Cloud Strife
Established Member
- Joined
- 25 Feb 2014
- Messages
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There’s a few quotes in Fight Club that sound quite prescient now, about the generation of young men brought up by women (due to the much higher divorce rates/ single parent families in recent decades)… guys growing up without a father figure, looking for some “authority” in their lives
I can believe in this. By education, I'm a teacher, and it is *very* apparent when a child is mostly brought up by a single parent, usually a woman. It doesn't even have to be the result of divorce, it can be enough for the parent to be simply absent through excessive working hours. This mostly manifests itself in the way that you mention with boys, with girls attention-seeking in a different (but equally destructive) way.
I think that the comparison with Musk fanboys is very valid (albeit I don’t know enough about Peterson as a person to know what he’d think of the calibre of fans he has)
From what I understand about Peterson, while he's a wreck, he's also intelligent enough to understand the value of the 'brand'. All his claims (like eating only beef) are plainly ridiculous, yet we can't argue with the way that he's successfully commercialised himself. Most of what he says about himself is very deliberately designed to be shared on social media as well, and you can see this in the way he speaks when he's being interviewed.
Yes, I did have the possibility of that happening in my mind. If it did, then that would likely result in it being forcibly shut down.
This is exactly why it's so important to have an experienced content management team who have a grasp on technical matters. If these people leave, then it will be very, very hard to replace them.
Surely people have always had idols - sports people, musicians etc - and this is just a different manifestation of it?
They do, but I think the difference is in how toxic they are. All fandoms are toxic to varying degrees, but Musk, Peterson and others openly encourage their fans to be toxic with their behaviour and statements.
I think partially, it's because of the faux-intellect that surrounds them. A rock star throwing a TV through a window on a drug and alcohol fuelled binge isn't pretending to be some sort of higher being, he's just being an idiot with more money than sense.
But again: these people always existed and that Musk is just the current fashion. Once tech stops being sexy (and it will), then the Musks of the world will be gone as well.
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