the alt-right

the first sentence of the writer's previous piece in the archives is:

There is no more quintessential a model of the failed hero than Elliot Rodger.

All you need to know.

lmao jesus fuck what

the "failed" part is right at least

When literally the second great idea you locate as being 'universal' is 'the heroic individual' the whole thing just reeks of banality.

Much more reassuring to nod along with the smart, handsome & successful father figure saying "toughen up, you weasel" while sneering at feminists and transpeople.

Wait, are we still talking about JP?

The whole thing is bullshit. At one point he decries that the left doesn't take credentials seriously and that Jordan Peterson is a trained psychologist and clinician. The next he is explaining that a lecture is actually really about the history of the Soviet Union. The idea that other scholars might take JP for a charlatan exactly because he takes scientific tools into areas where they don't work, and have been repeatedly shown to not work, doesn't seem to worry the writer.

someone mentioned James Hillman above--that's actually a very good place to send kids who are interested in JP's derivative shtick.

when y'all call Peterson 'transphobic' is that only because of his opposition to the canadian pronoun/language bill, or is there more to it than that?

frogbs OTM

not acknowledging chosen pronouns is inherently transphobic

yeah wait what more do you need sleepingbag?

when y'all call Peterson 'transphobic' is that only because of his opposition to the canadian pronoun/language bill, or is there more to it than that?

― sleepingbag, Friday, March 23, 2018 10:42 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry, that bill doesn't exist

ok human rights bill that he hysterically/opportunistically chose to interpret as "maybe someday i'll be forced to use trans ppl's pronouns because political correctness has GONE MAD"

relatedly re: JP and identity, if this got linked earlier I didn't spot it

Jordan Peterson has claimed on several occasions to be a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation in BC. That appears not to be true. https://t.co/sW6BMAjJ1D

— ishmael n. daro (@iD4RO) March 22, 2018

It's a whole other question whether that bill even does what Peterson thinks it does. In any case, Peterson is weaselly about whether he refuses to use preferred pronouns only because it's 'compulsory' or because he doesn't believe they map onto reality.

xp. quite hilarious that he self-identifies as indigenous when he isn't and gets upset if he gets called on it.

pizzagate guy's sci-fi novel sounds hilarious, via @willsommer's kick-ass newsletter pic.twitter.com/m9ObO8dKLW

— Tom Kludt (@TomKludt) March 23, 2018

Serious question: why is the left unable to reach out to the types of dudes who fall for JP's drivel?

― pomenitul, Friday, March 23, 2018 10:14 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, they're p much all white men, and the left/liberals haven't been too keen on them lately.

#KillAllWhiteMen, white male (x), patriarchy, white male privilege, blah blah blah. it's obvious why a lot of white men who weren't actively racist/transphobic would cotton to JP. there's a huge number of social/cultural changes happening very quickly and the dialogue on the left is consistently very anti-white male. if you're not smart enough to separate you as an individual white man from the structural advantages of the white male patriarchy you are a part of and at some level implicitly endorse and encourage then JP is a godsend. you can feel good about yourself again without any of that extreme alt-right stuff.

it blows my mind when white men take stuff like this so personally, how fucking dumb can you be

"why isn't there a white panther" it's basically just that sublimated

The problem is partly in the limitations of that sort of privilege discourse. Most people will never want to live on their knees. Becoming aware of privilege is necessary but it's not sufficient to be an ethos. People want some sort of heroic narrative to define their lives. Liberal culture is a bit schizophrenic on this when it comes to gender right now, where on one hand any association of positive traits with maleness or manliness is dismissed as "gender essentialism" and implicitly negating women, yet there is all kinds of deliberate association of women and femininity with positive traits (girl power, strong women, etc.), including traditionally "male" traits, which is an understandable impulse but the resulting message is "women = good, men = ?". I mean basically you have pressure from one side to be hypermasculine, and the other side just says you need to engage in a lot of reflection and self-flagellation but doesn't offer much of a positive vision.

Chapo pointed out that a lot of JP's success just comes from identifying discontent and offering a purported solution. And some of that "solution," when you strip away the toxic politics and pseudo-jungian bullshit, is just basic self-help, self-respect, etc. We've done a really good job of improving the way we teach women self-respect, but there's just kind of a hole left in terms of how men should be taught it.

You can continue to browbeat anyone who feels the way I described but they will continue to turn to JP rather than the left most of the time.

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.