The Empowered Nerd.

craner

Beast of Burden
You're also a Birther Conspiracy Theorist on the question of Craner. You reckon I'm 48 or something.
 

luka

Well-known member
We're both well preserved but craners kept his hair. He's looking a little drawn with stress but otherwise is in good nick. My youthful outlook on life keeps a twinkle in my eye and a spring in my step.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Some woman in the pub the other day said I looked 28. I haven't had kids, have all my hair, remain skinny, and good teeth (gums are playing up, though).
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I thought this was Craner?

c-bard.jpg
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
i was saying this on facebook the other day. i think the new empowered entitled nerd is a blight on our times. its especially posioned the interent. nerds were ok when they just shunned society and played role playing games together in closed communities. now theyre martin skhrkel or whatever.
theyre politics are gross. they are physically and morally repulsive. i think we must eradicate them.

Shows how credulous I am that I missed the ironic intent I assume was behind your initial posts!

I was kinda onside with the getting rid of nerds thing.

Assuming you aren't a nerd and (more audaciously) that I'm not one either!
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's clear to me that you're parodying the anti-nerd rhetoric that has arisen in the wake of Trumpmania. The blaming of this problem on nerds, rather than on people who enjoy watching American Football and committing hate crimes.

I only worked this out because I was confused by the fact that you were defending the angry nerds who shoot up schools even though initially you'd been saying nerds are a scourge to society.
 

vimothy

yurp
Excellent article on the "empowered nerd", "toxic masculinity", school shootings and the "beta rebellion" by Angela Nagle..

According to Nagle, the conventional wisdom is that the misogyny of certain online "geek" communities is due to the influence of the patriarchy, traditional gender roles, "toxic masculinity", etc:

It’s easy to mistake the beta rebellion for a youthful... variation on the bad old tradition of patriarchy. Yet the phenomenon bears the unmistakable signs of a new, net-bred brand of misogyny. It exists squarely within the libertarian ethos that infused computer cultures spanning from the early, back-to-the-land, frontier hacker culture of the sixties and seventies to the Californian rebel capitalism of the dotcom neoliberalism of the nineties.

As the same frontier sensibility that characterized early Internet culture also runs through American gun culture, it’s no great surprise that the rites of gun worship and principled geek isolation should overlap... But this seamless convergence of women-demonizing forces is, indeed, something new under the sun, an innovative incarnation of the free-floating male grievance that... metastasizes through culture. It’s striking... to note just how thoroughly both the press and the social media-centric feminist commentariat have consigned the beta rebellion to the dustbin of outmoded patriarchy....

In... Cybersexism, feminist journalist Laurie Penny admits that the culture of digital woman-hating does indeed have a surface affinity with geek culture, but then goes on to suggest that online misogyny is a conservative remnant of the pre-Internet past....

Academics have echoed this view, characterizing online misogyny as the politics of conservatism and patriarchy reproducing itself anachronistically in new media, or as just another emanation of hegemonic masculinity....

In response to Harper-Mercer’s massacre, Salon ran the headline, “Toxic Masculinity Is Tearing Us Apart.” The Huffington Post and Ms. magazine ran articles declaring the problem was “masculinity, masculinity, masculinity.” Writer Soraya Chemaly asserted, “What we really need... is a public conversation about hegemonic masculinity in the United States.... Schools, parents, coaches and religious communities all need to be thinking deeply about how traditional ideas about gender and gender stereotypes work to create a national culture.”

However, that view doesn't really capture the true dynamic of these online communities, which have little to do with social conservatism in any sense or with conventional notions of masculinity:

But how, exactly, does “hegemonic masculinity” accurately sum up a scene explicitly identifying as beta male? And can “traditional ideas about gender” really be bursting forth from an Internet culture that also features gender-bending pornography, discussions about bisexual curiosity, and a male My Little Pony fandom? What’s more, can a retreat from the traditional authority of the nuclear family into an extended adolescence of videogames, porn, and pranks really be described as patriarchal?

Those seeking to defend their ideological turf will say that the killers are measuring themselves against a damaging masculine ideal, but at what point is this stretching the hegemonic masculinity theory so far that it becomes tautological—and a rote explanation for all bad male behavior?

In fact, a great deal about the beta-male rebellion runs counter to theories of masculinity advanced by scholars like R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel. In her 2005 book Masculinities, Connell lists the words “nerd” and “geek” among the terms that stigmatize marginal masculinities....

The self-organized corps of women-hating men, by the lights of conventional academic-feminist theory, should be united in the repression of any and all gay male tendencies expressed online. But 4chan/b/ traffics openly in gay and trans pornography and hosts discussions of bisexual attraction....

Similarly, the beta view of gender is complicated by an anti-mass-culture outlook. As copycat threats multiplied on /r9k/ after the Harper-Mercer shootings, one commenter advised, “Make sure you got molotovs. it is really easy and painfully [sic] way to kill many normies.” Another wrote that “Chads and Staceys” should be targeted.... As his name none too subtly suggests, Chad is a stand-in for the young, attractive, muscular football player claiming dominance over the beta-world in the contest for sexual success with women....

As one patiently surveys the varieties of online expression favored by beta males, it becomes apparent that, in addition to their all too palpable sense of self-loathing, they’re further actuated by a pronounced sort of class contempt. One key source of their rage—against both the sexual pecking order and society at large—is that their own sense of superiority over the masses, the unspecial “normies,” is not reflected back to them by others in real life.n fact, a great deal about the beta-male rebellion runs counter to theories of masculinity advanced by scholars like R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel. In her 2005 book Masculinities, Connell lists the words “nerd” and “geek” among the terms that stigmatize marginal masculinities....

The self-organized corps of women-hating men, by the lights of conventional academic-feminist theory, should be united in the repression of any and all gay male tendencies expressed online. But 4chan/b/ traffics openly in gay and trans pornography and hosts discussions of bisexual attraction....

Similarly, the beta view of gender is complicated by an anti-mass-culture outlook. As copycat threats multiplied on /r9k/ after the Harper-Mercer shootings, one commenter advised, “Make sure you got molotovs. it is really easy and painfully [sic] way to kill many normies.” Another wrote that “Chads and Staceys” should be targeted.... As his name none too subtly suggests, Chad is a stand-in for the young, attractive, muscular football player claiming dominance over the beta-world in the contest for sexual success with women....

As one patiently surveys the varieties of online expression favored by beta males, it becomes apparent that, in addition to their all too palpable sense of self-loathing, they’re further actuated by a pronounced sort of class contempt. One key source of their rage—against both the sexual pecking order and society at large—is that their own sense of superiority over the masses, the unspecial “normies,” is not reflected back to them by others in real life.

The New Man of 4chan, Angela Nagle, Baffler
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Interesting piece, vim, although I find it hard to believe that anyone is naive enough to be surprised that gay and bi men can be misogynists, too.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Was just thinking that in the era of the geek billionaire, perhaps the 'entitlement' is coming from this?

Perhaps it's naive to think that nerds were ever happy about not getting the girls (or the money/power or whatever), but perhaps in this era they now feel they CAN, and therefore SHOULD.
 

vimothy

yurp
Interesting piece, vim, although I find it hard to believe that anyone is naive enough to be surprised that gay and bi men can be misogynists, too.

Which certainly would be naive, but I don't think Nagle says or even implies that anywhere. It's more that the misogyny witnessed at online communities like 4chan is not routed in conventional masculine norms, the patriarchy, the traditional family, or any of the more "generic" explanations commonly offered in the media and academia.
 
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