politics

These conversion & deconversion stories always go the same way:

"I'm an impressionable fuckwit who immediately gets on the first ride that looks appealing. But soon I realized I wanted to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride, because it looked much cooler than it actually was. Whew what a relief when I got off. Let me tell you about my current ride, which is much better, the most important ride of the world and you should definitely get on it too. Everyone who doesn't get on THIS ride (which is definitely the correct one to be on) is evil and dooming humanity!

I'm a reformed person."

There was a great article the other day talking about young men being lost and adrift, and a great takeaway is that JP and his ilk are a symptom, not the cause of men feeling guideless. While sane people haven't really discussed what good, healthy masculinity looks like, the alt right shlubs have been luring in people with no purpose by offering them toxic, reactionary masculinity.

The article went on to point out that the left needs to do better here. We need to provide a firm, healthy definition of masculinity. It isn't about absolute traits or the male ideal. And it doesn't have to be exclusionary from femininity. It can be both a masculine trait and a feminine trait to want to protect. To provide.

I watched 30m of a Peterson 'lecture' a co-worker recommended to me. It kind of opened my eyes. Peterson is basically a 'motivational speaker' that presents himself as an academic well enough to fool people that only understand academic aesthetics. He doesn't even try to back up his claims or references, he just makes wildly abstract and generalized claims about human civilization and draws analogies that sound like they support that perspective. They sound right enough to people that want to believe that there is an expression of their culture that is inherently 'good' and all of civilization's problems are based on corruptions of that culture. But in the minds of his fans he's offering 'proof' of this perspective by appearing academic, even though he offers none.

As someone who used to be obsessed with Jordan Peterson and had a similar 180 transformation, this is super familiar to me. I remember speaking up at work against critical race theory in a meeting. I look back on that now with huge embarrassment of who I used to be. I was actively working against the things that I stand for now. I'm super grateful to breadtube creators for pulling me out. I still have friends in my life who are like this and I can't seem to break them out. All I can do is try to be a better example

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

I've never agreed with Peterson much, and this article was really eye opening. I think the expression "not even wrong" precisely nails it: he talks in such broad strokes and general terms that you cannot even start a debate before he swamps you with more generalizations.

The problem is, as OP experienced, that Peterson (although he would never admit as much) and his followers use this rhetoric to justify misogynistic, racist, sexist, and other "traditionalist" views, that are a real danger to the people on the receiving end.

The best and only case against Jordan Peterson, is Jordan Peterson. If you can find rationality and logic in his rhetoric, you are not well and think poorly.

Ribbit

So mocking young loser men is back firing because some clown alpha daddy thought leaders are able to fill "loser's" needs for profit as "influencers" while spreading unfavorable ideology to the "left"

Who would have thought that running exclusionary and hostile rhetoric against a group of people would lead to them into opposition.

I agree overall with the authors point, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some solid media from the left side of things.

Some More News/Cody’s Showdy has been consistently great at firing back at alt-right figures like Peterson and Shapiro And related is the content put out by Robert Evans and Cool Zone Media. Behind the Bastards, The Woman’s War, It Could Happen Here are great. And they also did the collaboration in 2020 for Worst Year Ever which I really hope makes a return for 2024

Really most of the Cracked alum are great in this regard but those are the two sources I’ve got I’ve gotten the most enjoyment from

Interesting to see where the author's escape from the alt-right started; Frederick Douglass has been changing minds for a long time now.

Because the right-wing saturation of platforms like YouTube was so central to my becoming a reactionary, I believe that creating a competing left-wing presence in online spaces should be a priority for the Left. Currently, conservatives enjoy a nearly unchallenged role in grabbing young men who may very well be supportive of progressive movements, but whose lack of community drives them away from collective politicking. This needs to change.

It's really refreshing to see a suggestion for how to help solve the right-wing rabbit hole problem other than just blaming "education" and saying it needs to be fixed (not that I think fixing education isn't the answer, I just don't think that it is the only answer). Something I've been asking myself since the 2016 election is, what the hell are we going to do about what is happening to our society that is turning people towards hate, bigotry, selfishness and cruelty? Sure, we can try to educate people, but there will always be folks that turn away from public education. Additionally, here's only a fraction of us who attend some form of higher education that might expose us to information that might bring some out of a selfish world view. Meanwhile, all that right wing content has flooded the internet, just waiting to enthrall folks who don't have direction.

Fighting back by introducing an equal (or even greater?) amount of content that opposes hateful ideology is not a bad idea at all as a method to try and catch these folks before they fall into these dark rabbit holes.