>>9856136

>He’s drinking a $4 Americano

Wait, how much should an Americano cost? The cheapest espresso I can find is 2.50

Don't worry leftists like you will be left in the nigger hoods you love so much rather than being killed outright as you don't deserve fast death

>not realizing I've been "pretending" to be a /pol/ charicature for a full year
>not realizing this has driven off all the literature interested leftcucks off the board
>not noticing that this is now entirely a right-wing board

You should thank me. Have a look in the catalog. It's all bait to talk white identity politics.

It's splitting mixed with ad hominem, he's trying to eradicate a perceived 'enemy' by making him be what is most despicable and base in their own eyes, as if he/she is not even human at all or even capable of being right.

I really like this post. I had this idea that whenever you manage to group a specific individual and assign him to a party or with other similar (sometimes identical ) people , you manage to undermine his individuality and values by a lot.

By no means do exclude myself from the man the article writes about. Some of these attributes I can see them in my self, appearing out of influence from society and other naratives around me. Intense self hating made me realise that it isn't that hard to root out such attributes.

Huh, thanks OP

So basically the writer knows he's an alt-bro himself to the bone but he gains salvation by writing an ironic, witty essay. He knows he's still pathetic, but at least he's self aware of it and accepts it, so he's done the exact kind of "transcendence" that the alt-bro is so fond of.

These people with this kind of hypersensitivized self-awareness will never manage to create anything lasting. Not that you or me will do that either.

Yeah we've got a big surprise to thank you for your deed. You will be surprised to see what it is.

Veeky Forums BTFO!!!!!!!!!

You will be surprised when we start rounding up Bolshevik feminists like you, cuck

this self aware criticism of his transcendence seems like a pathetic way to re-assert control over your identity and (for lack of a better word) our generation's understanding of our own zeitgeist.

If you have a functional set of sensory organs you can notice the patterns of the average humanitiesfag on your campus. Lump enough descriptions of those traits into one article and yes, people that inhabit places like Veeky Forums will find at least something describing a part of themselves.

Here, have some more revelatory zeitgeist:

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.

literally a horoscope that applies to everyone

Bingo!

2.50 seems reasonable, but I wouldn't pay much more than that

>At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable,
Nice try

Made me laugh and feel insecure at the same time.

I'm insecure knowing that even alt-bro can get laid

Good thing I'm not like this!

Made me laugh and feel sorry for the guy. If only it was written in first person present it would have been good.

X-art is sterilised boredom, I don't know why anyone would bother with it

>think to myself there's no way people will bump, discuss, and promote such obvious shill bait
>30 / 2 / 16 / 1

this article is 3 years old, why do you think its shill?

>alt bro

Is Hipster Runoff back?

Sounds like you know the spiral very well but we'll have to wait and see if we touch ends ;)

Who is this fairy faggot quoting? What is an alt-bro? Is this just a thinly veiled diary entry?

Honestly a lot funnier than I expected it to be. Of course, few if any people exist who meet all these criteria, but I've met some that come close. They're alright dudes if you can steer them away from rambling on about their intellectual pursuits.

Are they still a thing? I admit I thought it was funny but it feels a bit like it's from 2005. It appears to be making fun of the same crowd that Radio Broker did in GTA IV.

>Are they still a thing?
Always were, always will be. As long as there are sad young men who think they're smarter than they actually are.

oh no, am i a sad young man who thinks i'm smarter than i am? am i bad?

Man, I said these alt-bros are alright dudes. Just realize that nobody at a house party wants to hear your take on Marx or Taoism and you're in the clear

I get the feeling the guy who wrote this article wants to throttle anyone like that

Altbro is nothing more than a damaged Chad

Why does the left like to use "bro" as an insult? What's possibly negative about being a bro?

It's masculine.

tricks on you, non masculine guys are bad too
byrslf.co/have-you-encountered-the-softboy-7e95e2c7f3e7

Ah yes, what small people like to talk about most..... other people. Thanks /pol/.

lel, none of this applies to me other than "religion has done a lot of bad things, but has also done a lot of good things" and "The Alt-Bro doesn't shit talk"

>The Alt-Bro who reads this will think he’s an exception.

Most great writers in history were, at one point, ''sad young men''.

The alt-bro writes an article for the Awl insulting alt-bros. The alt-bro is self-aware, but not enough

>The Softboy doesn’t want to talk to you about The Wire. He concedes that it is “objectively good television” yet “ultimately problematic” and “undeserving of its lionization.” Obviously, he is an Ally.
>He is emotionally intelligent but does nothing with this knowledge. He is artistic. He is aware. He is still a dick.
ohh my.

You are not in pol domains kid. Hope that doesn't make you cry

this is an attempt at making fun of a culture vulture, but doesnt cut deep at all. horrible writing. op probably wrote it. faggot

>the author imagines /pol/posters this way

Why do people always try to overcomplicate everything? People on /pol/ are like the people on most pther chan boards: disenfranchised, antisocial, sexually insignificant young (15-25) men projecting their own problems on other things. On /v/ it's bad games, on Veeky Forums it's hacks like Rupi Kaur, on /pol/ it's jews and black people stealing our women.
This is almost the correct portrait. Not a fucking pseudo-intellectual pseudo-hipster rebellious student who go around feeling aristocratic while looking down on another minorities. It is far more likely that the guy you're talking to is either a scrawny or obese kid who is getting a giggle out of being edgy.

I've said almost because it's not really only young disenfranchised losers: there are Stormfront shills too.

What a smug judgemental jerk.

It is fair to be smug towards /pol/ users.

this has nothing to do with /pol/ though
it just feels like a mean spirited anti young artist diatribe

In this sense I agree with you. I genuinely do not understand where the author picked this portrait from. He probably met a guy like that, discovered that he knew about /pol/ and wrote an article as if that guy was every user on that board.

where do you see /pol/? it's not talking about "alt right" the article was published before that was even a term (at least to the public)

>what does the alt-right have to do with /pol/
Who knows...

Anyway you were right about the date, I dis not check it.

>what does the alt-right have to do with /pol/
i didn't write that

is this bait?

The only insightful bits of this article are the ones that diagnose young angsty men as longing for higher ideas and ideals, and for a less bourgeois commitment to ideas in general. For any young Veeky Forums faggot reading this stupid op-ed, those lines will be the only ones that resonate: the ones that diagnose his melancholy and his sense that something is wrong.

But those bits are only insightful because they're completely true. They're being channeled from the exact literature that the article uses to ridicule the young angsty men as naive and passe, like Steppenwolf and Thompson, literature that naively suggests that life should be lived seriously, that it isn't being lived seriously anymore, and that something is wrong. Any "alt-bro" reading this article is going to resonate with the truth of those bits, insofar as they're simply a window into that literature.

The sole, cheap trick of the article is that it wants to associate that open and unanswered challenge to modernity with all the shallow, embarrassing, hipster behavior that it then catalogs. No further insight makes those two elements of the critique hang together. The hipster accusations are just an awkward non sequitur. If you resonate with Mann, you... must like Ethiopian jazz? The article is only saying, "Whatever _you_ feel when you read Mann is simply wrong, and if you were smart like me, you'd enjoy being a cow like me. All the rest of the cattle are laughing at you for lagging behind." The article is trying to peddle a bourgeois cure for postmodern melancholy, but as always, the cure boils down to chiding.

Lukacs wrote that a writer with world-historical insight will be able to discern "types" of men, the major archetypes whose struggles define his age. The article's author probably thinks he's done that, but in fact all he's done is wrench open the same old wound, the same dichotomy and dialectic that divides modernity, and use the same old postmodern, sarcastic, less-naive-than-thou insults to pour salt in it. The author's own personality is more typologically and historically informative than what he writes, because he shows (for the millionth time) just how oblivious, feminized, and "wretchedly content" a bourgeois "last man" really is. He looks at the alt-bro and only sees himself, sees someone fundamentally like himself, because to the bourgeois man, all humans are fundamentally cattle just like himself, even if a few suffer from the illness of not having embraced it. The cure, as with everything at the end of history, is to cease being insane and become like everyone else.

In trying to discern a type, to see an "individual" other than himself, to encounter something strange, the article's author has only mirrored himself, as the bourgeois mass-self only ever can do. Same old fatal flaw of ressentiment, of not being able to tolerate any individuation, of needing to cut down anything that stands outside it with effeminate ridicule.

Good post.

I couldn't get past the 4th paragraph, it's just so "poorly written". Is this what happens when high-school kids take "writing classes"? OP, if you "wrote" this article, you might want to consider reading more "books", the kind written for "adults", but I know you probably consider yourself an "individual", or maybe even an "intellectual", but none of your observations were "funny" or "interesting".

Good post.

>The Alt-Bro pretends he has self-hating thoughts

kek imagine being this insecure about depression. jeez.

idk at one point this would probably make me insecure (although i'd never do any of the things that the author mentions in the article)

what confuses me is that all of these stereotypes are supposed to describe a single type of person. i have literally never met someone who embodies all of these things. i've definitely met guys who would say things like "but then you start to think in iambic pentameter and its FUCKED" but they're not the same people this author is describing.

also trivializing the work that goes into getting a Ph. D in philosophy is retarded. you can only pretend to be deep for so long (which happens exactly to be the point where you have to defend your thesis)

>The Alt-Bro who reads this will think he’s an exception.

this was a good addition though lol.

overall i'm just confused by this whole article. who exactly wrote this? how many people does he know like this? does he think this describes every humanities major?

Lol

good ass post

That's about right nowadays, at $4 it better be a big-ass americano.

fuck off virgin

Who the fuck is this actually trying to describe? It sure and the hell isn't your average alt-right. It looks like a jumble of things the author finds funny in other people.

this has nothing to do with politics guys
this was written in 2013 or 14, way before alt right was even a thing
it's about pretentious douchebags who get laid

no it's not. it's about telling young white males with high minded interests that they should be ashamed of themselves and come down to earth so to speak

it's the same anti-artist sentiment the right has always had now coming from the left

can you post this on his article please, I think if you posted this the author might kill himself.

Honestly doesn't seem like that bad of a guy. Overly sensitive and abstracted, but it's not like he does anything to merit such hate.

Damn son, where'd you find this strong ass post?

Shit, makes more sense i guess.

people who write things like this cant grow out of celebrity culture style commentary. its very politicized without admitting that it is. its like he hates his job but is too caught up on classic newyork style dicksuckery. so in writing this he is the 'made' writer. in a way he wants to experience the alt-bro life but he memes it away. this isnt that different from autists who post here who sound exactly like him.

I don't want to do it, Sarah. I don't want to do it, but my pa. He has to know. He has to.

>The sole, cheap trick of the article is that it wants to associate that open and unanswered challenge to modernity with all the shallow, embarrassing, hipster behavior that it then catalogs.

"Cheap trick" is too kind. But that "the article is trying to peddle a bourgeois cure for postmodern melancholy" is giving him too much credit and ignoring the simplicity of its irony.

This is internet writing that wants only an instant before it disappears. Don Delillo catalogues, transcribes, and this guy posts. He sincerely tweets and waits for feedback for a while, but forgets that he ever wrote it, unless someone reminds him.

What's the point of writing this caricature, exactly? Is the author advocating the opposite of the lifestyle he is lampooning, to live in the social media sphere and watch Netflix? Or is he saying that this kind of person doesn't apply himself enough to the kind of studies he says he loves?

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. Everyone else in the thread has already expressed my confusion as to who this is actually making fun of (I attend a university in a fairly hipster-ish Canadian city and have never encountered anyone remotely close to the archetype the author is describing) but what really has me scratching my head is why the author is so disgusted by this image.
From what I could gather the "alt bro" is guilty of being lazy, financially dependant on his parents, a dilettante, narcissistic and naive. But he doesn't even bother anybody. I'm even more confused by his two interactions with women. His female friend chastised him and broke off their friendship, because he was being a bit juvenile and directionless. Seems like a shittier person than him. The thing with the girl he met outside of a bar- what did he even do wrong? He went on a few dates with her over the course of a week, then admitted he didn't know if he wanted a relationship? Unless my reading comprehension is even worse than I thought, it's not even implied they had sex. Why does the girl feel used?

Truly a puzzling text. I really wish I could have the author sit down and walk me through his thought process.

i can see the "alt bro" on my campus. if i wasnt so autistic i'd probably fit the bill too.

Good post

Really? It's far removed from anything I've ever experienced. Maybe it's because I don't hang around coffee shops or poetry readings. Literally the only dude I've talked about philosophy with was some chill gay dude in my philosophy 100 course.

I really don't see anything in the article that describes me, despite being a charlatan. My lifestyle is completely different.

one day i hope to be that chill gay dude

perhaps a sole alt-bro stole his chick or made him feel like a pseud at some point in his life. theres a patrick bateman kind of bitterness to it

He seemed to me like a mildly intelligent guy who only has vague notions of getting more out of life and ends up getting nowhere. Pretty sad. I don't know why Gavin Thompson feels the need to mock him.

That's the point of its failure. It doesn't care. It sets out with nihilistic laughter as its goal, and needs to do so within stylistic framework that satisfies a certain readership. It's the writing of a injoke.

That comedy effaces tragedy is the only motive.

There are certainly worse things you could aspire to be.

An excellent and articulate post. Thank you for writing it.

This voice that affects "cool irony" is a typical stance for these kinds of people. Criticizing someone else's views and beliefs and ridiculing their naivete while at the same time obscuring their own inner self and evading anything that would approach their own beliefs so that they may be attacked in the same way; that is assuming they have such a core. It's the simple tactic of tearing down something while offering no real alternative, and when you ask the question "What should I be instead?" they just chuckle and shake their head, as if to convey "If you need to ask, then you're too naieve and stupid for the answer." Their foundations are concrete and immutable, but they will never reveal its dimensions or quality, because it doesn't really exist in the authoritative mode that they proclaim it to be.

Detection.
Rejection.
Deflection.

It really doesn't even feel like it's criticizing a strawman. It seems more to me that it's pointing out that good looking young men with above average intelligence often have trouble actually finding their place in the world, and thus float from one empty intellectual pursuit to another, never really finding fulfillment. I feel like it's more critical of the sort of affectatious culture that ensnares these people, rather than the people themselves.

it's not the lifestyle but the social shortcomings and wide ranging interests. i do feel somewhat hurt that people see someone with even a naive passion for art in such a negative mocking light. i don't hurt anybody.

...

What exactly are you trying to say m8?

Brainlet here, someone explain this post

>a dilettante
>masters/Ph. D in philosophy

pick one and only one

the weirdest part about this was how he flip flopped on what the alt-bro actually does. first, he was making fun of the fact that he was going to get a ph. d. then, he makes fun of the fact that he doesn't have the grades to get into a ph. d program.

he makes fun of the alt-bro for not actually being depressed, then makes fun of him for becoming genuinely depressed.

overall weird as fuck

>the social shortcomings

what social shortcomings? it seems like he gets laid a lot and has a circle of friends

I don't think the author had /pol/ in mind while writing. As you are correct a lot of the denziens are antisocial etc but there are scores of full fledged Nazis on that board who have zero self awareness.

What this article is attempting to satirize is the sort of guy who isn't really committed to anythiny, lilts from fad to fad meanwhile putting on airs that he is superior to it all, there's several of them on college campuses but not much.

What I detest is that articles like this and others that attempt to chastise any guy who is intetested in anything outside the norm is seen as weird "problematic" and deserve mockery. Then on the opposite spectrum a fairly masculine guy who has opposites interested the the aforementioned are also chastised and mocked. Fucking no one can win in this era.