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

Oh man, my cousin... I'm not real close to him, but he's my age, good dude, excellent guitar player, never very active on Facebook, and we've never discussed politics at all, just started posting COVID conspiracy shit from One America News.

HALLELUJA THANK GOD TRUTH IS COMING OUT! Soros, Clinton, Gates suspected of Beijing WHO coverup to seize Covid cure, undo US constitution.

Man, that's some headline...

I fear this pandemic is creating brain worms at an alarming rate. Lots of otherwise apolitical ppl seduced by the idea that actually no, it's fine for them to ignore this.

There's a lot of uncertainty, and people who don't necessarily follow the news particularly aren't able to avoid whats going on, which may mean a hugely increased intake of news due to very real direct changes to life. If no filtering of events is ever happening but there's a general sense of distrust but with no markers or waypoints, its not that surprising stuff like this is taking off.

I don't really think of this as brainworms as such, I think its something different. People are suddenly faced with a load of stuff and no practice or ability at processing it

or filtering it

Just saw an old family friend railing on Facebook against the "tyranny" of present restrictions write "I value my freedom above my own life" which is...yeah.

I appreciate your epistemological rigour anvil but when the end result is still "SOROS 5G SLAVERY MARTIAL LAW" it does look a lot like brain worms to me.

fans of this thread may (or may not) like this pretty wild story of a guy who got brain-wormed by youtube in a number of different ways over time

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/podcasts/rabbit-hole-internet-youtube-virus.html

The amount of Mandela Effect shit that’s going to be floating around in the wake of all this is going to be mind-boggling

"Obama did nothing about COVID-19!"

fans of this thread may (or may not) like this pretty wild story of a guy who got brain-wormed by youtube in a number of different ways over time

Is this that Caleb guy again?

was there already a piece about him?

He did the rounds last year, there was a bunch on him. At one point I thought it might be a grift

Don’t know whether to laugh or cry. pic.twitter.com/s77zR4eg5e

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) May 12, 2020

Not that it makes it any better, but that poll screenshot was from back in early April. Not sure why it's being spread around again this week.

I really don’t get Twitter. Am I supposed to know who that person is?

is that the kind of enlightening Twitter content that filters is way down through the murk?

it's irrelevant who posted it, grandpa

There's a really good article at The Atlantic about QAnon, and how people get brainworms.

it's irrelevant who posted it, grandpa

The medium is the message, yo.

I've been having relative success with my RW cousin. He has actually asked my opinion a couple of times (and not ascribing an opinion to me and saying "so you think this?", but actual questions). Some of the combativeness and defensiveness has dissipated.

I think not refuting anything has played a big part. There are smarter ways around it

Not a friend of mine but a guy my sister used to know years ago in Glasgow, a photographer I think, anyway very closely associated with the Glasgow music scene in the early 80s. My sister, being a the sort of person she is friended him on Facebook a while back and he's an absolute horror. There's so many times i've been tempted to wade into him but he's and old friend of my sister's and I don't know him at all.

Anyway he was fanatically pro-Brexit for all the usual reasons but he's particularly exercised on immigration and preserving European culture from Islam. He's also a gungho Unionist and British nationalist with a virulent hatred for the SNP, Scottish nationalism and Nicola Sturgeon, he thinks Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf are planning to flood Scotland with Muslim immigrants as part of Yousaf's plans for the Islamization of Scotland. On COVID-19, he thinks Nicola Sturgeon has got it wrong and Boris Johnson has got it right - and that Scotland will end up bankrupt and with skyhigh unemployment. Oh and the reason that the death toll in England is much higher is because there's 'more blacks in England and they're more likely to die from it'. Not that he thinks COVID-19 is actually killing that many people anyway, they're dying because of pre-existing health issues, of course. As usual with these guys, he has no shortage of bullshit stats and anecdotes to back all this up. He non-ironically used the word 'sheeple'. Oh and more thing: THE CUNT LIVES IN CHINA! And has done for years. Anyway, my sister eventually blocked him with the classic kiss off line, "... and don't come back to Scotland... please!"

Uyghur concentration camp country so there's some consistency to his cretinous racism. I'm sure he'd also have a grand old time in Orbán's Hungary.

The Chinese are a lot better tha Europeans at preserving their own culture you see.

Where is Paolo? I think we need an update!

I think there's a substantial difference between "bad and unreachable people on the internet" of which there are a relatively high number, and "friends, family, and people we know, that are exhibiting brainworm symptoms". I think the former is just best off left completely alone, it's not hard to find such things. The latter is the more complex

I suspect a lot of em don’t really how much they’re embarrassing themselves by doing their speakers corner thing

fanatically pro-Brexit for all the usual reasons but he's particularly exercised on immigration and preserving European culture from Islam. He's also a gungho Unionist and British nationalist with a virulent hatred for the SNP

Gonnae go out on a limb and say I can name this guy's favourite football team in one

I don't know, he's an arty West End type from the time before football was hip. However my sister knows a lot of ageing mods and a wearying number of them are Tory voting Unionists who happen to support a particular football club.

Hi. I've been chatting with my pal quite a lot recently but haven't brought up the vaccine thing because I'm just not sure how to go about it. She's not a bad and unreachable person - it's not like she's posting a whole bunch of anti-vaxx shit on Facebook and going on about 5G or anything like that.

There's a really good article at The Atlantic about QAnon, and how people get brainworms.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, 14 May 2020 19:29 (three days ago)

This is good. I can't get enough articles from the likes of The Atlantic and The NYT and The Guardian about right-wing conspiracy theories and what's really motivating Trump supporters and how crazy it all is. I find the subject horrifying and fascinating at the same time.

It's like when I was a kid I was scared of ghosts but I loved reading ghost stories. Or now I'm scared of snakes and I'm also fascinated by those slithery motherfuckers.

FAO Americans - are there really more people getting into conspiracy theories since Trump got elected?

because I'm just not sure how to go about it.

Can't you just ask her opinion? 'Hey what do you think about all this covid stuff?' , 'Or do you think we should open up or not?'. Without necessarily thinking about how you're going to respond/counter/refute etc, but just getting her opinion because she's your friend and you're interested in her opinion?

I think we can too easily fall into the trap of thinking about what we're going to say, which means we're not focusing on listening. Then when we do respond its too easy to end up responding to something when actuality they said something slightly different

Even perhaps telling yourself you might not even say anything definitive at all

Doctors get paid to say people died of coronavirus in private care homes even if they died for other reasons. Apparently.

I won't ask who pays them, I don't want to know.

good friend of mine hates Trump, but is one of those annoying people who likes to lecture liberals and conservatives alike about how much better he is because he is an "independent", is starting to fall for Desantis's bullshit.

I can't imagine how you could hate Trump and love Desantis - the latter is a much better speaker, but has zero charisma, and though he seems like he gives more of a shit about his constituents than Trump, he's also easily exposed as irascible and defensive when you give him a tough question.

so naturally today, after Desantis essentially blamed citizens for fucking up the unemployment application if they applied in March and haven't been paid yet, he cried to me that the headline was clickbaity and inaccurate. The former, yes, the latter, no.

just think it's a really bad look to defend this dude's handling of the unemployment debacle (even if he didn't directly create the system) when your own friends are actually reporting how bad they're impacted by it.

FAO Americans - are there really more people getting into conspiracy theories since Trump got elected?

― paolo

more and more of us are deranged, utterly detached from reality, and unable to construct a narrative about existence that isn't profoundly harmful to ourselves and others, does that help?

Can't you just ask her opinion? 'Hey what do you think about all this covid stuff?' , 'Or do you think we should open up or not?'. Without necessarily thinking about how you're going to respond/counter/refute etc, but just getting her opinion because she's your friend and you're interested in her opinion?

That would probably be for the best. It certainly should be pretty easy to bring that up in conversation.

'wow, how about those mets, eh?'

FAO Americans - are there really more people getting into conspiracy theories since Trump got elected?

I mean people said we didn't really kill Osama Bin Laden in 2011 as well

also people have said "there weren't that many Jews living in Europe at the time" re: the Holocaust for decades

Doctors get paid to say people died of coronavirus in private care homes even if they died for other reasons. Apparently.

― nashwan, Sunday, 17 May 2020 11:40 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

My main exposure to that one is through following my local newspaper on FB.
There's a split in the conspiracy ranks with many saying this and other practices are being use to inflate the numbers to keep us all under control while another group says the numbers are being suppressed to prevent panic and the government is hiding mass graves.

Thankfully I don't have any 5G clowns among my online friends. They are universally seen as figures of fun, even by the libertarian clown who insists this is no worse than an annual flu spike.

I was recycling newspapers the other day and came across this article in one and wondered whether this was where it all started

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/04/5g-mobile-networks-threat-to-world-weather-forecasting

Add the Chinese government thing on top of that and...

Horseshoe theory is mostly nonsense but my mom's childhood friend's Hungarian husband, a pro-Orbán neo-fascist, is now on the same wavelength as my far-left soixante-huitard French father-in-law, in that both believe the pandemic to be a) just a regular old flu, b) orchestrated by Bill Gates and/or Big Pharma and c) a ploy to control the populace via microchip injections.

I forgot d) hydroxychloroquine, as peddled by le bon docteur Raoult, is the real cure and it's being actively suppressed by the Deep State and/or Macron.

Is RussiaGate an example of horseshoe theory?

No anvil there's another name for the theory that centrists and fascists tend to converge, I forget what it's called.

I think what far right and leftist circles do share is: a) a deep distrust of official narratives and b) continual infighting. These are not moral equivalences, obv.