4chan Isn’t Sure Whether It’s Excited the Times Wrote Up Its Anti-Semitism

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jesse Singal writes:

In an article that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times, Jonathan Weisman, deputy editor in the Times’ Washington bureau, explains what it’s like to be targeted by a swarm of (ostensibly) Trump-supporting anti-Semitic Twitter-goons:

The anti-Semitic hate, much of it from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn’t stopped since. Trump God Emperor sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless, hooknosed Jew. I was served an image of the gates of Auschwitz, the famous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” replaced without irony with “Machen Amerika Great.” Holocaust taunts, like a path of dollar bills leading into an oven, were followed by Holocaust denial. The Jew as leftist puppet master from @DonaldTrumpLA was joined by the Jew as conservative fifth columnist, orchestrating war for Israel. That one came from someone who tagged himself a proud future member of the Trump Deportation Squad.

It’s a good read, and one of the interesting things about Weisman’s story is his ambivalence about telling it. “I retweeted the choicest attacks for all to see, and with each retweet, more attacks followed, their authors gleefully seeking the exposure,” he writes. “Some people criticized me for offering it, but I argued, perhaps wrongly, that such hate needed airing, that Americans needed to see the darkest currents in the politics of exclusion animating the presidential election.” Then, a bit later: “‘Thanks to @jonathanweisman for redpilling at least 1.5k normies today by retweeting premium content. Epitome of useful idiot,’ responded one tormentor whose Twitter handle is too vulgar to repeat, even if I wanted to. Maybe he was right.”

In other words: When you’re caught in a maelstrom of that sort of internet hate, you can’t win. Either you sit there and mute and block an endless cavalcade of idiots proudly announcing their desire to send you to the ovens, or you draw attention to their awfulness and give them exactly the attention they covet. These are the cases that stretch the logic of “Don’t feed the trolls” to the breaking point.

Weismen doesn’t mention 4chan by name, but it and the other chanboards are a major source of this sort of Twitter garbage, and they are the birthplaces of many of the memes most eagerly and obsessively embraced by alt-right Trumpkins. And if this thread on /pol/, the “politically incorrect” board that serves as one of the unofficial headquarters for Trump’s anti-Semitic online army, is any indication, some channers are in fact thrilled to have gotten coverage in the pages of the nation’s top newspaper, even if their home base wasn’t mentioned by name in the article (the thread appeared shortly after the article went online last week).

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Understanding the Alt-Right’s Jew Parentheses

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jesse Singal writes:

Two defining characteristics of the alt-right, the loosely organized online coalition of meme-loving racists, are that its members like being weird online and aren’t particularly fond of Jews. Keep those two things in mind, and the following discussion of a punctuation meme might make more sense.

Yesterday, Mic published an article in which Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith traced the history of a weird thing some alt-righters do online: They’ll put multiple parentheses around Twitter-targets’ names to indicate that they’re Jewish. It’s never happened to me, but as the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman explained in a recent column, he got a tweet which read “Hello ((Weisman)).” It seems to be a way of saying something like “Ha, look at this Jew!,” and is often followed by a wave of the alt-right’s now-standard meme-drenched anti-Semitism.

As Fleishman and Smith explain, “The symbol comes from right-wing blog the Right Stuff, whose podcast The Daily Shoah featured a segment called ‘Merchant Minute’ that gave Jewish names a cartoonish ‘echo’ sound effect when uttered. The ‘parenthesis meme,’ as Right Stuff editors call it, is a visual pun.” As the Mic authors note, that same blog also explains on one page that “all Jewish surnames echo through history,” meaning that — and this is Fleishman and Smith again — “the supposed damage caused by Jewish people reverberates from decade to decade.” The idea is that it’s a “silly” way to make Jewish names sound evil and sinister, in other words.

It’s an interesting — if that’s the right word — origin story and a good rundown. But Fleishman and Smith end up overanalyzing things a bit when they argue that the parentheses help alt-right folks obscure their online anti-Semitism. “To the public, the symbol is not easily searchable on most sites and social networks; search engines strip punctuation from results,” they write at one point. “This means that trolls committed to uncovering, labeling and harassing Jewish users can do so in relative obscurity: No one can search those threats to find who’s sending them.” In a subheadline farther down in the piece, they ask “How have these trolls been able to hide harassment in plain sight?,” and then answer their own question by referring back to the parentheses-search issue. Then, toward the end of the article, they write that “Whether they know it or not, Neo-Nazis on Twitter have discovered a brilliant loophole — a code that’s difficult to filter whose meaning incites waves of hate before the target realizes what’s happening.”

None of this jibes with what we know about how the alt-right operates on Twitter. For one thing, this group loves the attention they get from their online anti-Semitism — its members have no interest in “obscurity,” relative or otherwise. In fact, when Weisman asked the person who tweeted the parentheses at him what it meant, they explained and seemed quite impressed with themselves. For another thing, plenty of the tweets that use the parentheses — including one embedded in the Mic article itself — are explicitly anti-Semitic, or if they aren’t they are quickly followed by tweets which are. Plus, Twitter accounts dedicated to online anti-Semitism don’t tend to hide that fact in their online handles and profiles. All of this renders the parentheses’ mystery a lot less mysterious. (And this is all ignoring the fact that there’s little need to “hide” anti-Semitism on Twitter anyway, since Twitter rarely takes any sort of aggressive action against it — even, anecdotally at least, after it’s been reported.)

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Two UCLA Female Profs Ordered Students To Ignore Lockdown And Take Exams

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

News: A professor at the University of California, Los Angeles asked her students to leave cover during a lockdown Wednesday and expose themselves to an active shooter situation in order to complete a final exam.

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“This is what I will do, you can take the exam anywhere today, not in Boelter,” Professor Vivian Lew wrote to her students in an email obtained by Campus Reform. “Unfortunately, you need to take it between 11-11:50 Section 1A and 1 pm-1:50pm Section 1B.”

Meanwhile, thousands of terrified UCLA students were forced to take shelter in buildings while local authorities searched the campus for an active shooter, putting the school on lockdown for over two hours and prompting a massive police response.

Professor Lew even informed her students that she could not make it to the exam herself because her building was on lockdown.

“I am locked in my office now and cannot leave[;] my building is under lockdown,” she wrote.

Nonetheless, Lew encouraged her students to leave safety so that they could find a computer to complete their exams remotely.

“So leave this area if you are in [it] and find a computer. If you cannot take it at 11 am, I can reschedule you for 1 pm,” she ordered.

…The Tab notes that at least one other professor also refused to cancel final exams, at least initially, in an email sent at 11:30 a.m., more than an hour after the shooting was reported.

“I am not cancelling our final. Am not aware of other classes cancelling,” Professor Dahlia Zaidel wrote.

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Mainak Sarkar: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Who allowed this killer into our country?

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From Heavy.com:

sarkar

The suspect in the shooting of a UCLA professor has been named as PhD candidate Mainak Sarkar. The victim was Professor William Klug. He was a teacher in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, according to his official bio on the school’s website.

Sarkar was first named in a report by CBS News. He was a native of Minneapolis and had a PhD in solid mechanics from UCLA.

The shooting prompted a two-hour lockdown at the school with LAPD Charlie Beck telling the media when it was over, “The campus is entirely contained. We believe there are no suspects outstanding and no continuing threat to UCLA’s campus.” William Scott Klug was 39 years old.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Sarkar Came to UCLA Clad in All-Black & Armed With a Pistol

The Daily Bruin reports that Sarkar has been described as a white male who six feet tall. The newspaper adds that Sarkar was wearing a black jacket and black pants.

In his press conference immediately after the shooting, Chief Herren alluded to the incident possibly being a murder/suicide. KNX reporter Rob Archer tweeted that a suicide note was recovered at the scene.

KNX reporter Claudia Peschiutta tweeted that Sarkar was “despondent” over his grades, which prompted the shooting.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Klug was killed inside of an office in the engineering complex.

CBS News reports that Sarkar has no previous criminal history and used a 9mm to kill Professor Klug and himself.

2. In March 2016, Sarkar Wrote That Professor Klug Was a ‘Sick Person’ in a Blog Post Though in 2014 He Thanked Klug & Called Him a ‘Mentor’

In a now-deleted blog post on his WordPress site LongDarkTunnelblog, Sarkar wrote about Professor Klug. On March 10, the shooter was scathing in his criticism of Klug saying:

William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy…

My name is Mainak Sarkar. I was this guy’s PhD student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it another student. He made me really sick.

Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.

Stay away from this sick guy.

The Los Angeles Times reports that in 2014 in a doctoral commencement booklet, Klug was listed as Sarkar’s advisor, the shooter wrote to Klug, “Thank you for being my mentor.”

The only other visible post on the blog shows a photo of comedian Bill Maher with the caption, “Bill Maher still looks so cool……”

A source at UCLA told the Los Angeles Times that Sarkar’s claims were “absolutely untrue.” The source added, “The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic” and that Klug “bent over backwards” to help Sarkar finish his dissertation.

3. Sarkar Was a Member of the Klug Research Group

Klug had his own research group at the school. On their website, the Klug Research Group says:

We are primarily interested in theoretical and computational biomechanics. In particular, we are developing continuum and multiscale methods to understand the mechanics of biological structures from the molecular and cellular scales upward. Some of our projects are listed below.

There are six doctoral students involved in the research group, including Mainak Sarkar. On that page, Sarkar is said to have been studying at UCLA since 2006.

According to his LinkedIn page, Sarkar got his master’s degree at Stanford and also studied aerospace engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. After that, he apparently returned to the U.S. to work as a research assistant at the University of Texas in 2003 before working as a software developer.

Sarkar also worked for a rubber company named Endurica as an engineering analyst. The Los Angeles Times reports that he left that job in August 2014 that was according to the company’s president William Mars.

He wrote a glowing tribute to Sarkar on LinkedIn saying:

Mainak is a steady contributor with solid technical skills in FEA and software development. I appreciate the quality of his work, and his careful approach to new problems. He has worked for Endurica in an off-site situation requiring great trust and independence, and he has performed well under those conditions.

Sarkar represented Endurica at a conference in Cleveland in October 2013.

Another of those who provided an endorsement on LinkedIn, Matthew Uy, told the Los Angeles Times that he hadn’t seen Sarkar in years and the Uy felt “pretty disconnected” from the shooter.

In 2010, Mainak was a teaching assistant in an aerospace engineering course at UCLA under Melissa Gibbons.

Klug’s friend Lance Giroux told CBS Los Angeles that, “Kids loved working with him because he was such an easy coach to work with.”

A professor of integrative biology and physiology, Alan Garfinkel, told the Los Angeles Times, “I am absolutely devastated. You cannot ask for a nicer, gentler, sweeter and more supportive guy than William Klug.”

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How Do You Keep Your Kids Sheltered?

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Luke Ford

Orthodox Jews send their children to Orthodox schools and to Orthodox activities and keep them sheltered. As a result, most of them are virgins when they marry — despite growing up in big cities — and they rarely turn into feminists and SJWs.

I just need a little money to start setting up yeshivos for goyim so they too can protect their kids from the filth. I’m willing to share the wisdom of the Torah for a price.

I’ve also got scripts and actors for a whole series of movies designed to eroticize each group to its own kind. Tikkun Olam!

Comments:

* In a way my children are sheltered (in the context of religion and social norms), but in other ways, they very much are not.

I’ve received one of those police visits for one of my children being out and about unsupervised: my 14 y/o son biking around town. The cop was extremely cool about it, though, and agreed with me that kids were supervised too much, but because it was peculiar in this day and age…

* I was raised in a non-Orthodox Jewish home and managed to avoid the worst of the modern filth and indoctrination while getting a reasonable education from secular schools. Some modern Orthodox schools do a good job teaching both religious and secular subjects, but the haredi/hasidic schools turn out people who are well-versed in Talmud but who can barely speak, read and write standard English and who are sorely deficient in math and science knowledge. There aren’t a lot of jobs in Talmud research, so the young haredis/hasids are totally dependent on the community for economic survival. Non-Jews would be wise to say no thanks to that model of education (and to end welfare payments to huge haredi and hasidic families forcing the haredis and hasids to limit the sizes of their families and get jobs).

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