Like, this is superliminal propaganda

This…this is very on the nose.

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Slip him some LSD.

Coraline is pretty intense.

A quote from Neil Gaiman about his editor’s daughter, who served as the book’s first audience

I told her, “You know, we kind of have you to thank for all this, because you weren’t scared by it.” And she said, “Actually, I was terrified. But I wanted to know what happened next. I knew if I let anybody know I was scared, I wouldn’t find out.”

It was dumb reactionary bullshit that is continuously biting them in the ass.

I wonder what they’ll do with those weapons once they’re no longer pawns of the US empire? It’s a shame that this is an entirely new situation and there’s no lessons history could teach us about arming extremist militias.

You have definitely fallen into a radicalization pipeline, my dude. But you’re in good company.

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror —that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

-Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, chapter 13”

“He that is angry without cause, shall be in danger; but he that is angry with cause, shall not be in danger: for without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked.” Therefore to be angry is not always an evil.

-Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologae, misattributing a quote from Opus Imperfectum to St. John Chrysotom

I happen to be a pacifist, but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporarily given up my pacifism and taken up arms.

-MLK, The Other America

There are reasons we celebrate righteous violence. To suggest that all violence is the same is pure liberalism. Literally. The worst type, the zeroeth:

We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.

But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.

-Mao, Combat Liberalism

…[I] must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…

-MLK, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Horseshoe theory is a centrist trap. Don’t fall into it.

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: “theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron”

-dril, Tweet

Honestly though, the direct direct direct answer to your question as phrased, “what caused internet/nerd culture to go full-on fascist [in the mid-2010s]?” is just GamerGate. That’s it. That was kinda the moment that all the right-leaning nerds who hated women that wouldn’t date them realized there were other right-leaning nerds that also hated women, and they very publicly organized around it, formed forums about it, and basically created the modern alt-right.

Before that, like, the loudest nerd voices on the internet were like Wil Wheaton whose core tenet was “Don’t be a dick”, and the loudly anti-copyright Cory Doctorow. They got drowned out by the forces of reaction.

I wouldn’t say that it has? At least not unilaterally.

I’d lay the blame squarely on capital’s doorstep. Capital runs most major internet forums, and capital decides which views are platformed and which are muted. Fascism and capital go hand in hand. Rage gets more clicks, which means more ad revenue.

We’re both on sites loaded with nerds who are comrades. Nerds are not at all inherently fascist. The terminally online are not inherently fascist. However, “Internet/Nerd culture” was doomed to become fascist when it became a packaged commodity. The most successful “nerds” were also the most ruthlessly capitalist. Wozniak vs Jobs and all that.

Inceldom also has a part to play in this, but, again, this is largely a product of capital. They’re useful idiots. Like LBJ put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Lonely men are convinced women are to blame, that women are garbage, and they become clients and, frankly, weapons. There are a lot of lonely nerds out there thanks to the isolation that capitalism encourages.

You say this change happened in the mid-2010s; putting that in context, social media as we know it really only started taking off in the late oughts. Reddit and Facebook were like 2005-ish, and didn’t hit their strides for a few years. Facebook’s IPO was 2012. Capital.

And, finally, nobody’s immune to propaganda. It’s not just “nerd culture” that’s taken this turn, it’s a society-wide poison.