Monthly Archives: March 2021

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

Jordan B. Peterson

Allen Lane,, pp. 432, 25

Like most novelists, I am a firm adherent to the W.H. Davies principle of finding time to stand and stare. I was once sauntering down Regent Street when a gentleman hared out of a department store, closely followed by two rather healthier specimens. They flung him to the ground, upon which large quantities of merchandise started falling from his pockets. I was fascinated, both by the level of violence the shops security was using and by what a captured thief actually says when hes being subdued. (Clue: not You got me bang to rights.) After a moment or two another bloke came over to me and a couple of others gawping on the public pavement. Move along there, he said. Theres nothing for you to see here. I replied as anyone would when a stranger starts ordering you around: Who the bleeding hell are you?

The same question came to mind when reading Beyond Order. Jordan B. Peterson published the successful 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos a couple of years ago, quite no-nonsense in tone. Stand up straight with your shoulders back was number one; Tell the truth number eight. Now he presents us with 12 more rules. Are these self-help books? And before we start listening seriously to someone telling us to Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible, lets look at Peterson. Why should we follow his rules for life rather than those of Bimini Bon Boulash?

Peterson had been leading a blameless life in the groves of Canadian academe until, in 2016, the Canadian parliament passed a law prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of gender identity. Many transgender people, as well as those unwilling to conform to gender stereotypes, think its important to be able to choose the pronouns they use. Peterson, though acknowledging that it would be jolly rude to refer to Jan Morris, say, as he, questioned the proliferation of invented non-binary pronouns, such as zie and per, the rather ungrammatical codification of the singular they and, most importantly, what the merry hell parliament was doing trying to control peoples speech in this regard. His haranguing of a weedy mob on campus quickly became a YouTube favourite. A richly amusing debate on local television followed in which a colleague of Petersons demonstrated just how absurd the proposals were:

Heres a great little tip for people who are despairing at the possibility of remembering all those pronouns. What I do is programme in the persons pronoun next to the persons name in my smartphone. So whenever Im out and about, and Ive forgotten whether one of my transgender friends uses zie or zer or they and them or something else, I just look it up and its really super-easy.

As with all attempts to engineer linguistic usage, the appropriate response is what Regina George might say to Gretchen Wiener in Mean Girls: Gretchen! Stop trying to make zie happen. Its Not. Going. To. Happen.

If only we could all have such opponents in a debate, you might think. Peterson went on to build his sudden fame into worldwide celebrity, putting talks about all manner of things on YouTube and engaging in enjoyably robust exchanges with intelligently flabbergasted journalists I recommend an interview with the excellent Cathy Newman, in which both appear to be enjoying themselves a good deal. (Death threats followed, however.)

Peterson though rarely coming out with anything much that would be thought objectionable, rather than worth discussing is now a sort of bogeyman for millennials to scare each other with. When Penguin Random House Canada announced that it was publishing this book, a general meeting of employees was held. As reported by Vice website: People were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives. [One employee] talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend. You may find this amusing, or you may wonder whether the book you yourself are writing is going to have to be approved in advance, without being read, by the non-binary friends of junior employees of your publisher.

Anyway, here is the book itself, which, unlike the weeping juveniles, I happen to have read. It is pretty odd, I must say. The rules are quite old-fashioned Canadian Presbyterian in tone. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.

How is this going to work in practice? Petersons readers, surely, are drawn from the class of persons who are already firmly convinced about social order, hard work, hierarchy, tradition and so on. They arent likely to need his book unless they are planning to give itin a passive-aggressive way to their non-gender-conforming snowflake children.

The fact is that this is not really a self-help book at all. Cunningly disguised, it is a Savonarola-like jeremiad about things going to the dogs. If you dont do what Peterson says

Then you will come to curse man, reality and God himself for producing such an impenetrable maze of impediments and barriers. Corruption will beckon to you, led as you increasingly will be by dark, unexamined motivations. This will impoverish your life, your community, your nation, and the world. This will in turn impoverish Being itself.

On the other hand, things might go on much as before, one suspects.

This is a genuinely frustrating book. I wish, for instance, that the positions Peterson chooses to pick a fight with were better documented, rather than (quite often) the beliefs he imagines his opponents to hold. He goes to the Met in New York and looks at a painting (a little digging suggests hes talking about a Guido Reni.) There are people looking at it. I thought They do not know what that painting means. They do not understand the symbolic meaning of the mandorla. How does he know? It might have been an outing for a bunch of Guido Reni scholars.

More worryingly, there is a tale of a client of Petersons whose employer is said to have banned the use of the word flipchart on the grounds that it might be derogatory to Filipino employees, once insultingly known as Flips. I just dont believe this story. The racial slur is quite unknown to the OED, and any investigation of the new taboo placed on flipchart, including the source which Peterson cites, only turns up conservative voices bemoaning the ludicrousness of any ban. Of course there are cases of people objecting to words apparently close to racial slurs but etymologically distinct black students have complained about their professors using the word niggardly. But you need to be very sure of your ground here, both of the facts and that the choice of usage was genuinely innocent unlike a former colleague of mine who used to enjoy telling me that he was looking forward to eating faggots and peas for his dinner. The flipchart story, as so much here, just looks a lot like projection.

As an old-fashioned liberal, I ought to be on Petersons side: the defence of free speech against official or mob control; the injunctions to read and listen to other people, especially those who know what theyre talking about. But he makes it so hard. For one thing, he writes terribly badly:

This variance in ability (as well as the multiplicity of extant problems and the impossibility of training everyone in all skilled domains) necessarily engenders a hierarchical structure based ideally on genuine competence in relation to the goal.

His evidence too often looks constructed for his own convenience, or conjured out of some frankly weird readings of Harry Potter and Disney movies; and he is apparently totally lacking in humour.

The moment, however, when I really started to wonder whether I wanted his guidance about how to live was when, advising us on how important it is to make one room in your house beautiful, he describes his own. In his living room, no more than 12ft square, he hangs

some large paintings... Soviet realist/impressionist pieces, some illustrating the second world war, some representing the triumph of communism. There was even one... on the ceiling, where I had attached it with magnets.

Maybe not.

Here is the original post:

Jordan Peterson is the Savonarola of our times - Spectator.co.uk

Billionaire Elon Musk could be interviewed by Jordan Peterson, the controversial critic of political correctness. The two appear to have set up a sit-in on Petersons YouTube talk show.

Peterson asked Musk on Friday if he would be a guest on his program, to which the entrepreneur responded: What would you like to talk about? Musk suggested that the conversation could be about Life, the Universe and Everything, citing the title of an iconic book by science fiction writer Douglas Adams, so one assumes the number 42 may come up in the discussion.

Its unclear if the exchange will lead to an actual interview, but the proposal definitely made many people excited.

Musk, who currently holds the title of the wealthiest person in the world, is known for his extensive footprint on social media and swift embrace of unconventional public moves. For example, at the peak of the scandal involving amateur investors on Reddit going after Wall Street short sellers, Musk invited the CEO of RobinHood an app that drew much hatred for seemingly undercutting the small guy and siding with the big financial players in the situation for a surprise interview,

Peterson, a Canadian psychology professor, made his name by going against the woke trends in academia and elsewhere and championing conservative values. He is a bestselling author and has a significant fan following online.

Critics accuse him of fostering hatred toward minorities and catering to far-right extremism for actions like opposing policing the use of preferred gender pronouns for transgender people and speaking about a crisis of masculinity in the West.

Among his recent guests was Abigail Shrier, the author of the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which got pushed out from some major bookseller shops by activists accusing it of promoting transphobia.

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The rest is here:

Elon Musk offers Jordan Peterson discussion on Life, the Universe and Everything after invitation to talk - RT

The scandal broke in The Wall Street Journal, two and a half years ago. Three self-described "left-leaning liberals" had fooled feminist and gender studies journals to accept a number of absurd and horrific hoax papers for publication. One paper was billed as a rewrite of a chapter from Hitlers "Mein Kampf," but using feminist theory.

Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckroses endeavors were praised in some quarters as an essential satire of fashionable jargon and theories, and a brave expose of academic journals openness to publishing "intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit," as Yascha Mounk put it.

Others slammed the authors hoaxes as mean-spirited attacks on leftist scholarship; 11 of Boghossians Portland State colleagues described them as "fraudulent, time-wasting, anti-intellectual." When Boghossians university opened an ethics investigation against him, Jordan Peterson (of intellectual dark web infamy) declared only Boghossians critics could be accused of "academic misconduct"and not the philosophy professor himself.

What is clear is that the hoax and its controversy propelled Boghossian and his co-writers into the media limelight, big time, with multiple article in the mainstream press and a particularly warm welcome from right-leaning platforms: Dave Rubins show The Rubin Report and Petersons own YouTube channel, but also from more centrist outlets like Joe Rogans podcast.

Boghossian deepened his longstanding allyship with right-wing provocateur, Andy Ngo, and won a phalanx of new fans from Richard Dawkins to Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan to Megyn Kelly.

But did the trio really demonstrate that contemporary academia is receptive to an "intersectional 'Mein Kampf'"? What did the stunt actually prove? What were the underlying motivations of the hoaxers, and the conservative media stars who embraced them so eagerly? What light does this saga throw on todays culture wars and the so-called "anti-wokeness" and cancel culture campaigns? Whom did the three writers really hoax?

Let's go back to the stated aims of the three writers themselves.

Inspired by physicist Alan Sokals famous 1996 hoax paper in the journal Social Text,these "concerned academics" saw themselves as critiquing "an ongoing problem we see in gender studies and related academic disciplines," a problem they name as "grievance studies": the effort to inflame the grievances of "certain identity groups" on subjects such as race, gender and sexuality.

Their aim was, they claimed, to "reboot" the academic conversation, to "reintroduce scepticism" about core assumptions, and provide a safe space to challenge the "increasing power of grievance scholars."

Over a period of 10 months, they wrote 20 papers: seven were accepted for publication, and four were published.

To excavate the controversy, and as a historian studying Hitler, and, I've chosen to drill down into one of the hoax articles: "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," the piece flagged by the WSJ as based on "Mein Kampf."

It was sent to the journal Feminist Theory but was rejected; it was accepted by Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work in the fall of 2018, but never actually published. On The Rubin Report, James Lindsay airily hypothesized that it was "probably days away from actually being published when the WSJ broke their story."

Clearly, the idea that an article based on "Mein Kampf" could be published in a serious scientific journal is certainly an appalling prospect and generates instinctive outrage. So let's dig a bit deeper: What does "based on 'Mein Kampf'" actually mean?

First and foremost, the source material. The chapter the hoaxers chose, not by coincidence, one of the least ideological and racist parts of Hitler's book. Chapter 12, probably written in April/May 1925, deals with how the newly refounded NSDAP should rebuild as a party and amplify its program.

According to their own account, the writers took parts of the chapter and inserted feminist "buzzwords"; they "significantly changed" the "original wording and intent of the text to make the paper "publishable and about feminism." An observant reader might ask: what could possibly remain of any Nazi content after that? But no one in the media, apparently, did.

Indeed, in public, the trio constantly downplayed the amount of re-writing they did to the original text. On Joe Rogans podcast in October 2018, Lindsay described how they'd "modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly," and in another interview explained that this was to "get past plagiarism."

Chapter 12, he noted, included sentences like: "This is why we need the Nazi Party, and [this is] what is expected of people who are going to be part of it." What did they change? "We took that out [the Nazi party reference] and replaced it with intersectional feminism." What's left is an entirely anodyne sentence, stripped of any identifiable Nazi vestiges. Hardly "owning the grievance warriors."

So what did the text in the article accepted by Affilia actually look like? Was it, as Fox News claimed, a "feminist Mein Kampf", suggesting men should be treated the same way as Hitler victimized Jews?

It is surprising, to say the least, that none of the journalists reporting on the controversy actually bothered to compare the two texts. If they'd done so, they would have found that the Affilia article didn't contain anything that could be recognized as "Mein Kampf" even by a Hitler expert, let alone a lay person.

The best way to illustrate this is to highlight a section of what remained of Hitler's text, spread out as it was over several paragraphs on several pages:

[] to appeal to [] contented and satisfied, [] to embrace [].

[] half-measures, by [] a so-called objective standpoint, [] the goal []. That is to say, [] in the sense [] many limitations, []. [] countered only by an antidote, [] only the []. [] people [] neither [] nor []. [] abstract knowledge [] directs their []. [] is where their [] lies. [] receptive [] in one of these two directions [] never to a [] between the two.

[] emotional [] stability. [] than respect, [] is more [] than aversion, [] weakness) [], [] will [] power.

The future of a movement is [].

The lacunae between these preserved pieces of text were filled with material that was either re-written, or entirely new (including references to bona fide scholarship). This created the convincing illusion of an original philosophy paper. Neither the words nor the intent were comparable to "Mein Kampf"; indeed, the intent was the very opposite.

If the idea was to showcase the 'absurdity' of feminist theory, and the ideology-fueled laxity of editors, why didnt they choose to work from a much more ideological or racist part of "Mein Kampf," say chapter 11: Volk und Rasse ("People and Race") instead? Well, Lindsay told Rubin, revealingly, it was "too extreme" to be useful.

If the point of the experiment was to prove that radical theory was so unhinged it could pass as Nazism, they failed. If the point was to hoodwink a feminist journal to run "Mein Kampf" dressed up as feminist theory, but denatured the text to be unrecognizable from the original, then they didnt prove their contention at all. What they did prove was that there are workaday sentences with nouns and verbs and adjectives in "Mein Kampf" that can be repurposed.

Ironically, the figure whose 1996 hoax inspired the "Mein Kampf" stunt, Alan Sokal, was lukewarm on whether the later hoax had actually proved anything of importance, precisely because the authors had gone so far out of their way to mask their core contention in order to get published. He noted in a 2019 interview that the problem with the grievance studies hoax "may be that the authors did too good of a job of imitating the style of other articles in the field. In which case the articles [] wouldnt prove much of anything."

In fact, the trio wrote two articles based on "Mein Kampf." In one of them they claimed ) to have "essentially" just replaced references to "Jews" with "white men," although their own fact sheet states the article was a more comprehensive "rewrite": they exchanged "Jews" with "white people" or "whiteness," and "added plenty of jargon and critical race theory."

Why didn't this article get any media traction? Because it was never accepted by any journal, let alone published. That failure meant two out of three journals chose to reject "Mein Kampf" articles.

Nevertheless, the trio's stunts garnered them enormous attention. Besides Rogan and Rubin, they were interviewed by Jordan Peterson (at the time at the pinnacle of his fame), and their results spread through largely uncritical reporting in leading newspapers all over the world.

Riffing off Lindsay's framing, an op-ed in The New York Times falsely claimed that not only had the "Mein Kampf" piece been published, but that they had "simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitlers 'Mein Kampf'"; in The Washington Post, an op-ed incorrectly stated that it "was literally a partial chapter of 'Mein Kampf' rewritten using womens studies buzzwords."

Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro called the stunt "genius" and asked, unself-consciously, when "true power" would be restored to educators not engaged in "navel-gazing mental masturbation and toward a renewed intellectual search for knowledge."

The online magazine Quilletteoffered a prcis of the scandal that indicated its self-appointed status as savior of free speech wasn't bothered by obvious factual inaccuracies, stating that all seven papers had actually been published (false), one included a 3000 word excerpt from "Mein Kampf" (false) and that the latter had been published in Affilia(false).

But it was in Sweden that perhaps the most egregious write-up appeared. The country's second largest daily newspaper, the liberal Svenska Dagbladet, featured an editorial headlined, "The Feminazis at Our Universities," and it went downhill from there.

Editorial staff writer Ivar Arpi didn't bother to fact-check his claims about the Mein Kampf piece, regurgitating the same mistakes as Quillette, and then claimed the article accepted by Affilia was nothing less than "feminazism, literally."

"Feminazi" was the go-to slur for feminists coined by right-wing Christian shock-jock Rush Limbaugh back in the 1980s but its use in a Swedish newspaper was shocking and extreme; no other news outlet in the world (not even Fox News) used "feminazi" in connection with the hoax. Arpi, however, brought the term into mainstream, liberal parlance as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Perhaps Arpi's foul language was a harbinger of Sweden's growing anti-feminist backlash. A poll last month showed 41 percent of Swedes somewhat agreed with the statement: "It is feminisms fault that some men feel at the margins of society and demonized," the highest rates among eight European countries surveyed. According to Nick Lowles, chief executive of the anti-racist group HOPE not Hate, that anti-feminism is "wrapped up in the growing right-wing culture wars" and exhibits increasingly aggressive, even violent, rhetoric.

Feminism and gender studies are in the crosshairs of neo-fascism, and Sweden just so happens to have the worlds largest far-right party, the Sweden Democrats, formed by ex neo-Nazis, and one actual Nazi (an SS volunteer on the Eastern Front in WWII). The party won no less than 17.5 percent of the popular vote in the country's 2018 general election.

The "Mein Kampf" hoax itself is embedded within these wider culture wars, and is revealing about their dynamics and the strange-looking self-declared liberals-and-right-wing alliance pushing so much of the outrage machine.

That is best seen in the hoaxers own parsing of their stunt as they bathed in the glow of right-wing adoration. It had a far cruder, nastier edge, and goes to the heart of why the trio so deliberately chose "Mein Kampf" to "expose" the left.

On the Rubin Report, Lindsay offered an explicit analogy between "Mein Kampf" and so-called leftist "grievance studies": He claimed that Hitler, too, "was pushing the politics of grievance."

Perhaps Lindsay thought this was the winning tell of the whole endeavor. But it resembles far more what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls "pseudo-profound bullshit": To the extent it is true, it is trivial to the extent it is not trivial, it isnt true. All politics is based on some form of grievances; that is why we engage in political struggles in the first place: to correct a perceived wrong in the world.

Ironically, the trios whole stunt was based on their grievances towards "intersectional feminism" and gender studies; so are their grievances also the same as Hitlers? Of course not. Hitlers grievances and feminist grievances are not the same, and it is absurd to claim that they are. They are fundamentally different in every possible way except for them being termed "grievances."

This ludicrous equivocation does, though, illustrate just how widespread the relativization of Nazism and its crimes has become, and the nave ease with which it is being spread by people who are far from being fascist themselves.

To imply in any way that feminism and Nazism can be put on the same footing is a reductio ad absurdum: to relativize the atrocities of Hitlers regime. The right-wing media constantly replays the same equivalence dynamic, comparing cancelled events on campus, sanctioning platforms publishing threats of violence or just losing followers on Twitter as Nazism, Kristallnacht or the Holocaust.

But the use of the Hitler analogy is also intended to valorize the current-day "victims" of the so-called "feminazis" conservatives, Trump supporters, the "anti-woke" and their self-declared liberal fellow travelers. They are now framed as the "Jews," the victims of a totalitarian left which, not coincidentally at all, is often equated by the right-wing fringe to Nazism (the "National Socialists were socialists" idiocy.) Much of the outrage at this ravenous but nebulous "left" has now transitioned from attacking feminist theory to the all-encompassing bugbear of "critical race theory."

All this, despite the evidence of the real world where the right-wing was just in power, where in 2020 the GOP won nearly 47 percent of U.S. votes, where conservative churches, universities and think tanks are as solid as ever, and where an enormous and influential right-wing media ecosystem thrives a fact hardly peripheral to the careers of Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson themselves.

So, what did the "Mein Kampf" articles actually prove? Ironically, they showed that the journals they targeted rejected both of their papers; only after major revisions to one of the texts and after having been emptied of all traces of Nazi ideology and no longer had any resemblance to "Mein Kampf" did they manage to get it accepted.

If anything, it proved a remarkable resilience on the part of these journals to withstand pseudo-scientific bullshit. Moreover, the article Affilia accepted was a philosophical paper not premised on outrageously obvious forged data, as some of the other articles did. The fact that they managed to fool some reviewers with fraudulent content, and in some cases fabricated data, is not exactly earth-shattering news.

As Science reported, by late October 2018 more than 18,000 papers have been retracted by peer-review journals since the 1970s, about 60 percent due to fraud. The problem is arguably much bigger in the natural sciences than in the humanities and social sciences. Yet, we dont see Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose berating natural science journals for publishing bad science.

When Inside Edition featured an experiment where a comedian read Hitler quotes to Trump supporters, who were told they were from his speeches - and most agreed with the statements. The prankster didnt even tweak the quotes.

That didnt demonstrate that Trump supporters were Nazis, but that people are naturally gullible and suggestable, and will accept a persons framing (especially if it comes from an academic or a friendly journalist) unless they have strong reasons not to, or information that contradicts it. The same is true in this case; reviewers assume that their peers dont brazenly lie and fabricate content for the sake of an ideological prank.

No, the campaigns against gender studies, the study of racism and "intersectional feminism," and the gleeful efforts to humiliate other academics has nothing to do with a wish to preserve the integrity of science; it is an ideological and political crusade against an entire field of science simply because of its connection to feminism, social justice, and the fight for equality. Dont be fooled by it.

Mikael Nilsson is an historian based in Stockholm, Sweden, specializing in Hitler and National Socialism. His latest book is "Hitler Redux: The Incredible History of Hitlers So-Called Table Talks" (Routledge, 2020). Twitter:@ars_gravitatis

Read the rest here:

'Mein Kampf' and the 'feminazis': What three academics' Hitler hoax really reveals about 'wokeness' - Haaretz

In the past, or, to put it more directly, back when I wasnt even an idea, the internet was an expansive canvas for people to use as a tool to reach and talk to others. This includes early precursors to some of our greatest areas of interest resided in technology across the World Wide Web. Many facets that reside on the internet platform include but arent limited to social networking and dating sites, stock prices, banking information and even games on sites that will age me like Poptropica, Webkinz and AddictingGames.com.

The internet was a haven, so to speak, for many to use, young and old generations alike, to engage and interact with the many facets of life that were once deemed only reachable in person. While nowadays we are more cognizant of the internet now that we can use it in more ways than ever before, 20-30 years ago things were looking up for the internet. Now, Im a bit worried about the current state of the internet. Granted, the internet still acts as a platform for good in this world with social causes and awareness campaigns for many to give relief for causes like the Australian fires to racial injustice, but Im still wary about what the internet has indirectly caused.

With our increased hours inside, increased tensions have been dispersed between people of all walks of life for issues big and small from topics in politics to Dr. Seuss of all things. I wont talk about those specifically here because unlike a number of people on the internet, Ill admit I know nothing about those topics and dont wanna waste time on matters I dont see in my control directly. What I want to bring up is the debate currently pertaining to if the internet currently in 2021 is used entirely for the right reasons.

Some aspects that we know of now are definitely looked at under tinted glasses, as when the WWW was invented decades ago issues such as cyberbullying, cybercrime, dark/deep web fostering and other issues werent known of back in the 80s and 90s. I get concerned when sometimes the internet and even social media work around the loudest voices first rather than the right ones. For instance, its because of the internet rather than news and newspapers of the past that many of us know figures on YouTube and celebrities from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, the Paul brothers and others with eccentric personalities over people in high positions in science or industry. Figures like those aforementioned have garnered within themselves a cult of personality within themselves with their audience being across many different demographics across each of them (i.e such as the unethical and frankly loud former Disney stars and former Ohioans Logan and Jake Paul catching eyes of many pre-teens despite their adverse content against decency). Im not saying we are at fault for this (completely at least), but the internet creates correlations across figures like Alex Jones and the Paul brothers or entertainers like Daniel Tekashi 6ix9ine Hernandez for what they represent and are a part of. As a result, platforms like YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud and other platforms that carry hip-hop or music took some hits from their connection to these people by proxy whenever a bad story came from the resolute celebrity/entertainer.

Im all for free speech as a former stand-up comic as it adheres to not promoting violence and hatred. Im against blatant hatred and verbal abuse that the internet has overseen a great deal of over the past. Its frankly very poor how the internet has tried to mitigate such actions as someone who is a part of the sometimes volatile online gaming and YouTube community.

The problem isnt going away anytime soon with one-fifth of kids being bullied happens on social media and 59 percent of teens stating theyve experienced it, per a 2018 survey. If you want to look into some cases as to how this all happens, you can check out and read about six cyberbullying cases here as these only account for the stories that were told and investigated, with many others who havent been looked into as the stigma around mental health persists in many. The veil the internet provides allows people to say the most venomous and flagrant things to complete strangers sometimes, and it is appalling to me that this is still going on and the best people can give in terms of advice is to walk it off. Its never that easy sometimes, as some people I know have had long-term effects from this mantra and from constant cyberbullying.

Other issues pertaining to other matters are kids seeing inappropriate content on accident or without merit on commercial platforms like YouTube and Facebook, a matter that caught even more fire after the rise of OnlyFans and inappropriate content on the former from the exploitative to the abusive. Part of me wants to place blame on the internet but also its up to the parents to not raise them with ample amounts of technology in contrast to face-to-face engagement, but thats just what I think and other studies back up. In short, the internet should provide more motions toward stopping radicals from cultivating online through their capabilities, minimize cyberbullying activity across its widespread coverage space and above all mitigate the amount of damage that some cultivated figures can do thanks to the internets services and ability to push what is shared rather than whats right.

Regulating the internet via the government has many caveats to it, as worry may arise in how much they regulate it and what may be censored potentially. Some would say that current organizations trying to regulate content are inhibiting its content creators such as YouTube, Spotify and Twitch, but those can be solved on a more direct level with them instead of a slower government-based process. What I want is for the derived parties on the internet to take ownership of its faults within its platform that used to be completely safe and sound and now resembles, in some areas, a wasteland of what it used to be and hold.

Gregory Hess is an opinion writer. Contact him at ghess5@kent.edu.

Excerpt from:

OPINION: Should the internet be regulated for our and others' own safety? - Kent Wired