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[janrinok] For those of you who do not want to read about the 'extremes' of US politics (alt-right or left-wing) I suggest that you skip this story and wait for the next one. If you feel that we shouldn't publish any story that does not accord with your own, probably less extreme, views then perhaps you should remind yourself that we try to give everyone in our community the benefit of free speech and we do not intentionally censor or promote any particular view or political leaning. Of course, you are welcome to contribute your own comments in the subsequent discussion that will follow.
This MSNBC Guest Just Showed Why The Intellectual Dark Web Exists
On Tuesday, The New York Times’ Bari Weiss appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss her new in-depth piece on the so-called Intellectual Dark Web – an agglomeration of thinkers from all sides of the political aisle who have been cast out by political correctness and now converse with one another regularly and publicly (full disclosure: I’m a charter member, along with friends including Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and others). The entire premise of the IDW is that many on the Left refuse to acknowledge good-natured disagreement; instead, all disagreement must be due to nefarious evil on the part of those who disagree.
Proving the point on MSNBC was guest Eddie Glaude Jr., chair at the Center for African-American Studies at Princeton. When Weiss cited the discussions between me and Sam as evidence for the diversity of the movement, Glaude responded, “What allows you to describe these folks as intellectuals of sort? Let me say it differently. They’re connected intellectually by what common commitments? So you might have different ideological spaces, but when you talk about Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro in one sentence, I can see the connection between those two.” Weiss responded, logically enough, “Which is?” And Glaude explained:
Having something to do with how they think about race, having something to do with how they think about diversity in the country and the ways in which diversity is talked about, right? The way in which they think about political correctness. Weiss responded, “Yeah, they’re anti-identity politics, for sure.”
To which Glaude launched into a full defense of identity politics: “Identity politics is a phrase that kind of is a red herring. Identity politics is just simply questions of justice, right?”
At this point, Joe Scarborough jumped in and hit the nail directly on the head:
Eddie, you have just made Bari Weiss's point, that you disagree with the way Bari Weiss views the world, so you're going to help her view the world more the way you view the world. The entire purpose of the exercise is to have honest conversations with people, and to not question their morality, or their wisdom just because they don't view the world exactly the same way that you do.
The "Intellectual Dark Web," Explained: What Jordan Peterson has in Common with the Alt-Right
Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, created a stir this week with a long article on a group that calls itself the "Intellectual Dark Web." The coinage referred to a loose collective of intellectuals and media personalities who believe they are "locked out" of mainstream media, in Weiss's words, and who are building their own ways to communicate with readers.
The thinkers profiled included the neuroscientist and prominent atheist writer Sam Harris, the podcaster Dave Rubin, and University of Toronto psychologist and Chaos Dragon maven Jordan Peterson.
Some assertions in the piece deserved the ridicule. But Weiss accurately captured a genuine perception among the people she is writing about (and, perhaps, for). They do feel isolated and marginalized, and with some justification. However, the reasons are quite different from those suggested by Weiss. She asserts that they have been marginalized because of their willingness to take on all topics and their determination not to "[parrot] what's politically convenient."
The truth is rather that dark web intellectuals, like Donald Trump supporters and the online alt-right, have experienced a sharp decline in their relative status over time. This is leading them to frustration and resentment.
[janrinok] And another contribution from Ari reviews Amanda Marcotte's new book:
Birth of a "Troll Nation": Amanda Marcotte on How and Why Conservatives Embraced the Dark Side
Interview at Salon with author Amanda Marcotte:
I had no role in editing Amanda Marcotte's new book, which bears the amusing and highly appropriate title, "Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." None of it previously appeared in Salon, to be clear;
But "Troll Nation" is not about the election of Donald Trump. Amanda and I have certain areas of cheerfully-expressed political disagreement, but I think we share the view that Trump was the culmination of a long process, or is the most visible symptom of a widespread infection. Amanda's analysis is, as always, calm, sharp-witted and clearly focused on available evidence. American conservatives, she says, used to make rational arguments and used to present a positive social vision. Did those arguments make sense, in the end? Did that "Morning in America" vision of the Reagan years conceal a vibrant undercurrent of bigotry?
[...] How we got from the supercilious, upper-crust conservatism of William F. Buckley Jr., the dictionary definition of an elitist -- the dude could read and write Latin, for God's sake -- to the delusional ignorance of Alex Jones and #Pizzagate, the small-minded hatred of Charlottesville and the unquenchable thirst for "liberal tears" is one of the darkest mysteries of our time. It's also the story of "Troll Nation."
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @08:02AM
Both have centralized aspects of the services (guard nodes and seed servers) that are located primarily in the US/EU(primarily Germany.)
Java I2P is controlled by 5 people currently, the primary ones pushing a pro-SJW agenda. They are also sitting on significant donations (I2P currently has over 5 million dollars in published assets(https://geti2p.net/en/about/hall-of-fame). All of them have their public identities revealed and are either US, German, or Canadian citizens. For someone with more time, credentials of these staff warrant further scrutiny as well as how the finances are being handled.
The only feature-complete alternative is the C++ i2pd, which had a heap leak CVE (https://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2017-17066) in the past year. This leak dated back many years and the main developers try and pretend concerns about it are just an attack by a rival fork while brushing over concerns about the security of their application, which they have been bragging heavily about as being both faster and more secure than Java I2P. Kovri, which is aligned/backed by Monero, was also affected by it, both being forks of code from an earlier developer who stopped maintaining the project. The primary developers for both projects are Russian, with a few ,mostly American, Westerners in the mix.
Tor has fallen down a similar SJW hole since the Applebaum fiasco and leadership shakeup, and due to both its American centered leadership, primary infrastructure in 5 eyes signatories, and changes to increase circuit performance at a trade off in anonymity are causes for concern.
After saying all this, the I2P protocol is still worth further development, but for that to happen a new project needs to be formed. The first step is taking the java I2P router and completing optional protocol features that were defined but never implemented, like payload padding to make actual traffic patterns less discernible. From there anti-Sybil protocol features need to be implemented/added to take care of ongoing concerns over services or users being deanonymized, as well as modifications to help improve multihoming support which could help both with DDoS prevention as well as anonymity of hidden services against targeted attacks. If the udp tunnel support currently in C++ i2pd was documented and ported to Java I2P, the SOCKS client tunnel type extended to include the optional SOCKSv5 UDP support, and volunteer outproxies were set up, with outbound throttling of UDP handled by the exit node, I2P as a platform would provide a much wider selection of benefits compared to Tor. But without a major change in leadership or a fresh blooded fork developing the features, it is destined to stagnate and die, as it has been doing for almost 10 years now, and almost 3 despite what should have been more than sufficient funding and demand.
Whatever your politics, so long as you believe in free speech, the right to privacy, and the need for a secure internet platform free from government or organizational, the anonymity platforms need *YOU* to continue protecting us, both from corporate/government surveillance and extremist agenda groups; whether SJW, AltRight, or your regions equivalent ideological demographics.
For the record, i2pd is the only thing that has kept I2P features developing the past few years, but has leadership flaws similiar to the java project that will hamstring it going forward for a variety of mostly technical reasons, some of which have security implications. At the same time, Java I2P itself is lacking in both sufficient and competent developers, especially cryptographers, to take the next series of steps in development and verification of the protocol.