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

#441

Post by pnutjam » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

opan wrote: post #370

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.…

> When I ran out of math classes to take at high school, I took them at college. It's interesting how this works. I remember I had an English teacher I really hated at one point in high school. It was pretty early in the year, so I went to my counselor in hopes of getting it sorted out in those first couple weeks. The teacher apparently found my reactions entertaining and kept singling me out to tease me or imply not…

I was an army brat who experienced several schools. I had problems and got into fights. The best school I ever went to was the DOD school in Panama. It had structure, the parents were forced to be involved. In the Army, you are responsible for the actions of your dependents, you are the one who sponsors them to live on base and their actions can show up on your military record.

My kids seem to like school, I've consciously kept them in the same good school district. It's a bit too wealthy and not as diverse as I'd like, although there is a good bit of diversity. They key is to stay involved. Volunteer in the classroom when your kids are young and you have the chance. Make sure the other kids in you child's grade recognize you and their parents do as well. Don't let your kids get lost in the shuffle and work with people to create a community.

//edit: I have 6 kids and my oldest is graduating next year, so I have experience.

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

#442

Post by cafard » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #388

chaostheory wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capri…

I'd be interest to learn of a country that does not have this sort of problem to some degree.

"teens need to see adults modelling rational, fair, and effective boundaries, and dealing with problems in sane ways". This may sound like sarcasm, but is not intended as such: this is rude preparation for the workplace and the "public square". I agree that education would be better.

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

#443

Post by pureliquidhw » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

Xelbair wrote: post #413

MrLeap wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as…

I had only two horrible teachers to be honest, so i consider myself lucky. One was in both primary and middle high, the other was at my university. First one basically stripped me of my ability to count big numbers in my head - i could multiply and divide 4-5 digit numbers easily. She just didn't believe it and marked everything as failure unless I've written down everything step by step. Latter on she was my chemist…

It's funny how little organizational power structures change:

I only had two horrible bosses to be honest, so I consider myself lucky.

One was at my first job out of school, the other a few jobs later.

Fist one basically stripped me of my confidence in my coding ability - I could build complex algorithms easily. She just didn't understand minor complexities and made me use more, simple algos and over document.

Later on another project, we were always behind schedule, just one fire away from the project collapsing. When we got a new boss, we were able to complete features easily, not because there were less features, but she could actually convey requirements.

At my later job, the boss didn't care about code quality, just that PBI's were moving through. Single mistakes brought down the entire app. We never did root cause analysis, just patched symptoms. Thankfully a boss that came in later was way better, he actually pushed quality.

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

#444

Post by api » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

jml7c5 wrote: post #390

api wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was no Grand Congress but there was a loose confederation of ideologues who saw GG and saw a major opportunity to radicalize young people. I don't know how organic GG itself was. It didn't look organic but then again it's hard to tell.

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

#445

Post by zamber » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #388

chaostheory wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capri…

It's not a US-only phenomenon. I've got lots of similar incompetency stories from Poland.

My mom was a math teacher in primary school for 6 months after which she had to stop doing it because the kids drove her close to a mental breakdown.

Her friend from high school (which sucked at math) still teaches in her hometown and is seen by a lot of kids (and now adults) as completely incompetent (as reported by cousins growing up there).

I recall multiple instances of incompetency, abuse, blaming and general stupidity in my own education. Good teachers were the odd ones. Most were mediocre. The problematic ones had to really cross the line to get fired or warned.

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

#446

Post by boapnuaput » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

_yt0l wrote: post #380

boapnuaput wrote: post #19

Fascism is seductive. It has little idological substance aside from that needed to apologize for promoting the ethnostate, and instead operates on style and spectacle. We let our teenagers become broadcasters, influencers, reviewers, and players, but failed to teach them how to avoid being parasocially suckered, influenced, gaslit, and used as pawns. Perhaps we need to craft an educational system which is more substa…

>It has little ideological substance Fascism is an attempt to preserve tradition and meaning in an increasingly chaotic and senseless world. It creates order by demanding a return to organic hierarchical structures and by eliminating threats to a meaningful existence. Fascism is clearly incompatible with modern values which place the individual first. Individualism atomizes people rather than seeing them as part of a…

This is an interesting cryptofascist argument: The world has meaning, and denying that meaning is an artifice which leads to alienation and atomization.

A counterpoint: There is obviously no such thing as meaning in the traditional/religious/corporatist sense. Chomsky, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Tarski, etc. hammered this particular peg into the ground last century.[0] Additionally, the natural/artificial divide doesn't matter; there is no such thing as an artificial society.[1] Therefore this "return to organic hierarchical structures" is a fascist resurrection myth, and "eliminating threats to a meaningful existence" is fascist fear of the Other.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski's_undefinability_theore... is a reasonable entrypoint to these concepts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto...

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

#447

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:23 PM UTC

alexandercrohde wrote: post #221

esoterica wrote: post #176

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…

[deleted]

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

#448

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:23 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #368

mensetmanusman wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You can’t ensure anything. I just find it so fascinating that humans naturally acquire skills to battle others in mental and physical ways when under duress.

These types of outbursts also happen in the very elderly as they near death or have dementia, and are more likely to happen when people are very hungry or uncomfortable. Just knowing that is normal helps frame a response.

Our job as parents could therefore be described as helping create an environment where it is easy to do good and hard to do bad. I.e. get enough sleep with strict bed-times when kids naturally would sleep 10-12 hours each day, good nutrition with strict ‘if you don’t eat veggies, there is no dessert’, good activity levels with strict ‘you have to be physically active at least as long as you want to be mentally active/passive on an entertainment device’ (and for some religious households like ours, intentional daily and vocal ‘prays/acts of thanksgiving’ to help frame the mind towards gratitude for mental well being ~i.e. our children in this context have shared with the family at least one thing they are thankful for each day since they could vocalize.)

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

#449

Post by zamber » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #292

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.

A student whose situation I’m personally aware of was threatened with expulsion during middle school after a history of being an undistinguished but not particularly troublesome student for a) doodling a bobomb (character from Mario) in their notebook during class and b) filling in a speech bubble saying “Let’s blow up the school.” Zero tolerance policy; bomb threat. It took substantial efforts by a parent to keep th…

That reminds me of an instance where a not-too-bright fellow was stressed out about some exam. He strapped a LED blinker to a clock and a box with rocks, put it at the basement floor corridor and informed teachers about a bomb he "found just laying there".

Everyone was evacuated. A bomb squad had to come from 90km away to disarm it. The kid was expelled after he admitted doing it after questioning.

Moral of the story: don't teach kids about LED blinkers.

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

#450

Post by treis » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:28 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #292

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.

A student whose situation I’m personally aware of was threatened with expulsion during middle school after a history of being an undistinguished but not particularly troublesome student for a) doodling a bobomb (character from Mario) in their notebook during class and b) filling in a speech bubble saying “Let’s blow up the school.” Zero tolerance policy; bomb threat. It took substantial efforts by a parent to keep th…

>doodling a bobomb (character from Mario) in their notebook during class and b) filling in a speech bubble saying “Let’s blow up the school.” Zero tolerance policy; bomb threat.

My school forced us to show IDs to get on the bus home. I got in school suspension* for saying something to the effect of if I were going to bring a bomb I wouldn't forget my ID. This was almost 20 years ago so I guess I got off light. I still remember how ridiculous it all was and more ridiculous that my parents sided with the school.

*Essentially all day long detention. Sit in a room, no talking, do work