#she’s only seen extremely out of context screenshots and memes so she has NO IDEA what she’s in for | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rgr-pop · 5 years

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[ rape advocacy politics / t*rf shit / dv / actually looking for advice for navigating this social thing or helping someone do better I guess ]

I’m sure I’ve subposted this person before but I am reasonably sure that I have never screenshotted her shadiness because at the time it happened, I felt it the contents of the shadiness were so bad that they would only hurt people if I reproduced them. here goes.

there’s this person in town I knew from college, ws classes. back then she didn’t do any like anti-rape activism with us, but after college she went to get a social work degree, and decided to do antirape social work professionally. she now has some kind of peer educator organizing/advocacy position in the sexual assault program (unsure if the core sexual assault program, but something like that) here.

now, I want to couch that as carefully as possible: I think she came into that position around the time of the title ix news or just before, but significantly before the you-know-what shit at the university. [editing for clarity: obviously not before the things happened, but before they were national news.] back then, even before all of that, a lot of people had issues with leadership in the core sexual assault program, they did some shady political stuff and were awful to some survivors who were pretty public about it. I’m not sure that most of those people are still working over there. this person came into the programs around the time of that transition, likely as some kind of hiring sweep to preempt the title ix stuff, it’s on us era, I dunno for sure. she wasn’t involved with all the high level controversy, but I recall that she was involved in an absolutely horrendous bystander intervention program. we all know that the lit on bystander intervention doesn’t look so great, and we also know that bystander intervention programs are usually just a way for universities to preempt title ix related funding cuts without getting sued by frat dads, right, but it was worse than just ineffective. the program, I shit you not, the slogan was: “be a bystander.” I don’t know that it was her idea or anything, but she was really proud of it. on facebook she was sharing her work asking people to “pledge to be a bystander.” I guess I should sort of feel bad for her for being that dumb after paying for that much college? but that’s not the point. the point is actually that we should not trust professional anti-rape advocates anyway, especially when they work for institutions like the one she works for. that’s just the context.

the real thing is that back then--I really can’t remember exactly, but I believe that it was around the time she was hired in--she was sharing and posting a bunch of extremely disturbing t*rf memes on facebook, including some from pages that were unapologetic anti-trans pages. I took some screencaps but I don’t know if I still have them. this must have been around 2015, because she was posting things about c**tlyn j*nner. one of them was a graphic photoshopped photograph of a woman who was all bruised up, supposed to be a dv victim, you might have seen this one, I don’t remember exactly. it said something like... j*nner will never know what it’s really like to experience gender based violence? or maybe it said like, trans women only care about superficial things, not real issues, like dv? you get it. after a handful of these someone actually kindly “called her in” about it, but they made the mistake of basically saying, “hey, these memes are from a page that advocates hatred toward trans women.” so she removed them and posted an apology, but what she actually apologized for was sharing from bad facebook pages, not for saying alarmly transmisogynistic, violent horrible things. (not to mention a dv advocate sharing disgusting exploitative images of dv victims like that.)

so anyway, I hate”follow” on facebook since then. trouble is that she hasn’t disappeared off the face of the earth, inconveniently. and now she knows a lot of my friends, including some people who are my friends and would be vulnerable to her beliefs, ie, like, regardless of any power she has, I would like for a fake bitch t*rf to not be fake friends with my trans friends, on principle, and for their emotional safety.

but I’m hearing what you are thinking: she maybe has educated herself, and has changed. so what I’d like is for a way for her to demonstrate that she has changed (to me! I mean to anybody else who is wondering, but to ME), maybe while also doing something constructive, ideally without making a spectacle. I’m not really sure if people who would be impacted by her past-maybe-current-evilness would even want to know, and maybe I should actually just talk to her one on one about it. calling in, lol!

this is coming up now because I saw her dumb ass on facebook--listen, she could absolutely apologize for those particular bad actions and show me that she is not an evil t*rf bitch, but she could never convince me that she’s a genius--promoting a new zine she made--and here’s where we return to “social workers are helplessly stupid, borderline a plague”--which is called “the do’s and don’ts of supporting survivors.” in 2018. I mean okay!

anyway: I can seethe about this forever while feeling hopeless, I can unfriend her which would only achieve peace of mind for ME plus lower the risk of me doing something impulsive that helps no one lol, orrrr what. I should tell her that I’ve been stressed about this for many years? I could ask her if she understands, imperfect white woman to imperfect white woman lol? I could ask her to maybe like do some kind of trans fundraising gesture to make sure anybody who may remember what she did in the past can understand that she now understands that the safety of trans women is important to her professional feminism lol? I really don’t wanna tell my friends about this and stress them out needlessly but I’m OFTEN pissed at this person and like, it does not seem like she’s going anywhere, so

eta: like to clarify, the stakes are not just my friends, the stakes are that she does hold a position of power in anti-rape advocacy locally and back then I wanted to get her ass fired but didn’t, and now I would only feel comfortable having her around getting paid to advocate for victims of sexual violence if she demonstrate that not only does she think trans women deserve care and advocacy and dignity, but that she is actively including that principle in her work, getting PAID to REPRESENT SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE

#please don't reblog but you can give me any kind of input

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joel-furniss-blog · 4 years

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Shitposting and Dada

I discussed briefly in my project statement how I sense a certain lack of ambition and that I enjoy and produce work that is often of low-effort and low-quality, and in the previous semester I intended to sort of trick the examiners into giving me a better mark by overloading them with a quantity of work, trying to sort of test the ‘quality ≠ quantity’ saying. This method of producing work is quite like another of my favourite pastimes, the online behaviour of shitposting.

As vast as its internet domain, shitposting can take up a myriad of different forms on different forums, but a generally agreed definition is ‘posting large amounts of content "aggressively, ironically, and of trollishly poor quality” to an online forum or social network,’. Usually this is in order to derail otherwise orderly online discussions or alternately to bastardize a site to its regular visitors. Its usage dates to the early 00’s under the influence of niche online forums and imageboards, in which comment threads were often derailed from discussion by anonymous users either adding unconstructive posts out of ignorance or malicious intent. The resulting environment of chaotic misuse it results in is commonly referred to as ‘cancer’ (highlighting just how seriously an issue it is thought to be).

From its initial days as a minor annoyance on obscure online sump, shitposting has since changed into a much more mainstream culturally practice, especially in the intersection between internet trolling and politics. With its ability to aggravate, avert information, and overload systems, shitposting has fit well into the maddening expanse of contemporary politics and its sensationalist coverage, its first prominence being in the 2016 United States presidential race among examples of other radicalised internet phenomena—such as the appropriated mascot Pepe the Frog who has his own shitposted legacy—where the internet-savvy right-wing circles used memes as a new age propaganda machine to entertain its recruits and alienate its enemies through a stream of coded slang and images pumped out at a perpetual speed.

A most extreme and unfortunate example of the extent of the radicalization shitposting can cause is the 2019 Christchurch shooting in which an ethno-nationalist terrorist livestreamed his attack on Facebook and released a 74-page manifesto publicly on Twitter and imageboard 8chan as well as being sent directly to more than 30 recipients including multiple media companies and the New Zealand prime ministers office. The manifesto was allegedly littered with multiple memes including references to video game Fortnite, YouTube personality and alt-right running dog PewDiePie, and the classic Navy Seal copypasta, as well as alt-right associated meme and Serbian anti-Muslim turbo-folk song commonly referred to as Remove Kebab, paired with the method of distribution the manifesto could be seen as a most radical version of shitposting, intended to throw out morsels of the shooters philosophy to confuse outsiders and tempt those who might sympathise.

But shitpostings use is not exclusive to the political-right, as left-identifying groups have also used it for their own advancement, such as Facebook group New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens with over 175,000 members who produce and exchange memes and general discourse related to environmentally friendly and socially accommodating urban design schemes and transport reform, whose impact has seen 2020 United States presidential candidate Bernie Sanders become a member and supporter. Shitposting and trolling has even cropped up in the UK political scene, with current Liberal Democrat party leader Jo Swinson having to explicitly state that she does not murder squirrels after a fake screenshot of a news article saying so began circling Twitter.

With its relation to the fake news phenomenon and the post-truth environment, shitposting has found a comfortable place in the current political climate, but for my own sake I have to ask; how does it relate to art. Surprisingly, shitposting—while not in its current form—was very crucial to art history. The conceptual elements of shitposting, its ideas of producing an output of notably low effort, with enough capability to rise reactions from those lacking in acumen, and then continue to overwhelm the viewers by reproducing the same min-effort/max-impact work are comparable to the pursuits of the Dada movement. With its lack of principles, no cohesive aesthetic, and overt anti-normality take on making art, Dada holds many similarities with shitposting. Even contextually they are somewhat parallel, with the birth of Dada spewed from the loins of a WWI-era Europe in which class divisions widened between the uppers who were protected and profiteered from the war and the working class who suffered financially and psychological from its first-hand effects, paired with a spike in nationalism and a deduction in perceived human rights it was the turmoil and the bastardizations of the modern human society that spurred the reflective works of Dada, in essence producing shit art for a shit period. Whilst lacking in the same kind of industrialised killings of a World War, today’s society can be seen as comparable to the same conditions Dada was born under, a sharp rise in nationalism broaching into outright fascism in many places; a correlating increase in alienated peoples changing the other side of the political pendulum; governments which actively undermine their own people for financial gain (as if that’s anything new); consequences from governments decades past haunting marginalised communities and countries; a revolt every other day in every other country; an alphabet or damaging ‘-isms’ and ‘-phobias’; and a general feeling of slow and sinking madness infecting society, it’s easy to see why such absurdist practices as shitposting were born.

It’s easy to see certain similarities, even in famous—or infamous—examples such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) which was sent to a gallery exhibition as an absurdist remark on arts dichotomy between the aesthetic and the conceptual, the ceramic shitpost (or rather pisspost) of an overturned urinal embodied the same attitude as a modern shitposts, irritating to any traditionalist constant, and amusing to those who either don’t understand it or do. Shitposting is an effective way to overturn expectations and subvert opinions. Even the way it spread so suddenly, with a rise and fall caught in six years in over ten countries across the globe mimics the viral sensationalism of internet trends, rising to a global impact to suddenly deconstruct itself through saturation.

Both subjects were also entwined with the political game, with Dada practically challenging any traditionalist view it could, condemning the rising nationalist tendencies and capitalist fervour of societal ‘progress’, found especially amongst the Berlin group. Under the depression of the Weimar republic and the following rise in oppression by the Nazi party, German Dadaists continued their absurd political communication and activities through art, with their efforts corralled in with other morally objectionable art labelled as ‘degenerate’—a word that has also found relevance amongst certain shitposters—they rebelled nonetheless, with artist John Heartfield even sending postcards of his work directly to Nazi leaders, a literal shitpost.

However, just as concept and context can be applied, so can criticism to both subjects. Some art historians have noted Dadas perverse relationship with race, with a streak of using racially charged language an imagery with little to know relation or appreciation for other races, especially that of Africans with prominent member George Grosz often performing a minstrel show at the movements epicentre the Cabaret Voltaire and the Incoherents Paul Bilhaud painting an all-black work titled Combat de Nègres dans un Tunnel (Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel by Night, 1882). Paired with a fetishization of racial others as ‘primitive’ Dada had problematic effects, much like shitposting which, as previously discussed, has become lumped in with the narrative of deplorability within right-wing margins, and later majorities. However, from personal experience I have seen just as much shitposting from left-wing sources as right-wing, because it lacks any concrete coding and has evolved from mindless pastime to activist tool, but there are obvious questions on whether politics should be taken in such a Dada direction, whether it’s anti-sense sensibilities will reduce politics to further churlishness that it already is, whether elections will do away with voting systems for a game of ‘how many memes can either side send’.

I’m not here to concern myself with the politics of shitposting, I’m studying this topic from a sincerity past politics and into a wider philosophical scope. I love shitposting, the anonymous nature of the internet lets me crawl into someone else’s life, sew whatever discourse or confusion I can and then promptly leave, like a stray rat running across a kitchen floor only to never be seen again, moved on to another person’s virtual kitchen. However just as a rat searches for food, I search for shitposting grounds that are comfortable to me, things that I care about or have some sort of personal opinion on, things like euthanasia, suicide, societal expectations, abortions, issues on morality, art, and other various philosophical conundrums that I am slowly devolving. In some cases, I think it’s the most earnest thing one can do, to laugh into the void as it were and generate absurdist rebellion to normality that’ll upset its balance. I even think it has practical applications, take into consideration the increase in targeted advertising algorithms, in which websites and apps hijack personal information you send or even speak privately to sell you products. But by streaming false or flagrantly inflated information instead it is possible to confuse and disrupt the targeting algorithms, a small rebellion against corporate injustice. Some may call it sadistic, or sociopathic, or just plain sad to deliberately seek and produce such effortless and meaningless content, but I see it to hone my ideological axe, to build my ideas into more concrete forms. Paired with the previously mentioned anti-normality connotations with the Dada movement, and the current cultural relevance of it, I think the philosophical implications behind shitposting are essential to my current work and I will continue to take inspiration from it.

“How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul; dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap

Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.”

#contextualresearch #studiopractice4

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heavyyhearts-blog · 7 years

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actually heres my side

“ first, before getting to real stuff, aya has done this to other people in the past too. when she talked about them to me she said they abused her or abandoned her suddenly. i’ve only talked to one of these people, but they confirmed that aya actually abused, and then stalked them when they cut her off. i don’t have permission to post these logs so out of respect i won’t put them here. “

ive never been very clear in talking about my past experiences with most people. you make this sound as if every person that's ever "abandoned me" were all "abused" by me, when that's not the case. have i acted in shitty ways to some people? yes, but it never had anything to do with me being abandoned, at any point. one of these people, actually straight up disappeared from my life, and i have no idea why. they disappeared off skype and i havent seen them since. we had no problems between eachother whatsoever. a different example i can think of for someone i was talking about? they left because i was too stressful to be around. as in, i always complained too much and that kind of thing and it was too much to be around. i didnt even know them very long. another example of a person i mentioned with that: they had really bad schizophrenia and like, trauma issues, and what happened there? they'd randomly like? actually start basically splitting on me and getting extremely angry at me out of nowhere for no reason, which i tried to be really tolerable of, until things basically got too much for either of us to handle and after a bit of dumb drama, we separated with , i believe, no hard feelings.

my point being? when i say "ive been abandoned by a lot of people" or whatever, im not literally claiming that i was abused by literally everyone and im some huge victim, lol. that last example? you could probably say i was abused due to the level of pent up anger they were throwing at me, , unprovoked

“ i’ve only talked to one of these people, but they confirmed that aya actually abused, and then stalked them when they cut her off “

first of all, this happened literal years ago. second of all, this person is still full of shit and i can't believe they still insist all of these bullshit lies. "aya stalked me" i hadnt visited your blog for months, i'd literally forgotten about you, yet you somehow still had it set in your head that i was "stalking" you. i wanted to remake my blog for a multitude of reasons, and one of them being, a more back of my mind thing, was, i didnt want you viewing my blog. so i remade. and, like, 2-3 days later, i got paranoid that you had somehow found my new blog, entirely new, so i asked my friend to go see if my new url was on there, because i didnt want to go back on your blog myself. and sure enough, there it was, my new url, even though i hadn't given it out to anyone or posted it anywhere, meaning you literally searched through notes of a post or something along those lines to find it. yeah ive explained this so many times now its fun :) not to mention your shitty friend(s) that would constantly twist my words around and lie saying i was doingthings that i didnt. and your only "proof" was logs of talking shit about me behind my back to one of my friends, you had no screenshots of me doing anything, because guess what, i never did it. wow. "i dont have screenshots because i deleted them all" okay bud. anyway

and now here's my main issue with everything: you are "calling me out" for things we have already personally talked about, that we either resolved, or i apologized for/said that i would try to stop doing so i can better myself which i have actually done? so i literally do not understand why youre calling me out for shit as if im some malicious person trying to hurt people that's just completely incapable of getting better or whatever. lets start

“i’ve tried to cut her off several times, both by trying to talk and express my want to stop talking to her first and by just blocking/ignoring her on everything. i made it clear i wanted to stop talking the first couple of times. she will spam and beg me and make new accounts if she has to. once ive added her back however she’s used that against me”

okay youre calling me out for this but you admitted what you did was fucked up too? and i dont know what else to even say to this other than im going to try to stop getting so attached to people like that so i maybe dont have such bad mental breakdowns every time i thnk someone close to me is leaving like sorry i cant. help feeling that way or control this thing specifically unless i just dont get attached like that at all, which is my fault.

[x] [x] [x]

here, you post a completely out of context rant from me, where i got mad at something you did that you literally admitted was fucked up. full context!

[x] [x] [x] [x] [x]

you even told me you had no idea what you were talking about with any of it.

“ one of the times that we weren’t talking she DMd my twitter mutuals asking them to screenshot my recent tweets. “

i told you my reason for it. i was extremely paranoid that you were talking shit about me behind my back and i wanted to know if you were or not, even though i did it in a really shitty way. i instantly felt so beyond terrible that i had done that. i was sobbing the entire time i was trying to apologize for how fucked up and wrong it was of me to do that, and even apologized for it again later after it had happened already. because i wanted to make sure you knew how sorry i was for it. i cant take something like that back.

[x] [x]

“recently, after getting so upset with me for doing the same thing in the past, she randomly blocked me on everything and refused to talk to me. i would understand if she hadn’t previously gotten so mad and upset at me for the exact same thing. “

?? i split really bad just like i already have been, due to , as i've already exlpained, the nonstop bad things we've had between us for months, to the point i havent been able to talk to you like normal anymore, because just seeing you pisses me off and everything you say/do will just piss me off. i cant help that. its not my fault. i cant just not split like that because we've had fucked up problems for months, that, guess what, shouldnt even be public here for all reasons ive already stated! but i also did it just because ive been deciding i need to get away from you for good, that i dont WANT to talk to you at all anymore. sucks to be treated the way you treat others right.

“ i posted on my twitter saying i wanted to drink and she instantly messaged me begging and spamming me not to “

and everything else like stalling, pressuring you etc. this is still. we talked about this. i said sorry. i got better about it. why do i have a callout.

[x] [x]

like this is literally all just trying to make me look bad in ways that i'm not. nice try, though!

“ when i cc’d bakugou and she tried to make me explain my trauma to make it Valid “

you're trying to make me look bad again. i was just asking because i was anxious wanted to know the reasoning for it and im sorry for pressing it at all but that doesnt mean i was trying to make you explain it so it could be "valid" shut the fuck up lol i even explained to you afterwards why it made me so uncomfortable and that it didnt bother me anymore, that i thought you were just blindly cc'ing him for no real reason like i just assumed it wasnt a coping thing or anything and thats my fault but??? youre trying to make me look bad for it so??? i'd even keep sending you fanart of him like.

[x]

“ she was extremely dependent on me and would spam me if i fell asleep before she woke up, she’d got upset and started splitting on me because i didn’t return her feelings of attraction. “

wat...

“ second, she’s blaming everything on her BPD and “not being able to help it,” or “can’t control herself” “

well, as you can clearly see, ive been anything but that??? but if you wanna keep telling yourself that, go ahead. have i said things LIKE that before? yes, when i was freaking out, over certain things i actually can't help, for example: abandonment trauma??? and like i said before: i need to try to not get so attached to people in the first place so that doesnt happen anymore! otherwise, should some sort of situation like that happen again, i can't handle getting that level of upset. so i prevent that by not getting that level of attached at all. like sorry but theres certain things nobody can help, even you. you're just trying to make it sound like this entire thing has been nothing but "i cant help it"

and lastly, we can't forget the fact that, for a long time, you wouldn't tell me anything. literally anything. i would repeatedly ask you. "what do i do that bothers you what am i doing wrong" etc and all you'd ever say was "idk" 95% of the time. i had absolutely no idea that for the longest time, i had been saying a lot of manipulative, shitty things and acting bad and etc, slash i had no idea that some of my episodes were actually affecting you that badly until way too late.

when you first told me that i had been acting so shitty, through a jpeg meme that was making fun of me, did i realize how awful i was being. i honest to god never had any idea and i explained this to you countless times. that i was oblivious/i can be oblivious to shitl ike that and that i need you to tell me, otherwise I WONT KNOW.

nice meme. :) but yeah clearly this is still an accurate representation of me, right?

[x] [x]

yeah, you got me though. im a toxic, abusive piece of shit that will never get better, all i do is hurt others, i can't change, ive never apologized, ive never gotten better. totally

and since we're playing this game,

and now that i've said all this, i have nothing else to say. i can't make anyone believe me, but if you do, thanks.

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shutdownld50-blog · 7 years

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ABOUT LD50'S REACTIONARY TURN

The LD50 gallery in Dalston, London last year ran this series of talks featuring 6 high profile far right reactionary speakers:

#9 Sunday – 7th August 2016– 12pm NICK LAND on Techno-Commercial NRx

#8 Saturday – 6th August 2016 �� 6pm MARK CITADEL [as virtual avatar] 'Christianity, Progressivism, and the Occidental Soul' watch here

#7 Saturday – 6th August 2016 – 6pm BRETT STEVENS [as virtual avatar] ‘The Black Pill’ watch here

#6 Sunday – 31st July 2016– 6pm PETER BRIMELOW on Imigration, Ethnicity and Economics listen here

#5 Sunday – 24th July 2016 – 6pm IBEN THRANHOLM on The Sanctuary of Traditionalism in Russia and the West listen here

#4 Saturday – 28th May 2016 – 6pm Dr PETER SAUNDERS ‘Epigenetics and Evolution Theory’ screening: The Monk and the Honeybee (1989) listen here #3 Saturday – 21st May 2016 – 6pm Dr FLORIAN PLATTNER ‘Can we enhance memory?’ screening: TransHumanism ( h+) / Genetic Modification of Life (2010) listen here

#2 Wednesday – 18th May 2016 – 6pm ‘Autoimmunity’ (hosted by Goldsmiths university) watch here

#1 Saturday – 7th May 2016 – 6pm Dr SILVIA CAMPORESI ‘CRISPR Genome Editing Technologies: Which possible futures?’ screening: Gattaca (1997) listen here

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.ld50gallery.com%2Ftalks%2F

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

The talks programme mixes straight up fascists and reactionaries with other innocuous seeming figures with no known right wing affiliation or convictions.

Peter Brimelow is hardcore fascist: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/peter-brimelow

As is Brett Stevens: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2011/07/26/american-blogger-praises-oslo-shooter

Mark Citadel seems to be part of the 'Return of Kings' manosphere blog, so is clearly another reactionary voice. (‘Return Of Kings is a blog for heterosexual, masculine men. [...] men should be masculine and women should be feminine.’ – to quote their own philosophically self-undermining self-description.)

Iben Thranholm is a proponent of racist, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, homophobic and misogynist politics. She routinely discourses on the need to resurrect strong ‘european' gender binaries and ‘strong men’ to ‘protect women’ from 'male immigrants' who she presents as a violent sexual threat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaOLgy3YKtA

Nick Land: One can split hairs by saying that Nick Land isn't a white supremacist and is just into eugenic selection for intelligence so we can survive the coming AI singularity. However, a close reading of his recent writing reveals he just doesn't like immigrants and black people. He likes Asians because they are deemed to be smart and polite, and he likes Japanese because they've resisted immigration. Racism is an aura around all his other pronouncements.

The first three named speakers in the talks series – Peter Saunders, Silvia Camporesi, and Florian Plattner – are all reputable scholars. The topic of epigenetics (Saunders’ subject) is a hot button one for the new biological racists, because it shortens timelines over which evolutionary change can potentially happen, meaning that changes in historical time can have significant effects on human populations. This is usually used to argue that evolution within NW European populations has led to the wonders of the Enlightenment and enhanced IQ, while everyone else are just cousin-marrying knuckle draggers who are resistant to democracy because they haven't selected for non kin altruistic behaviour. The fact that HBD (human biodiversity) proponents use and sometimes misuse epigenetics doesn't mean anyone talking about it is necessarily fascist.

Considering the rest of the line up, however, it seems these figures fulfilled a kind of legitimating function for LD50’s project. Openly reactionary speakers could enjoy credibility by association with reputable academics. However innocent, they became tools in what appears to be a conscious and extended attempt to promote extremely reactionary ideas by introducing them, uncritically and indeed enthusiastically, to an art world and art educational context.

The live streams still available on the gallery’s blog testify to LD50’s gushing reception of and advocacy for racist, white supremacist, misogynist and homophobic views. If we can learn one thing from the above, it is the need to stop assuming everything programmed by small or large galleries is at worst ‘exploratory’, ironic or even critical – either an intellectual provocation or contribution to ‘discussion’. This programme appears to have been part of a wider far right push to infiltrate academic institutions, and to normalise and promote extremely reactionary ideas.

THE ART OF ENTRYISM

As well as the talks programme, LD50 also mounted a gallery show, 'Amerika'. Dedicated to the so called alt-right, and featuring wall to wall Pepe memes, kek, 'neoreactionary' esoterica, and misogyny, the same structure of plausible deniability allowed some at least to view the show as a kind of enquiry into a cultural phenomenon rather tha a direct act of political infiltration. Any illusions about the disinterested or critical ambitions of the gallery have been dispelled by the recent public revelation of the gallery's politics. A brief review of the gallery's blog reveals a show brimming with sympathy for affluent white male mass murderers of of women and muslims, but nothing that would pass for actual critique – let alone the visceral disgust this material evokes in those who side not with abstractions ('free speech') but human victims of violent oppression.

A similar standard of fascist entryism is seen in artwork still displayed on the gallery's website: a pseudo-critique of consumerism by replication (look, Taylor Swift!) exuding a will to distinction and superiority, at the same time functions to run fascist ideas (text by Hitler) and symbols (the Afrikaner white supremacist flag) past the un/knowing art consumer:

https://www.ld50gallery.com/exhibitions/

Some further background and analysis from the Horrible Gif blog's piece on the LD50 debacle:

'LD50, a small project space in dalston junction, had some exhibitions of questionable taste and arrangement in recent months. The alt-right exhibit it staged using scavenged parts of the aesthetic and philosophical matter online wasn’t immediately partisan on the surface. It could have been bad satire, it could have been one of those things many adult-child digital artists do where they incorporate the very thing they critique. Obviously the depraved chasm which 4chan and allotments of reddit are located in is morbidly fascinating, to someone who feels they’re on an important media archaeology tip even moreso. Despite the Hitler quotes coupled with anime motifs and other bizarre conflations of alt-right imagery, the show itself didn’t offer a concrete position. This is a commonplace exhibition model that allows “racy” subject matter to be presented with critical immunity, because the art moves to within a viewers praxis. More often this is used with cultural appropriation, where a white artist will extract reference points and framing devices from culture they do not belong to and situate the art itself on the intersection of their gaze, etc etc. So the art is about the white gaze on other culture, that way it removes itself from, at best, being accused of ignoring postcolonial theory or, at worst, just being mildly racist. Very meta though, and you can extract 2000 words from meta quite easily. With the benefit of hindsight plus a screenshot of a private fb conversation, it became obvious the curiosity with the alt-right wasn’t coolly detached in the LD50 show. Given the social media output of LD50 runs along moaning lines about the apolitical nature of net artists and glib rejoinders to political/social occurances, strangely they might have found the blazing political net art they were looking for… just the bad kind of politics. HEY, bad is a construct in art that is irrelevant after postmodernism and pop art, so who is to say it is bad? It’s just neo-reactionary. Sounds like the working title of a group of Final Fantasy rebels. These dodgy politics weren’t always so clear, even in that classic uncertain/ironic way, so it’s possible it was a slippery slope slodden down.

As said in the beginning of this longform rant, the social media microdramas of the art cottage industry aren’t very interesting in themselves beyond the sorry online appearances of calculated hostility and contrived artjoke acumen. But with artist Sophie Jung posting in a public way a ‘call-out’ to a curator of a gallery holding quite dodgy fascist views, the fallout is more interesting than the usual bruised/inflated egos or comment flame wars. The gallery itself has responded by “archiving” the post and all the comments on the main page, as doxing (a strategy of online shaming perfected by the alt-right) bait to sentient pepe memes and twitter eggs. It’s an obfuscatory and aloof reaction, one that shows particular acumen to online psychological skirmishing. Take away the veneer of irony and you see only a few slimy individuals toying with repugnant ideas that most good artists would give no merit, even as illusory discourse.

Is it right to call out someone by posting private convos? Well, check the gallery events and talks - they were pretty public (albeit small and within purposely obfuscating platforms) call outs to those neon genesis authoritarians. A lighter discourse than “is it ok to punch a nazi?” but no less annoying. Of course the answer is yes. Do you argue the inverse that the alt-right should be given platforms? Do you agree with the BBC giving airtime to UKIP but not the Green Party, who have existed for longer/have more members/more elected MPs/have actually run a fucking area of the country? Logic has associations, and while you can spin them away, we fucking see you. The alt-right would legislate for the structural, hidden bureaucratic violence against non-white/foreign people but it is not OK to punch them? They’d happily punch you. It can be so easy if it doesn’t affect you, or to think it wouldn’t, to think that exposing their bullshit is better. Hindenburg thought Hitler wouldn’t be as evil when he finally was given power, the tories seemed to think appeasing the UKIP types was the best way to keep themselves in power. Fuck m9, punch tories AND nazis if you can get away with it. Yeah, if you can back it up, calling people out on something as basic as nazi sympathies is OK. Why did it take so long to be called out on? The alt-right are super zeitgeisty right now and net art dorks are into that because it can be processed into smug “political” diatribe and gestural academica. Things within the art gallery mechanica are afforded un-anchored critical protection at least until the management are revealed to think the muslim ban is fine.'

http://horriblegif.com/post/157189463814/level-drama-50

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