Anonymous ID: 115405 Feb. 5, 2019, 7:20 a.m. No.5036742   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6746 >>6864 >>6923

The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins of “Learn to Code”

 

“Learn to Code = brigade attack” Apparently, 4chan is the current target.

 

an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”

 

I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.”

 

On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. It’s also a line many of us may have already heard from relatives who pretend to be well-meaning, and who question an idealistic, unstable, and impecunious career choice. But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility—and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.

 

What’s a brigade attack, you may ask? It’s a rather dramatic name for coordinated harassment, usually migrating from one social media site to another. Often hatched in the internet’s right-wing cesspools, these campaigns unleash a mass of harassment on unsuspecting targets. 4chan’s /pol/ board—a gathering-place for people who want to say the n-word freely, vilify feminists, and opine on nefarious Jewish influence—has an oversize role in organizing brigade attacks, in part due to the fact that all its users are anonymous.

 

While it’s difficult to trace the origins of brigading—like most of internet history, its beginnings are ephemeral—the term, and its tactics, came to new prominence during the loosely organized and militantly misogynist harassment campaign known now as GamerGate, which unfolded over the course of 2014 and 2015.

 

“I think brigading has always been around,” said Caroline Sinders, a design and research fellow with the digital program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, who received enormous volumes of harassment during GamerGate. “I think of it like ‘campaigning’—it’s coordinated, it’s planned, it’s designed. Brigading is like targeting a victim and planning a course of attack—from overwhelming their mentions, flooding a hashtag, to SEO bombing.”

 

After Sinders wrote about GamerGate harassment online, a SWAT team was called to her mother’s house—a malevolent kind of “prank” that has resulted in at least one death.

 

Shireen Mitchell, founder of the project Stop Online Violence Against Women, had a similar experience during GamerGate. A campaign originating on Reddit targeted a South by Southwest panel on online harassment at which Mitchell was scheduled to speak. It received thousands of “down-votes” when audiences were encouraged to vote on proposed panels at the festival. Mitchell and others involved with the panel were bombarded with abuse and threats, accused of being biased against GamerGate.

 

https://newrepublic.com/article/153019/fetid-right-wing-origins-learn-code

Anonymous ID: 115405 Feb. 5, 2019, 7:43 a.m. No.5036928   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6950 >>7007

MAGA hats and blackface are different forms of expression, but they share a certain unfortunate DNA

 

 

Two potent racial symbols — MAGA hats and blackface — have been in the news. They may not appear related at first blush, but they belong on a political continuum that ranges from racial provocation to outright racism. They share DNA.

 

Wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat is not necessarily an overt expression of racism.

 

But if you wear one, it’s a pretty good indication that you share, admire or appreciate President Trump’s racist views about Mexicans, Muslims and border walls.

 

That hat stirs strong emotions. It is meant to.

 

I know a Democratic mom in Orange County who asked her teenage son’s friend to take his MAGA hat off in her house. On his way out, the kid yanked up her Katie Porter-for-Congress lawn sign, which ended the boys’ friendship.

 

Last week, a biracial restaurant owner in San Mateo tweeted that he regarded the hats as no different than “a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”

 

“It hasn’t happened yet,” wrote J. Kenji López-Alt, “but if you come into my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served.”

 

He quickly — and rightly — apologized after he was slammed for intolerance. You can reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, but if you choose your patrons based on their politics, you deserve to go under.

 

(If I owned a restaurant, I wouldn’t toss you out if you wore a MAGA hat to dinner, although I do think hats at the table are extremely rude.)

 

When Nick Sandmann, a Kentucky high school student, wore a MAGA hat as he engaged in what appeared to be a staring contest with Nathan Phillips, a Native American man, the image came across as disrespectful at best, and racist at worst. The resulting analysis of the event has taken on a Rorschach-like quality: You see what you want to see. But without that hat, the story would not have blown up.

 

MAGA hats simply don’t mean anything outside their implicit political message: The past was better because the country was whiter.

 

I look forward to the day they are consigned to the same historical fate as Confederate flags.

 

Even then, they will surely still have their fans.

 

Whether white people who blacken their faces for fun know it or not, the practice is rooted in minstrelsy and the mockery of blacks by whites. Like the MAGA hat, it is an expression of white supremacy.

 

https://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-maga-hat-20190205-story.html

 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/05/l-a-times-columnist-maga-hats-are-like-wearing-blackface/

Anonymous ID: 115405 Feb. 5, 2019, 7:47 a.m. No.5036965   🗄️.is 🔗kun

33 Men Arrested over Historic Child Sex Abuse Allegations in Northern England

 

Thirty-three men have been arrested in relation to allegations of sexual abuse against a child in Halifax, West Yorkshire, between 2002 and 2005.

 

All men, now aged between 30 and 40, have been released under investigation, whilst homes in the West Yorkshire borough of Calderdale, where Halifax is located, Kirklees, and Bradford are being searched, reports the Halifax Courier.

 

Police said Monday the multiple arrests across the region were part of an ongoing operation that began in October 2018.

 

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/02/05/33-men-arrested-over-historic-child-sex-abuse-allegations-northern-england/

Anonymous ID: 115405 Feb. 5, 2019, 7:51 a.m. No.5036997   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>7008 >>7146

>>5036885

She attended a concert called “Notorious RBG in Song” in Washington at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on Monday night, Feb. 4, watching as her daughter-in-law Patrice Michaels and other musicians put on the event.

 

Michaels, a soprano and composer, is married to Ginsburg’s son James Ginsburg.

 

The concert was dedicated to Ginsburg’s life in the law and was presented for high school students.

 

No photographs emerged of Ginsburg at the event because the National Constitution Center, which sponsored the concert, did not permit photography.

 

Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the center, took to Twitter to say he was pleased that Ginsburg attended the event.

 

https://twitter.com/RosenJeffrey/status/1092603018095329287?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1092603018095329287&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ntd.com%2Fsupereme-courts-ruth-bader-ginsburg-finally-appears-in-public-after-surgery_285177.html