-
Man... in retrospect there were so many signs, not only that the alt-r*ght would emerge but that it would focus on Bros and start w/Gamers.
-
Sometimes I think: if I had stayed in Barrens chat & tried to explain to people why Holocaust jokes were bad it would have had an impact.
-
Which sounds laughable but not really if you think about how people were probably inducted into this...
-
There's a pre-teen or a teen and they join a WoW group or guild and they are all trying to be 'edgy' by making 'offensive jokes'...
-
... and some older/better player says 'haha it is funny b/c the Holocaust wasn't real' & kid looks up to the person and doesn't question it.
-
... and boom their ideological immunities are weak and they repeat and multiply it and even they aren't sure of the line b/t truth and joke.
-
And your in this situation for years, and when someone calls you out & says 'hey the Holocaust happened and this is seriously offensive'...
-
... that person must just not be cool or edgy enough so kid goes 'haha jk, just trolling & you fell for it.' B/c your friend can't be wrong.
-
... and then the kid is talking about girls with other social awkward teens and suddenly you hear about "honest" advice on RedPill
-
...And now this kid has slid through this toxic social environment and is leading up threads about how awesome MRAs are...
-
Each one of these social groups slides the kid into another level of terrible shit & next thing you know their posting on the Daily St*rmer
-
You know, not any one of those groups were necessarily heading in that direction and that kid didn't have to go in that direction but...
-
... the path there is so smooth and so easy and just paved over with jks and 'jus trollin' and they all reinforce each other.
-
... and that kid ends up founding an MRA group, or making bomb threats for the lulz, or being a M*lo sycophant...
-
And suddenly he's leading a whole god damn group of people and they're all Nazis and even he couldn't tell you how he got there.
-
But you know what, I saw it, it happened again & again in places like Barrens chat in WoW, that's where it starts...
-
The wrong joke, wrong group, wrong forum. It all snowballs b/c some pre-teen trusted the wrong person behind a screen-name in a game.
-
B/c they were good at the game. That was enough to trust them. It isn't the game, it's the people, it's always the fking people.
-
And that slide would have been so so easy, especially if your white, male and Christian and that talk rings no personal experience alarms.
-
So yeah... I wonder if I talked to the right people in that virtual environment, explained why it was wrong, things could've been different.
-
Because really it is all about the people and such a small thing could have stopped so much larger consequences...
-
I see this shit now and I *know* some of those people were people I knew in WoW.
-
I was just a kid myself, & I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't have the training, or the knowledge but shit. Still could have said more
-
It isn't enough to inform kids I think. We really need to think about how we can go into schools and train them to argue this stuff.
-
You know why? Because those environments haven't changed, they've just gotten worse. This is happening again *right now*.
-
We're going to be facing an endless supply of shitty bro sexist racist assholes because we are doing nothing at the source.
-
The gd nerd to Nazi pipeline srhbutts/831962353948303360
-
Also: people you know can be monsters. buzzfeed.com/jacobclifton/pewdiepie-isnt-a-monster-hes-someone-you-know?utm_term=.dpyr0yqp5#.vqJBxGQgO
-
The point I'm trying to make in this thread really: no one starts out as a monster, but they can end up there almost by accident.
-
"He is both a creature of, & unavoidably a thought leader in, a nominally masculine industry and culture undergoing extreme identity crisis"
-
"Hitler jokes and rape jokes alike come originally from naivete, and eventually harden into belief"
-
"Hiding from the ugliest parts of our own culture is putting them in a position to do the most damage."
-
"They become collectives, at which point it feels like they came from nothing. But they came from somewhere"
-
This is so on point it hurts. THEY CAME FROM SOMEWHERE, but we're not there, the arguments, the defenses we make they aren't in that place.
-
These young bro hate groups are forming in the dark places we shoved them and they're not listening to our arguments on Twitter. What to do?
-
The core of the problem: They didn't start as monsters, but they *are* now. It would be better to handle them *before* they become monsters.
-
"The reality is that they were begging for limits, and we didn’t offer them"
-
"This becomes a self-protecting, self-healing status quo that goes spiraling into madness, with everyone in the mob reassuring each other"
-
There is so much about this article that is on point it is a shame it doesn't get all the way down to where this stuff starts...
-
... because honestly it really does start inside video games.