Friend Infected With Right Wing Brain Worms - What to Do?

Well, yeah. But my self-loathing is more because I'm me specifically.

I thought about this some more yesterday, in terms of my relative, boxedjoys people (who all seems reachable to me, maybe not Rangers kid but then thats a whole other thing!) and latebloomers friend, who also seems reachable - at least if you want them to be, maybe you don't and thats something only you know deep down! - and I dont want to critizie anyone for ostracizing or cutting someone out, you'll know way more about your particular situations than any of us, its not going to be a decision taken lightly!

It sounds like boxedjoys brother, with arguments in the pub, is 'normal', in terms of the interactions themselves (he's conceding things, which normal conversations, debates, and even arguments have) - i mean it sounds like he/you/both are actually listening to each other? thats a lot! It doenst sound like he's parroting pre-formatted viewpoints with the 'him' lost somewhere within?

with my relative, and perhaps latebloomers friend, and situations where you feel you're dealing with someone who's talking at you, making statements..I think there's two choices, one is absenting self from that particular conversation, "sorry pal, no idea" or try move it from the existential to the tangible. I'm not American but if it was like a Trump conversation, I'd try move it to 'what do you think the key states will be? how will he do in Wisconsin next time". With the Russia/Uk stuff, I moved it away from "Britain great do you support putin or something?" to 'what will Uk do, how will russia respond, how will we respond to that". The conversation becomes more a level playing field. some level of measurability about it as well, existential stuff is ultimately fruitless, I dont spend any of my time debating Jehovahs Witnesses on the doorstep, every second I spend doing that is a personal defeat

its a way of having a better conversation (if you want one that is), though like I said above, what Ive found in my own case is that because these are seen as 'details', they prefer to shift it back to the existential, to the bigger point. What Ive also realized with this, is not just that we're both judging/assessing something differently, but often we're not even judging the same thing, or the thing that I thought you were. Its like having an argument about what to do with the garden, and realizing halfway through, they don't even think there is a garden and I've made a big assumption right from the off

I'm reminded a little about JRM's recent interview about the Irish border. He hadn't been there or talked to anyone who lived there, and didn't see the need to. He'd spoken to 'some people', and didn't see the relevance of what any of this had. Because he believed he was right, unshakeably right, no doubts, black and white - getting involved in anything like that is just fannying around. If you're right with the big picture, the details will sort themselves, no need to bother wasting time on them, "it'll be fine'. The unflappable belief. Details are for the small people

Surprising how difficult it is to put this into words! Partly I think because when you have this big picture of a personal situation, and then you're trying to condense, inevitably it gets reduced and lots gets left out, and the everyone else sees something slightly different than what you intended because of that. Then it gets distorted because they're then thinking of other people and it doesn't quite map the same so before you even get to agreeing/disagreeing/processing others have a different picture in their head

i think thats another thing, I think so many arguments in life aren't with the person you're having the argument with, but someone else lurking in your head that you didnt get to have the argument with at the time. The person in front of you, they're often just filling in for that person, and they're close enough, they'll do

all of that!

Oh great

Ye olde solipsistic argument

Had a guest over tonight. I mentioned one little thing about the economy and he says Obama ruined the economy for 8 years. I looked at him square in the face and said "Get the fuck out of my apartment".

Am I doing it right?

— MK Genest 🌊 (@MKGenest) May 16, 2018

Don't follow the twitter thread. Just don't. There's no point. But the initial tweet made me laugh.

I mean...there's just no argument to be had in a situation like that. Once someone has embraced a demonstrable falsehood as, like, just their opinion maaaan, what more is there to say? I'm not going to waste time arguing with someone that the sky isn't actually forest green. If you've divorced yourself from basic consensus reality, good luck navigating the world and not dying prematurely from something entirely preventable, I guess.

Well the fire went out of this one alright!

I couldnt think exactly where to put this but I was thinking about Graeme Souness yesterday - not exactly as someone who has this in the thread, but in terms of my relative and the seeming rigidity of thought, where details are obfuscatory and detract from the greater whole.

I cant find the clip but theres probably a bunch of them, he was talking about some player and how they didnt work as hard or cover as much ground as some other player, and then he was called on it and said actually he 's covered MORE ground this season, if we look at the stats. He didn't like it at all, fired back "you know what I mean". of course stats can be misleading but the greater feeling was that he knew he was right, absolute certainty and no facts, details, debate, statistics were going to change that. His source of certainty was himself, his gut, and his certainty was absolute. Not only that, his view was greater than the other analysts views, because it was self-evident, and also because he was the best player, a natural order. I'm wary of stretching a point, but I'd put good money on GS not only being a Brexit voter, but conceptualizing it in the same way - his authority in football carrying over to everywhere. He is right because how could it be otherwise, its obvious, self-evident, anyone can see it and theyre kidding themselves if not

My relative has some of this, absolutely unshakability, if its cold outside, its cold outside. If it warms up? still cold. The difference is, I think with Souness (and JRM), its their core, its ingrained. They are right not just because they are right, but because they are better than you and nothing is going to change that, not some jumped up poindexter with a bunch of stats about distance covered per game, and not some other poindexter with some flannel about the Irish border. Just excuses, get it done, how hard can it be?

I think its sorta where a conceptual truth comes up against an tangible truth. perhaps a tangible truth is one that can be changed and is therefore less solid, and, weirdly, less tangible

Oh wow just googled Graeme Souness Brexit

https://m0.joe.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/19080006/cats27.jpg

If you don't know who he is, he NEVER looks like that!

bah

https://m0.joe.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/19080006/cats27.jpg

https://i2-prod.liverpoolecho.co.uk/incoming/article10207197.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/MPP_LEC_061015_Blackstuff_10.jpg

"You're Graham Souness.... you look like me"

lol @ those pearly whites, what is the Souness mindset?

Here's the clip, its brilliant - never seen him so happy before when he gets to it. Missed this completely till just now

souness speaks his brexit brains pic.twitter.com/X7Ts3rk6xD

— Ken Early (@kenearlys) April 18, 2017

Kevin Kilbanes look halfway through clip as well!

he was talking about some player and how they didnt work as hard or cover as much ground as some other player, and then he was called on it and said actually he 's covered MORE ground this season

Wasn't Charlie Adam was it?

re: Souness, never trust a man who looks younger at 65 than he did at 25

he looks like the lovechild of dale winton and david warner in that screengrab anvil posted

he was good mates with dale winton!

As a straight white cis American dude, I agree that pretty much all of the stories about people like me are unnecessary and played out.

― The lovely and talented Loretta Switt and the irascible Jamie Farr (Old Lunch), Tuesday, May 15, 2018 3:31 PM

Who are you and what have you done with the Old Lunch that follows hundreds of instalments of ostentatiously unnecessary and played out stories about mostly straight white cis American dudes?

I can own up to being part of the problem.

(Also, Marvel stuff, as the angry chuds have pointed out, is pretty diverse these days, and I'd be thrilled to see it become even moreso.)

(Now excuse me while I return to my Gilmore Girls marathon.)

I think that books without pictures may benefit from the surge of interest in diversity and #own voices. In comics its hard to get a good writing and art team but in prose there's been an explosion of writers doing stories that probably wont be emulated on screen for quite some time. And there's more freedom for these writers to not have to make themselves palatable to a big audience.

Not to say there isn't publishers, editors and writers against the freedom.

In comics its hard to get a good writing and art team

super-easy to find comics by good racially diverse and sexually diverse and gender-diverse and background-diverse and geographically diverse authors that don't work on an assembly line for copyright thieves though

"Good" was the criteria I said but personally I find it hard to find many comics I like by anyone from anywhere. I'm sure lots of people looking for stories with social groups in mind will find it difficult to scratch the itch they want.

With prose books it takes much longer to find out if I like them. If was looking for afrofuturist comics, I'd know fairly quickly by the art if I wanted to read them, but there's so many more prose writers who do that stuff and if I came from a different background I'd probably have a bunch more criteria to be satisfied.
Some people will always find it hard to find anything they like.

I think its sorta where a conceptual truth comes up against an tangible truth. perhaps a tangible truth is one that can be changed and is therefore less solid, and, weirdly, less tangible

― anvil, Thursday, 17 May 2018 07:41 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree with this. but i think even narrative, and tribal affiliation, can change on a dime given enough personal motivation/resentment. i'm thinking about how eric greitens changed from republican to democrat. if our egos, in a time of rejection, can see a way to being flattered again even the power of conceptual truths can fold like paper.

this is a great book, though probably unhelpful on a practical level to those of us with people in our lives who have taken a long detour down Douchebag Boulevard: https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062

there's a lot of stuff about sports, how "hot streaks" don't exist even though we persist in thinking they do, etc. but there's also a great story in there about rewards and punishments. pretty much every psychologist will tell you that rewards work as a behavioral nudge far better than punishments do, yet we persist in believing the opposite. to illustrate this, an experiment was done where the participants role-played a teacher trying to get a hypothetical student to arrive at class on time, at 8:30, across 15 days. a computer would display the time that the "student" arrived at class. now, the participant didn't know it, but the time was actually completely randomized for any time between 8:20 and 8:40. for each of the hypothetical days, the "teacher" was told to decide whether to reprimand the student, praise the student, or make no comment. here's what happened: simple regression to the mean meant that after being praised for arriving early, the student usually arrived somewhat later the next day. and conversely, after being reprimanded for arriving late, the student usually arrived somewhat earlier. the vast majority of participants in the study concluded that the praise was worthless and the reprimands worked.

agree with this. but i think even narrative, and tribal affiliation, can change on a dime given enough personal motivation/resentment.

Agree with this, and how also this can change easily with no seeming contradiction, or how saying one thing one day and another another day isn't contradictory. Could also reframe Conceptual vs Tangible as Inherent vs Learned.

Sports are often a good analogy. Messi is the best and no amount of work is going to change that, if he changes his mind who are we to judge "You cant teach that". its the idea of going with gut feeling, big picture. no stats are going to change our view on that. the only thing that changes the view is when we decide to get a new view, and no nerd with a notebook is going to say when a new view is in town

I have a friend similar to the ops description albeit a little less extreme and he doesn’t use social media on any level.

His mom left when he was younger so he ended up raising himself and isolating into worlds of video games and conservative blogger YouTube videos. Years back he would force me to watch a conservative political humour video or something and we would often argue. He always claimed that the lesser popular opinion or different way of thinking should be considered, which would be fine if he wasn’t always just hearing out the YouTube suggested conservative videos that appeared to him.

I think he felt disenfranchised growing up and being a pothead loner made it pretty easy to be marketed to. He started off with Alex jones and prison planet years years back and lost his marbles, but these days he is far less extreme and goes to pains to say he doesn’t support alt right

Yet, any time I want to ask his opinion on something I can guess the answer. He likes Peterson and when I argued that Jordan would not use a pro noun to refer to an individual he claimed that this was not true. Yet I’ve seen videos where Peterson says just this.

Point tldr is I don’t think some people can change. He’s a flar earther too and I think he seeks to rebel against the norm

I mean, YouTube is social media for the right wing.

I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about this for a while but I let my morbid curiosity get the best of me and took another look at my friend’s twitter. He’s really mad about the new thunder cats cartoon. Lmao

are there lady cats in it or

Nah it has a cutesy animation style or something. Like, who cares! You’re 36, dude.

Looking at his comicsgate related tweets has made me realized that it really is like an alternate universe these guys live in. Also he’s into commie bashing now too, always a good sign. Hooray.

😀🔫

It’s all just so stupid and juvenile

Holy shit, he's 36??? I just assumed he was early 20s.

these dudes are the motherfucking Lost Boys

I have a friend a bit older than that who has found a second wind as an alt-right cartoonist of little skill but dumbly obvious enough to get some kind of following on SoCal media, and he’s always going on about Michael Moore and Karl Marx....in 2018. And he suddenly started caring about MS-13, it’s the damndest thing.

i just can't get over how impossibly dumb all these clowns are. like, i get how Buckley, George Will et al were never actually the towering intellects that their partisans and even detractors tried to portray them as... but guys like Ben fucking Shapiro or Peterson?? get the absolute fuck out of here.

maybe social media's making them stupid? i mean, it's made me stupid, too. but i don't get paid to be the Intellectual Dark Web.

“Have” a friend? xp

It's not the whole story but basically: a constant deluge of information (mostly noise) + a dearth of education wrt critical thinking skills that might allow one to parse and sort and filter that constant deluge of information (mostly noise) = the progressive decay of consensus reality and the need many feel, in response, to cobble together a substitute reality, however incoherent it may be.

“i just can't get over how impossibly dumb all these clowns are”

That’s the part of all this that sends me into despair. It’s like, these dudes aren’t even slickly packaged! They’re obvious hucksters! What is it that makes people like my friend subsceptible to their bullshit?

“It's not the whole story but basically: a constant deluge of information (mostly noise) + a dearth of education wrt critical thinking skills”

Yeah I think this is OTM. Also a contributing factor, especially with nerd types like my friend is an extremely limited frame of reference. Like, generally he’s a bright guy! But not the most curious dude when it comes to stuff outside the world of comics/games/tv etc.

You better believe he loved Ready Player One

aw man

“Have” a friend? xp

― valorous wokelord (silby), Monday, May 21, 2018 6:22 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i guess it's like how people refer to the recently deceased as if they're still alive.

That’s the part of all this that sends me into despair. It’s like, these dudes aren’t even slickly packaged! They’re obvious hucksters! What is it that makes people like my friend subsceptible to their bullshit?

This is what gets me about my one friend who's like this. If he realized how badly he's been had he'd be so pissed, except in a way I agree with instead of a "Muslims are taking over Europe and our country is next" way.

“It's not the whole story but basically: a constant deluge of information (mostly noise) + a dearth of education wrt critical thinking skills”

its ALL about the repetition.

I was talking to a friend about maybe working in Malmo for a while, and I'd been looking at cost of living stuff, and she said "are you sure? its not safe anymore, right?"

We'd mentioned a few months ago the ridiculousness of these stories about how Bradford, Birmingham and Manchester(and Malmo!) are no go cities, and how silly it is. But it had wormed it way in enough with her. Neither of us know Malmo at all, but I said "all those stories are from the same people that try and tell us Manchester isn't safe, c'mon, they're not credible or honest"

And the realization credibility is irrelevant, all that matters is airtime. Arguing 'well Manchester is safe actually because statistics actually show blah blah" doesn't refute anything in peoples mind, it just links the words Manchester, Crime, Muslims, together some more. If these guys get their brand and their buzzwords more and more airtime, thats all that counts, no publicity is bad publicity.

If there is a deluge of information (and there is!), the simplest and loudest and the most repeated will always stand out

There's some kind of argument over on the Mary Lattimore thread. I'm now more likely to check that album out. Without the argument popping up in blog view, I probably wouldn't have even noticed the thread as I've no idea who that is. Airtime

I had the same reaction, it led to me having some pleasant naptime this afternoon.

Anvil so otm about the effect of repetition. People don't think, they "believe" the loudest, most frequent, and most recent things they've heard

yeah this whole 'slick, polished, hipster-ish' thing does my nut in.. like *this* is the re-brand??

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ddth-_tV0AAdwHO.jpg

Also, Marvel stuff, as the angry chuds have pointed out, is pretty diverse these days

Stories featuring non straight white male protagonists written by straight white males are still coming from a straight white male perspective, and that's what much of Marvel's "diverse" line-up boils down to. Not that I think straight white males shouldn't be allowed to write those stories or anything like that, but let's not overhype Marvel's role here.