Immediately following this paragraph is a quote from a researcher:
> “If you’re a young man with no prospects hanging out on 4chan, you’re definitely on some Discords and probably some pretty dark Discords,” said Dale Beran, a lecturer at Morgan State University and the author of “It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.”
Researcher, perhaps, but seems to not be what his credentials or college role is about.
https://www.morgan.edu/screenwriting-and-animation/faculty-a...
CNN and reddit arguably did more than 4chan to get trump elected. They couldn't shut up about him and they have way more reach than 4chan.
It's beside the point, but does anybody actually see social studies and the like as "science" anymore when people in them get bullied and silenced and have their careers destroyed if they think or say the wrong thing? When things that go against left-wing beliefs don't get published? When an overwhelming majority of them are on the same political spectrum? After the grievance studies affair? I see it more as a propaganda machinery and after all if you tortute the data long enough, it will confess. I basically just ignore their research whenever I see this sort of stuff.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose." — James Baldwin.
And then, when the hotpot they ve been steering for a generation boils over, its all clutching pearls and "how could this happen".
Has the White House been grossly over-representing Ukraine's chances? Will Ukraine be unable to protect their airspace after late May?
At the very least it's not more anarchist leaning like it was 15 years ago.
Often it's political, and political messaging particularly about war is propaganda.
We don't have different words as to motives of those doing the leaking. A leak can be to support the status quo or hostile to it or anything else besides.
The New York Times has published, by my count, 15 articles on this leak in the past 7 days.
>But the unfiltered, edgy banter in the wow_mao server, which is called the End of Wow Mao Zone, and in many other servers like it, can sometimes veer into darker territory. Those servers are sometimes described as the less venomous cousins of 4chan, the far-right anonymous message board known for sharing conspiracy theories and popularizing QAnon. Many 4chan users split their time between Discord and 4chan, sharing digital memes and chatting with friends.
Emphasis added.
So... they fear NYT? Does this count as a publication threatening the government?
I know some newer versions of the IRC spec try to address at least some of these, but as far as I'm aware, they aren't very widely supported
The average person doesn't care about federation or an open protocol or whatever. They probably don't even understand those things and they don't want to understand them. They just want to chat with their friends and send emojis and not get upset that things don't work. IRC, by all accounts, fails to do—out of the box—all of those things (well).
https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1644139100407054336?cxt...
We have entered into a era where the difference between real and fake is almost impossible to distinguish. Deep fakes and LLM's are going to change propoganda forever.
Is it some kind of psych-op, LLM going on in the comments? No one's interested or curious about the documents and are spamming the page with 4chan shit?
4chan's Rule 3: "You will not post any of the following outside of /b/: Troll posts, Racism, Anthropomorphic ("furry") pornography, Grotesque ("guro") images..."
These rules are constantly being violated across many of the boards, and moderators rarely take action on some of the boards when posts are reported unless they explicitly violate US law. I've seen so many threads get to 400+ replies and fall off the boards, threads that blatantly violate these rules. The period of time after the 2020 election was brutal, an enormous amount of violent and racist content was not removed.
Rules are often even selectively enforced, sculpting narratives that moderator cliques decide on (see /pol/ for example).
At some point, it's worthwhile to ask "who benefits?" from these rules not being enforced. The kind of content that doesn't get moderated is strictly far-right stuff.
I mean, if giving the finger to pretty much everything is considered far-right, then what's considered far-left? Fundamentalism?
And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.
If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.
Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.
https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089253502461952...
However 4chan has always had, and continues to have quite broad demographics, it attracts extremes, by nature of it's low moderation and permissive content policies.
Some examples of left wing associated content could be it's very active LGBT user base.
It's involvement political movements like "anonymous", targeting groups like the Westboro baptist church, hacking the website of Uganda's anti-gay prime minister, occupy wall street, etc.
I can tell you for a fact that the large majority of the mods despise /pol/. As for rules not being enforced, if a post is not reported it likely won't be acted upon.
Now some people break down racism in some weird way where bigotry towards Africans or Hispanics is "right wing" and bigotry toward Caucasians and Asians is "left wing," but those people are laughable in their tribalistic thinking and weird politicization of everything.
For the admins, its a problem. Besides 8kun, they are pretty much the only major image board with anything really going for it, especially now that 420chan has bit the dust. However, if they enforce the rules, its very likely that people will either stop using it entirely or move on to 8kun instead. For the janitor problem, 4chan relies almost entirely on them to report posts that break the rules to the admins, but since its on a volunteer basis, janitors have no reason to take the role seriously which has led the site to be the gutter it is now.
Basically, the whole 4chan system is screwed. I used to go to 420chan as an alternative because it was way more "chill" and there was way less racism and trolling due to it having actual moderation. Now that its gone though my only choice for imageboards are 4chan and its much worse brother, 8kun so I have decided to stop using imageboards entirely until something decent gets started.
... now? It's felt like a cesspool for decades.
Even /sci/ has changed. You have race IQ intelligence threads all the time compared to 2011. Instead of the daily Putnam problem thread, you get that garbage.
NYT is pretty on the money here.
If this were 2010, I'd disagree with them, but not nowadays.
disclaimer of my own bias: I stopped using 4chan in 2012 because of how much of an alt right mess it became after /r9k/. Didn't have the words to describe it back then. I remember people making endless Dragon Age memes in the pinned thread in /v/ in response to the mass shooting by a particular Anders in 2011. They were celebrating it, and it was the most active live thread on the site in that moment.
Is race IQ intelligence discussion really "garbage"? To my knowledge there isn't strong evidence confirming or disproving the theory, but the science on the genetic component of intelligence is pretty solid, and it isn't implausible that certain ethnic groups have genes that confer more intelligence, similar to how certain ethnic groups have genes that make them taller or better runners (see for instance, the olympic winners for sprints).
If anything, they are good evidence for horseshoe theory, or perhaps invalidity of the left-right scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
4chan. The most notorious boards feel anarchist and were very anti-globalist long before it was fashionable.
But as you implied, 4chan as a whole is not homogenous.
They mostly keep the communism will win white genocide now stuff behind the paywall though.
Everyone has their uncle or cousin that says "I am not racist I just hate everyone equally"...
It's also a GOP playbook to destroy or disrupt social services and education to then say "look how bad everything is"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_2016_Uni...
As for the lecturer mentioned in the parent comment, I'm not sure you can draw any conclusions about whether they research or not from their title without looking into how things work at their institution/department, but at least in my experience people with the title "lecturer" tend to actually engage with students a lot more, so I wouldn't be surprised if they spoke with the journalist with the intention of sharing their own first-hand observations rather than from a research perspective.
African Proverb
We can move the goal post and now debate the person's credentials, but we can do that because we know their name.
If someone is using their own money to host a forum for neo nazis it's very coherent to describe this behavior as, at the very least, supporting neo nazis. If they are also hosting a motorcycle forum with their money, does that cancel out the neo nazi support? Is it reasonable to say either site IS a nazi forum?
What if most but not all members of the motorcycle forum are also nazi forum members? What if only a few of them are? What if they share login systems and comment histories?
There aren't clear boundaries between these things. The nazi forum is definitely a nazi forum. Whether the motorcycle forum is a nazi forum depends on how much userbase and culture and branding they share, and how high your tolerance for nazis is; an individual assessment without an objective answer.
O wait.
Of course, the boogeymen borne of tribalistic (politico-cultural) battlegrounds mean that those on the broad right look leftward and see people calling themselves 'leftists' dragging the classical left tenets toward strange, centrist-ized, often authoritarian lines and assume without further evidence that this applies to the left generally.
I promise you there's still plenty of folks who competently understand the labels they choose to inhabit.
I disagree that, within the left and far-left, the anarchist or anti-globalist segments have recently retreated. OTOH, in the United States, the old (peaking around 1990) overlapping center-right neoliberal globalist faction forming the moderate wings of both major parties has faded in the Republican Party, leading the remaining segment of it – which is the dominant faction of the Democratic Party – to be called “left” (and sometimes “far left”) by Republican partisans.
The far right has a number of anti-capitalist. Usually around capitalism undermining social order and traditional bonds.
If we're talking 4chan specifically still, then the idea that capitalism is a jewish plot to... something? (the what varies a lot as far as I can tell) is probably more likely.
Stop using the term alt right. Alt right means neo nazi. Nothing else.
Lumping them together is a cheap tactic to aggravate people, which I think it's dishonest and not very effective.
True, American racists are, for instance, quite often neoconfederates. OTOH, the Confederates were among the direct inspirations for the Nazis, so in a sense that makes those racists Neo-Proto-Nazis.
Do you think that /pol/ is anything but some bastardization of right wing principles?
...
>I was joking
This might be a good opportunity to read up again on Poe's law[0]. It pretty much always applies when one tries to make jokes like this on the web.
Sarcasm and irony only work as intended when talking with people who know you personally or with people who assume they know your viewpoints. If people don't have reason to believe they know your viewpoint, they hear your sarcasm as literal (and frequently think poorly of you, as a result).
Is this sarcasm?
"How much of the recent rise in transgenderism can be attributed to people being more accepting vs how much is peer pressure"
Such a study won't see the light of the day any time soon. Yet, I wouldn't classify it as bad faith, as kids/teens are VERY impressionable. (And then there's the whole detrans thing)
Would you classify it as bad faith?
It's not so much that discordant views get silenced, it's that everyone is aware that in the current climate, almost anything can - and WILL - be used to fuel discrimination. Such a study being approved alone would be taken as proof that "even the left finally admits transgenderism is hurting children" by a LOT of people. Even the way you titled the hypothetical study is de facto begging the question.
I mean yeah, these things should be studied. But it's not as though we have no science. E.g. detransition- we know it's uncommon, and mostly due to external circumstances, not regret. In light of this, is proposing to study specifically whether kids are getting pressured into transition(instead of "factors leading to transition"), in disregard of the fact that we already know most benefit from and don't regret it, "bad faith"? Yeah. Kinda.
The science very much so supports the rationale and safety of transition, but everyone and their dog has that one anecdote, that one outlier news story that convincingly prove how dangerous giving people agency over their gender is, that one "but what about the kids!" concern.
Social studies aren't out to find truth. They're out to confirm their beliefs, basically working to justify their own jobs.
Please elaborate. This is a common claim among "disinformation experts," when what they really mean is they occasionally browse /pol/ while telling themselves it's an academic exercise and they're obviously better than everyone posting on that "cesspool."
If reading /pol/ for hours a day is enough to say you "research far right extremism professionally," then I'd posit that every one of the most active users of /pol/ is more of an expert on it than any pseudo-intellectual making a spurious claim to authority based on their "professional expertise." By that metric, nearly every one of your "research subjects" is more of an expert than you, so if we want a fair assessment of 4chan, we should probably ask someone who uses it genuinely rather than sanctimoniously.
There is no way you are talking about /pol/. I refuse to believe you have spent any amount of time on /pol/ and haven't seen the countless race IQ charts.
Source of this happening systemically? I ask systemically because for any forum there's accusations (and corresponding anecdotes) of censorship from both sides, so a few posts don't really prove anything. You see this on twitter for instance, with accusations that both the left and the right are being unfairly targeted.
2. Look at /pol/.
3. Break another of the rules. (ie not the racism rule).
4. see your post get deleted.
Some truth in that, in Western countries right now, but less so historically or globally. Stalin re-criminalised homosexuality in 1934, and in Russia even today you can find far-left people whose views on LGBT issues are largely indistinguishable from those of the far-right. I’m sure some are going to argue those people “aren’t really left”-but unapologetic Stalinists really are far-left not far-right, and the anti-LGBT stuff is just their following in Stalin’s own footsteps. There are heaps of Western right-wingers who are far more LGBT-friendly than the average Russian Stalinist
The 4chan moderators are rarely enforcing the rules against racism, like anti-semitism, on the extreme boards, and sometimes they don't enforce those rules on non-extreme boards too. The anti-semitism on the extreme boards is rampant. It's pretty clear that the far-right is the current social phenomenon that is driving modern racism and anti-semitism, at least in the West.
> It's pretty clear that the far-right is the current social phenomenon that is driving modern racism and anti-semitism, at least in the West.
That really depends on who you ask. There are many Jews who insist that left-wing antisemitism is a big problem-some will even argue it is as big a problem as (or even a bigger problem than) right-wing antisemitism. And it isn’t just right-wing Jews who speak of left-wing antisemitism as a big and growing problem - the ADL, which is very much a respected part of the American Jewish establishment, is saying the same thing - https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/09/06/adl-ceo-left-wing-anti...
4chan hasn't...
Oh god, 4chan has been around for almost 20 years. I'm getting old...
The more things change, I suppose.
- East Asians and Jews are intelligent but lack creative thought and individualism (the terms hivemind and "bugmen" will often pop up here).
- I don't need to explain what they think about Black People.
- But White People are juuuuuust right
Is he really considered an expert to you, solely because of the publishing of a book? Here it is by the way: https://www.amazon.com/Go-Programming-John-P-Baugh/dp/145363...
I know that's not necessarily your view, but this is the standard we are working with
I was on a meetup, where 4 scrum master "experts" were doing some presentation and they gave out their book. It was around 100 pages with very big font :) written by 4 people. So basically 4 bad essays of 25 page each.
But hey, they could then tell to HR that they (co)wrote a book on agile methodologies. Also they (co)hosted lectures for meetup attendees.
The more interesting part, is that this wasnt even the worst book about agile / scrum that I have read...
In the US (which this person is).
In most of the rest of the English-speaking world, the majority of full-time academics are "lecturers" (or even "senior lecturers"), expected to do both teaching and research, and a PhD is usually required (but exceptions have occasionally been made). An "adjunct/visiting/associate/guest lecturer" is a different thing, that's generally a part-time or even honorary position, and there are no expectations about research output.
Part of this is because Americans inflated the title of professor to the point of making almost every full-time/permanent academic one, whereas in the UK and Commonwealth professor was reserved for the most senior rung of academics, with associate professor for those part-way there. (For most fields–medicine has a lot more professors, but clinical professor is generally a giveaway they spend the majority of their time treating patients, and teaching and research is a side-gig.)
Although–I wonder if everyone in the US uses the terminology in the same way. It is not unheard of for some university out there to just do something weird which others don't. Not saying that's true in this person's case, but not impossible.
This is the same in the US. Tenure-track starts with assistant professor. Associate professor is when you first get tenure. Finally after having tenure for 5-7 years you can become full professor.
[We have the data](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909367116), being trans is identifiable as early as 2-3yo, from the moment gender differences in behavior become apparent, long before any capacity to comprehend and adhere to complex expectations of boogeyman "transtrender parents".
You want to be treated as arguing in good faith, but fail to research the subject, propose questions that assume the conclusion, bring up vague anecdotes contrary to the statistics you're unwilling to consider, and disregard the fact that transgender children suffer from lack of treatment just as hard as wrongly treated cisgender children.
This isn't what the GP is arguing, did you reply to the wrong thing?
You quoted their question:
> Another one is the question, whether gender dysphoria results from mental illness, or the other way around.
The study you provided - whilst interesting - doesn't answer it or even attempt to answer in its purpose.
The study shows 3-12 year olds who are "socially transitioned and live in families that that affirmed their child’s current gender identity through a social transition" have a strong affinity towards their gender, just as non trans children who have their families affirmation of their gender do.
It seems odd to me you're arguing bad faith when it seems you're acting that way by misdirectly and providing studies irrelevant to the point as evidence of the GPs lack of research.
which specific rules are you talking about, aside from racism? Or is your claim simply that rules against racism isn't being enforced and therefore that constitutes "but enforces them against other groups"? Note that the latter is slightly different than the former. The former simply implies a rule that is written but not enforced, but the latter implies that certain rules (eg. "be polite") are being selectively used against a particular group (eg. impolite far-right posters are not punished, but impolite far-left posters are punished).
The University of Oslo has a "Center for Research on Extremism" (CRE-X). https://www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/
While their name suggests they might be just as interested in the far-left as the far-right, if you look at their actual publications, they are almost entirely focused on the far-right, and even those rare occasions they do pay any attention to the far-left, it is generally cases of far-right/far-left overlap. So yes, they are an example of people researching far-right extremism for a living.
In fact, there are lots of other university and independent research centres looking into the topic–I cited CRE-X as an example only because they were at the top of my Google search results. It is something government research funders in many countries want to invest in, and there are also various wealthy philanthropists and charity/activist/lobby groups willing to put money towards it. Nothing unbelievable about someone claiming to do it professionally, because people do.
> I cited CRE-X as an example only because they were at the top of my Google search results
C-REX, not CRE-X. And I didn’t just mangle their acronym once, I managed to do it twice
e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.
Each board has its ridiculous bullshit, groupthink, absurd extremists, edgelords, etc. once you know how to parse that you can quickly navigate to quality posts.
Each board of course has different signal:noise though, somewhere like /lit/ is probably 1:20 whereas /pol/ is probably 1:500-1/1000. But the quality posts are totally different from what you'll find anywhere else. Different users and audience.
Learning about opposing viewpoints doesn't count as learning?
And this is ... a good thing?
I don't think it's good, that's why I don't go there. But the discussion was never whether it was good.
False dichotomy.
Just because I don't like the same radio station you like - doesn't mean I want to live in a bubble, and only listen to my own music.
It's not so much the voting that makes things lopsided but when posts are ordered or deemphasized based on those votes or if the actual moderators are opposed to free speech ideals. I can think of at least two low-moderation forums that do manage to host people of opposing opinions for the Ukraine war and other topics so it's not like 4chan is particularly unnique, just bigger and better known.
Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.
> truly free speech environment
Sounds awful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfrei
Are doxing, slander, defamation free speech?
At the risk of sounding like I wear a tin foil hat... that's what they want you to think!
It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.
Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!
As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind.
We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.
Unrelated to this topic, but I don't see a logical way around this.
I guess I shouldn't talk to anyone. Almost unironically. Or should disengage from people who push into my boundaries, who would turn me into a worse person. So any white supremacist who keeps trying to "convince" me would be substantially worse than a meat eater who respects my views and doesn't push.
It's not ok to be a white nationalist. /b/ and other 4chan boards do not ban white nationalists.
Only if you ignore the mountain of skulls
However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated.
I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.
I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On websites like Facebook or reddit, you're either screaming into the void or preaching to the choir.
It is different in the US. In the US, someone who just finished their PhD and wants an academic career will look for an “assistant professor” entry level academic job. Whereas, in the UK/Commonwealth, the entry level academic job is a “lecturer”-which is equivalent to US “assistant professor”. In the UK system, the first promotion is not to “associate professor”, it is to “senior lecturer”. Then a senior lecturer looks to get promoted to “associate professor”-which is actually a more senior/exclusive title than US “associate professor”. So this is my point-the US calls junior academics “assistant/associate professor”, whereas traditionally in the UK/Commonwealth they aren’t a type of “professor”, they are a type of “lecturer”. An “associate professor” in the UK/Commonwealth is roughly equivalent to a full professor in the US, so a UK/Commonwealth full professorship is (in itself) more prestigious than a US one-a UK/Commonwealth full professor is more like a “distinguished professor” in the US
Furthermore, it’s not unheard of in UK/Commonwealth system for people to get stuck at the senior lecturer level and never get promoted to associate professor-a person who retires as a senior lecturer hasn’t reached the heights of academia, but they haven’t been a failure. By contrast, the US hands out senior academic titles much more easily, which makes the a failure to reach them look like much more of a career failure.
As always there are exceptions: a small number of UK/Commonwealth universities have been adopting US-style academic titles (such as “assistant professor”), and Canada has always been far more US-influenced than the rest of the Commonwealth
Generally it's failure to get tenure (or failure to get on the tenure track) that's considered a failed academic career. Many professors might stop at the associate level and not go on to full professor, but they don't care because they have tenure.
The UK abolished academic tenure in 1988. So nowadays nobody gets tenure in the UK.
In the 21st century, “tenure” is primarily a North American concept (US and Canada), the rest of the English-speaking world doesn’t have it
The main point of tenure in the US is once you’ve got it, you now can’t be fired without reasonable cause. In many other countries, that’s not a special perk for academics, it is a standard aspect of employment law for all non-temporary employees - making the whole idea of “tenure” rather meaningless
/s
Not the portion of people in your immediate vicinity who happen to read/listen to it.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.
You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them.
You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality.
How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?
a lot of them. Nazis in dog costumes are an actual population on the board and get into frequent conflicts with non nazi pornographic content consumers. You just need to check out the 18+ boards and you see it almost immediately.
Edgelords that argue for sport exist of course but they too are people - and might not even believe in whatever ideologies they are meming.
No fucking way I am. Reading the above, it seems you lack awareness of how messed up and dangerous certain people out there are.
Sure, they might, but it'd be ridiculous.
Being a white nationalist is a choice someone makes (and continues to make every day) whereas being trans is not.
Further, white nationalism is associated with bigoted actions (including speech) whereas trans is just someone's personal identity that doesn't really affect anyone else. The two aren't remotely comparable.
To what extent beliefs are voluntary or involuntary is a major topic of philosophical dispute: https://iep.utm.edu/doxastic-voluntarism/
The white nationalist made genocide an efficient industrial process. Just look how little time they needed to nearly eradicate the Jews.
A money quote for those who can't be bothered to read: Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.
And people still want to be communists. Ideology is strange.
It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.
It's a "smoking causes cancer" situation. Just because other things also cause cancer doesn't mean that smoking doesn't. Read up on the history, look at each communist country, see what they become. Smoking causes cancer.
There's just still a bunch of communists who deny it because it's uncomfortable. Just like Neo-Nazis are denying the holocaust. If they were proud of it, they wouldn't deny it. They're not, but they'd like to keep the rest of their worldview intact and pretend that it didn't happen. Don't be like that, look at the history.
There are countries that while not communist, successfully enact a blend of socialism and capitalism without any significant violence. I don't think white nationalism has any sort of validly applicable aspects that can be stretched to that effect.
I don't think it does any more than any other form of nationalism does. Are the Baltic countries violent in your eyes? Their nationalism necessarily is hard to distinguish from ethnic nationalism, because they're very homogeneous. All they'd need to do to be white nationalists is to declare so openly. They're a pretty peaceful bunch, unless you invade them (like the Soviets found out in the Winter War).
Communism on the other hand, is necessarily violent, it cannot function without violently suppressing those who do not believe in it, and it will, always and without fail, go on an eradication trip to do so.
I think isolating white nationalists just makes them congregate on echo chambers more. There should be a balance; you should not talk to racists/people with evil views if you can't maintain boundaries with them. So I don't disagree that you should be uncomfortable
I do not feel that way though.
White nationalism universally seeks to carve out its own space at the expense of others. It's impossible to engage with the ideology without associating with violence.