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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

#281

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.…

Reminds me of this story https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/06/75f0f464cb3367... (audio) http://snapjudgment.org/no-one-calls-me-shooter-0 It's basically an autistic kid who was falsely accused by an Oregon public HS of being a potential gunman. All of this based on a vague offhand comment by a random student. The school and police refused to provide details until a few years later. When the school released t…

Your story reminds me of something that happened to me in high-school. I registered for a challenge english class. I lasted about two weeks because of a strange grading policy the teacher chose. If you didn't turn in ANY assignment, regardless how few points it was worth, your grade in the class would be set at a hard F. If you wanted to pass, you had to turn in assignments late. She'd give you a zero for the late assignment, but your grade would be allowed to calculate.

I found this policy led to her doing ridiculous nonsense, like having extremely long essays be worth 3 points. and then a three question quiz worth 40 points. Her whole setup just struck me as bizarre and kafkaesque. So, I went to my guidance councilor and changed classes.

Less than a week later she tells her remaining students that she had a dream that I was shooting students and teachers from a tree with a sniper rifle. Some friends I still had in the class relayed this to me and it rattled me a bit. I asked around to a few other teachers / administrators about it and got shrugs.

Same same but different I guess.

..I have a lot of stories about teachers.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You left out the first part of that sentence, which reads: “Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of radical, right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism...”

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I most certainly do. Ukip's belief system is pretty fundamentally palingenetic ultranationalism at its core. (As is "Make America Great Again [By Making Sure White People Win]".)

EDIT: but, gosh, I sure can't help but notice the first part of the sentence you cherry-picked: "Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of radical, right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism" - can you tell me why you tried to play dirty pool about that?

EDIT 2: ha, sibling poster got there too. Nice, dude.

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

#284
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not take HN into generic ideological flamewars. They're boring, they spread, and we don't want them here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't want it either, that's why I posted since the person I replied to was the one bringing up communism out of no where

I believe you, but please don't post in that way, since it only takes the thread further in the direction we don't want to go.

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

#285

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.…

Hey, I don't want to be a dick here, but your heroic story is that your parents had the juice to get you into college math classes as a high schooler?

How many kids don't have that going for them?

Maybe the best lesson for them is learning how to deal with the machine. Not that it's right. But it's what they'll need to do.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really.... these aren't real nazis committing atrocities.... Going to 4chan and saying a bunch of trolly triggering stuff at your friends to get out your anger isn't really a bad thing. It's immature, but it's not really immoral, nor is it illegal, nor does it make you a "bad person." It's venting, tribalism, and immaturity. (case-in-point, the moderator was a 13-year-old jewish boy) This is what the article desc…

[flagged]

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obj…

> 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.

Let's assume for a second that Carlgon isn't the misogynistic white supremacist charmer--he of the "I wouldn't even rape her" so recently, lest we forget--that he's made sure everybody knows he is. Let's assume that you are correct and that, gosh, he just doesn't like EU membership. Let's assume all of that.

Do you know the term for somebody who works with fascists to achieve their goals?

A fascist.

This stuff just ain't that hard.

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

#288

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?

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…

I've only experience with Berlin Germans, but when I lived among them, they were more racist than the good-old-boy-est good-old-boys I knew in northern Appalachia. Just get them started when they had had a few brews about der Türker...

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

#289
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".

Oh goodness, there were 4.7 million US soldiers in the first world war - out of a US population of 102 million at the time. Surely that must be major?

We entered WWI late in the game and "only" suffered 53k combat deaths. WWI was huge for the major combatants of France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, each of whom lost over a million in combat, plus the British empire which lost just under a million between England and all her subjects. To put it in context, more Canadians died in combat in WWI than Americans, and Canada at the time was much less populated than the US, even more so than today. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties

So, yeah, we don't tend to think of WWI as much as being one of the major wars we were involved in. The major wars we tend to think about in our cultural consciousness are the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWII, Vietnam War, and then because of the recency bias, the "global war on terror" in Iraq/Afghanistan. WWI is covered in history classes of course, but primarily from the western front perspective, which the US didn't get involved in until the war was almost won.

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

#290

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?

Americans have (for generations) been indoctrinated into an extremely narrow view of WW2, where Holocaust is front and center and everything else is made irrelevant. In an American mind there are no real victims of WW2 other than the Jews, which is very insulting to pretty much half of European nations that suffered immensely.
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