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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

#191

Post by PorterDuff »

GreaterFool wrote: post #8

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?

"Why are Americans so obsessed with Nazis? "

Good question. Maybe different reasons. There sure are a lot of Nazi documentaries on cable.

. Twelve year old boys like snappy uniforms and the idea of a warrior ethos.

. You don't need a God to form a religion, sometimes a Devil is enough. The secular Left, now that culture has taken the place of economics as something to argue about, seems to have built a philosophy with Hitler at the bottom. Enemies are, of course, Hitler.

. WWII makes for a great story. Good guys, bad guys, worldwide (thus the name), heros and villains. Maybe the US is bored with Cowboys and Indians.

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

#192

Post by ashleyn »

mirimir wrote: post #58
ukulele wrote: post #13

> He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid. I wonder to what extent the alt-right actually is a young teen movement, with adults mixed in (being the ones who show in person). Is there any at least semi-reliable data on this?

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.

I can't quite tell if I simply grew out of racial humour or it's genuinely taken on this propagandist, explicitly political subtext it didn't have before. Whichever, I don't really appreciate it nowadays.

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

#193

Post by rayiner »

educationdata wrote: post #172
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.

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

Students who engage in serious misconduct, or repeated disruptive conduct will be “counseled out.” But private schools are generally small, closed communities, which creates a high level of trust and allows routine misunderstandings and disputes to be resolved reasonably. Also, there are strong disincentives to “going nuclear” for both the school and the parents. The schools obviously stand to lose revenue, but the parents also stand to lose their monetary and social investment into the school.

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

#194

Post by PaulBGD_ »

This happened to myself in middleschool, almost 10 years ago now. Was pulled into an office, told the police would be called, and was told I needed to confess for hours to something that was unrelated to me. The school never had any retaliation from my family who didn't see it very serious at the time.

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

#195

Post by rjdagost »

cfv wrote: post #115

Editorialized but frank 1 sentence summary: "My son turned into an American Taliban right in front of me and I blame his previous public school based on this one incident". Now look, I'm pretty sure the American education system heavily needs an overhaul, but the whole story is just so unbelievable I was half expecting the words "and then the whole plane clapped" somewhere in there as a dog whistle of sorts.

I got a similar vibe- I think the article is fiction, or at least primarily fiction. Everything fits too perfectly into the narrative the anonymous author is telling. And the ending is just too cute to be believed.

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

#196

Post by sergiotapia »

GreaterFool wrote: post #8

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?

Why indeed. I believe it is because its massively funded to perpetuate it in the mindsphere. Who benefits? I don't know.

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

#198

Post by vzcx »

munk-a wrote: post #112
vzcx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little too... optimistic in my opinion. I dislike both nazis and commies, but it seems clear to me that there are deep and irreconcilable value and cultural conflicts at play in society. Ultimately, these groups do not "speak the same language of Good and Evil," as Nietzsche would say, and are potential precursors to new societies. They should be allowed to part ways, permanently, in my opinion.

How can any of us part ways permanently? We're all inhabiting the same world.

Well, this world has formal boundaries we call borders. Beyond that, it's a big universe...

I know this sounds a bit glib, but I'm deadly serious about this. There are geopolitical complications, yes, as well as some additional complexity when it comes to commerce, but all in all, more regime diversity seems like a good path towards lessened internal social tension.

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

#199

Post by yellowapple »

GreaterFool wrote: post #8

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?

Part of it is that Nazis and Communists (with a capital C, usually taken to be communism in the Chinese/Korean/Soviet sense) fit the "bad guys" archetype in American media (or - more precisely - said archetype developed in response to them being our adversaries in WWII and the Cold War, respectively). Naturally, that means accusing someone of being a Nazi or Communist is an effortless way to paint that someone as a pure and classic villain.

Now we have people overtly and brazenly affiliating identifying as Nazis (usually citing The Bell Curve and other pseudoscientific racist drivel) and Communists (still with the capital C; they might claim to be lowercase-c communists or plain socialists, but it doesn't take long before "Stalin did nothing wrong" or "China's more ethical than the US" starts peeking through the façade). Both have always existed, of course (at least as long as those ideologies have existed), but nowadays folks are more open about their abhorrently-anti-democratic viewpoints (especially on the Internet, where they enjoy relative safety while simultaneously reaching worldwide audiences).

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

#200

Post by kristofferR »

lpernille wrote: post #189

This is why I homeschool my kids. I think as geeks we've solved the problem of learning, look at all the stuff we've built by figuring out how to learn by ourselves. We don't really need schools for this function anymore.

You can't homeschool social skills though.
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