Red Ice TV - July 29, 2021


EU Says Humor & Memes Are Right-Wing Terrorism

Topics
EU humor crackdown
Hosted by
Henrik Palmgren Lana Lokteff
Mentioned
Funny Anymore Saul Alinsky Rahele Amidi Mike Fializ Wojak Slurs
An Olympic Covid Debacle - FF Ep130 The Vaxxed Are the Super Spreaders - FF Ep131

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

145.56

Word count

1,183

Sentence count

102

Harmful content

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

If you are having fun in any capacity with any of this stuff that's happening, you're a terrorist. The European Union released a non-satirical report this week offering that humor, including the sharing of memes, could be a sign your peer is a far-right extremist.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 EU's crackdown on humor and memes.
00:00:04.560 They're going after everything, right?
00:00:06.060 So they're going after white liberals.
00:00:07.440 They're going after if you are having fun in any capacity 0.99
00:00:10.380 with any of this stuff that's happening, you're a terrorist.
00:00:15.020 The European Union released a non-satirical report this week
00:00:17.780 offering that humor, including the sharing of memes,
00:00:21.080 could be a sign your peer is a far-right extremist.
00:00:26.140 In partnering with the Radicalization Awareness Network,
00:00:31.660 an EU-funded group involved with countering violent extremism
00:00:36.860 through surveillance and security,
00:00:39.600 the European Commission published an 18-page report titled
00:00:42.900 It's Not Funny Anymore, Far-Right Extremism and the Use of Humor.
00:00:49.480 There you go.
00:00:49.880 From the European Commission, an actual source here.
00:00:54.740 It's not made up.
00:00:56.920 We're not making this up.
00:00:58.660 Humor has become a central weapon of extremist movements
00:01:02.700 to subvert open societies and to lower the threshold towards violence,
00:01:08.400 the report states.
00:01:09.720 Especially within the context of a recent wave of far-right terrorist attacks,
00:01:14.760 we witness playful ways in communicating racist ideologies.
00:01:19.620 This, so you can't have any fun, even if you're being facetious,
00:01:24.340 even if you're obviously being comical,
00:01:28.300 although you might underline a serious issue or something,
00:01:31.420 this is a major problem.
00:01:33.200 Because why?
00:01:34.400 Because it's effectful, right?
00:01:35.780 Because it works.
00:01:38.000 Again, you want to know why,
00:01:40.900 like, in any of these dystopian, you know, movies,
00:01:45.020 where, like, there's a dictator at the podium
00:01:46.720 and they're, like, wagging their finger at you
00:01:48.440 and they use some, like, you know,
00:01:50.300 I actually, in the Weekend Warrior show,
00:01:51.800 I played a clip from Equilibrium, right?
00:01:54.440 Everyone is taking this drug to nullify their emotions, right?
00:01:58.820 That human emotions are wrong.
00:02:00.520 And we're already there because they're banning and outlawing hate,
00:02:03.160 which is a human emotion.
00:02:04.480 And so the only logical conclusion you can make is,
00:02:06.960 well, what other emotion is next?
00:02:09.380 And, well, in this case,
00:02:10.360 it seems that they're going for humor,
00:02:12.640 for laughter.
00:02:14.900 That's the big problem now.
00:02:16.460 The big issue with the world
00:02:18.340 is people who laugh too much at serious issues.
00:02:21.480 Or at all. 0.85
00:02:22.520 Even shitposter, I would say,
00:02:23.820 people trolling.
00:02:26.280 This paper scrutinizes how humor functions
00:02:29.180 as a potential factor
00:02:30.740 in terms of influencing far-right extremist violence.
00:02:34.780 And I'm not seeing too much of this violence
00:02:37.460 that I keep reading about
00:02:38.600 over and over and over again.
00:02:41.040 I do see a lot of violence
00:02:42.560 on the far left, though.
00:02:44.360 I see a lot of murders from BLM 1.00
00:02:46.500 and burning people
00:02:47.320 and beating people up 0.99
00:02:48.380 and hunting them down 1.00
00:02:49.200 because they're white and, 0.95
00:02:50.240 you know, these kinds of things. 0.99
00:02:52.220 And destroying property and things.
00:02:53.680 But I don't really see this
00:02:55.060 far-right extremist violence
00:02:57.280 really anywhere, to be honest, right?
00:03:00.740 In block quotes on page 5
00:03:04.600 of this report,
00:03:05.360 it states the following.
00:03:07.300 The most potent weapon
00:03:08.640 known to mankind
00:03:09.980 are satire and ridicule.
00:03:14.440 True story.
00:03:15.820 And you know who they reference?
00:03:17.100 They reference Saul Alinsky
00:03:18.600 regarding this, too,
00:03:20.020 back in 1971.
00:03:21.260 His run book,
00:03:21.900 Rules for Radicals. 0.95
00:03:22.840 And many people actually on the right
00:03:23.900 have been talking about that book.
00:03:25.160 And they said,
00:03:25.760 it's a great method.
00:03:27.320 Ridicule them.
00:03:28.100 Have fun with them.
00:03:29.400 Memes is a very powerful way,
00:03:30.760 of course, to, you know,
00:03:31.520 it's a memetic warfare, right?
00:03:33.480 It's, what do you call it again?
00:03:35.520 It's, what is the word for it, right?
00:03:37.820 It's like a thought form or something.
00:03:39.640 I forget what the term for it is.
00:03:42.140 But it's like a,
00:03:43.360 it's an actual concept.
00:03:45.300 I'm not sure if it's in psychology,
00:03:46.580 but there's an actual concept
00:03:47.560 of like it essentially being
00:03:49.200 like a form of a mind virus.
00:03:51.220 And you could argue anything is right.
00:03:53.400 There's a commercial
00:03:54.040 is that at the end of the day.
00:03:55.720 A movie is this.
00:03:56.980 Nothing is, you know,
00:03:57.660 out of bounds
00:03:58.220 or being influential, right?
00:03:59.680 Anyway, continues here.
00:04:03.160 A significant portion
00:04:05.280 of the EU's humor documents
00:04:07.780 discusses memes
00:04:09.280 and how they are supposedly indicative
00:04:11.240 of right-wing extremism.
00:04:13.220 According to the EU,
00:04:14.160 the far right puts a lot of time
00:04:16.380 and energy into meme production
00:04:18.040 to spread their ideology.
00:04:19.900 There's a couple of wonderful examples here
00:04:21.460 that the EU has put.
00:04:22.440 The detached elite,
00:04:25.000 the unelected ruling class elites
00:04:29.500 in the EU, right?
00:04:30.580 This is what they're funding now.
00:04:32.100 This kind of work.
00:04:33.600 Some of the supposedly racist means
00:04:35.560 co-opted by extremists
00:04:36.660 that the EU reference,
00:04:37.660 including Pepper the Frog,
00:04:39.120 that's old school stuff,
00:04:40.920 the dog meme
00:04:41.840 and the Wojak meme, for instance.
00:04:45.900 Pepper the Frog is said
00:04:46.580 to have been appropriated
00:04:47.540 to become the icon of the alt-right.
00:04:49.700 God, this is so boomer-tier here.
00:04:54.040 This is incredible, right?
00:04:56.400 In recommendations for approaching
00:04:57.820 such identified extremism,
00:04:59.560 the commission argues
00:05:00.480 for the deplatforming of accounts
00:05:02.960 from social media, of course.
00:05:04.560 So if you are having any fun
00:05:05.940 with any of this,
00:05:07.480 straight to jail.
00:05:09.720 There's no direct reference
00:05:11.120 to left-wing extremism,
00:05:12.380 of course not,
00:05:13.180 and whether individuals
00:05:14.140 who promote racial ideas
00:05:15.620 on all sides of the political aisle
00:05:17.400 ought to face consequences as well.
00:05:19.540 No, of course not.
00:05:20.360 This is, again,
00:05:21.220 this is, that's right,
00:05:22.920 the Federalists.
00:05:23.800 Okay, they're not quite,
00:05:24.560 they're not quite fully,
00:05:27.320 they're not quite fully understanding
00:05:29.440 what this is about yet.
00:05:30.740 Well, I'll give some news for you. 0.99
00:05:33.080 Hate white. 1.00
00:05:34.560 Hate whitey. 1.00
00:05:35.500 Hate whitey. 1.00
00:05:36.120 Get rid of the whites. 1.00
00:05:37.700 That's the basic outline 0.99
00:05:39.220 of what they're working towards here,
00:05:41.820 the Federalists.
00:05:42.720 That's what you have to understand.
00:05:45.460 Once literacy
00:05:46.580 on the extremist
00:05:47.580 underpinnings
00:05:48.640 of strategic humor
00:05:49.700 is established,
00:05:50.500 the next step
00:05:51.120 is to closely monitor dynamics
00:05:53.820 around far-right meme cultures,
00:05:55.940 the report states.
00:05:57.680 Online cultures
00:05:58.400 quickly develop
00:05:59.200 into extremist movements,
00:06:01.240 as seen in the conspiracy cults
00:06:03.320 and around QAnon
00:06:04.380 and the anti-government
00:06:05.740 and militias
00:06:06.320 in the United States,
00:06:07.460 known as
00:06:07.840 the Boogaloo Movement.
00:06:09.080 Do you see how all of this
00:06:09.900 is being America-fied too?
00:06:13.940 It's like anything
00:06:15.020 that happens in the U.S. 0.98
00:06:16.520 with their gay ops, 0.97
00:06:17.480 it's like EU is like 0.98
00:06:18.360 talking about this
00:06:19.140 on the forefront now.
00:06:19.940 Ban them all
00:06:20.400 because of the Boogaloo Movement.
00:06:22.180 As far as I know,
00:06:22.860 there's nothing,
00:06:23.440 there's no Boogaloo Movement 0.97
00:06:24.540 in the EU
00:06:25.180 or anywhere in Europe.
00:06:27.460 Under the resources section
00:06:28.700 at the end of the report,
00:06:29.740 several websites
00:06:30.480 are listed,
00:06:31.540 including
00:06:31.860 Urban Dictionary,
00:06:33.880 Tech Against Terrorism,
00:06:35.220 Meme War Weekly,
00:06:36.480 Know Your Meme,
00:06:37.280 and Car Guide to Online
00:06:38.640 Radical Right Symbols,
00:06:40.200 Slogans,
00:06:40.720 and Slurs. 1.00
00:06:41.980 The authors are
00:06:42.640 leftist Rahim Ahmed,
00:06:45.220 big surprise,
00:06:46.460 a PhD candidate,
00:06:47.560 and Mike Fializ,
00:06:50.860 a doctorate fellow,
00:06:53.020 a doctorate fellow,
00:06:54.180 there you go,
00:06:54.600 studying far-right movements,
00:06:56.760 digital cultures,
00:06:58.020 and online activism.
00:07:01.160 All right.
00:07:02.680 This is,
00:07:03.440 we're in a new era, folks.
00:07:05.740 Unbelievable.
00:07:06.900 Unbelievable.
00:07:09.560 Humor and memes.
00:07:11.500 And I mean,
00:07:11.780 we were kind of,
00:07:12.480 what,
00:07:13.180 facetiously talking about this
00:07:14.920 in a way,
00:07:15.340 right,
00:07:15.580 a while ago.
00:07:18.480 And now it's here.
00:07:19.900 Now it's here.
00:07:20.440 Now it is
00:07:21.220 right in front,
00:07:22.640 right in front of our faces,
00:07:24.060 right in front of our noses.
00:07:25.100 But you know what?
00:07:25.620 Let's just get this over with.
00:07:27.720 Let's just get this on,
00:07:29.560 as they say.
00:07:30.640 I think the sooner,
00:07:31.640 the better at this point.
00:07:32.420 I think the sooner,
00:07:33.620 the better at this point.
00:07:36.480 We'll be right back.
00:07:37.660 Thank you.