Well, that failure was because drug use doesn’t also make you an asshole.
But, being an asshole makes you an asshole.
And alt-right trollies like Milo are assholes.Like, it’s literally what they’re trying to be.
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Yup.
But demonstrating Milo’s arseholery to his fans won’t reduce his popularity, because unapologetic arseholedom is what they aspire to.
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Right, that’s why the “know your audience” thing. Your audience isn’t people who already believe the message. It’s people who might be interested in the message because it’s taboo.
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I actually liked him in Waking Life…
…although that was – let’s see, today’s Wednesday? – yeah, about sixteen years ago. I was in Austin back then; he seemed more of a libertarian with anger management issues than the full-on John Bircher (at best) that he is today.
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The only half-way decent long-form interview with Milo that I’m aware of is on the Joe Rogan Experience. It’s about 3 hours and is insanely frustrating. The only reason I recommend it is for you to get a better idea of how Milo performs, and ultimately starts to fail at maintaining his rhetoric, in this kind of long-form interview.
Joe takes psychedelics, does yoga and jiu-jitsu and uses an isolation chamber on the reg, so his attention span seems greater than Milos, who isn’t used to maintaining his manufactured image for that long. The veil starts to wear thin, and towards the end the religious justifications are brought out as excuses of last resort and Milo goes on to suggest there is something wrong with his being gay. It’s a tortuous examination of what underlies his actions and at least some of it does appear to be religiously fuelled self-hate.
I’m reticent to get into this kind of personality tear-down, especially as it means that Milo is essentially a victim (however willing) of religious and cultural indoctrination.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that he regularly uses religious talking points as justification for his beliefs but it does appear that the rhetoric he uses to promote the ideology of the old boys network is mined from the neurosis that surely developed through that bigoted environments evaluation of and reaction to his sexuality, and it is upon that fulcrum which his rhetoric, his persona and his self pivots.
Going this far to acquire weapons to use against someone usually lies far outside my wheel house and I would never suggest using these facts as an insult or talking point directly against him… just know that he is ultimately as injured and captured by his ideology as he hopes to make others.
And please don’t think I’m encouraging sympathy for him. I’m just pointing out an abysmal weakness in his character to be exploited. The ideology of strong individuality he promotes causes him to not want to be the individual that he is and, given the chance, he would change himself to better fit the puritan collective he desperately seeks approval from.
It’s a huge pain in the ass to watch, you have to listen to Milo for a long time and Joe also has some problematic views, but if you want to see at least one successful, eventual interdiction into Milo’s rhetoric, you can watch it here:
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Or, you know, help organize this young audiences around working class demands they might have ($15/h minimum wage, anyone?), approximating them of progressive movements like trade unions and away from reactionaries like Milo.
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At the same time, how many people got involved in leftist organizations after the protests in the colleges he was going to speak? How many people got in contact with movement organizers and stuff like that?
He has apparently incited violence. Much more of it by the black bloc than by his supporters. Does that count?
Subtle. /s
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I wonder about the economics of MILO Inc.
He claims that he makes a million dollars a tour, and pays his staff a million a year.
That kind of money isn’t coming from the Young Republicans on Campus student groups.
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Yaknow, I pride myself on being a nonviolent sort of person, but committing to a cause means drawing a border around your values as well. These are by-and-large great suggestions, but I need to remind everyone that despite all jocular attempts, Tomi Lahren and Richard Spencer are doing better than ever. I’m sorry, but punching Nazis are getting more and more attractive by the day.
We all know that the violence isn’t incited by people like us. We also know that if these cretins weren’t a danger to civil society, we’d all be happy to Gomer Pyle them until they all come out of their dark little closets. But for the sake of our nation, we have to make their “free” speech more and more expensive for them. We need to respond to provocateurs in kind. We need to make these people pay out the nose for their security. A few more bloody lips isn’t going to swell their ranks–it’s going to offer us a moment’s respite from their vitriol
All I’m saying is there’s room for satire and retaliation. So for your children’s sake, please punch a Nazi.
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Very interesting article from the mists of ancient internet time, thanks for that.
I’ve seen waking life and that skit is reasonable but now he’s just unhinged, he’d make david icke blush and that fella believes in lizard people.
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I could not have said this better myself. Thank you.
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Naturally the MILO-thals have a spin for that.
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Has Maher ever done anything that wasn’t stupid and counterproductive to his claimed ideology?
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I think maybe Holiday doesn’t understand what he did. If you go back to:
The premise is that the base of people who he was trying to fleece already exists. Stirring up protest against his client didn’t create a market where none existed, it grabbed up market share. If there is a a group of young men with disposable income who will do anything they are told is forbidden, then those young men are going to be spending that income on something that society doesn’t like, he was just convincing them to spend it on his guy.
So the positive outcome of protesting isn’t to ruin the career of the person being protested, it’s to shrink the overall size of the market by signalling the unacceptability of the message.
Holiday is wrong that there’s a group of people who can simply be mind controlled by a few protests. They all still have their own thoughts and feelings. It’s easy to make observations about how people act as an aggregate, and foolish to make inferences about how individuals think based on easy aggregations. A simple, “do anything that is forbidden” predicts a massive black market in human flesh (that’s a good contender for the forbiddenest).
These people who will do anything forbidden are still driven by cultural values. They probably skew less empathetic than the general population but they are not uniformly psychopaths.
If they have disposable income, they are probably pampered and used to being safe, and they want to rebel within safe limits. They want to see they’ve upset “the establishment”, but they don’t want to do anything that will really blow back on them. So you bring in someone who will vastly exaggerate the power of minorities to make this group feel like they are punching up when they are really punching down and you’ve got a recipe for success. The stronger the targets of the hate speech actually become the less comfortable it is to attack them for people who were looking for an easy target. The more people raise awareness about the harm done by hateful political speakers, less comfortable it is for people with empathy to continue to support the actions that are causing the harm.
If the market for hate speech was stripped down to include only those people who lack empathy and are willing to put their safety at risk to fight for their cause, there’d still be a dangerous physical threat, but there’d be no money in the business of stirring them up (which is to say there’d be no money for corporate endorsements or big book deals, there’d still be money in it for small-time local operators).
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Someone read from my playbook. 
Although it’s hardly necessary to actually turn the screws because he devolves into a kind of clownish fall-back position once he’s been upbraided.
So, a kind of evolution of my earlier suggestion is required. I would replace the “Go fuck yourself” with something along the lines of “That was very rude,” or another equally analytical statement. No question or rejoinder as that would provide emotional substance to the interaction and it seems that kind of validation is what Milo is in the game for.
