So Parler has been in the news a lot lately, as a number of prominent conservatives and far-right figures have been talking up the “free speech” platform as an alternative to Twitter, which they think is too quick to censor their terrible tweets.
There is a just a teensy bit of irony in the fact that so many of these right-wing celebrities — I’m looking at you, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — are talking up Parler on their Twitter accounts. So far at least, they’re not devoted enough to Parler to give up their still much bigger audiences on Twitter.
Anyway, so I thought I’d take a little tour of Parler and see how things are going over there. And the answer is pretty much as one might expect: the site is flooded with far-rightists yelling about the things that far-rightests like to yell about.
But if you’re still curious I thought I’d save you a little time by presenting you with an impressionistic survey of the Five People You Meet on Parler — or, at least, the five people I met.
The MAGA Who Speaks Entirely In Hashtags
The Lovesick Nazi
Here’s one Nazi fella who thinks he’s found the girl of his dreams in the form of a proudly pale-skinned young woman who made a little video of herself singing a song about how Hitler was right. Nazi boy just doesn’t know how to contact her to profess his endless love.
The Jargon-Spewing MGTOW, with a meme no one but other terminally online misogynists (and those who monitor them) will understand.
The Proud-Boy-loving Tradwife Who Don’t Want No SImps
If that’s impossible to read, try this:
Momma don’t let your babies grow up to be #simps
Mom teach your girls that it’s just fine to be a wife and a mother
Dad teach your boys to #veneratethehousewife and be #proudboys
#MAGA#MakeFamilyGreatAgain
And then of course there are The Trad Dudes Who Are Trying to Start an Intentional Community for Dominant Men and Submissive Women Though it’s Really Not Going to Be All About Spanking Though it Maybe Sort of Is.
I’ll let the fellows at the Enlightened Men’s Club explain:
We’re a small group of Men and women who’ve had enough of the toxic feminism and misandry that is destroying Western countries today.
We’re creating a new #club for #EnlightenedMen and #submissivewomen who prefer Men to lead society in more traditional roles.Our goal is to start a new #IntentionalCommunity and a timeshare “Red Pill Resort”, where eventually Men and women can meet others who share their beliefs and values.
This is not as much about sexual submission as it is in other areas of life, even if sexual submission is often a natural consequence in these type of relationships.
Instead of trying to change society from within, which we believe is an almost hopeless task at this point, we are simply “walking away”.
However, unlike the #MGTOW movement we are not walking away from women.
By offering financial support and the ability to live in fairly luxurious accommodations completely for free we will invite and select only the highest quality women to join the community.
But it’s NOT going to be all about spanking, though maybe it partly is, they explain in a followup post, except this time it seems to be a woman posting:
People interested in our Enlightened Men Club often assume it’s purely about #sex and #bdsm and #spanking etc.
Although for us #submissive women in the club this is part of the appeal, it’s far from everything.
I want to find a Man to lead me, guide me and care for me in life. And yes, I want him to discipline me also, (when he thinks that is appropriate), but mostly I just want to feel safe, protected and loved and cared for by a good Man
This is the general feeling of all the #women who’ve joined our club so far. The motivations of the Men varies, but yes there is a lot of request for sex and #sexual #submission for sure
Glad they got that all straightened out!
Despite the, er, variety of people one meets on Parler — from Nazis who admit they’re Nazis to Nazis who won’t admit it — I rather doubt it will end up being a serious challenge to Twitter. Why? Because it basically only attracts far-rightists, and far-rightists are rarely content just to talk amongst themselves, unless they’re outright plotting terrorism or something — they want a steady source of liberals and leftists to troll, and the only places that provide those reliably are Twitter and Facebook and other mainstream social media sites. And if they don’t have that, they end up fighting amongst themselves, as they did on Gab.
And for that reason I wish Parler all the best. The more these guys troll and attack one another, the better.
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So someone bought a timeshare, is now stuck in it with no way out except death, and has come up with a “red pill” way to subsidize it by getting men … wait, sorry, Men to help pay the fees in exchange for sex with desperate women lured in by the promise of free housing.
Seems legit.
I hope the women are free to leave the “free” housing.
Welp, most of them have a few too many hashtags for my tastes, not just the overachievever from example #1.
The Nazi crushing on the potential minor he knows nothing about singing pro-Hitler songs is… deeply disturbing. Gonna err on the safe side and hope he gets cock-rot before anything happens. At all. Yes, that includes his next piss.
As @Diego mentioned, the hypergamy meme thing is hardcore projection on their part, though to be fair unless most cheating/polygamist men are cheating with other men there’s a significant number of women on the other side of the equation, and I’d like to know their side of the story (are they dupes who think the man loves them? Sex workers who have to pay the bills? Married women also cheating? Currently unattached women looking for Mr Right/a casual fling/something else? And how aware are any of them that the man is leading a double life and if they are what do they think about it?). Not saying the man isn’t a total scumbag in the overwhelming majority of these cases (being deadbeats not paying alimony is the reddest flag in the history of red flags) or that the other woman diminishes the man’s scumbag-ness in any way, shape or form, but I can’t help but think that could also be an important element to consider.
I give about 50/50 odds of the Trad Wife being a troll. Uncaring Cosmos knows there’s a disturbing number of women who’ve internalized misogynist ideologies.
As for the “Enlightened” Men’s Club (Protip: never trust anything using enlightenment and related words unless it’s a reliable source concerning the Enlightenment historical time period) and their “Intentional Community”… Yeah, even if I was a sub woman I wouldn’t go within a hundred miles of the place. Because with that kind of dude, things can easily escalate from spankings to violent shakings, shoves to the floor/against walls/furniture/down the stairs, punching bag practice leaving bruises and back eyes, broken bones, and worse. And John Norman was somewhat okay at first (in appearance anyway) until he drank waayyyy too much of his own Flavor-Aid (or said “fuck it” and decided to just drop the mask entirely). Now he’s pretty much non-incel, non-MGTOW redpills’ platonic ideal of a proper author- which makes me wonder why I haven’t seen them sing his praises yet (maybe I’m just not looking in the right places?)
@Paireon : AFAIK, the main explanation is that men exagerate their number of cheating relationship, while women undercount it.
That being said, it’s possible to have a lot of cheating men and few cheating women if thoses women have a lot more relationship than the men. Like, if you have 12 men and 12 women, if all 12 men cheat their wife with that same women (one different every month) you have a lot more men cheating than women cheating. That might seem far fetched, but that’s more or less what the job of prostitute is.
Unrelated, or only halfway related : at work, we have the (overwhelming majority) white engineers that are OK with the concept of a linter for bigoted language ala https://github.com/get-woke/woke. The minority of non-white engineer however are all against or not caring about it, saying it’s excessive white guilt and all. Not sure what is the best position, for now I mostly argued that there’s a bunch of suggestions who are about mental health and people thinking differently.
(I personaly think that it’s good mostly because it’s almost effortless ; I would prefer actual effort to go toward having enough female engineer in the firm to play a game of bridge, for example)
Parler isn’t competition for Twitter, it’s competition for 4chan/8chan/8kun.
@Ohlmann
I personally think it is good to be mindful of language, but it also needs action to be taken for equity, otherwise it’s just performative.
Completely O/T, but I know we have a lot of knitting and crochet fans here. So I thought this might be of interest. Someone told me today that it was a fashion in Ancient Rome to wear mis-matched socks. That sounded a bit dubious, so I started digging. Turns out Romans were well into funky socks! (or Udones to use the Latin)
Couple of real examples from archaeological digs.
Well, Romans knew how to wear socks with sandals.
@Ohlmann: That’s one possibility, yes. Though I doubt it accounts for a majority of cases (for many, certainly).
@Alan: First thing I thought seeing that first pic was “Huh, looks like a sock for a Ninja Turtle…”. I’m weird like that.
I’m think the little nazi ditty is a poe. Notice the eye roll midway through.
Two things I’ve heard about Parler lately:
Firstly, someone has been spreading a rumour that it’s secretly owned by Soros. I don’t normally condone the use of disinformation, but I must admit I was amused at the thought of how this would play with the nazis on the site.
Secondly, people complaining about the privacy policy. In particular, this bit: “If you choose to join our influencer network, we may ask for information that can be used to verify your identity, such as a copy of your government-issued photo identification, and information that can be used to facilitate the redemption of virtual items or payments, such as your Social Security number (SSN) or your tax identification number”. Does that justification for collecting SSNs sound sketchy to you? Would you trust them with that information? If so, you’d better hope they don’t get hacked.
@ paireon
Well, the Romans went for the split toe look; like those Japanese tabi socks. So, understandable.
@Moggie : I guess that if Parler didn’t looked like an obvious scam, the far righters would feel ill at ease in it. You have to adapt to your customers after all.
@Moggie
IMO it sounds extremely sketchy and given the general security level on conservative groups, it sounds like a very bad idea to give it to them. Of course, a significant number of US Republican politicians have signed up (Idk if Trump has, he probably will come January 21), so their information could probably be leaked in the future.
@Naglfar:
Excellent point. The right-wing trolls may hate us, but they need us. Without an audience, they’d turn on each other even more than they already do, since their whole worldview is based on rage and spite. Conversely, we don’t need them at all to have interesting coversations, as this site (among others) proves every day.
@personalpest
Exactly. Unlike the left, which builds on shared ideas and goals, the right builds itself around hating the same groups and ideas. When they don’t have something to hate, they’ve got nothing in common and nothing to do but hate each other.
Of course, no leftist wants to set foot in Parler because we don’t want to be punching bags for angry fascists. Unlike the trolls that occasionally show up here, we have some common sense.
@Alan
I may be wrong, but it looks like those socks were knitted with the heel flap construction, which happens to be my favorite technique for making a sock heel.
Those socks look like something you’d still find in Macedonia or Bulgaria.
@ Vicky P
There’s relatively little discussion about how undones were made; but reconstructions suggest it was either with a single large needle or something called naalebinding.
Socks with no toe or heel were also quite popular.
I love this though. It’s one of the Vindolanda tablets. It’s from a soldier’s mum saying she’s sending him some more socks (and underpants).
ETA: Sorry, that first one was the birthday invite. This is the socks bit.
@Paireon
As someone who has had several womanizers in his family, I’ve been over-exposed to gold diggers from birth. It would really be an understatement to say that I’ve met, interacted with, gotten to know no less than 300 (yes, I did the math and still subtracted some because it still sounded baffling). I could literally write a book on this subject.
If anyone cares to hear I can go into detail, but I’m just gonna say here and now that, from my personal experience, most of these women are 100% aware that these men are married/have kids and they absolutely don’t mind. The mentality with gold-diggers is that they either want to replace the wife, or they have 1-2 sugar daddies on the side in case things don’t work out.
The vast majority exhibit a criminal lack of empathy and incredible sense of entitlement. I’ve even witnessed, on more than one ocassion, some of these ghouls demand luxury items from the deadbeat/cheating asshole, at a time their children (the deadbeat’s that is) needed life saving medical treatment. They did this having full knowledge of the situation by the way.
Then there’s the rare instance of the women who are tricked, who actually account for around 10% of the women the deadbeats cheat with. And these women, who are actually sincere and believe the deadbeat to be a good person, will invariably be subjected to abuse.
Deadbeats and gold-diggers are a match made in hell. Not good people, either of them.
OT, but is anyone else getting constantly nagged to install updates by their Mozilla products (Firefox, Thunderbird) lately, even just a day or two after they’d installed a bunch of damn updates? It’s been going on for a month or so.
@Alan
Oh, yes – I have a knitting buddy who was learning nalebinding a few years back, and she shared photos of socks from the Scandinavian region that looked a lot like the Roman ones you’re showing here. Nalebinding at work!
@Paireon
“Huh, looks like a sock for a Ninja Turtle…”.
I knew something was off about that sock, but I couldn’t place what.
@Surplus : I don’t have that problem. Mozillas product do tend to be updated often, but not that often.
Yay for mismatched, stripey socks! I’ve made a fair few pairs of those myself.