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

washingtonian.com

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

#421

Post by zimpenfish »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #224
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…

The article doesn't use the term I've heard of to describe this, which is "data gap". Take something like a query for "Is the Earth Flat?". There's not a continual stream of videos, posts, and comments about how round the earth is (it's just taken as a given). So Google naturally floats content that says "The Earth is Flat" to the top. This plays out in all sorts of odd and horrific ways. There was a local political…

> What is that candidate to do? Put up their own competing post saying "I don't smell like sulfur?"

"Well, of COURSE he's going to say that, he's a minion of Satan."

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

#422

Post by zimpenfish »

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.

> He's also removed what little context those videos had

He does specifically say at the beginning of his videos that you should go and watch the ones he's quoting to make sure he's not taking them unfairly out of context.

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

#423

Post by Xelbair »

bigred100 wrote: post #411
mantap wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children live in a more violent environment than adults do. As an adult I have never been physically assaulted, yet in school I was assaulted all the time. If an adult were to be assaulted by a random stranger, there's a good chance the "bully" would get beaten up (or in America, shot). Any adult stupid enough to randomly assault other adults is likely to spend a long time as a ward of the state, until they learn not…

Assault is already a crime. Why not just involve the police when students commit it?

Because that doesn't work in schools favour.

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

#424

Post by lostphilosopher »

ricardobeat wrote: post #389
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…

> 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.

I grew up US rural and this checks out with me. I'm sure not every rural community had this era, but I bet a large number did.

(I highly doubt it's still like this.)

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

#425

Post by mango7283 »

garfieldnate wrote: post #381

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 fi…

I'd be curious to hear how you plan to teach your children to not be overly trusting/naive of adults/authority figures while simultaneously ensuring adhere to your oversight and regulation. It sounds like a fine line to thread.

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

#426

Post by mirimir »

chmod775 wrote: post #399
nailer wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such an awful thing for your child to say. How do you ensure they won't do it again?

She'll feel bad about it on her own once she's not angry anymore. Especially when she learns it didn't even further her goals. The second worst thing you can do is to also get angry or punish her, which will only make her feel justified and not question herself. The worst would be giving her what she wanted. That's not the lesson you want to teach at all. So basically follow this father's lead and do nothing. Maybe t…

It's good that I never had kids. I have a short but largely deadpan temper. I would probably have "keep at it, and you'll get what you want, and good riddance" ... and maybe how her college fund is buying bpme a newmachine"

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

#427

Post by basetop »

crsv wrote: post #167

It’s a very well written piece, but it just feels too well written, to the point of feeling to precise, too calculated, too... contrived. Aside from the opinions expressed, the ideological concerns, the relevance to the current political landscape - these are all relevant and interesting explorations, but the whole narrative is just too picture perfect and too close to a screenplay. It just feels like good fiction.

It's propaganda. It's a caricature coming to life. A caricature created by the establishment media.

It's like if foxnews ran a story "What happened to my 13 year old daughter after consuming establishment media or democratic speeches". And then daughter turned out to hit every checklist of a "leftist" fanatic caricature. Or christian publications that would publish "stories" about how hollywood movies or rock 'n roll turned their child gay or in devil worshippers.

A lot of these "stories" involving children are even manufacture ( in order to write an article ) or sought out specifically. Just like the UVA rape story.

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

#428

Post by maxheadroom »

ianai wrote: post #261
asark wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Likewise. I've never been to a reunion because fuck those guys (and gals).

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

#429

Post by alehul »

nailer wrote: post #361
alehul wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the poster you're replying to, I can assume a much more charitable interpretation is that the quote draws an equivalency between being against Trump and being against the KKK, and that's the over-zealous and tribal aspect. It's similar to saying "No Bernie, No Marx." Yes, they're on the same side of the spectrum compared to center, but it seems unfair and disingenuous to combine them as such.

I'd say "no Bernie, no Stalin" would be more apt (Marx wasn't directly violent) and yes as you say it would be a completely unfair comparison.

That is much more apt, thank you!

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

#430

Post by dTal »

philliphaydon wrote: post #187
nv-vn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the time me and my friend were sent to the principal's office for talking about Nerf guns. Because obviously 2 second graders were plotting to shoot up the school. Or the time a girl said I threw something at her when I said she couldn't have it. Note that I don't think this was something about girls lying, I think everyone lied equally at that age or maybe even boys lied more. But the way school admini…

> I think everyone lied equally at that age or maybe even boys lied more. I definitely was no saint at school. Not sure many people can say they were. > I don't think this was something about girls lying Me either, but I do feel when something happens between a male and female, unless there is enough witnesses, side is always taken with the girl it seems, unless the witness is friends with the boy, then they aren't d…

If all children initially lie equally, and girls are invariably believed over boys, wouldn't all parties rapidly learn this? We should expect girls to lie much more if this is the case, because they know they can get away with it.
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