SGR

Marcus Aurelius's Meditations should be required reading in school. Young men would get more pragmatic advice from that than they ever would watching Andrew Tate.

Concentrate every minute like a Roman— like a man— on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can— if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered , irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.

jwb

it's not just out of spite. I would rather have the content out there and decide for myself how to engage with it. Im not a saying you can't run into figures that are going to be problematic but I prefer that over the mob and platform just deciding for us which ideas or arguments are ok to explore which ends up being rather arbitrary. Joel Osteen is probably just as big if not a bigger grifter than Tate and he will never be cancelled for bilking his congregation out of their hard earned money based on a literal lie that they will be going to heaven to be with Jesus and their families. If Tate is a scam artist that feels completely incidental to the fact that he got banned.

jwb

All you are going to do is keep playing wack a mole with these people. It's not about the individual. A person like Tate exists because of the niche he found and exploited. He wasn't the first and won't be the last, and banning someone like let's say Alex Jones has done absolutely zero to get people to stop believing in the kinds of conspiracy theories he pushes. So I do think you're quite overstating how effective this method is at actually battling harmful ideas. Not to say arguing with them is necessarily going to yield better results, but at least it would yield better content.

jwb

That's a cop out that is pretty emblematic of what I mean. If instead of getting into Jordan Peterson and self help let's say I just decided to sit around and vote for Bernie and hope eventually someday people will have free healthcare. That feels like a completely powerless and hopeless message to give. On an individual level even relatively bland advice like clean your room is infinitely more useful than believing in all the correct policies.

TheBig3

Some nameless conservative guy in an interview once said "the Left is incapable of talking about any relationship other than government." which was his way of saying church, family, yada yada. But it's also true of things like this. People should be free to fly their freak flag, and also the government should help. Those are the two things they stand for. The Left abandoned a lot of the staples of society like, neighbors and communities because of course, those enforce norms, and we don't like norms because they get exclusionary.

When Peterson talks about psychology and the adjacent topics, he's not bad. Just basic. When he talks about politics it's not different than Sean Penn. You're a celebrity for non-political reasons, and now you're going to talk about politics. There doesn't need to be a Left-version of the kind of folks who help young men (which is needed, by the way) because helping young men become Men and not raging incels shouldn't be political. The real question is, why do all these people speaking to young men come up with a Right-wing bent? The only person I know who is out there, attempting to help people in this same vein is Ryan Holiday, though he is completely focused on the Stoics, and isn't targeting young males specifically.

But he's the only one who isn't trying to sell a cult of personality on the side. As for Andrew Tate, I have nothing positive to say.

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Frownland

Ja the left really needs to step it up and provide the validation of misogyny that the bros desire.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

jwb

No that would be dumb. Instead, when someone asks why guys like Tate and Peterson are having such success giving self help messages to young men we'll scratch our heads and give some vague bull**** about wealth inequality.

Like I said you don't have to give the same exact kind of advice but if you are just going to write the actual questions off rather than try to come up with your own answer then don't be surprised when that field is dominated by the opposition.

Frownland

Nah you pretty much have to give the same advice to corner the same market because it's easier to let pre-established doctrines of misogyny think for you than to be a vague and overcomplicated nerd. That's why this brand of grifter is so consistent in terms of ideology.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

jwb

I mean I'm not gonna lie I do think it's going to be easier to grift than to offer any actual useful self help advice the same way it's going to be easier to find some idiot YouTuber to teach you the ways of communism rather than cracking open an actual book. And the more digestible video is also more likely to leave you with over simplified misconceptions. But that's not exactly a reason to abandon the project completely. So while I do think you have a point there I also believe that the left just tends to shy away from placing much emphasis on personal responsibility because they think it gives political fuel to the right. But that kind of approach is literally the only way to give any useful self help advice.

Frownland

It's probably more because self help is a better vessel for right wing ideas since it focuses on the individual and encourages people to ignore structural factors influencing their lives rather than the left "avoiding" grifting people. The existence of the market doesn't necessitate pursuing it either, since to be similarly effective you're basically asking the left to operate like the right.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.