8chan and the issue of speech on the internet

The website known as 8chan has served as a cesspool of bigoted and racist hate mongering for a long time in which posters seemed to be competing to see who could come up with the most offensive stuff, all while arguing that they were doing it ironically, ‘for the lulz’ as the kids say these days. They operated with impunity under the shield of free speech and things were going well for them (in terms of reaching their target audience) until three mass shooters in Christchurch (targeting Muslims), Poway, California (targeting Jews), and at a Texas Walmart (targeting Hispanics) posted their hateful manifestos on the website.

This proved to be too much for those companies that had been at least indirectly supporting the site and the internet security firm Cloudflare withdrew its support, thus enabling hackers to invade the site, overwhelm it, and shut it down. The creator of 8chan, an American who lives in the Philippines and seems to covet notoriety, vows to bring the site back in some form with a new name 8kun and different security firm backing it.

The NPR radio program On the Media had a fascinating 17-minute segment tying together 8chan, the people behind it, as well as Q and the QAnon conspiracy theories that spread its message via that site, and the problem of balancing free speech and deplatforming on the internet.

It raises some crucial questions: should tech companies stymie sites like 8chan? Can 8chan stay dead? And what happens to the dark content that flourished on the site — content like the QAnon conspiracy, whose purveyor vowed to only release definitive content on 8chan, lest his narrative gets drowned out by that of impersonators?

Trying unsuccessfully to convince flat Earthers

National Geographic had a segment about the Flat Earth movement. The ten-minutes piece begins at about the 11:30 mark.
What surprised me is that it said that 2% of the American population believes in it. That works out to about 6 million people and is said to be growing. The other thing that disturbed me is that there seemed to be a lot of young people in the group. The video shows a small model of a flat Earth.
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Alaskans desire to protect their precious bodily fluids is going to cost them

Many will have seen Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant satire Dr. Strangelove. Here is the clip of two famous scenes where the US general (played by Sterling Hayden) who has unleashed an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union explains to a British officer (Peter Sellers) how the introduction of fluorine into the drinking water (promoted as a way of reducing tooth decay) was actually a cunning Communist plot to weaken Americans by destroying their precious bodily fluids.


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Backlash to the NYT op-ed

There has, not surprisingly, been a huge reaction to the anonymous New York Times op-ed penned by someone the paper describes as a ‘senior official in the Trump administration’. If the author expected to be treated as some kind of hero, then s/he must be disappointed. There has been condemnation from many sides, the only supporters being those who like to see Trump embarrassed and do not care that the author and associates in this scheme to undercut policies they dislike seem to be doing so because they think he is not conservative enough or not as hardline on foreign policy.
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Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind

It may seem like there is nothing that the fever swamps of the right wing can throw up that would be disavowed by the Republican party. But it seems that even they have limits. You may recall my post on QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy mystery phenomenon that has inexplicably captured the allegiance of so many people despite its manifest wackiness, such as that Donald Trump and the military are in a secret allegiance to combat the Deep State and are at this very moment poised to carry out sweeping indictments and arrests of vast numbers of well-known people before they can stage their coup.
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Yet another rabbit hole to avoid

There are so many weird news items these days that I simply ignore most of them as not worth following up, since their existence is so fleeting and they are soon replaced by the next absurdity. But if they occur frequently enough, then the names and words associated with them stick in my mind and once in a while I find an article that explains what is going on. That is the case with QAnon.
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