NYMag’s Jesse Singal mocks America’s alpha male obsession; critics denounce him as a “beta”

Tried to read the Singal article, frankly got bored and kept going back to learning about chemistry from Youtube. Finally closed the window when I realized that if chemistry is more interesting, I should probably just stick with that. It’s definitely not one of Singal’s best works.

Which makes me wonder how many of these tweeters actually read the whole thing.

And yet a flabby, draft dodging, three times bankrupt/divorced oompa loompa is considered an Alpha male by these idiots.

Among all the strange behavioral patterns of various bigots and extreme righters, the tendency to fixate on specific persons seems to be common to all these kinds of people. Anti-feminists don’t only fixate on current feminist authors, such as Jessica Valenti and Lindy West, but they have also developed strange obsessions with people who are long dead and/or irrelevant to the current reality. Manospherians always come back to whining about the evils of Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas, for example. They keep repeating quotes (real and fake), and discussing the actions and ideologies of these women, to each other in their reddit or 4chan echo chambers, with the result that they vastly overestimate the cultural relevance of these people. When they finally step out of the bubble and try to argue with a feminist, they’ll generally only get confused looks when they bring up Solanas out of the blue.

Woman hating atheists still go on and on about Rebecca Watson, who committed the terrible crime of turning a guy down once in 2011. They also fixate on Jen McCreight, who proposed the term atheism+ for atheists who also care about social justice issues, and several others.

One extremely strange example of this behavior comes from Swedish right wingers. Anna Sjödin is the name of a woman who was elected president of the Social Democratic Youth League of Sweden in 2005. The following year she was involved in some sort of kerfuffle with security guards at a night club in Stockholm. She was convicted of assaulting a guard and insulting him using racist slurs, as well as resisting arrest. Of course, she was immediately replaced as the president of the Youth League, and was severely criticized by her own party.

In the aftermath, right wingers became completely obsessed with Sjödin. Pictures of her face, with injuries from the night club fight, were shared all over the internet, usually coupled with the regular misogynist slurs, as well as the familiar communism paranoia (even though Sjödin is considered a very centrist social democrat). Despite this incident now being almost a decade in the past, and Sjödin having kept a fairly low profile ever since, I still to this day sometimes come across right wingers ranting about the evils of Anna Sjödin.

As we all know, GamerGate is a movement whose entire purpose is to fixate on specific people, namely Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and others.

This behavior seems so universal to bigots/right wingers of all stripes, I’ve often wondered why it is that they all act this way. Alt-righters are at the moment fixating on journalists who have offended their delicate sensibilities in one way or another, such as Jesse Singal who is mentioned in this post, and Adam Serwer who wrote some stuff for Buzzfeed that they didn’t like. They also cling to people who made the news for a limited amount of time, and then were mostly forgotten by normal people. Again, they rage over these perceived enemies in their echo chambers to the point where they become unintelligible to outsiders. An alt-righter can suddenly blurt out “Oh, you think Trump is a racist? But what about RACHEL DOLEZAL??? A-ha, checkmate!”, to which the response is “err, wut?”

They even pick out random celebrities and start one-way twitter wars with them, such as Juicebro Cernovich obsessing over Seth Rogen for months, spamming word salads packed with weird alt-right lingo that nobody outside their bubble understands or cares about.

Why do they all display this kind of behavior? What is it about being a right wing bigot that makes you fixate on specific people for years and years?

So I couldn’t resist looking at Candace Owen’s Twitter. She’s gone full alt-right. Like HARDCORE.

As in she fooled us all alt-right.

And all of her writers are, wait for it…

Interns.
Interns.

One thing to consider, conservatives and reactionaries often have a visceral dread of actually understanding their opponent’s ideas. Their understanding of what they are actually up against often comes from the same sources, recycled over and over. That’s why quote mining is so useful to them as it is a handy resource to share that only shows what is ‘bad’ but can’t contaminate them with actual knowledge.

I’m wondering how much of this is plain fear of the ground shifting underneath them (like “biblical inerrantists” insisting that if any part of their theology, no matter how backwards or easily disproven, is wrong, then Jesus is dead and nihilism reigns supreme), and how much is just an ignorant conflation of comprehending someone else’s idea and agreeing with that idea (like how trying to understand the motivations of terrorists somehow automatically means you “hate America”).

Or if there’s even any significant difference between those two things.

Rubs his nippl- what!? Why!? Where did that come from!?

Also, remember when some dude got all snippy, cos David put a #GG tag on an article with very little, if anything, to do with #GG?
Exhibit A: Marty Ramscurt

@ Ray of Rays

My thoughts on the matter are that a lot of (social) conservatives think of society as a house of cards. Any change may cause the whole to come tumbling down and just because the last 1000 times that prediction was false doesn’t mean the next time will be the same. Attempts to understand the enemy tend to reveal problems, like maybe that whole Shah thing wasn’t such a great idea or that blind patriotism has very negative side effects. Understanding leads to uncomfortable questions. Labeling people as hating America, being self hating Jews, etc… are silencing tactics and poisoning the well.

Hey, here am I again, the girl with the burnt house.
Today i was brave enough to enter home. I cleaned a big part of the garbage. My back is killing me, but it felt good to put some order to that mess, to work hard and know I’m doing all I can. Tomorrow a specialist will look at the eletric part and give me a price to make my house safe again. Lets cross our fingers and hope its not too much, but if it is, I may ask for your help, my friends. But I prefer to wait until I know how much I need. I’d never ask more than enough, especially knowing it’s difficult for everyone.

My mother is out of the ICU and my father is reacting very well to the meds. I love my mother a lot, but god, I admit he is the person I love the most in the world and it breaks me to see him sick. But he is getting better and, thanks to God and the place he works in, the hospital is excellent and full of doctors and nurses so kind and wonderful they cry with us.

Thank you for the support. Keep up with the prayers, cause it’s damn working. Not even the doctors can believe how fast it’s going.
Big hug for you all!

He risked his life and health to protect us and save mom. He is my hero, and I want to make him so proud. My first son will be named after him and he WILL meet him! And I will give him a life of peace, safety and prosperity.

We will go through this too.

And its a bit silly but seconds after we were out of the house and I saved the cat, until now, this chorus from Steven Universe keeps playing in my head:
Life and death and love and birth…
Is there anything worth more than peace and love in the planet earth?

@Imaginary Petal

Why do they all display this kind of behavior? What is it about being a right wing bigot that makes you fixate on specific people for years and years?

This may get a little stream-of-consciousness, but in my defense I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how that is structured. Seeing if any of it relates to the experiences of others is how I do error checking anyway.

I have some thoughts, and it comes down to the fact that they reason differently because the goals are different from ours and they are emphasizing different instincts and strategies, consciously or unconsciously. I remember some of this better than others and if you have any links I can get specific. What is fascinating is how much of this can be tied to harmful expressions of things in here. I also tend to have an “action based perception”. I pay a lot of attention to what people are doing independent of anything else to get the real meanings because often there is a layer of emotional distraction on top of it.

Bigots like to think in the simplest categories possible for ease of thought, and they tend to view social relationships in terms of conflict. Simple categories are convenient in social conflicts because it makes for good speed while you primarily depend on group activity to “win”, but as we know they have a very severe trade off in terms of accuracy so winning is not about being correct. I think of it as being “symbol minded”. Instead of individuals people become and symbols represent things and are things to be used, not people. Symbols are very important in social conflict because it’s only because we agree on their use and meaning that they have any power, but there are real instincts underlying them that are compatible with many replacements. “Dog whistles” are convenient to think about here. The terms may make no sense, but it’s how they are used and how they socially “flock” with them that matters.

I legitimately have the same mindset, but base my symbols on belief, pattern of thought, action and communication with a heavy emphasis on solid reasons for connections. I additionally let other people constantly update my categories, because the trick is making sure you use other people in the ways that they are comfortable with as much as possible (unless they choose the posture of combat and then we start trying to use one another). I think of it as letting people I don’t know show me what they are. Remember that until 50,000 years ago or so we were in groups of 150 or so. It would make more sense in such a small group even if it’s something I would like left in the dustbin of history. But in a civilization it’s not so easy to stop a movement and lots of what happens today is effectively leaderless, which is another reason to focus on belief, pattern of thought, action and communication. But we love our chosen leaders, and celebrities, and role-models, and heros and I just wish we had more control over the process and…

Bigots also tend to be authoritarians who feel more strongly about “representative examples” in a general symbolic sense, their own representative examples and those of others. They treat the people getting positive attention from groups they feel threatened by as leaders to be dealt with and made into examples in a conflict sense. So if anything negative (or something presented as negative) can be pinned on a person they inflate its importance and conflate it with the whole person or the whole group they feel threatened by. Such people are made into examples so that others won’t follow their example because to them the leader (or the example like Dolezal) is the group in symbolic form. They worry about role-modeling even if they are not consciously aware of it. In their minds if they can make a perceived leader stop leading, or make the leadership look too terrible to endure, or spam the social space with the leader connected to negative social information they win. So many of the people they fixate on become people getting attention that they need to worry about. The target choices are the people and the attention, and there are many unfortunate ways of manipulating both.

The physical person or social connections that person might have are targets (think Trump’s rhetoric here). Slurs and insults based on anatomy are common even though they have nothing to do with any substance. Language that involves the body is powerful because emotion is embodied so they use the emotion and ignore the substance, and it works on us, and takes some practice to recognize. Body-centered language is among the most emotionally intense, it’s implicit in metaphors and analogies. Attacking social connections is done similarly so that the target is isolated and used as an example.
Tone becomes more important than substance, and if there is no actual objectionable tone then the normal is often conveniently decided to be outrageous. Rebecca Watson’s statement about elevators and politeness was quite tepid and reasonable and said without much intense emotion at all. But when it gets mentioned it’s presented as awful unreasonable orders and the impression of the characterization (never a quote) makes her sound like a tyrant. That impression is divorced from her actual point about how the incident related to the subject of her talk that day, which I have never seen one of these cretins ever mention. Get enough other people to spread the info and the myth becomes the truth.

Interestingly this pattern (focus on something “outrageous” taken out of context) is reversed in the case of Harris fans. I can point to Watson’s context, but I never really get a Harris fan to point me to context that makes his words any better. “Heads I win, tails you lose” is a regular feature of how those with historical social control try to function.

Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas if I recall correctly are used because they either had some genuinely troubling ideas and/or their ideas get misrepresented, and they get conflated with feminism broadly. I’ve never seen a feminist claim that someone with bad ideas was not really a feminist(though I’m sure it’s happened), we tend to say they were bad feminists. When one of the MRA/PUA/manosphere/MGTOW crowd ends up awful they find excuses to make them illegitimate members, in public anyway.

So yeah. Manipulation of attention with respect to representative individuals and groups in order to try to define the social information connected to groups in a conflict sense. The rest is a numbers game when one has poor skills with respect to investigating the truthfulness of the information, and that is probably how it worked for most of our history. I hope the internet and data storage will be a game changer, in a good way.

Now my head hurts.

Happy for ya, Chio!

@Chiomara–my best wishes to you, and your resilience is a model for all of us.

@IP I may have mentioned this here before, but a few years ago I was fortunate enough to get a chance to read this:

http://galileowaswrong.com/buy-the-book/

(it’s damn hard to get hold of) and one of the striking things about it was the amount of space the author spent dissecting the personal lives of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Einstein. I mentioned in my review that typically while books about science, rather than history, may acknowledge the people who did the work on which the science is based, they generally discuss ideas and evidence, not the character of scientists. So now I’m intrigued by your point–what is it about this constellation of personality types that leads to fixation on particular people? Is this just an authoritarian thing?

Singal fails to categorize this nonsense as a component of neoliberalism – hyper individualism and masculinity as a commodity to be purchased; the self constructed as a personal “brand”. There’s a reason why all of it is sold as self help.