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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
#52I got removed from a different forum the other day for posting this link along with "people worked up over Nazis vs Commies just need to get outside, meet each other, and see that we're all just folks."
Not my takeaway at all...if the teen in the article didnt have an unusually high amount of critical thinking, meeting in person would have not have changed much.
Critical thinking? As the story presents it, his conversions to and from alt-right were entirely emotion based.
Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#53What 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 a teacher emotionally abused me in class I was in a different class the next week. When I ran out of math classes to take at high school, I took them at college.
Years afterwards I was tutoring a high school student in mathematics. They asked me a question about school and I felt a moment of panic, as I remembered all of the shit that I went through.
By the time I finished college, it made sense to me. I could make it through an awful class or cut through red tape and weird requirements. I knew that I had survived a couple decades of bullshit, I was still here, and a little extra bullshit wasn't going to kill me. But at age 14, I remember being angry and upset all the time about things that happened at school.
Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#54Why 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?
I find it curious that you got downvoted. I'm European as well and I have had the same question for a while. We have far-right, nationalist parties and even more extreme fringe groups, but no threat of secret Nazis.
Maybe it's because we had to deal with the consequences of the actual Nazis and they're not just comic book villains to us. Or because it's the last big war America fought in with a clear bad guy, whereas more recent events are harder to defend.
Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#55> 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.
Unfortunately I've heard this story more than once now. School faculty are terrified of public scandals and many of them are checked out of their jobs. So they tend to take the path of least resistance (blame the boy just in case, to avoid ending up on the news).
The solution is probably some variation of "pay teachers more."
Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#56Why 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?
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Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#57[flagged]
>Truth is you're all a bunch of totalitarians who want impose your ideas and don't like free speech
You can support free speech without supporting all of the things people choose to do with it.
Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#58> 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.
Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#59Fascism 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…
Do you mean memetic inoculation or memetic indoctrination?
Children already get a whole lot of the latter, civics and ethics are entirely the latter, and it is the rebellion against this indoctrination that gets us this angsty memery.
This memery is mostly harmless... the unexamined angst, anxiety, rage, and isolation is not.
I would be very interested to see what a true memetic inoculation program would look like, though. I feel like my own immunity is developed entirely from exposure, with frequent bouts of illness and overcoming.
Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
#60Why 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?
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