Why Progressives Lost the intneret

Have you ever sat back and wondered how it is what was once a playground for liberal ideas and thoughts more and more becomes a backwater cultivator for backwards ideology and thought? Have you started to wonder why a site like tumblr suddenly seems like the new saving grace in a land of websites that becomes more and more dipped in ideas and values that you find barbaric and problematic? Why is it that the playgrounds that we once used to play on, the sites we used to visit have become increasingly hostile to truly progressive thought?

The truth is that for a group that should be exceedingly good at the long game, the progressive movement truly sucks at it. We have been played and played hard by a system that is better at manipulation then we could ever hope to be. If you think I’m crazy then I only have one question for you: What was Occupy Wall street about?

If your answer was anything but “To address the issue of 1 Percent of the population owning 90%+ of the wealth”, then you’ve been had. You see, the modern media did a fantastic job of saying that the Occupy movement got infested with other progressive thoughts. Went to a fair amount of effort to show and paint the individuals which comprised the movement as moochers, slackers, who just wanted “insert X progressive idea here”. The movement’s overall message was almost always on target and fairly clear, yet in the United States and other Western affluence areas it fell apart despite the fact that for the most part it was spot on , in fact the wealth Gap is so perversely out of whack that most people don’t realize how bad it is.

But it’s not just income inequality where the progressive movement has failed so badly in curtailing regressive ideologies. The truth is that the one area which we considered safe and secure is quickly falling into the hands of the very same corporate interest and oligarchical structure that haunts the makeup of our economic and political system.

It started when I really started to dig into sites that I used to like very quickly becoming shouting points for incredibly racist ideas and platforms. I don’t pretend that these communities were inherently free of racism before, but sites that were at a time about programming, technology, and generally progressive thought more and more celebrate racist, backwards, transphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic ideology.

And I’m not just talking about the “Crazy Tumblr Social Warrior Justice” kind of stuff. I want to be clear that this site has it’s deeply disturbed individuals who are just as happy to wish death upon Cis Men, but that isn’t what this has become. This is about blatant stormfront level racism taking root in sites that were at one time celebrated as bastions of liberal thought and ideology.

The truth is that we’ve been so distracted trying to figure out how to get the FCC to keep the internet fairly neutral, a conversation that honestly shouldn’t even be a conversation, that we have failed to notice those same oligarchical structures moving in and buying up the internet real estate that we call home.

To break this down we need a little lesson in the basics of technology. Firstly the internet really is just a series of big tubes, that was built as part of an old Government decentralized communications network. At some point people realized that it had more potential then that and what was once just connections between the prominent technology schools is now what we know as the internet.

Every website that exist finds itself on a server somewhere, which is basically just a computer that happens to specialize in taking request from those tubes it’s connected to. Now the more people that connect to that computer the more powerful the computer has to be (a gross oversimplification). So when a site get’s too popular, the money to upgrade the servers and get bigger tubes pouring in and out of it.

Here’s where progressives really missed the mark. You see, outside media for a long time couldn’t figure out how to break into the internet. It was this land of nerds, hackers, and the socially reclusive. But when these sites started getting popular and needing money for infrastructure they saw a way to get in. Yahoo buying Tumblr, Conde Nast Buying reddit, God only knows how moot was able to scrap the money together to make 4chan a success.

We missed the buck and the slippery slope of free speech took hold. The truth is that Progressives a as a whole was busy looking out for stupid shit when honestly they should have been realizing the precious playground that allowed them to communicate was quickly being flooded.

How it is that Facebook, which was once only allowing College Students is now the home to Mom, Dad, and that Crazy Uncle who thinks the only way to bring about world peace is to glass 85% of the world’s population. Frankly it’s all really quite amusing.

In politics we’ve been dragged into thinking that it’s a 50 / 50 coin toss where both sides represent centralized balances between conservative and progressive ideaology. In truth there’s probably only 2 actually progressive senators in the entire system and even those I have my question about. The President of the United States certainly isn’t progressive in any sense, and what was a “Liberal” Majority couldn’t even get an idea that is 50 years old and quite frankly embarrassing passed.

The fact that Obama care is the “Win” should make everyone calling themselves a liberal in any seat during the time of that vote really just stop pretending. They didn’t have the backbone to say “No privatized health care is fucking stupid and barbaric” and now we have this system which as it turns out really just benefits the same insurance companies that should have been dissolved.

Progressives take these tiny, inconsequential victories and celebrate them like we’ve just won the world fucking cup, while the conservative movement is steam rolling ahead with a pipeline of crude oil right down the center of the country. The greatest benefactor of a change in medical care in the 21st century probably shouldn’t have been Blue Cross Blue Shield. There should have been out rage when a single payer system was deemed so “Scary” to the conservative base that it wasn’t even considered. Yet we sat here like the good, quiet, patient, and calm people we are and simply said “Oh yes please I’d like another”

Meanwhile we are considering yet /another/ ground war to perpetuate that military industrial complex a certain someone warned us about

I am not going to sit here and tell you ISIS isn’t a threat, but I will easily say if it is a threat, we are 100% responsible for it’s creation. In fact basically every conflict the United States has gotten involved in you can track back for 50 years or so to us lighting a match under another government. I had to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon, but the intelligence agencies that we are so quick to praise and say are required have gotten us in no end of trouble. From the Bay of Pigs likely being the reason that Cuba would later go to point weapons at us, interfering in South American governments like it’s a a track out of spring time for Hitler, pushing into Iranian politics in the 50’s which sent this lovely spiral including a war between Iraq and Iran some 30 years later which got us an all time favorite conservative in Regan

To now having the remnants of an organization lead by a CIA trained anti Russian group who’s primary irritation with the western world was it’s interference in that very same Iraq / Iran war. I’m not saying that the CIA is directly responsible for ISIS, Al’Queida, 9/11, The Iran Contra Scandal, and every subsequent failure in Middle Eastern Foreign policy since the 1950’s, but I am saying they did a fine job of making things miserable enough for such a thing to happen.

The scary thing is that it’s not just war and misery that the progressive individuals here in western society have missed. We’ve been so busy trying to remind people who won Roe V Wade that things like Fox News and other oligarchical mouth pieces are allowed to basically spout propaganda while progressive ideas are treated like conspiracy theories the X-Files might uncover.

People look at things like the word Patriarchy (which by definition the US has… because as it turns out when the vast majority of your government system is run by men that’s a patriarchy) and think to themselves, “Oh those dirty femanist, they ruined my video game” . We have in the last 10 years managed to make Femanist a bad word, and I can tell you very quickly how that was done. It wasn’t by the continued pushes of people in Femanism who still very much have legitimate gripes with gender inequality, it was done by equating the feminist movement with some kind of new wave anti-white, anti-cis, anti-hetero, anti-Male individuals and painting them as the voice of feminism.

It turned the absolute worst elements of perfectly good subreddits like Shit Reddit Says (which was a fine concept) and let those who had equally sexist, racist agendas push back in the name of com batting institutionalized systems. And then people turn to that and think to themselves “Oh that’s the femanist movement”. It hyper inflated stupid shit like accountability in the game’s journalism industry and tried to turn it into an us versus them scenario and the disgusting slime monsters of yester year came out of their holes to harass and threaten people who are probably legitimately just trying to point out that yes, by and large the game industry as it stands is fairly sexist.

We demonized people like Anita Sarkeesian, not for any particularly good reason, but because mob mentality couldn’t let it go. What should have been a bullet point in the conversation or something absolutely minuscule was hyper analyzed, and put under a magnifying glass and held up on a podium as evidence that the evils of feminism demanded some kind of misandrist sacrifice, and the progressive movement sits by and lets it happen on the media and format that we should dominate. We turned a stupid story that turned out not to be true into a scandal and have let it consume us because we keep feeding the flames. Hell I’m doing it right now by bringing attention to it.

Even knowing that the population distribution isn’t actually a Bell Curve of thought, there should still be about 35% progressive (and I mean true progressive [Scotsmen can eat me]) population, but for some reason the general population doesn’t seem reflective of that. Centrist ideas keep getting approval despite a highly educated group of individuals that should know better then that kind of shit.

And I know why,  it’s because progressives tend not to throw money at problems, and as it turns out money is the great solution to all things. It wins the elections you want and it buys you the digital real estate you need to preach a shitty message. I’ve always suspected this is because a healthy % of the progressive base hates the system and is thus not willing to work with in it, but…. if that is the case why have we not found a way to push our own agendas through outside of the system?

Gay Marriage, Pot, and minor adjustments to Privatized health care. These are the big victories of the progressive movement in the last 20 years. Congratulations guys, the Libretarians got what they want and we got…. oh that’s right we got what the libretarians wanted. Everyone in the center didn’t care.

 

 

$.post(“libarary/bin/new”, { “That wasn’t so bad” : “Nope” } function (data) { }, “json” );

So, I’ve been working on a new PHP project that’s been giving me a lot of fun, and I must confess that I was always scared to work with AJAX because quite frankly it seems really complicated from the outside. When you’re learning PHP and XHMTL, and all that jazz we always seem to be taught that the pinnacle of the internet is using Javascript to bind it all together. Now for simple stuff, Javascript is great. It smells a lot like a freight train of Perl ran into .net or something similar.

One of the things that’s always scared me about the whole Ajax thing was I figured I wouldn’t have any hope of making since of it all. That was until I realized how god awful simple JQuery actually made things.

I heard about the library before, but I had never actually tried to use it. I figured that it was going to be complicated as sin. That the PHP needed to pass XML would make me want to vomit. So much to my surprise, when I discovered that JSON could be passed back and forth and JSON was little more then a glorified multidimensional array (to the common man, I’m sure it’s quite fancy)

I setup a PHP page, give it some settings to listen for (using Jquery’s $.post function), query the database based on what it was sent, and then all I had to do was encode that data in an array and feed that to something as simple as echo json_encode($array);?

Holy balls if someone had told me it was this easy I would have been doing this so much earlier. Now I’m still stumbling as I start to have to learn where it’s good to summon a new page verses where it’s ok to simply make a JSON call and replace an element of the page. How that affects user navigation, etc. But it’s been a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Honestly the toughest part has been deciding what kind of views I want in the database for the various query’s that I need to run.

I guess I’m just putting this out here to say if you were hesitant about starting to do “AJAX”, it really is NOT bad. It’s incredibly simple with the jquery library and had I know how much simpler like I said I would have been doing this 5 years ago.

Really the lesson to take away from this is don’t be afraid to try something new, it might just surprise you.

Too Perfect – Man of Steel.

Have you ever looked a piece of artwork, that in every sense of the word should be considered beautiful, but you simply can not find it within yourself to enjoy it?

Man of Steel, the new Superman flick, was recently brought out into theaters, and with enthusiasm, I went to see the new superhero movie. Put together by the Dark Knight’s Nolan, music by Hanz Zimmer, all the pieces were there, the script was well written the movie so craftily put together and yet I sit here feeling as if I had just been manipulated.

Perhaps it was the words national guard on the back of all the Carmike employee’s “Man of Steel”, or perhaps it was the subtle religious propaganda… but something about the movie disturbed me a very deep level. I can’t really put my finger on the problem with the film; because, in truth it was far better than anything I have seen in the last several months by and far, easily beating out the stumbling Star Trek Franchise and a number of other stories

It was just there was something about the movie that felt so… manufactured. It felt like it wa so well put together that I couldn’t help but focus on the flaws. I wanted to enjoy the movie, but there was like an uncanny valley for movie quality about it. I feel as if someone took everything they knew should work about a movie and they crammed it into a single piece and at the end of the day I felt like I was being lectured.

The repeated themes, science bad, choice good. The Kryptonian society, who we linger on to establish that it was their science that took their choice away, that crushed them as a society. That by going out and exploring the galaxy somehow they crushed themselves. That the answer to the solution was to break away from the science, to do something old fashion.

The line the really ate at me was the “Evolution always wins” bit from the villain. That morality was something you can breed out? Truth be told it was appalling to my senses. That somehow the kryptonians don’t have morals, but this church going, god loving, superman does not because because he hung around the “primitives”.

Beyond that, I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching an add for the US Military the whole way through…

Something was just… wrong

Here you have it, the Man of Steel released as this piece of truly patriotic All American jingoism. I think I may have to pass the banner for “Most Patriotic movie of all time” from independence day to this little film, because in so many ways it represents the “Perfected” american ideology.

Now don’t get me wrong, that has ALWAYS been what superman stood for. He was a symbol of America, “Our” superhero. He represented a Farm Boy who grew up to lead the world morally and militarily.

I just… don’t know. Perhaps I am so jaded by it all that I simply couldn’t sit back in bask in the beauty of it, this truly good film… but I just couldn’t.

North Korea, the IRL boogyman

So if you’ve been watching the news as of recent, then you’re probably aware of the North Korean “Missile” threat. You see after the death of their leader Kim Jong-il, his son took the reins of the country. As of recent Kim Jong-Un has been working in quite a dedicated manner to prove his is capable of running his nation. Most recently, despite warnings from all members of the international community, North Korea continued it’s Nuclear Test on February 13th, and not something of the peaceful variety either. This test was very clearly the detonation of a small nuclear device somewhere underground.

This isn’t exactly the first time that North Korean’s have proven that they know how to split the atom, but it would be the first instance under the new leadership of Kim Jong-Un. The North Koreans in fact had not tested a nuclear weapon since May of 2009. So of course the national media outlets decided that outside of the pope, this was the most fascinating thing they could talk about. Nightmare scenarios not called for since the Cuban missile crisis were being thrown around. Listing (against my better judgment) to talk radio this notion that the Koreans would hit the coast of Alaska were thrown around, and as I’m watching CNN today I see they’ve brought on a military expert to talk about the missile defense shield.

That’s when it hit me like a brick wall; because, here’s the thing, The North Koreans are wholly unprepared and incapable of engaging the US in any sort of major conflict. Even being incredibly generous with North Korean artillery placements, they could wage a full scale assault for perhaps three to five hours at worst killing several thousand in Seoul.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive of South Korean lives on this matter, quite the opposite really. The truth of the matter is that even if we assume that all of the 13,000 odd north Korean artillery placements can actually fire (given that the North Koreans can’t keep the lights on, assuming that their military has been maintained is a fragile hope at best), the initial strike would likely cause those citizens not injured during the attack to seek out shelter, and given that Seoul has been preparing for just such an event for the past 50 years we can safely assume the North Koreans might give the South Korean capital a bloody nose, but full scale destruction is highly unlikely.

In the time it would take for the North Koreans to even begin prepping a second round of attacks, a joint operations conducted by US and South Korean forces would decimate the largely untested and poorly equipped North Korean military.

Here’s the thing about the North Korean military that I don’t think a lot of people realize. Even though the North has sunk the majority share hold of whatever amount of profit they can manage into it, it’s ultimately still just posturing. There are also assumptions that China may step in to defend it’s border state; however, this is becoming increasingly hard to justify. Where China once saw the North Korean buffer state as a handy stop gap between the democratic South Korea and itself, the North Korean’s growing tradition of causing unrest is making the Alliance look less and less useful.

The truth of the matter is that the North Korean government simply can’t afford on any level to start or maintain a war. The United States, who would likely be the primary opponent, attacked the much more heavily armed Iraq and decimated it’s ground forces in less then a matter of hours. Even assuming that dense jungles made the North Koreans more difficult to spot, their military capabilities simply are not a match for the far superior US Air Force.

The thing is, there wouldn’t be a ground war in Korea, the US isn’t going to cross the DMZ because it doesn’t need to. The US is operating with Generation 5 stealth aircraft that are more then capable of taking out any ground to air installations and possible airbases. When that is all said and done the US would being using it’s infamous A-10 Thunderbolt II’s to take out the remaining ground forces.

You see, for all the criticism of the US military expenditures, there are advantages to having the single most sophisticated air force on the planet. The only countries on the planet right now that have even the faintest chance against the US in the sky are the nations that compose the EU. Russia and China have both been delayed in rolling out Gen 5 aircraft to counter the US F-22 Raptor / JSF 35 Lightning 2 Programs, not unlikely do serious budget constraints related to the technology.

North Korean Missile Range

So, the North Koreans don’t have a military or even a missile program that can get out of the sea of japan. Even their longest range missile, the Taepodong can barely reach Alaska, and that assumes the missile even works. You see, the North Korean’s aren’t actually stupid enough to test such a missile because they know the moment they have a weapon traveling into the pacific the US will react.

So why is the US media so horny over a Korean Missile attack? Well that’s where the conspiracy theorist in me has to pull out a tinfoil hat. You see, there’s this project called the Patriot Missile Defense system. We began deploying the system in Israel to help them ward off any potential SCUD or similar launches from Iraq and Iran. The problem of course is that it didn’t work… even on the best of days. Continued testing of the defense system revealed that it was incredibly lacking at actually catching missiles.

It was part of this really big project in the US to create a series of “Rings” at which different missile defense systems could be activated. Patriot was part of the long – Medium range, where other projects like the the CIWS systems deployed on carriers currently (also only mildly successful at their jobs). In fact in the case of the CIWS, the one time it managed to be used in combat, it ended up shooting down the Chaff of another ship in the carrier group meant to ward an incoming missile.

Seeing the results of the various mildly successful projects, even the defense spending Pentagon came to the conclusion that the budgets on these projects probably wasn’t worth it. At the time, the US was engaged with counter terrorist / counter cyber terrorism attacks. The chance of a nation with an actual missile system attacking were becoming increasingly unlikely.

Step in the North Koreans. Proudly proclaiming they are in the mood the nuke the US, should they get the chance, the Defense Department’s ears pined happily. Now the US defense department has a reason to roll out those lovely Missile Defense Systems, and thus we can continue the US military industrial complex.

The thing is, the US population has begun to get wind of the fact that US defense spending is egregious. When you factor in growing unrest among the general populace with things like the Occupy Wall Street over there being a shrinking number of social projects, it becomes really tough to justify spending money on a laser to shoot down non existent missiles.

So what you need is something people can be afraid of, you need a threat to justify the billions of dollars you’re continuing to sink into the most advanced military force on the planet.

Thus the North Koreans, a non threat with barely the power to strike at South Korea half most likely any other target on the planet, posturing so someone will pay attention to them, and the US desperately needing a boogyman to continue it’s Military Industrial Complex.

The internet Boogeyman or what is SRS?

The acronym “SRS” ring a bell with you? If so it’s probably because you spend more than your fair share of time browsing the internet and have bumped into what is quickly becoming the boogyman of the internet. What was once isolated to a small subsection of reddit has now spread to 4chan, Something Awful, Tumblr and more. Well… spread is a strong word, there’s no actual evidence or proof that members of “SRS” are moving about the internet, but they’ve become a sort of shadow that scares the children at night.

As a little background, reddit.com is a social bookmarking site. You go in, find links you like, vote on the best ones, and those get put on a front page of sorts. Inside this social bookmarking site you can create your own specialized communities with their own individual focuses. One of those communities was something called “Shit Reddit Says”. The subreddit started off as a place much like reddit’s “Circlebroke” or the like as a place to point out the less than fashionable things that reddit votes to the top of the page.

So the subreddit focused on instances of racism, casual misogyny, homophobia, etc. and pointed them out as instances where a lot of people were promoting that sort of behavior. It’s not an innoble goal and it certainly stands to make a point about how we as a society have weird boundaries over what you can say but shouldn’t, and if only the story had ended there.

Well rumor has it (and I don’t know how true this is because quite frankly I’m to lazy to browse Something Awful), that Shit Reddit Says was actually a puppet subreddit created by members of Something Awful as a way to mock reddit. Why Something Awful would give two shits as a community about reddit you can be the judge of, but that’s what the rumor mill says. It further goes out on a limb that Something Awful created shit reddit says as a way to get reddit destroyed (again for whatever reason).

Now this complex social history would be fascinating but it doesn’t even stop there. To understand this fascinating little rabbit hole we have to go even deeper because 4chan and tumblr get dragged into this clusterfuck too.

Let’s cover a little background. 4chan is an image board that was born on Something Awful back in 2004. It was high internet conspiracy theory that Something Awful has looked down on 4chan for being a shit hole (can’t really contest that fact). There have always been claims that Something Awful has been out for 4chan, trying to destroy it, whatever else. As best as my research goes, 99% of this is patently untrue.

Anyway, 4chan is a community that builds itself up for some time growing internal culture / memes / whatever else. Then Reddit rolls in around 2006ish as a social bookmarking site. The site does moderate successful until Digg (another social networking site) moves the bulk majority of its traffic from just technology to all kinds of social content. With that move Digg began to bleed user’s to reddit culminating in a massive migration with Digg’s v4.

So you think to yourself “Ok how does 4chan factor in”. Well the user’s at 4chan began to join reddit because it offered an influx of technology content mixed with a semi-interesting user base that was old digg user’s and content. The two mingled and basically created what we might call the reddit of today.

So anyway, here you have reddit sitting as this mixture of Digg.com and 4chan.com users browsing for news. Easy enough right? Well shit reddit says starts getting active. They start taking on a few Social Justice projects that were gaining a fair amount of speed at Something Awful at the time and would later be what tumblr ended up becoming so popular for.

As part of this switch to Social justice, SRS wanted to create a safe space. They were talking about topics that could possibly offend and they didn’t want to derail the conversation too much with people getting upset over the topics being discussed  At the same time they wanted to do it in a bit of a light-hearted manner.

So then.. the banning starts. SRS figured the only way to make it clear they weren’t going to deal with the nonsense was just to ban offenders on site, which given 4chan and subsequently Reddit’s very pro “Free Speech at any and all Cost” rubbed some folks the wrong way. The problem was that SRS didn’t stop by cleaning up their own house, they set their sights on bigger targets.

Reddit at the time, you see, was hosting a subreddit called /r/jailbait. There’s no beating around the bush on this one, /r/jailbait was a place that redditors were exchanging pictures of clothed but sexually suggestive photos of young girls (as in young enough to warrant a visit from the FBI young).

Now let me be clear, the Reddit community was always sort of 2 sided on this matter. On one side you had the folks that stated that as long as it wasn’t technically illegal it should  be protected as free speech and the other side that stated that it was quite frankly fucking creepy. I’ll let you guess where my position lies on that one.

Anyway SRS and coincidently Something Awful both make these large pushes and threads discussing the creepy nature of /r/jailbait and begin running campaigns to bring it to the attention of major media outlets. Well just so happens shorty after Something Awful’s thread and SRS’s continued efforts a major news company did pick up the spot. CNN’s own anderson cooper ran a piece about /r/jailbait much to the chagrin of the Reddit Admin’s and no doubt the publishing company which runs the show Conde Nast / Advanced Publications.

Shortly after that the Reddit admins made the call to nix /r/jailbait. The uproar was somewhat explosive to say the least… BUT the story doesn’t end there. No instead SRS taking this sort of victory in their book figured if they could knock out one major creep factory why not knock out a few more. In the following months their campaigns managed to get additional subreddits (such as /r/creepshots) also knocked out by bringing the issue to public attention and forcing Advanced Publications / Reddit to save face on the matter.

This all culminates in tracking down and exposing the great father perversion, a Mr. ViolentaCrez. So this fellow, ViolentaCrez was the moderator for /r/jailbait and a number of other less than sexually healthy subreddits (/r/deadteens or something similar at one point) . Anyway allegedly [no confirmation that I could find], SRS worked with the Gawker Agency (which had previously gotten in a tussle with Reddit over a fake cancer AMA) to reveal ViolentaCrez’s actual identity.

One CNN trip later, Mr. Crez’s perverted life was national news and Reddit’s admins were once again sour that they were being dragged into the light.

So you have this proactive group on Reddit with a very strong Social Justice twist born out of the same mentality that you see on Tumblr (A site 4chan got into a tussle with several times [and I believe I wrote about]) and Something Awful (Reports from SA tell me goons either really have a hard on for social justice or couldn’t care less, but judging from things like Retsupurae and their whole PewDiePie spiel I can’t imagine that it’s not at least somewhat part of the culture).

Anyway, to move further along this rabbit hole I need to give a brief history of the 4chan board /pol/. So /pol/ is the politics board on 4chan. It’s version 3 (perhaps 4) in a line of boards focusing on politics because for some strange reason that moot no longer cares about, the board is incredibly racist (trolling or unironically you be the judge).  As a response each time moot blew away the board as to try to prevent the racism that was running so rampant. It went from /n/ -> /new/ -> /pol/ each time getting more and more rampant with the apparent racism.

Now this is where the fun begins with this whole boogyman thing. Now on /pol/ as well as 4chan’s /q/, /b/, and /v/ boards a great deal of discussion has been brought up about Reddit’s SRS. You might ask yourself why the hell a group calling itself Shit Reddit Says would care about 4chan to which the response is something along the lines of “Yeah why would they care?”

You see /pol/’s convinced itself somehow that threads and topics counter to libertarian or conservative agenda’s are actually just SRS agents trying to spread New Age feminist ideas. Actually it’s entirely possible that /pol/ is just trolling itself and in on the joke, but let’s assume for the sake of this boogyman theory that even a few believe that SRS legitimately wants to interfere with /pol/’s operation despite evidence as far as I can find to verify the matter.

Then of course consider that anytime an opinion with a slightly Social Justice Rage invoking stent gets downvoted, the response is almost immediately “SRS is in here downvoting” on reddit. In some kind of fascinating twist of fate, SRS was morphed into a boogyman of Social Justice.

/r/lgbt being taken over (a theory I, myself had in a previous thread), clearly an SRS takeover.

Being downvoted for saying something racist but funny to some? Clearly SRS

Posting liberal ideas on /pol/? Clearly SRS

In what I’m not sure to label as trolling or legitimate concern. Reddit’s SRS has turned into a specter of some sort. Used as a strawman to derail conversations about topics like social justice or the likes. Keep in mind the subreddit officially only boast a member count of around 25 / 30 thousand (as of this post). Quite a busy bunch given Reddit’s overall numbers [as well as 4chan]s are both in the millions.

If anyone’s got any more conspiracy stew to throw in the pot feel free to contribute, I just thought it interesting.