Don't make me post motivational alcoholic pictures as encouragement.

Ban cities. Boom, gun problem solved.

No more school shootings without a school to shoot up, amirite?

And why are these states surrounding Chicago not as bad off?

That's a strange question. I'm sure you're aware that Mexico has some major issues with violent crime and shootings, right? Just like Chicago, Mexico has pretty strict gun control rules but they don't have that much effect because lax gun laws in the US cause tens of thousands of guns crossing the border to the cartels. It's estimated that 2000 American guns are smuggled into Mexico every single day as a consequence of the loose gun control rules in America. Maybe you'd understand it better if I rephrased your question as "why is the USA, a country bordering Mexico, not as bad off"? I'm sure you'll agree that there's more differences between the countries than just their gun laws, no?

But to briefly answer your question, there's several reasons. As I already said, Chicago is a historical crime capital. It's globally notorious for its gang culture and was the home city of Al Capone and the original gangsters back in the early 1900's. It has a major opioid crisis, its police force has actually been relatively undercut compared to other major cities, it's got poor (social) housing, large high poverty areas with little social support, job opportunities and access to good schooling. This drives a large influx from guns from surrounding states where they're easier to get. There's entire books written on crime trends in Chicago and this Quora Thread provides a nice overview with references and sources.

And again, I just want to remind of you cities like St. Louis which have a higher violent crime and homicide rate than Chicago despite having some of the loosest gun control laws in the country. Poverty, lack of social mobility, gang culture and drugs have long been proven to go relate to higher crime rates, so you framing this as if Chicago's gun control is somehow to blame for the situation is incredibly disingenuous and misleading.

Also, just to entertain your line of thought from earlier. You made the point that gun control doesn't work because of the (very questionable) claim that crime went down with less restrictions on firearms. Well in 2013, Chicago got rid of a gun owners registry and allowed concealed carry in public. This was arguably the most significant loosening of its gun laws ever. The two following years, the amount of people wounded and killed by guns increased significantly. By 2016, the amount of people murdered in Chicago had almost doubled. How could this possibly have happened? You said gun control doesn't work and only increases crime rates. Surely the introduction of concealed carry would allow people to defend themselves and deter or stop criminals, no? So why are we seeing the opposite? Why are there more shootings, more murders and more violent crime immediately after removing gun control rules?

Of course, no one who knows anything about crime trends and criminology would jump to the conclusion that it's the concealed carry that contributed to the spike in homicides. There's too many other factors to definitively prove correlation, let alone causation. My point just is that two can play the game of, as you put it, "not seeing all the variables here" and pushing a very narrow argument that lacks nuance and ignores key information. So let's not do that, alright?

Quote from: Shhhhhh on March 26, 2018, 04:16:37 PM

YouTube

His sources were no better or less biased than mine, actually.

Lol. You had two sources. One is "Wintery Knight", an anonymous, heavily religious and very much right wing and pro-gun blogger with zero credentials citing a 6 year old Fox News editorial by, as I already pointed out, a discredited and nearly fraudulent NRA-financed economist whose research is so shoddy that even other right wing institutions like Cato have distanced themselves from him. The other is nothing more than an opinion piece by a climate change denier who didn't provide any links to his sources and cited long debunked research from the 90's that was so incorrect and misleading that even the DoJ got involved in the gun debate with a press release stating that it's in no way reliable. Excellent and unbiased sources man.

Mine were by PhD's in public health and law, the RAND Corporation, the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, the International Business Times providing a factual overview of gun control in Chicago, a Snopes article filled with references, the Scientific American Journal and the Live Science Magazine (both providing an index of dozens of peer reviewed studies) and the official Department of Justice's National Gang Center.

It's very disingenuous to imply these are equal or even comparable, and the fact that you've been unable to respond to any of my arguments and counter-points very much adds to that.

It is proven that gun control only makes things worse, even in areas with strict gun control like Chicago and D.C. it increased GUN CRIME!

On the off-chance that you're not just another troll, this is factually false and downright uninformed to say.

Why is “Sieg Heil” offensive again? It literally just means “Hail victory”. We don’t get offended by the Japanese going “Banzai”.

Because of the context. Sieg Heil has been claimed and tainted by Hitler and his regime. It's not used in Germany anymore and is inextricably linked to nazism. The words "blood and soil" are also completely innocent and meaningless on its own, but the context of it being one of the most prominent slogans of neo-nazis / far right extremists / white supremacists all over the world does give it a very loaded meaning.

Also, this guy isn't German. That's a key difference here. There is no way he'd ever use the words sieg heil to describe anything normal as someone speaking German might do. It's like the word "fuhrer". In Germany, it's still used to refer to "leader" in conjunction with other words. But outside of the German language, literally no one would use it in any neutral way. If you're a German and say Fuhrer there's several things it might refer to. If you're a Scottish dude saying Sieg Heil (two words that don't even appear in your language), it's very clear what you're getting at.

Bed joke

True love.

Quote from: Flee on March 24, 2018, 09:23:12 PM

Quote from: Aether on March 23, 2018, 04:56:39 PM

Can I just ask you what you believe the alt-right really is as a movement?

It's hard to define because it lacks a central platform and doesn't really have an established program or leadership. But if I had to make an attempt, I'd say it's a reactionary anti-movement consisting primarily of younger people (15-40) who are resisting the left / liberal / progressive mindset but also feel they're out of touch with the established and traditional conservative platform. I think it's "alt(ernative)" in two ways. One, it's different in the way it operates. The alt right embraces internet culture, social media subgroups and online anonymity to reach a large audience without relying on traditional methods like membership registration and centralized platforms. While there's no real leaders, the movement relies heavily on the voices of community figureheads who steer and influence followers on platforms like youtube and twitter.

Two, the alt right espouses a different ideology than other conservative / right wing movements. As an explicitly reactionary counter-movement, it's more radical and regressive than traditional conservatism. Due to it being such a vague group without a concrete goal or defined stance on many issues, it consists of a wide variety of people. Still, I think there's some views that are either integral to or extremely common in the movement. It's highly populist, anti-immigration, anti-globalism, anti-multiculturalism and against anything perceived as political correctness or the mainstream media. It's usually transphobic, islamophobic and often anti-semitic, and frequently associates with white supremacist and identitarianist views. It's anti-feminist, regularly homophobic, often misogynist and very nationalist. It's an enormous propagator of fake news and misinformation, thrives on filter bubbles and echo chambers, and pushes a very divisive narrative against "the other" that lacks nuance, honesty and intellectual rigor. While I sometimes do happen to agree with them on certain things, I can't stand the movement. It's hypocritical to its core as it's as much of a giant snowflake as the SJWs it opposes, and it too usually values emotions over facts and reason. It's shameful and, again, embodies so much of what I think is wrong with our (digital) society these days.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying these people should be banned. I'm just not sure what the best solution here is. As I said, driving them away indeed risks entrenching their beliefs further and turning them into even more of an echo chamber. But the opposite isn't exactly working well either. Having them on the mainstream platforms gives them much more legitimacy, a much larger audience and more (monetary) incentives to continue. They make more money, grow faster, are more easily accessible and can infect many more people at a much more rapid pace. Misleading videos and fake news are going to have a much larger impact on a platform like YouTube than they are on a fringe site like Bitchute where the most popular video of the last 24 hours only barely has more than 2,000 views (and to add to my impression of the low quality of these sites, it's called "Game over, Hillaryites" and talks about Podesta being an occult child rapist murderer in the description). I think you can definitely argue that many of the people whose beliefs are already so radical that they'd move to these fringe alt-tech sites just so they can continue eating up this content probably already are beyond constructive debate and that it would be a net positive to move them to the offsites where even the top trending videos have only a fraction of the impact that any decently popular video on youtube has. That, or perhaps simply demonetizing and hiding the videos as much as possible on the mainstream platforms would work better.

Trust me, I want to believe that debate and reason still works as an effective counter. I've just grown increasingly disillusioned with how effective it is in the digital age. Massive manipulation campaigns and people spreading misinformation got us Trump and Brexit despite significant efforts to counter it. YouTube has millions of users and content creators on all sides of the political spectrum and yet, despite this balance that you speak of definitely being there, I don't think you can honestly say that it's improved the situation much or that reason and properly informed debates are coming out on top. People just do the same thing and stick to their own comfort zone of alt content creators pushing misleading information and very slanted narratives. Only now, these bottom-tier channels reach a large audience, make good money and still go pretty much unchallenged.

And I agree that most people won't follow along with the most extreme ideas being pandered there, but that's not what I think the real issue is. It's the slowly escalating alternative facts and misinformation. "Obama is a reptilian zionist working with illuminati" is something few people will buy into. That's of little concern. What's much more problematic are the real examples I gave earlier. "California liberals to legalize child prostitution". "Clinton pushing nuclear war with Russia over Syria". "EXPOSED: Clinton guilty of TREASON and plans to steal American jobs". People pretending to be factual and scientific while cherrypicking and presenting information in a slanted and misleading way. From openly alt-right conspiracy theorists like PJW to thinly veiled "skeptics" pushing the same misleading narrative onto impressionable people who often just want their biases reaffirmed and don't have the time or interest to do the research themselves. And it's insidious because it affects so many people. You're clearly a reasonable and intelligent guy. And yet, not too long ago, you ran with the opinion of a wholly unqualified and uneducated psychologist and his devotees on something very complex and well out of his area of expertise even though one of the first Google results is a Canadian scholar and law professor specialized in this field giving a detailed overview of how these people got it wrong. It took me going over the law in detail and providing you with over a dozen sources from law institutions, legal experts, the Canadian bar association and so on before you started seeing things differently. And I'm not saying that to blame you or anything. We're all susceptible to this but it pains me to see it almost weaponized like this.

This was much more of a rant than I intended. This stuff just frustrates me to no end. Maybe it's because my job requires me to do the opposite, but I find it hard to stomach how many people not only want to validate their preconceptions (which is something we all do) but deliberately go out of their way to exclusively dig up information that feeds into that and see things so black/white without nuance or much critical thought. Yeah, fuck the high quality news outlets with journalistic standards that issue apologies and retract mistaken pieces. Really, it's liberalgenocide.blogpost.com that brings the REAL news instead of the fake MSM! And fuck peer reviewed research by criminologists and economists. Really, it's DeplorableGunLover on YouTube twisting 15 year old crime stats without looking at any of the other socio-economic happenings that will bring you the REAL truth about violent crime next to his "pepe cucks libtards" hit videos. It's all just so depressing, you know? There's no nuance or honesty and almost none of these channels present anything fairly or properly. I'm all ears if you know some that are but most of the skeptic and alt channels are just so embarrassingly shit, dishonest and biased. I genuinely hate that, and the alt-tech platforms just really seem to embody it all.

So Blizzard are banning people over emotes pepe memes, and even in-game fucking voice lines now.

Man I wish I could refund this shitcan game. I need cash for a mouse or a wiimote.

Not sure where you're getting that from, but they haven't banned anyone for using pepe memes and there's only been one case of someone being banned for spamming voice commands - and that was non-stop disruptive spam alongside griefing and throwing several games.

Quote from: Flee on March 22, 2018, 08:23:38 PM

Quote from: Aether on March 22, 2018, 08:13:16 PM

I try to spread the word about alt-tech sites but normies don't really give a shit, and until something forces them to, Google, Facebook, and all the rest will maintain their monopoly on social media.

I'd be a lot more sympathetic to these alt-tech channels if they weren't almost all detestable shitholes pushing lies, hate, fake news and inflammatory content in an attempt to drown out reasonable and intellectual discussions and promote division, filter bubbles and populist shite.

Wow you sound bitter af.

I enjoy Bitchute and Minds because they respect free speech values and allow creators to monetize without having to compromise what they think and say. Sure there can be some whacked out ideas presented on these sites but there are whacked out ideas on Youtube and Facebook as well, and I believe I am perfectly capable of entertaining crazy without having to agree with it.

Your idea of alt-tech seems particularly distorted by a disdain for certain types of people. A site like minds for instance has a very diverse user base and has plenty of reasonable intellectual discussion happening. Just because they don't boot out aggressive or provocative users does not mean the site is a detestable shithole. If that's what you believe then we certainly aren't on the same page. I just can't agree with that sentiment.

Bitter isn't the right word. Legitimately pissed off is. I recently worked with a group of sociologists and engineers to provide legal counsel for the development of technologies to "burst the bubble". I've read the impact studies and talked to people with hands-on and behind the screens experience with these big social media giants. At the risk of sounding cliche, the potential fallout of this is unprecendented as this kind of toxic content gains more and more traction in increasingly divided and misinformed groups. The "alternative facts" meme has lost popularity but it's actually worse than ever. I genuinely think that this is one of the biggest issues our society faces right now, so you saying I have a disdain for these hatemongering and anti-intellectual people pushing fake news, misinformation divisiveness against "the other" is a massive understatement.

YouTube and Facebook have their fair share of crazy stuff, that's true. But it's in moderation, doesn't reward the people pandering it, and isn't (intentionally) promoted. On these alt sites, this kind of content is the core of the whole platform. It tops "most popular" and "trending" and is pushed in your face under the shiny banner of "featured" content. I already posted a list of the shit that's considered top content on bitchute and checked out Minds earlier as well. Among the first groups I saw were a climate change debate and skeptic one. Sounds interesting and reasonable, no? Unfortunately, the first one consisted largely of deniers posting memes and attacking "alarmists" for thinking climate change is real, and the "skeptics" were people talking about how the government has been hiding UFO landings. And these weren't some tiny fringe hideouts but relatively large and promoted communities. Even the discussions on the current top blogs aren't any better. It's as if your "seeds and gemstones can cure cancer" hippie aunt and "I'm not racist but damn negroes" uncle started their own social network. The only "reasonable and intellectual discussions" I've seen on there were in a group about gardening.

Minds is better than bitchute but I don't think either has much going for it. They're not detestable shitholes because they don't boot out provocative users. They're detestable shitholes because they embody all of the problems I've already described and are only looking to capitalize on it further. You can well say that bitchute wasn't created for these people but I think that's disingenuous. The site was deliberately made as a platform when other sites started pushing back against the bullshit they put out. IIRC, Bitchute reached out to specific names to join and promote the platform. That's not a neutral alt hosting site made to benefit all. It was made specifically to cater to these people. You can say that I'm slapping a blanket label on it, but I've been checking out both sites intermittently and think I've got a pretty good idea of what they're like. And that's just more of the same echo chamber, slanted misinformation and anti-intellectual BS that is becoming increasingly problematic.

In theory, I'm all in favor of alt-tech moving away from the current giants with their data mining practices. But up until actually decent platforms start popping up, I'm in no way interested in becoming part of these sites that are really just echo chambers and havens for the alt right and the fringe groups whose bullshit and behavior got them shunned from reasonable platforms.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925

A man who filmed a pet dog giving Nazi salutes before putting the footage on YouTube has been convicted of committing a hate crime. Mark Meechan, 30, recorded his girlfriend's pug, Buddha, responding to statements such as "gas the Jews" and "Sieg Heil" by raising its paw. But police were alerted and he was arrested for allegedly committing a hate crime. The original clip had been viewed more than three million times on YouTube.

Meechan, of Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, went on trial at Airdrie Sheriff Court where he denied any wrong doing.

He insisted he made the video, which was posted in April 2016, to annoy his girlfriend Suzanne Kelly, 29. But Sheriff Derek O'Carroll found him guilty of a charge under the Communications Act that he posted a video on social media and YouTube which was grossly offensive because it was "anti-semitic and racist in nature" and was aggravated by religious prejudice. Sheriff O'Carroll told the court he did not believe Meechan had made the video only to annoy his girlfriend and ruled it was anti-Semitic.

He also said he believed Meechan - who was supported at court by Tommy Robinson, former leader of far-right group the English Defence League (EDL) - left the video on YouTube to drive traffic to other material he had on there. He added: "In my view it is a reasonable conclusion that the video is grossly offensive. "The description of the video as humorous is no magic wand. "This court has taken the freedom of expression into consideration. "But the right to freedom of expression also comes with responsibility."

Sheriff O'Carroll said Meehan was "quite obviously an intelligent and articulate man". But he added: "The accused knew that the material was offensive and knew why it was offensive. "Despite that the accused made a video containing anti-Semitic content and he would have known it was grossly offensive to many Jewish people."

Ross Brown, defending, said Meechan had only intended the video to be seen by a small group of friends and to annoy his girlfriend.  He said the material had been leaked and gone viral but Police Scotland then wrongly pursued Meechan despite his later videos attempting to "set the record straight".

Mr Brown said: "His girlfriend testified that Mr Meechan had never made known to her any anti-Semitic views whatsoever. "The accused possesses both tolerant and liberal views. "His girlfriend is in no doubt it was an example of his sense of humour."

Shameful judgement. Not a fan of the guy but this is undue.

Understandable. Such free platforming does unfortunately bring out the true undesirables  that most everyone else does not wish to hear from, but those of us who simply wish to lawfully and safely enjoy recreational firearm use do not appreciate the automatic association with such.
But what else can you do (besides moving to pornhub) when the monopolizing force on video sharing social media decides that you're not welcome on their platform anymore?

Yeah, that's the bigger issue. It's a derivative from the age old question of whether and how to tolerate intolerance. Keep them on the mainstream platforms and you risk harming the business and exposing heaps of people to this kind of toxic content that might draw them in. But shun them and you risk feeding their persecution complex as they migrate to an echo chamber where their convictions and divisions just deepen. I don't know what the answer here is either, other than limiting their exposure on the mainstream platforms.

For what it's worth, I don't think the good Youtube channels should disappear either. I understand Youtube's reasoning but don't believe getting rid of all gun content would be the right to do.

Quote from: Flee on March 22, 2018, 07:24:07 PM

"YouTube has turned to their community to identify which videos potentially violate their Community Guidelines.  If a viewer flags a video that they think violates the TOS and Community Guidelines then YouTube staff will take a look and, if it is a violation, they’ll take the video down.

That doesn`t make any sense. There are thousands, if not more, videos which get flagged everyday and they have average 10 min length (after youtube implemented adpocalypse). So to review those, you have to have either a giant team of people (which you need to pay) or you have to implement "more reviewed videos - more salary" mechanism that just make your team to skim through all videos, but that just will make things even worse.

I don't think it's that nonsensical. Youtube will soon be employing 10,000 fully paid moderators that do nothing but review reports. To me, that constitutes as a "pretty giant team of people". :p

I also don't think the average length of a youtube video is 10 minutes. The known youtubers that make money and put out these kinds of videos are a tiny fraction of the site's users. The vast majority are people just uploading short clips and fragments to host and share them. I'd guess it's pretty easy to skim through a lot of them very quickly. It's also pretty irregular for the bigger channels you're talking about to get shut down completely or have their videos removed, so I think it quickly becomes obvious what videos are actually breaking the rules.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/04/google-youtube-hire-moderators-child-abuse-videos