I remember the chan dorks having various splits, with some contingents being more sympathetic to leftism and the others being the exact same racist pedophiles they are now. Like one person said here a while ago, they used to be horrible in a whole bunch of different directions, now they’re more focused on being horrible in very specific ways.
I was there when they decided to take on Scientology, with some regarding it as some kind of personal moral crusade to go after an evil organization, and then another half being against any attempt to do serious real-world political movements. The latter half didn’t have the word cringe back then, but that’s what they would have called it.
on one hand, scientology raids, animal abusers doxxed, anon hacks and data dumps of unethical companies.
on the other hand, pool’s closed, fandom of a certain space movie, the advent of /pol/
truly a land of contrasts
I remember always getting confused about their treatment of Hal Turner. It was a pretty common thing back then to prank call anyone who had a call-in show, like with Tom Green. With Hal Turner they mocked him both for being racist and for not being racist in the correct way, they didn’t like that he was a serious racist rather than the meme joke style racists they were. I remember them really laying into him on one show immediately after Obama got elected and relentlessly mocked him by gloating about Obama’s victory. It was weird. For a while the overwhelming attitude was a kind of pointless nihilistic hatred in every single direction possible, because they found it funny, no matter how incoherent that made them.
Then I’m convinced their moderation teams actually got usurped by a bunch of stormfront mods and then after gamergate happened Cambridge Analytica started doing little trials testing how much they could steer discussions
I think it’s more that for a long time basically any counter-culture thing fell into a sort of left-by-default place, that wasn’t actually left but just fell into a broader category of opposition to the theocrats and business school cultists that defined the political establishment. It wasn’t an alliance by any means, just a general ideological incoherence and there were a whole lot of chauvinist libertines who hated being told “no” by anyone, wanted healthcare, and could see that their enemies were also doing a bunch of heinous shit in addition to their primary crimes of banning weed and not showing enough tits on TV. So just a vague morass of libertarians and chauvinist socdem libertines.
Then the far-right establishment cynically started bringing the chauvinist libertines into the fold with a newer, dumber edition of Fascism that raised hentai and treats to a similar level that the original Fascists put things like “family” and “dying stupidly in an act of redemptive violence,” and that vague morass started crystalizing and creating an actual left that has since embroiled itself in a constant struggle to purge the lingering chauvinists, while a new bloc of chauvinist libertine socdems has formed in an attempt to create “V**shite” as an actual tendency that is willfully chauvinist and deliberately opposed to the left.
As evidenced by pixelcanvas.io
