson get aloha shirts in prison?
Trump, too, makes "jokes" all the time. You snowflakes are just too sensitive to appreciate his sense of humor.
To the extent that loneliness and resentment (that their natural entitlement hasn't been fulfilled) drives them, they were radicalized by the patriarchy. Then it is just online chance whether they find white supremacy, misogyny or a non-malignant hobby with new friends.
Also, blowing up the building dedicated to cross-border negotiation and cooperation is an extremely vivid way to make a point. Beats the time my old cat shat on the pillow to protest the new kitten.
This is a thing in fascism
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/08/rudolf-hess-and-comic-absurdity-fascism
16: Some genius on Twitter explained that liberals love Sarah Cooper's lip-syncing because it allows them to laugh at Trump's jokes without having to acknowledge how funny he is.
I can't listen to his voice and remain calm.
The Ku Klux Klan had an ancient history of being being jokey, starting with the misspelling in the name and the absurd costumes and ranks ("grand cyclops" etc.).
This is not unique to the KKK, though. In this respect, the KKK is not so much "one element in a long historical tradition of racism" as "one of many late 19th and early 20th century mutual-benefit 'secret societies'". The Shriners, the Rotarians, the Elks, the Masons, the Oddfellows and so on. All of them had silly names and silly costumes and silly rituals, and all of them had some sort of mutual-aid element.
The KKK's unique selling point was horrific racism (and it was also, from a cash flow point of view, more of a pyramid scheme than a mutual-aid or charitable society), but its silly office names are not different from the Grand Esteemed Loyal Knights of the Elks, the Supreme Chief Rangers of the Order of Foresters, the Venerable Grand Masters of Freemasonry, the Imperial Grand Council of the Ancient Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, the Priors of the Grey Monks of St Giles and so on.
22: The Woodsmen are still around as a not-for-profit life insurance firm. My understanding is that much of the early Klan's ceremony was meant specifically as a parody of the Masons.
22.2 is true. In high school some friends and myself had an International Order of the Grand Iguana (motto: "Thou shalt not worship a lesser lizard"). Paramilitary unit was the Iguandos (basically local mischief). I rose to the highest rank of "El Supremo A #1"
Jesus, Breakin 2 references have tired for something like 20 (30?) years. Can't these Just Joking people ever trip over something actually funny for a change?
I do not, at all, get the Pepe the Frog thing. Like, I've read multiple explainers on it over several years and it still makes zero sense to me. It's so Not Funny that it just slips off my brain.
24 Which motto was to be said while giving the equivalent of a black power salute while sticking your tongue out like a lizard. Jesus, we were geeks and I haven't thought of this in years.
23: I think they have a giant Art Deco meets Il Duce headquarters in Lincoln.
The sister of the security guard who was murdered by the... jfc do I have to type "Booger" in a serious conversation, is this what we've fucking come to... anyway she's a Republican, and seemed to dearly want to blame the murder on the protestors and rioters. I do kind of feel for her working through the cognitive dissonance. This is the worst way to have your worldview scrambled, and at an otherwise heady time of unprecedented Republican lip service about the evils of racism.
22: I think the Klan was (sorry, Barry) closer to Barry's friends' goofiness than to the actual vanilla fraternal organizations they were satirizing. The phrase that comes to my mind is "an orgy of license:" the only authority that matters is whether your friends laugh and other people look nervously puzzled.
Hey, has anyone here read How the South Won the Civil War? It just came out, so unlikely, but I'm pretty disappointed: so much cherry-picking, so much letting the author's native Northeast off the hook. Her thesis isn't broadly incorrect, but it's frustratingly reductive.
I thought the pyramid-scheminess of the Klan was specific to its 1910s-20s reboot.
It's not a new thought, but the joking and grotesquery (pepe, wojaks*, etc) is partially about aggression - being disgusting and ridiculous while knowing (or hoping, actually) that people will be too scared to point it out or laugh.
It's also about misogyny and homophobia, IMO - the sort of generic gender narrative which says "men are gross hairy and unkempt while women are beautiful hairless angels, or at least they'd better be". You have only to look at male wojak characters (the majority - you can google "doomer" if you want) versus the few female ones.
The whole thing is basically resentiment - knowing or fearing that you are inferior in some way but preferring to exterminate the world rather than get a haircut and wash your ass.
Juggalos are a useful comparison, since they also incorporate elements of the grotesque but have a basically open and welcoming politics.
*to be fair, there are a lot of wojaks on the irony-poisoned left too
I guess I'm now old enough that I can't be expected to be aware of all internet conventions. I had to google "wojack" and "doomer".
I find doomers very disappointing. I had so hoped that they would be just generically "the world is doomed, climate collapse and coronavirus and the economy mean that we'll all have short miserable lives except the billionaires, it's too intractable and nothing can be done", which is basically what I think. But it turns out to be that plus misogyny and racism plus the usual "whyyyyyyyyy can't I get a girlfriend who is dramatically more attractive and socially adroit than I am, only a feminazi would reject someone who does nothing but game, complain and refuse to get a haircut".
9: Ha, yep. I was taking my laundry out of the bag to put in the washing machine and got to a Hawaiian shirt and thought: welp, nevermind forever. I'm not sure how long it takes to culturally uncouple such things but I figure better safe than Nazi.
Certainly the flavor of doomer I have found to evince the headiest mix of hilarious and disturbing is something a friend pointed out on facebook called the Sexy Garfield Collapse Cult. Proceed at your own risk. Possibly self-evident TW: pictures of Garfield with very large bosoms.
I'm holding out for a sexy Garfield with maybe B-cups.
9, 33: We are not surrendering the aloha shirt to racist assholes. If it survived Hilo Hattie's, it will survive these clowns.
I am not replacing 90% of my business wardrobe (upper half).
On Zoom, nobody can see the lower half.
28.3: I read an earlier version of it and saw HCR give a bunch of talks from it. I think your description is 100% correct.
Yesterday I was totally at a meeting with a blazer and tie up top while wearing shorts and crocs.
Film Crit Hulk's essay on Gamergate details the first obvious manifestation of this phenomenon in the Internet era. It's extremely well written, strongly recommended. Among the key insights:
"YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND HOW PROBLEMATIC THIS IS. IT'S ALMOST THOUGHT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE. WHAT HAS ESSENTIALLY HAPPENED IS THAT WE HAVE TAKEN A CULT BEHAVIORAL APPROACH TO DISCUSSION AND PHILOSOPHY - NORMALLY A REALLY DIFFICULT THING TO INSTILL INTO PEOPLE AND REQUIRES ISOLATION, DIRECT PROGRAMMING AND FULL-ON CULTURAL SEPARATION - AND TURNED IT INTO SOMETHING THAT HAS BEEN CASUALLY LEARNED ON THE INTERNET'S PROVERBIAL STREETS THROUGH THE ORGANIC PROCESS OF BEING A PART OF VIDEO GAME'S MOST TOXIC SUBCULTURE.
THIS IS ONE OF THE SCARIEST THINGS HULK HAS EVER SEEN."
Every time I read the news lately, I want to buy freeze-dried food and an umbrella with a sword inside. So far, I've only done the first.
The jokiness thing is just 4/8chan culture, nothing else. It might also be recapitulating the early clan or whatever, but right now it's just the internet leaking.
43: I like that a lot. I've been striving toward a view of Trumpism that I haven't got a word for. "Sympathetic" isn't it, because I don't really sympathize. But HULK gets it:
HULK IS JUST DESPERATELY CLINGING ONTO THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THIS MOMENT AS IF YOU WERE HULK'S CHILD TURNING TO SOME SORT OF DRUG ADDICTION. IT'S THAT SERIOUS.
I've used that analogy before. I think it conveys the genuine concern and even affection I have for those afflicted.
I think it conveys the genuine concern and even affection I have for those afflicted.
Get a grip. We're long past concern and affection. The death cult's members need to be put to the flame. They can't be rehabilitated; they want to kill us all.
The death cult's members need to be put to the flame. They can't be rehabilitated; they want to kill us all.
If only Abe Lincoln had heeded this advice.
45: The toxic joking-but-not-really attitude of the chans has deep, deep roots in Internet culture, back to irc and usenet, but it didn't manifest as organized real-world violence and harassment until Gamergate.
I don't play anything more recent than Civ V, because I'm a feminist.
They were giving away Civ 6 last month, so I started playing. It's pretty good, but probably not better than 5, and I think despite some good ideas in 5 and 6, the series peaked with 4.
They can't be rehabilitated; they want to kill us all.
Yeah, well, I'm not recommending that you give your drug-addicted niece access to your bank account or your house. Or even your phone number. To say someone is a drug addict isn't to minimize the danger that they pose. It's a way to acknowledge their humanity, and to recognize that they aren't entirely in control of the ways they have strayed from decency.
And they can be rehabilitated. We all can. The clever folk of Unfogged have reached an understanding that people can't be persuaded -- that the mere effort to change someone's mind merely entrenches their views. That's always been wrong, but we can really see that clearly with the public reaction to the latest racist killings by police. People are not rallying around Trump in favor of "law and order" in the way they have done in the past. People can be shaken loose from The Crazy.
I'm not sure how much tension there actually is between 47 and 52, despite the phrasing. Rehabilitating people in a death cult requires acknowledging that they're in a death cult, as opposed to the Brooks/Broder/Vance approach of treating them like one valid viewpoint among many, or at worst well-meaning people who happen to be wrong about some particular issue.
It's all going to be viewed as footnotes to Gamergate*.
*Let a thousand pedantically-minded fuckwads rail about the all the obvious history and pre-existing influences on that hot mess, but let me point out that the same was of course true of Plato and yet there is almost always some person or thing that is annointed as the important exemplar and influence and in this case my correct analysis is that it will be Gamergate.
This is an interesting podcastM featuring a researcher (from the Middlebury Institute) who has been vociferously pushing back on those characterizing the Boogaloos as right-wing white supremacists. I do not think his case is that strong and that the overlap is more "importamt" than he allows but it provides some good background. In particular his emphasis that this group wants to dismantle all government (violently) so therefor antithetical to Trump/Republican white supremacy is not as convincing as he thinks. The election of Trump was arguably a huge step in the direction of the violent destruction of government.
This reminded me of one of the saddest political events in the saga of domestic extremist groups which was in 2009 when the Dems joined the Reps in piling on a completely anodyne government report which simply noted that returning vets were at risk of recruitment by extremist groups. Short article on it here.
At some point I was trying to come up with a fake AP history question from 50 years in the future.
"It's about ethics in video game journalism" was which of the following:
a) An early rallying cry of what became the 4chan domestic terrorist movement.
b) A common criticism of Assange's Wikileaks organization.
But I really couldn't come up with more wrong answers I was happy with.
c) Donald Trump's presidential campaign slogan.
d) Backlash against the controversial Warcraft 3: Reforged.
The early 21st century phrasing for a vow of celibacy.
I'm just reading this thread but... the link in 2 wasn't me?
Anyway this seems like an informative thread on the multi-headed nature of the beast.
It would have been you if you lived up to your full potential.
Oh christ this is a lot of bullshit. The boogaloos are fucking white supremacists looking to start a race war. I don't have time for this shit.
All fringe movements are going to be a bit inconsistent in composition and incoherent in ideology but anyone who takes the boogers claims of being primarily motivated by opposition to the police state rather than desire to instigate a civil war is falling for some extremely transparent, cynical, bad faith arguments and actions. The paper trail is there for anyone who wants to wade into the sewer and do their homework.
One of the primary tools of the broader ideological movement, the alt-right for lack of a better name, is to intentionally mislead about their motives, hiding their real intents behind sophistry, sock puppets, and sarcasm. That their real intents are often inconsistent, nihilistic, and ever-changing is almost beyond the point. Not quite the medium is the message... perhaps, the method is the message?
My only knowledge of this is from Wikipedia and an article in Vice magazine, but 63 and 64 seem right to me. I mean, the origin of the name was the slogan "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo", and I doubt they're thinking of themselves as channeling the spirit of the Union armies, so it makes the white supremacist affiliation hard to deny. Unless you're saying it's really tariffs they're up in arms about...
I realize it's inappropriate to have a favorite part of such a terrible thing, but my favorite part of the Boogaloo movement is definitely the flower-print assault rifles.
I know it has been deeply laundered via the Internet joke/tropes, but I am still having a hard time with the fact that the thing being originally referenced by Boogaloo was a not-very-white movie.
Not even racists think white people can dance.
I see the Department of Homeland Security says there are good bad people on both sides, which I'm sure will settle the question given the famously apolitical and universally respected source: https://mobile.twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1274404688276754434
I didn't read the thread in 61 as saying that Boogers aren't white supremacists, but that the white supremacists have used a number of recent events and plausible deniability to co-opt other militant groups into becoming more racist. I think it was raising an alarm about the rapid expansion and consolidation under the race war banner, not saying that it's not too bad because most of the armed white people didn't start out as Nazis.
Just a bunch of nonpartisan extremists.
The cocaine does all the work there.
72: And the Safety Dance - can't forget about that...
Riverdance were a result of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which compelled paramilitary factions on all sides to put their arms verifiably beyond use.