Quote:1. Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

At the very beginning, 4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland at the anime convention, Otakon. As a nerdy teen growing up in Baltimore in the 90s, I had wandered into Otakon much like I had later wandered into 4chan, just when it was starting. I also attended Otakon in the mid-aughts when 4chan met there, likewise to promote my webcomic.

As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain.

This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right...

(02-19-2017, 03:31 PM)gabrielle Wrote: I found this to be an interesting, and enlightening, piece about the history of 4chan and an analysis of the motives behind the young "deplorables'" embrace (from their mothers' basements) of Donald Trump.  

Quote:1. Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

At the very beginning, 4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland at the anime convention, Otakon. As a nerdy teen growing up in Baltimore in the 90s, I had wandered into Otakon much like I had later wandered into 4chan, just when it was starting. I also attended Otakon in the mid-aughts when 4chan met there, likewise to promote my webcomic.

As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain.

This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right...

4chan: the Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

(02-20-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

Interesting how the guys most likely to rant about how evil feminists are also seem to be the same guys having trouble with relationships. It's almost like they are using "rad-fem man-haters" as a scapegoat because nobody wants to date them...  

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:


Something to "loose"?    Geez, what lousy grammar.  It should be "something to lose".  That means who wrote this is grammar stupid.

Quote:The left does more than simply declare their opposing viewpoint wrong, the radical idea of sex/gender-as-illusion denies their viewpoint an existence. To the left, a complaint stemming from being a man is null space, lying outside the realm of what it will acknowledge as true.

The irony here, of course, is the radical idea of sexual-difference-as-illusion is meant to solve the deplorables’ problem. It was created to liberate those who are oppressed by the concept of sexual difference by dispelling it as a cloud of pure ideas. But to these powerless men, it’s as if the left were addressing their issue by saying in an Orwellian manner, “There’s no such thing as your problem! Problem solved!”

(02-20-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

Interesting how the guys most likely to rant about how evil feminists are also seem to be the same guys having trouble with relationships. It's almost like they are using "rad-fem man-haters" as a scapegoat because nobody wants to date them...  

(02-20-2017, 05:09 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

Interesting how the guys most likely to rant about how evil feminists are also seem to be the same guys having trouble with relationships. It's almost like they are using "rad-fem man-haters" as a scapegoat because nobody wants to date them...  

I don't think anyone , including non feminists would want to put up with Bipolar Disorder.

Weed doesn't care when I stay up all night due to the inability of my brain to STFU at times.   Dogs are the same way.

(02-20-2017, 06:26 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 05:09 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

Interesting how the guys most likely to rant about how evil feminists are also seem to be the same guys having trouble with relationships. It's almost like they are using "rad-fem man-haters" as a scapegoat because nobody wants to date them...  

I don't think anyone , including non feminists would want to put up with Bipolar Disorder.

Weed doesn't care when I stay up all night due to the inability of my brain to STFU at times.   Dogs are the same way.

-- you don't take lithium?

(02-20-2017, 06:34 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 06:26 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 05:09 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

Interesting how the guys most likely to rant about how evil feminists are also seem to be the same guys having trouble with relationships. It's almost like they are using "rad-fem man-haters" as a scapegoat because nobody wants to date them...  

I don't think anyone , including non feminists would want to put up with Bipolar Disorder.

Weed doesn't care when I stay up all night due to the inability of my brain to STFU at times.   Dogs are the same way.

-- you don't take lithium?

No, I take Valproate,duloxitene,Latuda,Seroquel, and if I need it, a benzo.  Weed works better than benzos, which may be sorta weird...

(02-20-2017, 06:59 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 06:34 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: <snip>
-- you don't take lithium?

No, I take Valproate,duloxitene,Latuda,Seroquel, and if I need it, a benzo.  Weed works better than benzos, which may be sorta weird...

-- jeez you need all that? my sister just takes lithium, it works for her

(02-20-2017, 08:25 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Yup. In my case I know where to put the blame, and it wasn't on women. It was a b--- known now as Asperger's syndrome... well, excuse me, for I don't want to insult female dogs, which can be wonderful companions... would have expected any woman to become a feminist if she married me even if she were from an anti-feminist culture.

By 1975 male chauvinism was for primitive types who liked their wives submissive.

(02-20-2017, 07:41 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 06:59 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 06:34 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: <snip>
-- you don't take lithium?

No, I take Valproate,duloxitene,Latuda,Seroquel, and if I need it, a benzo.  Weed works better than benzos, which may be sorta weird...

-- jeez you need all that? my sister just takes lithium, it works for her

Yes, there's a long story ,,,  The Shrink on I are working on is getting my latest manic episode sorted out. There's a genetic fuckup someplace. My youngest sister just got readmitted to one of Oklahoma's wacky wards. One of her sons [blood nephew] also has Bipolar Disorder as well. Now, with all that said, I'd much rather have Bipolar Disorder than heart disease or cancer. As most of us who have it, messed up sleep/jacked up moods is far better than some terminal condition. I think it wise to focus on "it could be worse" than feeling sorry for myself. I'm glad your sister can get by on just one prescription.  It's cheaper, I'm sure...

(02-21-2017, 12:04 AM)Craig Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 08:25 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Yup. In my case I know where to put the blame, and it wasn't on women. It was a b--- known now as Asperger's syndrome... well, excuse me, for I don't want to insult female dogs, which can be wonderful companions... would have expected any woman to become a feminist if she married me even if she were from an anti-feminist culture.

By 1975 male chauvinism was for primitive types who liked their wives submissive.

Wait...you were dating a woman with Asperger's? Or are you saying YOU have Asperger's? Because I never would have guessed... -Craig

(02-20-2017, 10:37 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Yes, Rags, we are. 

At least, we like to think so...

(02-20-2017, 05:09 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

Interesting how the guys most likely to rant about how evil feminists are also seem to be the same guys having trouble with relationships. It's almost like they are using "rad-fem man-haters" as a scapegoat because nobody wants to date them...  

I don't think anyone , including non feminists would want to put up with Bipolar Disorder.

Weed doesn't care when I stay up all night due to the inability of my brain to STFU at times.   Dogs are the same way.

(02-21-2017, 07:36 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 05:09 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 02:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I'm glad I fucked off the other sex for substances which make for a nice relationship with weed.

Interesting how the guys most likely to rant about how evil feminists are also seem to be the same guys having trouble with relationships. It's almost like they are using "rad-fem man-haters" as a scapegoat because nobody wants to date them...  

I don't think anyone , including non feminists would want to put up with Bipolar Disorder.

Weed doesn't care when I stay up all night due to the inability of my brain to STFU at times.   Dogs are the same way.

I know several people with Bipolar who are married.