the alt-right

i remember when ppl used the term "speech policing" and idpol folks went bananas, "you consider chiding and mockery on the internet to be equivalent of pigs shooting black men in the street???" but i guess that was just a rhetorical tactic and not real moral outrage in hindsight.

wasn't it 'tone policing' get it right u monster

i can't believe you'd use the term monster what am i walking around w/ bolts in my skull brought to life by lightning? sucking the blood of innocents on the streets of london? some hideous deformed green thing that has emerged from the local swamp???

the monster was actually named 'doctor'

Some of like the swamp so much we moved here and started families. So what.

Yeah wait I thought Satanists were cool :( are they cancelled?

there are two major groups that call themselves Satanists, one of which is cool and the other not so much

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-between-Anton-LaVeys-Church-of-Satan-and-the-Satanic-Temple

it's more satanic that way

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world one of him was cool

Good friend of mine was telling me her 10th grade son is getting into this stuff and I didn't know what to tell her, nor do I have any idea what I'd do if my own son got into it when he was older.

what, satanism?

the internet

I think I was in 9th or 10th grade when I was told about/shown Anton LeVey in the Hoel California gatefold, it made no lasting impresYOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL

Play him the Dollop episode about the rocket scientist satanist guy. The ending should convince him it's actually, uh, not that cool in the final analysis.

I'm grateful that my youthful ideological indiscretions were only being a dogmatic atheist who read Richard Dawnkins' The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker ostentatiously at school. It's a weird time to grow up.

blowing yourself up in your garage while doing homebrew rocketry after stealing l ron hubbard's money and his girlfriend isn't cool to you?

wtf simon i thought i knew you

(the jack parsons story is incredible tbh, i think we have a thread for him somewhere)

sorry i meant my friend's son is getting into alt-right stuff

i'd far prefer a satanist son than an alt-right one

blowing yourself up in your garage while doing homebrew rocketry after stealing l ron hubbard's money and his girlfriend isn't cool to you?

that's not really the bit I had in mind lol

https://www.bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/marvel_spotlight_13-600x874.jpg

also, didn't L Ron Hubbard steal HIS wife?

sorry i meant my friend's son is getting into alt-right stuff

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, March 22, 2018 9:05 AM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have you tried calling him a racist sexist bigot homophobe transphobe asshole?

maybe see if he has any tweets that will get him kicked out of school

there was a parenting thread on this theme recently (child getting into the alt-right) w/ some varied advice. i think it helps to get where the kid is coming from and what is motivating them. if they're just into the edginess and transgressiveness you'd need to have a different conversation (and steer them differently) then if they're having anxiety about their future, and totally different from if they just hate hypocritical progressives, etc. hopefully parents have been engaging their kids on these kinds of topics for years tho and aren't just getting started when they find /pol/ bookmarked in safari.

actually yeah you're right xxp

but either way i'm still not convinced that pointing to the example of the dashingly handsome founder of jpl who lived a life of wild abandon is gonna do much to dissuade young people from exploring satanism

A close friend of mine's 15yo son with autism (mild, but more than aspie) is into this stuff too (alt-right, not satanism). Youtube was definitely the main vector, which is why I brought it up up-thread.

For him, it's obviously not at all about edginess or the shock value or masculinity or the appeal of violence. He's earnest, without that sly disingenuousness (yes, "bad faith") that's the stock-in-trade of every Republican voter.

I think it has to do with a warped sense of fairness, of not understanding the fundamental asymmetries between, for example, the left and the right. The modern world, I guess, is understood only through a narrative lens, where every force is met with another that is understood to be by definition equal and opposite. Things like "good" and "evil" are just tags, just hats that different teams wear. So he gets righteously indignant when a nazi gets punched in the face or not allowed to speak on a campus, because that's not "fair". He can't understand that antifa and nazis aren't just the same guys with different uniforms. His world is so safe that he doesn't understand the stakes. I think that's a big part of why Trump got elected: people wanting to "shake things up" have no conception of how bad things can be. The worst thing they can imagine is a really bad recession; they can't begin to conceive that genocide could happen here, or what totalitarianism actually entails.

booming post

time for a visit to the holocaust museum

otm

Have a newly (yet unhappily) married friend who's been gushing about how great Peterson has been for him as a self-help guru. After discussing with him it turns out he has never even heard the term alt-right and has no interest in or knowledge of the ideology/politics behind Peterson's material.

Trying to get him to look deeper but can't find any critiques of Peterson that are both concise and not full of vitriol. Anyone know of anything (preferably in video format) that might be helpful?

why not ask him to show you some passages JP has written that he finds particularly meaningful and then read them yourself and discuss them with him?

if you just want a one stop fisking then the current affairs piece is the best thing i've read and really exposes the void at the heart of JP's intellectual project. but nothing beats discussing the actual texts that your friend is responding to.

it looks like the self-helpy parts are kinda like a dime store Marcus Aurelius minus the gratitude, empathy, and humility

Just point to the fact that this man got famous for shouting down a group of trans folks.

Yeah, I'd show him what Peterson actually says on ideological issues first and see what he thinks of it.

There's this, from fall 2016, which is when I think he first started becoming prominent in Canada.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiijS_9hPkM

fwiw i think that's a bad approach. his friend isn't going to abandon someone he's getting perceived value out of bc he isn't politically correct. he'll either explain away the improper political position, or he'll say that "well i still like him despite this" or he'll agree with it (which is what ppl do when they are challenged with an inconsistency)! you need to dig into precisely what he is getting out of JP and help him see that JP is entirely full of shit and he's either accepting platitudes as great meaning, or he's reading content into vague assertions, or maybe you'll admit that in some particular writings JP has something to say, but those options will engage your friend in a deeper way than sending him links of how bad JP is.

If it's someone you care about, I think Mordy's approach is best. I think an adult--particularly a male adult--even just taking enough of an interest to discuss big ideas and most importantly *listen* in a non-prescriptive context to a teenager in their life describe what he's thinking and feeling would make a huge difference. They feel *seen* by JP (though it is a con).

I think Mordy's approach is a good second step, but it seems like tsrobodo's friend doesn't even have a complete picture yet. Lots of recent followers of Peterson have probably never heard anything about the Bill C-16 controversy. If the response is "I still like him despite this," then that at least serves to complicate the picture.

The last couple of posts are very interesting. I'm getting more curious about JP recently, because a colleague of mine who is a really kind and thoughtful person mentioned him in a positive light recently in conversation. I asked him if he was aware of JP's alt-right connections, and he just kind of smirked, shrugged, and rolled his eyes giving me the impression that he was and possibly didn't believe it. This guy is older, definitely seems to have mostly liberal politics, yet is also single (and has been for a long time), has definitely mentioned some MRA stuff in the past, and seems to view life in absolutes (not just politically, but his whole approach to dealing with job-related issues as well). He's a huge Jung personality type guy - has more or less written an unpublished book about it - and generally prefers solitude. I've wondered before if he might be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I guess I mention this as a way to profile someone who might be more susceptible to someone like JP. He also likes J*e R*gan's podcast and I think became aware of JP from that, so I've been sort of procrastinating watching that to try to get a better idea of what might be appealing to someone like my colleague about JP.

a co-worker brought JP up on Slack in a public channel a couple months back and had no idea about the transphobic shit. I went off on him a bit. (He left the company a little later. I'm assuming that was unrelated.)

just show him this meme

https://i.imgur.com/RtYEoiL.jpg

looool

my posts are free y'all

just show him this meme

https://i.imgur.com/RtYEoiL.jpg

― kurt schwitterz

i laughed

same

pretty good

https://twitter.com/JPetersonReview

why not ask him to show you some passages JP has written that he finds particularly meaningful and then read them yourself and discuss them with him?

― Mordy, Thursday, March 22, 2018 5:58 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This would be ideal if there were any passages he could point to to begin with.

I'm pretty certain he exclusively watches youtube clips and listens to podcasts, which is why I had hoped one of those summarise stuff youtube people (vox, nerdwriter etc.) had done like a primer or something I could use as a starting point. Surprised how hard it is to find stuff like that.

Really though the idea of having to personally listen to hours of Jordan Peterson just to be able to make a case to my friend gives me hives. I know its potentially counterproductive to look for shortcuts with things like this but life's too short

Doesn't help that he himself is hazy on the appeal. Much of what he says he likes boils down to, "He's just so honest", "He breaks things down really well", "Leaves no room for excuses".

i hate watching youtube lectures really from anyone and from JP in particular i imagine it's a nightmare but maybe you could say to him "hey i really want to understand the appeal is there a particular 5 minute segment somewhere that you think is just the best thing you've heard from him so i can get an idea of what you like?"

I mean the latest Chapo is a pretty sober conversation pointing out JP's snake oil bullshit, even though the ep starts with a bad Elon Musk improv bit - but why is does a Joe Rogan fan need a non-jokey, intellectual discussion of JP?