So you’re saying the emails are dated incorrectly or fake?

No? What does that even mean? How are those things comparable?

Are you even trying to explain these events?

but you do have to explain how /pol was started on 4chan a day before m00t met Epstein

I don’t have to, because that’s a whole other story that I didn’t dispute. In fact, perhaps you should explain why you would logically connect these two events in the first place. If Epstein caused/convinced moot to create the board, wouldn’t have these two events happened in the opposite order? What do you think was the actual sequence of events?

more promoted, and took it under his belt

It should be admitted that this is only conjecture for now.

So you can’t make the case that 4chan wasn’t influential.

That’s ok, because I never even suggested I’d make it. In fact, 4chan may have been the most culturally and politically influential website relative to the size of its userbase.

As for what I am dead certain happened: 4chan had a large proportion of racist and fascist users before 2011. These mainly congregated on the board /n/ (“News”). Due to the board becoming a hotbed of racism, moot deleted it. The users were pissed off. A few months later, /pol/ was created as a replacement to contain the racist users (one of the rules on 4chan said that racism outside of /pol/ is forbidden; from personal experience I can say this wasn’t enforced too strictly, but it reflects the original intenet). At that time moot met with Epstein. Later on, the fascist board culture was in harmony with the discourse espoused by Trump, and was likely one of the key origin points for pro-Trump cultural discourse. In 2017, the persona “Qanon” started to post on /pol/, and then migrated to 8chan where many Trump supporters followed. According to Frederick Brennan, the founder of 8chan (and recently deceased), the person behind Qanon was Jim Watkins, who had taken over 8chan from Brennan, although I don’t know how solid the evidence for that is, there have been other theories. Also bunch of other stuff happened on 4chan and 8chan, Gamergate, moot retiring, the takedown of 8chan after the Christchurch massacre and subsequent decline of Qanon…

It’s difficult to connect this all into a neat unified story. Slapping an “it was Epstein” does not actually make sense of most of it. Even if the Epstein-moot meeting wasn’t accidental or inconsequential, what could’ve actually happened, what would’ve been Epstein’s involvement, why do we have no further evidence of it in the emails, and how was it different from the existing fascist board just keeping up being fascist?

Have you read the relevant emails yourself, and do you at least vaguely remember their content?

Anyway, the contacts between Poole and Epstein have been covered in media quite a lot and I’ve read articles about it, as well as checked some of the documents myself. None of what I’ve previously read and what shows up on google now supports the claim that “4chan was Epstein’s creation”. Epstein met with Poole in 2011, that’s the currently widely confirmed information, and I hope I don’t have to write an essay explaining why that’s not proof that “4chan was Epstein’s creation”.

Can you point me to something more specific than a bunch of disjointed and duplicate emails? The database is really difficult to navigate.

4chan was also an Epstein creation.

These claims of 4chan-Epstein connections are becoming more and more ridiculous. No, 4chan was not an Epstein creation.

Funny how I never see this statement posted on /c/[email protected]

Better chances to vote it away than shitpost it away, as far as Lemmy’s options go.

Khan made lots of kids tho. This one did it just for the love of the game.

Genshin works normally, no special trickery needed AFAIK - my sister plays it on Linux all the time.

You are in some deep seated denial if you don’t think homosexuals express affection through kissing.

I expected more than defaulting to disingenuity. Straight men kissing is not the same as gay men kissing. Implying that Soviet politicians expressed their homosexual desires by kissing is an insulting level of trivialising homosexuality.

Yeah, I’m sorry if the size and depth of the document scared you off.

And - more disingenuity, along with childish pretentiousness. The text doesn’t say anything specific in support of your claims. The “depth” required to prove LGBT culture existed in USSR is miniscule, the general methodological considerations that the PDF discusses are irrelevant here.

I’m arguing the homosexual urge is strong and universal. Russia is no exception. And that, when the political moment allows for it, the expressions of queer love flourish.

I don’t remember anyone claiming otherwise. What was being discussed was how the state deals with that urge and, implied, how we evaluate states with regards to how they dealt with it.

Liberals want to deny that this golden age of free love and open queer expression occurred, because it flies in the face of their orthodoxy. But it happened repeatedly over the history of the USSR. Soviet peoples openly expressed their queer love and accepted the queer love of their neighbors. Soviet governments bent in the face of it, even as the reactionaries fought against it.

This is pure fantasy. You are free to provide actual documentation from that age and prove me wrong - not meta-methodological pontificating of academics but actual traces of that time period from USSR - but as I’ve studied Russian and had some interest in their culture, as well as spent some time in Russian online queer spaces, all I’ve seen is historical silence or erasure, even during the supposed “golden age”. I would be sincerely glad to be proven otherwise, I’d be glad to see that LGBT history hasn’t been as uniformly bleak as it seems to me now.

You don’t need perfect liberal conditions to enjoy a queer society.

Maybe. The point is simply that USSR was very far from a queer(-positive) society either way, with a possible window of greater freedom for a short while that doesn’t seem to have left any serious traces in practice.

Hell, quite a bit of modern western history suggests liberalism is as much a threat to queer expression as any socialist government.

And - standard defaulting to “liberal societies are equally bad tho!”. Right after desperately trying to prove socialism created a queer “golden age”, as if you don’t believe your own claims about it yourself.

Russia and the surrounding states are filled with these people and will continue to be filled with these people, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.

This has nothing to do with the topic. We’re talking about USSR’s sexual politics, not current LGBT activism in Russia.

Kissing as a sign of friendship/goodwill is not a sign of homosexuality or of acceptance of homosexuality. It is deeply tasteless to use it as an example of being “super gay”.

How do you explain the continued prevalence of gay culture in a country that has so militantly sought to oppress it?

Your claim about the “prelevance” of gay culture in USSR is based on a link to a lengthy and wordy PDF of an introduction and one chapter from an academic volume. It is a vague theoretical/methodological text about studying not just USSR but Central and East Europe during and after socialism. I don’t intend to scrutinise the pages and pages of the Foucaultian language to wring out some potential proof for your claim, what is needed is actual documentation. In fact I’m wondering if you yourself have read and understood the PDF.

If by “gay culture” you mean cultural output with LGBT themes, that effectively didn’t exist in USSR (or at least in Russia, that I’m slightly more familiar with). We can go look for specific examples to check that. If by “gay culture” you mean gay people managing to survive away from the public eye and having some small communities, that’s an unacceptably low bar. By that logic you could make excuses for just about every repressive regime that didn’t completely eradicate its “enemies”.

If you’re arguing against the idea that USSR was the most henious country against LGBT in history, yeah, that’s likely not true. But nobody was claiming that. OP text is (I believe) a reaction to the current touting of the progressive sexual victories in the earliest years of the Union while making little mention of their reversal and the overall bleak situation for most of the country’s history.

You ok there fella?

Well, for accessing paywalled articles .org is no replacement for .ph/.today, sadly. But it’s advisable to use it as little as possible, it seems using visitors for DDoS’ing the blog is still going on.

OTOH you may have missed the communication even if you were on Facebook. These days your feed is just 1/3 the groups you’re in and pages you’ve liked, 1/3 is the “recommended for you” random garbage, and 1/3 is ads. I’ve missed many notifications for events that interested me, they’d pop up a few days after the event actually took place.