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

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.

We're not just taking about the US, though.

Where aren’t you going to encounter that nationalist narrative on the right/far-right?

Everywhere, except it's not always 100% 'official' and, in most cases, nowhere near as histrionically exceptionalist as your country's version.

Sorry, I meant 'nowhere'.

Right, so if you shift the semantics slightly... it holds. This is a fundamental difference between left and right and where horseshoe theory (even watered down to ‘both suspicious of narratives’) fails.

As far as anti-vaxxers, aside from the low income areas where the idea dwells, that’s the domain of rich white liberals not ‘the left’ AFAICT. Granola Karens.

I completely agree, I was just slightly peeved by your assumption that we'd been talking about the US all along.

xp

The “distrusts official narratives” comparison doesn’t actually work.

Covid?

Granola Karens are JULIES.

Nhex: https://xkcd.com/966/

Granola Karens are JULIES.

― santa clause four (suzy)

not gwyneths?

We're not just taking about the US, though.

Makes a change.

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.√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.

This doesn't really matter though because belief in a meta-narrative of exceptionalism won't help you navigate the media and govt narratives of what you view as a fallen government. So the far right is still faced with the same challenges the left is - no official version of events to glom on to, and as a result, a much stronger tendency towards infighting than you'd find in the centre.

As I said earlier, this is not a moral or ideological equivalence - it's about the challenges any group will face if it doesn't suscribe to the official narrative.

few xs back- we desperately need more of a (re)decoupling of intersectional opposition to capitalism/patriarchy/white supremacy on the one hand, from this anti-radical liberal diversity/inclusion shit and progressivist whig mythology on the other, no necessary reason why they should be linked except to hold former back

actually tho how true is the notion of a single official narrative at all these days, if it ever was? except occasionally in most broad or limited terms it’s not like there’s a single bourgeois line accepted by centrists & rejected by left & right, it’s way more of a mess