People only offer derision towards people who fall for this (which is absolutely reasonable), but only a few see it as the fucking tragedy it is, no one gives a fucking shit about young men and their issues or gives them support, who are then taken wholesale by THESE bastards and turned into incels and/or nazis, had young men had any support from decent people we might have less people on the side of the bastards
I’ve stopped believing that. I think there’s plenty of support for them online; people like Mark Manson have been putting out great stuff for years. (His writings helped me through a lot of stuff.)
I think the main problem is that improving yourself requires admitting that you were wrong about some things, and apparently that’s really hard to do for some people. Easier to blame it on the rest of society.
Usually if something is as easy for another person as it is for you, then they’ve been as successful in it as you have. That’s all I have to say about your readiness to judge others with that implication that you are better.
Ah, actually visited that link of yours, clicked through one article and it does look good. The only catch is that I’m confident most people with such problems haven’t ever heard about this guy and his website.
Fair enough. I didn’t mean to say it was easy. Took me about eight years to realise I needed to work on myself, and then a few more to actually do so . Back then pick-up artists were still a major thing, so I learned and then had to unlearn all that bullshit.
However, things won’t get better if we’re treating young men as poor, helpless victims of society and the YouTube algorithm, instead of treating them like, you know, men, and telling them to take responsibility for their lives and online habits. It’s just the same victim complex with a new narrative.
One of my favourite movies/books is Fight Club, because it takes this societal dissatisfaction and tells you to get over it by working on yourself. You’re not a victim, because you still have the power to change yourself. (Of course, the whole descent into violent madness isn’t something to aspire.) I feel that notion is sorely absent in this discussion.
Back then pick-up artists were still a major thing, so I learned and then had to unlearn all that bullshit.
Oh. Thank dear god I never tried.
However, things won’t get better if we’re treating young men as poor, helpless victims of society
They are usually victims of their own parents, who may have too differing behavior from what is common average (say, example 1) both asexual and thus treating nonverbal communication as something not very hard or important, and thinking that you’ll just learn it, or, example 2) too sexual, like, sorry, one of the parents being an ex-escort and thus their child incorrectly measuring the signals sent, or, example 3) both parents having grown with their mother only or with little attention from their father, thus again not learning the skills of communication for men, one can imagine other examples).
instead of treating them like, you know, men, and telling them to take responsibility for their lives and online habits
Responsibility is fine for most, not knowing what to do is a different matter.
You’re not a victim, because you still have the power to change yourself.
That’s a philosophical question. You may have noticed that what you eat and how you exercise physically and what news you hear and what people tell you all affect very much what you think and how. So whether you can consciously change yourself to some intended end is, again, a question.
There are PLENTY of people who cares about young men. Many of them are just in REAL LIFE not on the internet.
Teachers and social workers at schools, classmates (yes, you can make friends with real people too.), FAMILY. Even if all that fails, many, many NGOs need more hands and would welcome any young men willing to volunteer. They just need to go there IN REAL LIFE.
Some areas or fields have a difficult time reaching men, including young men, and it’s not because they are not wanted. Let’s take psychiatry, for example. Many people already believe psychiatry is nonsense; add to this the common idea that psychiatric treatment is for cowards—and that cowardice is mostly for women (because women can be many bad things, but men can’t)—, and that’s a recipe for men scoffing at the idea of visiting a psychiatrist (and a psychotherapist, by extension).
I’ve also heard people complaining about a lack of role models, but there are excellent role models. I hope I am not wrong about them, but I admire Stephen Fry, John Oliver, Keanu Reeves, Bill Nye… I also like many small influencers. Some of them talk about being a man with great insight, such as @watchfulcoyote on TikTok.
I cannot say with certainty how free these radicalized young men were to choose a better path than the one they are on, and it probably varies from case to case, but I know there were and are normal and decent people watching out for them.
No, these people were always sexist, that's why it's so easy to hook them on this bullshit.
We are all socialised with misogyny (as well as cis-heteronormativity) literally from infancy (and those of us who are directly impacted sadly internalise them to a depressing degree), and that's when we need to start fighting against it, not only once the misogynists turn violent (verbally as well as physically), it's too late at that point (even if they can be deradicalized the damage they did is already done).
If you don’t know that you’re ridiculous, you might never not be ridiculous. You might never know that the premises of your beliefs are absurd nonsense.
Andrew Tate is absolute trash. He’s also not one of the lonely people he’s targeting.
I’m not defending Tate or Peterson. I’m defending the lonely men who fall prey to his bullshit because everybody else just ridicules lonely people for being desperate enough to reach out tothe only people offering anything to them at all.
So the secret to deprogramming a rapist’s online cult members is just to have really good intentions. Got it.
I think I’m just going to continue ridiculing Tate. If that hurts his believers’ feelings and they feel a bit ridiculous, well, I guess I’ll have to live with myself.
Yes, the secret to deprogramming a rapist’s cult is definitely 100% to have good intentions for those lonely men who fall prey to the cult.
Yes, keep ridiculing Tate because he is ridiculous and hostile. But if you are generally ridiculing lonely people for their desperation and their failure to find a good response to their misery… then you are exactly the same as Tate.
I think making counseling a mandatory part of school for everyone would go a long way to helping prevent this problem. Something to get the kids that are behind socially to be more comfortable socializing. When I was a kid all the incel types were coming out of highschool having had the shit bullied out of them for years and being afraid to socialize with anyone outside their group. Then they get out of school with social skills and at the mercy of wherever they end up(college, job, neet, whatever) if they don’t find someone to include them in shit and rewire them out of that “other people are cruel” mindset they’re fucked.
Why does it always have to be on the rest of society to take the highest road, offer all of the grace of community to those who actively participate, encourage and promote the destruction of our society?
Ever notice that they immediately have to take the role of the victim and expect to be treated in a polite manner, then get mad when society doesn’t respond the way they want? Fucking exhausting.
I’m glad you admit that you will not take the high road, and that you have no empathy or compassion. You are a sociopath and you enjoy making vulnerable people suffer.
If somebody is in a position where Tate appeals to them, my criticism of Tate’s brainwashing combined with criticism of those who ridicule lonely people will be more influential than this meme’s ridicule of lonely people for being desperate enough to fall prey to brainwashing.
These lonely people are trapped between two hostile forces. I am drawing attention to that.
We aren’t criticizing lonely people. Go take your strawman elsewhere.
Incel/NEET/sigma/Redpill “culture” 100% deserves as much and as frequent derision as fucking possible. The only remotely positive thing these horrendous ideas perpetuate for their target audience is the “grind mindset” (which in itself is horrifying). The only reason the “grind mindset” is helpful in these situations is that it helps people stuck in this world get into the real world.
if you are dumb enough to be bigoted out of ‘loneliness’ then I don’t think I care too much. being an asshole and being sexist and transphobic are not the same.
I’m fully aware of the depths depression and other mental illnesses can take someone to. I understand hating people because your life sucks, I won’t understand people that resort to demeaning those already beneath them (in a socioeconomic sense, that is.)
The grift doesn’t lead with hate or demeaning people. The grift leads with answers and solutions to serious problems (albeit largely bullshit solutions), and then the hate is brought in later to isolate the recruited person and build in-group loyalty be defining an out-group.
When bloodthirsty lunatics then start their attack on that high level by ridiculing the recruited person for showing interest in a cult whose only appearance to us is that they treat us like the out-group, but without offering any solutions or even humanity (just explicitly mocking them as lonely people), then you’re just solidifying the group dynamics that the grifters created.
I don’t believe ridicule should be the immediate response. However this comment and its tone is exactly the kind of thing you’re bemoaning, but from other direction. The only difference is you’re being preemptive about it and basically announcing it at nobody in particular instead of reacting to one person specifically.
My kitchen YouTube feed randomly showed me a “Rachel Zegler criticism” video and I was curious so I put it while cooking.
It was basically a 40 min rant where some YouTuber was showing her hypocrisy because she said Hollywood needs more representation from latinos even though she was acting on a movie as a puerto rican. The video could have been 2 minutes long but I noticed it was mostly the guy criticising every single word she’s said and telling you how to feel about it.
I checked YouTube the next day and now it’s full of alt right channels, for context I mostly watch veritasium, audit the Audit, science podcasts, dw documentaries, kurzgesagt and some music videos, I rarely watch political stuff on that account and yet now I see Ben Shapiro, Piers Morgan, Andrew Tate, Steven Crowder and the likes, literally my whole front page was just them and my automatic queue would be increasingly alt right shit.
I clicked on not interested and don’t recommend this channel and yet I constantly see the videos showing up in the front page.
I think YouTube is heavily pushing this type of content, even if you try to show the algorithm that you are not interested. They probably see that it makes people get more engaged with the platform so they are okay with radicalizing everyone just for profit.
You got it. Alt right to Nazi pipeline = increased view time = increased ad revenue. Same with how Facebook ranked content that got people to give it an “angry” react 5x higher in the algorithm than a “like” at one point. Anger/hate drives engagement.
I think you tubes algorithm looks for things that are new to you and then loads you up on that. For example, I had an event that has caused my tinnitus to spike and I found a 10 hour video to listen to while I work that helps mask it. Now my entire fucking feed is overrun by different coloured noises and quack/chiropractors telling me to pull my ears to heal my tomorrow
I actually got this solely in YouTube shorts, but without having viewed anything related to it. Every few Shorts I scroll through, I’m met with something plucked straight out of the alpha/sigma/HKV trashbin and I’m assuming it’s because I likely got demographic’d. It frankly kind of pushed me away from the whole feature - not much of value was lost since a lot of Shorts are just teaser trash that gives you a portion of a story designed to drive you to the channel.
Oddly, my regular, non-Shorts recommendations are fine.
Youtube will add things here and there to find you something new to binge on to stay on their platform. If you watch something a little, you’ll be shown a couple similar videos. But if you watch a lot of that first video, you’ll be bombarded with similar content like you were.
It’s made me have to watch in incognito first, just so it doesn’t screw up my Recommended.
You might want to try deleting that video from your watch history. Idk if it actually does anything to the recommendations but definitely something to try.
Work motivation content is a funnel into this kind of content. You watch a whole short form video about someone talking about work ethic with the hashtag #motivation and you will probably start getting Peterson and Tate clips
Sneako and his “I’m a little teapot” lookin ass with those goofy ass ears. Holding a dickhead like him or the Tates up as some sort of goal to strive towards is synonymous with “rock bottom.”
I get it - like I understand the mechanism behind why some younger dudes become infatuated with these figures. It’s the same reason boomer housewives get into the Law of Attraction or why people who don’t have a single fucking clue think Trump is going to fix everything if he could just get one more term in office… but I don’t get it.
Holding a dickhead like him or the Tates up as some sort of goal to strive towards is synonymous with “rock bottom.”
for real, have you seen the chin (or lack thereof) on tate? lmfao. might be hard to spot of course because he tries to hide it very desperately with his little prepubescent goblin beard
The funniest thing about Andrew Tate is he’s so obviously overcompensating for being gay. I mean funny weird, it would be funny ha ha if he weren’t also a manipulative kidnapping rapist and grifter.
True but it might mean he isn’t gay. I would be more inclined to think he gets off on the approval and admiration from anyone vs wanting sexual or romantic relationships with other men.
He did a video of him and some dude playing Chess in his undies.
I play both sides of the fence, I have seen some hot femboy on femboy action, and I swear right hand to God that Andrew Tate video is the gayest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s gayer than 8 dudes blowing 9 dudes. I was ready to go back to women after seeing the THUMBNAIL of it. It’s that bad.
Even now I’m having Akira flashbacks of this video and the damage it’s done to me and god knows who else. Also, they can’t play chess. Neither can I but he definitely can’t.
I think a lot for the guys that follow these morons and buy into this culture did not have positive male role models growing up, thus turn to media for some guidance.
This does not excuse their conduct or self-delusion, but does explain why it happens.
I’m in no way excusing their villanry, but most are so delusional that they won’t ever take a hard look at the way they are and wonder if they could be something else or if they need to change
I mainly feel bad with the young men who are not yet captured but are down that path. I’d like to think it couldn’t have happened to me but I had the luxery of going through that time of my life when that stuff wasn’t really around.
Though actually I had 4chan at that time and I turned out mostly well adjusted so they’re not completely blame-free.
people seem to think if you’re not in support of them or their position, then you haven’t experienced the same things and been on the same path. I saw where I was going and specifically changed it.
I’m still a depressed, alone, piece of shit, but I’m not a bigoted, fascist piece of shit.
Empathy doesn’t have to mean letting them do whatever they want. It’s the only path to reforming them. I’ve worked with a young kid with no dad in the process of going down this pipeline. You have to challenge them on what they think they’ve learned about being a man, but if you don’t try to understand how they feel they will just shut you out. Ultimately you can’t make someone believe something. So you either give up and label them a lost cause, or you actually try to reach them and convince them person to person.
What do you think they should have done differently? I am excusing their behaviour but I want to understand what should anyone with no positive male role model do other than turn to the internet?
well people can be both, victims of circumstance AND be accountable to their own agency that’s life its complicated and ambiguous. I bet like 20% of people with male socialization and no good role models haven’t become complete dicks
It’s not the fact that they’re on the internet, it’s the fact that being on the internet doesn’t inherently make them good.
Of course a boy subconsciously looking for guidance will find these guys and feel inspired or compelled by them. But maturity is the concept of learning from experience and challenging your own understanding in order to be a more balanced and level-headed person tomorrow. You know, exactly what these guys try to stop.
So the only thing these kids can do is embrace growing up, becoming mature, and finding role model figures that champion that instead of ones that peddle the arrested development that these charlatans do.
I find it crazy that I didn’t really have any real male role models, but the media I turned to ended up being guys like Henry Rollins.
The “finding myself” period of my life pre-dated the existence of this manosphere/shallow-ass-masculinity shit, but the archetype has been around for far longer and there were plenty of slimy douchebags to look up to. Sometimes I wonder what spared me.
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