the alt-right

I’m also angry and white

I keep hoping one of these socialist organizers I hear about will organize me into a militia but nobody has come a knockin

Have you tried Antifa?

I'd like to hear more about what yr antifa ppl do Fred, ime most antifa ppl I encounter are anarchists not socialists

i think there's a way that the majority of alt-righters could end up "outgrowing" it while the movement as a whole still grows in power. even if the the majority of them end up dropping out of it fairly soon, if the rate of new arrivals outpaces the rate of exits, the group continues to get larger.

I can’t be an anarchist bc I love rules so much

I'd like to hear more about what yr antifa ppl do Fred, ime most antifa ppl I encounter are anarchists not socialists

― Simon H., 12. februar 2018 17:42 (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The ones I know are from the Redox program, they do research into far righters who try to stay anonymous, figure out who is organizing, who is a member of which group and which other groups they are collaborating with. I've met them since I've written about MRAs and alt-righters in the Danish film industry. They pretty routinely support the Unity List, the far-left party that got 18% of the vote in the municipal election in Copenhagen last fall. The existence of that coalition means a lot of far-left distinctions doesn't mean as much as I guess it does in other countries.

I think we're slowly seeing that elsewhere too, I mean DSA is openly trying to be "multi tendency"

alt-righters could end up "outgrowing" it while the movement as a whole still grows in power.

yep. they'll stop posting wacky little frog cartoons on the internet and start running for office. and yes, a lot of these guys are disaffected and have no economic agency. but LOTS of them are just middle and upper middle class fratty bros who just like to troll. they'll "grow up" and get with jobs in finance or GOP politics.

That makes them no different than their forebears

I mean if the problem here is that alt-right boys grow up to be garden variety Republican men, uh

https://www.splcenter.org/20180205/alt-right-killing-people

Kill ‘em back

I mean, not really, maybe, but goddamn

100 victims over 4 years is less worrisome than stinging insects

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/16/chart-the-animals-that-are-most-likely-to-kill-you-this-summer/

idk if I would describe them as "fratty bros" -- part of their whole thing (the "alt" part) is defining themselves in part as opposition to fratty bros, "chads" if you will

I mean if the problem here is that alt-right boys grow up to be garden variety Republican men, uh

Like all those Young Tories in the 80s and 90s with their Hang Mandela badges and t-shirts who turned into Old Tories who'd rather not talk about when they were Young Tories.

Whites still have quite a ways to catch up, 7000+ dead by Islamic terrorists in the same time period (if this is how we're choosing to look at things) (obviously I find silbys post reprehensible)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

in an American context, the majority of mass shootings are done by white folks and right-wing nationalist goons.

Yeah I wouldn't really go down that road SB. But I'll see your Wikipedia (sigh) link and raise you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_States

Mass shootings are just one of the dangers of far right ideology. For every one mass shooter there are probably 10,000 me who share that kind of extremely antisocial, grievance driven way of looking at the world. And now the alt right is giving these tendencies in American life — this disease — a more political shape, and the shape is an ideology of white supremacy and male supremacy. It’s poisonous to the whole society. Of course it’s *their* moral failure for turning to hate but the costs of are borne by all of us, especially the most vulnerable groups.

*10,000 men

I don’t have the answers to this but I find it really troubling.

Meanwhile, Kent State TPUSA organizer quits publicly:

http://libertyhangout.org/2018/02/im-turning-point-usas-top-activist-in-the-country-im-quitting-this-shitty-organization/

.@charliekirk11 you should’ve been the one in the diaper

— TPUSA at Kent State (@TPUSAatKent) February 12, 2018

sadly we are all the ones in the diaper now

The answer to mass shootings in the USA is strong gun control, which will require work on GOTV and enfranchisement efforts to win elections. The answer to depressed, angry, disaffected populations is a strong commitment to investing in domestic mental health and social work programs at every level of government, which requires the same thing.

But let’s keep wringing our hands over where these asshole saddos are coming from like this shit is in any way new or unique.

the sort of lost mb resentful young ppl chaos sex dragon man is appealing to exist in all manner of societies including ones which are much more socialist than the US cld conceivably get in our lifetimes so I'm not convinced leftist groups have much to offer them. saying its 'capitalism' is the source of their ills is as useless as saying it's society, or america, or the patriarchy. the psychological lens (& mythic dragons) gives ppl a sense of individual control which is not really what the left deals in

The ravages of late capitalism as a totalising lens through which to read the grievances of angry young men is an unsurprisingly short-sighted way of looking at it. A yearning for community and social recognition in response to slights real and/or perceived, a desire to enter the proving grounds and emerge a seemingly capable, strong male adult, strike me as the driving forces behind aspirant Jordan Petersons and their ilk. The question of masculinity is the fulcrum here imho. As a side note, I highly doubt public shaming is the proper corrective, barring a few cases.

a desire to enter the proving grounds and emerge a seemingly capable, strong male adult

I wonder what could be helping convince young men they won't grow up to be capable adults? definitely not their (and everyone else's) dwindling career prospects

A yearning for community

sorry to sound reductionist again but yknow our economic system is *fantastic* at creating a hyper-atomized and alienated population

That is undoubtedly a factor, it's just not the be-all and end-all. A man in his late twenties who works in IT, to take a particularly glaring cliché, but who is ultimately viewed as a neckbeard loser virgin by his peers due to his poor grasp of normative social cues and unattractive appearance is also a prime candidate for MRA-ship and the like. I am simply wary of the tendency to systematically pin the blame on capitalism – it is a culprit, yes, but not the only one, and hardly to such an extent.

A man in his late twenties who works in IT, to take a particularly glaring cliché, but who is ultimately viewed as a neckbeard loser virgin by his peers due to his poor grasp of normative social cues and unattractive appearance

I'm sure this was just as much of a thing in the 80s/90s, but they didn't tend to calcify that resentment into something resembling an ideology before (at least not at the levels we're seeing, to my knowledge). What's changed between then and now, besides the appearance of Reddit?

Reddit, 4chan and others are game-changers. They've provided an outlet for their tacit suffering, giving them a modicum of twisted hope.

If you really think Reddit and 4chan are more consequential (or equally consequential) catalysts for brewing resentment than capitalism then I don't know what to tell you

Are we talking about root causes or catalysts?

I'm more concerned with the former

shutting down reddit and 4chan would accomplish nothing (though it would be satisfying, lol); offering a robust and convincing counternarrative for the malaise and alienation people experience might not accomplish nothing

I certainly don't think of social media as a root cause, for what it's worth. Like I said, it's a primarily cultural, even psychological problem that is in some ways aggravated by capitalism, though possibly alleviated it by it as well. If you believe these types didn't exist at all in the Eastern bloc throughout the communist era, for instance, trust me, it's a lot more complicated than that. The fact that they've channelled that resentment into something resembling an ideology in the past decade or so is a slightly different matter as far as I'm concerned.

xp

What's changed between then and now, besides the appearance of Reddit?

The rise of everyone else - a black president, nearly a female one.

Dude, the internet is absolutely an accelerant for this shit. It's never been so easy to find and communicate with people across the globe who will buttress whatever worldview you hold or are susceptible to buying into.

Not to mention that the distribution of alt-righters varies quite a bit among capitalist countries, with the US reigning supreme due to other factors (the association of masculinity with phallic gun violence being one of them).

xp

No oen is dumb enough to argue, and no one is arguing, that the internet is not *an accelerant*

reddit is practically a left-wing institution you guys or at the very least center left.

"sorry to sound reductionist again but yknow our economic system is *fantastic* at creating a hyper-atomized and alienated population"

this is by design. in communitarian economies families + communities are developed inherently through the structure of the economic system (through things such as inheritance laws). although egalitarian communitarian societies do exist, it seems to me like capitalism has been much better at generating equality. societies that have not moved to a market economy are generally stunted (by nepotism/corruption). i personally think we've become too atomized but it's good to talk about why this has come about. capitalism isn't a magic demon -- when you move towards an individualized economy (aka no forced inheritance) you gain economic growth, you create opportunities for people who might otherwise grow up and die on the same family homestead, etc. But then you also lose the family and consequently the community.

tldr the market economy has upsides and downsides for the very things we claim to be interested in (equality, egalitarianism, individualism, liberalism, and then on the other side, tradition, family, community, etc).

I even like to think, perhaps naively, that if Canada weren't right next to the US we would probably be less prone to copying even the most harmful of our neighbours' ideological trends, though you could conversely argue that this proximity has partially inoculated us against their excesses. If memory serves, Canada is the country whose opinion of the US was most negatively affected in the wake of Trump's election. Do degrees of capitalism alone explain this difference? Some of it, I'll wager, but not all.

xp

Canada was mostly shielded from the '08 crisis, for starters.

Mordy otm re: reddit. Not so sure about 'capitalism has been much better at generating equality', though it's a perfectly defensible point. It also depends on the instance of capitalism under discussion.

ultimately western capitalism has been an engine for exacerbating *in*equality

like on a massive scale

compared to what? feudal europe?