SBF pulled an Alex Jones. A losing case, answering questions for which objections were sustained, thinking he can talk his way out of everything, going through counsel like candy while ignoring their recommendations...truly, a match made in hell.
> Isn't this the same as computer nerds talking about how much they're spending on their graphics card or their motherboard or whatever?
GPUs have measurable performance benefits. Many people tend to buy more expensive parts than they need and there are diminishing returns (justified as "futureproofing"), but at the end of the day you can easily run reproducible benchmarks to determine exactly how much performance you bought.
Audio quality is much more subjective and there's a whole lot of snake oil. You can certainly recognize a higher quality pair of cans to an extent, but price is not necessarily correlated with quality.
This is a bad analogy because that's not how free speech havens tend to work out in practice. What happens is you probably have a fairly normal crowd at first, then the racists, anti-semites, etc start stumbling in. Gradually, normal/moderate people leave, especially those who are members of the minority groups the newcomers hate. The local Overton window shifts as moderate voices disappear and dissent becomes more scarce, making the site even less appealing to normal people who stumble across it.
>Lots of people are afraid of blood and spiders
These are inevitable in life. But you can choose to use a forum that is full of flat-earthers, racists, etc or you can choose to go elsewhere and not have to deal with people harassing you for what you were born as or what you believe in.
>Sure, there will be a few who are attracted to it because it is so reviled, but many more will be repulsed. There's a reason why the hate groups did everything they could to be more appealing to the mainstream. Being forced back into the underground essentially means defeat.
This is correct, it's the very essence of the southern strategy. As Lee Atwater once said (censorship mine, dunno HN's policy about this type of language) [0]:
>You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-----, n-----, n-----." By 1968 you can't say "n-----" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N-----, n-----."
If you join a forum and start saying "N-----, n-----, n-----", you'll probably get banned right away. But if you're talking about crime statistics and totally true stories that totally happened to you which just so happen to feature minorities as the antagonists, your dogwhistling might be allowed, and that can serve as a valuable recruiting tactic as people who don't realize it's a dogwhistle read "sources" you provide and fall down a racist rabbit hole. (Even if someone doesn't buy into these ideas right away, planting that seed can bear fruit someday - maybe they've been unsuccessful getting a job for awhile and are really frustrated, then they remember the links they were sent long ago, and suddenly it doesn't seem so unreasonable...)
>Why are there not FBI agents in /pol/ on 8chan actively chasing up leads on people who are threatening violence?
They might be, or they might not be. They tend to keep their mouths shut during active investigations, if people found out the FBI was actively subpoenaing the site they might be inclined to stop giving them more evidence. (That is, the FBI could have developed a public-private honeypot partnership for all we know.)
And many times people aren't espousing direct, actionable threats. Talking about "international bankers" and "globalists" is protected speech, saying they control the world is protected speech, and saying something needs to be done about this is also protected speech - as long as they don't get specific (i.e. "we should fight back, let's meet up at <place> on <date/time>"), they can't do much about it. So you have people constantly agreeing about how "Zionists" are a threat to "the west" and that "something" needs to happen, egging on each others hate with various hoaxes, reactionary takes and praising Hitler, and finally someone snaps. Despite these people clearly being partially responsible for encouraging one of their members to violence, none of them will get in trouble because they never gave direct threats or incitements.
I think that the settings search has gotten worse in 10. "Disk management" no longer returns the relevant MMC, for example, I have to search "disk partitions". Last night, "add or remove" defaulted to a web search, so I searched "programs" and "Add or Remove Programs" was the first result...I still can't figure out that one.