The Ouroboros of Hate

I’ll confess I’ve said that if bigots were smart, they wouldn’t be bigots. Reality is a bit more complicated than that, but there is a way to rescue the sentiment.

  1. Opponents of Social Justice movements generally have a poor grasp of social justice concepts.
  2. As a consequence, some of them think these concepts lack any firm meaning. They instead act either as in-group/out-group signifiers, or as synonyms for “I don’t like you.”
  3. As a consequence, some of them have difficulty telling if these concepts are used in their proper manner.
  4. A few opponents of social justice, motivated either by a desire to show #2 to be true or simply to grief, will stage faux social justice campaigns.
  5. As a consequence, the subset mentioned in #3 will think the opponents from #4 are sincere, and given enough exposure may start thinking social justice concepts lack meaning.

I’ve seen this in action; while one group of bigots were trolling me, I saw another group think the trolling was sincere. Just recently, I spotted another example.

Older members of the crowd carried Confederate flags, while the younger, internet-driven masses wore patches with 4chan’s Kekistan banner. Rally-goers in homemade armor and semi-automatic rifles paced Houston’s Hermann Park, waiting for an enemy to appear.

The crowd, several hundred strong, gathered in the park on Saturday to defend a statue of Sam Houston, a slaveholder. They had gathered in response to reports that leftist protesters had planned a rally to remove the statue, despite Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner publicly stating that removing the statue wasn’t “even on my agenda.” But as sniper rifles and Infowars-branded jackets crowded the park, it became evident that the left protesters were not coming. They had never planned to come. The rumors of an antifa protest were actually a hoax, orchestrated by an anti-left group defending Confederate monuments.

I suspect these scenarios are more common than we realize, if only because the same thing happened again a month later.

A “patriot” who brought a revolver to Gettysburg National Military Park Saturday amid rumors of desecration of memorials accidentally shot himself in the leg Saturday. […]

Dozens of self-described Patriots came to the park about noon Saturday after hearing rumors that Antifa protesters might crash the park’s events and try to desecrate memorials. Members of Antifa caused a ruckus in Harrisburg recently at an Anti-Sharia rally and one member was arrested for swinging a wooden pole with a nail attached at a police horse.

The rumors on Saturday appeared to be just that: rumors, as no Antifa members were seen at Gettysburg park Saturday.

The result of all this is a self-supporting feedback loop, where people opposed to social justice keep getting fooled by false flags into thinking social justice is as loopy as they’ve been told, and some of them graduate to generate those false flag campaigns.

Look Around You

Let’s say the Kremlin was responsible for the DNC hack, and deployed Twitter bots and trolls to drive disinformation during the recent US election. You wouldn’t expect something like this to pop up overnight, instead it’s likely Russia has practised on its closer neighbours for years. If this were the case, you’d expect them to have plans and organisations set up to counter Kremlin influence.

Sweden has launched a nationwide school program to teach students to identify Russian propaganda. The Defense Ministry has created new units to seek out and counter Russian attempts to undermine Swedish society.

In Lithuania, 100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed “elves” link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes “Elves vs. Trolls.”

In Brussels, the European Union’s East Stratcom Task Force has 14 staffers and hundreds of volunteer academics, researchers and journalists who have researched and published 2,000 examples of false or twisted ­stories in 18 languages in a weekly digest that began two years ago. […]

France and Britain have successfully pressured Facebook to disable tens of thousands of automated fake accounts used to sway voters close to election time, and it has doubled to 6,000 the number of monitors empowered to remove defamatory and hate-filled posts.

The German cabinet recently endorsed legislation — now before Parliament — to impose fines of up to $53 million on social-media companies that fail to remove posts deemed to be “hate speech.” Some especially notorious recent examples concerning migrants have been traced to Russian origins.

You’d also expect the Kremlin to brag about their online savvy. It would be a national source of strength and pride, after all.

Last February, a top Russian cyber official told a security conference in Moscow that Russia was working on new strategies for the “information arena” that would be equivalent to testing a nuclear bomb and would “allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

Andrey Krutskikh, a senior Kremlin adviser, made the startling comments at the Russian national information security forum, or “Infoforum 2016,” held Feb. 4 and 5. His remarks were transcribed by a Russian who attended the gathering and translated for me by an independent European cyber expert. […]

According to notes of Krutskikh’s speech, he told his Russian audience: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President Harry] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.”

Krutskikh continued, “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

Putin’s cyber adviser stressed to the Moscow audience the importance for Russia of having a strong hand in this new domain. If Russia is weak, he explained, “it must behave hypocritically and search for compromises. But once it becomes strong, it will dictate to the Western partners [the United States and its allies] from the position of power.”

If you live in the United States and focus on news relevant to there, it isn’t that hard to dismiss evidence of Kremlin hacking. They haven’t done it before, right? The US is a tech leader, anyway, and would spot any attempts coming from a mile away.

If you step outside of that bubble, though, you find many more people convinced of the Kremlin’s hand, if only because they’ve felt it themselves.

Bookmark This One

Not this one, mind, but this one from Shiv.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into the latest candy-glossed hate piece to make waves in feminist discourse: “I am not a ‘cis’ Woman, I am a Woman and that Matters.”

Hands down, it’s the best counter-argument to the “E” in TERF that I’ve read.

I mean, hey, it’s taken a good ~2,400 words but now we can answer the question, “why is it wrong for cis women to have some spaces just for them to feel safe in a world where they don’t?”

It’s not wrong to want safety. However, the motivations for this trans-free “women only” space…

  1. Perpetrate rape culture by overstating stranger danger;
  2. Perpetrate rape culture by obscuring the actual tactics of serial predators;
  3. Assumes trans women are as likely to be violent as cis men, which is factually incorrect;
  4. Assumes violence is an essential property of certain persons, which is also factually incorrect–not to mention the rhetorical flourish liberally employed by white supremacists;

…all of which are complaints which have nothing to do with “trying to take away cis women’s safety.”

And all of those prior 2,400 words are well-cited and argued. I do two minor nitpicks, but the first only strengthens the argument. The second:

Please note, I have not once accused Broustra of being transphobic in this piece, nor will I.

I’ll go two steps farther. Broustra denies gender identity, via calling for the explicit exclusion of trans* women in “women-only” spaces; she shows a familiarity with TERF culture, through her Xeroxing of their ideas and arguments; and as a bonus, she is actively working to exclude trans* women, because she is campaigning for her point of view in a public forum. In my books, that makes her a TERF.

That first? I’ll post it over on Shiv’s piece as a comment, when I get a chance. So go read and bookmark her post!

When Winning Becomes Everything

Before getting to the point, though, do you mind if I be a little petty? Emphasis mine:

I was asked about my observations on technical details buried in the State Department’s release of Secretary Clinton’s emails (such as noting a hack attempt in 2011, or how Clinton’s emails might have been intercepted by Russia due to lack of encryption). I was also asked about aspects of the DNC hack, such as why I thought the “Guccifer 2” persona really was in all likelihood operated by the Russian government, and how it wasn’t necessary to rely on CrowdStrike’s attribution as blind faith; noting that I had come to the same conclusion independently based on entirely public evidence, having been initially doubtful of CrowdStrike’s conclusions.

MMmmmm.

But on to the main point: the day after Thursday’s revelation that “a GOP operative who presented himself as working with Mike Flynn, … actively solicited Clinton emails from hackers he believed to be Russian and assumed to be affiliated with the Russian government,” one of the anonymous sources became nonymous. Meet Matt Tait, a British cybersecurity researcher who’s covered that angle of American politics. Said GOP operative, Peter Smith, approached him to validate the batch of emails that were claimed to be from Hilary Clinton’s private email server.

In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.

Ignore the whole attribution angle of the DNC hack. Instead, let’s focus on the actions of the Republicans. They had access to illegally-obtained dirt on a rival party, and didn’t care that this dirt was illegal. All that mattered to them was winning.

This isn’t a one-off, either; yesterday I pointed to an old story about another GOP operative, Aaron Nevins, who struck a deal with “Guccifer 2.0” to use the material they gathered from local DNC chapters in local races. That material wound up being used in attack ads, and may have swayed voters. But there was also a recent report which showed that Republicans had extensively gerrymandered electoral districts, guaranteeing themselves safer seats and a greater odds of winning. This lines up with prior reports. Republicans are also notorious for voter suppression, to the point that they openly brag about it and waste taxpayer funds to do it. Voter disenfranchisement? Also a Republican tactic.

This is a party devoted primarily to winning. Their policies and values are secondary, leading to an unending stream of hypocrisy. This explains a lot about why they have so much difficulty governing, the Republicans lack a unified vision to guide policy and rally everyone around. This makes it easy for outside groups to sway Republicans to their side, to the point that they even rely on them to draft some legislation.

This is poisonous for democracy. It must be opposed, no matter your political leanings.