Now that Bob’s hysteria has died down I’ll say that I had a compulsion to read Bob, along with many other “leftists” because I know they wanted me to die. I eventually ended up involuntary hospitalized due to suicidal ideation.
But the real reason I came back to respond was was I disagree with “John Andrews Stan”. I think Bob was likely told he was a very smart and special boy. I think this because so was I. I’m literally autistic, and I know Bob has suggested that he is also. Of course, as is typical with children with Aspergers I was weird and memorized textbooks of information. I was the little professor who was smarter than every single person, in my small, Catholic elementary school of maybe 250 people total. (That’s all 8 grades folks). As with a lot of “gifted” kids (I’d argue there’s significant overlap between neuro-atypical kids and “gifted”) we end up with some type of complex or another. Some burnout, or depression, or some become insufferable as adults.
There was a time I would’ve agreed with a lot of his shtick about intelligence being the only thing that matters, or technological progress being the only thing that matters (to a certain extent, I still think that one, I’m a transhumanist, maybe even an accelerationist like Land). I very much remember advocating un-ironically for intelligence tests for voting. I thought people who disagreed with me were dumber than me, almost without exception. Even as a freshman in (public) highschool I was the kid who asked my geology teacher absurdly specific questions beyond the scope of the class just to prove I was smarter than everyone else (and him). I hated democrats and atheists, and really believed in the “thinkers vs believers” dichotomy. I, of course, was a Thinker. Of course, its harder to be the “smartest person ever” in a 1200 person highschool (still relatively small) and not everyone is a catholic republican that automatically respects your opinion because you were always the smart kid. Its impossible at UVA. That’s when you get your first grade that isn’t an A. You ain’t shit there.
So we have to grow up. Hopefully to a certain extent I have. Bob hasn’t. If anything the association of views like his with his horrid cruelty towards what at least would’ve been people like me (a few years ago) has pushed me further left to be sympathetic to ideas like prison abolition and “disability activism discourse”. Also the importance of maintaining human rights, he rights he wants to strip. That’s why people call him right wing, because his ideas are right-wing. No one told Bob he was dumb, too many people told him he was smart.
When we think of someone who never left highschool, we think of the Jock who still brags about his football letter and being prom king, but plenty of nerds are stuck in highschool too. I think that’s where a lot of reddit atheism (all of reddit, to be quite honest), and star wars warfare comes from (people who harass or define politics by star wars/marvel shit). Bob is a man who hasn’t left highschool, or more accurately freshman year.
People under-estimate the value of an actual well-rounded childhood. I was a competitive swimmer before and during highschool, and while it was a private club and I qualified for national meets and all that I certainly wasn’t the best. Has Bob ever talked about doing a sport or even an instrument as a child? No one is good at everything, and it teaches you how to lose and not be the best at something. That in turn teaches you to respect people who aren’t as good as you. Because there’s always someone better. It also introduces you to different types of people. I would be a Bob probably without that. I met some of my best friends there and they were not the stereotypical “smart” people (this sounds dickish, but they were actually very smart and thoughtful people, just not “nerds”). They introduced me to rap and how to actually have fun. Of course people who always excel at sports have the opposite problem, which is where the stereotypical “jock” comes from.
I’d also bet the extent of Bob’s bullying is some relatively “cooler” kids calling him names and making fun of him for being weird. Yeah that sucks dude, they did that to me too. I’m friends with those people now few years later because teenagers are dicks. Just my opinion.