This is a fascinating case study into how paranoid and reactionary the modern left has become as a movement. It's always had a very conspicuous element of accusation and incrimination, but the sense of forward-thinking ascendancy has disappeared and this is all that's left.
Most interesting is that it's the same from top to bottom. Random independent blogs are launching inquisitions against health and wellness photos, and the British government is restricting free access to the internet and spending the most airtime demonising anyone alleged to be "sowing division".
In all cases the target is the same - an ill-defined silent army of ontologically evil societal saboteurs. It all speaks to a system that's becoming increasingly unstable and unsure of itself.
There isn't exactly a "curve" to be behind, just as there isn't one single "history" that you can end up "on the wrong side of". Politics is just the constantly shifting borders in a formalised war for power between different groups, long term there is no single direction of "progress".
>You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
This is the correct view, in the sense that if you don't belong to some kind of tribe, you'll get ripped off by someone who does. The inert group are not wrong, but by participating less than the others in the battle for their collective self interest, they will end up being the ones taken advantage of.
>Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side”
This is factually not true. Levels of violence by the state against citizens in the United States is at near historic lows. The state killed dozens of children in Waco in the 90s, bombed domestic buildings in Philadelphia in the 80s, shot protestors Kent State University in the 70s, going back to the early years of the USA where protests and rebellions were put down with private militias and bounties. The shooting by one officer of one protester in a scuffle with officers wouldn't have reached the history books in any other time.
The rub here is "skilled workers". Just after Brexit, the Boris Johnson Tory government adjusted immigration rules for "skilled" workers, and caused a civilisation-altering number of people (now known as the "Boriswave") to immigrate to the country, mostly from India, Africa, and other less developed areas. It's now known that almost every pay level and skill (or lack thereof) of job was eligible under the new rules, with some countries of origin, like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC. The same story has played out in the US with the "skilled" H1B visa scheme. People have lost all trust in governments to architect immigration laws in the interest of the natives, rather than giving big business carte blanche to import their own replacement workforce who will do any available job for the national minimum wage.
US immigration policy was explicitly racist from its founding up until the Hart Cellar act of 1965. Assuming that the 2016 election of Donald Trump is your benchmark for when immigration policy became determined by racists again, then the US's immigration policy was non-racist for 51 of the last 251 (and counting) years, or 20% of its history.
Safe to say that the 1990s "End of History" theory has been proven wrong. It may be that the ~1960s-2010s "post-national" political consensus was actually just a historical aberration that is still in the process of being unwound.
Do you appreciate that, in the wider historical context, this position is an exceptionally radical one? You seem to not understand how there could even exist a difference of opinion on this, but I'm confident that this outlook of humans as being completely fungible, transactional economic units would appear unthinkable to anyone throughout 99% of human history. Just the suggestion that a nation's population should be restocked by swapping it out with another nation's population would be tantamount to treason any time prior to the revolution of the 1960s.
Perhaps on the smaller subreddits, but have a look at /r/all on any given day and it's obvious that real people, and diverse backgrounds, it is not. Every single subreddit that goes above a certain activity threshold collapses into the exact same state of astroturfed, mass-produced political slop targeted towards low IQ people.
Why does the technicality that red and grey squirrels are different species hold any weight to you? The effect is still the same: They are two discernibly different populations, of which one is on the decline in its native land alongside the increase of another. As humans, we are orders of magnitude more sensitive to population differences amongst humans than amongst squirrels. Squirrel populations do not have associated music, dress, religion, traditions, and so on. So the question remains: Why does the decline of a discernable population of squirrels carry immense sentimental weight to many people, but not the decline of an ethnic group? Especially when most people would give a very different answer if that ethnic group were, for example, Native American or Palestinian? The only answer to me is that people feel that they aren't allowed to hold these sentimental thoughts, and work to block them from their own mind.
I don't mean to say this as a challenge to what you said, but as a genuine question: Do you hold any value in the continued existence of the red squirrel in Great Britain? Would you see its extinction as any kind of loss? I know many people that are hugely invested in securing the red squirrel, but would never be seen dead expressing any kind of hesitancy towards the idea of their own ethnic group disappearing. I've always found it a little odd, given that squirrels don't have culture, traditions, or a written history attached, and it's purely aesthetic.
Demographics by births are much more meaningful than the total population because it's only births (and more immigration of course) that informs all future generations. Even if all immigration was halted today, the Britain of the future will be ~50% native (not taking into account the statistically lower native birth rates).
>if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British
Not exactly. "White British" as a compound noun means "ethnically British", not "white AND a British citizen".
>Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.
Large areas of England do not speak English as their first language, and there are rapidly evolving youth dialects with strong black and other minority ethnic influences. As a reminder, the mutation of Old English due to Norman French influences took centuries. It's not at all out of the question that even the current already-done migration may cause the largest transformation of the language since the Normans.
White British is an ethnic umbrella recognised by the British government. In the last recorded statistics, the White British population in Britain had been reduced to 54% by births, and dropping significantly each year. A generation ago Britain was 90-95% White British. It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.
"The current times" are a direct result of decisions like that of Merkel to throw open the borders of Germany to a million unchecked foreign men. If there's one reason that the AfD is the largest party in Germany today, it's because of that decision Merkel made a whole decade ago. How was that "based in facts, truth and science", or "slow and steady"?
I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.
The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol, which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some very thin, actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community. To say these terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.
I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.
>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
The contradictions in that definition and its examples indicates to me how outdated it is. Connecting "white men" and Ivy League universities, despite those institutions adopting an ideology explicitly designed to dispossess white men from institutional power. Connecting universities and Trump, despite the Trump administration occupying an opposing faction of power to academia (hence the articles bemoaning this being posted on HN). Connecting Trump to Bush despite Trump existing outside and against the Bush dynasty (to the point that the Democrats took Liz Cheney onboard in their campaign against Trump).
The better definition is simply that the elites of a nation are the ones that hold the most outsized political power, often the kind of intangible power that they are loathe to admit having. Trump is more or less attempting a small-scale revolution in America, being the replacement of one class of elites with another. What the prospective replacement class of elites looks like is harder to say than who they're attempting to replace.
Most interesting is that it's the same from top to bottom. Random independent blogs are launching inquisitions against health and wellness photos, and the British government is restricting free access to the internet and spending the most airtime demonising anyone alleged to be "sowing division".
In all cases the target is the same - an ill-defined silent army of ontologically evil societal saboteurs. It all speaks to a system that's becoming increasingly unstable and unsure of itself.