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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

#311

Post by rland »

caconym_ wrote: post #181
chii wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The role of education (and parenting) is to teach the child how to sort information they obtain from sources like those googled results. Why did he believe in those biased sources of info? How come he didn't have the skills to determine what is fact and what is opinion stated as fact?

Is this a rhetorical question? A lot of (most?) adults aren't immune to this sort of manipulation, let alone kids. See: Fox News, cults in general, and so on. It's not just about bad information, or opinion stated as fact, or whatever. Whether it is designed to indoctrinate and radicalize, or whether it "simply" evolved that way as a meme (in the Dawkins sense, probably clumsily applied), that's how it works. These p…

Meme is an absolutely perfect word for it.

It sounds like a joke, but this content is purposefully created and disseminated for the purpose of "going viral," so that it can spread itself. It's created by people who either have only consumed like content and want to spread their virus ("my personal opinion based on internet reasearch is that...") or people who actually create this stuff on purpose to push the agenda of their employ.

The Dawkins meme analogy is brilliant, we just hadn't really seen it used as a weapon until pretty recently.

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

#312

Post by mionhe »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #308
thrower123 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'd make it in the current age. We routinely drove snowmobiles to school in the winter, parked across the street in an empty lot during hunting season so that our bird guns were locked up technically off of school property, and carried leathermans and swiss army knives every day as a matter of course. Kids were frigging dipping Grizzly into soda bottles in the back of the class room most days. People wo…

> dipping Grizzly into soda bottles What does this mean?

Pretty sure that's referring to chewing tobacco (Grizzly is a brand), and spitting it into empty soda bottles (because it has to go somewhere.)

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

#313

Post by klodolph »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #285
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.…

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.

I don’t get why you’re saying that my story is heroic. Could you explain? I was some kid who got lucky and had parents who could navigate the system, it never felt heroic to me.

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

#314

Post by mirimir »

will4274 wrote: post #303
mirimir wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've watched the so-called alt-right develop online over the past 2-3 decades. Usenet, Live Journal, Encyclopedia Dramatica, the chans, etc. At least at the start, it was mostly about trolling and lulz. The anger of TFWNG. But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. That's frightening. There's a lotta young male angst out there.

> young male angst Tbh, it's this sort of thing that fuels the alt right. I'm a young male and I have some political concerns. I don't consider myself alt-right. But, when you dismiss my concerns as "angst" - I'm far more likely to continue talking to them than to you.

I apologize. I didn't mean to dismiss or criticize your concerns. So perhaps I ought to have used less loaded language. Something like being angry about how screwed up things are. Or however you might describe your political concerns.

Indeed, it worries me how much such concerns are being dismissed and suppressed.

Also, one of my favorite lines is "Still angry." And my favorite fantasy hero is Stover's Caine, who says that a lot.

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

#315

Post by BearsAreCool »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #243
mirimir wrote: 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.

School administrators are more alike than they are different. The proclivities of boys haven't changed much since I was one. I can't find anyone who will listen to me about the impending consequences of boys who were raised in a system with these and other biases. Every system is perfectly designed to produce the result that it produces. So the question we might want to ask our selves is, "what is the system producin…

Pretty much any mens group where some form of behavioural issue facing men is discussed loops back to the effect of school and other childhood factors extensively.

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

#316

Post by objectivetruth »

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.

So you see a peaceful protester with a sign saying "No fascism" and a bunch of people saying "Jews will not replace us!" and -- let me get this correct -- to you, they are the same because of the level of zealotry?

Sometimes the people on this site amaze me with how much they're willing to use pedantry and sophistry and their "intelligence" to just throw away the lessons that our society learned 70 years ago, such as "ethno-nationalists are BAD."

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

#318

Post by Slix »

philliphaydon wrote: post #70
mirimir wrote: 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.

Hasn’t it always been like this? When I was at middle school, the Teachers used to lock the classrooms during lunch time, and I had some tennis balls in my desk so I asked my teacher for the key. She gave me the key and said “just get your things and don’t forget to lock the door, so not let anyone else in the room”. When I left the room one of the girls from the class tried to enter. I stood in the doorway because s…

One time me and some girl were grouped together for a few minutes for a French exercise in high school. I was known for constantly being tardy to class. After we finished the exercise, that girl said that I wouldn't be tardy if I was hit more as a child.

That was upsetting. I don't remember being angry or yelling (but I could be wrong?). But I was sad and probably non-communicative with her for the rest of the class time.

The teacher took me out of the classroom and scolded me for behaving the way that I was and that I have to talk to her and that I was bad. I kinda just took it with a blank face. I didn't tell the teacher what the girl said, probably because I didn't really understand why I was upset.

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

#319

Post by iron0013 »

DuskStar wrote: post #296
eropple wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, go…

[flagged]

"Fascist person"?

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

#320

Post by lancefisher »

When my brother and I were in high school, he got into a discussion with the English teacher. At one point of disagreement, he asked her heatedly, “what are you on about?” We’d been watching a lot of Monty Python. She misinterpreted it as, “are you on the rag?” and proceeded to flip out.

She went to the principal, and they began some Title IX paperwork along with extreme disciplinary action.

This was a small rural school. My class had less than 70 students. My parents didn’t have a lot of resources, but they showed up the next day with a lawyer in a suit carrying a briefcase. The school was completely unprepared for that type of response and immediately backed off. They were able to clear up the misunderstanding.

It means so much for parents to listen to their kids with respect, and stick up for them. I’ve never forgotten it.

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