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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

#271
post #205
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're using the word "alt-right" wrong. When other people use it, they're talking about the people who marched in Charlottesville, and lurk on freerepublic and Stormfront. A free nation for a certain pale skin tone, and those blacks and yellows can go be proud Africans and Asians on their respective continents. But not red people, we already took their land, so they can suck eggs.

He is using the original meaning, which has since been hopelessly slandered by those who compete with the alt-right. This competition isn't just with the left; there is a fight for control of the republican party. (hence "alt", meaning neither the religious right nor the globalist libertarian right) That original meaning may be a lost cause. The same happened to the word "hacker", though that seems to be recovering a…

No such "original meaning" for alt-right exists, and I'll drive straight back to the wellspring if you make me. I study this stuff. The alt-right movement has, since its very inception, been the nexus of misogynistic and white-supremacist fearmongering with recruitment channels pulling from the chans, from games, and from the MRA community.

That is literally all it is and these attempts at revisionism are poor attempts at that.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

Students who engage in serious misconduct, or repeated disruptive conduct will be “counseled out.” But private schools are generally small, closed communities, which creates a high level of trust and allows routine misunderstandings and disputes to be resolved reasonably. Also, there are strong disincentives to “going nuclear” for both the school and the parents. The schools obviously stand to lose revenue, but the p…

Alternatively, as was the case at my private high school, the small, closed community creates a high level of trust and allows truly awful behavior to be papered over and worked around, because that can line up with the incentives of the community.

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

#273
post #86
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…

It makes you wonder how much of this is school, per se, and how much of it is just growing up. Home-schooled kids removed from that environment, for example, tend to have worse outcomes, partly because even while school can be stressful, not socializing routinely with same-aged peers is worse.

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

#274
post #39

> Sam pledged fealty to the idea of men’s rights because, as he said, his former administrator had privileged girls’ words and experiences over boys’, and that’s how all of his troubles had started in the first place. I wonder how common this dynamic is now.

Father of boys and girls here. Both sexes are just as violent, boys more so on the body, and girls more so on the mind. It was fascinating to hear my 7 year old daughter grasp for words to make me angry: ‘when you and mom divorce, I’m going with mom.’ I just raised an eyebrow and ignored. Boy’s will just throw things.

> ‘when you and mom divorce, I’m going with mom.’

Wow! Adult, professional writers could work for a long time to produce such multiple brutal takedowns in so few words.

I pray for the sake of all of us that your daughter uses her powers for good.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I define "fascist" much as Ian Danskin does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Luu1Beb8ng&list=PLJA_jUddXv... Its critical aspects include inherent beliefs of racial superiority and the need to "recapture" a great society lost. And there are plenty on YouTube with large followings. Though some have been banned since. Chud Supreme Carl, "Sargon of Akkad", comes to mind as an example, and one I'm willing to namedrop bec…

But from "Sargon's" perspective, UKIP isn't fascist - it's the party attempting to remove the UK from the growing, minimally accountable supreme bureaucracy known as the EU.

It's always better to understand your enemies before you start to insult them. Otherwise your insults just increase polarization, because while people who agree with you will find them obviously true... People on the other side will find them objectively false. And we don't need more polarization nowadays.

> inherent beliefs of racial superiority

IMO painting all belief in racial differences as racist/fascist (which is what this tends to devolve into) is a great way to ignore actual problems. Problems like medicines being tested on populations of primarily white men and women not always working for african americans or other groups... And of course this is an area where one side is politically correct (no differences below the skin) and another is factually correct (different ethnic groups have significant differences in susceptibility to disease, athletic performance, etc).

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I define "fascist" much as Ian Danskin does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Luu1Beb8ng&list=PLJA_jUddXv... Its critical aspects include inherent beliefs of racial superiority and the need to "recapture" a great society lost. And there are plenty on YouTube with large followings. Though some have been banned since. Chud Supreme Carl, "Sargon of Akkad", comes to mind as an example, and one I'm willing to namedrop bec…

You think UKIP is fascist? Wikipedia defines that with the phrase "...dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition...". Many powerful politically inclined groups are forcibly silencing their opponents these days, but UKIP is not among them.

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

#278

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]

If you actually bothered to watch more than one of his videos you'd easily be able to surmise he is politically left of center. He's probably more of a classic liberal than a modern one, but he wants things such as single payer health care, progressive taxes, etc. Those are definitely left of center ideas.

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

#279
post #13

> He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid. I wonder to what extent the alt-right actually is a young teen movement, with adults mixed in (being the ones who show in person). Is there any at least semi-reliable data on this?

Earlier on in its history, the English Wikipedia (at least the cultural/administrative side of it) was a lot like this. The average age has increased over time as people have aged up, but when I was most involved around 2004 it was a pretty young crowd. I was in college at the time, and there were plenty of other college students involved and even some high schoolers.

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

#280
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Europeans have their heads in the sand like ostriches about all forms of societal change. I'm a Canadian that just moved back after 4 years in Europe, and I found it impossible to have a progressive-minded conversation with most europeans (not all, but much higher ratio than at home) - about feminism, rape culture, about racial discrimination, about unconscious bias, about migration and immigration. Eu…

Who's getting nervous about brown people at train stations? This whole observation seems pretty weird. A foreigner from a different continent finds it hard to talk to most Europeans (because they are all a singular block) about feminism? Don't be ridiculous. They likely just didn't want to talk to you about it, and it sounds as if you laboured on such points a few times. And, depending on how well you knew the people…

When you have intelligent coworkers that say things like "Most black people in town are drug dealers, so if I see a black person I'm going to assume they're a drug dealer", or "Sexism wasn't a problem in Europe until North America invented it as an issue", and the other Europeans agree and the other North Americans don't, and when this type of thing happens over and over in many circumstances, I come to the conclusion that it's not me.

Before you wonder if it's just my coworkers and company.

* Person I'm buying a car from 2 hours from my city telling me "It's a good thing you're buying a car from me and not one of them black boys, they rip you off" * Landlord I'm viewing an apartment for saying "I would prefer to rent to a white renter. We have a lot of indians that try to rent and they smell"

These kinds of things happened way more in 4 years in Europe than in 20 years in Canada.

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