What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by garfieldnate » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

A few thoughts after reading this (very compelling) article:

* It's strange to see a patriarchal over-protection of girls being called liberal. I think we've come full circle on this one.

* Why does this thirteen-year-old have full, unfettered access to the entire internet? That seems like a recipe for disaster. My kids will have dumbphones and access to the desktop computer in the living room, with age-restricted filters and probably internet activity logs. I would not invite random strangers into my home to teach whatever they wanted when I wasn't around.

* I love parenting articles that teach me what I have to teach my children. The parents here loved the trusting aspect of their son, but this really burned him. First he overtrusted the adults at his school, then he overtrusted google search results. I can relate to this! My parents admired my trusting, sweet nature as a kid, too; looking back, I think I was trustful to a fault, especially of adults. "Naive" would be a better description. For example, when an adult said something really unacceptable, I would always try to justify their words and try to learn from them. This led to confusing lessons and some self-esteem issues that needed to be corrected when I had grown out of my naive adult trust.

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

#382

Post by mercer » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:35 AM UTC

vxNsr wrote: post #338

eropple wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PragerU is exactly what I was thinking of, yes; it's firmly chud stuff. Everybody's favorite cool skull, Shaun, has a pretty good breakdown of the nonsense they throw out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM7BgrddY18 From there, you definitely can get to actual fascists, whose channels I won't shout out here. And, because YouTube fits to a very small set of data points, one misclick onto PragerU may very well fi…

I watched that whole thing... and honestly, he's just as guilty of the straw-man arguments and fallacies he's accusing pragerU of. He's also removed what little context those videos had and thus they make even less sense then if you saw the full context.

Could you elaborate on that? I found the video (and other similar ones I've seen) pretty convincing.

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

#383

Post by wtdata » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:37 AM UTC

I keep trying to tell all of my social circle that the normal (although not proper response) to an extremist point of view, is to either embrace it or to vouch for the oposite one. Very few people seem interested to even give it a thought about that and happily continue expousing their extremist points of view (when it's an extremist left point of view of course, since they are told by all the media and social networks that's the moral point of view to have).

When stuff like this has become the norm, exactly what reaction would you expect?

"One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. 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 paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”"

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

#384

Post by johnisgood » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:51 AM UTC

rland wrote: post #311

caconym_ wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Same with religion.

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

#385

Post by burfog » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:52 AM UTC

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]

Pew Research has determined that the Overton window has barely moved at all for the right-wing, but has moved quite a bit for the left-wing. This means that what you perceive as nudging may in fact just be trying to hold it in place. We can call it a Theory of Overton Relativity.

https://imgur.com/QJd2gRB (a really interesting set of histograms)

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/05/takeaways-o...

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

#386

Post by mirimir » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:52 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #371

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.

This is a bit tangential, but you sharing your experience with the term before it became widely-known reminds me of something interesting about the way we group and label ideologies. I still remember 5+ years ago having periodic exposure to the term alt-right and having it more or less exclusively refer to relatively languid writings like Mencius Moldbug and NRx[1], in sharp contrast to the rowdier, meme-ier aestheti…

Just to be clear, it didn't call itself the "alt-right" back then. GamerGate was a turning point, I think. And yeah, it hit mainstream in the 2016 US presidential cycle. But until maybe 2015, I really had no clue that this was a political thing.

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

#387

Post by nkkollaw » Thu, May 09, 2019, 8:24 AM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #153

Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes aren't "I don't like you / your idea". Obviously some people use them that way, but ultimately they're about public moderation. I downvoted your comment. I can explain why if you like. It's not because "I don't really care about what you're saying", and it's not right to be so dismissive. There are substantive reasons. First, you set up a strawman: Why are Americans so obsessed with Nazis? There are two imp…

> the rise of right-wing ideology in America has been so sudden and pervasive that it strains credulity that anyone would be surprised that the issue gets lots of attention Has it really been sudden? The actual Nazis and Klansmen are still bumbling around, selling guns and meth like they always have. There aren't actually very many of them, and they are stupid and nasty, but largely harmless in the grand scheme. What…

From what I understand, the Left has gone more and more to the left throughout the years (the Right has stayed pretty much the same).

For this reason, even a center-right person can seem to be extremely far away to the right, to them.

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

#388

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, May 09, 2019, 8:24 AM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #81

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.…

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…

From outside the US, it's hard to avoid the impression that some non-trivial percentage of high school supervisors and support staff are fundamentally irrational and unable to think and act like stable, responsible adults.

This is incredibly damaging for teens, because teens need to see adults modelling rational, fair, and effective boundaries, and dealing with problems in sane ways.

Powerful adults acting like capriciously ineffective self-indulgent authoritarians is almost the worst possible school environment.

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

#389

Post by ricardobeat » Thu, May 09, 2019, 8:25 AM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #301

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.

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…

> I don't think I'd make it in the current age.

Or any other country (besides Russia/USSR?). That doesn’t sound like an average childhood at all.

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

#390

Post by jml7c5 » Thu, May 09, 2019, 8:29 AM UTC

api wrote: post #142

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.

Targeting gamers is neo-fascism's bread and butter strategy since they proved the concept with "GamerGate." I remember seeing all that stupid GG nonsense and having no idea I was watching the beginning of a massively successful propaganda offensive.

"Targeting" and "strategy" imply that there's some Grand Alt-Right Congress directing some organized movement. That doesn't need to exist: it's worth recalling that the people who follow the whole GamerGate thing are, themselves, generally interested in video games. It's not unexpected for overlap and recommendations to go both ways.