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Paraphrasing an article by Time Magazine's Joel Stein:
The Internet's personality has changed -- once it was like a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now the web is a sociopath with Asperger's. [ Submitter's note: the "Sociopath with Asperger's" comment is not my addition, but a verbatim phrase in the source article ]
The people who relish their online freedom to act under influence of the online disinhibition effect are called "trolls." Trolling is, overtly, a political fight; but it has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men's rights and against immigration. They derisively call their adversaries "social justice warriors" and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weaknesses to gain pity, which allows them to control the leverage of political power.
When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethic and religious minorities, gays -- anyone who might feel vulnerable. The alt-right argues that if you can't handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that's arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet.
The article closes with a description of an exchange between Stein and a detractor. In meeting the detractor in real-life, he was surprised by her lack of bravado, to which she responds, "The Internet is the realm of the coward. These are people who are all sound and no fury."
Stein ruminates in response, "Maybe. But maybe, in the information age, sound is as destructive as fury."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:05AM
There's an amazing amount of projection in the people who use terms like that too, and what's even more amazing is that they don't see it.
Take the alt-right types who use "cuck." That word is very, very revealing about the psychology of the user. It's a short form of "cuckold," a man who was cheated on by his female partner. Now the rational response to that is "that sucks, you deserve better, dump her lying bitch ass and move on."
But to the people who actually think calling someone "cuck" means anything in political context, what it reveals about the user is a set of Iron-age ideas about everything from personal honor to female sexuality to what it means to be male to their ideas about power and government. I can guarantee you its users are the classic "Authoritarian Follower" stereotype, are likely to be Trump supporters or worse, are probably homophobic (and may or may not be repressing homosexual tendencies themselves), are likely to see women as inferior, and so forth.
They're also projecting like mad. They see *themselves* as having been cuckolded by the supposed right wing, with all the wounding to their masculinity that that implies, and are lashing out, thinking that by accusing someone *else* of being a cuck[old] it will somehow magically wipe away their shame.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:13AM
You're an idiot.
It simply refers to being used.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:47AM
No, I think she has the correct interpretation here. It's a sexually charged term to begin with. Why choose a sexually charged term like that to describe one's political position? It can't be merely a political position.
I first encountered the term cuckold on hypnosis websites. At the time I was attempting to find a way to experience the things that cannabis analogues had helped me experience years before, which had a mentally stabilizing effect, completely the opposite of my erratic shitposts prompted by alcohol. (If I hit submit on this one, whoops I guess who cares.) Hypnosis proved to be a dead end for me. I found one recording that almost, almost, so very almost did it for me. For a moment I was there, but I need to be there for more than a moment.
At any rate, I was curious about just what a hypnotic recording meant to train a man to be a cuckold might comprise, and while I didn't bother to actually listen to one, I was familiar with some of the affirmations from various IRC channels. I gathered it was something very perverse and very weird given my mammalian supremacist beliefs. Around the same time, I read The Cuckoo's Egg [wikipedia.org], a story about one of the first international hacks, and I made the etymological connection.
Suddenly, cute clocks from der Schwarzwald I'd always been fond of took on a whole new, weird meaning I'm not sure even the clockmakers intended.
So fast forward about six years and I find that the term cuckold has become part of the MRA/RWNJ vocabulary. How odd! It doesn't mean simply being used. It means being used to raise another male's offspring, which a bit of a corruption of raising another species' offspring (with delicious possibilities for my conspiracy theories about lizard people), but hey. This implies that a cuckold is genetically dead. The term is deeply intertwined with the stuff different people have posted here about how Muslims are going to out-breed the rest of us.
I wasn't sure if I should bold the tl;dr portion, but it's in the paragraph above.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:51AM
Biiiiingo. The people using the word "cuck" are deeply frightened for their genetic and cultural futures. Would heaven their genes and cultures had more worth preserving!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:33AM
Then you too are an idiot.
It originates from a particular troll on /pol/.
But it has been fascinating witnessing your projections on the issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:48AM
Darn! The first two times didn't work. Try calling someone an idiot again! It's sure to work the next time!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:28AM
Pretty sure it's not gonna work then either :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:41PM
Oh. My. God.
You do realize that the term was in usage way before /pol/ ever existed? I'll admit, my post was an inebriated meandering anecdote. The only origin I will accept that involves /pol/ is its use as a political buzzword. I am not going to go all the way to the library just to get you a proper etymology out of the OED, so you're going to have to settle for Wiktionary [wiktionary.org]:
From Middle English cokolde, cokewold, cockewold, kukwald, kukeweld, from Old French cucuault; a compound of cucu (“cuckoo”) (some varieties of the cuckoo bird lay their eggs in another’s nest) and Old French -auld. Cucu is either a directly derived onomatopoeic derivative of the cuckoo's call, or from Latin cuculus. Latin cuculus is a compound of onomatopoeic cucu (compare Late Latin cucus) and the diminutive suffix -ulus. -auld is from Frankish *-wald (similar suffixes are used in some personal names within other Germanic languages as well; confer English Harold, for instance), a suffixal note of Frankish *wald (“power, mastery, dominion”), from Proto-Germanic *waldą (“might, power, authority”), from *waldaną (“to rule”), from Proto-Indo-European *wal- (“to be strong”). Appears in Middle English in noun form circa 1250 as cokewald. First known use of the verb form is 1589.
cuckold (plural cuckolds)
1. A man married to an unfaithful wife, especially when he is unaware or unaccepting of the fact.
2. A West Indian plectognath fish, Rhinesomus.
3. The cowfish, Acanthostracion quadricornis and allied species.
Boom. Done. You're welcome. It has always, since back in the 13th century day, had a reproductive denotation and a sexual connotation with overtones of sexual domination through trickery. Is that not what's meant? My fucking apologies if people who are using it have no fucking clue what it actually fucking means. I mean, fuck.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:22PM
So fast forward about six years and I find that the term cuckold has become part of the MRA/RWNJ vocabulary. How odd! It doesn't mean simply being used. It means being used to raise another male's offspring, which a bit of a corruption of raising another species' offspring (with delicious possibilities for my conspiracy theories about lizard people), but hey. This implies that a cuckold is genetically dead. The term is deeply intertwined with the stuff different people have posted here about how Muslims are going to out-breed the rest of us.
Yeah, you're getting close. The problem is you're still imagining the word cuck is merely a shortened form of cuckold. It is not; the term has a new history and thus accumulated connotations. As noted by another poster (and as I understand it), its popularity on the internet seems to have increased in reference to so-called cuck porn, which almost always (as I understand it -- I've actually never seen any) has a racial component, i.e., white man abandoned by wife/girlfriend for sexually superior black man.
From there, it was picked up by white-power folks before spreading to broader internet culture, which is what you're seeing.
Basically, the people using the word cuck today are like the people who would have used words like miscegenation in the past. But the folks using cuck don't have vocabularies that big, so they borrow terms from things like internet porn. I doubt half of the people who use the term cuck even understand what cuckold really means.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday August 21 2016, @03:16AM
Hmm… fair enough. I don't think if we're going to create a new term cuck to refer to cuck pr0n we can entirely disregard the etymology. We'd need to add to it, perhaps with the mention of /pol/. Even then, it retains its basic qualities of referring to the reproductive habits of the cuckoo.
*sigh* Your point about their limited vocabularies is the depressing point in the end. They're probably duckspeaking without even having something they're trying to say outside of tribalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:50AM
It simply refers to being used.
Very interesting, and in the long tradition of *nix recursives: if you call someone a "cuck", your are being used by "alt-right" who came up with the term because they were being used! And even worse, they did not have to worry about the provenance of their offspring, since they had never. . . . we'll just leave it there, with cubancigar. God, I hope nothing untoward ensues!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:18AM
It goes further than that. Practically all cuck porn is a white woman getting banged by a black man while her white husband is forced to watch. A shit-ton of people using the term are white nationalists. [ace.mu.nu] Its to the point where it is so popular with the racist crew that anyone using it is painting themselves as a racist, [radixjournal.com] kind of like any one using a swastika in the west is now nazi-suspicious at best.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:55AM
Nope, cuck is used more broadly than that and has become a meme. You just want an excuse to ignore others while feeling morally superior, same as with the term "SJWs", which are real [reddit.com].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:13AM
Perhaps not. My understanding was largely the same because:
A) I don't expose myself to too much of the Internet hate apparently to see it
B) I expose myself to too much of the Internet's porn to see anything other than cuck porn being advertised in the thumbnail previews.
Purely from a stastisical viewpoint, the submitter is correct. The term is more often used to describe black cock pounding middle age white pussy while the small and limpdicked husband waits to snowball her. I can't speak to the White Nationalist overtones asserted, but a definite yes on the porn. Interestingly enough.... there has been a rather large uptick in it since the election really started.
Who wants to bet that Pornhub can tell us that the largest consumers of this porn are in Red states? ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:29AM
Hahaha, fair enough.
Don't forget the wedding dress. That really adds to the scene.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:08AM
That word is very, very revealing about the psychology of the user.
I hope you know that words don't have any inherent meaning and what matters is the intent of the user if you're going to try to examine their psychology for using particular words. Language evolves.
But let's not get into all this fake "psychology" pseudoscience where you try to examine someone's mind over the Internet, alright? Don't pretend to know what others think better than they do, or else it seems to me that you might appear similar to one of those theists who claim that atheists actually believe in god and are just deluding themselves by pretending otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:42PM
> you might appear similar to one of those theists who claim that atheists actually believe in god and are just deluding themselves by pretending otherwise.
I've literally never heard that. And I was born an atheist.
I have heard, on many occasion, the accusation that some atheists have turned their atheism into a religion. And I agree with that. It isn't so much that they uncritically worship not-god, but rather that they are on a crusade to spread their non-belief and can't critically evaluate religion beyond the most narrow definition of "magical sky fairy" when in practice religion has a much more broad and intellectually coherent place in the lives of religious people. I fault the theists who make that accusation for rarely, if ever being able to express it in anything more complex than a sound-bite. But ultimately they have it right - especially for the people who have left a religion for atheism, many have just substituted all the rituals, evangelizing, social identification and self-righteousness for a new set. There is a saying that the most devout are the newly converted, and seems to apply to a significant number of newly converted atheists too.
To bring it back around, I think you've unintentionally discredited your argument with your central example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:46PM
I've literally never heard that.
I have. It's good that you haven't. Some people will literally say that atheists do not exist.
I have heard, on many occasion, the accusation that some atheists have turned their atheism into a religion.
There's no need to stretch the definition of religion so far when all they really want to do is say that they don't like certain things the atheists are doing.
To bring it back around, I think you've unintentionally discredited your argument with your central example.
Nope. Even if my example was wrong, my other arguments would stand on their own merits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:44AM
> Nope. Even if my example was wrong, my other arguments would stand on their own merits.
What other arguments? That people do not make unintentionally reveal themselves through their word choices and their areas of focus?
Sorry, but that is disproven so frequently it's practically axiomatic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:39AM
What other arguments?
That you can't psychoanalyze every single person who uses a particular term over the Internet. It's fake Internet psychology of the worst kind. Where is your evidence that this is valid at all?
Sorry, but that is disproven so frequently it's practically axiomatic.
By what? Social science?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:46AM
Basically, if you claim that by using term X, that really what's happening in my individual brain is Y, then you need to prove it. If you make that claim about everyone who uses term X, then you're just flat-out bullshitting now. Even the worst pseudoscientists would hesitate to make such a broad claim about the psychology of an entire group of people who are tied together only by the fact that they use a particular term.
If there is actual scientific consensus that this specific tactic laid out in this comment is good practice, please present the studies which you think prove this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:08AM
Your hatred for the right is obvious. It is obvious they are your enemy. I think your love for them does not exist. You will know how far you've gone if you try right now to empathize with them or think of them in any positive way but cannot. Think hard if it is that you just don't want to, or if your demonization of them is truly complete.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:11PM
Uh, Anon...stop and think for a moment: if I had no empathy I wouldn't be able to get into their heads and figure out how they work so easily.
Fact is, this is a very, very human thing they're doing. It's not hard to understand; it's easy, all too easy, and it makes perfect sense if you think like they do. If I really had no empathy i wouldn't be arguing with--or horrified by--people like Uzzard and J-Mo either. The fact is, it's *because* I know how easy it is for people to fall into that kind of thinking and why that I'm up their noses so hard. Think of it like someone dealing with the early stages of a plague: you can feel sorry for the victims, but you have to, absolutely must, keep them quarantined.
You don't know me, so I can't really blame you too much for what you said up above, but it's simply not true. As it is, here in meatspace my problem is NOT being able to turn this off. I've had spooky shit like precognitive flashes and constant, receptive emotion-sensing happening to me since age 4 or 5 (probably before but I don't remember). It runs in the family, too; my father has a weaker version of it, though he never trained it like I did, the result being something that edges dangerously close to psychic abilities...which I personally do not believe exist, and which is making me feel like I imagine an atheist would if God started talking to him.
Is any of this making sense? I'm constantly going out all-guns-blazing on these people because I recognize how very similar we all are and I've seen this pattern over and over and over again throughout history. It never ends well.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday August 23 2016, @04:00PM
I know some people who have uttered the word "cuck" and I can almost guarantee they don't understand any of the background you have provided. Sometimes words are just fun to say to those who only know what it means in its post-political context.
It's one of those words that may actually have been invented by trolls. Not the nouveau-political meaning of "troll", but the older internet meaning of "jerks stirring up trouble". Because your analysis of the word's origins ring true, and somebody has managed to get a bunch of people too uneducated to even have heard of a "cuckold" before to repeat a strange slur with misogynist overtones, probably just to elevate the anger as people like you understand what they are saying even when its users probably don't.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?