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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Also known as Popehat's Law of Goats:

    He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.

If your goal is to be seen as a racist, and to provoke a response from people who are offended by racists, and you do all of the things that racists do to that end, spending time on racist forums spreading racist memes and hate speech, then the distinction between you being an "actual" racist and your racism being mere performance is one without a difference.

Because being racist as a hobby isn't really something non-racists tend to do.

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Meh, be racist in an on-the-nose and obviously dumb way, like 4chan is doing here (whether intentional or not), and you get the opposite result: You make racists look bad.

In the end some will think it's satire, some won't but will still laugh because it's stupid, and some will get mad.

Actual racists lost, 4chan got a laugh, and outrage culture got played again.

> and you get the opposite result: You make racists look bad.

doubt it.

won't change the beliefs of anyone looking at it one way or another.

the people participating in it, though, after years of spewing out racist garbage risk without any self-reflection risk going down the spiral of "hey, this one actually makes a valid point".

and i suspect that most of them are just flat out racist and not just memeing for the lulz.

The people that act like goat fuckers look bad because they are goat fuckers...other goat fuckers also look like goat fuckers.

And then fucking a goat ironically looks an awful lot like fucking a goat.

>you get the opposite result: You make racists look bad.

In general I find myself agreeing with your comments in this thread but here I disagree.

It's tempting to find the overall societal benefit from those actions but I don't think there is one. Or it's much more subtle than this.

I also think that it's mainly done to create chaos and get a reaction and not so much to spread x opinions. But just randomly throwing shit into the world *mostly* makes everyone get used to the smell of shit while they hate you for it. But in my experience it *usually* leads to more shit and not less shit.

It really baffles me how people think "people who genuinely believes black people are an inferiors species" and "people who try to get a rise out of people fur teh lulz" are really literally exactly the same.

They're obviously not. You may have the same moral judgement about these people, and that's fine, but that's not the same as reality.

And it ABSOLUTELY matters, because if you want to do something about this then you need to actually understand the problem on a meaningful level, which includes people's motivations. You're never going to solve anything you don't understand (except, maybe, by accident).

A prime minister who fucks a goat because he's being blackmailed to do so is not the same as someone who does so for pleasure (who is different still from someone who does it for sadistic reasons). To describe all these as "simply a goatfucker" would be silly, even idiotic.

It's one of those nice-sounding one-liners that falls over with even the most superficial and casual of scrutiny.

The difference is, if you stopped giving them attention, one of those two would also stop being a goatfucker, but people obviously want more things to be outraged about, not less.

These people would clearly still be virulent racists getting excuses made for them by people who desperately don’t want to believe that posting racist memes and hanging out on Stormfront make you a bad person.

Yes, but they wouldn't be getting a free marketing campaign that draws more people to their communities and their ideology if it weren't for all these professional victims being outraged by them.

Instant downvote, “Professional victim”, “outraged”… yeah, it seem like it’ll be super productive to have a conversation with you.

It’s certainly impossible that people hurt by, say, racism might have legitimate concerns about the virulent spread of more racism by actual, literal racists on 4chan. No, it’s actually black people, for instance, who dislike racism, or Jews who think anti-demotion is bad, who are to blame.

Brilliant.

Yes, they are to blame. The whole point of edgy humor is to imagine the person behind the screen fuming at the bait that you posted. By giving them what they want, you have become the punchline that they were seeking, hence encouraging them to continue posting bait and getting you outraged.

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