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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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From the Twitter thread you linked:

During our investigation and ongoing monitoring of extremist groups, Knightsbridge found no evidence that any “National Day of Hate” was planned outside of a few small groups with very little influence nationally

Unless you're claiming the ADL was behind these "few small groups" Knightsbridge mentioned, hoax is too strong a term here. Sounds to me like there was a credible-but-low-risk threat that the ADL reacted to for either political/financial reasons. It's also possible ADL blaring this as loud as possible deterred those few small groups from actually going through on their plans. It's one thing to hit a target that's not expecting you, it's quite another to hit a target with beefed-up security.

EDIT: Added a link to the specific tweet.

I think hoax is a perfectly adequate term. There are billions of people in the world, there's a near certainity that there will be someone, somewhere who will vaguely fit the profile of what scenario you wish to conjure up. But the scenario itself is still fictitious, a deliberate choice to misrepresent (and necessarily fabricate) information.

Even if you want to make the 'well, technically there was at least one dude somewhere saying something along those lines, so it's not a hoax' the obvious and immediate counter-argument is that the hoax is not the fact there is that one guy somewhere, but rather the hoax is the deliberate misreprentation of a non-credible threat as a credible threat, in a situation where it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence it's a non-credible threat, least of all supposed 'hate crime experts' like the ADL.

On principle, this is not dissimilar to a situation where someone sees a bunch of mischievous teenagers messing about with some paintball guns, this someone knows they're nothing but mischievous teenagers with paintball guns (who might even talk a big game but everyone including the someone knows are harmless), calling the police on them as an active shooter situtation,where people are being shot and 'potentally' killed then literally everyone believes and parrots the caller, up to the top level of government and media, no one does any due diligence investigating because it plays into their political incentives (an active shooter situation is great fodder for gun control politics). Oh, and it turns out the caller is a owner of a private security firm who tends to gets a lot of contracts after something like this occurs. What would you call that situation, if not a hoax?

What would you call that situation, if not a hoax?

A plot? A scheme?

Yeah, maybe like a scheme to maliciously deceive a mass audience... wait, that's a hoax...

I mean, the goal seems to be for money rather than pure mastery-of-reality, I guess it's a hoax in the same way as something like the jackalope and less like the normal conspiracy theory inflection the word "hoax" might have.

I would firmly say it is a hoax because (1) crew 319 is approximately one weird person, (2) the request was to distribute fliers, (3) the telegram post has only 1000 views when I saw it (absurdly low, and this was after it went viral) plus only four reactions. The hoax is in the nation-wide coverage that led to 150,000 tweets, because someone on telegram told his followers to distribute flyers

Hoax calls to mind the Smollet incident or some kind of false flag. "Over-reaction" or "exploiting an opportunity" seems a better descriptor.

I don’t think “over react” conveys the magnitude of the exaggeration. “Hate groups declare” -> it was one guy. “A day of hate” -> it was putting up flyer. “Police order extra patrols” -> no one found any serious threat.

For example, if the story was titled “nation in horror as rabbi takes to street to hunt children on racist day of hating gentiles”, would this convey the singular incident of Baruch Nockowitz attacking a child? Or would it be a 1000x exaggeration which would benefit antisemites?

I'm equally okay with both this incident and your hypothetical story-title being classified as exaggerations instead of hoaxes. If you can find me some evidence the Crew 319 is really an ADL plant, then I'll call it a hoax.

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