the alt-right

it also doesn't help that if you're a 14-year-old boy on the Internet 18 hours a day including during school, you probably don't interact with any actual progressives, so whatever bullshit gets screenshotted on 4chan seems as much like a representative sample as anything

yeah for sure

otm

both of u

it also doesn't help that if you're a 14-year-old boy on the Internet 18 hours a day including during school, you probably don't interact with any actual progressives, so whatever bullshit gets screenshotted on 4chan seems as much like a representative sample as anything

― aloha darkness my old friend (katherine), Sunday, March 25, 2018 10:23 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is why i always talk to my students who make "i identify as a toaster" kinds of jokes about gender/sex or think feminists are annoying or have gone too far (ive heard this from cis boys AND girls). and generally they get the concept once we've talked for like 5 minutes because there isnt enough real talk about it trickling into their timelines but there is a "ben sharpir0 owns a lib college student on transgenderism" video coming up often.

like we scoff at JP (and shapir0, who i think is as close as the american counterpart as we have now, the educated "smart" conservative) because theyre charlatans, but the high schoolers i teach dont have enough background knowledge on what theyre talking about to know that. they just seem no-nonsense and confirm some of their biases so they dont really have to engage with this counterintuitive challenge from the left because this smart guy just laid out why theyre dumb.

yea Shapiro is already a marginalized clown tho, JP is burning brighter faster

he def doesnt have the crossover appeal into mainstream audiences, thats for sure

m bison your script for talking to the young people about this would probably be handy for most of the general population tbf

In the experience of this college professor, Jordan Peterson has had a discernibly negative influence on intellectual curiosity and open mindedness in the classroom https://t.co/K3GVbY4gCx pic.twitter.com/FlvBT6EDiD

— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) March 26, 2018

'neurological addiction to anger and belief vindication'

i like that

Yeah, that's otm. And to be fair, it's not exclusively the province of the alt-right.

Yup

Anybody hear this one that On the Media did earlier this month trying to point out how (white, mainly) reporters continually fail to cover these assholes properly?

http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-2018-03-02/

Yup, a classic "no shit" NPR moment there

"neurological" and "addiction" are getting at something imo. i know this is #trenchantsocialcommentary but i feel like in general everyone's dopamine cycle is fucked up from the internet and video games and twitter and facebook and politics and primo weed and craft booze and nicotine inhalers and fast food. i know mine is.

A good followup On the Media ep:

http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-2018-03-07/

Haven't listened yet, but one of the tics I hate most when media cover the alt-right is that their idea of "confronting" them is entirely based on the assumption that everyone thinks racism is wrong, so they just say stuff to the effect of "But don't you realize that's racist?" They tend to be nice liberals who have received the right views but have no theoretical framework so they can't really get beyond "what you said is wrong and outside of the scope of what I normally deal with"

And it's like, they know they are racist. They are deliberately making a case for racism. They won't admit it directly, but they're not even that coy about it. So you have to come up with something a little more hard-edged than that.

I do think there needs to be more education not just on racism being a bad thing but the reasons that it is wrong and the problems it creates. Also an acceptance that everyone is racist to some extent and we all need to face up to it, not just "the racists"

But seems like this is part of a wider problem, of course.

m bison your script for talking to the young people about this would probably be handy for most of the general population tbf

― El Tomboto, Monday, March 26, 2018 9:00 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually had a good convo at the end of the day with a kid who made some "there are only two genders" crack. i don't know that i hae a script per se, i think it depends on the kid. and i dont know how helpful that any script i could come up with would be for the general population bc i have a preexisting positive relationship with my students and they see me as an authority on intellectual matters bc im smart af and use hella big words. but i usually start by asking about how they understand gender and sex. kid today explained it was the presence or absence of a penis. i pressed if there was anything else we might consider as part of a person's biology and he was stumped at the moment, so i offered chromosomes. so we went over xx and xy, so i asked well, what happens when someone is xxy? what happens when someone has male parts outside but a uterus inside? what about when they have male and female eternal sex organs? so i taught him the word intersex to describe people who fall outside the biological sex binary. and then his partner commented that that might explain why people might be attracted to ppl of the same sex. and i added that that's not always the case! that what your body looks like or has inside doesn't determine your sexuality or your gender. i explained gender as who you got bed as and sexuality as who you want to go to bed with. i think i mentioned how gender is not thought of the same way across the world, brought up 2 spirits and how native american languages have multiple signifiers for gender outside of man and woman. by the end of it, he seemed to get it and seemed kinda shocked tbh.

i think the thing to take away from it is to be patient, ask questions, correct gently, and be someone that they trust. most of my kids saying this stuff are picking it up from like gamer shit and memes so they really have not heard an educated presentation on the alternatives in most cases.

I do think there needs to be more education not just on racism being a bad thing but the reasons that it is wrong and the problems it creates. Also an acceptance that everyone is racist to some extent and we all need to face up to it, not just "the racists"

But seems like this is part of a wider problem, of course.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, March 26, 2018 7:38 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean the whole point of the alt-right is to normalize racism among people who have been taught that it's taboo. So even MORE messaging that "racism is bad" is not going to be sufficient unless you can provide some kind of framework for why it's bad. The alt-right gets part of its fuel from the "thrill" people get out of breaking a taboo.

m bison from the sound of it you are putting in the good work that pays dividends and I really appreciate that, good on you

thanks! i kinda feel like as the lgbt student club sponsor i have to be extra vigilant about it or else i'd be pretty worthless.

many thanks to you bise for reals

They tend to be nice liberals who have received the right views but have no theoretical framework so they can't really get beyond "what you said is wrong and outside of the scope of what I normally deal with"

They get into this, but never actually mention the word “liberal”

"neurological" and "addiction" are getting at something imo. i know this is #trenchantsocialcommentary but i feel like in general everyone's dopamine cycle is fucked up from the internet and video games and twitter and facebook and politics and primo weed and craft booze and nicotine inhalers and fast food. i know mine is.

― had (crüt), Monday, March 26, 2018 7:41 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

i think the thing to take away from it is to be patient, ask questions, correct gently, and be someone that they trust. most of my kids saying this stuff are picking it up from like gamer shit and memes so they really have not heard an educated presentation on the alternatives in most cases.

Good advice in general

m bison that sounds an ideal approach. i recently had a v rough seminar discussion myself with a bunch of young men who evidently got all of their opinions on gender from daily mail headlines and reddit memes, and one of the ways of getting through to them (maybe, a bit) was just pointing out to them that whatever yr position is, there are serious issues here that deserve attention and respect and generally a whole lot more nuance than the "you can't say anything about gender without being called sexist", "if you don't know 68 different genders you'll get yelled at" kind of positions they were trying to start the discussion with.

i shd say that its usually a productive conversation tho i did have one kid last year who was pretty deep in the alt right woods who was reading breitbart and was into g4v1n mac1nn3s and i think wore some Islamophobic sign on his back one time iirc? kinda scared to see what kind of adult he's turned out to be. again, common thread with him was gaming. it's really the ground zero for a lot of this shit.

Is it that gaming is ground zero or that finding relatively little social satisfaction or success outside of gaming is ground zero? From what I understand all the kids are gaming now all the time.

Oh look some hairs let me split them

true, gaming too broad a target here. sweeps in the gentle nerds who i play super smash bros with on thursdays after school who are dope.

maybe its first person shooter fanatics.

m bison that sounds an ideal approach. i recently had a v rough seminar discussion myself with a bunch of young men who evidently got all of their opinions on gender from daily mail headlines and reddit memes, and one of the ways of getting through to them (maybe, a bit) was just pointing out to them that whatever yr position is, there are serious issues here that deserve attention and respect and generally a whole lot more nuance than the "you can't say anything about gender without being called sexist", "if you don't know 68 different genders you'll get yelled at" kind of positions they were trying to start the discussion with.

― lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living (Merdeyeux), Monday, March 26, 2018 8:59 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man that sounds rough, its definitely easier in a one on one or two situation than one on a bunch.

also they sound like they are in a hurry to paint themselves as victims of the mob.

if schools have abstinence-only education, that also definitely doesn't help, because if your sex ed program consists of "don't do it" then it definitely isn't going to encompass "what your body looks like or has inside doesn't determine your sexuality or your gender."

From what I understand all the kids are gaming now all the time.

I think that's right, and that also includes tumblr social justice kids - though of course their tastes in games are gonna be different from alt-right kid's.

(citation needed)

That tumblr kids play video games or that the games they play are different from the ones the alt-right plays?

they all just play fortnite

^^ the games people play don't map up with their political beliefs that much, kids just play games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Cleansing_(video_game)

I don't think this was a runaway hit.

I mean https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/ultraviolent-flash-games-after-9-11-b416b836f28e

^^ the games people play don't map up with their political beliefs that much, kids just play games.

Eh, I think there's definitley games that have a stronger following amongst kids who're right on than amongst those worried about white genocide - this doesn't preclude that there aren't a bunch of super-mainstream things the two overlap on.

Yeah, but that's the wrong way around, there's definitely games, such as those on katherine's list, but those would be played by about 0.1% of kids, or even of 'Gamers'. I'm definitely not saying there's not a toxic culture in places, but it's not actually coming from the games as cultural objects.

it's not coming from the games as cultural objects but there is a significant overlap between games communities/forums/etc and alt-right spaces. just like if you get really into certain fandoms you are probably going to encounter Tumblr/former Livejournal users at some point, the further you become a "fan" of games the more likely you are to come into contact with these people

(plus, with AAA games at least, there are so many people involved in so many often tiny roles that "coming from the games as cultural objects" is a steep ask)

yeah the emergence of the gamer identity is the most suspect thing imo, it's inherently defensive and ofc there has been proliferation of anti-SJW type memes and discourse among this crowd, but the overall percentage of gamers involved in these communities is small bc gaming is so fkn huge (>40% of americans, 17% globally, only going to go up (I'm sure you cld make a case for the popularisation of gaming as being one of the drivers of the gamer identity as a reactionary purist subgroup))

with the caveat that I haven't read all that much about it, the discourse around this game seems to stink more than the game itself: http://robertwguthrie.com/whats-racist-about-telling-the-truth-when-historical-accuracy-is-used-to-deny-agency/

Aye, I'm agreeing that it's a steep ask. But not entirely with the previous post - the 'certain fandoms' definitely includes games fandoms too.

in my experience it's different games. there's some overlap, but the overlap tends to be the games that are so big they're practically monolithic -- something like overwatch or pubg for instance