We are heading towards an Idiocracy!

[Tev]

Originally Posted by Token

These people are depressed and lonely because they're terrible. It's not a precursor to anything, it's the direct result. It's hard to make friends when you think the world owes you. It's hard to have a relationship when you only care about your own gratification. If people feel isolated for being selfish pricks, they damn well deserve it.

I think the problem is that they are no longer isolated. Before the internet, selfish pricks were very isolated in society and needed to either choose to be less so it fit in or find one or two other selfish pricks to be crotchety with all day while the rest of society avoided them until they died sad and pretty much alone.

Nowadays selfish pricks can get together in online communities of hundreds and thousands. They can still feel lonely and depressed in their personal life, but also have a virtual village of support, nursing their wounds as they rage against a society that they feel owes them.

The problem is that they can make friends......just with other shitty people like them instead of less shitty people in their community. They don't have to change.

[MasterOfMagic]

I've been seeing this "Free communication on the internet is the problem" sentiment more and more lately, and it is worrying.

There are going to be individual instances of people finding a shithole to woller in, and coming out worse for the wear. There are also instances of people like me coming across good ideas they would have not been exposed to otherwise, and coming out ahead. So the question then is, which out weighs the other? Do we need to really start cutting down on how freely people can communicate so the shit rollers don't ruin things more than the second set are improved?

Maybe I'm biased as one of the people who has greatly benefited from the free communication, but I think its clear that the second set is happening more often, and having a more lasting impact. I've seen the views of even my Trump-supporting parents move more and more to the less extreme side as time moves on, because of this kind of exposure.

And there's a flip side to isolation, in that yes if the community overall has less-shitheaded views its hard to create a new shithole. But its also easier for people to get trapped in the ones that already exist, be corrupted by that horrible experience, and thus have it get deeper and wider.

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm worried that we are going to move more and more towards censorship, and in that case who gets the controls? We just saw the keys of the kingdom get passed to a horrible person, isn't it better if the controls don't exist in the first place? Take facebook. Yeah, Zuckerberg can put filters on what people see and start policing it more. But what if Facebook is taken over by someone like Trump? Now they are free to push things whichever way they want, with existing user-hidden controls. Is this really what we want?

I mean free communication on the internet isn't going to solve all of our problems or anything. Sometimes more direct exposure is needed to change someone's view (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...fae_story.html). But having it be free has to be better than someone having easy to use controls on what people can discuss.

[Kim]

The issue is that when you have these shitholes of bigotry and abuse like nobody does anything about them. Nazis and white supremacists harass and abuse people on Twitter but Twitter ain't give a shit. They make clubs on Facebook but Facebook ain't give a shit. They hang out on websites like the chans but the places hosting those sites ain't give a shit. Reddit ain't give a shit either.

It's a matter of responsibility. And tech culture refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever. They continue to encourage and enable violent bigoted ideology, making it easier for those groups to communicate and organize and like there is no excuse whatsoever. At no point do you ever owe a platform to racists and transphobes and homophobes and misogynists, but tech companies refuse to do anything about it.

And I mean "we can't police ideologies that are INHERENTLY VIOLENT because what if that was used to police you" is a pretty fuckin weak argument imo.

[MasterOfMagic]

True enough, the line of reasoning in my post above could use a lot more nuance and thought (and facebook was probably a bad example, I mean, just jump ship, right? Edit: that whole paragraph is eh, actually. welp.). It was kind of a knee-jerk vent response to what I guess is better described as glorification of isolation.

The responsibility thing is something I've seen before, and yeah, there's no real argument there. If you create a website you have responsibility for what it enables.

[rpgdemon]

I haven't read the article because I don't have time, but I think white men feeling like they lack a place or whatever is more due to being coddled and not having to deal with rejection and forming their own sense of security and coping mechanisms as a result?

I've given some thought to what pushes men towards misogynistic and anti-feminist ideas, and I'm pretty sure that it actually boils down to them being man-children who have never grown up.

I mean that literally. Strap in, because it's gonna be a wild ride.

I'm no child behavior psychologist, but I think we can all agree that elementary school children really have no agency for themselves. They have no power in the world, and they're pretty much at the whims of their parents and teachers. For most of the day, most of the year, it's their teachers. Likely due to biased societal pressures and gender roles, most elementary school teachers are women, and a majority of those are older than 40. At home, their moms probably do most of the child-rearing, again due to the same shit. So, you have a bunch of boys who see women as the absolute highest power in the world.

The older teachers are more likely to have a more "traditional" view about gender norms, how "boys will be boys", and how girls are conversely more well behaved. Heck, younger people also hold those same attitudes, because society is super pervasive as it turns out. This leads to an environment where boys are given less leeway to misbehave, where they're taught that being a boy means that they are a rowdy ruffian. So, in elementary school, the highest power to them is a woman, and there is actually a societal bias against boys, MRAs, rejoice!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that girls in elementary school have a great time and are treated well. There are plenty of other gender-based problems, eg "Men can play pretend where they're the leader of the free world, and YOU can pretend to be moms!". My point is that immature schoolboys see themselves singled out directly based on their gender, while the more pervasive toxic gender stereotypes are less direct. As an anecdote to demonstrate what I mean, I remember a teacher who would routinely snap out something like, "All the boys have to skip recess!", after a couple of misbehaved kids disrupted the class. As a quiet demure 8-year-old kid who always sat in the second-to-front row, I felt like I was being unfairly punished for something that I had no control over, based solely on my gender. Meanwhile, I had no idea that I was being told by society that I could be successful in anything I wanted to do, when my female classmates were being told that they could be an accessory to a man.

The thing is, the entire power dynamic flips once these kids hit like 12 or 13. Suddenly, the world bends over backwards to keep them from being accountable for their actions ("They'll be boys, after all!"). Girls need to be told how they are or aren't allowed to dress, because heaven forbid that a boy be told that staring at a schoolmate's chest is inappropriate. At the same time, these boys are still being treated as a group of miscreants who have no impulse control. There are two directions that a guy's toxic attitude towards women could develop from here.

1) The nerdy "nice guy" MRA. This guy thinks that men have a bad rap. Even if women are paying the price, he thinks that it's unfair that the people think that all boys are monsters who can't control themselves. "They're still lumping me in with the other boys! I'm different! I'm a nice guy! It's stupid that they think boys will be distracted by girls in short skirts, #NotAllMen are like that! This feminism stuff is a crock of shit, I'm still getting belittled based on my gender, it's ME who needs better representation in the world!" Maybe even throw in some angst about how he needs to work up the courage to ask a girl to the school dance.

2) The misogynist who just accepts that boys will be boys, and women should accommodate. He believes the administration making the dress code - They say that the job of a woman is to stay out of the way of men, and he accepts that. If he fails a test, it's because that BITCH Karen wore a short skirt and she KNEW that no one would be able to concentrate. If he gets rejected, doesn't she know how HARD it was for him to ask her out?! He DESERVES to go out with her! That time he screamed at his wife for not having dinner on the table? Well, come on! He just asks that she do EVERYTHING that he asks her to, like she's SUPPOSED to. Throw in some self-righteousness about how men should work and protect women, adoration and promotion of anything society tells him is masculine (I love chivalry! And beer! And cutting wood!), and a derision for any men which break that mold.

I don't know what the answer is, I was just thinking about where these attitudes probably come from. Plus it's nice to be able to say definitively, "Hey person, you hold toxic attitudes about women/minorities/anyone else because you're an immature manchild who is mentally stuck in the 4th grade."

[pochercoaster]

In my experience things were flipped: rowdy behaviour was tolerated in boys but not in girls from the get-go. Girls weren't supposed to speak up or be direct because it wasn't ladylike, even if the teachers weren't consciously thinking that.

For example, one of my very earliest memories as a child was being told I need to smile more. I was in kindergarten, and already I was being told I need to fake a sunny countenance.

In grade three- when I was 8- I wore a tank top to school because it was hot. They made me wear a dirty t shirt from the lost and found because I was inappropriately dressed. I was 8!

When I was in grade five the boys started grabbing my breasts (because early puberty, yaaay) but did the teachers give a shit? Nope. So I hid myself in big, baggy sweaters.

The same year, an older boy started picking on me. One time he picked me up and threw me on the ground so hard it knocked the wind out of me. So I fought back and shoved an ice ball in his nose. He needed to get stitches, and guess who was disciplined? Me.

I still think it comes down to the fact that we socialize (mostly white) boys and men to expect that they will rule the world, don't teach them boundaries, encourage them to be violent or at the very least tolerate it, etc. We teach men to hate women- to see them as subhuman, as prizes they're owed- and it's evident in our media too.

I meam, obviously a lot of parents do a good job and socialize their sons to be better people, but it's not like there's a lot of things stopping young men from developing into misogynists. You have to actively inculcate a sense of culture and respect in kids and teenagers.

For more information about the differences in how boys and girls are socialized, I highly recommend you read Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine (it's basically a meta-analysis by a neuroscientist.)

Edit: Also Snek I think I changed my mind about your earlier post and understand it a bit more. The nuclear family ideal that is prevalent in white families can be pretty isolating and leaning on extended family and community is seen as weakness.

I discussed it with Erick and he brought up how economic hardship in his family meant that everyone helped each other out, and now that he and his extended family are financially stable they rarely interact with each other and it's socially destructive how we basically become individual entities under capitalism.

I'm just kind of shitty in that my default view is that everyone should BOOTSRAPS, MOTHERFUCKER- not because it's right that people are left without safety nets and no help, but because there's no choice. But sometimes that kind of thinking isn't helpful or applicable.

There is also probably some bitterness in there about how I never had a family to lean on and had to do shit with no help. Not asking for pity, I'm as happy as I can be, but it was a real struggle sometimes and I'm probably still mad about it.

I mean getting married into Erick's family has given me a safety net that I never had before and it's fucking bizarre to have relatives who will lend me money or give me advice when I ask for it. If for some reason I lost my housing I have somewhere to stay. I've never had that.

[BitVyper]

[rpgdemon]

Apparently Paul Ryan is holding a phone survey, trying to rally up support to gut the ACA by showing that people want to get rid of it. If you do not want the ACA to be gutted, you can show your support by calling (202) 225-0600, and pressing 2 and then 1 when prompted.

[Solid Snake]

Welcome to the ~**BOTH SIDEZ**~ Normalization of the Alt-Right in the Mainstream Media

"Does President-Elect Trump need to Denounce Objectively Evil People?"
"Maybe, but maybe not, this is worth debating, it could be controversial, there are risks involved"

EDIT: Holy shit we are literally goddamn 1930's Germany right now
Literally 1930's Germany

EDIT 2: This guy is the worst (WARNING: YouTube video link)

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by Solid Snek

This guy is the worst

I don't have anything to add, but I do have a request: could you use the YouTube tag for videos or label them as such in the future?

I really don't need my phone screaming 'Hail Donald Trump' from the backroom at work when I think I'm clicking a link to an article.