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

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.

I thought only centrists liked russiagate?

fishhook theory, which is actually correct

a deep distrust of official narratives

This is the key one for me. The closer you get to the center the more this distrust dissipates.

RussiaGate interesting because it designed for a crowd that don't usually do distrust, and they were really into it (same in a way with Remain)

as illustrated xp

https://www.theweek.co.uk/sites/theweek/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/2019/10/fish_hook_theory.jpg

All the centrist crowd turned into Colombo over Russiagate and Roy Keane over Brexit, you love to see it

Graham Souness and Gary Lineker - the very same person.

and that very same person? graham linehan

i would say, yes, some qualities i possess that are also found in the far right are a deep distrust of institutional power and the way it is used, profound fear/anxiety, and a certain feeling of persecution. i struggle sometimes with how similar my thought processes can be to the thought processes of the paranoid right, particularly since i do also have ongoing problems with serious mental illness. the thing that bothers me most is this recurrent feeling i have that the biggest difference between me and them is that "i'm right" and "they're wrong", which is, uh, not a helpful way for me to think, given that i'm not perfect, i'm not always right, that i really can get it super fucking wrong sometimes.

Linehan now writes for the Mail. A logical destination for a transphobic bigot of course, but he'd probably be a fish nook denier despite being a textbook case.

lol hook

I'm fonder of Anchor Theory

https://external-preview.redd.it/wiVJnY58krKoycsKMQVR4zBMb5HqQwG45lvRbODrj3E.jpg?auto=webp&s=de98ccb9724df400b93afcf86920851326fb9ff5

I thought the Chapoistes' problem with 'Russiagate' was that it was irrelevant rather than wrong?

shut up Popeye!

The Chad sea and the Virgin Anchor

"White male hegemony" with no reference to class is as useless as "class only" leftism.

I thought the Chapoistes' problem with 'Russiagate' was that it was irrelevant rather than wrong?

A mix - most leftists critical of it think there's been some Russian interference but the conspiracy theory cottage industry around it quickly spiralled way beyond that.

Linehan now writes for the Mail. A logical destination for a transphobic bigot of course, but he'd probably be a fish nook denier despite being a textbook case.

― calzino

i know that was a typo but can we talk about tom nook truthers here

"White male hegemony" with no reference to class is as useless as "class only" leftism.

All these fishhooks, horseshoes whatever may be true in different contexts but I don't think any of them have a fundamental truth to them. That self-congratulary Anchor theory should be thrown overboard immediately however.

by putting leftism on the right and "reactionarism" (ugh) on the left that Anchor diagram is immediately discredited imo

well that's what it's there for xp

A mix - most leftists critical of it think there's been some Russian interference but the conspiracy theory cottage industry around it quickly spiralled way beyond that.

we got into this yesterday on the Gr33nwald thread

The horseshoe theory often used to discredit leftist ideas by magic - that idea is x inches toward the left therefore it's also x inches toward the right, blah blah

There is however a set of stock images and cliches that are cool sounding (e.g. you get to fight the GOVERNMENT!, Everything you thought before is WRONG!) which everyone feels tempted to use I think?

horseshoe theory is popular imo bc nutty ppl are attracted to fringe political movements so at the extremes you'll often find overlapping conspiracy theories and brainworms

duh theory: 2 things can have similarities but still be drastically different in many other aspects

When group a defines itself in staunch opposition to group b (and the obverse), it's only natural to derive amusement from what they have in common. That being said, statements such as 'fa and antifa are two sides of the same coin' almost always betray unspoken alt-right sympathies.

the amusement in seeing what they have in common is often based on (deliberate or engineered) misunderstanding or outright lies, is the thing.

obviously wrong to apply horseshoe to everything, but you do see a lot of crossover in things like antivax movement, conspiracy theories (jet fuel can't melt steel beams etc)

The “distrusts official narratives” comparison doesn’t actually work. The right and far right do absolutely believe the official (meta-)narrative of American greatness and exceptionalism. They just think there’s a fallen government undermining its true nature.