What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right | Hacker News Reader

What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

washingtonian.com

531 pointsearenndil438 comments

What 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.

Heck. I'm still making nightmares about being back to school.

Mid 30s, same, and my k-12 experience wasn't even bad. I wasn't really bullied. I was popular enough, and moved between a few different friend groups, some of them semi-cool (though one of the nerdier groups was my "home"). School's just that traumatic, I guess.

I worry about that for my kids. Unlike an adult, if you're in an environment that's making your life hell (and normal school life is friggin' intolerable, from an adult perspective, without awful-yet-common levels of bullying or social bullshit happening), you don't have any real way to get out except to wait. Assholes can't be "fired". Hell, someone might commit battery and be back in the seat next to you before long, let alone lesser crimes. You can't really get transferred, with any certainty. You can't quit and go somewhere else, and anyway the environments are so screwed up you'd probably end up somewhere that's still bad, even if it's better. You can't even do much to avoid the jerks. The school work itself's a mess even in the best case, and wastes huge amounts of time—any bright kid's gonna notice and find it, at best, very annoying. You're not even being paid.

Keeping the kids indoors all Winter while the sun's out (recess is nearly dead around here, even at the good schools, and they avoid going outside anyway if it's even a little shitty) is dooming tons of them to short-sightedness (insufficient bright sunlight during formative years, turns out that's the main thing that does it), SAD, and probably contributing to obesity. It sucks.

If you have the option of a Sudbury school nearby, you may want to look into that for your kids. The students and staff run the school jointly and students get down to the business of living life instead of doing bs work. Students are part of an accepting and just community which gives them all a compassionate and tempered view towards others. The price is giving up the gold stars (academic metrics of success) and simply accepting that a child has an inherent drive to find a successful path in life if given the opportunity to pursue it in a supportive environment.

The community as a whole is responsible for deciding on the rules and what to do when they are violated, including possible expulsion (student) / firing (staff) though, being a community, such things happen only as very last resorts. Everyone gets to tell their side of the story and the community decides as best it can with no one in a position of needing to do a knee-jerk response to cover themselves. Compassion and limits coexist.

Conversely, I was bullied relentlessly for years. It warped my perceptions so badly that for years into my adulthood I couldn’t exactly identify when it finally ceased. Public school has to be the worst way we could teach little humans how to behave to one another without just going lord of the flies.

I’ll never fully move past it. That stuff is permanent to some extent.

>I’ll never fully move past it. That stuff is permanent to some extent.

Likewise. I've never been to a reunion because fuck those guys (and gals).

> Likewise. I've never been to a reunion because fuck those guys (and gals).

Oh, do go if you've been able to have any success at all in your professional career.

The only way I ever got thru the years of bullying was to know I would go to college and get a good job and succeed.

Going back and seeing how many of my tormentors never moved beyond high school, live in the same place, and look 10 years older than me is DELICIOUS.

It makes you wonder how much of this is school, per se, and how much of it is just growing up. Home-schooled kids removed from that environment, for example, tend to have worse outcomes, partly because even while school can be stressful, not socializing routinely with same-aged peers is worse.

I call BS on the parent comment's perspective. Some evidence:

"Homeschooled kids have the same access to online learning, friendships, and extracurricular activities as the typical public school student — but without many of the drawbacks, like standardized lesson plans and bullying."[1]

"Regarding socialization, Taylor's results would mean that very few home-schooling children are socially deprived. He states that critics who speak out against homeschooling on the basis of social deprivation are actually addressing an area which favors homeschoolers." [2]

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/reasons-homeschooling-is-the...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

I do not think that sitting alone during breaks and only talking during the other 6 hours when you raise your hand to answer a question that a teacher asks really counts as socialization.

Children live in a more violent environment than adults do. As an adult I have never been physically assaulted, yet in school I was assaulted all the time.

If an adult were to be assaulted by a random stranger, there's a good chance the "bully" would get beaten up (or in America, shot). Any adult stupid enough to randomly assault other adults is likely to spend a long time as a ward of the state, until they learn not to do that anymore.

We should teach our children that they have a right to defend themselves and a duty to defend other kids who are being bullied at school.

Assault is already a crime. Why not just involve the police when students commit it?

Because that doesn't work in schools favour.

obligatory: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/final-exam-dram

Reminds me of this story

https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/06/75f0f464cb3367...

(audio) http://snapjudgment.org/no-one-calls-me-shooter-0

It's basically an autistic kid who was falsely accused by an Oregon public HS of being a potential gunman. All of this based on a vague offhand comment by a random student. The school and police refused to provide details until a few years later. When the school released the details, they didn't bother to even interview the other kid who made the random comment before jumping to crazy conclusions.

Your story reminds me of something that happened to me in high-school. I registered for a challenge english class. I lasted about two weeks because of a strange grading policy the teacher chose. If you didn't turn in ANY assignment, regardless how few points it was worth, your grade in the class would be set at a hard F. If you wanted to pass, you had to turn in assignments late. She'd give you a zero for the late assignment, but your grade would be allowed to calculate.

I found this policy led to her doing ridiculous nonsense, like having extremely long essays be worth 3 points. and then a three question quiz worth 40 points. Her whole setup just struck me as bizarre and kafkaesque. So, I went to my guidance councilor and changed classes.

Less than a week later she tells her remaining students that she had a dream that I was shooting students and teachers from a tree with a sniper rifle. Some friends I still had in the class relayed this to me and it rattled me a bit. I asked around to a few other teachers / administrators about it and got shrugs.

Same same but different I guess.

..I have a lot of stories about teachers.

I had only two horrible teachers to be honest, so i consider myself lucky.

One was in both primary and middle high, the other was at my university.

First one basically stripped me of my ability to count big numbers in my head - i could multiply and divide 4-5 digit numbers easily. She just didn't believe it and marked everything as failure unless I've written down everything step by step.

Latter on she was my chemistry teacher - average grade for my class was just one mark above failure. When we got new teacher i could score top grades easily - not because she was more lenient at grading - but she actually could convey her knowledge.

At university we had a numeric methods teacher who didn't grade the method, but the result. a single mistake in writing things down resulted in a failure of whole assignment. We never did any theory, just did everything by hand. Thankfully numeric method teacher at my masters was way way better - he was actually teaching us.

It's funny how little organizational power structures change:

I only had two horrible bosses to be honest, so I consider myself lucky.

One was at my first job out of school, the other a few jobs later.

Fist one basically stripped me of my confidence in my coding ability - I could build complex algorithms easily. She just didn't understand minor complexities and made me use more, simple algos and over document.

Later on another project, we were always behind schedule, just one fire away from the project collapsing. When we got a new boss, we were able to complete features easily, not because there were less features, but she could actually convey requirements.

At my later job, the boss didn't care about code quality, just that PBI's were moving through. Single mistakes brought down the entire app. We never did root cause analysis, just patched symptoms. Thankfully a boss that came in later was way better, he actually pushed quality.

From outside the US, it's hard to avoid the impression that some non-trivial percentage of high school supervisors and support staff are fundamentally irrational and unable to think and act like stable, responsible adults.

This is incredibly damaging for teens, because teens need to see adults modelling rational, fair, and effective boundaries, and dealing with problems in sane ways.

Powerful adults acting like capriciously ineffective self-indulgent authoritarians is almost the worst possible school environment.

Unfortunately all it takes is one irrational adult to cause lasting harm, and over the course of 12 years each student is likely to come across several.

The common trait, based on my experience, is that the problem staff feel they have all the information, are the experts, categorize complex interactions into 'seen this before' bins, and feel they are the sole authority and report to no one. They are basically acting as judge, jury, and executioner.

They are a minority within the public school system however they have the overwritten rules and regulations to back up their actions.

I'd be interest to learn of a country that does not have this sort of problem to some degree.

"teens need to see adults modelling rational, fair, and effective boundaries, and dealing with problems in sane ways". This may sound like sarcasm, but is not intended as such: this is rude preparation for the workplace and the "public square". I agree that education would be better.

It's not a US-only phenomenon. I've got lots of similar incompetency stories from Poland.

My mom was a math teacher in primary school for 6 months after which she had to stop doing it because the kids drove her close to a mental breakdown.

Her friend from high school (which sucked at math) still teaches in her hometown and is seen by a lot of kids (and now adults) as completely incompetent (as reported by cousins growing up there).

I recall multiple instances of incompetency, abuse, blaming and general stupidity in my own education. Good teachers were the odd ones. Most were mediocre. The problematic ones had to really cross the line to get fired or warned.

Better safe than sorry is an excellent policy when someone else bears all the consequences.

What drove me crazy about K-12 is that all the bullshit zero tolerance policies affected mainly the normal kids. The real problem kids didn’t care, and continued to wreak havoc. It’s the main reason I send my kids to private school, even though the public schools where I live are good.

I really hated that. It’s a system that punished people who were trying to do the right thing.

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

Usually they have the policies, but choose not to enforce them. The rule is there so they can expel or severely punish kids at their discretion, but typically don't want to because that represents lost revenue if the kid leaves.

The biggest pressures on school administrators and teachers are parents through direct screaming and anger, not politics. If you want to have a good schooling environment, make sure to put a parent sized amount of support behind teachers that are good, even when they come to you and tell you little jimmy is being a right asshole and needs to be disciplined

Students who engage in serious misconduct, or repeated disruptive conduct will be “counseled out.” But private schools are generally small, closed communities, which creates a high level of trust and allows routine misunderstandings and disputes to be resolved reasonably. Also, there are strong disincentives to “going nuclear” for both the school and the parents. The schools obviously stand to lose revenue, but the parents also stand to lose their monetary and social investment into the school.

As shared by a friend of mine recently:

Well, my kid screwed up! She took a multitool to school. It has a knife blade. I'm sure every student will go home and tell their parents that someone had a knife at school. Which is true, and only part of the story.

I am glad she is at a private school, where she was only suspended for the day, vs at a public school with an onduty police officer, where she would have been formally charged and entered into the 'system' (a discussion for another time, but this is one problem I have with SRO and the criminalizing of students for minor offenses and how that leads the schools into a pipeline to prisons).

Suspended for the day; sure I guess that’s “reasonable.”

Personally, my wife and I are glad to have homeschooled our kids.

Wait.. there are resident police officers in schools in USA?!

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

> In the late 1990s, SRO presence on campuses again increased after the Department of Justice created a $750 million grant program, Cops in School, to hire over 6,500 SROs.

https://txssc.txstate.edu/topics/law-enforcement/articles/br...

"Normal country", as they say. Gotta keep the school-to-prison pipeline pumping.

Alternatively, as was the case at my private high school, the small, closed community creates a high level of trust and allows truly awful behavior to be papered over and worked around, because that can line up with the incentives of the community.

Or you could be at an elite private high school, rightly upset about aspects of it, but aware that something which strikes a 14 year old as a pointless abuse of power might actually be the grit for which penicillin and the structure of DNA are the pearls, and desperately hoping that the pervasive homophobia falls in the former category.

Being at a private school won’t stop e.g. kids from being expelled for being caught a single time with a small amount of pot, as happened to my cousin and several of his friends. I guess at least they weren’t referred to the police?

Plenty of zero-tolerance bullshit at (extremely ritzy and exclusive... or any other type of) private schools too.

It’s not like being unaccountable to the local government makes school administrators stop power tripping.

I'd imagine there's a more direct financial incentive; if a student's parent(s) decide(s) to pull that student out of school because of a disagreement with the school's administration, then that directly leads to less money for the school.

Meanwhile, a public school doesn't have that direct penalty; if anything, it's just one less student in already-crowded classrooms, so pushing a student out might very well be a net positive.

> a public school doesn't have that direct penalty

That is false

You are correct. Public schools lose funding when enrollment drops but the magnitude of the funds lost and the degree to which those funds affect the total budget of the school is usually much greater at a private school.

> the magnitude of the funds lost and the degree to which those funds affect the total budget of the school is usually much greater at a private school

This is false

> It’s the main reason I send my kids to private school

I was sent to a private school for jr. high, and it was a shit show that severely derailed my education at the time.

Unbeknownst to my well-meaning parents, it turned out the private school was where parents of abusive troublemaker bullies sent their kids after their barely having passed public school, as the last option before military school.

There were quite a few years where I wanted to murder the administrators at the school and my parents because they were entirely incompetent and in my eyes responsible for creating this abusive situation I was forced into, for no apparent reason other than religious beliefs (it was a catholic school, catholic parents).

A student whose situation I’m personally aware of was threatened with expulsion during middle school after a history of being an undistinguished but not particularly troublesome student for a) doodling a bobomb (character from Mario) in their notebook during class and b) filling in a speech bubble saying “Let’s blow up the school.” Zero tolerance policy; bomb threat.

It took substantial efforts by a parent to keep them in school, including begging, pleading, and threatening a PR campaign along the lines of “I will personally call every mother at this school and break down in their living room about how you ruined my son’s life” to get him reinstated.

The school was, obviously, neither bobombed nor hit with a turtle shell nor stomped on.

It seems the only reasonable response by school authorities is to put teachers in bomb-vests to pre-emptively quash any bomb threat.

That reminds me of an instance where a not-too-bright fellow was stressed out about some exam. He strapped a LED blinker to a clock and a box with rocks, put it at the basement floor corridor and informed teachers about a bomb he "found just laying there".

Everyone was evacuated. A bomb squad had to come from 90km away to disarm it. The kid was expelled after he admitted doing it after questioning.

Moral of the story: don't teach kids about LED blinkers.

>doodling a bobomb (character from Mario) in their notebook during class and b) filling in a speech bubble saying “Let’s blow up the school.” Zero tolerance policy; bomb threat.

My school forced us to show IDs to get on the bus home. I got in school suspension* for saying something to the effect of if I were going to bring a bomb I wouldn't forget my ID. This was almost 20 years ago so I guess I got off light. I still remember how ridiculous it all was and more ridiculous that my parents sided with the school.

*Essentially all day long detention. Sit in a room, no talking, do work

Obviously the environment is different now, but me and a few friends called in a bomb scare to our high school, got a day off while cops came and everyone was evacced to sports fields.

Got caught, suspended, and given a stern talking to by the cops, but no records or permanent consequences.

We’re all functional adults now, contributing to society, some in upper management roles, some heading up charities. A punitive approach would have made those stories impossible.

I don't think I'd make it in the current age. We routinely drove snowmobiles to school in the winter, parked across the street in an empty lot during hunting season so that our bird guns were locked up technically off of school property, and carried leathermans and swiss army knives every day as a matter of course. Kids were frigging dipping Grizzly into soda bottles in the back of the class room most days.

People would have a conniption fit now, and this was only when Bush II was in office.

I think your geography had more impact than your era. Is your hometown much different than this today? Seems like the normal rural vs urban divide to me.

> dipping Grizzly into soda bottles

What does this mean?

Pretty sure that's referring to chewing tobacco (Grizzly is a brand), and spitting it into empty soda bottles (because it has to go somewhere.)

chewing tobacco.

> I don't think I'd make it in the current age.

Or any other country (besides Russia/USSR?). That doesn’t sound like an average childhood at all.

I grew up US rural and this checks out with me. I'm sure not every rural community had this era, but I bet a large number did.

(I highly doubt it's still like this.)

Welcome to the poorer rural areas of the united states

Curious where you got 'poorer' out of that. I'm a city boy all my life, but I've driven the country quite a few times - I could picture the Grizzly dip guy with guns and snowmobiles being in Wyoming .. https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/wyoming/

I bet they respected the teachers at least.

My kids' middle school had a similar problem. For example, three kids out of a hundred would cause a problem during lunch, so all hundred kids in the grade had to sit in alphabetical or some pre-determined order for the rest of the year. My kids said everyone including the teachers and kids knew who was causing the problem, but everyone had to pay for it. I think the school was afraid to single out the "trouble makers" (they were just throwing food or yelling or some other typical bs) and contact their parents, so they just made all the kids pay for it.

Wow, we had quite similar upbringings. My dad was the co-president of the county's Gifted & Talented Association, and like you I was always in the best classes and magnet programs (even if that required busing), and when I had bad teachers, my dad got me swapped into the best teacher's class within a week. I even had a similar issue with a teacher, but fortunately that was later in high school and I was able to handle it by myself. This teacher, in fact: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/a-reno...

And yeah, having someone in your corner who knows how to navigate the school system and get the best for you is super important. I wouldn't be where I am today without his guidance, plus all the extra-curricular science and math activities/competitions he took me to on weekends or for summer camps.

> And yeah, having someone in your corner who knows how to navigate the school system and get the best for you is super important.

This is very typical of the bureaucracies that run socialism. It becomes a system of bartering favors, connections, and influence. (Instead of money.)

This is a typical feature of any bureaucracy, which basically describes every large power to some degree (some of which are more bureaucratic and others are less).

In a free market business, you can get special treatment, favors, etc., by offering more money. For example, if you want a better apartment, you pay more money for it. Under socialism, where supposedly everyone is treated equally and the apartments are supposedly equal, you get the better apartment using influence, trading favors, bartering, etc.

For another example, when you need surgery, which surgeon do you get? Under capitalism, you pay more for the better surgeon. Under socialism, you get the better surgeon through influence, favors, barter, bribes, etc. The same goes for any service or product where nothing is exactly equal.

This distinction doesn't ring true to me. There is plenty of corruption of all types in capitalism as well. You never seen or heard of someone calling in a favor to help a friend, even though no money changes hands? Or even if money does change hands, it's often under the table (like the recent college admissions scandal), and doesn't actually go to pay the correct body for the service being rendered.

> You never seen or heard of someone calling in a favor to help a friend

Of course I have. But under capitalism the normal method is through prices. With socialism, the normal method is as I said, because the pricing method is not available.

For another example, food prices are set by the government under socialism. The actual "price" of food was how long you were willing to wait for it. People would pay others to stand in line for them. There were shortages of the better stuff. While in a free market grocery, the price varies daily depending on fluctuating demand and supply. Shortages are rare.

Talk to someone who used to live in the former USSR.

I would absolutely love to go deep into all the ways in which what you've said misses the mark, but I frankly don't have the time (or probably even adequate space) to do so here. If this is a subject that interests you, you could probably find some neutral sources to educate you. That will help you discuss this in a way that doesn't lead to people exclaiming "What?!" out loud while drinking their morning coffee.

I thought socialism was the central ownership of the means of production. What do you think it means?

I too am unclear about the relationship between socialism and bureaucracy.

David Graeber argues that government's acquired bureaucracy from corporations.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22245334-the-utopia-of-r...

Parents need to stay involved in their kids education. Many are forced away due to circumstances they can't control, but too many are willing to abdicate and let things run on autopilot. They they are surprised when their Tesla runs into a firetruck.

The thing is, the vast majority of parents do not have the kind of experience with the school system that our parents do. It's unreasonable to expect it.

The system should work well even for those who don't have knowledgeable parents advocating for them, because most do not, and it's a horrible waste of talent for an entire country to throw away most of their potential geniuses through lack of good education that works for everyone. I was in magnet programs my entire public school life from fourth grade, but most of my peers were similarly privileged students, because the average students' parents didn't even know about the admission exams to get into these programs, let alone how to properly study for them. I got a huge leg up on all of it.

Of my oldest three daughters, two are in the "advanced" track. I personally think it stifles them. They are kept with the same small group of kids through elementary school and afew more are added in middle school (from neighboring elementaries), but all the kids have fairly interested parents and kids who can't keep up get shunted out. They struggle and feel stressed.

My oldest is not in the advanced track, but she's still able to take AP courses and keep a high GPA. She stresses less about socializing since she's been exposed to a wider variety of kids.

I'm don't think you have to know the ins and outs of school bureaucracy to help your student succeed. I do think you need to talk to them, keep informed of their progress, and make an effort to communicate with teachers.

Hey, I don't want to be a dick here, but your heroic story is that your parents had the juice to get you into college math classes as a high schooler?

How many kids don't have that going for them?

Maybe the best lesson for them is learning how to deal with the machine. Not that it's right. But it's what they'll need to do.

I don’t get why you’re saying that my story is heroic. Could you explain? I was some kid who got lucky and had parents who could navigate the system, it never felt heroic to me.

Cheers, nothing against you - I was commenting more on the overall culture.

I've taken every advantage I was offered as well (with varying degrees of success).

I took math classes at the local community college while in high school. All it took was signing up for them. No juice required.

Likewise.

My school experience was horrible, there's a reason I left formal education as soon as I could, I'm pretty confident I've learnt significantly more since leaving school than I ever did in it.

What I found crazy about my school was the contrast between the pressure and the (lack of) power. We'd be given the workload of full time finance/medicine/law jobs, veritable Elon Musk workaholic situations, but no sort of power, no sort of control. Granted my school was better than most. The administration was fairly lenient and I can only think of one teacher whom I truly despised. But still, we were constantly at the mercy of teachers and security guards, gym teachers and assistant principals. We'd get hours and hours of homework and have to just smile and go with it.

> When I ran out of math classes to take at high school, I took them at college.

It's interesting how this works. I remember I had an English teacher I really hated at one point in high school. It was pretty early in the year, so I went to my counselor in hopes of getting it sorted out in those first couple weeks. The teacher apparently found my reactions entertaining and kept singling me out to tease me or imply not taking the notes was the end of the world. My counselor said I couldn't just change teachers, but I immediately asked if I could switch to Honors English, and he changed his tune. I'm not sure if he was somehow oblivious to my angle or if he was just willing to help me out so long as we went by the rules. I'd been in Honors classes on and off before, and this got me a different (and much better, but that was maybe luck more than anything) English teacher. She was what I'd describe as a nice and calm old lady, rather than a feisty young teacher who starts fights with students for some reason. There was also less homework in the Honors class and the difficulty difference was negligible. It's amazing how within the same school things can go from so bad to so good. I have a lot of issues and regrets with my time in school, and I worry that if I ever have kids I'll have to put them through the same. I'm seriously considering homeschooling.

I was an army brat who experienced several schools. I had problems and got into fights. The best school I ever went to was the DOD school in Panama. It had structure, the parents were forced to be involved. In the Army, you are responsible for the actions of your dependents, you are the one who sponsors them to live on base and their actions can show up on your military record.

My kids seem to like school, I've consciously kept them in the same good school district. It's a bit too wealthy and not as diverse as I'd like, although there is a good bit of diversity. They key is to stay involved. Volunteer in the classroom when your kids are young and you have the chance. Make sure the other kids in you child's grade recognize you and their parents do as well. Don't let your kids get lost in the shuffle and work with people to create a community.

//edit: I have 6 kids and my oldest is graduating next year, so I have experience.

It really feels to me as if a lot of teachers join the profession only because they are power-hungry and want some powerless kids to abuse, something like an authority complex. We had teachers at our school print low quality invitations to an event for the students and high quality ones for the teachers. We also had a kid that was expelled from school for insulting a teacher after the teacher insulted him much more heavily first. Every single person that I have talked to had at least four extremely crappy teachers while at school.

I had probably 20 different teachers through the course of primary and secondary school. If I had 4 extremely crappy teachers in school, that would be 1 in 5.

Anecdotally, more than 1 in 5 software engineers I've worked with are extremely crappy. At least 1 in 5 people in any job will be incompetent and inept.

I am not talking about incompetent and inept teachers but straight up abusive. There were many more that were not abusive but were quite bad.

> Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

It is not surprising that it started with someone whose lack of ability to respond caused them to resort to the most extreme measures, thinking that nothing could be worse than doing too little. They have a lot in common with the disillusioned youth whose hateful ideology they were stoking.

These adults saw a child as an easy adversary and jumped at the opportunity to get a win and sing their own praises. Bureaucrats make poor educators and poorer law enforcers.

Yes! This is an anti-public school administration article masquerading as an anti-alt-right article.

No, it is both of the antis- you specified. Specifically, it is a story about how the author believes the bad behavior of school administration pushed their sun into the bad world of the alt-right.

Oh, I don't mean to say that it is secretly uncritical of the alt-right. It's clear that the alt-right runs counter to the mother's morals, just that these morals are taken as given and assumed in the audience as well. It is not a direct critique of the alt-right.

There are tons of strange subcultures and radical groups out there looking to eat your mind and the minds of your children. "My child joined the alt-right" is far more of a catchy title than "my child joined a neoreactionary reading group" or "my child joined some communist revolutionaries." Those groups are either things no one has heard of or are has beens. The alt-right still have some energy as today's "evildoers." It's our modern "my child became a satanist," or, hell, "my child became a protestant."

All this is reminiscent of that old "Is Your Child A Hacker." Where is our "Is Your Child A Shitlord?" Of course, the entire story could be a fabrication, for all we know.

Since it's the evil of today and will surely grab some eyeballs... why not stick in some valuable reminders of how absolutely terrible being a child in the school system is?

If that was the intention in this piece, I salute the author!

Remember how those d@%$ Clintons were the ones who instituted this "zero tolerance" bullshit, turning our schools into actual freaking prisons?

Or was I the only one who watched that happen around me as a child?

Schools should be freaking schools once universal healthcare happens. And once prison actually turns into something about reform.

> Schools should be freaking schools once universal healthcare happens. And once prison actually turns into something about reform.

Why wait? A populace that receives an actual education instead of a Kafkaesque exercise in bureaucratic absurdity will almost certainly be healthier and less prone to crime.

No. It's the story of one extremist making another. So much so it's basically Newtonian.

If the child had a lesser home life he could have stuck that way. This one had a happy ending but it's a sobering lesson.

Zero tolerance seems cheap up front but the societal "technical debt" is a real bitch.

> Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.

I would like to nominate “Sam” as poster child for why the feedback systems in Google Search and Facebook are so damaging. It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children into one extreme or another based on a few semi-random data points.

I saw a similar thing with a religious apologist, they had a very specific claim ready to throw out out to me on a specific supposed "prophecy", and later googling that I got page after page of religious propaganda. They'd targeted that particular thing, rather than trying to take over more general listings for "prophecy in the bible", so that only articles that agreed with them showed up.

It took some creative googling to eventually get to an actual academic historical paper on the subject, which then of course immediately blew what they claimed out of the water.

What's the prophecy?

Google-related, but I'd submit that YouTube is one of the prime culprits. Kids like stuff like video games. Video game recommendations devolve into chud territory in two hops - fascist in three or four.

I wonder how much of this is due to marketing. I know for example PragerU heavily advertises on Youtube. Is there a way for an advertiser on youtube to get better recommendation placements?

Dunno why you're downvoted; to me it's a reasonable question. What I don't know--and why I am profoundly concerned about such recommendation algorithms--is if there's any way for non-Googlers to ever check that.

I didn't know either, until I saw educationdata's comment. It's subtle, but I think opportune is implying that PragerU is fascist.

I'm not. I am implying that it is conservative and advertises a lot. If you can get from videogames to PragerU in a couple clicks I wouldn't be surprised if you could get from PragerU to facist stuff in a couple clicks.

And if it's possible to get from almost anywhere in youtube into conservative propaganda territory in 1-2 clicks, then from there I think the recommendation system can (without ads) probably get you to the fascist stuff, since the recommendation system wants to give you more right wing politics and maybe can't differentiate very well within that space

OK, but fascism also isn't conservative or right-wing.

Benito Mussolini: “If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.”

Benito Mussolini: “Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”

Benito Mussolini: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Benito Mussolini: "It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity."

That sort of government-oriented thinking sure isn't conservative or right-wing.

While deification of the government is not conservative, deification of the state most definitely is conservative. We've been dealing with this for decades. Have you noticed the way that conservatives drape themselves in the flag to assert some kind of innate kinship with the state? Do you remember conservatives' "America: love it or leave it", aimed at anti-war (i.e., generally left or left-leaning) Vietnam protestors?

Fascism arises from racial supremacism and a desire to re-acquire a period of purported historical greatness. This is definitionally "of the right wing" and it is incidentally why it is in many ways very compatible with conservatism; it uses their language. They have shellcodes into conservatives' brains.

Frankly, assertions of "non-right-wing fascism" to the otherwise are mostly seeded by bad actors to muddy the waters and to whatabout about leftists. (EDIT: and this is really dumb--the left in the United States, the UK, etc. are happy to give you actual sticks to beat them about the head with, why is there a need for these fake ones?)

How is PragerU fascist?

I don't think PragerU is fascist. I was thinking you can get from video games to PragerU in two hops like the parent comment mentioned. Maybe two hops from there you can get to fascist stuff

Keep in mind a lot of fascist stuff tries to brand itself as " a search for "inconvenient truths" and usually doesn't outright say "yes I want to support a white ethnostate and murder minorities by doing X/Y/Z".

PragerU is exactly what I was thinking of, yes; it's firmly chud stuff. Everybody's favorite cool skull, Shaun, has a pretty good breakdown of the nonsense they throw out there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM7BgrddY18

From there, you definitely can get to actual fascists, whose channels I won't shout out here. And, because YouTube fits to a very small set of data points, one misclick onto PragerU may very well fit you for a whole lot of shit.

I watched that whole thing... and honestly, he's just as guilty of the straw-man arguments and fallacies he's accusing pragerU of. He's also removed what little context those videos had and thus they make even less sense then if you saw the full context.

Could you elaborate on that? I found the video (and other similar ones I've seen) pretty convincing.

> He's also removed what little context those videos had

He does specifically say at the beginning of his videos that you should go and watch the ones he's quoting to make sure he's not taking them unfairly out of context.

Targeting gamers is neo-fascism's bread and butter strategy since they proved the concept with "GamerGate." I remember seeing all that stupid GG nonsense and having no idea I was watching the beginning of a massively successful propaganda offensive.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, it's completely correct. Andrew Auernheimer (weev) says:

> the man is talking down to gamergate which is by far the single biggest siren bringing people into the folds of white nationalism. More people have been converted in the past year by things like images of Anita Sarkeesian being rendered as a happy merchant than were in the three before it.

https://archive.is/fOprk#selection-3605.0-3605.511

"Targeting" and "strategy" imply that there's some Grand Alt-Right Congress directing some organized movement. That doesn't need to exist: it's worth recalling that the people who follow the whole GamerGate thing are, themselves, generally interested in video games. It's not unexpected for overlap and recommendations to go both ways.

There was no Grand Congress but there was a loose confederation of ideologues who saw GG and saw a major opportunity to radicalize young people. I don't know how organic GG itself was. It didn't look organic but then again it's hard to tell.

Really? I haven't seen any fascist video on YouTube. Yes, there are lots of right-wing videos. Fascist? I don't believe there are that many on YouTube, unless you define fascist as anything anti-left.

> I haven't seen any fascist video on YouTube

The Recommendation Algorithm Gods have been kind to you, then. Not all of us are so fortunate.

OK. I believe that. But does this mean you watched fascist video by yourself, otherwise YouTube wouldn't recommend those videos to you, right?

No, that's not how their algorithm works. I can't find the link now, but a former employee said that their algorithm is designed to keep you engaged with the site, and that typically involves directing you to more and more extreme versions of the previous videos. For example, if you were to watch a video about mainstream rock and continually follow YouTube's recommendations at the end of the videos, you'd end up at videos about death metal, or other niche genres. It does the same thing with politics; you can start out watching a Bernie Sanders video and end up at videos promoting full on socialism, or watch a video about increasing border security and end up at videos about immigrants ruining the country.

If what you said is true, I would definitely have seen fascist videos, but I haven't. I really doubt your theory.

It's a correlative algorithm.

If a lot of people into video games and history watch X, it will recommend X to you. And it turns out that the community of active, engaged video games folk have a lot of chuds who are all over alt-right-to-fascist video content.

Right, which means if someone in some other site linked to one of those videos and I clicked on it out of curiosity (or - more recently in my case - to pick it apart in yet another online argument), guess what kind of videos are going to spam my recommendations for months on end?

I define "fascist" much as Ian Danskin does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Luu1Beb8ng&list=PLJA_jUddXv...

Its critical aspects include inherent beliefs of racial superiority and the need to "recapture" a great society lost. And there are plenty on YouTube with large followings. Though some have been banned since. Chud Supreme Carl, "Sargon of Akkad", comes to mind as an example, and one I'm willing to namedrop because 1) he has been banned, and 2) dear Carl is now running for the European Parliament as a member of literal-fascist Ukip.

But from "Sargon's" perspective, UKIP isn't fascist - it's the party attempting to remove the UK from the growing, minimally accountable supreme bureaucracy known as the EU.

It's always better to understand your enemies before you start to insult them. Otherwise your insults just increase polarization, because while people who agree with you will find them obviously true... People on the other side will find them objectively false. And we don't need more polarization nowadays.

> inherent beliefs of racial superiority

IMO painting all belief in racial differences as racist/fascist (which is what this tends to devolve into) is a great way to ignore actual problems. Problems like medicines being tested on populations of primarily white men and women not always working for african americans or other groups... And of course this is an area where one side is politically correct (no differences below the skin) and another is factually correct (different ethnic groups have significant differences in susceptibility to disease, athletic performance, etc).

Oh that's stupid! We (non racist people) know that black people are black and white people are white (biological differences), we just don't think it's in any way a reason to treat them differently. (same thing with men and women ;)

> we just don't think it's in any way a reason to treat them differently

This is blatantly false. At least different skin color can lead to different treatment in face makeup and portrait photography. Not to mention all sorts of different needs from men and women. Your belief of biological differences should have no impact on social implication cannot be more wrong.

You think UKIP is fascist? Wikipedia defines that with the phrase "...dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition...". Many powerful politically inclined groups are forcibly silencing their opponents these days, but UKIP is not among them.

You left out the first part of that sentence, which reads: “Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of radical, right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism...”

On political topics, Wikipedia is extremely untrustworthy. Paid political workers are writing things like that. Lots of definitions have been changing over the past decade or two. Fascism and also Nazi would not normally have included "right-wing" in the definition in the prior century.

> I define "fascist"

I'm sorry, but you don't get to do that! `fascism` already has an established meaning. Please make up a new word for what you believe `fascism` means.

Going by the dictionary definition:

> 1. a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

> 2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

This is the exact opposite of Carl's beliefs and agenda.

EDIT: how can we have any discussion about anything if everyone gets to define words to mean whatever they want to mean?

Well, a lot of people seem to have accepted that it's racist to oppose discriminating based on race in college admissions... This would not be the first time in recent memory that a word came to be used for exactly the opposite meaning.

I'd love to hear from someone who thinks that that isn't a definition in use today, or that affirmative action wouldn't have been considered prima facie racist a century ago, no matter the races.

> how can we have any discussion about anything if everyone gets to define words to mean whatever they want to mean?

Redefining terms has been common on reddit for years now but it is gaining ground here quite steadily. It's pretty disheartening that the mods seem fine with this, perhaps they see it as an ends justifies the means type of thing.

Perhaps it's time to put it in the Terms of Service that blatant disregard for dictionary definitions shall lead to suspension or an outright ban!

No one will willingly give up their memes, they seem to have the allure of the ring of power.

> I'm sorry, but you don't get to do that! `fascism` already has an established meaning. Please make up a new word for what you believe `fascism` means

I see your point, but honestly, that's not how language work. Changes in meaning over time are not so uncommon, and "fascist" has been used in a loose sense for years (at least in Italian), but looking at Wikipedia this holds for English too.

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

Your dictionary editor gets to do that. That narrow definition you quote did not come out of thin air. Or maybe it did.

I’ve never heard of ‘fascisti’ - that’s just Italian for “fascists”, not an Organization.

There is a lot more nuance to what the word came to mean that is impossible to capture in one or two paragraphs. The Wikipedia page is already a great improvement over that, recommend that as a source instead, collectively reviewed by hundreds of editors.

You can of course define it however you want but that doesn't mean your definition is correct or even close to the actual definition.

You see, according to your and Danskin's definition roughly 20% (and it's growing since more political parties are adopting the same politics) of the swedish population are fascist based on last years election where the Sweden Democrats (labeled as racists and fascists in the mainstream media) became the 2nd largest political party.

The problem here is that the left is tilting so far left that even centrists are being labeled as far-right these days.

But how does one respect the intellect and agency of one's peers when one feels the public can be "damaged" merely by the local maxima of YouTube or Facebook's recommendation systems?

It's like YouTube showed me too many spiritual videos, and now I give all my money to Scientology.

To me it is simply the truth that we as a population is affected by ads or propaganda. Every single person might tell themselves "those ads dont affect me", but that is obviously not the truth. It does not mean that I lose respect for anyone. We, as humans, are simply flawed. And our society should help us make the best of our flawed selves.

I don't know about you, but a 14 year old is not my peer and I do question their agency and intellect.

Children are not fully able to fend for themselves yet, be it physically or mentally.

The role of education (and parenting) is to teach the child how to sort information they obtain from sources like those googled results.

Why did he believe in those biased sources of info? How come he didn't have the skills to determine what is fact and what is opinion stated as fact?

Is this a rhetorical question? A lot of (most?) adults aren't immune to this sort of manipulation, let alone kids. See: Fox News, cults in general, and so on.

It's not just about bad information, or opinion stated as fact, or whatever. Whether it is designed to indoctrinate and radicalize, or whether it "simply" evolved that way as a meme (in the Dawkins sense, probably clumsily applied), that's how it works. These people haven't just been taught incorrect facts, but whole distinctive patterns of speech and thought that serve to reinforce their own commitment and induce it in others.

It's an arms race, and in an emotionally vulnerable state I doubt even the sharpest kids (or, again, adults) are fully armored against it.

Meme is an absolutely perfect word for it.

It sounds like a joke, but this content is purposefully created and disseminated for the purpose of "going viral," so that it can spread itself. It's created by people who either have only consumed like content and want to spread their virus ("my personal opinion based on internet reasearch is that...") or people who actually create this stuff on purpose to push the agenda of their employ.

The Dawkins meme analogy is brilliant, we just hadn't really seen it used as a weapon until pretty recently.

Memes have been a core part of political strategy for decades. Human beings have never thought fundamentally based on facts, and they likely never will. All parties do it to varying degrees, but it's very difficult to see it when it lines up with your personal ideology.

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

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

Same with religion.

It's a good question.

I guess one part of it is that alt-right sources pre-inoculate readers against potential sources of truth, by calling them liars.

For instance, Snopes is often held up as a good place to go to debunk things. Except one of the things you learn early on from even moderate right-wing sources is that Snopes is apparently massively left-wing-biased, and since they've been wrong or biased on a couple of things, it means their entire worldview is suspect. And of course you can't trust any of the lying mainstream media.

So at that point you hit up Google and - surprise - the only sources of truth remaining are right-wing sites, and left-wing blogs trying to discredit them; but the left-wing blogs have a very obvious political bias, and they're just written by some guy in a basement, so of course they're lying too. So you're left with only writing that confirms what you suspected in the first place.

I guess the only way out of that is to be smart enough to notice the internal inconsistencies or plot holes, or that some of the facts that are being asserted simply cannot be true - and then principled enough to care about that. Both of those are probably quite high hurdles for a casual news-reader.

Certainly in less extreme circumstances, when I have occasionally checked moderate right-wing sites to fact-check my own left-wing news sources, I have found it very hard to trust that those sites might be correct, and that my favourite news site might be mistaken. And I don't do that anywhere near as often as I should do.

In part I would say it is because facts is very rarely as clean as we would want so the norm is to mix opinion and facts in a way to create a easy to understand narrative. In addition information tend to be simplified by making things more extreme, like turning "a few" to "all" and "sometimes" to "always".

The article brings up several topics which education did not give the boy enough tools or information to properly investigate. The relation between religion and violence. The relation between religion and usury laws. Wealth statistics and distribution and the extreme amount of different way it can be presented based on different narratives. Gun laws in relation with crime statistics. Human rights and how/why there exist sex differences in the law covering rights and responsibilities for women and men during and after a pregnancy.

Those are quite complex topics and the issue as I see it is not that he was unable to determine which sources from Google is right or wrong, but that society is presenting them as easy facts with right and wrong narratives.

The article doesn't use the term I've heard of to describe this, which is "data gap".

Take something like a query for "Is the Earth Flat?". There's not a continual stream of videos, posts, and comments about how round the earth is (it's just taken as a given). So Google naturally floats content that says "The Earth is Flat" to the top.

This plays out in all sorts of odd and horrific ways. There was a local political contest where one candidate accused the other of some literal nonsense (it was something like they were a demon or smelled like sulfur). This rumor was making the rounds on Facebook, etc and if you Google'd their name and "sulfer" you'd find some whacked out post about how some lady stood behind them at a coffee shop and thought they smelled and that they were satan's lovechild.

What is that candidate to do? Put up their own competing post saying "I don't smell like sulfur?"

> What is that candidate to do? Put up their own competing post saying "I don't smell like sulfur?"

"Well, of COURSE he's going to say that, he's a minion of Satan."

There's the story of Lyndon B. Johnson suggesting that his opponent had "carnal knowledge of his own pigs", just to make his opponent deny it.

> It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children

I'm not sure there's much of a difference. I'm very grateful for my high school librarian who ingrained into our minds the importance of data verification. She seemed to recognize the potential for user manipulation in a very real way. I feel like that's something that a majority of my acquaintances lack.

Before Google search got personalized it was great for fact checking, but today it seems to re-enforce your existing views. There's value in both approaches, but it depends on context. At some point I'm sure that context will be resolved, but I'm afraid the fallout from the existing state of things will be severe.

Don't forget that this is a huge point why "Just let them speak/Censorship is the devil" Has utterly failed the past 20 years

It's an interesting story. I find the conclusion not unsurprising. The author seems to assume the existence of `alt-right` as a monolithic group with a specific agenda. As far as I can tell that's not true. These groups may come out together to protest because they've been lumped together by the media. If they weren't all branded `alt-right`, would they connect? If you want to disarm them, divide them! Don't label them as a single group.

A lot of these groups have internally inconsistent ideologies. These can be overlooked for a while as one is drawn to the community. But eventually the novelty wears off and cracks start to show and one realizes that a lot of the personalities are one note and don't actually have anything interesting to say.

This is true about the Left and the Right.

And then one moves on.

I dunno...if you lump them together they start to believe it and end up tearing each other apart in internecine battles surrounding their subtle differences in beliefs.

I think that's exactly what is currently happening to the left!

EDIT: But I think the left believe they must be united at all cost. Because anyone not in their group is wrong. I don't get that vibe from any other part of the spectrum: moderate left (if it still exists)/center/right/alt-right/far-right.

People don't go to radical groups for the ideology: They come for the emotional outlet and camaraderie. Some radicals will flip flop enormously during their "career." They are activists. The guy with anarchist and nazi symbols is not an unusual sight. He's a perpetual misfit without the creativity to fashion his own ideology, someone looking for an edgy support group, who wants to be both with people and distinct from society at large.

People actually interested in ideas might end up thinking radical (as in, things other people find strange or upsetting) things, but they'll take a different path and won't engage in activism. They are philosophers, and if they write and are original enough, maybe the best of them will be remembered and appreciated sometime after their deaths.

This is too strong of a generalization. There are several people from the woman's suffrage movement, the 1960s civil rights movement, and countless others that both had radical (for the time) internally consistent ideology and participated in activism.

Yes, there are people in radical groups just to be misfits. Yes, there are people that think and write radical ideas without participating in activism. There are also people that join radical groups because they believe in the ideology, and there are original thinkers in radical groups that participate in the activism side.

Is activism completely useless though? I do think most of it, in particular group-focused preaching is probably very close to religion and soccer teams in engagement, with little critical thinking. However, there is probably a role for voicing opinions and even stating publicly (as in "the emperor has no clothes"). Not everyone is fully informed and those networks of opinions can have a significant/important impact I imagine. Then again this occurs inside close circles.

As mentioned elsewhere, I think by far the greatest threat to democracy is groups enclosing themselves, forming rigid identities like has happened to right-wing (and some left-wing) groups in the West: this makes them far easier to manipulate (by tying propositions one wouldn't accept together with the collective identity). This effect has been amplified massively by technology. You can stay insulated by exactly what you want to hear by visiting certain sources exclusively, or worse -- most people are being isolated automatically.

The solution to this seems quite obvious: if technology is fostering isolation, it could instead foster contact with distinct ideologies, by default. Give more weight (through visibility) to long, well thought out arguments instead of short quips and 'likes'; have some kind of diversity bonus (where people a certain 'ideological distance' away are not given lower weight).

The problem is enforcing this kind of structure on social networks. If most people get a large chunk of their information from social networks, we're being controlled by an obscure algorithm that's probably not in our best interest (instead simply driven by simple profit measures). Given how large and impactful Facebook (and Youtube, Twitter) is, I don't think it should be out of question to regulate those algorithms somehow (given repeated failure to self-regulate). We should have a right for seeing the algorithm implementation, have an option to upload a curation algorithm (given some specified API), and if we want select from a few sensible options, like simple chronological ordering, to the aforementioned civil-discourse-promoting ones (which should probably be the default).

Having multiple sub-groups, some less connected than others, is an important quality in any movement. It creates more opportunities to attract more and different types of people. It's a feature.

This is gripping, insightful and beautifully written. I especially like how it leads with the request to go to the Mother of All Rallies, so that the reader gets to experience the same knee-jerk reaction as the parents. I like how that knee-jerk reaction is later proven wrong. It compellingly illustrates the importance of open-mindedness, and that "sunlight is the best medicine".

Very thought provoking.

It's fiction imo

I agree, its completely fabricated. There's only one believable thing in it - the failure of the school.

How did you arrive at this conclusion? At least for myself, no red flags or gross inconsistencies were readily apparent so I took it as truth.

My favourite quote from the article:

'For the next ten minutes or so, the reporters filmed the Nazi. When they finally turned away from each other, each side seemed happy, shaking hands, nodding enthusiastically, and smiling their thanks. It was the most nakedly symbiotic transaction I’d ever witnessed. The reporters and the Nazi needed each other. There was no meaning—no job—for one without the other.'

It’s a very well written piece, but it just feels too well written, to the point of feeling to precise, too calculated, too... contrived. Aside from the opinions expressed, the ideological concerns, the relevance to the current political landscape - these are all relevant and interesting explorations, but the whole narrative is just too picture perfect and too close to a screenplay. It just feels like good fiction.

Yea there’s no way to tell, but I got the same feeling. It seems too much like a fiction with a narrative arc, and neat story with a good resolution. Who knows.

It seems like good fiction until it’s your life and then it seems terrible.

I can assure you, as someone who has multiple family members get sucked up into this ideology, this is how it happens.

As someone who also has watched people get sucked into dogma of both sides...yes this is how it happens

but, the story does give a feeling of being too perfect. I doubt they would just make things up, but it feels likely that a lot of liberty was taken with making it all fit really nicely.

Again all that said, the points within it, are true and valid, the story at plot level is very realistic and is happening all the time.

It's a sort of standard form for human interest articles. Much like a movie, it might be better if it were were more open-ended or reflected the untidiness of life, but many people want reassurance and a minimum of loose ends. The unusually young subject makes it more of a parenting article than a political study IMHO.

It's propaganda. It's a caricature coming to life. A caricature created by the establishment media.

It's like if foxnews ran a story "What happened to my 13 year old daughter after consuming establishment media or democratic speeches". And then daughter turned out to hit every checklist of a "leftist" fanatic caricature. Or christian publications that would publish "stories" about how hollywood movies or rock 'n roll turned their child gay or in devil worshippers.

A lot of these "stories" involving children are even manufacture ( in order to write an article ) or sought out specifically. Just like the UVA rape story.

It IS fiction. It contains true events, and way more real than "based on a true story" fiction. But we're reading the story this mother told herself about events that transpired.

The writer needs this to be a story about descent into a seedy underbelly, slowly becoming more and more unreachable by those around him, followed by a come to Jesus moment. Hell, it even has a clean three act structure and villain (a dangerous influence that Mom and Dad don't understand and are powerless to stop).

It can't be a story about an isolated kid that memed too hard and needed to be see with his own eyes how retarded the people in the deep end are IRL.

I had the same feeling :(.

I was totally onboard with this article until the last sentence.

I was enjoying this article as an exploration of emotional vulnerability, the connection between beliefs and belonging, the mixed blessing of internet anonimity.

But if the (suspiciously articulate) kid goes from alt-right to antifa, I don't think that's any sort of progress to be applauded. I interpreted the article's point to be that alt-right is just emotionally hurt people venting online, and they do antics for attention and the media latches on to it to sell clicks, even if it's all BS.

But if that's the case, the best way to handle it is not to counter-protest, but just to hear out the fears and insecurities.

Presumably the author & son are alluding to the middle-aged man holding the poster, which I should hope is obviously nowhere near the same as antifa.

Yup this is what i was thinking.

Well, I don't know if I think a middle-aged man who goes to a rally to hold up a sign saying "NO TRUMP. NO KKK. NO FASCIST USA," is progress over the alt-right. To me it's the exact same thing -- an overly zealous person who takes politics as a tribal game and has no sincere intention of changing anybody's mind.

I'm reminded of the "is it OK to punch a 'Nazi'" debate.

> an overly zealous person who takes politics as a tribal game and has no sincere intention of changing anybody's mind.

But he did, didn't he?

That persuasion happened thanks to his verbal communication, not his over-the-top rhetorically toxic T-shirt.

The sale happened because of the product's merits - it had nothing to do with the advertisement copy.

The exact same thing? That’s one hell of a false equivalence. The alt right aren’t bad people because they are “overzealous”, they are bad people because of their bigotry on the basis of race, religion and national origin.

To be fair to the poster you're replying to, I can assume a much more charitable interpretation is that the quote draws an equivalency between being against Trump and being against the KKK, and that's the over-zealous and tribal aspect.

It's similar to saying "No Bernie, No Marx." Yes, they're on the same side of the spectrum compared to center, but it seems unfair and disingenuous to combine them as such.

I'd say "no Bernie, no Stalin" would be more apt (Marx wasn't directly violent) and yes as you say it would be a completely unfair comparison.

That is much more apt, thank you!

Not really.... these aren't real nazis committing atrocities....

Going to 4chan and saying a bunch of trolly triggering stuff at your friends to get out your anger isn't really a bad thing. It's immature, but it's not really immoral, nor is it illegal, nor does it make you a "bad person." It's venting, tribalism, and immaturity. (case-in-point, the moderator was a 13-year-old jewish boy)

This is what the article describes when it shows the man with the nazi flag posing for the reporters-- a symbiotic relationship that is entirely for show.

I agree with you in the abstract ideal, but for a lot of people, this choice is roughly as good as it gets. In place of moral compasses, most people have thermometers they use to read the room, adopting belief systems and then enforcing them brutally, with no room for anything resembling moral reasoning, nuance, or basic human decency. The majority of the variability tends to be in 1) the belief system they choose to ingest and 2) the degree of passion with which they choose to engage in it. I'm not throwing my hands up and drawing a universal false equivalency here: Not every possible manifestation is as harmful as every other, and I have no trouble saying that the dehumanization and hatred that marks the strain of mainstream idpol leftism that's currently popular[1] is nowhere near as dangerous a manifestation as that of the alt-right. I don't see a lot of moral distance between the _participants_ in either of these ideologies; as far as I can tell, circumstances out of one's control have an outsize influence on which ideology most people end up as footsoldiers in. But the way in which people's barbarism is sublimated is extremely important from a pragmatic point of view, and I'd much rather see Sam become a mirror of the old man described than the modal alt-right participant at that rally.

Taking the author at her word[2] when she describes how Sam started out, it sounds like he may have been in touch with the sensitivity and decency it takes to approach others with basic empathy. But such a state can be fragile and it sounds like Sam's reaction to the incident at his school knocked him out of that orbit. In the best-case scenario, it's a temporary situation, but the author's claim is that Sam is at a point where he's got a lot of confusion and passion and rage that he's sublimated into politics, and perhaps the best we can hope for is that the path of hate that he picks is one of the less harmful ones like garden-variety identitarian center-leftism.

[1] I'm aware that this is probably an extraordinary claim to many here, so here's a simple example of what I mean. FTA:

> I’d never in my life backed the “masculinist” cause or imagined that men needed protecting—yet I couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s analysis.

The idea that the author doesn't realize what an abhorrent view this is is chilling; people and their lives are insanely complicated, and there's no group that's flatly-generalizable enough that a decent person would never have occasion to imagine they may need protecting in some scenario or another. There's no difference, at its fundamental root, between this and other more recognized forms of dehumanizing people by erasing their individual identities.

[2] Though perhaps we can't take this for granted: as evidenced by other parts of the article, she doesn't seem like a particularly decent person herself.

This is hilarious. You couldn't get any more on-brand for Hacker News without suggesting that someone rewrite the kernel in Rust.

The people at this rally almost certainly supported Trump, and at least some of them supported fascism. As such, a slogan condemning Trump alongside fascists is totally reasonable, even if it wouldn't necessarily be in other contexts. (And if you think that someone carrying a nazi flag doesn't really believe the message, well, the burden of proof is on you).

Politics, by the way, is a tribal game. Almost everyone develops their beliefs primarily based on those of the people in their community or communities. For example, the belief that "holding an anti-Trump sign is just as bad as holding a Nazi flag, because both of them passionately express opinions" is basically non-existent outside of the Hacker News-reading demographic, but one which I've seen expressed here fairly often. That's not because HN readers are smarter than everyone else: it's because people tend towards the opinions that they're exposed to in their communities, and the rules of Hacker News effectively mandate impassioned centrism, so that's the ideology of the Hacker News tribe. If you think you're immune to tribalism, you're wrong, in the same way that if you think you're immune to confirmation bias, you're wrong.

Visibility is much more important to influencing people than good arguments or sincere intentions. For example, five years ago, I was aware of the arguments for open borders, but I didn't publicly advocate for them, nor did I have a particularly strong opinion on the matter. That's because back then, there was very little public discussion of the issue. Now that I've met other people who are pushing for open borders (probably in response to Trump), I consider it to be one of the most important issues that I care about. That's just how humans work. That's the reason that people advocate for their views in highly visible ways, like protests. The point isn't to convince your enemies, it's to bring out the people on your side.

John, who derives all his beliefs from careful research and pure reason, gets just as many votes as Bob, who likes Trump because he triggers the libtards. Actually, I suspect that Bob will get more, because half the time, people like John don't actually vote. You can talk as if you're above the rabble all you like, but in Democracy, it's their opinions that matter, and if you take politics seriously at all, it's them that you have to reach. Going out in the real world carrying signs, shouting, blocking traffic, throwing bricks, and maybe getting arrested is the best known way to get your message out, even if it offends your sensibilities.

Excellent, excellent points. Antifa members are often just a sick with fears, insecurities, and vengeance, as alt-right members. They are both peddlers of resentment, just run by different priests, and aimed at different enemies.

Self-examination, getting beneath the ideologies and down at the underlying emotional content motivating their hosts is the only productive path to dialog and growth I've encountered so far.

> But if the (suspiciously articulate) kid goes from alt-right to antifa, I don't think that's any sort of progress to be applauded. I interpreted the article's point to be that alt-right is just emotionally hurt people venting online, and they do antics for attention and the media latches on to it to sell clicks, even if it's all BS.

I would point out that there is quite a difference between "anti-fa" and "counter-protester", just as there is between a conservative and being a white nationalist. One of those differences is the ability to see shades of grey in both "your side" and "the other side".

you say:

> I interpreted the article's point to be that alt-right is just emotionally hurt people venting online, and they do antics for attention and the media latches on to it to sell clicks, even if it's all BS.

I think it is less "emotionally hurt" and more "emotionally vulnerable and alienated". It also isn't all BS. There are nuggets of insight and truth buried in all the bile and lies.

the article says:

> 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’d never in my life backed the “masculinist” cause or imagined that men needed protecting—yet I couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s analysis.

you say:

> But if that's the case, the best way to handle it is not to counter-protest, but just to hear out the fears and insecurities.

There is room for both and when done well, they are the same thing. A single brave counter protester helped open a young man's eyes with courage, integrity and compassion. Would a horde of black masked militant "anti-fa" protestors have had the same effect?

I strongly believe that using hate, rejection and isolation to fight against hate is counter-productive and destined to a a failure. Compassion and courage on the other hand...

Counter-protesting neo-nazi's doesn't make one Antifa, unless you suspect the teenager and his presumably middle-aged mom were going to be Black Bloc'ing (if so, the article ended way too early). Antifa is a very specific ideology and is not a nebulous "counter-protesting the alt-right"

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."

I don't think "pay teachers more" is sufficient. It's one part of the solution, but the other part is "be at least a little bit hesitant to fire junior teachers". When I was in high school, pretty much all of my teachers under 40 were constantly on the verge of not having a job (due to constant budgetary inadequacies); they'd be repeatedly pink-slipped only to barely manage to keep their jobs another year. Naturally, the more "experienced" teachers with more tenure were less fearful of this.

Never mind that the younger teachers were almost always leaps and bounds more engaging, while the older teachers were far less engaging. Everyone liked the younger teachers more than the older teachers - everyone except the teachers' union, that is (this is, naturally, why I came out of high school believing labor unions to be outright detrimental to worker welfare, and why I still tend to be skeptical of them).

Naturally, in an environment where you're doing everything you can to not get laid off, you're going to end up being a lot more risk-averse (lest that layoff spontaneously turns into outright at-fault termination).

As a teacher's son, you've made a bunch of fairly ageist generalizations that are not true. There are plenty of shitty old and young teachers, and plenty of amazing old and young teachers.

My only reference point is my own middle and high school experience (plus perhaps those of my classmates). From that reference point, on average, the younger teachers did a better job of actually engaging me and my classmates while simultaneously getting shafted by the school district. There were of course outliers (one or two older teachers were fantastic, and I recall at least one younger teacher who was sub-par), but "plenty" wouldn't be the quantization I'd use in either case.

It's a bit rich to accuse me of ageism when the exact problem I'm pointing out - of younger teachers getting the short end of the stick despite their skill - is literally ageism manifest.

Hasn’t it always been like this? When I was at middle school, the Teachers used to lock the classrooms during lunch time, and I had some tennis balls in my desk so I asked my teacher for the key. She gave me the key and said “just get your things and don’t forget to lock the door, so not let anyone else in the room”. When I left the room one of the girls from the class tried to enter. I stood in the doorway because she refused to let me out and tried to push past me. I told her to ask the teacher for the key because she told me not to let anyone in. She tried to shove me, but I didn’t budge. She then went to the teacher and told the teacher I kicked her. I then got told off, sent to the principal, and my parents called, and forced to write a written apology to the girl for kicking her. The only person who believed my version of the events was my dad. This would be like 20 years ago now.

I would say believing girls/women is more common now.

Reminds me of the time me and my friend were sent to the principal's office for talking about Nerf guns. Because obviously 2 second graders were plotting to shoot up the school. Or the time a girl said I threw something at her when I said she couldn't have it.

Note that I don't think this was something about girls lying, I think everyone lied equally at that age or maybe even boys lied more. But the way school administrators deal with these issues is insane and certainly seems to damage kids far more than whatever they fear will happen if kids are allowed to have a little freedom. I can say with high certainty that the number of times I was sent to the principal's office as a kid for things I didn't do was the primary cause of my constant trouble making behavior for most of elementary and middle school

> I think everyone lied equally at that age or maybe even boys lied more.

I definitely was no saint at school. Not sure many people can say they were.

> I don't think this was something about girls lying

Me either, but I do feel when something happens between a male and female, unless there is enough witnesses, side is always taken with the girl it seems, unless the witness is friends with the boy, then they aren't deemed reliable.

Another time at school I was playing basket ball with a couple of friends. There was an Indian girl walking by and the ball almost hit her, I pointed at her and said watch out and the ball just missed her, I laughed at the fact she just narrowly escaped being hit with the basket ball, but she thought I was laughing at her nose piecing for some reason. (I don't understand where this confusion came from, I couldn't even see she had a nose piecing until later when I was standing next to her) but again I was forced to apologize for laughing at her culture or something like that.

If all children initially lie equally, and girls are invariably believed over boys, wouldn't all parties rapidly learn this? We should expect girls to lie much more if this is the case, because they know they can get away with it.

One time me and some girl were grouped together for a few minutes for a French exercise in high school. I was known for constantly being tardy to class. After we finished the exercise, that girl said that I wouldn't be tardy if I was hit more as a child.

That was upsetting. I don't remember being angry or yelling (but I could be wrong?). But I was sad and probably non-communicative with her for the rest of the class time.

The teacher took me out of the classroom and scolded me for behaving the way that I was and that I have to talk to her and that I was bad. I kinda just took it with a blank face. I didn't tell the teacher what the girl said, probably because I didn't really understand why I was upset.

Father of boys and girls here. Both sexes are just as violent, boys more so on the body, and girls more so on the mind.

It was fascinating to hear my 7 year old daughter grasp for words to make me angry: ‘when you and mom divorce, I’m going with mom.’ I just raised an eyebrow and ignored. Boy’s will just throw things.

> ‘when you and mom divorce, I’m going with mom.’

Wow! Adult, professional writers could work for a long time to produce such multiple brutal takedowns in so few words.

I pray for the sake of all of us that your daughter uses her powers for good.

That's such an awful thing for your child to say. How do you ensure they won't do it again?

She'll feel bad about it on her own once she's not angry anymore. Especially when she learns it didn't even further her goals.

The second worst thing you can do is to also get angry or punish her, which will only make her feel justified and not question herself.

The worst would be giving her what she wanted. That's not the lesson you want to teach at all.

So basically follow this father's lead and do nothing. Maybe talk about how it makes you feel once things calmed down.

It's good that I never had kids. I have a short but largely deadpan temper. I would probably have "keep at it, and you'll get what you want, and good riddance" ... and maybe how her college fund is buying bpme a newmachine"

You can’t ensure anything. I just find it so fascinating that humans naturally acquire skills to battle others in mental and physical ways when under duress.

These types of outbursts also happen in the very elderly as they near death or have dementia, and are more likely to happen when people are very hungry or uncomfortable. Just knowing that is normal helps frame a response.

Our job as parents could therefore be described as helping create an environment where it is easy to do good and hard to do bad. I.e. get enough sleep with strict bed-times when kids naturally would sleep 10-12 hours each day, good nutrition with strict ‘if you don’t eat veggies, there is no dessert’, good activity levels with strict ‘you have to be physically active at least as long as you want to be mentally active/passive on an entertainment device’ (and for some religious households like ours, intentional daily and vocal ‘prays/acts of thanksgiving’ to help frame the mind towards gratitude for mental well being ~i.e. our children in this context have shared with the family at least one thing they are thankful for each day since they could vocalize.)

School administrators are more alike than they are different. The proclivities of boys haven't changed much since I was one. I can't find anyone who will listen to me about the impending consequences of boys who were raised in a system with these and other biases.

Every system is perfectly designed to produce the result that it produces. So the question we might want to ask our selves is, "what is the system producing"?

Pretty much any mens group where some form of behavioural issue facing men is discussed loops back to the effect of school and other childhood factors extensively.

I have no answer for the rest of the article, but I've been poking around school administrations for quite a while now.

One of the problems with public school administrators and teachers is that staff are relatively difficult to adjust. Whether it be firing, transferring, rotations, etc. The article makes no mention of any of the complicit faculty suffering consequences. No, I don't think anyone has to be immediately fired. But mistakes happen, and staff that interact with kids on a constant scale like this need to maintain trust. Faculty that mess up like this need to be transferred away at the minimum. Making the victims take corrective action is completely wrong.

Teachers and administrators alike need more accountability, and more mobility within positions. Witch hunts like this need to be stopped before they traumatize kids. Employees should be shuffled around when inevitable interpersonal conflicts poison the relationship between school and community. Give adults and kids alike a break, a chance at a fresh start, an opportunity where their past mistakes don't destroy their future prospects.

> 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?

Fascinating question. I certainly wouldn't be surprised at all if they account for a substantial portion of online participants, but I don't know of any data on the matter.

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.

This is literally connected to Steve Bannon.

Maybe so. I don't recall seeing his name, back in the day, but Wikipedia tells me that he's done lots that I would have agreed with. Biosphere2, for example, SF fan that I am. And that movie about Ronald Reagan. But the rest of it is batshit insane, like something out of Hunter Thompson. A right-wing Wavy Gravy.

I can't quite tell if I simply grew out of racial humour or it's genuinely taken on this propagandist, explicitly political subtext it didn't have before. Whichever, I don't really appreciate it nowadays.

> young male angst

Tbh, it's this sort of thing that fuels the alt right. I'm a young male and I have some political concerns. I don't consider myself alt-right. But, when you dismiss my concerns as "angst" - I'm far more likely to continue talking to them than to you.

I apologize. I didn't mean to dismiss or criticize your concerns. So perhaps I ought to have used less loaded language. Something like being angry about how screwed up things are. Or however you might describe your political concerns.

Indeed, it worries me how much such concerns are being dismissed and suppressed.

Also, one of my favorite lines is "Still angry." And my favorite fantasy hero is Stover's Caine, who says that a lot.

I see people trot it out in online arguments as an excuse, or in think-pieces as a justification. But if white male identity politics is very important to someone, important enough to find common cause with literal neo-nazis, I think their conversion already happened.

Maybe. However, as TFA shows, "conversion" isn't irreversible.

>But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing.

You can thank Stormfront forums raiding 4chan for that.

Raiding is underselling it. It's significantly coordinated and thoroughly planned, long running campaigns to further radicalize the younger people who thought they were just getting "Edgy memes" on 4chan and haven't learned/realized yet that maybe, just maybe, making jokes about hanging black people because they are black isn't cool.

/pol/ is a shitshow

> There's a lotta young male angst out there

See this is exactly the problem the article talks about. A young man got so heavily invested in a community because they weren't dismissive of him. Maybe a lot of young men feel people are treating them dismissively and that a lot narratives other people espouse don't resonate with their personal experience.

Maybe we should consider why this anger is so much more common in young men. The narrative of "equality looks like aggression when you've always been the one on top" doesn't really apply to kids who are only 13, because no matter who was on top it wasn't kids.

I'm not arguing that young men's anger is unjustified. But I am arguing that it's being dismissed by some, and exploited by others. And actually taken seriously by hardly anyone.

Ah, my apologies. I see a lot of people reading articles like this and then talking about how young men's anger is being exploited without ever really asking about why young men are angry and I guess I extrapolated a meaning from your comment that I shouldn't have

>There's a lotta young male angst out there.

It's kinda odd, because nothing you say in this line is dismissive at all. But because of the everyday association with 'young male angst' that many encounter, merely mentioning it like this is enough to lead some to conclude you are being dismissive. Almost as if the concept has been put down so much that merely mentioning it has become a form of dismissive slang.

This is a bit tangential, but you sharing your experience with the term before it became widely-known reminds me of something interesting about the way we group and label ideologies.

I still remember 5+ years ago having periodic exposure to the term alt-right and having it more or less exclusively refer to relatively languid writings like Mencius Moldbug and NRx[1], in sharp contrast to the rowdier, meme-ier aesthetic it has today (eg /r/The_donald, from what little I've seen of it). I didn't see it come to refer to white-supremacy and other more well-known forms of the far-right until Hillary Clinton made the term a household name. After that point of course, it was a self-fulfilling Schelling point that coalesced around what she said it was: white supremacists et al flocked to it, and everyone not willing to be associated with them had to stop associating with the term, now that "everyone knew" what it referred to. Fascinating dynamic.

(Not that I'm suggesting that she created the movement, but rather that from my skewed sample, it seems that she made the _term_ well-defined, by bringing it into the limelight).

OTOH, this may have been a consequence of the fact that I had little exposure to chan or white supremacist subcultures et al and lots of exposure to often-iconoclastic longform blogs talking about every random topic, including politics. It's entirely possible that my sample of encounters with the term describes my filter more than it does the term.

It's a fascinating window into language, to see a term become widely-known, and by doing so, change its meaning. It's particularly interesting that it's difficult to know how close to how far off you were in your role as one of the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Thanks for sharing your data point!

[1] I'm referring to the aesthetic and energy here, not the content, which wasn't quite "languid..".

Just to be clear, it didn't call itself the "alt-right" back then. GamerGate was a turning point, I think. And yeah, it hit mainstream in the 2016 US presidential cycle. But until maybe 2015, I really had no clue that this was a political thing.

Oh haha, ok. Then never mind, my comment is somewhat irrelevant

Somewhat off-topic but I appreciated the combination of your analysis, mirimir's response, and your admittance that the initial analysis was not altogether correct. Especially online, it's rare to see people admit that they're wrong especially in the face of a (presumably) factually based reply.

I think you're spot on here. I always saw a lot of one-upsmanship in terms of harassment and being offensive, but eventually it got real. A friend of mine jokes that "weev won the election" and I'm not sure how wrong he is.

Almost every "movement" is a teen movement. They're the ones who feel most passionate about, well ... anything, the ones who have had the least life experience countering what's being "revealed" to them, the ones with time on their hands, the ones with few other distracting responsibilities, and the ones most likely to believe in simple solutions to problems they don't fully comprehend. Teens are the ideal foot soldiers for any movement. Yes, on both sides.

Regardless of how it started, it’s seemed pretty clear to me that the alt-right has been a very deliberate vehicle for the radical right to recruit young people for quite some time now.

The damning thing is the alt-right is very occasionally right. This one stuck out at me:

> I trained myself to freeze my facial expression into something neutral so that when I countered Sam’s remarks—“Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective.

A big chunk of the alt-right is precisely divorced dads drawn in, or people drawn to their stories, and the insane racist, sexist, and other baggage comes along. Much of the far-left is precisely people drawn to horror stories from LGBTQ members or African Americans who join a community and bring along similarly insane baggage for the ride.

I'm pretty convinced that unless the left manages to find a way to dive into alt-right ideology, with an open mind, and bring in the very few sane pieces, and change their opinions about the places that their reasoning is wrong, the alt-right will be able to keep recruiting.

> “Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective.

Except that feminism actively derides both the gender norms that say mothers are better caregivers and the US court system's bias against fathers in child custody rulings. There is literally decades of literature and other sources on these points.

A old, common talking point and accusation is that feminism is equivalent to female supremacy, and antifeminist groups recruit men who feel emasculated by women[1]:

> A second set of texts presents varieties of the contemporary masculinist response. Like its earlier incarnation, contemporary masculinist response is split between efforts to dislodge women's supremacy in the private sphere and support for men who are "wounded" in the struggle to exude an aura of masculinity in the public sphere.

> Men's challenges to women's perceived parental monopoly come from men's rights groups such as the Coalition for Free Men, Men's Rights International, and Men Achieving Liberation and Equality (MALE), as well as numerous fathers' support groups. These groups often deny that men have power in society, arguing that male supremacy is an illusion, along the lines of the illusion of the chauffeur: "he's dressed in the uniform and he looks like he's in the driver's seat," noted Warren Farrell, "but from his perspective someone else is giving the orders" (cited in Woldenberg 1986, p. 10). Masculinist texts claim that women and men are "equally oppressed" (Baumli 1986) and rail against perceived institutionalized female privileges, such as exemptions from the draft and advantages in alimony, child custody, and child support (Goldberg 1976; Haddad 1979). One critical review of these texts summarized their claims as follows:

> > Men, they say, are emotionally and sexually manipulated by women, forced into provider roles where they work themselves to death for their gold-digger wives, kept from equal participation and power in family life, and finally dumped by wives only to have courts and lawyers give all the property, money, and child custody to the women. (Messner 1986, p. 32)

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/189564

> Except that feminism actively derides both the gender norms that say mothers are better caregivers and the US court system's bias against fathers in child custody rulings.

Among people who call themselves feminists there are both people who strive for equality (and better relations) between the sexes and those who are striving for better conditions for women only.

Many self-proclaimed feminists probably wouldn't consider bias against fathers in child custody rulings a major issue. And those who don't concern themselves with men's rights are likely to alienate men in their quest for better treatment of women.

>Except that feminism actively derides both the gender norms that say mothers are better caregivers and the US court system's bias against fathers in child custody rulings. There is literally decades of literature and other sources on these points.

But a feminist was the originator of the idea that women should get primary custody of children[1], and the National Organization for Women opposes joint custody[2][3], and highly patriarchal societies such as Saudi Arabia generally give default custody to the father (Saudi Arabia just changed the law last year, and now mothers get primary custory[4])

I would say that the idea that "gender roles, not feminism, is responsible for default custody for mothers" is by far the most commonly debunked argument amongst the men's rights community.

[1] https://baysingerlaw.com/2018/02/tender-years-doctrine-origi...

[2] http://archive.is/mbfAY

[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20070708213232/http://michnow.org...

[4] https://www.khaleejtimes.com/region/saudi-arabia/saudi-arabi...

This reply or at least the first source cited is a little disingenuous; modern feminism (mostly third wave and left-wing) rejects the doctrine of essentialism used by second wave feminists. Most third wave feminists are highly critical of gender essentialism (for instance on trans issues which for them must deny essentialism) to the point where you and the person you're replying to are speaking of totally different movements. It would be like saying that science can't explain the motion of the planets - but of course it can, if we're talking about the majority of scientists after Newton. The boy's hate for feminism should not right extend past the 19th century women named in the article.

If you don't believe me when it comes to what modern feminism actually believes I'd be happy to walk through a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article to make the point. Most modern feminists do not support the tender years doctrine.

> If you don't believe me when it comes to what modern feminism actually believes I'd be happy to walk through a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article to make the point. Most modern feminists do not support the tender years doctrine.

No need! Just point me to the testimony at any senate hearing where any major feminist group stood up for equality in family law or in domestic violence law. Or an endorsement of a reform law moving those towards equality.

As far as I know, most U.S. states (34 of them) reject the tender years presumption in the first place. Furthermore, there are different approaches to feminism; liberal feminism propounds formal equality, which is generally rejected by other approaches which favor more radical solutions. The issue becomes vanishingly small when it turns out that most men opt for joint custody when it comes to the choice, and this is only of the very small number of custody trials in court - the vast majority are settled out of court.

And it's a mistake to characterize opposition as only being legal; if I said I was against murder, would you only believe me if I prosecuted a murderer, or campaigned for the death penalty?

What if feminists had other (bigger) issues to fight in the name of gender equality, which would be better for them to direct money? What if they don't believe that "standing up for equality" in the way you think makes much sense compared to writing and educating in society? We can already see this at work in other areas of feminism; a great number of feminists believe that pornography is harmful, but few seek legal means against it.

You seems to have a strong opinion about what current Feminism movement stands for, so let me ask you a quick questions on their views. What is the majority opinion on who is more likely to initiate physical violence, men or women?

As far as I know, prior to Brown v. Board, most states (50 of them) legally gave equal rights to blacks and whites. The reality was different.

Joint custody is not the same as equal custody. Courts will almost always assign joint custody, but rarely equal custody and almost never primary custody to the dads, at least where I live. That's not tender years presumption; that's simple sexism. Typical arrangement is 3 nights dad, 4 nights mom.

That, in turn means a massive windfall for the mom.

In the cases I know which were settled out-of-court, the men were told, in essence, they had little chance at equal custody due to gender and sexism by the courts. In at least two cases I know, the dads were the primary caretaker before the divorce.

Virtually all the men's rights groups lobby for default equal custody. A majority of the opposition comes from feminist groups.

The majority of men in this situation voted for Trump over Clinton, and believe it or not, would still vote Trump over Warren, despite agreeing with Warren on quite literally everything else.

As much as I appreciate the abstract, theoretical perspective, the reality on the ground is different:

1) Many courts assign default custody to women, almost no matter how bad a mom she is.

2) In liberal, feminist blue states, assuming both parents have equal incomes, the Dad will often pay about a third of his income post-tax to the mom in child support. Assuming the dad was a good parent, the de facto default custody split is quite often 4 nights mom / 3 nights dad, so expenses are essentially equal. The Mom has twice as much money as the Dad

3) If the Mom remarries, her household income will than be several times higher than the Dad. Dad keeps paying the same child support; spouse's/household income doesn't factor. The Dad, at this stage, is unlikely to be able to successfully remarry, given new socioeconomic bracket, or even be all that good a caretaker.

4) The Mom, for the most part, has almost all the tools to continue a pattern of abuse after divorce as before.

Like it or not, these laws came to be from a very active divorce lawyer lobby parading feminist groups in front of legislatures. Nice, abstract texts don't do much against actively lobbying for the opposite.

That pattern continues across the board. It's not abstract. We have a Violence Against Women Act. When men call in for domestic violence, they typically get arrested for having been assaulted. We don't have a Domestic Violence Act. Schools are incredibly sexist to parents -- the mom is the default parent. That's all thanks to very active work by women's groups.

As you might guess, that leads to a small surge of alt-righters, and a bigger surge of Trump voters. Want to know why Trump won? I know a large number of registered Democrats, otherwise as far left as you might imagine, who held their noses to prevent electing someone whose campaign was quite literally handing out "woman cards."

The author's son is far from unique here.

Separate-but-equal had a similarly nice theoretical perspective of equality, and a similarly not-so-nice reality of one side being treated well, and a second side getting the shaft.

Until and unless feminism can start to act for equality (rather than write nicely cited academic texts), it's likely the alt-right will just continue to swell.

I've never seen a feminist testify for equitable family law reform.

Ever.

Not much (I'd estimate <20%) and no.

Earlier on in its history, the English Wikipedia (at least the cultural/administrative side of it) was a lot like this. The average age has increased over time as people have aged up, but when I was most involved around 2004 it was a pretty young crowd. I was in college at the time, and there were plenty of other college students involved and even some high schoolers.

That was a great article, I think this is a big problem right now. I'm not sure how I would handle it as a parent.

Two things that stood out to me were the principal/officers at the public school and how they dealed with that situation, or even the girl that reported Sam. I wonder if they know what they created.

Also this part: "I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult. I was one of them,” he said. “I was participating in a conversation. They took me seriously. No one ever took me seriously—not you, not my teachers, no one. If I expressed an opinion, you thought I was just a dumbass kid trying to find my voice. I already had my voice.”

Does every kid just go through this phase, whether it is happening or not, how best to navigate it?

Every kid goes thru the phase where they want to be acknowledged, and their views verified by others (despite that they don't actually know their own views, and is still absorbing).

Those who would want to prey on this can take advantage. It's the role of the parents and public institutions like schools, to teach right from wrong.

In this story, the school failed, but the parents tried and got lucky. But you can imagine the story could have easily gone the other way.

No need to imagine, here's a headline from late 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/teen-char...

When my brother and I were in high school, he got into a discussion with the English teacher. At one point of disagreement, he asked her heatedly, “what are you on about?” We’d been watching a lot of Monty Python. She misinterpreted it as, “are you on the rag?” and proceeded to flip out.

She went to the principal, and they began some Title IX paperwork along with extreme disciplinary action.

This was a small rural school. My class had less than 70 students. My parents didn’t have a lot of resources, but they showed up the next day with a lawyer in a suit carrying a briefcase. The school was completely unprepared for that type of response and immediately backed off. They were able to clear up the misunderstanding.

It means so much for parents to listen to their kids with respect, and stick up for them. I’ve never forgotten it.

I wonder why teachers and school administrators don’t simply interact respectfully with their students instead of engaging in such extraordinarily bad behavior. Is mental illness or social disability common in their profession?

They're surrounded by children all the time. It probably rubs off.

> I wonder why teachers and school administrators don’t simply interact respectfully with their students instead of engaging in such extraordinarily bad behavior.

Lots of them do; if 1,000 do that and one acts badly, guess which one is going to be the focus of a story that gets widespread exposure?

I do extracurricular lessons with schools - teaching engineering through fun experiments and the like. I'm not very deep into the teaching sphere as such, but I think close enough to make some anecdotal observations. Frankly, I have seen some pretty disgusting practices from teachers I've worked with. Not to say that is the majority, but it only takes a handful of poor teachers to muddy the water. Three theories as to why that is happens:

Firstly, many teachers subconsciously have a tendency to see their classes as a group entity, not as a selection of individuals. As such, when a couple of kids behave badly in class they abstract that feeling of "getting attacked" to the whole group, and lash out defensively against everyone in said group. The amount of times I've seen a teacher unfairly punish a kid because a different one has irritated them over the course of the lesson is astonishing.

Secondly, from my experience it seems that the type of people that go into the profession (thinking more pre/middle school ages, not high school/university) often have a propensity towards narcissism. I don't know why, but this is just what I've observed. They have little power outside of the classroom, had little power growing up, and were never really especially gifted academically; but now they've been given power over large group of kids with little to no means to respond. I see a lot of teachers projecting the problems they have/had at home or with the school bureaucracy onto their classes, and use them as a metaphorical punching bag for their internal struggles.

Thirdly, teaching work at lower ages has sunk from a middle class job to a middle-lower class job. The stagnant wages has meant that a lot of talent has been put off teaching where we need it the most, and with that has gone some of the better educated. Some of the children I work with are honestly better at some subjects than their teachers are (thank Khan Academy, YouTube educators, et al for that!) and some teachers do not appreciate it. Just last month I saw a teacher shoot down a child for correcting him, even though he was not only right, but polite about it. I was sure to let the administration know what I thought of this behaviour...

Note; please don't take this commentary as me condemning teachers. The overwhelmingly vast majority of them are incredible people that in my eyes are poorly compensated for the service they do - but like I said earlier, it only takes a couple of bad eggs to put some kids off of education for life, and that dissolution translates to the class rooms of teachers who are truly amazing at what they do, which ruins their experience with teaching too.

Your parents are so awesome.

When I was in 3rd grade a girl accused me and my best friend of purposefully stepping on her. We were forced to sit in a room, no parents, no lunch, until we confessed. Eventually I was told I could go to violin lessons if I admitted to my wrong. So I lied to get out of the room I had been left in for 5 hours.

My friend never lied. He got in a lot of trouble because I did lie. He left school the next year after being dogged by the administration for every wrong that could be piled on him. Last I heard he was in jail.

I am utterly ashamed of that lie. Probably the worst lie I ever told.

Damn. That’s tough. I’m sorry that happened, but almost no third graders would be able to successfully deal with such a classic “prisoner’s dilemma.”

All I’m saying is, try not to blame yourself, anyone would have acted the same in that situation. The system is to blame, not you. :/

The ending of this article is a little hard to believe. It seems to end the exact way that the author would have wanted it to, something that is very uncommon behavior in teenagers in these situations.

I don't know, I'd believe it. Two years is a long time for someone who's just starting high school and a lot can change in that time.

I assure you it's quite common for teens who exhibit shocking behavior to grow into well-adjusted adults.

The endings probably aren't as perfect in most cases, but those cases make for less inspiring articles than the few that do. The only ones we read about are about the rare cases where the almost unbelievable happens.

Very well written piece. The most thought-provoking part is how the author links the ham-fisted behavior of the school administrator with the path her son followed.

The truth of the charge isn't the problem. The problem is how due process flies out the window when the charge is leveled.

Both accusers and accusees suffer from the same lack of due process. Its very tempting for other party to seek revenge that can lead to truly awful consequences.

Still, I can't help but wonder if the author isn't ascribing too much significance to the episode. The lives of teens are very full and extremely complex. They rarely reveal to parents everything that's happening to them.

> When we did confront Sam—say, if we caught a glimpse of a vile meme on his phone—he assured us that it was meant to be funny and that we didn’t get it. It was either “post-ironic” or referenced multiple other events that created a maze-like series of in-jokes impossible for us to follow.

I have made it clear to people I know that parroting vile positions online "because of humor" isn't really a clarification that you can make, and even when fine in person it still offers safety to those that hold and speak then with fervor. Giving white supremacist positions as a joke cannot be effectively separated from being a white supremacist (most aren't violent), and satire in this era is nearly impossible.

Perhaps having been on the receiving end of racism and it's associated violence has made me bitter. I got increasingly angry at the authors apparently laissez faire attitude about everything and trying externalize so much blame for what happened. The parents have given up on responsibility and this is the obvious result. If you don't shape the culture and ethics of your children then someone else will.

Peer influence is a real thing, parents aren't the only ones that get to shape their children, whether they like it or not.

But laissez faire IS a cultural and ethical stance. “Live and let live” was a powerful cultural standard I remember from my childhood.

Deciding that these parents have “given up on responsibility” is a loaded accusation to make because their child has adopted political ideals you disagree with. Given the thoughtfulness of the piece i’d characterize it as unfair.

It seems like there might be a little bit of inconsistency between 'live and let live' and 'political ideals' that involve killing lots of people.

I have a friend who went to a Jewish high school in the U.S. (reformed, not Yeshiva) and graduated with enough Holocaust jokes to write her own anti-Semitic encyclopedia. Children challenge their surroundings, it’s part of growing up.

If Sam (from the article) feels like he has been marginalized, misrepresented and punished unfairly by a system that does not even try to understand him then I am sure he would relate the experiences relayed in a Holocaust museum. A little perspective goes a long way.

> I am sure he would relate the experiences relayed in a Holocaust museum

As am I, and as did I at around that age. It's one thing to learn about the Holocaust in a classroom setting (and I remember getting bombarded by it every year; pretty much every class that wasn't categorized as "math" or "elective" would spend what felt like - and probably was - a whole month on the Holocaust, to the point of borderline desensitization). It's another to see it up close and personally in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; I distinctly remember the wall of shoes, and even thinking back on it right now shakes me harder than the entirety of my in-classroom education.

If you're ever in Washington DC, definitely take the time to visit the USHMM. It's free and open every day except Yom Kippur and Christmas. I wasn't enthused about it beforehand (I was a bratty teenager, and way more interested in the Air & Space Museum), but it ended up being the most memorable part of that trip, and the part I appreciated - and still appreciate - the most.

Reminds me of my soon to be little brother. When I met him he was 14 year old Vietnamese-American kid, immersed in meme culture, spouting white supremecist ideas under his breath and making Holocaust jokes. Fortunately he seems to have grown out of it now.

The whole 4chan culture is so appealing to young boys. Inside jokes, porn, violence, conspiracy, and you can participate. Frankly I'd probably have been sucked in if it was around when I was a kid(I still had a 4chan phase a few years ago but wasn't stupid enough to go alt right).

Why 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 worked in Italy and my boss was very conscious of the fact that his neighbor was a Fascist. I saw VV graffiti in the streets.

I lived in Italy for many years, and one of the more dismaying aspects of the culture is how much some people still identify with actual fascists and communists. They're both terrible ideas that should be widely repudiated by both left and right.

The Brigate Rossa was, like the Baader Meinhof Gang, just evil. But as I recall, the Communists (PCI) by the 90s were just another left wing party, democratic socialist. I think they even changed their name.

I recall rallies where they or someone related was still waving their hammer and sickle flag around.

Italy certainly has its share of modern center-left people, but it still has outright communists as well.

I don't really understand why you're writing as if people who want to eliminate minorities are as bad as people who want to eliminate inequality. It's not relevant

> as people who want to eliminate inequality

Communists eliminated a whole heck of a lot of minorities.

Also, the only group that killed more communists than the Nazis, were other communists themselves.

I'm sure Nazis themselves would make the same argument as you, about how they actually just support "traditionalist culture" or whatever. But we know what really happened. Same argument applies to communists.

These blanket statements would seem less provocative and more convincing if you backed them up with reliable references.

Sure. Leftist violence against other leftists is well documented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_th...

Usually one of the first thing that communists do once they are in power is crush the anarchists, and other competing leftist movements.

None of this is controversial.

Soviet repression of gay people was also well documented, as well as Cuban repression/murder of it's gay population.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fidel-castros-horrific-record-...

Please do not take HN into generic ideological flamewars. They're boring, they spread, and we don't want them here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't want it either, that's why I posted since the person I replied to was the one bringing up communism out of no where

I believe you, but please don't post in that way, since it only takes the thread further in the direction we don't want to go.

"I don't really understand why you're writing as if people who want to eliminate babies are as bad as people who want to eliminate abortions" -- A pro-lifer, probably

What does flagged mean on HN? Not sure why my comment got down-voted so fast. It's a genuine question.

If people can't agree on what Nazi means we should ban the word altogether since it has loaded political context and doesn't foster proper discussion.

It appears to me that:

1) Some use Nazi to mean Nazi Party with proper historical context 2) Some use Nazi as tool to bludgeon anyone they don't like 3) Some use Nazi to be an umbrella term for anything related to fascism, racism, right-leaning ideology, all kinds of other stuff.

If a single word means all kinds of things to all kinds of people, it's a useless word.

It's probably put in a way that can cause flame wars.

Unmoderated quickly devolve into toxic pool of "I don't actually care about what you're saying, I'm just going to downvote/report you". And it works! No discussion can take place just self-reinforcing feedback loop (ironically that's what the author describes in the article!).

Moderated platforms are no better because then one is at the mercy of the moderator.

What are we to do?

I like to discuss anything and everything because I can't turn off my brain and I just think about all kinds of random stuff, a lot. There's no "idle" mode.

There just doesn't seem to be any sane place left on the internet.

The spirit you're describing is pretty much the intellectual curiosity that is most welcome here. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

But even when motivated by curiosity, it's easy for comments on divisive topics to get caught in, and even feed, the flames. Therefore one needs to learn how to include a bit of flame retardant each time one does so. Unfortunate, maybe, but it's a reasonable price for not having the forum burn to a crisp.

Downvotes aren't "I don't like you / your idea". Obviously some people use them that way, but ultimately they're about public moderation.

I downvoted your comment. I can explain why if you like. It's not because "I don't really care about what you're saying", and it's not right to be so dismissive. There are substantive reasons.

First, you set up a strawman: Why are Americans so obsessed with Nazis?

There are two implications here:

* The first is that there is an obsession, an irrational amount of attention. Obsession has strong negative associations. It's a highly loaded word. This is a common rhetorical pattern: choose such a loaded word and present it as the antecedent of whatever argument you're putting forth. It lays the groundwork of the ensuing discussion that, indeed, Americans are obsessed, why would anyone not agree with that? It's often used as part of a Gish Gallop, where highly editorialized statements are peppered throughout an argument, making a thorough response become far too long-winded, meandering, and rhetorically weak. It's a strong signal that someone is posting in bad faith; there are many ways to ask this question in a neutral way, but that wasn't done.

* The second is that Nazis are the issue, rather than fascism or the right-wing in general. It's definitely worth noting that this article specifically used the term "Alt-right", and only referred to Nazis when referring to actual neo-Nazis, Nazi symbolism/flags, etc. Generally, discussion of Nazis is common because it's an entirely apt and powerful example of right-wing ideology and political power.

Beyond the rhetorical flair, the rise of right-wing ideology in America has been so sudden and pervasive that it strains credulity that anyone would be surprised that the issue gets lots of attention. The rhetoric of foreign threats, heterodoxy and distrust of academics/authorities/elites, national/racial pride, traditional values, etc. are all shared between the contemporary alt-right and the Nazis, so these comparisons are bound to happen, and are often apt. Certainly it's not always used appropriately, but nothing can change the fact that these are, overall, similar right-wing movements.

Your comment went out of the way to bring up "obsession" with "Nazi hysteria" despite having nothing to do with this particular article, so it's hard to believe it's made in good faith. Perhaps it is, but the cost of false-positives in this sort of moderation strategy are very low; you can easily get around it by taking on a somewhat more neutral tone.

> the rise of right-wing ideology in America has been so sudden and pervasive that it strains credulity that anyone would be surprised that the issue gets lots of attention

Has it really been sudden? The actual Nazis and Klansmen are still bumbling around, selling guns and meth like they always have. There aren't actually very many of them, and they are stupid and nasty, but largely harmless in the grand scheme.

What is different is that the scope of the definition has grown such that a kindly Canadian psychology professor, a gay Jewish talkshow host, a Somalian lobbyist/politician, and a feminist philospher can be painted with this all-encompassing Alt-Right brush.

From what I understand, the Left has gone more and more to the left throughout the years (the Right has stayed pretty much the same).

For this reason, even a center-right person can seem to be extremely far away to the right, to them.

What do you mean by right-wing? Does right-wing automatically mean something negative? It seems to me that to you right-wing means something bad. I don't have that kind of association.

To address your first point, I disagree it's a strawman. My personal opinion and what I'm arguing here is that yes, it is indeed an (unhealthy) obsession. I'm an expat. I lived outside my home country longer than I lived there. I bounced around Europe, Asia and US. I've never heard much Nazis except the constant coverage from US media that emerged in last few years.

I agree that comment was only tangential to the article. But every time someone says Nazis I raise my eyebrows and think "who are those Nazis they speak of"? I've only been to New York, DC, Bay Area and few other places in US and I've never seen a Nazi.

I'm happy to concede that what I've said was somewhat off-topic though.

To address your second point, while the bulk of the article talks about alt-right, Nazis and American History X are mentioned, and I think that makes discussing them fair game. Because this article does not exist in vacuum.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your downvote though.

I think I could substitute "obsessed" for "preoccupied" in the future :)

It’s impossible to have a balanced discussion in which all sides on a controversial topic are viewed at face value when the format of the forum promotes and hides content based on popularity. /pol/ could never have existed if it had upvotes and downvotes, for instance.

Flagged on HN means that some users thought your comment broke the site guidelines and shouldn't have been posted here. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.) After that, your comment got enough upvotes to override the flags, which is why the [flagged] marker disappeared.

I think your comment was fine, but I had to read it pretty closely to be sure. Most likely it was worded in a way that it made it seem more provocative than it actually is. Unfortunately, seeming provocative and being provocative are pretty much the same thing on the internet. The word "Nazi" itself contains a provocative charge for many readers, so in a way your comment was affected by the phenomenon it describes.

Interesting. Dang, you should write a book -- or at least a blog post -- on the psychological dynamics of internet communities!

> The word "Nazi" itself contains a provocative charge

I find this a bit confusing. Provocative to whom? There are 1) people calling other people Nazis and there are 2) people being called Nazis.

1) Can't claim they're being provoked because they're the ones using the word in the first place. I don't think 2) would be offended by the word itself. They don't like being called Nazis, which is different.

When someone says "Nazi" I'm thinking "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question" and the "superiority of the Aryan master race". These are very bad things and practically everyone agrees!

Side note: perhaps when people say Nazis they mean ethno-nationalists?

Nazis killed millions of people in Europe and took my country apart. What was left behind is a deeply damaged society. I don't know how many generations it will take to fix it. So it annoys me when the word is thrown so casually at any random person on the internet. A dude going to a Mall with a swastika flag is probably just an ass that wants to "trigger lefties". And they take the bait. And media takes the bait too.

There are also 3) people like yourself and myself who are neither calling anyone a Nazi, nor purporting to be Nazi's, but who are nonetheless provoked by the usage of the word.

I'd argue this category actually represents the majority demographic. Heck, I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've typed the word "Nazi" on the internet.

> "Why are Americans so obsessed with Nazis?"

Terms like "Nazi" and "alt-right" are powerful memes. They have dictionary definitions of course, but people aren't dictionaries. Outside of special practices (engineering, math, etc), people think in terms of relatively vague concepts - in memes. Language can be used to shape people's perception of reality. This very article is an example of that, look at how many characters in this simple story had their beliefs shaped by memes of various kinds: the girl who had detailed beliefs of what the boy did despite having next to no information; the school administrators who were absolutely sure he had done something terrible despite working from a child's opinion, the parents who had trouble seriously addressing their son's new obsession despite being highly knowledgeable on "the facts of the matter". Another example is forum discussions on topics similar to this one.

Human beings hold an incredibly detailed model of reality in their mind, they have extremely high confidence in their model (after all, if it was incorrect, they'd change it of course), yet every single person's model is largely based on memes. Ideas and "facts" about the reality they live in, picked up from here and there, all added to the ultra high resolution model of reality they hold in their heads. The vast, vast majority of that model is based on vague, often incorrect data. But to the observer, it looks perfectly correct.

As for why Americans are so obsessed with Nazis? Because it is a powerfully persuasive meme. Attaching a label ("Nazi", "alt-right", "socialist", "crooked Hillary", "Lyin' Ted", etc) to someone alters the mental model of reality held by other human beings. Sometimes it is used for good, sometimes it is used for evil. Language has always been used to shape people's perceptions of reality, the internet has just increased the speed of propagation. We often hear how we should base our opinions on facts, yet those in power who tell us this seem rather reluctant to give up their reliance on memes.

Here's a fun experiment: next time you encounter someone online asserting a "fact" that you sense is actually a meme, ask them how they know that their fact is actually true. In my experience, you will collect several downvotes, and zero answers to a perfectly obvious and reasonable question.

I think it’s fair to use the term about those who self-identify as “Nazi”, “Neo Nazi” or generally express the historic Nazi party / 3rd Reich as their main philosophical inspiration.

I don't know if obsession is the right word. However there is strong reaction partly due to large Jewish population in the u.s. and there is no stronger expression of anti semitism than Nazi.

Another thing. This may not be a popular opinion but based on my personal observation, ordinary Americans don't "obsess" over Nazi to the same degree as the media.

The percentage of Jewish people in the US is around 1-2%. Large in the sense of a significant portion of total Jews, but compared to other ethnic groups in the US, fairly small.

That's true, but their representation in media/policy is extremely high. (and, I hate that I have to qualify this statement of fact, but I am not saying this is a good or bad thing -- or that I even particularly care).

I don't think you can say this is a statement of fact. How are you measuring this?

I'm not measuring it, I just know that people of Jewish origin are dramatically over-represented among journalism, banking, and fields such as physics or CS. It's common knowledge, although I'm sure there are ways to confirm it if you're so interested. (nothing unreasonable about that).

Many things that were once considered "common knowledge" turned out to be nothing of the sort. The idea you're espousing is a damaging one that reinforces the worst stereotypes about Jews.

I take pride in being extremely charitable and not toxic when discussing topics with people, but I find your accusation that I'm doing something damaging as incredibly rude and uncalled for.

The claim that Jews are over-represented in fields correlated with success, such as finance (once my field), journalism, and academic disciplines such as physics, is not damaging, even if it is wrong. How would the view that Jews tend to be successful be one of the 'worst stereotypes?'

It's strange to me that you're so unaware of Jewish success that a banal claim that Jews have a high representation in some fields has you shocked.

I took a few minutes to at least get a couple sources, but honestly if the idea that Jews are over-represented in fields like physics or journalism or economics (or ivy league universities) is new to you, then you haven't done a very good job paying attention in class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4099803,00.html

You're changing the goal posts. You went from saying their representation is extremely high to over-representation. Over-representation is simply a higher percentage than their demographics in the US might imply. High representation implies that they hold majority or near majority of influence.

It's strange to me that you're so unaware of the anti-semitic tropes that portray a Jewish cabal controlling politics and media in the US. Perhaps you weren't paying attention in class...

> Are Europeans worried about Nazis?

Where are you in Europe? In my experience, lots of Europeans are worried about fascism. Not necessarily Nazis, but fascism and extremism.

In most of Europe WW2 was just a terrible ordeal. In Germany it's a source of great shame.

But the US? WW2 was the making of modern America. The US was catapulted into a world leader position, and got to feel like a badass hero doing it. And WW2 was the US's first major overseas conflict. Nazis are the archetypical "enemy without".

Great comment, but aren't you overlooking WWI? Phillipines? etc. There was even an anti-imperialist movement in the US before WWI.

WWII was the last time the US "won" a war, so it gets more attention.

Damn, you're right. WW1 was certainly a major international conflict. Scratch that bit.

It does offer a useful comparison though. In WW1 there were no cartoonishly evil baddies, just a bunch of pointless deaths. It didn't devastate a civilian population, either - nobody got to feel like a hero, there were no joyful liberations. WW2 was a righteous war (that also happened to be an economic goldmine). That permanently shifted American culture (and killed isolationism stone dead). So Nazis became THE enemy - the Lucifer to America's new God complex.

The Germans were cast as, if anything, even more evil characters in the WW1-era propaganda than they were in WW2. A series of atrocities in the opening phase of the war while the German armies were marching through Belgium were widely reported and inflated into stories of raping nuns and bayonetting babies.

In contrast, the full scale of the horrors of the Nazi regime were not widely known until the final days of WW2.

Oh goodness, there were 4.7 million US soldiers in the first world war - out of a US population of 102 million at the time. Surely that must be major?

The US reacted to the end of the first world war by retreating from global affairs. They didn't even join the league of nations their president was instrumental in creating. WWI was terrible, but it simply did not result in the drastic societal changes that WWII caused.

WWII was the start of a new world order with the USA at the forefront.

We entered WWI late in the game and "only" suffered 53k combat deaths. WWI was huge for the major combatants of France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, each of whom lost over a million in combat, plus the British empire which lost just under a million between England and all her subjects. To put it in context, more Canadians died in combat in WWI than Americans, and Canada at the time was much less populated than the US, even more so than today. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties

So, yeah, we don't tend to think of WWI as much as being one of the major wars we were involved in. The major wars we tend to think about in our cultural consciousness are the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWII, Vietnam War, and then because of the recency bias, the "global war on terror" in Iraq/Afghanistan. WWI is covered in history classes of course, but primarily from the western front perspective, which the US didn't get involved in until the war was almost won.

Until WWII, the US population generally favored isolationism and were very reluctant to get involved in "Europe's wars". The attack on Pearl Harbor instantly showed Americans that we were no longer insulated from the world.

"During the war, over 16 million Americans served in the United States Armed Forces, with 405,399 killed in action and 671,278 wounded. There were also 130,201 American prisoners of war, of whom 116,129 returned home after the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...

Soldiers returned home with stories of what they had seen, including horrors of the death camps in Europe and atrocities in the Pacific. This deeply affected Americans. I was born decades after it ended, but growing up it seemed everyone older than me had been affected by it.

Also, the modern media age was in full swing. Huge amounts of footage had been filmed during the war, and there was an oversupply of military hardware that needed blowing up. These made WWII films easy to splice together.

The US was operating a massive program of denazification in Germany and demilitarization in Japan. This was combined with economic rebuilding with the goal of establishing the type of peacetime prosperity that people wouldn't want to give up for fighting.

Why Nazis specifically? Many Americans saw what happened to the modern hardworking Protestant society that was Germany and thought "Oh so this is what it looks like when white people become drug-fueled psycho nationalists" and then quickly "Dear God, please not here."

It's probably a consequence of the media. Proclaiming yourself a nazi is still an easy way to provoke outrage and get media attention in America, so attention-seekers abuse it.

Also Americans value free speech over most things. Proclaiming yourself a Nazi in Europe would probably have more severe consequences socially. In Germany it could land you in prison.

> In Germany it could land you in prison.

Proclaiming yourself a Nazi shouldn't. Expect to be watched closely by intelligence services though (unless you're a cop, very different rules apply then).

Promoting the ideology may land in you in jail, depending on details (after a series of trials ending in fines because we believe in measured response).

I am not German or living in Germany, so I have to rely on secondary sources here. I understand that there are laws in Germany banning the use of Nazi symbols [1], as well as very strong laws against hate speech.

Maybe I should have said "face criminal penalties" instead of "end up in prison".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

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.

Well didn't you see the rally in 2016? they amassed a whole 5 people from across the US. For the MSM that's an international security threat.

I believe this is a lasting effect of the PR campaign to vilify Hitler and the Nazis. Don’t get me wrong, Hitler and the Nazis are obviously villains and deserve every ounce of contempt. But the US went to extra efforts to make sure people knew it was the work on Hitler and the Nazis and not the Germans so that we could quickly forgive the Germans and make them an ally.

Fun fact, before Hitler, the worst person euphemistically was the biblical Pharaoh

Edit: getting some down votes. I hope it’s clear that I’m still trying to say that hitler was maximally bad and not trying to reduce anything to that effect.

Alt-right and Nazi have become such reflexive insults that they have lost all meaning. In most cases, it just means that someone dislikes the person, often for imaginary reasons.

Paraphrasing, because I can't find the original quote: You can start a movement without a god, but not without a devil.

It's mostly a boogeyman used to galvanize and justify another extremist group.

I’m European and I’m very worried about Nazis.

In both Europe and America for what it’s worth.

Portions of our far-right literally wear Nazi regalia. If it weren't for that, we'd probably be less concerned.

Don't worry about the LARPers. There are so few of them, they are so dumb, they have so little power, and they never will.

Worry instead about those quiet ones out there reading old and problematic books: the free spirits, burning forth, ready to smash all our tablets of values.

Maybe we should burn those old books, just to be safe

Yes, you'd better...

In case it wasn't clear (Poe's law, and all), I am speaking about myself and people like me, who get along just fine but find themselves quite at odds with the modern world and it's mythologies, and also deeply uninterested in what these radical groups and "activists" have on offer.

I may be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure Conservatives are the opposite of "free spirits."

I am not talking about conservatives.

That's because Europeans have their heads in the sand like ostriches about all forms of societal change.

I'm a Canadian that just moved back after 4 years in Europe, and I found it impossible to have a progressive-minded conversation with most europeans (not all, but much higher ratio than at home) - about feminism, rape culture, about racial discrimination, about unconscious bias, about migration and immigration.

Europe has figured out a pretty good well-balanced society for its' citizens, and is incapable of reacting to change.

This is why nationalism, racism, and yes - fascism - are on the rise throughout Europe. Because nobody worries about it, and nobody pays attention to it. They just see brown people at the train station, get nervous, and ask no follow-up questions.

Who's getting nervous about brown people at train stations? This whole observation seems pretty weird.

A foreigner from a different continent finds it hard to talk to most Europeans (because they are all a singular block) about feminism? Don't be ridiculous. They likely just didn't want to talk to you about it, and it sounds as if you laboured on such points a few times.

And, depending on how well you knew the people you where talking to, they likely mistook your accent for American (I'm English and this happens even to me), which would certainly affect how people see your views on such topics and would impact their willingness to talk to you about it.

All in all, not many people want to talk to American sounding people they might not know very well about issues like their views on feminism or racial discrimination. I see this more as a "you" thing than a "Europe" thing.

When you have intelligent coworkers that say things like "Most black people in town are drug dealers, so if I see a black person I'm going to assume they're a drug dealer", or "Sexism wasn't a problem in Europe until North America invented it as an issue", and the other Europeans agree and the other North Americans don't, and when this type of thing happens over and over in many circumstances, I come to the conclusion that it's not me.

Before you wonder if it's just my coworkers and company.

* Person I'm buying a car from 2 hours from my city telling me "It's a good thing you're buying a car from me and not one of them black boys, they rip you off" * Landlord I'm viewing an apartment for saying "I would prefer to rent to a white renter. We have a lot of indians that try to rent and they smell"

These kinds of things happened way more in 4 years in Europe than in 20 years in Canada.

I've only experience with Berlin Germans, but when I lived among them, they were more racist than the good-old-boy-est good-old-boys I knew in northern Appalachia. Just get them started when they had had a few brews about der Türker...

You have your own head in the sand about something else : most Europeans you spoke to were probably all too familiar with the kind of North American identity politics you were pushing onto them (what you describe as a "progressive-minded conversation"). Most of us (including progressives) find it alien, over the top, polarizing if not sometimes downright harmful and counterproductive. Our choice not to partake is a conscious and informed one.

You mention fascism being on the rise throughout Europe because of our supposedly poor understanding of these issues, but the intersectional flavor of progressivism you're advocating hasn't exactly demonstrated it could make society less divided (quite the opposite). In other words, I guess we're not quite prepared to get lectured about fascism by the continent that brought us Trump recently.

In fact, this article is a powerful cautionary tale against the backlash that comes with ostracizing young white males. And yes, I'm pretty sure most Europeans shook their head reading the piece of insanity below, thinking "only in America"

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

Thanks, but no thanks.

I'm Canadian, not American, so I take no responsibility for Trump, or American puritanism, nationalism, or divisiveness.

The example you mention is apalling, but is just one version of the story. Here's another.

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s made a sexual reference to a classmate of theirs using an inside joke. Sam laughed as they both poorly masked their attention on the girl. The girl at the table overheard their private conversation, frustrated with this not being the first time she was harassed by Sam and his friend got fed up, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor, who's already heard about Sam and his coworker being sexually inappropriate in class, pulled Sam out of class and tried to have him have a "come to jesus" moment by taking the situation very seriously and explaining that sexual harassment is a crime. Sam ignored him, defended the comments as "just an inside joke", and was completely dismissive of his role in bullying his female classmates. Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who doubled down on trying to break through to Sam that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

Is this the truth? Probably not directly.

But the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The rate of people getting accused of sexual harassment falsely is miniscule - maliciously or accidentally.

The rate of people get accused of sexual harassment, and are self-aware enough to understand their role, and admit it is also miniscule.

The most common situation is one where the accused simply do not care, and have plausibly deniable excuses for their behaviour, with "IT was just a JOKE" being #1 on the list of excuses.

I know, I've been one of them.

Historically, teenagers were given a lot of leeway with this - boys will be boys. Society is now dealing with it and saying "No, actually. You can cause real harm, and you need to give a shit about how your actions affect others."

Europe and Europeans are simply next.

"Why are Americans so obsessed with Nazis? "

Good question. Maybe different reasons. There sure are a lot of Nazi documentaries on cable.

. Twelve year old boys like snappy uniforms and the idea of a warrior ethos.

. You don't need a God to form a religion, sometimes a Devil is enough. The secular Left, now that culture has taken the place of economics as something to argue about, seems to have built a philosophy with Hitler at the bottom. Enemies are, of course, Hitler.

. WWII makes for a great story. Good guys, bad guys, worldwide (thus the name), heros and villains. Maybe the US is bored with Cowboys and Indians.

Why indeed. I believe it is because its massively funded to perpetuate it in the mindsphere. Who benefits? I don't know.

Part of it is that Nazis and Communists (with a capital C, usually taken to be communism in the Chinese/Korean/Soviet sense) fit the "bad guys" archetype in American media (or - more precisely - said archetype developed in response to them being our adversaries in WWII and the Cold War, respectively). Naturally, that means accusing someone of being a Nazi or Communist is an effortless way to paint that someone as a pure and classic villain.

Now we have people overtly and brazenly affiliating identifying as Nazis (usually citing The Bell Curve and other pseudoscientific racist drivel) and Communists (still with the capital C; they might claim to be lowercase-c communists or plain socialists, but it doesn't take long before "Stalin did nothing wrong" or "China's more ethical than the US" starts peeking through the façade). Both have always existed, of course (at least as long as those ideologies have existed), but nowadays folks are more open about their abhorrently-anti-democratic viewpoints (especially on the Internet, where they enjoy relative safety while simultaneously reaching worldwide audiences).

That which is obviously true or obviously false needn't even be mentioned.

That which is secretly true must be contradicted constantly.

That which is secretly false must be affirmed constantly.

> Are Europeans worried about Nazis? Not as far as I can tell.

It probably strongly depends on the bubble one lives in, both in America and Europe.

I remember reading the Millennium trilogy, written by a Swedish author, where (spoilers, I guess) every unsympathetic guy, without exception, turns out to be literally a secret Nazi. The books sold 80 million copies worldwide, multiple movies were made of them.

Or, if you read Russian propaganda, they never stopped fighting Nazis; it's like WW2 actually never ended. Recently they have liberated Crimea from the Nazi attack.

All this seems crazy to some people, and serious to others.

Americans have (for generations) been indoctrinated into an extremely narrow view of WW2, where Holocaust is front and center and everything else is made irrelevant. In an American mind there are no real victims of WW2 other than the Jews, which is very insulting to pretty much half of European nations that suffered immensely.

I'm always skeptical of the veracity of these articles. This one doesn't pass the sniff test. It has a narrative arc that doesn't recall reality. Seems contrived.

The thing that rang truest was the school interaction. That's where my trouble with authority started -- overzealous, bored, administrators.

What about the narrative arc seems contrived to you? Is it the ending? Because I agree with that. Everything else seems plausible does it not?

And where does your trouble with authority take you now?

Chuckled at the list of things considered 'alt right'. The window is moving so quickly. Some of these things a good half of the US or so would agree with.

This happened to myself in middleschool, almost 10 years ago now. Was pulled into an office, told the police would be called, and was told I needed to confess for hours to something that was unrelated to me. The school never had any retaliation from my family who didn't see it very serious at the time.

I can definitely relate to his feelings of not being taken seriously in school and being put in the spotlight without oversight. I frequently did dumb things when I was in middle school, and it became a self-actualizing thing as I became increasingly frustrated that I had been pegged as some kind of criminal for doing mostly average rebellious teenage things. But what really got me was when I was increasingly blamed for things I DIDN'T do, and the frustration of it all led me to lash out because I had a difficult time refuting baseless claims against me.

School administrators don't give a damn about the majority of their students. They mostly care about their image and the top 5% of students who make them look good. If you're even remotely troubled, the school system chews you up and spits you out.

I think the worst example of this from my own experiences is during High School when I was put in "alternative education" because they just didn't want to deal with me anymore. Nobody thought "maybe it isn't that he can't do the work, maybe there's problems he's dealing with that nobody cares to ask about" or that the increasing frustration of being a social pariah and someone who can't find the words to express his issues was the problem; they just didn't care, so they just threw me out.

Fortunately, I did finally get my act together and get through college... but I sincerely hope that what I experienced doesn't become common-place just because school administrators would rather "throw out the trash" than deal with the root of the problem.

Tim Pool (self described as left of center) has his take on the article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOyb8cN_A_8&t=946s

Just to add to the pile. I was once accused of kicking a teacher during a class. I was at the back of the class when it happened. What followed was 2 days of "guilty until proven innocent" karangaroo court, the teacher vowing to get me put in the remedial class (he knew I was striving for valedictorian, he was trying his best to inflict whatever pain he could on me). I was terrified, beyond upset and I don't think I ever truly got over the injustice. Luckily I had pigheaded parents who point blanked refused to accept the idea I could have done something so stupid. I will always remember how my life could have changed for the worse due to the pettiness of one man who was suppose to be looking out for the future of kids. One of many, many injustices I witnessed. No wonder kids are getting angrier and more stressed.

This is why I homeschool my kids. I think as geeks we've solved the problem of learning, look at all the stuff we've built by figuring out how to learn by ourselves. We don't really need schools for this function anymore.

You can't homeschool social skills though.

That’s what Sudbury schools are for.

Humanity was socializing long before public schools existed, and by no means does the present public school system have a monopoly on teaching social skills.

Statistically, home schools produce outstanding educational outcomes compared to public schools on standardized tests, so public education proponents insist that they compensate for this by providing better "socialization". This claim is conveniently difficult to refute with hard data since "socialization" is harder to quantify, but it doesn't prove public schooling produces better socialization outcomes.

To the contrary, homeschooling is so effective at education because it's taylored to a particular student's developmental level in each area, including socialization. Home educators have tremendous schedule flexibility, and in many areas, large co-op resources, presenting endless opportunities for friendship, teamwork, conflict, community service, and time to develop their own interests (programming? theater?) with other like minded students. For instance, while day-school students are stuck in a room not interacting with one another, a nine year old home schooled student may attend day rehearsals for a play at the local university, volunteer at a local food bank, or build robots with their FRC team, all before playing little league baseball after the day school students become available. These opportunities don't just lock students into same age groups all day for 10 years, but allow time for them to participate in the real world community outside with a broad range of both peers and adults.

The diversity of opportunities for homeschool students often results in a student whose social experience and civic responsibility is as outstanding as their standardized test scores. You can absolutely homeschool social skills.

English isn't my first language, so I naturally thought of homeschooling as keeping kids at home during the day while others are at school. If kids do social activities outside the home during "homeschooling" then that's obviously different than the type of homeschooling where the kids only interact with their guardian(s)/teacher(s).

This whole article was about how public schools resulted in a socially maladjusted kid who was brought back from the brink by his mother at home.

I’m not an expert, but maybe institutionalizing children like prisoners is bad for their emotional development.

My favorite was when the administrators and teachers would tell me to “move away“ from bullies. That’s nice, how do you move away from a bully in a packed classroom of 30 kids?

A few thoughts after reading this (very compelling) article:

* It's strange to see a patriarchal over-protection of girls being called liberal. I think we've come full circle on this one.

* Why does this thirteen-year-old have full, unfettered access to the entire internet? That seems like a recipe for disaster. My kids will have dumbphones and access to the desktop computer in the living room, with age-restricted filters and probably internet activity logs. I would not invite random strangers into my home to teach whatever they wanted when I wasn't around.

* I love parenting articles that teach me what I have to teach my children. The parents here loved the trusting aspect of their son, but this really burned him. First he overtrusted the adults at his school, then he overtrusted google search results. I can relate to this! My parents admired my trusting, sweet nature as a kid, too; looking back, I think I was trustful to a fault, especially of adults. "Naive" would be a better description. For example, when an adult said something really unacceptable, I would always try to justify their words and try to learn from them. This led to confusing lessons and some self-esteem issues that needed to be corrected when I had grown out of my naive adult trust.

I'd be curious to hear how you plan to teach your children to not be overly trusting/naive of adults/authority figures while simultaneously ensuring adhere to your oversight and regulation. It sounds like a fine line to thread.

I think I said the wrong thing when I said not to "trust" adults; what I really meant is that it's dangerous to teach kids that adults are infallible; otherwise they can be taken advantage of by those in positions of power. I think it's important to teach children proper behavior and to show by example that adults are beholden to the same rules as they are, including their parents.

I spoke with my wife about the article and realized I missed a really important negative point about the parents. If the son had become a gung-ho "SJW", espousing extreme views and causing hurt to other people (whose word would of course be unheard as his was), would they have worried about him or would they have encouraged it? The son says he was happy to be out of the "cult" of the alt-right, but the culture at his school was also essentially a cult, which he was violently ejected from when it turned on him suddenly.

The parents weren't doing their son any favors by being so consistently biased; the mother could only barely except that her son was discriminated against for being a boy. The article seems to say that the mother realized how badly she had written off anything her son said, but doesn't really hint at any introspection or rethinking regarding her own world view. And at the end it sounds like they are going to go be protesters at the next rally, which fuels the them-or-me mentality that caused their troubles in the first place. The moral seems to be "my son was wrong for a year and I finally convinced him."

Wouldn't it be a better ending if they reconciled the experiences of their terrible year with the other wonderful things they believe about human rights and dignity in general? It's like they still think you have to choose between women's rights and men's rights.

Whoa that line about the press and their symbiotic relationships is interesting if ugly.

A big, unstated theme was how memetics goes for the most radical, extreme, offensive viewpoint. The same phenomenology that causes the press to seek out Nazis to talk to, causes search engines to return only radical viewpoints. It's what people want, but it's not good for us.

There are bits of this story which simply don't add up or end up feeling quite embellished. The reaction from the principle seems quite far-fetched and the ending feels like it was meant as a call back to the beginning rather than something that actually happened.

Regardless though, this story is generally correct in how the alt-right appeals to younger and more vulnerable individuals. They tend to recruit through avenues like video games, discord and so forth. A lot of memes can also help drag people into the fold with not-so-subtle racism and xenophobia which kids might not be able to fully grasp at their age.

It's one of those things I find strange because I grew up heavily addicted to the internet as well and it's hard for me to think of many memes which were weaponized to such an extent.

For all the talk about Russian social media meddling, I'm surprised no one ever speculates about foreign meddling in media such as the chans. To what extent has chan culture been influenced by foreign agitprop?

Outsiders, maybe, but many within these kinds of boards understand the extent of the psy ops going on more than anyone speculating from outside.

> I'm surprised no one ever speculates about foreign meddling in media such as the chans

I feel like plenty of people do speculate about that - and for good reason, given that anonymity includes not knowing the nationality of any given "anon" (and even 4chan's operators won't ever really be able to know, given how common it is for non-Americans to use American VPNs for other things - e.g. bypassing region locks on media services).

Same goes even for places that don't have a concept of an "anon" per se, like reddit or even Hacker News. I might claim to be an American citizen living in the SF Bay Area, but that doesn't mean I actually am an American citizen living in the SF Bay Area. Y Combinator might be able to see that my posts are more-or-less consistently coming from American IP addresses (barring a point in time where one of the GeoIP data providers believed my home IP to be Canadian, thus locking me out of various content on Spotify and shunting me over to the Canadian version of Newegg, much to my combination of chagrin and amusement), but it's quite possible that those IP addresses are just the far ends of VPN connections from, say, Russia.

This article is not good. It has its good points but the rest of it is deeply and completely flawed and it definitely has the feeling of ideological propaganda.

If you don’t know why that is the case, I will explain.

Firstly, it causes me actual physical pain to read because I have a son and society has become so default toxic towards men and assumes that they are somehow evil and guilty for....wanting sex and not knowing how to get it, or laughing at stupid jokes...

The reason this article is bad is that it is that it does exactly the things which cause the alt-right movement to get stronger and stronger, while knowing that it is doing them. It is hard for me to look at this other than a form of propaganda.

Here are the real, severe problems:

1. Categorize everyone who disagrees with you as a Nazi or alt-right. 43% of the population leans republican, call them all Nazis and you get the alt right. 2. Ignore or dismiss 100% of the counter arguments without naming what they are, just that they “must be wrong” 3. dismissing the entire validity of the alt-right by saying “there was one Nazi there”

There was a Nazi in Seattle once, he got punched in the face after ten minutes by a mob from the Internet. It doesn’t mean that everyone in Seattle is a Nazi.

What Liberals are going to have to do in order to get people like me to ever vote for them again is the following:

- admit There are extreme views on both sides and we can see how certain aspects of the Democratic Party are out of control, but that doesn’t excuse allowing Nazis, get rid of them and we will get rid of our nutcases also - If you don’t agree with 100% of what we are saying you still are welcome. We are not going to destroy your career and reputation if you want to argue over specifics - We are not going to use the words “whiteness” and “privilege” as a derogatory insult implicating all white people as being bad.

I work in tech, my twitter stream is filled with anti male and anti white rhetoric. I have blocked dozens of people for this reason.

- We are going to proactively eliminate bad actors with extremely racist and negative, toxic views from our own side

Until the Democratic Party and liberals admit to these things, moderate their tone, I am never, never, never coming back, and I voted for Obama twice.

It is time to stop pretending that there is only a single right answer, this article is exactly the propaganda that is driving the alt right and if it continues you are going to see it grow and I will be joining it, at this rate, I’d this continues.

>Until the Democratic Party and liberals admit to these things, moderate their tone, I am never, never, never coming back, and I voted for Obama twice.

I always find this argument fascinating. "Some people made fun of white males, therefore low income people shouldn't get healthcare/college".

I dislike identity politics too, but I don't let it change my values.

> There was a Nazi in Seattle once, he got punched in the face after ten minutes by a mob from the Internet. It doesn’t mean that everyone in Seattle is a Nazi.

The assertion "There was a Nazi in Seattle once" is as ridiculous as your subsequent strawman "everyone in Seattle is a Nazi". There's is an extremely low likelihood that either is true. But more importantly, you've just engaged in precisely the sort of exaggerated rhetoric you just decried.

Excuse my ignorance, but what makes all of this alt-right? This left/right labels always confused me as I can't clearly see the difference.

The comments in this thread indicate clearly, I think, why we should never listen to engineers on social topics and questions.

Now I'm wondering which subreddit it was.

/r/MemeEconomy most likely

The "alt-right" is the natural reaction to the bombardment of progressive leftism (for lack of a better concept) perpetrated initially by the media and now by mainstream society in general, including silicon valley.

Most of these alt-righters aren't educated enough to articulate a good ideological response to this bombardment, but they know that people are being manipulated, and the best thing they can do is state the complete opposite (or what they see as the complete opposite) to what progressive media says, which makes them be this way.

Another thing to consider is the hypocrisy with which most people criticize the "alt-right", but don't even bat an eye when the 'progressives' act the same way.

When mainstream society becomes reasonable again, alt-righters and similar movements will disappear.

That's a good read, as the parent of a teenager I probably am not supervising him as much as I wish I did, but fortunately he hasn't fallen into that world.

America is going crazy, and it's spreading its madness around the world.

Sorry for the blanket statement, but from an European perspective, the US really seems to go crazy.

There's a resurgence of alt-right parties in Europe; this isn't just a US thing. I bet there are European Kekistanis just like this boy, but that just proves politics doesn't care about borders now that everything's online.

So, does this chap just take the word of his kid for truth?

I keep trying to tell all of my social circle that the normal (although not proper response) to an extremist point of view, is to either embrace it or to vouch for the oposite one. Very few people seem interested to even give it a thought about that and happily continue expousing their extremist points of view (when it's an extremist left point of view of course, since they are told by all the media and social networks that's the moral point of view to have).

When stuff like this has become the norm, exactly what reaction would you expect?

"One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”"

>Ergo, clueless normies who put their own spin on your brilliant memes deserve to die.

The term 'normie' means alot more than just 'someone who ruins memes'. Normies are primarily hated because they often treat 'autists' as other or less than.

>“I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult. They took me seriously.”

I totally agree with this, growing up it would anger me to no end that people wouldn't take me seriously because of my age, Aaron Swartz used to say 'I hate when you don't take me seriously'.

Fascism 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 substantial. Or perhaps we need to teach early grade-school civics and ethics, so that teenagers will have had a round of memetic inoculation before being introduced to modern cryptofascists. I certainly think that my scant lessons in high school were crucial in helping to rebut some of the stupider strains of online thought today, like sovereign citizenship, flat-Earth astronomy, or (the modern flavor of) the Lost Cause.

Not that I necessarily disagree, but I quaver at the thought of a government that understands memetics well enough to craft such a course. Defense can so easily turn to offense...

Fewer members of this generation are learning ethics through religion. I'm not religious and I don't believe that religion is necessary for ethics, but I do recognize that religion was a traditional vehicle for introducing young people to an ethical system.

Grade-school civics is one solution, but I think there are some other family- and community-based ways (religious or otherwise) we can raise the next generation with a strong ethical code.

There can also be secular ethics classes in early high school. I had one in my private school. We covered virtue ethics, deontological ethics, utilitarianism and briefly outline some modern material. Won't give people a great understanding but should at least introduce them to the concept and give them a foundation they can use to learn more

Teaching a particular brand of ethics (religion) over 18 years while a child is growing up as a member of their community is very different from teaching a survey about different ethical systems at a high school level crammed into a semester. The outcome of the latter is "there's a lot of different ways to look at things." No moral compass has been installed.

I say this as a Philosophy degree holder. Arguably I have a lot of ethical training and it shapes some very abstract thinking, but learning all these systems and poking at them does not make me an ethical person.

Personally I got lucky that my parents instilled some decent values in me and taught me to value critical thinking skills. I'm not really sure what the solution is, an awful lot people are not getting that today.

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.

Also offers someone to blame for the problems that matter most to young males.

No girlfriend ? Race mixing and feminists.

Poor upbringing ? Foreigners.

Lack of respect ? Political correct culture.

What is "ideological substance"?

>It has little ideological substance

Fascism is an attempt to preserve tradition and meaning in an increasingly chaotic and senseless world. It creates order by demanding a return to organic hierarchical structures and by eliminating threats to a meaningful existence. Fascism is clearly incompatible with modern values which place the individual first. Individualism atomizes people rather than seeing them as part of a whole, and indeed today people lack the feeling of togetherness that is brought about by striving collectively for a higher cause. Some people can experience it fleetingly in the modern world—soldiers, for example—but it’s rare that a fire rages within anybody anymore. Everyone dedicates their lives working toward some cause and under some underlying pretense, but what is it that gives your life’s work meaning and to what end does your effort go? Now put yourself in the shoes of the teenagers who are so seduced by fascism or any other system that promises to give meaning to life. It’s not hard to imagine that in those turbulent formative years one would favor a way of life that, on one hand connects you to your past (culturally, geographically, spiritually), and on the other hand provides some hope that your efforts today are not going to be in vain—what meaning does your life’s work have if you expect the next generation to tear it down? You say fascism has little ideological substance. Its substance, to use your frame, is the preservation of meaning. Odds are, your ideology is rooted in modern norms that stand at odds with nature. They deprive the world of meaning. I would argue that that is worse than fascism.

This is an interesting cryptofascist argument: The world has meaning, and denying that meaning is an artifice which leads to alienation and atomization.

A counterpoint: There is obviously no such thing as meaning in the traditional/religious/corporatist sense. Chomsky, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Tarski, etc. hammered this particular peg into the ground last century.[0] Additionally, the natural/artificial divide doesn't matter; there is no such thing as an artificial society.[1] Therefore this "return to organic hierarchical structures" is a fascist resurrection myth, and "eliminating threats to a meaningful existence" is fascist fear of the Other.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski's_undefinability_theore... is a reasonable entrypoint to these concepts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto...

Different societies can be more or less functional with respect to a given set of values.

And besides, if someone complains about something being artificial, I'm not sure what matters is the appeal to nature so much as complaining about the thing being rigid and insufficient.

The word 'fascist' in your post doesn't seem to mean much. I can replace it with 'bad' and it doesn't seem the change the meaning.

"this [...] is a bad resurrection myth, and [...] is a bad fear of the Other."

I 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.

That was not my interpretation at all, especially in the part where he interviews marchers and finds that some of their beliefs are "internally inconsistent"

What do their beliefs matter, if his own are consistent? That's just association fallacy.

We're literally talking about how this teen decided who is trustworthy. As pointed out in the article, googling around to confirm GAVE HIM "confirmation". Recognizing that their views fell apart under inspection despite the previous confirmation required (as written, at least) above-average critical thinking.

This is a little too... optimistic in my opinion. I dislike both nazis and commies, but it seems clear to me that there are deep and irreconcilable value and cultural conflicts at play in society. Ultimately, these groups do not "speak the same language of Good and Evil," as Nietzsche would say, and are potential precursors to new societies. They should be allowed to part ways, permanently, in my opinion.

How can any of us part ways permanently? We're all inhabiting the same world.

Well, this world has formal boundaries we call borders. Beyond that, it's a big universe...

I know this sounds a bit glib, but I'm deadly serious about this. There are geopolitical complications, yes, as well as some additional complexity when it comes to commerce, but all in all, more regime diversity seems like a good path towards lessened internal social tension.

This article sounds like a mother immersed in social media not parenting her child’s social media access. There is probably some level of gullibility and influence from each of their online habits.

I don’t have any sympathy for the problems here, and I can say that as a parent of two teenagers. Parent your damn children and stop relying on media to form your opinions for you. The cliche some of friends use to explain this failure is: You’ve made your bed, now sleep in it.

It's going to be such a long slog until the election.

Already, there is an increase in the number of articles meant to subtly smear people. Call them racists, neo Nazis, extremists, etc. On the other side, photos of Antifa, anarchists and other extremists will be shown.

Please do your best to look for the truth. The vast, vast majority of people are good. (To be sure, there are some bad ones. But they do not dramatically increase in number as an election draws near!)

It is completely evil to sow the seeds of fear, doubt and hatred in this manner. Please look to the good in people. Turn away from the hatred.

Edit: I am in no way excusing neo Nazis, alt-right, alt-left, Antifa, etc. I am saying that these nutballs are few and far in between. Almost everybody you meet out on the street today is going to be a decent person.

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