The last bit really speaks to me. "So they want a cookie for basic behavior??" YES THEY'RE CHILDREN. COOKIES ARE THE DRIVING MARKET FORCE IN PRETEENS. GIVE THE KID THE DAMN COOKIE.

Cookies are my driving force, and I am in my 60s.
- Username definitely checks out and is so very wholesome. I picture you baking your own cookies and sitting down after a long day with one saying "I deserve this" and you absolutely do!

Part of the issue is that online, it's often hard to tell the difference between someone who is genuinely asking questions and someone who is asking questions in bad faith. The (relative) anonymity between people is definitely a hindrance here, you can often not easily tell if the person you're talking to is 15 or 30.

It does not matter at all who the person asking the question is, how old they are, or whether they're asking in good faith or not. You answer the question for the sake of the audience who will read it. Answering the question is an opportunity to demonstrate understanding, inclusiveness, and compassion. Even if you suspect that the person asking is doing so in bad faith, there is no downside to responding as if they were doing so in good faith, whereas attacking them for asking the question is all downside.
If you're feeling frustrated and suspicious and you don't have the patience for it in the moment, then do not engage. You'll only do harm, to yourself, to them, and to anyone else who reads the discussion.
- If it's clearly bad faith, you report and remove it. It doesn't actually benefit anyone to discuss with people who are using the question format to spread fascist conspiracy myths. Some posts are very blatant about it.
Then answer as though they are asking in good faith, remain calm (which can be difficult, I acknowledge), and avoid dismissing their feelings or position. Remember that you're talking not just to them, but to everybody who reads the exchange in future, and some of those people will need those calm words to turn away from the rabbit hole.
- And take breaks. You don't have to be everyone's savior. Do the help you can, when you can and just try to make the internet a little safer and happier than you left it.
- The problem with this is that the trolls will have more time to sealion than you do, so even if you are confidently and eloquently rejecting their ideas, they will just keep flinging new bullshit until you run out of energy and they get the last word.
Tbh, if someone is asking questions, that's (kind of) already a good sign - even if in bad faith, at least it gives space for expressing an opposing viewpoint instead of just closing off all the discussion with insults and attacks.
- I'm definitely not a fan of insults etc. - at worst, I'd just report it. The issue is that some of these bad faith posts are made by rightwing political activists, those aren't in any way willing to change their point of view and are just binding resources that could be used elsewhere more productively. And if a community is targeted by those types, they can easily destroy it by posting so much that they dominate the feeds.
I think an under discussed issue is the people answering questions in bad faith as well, not just obvious trolls but those playing longer cons.
Could you give me an example of this asking questions in bad faith? I've heard it before but I just can't wrap my head around what it means. Questions are questions and answers are answers. I'm of the opinion that unless it's in private messages, even answering troll questions with earnest is useful as public comments have an audience.
- If it were obvious from a single example, it wouldn't work. The goal of bad faith discussion is to make the other party engage in good faith, and they won't do that unless they think you're also acting in good faith. Once they're engaging, you can do things like waste loads of their time (it takes much less time to spout some dumb bullshit than explain why it's dumb bullshit), persuade bystanders that you're right by arguing with more logical fallacies and unreliable sources than they can point out, and make it look like they're being unreasonable by sealioning.
- Look up ‘sealioning’, ‘ad hominem’, ‘Chewbacca defense’ for starters. You will see these techniques show up quite often in bad-faith debates. You’ll also see a lot of goalpost-moving and general logical fallacies.
  If you want to see it in action, watch videos of Charlie Kirk’s ‘debates’; he uses all of these to ‘question’ in bad faith—in other words, not to learn things, but to prove himself right at any cost. For a good analysis video of common right-wing behavior of this style, watch The Card Says Moops by The Alt-Right Playbook.
  What I do is call out the bad-faith technique they’re doing in my response. If they try to move the goalposts (the ‘gish gallop’ technique is the speedrun version of this), I pull the goalposts back. It isn’t enough to point out the fallacies in the arguement; you also need to point out how they’re using bad-faith techniques too, so people who don’t have as much debate literacy can learn what patterns to look for, not just what answers.
  EDIT: For an easy start, there’s actually a very clumsy attempt at a bad-faith argument in this thread
  They make a false equivalence argument, where they try to equate removal of religious symbols from classrooms with the removal of religious names people have in an attempt to discredit the idea of keeping religious iconography out of schools.
- "I'm just asking the question" has become popular with various groups that don't have counter-facts. Instead, they couch statements as questions or use them to chip away at opposing, reasonable arguments. No answer to the question (other than the one they intended) will ever be accepted, and facts will just raise more questions or moved goalposts. Then, when these people finally get shut down or yelled at for being jackasses, they claim persecution.
  It was a VERY popular tactic with anti-vaxxers or pro-Russians on social media before Facebook etc became mostly a bot-populated desert.
Even if they're 30, it's better late than never for them to learn, right?
- If they're going in without a desire to learn, you can't really reach them, at least not with forum comments. They'll probably need some work in person.
  Some of these 30yos might even be paid trolls or bots.

Whenever I mention that the way things get phrased in left spaces matters, I get yelled at that it doesn't matter. This is why it matters.

I'm an adult, so.im not going to let some Internet Dipshit who can't practice what they preach chase me right, but there's plenty of vulnerable kids out there, who do have real problems, that are sick of being told those problems don't matter because of how they look - which is similar to the people WHO ARE ALSO OPPRESSING THEM.

Stop attacking fellow victims of the system. You are not creating allies

Yes. The left is horrible at messaging, both in terms of word-choice AND in terms of attitude. I fundamentally agree with left-leaning ideals far more than right-leaning ideals, but holy shit there are people who are just dog-shit at the messaging, and somehow that messaging sticks the hardest.

Big reason why I try to report and shutdown blatantly misandrist shit I see in leftist spaces. It's not clever, it's not funny, maybe it feels good for the person saying it but there is no difference in my eyes between a misandrist and a misogynist. Putting people down based upon intrinsic characteristics they cannot change is the exact kind of behavior done by conservatives.

You can hold everything that is in this post true to your heart and still understand the very real fact that misandry doesn't exist.
- changing the defenition of misandry is just as bullshit as changing the definition of antisemitism to include critism of isreal.
- what.......

Struthless has a really good video about this. I've seen it happen to the young men in my life first-hand. To my siblings, my friends, and - yes - even to myself at one point. And that hole is a hell of a lot harder to climb out of than it is to fall into, and I'm very lucky to have had some good, caring people in my life who helped me to do it. An uncomfortable truth that we on the left must face, is that this is an issue that will only get worse the longer we pretend it doesn't exist.

Just left a much less succinct version of this same exact sentiment. It really sucks seeing my family indoctrinate their own children, one of which is not severely but not moderately either spectrum. The sad shit I've heard come out of his mouth has been truly heart breaking.
Edit; watching that video was very reassuring as someone currently struggling with alcohol addiction. That compass metaphor was so incredibly powerful.
Thanks for the video, whole-heartedly. I'm an older millennial and don't really subscribe to youtube channels ever... but I did for that because I wanna be able to find them again. They were refreshing and I appreciate it

Heartbreaking: A Twitch Streamer Just Made a Great Point

Years ago I argued that misandrist feminist rhetoric (e.g. all men are rapists) was going to wind up creating a misogynistic counter-culture.

These days, I watch it unfold and just feel very very sad as it will ruin lives.

- I'll pop a little observation in here, as I've generally had a woman for my manager for most of my professional career (doesn't bother me, they've all been good managers).
  It's socially acceptable to make a joke about men (you know what men are like lol), it's a visit to HR if you make the same joke about women (you know what women are like lol). This isn't a false perception, or over exaggerated bit of right wing propaganda, it's just working life being a man.
  I'll NEVER forget an inaugural lecture where a professor stated she'd always hire women over men for her research team, and people cheered. She'd have been stripped of her title as a man, possibly sacked.
  To be quite frank, there are hundreds of little "adjustments" men live with today. I'm sorry to say that the iniquity men face today is real, and while older men can see how it balances past iniquities (or are indifferent) - younger men just see the iniquity levelled against them and rightly question it because their only crime is being a man.
  It isn't just "a few" - it's the normality we've created. It's a sad situation, because in the pursuit of justice we've created injustice and the predators that shape the manosphere have monopolised it for their own selfish ends.
- I agree the played victim like a soccer player.

As someone raised as a white Christian male: no, I have never felt like people were calling me evil, shunning me, or pushing me away because I am white, Christian, or male. That is such a bullshit take and people need to not tolerate that persecution complex nonsense.

Assholes get called assholes for being assholes, and instead of any sort of introspection they blame it on them being "white" or "male," because to them being a white male means they get to be an asshole and everyone else just has to accept it.

God damn this hits hard. I was seriously in danger of falling down that hole as a kid, because kids are stupid and the right talks confidently and ad naseum. Also my father wasn't exactly a stalwart of progressive ideals. I'm so very thankful for being a Mama's boy, she is probably the reason I'm not the typical chud I look like.

With that being said, this is also a societal problem when so many parents offload their parenting to the web. And I say societal because it is not often times not the parent's fault as having to work extended hours or multiple jobs just to provide the necessities.

It's really a feature, not a flaw, of the right's long term plan. Stupid people vote for stupid things.

The difference between liberal feminism and leftist feminism.

Yeah, let's put a label on it because we really have to smear someone somehow. I think the messaging must have gone right over your head.
- Yes, I'm smearing Liberals.
  What the person did there blaming kids to be inherently bad is a classic example of reactionary politics which Liberals specialise in plus given the history of liberal feminism particulalry in the US, I dont get why you're offended.
  Other aspects of Liberal femnism include:
  Thinking only specific cultures are enlightened enough to do feminism because other cultures might be "barbaric"
  Disdain for the working women who do menial jobs(prevelant in my country)
  Savarna Femnisim(upper caste femnisim) - related to the previous point but in this instance unique to upper class caste system practionerd in the subcontinent
  Blaming people of certain communities of being misoynistic bc they didn't vote in a war criminal - related to the first point and prevelant in you know where
  Point of all that yapping isn't just about putting in "labels". My point was recognising the fact that without having overall class consciousness feminism is useless as that version of feminism isn't truly universal and doesnt actually tackle conditions as to why right-wing or misogyny appears. It's the nature versus nurture argument which itself ties in to historical materialism. Sure empathizing with nurture vis-a-vis nature is not exlcusive to Marxism, but being a reactionary in regards to these sure is a lot more prevalant. Its the same reason you hear "Palestinians are inherently antisemitic" argument over and over again from imperial core liberals.
  Yhank you for listening to my TED talk.
  Sincerely,
  Person who you will most certainly call an insane tankie for having the most milquetoast lefty opinion.
- No.
  They're making a summary of distinctions made by a good deal of academics.
  You are just unaware of these as pre-existing terms, so you think this person is the first person to put an adjective in front of feminism.
  They are not.

So this is clearly personal to many people in this thread but I'm just going to point out objectively and non judgementally that Vaush and other participants misrepresent the argumemt made by the original poster.

The original poster specifically refers to men. Vaush's response either intentionally or unintentionally responds to to an argument not made by the original poster by referring to 12 year old boys.

This is actually fairly low level discourse because the entire reply chain is responding to a strawman. If anyone has any further insight I'd be happy to hear it. I think we need to elevate our reading comprehension if we're going to have meaningful conversations about this.

An adult man doesn't just join the Andrew Tate crowd. The foundations for agreeing with his misogyny were laid while he was a teenager (or even younger). The people who are alienated by this sort of rhetoric aren't adults, they're teenagers who haven't formed a political identity yet, who can yet be turned away from that self-destructive ideology and it is them who are turned away by such rhetoric.
The term "man" may by all of us be seen only to refer to males over the age of 18, but a teenage boy will already identify with it, will thinks of himself as cool, independent, grown-up. He will see an attack on "men" as an attack on himself.
While the targeted group may have been adult men, the actual targets will have been the twelve y/o Vaush spoke off and they will be driven further away from the principles of democracy and equality and into the hands of waiting fascists.
Young boys see comments directed at men as being directed at themselves as well. The foundations of the things that make a man buy into this shit are laid when he's young. I think it's quite valid to bring this up.
Yeah, the next step in the conversation is acknowledging that the same applies to a LOT of adult men. Not the majority, by far. But certainly enough to make a significant difference.
A lotta guys out there are participating in the patriarchy simply because it's how they were raised, or because they were in a bad spot and the right made a better pitch to them when they asked for help. Or the only pitch. They haven't thought it all the way through yet, and are just working with the information they have.
Every day at every age, there are some men out there collapsing the cognitive dissonance between patriarchy and basic human decency. Men who could be good people if they discard the right belief when the two finally become irreconcilable. When talking about effective outreach, these guys are important to reach. I'd say not as urgent as reaching out to the malleable kids before Dennis Prager sticks his oily little fingers in their brains or something of the like. But still a very worthwhile demographic to reach out to.
I figure that the assumption being made is that the alt-right social media pipeline is generally accepted to refer to the online ecosystem that was created to court impressionable young boys from the ages of 12-25 into the rightwing and then extreme rightwing ecosystem. And though Men's Rights Activists is more broad and could be considered a choice, it is the younger demographic that are the ones "falling in", and that's where I imagine Vaush clarified that with saying "12 y.o.s".
Older folks entering involuntarily, would have been through other media like Rush Limbaugh-style AM radio, Fox News or other Republican campaigns directly like Project Redmap in 2010, then those Republican groups shifted even further right over the last 15 years.
Perhaps the correlation that 12 year olds are the ones falling in even if others are doing it by choice, should have been explained by Vaush before jumping directly to the conclusion.
Sidenote: The problem is caused by the difficulty to have nuanced arguments within 150 characters. (The first two Twitter screencaps)

A big part of this is that parts of the Democrat base loves to actively sabotage any Democrat outreach efforts, because they are more interested in smug fart sniffing than strategic pragmatism.

more interested in smug fart sniffing than strategic pragmatism.
exactly.
For example: see the commenters in this thread

Yeah, this shit hadn't really taken off much when I was that age but I can 100% see it being a problem for me if it had. I was very much socially isolated and angry when I was younger because I was ostracized by basically everyone and couldn't figure out wtf I was doing wrong (looking back I still don't really know) and it wasn't until I got into college that I met people who were kind enough to help me get straightened out. If I hadn't met those people I think there's a pretty decent chance that I turned out to be a horrible person. I was certainly heading that way for a while.

Where exactly does she mention twelve-year old boys?

Or is Vaush just doing his normal shitlib thing of pretending not to have heard what the other person was saying?

The OOP may not have directly said it in their original post. But when people talk about young men "falling down the alt-right pipeline" it is generally referring to how thoroughly targeted that entire like 12-18 age bracket is with right wing propaganda. You're usually talking about kids that aren't old enough to know they're being taken for a ride yet. So while that person may have been referring to like... idk 18-22 year olds that's such a huge outlier in the usual discussion that it should be clowned on.
idk much about the guy you're talking about, but as someone with a 14 year old that I've had to teach to navigate this propaganda he's accurate in this instance. The way the right talks to these young men is insidious, and the kind of sentiment OOP is espousing here does nothing to stop young men being pulled rightward.
- But when people talk about young men
  12-year olds aren't "young men."
  idk much about the guy you’re talking about
  Vaush is a proven misogynist creep. So it should come as no surprise that those of us who know what he and his (so-called) "dirtbag left" ilk really is all about - ie, reactionary shitlibs masquerading as leftists - doesn't buy it when he suddenly jumps to the defence of a demographic that wasn't even a part of the discussion.
shitlib
Oh look at you proving the entire point of the post.
- Lots here are proving to be very defensive of a misogynistic creep masquerading as a leftist - is there any particular reason why?
It's assholeish to bring it up that way if that wasn't the original scope of what they were saying, but otherwise a fair point since teenage boys are probably the most vulnerable and relevant target for that kind of messaging.
- It’s assholeish to bring it up that way
  No. It's telling.
Shitlib? The OP is using liberal logic "the individual chooses to be a fascist" The person responding is using a Marxist understanding: These misogynists did not wake up one day and decided to hate women, they became that way growing up in a misogynist society, they were formed by their material conditions.
It is our job, of leftists to engage with the dialectic and push them to our side by being able to offer young boys an alternative.
This is my understanding at least.

They hated him because he said the truth (and didn't hand over his platform to someone "more marginalized" after one single drama).

Left is so othering. They want to qualify and categorise everything and everyone they meet. Stick name and stat tags on everyone so they can easily see where they belong on a purity hierarchy (which they are obviously queen of)

Source: cishet intj whtmle veg/choice/vax millennial leftist.

When I was doing the whole poly thing I was hanging out with a lot of self identified queer / kinky people. Among other things.
The first thing they'd always ask me is how I identified. And I'd always respond: I don't.
First of all it's no one's business who I choose to fuck unless I want to fuck them, and I always found it exceedingly cringy that people would make this their whole personality.
Secondly this shit just others people.all the labels just creates these homogenous bubbles of people that all just engage in masturbatory groupthink, and so many of them have almost no dealings at all with anyone who doesn't share their labels.
Fuck me , fuck women, be a man, be a woman, do whatever the fuck you want as long as it's consensual. But DO it, BE it. Accepting people who are in anyway not the norm should also mean accepting people who ARE, and you're not being inclusive if you don't include anyone who isn't like you.
- I‘m into hot people.

Okay sure but Vaush is an asshole. He says the r slur in almost every stream and the only one i watched [live] he went on for like 5 minutes about how he doesnt like to be in poor neighborhoods because "the layabouts make me uncomfortable and sad"

Lying about Vaush is a very respectable tradition on the internet, and you're doing it a good service.
- They're telling the truth about the horsefucker and you know it
- Lol okay

What is hidden here is the minimum age to use Twitch is 13.

It isn't important because it needs enforcement or something, but it does gesture towards the notion your generalized average 12 year olds are still too much of a child to be roaming Twitch.

It isn't the early days of the internet anymore. Safety is not guaranteed.

This is a civil discussion on the internet. It is possible it seems.

Not here though
- How dare you say we can't be civil?! The fucking nerve!
  (very, VERY big /S)

I like anarchy because I can trace a short line to a systemic failure in any instance

we need to talk to each other like we're babies. and babies are the smartest people of all, deserving the utmost respect and kindness.

edit: I CANNOT BELIEVE I FORGOT ABOUT

LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tldr

Literacy matters.
I'll try.
Left agenda sounds hostile to young boys. Right side exploits that, and are not honest about it. If you wanna teach them, you have to let them ask questions, let them feel included and not villainize them. Also, allegedly, there is more money behind right influencers. Less so behind left influencers.
If you choose not to read, the only opinions you will have on anything of importance will be the ones told to you by others.
Turn the other cheek.

Be nice and encouraging when talking about people. Saying mean-sounding things puts people off. Yes, even when it's really important people get the severity of something. Talk about the people who are suffering and the people who are actively doing it. Encourage people to think about how they might end up doing terrible things and how to prevent that. I know it feels so fucking wrong to be a politician about your most basic values, but there's a reason politicians are the way they are: they get shit done that way.

See how nice tumblr is?

Can someone please steal Twitter's url and redirect it there?