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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

#261

Post by ianai »

asark wrote: post #86
baby wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck. I'm still making nightmares about being back to school.

Mid 30s, same, and my k-12 experience wasn't even bad . I wasn't really bullied. I was popular enough, and moved between a few different friend groups, some of them semi-cool (though one of the nerdier groups was my "home"). School's just that traumatic, I guess. I worry about that for my kids. Unlike an adult, if you're in an environment that's making your life hell (and normal school life is friggin' intolerable, f…

Conversely, I was bullied relentlessly for years. It warped my perceptions so badly that for years into my adulthood I couldn’t exactly identify when it finally ceased. Public school has to be the worst way we could teach little humans how to behave to one another without just going lord of the flies.

I’ll never fully move past it. That stuff is permanent to some extent.

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

#262

Post by yellowapple »

educationdata wrote: post #249
yellowapple wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't seen any fascist video on YouTube The Recommendation Algorithm Gods have been kind to you, then. Not all of us are so fortunate.

OK. I believe that. But does this mean you watched fascist video by yourself, otherwise YouTube wouldn't recommend those videos to you, right?

Right, which means if someone in some other site linked to one of those videos and I clicked on it out of curiosity (or - more recently in my case - to pick it apart in yet another online argument), guess what kind of videos are going to spam my recommendations for months on end?

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

#264

Post by standardUser »

GreaterFool wrote: post #110

It's an interesting story. I find the conclusion not unsurprising. The author seems to assume the existence of `alt-right` as a monolithic group with a specific agenda. As far as I can tell that's not true. These groups may come out together to protest because they've been lumped together by the media. If they weren't all branded `alt-right`, would they connect? If you want to disarm them, divide them! Don't label th…

Having multiple sub-groups, some less connected than others, is an important quality in any movement. It creates more opportunities to attract more and different types of people. It's a feature.

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

#265

Post by spacemanmatt »

yellowapple wrote: post #214
educationdata wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

I'd imagine there's a more direct financial incentive; if a student's parent(s) decide(s) to pull that student out of school because of a disagreement with the school's administration, then that directly leads to less money for the school. Meanwhile, a public school doesn't have that direct penalty; if anything, it's just one less student in already-crowded classrooms, so pushing a student out might very well be a ne…

> a public school doesn't have that direct penalty

That is false

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

#266

Post by eropple »

tropo wrote: post #236
opportune wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not. I am implying that it is conservative and advertises a lot. If you can get from videogames to PragerU in a couple clicks I wouldn't be surprised if you could get from PragerU to facist stuff in a couple clicks. And if it's possible to get from almost anywhere in youtube into conservative propaganda territory in 1-2 clicks, then from there I think the recommendation system can (without ads) probably get you t…

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#267

Post by wahern »

iron0013 wrote: post #253
protomyth wrote: post #229

Tim Pool (self described as left of center) has his take on the article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOyb8cN_A_8&t=946s

[flagged]

One of this week's XKCD themes, Waiting for the But: https://xkcd.com/2146/

I don't mean to pick on anybody. It's a common rhetorical device, which is why the comic is funny. I've used it and struggle not to (not always successfully).

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

#268

Post by marshray »

ve55 wrote: post #159

The ending of this article is a little hard to believe. It seems to end the exact way that the author would have wanted it to, something that is very uncommon behavior in teenagers in these situations.

I assure you it's quite common for teens who exhibit shocking behavior to grow into well-adjusted adults.

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

#269

Post by cauliflower2718 »

mejari wrote: post #49
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…

I saw a similar thing with a religious apologist, they had a very specific claim ready to throw out out to me on a specific supposed "prophecy", and later googling that I got page after page of religious propaganda. They'd targeted that particular thing, rather than trying to take over more general listings for "prophecy in the bible", so that only articles that agreed with them showed up. It took some creative googl…

What's the prophecy?

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

#270

Post by CydeWeys »

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.…

Wow, we had quite similar upbringings. My dad was the co-president of the county's Gifted & Talented Association, and like you I was always in the best classes and magnet programs (even if that required busing), and when I had bad teachers, my dad got me swapped into the best teacher's class within a week. I even had a similar issue with a teacher, but fortunately that was later in high school and I was able to handle it by myself. This teacher, in fact: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/a-reno...

And yeah, having someone in your corner who knows how to navigate the school system and get the best for you is super important. I wouldn't be where I am today without his guidance, plus all the extra-curricular science and math activities/competitions he took me to on weekends or for summer camps.

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