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What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

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Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#171

Post by dev_dull »

rayiner wrote: post #166
klodolph wrote: post #53

What resonated with me is how impossible it is, as a kid, to make sense of being in the school system. The interaction with an administrator was school discipline gone awry... but it could have easily been something else. (Discipline is the most likely, there are tons of misguided zero-tolerance policies.) I'm lucky that my parents were advocates and organizers and that they knew people in the school administration.…

What drove me crazy about K-12 is that all the bullshit zero tolerance policies affected mainly the normal kids. The real problem kids didn’t care, and continued to wreak havoc. It’s the main reason I send my kids to private school, even though the public schools where I live are good.

I really hated that. It’s a system that punished people who were trying to do the right thing.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#172

Post by educationdata »

rayiner wrote: post #166
klodolph wrote: post #53

What resonated with me is how impossible it is, as a kid, to make sense of being in the school system. The interaction with an administrator was school discipline gone awry... but it could have easily been something else. (Discipline is the most likely, there are tons of misguided zero-tolerance policies.) I'm lucky that my parents were advocates and organizers and that they knew people in the school administration.…

What drove me crazy about K-12 is that all the bullshit zero tolerance policies affected mainly the normal kids. The real problem kids didn’t care, and continued to wreak havoc. It’s the main reason I send my kids to private school, even though the public schools where I live are good.

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#173

Post by marshray »

dTal wrote: post #46
GreaterFool wrote: post #8

Why are Americans so obsessed with Nazis? I mean, I'm from Europe and I don't recall growing up worrying about everyone being a secret (or overt) Nazi, which, unless promptly punched in the face, would somehow take over. WWII and Nazis destroyed Europe. Are Europeans worried about Nazis? Not as far as I can tell. Yet all I see from American news is Nazis this Nazis that. Can someone explain?

In most of Europe WW2 was just a terrible ordeal. In Germany it's a source of great shame. But the US? WW2 was the making of modern America. The US was catapulted into a world leader position, and got to feel like a badass hero doing it. And WW2 was the US's first major overseas conflict. Nazis are the archetypical "enemy without".

Until WWII, the US population generally favored isolationism and were very reluctant to get involved in "Europe's wars". The attack on Pearl Harbor instantly showed Americans that we were no longer insulated from the world.

"During the war, over 16 million Americans served in the United States Armed Forces, with 405,399 killed in action and 671,278 wounded. There were also 130,201 American prisoners of war, of whom 116,129 returned home after the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...

Soldiers returned home with stories of what they had seen, including horrors of the death camps in Europe and atrocities in the Pacific. This deeply affected Americans. I was born decades after it ended, but growing up it seemed everyone older than me had been affected by it.

Also, the modern media age was in full swing. Huge amounts of footage had been filmed during the war, and there was an oversupply of military hardware that needed blowing up. These made WWII films easy to splice together.

The US was operating a massive program of denazification in Germany and demilitarization in Japan. This was combined with economic rebuilding with the goal of establishing the type of peacetime prosperity that people wouldn't want to give up for fighting.

Why Nazis specifically? Many Americans saw what happened to the modern hardworking Protestant society that was Germany and thought "Oh so this is what it looks like when white people become drug-fueled psycho nationalists" and then quickly "Dear God, please not here."

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#174

Post by pizzazzaro »

vzcx wrote: post #78
gatherhunterer wrote: post #67

> Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of pap…

Yes! This is an anti-public school administration article masquerading as an anti-alt-right article.

Remember how those d@%$ Clintons were the ones who instituted this "zero tolerance" bullshit, turning our schools into actual freaking prisons?

Or was I the only one who watched that happen around me as a child?

Schools should be freaking schools once universal healthcare happens. And once prison actually turns into something about reform.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#175

Post by eppsilon »

neonate wrote: post #139
dTal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of Europe WW2 was just a terrible ordeal. In Germany it's a source of great shame. But the US? WW2 was the making of modern America. The US was catapulted into a world leader position, and got to feel like a badass hero doing it. And WW2 was the US's first major overseas conflict. Nazis are the archetypical "enemy without".

Great comment, but aren't you overlooking WWI? Phillipines? etc. There was even an anti-imperialist movement in the US before WWI.

WWII was the last time the US "won" a war, so it gets more attention.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#176

Post by esoterica »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #126
ip26 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the author & son are alluding to the middle-aged man holding the poster, which I should hope is obviously nowhere near the same as antifa.

Well, I don't know if I think a middle-aged man who goes to a rally to hold up a sign saying "NO TRUMP. NO KKK. NO FASCIST USA," is progress over the alt-right. To me it's the exact same thing -- an overly zealous person who takes politics as a tribal game and has no sincere intention of changing anybody's mind.

The exact same thing? That’s one hell of a false equivalence. The alt right aren’t bad people because they are “overzealous”, they are bad people because of their bigotry on the basis of race, religion and national origin.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#177

Post by educationdata »

eropple wrote: post #50
hinkley wrote: post #36

> Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right s…

Google-related, but I'd submit that YouTube is one of the prime culprits. Kids like stuff like video games. Video game recommendations devolve into chud territory in two hops - fascist in three or four.

Really? I haven't seen any fascist video on YouTube. Yes, there are lots of right-wing videos. Fascist? I don't believe there are that many on YouTube, unless you define fascist as anything anti-left.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#178

Post by educationdata »

opportune wrote: post #101
eropple wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google-related, but I'd submit that YouTube is one of the prime culprits. Kids like stuff like video games. Video game recommendations devolve into chud territory in two hops - fascist in three or four.

I wonder how much of this is due to marketing. I know for example PragerU heavily advertises on Youtube. Is there a way for an advertiser on youtube to get better recommendation placements?

How is PragerU fascist?

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#179

Post by mipmap04 »

educationdata wrote: post #172
rayiner wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drove me crazy about K-12 is that all the bullshit zero tolerance policies affected mainly the normal kids. The real problem kids didn’t care, and continued to wreak havoc. It’s the main reason I send my kids to private school, even though the public schools where I live are good.

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

Usually they have the policies, but choose not to enforce them. The rule is there so they can expel or severely punish kids at their discretion, but typically don't want to because that represents lost revenue if the kid leaves.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#180

Post by stale2002 »

sridca wrote: post #121
stale2002 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as people who want to eliminate inequality Communists eliminated a whole heck of a lot of minorities. Also, the only group that killed more communists than the Nazis, were other communists themselves. I'm sure Nazis themselves would make the same argument as you, about how they actually just support "traditionalist culture" or whatever. But we know what really happened. Same argument applies to communists.

These blanket statements would seem less provocative and more convincing if you backed them up with reliable references.

Sure. Leftist violence against other leftists is well documented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_th...

Usually one of the first thing that communists do once they are in power is crush the anarchists, and other competing leftist movements.

None of this is controversial.

Soviet repression of gay people was also well documented, as well as Cuban repression/murder of it's gay population.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fidel-castros-horrific-record-...

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