this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

As a zoomer that's old enough to be working class now. Man, my childhood was fucked. At school, being a right wing troll was the norm, at least for boys. I was too.

The worst part is no-one cared, fucking "they'll grow out of it" and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he's even in fucking denial about it, "Oh they didn't actually mean that, it was all jokes".

And our education system doesn't do anything to combat this shit either. Quite the opposite, the dogmatic authoritarian approach schools take coupled with zero-tolerance policies pretty much ensures people shouting this hateful shit get away with it.

After all saying "Hitler did nothing wrong" only gets annoyed looks, gets completely brushed off as "edgy" or something. But then when someone points out that person's shit, suddenly that's an attack???

[–] [email protected] 9 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that's basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I'm pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn't give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that's not exactly helpful either.

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It seems counter intuitive but I don’t think Gen Z is as good with technology as most people assume they are.

I think they just believe everything they see on YouTube and TikTok. Those algorithms just feed people what they want to see and don’t challenge anyone.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 22 hours ago (6 children)

Who thinks they're good with technology? They've never had technology that requires any more knowledge than how to swipe. They're shit with technology.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago (6 children)

I mean that many people just assume younger generations are better with technology.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There's no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.

Older people grew up on BBSes and later "Bulletin Boards", which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a "celebrity" vs "fan" content model where it's all geared around followers and likes. It's all parasocial relationships from the "fan" side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It really fucking sucks that platforms that used to be designed to allow 2-way communication between equals have flopped so hard trying to follow the exact model you just outlined. For all its faults, Facebook used to be a really great place to keep in contact with long distance friends and family. Now it won't even show you anything anyone in your friends list posts, and the options for interacting are completely neutered on their mobile site. It went from being a site I enjoyed, to a site I despise. And there aren't any alternatives. The era of a platform for friends and family is over.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.

Before Facebook people weren't locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.

Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn't a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you'd be nuked from orbit.

Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can't leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don't want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can't leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn't owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.

Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don't know how we back out of this shitty situation.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (4 children)

The main source of this recent trending fascism, anti-scientific thinking and so on is social media or the web in general. To resist or refute the mass of false information and find out what's likely true and what's not, requires education, literacy, media competency, things like that. I guess current generations are lacking this so they fall easy prey to "funny" fascist memes, fakes and rhetoric, then vote for rightwing extremists, destabilizing their own country as a result, not realizing that this leads to big disadvantages for everyone including themselves. We failed to protect these younger generations from misinformation, and now they are turning the world into what they are misled to believe is true.

We used to have relatively high living standards in the Western democracies. This will soon all crumble and we (most people who aren't rich) will suffer from it, regardless of who you voted for. And on top of that, climate change will finish us all off, because battling that isn't even on the radar for those fascists because they don't even believe in it. So instead of doing too little, we'll do literally zero and even accelerate the problem, meaning it'll affect us all much sooner already and with higher intensity.

So enjoy your still existing relatively privileged life while it still lasts. It's ging to get much, MUCH worse before it's going to be better again. Buckle up and prepare yourselves.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 17 hours ago

With the levels of anti-intellectualism, it's also quite hard.

You write more that 3 lines? You used a "buzzword"? Congratulations, your refutation won't be read, but will met with ridicule!

My mother's boyfriend often "reads" articles from more liberal-leaning news sources, and he just laughs at the buzzwords. Cannot tell what the articles were about.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 19 hours ago

PragerU was started to indoctrinate Gen Z when the realized the Millenials were Far Left and the Boomers were dying out

Mission Accomplished...

[–] [email protected] 139 points 1 day ago (14 children)

There is a lot to be said here. I'll use my own experience as an example.

I'm a millennial male who had a terrible time as a young adult through my mid 30s. I grew up in a fairly religious/conservative area of the US, and I didn't have the ability to even start questioning that before my college years because literally everyone I knew was either a vocal supporter of or tacitly accepted that cultural status quo. Mental health issues were either not discussed or not recognized in any serious fashion. It wasn't until my late 20s that I finally understood that I had severe depression and anxiety and sought help, despite suffering from it since my early teenage years.

Socially, I never felt like I was cool enough or good enough. I didn't understand women, and the endless series of rejections and confusing encounters only served to erode my low self confidence further. I had no idea what a healthy relationship looked like because my parents were just going through the motions at that point, and the relationships I saw in TV shows and movies were incredibly shallow. The few people I considered friends did not support me in any positive way. I eventually kicked them to the curb, preferring solitude to being the butt of their jokes.

I was a prime target for recruitment for the alt-right: depressed, alone, disaffected, and ready to lash out. The only thing that kept me from going in that direction was a keen sense that the rhetoric was bullshit and its leaders only cared to take advantage of the rank-and-file to accumulate money and power. Many people I knew were not so perceptive and became victims of that movement.

My only saving grace was that I had a decent job with healthcare benefits, which allowed me to get the therapy I needed to overcome these challenges. Again, most people I knew did not have such resources. Nearly a decade later, I am now a family man with a wife and child. I am far happier than I have been at any other point in my life. Despite that, there is still plenty I don't understand. I don't have a good grasp of what positive masculinity looks like. I cannot point to anyone who has served as a good, male role-model in my life. I still don't have any close male friends with whom I can share my feelings and challenges.

However, I do understand how easily young men can be swayed to far-right crusades. Social media warped my view of reality, and it's far worse now than it was 10-15 years ago. Moreover, there is no alternative to far-right echo chambers for young men to commiserate and get help. Those spaces simply do not exist on the left. If you dare to complain or vent, you will immediately be told your problems don't matter and called a misogynist. I can readily call multiple conversations I had with liberals and feminists who rejected my problems, even being told that I was "living life on easy mode" because I was a man.

For all the women who are reading this, I get it. As a man, I don't have to worry about the government meddling in my bodily autonomy. For the most part, I don't have to worry about walking alone at night or being accosted or raped. I don't have to worry about being taking seriously at my job or being passed over for promotions because of my gender. However, none of that negates the challenges that young men are facing. Their gender does not save them from broken homes, abuse, mental health issues, a bad job market, degrading standards of living, student debt, double-standards, confusing and contradictory narratives surrounding dating and relationships, etc. Yes, privileged men with no right to complain do exist, but they are an extreme minority. The vast majority of young men are in a bad place, and the only people reaching out to help have ulterior motives. If you want things to change, try having some empathy. Maybe you will get empathy for your problems in return.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 day ago (8 children)

This. Men are more often victims of violent crime, homelessness, mental illness, suicides, do worse in school, incarceration, die in wars, work dangerous jobs. Classic male institutions, structures, and spaces don’t exist anymore like they used to.

Add to that that men showing emotions is still seen as weakness.

These issues aren’t addressed or even mentioned.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

As a Gen Z man who statistically should have fallen down the incel and alt-right pipeline but didn't, this echos exactly what I see in my generation. We don't have positive examples of Masculinity, and the left just yells at us that we're trash, when we struggle with things and most don't have many (or any) good friends to lean on. So of course they go to the alt right.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

and the left just yells at us that we’re trash

I'm a millenial and I never got this. There must be a split somewhere when people fell into different echo chambers or algorhythms. Like 7 years go I used to frequent reddit subs like MGTOW and pussypassdenied, looking for something to connect to because of clinical single-ness. These were the only spaces I would find comments like that. On my other, left wing, socialist Internet spaces this wasn't present. That is why those pro-men/anti-women subs never connected to me. The work on yourself, improve yourself and keep reading was great, but the insane amount of hatred and religion pushing was crazy.

Yet it feels like men in my situation these days don't have alternatives. It's sad when Andrew Tate is considered masculine. Terry Crews or Keanu Reeves are much better. Sure they're not podcasters, but they give off a much better vibe.

It's a shame that the space these men find themselves is pushing against freedom of expression for others.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Thanks for relating all that - lots of information but worth the read. You largely summed up my own early existence in the first few paragraphs. My therapy came in the form of getting involved in theatre, which exposed me to all kinds of people and ideas, revamped my attitudes and saved me from embracing radical ideas that are more or less based on rejecting a society that rejects you. I think that same cynicism is common in people from many different backgrounds, who share the same alienation for all kinds of reasons.

I'll even add one - throughout my software career doing contract jobs, finding a new gig always took me 2-3 weeks and was very routine. When I turned 50 the 2-3 weeks abruptly and permanently became 2-3 months, and took a lot more effort. Apparently in that community I was suddenly too old. Only one recruiter let slip that age was the reason a potential client rejected me, but the sudden difference at 50 was stark. So I don't know what you do for a living but you might be facing that yourself when it's your time.

Anyway I totally agree about empathy. I don't know what it is but people seem to be constantly on guard nowadays. Their go-to assumption is to look for evil and refuse to accept simple mistakes. That and permanently crucifying anybody who does anything morally unacceptable, or ever did in their past. If somebody Likes the wrong tweet it's unforgivable and irredeemable. I don't recall another time when so many people were so militant about this attitude. Forgiveness used to mean compassion, now it means you're complicit, enabling, a shill, "just as bad," etc. I think we need to think of the glass houses analogy and stop pretending to be morally impeccable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

there is no alternative to far-right echo chambers for young men to commiserate and get help

I feel like there's an adjacent issue where any space like that without a clear political lean quickly gets pushed rightwards by shitters

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 day ago (7 children)

White women as a majority still voted for Trump. Why just blame men?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The result of telling women they could vote for someone their husband didn't vote for was the right flipping out and essentially calling them property. How likely do you think speaking up is when you are stuck financially to someone who sees you as a servant rather than a person?

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Social media. Gen Z grew up with youtubers and influencers pushing their beliefs.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

in the age of misinformation and grifting mind you. it's not just the technology, we've had youtube for 20 years

[–] [email protected] 160 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I’m a gen z male, raised in a far right Republican household. I’m a social democrat. I am progressive.

[–] [email protected] 106 points 1 day ago

Good on you. No group is a monolith

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 day ago

Unironically, congrats on breaking free of the brainwashing. I grew up in an insanely red rural area and a very conservative religious family, unlearning all that shit has been a decades long process (and still continues).

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (9 children)

I was actually wondering how the gender gap changed in this election, and it wasn't at all what I was expecting:

According to exit polls by CNN Trump gained +2% of the male vote, and +5% of the female vote compared to 2020 - though women were still more likely to support Harris, of course.

An analysis by the AP found similar results, with the support from men under 45 increasing +7%, and women under 45 +6%, while for older men it decreased -1%, and for older women stayed the same.

Surprisingly, Trump's support among racial minority groups increased while white and older Americans increased support for Harris.

After thorough analysis and much thought I have ultimately concluded that I have absolutely no fucking clue what is going on with American politics.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

It’s the economy. Look at the numbers for voters without a college degree, rural voters, and lower income voters. Trump won all of these groups. In the WaPo exit polls the issues are included, not just the demographics. For voters who think the economy is the most importantly issue and for voters who think the US economy is doing badly: Trump dominated.

The Democrats continue to fail at shedding their reputation for being out of touch with working class Americans. The only income bracket that Harris won was the $100,000+ group. This tells us that the Democrats are an upper middle class and upper class party.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So they voted to have their faces eaten

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (4 children)

the real metric that matters is that way way less people voted. not many people changed their votes from last time. many people are simply convinced to stay home, and as always, that results in a Republican win. the propaganda that was most effective was all of the "Kamala is no true Scotsman, so you should just not vote". i believe this was lost by the people that "refused to vote for genocide". i think that's what accelerated the genocide.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I guess the lonelyness epedemic plays a part in it which hits younger people harder then older ones and mans stronger then woman.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's a pretty ignorant way to overgeneralize about a whole generation. I hoped I was leaving this kind of bullshit behind on reddit.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Every flag-emoji in a user's profile name is a red-flag for a different mental illness.

But this is pure scapegoating. Even the most straightforward read on the turnout demographics tells us where the problem is.

Trump won the White People.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Trump was expected to dominate the white vote. Hispanic voters were expected to be way more blue tho, especially after the recent "porto reeko" fiasco. I read that Hispanic males tended to prefer Trump but women liked Harris. The geography stats are unsurprising - more dems live in urban areas and more repubs in the smaller towns and wide open spaces. The huge surprise is that younger voters are so evenly divided. Maybe I'm just used to the constant noise on reddit that blames Trump on boomers. Now it will probably shift to "BuT ThEy GoT HiM StArTeD!"

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

I'm a Gen Z male, from what I can tell it seems like older generations tend to rely more on cable or traditional news outlets while younger generations tend to get their news from social media platforms like Instagram. Cable news tends to be more corporate and "normal"/consistent, while Instagram tends to feed news from a larger variety of sources that tend to be more anti-corporate and radical, but those sources also tend to optimize for very short bursts to get the point across quickly so the user can quickly move on to the next piece of news, and there's also quite a bit of low effort content and reposts and misinformation and that sort of stuff. So I think it's social media that's the main driving factor in causing Gen Z to be more radical - which in some ways is a good thing since they have more awareness of the events in Palestine (and radical leftism is based), but the platform can also put them into far-right fear-mongering bubbles and cause serious problems.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Women asked for some basic goddamn respect and when they got “uppity”(because us men weren’t listening) they really got a “you were mean to me so I’m gunna elect Hitler again”. Millions of people alive today want women strip women of the rights they fought for and women are supposed to be polite about it?!

It’s crazy how weak they are and I’m sad sharing a gender with them.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (3 children)

And many of those people who voted to "elect Hitler again" were woman. I think it is wild that people keep minimizing the role of the single largest voting demographic into victims.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 day ago (34 children)

I can see why some young men might feel like the Democratic party is prioritizing women's issues over those affecting men, especially young men. In fact, it might seem like the Democratic party is not only indifferent to struggling young men, but hostile to them. I can understand why someone might not want to vote for a party that thinks of them as deplorable, pathetic losers.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Man. I get being disappointed. I really do get it.

But tarring all these guys with "hitler youth" when just like every other group, at worst it's a 45-55% split... Come on. That's a hell of an insult to throw towards people, many of whom are doing their best and didn't vote Trump. Doing your best, doing everything that you can do, and still being met with scorn... I know how bad that hurts. I know how it sucks the will right out of you. I know it drives people away. And even if it doesn't drive them to Trump because they're good people, it sure isn't going to drive them towards finding a solution.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I am Gen Z male and please do not let my blond hair, blue eyes, and German lineage deceive you. I’m as appalled as one can be with all of this. I never connected with my boomer dad or my millennial elder brothers over machismo or sports nor did I ever pick up TikTok and my social media consumption elsewhere was limited or gated by my own doing. From my experience, the pressure to conform to masculinity and male dominated in-groups; the perceived onus to keep males in power and powerful; and the propagandists’ weaponization of media such as TikTok, Facebook, podcasts, and Fox News and their ilk on TV and radio are the main depreciators of character in these cases.

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