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Notes -
Society vs Male Radicalisation II - Male Role Models/Surely This Time Our Plan Will Work
I was on the internet this week, and I found this:
Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny
It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager. The Labour Party, the UK's apparent next government, has come up with policy to reduce the influence of Andrew Tate among schoolboys with the intended aim of safeguarding women and girls. It means to do this by creating counter role models to whom boys can look up to. This would not even the utterly embarrasing 30 year old boomers trying to guess what resonates with children, but would consist instead of older volunteer boys taken from within the same school. This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.
Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining. This betrays a complete lack of understanding about why men choose the role models they do and how they attempt to emulate them. These role models are deliberately or implicitly chosen as role models for young men by people who aren't young men often because they display qualities that are useful, rather than valued, to society. This is because almost all policy dreamt up by institutions concerning Men and Boys is not to their benefit, but instead to neuter a perceived threat against Women, Girls and the wider society. For every Marcus Rashford, there are multiple Mason Greenwoods or Kurt Zoumas who continue to receive all the signifiers of male success and receive no punishment for any of their transgressions.
It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society. This is in direct contrast to what young men want, which is to be outspoken, to be popular with women, to be socially and economically successful. No role model ever produced or selected by the state could manage this, particularly not when operating under the notion that it must maintain women's liberation, which itself requires the stifling of men. I question for how much longer this approach will be kept in place. There are hundreds of people like Andrew Tate across SM, each ready to teach boys what society is unable to teach them. Educators can more easily dispel Tate because of the sex trafficking offences and because Tate himself is a clown, but people like Hamza, whose lived experience is much closer to the boys he is trying to proselytize to than that of Tate's, they have no counterargument.
There's been a fair amount of discourse in lefty spaces over the last 2-4 years about how feminist/progressive ideology is good at telling men what things to stop doing but bad at teaching boys what they should do instead, leaving a lot of young men who want to be progressive without a reliable script to follow. Presenting and promoting role models is the solution, that project is very much in early days and not going to be very good at first, but in the long term it's the only way to stabilize a new normal.
I mean if you ask anyone to name some role models off the top of their head, those people are going to be very famous and therefore almost-by-necessity rich or fake, almost by definition. A non-famous role model isn't necessarily a contradiction in terms, but it wouldn't be the first example most people think of. And it's hard to be famous in a positive way without being rich or fake these days.
But there are plenty of viable non-famous candidates that the community is growing and embracing on its own in the normal, market-driven, organic way. Just like I've never heard of Hamza, I'm guessing you've never heard of FD Signifier, but he's an example of an organically-grown explicitly leftist microceleb who can serve as a good role model for young black men. And of course there are plenty of creators who aren't explicitly politically aligned but exhibit the virtues of non-problematic masculinity and are popular with younger boys, like Markiplier or SuperEyepatchWolf or etc.
And conservative communities have little difficulty producing positive role models for boys. Which seems like an obvious drawback- leftist communities need to astroturf someone into a role that is already filled elsewhere.
Asked with genuine and humble curiosity, what are some positive conservative role models for boys?
Local scout leaders, church leaders, etc. Two of my bishops growing up (I'm LDS) were huge role models for me.
My biggest secular role models as an adult are probably John Carmack and Richard Hipp, but that's because I work in software development.
I haven't much experience with scout and church leaders though I also was a teenage admirer of John Carmack. I realize I knew very little about him until I listened to his four hour Lex interview
What makes him a good young role model? Even in a space like video games he can make a mark and be successful
Okay he seems pretty awesome. Someone kids could look up to.
Does this stuff make him a conservative male role model though?
Eh Carmack probably isn't a super good role model of conservative values outside of a role model for the value of hard work and education, I agree. Though he is anti-woke to some extent (good friends with Musk, guest speaker at an explicitly anti-woke sci fi convention, etc.).
Richard Hipp on the other hand would probably be a good conservative role model. Devout Catholic, family man, hard worker and successful. Also massively impactful worldwide (you probably have a few dozen instances of SQLite running on your phone or desktop as we speak). And appears to be very humble in spite of that.
Mm, I'll take your word for it. I'm pretty unimpressed by SQLite :P
If you need a SQL database and don't need multiple concurrent writers nothing beats SQLite in terms of performance and simplicity. But yeah if your usecase falls outside of that it's not really a good fit. Though the SQLite docs explicitly acknowledge that.
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