Alt-white wolf?

[Wumpus]

I don't follow White Wolf much these days, what with not being focused on chasing goth chicks, but seems some controversy has cropped up from how various topics are being presented and/or hinted at in the new revision:
http://www.dogwithdice.com/whitewolfaredead/

And as there's nothing the Den loves more than tearing apart bozos, I figured you'd all get some lulz

[Ignimortis]

There are lots of things that are wrong with White Wolf. This isn't one of them. Admitting that neo-nazis exist and might even get Embraced is not a bad thing. Having vampires be as disparate and multi-faceted in their opinions and beliefs as humans is absolutely normal.

Brujah are defined by their adherence to some sort of a cause. Nazism is not a noble cause, nor is it just or good, but it's a cause that some people follow, so it makes sense for some Brujah to follow that.

[WiserOdin032402]

White Wolf 3.0 hired Zak S.? Are you fucking kidding me? I thought saying 'FAILSNAILS is a usable system' killed your career completely in the RPG industry.

Minor criticism of the source: White Wolf games don't have rules. Stop lying and pretending like they do.

[Prak]

Eh, I understand what the guy who wrote this is getting at, but... it's a pretty absurd argument. There are elements of Vampire that could be used in a pro-fascism way, but, honestly, a lot of fantasy works can be twisted that way.

Besides, the Nazi problem of World of Darkness is way bigger in Werewolf than Vampire. Fuck, an actual race war is a part of Werewolf history, and you play as members of the group that instigated it.

[Whipstitch]

I remain dumbfounded by how bad they fucked up W:TA. How hard is it to let people be furry Planeteers? Why do you have to take part in dog rape based eugenics programs?

[Ignimortis]

I remain dumbfounded by how bad they fucked up W:TA. How hard is it to let people be furry Planeteers? Why do you have to take part in dog rape based eugenics programs?

Because they want everything to be angsty and sad, even when you're playing murderous Captain Planet or a fairytale character. It's White Wolf, they've been like this since 1990.

[nockermensch]

I don't follow White Wolf much these days, what with not being focused on chasing goth chicks, but seems some controversy has cropped up from how various topics are being presented and/or hinted at in the new revision:
http://www.dogwithdice.com/whitewolfaredead/

And as there's nothing the Den loves more than tearing apart bozos, I figured you'd all get some lulz

Leftists like this are why we can't have nice things. And fuck you for making me take Zak S's side on any issue, ever.


EDIT: On further reading, shitmuffin's antics are sufficiently repugnant as to make any product he is associated with guilty.

The point still remains that the linked article is bad, and the author should feel bad. A serious issue with intelectually lazy leftism is that when you take the moral high road, people actually expect that you behave in a morally correct way. The article has so many inconsistencies, unwarranted conclusions and plain bad reasonings as to make one doubt everything claimed on it.

[Username17]

I actually am genuinely not sure whether the article's conclusions are accurate or not. A bunch of Swedish Edgelords made V5 to be a product that was by and for edgelords. There really isn't a purpose or constituency other than that. Goin through the text and finding bits here and there that seemingly advocate rape, pedophilia, cannibalism, and murder on the individual level or oppression, injustice, and even genocide on the societal level just isn't very hard. It's an edgelord document written by edgelords and intended for an edgelord audience, so I can say with absolute confidence that such passages exist in chapters I haven't even read. That's just how the material that I have seen has been constructed, and there's absolutely no reason for me to assume that any other part of it is different in any way.

The larger question is how much of that is supposed to be "ironic" and how much of it is supposed to be "serious." And to that question I ask a counter-question: "Who fucking cares?" As we've seen with 4Chan's "ironic" support of Trump and the real-world consequences of actual babies being put in lice-infested cages because of the color of their skin, it is in many ways true that advocacy in jest is still advocacy. Racist jokes still hurt and oppress people even though they are jokes.

Which is not to say that there isn't room in the world for entertainment to say horrible things. Racist jokes are funny. Dead baby jokes are funny. Pitch black noir stories can provide pathos for the reader. Ruminations on depression and despair can be cathartic just as feel-good romantic comedies can be. There is an audience for horror movies and sad movies and stories that make the reader feel bad. But when a piece of entertainment says something terrible, it is genuinely saying something terrible whether there's an artistic reason for that or not.

Which brings us to V5. What exactly are the artistic merits that justify the horrible things it says? What's the payoff of the famous child rapist character in the preview adventure? As far as I can tell there isn't one. That child molestation plotline doesn't really go anywhere. There's no payoff. There's no larger story. It's not even the fulcrum for a point of cathartic revulsion - it's just there.

It doesn't seem beyond the reasonable that various Neo-Nazi text and subtext exists in a lot of the V5 shit I haven't bothered reading. I also wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the most repellant segments were intended to be taken ironically or some shit. But I also don't really care. I have no inclination to meet a Bunch of Swedish Edgelords half way. Horrible statements are at the end of the day still horrible, and while they might have a place in a finely crafted artistic work intended to explore the darker parts of the human experience, I don't think you could confuse V5 for something like that even while drunk.

-Username17

[Red_Rob]

Looks like it got taken down due to "attempts to silence voices of criticism and enquirey".

Sounds like they got a lot of flack from quarters they maybe weren't expecting.

[Username17]

Looks like it got taken down due to "attempts to silence voices of criticism and enquirey".

Sounds like they got a lot of flack from quarters they maybe weren't expecting.

Almost certainly they did. But of course the claims:

threats of personal violence and death directed at myself and my loved ones
…
emails from individuals claiming to represent White Wolf Publishing containing purported legal threats

Are rather more severe accusations. If true, and I rather suspect that is, that pretty much makes the case that the Swedish Edgelords that are NuNuWhiteWolf are vile Nazi-curious shitbags much better than the original essay did.

Honestly, I'd be pretty surprised if the original essay didn't get a lot of pushback, and I'd be surprised if it didn't draw the ire of a bunch of people who are nominal allies of the person who wrote it. It's kind of a meandering mess with a lot of asides and TL;DR bullshit. I fully admit to skimming large sections because get to the fucking point already! And of course, a lot of feminists and queer theorists and shit who have the slightest inclination to give a single fuck about Vampire were fans of Masquerade in the 90s. I would say the venn diagram is pretty close a circle there. So the reflexive attitude of everyone involved must naturally be to reject a hypothesis that Vampire is a vile hotbed of Neo-Nazism. Like, that's a fairly insulting premise to a lot of people who were born in the late seventies and early eighties and give any shits at all about role playing games. It's telling people "the playground of your youth has been completely taken over by a Nazi prison gang." Like, whoah if true.

But let's boil it down to just single issues:

They named the Brujah clan weakness "Triggered." That word only means one thing. It's alt-right Troll-speak. It has other meanings in other contexts, but to use it in the sense of "being pissed off" is absolutely alt-right Troll-Speak. "Triggered" is a word that also means getting upset because you have PTSD or something like it, but the term meaning getting upset in general is alt-right Troll-Speak to mock rape victims. Really. That's actually what means and where it's from. Neo-Nazi Trolls will accuse you of getting "triggered" by shit because their hateful comments get you upset, s they are intended to do. And the mocking takes the form of saying that you are weak and overly sensitive - like a rape victim. Because those assholes also consider the fact that many rape victims become touchy about various subjects to be a form of weakness. Because they are unbelievably horrible people.

The use of the term "Triggered" in the Brujah clan weakness is at best an example of colossal tone deafness. A reference to off-hand comments made by the very worst people online. The most affirmative defense you could mount of that decision is that perhaps they don't understand the context of the use of that word and simply don't notice that some of the people they hang out with online are disciples of Milo and Richard Spencer. Like, you wouldn't think to use the word at all if it wasn't used in your social group, and if people in your social group use that word it's because they are mounting an extended terror and harassment campaign to intimidate rape victims and prevent them from feeling free to come forward with their personal horrors in a public setting. That's literally and specifically what it means about the people in their social circle at the very least. And by using that word in their game they are - at best unknowingly - participating in that same extended harassment campaign.

There's no interpretation of any part of that where calling the Brujah clan weakness "Triggered" is remotely "OK." It is a bad decision, and you have to bend over backwards to be charitable for it to not also be an evil and hateful decision chosen to afflict the afflicted and rub elbows with their tormentors.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

The use of the term "Triggered" in the Brujah clan weakness is at best an example of colossal tone deafness.

Sometimes I wonder if we're getting old enough (I'm 42) to become seriously out of touch. If you head right now to "internet meme culture" places like say, imgur or Know Your Meme, you'll see TRIGGERED memes in what appears to be general use.

Kind of like with Pepe the Frog, which was, if anything, a marker for "4chan was here", until very serious people determined it was in fact a hate symbol. Meanwhile /pol/ is continuously at work coming with plans to associate some innocuous gesture, image or word with anti-semitism, white power or some shit like this, as part of their eternal culture war. To the best of my knowledge, their objective in these ops is to make very serious people fall for it and publish very concerned op-eds, therefore looking silly, which then makes young people trust the VSPs less and less and become more receptive to the Milos of the world.

Mind you, there is enough circunstantial evidence in Vampire's case to indicate that nununuWoD is indeed a trash product made by trash people, evidence mainly in the form of holy shit, but how is shitmuffin such a rancid douchebag?! I don't go to the Big Purple usually, so my knowledge about him was restricted to the drama here in the Den, which... wasn't out of ordinary, really. silva seems to have caused more angst than him, on the aggregate.

But then I followed the links in the now deleted post and it seems shitmuffin is also a serial harasser that sicks twitter mobs on people he disagrees with and engages in shit like year-long impersonating of people on reddit so what the fuck?!

[Username17]

If you head right now to "internet meme culture" places like say, imgur or Know Your Meme, you'll see TRIGGERED memes in what appears to be general use.

That's because Neo-Nazi hate groups are in general circulation. Donald Trump is president of the fucking United States of America. If you look carefully at the "Triggered" section on Know Your Meme, you will note that it's basically a non-entity in use until Spring of 2016. Gosh, what happened then? It was the rise of the alt-right. It's used to mock people who have PTSD, especially people who have PTSD because of sexual or domestic abuse. That's what the meme is from. That's what it's for.

The fact that Neo-Nazis feel emboldened enough to spread their filth all over the internet doesn't make their products any less vile. And referencing their bullying campaigns without a hint of rejection just makes you a useful idiot for exported Russian fascism. At best. Literally the best and most charitable thing we could say about someone who uses the word "Triggered" in that way is to say that they are a useful idiot of Putin, stupidly and hurtfully reposting segments of an ongoing campaign to terrorize women and child abuse survivors so that belligerent abusers feel more free to terrorize the weakest people in our society.

All that shit about "triggering the libtards" is a marketing campaign. And it's a marketing campaign for Fascism. Nothing more. Nothing less. It doesn't have anything to offer except heaping scorn on rape survivors who dare to mention that there are things that hurt their feelings.

-Username17

[Longes]

https://www.facebook.com/notes/danielle ... 541654637/
TLDR: people are already getting doxxing and death threats over this article.

[Starmaker]

The specific use of the word "triggered" is to insult rape survivors. The general use of it is yet another way to insult progressives for wanting to do anything at all. The "logic" goes, if you want to do something, it means you don't like the present order of things (duh); liking or not liking is an emotion (duh), so you're "emotional", "irrational", "hysterical", and now "triggered". If you're a progressive expressing a preference, you're automatically mentally unwell and your preference doesn't count for shit. If a Nazi insults you / hits you / murders your cat / locks children in lice-infested cages and you dislike him in return, you're "triggered".

Nazis are, of course, never emotional, even when they're angry or crying.

[Longes]

If you head right now to "internet meme culture" places like say, imgur or Know Your Meme, you'll see TRIGGERED memes in what appears to be general use.

That's because Neo-Nazi hate groups are in general circulation. Donald Trump is president of the fucking United States of America. If you look carefully at the "Triggered" section on Know Your Meme, you will note that it's basically a non-entity in use until Spring of 2016. Gosh, what happened then? It was the rise of the alt-right. It's used to mock people who have PTSD, especially people who have PTSD because of sexual or domestic abuse. That's what the meme is from. That's what it's for.

The fact that Neo-Nazis feel emboldened enough to spread their filth all over the internet doesn't make their products any less vile. And referencing their bullying campaigns without a hint of rejection just makes you a useful idiot for exported Russian fascism. At best. Literally the best and most charitable thing we could say about someone who uses the word "Triggered" in that way is to say that they are a useful idiot of Putin, stupidly and hurtfully reposting segments of an ongoing campaign to terrorize women and child abuse survivors so that belligerent abusers feel more free to terrorize the weakest people in our society.

All that shit about "triggering the libtards" is a marketing campaign. And it's a marketing campaign for Fascism. Nothing more. Nothing less. It doesn't have anything to offer except heaping scorn on rape survivors who dare to mention that there are things that hurt their feelings.

-Username17

Frank, you are completely out of your mind. I'm not going to say that no one uses "triggered" like that, because someone probably does, but the common use of "triggered" on chan-like parts of the Internet is for mocking "SJWs" reacting to seemingly innocuous stimuli. More broadly speaking, like Starmaker said, it applies to anyone identified as "SJW" or "libtard", doing anything at all in reaction to anything at all. Here's a selection of top rated posts containing the word "triggered" from /r/CringeAnarchy (picked because selecting from reddit is easier than going to 4chan):

• Professor is triggered their student wrote an essay on the "wage gap" without using "proper feminist sources".
  Dead LinkSJWs are triggered that Serena Williams is engaged to a white guy - "We lost another one"
  Imagine being triggered by a joke in a kid's movie
  Sara gets triggered by anecdote from Iraq

Mind you, there is enough circunstantial evidence in Vampire's case to indicate that nununuWoD is indeed a trash product made by trash people, evidence mainly in the form of holy shit, but how is shitmuffin such a rancid douchebag?! I don't go to the Big Purple usually, so my knowledge about him was restricted to the drama here in the Den, which... wasn't out of ordinary, really. silva seems to have caused more angst than him, on the aggregate.

But then I followed the links in the now deleted post and it seems shitmuffin is also a serial harasser that sicks twitter mobs on people he disagrees with and engages in shit like year-long impersonating of people on reddit so what the fuck?!

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/gene ... ith-im-out

[Username17]

Frank, you are completely out of your mind. I'm not going to say that no one uses "triggered" like that, because someone probably does, but the common use of "triggered" on chan-like parts of the Internet is for mocking "SJWs" reacting to seemingly innocuous stimuli.

Normally I let your cluelessness and vague Russian nationalism go unchallenged because I honestly don't care very much, but this is a step too far. Fuck right off.

Mocking "SJWs" for reacting to "innocuous" things is the same thing as mocking rape victims for talking about their trauma. It's literally the same fucking thing. It is not a counter argument. It's the thing in its entirety.

The way the shell game works is to straw man genuine grievances and equivocate between real things that get people upset and made up shit while also equivocating between things that are seriously traumatizing to people and things which are mildly annoying. That's it. That's the whole game.

So some feminist somewhere is annoyed by right wing frat boys are making loud noises about sports ball. She's annoyed, so she's "triggered." But people generally support the right of jerks to talk loudly about sportsball, so "triggering feminists" is OK. And then they also send a bunch of anonymous rape threats to woman who step out of their prescribed brood mare role, which is also "triggering feminists." But they already made the affirmative case for triggering feminists in a different straw-context, hence they can act like that argument has been made in the new and more clearly vile context.

That's the whole thing. It's not actually different, you fucking moron! If you lend your voice to supporting any part of the alt-right fuckheads ranting about "triggering the liberals," you are aiding them in normalizing a slippery slope argument that is intended to normalize the serial harassment of marginalized members of society. That's 100% of what you are doing because that is the entire point of that fucking propaganda campaign!

-Username17

[Prak]

Frank, you are completely out of your mind. I'm not going to say that no one uses "triggered" like that, because someone probably does, but the common use of "triggered" on chan-like parts of the Internet is for mocking "SJWs" reacting to seemingly innocuous stimuli. More broadly speaking, like Starmaker said, it applies to anyone identified as "SJW" or "libtard", doing anything at all in reaction to anything at all. Here's a selection of top rated posts containing the word "triggered" from /r/CringeAnarchy (picked because selecting from reddit is easier than going to 4chan):

Um... no, not really... I mean, you're right in that pro-fascism douchebags use "triggered" not specifically to terrorize rape survivors, but to belittle pretty much any social justice cause and their advocates.
But that doesn't make Frank "out of his mind," it makes him "slightly unaware of the broader use of a pro-fascism troll technique."

[Whipstitch]

If anything the argument against Frank's position is that he's too woke, not that he's unaware. His post is less "Derp, I've never seen people use "triggered" in X context" and more "I know the origin story of this meme so take your shell game and shove it up your ass."

Personally, I'm broadly sympathetic to that position. We're at a point culturally where people routinely miss the forest for the trees. For example, let's take a look at the Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" bullshit that's gotten a mini-revival recently. Somehow in all the hubbub people got fixated on whether "Pocahontas" is insulting in and of itself and shifted the narrative away from the indisputable fact that the POTUS is condescending as hell and totally meant what he said to be a sick burn irrespective of whether the term is normally a slur.

[Wiseman]

Seriously, these insults are designed to make is seem like people are complaining just to complain, trying to trivialize their arguments.

This video is a good explanation on the topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhuFWoN1nb0

[hyzmarca]

When I first came across the word triggered in this context it was being misused by people who were mildly annoyed and didn't have PTSD. And I just shook my head and said nothing, because I found it annoying that a small number of people were trying to coopt a term that applies to real mental illness for their pet peeves.


The second time I came across it was in complaints that trigger warnings on a university's modern conflict archeology class was somehow political correctness run amok and students being special snowflakes. For those who don't know, modern conflict archeology is a fancy way to say digging up fresh mass graves. Genocide forensics would probably be a more accurate name.


People have already used "triggered" to mean "if you're disturbed by half-decomposed baby corpses full of bayonet holes, then you're an overreacting wimp."

The use of the term "Triggered" in the Brujah clan weakness is at best an example of colossal tone deafness

To be fair, in the context of the Brujah, who do have a severe psychological illness that makes them uncontrollably flip out and kill people in response to certain stimulus, "triggered" is medically accurate. I haven't read the entry in context, so I can't say for certain, but I'm wary of throwing out all uses of "triggered" as obviously offensive. That would make it difficult to talk about shooting guns or setting off booby traps.


People would have used the word trigger to describe eliciting frenzy with a stimulus in 1991, in 2001, in 2011, and in goddamn 1981 if Vampire exited then. Because trigger is a pretty standard English word that means to cause something to happen, particularly setting off something volatile.

On the other hand, if they're naming things after internet memes, then they're worse than Nazis. They're tacky.

[Dogbert]

Let's see... the authoritarian left complaining that a product explicitly born in the 90s, and revived for its original audience (90s kids) is edgelord shit, then complaining water is too wet.

It must be Tuesday.

Of course Achilli and ReinHagen were a couple edgelords back then! Of course they were clueless! And of course whathever thing they happened to write would be highly offensive edgelord shit! THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE NINETIES! Highly offensive edgelord shit!

Whining about it over twenty years post-hoc is like the idiots who complained back then that Duke Nuken Forever was "outdated and clueless," or people who watch Jurassic World and then complaining it's "too unrealistic."

Now, can nazis grab vampire and use it for their cause? Sure, it's highly possible, the product is about playing an awful elite of monsters that engages in monster behavior, so of course it's going to resonate with them, but if we all know neither ReinHagen nor Achilli were confirmed nazis back then, then we can't hold them and Vampire any more accountable for whatever nazis do with their game than we can hold Buddhism for the creation of the cross that everyone else knows as the swastika, nor the Asatru religion for the creation of the Sowilo rune.

(Seriously, I had just muted that guy from my twitter feed, don't bring it here!)

[DSMatticus]

The concept of "triggers" was adopted by the dirty feminist left from PTSD to describe survivors of traumatic events and victims of mental illness having episodes "triggered" by the unexpected recall of those experiences. This is where the notion of trigger warnings comes from; announcing that you are about to have a frank talk about rape before actually having that frank talk about rape, so people who have actually been raped and don't want to run that back in their own mind can just walk away. It's a usage born of an accurate understanding of mental health and basic human decency.

It's also almost impossible to ever actually get right; I lost a parent under not great circumstances when I was starting highschool. I was a dumb kid finally growing out of my awkward phase and building a stable circle of friends and hobbies to enjoy with them. My parents were divorced and my mom lived so far away and it was this awkward back and forth on the weekends and the summer that just sort of put my life on hold every now and then. I loved her, but hated it. Then suddenly cancer. And somehow my dumb fucking kid brain never really got it, never really understood "hey, parents are mortal, this could be it, you need to be there for her more than this," and I just kept expecting things to go back to normal eventually, that I didn't really have to change much, and then she died. It's amazing how easy it is to be a shitty person.

Anyway, if you haven't been living under a rock, you'll know that 'tragic death of a parent' is a really common backstory. And while I guess my stupid little story's got nothing on Bruce Wayne's, that backstory nonetheless sometimes pisses me the fuck off for no particular reason. Well, I guess the reason is obvious. But I mean it's certainly not the writer's fault that it makes me feel like I'm taking a suckerpunch to the gut, that's my baggage, and it's actually fairly specific. There's not really any practical way to solve this problem when you get down to the level of detail that would be required for shit like this.

But it certainly doesn't hurt to at least try and cover the big ones. Rape is a fucking epidemic. It's something that happens to roughly 1 in 5 women. We know it happens to roughly 1 in 5 women because that's about the number of women who claim to be raped and that's about the number of rapes you can trick men into admitting to by not explicitly saying the word rape. The blast radius on that particular explosive is big enough that you're going to catch people with it. End of story. If your audience is ten fucking people, then that is a large enough audience that a subject matter warning will matter to one of them. I'm not going to crucify anyone for failing to do so, but I'm also going to think people who do are doing a nice thing. Sort of like taking paper over plastic at the grocery, I guess.

The right doesn't actually give a fuck about rape. Sexual violence is a thing women are meant to endure silently as part of being chained to the stove like a proper woman. Trigger warnings are ludicrous to them because rape victims aren't real victims and you shouldn't care about them. So they started using triggered to describe fucking everything in a deliberate attempt turn giving a fuck about rape victims into a joke. We are having this conversation because they succeeded. Plenty of people don't even know where the fuck the joke came from, and they repeat it unironically without thinking anything of it.

It is categorically unlike Pepe the Frog, which is a thing that got so big people's parents were sharing it on Facebook, and then a bunch of fuckwits on 4chan's /pol/ said "our's now," and then the media said "that's a story!", and the media's coverage of those fuckwits' attempts to claim Pepe is the mechanism by which those fuckwits ended up claiming Pepe. If the media tells you X is a racist symbol, the only people who will want to affiliate themselves with X will be racists. That is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Triggered is a meme about how extending minimal courtesy to rape victims is being some weird mix of "oversensitive" and "PC thought police." That's what it is.

[Mord]

The post may be down, but for those who missed it while it was up, Archive.org delivers.

When I first came across the word triggered in this context it was being misused by people who were mildly annoyed and didn't have PTSD. And I just shook my head and said nothing, because I found it annoying that a small number of people were trying to coopt a term that applies to real mental illness for their pet peeves.

This is also my experience. I'm prepared to accept that "triggered" has become property of the alt-right; if I really think about it, I realize that I should not find this in any way surprising.

The original intent behind "trigger warnings" was good and noble, but dilution, overuse, and overexposure were simultaneous with (and possibly identical to) the term entering the public consciousness. In the early days of the trigger warning epidemic, when the term was still reaching for the high-water mark of its unironic misuse and overuse by lolcow tumblrinas and reciprocal highly ironic misuse and overuse by trolls, I remember observing that there was a decidedly cruel undercurrent to the trolling above and beyond the normal cruelty involved in trolling. Even at the time I questioned whether some of these trolls were actually serious.

Ten years ago, 4chan fostered the Anonymous that ripped Scientology a new one, and I was proud to be a part of that. Now 4chan is fostering people who march around with actual Nazi flags. What the fuck happened?

[MGuy]

Same thing with Nazis in Germany. The Right is losing ground so they ally with the crazies. This time they have the internet. A lot of useful idiots are peddling bullshit making it seem harmless at first. Then with a lot of people getting poorer and more disenfranchised it becomes a breeding ground to prey upon the worst parts of humanity. When you're poor and working all the time simple answers are easier to digest because you don't have the time to seek out information. The mass media is no help and the right is allied with the crazies so they use their media to amplify the messages.

[Chamomile]

Ten years ago, 4chan fostered the Anonymous that ripped Scientology a new one, and I was proud to be a part of that. Now 4chan is fostering people who march around with actual Nazi flags. What the fuck happened?

Google image search Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and see how many people holding signs mocking too-frequent Hitler comparisons you can find. Godwin's Law wasn't developed by unwitting pawns of fascism, it was a genuinely accurate (if frequently misused - "comparing your opponent to Nazis" doesn't mean "mentioning Nazis in any way at all") identification of a real problem in online discourse at the time. There really weren't many Nazis to worry about, and the watering down of fascism to mean "anyone I disagree with" absolutely did - and for some people, still does - provide literal Nazis with a lot of cover early on because people were used to dismissing "they're literally Nazis" as a stupid exaggeration.

By this point you're probably wondering what this has to do with the paragraph I quoted. Well, 4chan's specific response to being accused of being Nazis was to shout "SIEG HEIL!" and throw out a Nazi salute. The idea was to draw attention to how ludicrous the accusation was by embracing it. The notion that some random anon arguing for a slightly different scheme for agricultural subsidies (or whatever) was the vanguard of fascism was ludicrous, and the easiest way to demonstrate that was for the guy accused of being a Nazi to begin actually behaving like a Nazi and let the audience take note of how there was an obvious break between back when they were arguing about agricultural subsidies and when they began throwing Hitler salutes. It was a funny and effective response to the Godwin problem. No one knew what its side effects would be. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Nazis being able to easily disguise themselves as only being ironically fascist could (and did) serve as the thin end of the wedge to normalizing and then popularizing actual fascist rhetoric. /pol/ was created in 2011 as a containment board for the growing racism (not yet fully married to fascism at the time, to my recollection), but unlike 40k fans in /tg/ or MLP fans in /mlp/, /pol/ wasn't unintentionally flooding other boards with their favorite topic, and weren't easily contained by having a special board dedicated entirely to it (and maybe a handful of related subjects). The fascists just set out occupying /pol/ and from there began raiding other boards. In 2014, the botched handling of Gamergate by assorted con artists and narcissists in the gaming press allowed /pol/, previously held to near-pariah status by most other boards, to paint itself as the lesser of two evils and get its hooks in all across the website. By 2016, with heavy support from paid Russian psyops, they were omnipresent and became the dominant perspective on most boards. Since then, they seem to have receded at least on some boards (I still look at /tg/ now and again, and it looks like that board is contested rather than occupied these days), but they're still a major influence on a website where ten years ago they were literally a joke.