'Alt-Furry' suffers blowback after Alt-Right rally leads to death of citizen
On August 12, during a "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a car drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. James Alex Fields, Jr., who some linked to a local white nationalist organization, has been charged with second degree murder in relation to the event. On the 14th, VoIP messaging application Discord announced they had deleted AltRight.com's server, and others, citing TOS violations and promising to "take action against white supremacy, nazi ideology, and all forms of hate".
Discord closed, content leaked
The same day, members of the furry community began reporting the "AltFurry" Discord server, an Alt-Right furry community who are associated with Califur's recent security issues. Before the rally, the server had announced on Twitter that members of theirs would be attending. Following a tip about a Dogpatch Press article linking the group (and member TheBigKK) to the Charlottesville rally, people sent in messages from leaked logs of the chat revealing TOS violations, and the server was closed, as well as a second "back-up" server.
Looking into the leak revealed that a Tweet by "Kekus of Akkad" that included an edited photo of Deo Vacuus as the driver during the vehicular attack had been created by AltFurry leader Len Gilbert, who encouraged the image to be Tweeted by a member:
Perpetrator in Charlottesville identified as @DeoTasDevil
Heard yelling, "OUTTA MY FANDOM, FASCISTS!"
This is why we need #AltFurry pic.twitter.com/kQ3Pz6AoRZ— Kekus of Akkad (@TheWolfsWord) August 12, 2017
In the interim of Discord's announcement and removal of the AltFurry server, the group set up a Telegram channel, where members discussed the vehicular attack, characterizing it as inspiring and overlaying a Mussolini quote to a photo:
Furrydelphia's preemptive act
More hits kept coming on the days following the rally as furry conventions weighed in and even took steps to preemptively ban individuals affiliated with the movement. Furrydelphia, a new convention that is having its pilot gathering this weekend, released a statement on August 14 indicating it has taken steps to ban AltFurry individuals it perceived as engaging in threatening behavior. While reactions to this announcement in the wake of the attack have been largely positive, a few have noted that this sort of preemptive banning may set a poor precedent.
About the author
Equivamp (Kile Onasi) — read stories — contact (login required)a team lead (production/manufacturing) and Zebra Pegasus from Kansas, interested in paleoanthropology, spider man and star wars
Comments
Great job. There is mainstream news attention coming.
Glad I got the story before them then :P
Like MSM you are choosing to ignore the redaction of Berke Bates' aerial footage.
Next step for Alt-Furry: a federation of Matrix servers hosted on a series of HavenCo 2.0 VPS.
I was gonna say they'll be off to Russia next but apparently even the Russians want nothing to do with DailyStormer so somehow I don't think they'll be too welcoming to people who promote the "gay propaganda" of dog-people fucking in addition to debating if black people are human and that nagging Jewish Question.
BTW I've heard that some alt-furries are attending or are associated with the staff of Alamo City Furry Invasion in San Antonio. Its a new convention in October. One of the GOH's has declined to attend because of it. Anyone know anything about this?
Here's how I answered the question at my site,
ACFI has had 3 issues that I know of involving the Furry Raiders.
1) A staffer was a Raiders member, but stepped down after some embarrassing attention – whether they really left or just stepped into the background, I don’t know.
2) A GOH left because of the following.
3) A staffer had what appeared to be inappropriate collusion with the Raiders, but offered an explanation about doing it for investigation.
These aren’t publicized for now. They published a statement against hate groups and hate symbolism. Personally I’m not impressed but they haven’t even had a con yet. It’s the first one and mistakes happen. Nobody besides altfurs are out to attack cons. However if evidence of dishonesty about this comes out, that would be a good time for public discussion.
What the hell is it with Alt-right and general douchebro types calling everyone and everything Autistic? It's like they have a fetish specifically for that word. That and cuck. It's like they don't see the irony of making "lol autism" the punchline of every (forced) meme while surrounded by other socially retarded manchildren who will almost assuredly never reproduce because they're debilitated in their fringe obsessions. I'm not being hyperbolic here. "Autistic" is like the new "Ha-Ha, Fag!".
So...wait...are you objecting to the use of "autistic" as an insult, but not "socially retarded"?
The euphemism treadmill strikes again! I think they may have been trying to make a "pot calling the kettle black" comparison.
Mainly this. But the reality of it is, being autistic is one thing, and being a social pariah is another. Most friendless losers with no lives aren't autistic.
The Alt right and the progressive left is an absolute embarrassment to this generation, and this cancer needs to be removed before it spreads further ultimately killing what's left of society.
Found the Furry Raider.
Yes it's linked there.
*protest chant* status quo, status quo, progressive taxation has got to go!
hi Perri
Furthemore, Texas Furry Fiesta, and... a Canadian convention whose name I forget, all have issued statements condeming hate speech.
Should there be a push to encourage more conventions to take an overt stance?
I don't think pushing people to say things they wouldn't normally say is good policy. You can inquire about their feelings on it sure. But if you force them to take a stance that is not their own, then would you want to be supporting institutes like that if they can't come out on their own.
The furry fandom is large enough where conventions are competing against each other and so taking stances, or not, will have effects on those willing to attend or not.
This isn't a person. These are events.
And it doesn't matter about their competition. What matters are them taking a stance that bigotry, hate, and their symbols are not welcome at their events.
Is that such a great thing to ask?
No it's not, in fact it really shouldn't have to be asked of at all, technically.
Such things should probably be in the ToS of the convention itself.
To me it is sad that recent events of failed leadership have lead smaller organization to feel they have to make exclusive statements to offset the uncertainty created by this lack of leadership in the White House.
What I was mostly alluding to is if you have to pry an organization for a basic statement on allowing a diverse and safe environment for attendees to enjoy themselves, it may be best to take that into consideration when deciding to go there or not.
Wait.
You think that in a time period where people are intentionally going to cons to cause problems, it's a failure of leadership for conventions to reiterate that behavior isn't welcome, or ban known troublemakers?
Edit: I may have misread. Please clarify on that.
Some conventions may think that Charlottesville is a non-furry issue so they won't make a statement. Obviously, a good deal of conventions believe it is, and given the patterns of such individuals that would use provocative symbols have made their presence known at other conventions earlier this year they felt is was best to make a statement, to which I would agree.
This kind of thing should be on the Code of Conduct section of the convention manual, regardless. But it doesn't hurt to make a statement on it. I would go so far as to that they get specific. List out what symbols are not allowed. Don't use broad language about symbols and then expect people to know what symbols are barred.
I believe in private enterprises holding rule sets, but I like them to be specific. It clears up the air and lets people know what they are getting into. If they have to use the clause: "We reserve the right to ban anyone" too frequently it means their rule sets need more amendment to make it clear when they will do it.
The failure of leadership I'm noting comes from the United States government in this case, and unfortunately when the government lacks leadership and conviction, the expectation is that this job then falls upon the local leaders. Yes, even our furry conventions.
"Obviously, a good deal of conventions believe it is, and given the patterns of such individuals that would use provocative symbols have made their presence known at other conventions earlier this year they felt is was best to make a statement, to which I would agree."
The problem is that we have a specific Furry issue on this matter. There are people who hold those stances and act in a provocative manner. That's not even accounting for those who cost Califur $24,000.
These people are bad actors, they're not participating in good faith. Why should they be allowed to participate?
That will be the question each convention will be asking themselves for certain, but it is up to them to answer.
You can ask myself, but I don't run a convention. Like when you were a moderator at FA, you should know it is good practice to submit trouble notes through the proper channels so that they can be addressed. Same goes for those that want to ask about what conventions are doing to handle these individuals.
So...
You have no problem with organizing a campaign to ask Conventions about this, then?
So now it's my job to ask every convention about their stances instead of having them, like adults, decide whether they are going to make the statements themselves? I don't work for the conventions, or volunteer for them, my inquiries would have the same sense of authority as those from the average person.
Personally, I like to report what is going on in the fandom rather than making the news myself. If other furries want to take a more activist approach, that is their prerogative, heck I know that there are other writers here that would enjoy doing a more hands on approach. I as an introvert wouldn't like to spend most of my time getting in email threads with leaders of the scores of furry conventions that exist.
If an activist were determined enough, they could make their own kind of site that lists all the furry conventions and then list out each one and their response to the thing. Such a thing could be referenced as a primary source by sites such as Dogpatch, Flayrah, and otherwise. However, I am not one to lead campaigns, and barely have time to deal with the tasks I've given myself currently.
But also be aware, getting a list of conventions of those that don't give a solid "no" to alt-furries or their symbology could give them information they need to know what conventions to try and implant themselves in, such as RMFC.
I have faith that those who run conventions will either make good decisions, or if they do not they will have to deal with the consequences of making bad ones, in the end I think we'll continue to have a growing and thriving fandom, in spite of efforts by some bad eggs.
Ah, my apologies. I thought it was clear that I am not expecting you, personally, to be doing anything.
"I have faith that those who run conventions will either make good decisions"
I no longer have that faith, and have canceled my plans to attend FAU over the convention chair's inclusion of Nazis (Actual Nazis, mind) as a protected class. I was on the schedule for three panels.
Did they have a statement that indicated that Nazi speech would be protected? FA:U has been having other issues with their con. They had an attendance dip after moving from New Jersey which I don't think they've recovered from and such.
Fur-the-More takes place in that same area (in fact less than 20 miles away from where FA:U takes place) and was one of the first following Furrydelpia to make a statement indicating that such symbols or propagation would not be allowed.
I got this Friday.
Warning Given from Quoting Mungo:
Code of Conduct, Section 1.8 - Do not engage in malicious speech.
This includes bigotry and disparaging remarks or content about anyone's race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, etc. This does not apply to fictional works.
You have done this by posting the following comments:
"Nazis are mentally deranged. They're Nazis. They fly the flag, they do the salute, the espouse the philosophy; a rhetoric of exclusion, intolerance, hatred, and genocide."
---
"I'm reminded of the comic where a guy, once being told to fuck off for saying something retarded, says "Jokes on him, I was only pretending."
So either they're actual Nazis, or just acting like them and pretending to hold those opinions in an attempt to get a rise out of people. There's no functional difference at that point, because both those who legitimately hold those values and those who only pretend to are both still acting and speaking upon those values."
As such, this is a Warning Notice (1st Offense). As part of this administrative action, the cited comments have been hidden by site staff.
While we allow for a great deal of artistic and literary freedom, we must ask that your content abide by Fur Affinity’s guidelines. Please be more careful in the future. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
quoting_mungo
Administrator, Code of Conduct Enforcement
-----
I filed a trouble ticket to appeal this, and was later suspended for further Anti-Nazi comments. I appealed it and got a rejection, and part of the rejection addressed this issue:
"Concerning malicious speech, which was not cited in this penalty but a previous incident, the rule ends in "etc" and our staff may act with discretion. On Fur Affinity, we do not want anyone to assault anyone else in the community with hateful commentary. This is not a stand on any political issue or side, but a policy that applies to everyone."
At no point did I issue a threat to any member of the community, or do anything aside call people apologists and defenders - for apologizing or defending Nazis, particularly by saying it was just a difference of opinion or that I just didn't like them.
Do note that these were comments on my submission or journals, and that I made no attempt to contact the users after blocking them. People were coming to my submission (Of a character of mine punching a Nazifur) to say "You shouldn't punch Nazis, that's bad". Those comments were left alone. Nearly every comment that was positive towards punching Nazis was hidden and the commentors warned.
I'm Jewish. I'm a little more sensitive towards Nazism than most, and I think I've got a historical justification for it.
Maybe it may be best to approach the reactions of our furry content sites on the matter as much as our physical conventions on what lines are drawn and where they are drawn.
I mean, as I said, I prefer specific examples rather than broad speak on rule sets, and Fur Affinity is one of the worst violators of it. I did an article where one user was suspended because the commentators violated the "call out" rule on an animation prize scuffle. I felt it was needed on the article because it was an enforcement that was never done before so it was important for users to know what could get them in trouble.
So their choice here may warrant a look into investigating these kind of decisions.
"So their choice here may warrant a look into investigating these kind of decisions."
May? I think it certainly does. The ONLY possible way to read my initial violations (For which there would have been no suspension, regardless if you can take "Punch some Nazis" as a threat) is if "Nazi" is treated equivalent to race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation.
"what lines are drawn and where they are drawn."
Had I given a threat to any individual on the site, I would have been in the wrong. Assault is illegal (and if I commit it, I do so knowing the consequences). If being a Nazi is an opinion, then saying someone is a Nazi Apologist is an opinion too, yes?
Had I said "All Republicans should be punched", I would have been in the wrong. Heck, there can be an argument for "I want to kick all Republicans in the balls" as being in the wrong.
But, what I said? That shouldn't be in the wrong.
"Nazis are mentally deranged. They're Nazis. They fly the flag, they do the salute, the espouse the philosophy; a rhetoric of exclusion, intolerance, hatred, and genocide."
The only way this could have been a violation of the rules, is if Nazis are treated as a protected group. Which, according to Dragoneer's response to my appeal, they are.
That's not where the line should be.
You make statements condemning a group of people then act surprised when you get in trouble for it? Just think if someone said, "Gays are mentally deranged. They're Gays. They fly the flag, they do the salute, the espouse the philosophy; a rhetoric of exclusion, intolerance, hatred, and genocide." That's what most furs would normally call homophobia and hate speech and be all against it. You can't suddenly say it's okay as long as it agrees with your beliefs. You need to have a consistent set of beliefs and to be fair those need to be, as far as is possible, content neutral.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
To me, the difference here is that a person sticking their dick in another dude's butt isn't going to suppress other's free speech. However, those that desire to suck the dick of an authoritarian and would kill for them very well might.
So the person replacing Nazi with gays would just be speaking non-sense.
It could be argued that neither should be ban-able words, however.
Sure but there is a distinction between speech and action that needs to be recognised. In some countries there is talk about brining back the death penalty for certain crimes (The US is of course in the company of such human rights luminaries as Saudi Arabia and China in that respect) but such discussions are acceptable. Organising mob justice to kill suspected, or even convicted, criminals is not.
I can agree that neither should be bannable offences. Attacking people can be bannable offences but not attacking ideas/philosophies etc. What I wanted to highlight is the problem that what is considered hate speech and offensive is highly subjective. The same sentence which someone says is acceptable for one group can be considered hate speech when applied to another group. That means that it isn't the speech that the person is judging but how they view the people it is directed at. Such assumptions are dangerous since they assume that the judger's opinion is always correct. While that is a perfectly fine way to base one's own conduct, it is not a good way to create a framework for a society with differing views.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Nazi iconography and ideology has been banned in Germany for many decades. Indeed, a Chinese tourist was recently arrested for throwing up a Nazi salute. They've had laws regulating this kind of opinion for a long time and society has not yet fallen apart. I think we all too often allow slavish devotion to certain principles to stand in the way of practicality.
That is true and in Austria too but I would use the same example to argue a totally different point. They banned all those symbols and outward support but it has not prevented those ideas and they are still a problem. The thing is banning such speech does not solve the issues. Furthermore those bans are troubling as they can be used as justification for further bans against speech that is not liked and target innocent people at the same time.
Also, for what it's worth, Germany has now started relaxing and removing those bans and many Germans do not think they should be there. They are also going about things in better ways than banning things. For example, last year, Germany published Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, for the first time since WWII. But with it is a lot of commentary on what happened, showing the consequences and pointing out where there are factual inaccuracies in the book. That is the appropriate way to address these things - with more, and better, speech - not by forbidding expressions of certain views. To quote a paragraph from the news article directly:
“I think one shouldn’t pretend the book doesn’t exist,” Education Minister Johanna Wanka told Germany's N-TV website. “Such taboos can sometimes be counterproductive. It’s important that people who want to debunk this book have the appropriate material.”
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Allowing for the printing of Hitler's book is a lot different than allowing people to wear Nazi gear, throw up Nazi salutes, and march with big Swastika flags. The latter will never happen again in Germany.
Certainly, there are still neo Nazis within Germany. There is no way to completely kill off extremism, no matter what you do. However, you can take steps to establish positive social norms and refuse to allow extremism to be normalized. Although the U.S. has not done this similarly in the "speech" area, we have done it in other related areas, most obviously, the right for people to freely associate. There was significant conflict over this concept during the Civil rights period where cetrain elements sought to maintain de jure segregation, and others fought and ultimately succeeded in getting the courts to recognize the Federal Government's power to ban racial segregation via the Commerce Clause of the U.S Constitution. This was a huge shift in American society that is analogous to placing similar restrictions on freedom of speech, and although there is still much debate about the use of that power, the results are undeniable. American society is significantly more integrated than it was in the pre-civil rights period. Yet, again, society has not fallen apart. And I can guarantee that people have made the exact same arguments about respecting the freedom of free association as they have made about freedom of speech.
The well known gay salute, and gay philosophy of genociding heterosexuals, or something, i dunno
Well there are gay stereotypes. Strangely enough the left generally considers stereotypes about gays to be bad. However it seems acceptable to apply gay stereotypes to young children. Not sure how that works.
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/07/25/prince-georges-subjects-have-crowned-him-a-...
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
What are you talking about, dude? Are you upset that people are using the word "Nazi" to describe Nazi beliefs because it stereotypes Nazis?
What? Now I'm confused 'cause I don't understand how your reply relates to what I said. You mentioned the gay comment and I went on a brief, fairly light-hearted aside about homosexuality and sterotypes. Neither your comment nor my response to it had anything to do with Nazis.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
(Psst. This conversation was about banning people for saying Nazis promote genocide.)
In the bigger sense, yes. For your specific comment, no.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Wait.
You think it's okay for someone to get in trouble for condeming Nazis?
Not quite. I don't think you should get in trouble for condemning Nazis but I also don't think you should get in trouble for condemning democrats or homosexuality or anything like that. But if the rules on the site prohibit that sort of thing then you would get in trouble for it. Such rules need to be applied fairly and not just to favour a side that the owner or even a majority of the users agree with.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
So, "Nazi" is the same class of group as "Democrats" and "Homosexuals" to you?
You don't think there's just a wee bit of difference between a group that literally espouses hate and racial supremecy, versus a liberal maintstream political party and people who like those of the same gender?
How I class any group is subjective and irrelevant to the greater principles. Ideally the rules are created so that they are applied fairly regardless of what group you are in as the time may come that you are in the hated group and so you should treat others as you would want to be treated.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
So, ignore context - the people saying "Death to Jews" should be treated the same as the people who say "I want to marry the same gendered person".
Congratulations: You just gave Nazis full equivalence as a legitimate idea.
Yes.
Well my current signature here is:
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
And the one I was using before that was:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
~Evelyn Beatrice Hall~
So at least my views are consistent.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
So here's a thought experiment:
You get into an argument with a Jewish person and say unto them: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
A Nazi then joins the conversation and says: "I plan on taking away the Zionist's rights, for they are less than human, and will fight to death for this cause."
What do you do then?
Nothing, until the Nazi tries to take an illegal action to achieve their goals. Then you arrest them.
Now, seeking a change in the law is rarely illegal; even if it were (and the U.S. Constitution has a few things to say about equality), the law making it illegal could itself be changed. So it'd be possible to erode the rights of Jews over time – or Nazis, for that matter.
This kind of situation was envisaged by the Founding Fathers of the USA, but they had faith in the ability of the marketplace of ideas to resist such "errors in opinion" while there remained the capacity to use free speech to reason against them. However, if reasonable people agree that it's a good idea to discriminate, all bets are off.
In Germany, the Nazi would be arrested (assuming that their statements or outward displays were in violation of German thought policing on Nazi-ism). In America, the Nazi would only be arrested if he tried to act on his threats, or otherwise created a reasonable fear of imminent harm.
We can argue subjectively about which is more effective, but one way has not yet proven to be more effective than the other as far as I know. It seems like the solution to this issue is currently more or less left up to the will of the masses. Do the masses want to allow for such displays or not? However, if the slippery slope that is so often threatened by those who are against such thought policing were an inevitable conclusion, then Germany should have fallen back into some form of authoritarianism long ago.
If you really think about it though, it is pretty ironic that America currently seems much more threatened by a slide into authoritarian rule than Germany. Currently American free press is under massive attack, tribalism has more or less completely replaced policy-based politics, and facts have become fungible to the extent that much of the American populace has renounced intellectualism and/or science and instead is willing to accept so-called "alternate facts" which have no basis in any concept of objectivity and in many cases have no basis in reality.
This current trend of America's gradual intellectual degradation was of course satirized in Mike Judge's famous cult film "Idiocracy," which seems eerily prophetic nowadays. I don't know that I am qualified to say to what extent this phenomenon has to do with America's particular ideology about freedom of speech/ideas, but I do think that it must be acknowledged that when crackpot ideas and ridiculousness are routinely placed onto a pedestal as equivalent to scientific facts and intellectual pursuits, such degradation does seem like an inevitable conclusion.
If Germany has not yet fallen back, perhaps it was on a special path to begin with? ;-)
In truth, anti-intellectualism and denial of reality has long been part of U.S. culture – as it has been in other countries, from time to time. Perhaps after the cost of ignorance becomes evident, the pragmatists will come to the fore.
The root cause of the problem is people. Clearly, one solution is to eliminate those of defective heritage… to be replaced, ideally, with superior human-animal hybrids.
[Incidentally, there are plenty on this side of the Channel who feel – rightly or otherwise – that the EU merely represents the latest form of German authoritarianism. This is as much our fault as anyone; we were quite never invested in the project, and in the current state, German hegemony seems inevitable, if only as a matter of self-preservation.]
Well I would say that anti-intellectualism has always been a part of every culture. I mean, the early scientists and philosophers were often ostracized or murdered by those in power who felt threatened by their ability to explain the world around us and the evolution of human thought.
However, I would argue that after the institution of public education, and the growth of the middle class in societies, we began to enter a period of enlightenment in which objective truths and science began to be respected to some universal degree, notwithstanding holdouts who were being left behind. In the U.S., this reverence for knowledge and facts likely grew with the increasing achievements in fields like medicine and engineering, and likely culminated with the Space Program, which was revered intensely between the 1960s and 1980s.
Now, if you consider the difference between the period of enlightenment and the 1990s into the 2000s, I would say the primary distinction is that there was previously some concept of "gate keepers" or sort of "high priests" so to speak, which were generally highly respected journalists, celebrity scientists, and other such professionals who were recognized and trusted by the general population. This makes sense to some degree, because every person in America is not, for example, a nuclear scientist. So if there was some important question regarding nuclear technology, the general populace would say "If highly-regarded nuclear scientist X says that we need to pursue Z course of action, we should trust him/her."
However, with the rise of the internet and breaking down of the gate keeping functions of journalism and other forms of disseminating information, we have entered an age where any individual can declare themselves an expert. So, for example, an extremist radio host can declare that he has superior knowledge on nuclear technology to an actual nuclear scientist, and said radio host will have millions of followers who will believe this to be true. They will say that the nuclear scientist is somehow involved in "fake news" or some kind of conspiracy involving "black helicopters" or some such. So now random radio hosts or similar individuals are able to build up these huge followings that are simply cults of personality, and there are many that are growing, and they can claim to have all of the knowledge of the world on all subjects, and they will be believed by millions of people.
Now, say that a deranged celebrity reality TV personality like that declares that he is running for president and starts to go on the campaign trial, making all kinds of outlandish statements and ridiculous claims that have no basis in science or fact, but because of the growing cult of personality, he now has amassed millions more followers and manages to become elected as President of the United States. Now he has the keys to all of the gates, which are no longer being manned by any universally respected figures...
Perhaps ultimately the marketplace of ideas will somehow reverse that trend. But, perhaps not... perhaps the warnings given by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Souter are just beginning to come to fruition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok-sYRpLsrc
By the way, I was watching the news this morning on CNN and saw something pretty amazing that illustrates this point. They brought in a panel of "Trump voters" and asked them about the Charlottesville incident. Those people said that the whole thing was part of a conspiracy against the president, and when asked where they got this evidence, they at first couldn't remember, and then later provided the reporter with a Facebook video showing some random guy in a car claiming there was a conspiracy.
The random guy in a car said that someone told him it was a conspiracy, but had no evidence himself. The conspiracy theory of course has been debunked by every news organization. However, when the reporter asked these people who they trusted more about facts and objective truth, the Trump supporters said they trust the random guy sitting in his car on Facebook to give them all of the accurate information about the world rather than any trained journalist with investigative resources. This is our current reality. We have to reflect on that when considering how the marketplace of ideas works today.
No one is saying society would collapse but your arguments would be stronger if it weren't that the slop is visible in different countries around the world. We'll set aside the Silicon Valley discussions to focus just on laws.
Restricting Nazi speech is restricting a form of political expression. This is similar to how China, for example, suppresses promotion of democracy as a political idea.
State suppression of ideas and beliefs is not always limited to the ideas that you find appalling. Russia suppresses any promotion of gay rights as harmful to the country, as do several Arab and African countries.
Germany and Austria, who you seem so fond of, suppress Nazi speech but they also suppress others too. For example, saying that a man had sex with a 9 year old is not generally considered controversial but it is illegal in Austria if that person happens to be Mohammed.
http://end-blasphemy-laws.org/countries/europe/austria/
Concrete examples of this slope are all over the world. Ironically you dismiss them while the party in power has historically been opposed to gay rights. And while the major opposition party, supposed pro-women, is supported by many people who worry about Islamophobia even for legitimate criticism of Islam, such as the way women are treated.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I'm referring to Germany because it is the perfect example to use here. People want to claim that if a society were to enact laws banning Nazi speech then we would go on a slippery slope toward authoritarianism or otherwise become a dystopia. Well Germany has banned Nazi speech for decades and it hasn't happened. They are doing quite well and indeed are often cited as a pillar of merit and responsibility by American Conservatives. So it is a great example to demonstrate how there is no real world problem resulting from banning Nazi speech.
If you want to complain about Austria's blasphemy laws that is your right. I don't see Austrian society falling apart either. Your article listed five instances of the law being used to prosecute people of ill will, i.e., trolls who get their rocks off by disparaging figures who existed 1500 years ago just to provoke hatred or violence. Well, if the Austrian people desire to outlaw that kind of provocation, that's up to them. They don't need white knights coming in and educating them about how allowing provocation of hatred and violence is actually a good thing, because otherwise they will transform into an evil empire. Well it's been 70 years since they actually were part of an evil empire, and that evil empire was created due to hate speech. Since they have banned hate speech, they haven't become evil again. Yay?
The ironic part is they are more authoritarian than the US. I bring up Austria because I am a bit more familiar with it and it has many of the same laws and you can see a tendency to further restrict speech.
I also don't understand how you keep talking about their restrictions of free speech as a positive when we know there was a recent resurgence of right wing parties throughout Europe. In Germany there are some concerns about the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party which has representation in most German states right now. Austria has not become an evil empire but lets not forget about the Austrian presidential election last year where the right wing candidate, Norbert Hofer, won the first round and, although ultimately losing, won 46% of the votes in the run off. Hofer is part of the FPO, a right wing Austrian political party which was founded by a Nazi. A literal Nazi that served in politics under Hitler. Over its history it has praised Nazi policies, welcomed war criminals and other such things yet it is one of the main political parties in Austria. So I do not find your points convincing in the slightest.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Hey, as I said, I don't think that we can completely eliminate extremism. Right wing extremism has been on the rise globally, in every society. This is likely linked to the impact of the widening income disparity and whole swaths of citizens are being left behind, which has created space for economic nationalism. Economic nationalism often leads to extremism. In this instance, people are blaming "the others" for their economic troubles. I mean look at the U.S., right wing extremism is on a massive upswing and we have the most protections on speech. So yea, I don't think your point is all that effective there.
Nazism rose to power in the years following the Great Depression.
We are recently getting out of a recession that has effected individuals of our generation adversely.
So perhaps our politicians need to understand why their jobs are important to keep our economy fair to those that are fair, and punish those who cheat harshly.
Not doing so, creates Nazis.
If that is the reason it makes me wonder how bad it really is in the US versus how bad it's claimed to be in the US. Maybe some of it is just cause it is so prominent in the media. The thing that often bugs me is that there's all this talk about income inequality in the US but there isn't that much of an income inequality problem in the US. The US is actually pretty average in terms of income equality.
Of course it might just be that the important part is how big the problems seem. Since the US is doing well, any problems seem like a big deal. Whereas looking at it from a country which really has income inequality you're left wishing you had income inequality like the US has.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I wonder how you could find that out, Rakuen. Maybe you could speak to some Americans about it. That would take some intellectual work though. Do you really need to do that when you have freedom to give your opinion anyways?
Think really hard about the last part. It has a lot to do with your wispy conception about tolerance for different opinions. Maybe that tiny candle in your head will light up. What a great day that would be.
Actually that approach is unable to answer my question at all. That would give the subjective opinions of Americans but it would not say anything about what the objective conditions are. It's not an approach without value but it's not an appropriate approach in this situation.
"Do you really need to do intellectual work when you have freedom to give your opinion anyways?"
*gives opinion anyways*
And the tiny candle in Rakuen's head stays dark.
Income inequality is most certainly rising in the U.S. Costs of living are growing faster than wages for the middle class. At the same time, certain high wealth groups are increasing their wealth at an escalating rate. Many individuals made enormous amounts of money after the recession. In particular, there was much money to be made in bottomed out real estate. Indeed, one of the cabinet members of our current administration made many millions of dollars foreclosing on thousands of Americans' homes. Those people who were foreclosed upon don't just disappear... Similarly, many companies used the recession to replace American workers with robots or increase their outsourcing of jobs outside of the U.S. to cheaper labor markets. Again, those people don't disappear. The fact that the recession was one big event that served as cover for many practices of shifting wealth up toward high wealth individuals has perhaps created somewhat of a "perfect storm" for radicalization I suppose. But yes, the income gap is rapidly growing in the U.S. just as it is growing in most places.
Is legality your barometer for morality or actionability?
I'd say instead that legality is [a] society's ultimate expression of morality, or at least actionability.
Of course, some are a law unto themselves…
So there cannot be any immoral laws?
That's a very... Interesting stance.
Such laws are typically moral.
They're just not your morals.
The question was:
"Do you, GreenReaper, think we should tolerate Nazis and White Supremacists?"
The answer appears to be yes, and furthermore, the answer appears to be "If it's the law, I'd go along with Nazis."
Do I understand this correctly?
No, because you seem to have assumed I would remain in such a society. :-)
So, the Civil Rights Movement in the US, they shouldn't have said anything? Jim Crow laws were the law, after all.
Nor should anything have been done to oppose slavery - it was the law, after all.
Every argument you've stated on here shows that you believe we should accept Nazism as a valid idea. When given a confrontation stark black and white, you continue to dodge and evade. Your entire argument is wrapped up in legalism and legal status, but even the First Amendment does not cover threats to groups or individuals - and my question doesn't even go into legal issues.
So, I'll ask again: Yes, or no, do you believe that we should tolerate Nazis.
I'm talking about law because that is the set of rules 'we' live by - our expression of "what we should [not] do". I was hoping you'd get clearer on who 'we' was, or what 'tolerate' means to you, but I've got the impression that you're just trying to provoke a response. :-)
So, in terms of not driving Nazis out of society, and letting them speak their ideas within the scope of law: yes, I think we should tolerate that. Limits on speech include (in the USA) true threats, with proven intent to intimidate, and inciting imminent lawless action.
Letting someone remain, or even arguing for them to be able to speak, is not the same as agreeing with their views. Actually I disagree with most Nazi tenets – not least the weird obsession with pinning everything on the Jews; but also their nationalist philosophy and disdain for parliamentary democracy. But I'm confident that, as long as free speech is preserved, others will come to the same conclusion, so they won't get what they want. Likewise, I believe law enforcement will typically restrain those seeking to act outside the law. [Yes, that doesn't always work.]
You've also conflated obeying a law with agreement. If you disagree with a law, I think you should follow it to the letter (but not necessarily the spirit), while attempting to change it – or else, leave that society. There's room for flexibility if you believe a higher law accepted by that society countermands it. But if you get into a habit of saying "these rules doesn't fit my morals, so I won't follow 'em", you're rejecting the rule of law. Would you have accepted that kind of behaviour on staff at FA? I doubt it.
I was trying to provoke an answer. Which you dodged repeatedly.
So the answer is, yes - you think we should tolerate Nazis.
Why was that so hard for you to come out and say that you support the right of Nazis to propose and argue for intolerance and hate?
Because you were trying to make it into a black and white issue. You still are. But as the cases above show, there's debate about precisely what behaviour should be tolerated. And it's these kinds of decisions which conventions are going to have to deal with. Is a flag on a fursuit speech enough? Do we condemn based on hearsay, or require open support - or threats?
As far as I know, political extremism has not been a topic of debate at past FCLRs, but it's probably on the schedule for this year - if not already under debate on their Slack server.
Y'know, I'll edit what I said.
I'm glad you finally came out and said that yes, you feel we should tolerate Nazis.
A straight yes or no is what I wanted to hear.
Assuming you get a different option.
So I guess it's more of "I don't agree with what you say, but if someone takes away your right to say it, I'm moving to Canada, that's your problem now bub."?
"I will defend your rights until it becomes inconvenient to me."
Seems a reasonable option! It was for many slaves, and thousands of draft-dodgers and deserters have taken the same approach.
As a bonus, my dad is a resident, so I'd get extra points on my application.
"Radically unlimited speech for nazis is good because you can respond to it just like the slaves who fled to canada on the underground railroad."
And the jews who emigrated from germany were just exercizing their equal opinions, right? Free speech is grand!
It's another one of greenreaper's greatest hits here. OMFG.
Strangely enough, when I was having a similar conversation on Twitter, Dogpatch Press was happy to say that the concept of free speech doesn't matter and the law is more important.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
--changed my mind, don't want to reply at all
That is by design to avoid sides only reinforcing their own views and removing material that disagrees with them. It's important for society to ever have a chance to grow and progress.
The thing is, free speech is the most important right that we have. There is nothing more important. The simple truth is that without free speech, you don't even have the possibility to discuss and promote other ideas/rights/etc.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
And without freedom of association, you wouldn't have the right to go to a furry convention or associate with other furries on the internet. You wouldn't have the right to hang out with your friends or engage in similar activities. Yet, that very important right has been severely limited by the use of the Commerce Clause to enact Civil Rights legislation, as I mentioned above. It used to be legal in the U.S. to put out a sign in front of one's business stating "whites only." Now that is illegal. At the time, people claimed that forcing people to not discriminate via such a law would lead to the downfall of society, but amazingly, that didn't happen. Instead, for the most part, people decided that they didn't want to put up "whites only" signs anymore.
Rakuen is obsessed with his freedom to speak about child molestation. He's on a quest to vindicate it from being considered a bad thing.
I don't know why you bring that up again, especially since you use it in an odd way. Putting signs saying "whites only" outside of businesses and such is prohibited by anti-discrimination laws. That has nothing to do with freedom of association. Freedom of association is the right of people to form groups that they want to.
The only mention of anti-discrimination being conflated with freedom of association in the Wikipedia article seems to be in relation to the US. For most people it's expressed as a positive right to prevent situations such as during apartheid South Africa where blacks were forbidden to be in groups larger than about five people or something like that and they were forbidden from many political groups and so on.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I keep mentioning it because in the U.S., equal protection from discrimination was long considered as something that could only be enforced against government discrimination due to the particularities of U.S. Constitutional law. Thus, the argument was made that the feds could stop government discrimination like at public schools for example, but that they couldn't prevent private businesses from discriminating. Thus, businesses put out "whites only" signs, because until the civil rights laws were passed, they could get away with it under the constitution.
The civil rights laws in the U.S. had to basically use a loophole to get around the Constitution's guarantees on freedoms that would have allowed for continued discrimination. The way they did that is they realized there is a section of the Constitution that says the federal government has power to regulate commerce between the states. Thus, they used that clause to say preventing discrimination in businesses that are available to the public is allowable under the Constitution.
Thus, the Civil Rights laws were allowed to stand. However, there us still some tension about this and many conservatives continue to argue that this was an improper use of the Commerce clause. Notwithstanding, the effect has been gradual integration and the creation of a social stigma such that almost no one will now put up a "whites only" sign in front of their business.
How something is classed is very important--sometimes you're talking about systems of belief and sometimes you're talking about sexual orientation.
By your logic, if I told people not to put cyanide in their food, but elsewhere encouraged adding salt, then my beliefs would be "inconsistent"
Dangerously inconsistent! Salt is the silent killer.
Also:
Gays do not espouse a rhetoric of exclusion, intolerance, hatred, and genocide. Nazis do.
Is my description of Nazis incorrect?
a fox news writer actually did this...
I'm already concerned with the some of the actions that have been taken, not just recently but in the past few years.
In fairness, in at least one of those cases there was a reason for heightened tensions which may have resulted in an overreaction; and some of the places you mention have obvious reasons to be tense now. But I would think twice about going to a convention which took an overt stance on, say, political interests – not because I necessarily share any of those interests, but because it says something about the kind of event they want to run, and how they run it.
Part of the point of a convention is to bring together people with different backgrounds but a common interest. Sometimes, especially in a fandom such as ours where our characters are so bound up with personal identity, those people want to express other aspects of themselves through those interests. Other attendees may not always be happy to learn of those aspects, but that doesn't necessarily mean there needs to be rules or policies against their expression – without malice (and I know that's hard to prove), there is no crime.
Some rules may be applicable across the length and breadth of a convention, but I think there also has to be a degree to which other potentially objectionable content and topics are allowed, along with a clearer delineation of the places, times and extents to which it is not – just as we have some topics which cannot be broadcast before a watershed, and conversely some times and channels set aside for children's programming. Otherwise, you're essentially leaving it up to individual staff to make decisions as and when they see fit.
Conventions (like cities) have managed this for "adult" content before, and I think they can do it again here. Most parties are amenable to compromise; and even with a sticking point in one area, it may be possible to make concessions in another to give everyone a fair deal.
But I understand this is hard to do when money, reputation, and an organization's relationships with its staff and venue are on the line, especially when the event in question accepts children and teenagers. (Some conventions might actually want to reconsider that last bit – being a "safe space for kids" has its costs, and there are starting to be enough conventions now to offer more of a variety in audience.)
What are you even saying here? Wishy washy wording about "actions, interests, aspects" is even a symptom of what's wrong. It's not hard to say "no hate groups allowed" and single out ones who refuse to dislodge their own haters.
Cue "well but what is a hate group really" while literal self professed white supremacists and sovcit nutjobs wedge themselves in and funnel kids towards stormfront. There's plenty of room for open expression while stuff like that is just oil and water.
That's the problem, isn't it? Without nailed-down definitions and limits to what will be prosecuted, everything ends up being "hate speech" to someone who "feels attacked" by it, and thus a legitimate matter for complaint.
You then get things like people being thrown out of conventions for objectionable fursuit patterns, or five-figure security bills over a Twitter spat. A triumph of protectionism over common sense.
I honestly doubt furry conventions are going to become a recruiting ground for white supremacists anytime soon, not least because furries clearly already believe in the superiority of the Lupine race.
Yes you are refusing to nail down definitions. It isn't hard to do. Name the "objectionable patterns" - it's a confederate flag. "Twitter spat" means targeted altfurry trolling raids. They either provoke a scapegoat to make it look like a spat, or make it up themselves to shift onlookers to a false middle ground of wishy washy apathy. You can honestly doubt the white supremacy by not looking at it, but it's right in those discord logs.
The five-figure security cost that I believe he's referring to was not related to AltFurry, just the "punch these nazis" + what the police allegedly viewed as a legitimate gun threat, back to RMFC. Ask Scorch about it sometime. Or, uh, don't, if you want to save yourself the headache...but hey: at least he admits that the Cease and Desist letter had no legal standing and was just a harassment tactic!
You mean the legitimate gun threat created by the Furry Raiders, right?
And don't forge tthe $24,000 security bill that Califur got because of the AltFurry discord swatting them.
Huh. What do you know, that's TWICE that these idiots have hit a con with additional security bills.
Yes, that was what I was talking about.
Because I think you're incorrect on the origin of those security fees, what with Califur's being done due to the AltFurry discord swatting them, and threats being called into the hotel before and after Deo's comment on punching Nazis - and her report of a gun threat was solely to convention staff.
Sorry for delay, don't know how I missed this.
Threats were called into the RMFC hotel?
According to RMFC staff as per Dogpatch ( http://dogpatch.press/2017/07/27/myth-that-deo-killed-rmfc/ ), yes.
"RMFC reveals that the hotel and local police have been called numerous times to make various threats (before and after Deo’s January tweet.)"
Meanwhile, Deo says she only contacted the convention, not the hotel or PD. The same article details some of what happened with Califur.
I think knowing what kind of event is being run and how, is a boon to know in advance, typically. :P
Well sure, it's just this particular knowledge might make me less likely to want to go there. :-D
But it all depends on the specifics. Maybe what they say shows a particularly thoughtful stance.
We're talking Nazis and Racists.
We're talking Confederate Flags and Nazi symbols.
This isn't a "political stance", this is taking a stand against Nazism and White Supremacy. Trying to claim it's just a difference of opinion just gives legitimacy and cover to those ideas.
Yeah, but all those those forbidden flags and symbols make for a truly cool fursuit . . .
Meanwhile your Twitter feed is full of pictures of people punching and being punched. Most of them aren't even furries. You're into this way too deep, man. Step back, before it's too late. >_>
You are telling me, a Jewish man, to step back from confronting ACTUAL NAZIS.
Not people I'm just calling Nazis, but actual white supremacists who use Nazi symbology and talk about getting rid of subhumans.
Think about that.
The issue is it indicates that you support a "punch-first" mentality – violence against speech, or just logos.
And the weird thing is, you don't support that. You're rebroadcasting assertions that you don't support.
It's likely that a lot of those who spout far-right nonsense are doing the same thing.
That doesn't make them right for doing it. But it does mean that we need to tone back the rhetoric.
Otherwise we'll end up in more situations where people legitimately think there'll be violence at fur cons.
Once again, you are missing something important.
This isn't just "far right nonsense", and trying to label Nazism as such is validation of it.
Further, these are people who espouse a philosophy that wants me dead. Not just to be around, but actually dead. In a fight of words, they most certainly have thrown the first punch.
Yet, all I ask is that people say "No, Nazism and White Supremacy isn't tolerated." Mere silence can not and will not be acceptable on this issue.
Do you, GreenReaper, think we should tolerate Nazis and White Supremacists? It's a yes or no question that should have an easy answer.
You're not going to get a serious answer. If you get any answer at all. The simple, if painful reality of it is, most furries have virtually zero direct experience with issues of racism in their own lives. That's why they often refuse to take a real stand. At the end of the day, the way they see it, they don't really have a dog in that race, and besides, the worst thing in the world is having people think you're wrong about something which obviously a lot of furries will. So they see it as the safest bet to just clam up once the "let's be tolerant for the sake of tolerance even if it means tolerating the intolerant" routine gets called out for what it is.
You know what the real appeal of the alt-right is for some furries? It comes across as a reaction to a fandom that's often more concerned with looking right than being right. And there are two things this generation hates above almost all else: censorship and hypocrisy. Make no mistake, it's a backlash. It's just a backlash spearheaded by the absolute worst people at the worst time. "Hey, join us, we'll do away with all this forced, phony virtue signalling. Aren't you tired of being shit on by these wimpy middle-of-the-road moderates?"
This Alt-Right type of posturing fills a void of self-worth they just weren't getting elsewhere in the fandom but that many of us can relate to: the need to be right about something and secure in the knowledge that we're on the right side even when everyone else is crazy.
I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that furry itself is still basically a fringe subculture. So Alt-Furry is really about as fringe as it gets. It shouldn't be this hard to denounce something this pathetic and small - unless you feel pathetic and small and that's where the shred of sympathy you feel comes from. And I've felt it too. Difference is, I'd rather know I'm right that settle for the illusion.
I'm giving him a chance to field the easiest question of all.
Of course, well. Check my FA account. You'll notice something about my status.
Suspended? Let me guess, for calling racists what they are? Yeah, I've been banned from SoFurry twice now for the "personal attack" of calling a racist a racist. Because that's a direct insult, whereas they shit they were saying was just bigoted, vitriolic generalities. I guess the logic is, "racist" is this horrible, terrible thing you never want to be called, but all the shit people actually say that makes that such a negative term is fine, as long as it's not personally directed at anyone on a given forum. It's such sound logic I can't believe most furry forums barely have any activity anymore!
It seems like most furries are moving away even from the sites proper and sticking to Twitter, YouTube, etc because what little moderation there is there seems to have some semblance of common sense.
I've been banned from so many things so many times for so many stupid reasons I just don't care anymore.
I'm currently appealing the suspension - and I was already appealing the adminstration action of the same administrator for marking me for a violation of Code of Conduct 1.8, which says:
Do not engage in malicious speech.
This includes bigotry and disparaging remarks or content about anyone's race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, etc. This does not apply to fictional works.
In other words...
Respect diversity. Do not discriminate based on other people's differences. This does not apply within the scope of fictional works as part of a narrative.
The comments?
"Nazis are mentally deranged. They're Nazis. They fly the flag, they do the salute, the espouse the philosophy; a rhetoric of exclusion, intolerance, hatred, and genocide."
and
"I'm reminded of the comic where a guy, once being told to fuck off for saying something retarded, says "Jokes on him, I was only pretending."
So either they're actual Nazis, or just acting like them and pretending to hold those opinions in an attempt to get a rise out of people. There's no functional difference at that point, because both those who legitimately hold those values and those who only pretend to are both still acting and speaking upon those values."
I don't see how, unless I was speaking of a specific person (I was not, not even in context), these could be a violation of the Code of Conduct.
I suspect there's just an out of control admin.
That or the admin actually sympathizes with their views and/or happens to be a close friend. Virtually everything on that site comes down to favoritism and, I hate to say it, but because the majority of furries are white, I've always believed they're part of the problem, creating institutional racism in the fandom by simply not giving a shit beyond platitudes of the fandom somehow being "above" racism.
Christ, just a week or two ago I ran into Dragoneer of all people on r/furry talking about how race really isn't a thing in the fandom because "we're more obsessed with dragons and wolves etc".
He was saying this in response to a post from a visible minority, a black person, saying in his own direct experience, he's unsure if he can really have a place in the fandom.
That's what these fucking whites always do, dismiss anyone's experience but their own because they wrote the damn history books.
I've filed my appeal. When I talked to Dragoneer about this the other day, he said that Nazis are not protected.
So i'm just waiting on him. I still think it's one admin who is misapplying the rules, but. Gotta wait on this.
Bonus points: I'm doing three panels at FAU.
Dragoneer's said a lot of things only to contradict himself later. If I were you I wouldn't lift a finger for these people anymore. They're clinging to the bones of a dead world based on a dying belief system. Remember when FA's motto used to be "Where Freedom of Expression Rules"? Because they sure don't.
I like to think I was a decent admin. Hell, if Dragoneer asked me, I probably would do it again.
That said, I'm doing my panels for me, not for them. Still deciding on how big a stink I want to make.
The logic is you were inflaming the situation, especially if you came to their space to say it.
You have to remember that the problem from a site perspective is, in general, not that topic X or Y is being expressed on the site, but the disruption it causes when people argue about it. So if you're the one triggering the argument, you're about as likely to get stomped on as if they had come into your space and shouted racist insults at you.
"especially if you came to their space to say it."
I did not. They came to me, and at no point did I issue a threat directed at any individual.
Further, they were blocked afterwards.
I didn't get an answer to my question, btw.
That's cool, but in this particular case I was responding to Wolf-Bone. I know, it gets hard to tell when the threads are this deep. My bad, I need to tinker with the CSS.
As for your question, I wrote up a draft response, but with other things on my plate (here and even moreso at Inkbunny), I'm not sure when I'll have it in a publishable state. If you're impatient, you can get the gist from my response to Sonious.
Its a yes or no question.
At the end of the day, who's "space" is it? Not mine, not theirs, but the owners or the people entrusted with representing them in the form of admins/mods. Mods who don't give a shit about or are completely oblivious to the reality most people live in. People who will seriously tell a Jewish person they don't have a right to lash out at someone defending Nazism, while defending said Nazi sympathizer's "free speech" to lash out at anyone with any common sense or decency through their rhetoric.
It never occurs to them (or you, apparently) that demanding the rest of us be tolerant of the intolerant out of some misplaced idealism or sympathy is what triggers the disruption and, inevitably, causes people to get fed up with the forums altogether.
If you're going to allow heated rhetoric, but not heated arguments, there's simply no way around it, you make your site look like a safe-space for everyone but the people being targeted by said speech. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to safely assume "he's not really talking about me there".
That's one reason the sites I run tend to allow both heated rhetoric and argument with it - e.g. Inkbunny doesn't have that "call-out" rule in terms of expressing disagreement with an individual's ideas, while still forbidding requests to others to harass them generally, and allowing members to ban each other. But it's a hard line to police, and rarely a popular policy, so I can see why other sites choose differently.
The thing I'd caution against is coming in out of the blue to, say, shout "you're a [racist/Commie/Sonic-hater/pervert], you shouldn't be here", without any immediate cause. That's different, in my mind, to arguing against a position expressed in a journal, or embodied in a submission, because that's responding to a bad action, rather than treating them as a one-dimensional bad person (which is no better than what many of the more objectionable philosophies do to groups of people).
[Submissions can be problematic where people take a mere symbol of a group as promotion of philosophies associated with the group. But this is not unusual, nor restricted to political symbols. Diapers have been hugely contentious; I saw people getting stressed over latex on ArtSpots, etc.]
How many actual views do sites that aren't FA get, though? I've tried looking up the stats for the "competition" and most come up "too low to calculate". So it shouldn't be too hard to see why people think FA is especially egregious in both its actions and lack thereof.
By the way, I've never argued they shouldn't be allowed to say their piece, only that we should be allowed to say ours in kind.
I should point out something here. Summercat has pretty much never had anything nice to say about me. Yet I feel like I have to take his side because, well, this is one issue where we find ourselves on the same side. My point is that some ideals are bigger than the people involved, and whether the staff of a given site want it to be that way or not, their actions/inactions send a message about what side they're on. And, from my experience, staff of furry sites tend to be completely tone-deaf in how they address (or don't) speech that "flies just under the radar".
You don't have to name names to attack targeted individuals. That's kind of why we have a concept of "hate speech" that doesn't include just any old angry rants about how much the world pisses you off.
Your first question is complicated but here's a few attempts to answer it:
Inkbunny has ~2,600 members accessing the site in peak hours, 22,000 per day, 44,000 per week, and 66,000 per month. Weasyl has 500 hourly users at peak and 4,000 a day. Weasyl has about the same number of submissions as Inkbunny, but fewer users looking at them.
In terms of pageviews, Inkbunny currently gets ~525,000/day across 45,000 visits. FA does not offer precisely matching stats, but I believe their "online" figure relates to the last 15 minutes; if this is the case, I figure it has roughly 10-15 times Inkbunny's user traffic (i.e. ~7.5 million pageviews/day), and hence 50-75 times that of Weasyl. My best estimate for SoFurry is that it's a tad busier than Weasyl; the site was inaccessible to me when writing this comment.
Alexa stats tend to be of poor quality, but give some support to this traffic magnitude:
Fur Affinity - e621 - Inkbunny - SoFurry - Weasyl - Furry Network - Furiffic
e621 clearly has a big audience, but it's more of a pure consumption portal.
Bigger is of course not always better, in sites as in cities. What tends to matter for watchers is how much unique art relevant to your interests is being posted, while for artists it can be more about how many active users are watching you (and perhaps how many are willing to pay).
You have to keep these needs in balance, and - for example - having a system on a new site which autoloads new art from elsewhere without the interaction of an absent artist can be counterproductive, because it reduces the chance that those actually participating in the community will get the attention of the very limited number of people spending time there.
Where you follow an artist can also impact where you +fav, or what works you +fav where. For example, one G-rated work posted by an artist at about the same time on each site saw:
on Fur Affinity (99 views, 33 +fav) - DeviantArt (74, 34) - Inkbunny (71, 17) - Weasyl (18, 2).
And of course there is some art which can't be posted on one or more of DA, FA, IB or WZL.
I would like to think that some sites are more tolerant than others - perhaps user age has an impact - but I have a sneaking suspicion that, if anything, they are tolerant of different things.
---
As for hate speech, there is clearly a problem with specific threats of harm, but we need to be cautious about people feeling unable to speak honestly about policies on, say, immigration or affirmative action over fear of being accused of hate speech. [Trump, UKIP, etc. tapped into a well of discontent with politically-correct language by expressing true feelings; willingness to do so has to some extent distracted from the debate about whether their ideas are any good.]
"Hate" also poses a problem for most of the world's religions, which find themselves outside the mainstream. There have, for example, been several cases where preachers have been arrested for calling homosexual conduct a sin, despite that being a tenet of the state religion.
It can be hard standing up for free speech. Test cases typically involve highly objectionable content which most people disagree with, or they wouldn't have led to a prosecution. Often people are willing to stand up for freedom of speech relating to causes they support, but the true test of their priorities is whether they support speech which they don't agree with.
Thanks for the stats, but actually, Flayrah's stats are the ones I was most curious about. I'm sure it must fluctuate a lot but could you give me a ballpark figure?
Roughly 425 visits/day, 750 pageviews/day, not counting bots. Relatively tiny, though rare stories could pull in a few thousand views in a few days.
Tweets – including Newsbytes, which are an important part of our coverage – tend to get 500-1000 impressions each; this article reached 5,000 due to retweets/likes. Facebook activity is about a tenth of that.
Good content which remains relevant has a very long tail. Stuff like Patch's FurFling piece or Fred's fandom retrospective average around 30 views a day, and over 50 stories got more than 100 views in the last 90 days. Often it's not the stories editors feel are important! (Which is one reason we tend not to refuse all that many submissions.)
Your comments are very disrespectful to MMA and boxing fans, Green Reaper.
Probably add that I'm trying to humorously point out that even "I'm not making a stand" is "making a stand", and somebody's going to get hurt. This isn't an issue you can't "can't we all just get along!" on. Because we can't. In fact "we CAN'T just get along" is literally the fucking stance the alt-right is making.
Also, vis a vis free speech; the metaphor used to explain why we need it is that it allows the public decide about opinions "in the court of public opinion". If a goddamn court finds you goddamn guilty of whatever, they don't go "You're guilty! Now go away and have a nice day, I guess!" No, they pass a sentence and try and make sure that shit doesn't happen again. Fuck the court of public opinion; the Nazis were sentenced and executed by real courts. Shitty opinions, especially shitty opinions acted on, are shitty and, if freedom of speech is to actually fucking do its job, should be actively opposed.
I mean, I'm not saying "there are many sides to issues" necessarily means you side with Nazis, but I am saying the last major public figure to say that totally was.
In most cases, it seems that opposing views is not about finding compromise with those they can and pointing out problems with others but about trying to shut down any form of disagreement. We're seeing people, furries and non, talking about (and doing) pre-emptive bans. One guy who was banned from a dating site for alt right views and that just doesn't even make sense and should actually be very worrying for everyone, regardless of their views.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
To be fair I don't think Trump is FOR Nazis. His daughter is Jewish so unless he wants her to go to the camps, I doubt he'd put himself in that position.
However, I do think he is pro-confederate/white supremacist because his father was an affluent member of the Ku Klux Klan. I can see Trump being the kind to want to appease his dad's ghost. He's worried that those men with racism will be erased by history, because then his father will be erased.
But here's the thing. Given enough time we will ALL be erased. We've had 45 presidents, and despite the prestige that comes with that and supposed "historical immortality" (at least in the US), I am sure if you went about and asked; less than 10% of Americans could probably not list more than 25% of the presidents that served.
Time swallows us all. Fearing that leads to foolishness in life.
Donald John Trump would sell out his own wife, daughter and son if it meant he got an extra million. Rest assured Trumpo the Clown would not hestitate to sell out his CONVERTED Jewish daughter (her husband, from a birthright point of view, is the only 'true' Jewish person in the relationship depending on which form of Judaism you're talking bout)
Right, and if Trump despised Jewish people and was a Nazi he would not give his son in law any power in his admin.
Bannon, well, that may be another story, don't think he got along well with Jared, and that putting globe emotes around the names of "Globalist"s (which apparently is the new word for Jewish people for the anti-Semitic).
The issue is that, for now, there seems to be a kind of alliance between these extremist view points, but I suspect that alliance to be bottom out eventually since their worldviews will eventually conflict with one another. May not happen soon, but would happen at some point.
You've got to be fucking kidding me... Seriously, you think that shit looks cool? The guy himself what made it even admitted the face were ugly as shite.
The suit itself was actually pretty good, from a construction standpoint. Whomever made it had real skill, because it looked good for how complex it was.
They probably shouldn't have taken the order, but the suit itself was well done.
Maybe it's because I grew up watching pro-wrestling. After you've seen like 100 characters with a flag for a cape, mask, set of tights, or in the most gaudy examples all 3 at once, it looks painfully cliche no matter where you see it.
Indeed, and it's sad that such skill (Those things had to be hand-sewn and I've done that before) had to be used on something meant to troll and upset people.
It took me a long while to figure this out, because I used to be more aggressive in getting into verbal fights with trolls, but here's the main problem with alt-right and extremist groups like the different alt-furry groups that are popping up: they don't actually want open discourse, free speech, or diverse opinions. They are trolls in the purest sense, in that what they seek is to incite a slugfest, rhetorical or otherwise. These types of slugfests are bad for business, as RMFC found out too late. It's why you see all of the business leaders at top corporations quickly distancing themselves from Trump (who they may have otherwise shared an economic interest with) once he began to equivocate on the Nazi/Klan marchers. These business leaders have probably figured it out, or they have people in their employ who have figured it out - its best to cut a cancer like that off immediately and keep as far a distance as possible, to keep business interests focused on good business, i.e. keeping a clean, family friendly reputation that is accepting of people from all backgrounds and thus able to sell goods and services to people of all backgrounds.
There is of course a balancing act that is being done but I think they have figured out that certain lines have to be drawn. For example, Wal-Mart could say "we want people of all diverse opinions shopping at our stores," and thus people of various political opinions would want to shop there and purchase items. However, if someone shows up in a Wal-Mart store wearing swastikas, I would expect that they would be immediately escorted out by security. Why? Well, having that person in there is bad for business. Thus far, the furry analogue is the Raiders with their armbands and the confederate flag suit, which are really just the vanguard testing the waters to see whether the envelope is being pushed hard enough. The next step would be actual swastikas incorporated into suits, or other symbols or possibly language attached to them which is similarly intended to provoke an extreme reaction from the viewer. And if you think that won't happen, you have to look at some of the conversations that are already happening among "alt-furry" people. They aren't playing around. For example, after that whole controversy about Roarey's cartoon blew up, I happened to be at his Twitter page and saw an alt-furry responding to his post about the Charlottesville conflict. This alt-furry individual's only post was to celebrate the fact that Heather Heyer was killed by the Nazi guy that plowed into the crowd, and asked if others had watched and enjoyed it as well. If someone is willing to openly celebrate the death of a woman at the hands of a Nazi, there is no doubt that such a person would be willing to do things such as put Nazi symbology or other extreme symbols into a fursuit or commit other acts to incite violence or the "slugfest" I spoke of.
So the issue then becomes that these groups thrive on extreme conflict. They literally want to be combatants in a "war." It's like how human beings enjoy vicariously living through our war video games and movies, and we imagine being heroes in such stories - or like zombie movies and tv shows like Walking Dead, we imagine being one of the heroes who is surviving the onslaught with our pals. With these groups, their form of entertainment is not fighting zombies or aliens or the usual enemies, instead they enjoy the idea of engaging in combat with "liberals" or "x minority group" or "sjw". If members of those groups are innocently going around minding their own business, and thus not cooperating in engaging in combat, they will force that to happen by attempting to incite them with extreme images, symbols, and hateful rhetoric. If that didn't work, they would take the next step, and simply start harming and/or killing people to spark the war (e.g. Dylan Roof, Anders Breivik, Eric Rudolph, etc. - http://myfox8.com/2015/06/19/charleston-shooting-suspect-dylan-roof-confesses-to... ) So the issue is again that what these groups seek is not intellectual discourse or debate or an open market of ideas. What they want is intense conflict. They want to see and be a part of people slugging it out, verbally or otherwise. They want war. However, war is bad for business unless you are an arms dealer (and holy crap was gun shop business booming big time while various extreme groups were popping up in increasing numbers during the last 8 + years).
I think cons are currently in a process of feeling this thing out, because in the grand scheme of thing, furry cons are still relatively new when compared to other types of business. That being said, this problem escalated very quickly with RMFC. They are going to have to figure out how to draw red lines and cut off those who would come to the con with the pure intent to incite a war, even if the act of incitement is framed as being "free speech" (which it always is with today's sophisticated provocateurs), because war within the community means more cons get shut down. Certain elements won't care if that happens I can guarantee it. They are already shouting all over twitter and in other places that the furry community "is already done for" or "has been destroyed by sjws" or "needs to be rebooted to return to the good old days."
Sorry, I live in a place where people can go into Wal-Mart with swastikas and other racist symbolism literally tattooed onto their face and all that would happen is the cashiers would politely pretend not to notice.
Well yea, I know there are people with racist tattoos going about. I was more speaking about people showing up with like Nazi regalia, like if someone showed up in an SS uniform with swastika armbands and started hanging about. I doubt there would be many stores where they wouldn't be made to leave.
Heck if we showed up in furry costumes to these stores they'd probably ask us to leave, to be fair :)
Yet I don't think they'd ask us to leave if we showed up dressed like a Continental Soldier or a Roman Centurion.
I'm not so sure anymore. Wal-Mart is starting to cash in on the growing mainstream acknowledgment of the fandom with their Maskimals brand of cheap fursuit heads. I saw them in the store a couple weekends ago and they were in a prominent location right in the middle of the aisle in front of the tvs and other electronics.
Also, I don't know if you have heard of the "Enchantimals" toys and animated shorts, but it's basically partial furry girls who have an animal partner. I saw it on youtube the other day and was kind of amazed. It's got a fairly significant toy set. I don't know if the people behind it are trying to get in on the furry merchandise business at the ground floor or if they just are co-opting Kemono Friends before that show hits American tv. If you don't know about Kemono friends, it's a recent Japanese anime that is like a massive success right now in Japan. Its about a bunch of animals in an animal park that got transformed into sort of furry girls (animal ears and tails and some furry features, but otherwise have human characteristics). I expect that show is in the planning stages for its U.S. debut, and if it is as big of a hit in the U.S. as it was in Japan, we will probably see more mainstreaming of furry stuff.
I'm pretty sure the main branch of the "Alt Right", as in the Richard Spencer brigage, would consider furries to be degenerates and expell them from the movement. Of course "Alt Right" is an open source label, so there are a bunch of different ideaologies using the label themselves, and of course the media uses the term to describe anyone who isn't far left.
So like, top kek, creepy self-destructive furry group, voting for the gas chamber you'd occupy.
If they truly believe in their chosen ideology, they will go into the chambers with a happy heart.
The trade-off at Anthrocon, apparently, was "keep your goddamn confederate flags and totally-not-Nazi Nazi armbands" at home, and in return, the comedy panels were told to lay off Trump.
Okay trade. I wanted to tell jokes about my nipples instead, anyway.
Well it's good thing I didn't say Trump when referencing large white men towers during my bit then, I looked back at it as a lost opportunity. Sears and Rockefeller were good enough then.
Sonious, you would have won the thread with a simple "Can confirm, re: crossie's nipples."
Your bit could be the very best, like no one ever was. Gotta catch em all.
THIS IS WHY WE NEED ALTFURRY
To increase everyone's car insurance premiums? No thanks.
See if you'd just copy pasted it like another dozen times I might've agreed with you but the lack of effort proves your heart's just not in it. Get fucked.
Is this the real bowlcut Crusader kitty? Are you still upset that I added strikethrough to a link on the ED article about you 5 years ago? Saw you complaining about that the other day. Will you stop being a moron if I apologize for that?
The better question is does he still have a bowlcut. It was already way, way out of style but you'd think Dylann Roof would've killed it off for good. Then again I'm not sure white trash yokels have fully abandoned the mullet yet either. Always like 5 decades behind the times.
1) He does still have the bowlcut
2) fuck you mullets will never die
I just started looking this guy up for the first time since old FAF's heyday and man... I guess he doesn't identify as Christian anymore. And I seriously have to wonder, was this pic of his own doing and if so, was it part of some fetish?
Also how the hell did he get unbanned from FA after threatening legal action? I've always resented FA (but to be fair pretty much all furry sites have been guilty of this) for their inconsistency when it comes to who they will and won't lift bans for.
I think it's safe to assume CrusaderCat didn't make that image.
re 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCGZHGHYkgs&t=5m30s
:)
So cute of you to feature my tasteless joke. :D
For the record, though, you made a mistake.
The image I used in my tweet wasn't made by Len. I did that one myself.
You're welcome for the update. ;D
Motherfucker you registered an account here just to post that. I actually read and comment on a pretty regular basis lately and even I can't be arsed. You guys certainly are "exceptional individuals"...
Apparently you can be "arsed" to reply to my comment, so joke's on you buddy. :D
At this point I'm reading these "Alt-Right" stories like an outsider. It's a cultural thing from the US. I see absolutely no relation between the furry fandom's culture and extreme political ideologies. It's a combination as weird and dysfunctional as fried chips & motor oil. I don't get the point. There is no point.
That's why I stay out of it. It just makes everyone upset. There is a time and place for these types of discussions, and while I don't think this site is the right type, if thats what the others want to do...
I would agree that we should be not giving too much counter-service to the alt-right furries. I believe they are a minority of furs and while I do oppose them and their ideas, particularly of white supremacy but also of how they wish to change and mold conservationism to those views even further than they already are.
However, also, at the end of the day obsessing over them to the point of eclipsing the enjoyment in normal fandom activities would also be helping them just as much as joining their ranks personally. They want us obsessing and forgetting the things we found fun in life. They want us to be as miserable as they are, and to spread anger as a result of that misery, just as their leader want them to do.
This is why I will be talking to staff about if we should be limiting these pieces surrounding the alt-right, because we already have another one in the pipeline dealing with infiltration of the group in European based MUCKs. It's not that I'm against giving supremacists heck, but don't let them give your psyche heck either, you don't have to spend 100% of your time fighting them, because they will try to make you look like the obsessive one who is not living a joyful life outside of combating them.
I don't think it would be helpful to have 25% of the pieces on this site be about 2% of the fandom that runs counter to the fandom's culture of tolerance.
Heck 25% of furries are bronies, and we certainly don't run anywhere close to that amount of pieces on MLP.
"I don't think it would be helpful to have 25% of the pieces on this site be about 2% of the fandom that runs counter to the fandom's culture of tolerance."
However, if the 2% of the fandom generates 25% of the newsworthy events, you probably should.
If that 2% of the fandom is generating 25% of the newsworthy content, then shame on the other 98% because their laziness may be the thing that is drawing attention to the other 2%.
But then again, when you do the expected thing it doesn't draw attention I suppose. We don't give praise to those doing the right thing as much as we give condemnation for those doing the wrong thing, which may lead to the culture in which doing the wrong thing becomes more tempting because doing the right thing gets you nothing? This may be why some of those desperate to be remembered in some regard flood to these groups, they are desperate for attention, perhaps?
I mean, let's take the Furrydelphia piece. Green put it up because, hey look, the non-furry press got their facts wrong so it was a good opportunity to point out how wrong they were. If they weren't wrong would we have run a piece on it? If the answer is no, then shame on us. We should be covering pilot events like that in any regard.
Think of this as not me asking that less be published here, I think if there are going to be a lot of alt-furry news, I am going to try my best to get more news published that has nothing to do with them in hopes that maybe the good in the fandom can truly overcome the hindering.
The fact people are uniting and taking a stand against this bullshit is the good in the fandom. For too long, we've kept our mouths shut while people try to make us out to be social pariahs for what 90% of us consider just an innocuous hobby. It's bad enough that in the past it's been over things that really ought to be no one's business but ours. But this is everybody's business. So this is a bridge too far.
This in driving terms could be seen as a bit of an over-correction. This is coming from someone who in 2012 had criticized this fandom of overusing the Drama word and having it obscure real issues and problems. In fact looking at the comments of it, you'll find a lot of irony abound given how some of the commentators have shifted beliefs between then and now. Including Perri, who advocated for furries reporting issue and Patch who didn't see any problems in the fandom. It has been 4 years though, so.
Perri's comments are particularly interesting given she was complaining about 2 fans being angry for being critical at her, and now she's one of the biggest advocates for defending him now that he's lost popularity.
And then there's this quote... which made me palm...
Oh Perri... if you only knew... the irony...
There is a fake quote attributed to Winston Churchill about saying one has to sacrifice art when fighting the Nazis and him responding "Then what are we fighting for?"
And while Churchill may never have said this quote then, I think I agree with it now. I will fight against Nazism, but I don't want to loose the spirit of creativity and understanding that the fandom provides in the process. Because then, what are we fighting for?
I will fight against Nazism, but I don't want to loose the spirit of creativity and understanding that the fandom provides in the process
Indeed, we should act with great care - but Nazism seeks to oppose and remove all that which it disagrees with. It is wholly incompatible with the ideals I hold for the Furry Fandom - and I think those are ideals you hold as well.
The fandom's strength partially comes from its diversity of viewpoints, but how much strength can be added by a philosophy that condemns all other viewpoints but its own? While yes, we should take care not to mislabel those we simply do not like as Nazis (despite many accusations of such leveled at me), we should not think it is a violation of the ideals we both share to condemn and attempt to cut out those who seek to work against those ideals.
Unrelated note:
[code]One such issue is that some consider it politically incorrect to refer to anything made before 1980 as Furry. Another is the "It must be made by a Furry to be called Furry" issue. [/code]
I am of the opinion there's a difference between Funny Animal, Furry, and other forms of Anthropomorphics. Part of my definition of Furry does indeed have it made by Furry. I also generally date the Fandom to the late-70s and early-80s for starting, but...
I readily admit that the borders are fuzzy, sometimes arbitrary, and solely my ever-evolving opinion. Sure, I espouse it and share it, and my archival work is rooted in this analysis (Primarily to save money on acquisitions), but I'm willing to listen to and be swayed by alternative views of thought.
Of course, I don't think this quote was aimed at me - back in 2012 I don't know if I had these thoughts, much less shared them. I'm certainly not going to shun a member of the fandom for enjoying some other form of anthropomorphics - the distinction is mainly academic anyhow.
"when you do the expected thing it doesn't draw attention I suppose"
Exactly. It's not News, it's Olds. The expected outcome is not news or newsworthy, and you shouldn't try to break it down on demographics like that.
"they are desperate for attention, perhaps?"
Attention, or the powerless seeking power over something to help compensate for the lack of ability to act on their own lives, or because they think it's funny - but as I've said before, ironically doing something bad doesn't change that you did something bad. Either way, when stuff like this comes up, we really should all get up and say "No. This isn't tolerated. Behave or be kicked out."
I'm an thin skinned hot tempered easily baited individual who is a terrible face for the sort of change I want to see in the world, and it shows in the language I use. But ultimately, all I want is that condemnation - and I get frustrated when people try to equivocate or minimize these behaviors and the dangerous ideologies that these bad actors are espousing, especially when those ideologies specifically call out my family for death. That kind of makes it personal.
'But Summer', some might say, 'if they seek attention, then even giving them negative attention is rewarding them, shouldn't we just ignore them and they'll go away?' The answer to that is no; these types of folk will continue to act out until they get what they want or get a correction from an outside source. If saying slurs gets no reaction, they'll try something else. At best, they would switch targets, but I don't really consider that to be a best.
As it turns out, sunlight isn't the best disinfectant - not alone, at least. Exposing this sort of fungus to open air only helps get rid of it when combined with actually addressing and confronting the fungus. In addition, great care has to be done to not allow the spores to spread it further as this particular fungus works in subtle ways, appealing to those facing adversity, allowing them to hold some specific group or individuals at cause for their problems.
I think ignoring this sort of thing is the second worst move than could be made. The worst would be opening it up and exposing it - and not following through with the condemnation.
And in specific: We're talking about a collection of Furry Fandom members who have at least helped kill RMFC, who organized swatting and fake reports to Califur that cost the con $24,000, whose chats feature pro-Nazi, pro-Fascist, Xenophobic, and Anti-Semitic discussions without much in the way of opposition to the ideals. Dogpatch's recent article covers some of this - check the section "Work begins for sorting info".
These behaviors are what I feel get defended as a "difference of opinion", or deflected with "what about this other group". I have a difference of opinion with lots of people - yet I don't seek to silence them, only those who think that I should be silenced, threaten to silence me, and has a history of doing just that. Rather permanently.
I mean, if it's news, it's news...limiting thinkpieces on it is one thing but...
Yes, if it is news it is news, and if alt-furrys do something bad, or maybe even good(?) then it should be presented as an event.
The think piece and opinions about the group was more what I was going for. Lots of people think that Alts are bad news (heck even the president coined the phrase "alt-left" live on camera to solidify that "alt" is no good; ironically his attempt was to make the left look bad, but no one on the left gave themselves the prefix 'alt'. All he did was solidify that the alt-right, a group that praises his leadership, is bad).
The alt-right is a USA cultural thing, but all this political drama is just another sign that the furry community is growing into a real culture. It's the first time ever that furries are divided over serious political issues rather than "fandom politics" nobody else cares about. The drama may be unpleasant to witness for those who don't want to get involved, but in my opinion it is a good thing. Any community revolving around things that actually matter is bound to stumble into real world political issues sooner or later and the furry community revolves around a lot of stuff that matters - self expression, self exploration, sexual tolerance, questioning human taboos, questioning cultural anthropocentrism, etc.
As a pure hobby community (assuming it has ever been that) furry was sheltered from this kind of stuff but that's no longer the case... you can't deal with powerful good ideas without also dealing with powerful bad ideas.
LMAO at the DeoTasDevil tweet. She's such a self righteous attention leech.
If alt right furs prove anything, it's that you can have a sense of humor while also wearing a fursuit. The left have lost the meme wars, so now they're attacking free speech and trying to take down other peoples' platforms. Even Youtubers like Black Pigeon Speaks are now losing their monetary funding because they simply recite the facts on IQ and crime statistics. What a world we live in today.
Damn, yall get your worldviews from memes?
Since this BPS character was brought up, I thought I would link this extensive analysis done by the Shorenstein Center on him and similar alt right voices on the internet. It speaks directly to the point I was making to Greenreaper earlier about the break down of of the concept of "marketplace for ideas."
https://shorensteincenter.org/anatomy-of-alt-right-youtuber/
"Black Pigeon Speaks presents a nearly complete world view capable of explaining anything from mass migration to the operation of banks. Though the root cause can always be traced to the Jewish transnational conspiracy being perpetrated by the Rothschilds, George Soros and presumably many others, there are other immediate causes such as the behavior of the Federal Reserve itself, the mainstream media, leftists who control universities—and women!"
The article goes on to discuss the fact that youtube has become the medium of choice for the alt right since it allows them to bypass all intellectual debate or discourse and allows for pure unfiltered propaganda to their followers. The idea that this type of discourse in any way resembles a marketplace of ideas seem kinda ridiculous to me. The closer we edge toward North Korean style propaganda as news where everyone simply tunes into their own personal "dear leader" for all their information on the world, the closer we will get to complete break down of society.
I glanced through most of it but it's worth pointing out some of the conclusion.
"The alt-right is growing. To stem it, some liberals are calling for censorship. YouTube is threatening to revoke BPS’s account based on community complaints. But censorship is no solution. It violates our commitment to free expression and almost never works. /../ The right-wing movement will continue to build power until liberals or the left finds its voice and begins providing answers—on YouTube and elsewhere—to the economic and social decline their societies are facing."
You can't win by silencing these people. You can only win by convincing others that you have a better way.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
But that's the issue. They can't. They have no talking points other than shouting "racist" or "fascist" at this point. They won't accept the fact that they helped drive others away from them.
That's why they defend domestic terrorists like Antifa and BLM. If you recognize that blacks commit more crime or that women are by nature more emotional than men are, they'll just attack you. They've abandoned reasoning, just like the very same groups they claim to be against.
You can't convince those who refuse to recognize facts, science, and even law. That is precisely the reason that they have created their own alternate realities with their own "truth speakers" who are often just wackos broadcasting from a bedroom somewhere. That is the whole point. It's like saying you are going to convince Hitler that Jews are good.
No, you probably will not convince the hardcore alt-right but that isn't necessary. What you do want to do is convince the moderates and the people that are on the fence and the people who the alt-right is appealing to and the people who are driven away by the far left or whatever you want to call them. If you're not going to try convince anyone then you might as well give up because the sides are not going to change.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
You know, it is possible to both provide the good people out there with facts and drive off the maniac fringe. I mean, consider if you were transported back in time to Germany right before the rise of Hitler and someone said to you "The principled thing to do would be for you to present your ideas, Hitler present his ideas, and let's see what happens!!" I would assume that you, like any sensible person with historical knowledge, would say "no, I don't think so" and remove Hitler from the picture, even if it meant paying someone off to commit him to an insane asylum (assuming you are a committed pacifist).
Unfortunately, given the political environment of Germany at that time, removing Hitler may not have prevented the blood lust of a country angry from losing a war, and going through a economic depression.
It's hard for people to realize that Hitler was the will of the German people at the time, so if you were to get rid of Hitler, someone else would have lit that fire just as hard, in my opinion.
So it's best to figure out what causes systems to allow a Hitler-type to take power and do whatever means you can to prevent it systemically.
I think the US has some measures, however they have been eroded somewhat over time given our three branch system eroding to a two-party branch system. But given Trump's pattern of behavior, he may have actually reset us to a three-branch government, because people in Congress and especially the Judicial (with the "so-called" judge comment and the recent pardon) don't like him that much.
However to me it is a highlight that government-sanctioned parties need to be abolished from politics. The people can call themselves what they want, but as soon as you're running for office you are running for the office. Not as a Democrat or Republican, but as a person. If people are too dumb to know what issues you stand for without a letter next to your name on a ballet, then they really shouldn't be voting.
I'm not going to say that removing Hitler would have solved all our problems prior to WW2 because I can't know that. No one can know how that would have affected things. However, my point is that debating Hitler would not have solved that situation. It might have gotten you murdered by him or his flunkies. That's my main point though. People act like conflicts of ideas have never been solved by force except by authoritarian regimes. Every country on this planet (including the U.S.) has solved conflicts of ideas by force, many times. I think it is dangerously naive to believe that all conflicts can be resolved through simple debate in the marketplace of ideas. I'm sure there were people who were advocating that during the 1940s, and if we had followed their position (particularly in the European Theater), we might now live in a world where all of Europe is now unified under a Nazi flag and all Jews have been killed off except those who escaped to the U.S. Historians would not look upon the U.S. kindly.
There were indeed people like that. They even had their own protest signs!
Yea, I can understand people wanting to believe in a world where there is no war, but had those protests succeeded we might be living in a hell-like dystopia right about now. Also, from what I recall a lot of U.S. missile tech was developed from captured German scientists. Imagine if instead of the U.S., a Nazi state spanning all of Europe had lead the way with missiles, the space program, and numerous other discoveries that came about later.
"government-sanctioned parties need to be abolished from politics" makes no sense TBH. Direct-democracy or anarchism are one thing but the US has a federal republic.
"It's hard for people to realize that Hitler was the will of the German people at the time, so if you were to get rid of Hitler, someone else would have lit that fire just as hard, in my opinion"
Hitler was under President von Hindenburg. He was the Chancellor and not head of government, and was appointed to the office not elected in 1933. That wasn't at all uncontroversial. He fought a lot of resistance to pose as a conventional politician at the same time as denying responsibility for violence by the SA wing AKA the Brownshirts. (It was the two-faced nature of all fascists).
A month after he was sworn in, he used the Reichstag Fire as an excuse to push emergency powers that set the constitution aside. In 1934 came the Night of the Long Knives when he purged the SA wing for being competitors to his power. (The SA was led by Ernst Rohm, gay nazi, who was purged for being a power threat, not for being gay - it's useful to make note of it.)
Hindenberg was old and in ill health when he ran against Hitler and won in 1932. Things were so unstable that he returned to the office despite his health. He died in 1934, and with his rivals dead, Hitler seized the opportunity to leave the presidency vacant and call himself head of state.
It would be naive to the point of irresponsibility to call that "the will of the people". Hitler and the Nazi Party pushed their power through against resistance, by incrementally destabilizing a weakened system from within, acting two-faced at every step.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-reichstag-fire-and-nazis-rise-p...
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007657
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Hindenburg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
Some reflection on this stuff can be useful in a niche fandom.
1) Altfurry's playbook of two-faced tactics is very old, and useful to know.
2) Many heads of cons and websites can't be bothered to sort out who is acting in good faith and who isn't. In some ways it's too much work - defusing bullshit can be orders of magnitude more work than generating it. (See: the Altfurry attack against Califur and lack of response we've seen so far.) Or they're simply spineless.
3) "The people" do have power to do what heads of cons or websites won't. Call out the bullshit and refuse to legitimize it. Don't treat it as jokes, don't be their friends, don't do business with them. Hold enablers responsible until they grow a spine. Any time you see two-facedness, use the punk scene guideline and "take them at face value". If they play nazis for the lulz, treat them as nazis and don't let them dodge and deflect or get a break in any way.
They're slimy as hell and they'll wriggle around and try to loop you into a series of games (the neverending show-me-the-proof loop, the "just reasonable discussion race-realism" game, "but muh free speech" etc). It's games to push incrementally, that's why the tactics are described as fascist creep and cryptofascism. ("Dog whistling" is the most furry term involved.) Refer back to 1) and send them to where the Burned Furs went.
AK Press's "Against the Fascist Creep" is getting great reviews and they have a deal on it until Aug 31. https://www.akpress.org/against-the-fascist-creep.html
Special note, when you rate comments here you're doing a mild form of what this suggests. Sorting by quality. Deleting my comment would be the same deal, I can just go post it on my own site. Nazis getting their sites taken down or denied payment services doesn't stop them from having free speech either. They might just have to send it on paper by mail like back in the olden days they want back, when bigotry was more acceptable. Good. Their lying deserves no platform whatsoever, in the same sense as fake science that does harm. We don't need to hear out anti-vaxxer conspiracies that made measles come back either.
Although the ideals you are going for are different in the end, the way you (meaning the left here) act is becoming less distinguishable from the Nazis.
Blame the problems of a country on a specific group. Check.
Forbid that group from speaking or any opposing views from being allowed. Check.
Use violence and intimidation to silence opponents. Check.
Silently remove political opponents, perhaps under cover of a lie. Check.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
"Blame the problems of a country on a specific group." Yep, that is exactly what we did in World War 2. We blamed the problems of a lot of countries on the Nazis.
"Forbid that group from speaking or any opposing views from being allowed." Yes, we did this as well during World War 2. Nazi propaganda was silenced and I can guarantee that our military wouldn't have allowed any soldiers to be reading a copy of Mein Kampf for personal enlightenment.
"Use violence and intimidation to silence opponents." It's called war. We have fought many of them, including against Nazis.
"Silently remove political opponents, perhaps under cover of a lie." We have done this as well in war.
You act as if we have never fought wars before. If all disagreements were resolved through a high school debate program, perhaps we would live in an idealized fantasy land. But they are not. Sometimes, extreme disagreements pop up to which there is no resolution because each side has become completely invested to the point of no return. When that happens, war often occurs. To ignore that is to be eternally naive. That is why we fought the Nazis. Having a debate with them would have been pointless. They were 100% committed to Holocaust and world domination. That was why the Union fought the Confederates. Having a nice chat over some tea wouldn't have resolved the U.S. Civil War. The Confederates were 100% committed to secession and maintaining slavery.
There are matters about which debate can and does occur, and there are matters about which it is pointless to debate. Again, it is nothing but naive to fail to recognize that. It means that difficult decisions have to be made by people of good will in distinguishing between the two.
To be fair, antifa also lost in their cause as well, in fact the first time I've ever heard of the group was after Trump's election victory. I never learned of them in my primary or even my college education.
So those advocating for antifa's methods are also highlighting a losing strategy in the context of Nazi Germany. Did Hitler use them as an excuse to put their citizen in internment camps? I'm sure he would have done something like that.
Luckily Trump isn't too good at this, and he's burned so many bridges of those in power that could assist him with his ends that his odds of pulling off an authoritarian overthrow is decreasing with every day. Antifa may declare victory here (though Trump's self-destructive behavior did the most damage than any form of activism), but when Trump fails are they going to go away? Or will they stick around and harass any Republican candidate as a fascist and move the goal posts? I think many are concerned that the later would be the case. People who start movements get addicted to leading them and don't tend to defuse them once the catalyst that got them together just because the reasoning they got together is no longer about.
They lost because you'd never heard of them?
No, they failed their objective ("lost") because it took WW2 to stop Hitler, indicating their methods failed to stop fascism from spreading to the point where countries had to declare war to stop it.
It's prone to false flagging, let's look at this way:
Let's say I am a right wing extremist who wishes to push the moderate right wing more extreme. The left, in order to combat me, creates a vigilante group to oppose so at first I say they're the extremists, just via words at first.
Once that's out there I get my fellow right wing extremists put on the garb that the group is known for and fly their flags and attack moderate right wingers. I then approach the bruised moderates indicating they should join with my group to combat the opposing extremists.
No doubt methods like this were used by Hitler, and that there could be those looking to do the same with Antifa in its modern iteration. Create a boogy-man that 'good people' will look to a strong-man to take on. And low and behold, look at what strong man is in office.
This is so off base it isn't even apples and oranges, it's apples and tanks. Militant resistance was very important. Partisans killed Mussolini, jewish ghettos had armed uprising, the Spanish civil war was the first fight against fascism that held out against it for 10 years or more. The fact that it wasn't enough implies nothing about tactics "losing" short of needing a world war. It means they were simply overwhelmed while other nations sat on their hands.
To put it another way, ordinary citizens weren't backed by the power of industry like the fascists - IBM, Ford, etc were complicit, it was all profit to them. "Fascism is another word for corporatism", to use a quote misattributed to Mussolini. There is a way to check that power- organized labor. Hitler's first act while consolidating power was to crush it before getting down to the blitzkrieg business. So peaceful resistance also "failed", to use your term. More like it was stamped out. Being passive simply got you turned into hamburger on a shorter schedule.
""The Left gives fascists a reason to feel like victims by engaging in militant resistance" is the hottest liberal garbage take I've seen" - useful thread.
I see. Meanwhile, in reality, groups like ACT! for America, post-Charlottesville, are told they're unwelcome by public officials and cancel nearly 70 rallies, trying to sheepishly distance itself from right wing extremism while citing specifically "Antifa" counter-protests.
"when Trump fails are they going to go away?"
History shows that being the case.
1.) BPS is not alt right. Just like Rachel Maddow is not a member of the alt left.
2.) HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. "People contradicting what I hear on corporate owned media monopolies are destroying free speech! CENSORSHIP NOW!"
3.) I guess not wanting your country destroyed by parasitic migrants makes you a Nazi. Go figure.
On #3- Nah, but believing all migrants are parasitic may make you a Nazi.
This is especially if those migrants are doing better at the jobs you want than you are and you go screaming into the winds that "They will not replace you". If your fear of losing your job has you to the point you will kill or act in violence against others, is that person then not the parasite? Only willing to let their fellow countrymen live if they get what they want?
"If your fear of losing your job has you to the point you will kill or act in violence against others, is that person then not the parasite?"
If my fear is that illegal immigrants who can be paid substantially less and give lower quality results will replace me then I do believe that is entirely reasonable. Especially when they have been doing so to others for some time now.
Same goes for migrants in Europe who live on benefits. Am I a Nazi for not wanting those people to come over in droves? Probably not. Especially if they're violent and ill-conforming on top of that.
Right, which is why our country has vetting processes and also when we discover migrants which are being parasitic (because acting in criminal ways gets you negative attention, go figure) we have ICE to take care of those. But I think the anger doesn't stop at the merely criminal; but the believe that all migrants are providing a service lesser than one's own and that one's service cannot improve in the slightest. If that is the case it is that stagnation and laziness in believing one is God's gift to whatever task they do that will result in their ultimate termination.
Do not take your job for granted, keep your creative mind working. Be cunning and full of tricks, because when they catch you they will kill you, but first they must catch you. And believing that you should have it just because you believe that your quality is better is a false comfort.
The saddest thing is that computers are going to fuck over both the "parasitic migrants" and the "patriots" both, especially if our economic systems keep all their eggs in the "compensation only goes toward labor" basket which will eventually be replaced by machines. And if we're still going to be blaming and killing migrants over that misconception; then I guess our Sci-Fi about robots killing humans directly is false. Instead the robots will just do their tasks while humans blame one another, and wages wars on one another, for taking all the jobs robots stole from them.
I'd rather companies be using robots legally than hiring illegals or Starbucks Hippies who wine about not being paid $15 an hour to flip burgers.
Well that's the problem with nationalistic thinking. What does it matter where someone comes from? It matters what they do. Country borders are all completely fictional constructs. There is no reason why someone born in Mexico shouldn't be allowed to freely migrate to Texas while someone from Alaska can. Your place of birth is just happenstance and not something that informs your character or that you should be judged for.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
"Borders are a fictional construct" Say that to Japan and Israel.
I love how commies hate patriotism when the only successful communists in history were all extreme nationalists.
I'm wondering if a low rating here means that the voters do think we should be nationalistic and judge people by their country of birth. That seems to be what they're saying. :/ If not, why would this get down rated?
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I never said that they're all parasitic. I'm just saying that there's nothing wrong with deporting someone if they're here illegally or violent and ill-conforming.
Are we gonna deport violent or "ill-conforming" citizens too?
No, we have prisons for them. I don't intend to house illegal vermin within the country because that means they'll still receive free benefits.
Oh, I see. Being "ill-conforming" is a really huge crime, eh? So what to do with the ill-conforming immigrants here legally?
You don't deport them if they're here legally and can pay for themselves. If they're rapefugees who come to Western Europe on rafts and don't have any money, I don't see why you shouldn't deport them then.
Wow. Here I was expecting a response that at least had something to do with your original argument. Silly of me I guess. So is your issue that they're ill-conforming or that they're poor?
Both. It makes them all the more undesirable. And yet people care more about third world dindus than they do their own people. These things spread themselves throughout Europe and suddenly everyone else is intolerant when they destroy everything.
This is why we need the wall. It may not keep out every migrant but it will keep out a good portion of them and that's what matters.
I love the fact that you all felt the need to down vote my comments to the point of them being hidden. Now people are just going to click on them to see what I have to say that's got you so flustered in the first place. Dancing for me like my puppets.
And you know what the best part is? From you degenerates cowering in the sight of my manliness and accurate crime statistics on race I've become more powerful than any of you ever will.
"cowering in the sight of my manliness"
Whatever keeps you going, I guess.
Because, you know, real men obsess over power and worry about seeming powerful at all times. Are you sure you're not on George Soro's payroll or something (/sarcasm)?
I'd be careful about going on your power trips around other alt-righters, they'd either think you're taking things too seriously and tell you to get back to memeing; or they might accuse your of being a "Globalist".
"Dancing for me like my puppets", "cowering in the sight of my manliness", nobody talks like this except pro wrestling heels trying to get some cheap heat. You're one of the rare types that's trying too hard but still ought to be trying harder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYIqkR5v4NI
Oh God, it's another Perri
Honest question for Mr. The Dragon:
Umm, so do you even know who Equivamp is talking about?
Please respond, will provide evidence for personal theory of mine!
Yeah I know that he's a sociopath and that and that he's making apologies for rapefugees.
"Who cares if they're criminal, low IQ and poor? We have Americans who are just the same!"
Typical liberal apologist. No real argument there at all.
I'm literally double typing because I'm so angry right now.
Stop, we're getting too intimidated by your manly typing and starting to dance like your puppets!
He's asking if you know who Perri is.
and don't ever call me liberal againNo I do not know who this "Perri" is and I can reassure you that I am not them.
No, I don't think Ike is Perri; I'm just happy to have confirmation that the self-appointed "voice" of the furry alt-right literally doesn't even have friends there, either.
Really? Not even in SecondLife? So literally no one wants to yiff that blue haired bunny? That's actually somewhat hard to believe.
Perri is long winded and takes the things seriously, this guy is one of those meme-lord /4/channers who does the whole parody thing; not realizing that others may not be parodying, even when those others hit people with cars.
As Roger Rabbit once said: a laugh is a very powerful thing, apparently it only not makes you safe from snitches, it can also let you influence others to give others stitches.
Who knew there was a dark side to that force?
Perri may be typically more verbose, but they both think anyone here is going to click on their unprompted, unlabeled links to cursed YouTube videos
When people tell me not to let refugees starve to death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITDD4doC6iw
Equivamp you have shared some false information here. Heather Heyer did not die as a result of a car hitting her. She can clearly be seen collapsing on her own as the car drives by about 5 feet to her right.
Her mother told the press she died of a heart attack. Coroner's office said COD was blunt force trauma to death, with exact causes unknown.
There are 3 visible candidates for this in the video:
1) when Heather collapses, her chest visibly collides into her knees under her own weight.
2) a civilian gives chest compressions to her
3) paramedics give chest compressions to her
Any of these could have caused chest injuries to compound whatever health problems she was suffering when she collapsed.
As a smoker who was obese on a hot day wearing black she was bound to be suffering, and the shock of the crowd she was in attacking a car and the car fighting back could have caused her to pass out or have a heart attack.
She could possibly have recovered if not for the blunt force trauma. I hope they find out what caused it. I'm hoping it was self-inflicted because it would be a shame for the good samaritan or paramedics to have caused her death, though these are strong possibilities because both were pushing very hard.
They already know what caused it. She was hit by a car.
What's your source on this? Latest update I came across was October 16th, per http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/heather-heyer-s-cause-of-death-ruled-as-...
>Heather Heyer’s cause of death was blunt force injury to the chest, according to the Central District Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond. Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal who was protesting the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in downtown Charlottesville on Aug. 12, died after a car rammed a crowd of pedestrians gathered at the intersection of Fourth and Water streets. Dozens more were injured. The manner of Heyer’s death is still pending, a representative with the office said Monday.
Note the last sentence. Look how this Oct 17 article interprets it http://www.newsweek.com/charlottesville-heather-heyers-cause-death-revealed-medi... :
>The Central District Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond released the cause of death Monday, reported The Daily Progress, with a ruling on the manner of death still pending.
Blunt trauma was declared CoD but they still need MoD. We don't know what caused the trauma yet.
If you believe so strongly the car hit her then can you show proof? Here's a collection of photos with HH location marked for analysis https://imgur.com/a/dPaGh She is clearly off to the side and did not get hit (well, not by the CAR anyway) at any point in the car's advancement.
Hate to be blunt, but cars cause blunt force trauma.
There were videos of the car going into the crowd, which I believe are linked in the comment sections above.
If he drove his car through a crowd and someone ended up dying, then he takes the consequence for the lives lost in that crowd regardless if they were 'dying' before his car struck the crowd. Because in the end we are ALL dying right? I mean, we're all dead eventually...
The idea of the law is to prevent people from getting away with accelerating said death.
Did I say anywhere that cars cannot cause blunt force trauma? This is common sense that they can cause it. I have no idea why you are declaring this, it feels like you're arguing a straw man here.
Yes, there are videos of the car going into the crowd. If you checked the IMGUR gallery I linked it includes stills from that video as well as an animated .gif depicting that. Again: I do not recall saying it did not go into the crowd, so I'm not sure why you're stating this.
I do not believe he hit EVERY member in that crowd though, and I do not believe he hit Heather Heyer, especially not in the chest.
The argument about whether or not he would be accountable for the deaths of people he did not hit would be a separate discussion to have after the issue of whether or not he hit her is resolved. If someone in the crowd who disliked her took the opportunity of her distraction to shove her from behind, for example, I would not see how James Fields is accountable for it.
Pro tip- don't take gifs and stills with the same authority as live unadulterated footage released in short order.
Even if no one had died from that act it was still a crime; regardless if he hit "everyone" in that crowd.
So the guy is going to jail, regardless if he is found at fault for her death, and if he is found at fault then guess what? His fault for breaking the law in the first place.
I see one still at the top of the page that shows indisputable proof that the car was driven by A CARTOON TASMANIAN DEVIL!
I've watched the live footage too, it's simply easier to discuss things like distance gaps with stills.
If you're willing to take murder off the table, we can certainly discuss whether he qualifies for lesser crimes, such as reckless endangerment.
I'm hesitant even about that though, because it seems plausible he was panicking and trying to escape a violent mob attack from behind, and the only exit (forward) was blocked by the other half of the mob.
These people had no legal permit to protest, and were illegally loitering in a public street, blocking traffic and endangering the public. I believe Fields had the right-of-way and if he had to choose between letting his car get mobbed (where he could be dragged out and killed) and pushing people gently out of the way if they ignored his warnings to disperse, I think he has the right to make a choice to defend his life.
Look, this is a furry site, and we've all masturbated to stuff we maybe shouldn't have, but you don't need to tell us about which specific snuff video got you off most recently, okay.
We aren't no District Attorney, go tell them you theories.
The district attorneys prosecuting the case, Joseph Platania and Nina-Alice Antony, are complicit in a coverup by sealing the aerial surveillance footage taken by Berke Bates to prevent the public from sealing it. Judge Robert Downer and lawyer-plant Denise Lunsford co-operated with that travesty of immortal selective disclosure.
FOIA requests for this footage have been denied, so having exhausted the usual channels, anyone seeking to know the full facts of this case must pursue other avenues.
You need to get your spellchecker under control, dude.
Since denials to requests should be public record and were sent to you, do you have a copy of said decline?
Believe it or not, the furry fandom has attracted a (real) journalist who specializes in FOIA requests and if you provided such documentation would be able to inform me if the claim you are stating is legitimate.
My guess is that they returned a "what you're asking for doesn't exist", which isn't the same as denying you data, that is even if you/someone actually did a request.
In the words of Reagan: Trust, but verify. So let's see if we can't verify your statement, yes?
It's not worth it
Thanks for the reply Sonious.
>Since denials to requests should be public record and were sent to you, do you have a copy of said decline?
I'm not an American citizen so I don't think I have the right to make FOIA requests. There's an article about a man from Fairfax Virginia having his FOIA appeals denied from February 2018: http://www.c-ville.com/videos-of-fatal-crash/
I would be very interested in the opinion of this (real) journalist on this matter. My guess is that William Evans would be more forthcoming sharing that document with this journalist than in sharing it with me. No need to add an unnecessary middle step.
>My guess is that they returned a "what you're asking for doesn't exist"
If that were the case it would be a lie, the existence of Berke Bates' video recording was entered into public record by Platania and Antony back in December in the pre-trial hearing: http://www.grandforksherald.com/news/crime-and-courts/4374698-first-degree-murde...
> In an eerie aspect of Thursday's hearing, the primary video that prosecutor Nina-Alice Antony showed in court was footage recorded from a Virginia State Police helicopter whose two crew members, Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Trooper Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, were monitoring the demonstration. About three hours after the airborne officers witnessed Fields's alleged attack and followed his vehicle as it sped away, the helicopter crashed while Cullen and Bates were flying to another assignment, killing both men. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
It's also been affirmed by interviewed Colonel W. Steven Flaherty 17 August 2017 article: https://www.virginiafirst.com/news/local-news/celebration-of-life-for-trooper-bu...
> Flaherty said Bates captured video of the pursuit after a driver plowed into a crowd of people during the violence in Charlottesville.
>> "We caught the murderer because of the work [he] was doing."
> Flaherty said the video will be used as evidence in that case.
The colonel's affirmation may have been what prevented them from simply destroying the video and denying it survived the crash. This means they simply have to seal it and hope people forget about it, or at least delay its release long enough to allow it to be professionally doctored.
So if you cannot make FOIA requests, and clearly didn't in this case, then someone else told you they are being declined? If so then who?
And if so then can they provide you the letter of decline?
Because you can go on all the tangents you want, but if the person is lying to you about the FOIA request denial, they could maybe, just maybe be lying to you about all the other tangential stuff they may have got into your mind that you are probably parroting.
Sonious, nobody told me personally, as I pointed out above the 14 February 2018 article by Samantha Baars identifies a citizen of Fairfax Virginia having one rejected already.
>Evans has filed a motion seeking a court order under the Freedom of Information Act that the city of Charlottesville and Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania unseal the videos shown in an open courtroom at Fields’ December 14 preliminary hearing, and make them available to the public.
>“The precedent is pretty clear across the entire country, both in the Supreme Court and in federal courts and in the state courts that statutes like this, when you show something like this to a portion of the public in a public setting, at that point you don’t have the right as a government entity to withhold it from anybody else who asks for it,” says Evans.
http://www.c-ville.com/videos-of-fatal-crash
As for the document, from https://www.scribd.com/document/371567637/Evans-Consolidated-Petition-against-Co... page 2 has the date the request was sent and the date of the response:
> 7. That on December 15, 2017, and then again on December 26, 2017, Evans sent requests
under VFOIA to the City, asking “to inspect or obtain copies” of two public records in the
possession of the City that were released to the public at the preliminary hearing of James Alex Fields on December 14, 2017.
> 9. That in its January 2, 2018 response, the City withheld the video recordings under VFOIA § 2.2-3706(A)(2)(a), which allows a public body like the City to, in its “discretion”, withhold public records that are part of “criminal investigative files”.
Given that Baars bothered to consult Gernhardt about this, I expect she did enough diligence to ascertain that Evans had actually sent the request and received a rejection to it. Do you think CVILLE magazine has dishonest editors? Do you take issue with any other articles at http://www.c-ville.com/author/samanthabaars/ ?
I don't know if he's actually shared copies. I don't know why he would share them with ME. A reporter with a specialty in FOIA would have a better likelihood of getting cooperation.
New Rule: We don't negotiate with terrorists, or those who defend them. And just because it's a white guy with a car and not a Muslamic Infidel with a Muslamic Ray Gun doesn't make it any less a terrorist act.
I do not care about James Fields' ethnicity. I do not view him as a terrorist because his actions appear to be defensive driving after his vehicle was assaulted by a crowd. He was first assaulted from behind and then his exit was barred in front. He gave the ones barring him opportunity to move and smart ones did, and then he tried to get through and failed, so reversed out as a last resort.
Even if you do not directly assault a vehicle, if you are assisting people attacking that vehicle by serving as a human barricade to them escaping danger, you are an accessory to deadly assault.
If Heather Heyer did not intend this, then the ones accountable for her death are the violent crowd who prevented her from leaving it.
Do other MRAs not know you're a pedophile or are they just cool with it? Important question for important research.
Wait, where is it established this guy is a pedo?
Tyciol is an old friend.
You have wierd friends.
*weird, not wierd
EV the term 'activist' is used far too loosely IMO. I don't think those of us who simply whine in comments qualify. Sure those who actually go out and rally are more deserving of terms like that.
I imagine most MRAs are not cool with pedophilia. I'm not cool with it either, I don't believe it is good to fixate on someone due to a physical characteristics, particularly something as transient as pubescence.
That's the most fucked up definition of "defensive driving" I've heard in my life.
Cars fight back! Be careful of teasing a car, you might get attacked while the driver helplessly watches. But they are usually more afraid of you. Heather Heyer probably flung herself at it while it fearfully tried to back away.
Cars are not that autonomous... yet...
But yeah, the driver certainly fled the scene.
Fleeing the scene of a crash is justified if remaining there puts you in mortal danger.
RMFC shut down rather than pay the exhorbatent extra security fee. Califur is covering it, but it will take a hit on their finances. I hope they can at least get said individuals formally tresspassed so it would actually be a crime if they showed up. At this point I can't see why any convention would allow any of these assholes to attend. They aren't adding anything to the community, they are actively harming it. No convention has to welcome anyone they don't wish to they are private functions. No violation of free speech, let the alt-furs set up their own convention and do their crap on their own dime.
What matters is them taking a stance that bigotry, hate, and their symbols are not welcome at their events.
Oh boy, this old article got necro'd. Good work by Equivamp for documenting.
Time to use hindsight that Antifa furries were right all along (anyone who paid attention knew)...
From this article:
The blood of Heather Heyer is on the hands of a nazi furry. That was Dillon Hopper, who used to go to fur cons in CA and OH (and was kicked out for starting fights.) Hopper went on to be the leader of Vanguard America, the nazi group at Unite The Right who denied killing Heyer in public while celebrating it in private. He worked with other violent terror groups that urged targeting furries and using chlorine bombs. That part didn't make mainstream news although it was investigated by the SPLC. Info about Hopper with his Furaffinity page.
"Kekus of Akkad" was Naskatan, who led his own nazifur group full of Proud Boys supporters (some in law enforcement) who tried to stage violence for Milo's Midwest Furfest plan. Pushing them back was not just a stance of beliefs; the J6 riot tells the violent stakes. It was meant to be the fandom's own J6 to "destroy" MFF, to quote Milo. Altfurry and Proud Boys
In the screens "PA8600" was outed as a prolific hate forum mod in Ohio and "Radix" is alias Saul Skunk, a white supremacist pedophile in the UK.
Reporting about altfurries had me targeted with a failed scheme to pull me into intimidating a witness in Foxler's sex offense trial, my reporting got an 8 year jail sentence for the nazifur offender.
In 2022 we also have far-right furry/army sergeant Daniel Perry waiting for trial for murdering a civil rights protester/military veteran. His Furaffinity page got nazifur praise for the killing while police refused to charge, a year before he was finally indicted.
Read it first in the furry news. :)
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