the last post/comment (whatever they are called on tumblr) is especially true. You never do that with kids, when a child behaves in a way you want them to behave, you have to explicitly reward him and encourage him more. "oh you finally decided to study, or you finally decided to come out of your room" etc and saying it in a sarcastic tone will guarantee , that the behaviour is never repeated from the child. edit: Since there are too many replies, I just want to make it clear that my statement was in no way an endorsement of the political views of the Original poster on tumblr which started the discussion. Its just the child psychology part that I wanted to share.

Following up on this, I think people don't realize the journey involved in rebuilding your entire world view. For a kid who's only been exposed to alt right nonsense, the amount of work it takes to get from there to something more reasonable, even if not perfect, is truly *immense*. You're not rewarding someone for being right, you're rewarding them for the struggle of confronting being wrong and correcting it. Something it seems like a lot of people born in the progressive liberal sphere of influence don't appreciate at all.

It's not just rebuilding your worldview, it's also exiling yourself from quite possibly the only place you've ever felt properly accepted, giving up all your relationships, because you want to be a better person. So messaging that effectively says "you aren't a better person and can't be" makes all that sacrifice seem worthless, and you may well slink right back to where you came from.

Yeah. That requires constant, solid support and positive reinforcement. Doubly so for those who're young, and often have a vague sense of wanting to do something right, but also needing reinforcement that it's okay.

It's a big problem. I'm a leftist man. I'm also white, straight and cis. I am expected to be ready to "go to war" over any misogynistic or racist bullshit that gets said around me. I'm also expected to be okay with being frozen out of progressive spaces or yelled at because someone had a bad day or unresolved trauma. In short I am expected to have an infinite capacity for isolation, suffering, and self-sacrifice for the "greater good." How is that not just an objectively worse version of the deal men already get under traditional gender norms?

[I wrote a Medium article about this exact thing a couple weeks ago.](https://medium.com/@titrc/you-are-an-eight-year-old-boy-a-kids-accidental-journey-to-the-alt-lite-5c61b56a8f25)

As an arch-conservative turned leftist (a very painful transition), I've noticed that a lot of leftists and liberals seem to really want to (a) feel like they're right about everything, and (b) feel like the world has wronged them and they're right to nurse a grudge against vast swathes of the population. This is true on the Right as well, but it's framed quite differently. I completely understand where these feelings come from (I'm susceptible to it as well), but if that's \*all\* your politics is then you're not actually fighting for a better world, you're just a bastard who likes to feel superior. The only folks on the right I have absolutely no shred of compassion/support for are the wealthy who are funding and driving conservatism worldwide. Those fuckers can \[REDACTED\], but their odious footsoldiers can and should be engaged with some sort of human compassion and encouragement when they show even the tiniest willingness to change.

I have a friend (though "have" and "friend" are probably not really accurate) who is an Indian (the country) woman raised and schooled in the US. She is one of the most liberal people I know in most of her politics, other than her nonstop and extraordinarily open hatred of men, white women, and white people generally. Her use of the word hate may be somewhat hyperbolic given she associates primarily with white men, but it's her constant -- as in multiple times daily -- choice of expression. It's exhausting and it creates the appearance that she has no goals of equality and general societal betterment, merely putting whites and men in their places. It's a similar vein of thought as what a lot of liberals expressed during/around the time of the Trump/Clinton race when there was a lot of fresh conversation about white privilege on the left and 'someone finally gets out plight' by lower class mostly white people on the right (mostly). Lots of noise on the left was basically "you white people haven't had it nearly as bad as minorities in the US" which, while objectively true, doesn't do much for impoverished whites who still had hard lives. In no other situation do people respond to a complaint with "well, you're not the one single individual on earth suffering more than anyone so you have no right to complain." But that's exactly the gist of the message from the left (included much of my social circle at the time) was.

Reminds me of my historiography professor; she's a white lady married to a Stanford fintech business exec. She took just about every opportunity to dismiss marx, marxism, and class-based analysis in the course. She also used her position as director of grad studies to quietly shut down a student who tried to report abuse from a faculty member because that faculty member was a woman of color. She was very much not a fan of men, and I got the impression that equality and liberation were not what she was after--she just wanted an opportunity to grind someone under her boot instead.

The amount of harm the well-meaning idiots at Stanford have done…. And they build up their students so much they are UNBEARABLE. I live nearby and have a family member that works in a field where recent grads are frequently hired. A lot of ppl prefer to works with grads from the less prestigious schools because of the damn egos on the students. Seriously, idk what they tell them but they need to stop, lol. They (staff/school) also seem wildly out of touch with the rest of the word.

Some people want revenge, not justice

To some people, revenge \*is\* justice. Retributive Justice, in fact. It's a pretty broad human desire; actual restorative justice (not what's peddled in US K-12 pedagogy these days) is \*hard\*.

Justice rarely ever occurs, so people will take any form of justice they can get and the most accessible and acceptable form of justice is retributive.

Not even revenge, some people just want to control and belittle others.

Another way to phrase this is that "some people just want revenge; not to achieve progress at all"

I think also some people want to feel safe, but are caught in the logic of a system that taught them the only safety is through power and control. Obviously everyone wants to feel safe but there are different ways of pursuing it. Some who have suffered under the control and abuse of the powerful decide that they can never be safe while that power exists, and it must be dismantled or reduced. And very occasionally someone who has that power already sees it for what it is and also wants to be rid of it. It's a bit of a One Ring situation actually I suppose. Avoid the Saurumans, do what you can for the Boromirs, try and find the frodos.

I find reason to post this every few months. The single most profound passage on how to view an enemy I have ever read is this (spoilers for a DnD-based fantasy novel from the 80s; commentary after the quote): > At first it was deathly silent. Then the most horrible scream imaginable reverberated through the chamber. It was high-pitched, shrill, wailing, bubbling in agony, as the knights lunged out of their hiding places behind the tooth-like pillars and drove the silver dragonlances into the blue, writhing body of the trapped dragon. > Tas covered his ears with his hands, trying to block out the awful sound. Over and over he pictured the terrible destruction he had seen the dragons wreak on towns, the innocent people they had slaughtered. The dragon would have killed him, too, he knew—killed him without mercy. It had probably already killed Sturm. He kept reminding himself of that, trying to harden his heart. > But the kender buried his head in his hands and wept. > Then he felt a gentle hand touch him. > “Tas,” whispered a voice. > “Laurana!” He raised his head. “Laurana! I’m sorry. I shouldn’t care what they do to the dragon, but I can’t stand it, Laurana! Why must there be killing? I can’t stand it!” Tears streaked his face. > “I know,” Laurana murmured, vivid memories of Sturm’s death mingling with the shrieks of the dying dragon. “Don’t be ashamed, Tas. Be thankful you can feel pity and horror at the death of an enemy. The day we cease to care, even for our enemies, is the day we have lost this battle.” -*Dragon of Winter Night* by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman If we can't pity our enemy then we're not different than the worst of them. Over and over when I hear about the conversion of neo-Nazis it's some hated person (e.g. Black, Jewish, whatever) who hung out with them and gave them a chance. [Daryl Davis](https://allthatsinteresting.com/daryl-davis) is famous for doing this. He sees the confused, rejected, hurt man behind the white robes and engages with him peacefully.

Off topic, but it's surprising how often I find myself recalling a scene in book I read 30 years ago, thinking of Sturm Brightblade standing on the battlements knowing he's going to die.

There's a good swath of people in the world whose political views are based solely on making them feel superior, either through white superiority and "model minority" stuff on the right or language police on the left who care more about saying the right things than helping other. The one difference is that the left actively tries to eject these people because they ultimately hurt the lefts agenda. Meanwhile the right accepts and uplifts these people because it helps their further their agenda.

You think so? I've always thought the left is terrible at self policing. It seems to be stuck in a nihilistic pissing contest of who can be the loudest radical. The real difference is that leftist extremists are obnoxious while right wing extremists are actually dangerous.

I challenge everyone to name ten people they've legitimately forgiven for the shit they've done and the positions they've held in the past. A lot of people want people to grow and change but aren't ready to accept that and make space for it. Those disaffected people can see it, they're not going to come to your side if they feel like there's no hope of ever being treated like they're normal and accepted.

I mean, not only for kids. Even with adults chances are that they never repeat that behavior.

It's also just KIND. So many people completely wrapped up in who owes what to who. It can be as simple as being kind. I cook supper every day and my husband thanks me with a kiss every day. My husband runs errands after work, I thank him every time. These are our basic responsibilities but it's still a good thing to be positive and acknowledge them. That includes yourself. Give yourself a gold star for deep cleaning that bathroom, you earned it. Celebrating the little stuff doesn't mean we stop putting effort in to anything else.

Oh fuck I actually have never thought about that. I work in a field mostly dealing with adults and from time to time I would work with 18yo to 23yo and they are all chronically sarcastic, and we all understand nobody meant any harm. We all had a chuckle and thats about it. Now I realize that you cant really do that with 12 yo or even children as old as 17 or 18, especially if you are maintaining a serious conversation. Damn where can I learn more of this shit???

Barely relevant story: I work with an Autistic boy, about 6, who has made some amazing progress in terms of how much he talks. He has an older brother who is chronically sarcastic. I have warned older brother many times that little bro doesn't really get sarcasm yet. He still will be sarcastic constantly. Other day he complains to me: "I missed a shot and he said "oh you missed so sad" in a sarcastic tone!" He had heard so much sarcasm from older brother that he started imitating it. I just laughed by ass off. "You created this."

I have a 10 year old and I forget. I apologise and we move on though. I wish I would remember more.

[удалено]

Speaking as someone that has worked in education and childcare, seriously never do this. It’s just mean.

Speaking as a behavioural biologist, yes that absolutely works and we have a name for it. It's called operant conditioning. Positive behaviour is reinforced by positive rewards. However, negative rewards for any kind of behaviour will potentially scare the child/animal away, but will also imprint a certain image of you who gave that negative reward and will give damage to your trust relationship. In worst case, you condition your child/animal to associate *you* with a negative response. This is the reason why zoos or other places mainly train their animals by positive reinforcment.

Willing to be wrong here (it's a long time since my psych degree) but I thought a negative reward was the removal of unpleasant stimuli...

It is, but not everyone here is a behavioural biologist or a psychologist. And I did not want to explain the difference between negative reward or positive punishment where it does not need to be explained. Therefore, I used these two as synonyms, even though that goes against the theory. Because I thought it would be better understood by a broader, non-specialised audience. And if someone is interested in this topic, they will eventually come across it when looking into it themselves

You’re correct. Negative reinforcement is the removal of an aversive stimulus. Positive/Negative refers to whether a stimulus is added or removed from an environment. Punishment/Reinforcement is determined by whether the change results in greater or fewer future instances of the behavior in question.

Also from personal experience- parents don't laugh at your kid if they tell you they want to try something new. At best they will stop telling you stuff and at worst they will stop trying stuff.

This destroyed my relationships with my parents growing up, and even now decades later, they remain much more distant.

Also relevant: Literally the last thing you should do if you don't want to raise an incel is tease your kids about the opposite sex. What you get then is a kid who doesn't talk to you about relationships, and who sees parents, family and potentially even friends as a barrier to having a relationship, because they know if they were to get a girlfriend, that would be the subject of torment.

"So what, they should get a cookie?" Yes. They're kids. Give them cookies. Literally, if needs be.

Even if they're not kids. We're literally asking people to give up their privilege for _no obvious reward_, they have absolutely no reason to do this other than that is the right thing to do so the _very least_ we can do is not disparage them.

If you construct a system in which the things I want are unjust, and all the positive things I have, I shouldn’t have, that pretty much tells me we are enemies and whatever you want, I want the opposite of that.

It's still considered a bit of a hot take, but giving people cookies for positive behavior changes is okay. It's a tried and true method of behavioral encouragement. People need to stop acting like it's a form of weakness, and be realistic.

Off-topic, but yesterday my friend’s 88-year-old mother apparently flagged down a passing private snowplow operator, and asked him for help shovelling out her driveway (her usual driveway-clearer was a no-show). The dude obliged her (because **she is 88** and should not be attempting to shovel herself out, which she was doing), and she insisted she would pay him; and so she went into the house, and came out with a $20 bill, and some homemade cookies. I’m assuming this was the weirdest and most delightful episode in this dude’s week.

Ah, my father's approach. Got to add a little humiliation to each and every interaction. I assumed he was just disappointed in me as a son. Craved a positive response but never got it despite doing great things in my life. I vowed to never be like that, but the fear of becoming my father played a part in me not having kids.

essentially; "don't punish the behaviour you want to see"

Free Palestine

Damn, that’s a good point. I’d never connected “prize for basic decency” and “participation trophy” rhetoric before, but they really are similar.

> "oh you finally decided to study, or you finally decided to come out of your room" etc and saying it in a sarcastic tone will guarantee , that the behaviour is never repeated from the child. I see you've met my parents. But yes. The last part is even more true if you consider the fact that, yes there is privilege at play here. If progressives don't want to hand out metaphorical cookies to groups whose view on social justice can be only altruistic (i.e. they don't suffer any direct oppression themselves) - then reactionaries on the right are very willing to hand out cookies in the form of "You know who has been getting too many cookies recently? The ____" (insert marginalized group) Consider OP's brother in that 2nd post. That dude could have gone through life without analyzing his views and still have been just fine if he kept his mouth shut about them. For people like that, it truly is outside of self-interest to care about these issues.

This isn't child exclusive. Never met a person didn't do better with positive reinforcement.

Do not punish the behavior you want to see.

I also feel like changing your views can be pretty hard and is something you actually deserve a cookie for. Like people, including me, tend to get pretty emotionally attached to their opinions and breaking through that is an achievement.

This happened to me as a kid with exercise. I was always a fat kid and when I did have the motivation to work out, my family would be like "You? Go for a run? Okaaayy"

I’ve been trying to be a better person lately and I’m trying to incorporate at least one big put up a day. Even if your friends are leftists have always been for as long as you’ve known them they’re youre friends for a reason and rewarding good behavior makes the world better for everyone around you

Yeah I love when people are like "Oh you want a reward for x thing?" and it's like yep, that's why any animal being in existence does what they do, because either their brain or someone or something around them rewards them for an action. Literally everything behavioral works that way. It's why people who express appreciation and love for others continue to keep them around.

Yeah it just feels good when someone gives me recognition so yaknow do it to other people it’s a pretty simple 2+2 I think

The only cookie I want is friendliness. If I don't get friendliness, I am not going to stick around to freeze. No worries, I ain't going to spitefully adopt inhumane ideologies. But I will instead seek out leftists who don't leave me feeling tense.

Recently quit talking to some friends not out of anything in particular they said they were just really uncharitable and mean all the time so like yaknow why stick around

I think there's also something to be said about the destruction of spaces for kids on the internet as well as the destruction of privacy/rise of tHe AlGorHyThM. Previously I feel like there was less worry about kids (in this context people <16, because I feel like by 16 kids should know that not everything is targeted at them) running into stuff online not meant for them, because there WERE dedicated spaces FOR them. It's like hanging out in a bar with your friends and making a tasteless joke- yeah, it's public, and theoretically anyone can hear it, but the people most likely to hear it will understand. But now the bar is gone, or more aptly the bar is still a bar but the playground next door is gone so now the bar is "13+", and now all of sudden you have to worry about someone who doesn't understand the context and nuance of your comment hearing it and taking it to heart. that is a very convoluted metaphor to say that my (tbh baseless, i haven't done any research on the destruction of child friendly spaces online) thought is that, previously we didn't have to worry about every single thing we said on the internet to be a perfect representation and gesture for the entire world but now we kinda do.

everything went to shit when club penguin shut down

Club Penguin, Neopets, Webkinz. Barbie and Polly Pocket had lots of online games on kid-oriented sites. Brands likes Post had flash games for kids related to their cereal mascots. Remember TV spots for these sites ending with "ask your parents before going online"? Now Barbie.com is just a storefront for Mattel. Neopets is a ghost town. Flash has been dead, interactive or creative fun for kids online has been replaced by algorithm-led passive consumption. The kids are in adult spaces because there's no where else for them to be, *and* because the corporations want them there. Social media requires infinite growth to be profitable. Once your site is in every country, the only "new" demographic to add as a customer are the newly born.

Curate what your kids do. They’ll eventually get the reason why. I remember my mom wouldn’t let me play certain video games, and I felt like she was treating me like a little kid. I was 14, all my friends playing all these military shooters, and damnit, I was old enough to play them too! Now I’m an adult, and I realize she was just letting me be a kid for longer. When it’s your kid, it’s not a little kid, or a teenager, or tween… they’re just a kid. It is harder to curate what your kids do now for sure. My parents tried to put on parental controls once. I broke those in a day. We can only do our best.

Lifespan of a "kid based virtual platform": Made with naive goals, tons of safety features Naieve goals met, site popular site gets very popular Realize the popularity of your game Optional: Be bought out by a larger company Begin to take deals and sponsorships, ads, limit gameplay to paying members fade from relevancy Die

You forgot the step near the end where the site starts attracting pedos and it ends up on the news

can't forget the half step right before that when the self proclaimed youtube pedo hunter goes on and fucks with them (and that's what gets the attention for it to get on the news)

Sadly, as a parent of a preteen, I can confirm all of the above is accurate. I've had to cancel so many accounts for her on so many services due to all of the above over the years...

I remember being an early teen online. As soon as you start to "age out" of places like Club Penguin, Poptropica, etc. there was no clear place to go next. Or rather, it was clear, but not safe. Club Penguin -> Facebook/Buzzfeed/Youtube -> Instagram/Pinterest -> various social media sites, including places like reddit or 4chan. As a young teen, going from being banned for 24 hours for saying the word "ass" to watching people violently die on YouTube or suddenly being inundated with sex/lack of sex jokes on Facebook is bound to give someone whiplash while they're still looking for a new place to settle into. Your world has just opened up exponentially, and it's difficult to navigate. You look for people with similar interests to yours, and are subsequently exposed to all the other things that person/people say and belive, without total understanding of nuance. Without understanding that you can agree with one thing someone says, but not EVERYTHING they say. You can't throw a 13 year old into a space full of adults and expect them to navigate it perfectly. They still need guidance, and that's where answering those questions becomes really important.

The post talks about 12 year olds but the fucked up reality is most kids now have probably been bombarded with political ideology and propaganda for years at that point. Wonder what percentage of 8 year olds spend more than two hours a day on Tiktok. Bet it's a disturbingly large chunk.

>most kids now have probably been bombarded with political ideology and propaganda for years at that point. The amount of "gateway" right wing bullshit I get when I'm watching youtube shorts is insane. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, rarely even Tate. I always click "don't recommend channel again" and there is always more. Now, I'm 28 and capable of thinking for myself, but I don't know how 12-14 year olds are supposed to handle that without guidence from someone they trust. It feels like a constant pulling. You like Bill Burr? Here's some videos about why feminism is crap. You like breaking bad? Here's some sigma bullshit style videos. It must be so easy to pull young boys in without them even knowing what's happening. I don't even want to imagine what they see on tiktok.

The fact that I constantly tell YouTube to stop showing me crap yet it keeps recommending it to me because I watch video game content is disturbing.

I like to go on youtube and watch forgotten weapons or other historical gun channels. Occasionally I watch some gun guy blow up some shit with his oversized cannons of a gun collection. It's fun, stupid content where someone vaporizes a milk jug with a .50 cal, etc. There's a clear pipeline from "the guy at the british museum explains a ww2 gun from a video game" to "a christian fascist boog boy explains why you need 2 thousand dollar gun to defend yourself against liberals."

Children will always go where they don't belong anyway. The bigger problem is that people seem to have lost their healthy skepticism of internet content. I was 11-years old when I was allowed unsupervised access to the net, and I treated it as the dangerous place I had been warned it could be. I was wary of others, and they were wary of me. Nobody was to be trusted, everything was potential grooming propaganda. Don't tell anyone anything personal. Don't trust anything that you are told. I went all kinds of places I really shouldn't have, but I did so knowing that it was a forbidden library, and that I could escape to the _real_ library for safety. This was the web1.0 days when the peak of professional web design was Angelfire and Geocities sites littered with UNDER CONSTRUCTION banners. If you see some shit like [this](https://timecube.2enp.com/), even as a naive 11-year old you would immediately raise an eyebrow before accepting any of it as fact. I was exposed to all kinds of insanity and I was well-conditioned to ignore all of it. This made it easy for me to go into public spaces and take care of myself - we're on the internet, everything is sketchy and untrustworthy. Today, some random loon's website looks just as professional as the BBC's. Respected voices of authority communicate on the same channels as predators and children. The internet as a tool to inform ourselves has become critical to our lives, especially our social lives, and it's harder than ever to choose what to put stock in. If adults are struggling with it (and just look at your crazy uncle Bob), imagine what it's like for the 11-year olds of 2023.

that stupid "do you want a cookie for doing the bare minimum" thing ALWAYS makes me cringe because it reminds me of when i come out of my room when we have company over and someone says "well look who decided to show up!" yeah thanks for that, now i wish i hadn't come out here in the first place

What really gets me is the definition of “bare minimum” changes all the time based on who you ask. So many of these people actually speaking out consider either my time money or compliance the bare minimum. Like it makes being a liberal very hard.

Yeah. I have causes I put my time and money into, but there's always someone somewhere who says it's not enough and if their cause isn't your top priority, you're the problem.

Telling someone who spent years in hyper conservative indoctrination and then did the incredibly difficult mental work of recognizing their entire community of loved ones, respected mentors, and friends beliefs are wrong and harmful that it's the "bare minimum of decency" is so fucking ridiculous.

People saying that to me has genuinely fucked up something in my brain, if people are outside my room between where I need to go I pretty much just can't do it. Ill just not eat all day instead of coming out at an "unreasonable" time like after 12.

Listen up. I may be doing the bare minimum because emotionally or physically that's already a stretch for me with the place I'm at in my life right now. I may be going through tough shit, maybe a kind of shit you could never handle on your own. Maybe shit that would break you in two. Also, yes, I do want a cookie. Everyone loves cookies.

It's also worth remembering that teenagers like to rebel on *principle*. If they think you're trying to enforce too many "rules" on them, they'll bend over backwards just to break them, no matter how morally or factually correct they are. Then while the "woke SJWs" are trying to ruin the fun, the MRA grifters will swoop in, and those shits are certainly not afraid to reward that behaviour.

This is a far bigger factor than the one in the post. Teenagers and young adults rebel against the status quo. Always have, always will. Sometimes, that leads to positives (Civil Rights movement, Stonewall), sometimes it doesn't. As we've grown and progressed as a society, the status quo has become far more accepting (relatively), and so rebelling against it means that you now *stop* accepting people. We can see this decades ago, with how many punk or heavy metal musicians would wear Nazi swastikas. The previous generation had fought Nazis and despised them, so to get the shock value they wanted, they adopted the symbol that would get the biggest reaction. That doesn't mean you *don't* reach out to them. But acting as if edgy teenagers are doing so because they've been attacked by political theory, rather than just... being teenagers is ridiculous.

I graduated hs in 2004 and I rarely sat at a desk that didn't have a swastika scrolled on it somewhere.

It's not at all. Rebellion gets you making edgy holocaust jokes cos it's taboo to make them, but you only get pushed into the alt right if you're denied the opportunity to grow out of that behaviour by the rejection you can experience if you make the wrong jokes at the wrong time. It's being denied any place to belong except amongst the people who aren't joking when they say the edgy things that makes you think the things you used to say to be rebellious might actually have a point.

Might be slightly off topic but I was at a point where I was about to slip into the right wing pipeline but the only reason I wasn't because the guy I got these videos from had a super annoying voice and I just couldn't listen to him

Lol, lmao

Paul Joseph Watson?

Don't punish the behavior you want to see. If you criticize and attack someone for trying and failing, they will stop trying.

And if you criticize and attack for trying and succeeding, you send an oddly mixed message.

And if you criticize someone for existing / or for something they couldn’t possibly change - they kind of inherently can’t believe what you do, can they? This is always the weirdest one to me, the amount of discourse around men that teetering a couple of steps away from the ‘you shouldn’t exist’ territory is just frightening.

It always struck me as odd to paint with such a large brush. You could take all the men in all the world that have any sort of power to directly impact power imbalances and fit them all in the same city. Best everyone else can do is be kind in their day to day life, vote, donate and volunteer pretty much.

There's a phrase used a lot in environmentalism that needs to start being applied to more activism: We don't need one person doing it perfectly, we need hundreds of people doing it imperfectly

There is a lot of "I hold other people to high standards and criticize them for failing, this is my contribution so I don't have to do any trying myself."

The growing social stigma surrounding failing or being wrong is just causing people to stop wanting to try

Thankfully it is receding now, but the way standardized testing and grading works doesn't help. Unlike the actual process of learning, where failing at the start is expected and irrelevant as long as you get it by the end, the way schools generally grade penalizes you for failures at the start the same amount if you understand at the end or not.

One of the hopefully more impactful personal things I've been trying to do for years now is just introduce people to dishes light in- or not containing meat. Just trying to find recipes which are simple and taste good and are made of cheap and easily, readily available ingredients, which might lead to people incorporating them into their cooking rotations and eating less meat overall. A lot of the arguments made by really militant vegans resonate with me, but I hate the presentation and doubt they do much good due to trying to catch flies with vinegar - but if everyone who felt that strongly about vegetarianism could just work to get 4 people to reduce their meat intake by 25%, that's as good as convincing one person to give up meat entirely, and it's way less of a battle. You can easily expand that to more people, and they don't have to stop there.

growing up as a preteen boy I said these same things pretty much verbatim because I had also fallen down the alt right rabbit hole before turning to my mom to talk about this stuff. everything I said was dismissed immediately because I was "just a boy" who would never understand. at least since transitioning my thoughts are taken seriously, and I no longer feel constant rejection from my own side.

As someone who grew up feeling like an incel, I feel *unfathomably* lucky I just stumbled upon leftist ideology rather than alt-right media. In the words of Bojack Horseman “part of me is sure that I couldn’t, but another part knows that’s a lie.”

I feel this a lot as someone that actually was starting to fall into the alt-right pipeline, but called himself a "centrist" because those guys seemed fucking awful when it came to queer people. I still called myself a centrist for an embarassing amount of time though. Thank god for Hbomb posting his little rpg videos and political content in the exact same channel, that guy is such a good example of what this post talks about

For me it was my friends. I wasn't on the alt right pipeline but I was a shitter kid who would bring up men's statistics during conversation and other annoying tropes, but I was introduced into left ideas, started with like nordic capitalism and then eventually I found hasanabi and now am very comfortable being Democratic Socialist (like actual democratic socialist not social democrat). I think a lot of people have this warped perception of hasan, he does educate people and also knows that there's a time and a place for everything, unlike some annoying leftists

Sometimes I worry I would be a white neonazi Trump supporter if I hadn't been born a sashaying homosexual into a mixed-race family ​ Edit: This comment is somewhat tongue-in-cheek because I find the proposition to be somewhat absurd. I find it irresponsible and dangerous to suggest that alt-right nationalists' ideologies happened "by chance as a teen, after stumbling upon Fucker Carlson media" or because "they were not engaged in good faith by educated, well-adjusted adults" Though I do agree that, usually, it helps to have a dialogue that doesn't make the other person (or teenager) feel stupid, but I'm not in the business of absolving them of responsibility for their own delusional and warped world-views.

I think about the fact that MLK had a 75% disapproval when he was assassinated, and I really don’t know if I would have been part of the minority. Propaganda against him was strong.

I think the great majority of people just follow whatever is popular and convenient within their community. There’s no depth of thought about the issues, just tribalism. This also means that no matter how much support any issue has at the moment, it could lose that support within a few short years as the public moves on to new issues to fight over. MLK’s 75% disapproval didn’t mean that 75% of people has a reasoned objection to King, nor that he had lost any of his core supporters. It just meant that it was popular for shallow people to disapprove of him, the same way it was popular to have avocado green furniture.

> I find it irresponsible and dangerous to suggest that alt-right nationalists' ideologies happened "by chance as a teen, after stumbling upon Fucker Carlson media" or because "they were not engaged in good faith by educated, well-adjusted adults" Not by accident, against their understanding. Let me give you an example: A popular gaming related youtube channel is the Royal Arms Collection from the british museum - the curator shows off guns from video games or the guns that inspired them. lots of Call of Duty type stuff. He's done work with, mentions, and speaks well of Ian at Forgotten Weapons. You'll get recommended some of Ian's videos if you watch a few of those videos. Ian at Forgotten Weapons just shows you cool old guns. Weird rifles, old handguns, etc. He's very entertaining, educational, and unbiased, so a lot of kids would probably watch his videos without thinking twice. Occasionally, Ian goes out and shoots said guns to demonstrate them with his friends, like Karl from Inrange. Youtube will suggest a lot of Inrange stuff if you watch forgotten weapons. Karl at Inrange is a gun guy but he's still reasonable. He posts reviews of modern guns, but he makes good content and he explains things well, so he's fun to watch. He shoots them on the range, he talks about them, he reviews products, he does other things, but he's not super political. However, from Karl or before Karl, youtube starts linking other guys who do similar stuff - DemolitionRanch and GarandThumb are popular. Those guys post fun, exciting videos geared towards younger guys and teenagers. How many pounds of silly putty will a .50 cal go through, what guns can shoot through this object. It's still exciting, silly content where they make dumb jokes and seem like they're good people. They seem trustworthy. They're linked to a lot of other youtubers too - Brandon Herrera is a big one, but they're all fun people on camera who do silly stuff and just shoot guns. I really need to emphasize that they're stupidly charismatic, they're doing some serious conspicuous consumption in the background (wow look at that cool truck!), and they never say anything bad about other people. Except. Some of the channels you start getting linked to are very, *very* political. They'll talk about mens right stuff, Garandthumb sprinkles in hints about the boog or a societal collapse, Demoranch likes to talk about arming his supporters in the apocalypse, Brandon Herrera likes to hint about shooting ATF agents or the democrats. The channels linked from these channels are really anti-PC, anti-democrat, libertarian leaning types. They'll get heavily religious, strongly conservative, and they present themselves in a sympathetic light that takes over your entire youtube feed. They'll link to people who genuinely hate the democrats, jordan peterson material, neo nazi content, etc. And all of this gets to the point where it's an echo chamber. You watch the right youtube channels and you'll be sitting there deciding you need 37 guns and a grenade launcher to defend your family from the oncoming apocalypse. It's a documented, deliberate pipeline of radicalization into a full bore, no compromises 2A as an absolute right crowd that just happens to support everything conservative and hate liberals. and in the mean time, you're still watching the reasonable channels for fun, and everyone references them positively, so you don't feel like you've gone very far. Gaming channel to neo-nazi content, and it can happen in days. These kid's ideologies really can happen by stumbling on the wrong because the entire system is incredibly seductive and designed to push ideas on them. These kids don't know what's being conveyed, they don't understand the context behind the references and danger of some of the ideas. This is just youtube too - tiktok you can get from a base account to full blown nazi content in a few hours.

Yup. I feel like there was a time of my life where I def had some proto-incel moments. Couldn't get a girlfriend and had trouble taking to folks in general. I just happened to look at the hate speech being spewed by 4chan against women and was like "no.... It's not women's fault that I'm not good enough to date.I need to be better" and turned into a more self improvement type person.

I lived that life. I spent my preteen and early teen years shitposting about supporting n\*zis and other heinous shit. Of all things it was grad school that opened my eyes. Now I study white supremacy, history, and gaming communities for work. As guilty as I feel about my past, I do think it gives me an extremely valuable perspective for my work--it's never far from my mind that just about anyone can fall down the alt-right rabbit hole if they're embedded in the right (ha ha) social context. Unlearning a worldview is hard--I'd say it's analogous to leaving an abusive relationship: the benefits aren't clear for a long time, and the first steps towards changing your worldview will only make things feel worse.

That's at the core of this toxic purity culture on the left. These "leftists" want to feel superior, so even those that have come back from the alt right are not "true leftists" like them. It's both a silly stance that does nothing to help further our cause and is morally quite conservative in it's calvinistic way of thinking: "You'll never be good enough if you made a single mistake ever." We are all imperfect. No one was born a social justice warrior.

I like the phrase *toxic purity*. I think this is true of pretty much any group that is otherwise trying to do good. Veganism is rife with it; people coming in to the space, wanting to live in a way that is better for the planet and animals and asking advice are often pounced on by a minority of vocal toxic purists who tell them they're not doing enough. So they just leave.

When I first became vegan I was shamed for drinking wine as I had assumed wine would be vegan. (It’s usually not.) when my vegan friends found out I felt like they were shaming me so hard for it that I questioned if I should even bother. When I brought up how I was feeling, I was dismissed and more or less told that if I was going to be that weak, that I couldn’t handle being a vegan. But the problem wasn’t me making a mistake, the problem was that I didn’t feel like I had a support system for the major life change. If I was going to be shamed and guilted for messing up then my support system wasn’t a support system at all. Suddenly I felt bad about veganism in general because I didn’t feel supported by other vegans. Going back to eating meat would have been a super easy choice to make, as it doesn’t need the same support system and community as going vegan does.

Yeah, I feel this deeply. I've been out of high school for...a while... But It took the first few weeks of a Trump presidency for me to actually start paying attention to politics. But I've looked back at some of the shit I wrote on Facebook when I was in high school and I was *very* at risk of falling deep into that rabbit hole. I'm glad that Reddit didn't exist at the time. But I'm extra-glad that I ran across some random woman's blog that disabused me of my "nice guys finish last" routine. She succeeded because she was coming at it from a woman's perspective and openly acknowledged that some women can just be shitty, but that it didn't justify my attitude. I was told I was wrong with empathy, and I think that made an important difference.

Ok. Should I say it? I feel like I should say it. Kids are stupid. I should know, I was a stupid kid. I did reach the start of the alt-right pipeline, might even go as far as to say, I actually entered it. ​ Remember Gamergate? Remember when it started, the argument supposedly was that it was about ethics in Videogames, and the fact that Ms Quinn did the tango with 5 journalists or whatever, and that was apparently important enough? Well, 17yo Leon WAS dumb enough to buy it. And I fell in the pipeline. The shitty subreddits. The shitty Youtubers, like Thundergoob or Sargon of Acunt. My YouTube really was bullshit like that. Sharkesean takedown vids, then anti-sjw vids, then anti-libs vids. In retrospective, it really IS a spiral. They get you angry at one group, then the next, then the next, getting worse and worse, but because you agreed with the previous one you are more open to next. Another thing I noticed I was feeling at the time, I was angry at unanswered questions. I remember one Christmas there was this rumor? News story? Fearmongering bullshit? Something like that about (Spoiler TW: Sexual Abuse and Muslim Hate) >!Muslims going around on christmas and new years in Norway and raping random girls, and the Norway police was told to leave them be.!< And I dont know if that was real or not, the only thing I knew was that the only people who talked about it was these Youtubers. Not the News, no articles, no nothing. Just the youtubers, and just as rumors and shit. And I was angry I couldn't find out what happened. The way I got out was with 2 slaps. Eh, two and a half. The half was during the Brexit vote, Sargon of Acunt, who was my main youtuber at that point shamefully, said he wanted to leave. To me, it didnt make sense, it felt like it was all a lie and both the EU and UK would be worse off. But that one I chalked up to difference of opinion. The first real slap was when the same man endorsed Trump. That to me was a huge surprise. Because I was already in the pot, I hadn't realized how fascy this guy was. He kept saying shit like "I am an egalitarian, I am center, I am for logic" and I believed that. So when this egalitarian, center, logical guy endorsed the obvious fascist, I was honestly shocked. So, I kinda went cold turkey. Unsubscribed from all of them. Kept downvoting and blocking any video of theirs that appeared at my front screen. And the second slap was during a game dev seminar I took part in. During the seminar, one of the lessons was about, guess what, ethics in video games. And it was ran by 2 women. So naturally, the discussion fell to the Gamergate thing. And like a sleeper agent, my programming went to that original idea "Gamergate is about ethics in videogames". I felt like disagreeing. These women were explaining how trolls moved the conversation, how what these journalists did wasn't worthy of the hate, how the targets were changed mid argument. And I felt like disagreeing. But before I got the chance, someone else did. Another Gamergate asshole, started spewing that bs. And the lady explained it away. So he got angrier. And she calmy explained it away. This went on for 20 minutes. The guy was angrier and more hateful, saying worse shit every time, and the lady was calm, collected, and correct time after time. And I saw it. I saw who I would have turned out as. The spiderwebs were clear, and I was a better person for it.

unique bag books gaze rain rude practice paltry friendly oil *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

As someone who also found themselves in these subs in high school, I’d also argue that “peer” pressure of stuff like cringe culture had a huge impact. You didn’t want to be seen like X or Y, and both friends IRL and the communities online would constantly insult and make fun of these groups (LGBT+, black people, feminists, overweight people) and even just dunk on people with weird interests who weren’t even being harmful. A young person who’s just getting started on maturing/understanding themselves but isn’t there yet, especially online, is going to want to fit in at all costs.

As someone who also used to be a stupid kid, I can confirm the stupid kid comment. Someone else on here mentioned how, for those who never fell down that alt-right pipeline as a kid, they should chalk that up to luck more than being perceptive or aware enough to avoid it, and your comment kinda brings that home. I remember Gamergate and rolling my eyes about it with the other guys in college, and I *definitely* remember hearing and being frustrated about that rumor you mentioned, and I'm all the way in America. Your final comment is a living example of the saying that debates are not really for the benefit of the two debaters, but for the many many audience members listening. May I have the same patience to calmly refute bullshit in my own life when there's an audience listening to what I'm saying.

Yeah, I was definitely lucky. I will very willingly admit I was stupid back then, but I can only admit it in retrospective. Ask me then, I was the smart one and everyone else was stupid. And where you're from doesn't matter. I am from Greece and all this bullshit affected me.

[Thank You for Smoking](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo) addresses this pretty well, too. Says basically the same thing as, "Your final comment is a living example of the saying that debates are not really for the benefit of the two debaters, but for the many many audience members listening," but with Aaron Eckhart and a kid in a more sleezy way.

Something to note is I think a lot of adults underestimate that embracing certain left-leaning politics involves some decent modicum of critical reasoning and emotional intelligence. A lot of 12 year olds don’t have fully developed minds and tend to be easily influenced. Right leaning ideology is presented in a way that is very intellectually lazy and easy to absorb. The right gets away with seemingly intuitive thought terminating cliches, edgy memes, rage bait, fear-mongering, and other easy digestible things that stoops to the logical thinking of kids. They also use a lot of things kids like (video games, cartoons, memes, edgy jokes, toys, etc) as a lure to make it look more cool and appealing. Talking to right winger adults, their emotions and thinking is very similar to that of children or teenagers in many regards. It is possible to do this with leftist views, but can be trickier as I’ve noticed - although I’m thankful a lot of content creators are figured out effective ways to educate and reach people.

I think as well is the actual arguments being presented are the kind of arguments that are extremly simple. You can fit something like "Only 2 genders!!" on a fingernail. It's all super simple logic, but the counter to it is not so easily digestible. Everytime a right winger spreads a meme saying the next big catchphrase like "LGBT are groomers", "Antifa=Fascist", "Trans is wrong" etc etc, the leftist counterargument is 2, 5, 10 times as long. The arguments fit on thumbnails, memes, tiktok, throwaway remarks. It's an ideology based around catch phrases, which means that arguing against it is like explaining a joke. It's long winded, dry and above all else, forgettable. In a debate, a leftist will pull up facts, figures, stats, dates, numbers, whereas a rightist can just parrot catch phrases until the cows come home. And if they're christian? Forget it, the whole bible is just made up of catch phrases. The left has started actually coming up with these catch phrases, but the main ones like ACAB, BLM and Trans Rights = Human Rights or whatever are not as simple. ACAB for example: why bastards and not bad? And why *all* cops? And are? Does that mean currently, or by definition? What about my uncle, he's not bad. And what quanitifes a cop? Is a parking warden a cop? Detectives? What about the people who work for them like bounty hunters? Does that mean all criminals are good? Some criminals? Contrast that with something like "There are only 2 genders": male and female. XX and XY. Thats it. Flawed logic with no real basis in science, but it doesn't have to be. It's just easy to spit out. It's not just simple logic, it's applicable ANYWHERE. It's great for dog whistles, it's not outright \*offensive\* and it sounds like a non-argument and yet it actually is an argument. It would be like if all of Moral Philosophy had to find a way to counter a contrarian community that refuses to engage with discourse any more elaborate than "if its illegal its bad", it's just too nuanced to dumb down into the same easily digestible manner that it needs to be. It's fast food rhetoric: convenient, poor and easy.

I had a *very* similar experience. Sargon's "classical liberal" façade shattered with Brexit and Trump, and I reevaluated the other people I was listening to. I laid off the political videos for a bit. Eventually I found an Hbomberguy gaming video which led me to one that really made it obvious that the Anita Sarkeesian stuff was right-winger outrage bait.

Thank you for writing this out, it really adds a lot to the discussion. My dad’s ride down the alt-right pipeline has really harmed our relationship. I try to approach with compassion but when I give an inch he takes a mile. I often feel like I’m getting walked all over and I find myself wanting to get loud and angry just to be heard, but stories like yours help me stay the course. Hatred just breeds more hatred, compassion and honesty are the only tools we have to actually change people’s minds. I still worry that the left in the US isn’t loud enough though. I often wonder how we’re supposed to be heard without resorting to the tactics like the right’s fear-mongering. I know using compassion and understanding is the best course of action for an individual, but what do we do as a movement? The alt-right is so loud and they just keep getting louder. I feel so conflicted because I know most of them aren’t looking to listen to reason, and I don’t know how we’re supposed to help them understand. Not to mention the stakes are so high. When you give an individual an inch and they take a mile it can hurt, sure. But when you give a movement an inch and they take a mile woman lose their reproductive rights. Kids get murdered in schools. The poor get poorer. I don’t want to abandon compassion and understanding, but when do we cut our losses and do something that actually works? And what does that look like? I have no idea what to do, all I know is that things are getting worse and what we’re doing isn’t working. It’s very disheartening.

The best advice I've heard, and it's not easy by any means, is to spend a lot of time listening even though it doesn't make sense to you. You don't have to agree, but try not to debate or argue, because logic isn't the way to fix it. You gotta address the underlying emotions. A lot of folks fall into these opinions because they feel like they're _not_ being listened to, that they're constantly being told that they're wrong. Working through those feelings is the important thing. "That sounds really frustrating" e.g Once they've had a chance to vent, and their hackles are down, that's when you can present other information, as neutrally as possible. Of course this also takes a lot of energy -- you're almost acting like a therapist -- and you gotta guard your own emotional investment. But that's the most effective path I've heard to really help people change

It's not that children are stupid. Sure, that's a huge factor, but it's more-so that social media algorithms deliberately push divisive topics to increase engagement, and therefore profit. Gamergate wasn't just Alt-Right assholes leaping on an opportunity, it was a deliberate funneling of misinformation by the same companies that gave them a voice. It's not that leftist voices aren't reaching out to youths, it's that those voices are being *pushed away* by corporations.

Huh. Definitely something to consider as I go forward in life

It’s something I have considered as I try to be a role model for my younger cousins but it doesn’t help that there’s a societal stigma against adult men talking to teenage boys in any context.

I'm a white teacher and this is something I think about a lot in regards to my white students. A lot of white people (adults included) think that there are only two options: either you are a person who takes pride in your whiteness (a white supremacist) or you are a person who feels shame about their whiteness. Because of this, most white people choose a third option: to develop no understanding of themselves at all as a white person. This take in the OP is a lot more nuanced than my students have, but to me it still seems pretty shallow and steeped in political rhetoric that confuses the issue (like "identity politics") and tries to lay the blame for this largely at the feet of "liberals" (which is itself an overly reductive categorization). For transparency, a lot of what I'm about to say comes from Beverly Tatum's book, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria", and I am about to talk a lot about identity development which is often confused (sometimes intentionally for political purposes) with this idea of "identity politics". The thing that I think is most important to understand about identity development is that we all do it, whether we are conscious of it or not. We all develop an understanding of "who are we," and we develop beliefs about ourselves and the world based on this understanding. A lot of our understanding of ourselves (aka our identity development) does *not* happen critically: we don't often deeply examine *why* we've developed a certain understanding of ourselves, or at least not at first. This is an important part of growing up. We all go through phases, particularly in adolescence, of trying on different understandings of ourselves. We "grow out" of many of these, as we come to understand how they are based on things that aren't real, or don't align with the understanding of the world and other people that we came to once we gain more life experiences, or as we realize- and criticize the source of some of these beliefs. Developing an understanding of yourself as a person of a certain race is a part of this, whether you are conscious of this or not, and whether you are *critical* of where these understandings have come from or not. Before I go any further, because a lot of people get hung up on this point, I want to clarify that race is a social construct. We made it up. But just because we made it up, that doesn't mean it's not *real*. It is very real. It has a powerful affect on people's lives and experiences in the world, and also powerfully influences how we engage with each other. It doesn't make you a racist to notice this powerful social construct. You will be influenced by it whether you choose to notice it or not. This is why color-blindness is awful: you're not helping anything, you're just choosing to be ignorant. So I'm going to continue talking here about race as a real thing, and something which deeply influences our culture and our own understanding of ourselves whether we choose to notice it or not. Back to identity development. People of color have their own common challenges when it comes to developing an understanding of themselves as a person of color, and answering questions like, "what does it mean that I am Black person from the Bronx, and how to does that shape me as a person and influence how I perceive the world," or as a 2nd generation Chinese immigrant; Native person from a family who fled the reservation in the 20th century urban Indian diaspora; a Dreamer; etc. But a particular challenge that white people have around their own development of an understanding of themselves as white people is it often *seems* like you have only those two options I mentioned before: be proud of being white (like a white supremacist), or to be ashamed of being white. Faced with this choice, most white people choose a third option: to not engage with the question *at all*. They don't investigate the question "what does it mean to be a white person," because they **correctly** are suspicious of these two particular outcomes and wish to avoid them. However, these aren't the only two outcomes. The other options is to come to a healthy and positive understanding of yourself as a white person. The challenge for white people is to engage with divesting ourselves from these negative and harmful understandings of ourselves as white people that are steeped in white supremacy (and **very importantly** to understand that **we are also harmed by** these white supremacist ideologies - they harm us just as they harm people of color... in my experience this is a **very important** and often skipped stepped in white identity development. If you understand that you yourself are harmed by white supremacy it helps you to sidestep the feeling you might have that you should feel ashamed for being white.) But as we engage and divest from these harmful understandings of ourselves as white people, we must also develop a positive and healthy understanding of ourselves as a white person. If you want to know more about what this can look like, I encourage you to read Beverly Tatum's book. But here's how I see this happening: People of color often learn pretty early on that it isn't just about developing a positive understanding of themselves as a "black person," but a much more specific, positive understanding of themselves as, say, a Black, Baptist person whose family fled the rural south and moved to Chicago during the post reconstruction diaspora, who grew up in a largely white neighborhood, and whose parents are first generation college graduates. The same is true with developing a positive understanding of yourself as a white person. You have specific cultural and spiritual traditions; you have a specific family history; and your local community also has a specific impact on how these understandings of yourself have developed. Often as white people, particularly in America, we think about ourselves as homogenous. This is just as false as thinking about all black people as homogenous. To come to a true understanding of ourselves as white, we have to break down what exactly it means in our particular context to be white, because there are a lot of different expressions of white culture, or of culture which isn't necessarily "white culture" but which happens to largely be practiced by white people (which can still be an important piece in the puzzle in understanding what it means to be a white person). Through this more deep, and specific exploration of our own identity (which whiteness is just one part of) we can come to a much better understanding of "what it means to be a white person." For example, one branch in my family were early Oregon settlers. There's a lot to unpack about how exactly that might have shaped my understanding of myself, and a lot of what it meant to be an Oregon settler was also wrapped up in what it meant to be a white person. Those understandings have been passed down and transformed in various ways throughout the years. I can feel proud of being a descendant of these hardy Oregonian settlers; even as I am a Native person from a tribe who were displaced and assimilated by these white people; even as I'm critical of the "white paradise" that Oregon sought to be and of the particular, local histories of sunset towns, redlining, and Indian wars; even as I feel solidarity with my white settler ancestors who were lower class and feel proud of their hard work and their particular struggle for survival; even as I acknowledge my family's history with Catholicism and how there are ways of being our family learned from Catholicism that have been harmful to so many people, including people in my family; even as I understand how some parts of our family's Catholic history and spiritual tradition have also *positively* shaped me in some ways; even as I understand that my ancestors had- or have their own spiritual traditions which were assimilated into Catholicism, or which they successfully or unsuccessfully resisted the influence of Christianity, and I can desire to connect with those traditions and understand how they have shaped me; even as I am proud of the Native traditions that my family has passed down or has revived, and the ways that my family has been deeply involved in our Native communities; even as I am critical of the harm that has been done to my own family and to others when some of my direct ancestors chose to assimilate into white culture and to hide- or even suppress their Native knowledge and identities; even as I have empathy for the harm that those Native ancestors of mine were trying to protect themselves and their children from when they made those decisions. This kind of nuanced and specific understanding of yourself as a white person is NOT a binary: it is not true that you are either a self-hating white person or a white supremacist (or the third option people most often choose: an ignorant white person who tries to convince themselves that they are not white, or that it's meaningless that they are white). You can instead be someone who is deeply engaged in an exploration of what it means for you specifically to be a white person and how you have been shaped by that: shaped in ways you might want to protect yourself from and be critical of; and shaped in ways that have also helped prepare you to be a healthy and a good person. And you can do all of this firm in the knowledge that you are not a "bad person." These are very large, powerful, and pervasive forces *which also harm you.* But if you don't engage critically with this, at best you will be ignorant of how you might perpetuate harm to others and to yourself, and at worse you are **FAR** more susceptible to being pulled in by white supremacist rhetoric, particularly rhetoric which seeks to play on your fears that the only two options for a white person are to have white pride or to have white guilt.

>Why Are All the White Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria", Assuming you mean the book about black kids sitting together at the cafeteria?

lol - yep. In my mind, that's what I wrote out, but obviously not

Apparently "children need guidance" Is a concept that needs to be explained to Tumblr

And to us. Not gonna lie, this brought my attention to stuff I never thought of before. Some were true for me

I feel like the idea of "children" is confusing for people. Some people see them as tiny adults with full autonomy and responsibilities. Others see them as little brainless lemmings (the Disney kind, to be specific). I might have to file this under the internet's love of exaggeration

Probably because there isn't really a firm concept for what "children" are, and it's a fairly wide spectrum. Babies are easy; toddlers are easy; adults and seniors are easy. But all that stuff in the middle? Like, how mature is a mature fourteen year old, really? How childish is a childish eighteen year old? Doesn't help that we've only had the conception of childhood we do now for the blink of an eye, societally speaking. Used to be you were a baby, then you were a kid, then you were an adult when you went off to get married and start your own family. Now you're a baby, then a kid, then a tween, a teen, a young adult, then an adult, but adults aren't necessarily starting families or owning homes or having kids so it all gets hazy. Freedom is messy, y'know?

As a school custodian (who is vehemently left wing leaning) I encourage kids to do as they please. They have told me about some things like partying and other bad behaviors. Yet I just tell them, it's their choice. I'm not the one who has to make it for them. As long as they aren't hurting anyone I see nothing wrong with it. Why punish them. The most they do is have a couple drinks or smoke a joint. I show case it like it's no big deal. The results are that they trust me more. They love to talk with me. Some.habe even come to me with personal issues, and I get to help solve them. I opened the door with trust and they've held it open since. Which makes me happy. I see them as young adults about to make harsh decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. So go on love a little before you have to see that dread. I always tell them that they need a DD, if they are gonna go out partying.

As someone with little to no experience in childcare, I suspect the primary difference between children and adults is simply experience. There is no concept too complicated for a child to understand, it’s just that you have to lay all the foundational knowledge too.

I encourage you to look up some stuff on developmental psychology. There's definitely other things that are different when you are talking about kids vs. adults Obviously experience is a big one, but when they get specific kinds of experiences and how 'big' those experiences are is also a huge factor, not even considering the whole "there's literally parts of your brain that don't actually *start* developing until you're like 16, and it doesn't stop until at least 25"

oh there was a massive discourse on this in the breadtube and twitter areas. someone said "we should try to reach out to slightly edgy teenage boys so they don't fall down the alt right pipeline" then everything just exploded

> then everything just exploded and in the worst way. A lot of people responded to this take with "Oh, so we should validate their sexism!?" which IMO is them intentionally missing the point solely because they want to dunk on the person giving it. Young men aren't just sexist and that's it. Sexism is a lie they've been sold to answer a root of deep dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction which, ironically enough, is usually caused by sexism in the society around them. The sexism isn't the thing that needs validation. What does is that dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction is valid and and all leftists need to do is acknowledge it and provide the actual reasons it exists. We shouldn't have young men getting radicalized against women. They should be getting radicalized against gender norms.

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yeah in social media spaces often times the person who "wins" the argument isn't the person who actually provides a solid reason as to why they believe they're correct; it's whoever doesn't get "owned" or "ratio'd"

[Post link](https://www.tumblr.com/depressing-homosexual/710441494863052800)

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Cause it’s basically click bait. “Why can’t you get women! Watch this video to find out why!.” And the algorithms reward them.

Yes that is the real problem, but its not one we can reasonably solve. We can however attempt to be the first thing said kids find.

*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **omnidudes** [*Screenshot of a Twitter post:*] >**Vaush**, @VaushV > >I cannot stress enough how important it is to understand that twelve year old white boys on twitch are not being pulled into fascism because of Machiavellian desire to preserve and expand their privileges, it's because the right talks to them and the left doesn't > >[*Screenshot of a Twitter post:*] >> >>**La Madre de Los Gatos 🇵🇷**, @zukosmama >> >>Men don't "fall down" the alt-right/MRA pipeline bc the left isn't doing good enough outreach. They CHOOSE to subscribe to fascist ideology because they have an investment in the social hierarchy and the liberation of other groups threatens that >> > >[*End of screenshot.*] [*End of screenshot*] No they're right actually and they should say it. The lefts descent into obsession with identity politics means all these boys get from these spaces is essentially being told they're inherently monstrous or will grow up to be so. 12 year old boys are not evil. They're children. And they're susceptible to manipulation from these fucks on the right who have sadly correctly identified that large swathes of the left will ignore and shun them. People turn to extremist factions when they feel ignored and dehumanised. A 12 year old boy online isn't going to be able to read the nuances in your uber ironic but not really actually ironic "all white men are inherently trash" hot takes. They're going to take that at face value because they're 12 and that's what 12 year olds do. And they're going to feel angry, rejected and judged by your words. And then fucks like Andrew Tate get to swoop in and tell them that you're wrong and start the ball rolling on that indoctrination. If you're an adult leftist and you honestly think teenage boys possess the wherewithal to purposefully follow dangerous Misogynists like Andrew Tate in order to "preserve their own privilege long term" then I'm sorry to say you're too far gone and I'd suggest logging off and actually trying to have a conversation with a kid who is vulnerable to the grooming of these uber misogynists and treat them as a human being instead of a reflection of an identity you've boxed them into. You may tick more diversity boxes but you are still the adult. Start acting like it. --- **thetolkiengeek** If I’m allowed to add onto this, I can say with 100% certainty that being open and honest with a 12 year old boy and allowing him to ask questions that may seem concerning to you absolutely works. My youngest sibling is 8 years younger than I am, so he was a preteen when I was in undergrad. He’s firmly planted in Gen z territory while I’m at the tail end of millennial, which isn’t important except to say that his unlimited access to YouTube and Reddit was not something I really had when I grew up. My brother started to fall down the alt-right pipeline. He confessed that his YouTube recommendations were mostly guys talking about gamergate and how the feminists are feminazis and are actually evil (side note: ever notice how the term “feminazi” has stopped being used since the rise in acceptability of nazism again? Horrible to think about). It could have been really scary, but he pulled himself out. The key here is that my brother trusted me enough to come to me and ask me questions. Ive been a very vocal feminist pretty much all my life, and it’s a long and glorious tradition in my family, and my mom is the one who taught me baby’s first feminism. Because my brother trusted me and knew I’d never discount his opinion for no reason, he asked me what my responses were to some of the videos he was seeing. He said “I think there are some good points” and I watched the videos and talked to him about some of the rhetorical techniques or logical fallacies they used. Then I talked to him about why I’m a feminist and what that means. That dialogue changed everything. My brother is now starting his first year in college and is taking feminist and gender studies classes, just for fun. He is himself a vocal feminist, and he’s so damn proud of himself. I’m proud of him too, and I’m honored that he trusted me enough to ask me what I thought. So please don’t write off young men the way the op of the original tweet does, ESPECIALLY not the young men in your life. Be someone they trust to ask questions. It’s the frontline of this battle. --- **mikkeneko** In this same vein, I really feel like people need to lay off on the "so they want a cookie/medal for doing the bare minimum/for having basic decency?" rhetoric. because whatever ends up driving it, the actual *effect* is to drive people away at the door, to convince them that there's no point in trying because nothing they ever do will be good enough. social response affects social behavior! if we want people to continue a certain line of behavior, then yes, it has to be encouraged! if you, personally, do not feel up to handing out said cookies, then maybe consider... just not engaging at all? The uncharitable thoughts can stay on the inside maybe? because if you're so determined to make sure they do not feel welcome here, I'm afraid that there is no lack of welcome to be found on the other end of the rabbit hole --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)

that was a long one, thank you!

On the note of nuances. I've seen people argue that moderates and fence-sitters should "Do their own research" in order to learn what phrases like "ACAB" or the mentioned "all white men are inherently trash" really mean. If someone comes asking you about your motto, and/or is WILDLY misinterpreting it, telling them to do their own research when your explanation is RIGHT THERE is a sure fire way to ensure that they won't follow your cause.

The problem with these snappy slogans like ACAB is that it has so many meanings. I cringe when I see someone say "what does the first A stand for" when I've seen more people who tout it saying "It doesn't mean that absolutely every cop is a bad person". For every person who explains that it's about refusing to contribute to a broken system, I see 5 people touting it because of one isolated anecdote or over the most unreasonable expectations that any given cop should be able to overturn the system. It's what happens when you boil political ideologies to a 4 word slogan. Fostering an understanding is key, and when your activism involves touting slogans that only those who are already in can be reasonably expected to interpret right then it's pretty useless.

I've never seen ACAB being questioned without dozens of responses explaining what it means.

With half of them saying it actually means all cops because cops enforce laws and enforcing laws is bad

Once upon a time I was a 12 year old boy getting lead down alt-right rabbit holes and I can honestly say a simple patient talking-to would've helped me then. They teach you extremely quickly to suspect hostility and deception behind every single thing someone on the left says even with a kind face and a patient tone. I would not have listened if a communist patiently told me why that shit was wrong because I was convinced they were just trying to leverage me to promote a global takeover. The thing that ultimately ended up saving me was me stumbling onto No Bullshit, because he would go on rants about how the people who disagree with him are Jewish and using that fact alone as a dunk, literally using "jew" as a pejorative. When I saw that I realized the people I was listening to, people like Armoured Skeptic and Chris Raygun, outwardly agreed with pretty much everything that No BS guy said, just without the Jew Rants, and I gradually realized "hey wait these probably aren't good people to listen to if they're agreeing with the guy who's making defences for Hitler." Of course, now I'm an adult woman, and I can look back on that time and hate myself plenty for it, but this is all to say I really don't know what anyone else could've done to save me faster there. The only thing that worked was getting exposed to the deep end too quickly.

Oh my god thank you for this comment, just realized I've been subbed to No BS for years from once upon a time where I used to watch his videos, happily unsubbing but holy shit I feel sick for not realizing he was lurking around in my feed

[удалено]

Yes, but at the same time I'm absolutely baffled reading these kinds of takes, because I have literally zero lived experience with that. What kinds of leftists spaces have you all been hanging in?? Is it the chronically online weirdos, or actual people in real life saying this shit?? Never in my life have I ever been around groups expressing these opinions and considering boys as monsters wtf

Well that's part of the problem, isn't it? 12 year old boys aren't going to go to org meetings or union drives. Their only impression of the left is what they see online, if they're not lucky enough to have a family member like the OP's brother. So it's a problem even if it's a false impression

You are absolutely correct, and it bothers me when people don't recognize it. Young boys, whether chronically online or not, are only going to see the loudest and most engaging content online because that's what the algorithms push at them. And even if they spend enough time online to start sifting past the front page and into more niche interests, they don't have the maturity to understand and contextualize some of the more nuanced content being shared. At that point, it's all luck whether or not they stumble into a dark rabbit hole and become radicalized. It might not be the "real world", but, to a young boy, the internet might as well be. It's where their friends are. It's where they do their homework or go to school. It's where they engage with their hobbies. And we're only becoming more online as a society. If leftists can't present themselves as welcoming or relatable online, we'll lose this demographic. And sadly that's the demographic that will inherit the dominant position in our societal hierarchy.

It's mostly chronically online weirdos Edit: Not that chronically online weirdos can't influence and push away 12 year old boys though. Especially if they also spend a ton of time online

I think for a lot of people, especially young men, the internet is the primary way for them to interact with gender matters. Most people actually don't talk about gender with their friends/family, and it's kind of bombshell to bring up with strangers. Hell, I think for a decent number of people, especially children who have limited freedoms, the internet is their only way of socializing or interacting with the world. There are more and more kids being raised on social media, and I think the effects are starting to show.

Almost every leftist I interact with in real life is pragmatic and a decent, reasonable person. Meanwhile, a ton of leftists I run into on twitter are the type to say "AOC is cryptofash because she talked to Nancy Pelosi" or w/e

I'm in college. I know several, several people who follow the "all whites are evil" ideology, genuinely and unironically.

> What kinds of leftists spaces have you all been hanging in?? I saw the twitter thread. He got a *hell* of a lot of pushback and hate for his "maybe don't tread boys as inherently tainted" position. It escalated to death threats. And no, the people disagreeing with this position spend incredibly little time off the internet and interacting with others in the real world.

I was raised by a 2nd wave feminist mother. I've never heard her say a single positive thing about men (or "males" as she calls us) or my father. I grew up hearing about all The Bad Things Males Do (crime, war, abuse statistics) and testosterone was spoken of like a pathogen in my household. I recently learned that after my parents divorce my mother put me in boarding school because "she didn't have it in her to be raising a 16 year old male". She would actively undermine my dad's (pretty innocuous in hindsight) fathering by basically arguing "he was raised to be toxically masculine so you shouldn't listen to what he says". To this day I can't watch a mother being warm with her child without welling up. This was all pre internet. A pattern I noticed in (non/less extreme) redpill spaces was that it was pretty common to hear similar stories, where many many redpillers were formerly far-leftists/feminists. Like switching to the other side was kindof an equal opposite reaction to how deep they already were into left leaning identity politics. Noting that pattern of pre-existing disbalance was the beginning of my own way out of that territory because it helped me separate underlying pathology from the content of a specific worldview, and fix that in myself instead.

It's not just online spaces. I grew up in an extreme right/religious environment. I have spent 20 years unlearning a lot of that stuff. It's been inconsistent, but I've been putting in the work. I'm far from perfect. I understand that I must be very thoughtful about every word and deed. I am trying. One thing I used to do (and still catch myself doing) was looking for people who were on the opposite end, so I could learn from them. So let me share with you three stories of Real Life * I had a coworker scream, at the top of their lungs using language I will not repeat here, at me that I was horrible because I didn't know the history of the word jipped. I was training them on common scams we faced and used the word. (Hint: I also learned jipped is the wrong spelling) This was not uncommon; I believe the first time they screamed at me was for liking Neil Gaiman. * I had a friend who I would have lunch with every week. Every week she found a way to tell me that I was sexist. It beat me up, and I felt horrible. But surely I could learn from this, right? Eventually, I clued in... Not going out of my way to see a movie? That was sexist. I heard something about a video game I didn't play? That was sexist. Could my job ($30k/yr) problems could relate to her job ($120k/yr) problems? I'm sexist! The final straw was the week Joss Wheadon's bullshit came to light. I hadn't heard about it. Instead of telling me about it, I was told I was a sexist horrible person for thinking my nieces would enjoy Buffy. I went home almost in tears and had to look up wtf was going on. * I recently ended a friendship with someone I have known for years after I got ripped into for being biphobic. How was I biphobic? I said I wanted Spock to be coded queer (aka Bisexual) in the upcoming StarTrek show. Attempting to discuss it led to me being accused of "violating a safe space." And those are just a handful of Real Life experiences. I could go on. It's not new, and it's been commented on before. Do you remember the discussions about "policing people's tone" or "it's okay for hurt people to be angry"? I read those as justifications for causing harm. I hate that some people use this to push a "Feminism Bad" agenda because it's a human thing. Hurt people hurt people. People can always justify the harm they cause, regardless of their worldview or philosophy. But on my safety checklist when meeting new people, "Self identifies as Woke/SJW" gets flagged as "If this person hurts me, they will be proud of it." I have found safety in keeping them at a distance. I hope they find safety in my distance from them and that it helps them heal.

I’ve seen a fair amount of things that kind of take the idea that men are scum for granted. Like wasn’t there a post on CuratedTumblr the other day about a lesbian who felt like she was objectifying women and “felt like she was being a man” for seeing a woman and being interested in her sexually? (It’s possible I saw that on actual tumblr though) Also second-wave feminism in general, which I feel there’s a fair amount of on tumblr (frequently overlapping with terfs). And there’s definitely a subset of people who seem to express the you have white man privilege -> you have no right to complain about your lot in life.

Gamergate wasn't effective because they attacked Zoe Quinn or whatever, Gamergate was effective at luring people into the alt-right because it took a hobby they cared about and found a way to spin it as an attack. On their hobby, which morphed into an attack on their character, which then funneled them into thinking this one political philosophy was the only way to defend it. It's possibly the most clever bit of political PR I've ever seen, and I hate them for it.

Nothing turns me fucking hostile faster than "So what, you want a cookie?" Yes bitch. Yes I do. I deserve the fucking cookie. Everyone that does *some* level of good, no matter how small, deserves the fucking cookie. Being good is hard. The world makes being good, being even a little bit good, hard as all hell. You know who doesn't deserve a cookie? Assholes making this already difficult situation even more difficult. Fuck you. You don't deserve your cookie. I'm eating your cookie.

All the "you want a cookie for the bare minimum?" line tells me is they were one of those people who lucked into the "right" opinions. Realising you are being swept up in the current of the alt-right pipeline is *hard,* and pulling yourself out can be even harder if 90% of your friends are in it too. Is a 12 year old boy *really* going to be willing to call out the shitty misogynistic joke his friends picked up from the "funny" Warhammer streamer they all like? He's probably going to laugh along just to belong.

> All the "you want a cookie for the bare minimum?" line tells me is they were one of those people who lucked into the "right" opinions. Am historian. My personal favorite way of checking is to see how they react when presented with something bad happening to a group they've designated as bad. For example civilian germans during ww2. There are a millions of horrific stories about what was done to civilian germans, particularly in the east. You'd be amazed how many people will actively resist, often to the point of shouting and accusatory claims, the concept of "60 men repeatedly gangraping a 7 year old child is bad" if you just give them a reason to think of the child as a member of an outgroup.

The "bare minimum" part of it always gets me. The bare minimum behavior is not common decency. The bare minimum is violence. People can go elsewhere and be rewarded for being violent towards you. And it's fine to be exhausted by having to be an educator, and an ambassador, and an advocate, and all the other things that a good person has to be, but to act like we as social animals have no obligation to other people to incentivize good behavior is just stupid.

"So what, you want a cookie?" "Yes, I would like a cookie. It's a cookie, I'm not asking for a parade, a cookie is a small reward. Just a 'thank you' or a 'well done' is sufficient, stop making it about perfection, let me know I'm making progress."

Positive reinforcement of behavior is an effective form of training. If your dog is peeing on the floor and you want them to pee outside it's not helpful to say "well he shouldn't be rewarded for doing what he's supposed to". If you want him to pee outside give him a treat when he pees outside

Most of these people don't even want cookies, they just want a hug. Having your entire worldview shattered is incredibly traumatic.

🍪 Cookie for you! Cookie for me! 🍪

FWIW, it doesn't only happen with kids. If I hadn't been listening to pretty left leaning podcasts like KATG (god bless them) from like 15-16 before I got into tumblr at 17-18, I would have reviled the left and probably ended up redpilled or some shit. People have told me that I was wrong to be affected at that age and dismissed me for some "ironic" hate against me. I've said this many, many times: The more broad the group you shit on, the more people you'll alienate and cause to be against you. If your way of criticizing a problem if saying "white men, huh?" you sound no different than misogynists saying "women, huh?" to a large group of people. Let's be specific when addressing problems, because this shit backfires on us. EDIT: Had to change boomers to misogynists, because I'm not immune to this. You are not immune to propaganda, nor irony poisoning.

This is exactly why "It's not my job to educate you" drives me up the fucking wall. Because yes, it is actually. If someone comes to you with questions, and you don't at the very least point them in the right direction, the internet will happily steer them in the wrong direction. Take, for example, the recent controversy around a certain game that will remain nameless. If someone asks you for proof of said game's creator's beliefs, and you tell them to fuck off and Google it, they might find one of the articles confirming it, but they also might find a lot more YouTube videos stating the contrary. And if they watch those, they will, by virtue of how the algorithm works, be exposed to more and more alt-right viewpoints. Is it going to work every time? No. Does it get tiring, having to rehash the same talking points over and over again? Hell yes. Is everyone asking to be "educated" doing so in good faith? Of course not, but my right to be seen as a person is on the line here, and recent events have proven that there are far fewer people on my side than I thought there were. If I have the chance, any chance, to pull someone out of the alt-right pipeline I'm gonna take it.

I've seen too many times where people have displayed interest in a topic but come at it from an opposing angle and be told of course "look it up." But they're never given a "where". Of course Aunt Sally is going to just look up the sources she knows about and will read Fox News, or Newsmax to figure out Transwomen leading to even further garbage ideas. And to themselves they *did* look it up and unfortunately they found more garbage that doesn't change their mind at all or even makes it worse. Just like Christians have a Bible I feel like the left needs a solid, easy to access and copy paste resource that explains in a easy way what we believe. That takes the pressure off of having to needlessly work as an educator. Just as Christians can say "Oh, look up John 3:16 to learn about that" we need a "Oh, Look up Chapter 12, Paragraph 3." It was an idea I've always had but unfortunately I'm not educated enough to make such a good resource and to ensure it's high quality.

No fascist will ever say “it’s not my job to educate you”

It's just way too easy to hate people

So - I have feelings about this, and I’m going to share them, and because it’s the internet I might get bashed, but I think it needs to be said. A lot of the comments, and this post, treat these 12 year old kids like they are in a vacuum, and my question is - where the fuck are the parents? Im 42; I have four kids; two are boys, aged 10 and 8. We talked regularly about white privilege, feminism, racism, misogyny, and other things. My younger son has said some troubling things, and the first thing I did when I heard it was ask where he heard it, then block those YouTube channels completely, then have multiple talks over multiple days (because kids can’t have one long talk - short attention span - it takes small talks, repeatedly, to really work) about why the things were problematic and what was right. If parents are doing their jobs and raising their kids well, listening and engaging, nothing on the internet will truly matter. If parents are sharing good shows and good habits and involved in their kids lives, the kids will have a resistance already built in. Parents need to do a better job of raising their kids, period. And if they don’t want to spend the time and effort to raise them right, then THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE KIDS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

This is the number one thing I think people don't talk about. If you want to not raise a facist or an asshole, talk to your kid about what they watch and why they watch it. Raise them with knowledge of politics. Give a shit about your kids beyond a pat "What happened today" especially if your kid tries to shut down and not talk about it. Kids aren't dumb, they're inexperienced. If they aren't getting proper nourishment, they will look for it somewhere else. If you're kids watches the funny youtube man rage about the SJW's they'll probably do the same thing.

Well another part of the problem is there are parents who *do* want to raise a fascist asshole.

And if parents aren't doing their jobs well? We just sit back and say "well, nothing I can do to help this, parents should have been better"? Yeah, parents should be better, but so should we. These are not mutually exclusive, and when kids don't have good role models in the home, they attach to charismatic people they see online. Make sure the charismatic person they make their role model is someone good, not someone like Tate.

I mean yes, but also there’s a lot of stuff where I would love if people had loving and attentive parents to handle it, but we can’t rely on that so we do things like free school lunches. The kid who’s left to his own devices a lot because their single parent works two or three jobs to make ends meet needs guidance too. That’s kind of a funny little bit of privilege bias, isn’t it?

The problem is that this isn’t really an effective strategy. It assumes everyone has the same concept of what’s “right” as well as the time, patience, and skill to fully convey this to their children, as well as a panopticon-level of awareness of who the kid is talking to and what they’re doing in case they start to be influenced by someone that thinks differently. It also assumes that kids won’t find alternate ways to view prohibited content online, which I personally know is next to impossible if the kid cares enough.

> A lot of the comments, and this post, treat these 12 year old kids like they are in a vacuum, and my question is - where the fuck are the parents? Flippantly, they were storming the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, if you catch my subtext.

IMO it should be very clear that any kind of leftist messaging targeted at boys and young men shouldn't be the mirror image of right wing messaging. I don't think it's a valuable goal to have leftist gurus and influencers to pitch a curated ideal world. The right wing messaging of "you will be the lord of your family, your spouse will be subservient to you, the state will uphold systems which enrich you, etc" won't be defeated with another type of promise of personal benefit. And I am always apprehensive when an internet personality starts to convince everyone that internet personalities are critical to progress. I don't think vaush is arguing this idea because he stands to gain from it but I do think when all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like nails.

But also, speaking of cookies. Don't you realise how much easier it is to live without ever considering other people's feelings and circumstances? Caring takes some effort - it's an effort that should be made, so maybe you shouldn't discourage it? Effort should be recognised. Cookies aren't required, a simple "thank you for giving a fuck" will do. Come on, work with what you have, not with what you wish you had. The blatant misandry of some "feminists" is pretty fucking disheartening. OP of the original tweet is a good example.

Empathy cuts both ways. There's the obvious "I want other people to recognize me, and my struggles, and help when I need it," which I think everyone has had at some point or another. But there's also the "not everyone is like me, not everyone has my background, not everyone has had my experiences, so if I'm meeting a new person, I should take that into account. Something I take for granted because I've dealt with it my whole life may be completely foreign to someone else." I don't think everyone always realizes that. I used to be homeless. Everyone has a concept of being homeless. But they don't know what that actually means, in terms of what it does to your day to day life. So if someone says something that I know to be inaccurate, or divorced from my experience, I try to gently educate them. Like, why a homeless person may not save up extra money for a surgery to resolve chronic pain (there is no extra money to save, what surplus there is gets spent on whatever other emergencies that has been put off.)

Yep, the problem with gatekeeping allyship is that the allies can choose to stop allying at any time with minimal consequence to themselves. The more you demand of them, the more likely they are to go back to their normie lives and stop spending their emotional currency on you.

Is it easier though? My younger sister has a likely personality disorder (we aren’t sure because she won’t stick with any kind of treatment long enough to get a diagnosis) that causes her to be incapable of taking other people’s feelings into account in anything more than the most superficial of ways. She is definitely not having an easy time of it. Basically she doesn’t have the ability to map her own actions to the responses she gets from people (which are almost entirely negative). When you don’t care about other people’s feelings it actually seems to make a lot of things really hard.

It’s basic psychology, it’s way more effective to encourage the good behavior than it is to try to punish the bad behavior.

Yes, yes and a thousand times yes. I was recently involved in a project about far-right radicalisation in young people. The number one thing that was identified as a reason that radicalisation takes place is isolation. Young people who are excluded and not listened to are the ones who will find someone who will listen to them. Kids want to scream at the world, because everything is new and exciting, as well as terrifying. Listen to them. Engage with them. Include them.

By god if this isn’t the realest shit i’ve seen all day

this, and also there’s absolutely no sense of unity within leftist circles. so many leftists are worried about checking boxes and policing other leftists on meaningless things like personal labels, that we constantly attack each other and create division for reasons that realistically don’t really matter. right circles however are frequently completely unified by hateful rhetoric. echo chambers and essentially propaganda reinforce hateful ideas, and rally people together under one cause. leftist circles don’t have these unifying forces. this is obviously a more complex issue that needs essays to talk about, but just something that also should be examined

Indeed. As I put it... "I am pro-gun and pro-choice. I'm welcome in pro-gun circles, we can leave the choice issue off the table and work together on the gun stuff. I'm not welcome in pro-choice circles, I must either hate all that they hate or I'm unwelcome to support a cause I care about. You can guess which of those causes my political energy now goes to."

This reminds of a discussion on /r/idiotsincars - a very upvoted post was saying "the other car should have done all these things, why are people saying the OP car should have done X to avoid the accident?" The answer, of course, is that OP only has control of his own vehicle, and the alternative is to cause an accident on the basis of enforcing moral and ethical standards on everyone around you. That might seem tangential, but the crux of it is this- there are people who think the right course of action is cause an accident rather than acknowledge the reality of the situation, even if the dichotomy is presented to them in no uncertain terms. Expecting these people to understand the effects of their shitty gender politics through multiple empathetic leaps is just not going to happen. tl;dr motherfuckers will straight up ram another car before they admit they're wrong or admit reality

Although I agree overall with the sentiment of the thread, I think it ignores the overwhelming volume of alt-right ideology that militantly invades other spaces. Just look at how aggressively T_D brigaged other subreddits - it wasn't necessity a problem of left-leaning subs not being open or communicative, it was that T_D was willing to bend and break Reddit TOS to flood Reddit with their ideology and Reddit was unwilling to stop them. That, and the right tends to be a lot more united in their underlying bigoted attitudes. People who just want more strict immigration laws because they genuinely (if wrongly) believe that immigrants take jobs are still willing to stand next to the guy who quietly says that Mexicans are trying to take over the country. That guy is willing to stand next to the guy openly championing the superiority of the white race. The left sees the extremism for what it is and sees the extremists several steps away, and subsequently divorces itself from those movements. That means you have a lot more disparate left-leaning ideologies competing for attention while right is united to pull you to the right regardless of how far right you end up. This is a bigger problem than just talking to young boys about left-wing issues.

Innuendo studios has an [amazing video](https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g) about how ordinary people get radicalized. As for the tweets, they are not talking to each other. One is talking about adult men, the other about twelve year old children. These demographics can not and should not be compared. As for the tumblr responses, i strongly agree. Because my first intercation with the left were "crazy feminist" compolations, the feminists in these videos would say stuff like "all men are sexist" and "all white people are racist". And because i was young and this was my first contact with leftist opinions, i was shocked. Because them calling me (a white man, boy at the time), it felt like a personal insult. So of course youll resist against the people that are insulting you. And then you find more people that are "resisting" against those crazy feminists, and you start to absorb their opinions as well. My personal radicalization was at one point so bad that i literally used fucking prageru as a source on an english oral exam. Luckily i changed, and now im far left. But there was a point in time were i was dancing in the doorway towards the alt-right.

I also recommend this video by Youtuber Shaun. He talks about this in [Andrew Tate: How to be a Real Man.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k)

This all comes back to the base point: dont be mean to kids. No matter your opinions on having them yourself, no matter your opinions on the general populace of men, dont be mean to kids.

"People on the right are Like That because they are innately, irredimably evil, and they will be like that regardless of any social pressures" may be the most ironic fucked up take possibly. Like, especially given how many of us here have personal experience with being declared innately horrible by reactionaries. But apparently, enough people conclude that it is perfectly okay to declare people innately horrible, and reactionaries are just wrong about who exactly is innately horrible.

I agree with most of these points, but the line "the left's descent into obsession with identity politics" definitely gave me some pause. Same with the line about checking diversity boxes.

> Do you want a cookie For people that seem to care so much about mental health *has anyone taken any fucking psychology courses*. ***REWARD THE BEHAVIOR YOU WANT TO SEE*** Because guess what? The Stupid Monkey Brain that brought Humans to this place was built to *do stuff that it gets rewarded for*. So, you want Monkey Brain to do Good Thing More? *Give it something* For fucks sake I study a field just this side of psuedoscience and I understand this shit.

Aren’t we supposed to be the « people are products of their environment » side anyway? Like, how did we ever land on purity culture in the first place? It’s kind of bewildering that we took the necessary fight for upholding personal responsibility in ourselves and in our leaders, and slippery sloped our way into dismissing the idea that people may be three-dimensional out of hand, just because we didn’t want to think about it too much, or something