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

"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.

Hard to overhype Disney / Marvel’s role in completely pissing off chuds though

yeah it's not like 21st century politics wd've entered their world thru any other source

Chuds see any concession towards diversity, no matter how vague, as the end of western civilization. I think it's important to demand a bit more than that.

nah I go to the movies to trigger chuds that’s all I care about.

hnnging chuds

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.

Be fair, their editor-in-chief is a Japanese man.

I will never tire of that sic burn.

I've been sitting here trying to come up with a more nuanced way to put it, but:
People want to be grifted

People want a daddy, someone to do the work of defining the parameters of the world to whatever extent their parents failed to do so. When the benefit is guidance through an uncertain world by someone with unwavering conviction, credulity is a small sacrifice to make.

It’s funny how a certain type of self-proclaimed extremely independent thinker results in probably the single most predictable series of talking points, led like an obedient dog by whatever a certain bunch of people are venting about that week on YouTube or Fox.

xp

thought i was in the controps thread for a minute

ime 97.9% of the time a self-proclaimed "extremely independent thinker" really just wants license to be racist free of consequences

that's a sign of the times

i remember when freethinkers were the progressives and open to diversity in the 90s and even early 2000s

i think there's a certain type of person who just always enjoys the friction of pushing back against authority or the status quo, which i understand bc i chafed under the status quo i grew up with, however i was happy to find a new more accepting status quo and didn't feel the need to push back anymore against it bc i don't have hate in my heart for women or minorities.

my ex-friend has been saying some "interesting" things about cultural differences w/r/t gun violence in places like, oh let's say, Chicago and D.C., vs the lack of gun violence in, for example, Vermont.

xxp ehh the atheist/freethinker contingent at that time still had a healthy overlap with libertarian types, it just that society caught up with 90% of their social concerns

wording it as society caught up to them means all their opinions have been static (since the 90s) and they were not influenced by the times they lived/live in

lots of freethinkers (don't know many atheists) that came from the 90s nowadays don't agree with racism, whether that was a conversion from 90s freethinking or they always held that view is difficult to prove, and probably useless to even argue

People want a daddy, someone to do the work of defining the parameters of the world to whatever extent their parents failed to do so. When the benefit is guidance through an uncertain world by someone with unwavering conviction, credulity is a small sacrifice to make.

― I cop this squat in the name of slack (Old Lunch)

of all the polite fictions of this time, i find the notion that people can be treated as adults is the worst.

I have no idea what freethinker association you're talking about, but nearly all groups using that are associated with atheist groups or groups advocating freedom from religion

oh forgot to switch to america

what country were you thinking of?

tbh the term gets lumped in with nonconformists and hippies but it's an actual centuries-old term connected to questioning religion

wording it as society caught up to them means all their opinions have been static (since the 90s) and they were not influenced by the times they lived/live in

lots of freethinkers (don't know many atheists) that came from the 90s nowadays don't agree with racism, whether that was a conversion from 90s freethinking or they always held that view is difficult to prove, and probably useless to even argue