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

true. from personal experience, they're both hateful and fearful

There’s a stunning disconnect that I see irl bc the several people I know who are apparently mildly-to-deeply right wing have always been perfectly respectful and decent in person. Online it’s an entirely different story — to see one of the nicest dads I know going off on NextDoor about a fifth column and shooting people who trespass, or seeing the mild-mannered dude I knew turn into an alt-right cartoonist bullying anti-women conspiracy theorist, or my quiet cousin who came out of the closet and married his bf and goes off on thinly veiled racist meme rants (his husband is from Central America!)...I think it shows how the internet can turn people who may otherwise debate in better faith into seeming monsters.

I guess the question is, has the internet actually changed them, have they always been this way, has the black and white debate style of internet discourse irreparably destroyed them (and almost everyone else?)

I only have deeply negative feelings about one of those people now tbh, due to what does seem like a deep targeted cruelty that is different from a rant or two and dumb meme sharing.

i agree with you in that someone being polite and nice in their everyday life has nothing to do with the vile feelings and attitudes they carry inside. at least most of these right wingers i know have the sense to keep these views inside before letting it slip "accidentally" about how annoyed they are about black people are actually awful, but i also live in a fairly liberal area

I'm kinda at the point where I don't give a fuck how kindly and polite and gracious a conservative is with me personally. A tip of the cap and a 'howdoyoudo!' doesn't offset the measurable damage their ideology does to the wider world.

Some of you guys seem to have neverending tolerance for absolute bullshit people in your lives. Congrats? I am still completely in the shame and shun operating procedure. So far, no regrets and awesome perk that I no longer have to travel home for the holidays (or funerals).

believe me, if i was anywhere close to affording it i'd get away from my family. but escape is not an option, so tolerance is required

I think Mordy's generally otm here, the biggest hurdle (in my experience) is getting them to engage in that kind of Socratic dialogue in the first place. Like that "democracy vs. republic" line gives you an avenue to pursue, but sometimes it's hard to dig past a bunch of bs rhetoric to get at larger, underlying issues.

mind you i don't actually really think my cousin is a fully decent human being, but i also empathize w/his genuine pain when he came out (at age 35) to his right wing folks and his very anti-gay mom (who is now very pro-gay, what a country), and his husband is afaict pretty damned left wing, which makes it all pretty strange as a situation, him being such a pro-Trump guy in very selective ways. we spent time with my aunt and uncle and other cousin (not him) and i think he was on duty and couldn't make it. we see them all once every several years. it's family, i don't really feel like shunning them. my son likes them all, idk.

this dad i know, his daughter is friends with my son. never even knew he leaned hard right til he discovered social media and one night my w1fe asked, "have you seen....anyone we know posting...."interesting" things on NextDoor?" And here I only thought the guy got worked up over WW2 books and grilling burgers. eh I don't know if he even likes Trump. Probably. I know he's also friends with a vv liberal lesbian couple, not to mention all their other liberal friends. People are complicated, maybe they can also change?

mostly i feel like leading by ingratiating, tolerant example sometimes does work maybe very incrementally and even if it doesn't work, i don't think it turns someone *more* right wing.

I've happily cut off all my family who espouse this shit (while keeping around one aunt who believes it but keeps her mouth shut; and TBH i don't know what my mother thinks, she used to be super liberal, became an alcoholic and then kind of conservative as she got closer to catholic church again, then I sensed a drift and now I think she doesn't know what to believe); I just can't get over the urge to recontact some of them and argue. that's my problem

I don't think my life or the world will be enriched in any way by my cutting out people who disagree w/ my politics. As long as they aren't explicitly advocating for genocide I can deal with most abhorrent political beliefs and they certainly won't evolve / change their minds if I ignore them. There are Republicans in my life who I've been interacting with for years who I can see in demonstrable ways that they've modulated and changed their opinions on things because they've interacted with me in cool, rational exchanges over and over again.

I admire your patience, Mordy.

I haven't got the energy tbh.

Well they aren't "politics" friends. They're people who I socialize with in my community - I eat meals with them, I pray with them, I play board games with them, our kids play together, sometimes we work together. And sometimes politics comes up as it does. It doesn't define our relationship. If it did I'd probably be less interested in socializing with them. And I prefer socializing with people who share my politics bc it's just easier. But I gain enough from these relationships that have nothing obvious/explicit to do with politics.

The vicissitudes of federal service require that I regularly interact with both small-c conservatives and big-R Republicans in a professional context and I’m thankful that they leave their brain worms at home, although sometimes the water cooler chumminess with ideological foes who apparently hate everything I believe in can create a stressful dissonance when I’m away from work and have time to reflect.

Right now I’m in school with a bunch of career military folks who seem like they could definitely be insufferable right wing assholes if the uniform didn’t demand that they not identify with any party.

I respect their dedication to being unaffiliated but sometimes their bothsidesism and barely-concealed libertarian tendencies make me sad.

Separately - I estranged myself from my family for totally not political reasons. I have a hard time imagining putting myself through the emotional wringer of being, like, famous ILX poster and Twitch streamer Karl Malone, basically.

My parents, brother in law, and cousins are wonderful people around whom politics is a tripwire. They don't bring it up anymore. Yet when I visit these days I have to relax. At its worst my anticipating of a crisis that won't happen reminds me of my pre-out days.

Our family fight enough about stuff we basically agree on I can't imagine what it would be like if they were actually Tories.

Also I want to make a differentiation that it's not differing 'politics' that I have a problem with. I hate using that word as a standin when it's really, like, peoples' daily lives that we are talking about.

I shouldn’t leave out the fact that hacker and cybersecurity circles are chock full of gun-collecting fedora’d “individualists” dressed in all black tactical gear, shoulder to shoulder with transgender feminists and innumerable categories of hippie.

As I said, if they openly advocate for genocide I would disassociate from them. But if they believe in policy X and I think policy X will lead to people dying, but they don't think it'll lead to people dying, then what we disagree with is the consequence of the policy, not whether it's okay to do things that kill people.

And as long as none of you have to interact with these Schroedinger’s People, well then it’s just impossible to say?

I'm pretty ice cold on anything impacting women or poc. It's absolutely not acceptable to me.

Once you bring up consequences they just revert to their barbershop versions of deontology or virtue ethics. It’s a jello squeezing exercise.

Never forget that most political attitudes are strictly tribal and a little bit emotional.

Yeah, the guys in my barbershop are always going on and on about deontology and virtue ethics.

I try to change the subject to, like, the categorical imperative or to eudaimonism, but they won't let me.

mine are mostly shavians

Like that "democracy vs. republic" line gives you an avenue to pursue, but sometimes it's hard to dig past a bunch of bs rhetoric to get at larger, underlying issues.

I can't even get to the BS rhetoric because people who say this are fundamentally incapable of knowing what words mean.

Also in order to have a conversation about values, you often are expected to have 1000x facts at your disposal to prove or disprove whatever tangent your conversational partner goes off on. I don't currently have to have this conversation bc today's politics have forced some ppl I know to really distinguish what they believe, but in previous family discussions it has been like, Them: "I vote Republican because of the national debt--they believe in balancing the books. You can't spend money you don't have." Me: "You know that's not a thing, right? [Insert a water-tight explanation of modern monetary theory and all the reasons national debt is not like house-hold spending.][Which in real life I am not knowledgeable about.]"

At that point I ask them if they paid cash for their house and cars.

That seems like a non-starter because it's too clear to them that they are in a process of paying that debt down. The kind of thing that's hard to explain is why it's not undesirable for a nation to carry debt, that it's not comparable to household debt which we're always told is "bad." Etc. Anyway like I said this is not my area of expertise but it's the sort of situation where in order to get them to wrestle with the moral qualities they're going to need you to refute 100 things first. It's exhausting.

How does this manifest? With my cousin it can be quite odd, its not even particularly clear if I am even considered one of the 'they' or not. sometimes yes but often no. Can it be that your loved ones are holding something similar, in some ways doing a form of mental gymnastics where you aren't part of the target group?

Also, your avoidance - Ive read plenty of people going down this route and its definitely understandable, but Ive found 'conversation avoidance' a better tactic than 'actual avoidance'. Granted I only really have the one person that is like this, but I've viewed this like, well, I do have a choice about the topic of conversation, I don't have to if I don't want to.

― anvil

it doesn't usually manifest! that's the destructive thing, that's why i adopt radical avoidance, because most of the time, at least for me as a white and male-presenting person, one can get along with these people, pretend that the systemic prejudices and hatreds don't exist. god knows i did it for years and years, and if i'm thankful for anything about the current situation it's that it's finally given me the motivation i needed to stop doing it. i spent decades excusing and accomodating abusers, and if it was still possible for me to do it, i would.

I was beat up by an alt-righter and it seemed the way it manifested with him was past failures with women, leading to a bitter view of feminism gone too far and (I wasn't sure how the next part formed) but a frustration with transgender politics. With my good friend, as mentioned previously it seems to have started with infowars-alex jones years back, then a youtube full of auto-suggestions that led him on a path that was similar, all the while he would claim it was objective..

oh yeah I was beat up because I didn't agree with him, I just sat silently and he could TELL I didn't agree. Given that he almost killed me it was pretty fucking lame

I guess the question is, has the internet actually changed them, have they always been this way, has the black and white debate style of internet discourse irreparably destroyed them (and almost everyone else?)

― omar little

for what it's worth i think trump supporters have changed, continue to change, as a result of their support of trump. partly this is because i see how majorly i've changed over the past two years, but i think affiliation, sociality (i'm not going to say "internet", that seems too imprecise, it's just as much the churches) work in a way that we become more like who we associate with. yeah, i think trump has made republicans more hateful and more racist than they already were.

i don't blanket-hate them because a lot of them, _particularly_ women, are caught in that trap of victims defending their abusers. which makes me sad, but i recognize there's nothing i can do about that.

"Separately - I estranged myself from my family for totally not political reasons.

― El Tomboto"

the encouraging thing about right now is that the political being so deeply personal is leading to an atmosphere of more personal accountability. i think back a lot to the way weinstein insisted that he was one of the "good guys" because he voted for democrats. it doesn't work that way anymore, thank god. now it's only the republicans making the excuses for these assholes, but it used to be everybody. the people i've stopped talking to as a result of all this aren't just republicans; it's given me the strength to get myself away from people who, regardless of shared political ideals, have seriously fucked up my life.

My mother is definitely is NOT one of these people, however one trait she does share is credulousness, takes most things at face value and isn't that great at seeing through things or questioning - though thankfully she is also aware that this is the case. She read an article on Corbyn recently and said "Even I could see through that one!" (I think the gist was that a) he loves to go round playing to all these crowds and soaking up all the adulation and its gone to his head, but also b) no one likes him and there are no crowds), so she acknowledges that she doesnt always notice and it jumped out at her when she did notice

In some ways its actually quite good, she is genuinely open minded, but I can see how easy it can be to tell someone something and just have it accepted unquestioningly. Like my cousin, she can accept a piece that says "some people are doing some thing somewhere", but unlike my cousin if I ask anything about specifics she doesn't then cling harder to the story but goes "oh yea, good point, it wasn't that clear". Some conversations can start out similar.

"They are..."
"Wait, who's 'they'?"

but it isn't the same at that point. I think the similiarity is that she can be quite muddled but its not walled off. She will examine things, but its almost like she doesn't quite know how - even though the desire to is there

The GOP and their supporters have become such mindless ghouls that one can't even express solidarity about basic human/civil rights without it being labeled as partisan.

many of them share values with you and mostly disagree about what facts are germane / what systems can best accomplish those values / etc. that has been my experience.

All I can say, Mordy, is that you apparently interact with people who have an unusual ability to temper emotion with reason.

i mean, at this point if you’re a republican you’re aligning yourself with people who seem to ultimately want to lock me (female hetero-agnostic journalist), my sister (lesbian who works in a higher ed program targeted by devos), and her wife (lesbian who emigrated here from poland as a teen) up, and probably my nephew by extension. so they can all fuck off honestly.

like i don’t understand why i should “civilly engage” with people whose boots are on my throat and those of people who i love. fuck that.

The people who call for civil engagement with Trump supporters can't even fucking unfriend some toxic acquaintance on fb without thinking it's a monumental insult.

yes, we need to stop looking at this as a friendly disagreement over abstract ideas

Apparently my cousin has disengaged from social media as its getting him too agitated. He's definitely become very radicalized by it (I wouldn't say its changed his personality, but its definitely honed it), but I'm fairly surprised this has happened. The daily existential battle against the enemy has taken a toll. He's not changing his views at all, but hopefully this can at least help him calm down a bit (the levels of angst caused by the most innocuous of things was sobering. the last one was something to do with "you cant say Man Sized Tissues anymore")

as always, you can still say "man-sized tissues", it just prompts people to go o_O for some reason

i've had a good friend get into Joe Rogan lately. as if that wasn't enough, apparently Joe Rogan convinced him to start wandering around the woods of suburban San Diego looking for mushrooms to hunt. the mushroom hunting I actually think is kinda cool, and I joined him for some of that last week (we found nothing), but I just don't like that it was Joe Rogan that convinced him to take it up through the teevee.

mushroom hunting is way too cool for joe rogan to ruin it

"is it still cool after joe rogan does it" is a pretty decent litmus test, actually, kind of a Great Filter for possible things to do

this quote from the Red Scare profile was being discussed on the chapo thread

It seems increasingly likely that the rising generation is more likely to turn conservative not because they want to be rich, but because they want to be mean.

this seems partially true, but I think being on the left also offers you plenty of scope for being mean, if maybe more restrictions on who you can be mean to and how? idk, meanness seems key to understanding so much of online politics somehow, it's the engine that it all runs on

I was thinking about this tweet:

consistently across all contexts the core underlying philosophical position of the intellectual dark web is that its members should not be made fun of pic.twitter.com/pU5RjfGoVk

— Max Read (@max_read) October 25, 2018

you could rephrase "its members should not be made fun of" as "no-one is allowed to me mean to us" - and this is definitely true, but it's equally as true of a significant chunk of social justice-y twitter as it is of the intellectual dark web? something about the way that very online politics involves lots of arguing with your opponents on twitter or wherever, and this encourages people to be defensive and build up preemptive defenses that make any criticism of their position illegitimate by definition, and this ends up shaping the positions of political movements themselves

xpost Perhaps we just need to provide them with many object lessons in that old 'don't mistake kindness for weakness' saw.

Nah, neither #MeToo nor #BlackLivesMatter was about 'being mean', and those two are by far the most important leftist hashtags.

A friend of mine briefly switched to an all-meat diet. He denied emulating Jordan Peterson, perhaps because he assumed I'd be less likely to dismiss his lifestyle as a result. He appears to have given up on it in the interim (I wonder why?), though he's still alt-righty when it comes to certain specific topics and unapologetically liberal when it comes to others, which is a fairly banal phenomenon come to think of it. For instance, he has no problem pulling the MRA card when women are involved and freely trades in ethnic stereotypes but will take advantage of every opportunity to tackle anti-Asian American racism because it concerns him directly. His misogyny and anti-racism are intertwined, in fact, as he feels like women (including Asian women) are less attracted to him because of his race. When I tell him that while it is indeed demonstrably harder out there for Asian men on the Western dating scene, his attitude towards women might be part of the problem, he doesn't pay me any heed (he's also not a bad looking guy, incidentally). As expected, he strongly dislikes it when I bring up his economic privilege (upper-upper middle class, as it were) and will occasionally revel in it as a corrective to recurring episodes of guilt. I still very much value him as a friend, but it's hard, perhaps even impossible to positively navigate these issues.