True, you’ll never go out of business selling kids things that will shock their parents.
…like a philosophy lesson on Plato’s republic
sorry, couldn’t help it
I’m gonna guess the Plato isn’t what draws people to him initially, but who knows, I could be wrong.
Well initially, it was him playing Amnesia: Dark Descent and screaming like a moron when something scary was happening. I remember seeing one of those videos from that era and discounting him as annoying for years afterwards.
Yeah, that is the truth.
I taught high school for most of my adult life, and most young people are strongly attracted to messages of rebellion.
My theory is that this is especially strong when aimed at stuff that the older generation considers to be “settled issues.” Stuff where there may have originally been an overwhelming reason for society to create a taboo, but now it’s just an assumption that seems not to need spelled out support.
I think of my generation’s reaction to George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.” It’s not that we had a long term commitment to being able to say those words on TV, it was just thrilling to feel a part of a rebellion against unsupported assumptions. Years later, many of the same people who felt that thrill, cringe when they hear a president uttering crudities in public.
If the goal is to prevent the Sterns and PewDiePies of the world from making fortunes, I think it’s a lost cause. It’s entertainment that is very well targeted to millions and millions of people at a certain stage of development.
But if our goal is to prevent them from having lasting influence… as a teacher, I strongly believe that depends upon the reaction of mature adults. The more hysterical-You-shouldn’t-need-any-explanation-how-evil-that-is, the more the crudity resonates with youth and the more likely it passes from short term thrill to political position. The more adults react with calm reason, re-visiting why swastikas or whatever came to be taboo, the more often it gets deflated. My father was a master at that!
Kind of hard to react with calm reason when the presence of certain symbols are essentially if not literally a threat to your life. I would not approach some shocking and often inappropriate things that some online and radio personalities say the same way we approach the the threat of renewing a genocide campaign. Approaching the latter that way is ignoring or at least overlooking the experiences and cost of a number of groups in favor of a point-of-view and experience of the majority in order to make it some sort of teaching moment.
Well, I’m open to other kinds of reactions, if they yield better results.
Some German philosopher, and I tried to find it but couldn’t, said something about every child needs to rebel to establish a distinct identity from his parents. That makes sense to me. I’m different from my dad. I believe different things. He’s older, has his beliefs, but mine are mine own. That kind of thing.
Definitely.
As best as I can tell, it is a normal developmental stage, and, like earlier ones which seem to be discussed more often, the person can/should pass through that stage on the way to maturity. But some get frozen there.
I know 40 and 60-year olds who got frozen into that rebellious stage. It seems to me that a common cause of that is when the supposedly more mature respond inappropriately.
Go apeshit over potty training (pun intended) and you create longterm problems. Go apeshit over rebellious urges, and you get similar results.
But that is tough when the commercial world inflames those rebellious urges into ever-more-aggravating forms.
tl;dr
PDP said he would donate $50k to the Anti-Defamation League. Some of his fans went nuts over it. He’s now saying he won’t donate to ADL but instead give it to another charity.
In other news, I canceled my plans to give a $10,000,000 donation to an internet stripper, also named Charity.
The “fan backlash” was alt right, /pol/ and The_Donald screaming that Felix Kjellberg (i won’t use that ****s infantilised nickname) was being blackmailed by Jews, who control ADL and use it to oppress the free speech of white males. Kjellberg is a 21st Century hatemonger.
What a weird self own.
I assume that he was going to donate to them in the first place because people think he’s an anti Semite, and then by flopping on it, he just proved the he either is one or listens to them.
For someone who claims h’es not an anti-semite, he sure does seem to do what his Nazi followers want an awful lot.
I’m so tired of seeing new … I don’t even know what to call them. Descriptors, for political groups. It’s so confusing. Ever day it feels like I have to fucking look up something to follow a conversation.
My father died when he was 70 and I was 44.
It took six months until the terminal cancer finished with him.
During that six months, I knew I had something important to tell Dad, but I kept putting it off.
As he became less and less lucid, one day I just went out to his place, where he was lying on the sofa with his eyes closed, grabbed his hand, and said the words: “Remember how rebellious I was as a teen, and how you tried so hard to reason with me?” He nodded emphatically. “Well Dad, I just want you to know that even though I acted like I didn’t hear you, as I got older, all of those words came back to me over time every time I needed those words. And I just want to say that…You were right.”
Dad nodded with his eyes still closed and gripped my hand. “I know.”
The following words had never been uttered between us in all of my years, but I mustered them: “I love you.”
“I know.” He had managed to avoid saying them again.
I honestly don’t think he knew that he stole that line from some film or TV show. I don’t remember which one though.
Empire Strikes Back
Oh, duh. Of course.
In that case, he may have stolen it. I know he saw “A New Hope” in the theater, and liked it. I don’t know if he saw any of the others though, though now I’m thinking that he must have.
/pol/ is the explicitly politics oriented subforum on 4chan. While the whole site is rife with pedophillic incel weeaboos, they really let their worst excesses hang out in pol. It is the breeding ground for a lot of the memes the alt right likes to co-opt (eg the fucking Pepe frog’s far right ties largely originated there)
Sigh…