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

pinker's one of those cases where he's reached the point that the right ideas are made in a completely wrong way

some inherent passive-aggressive tendency

that is, the ideas that are on the right track

not all of them are

i mean look i'm talking about a friend of mine, not a strawman, it's frustrating mostly, i wish it was something where the preconditions for rational discussion were met but it's just not

i feel like people will be more willing to listen to each other and find common ground when the long-term consequences of not doing that become sufficiently manifest

otm but when it gets to the point where we are living in separate realities, and one of the main realities is based on the notion that there can be no compromise, then what.

I'm thinking of an acquaintance of mine, Australian who lived in London and Ireland for quite a while. I don't think he's fully infected but around the Brexit election he would spit up tropes like the false factoid about how much money the NHS is losing to the EU. When we did spend time together (we don't anymore) I would generally avoid politics except to try to find common ground over issues like climate change.

In his case I do think a lot of his views were molded by being raised in an isolated environment with a succession of abusive father figures. It gets back to the mention of empathy above, and also what some pundits have noted about the conservative fixation with the "strong father". Personally I don't think my acquaintance fully lacks empathy, he's just a person who had much of his empathy beat out of him at a young age. Much like my father in fact but at least he was a leftist.

Regarding gun nuts and identity politics, I figure that like much apparent right wing irrationality, it's closely linked to the backlash against desegregation.

The federal government enforced desegregation, so in their minds they can't trust the federal gov't, therefore need guns to protect against "tyranny".

Closely tied to the exploitation of crime as a bogeyman by politicians and media throughout the worst decades of the Southern strategy, and which clearly continues today.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/suicide-rate-america-white-men-841576/

Like this article, the dudes in Wyoming thinking they need this stockpile of military-grade armament to protect themselves from some imagined home invasion. In Wyoming. And not to come off as classist but I'd guess some of their homes they imagine being invaded are trailers.

that, and a crisis in masculinity following the women's movement/2nd wave feminism. loss of (sole) "provider" role, feeling of insignificance, retreat into "protector" role

like its no coincidence that the NRA went from a shooting club to gun's rights activist lobbying group start in the late 1970's.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoying-man

This was highly satisfying.

otm but when it gets to the point where we are living in separate realities, and one of the main realities is based on the notion that there can be no compromise, then what.

― viborg

Right, that's the really frustrating thing about it. When dealing with a rigid and uncompromising opposition, compromise is not a viable option, only appeasement. The left has no real agency in this situation; we can only wait for the inevitable denouement of the right's ideology and rebuild what we can from whatever's left.

It ain’t over til brunnhilde burns

An exchange yesterday that was so abstract I'm finding it difficult to recreate here, but the gist is something like: "If we do the things that some people are suggesting then we will be like some countries where it has been tried before", one that is fairly familiar

With some work, I kind of got this as far as "If Rebecca Long Bailey becomes Prime Minister, and more money is invested in education or health, it will set off a chain of events and the country will become like North Korea"

I was unable to get a timeframe or any details on the chain of events between "Enters 10 Downing Street", "Marginally increased support for public services", and "Installation of dictatorship". This stalled somewhere around "its been tried before".

It is now too dangerous to consider even a marginal move to the left as the ensuing snowball effect will ultimately lead to the violent death of millions of people

I had a brief convo with an ex-army type who seems to think the UK has to be subservient to the US and commit troops to wherever they go to war next, otherwise the UK will become a rump state of the Russian Federation. Fuck knows his working out but he's a bit mad. But I did point out to him that Wilson did a very canny job of keeping the UK out of Vietnam and the UK didn't turn into a Soviet satellite - but he was only transmitting and not receiving at this point.

I know it makes me an Ugly American but I pay essentially no attention to English politics, this is the first I've heard of Rebecca Long Bailey but I'm heartened to see that perhaps there's someone over there worth rallying around. my almost entirely uninformed sense is that Corbyn seems to have worn out his welcome.

it was never there in the first place to wear out!

It was a push to get any name at all, usually its "some people". A mysterious group of people that are rarely defined or named but are stopping us from misgendering people. I have yet to find out who it is thats going to stop me, where I need to go to meet them, or what will happen to me after I have done it.

it's amusing bc i think liberals are right to be suspicious of nonsensical slippery slope arguments from the right of the kind you're mentioning, but otoh of all places to complain about it, ilx, where many commenters want developments that are in fact the end of the slope the right is concerned about is a funny place to do it. like yes no mainstream ppl in the DNC (or I assume Labour but I'm not as sure) want to demolish capitalism or disband states or form a one world government or abolish gender or have open borders or whatever radical proposal you can imagine, but plenty of ppl here do lol.

these ppl, such lunatics for thinking we want the things we purport to want

can't recall a lot of support for North Korea on here. i may have missed a banaka post or two.

in this country centre left policies that are hardly controversial throughout Europe and Scandinavia are termed "populism" or "marxism" and not just in the right wing press, this stuff is often parroted on the supposed impartial bbc. Sorry probably repetitively repeating myself here, but it feeds into all socialism/national socialism/communism - millions died! memes that people who don't really know much about 20th c history seem to get excited about and share.

I don't actually have a problem with a slippery slope argument! And I also don't think this type of thinking is necessarily right wing! and I don't have a problem if anyone has radical or ridiculous ideas!

but for me where the brainworm stuff kicks in is the inability or unwillingness to explain the middle steps, in any kind of thinking. I understand step 1, and step 2, but suddenly we are at step 50. I want to know what steps 3-49 are! I may disagree with them but uncovering what they are is really difficult, as getting from the abstract to the tangible is tough going. Getting my cousin to commit to anything beyond "some people" is almost impossible!

tbc the left does the same thing to the right where they extrapolate from their first principles and their seeming commitments to all kinds of horrors that the right-wingers themselves would blanch at and of course then the left finds some right-wingers who do want the US to be an ethnostate or liquidate all minorities or whatever horrors so it's easy to see how this thing works. you believe X. i think X would lead to Y. some ppl who vote similarly to you explicitly want Y. consequently you want Y too. maybe the process is more obscure with your friend but i don't think anyone is totally immune to this particular ideology game.

some right-wingers who do want the US to be an ethnostate

these people are in charge

Of course, I don't think its inherently a right wing thing (in fact my cousin exhibited this long before becoming political), but in general "the left" do this, "the right" do that is hard work, because unless we're naming names, we may not even be talking about the same people! Do left wing people do these things? Yes! but are we better off naming them? If they have the cloak of anonymity, they could be anyone!

I struggle with abstraction in general so with my cousin its an obvious mismatch. An example would be something like

Cousin: "some people are committing crimes, and they are committing more of them"
Me: 'Where? which people? what type of crimes? Do you have a link to the stats?"

Cousin: "Why does it matter, even if you found out that person committing a crime in fact didn't after all, so what? we both know some other people are committing that crime, and also that it is increasing"

I couldn't imagine my cousin saying "why do you need to know the circumference of each raindrop before you will admit it is raining?", but perhaps they should

the left does the same thing to the right where they extrapolate from their first principles and their seeming commitments to all kinds of horrors that the right-wingers themselves would blanch at

2016: "Calm down snowflake its not like Trump is gonna start putting people into concentration camps."

2019: "Actually they're necessary."

— Dan Arrows (@_DanArrows) July 14, 2019

The thread could absolutely do with some examples of Left Wing Brain Worms too, and Non-Political Brain Worms!

ftr i don't want to argue about whether the border camps or the trump administration are as bad as the left thinks they are and i do believe "concentration camp" is a okay term to use to describe the camps even if i do understand for most ppl the term will evoke the Holocaust and i don't think they're remotely comparable really, but there are many leftists (and lol i can name names) who will actually accuse the trump administration of preparing to commit genocide or as voodoo chili says above create an ethnostate when obv even if you could plausibly argue that idk Stephen Miller may want that there's no evidence that it's en route or particularly plausible but you can find all kinds of sentiments like this often in the guise of hyperbole or like dramatic license. i just thought it was funny seeing this kind of anti-slippery slope argument on ilx when i have seen loads of radical opinions expressed here which is to say what i said above lol these lunatics think we want to do the things we say we want to do. i do think they're totally wrong tho about liberalism or even the left in general but that's bc i think ilx is fairly marginal and non-representative of the general population.

i don't believe the trump administration is preparing to commit genocide, but im also not sure how different it would look from our current situation if they were preparing to commit genocide.

probably they'd be killing more people

that's fair. if they were planning to kill people systematically, they'd probably be killing more people unsystematically

but i also think that type of thinking lets the brainworms people into thinking that anything done to illegal immigrants or asylees short of killing people is a-ok

*lets them think

if they were preparing for the possibility to get violent with, say, undocument immigrants, they would probably be doing things like constantly comparing them to animals and trying to blame them for everything that happens in the country, possibly even raising the idea of just shooting them as they cross the border to see how the population reacts

I wasn't making an anti-slippery slope argument though! I'm totally happy for my cousin or anyone else to make any kind of slippery slope argument. I'd just like my cousin (or the leftist you are referring to in your post) to tell me what their argument actually is.

I'm totally ok with someone making the following argument

1) Corbyn is elected
2) Something
3) UK becomes Venezuela

They may be correct! I just want to know what it is thats happening in that step 2

(feel free to replace Corbyn with Trump, Bernie, Boris or anyone!)

that kind of language would probably come from near the top, and it would be pretty disturbing if everyone just got used to it and no one really called it out any more

so we're fine

xp

anvil what if they said "corbyn constantly sympathizes with regimes in places like cuba, venezeula and paramilitary organizations like hamas and hezboillah consequently if he were elected we might expect him to make changes that would make us more like those places"

i mean do you need a step by step blueprint for how that would go down bc i could write up some speculative fiction but i feel like it could easily be left as an exercise for the reader

Its a start! But I would want to know

1) What changes
2) What percentage chance he would have of getting those changes through parliament
3) What kind of timeframe

I'd have further questions like how he would handle a parliamentary rebellion, whether the changes would have popularity with the public or not, what the role of the police and the military would be - but those are difficult without knowing the answers to 1) and 2)

No Mordy please can you write this up I could do with some comedy rn.

i feel like it could easily be left as an exercise for the reader

― Mordy,

this is where it runs into trouble for me, because I'm having trouble imagining what these things are, and how they are going to happen. Sadly I also have trouble imagining a Corbyn government is really going to have much success in achieving 5% of its stated aims, never mind unstated aims of which I'm unable to properly imagine!

My pt is that you could say the same for trumps imminent genocide but ilxors don’t feel compelled to explain how it would actually go down

The idea that a 'Corbyn government' will be able to do anything genuinely radical or far left is laughable tbh. No chance.

That much is clear. But I assume Mordy is wondering whether the notion that a Johnson government would get anything radical done at the other end of spectrum is any less laughable.

My sense is that the left, even when it reaches the highest rungs, has its hands tied more often than the right.

imminent

come on, man

anvil what if they said "corbyn constantly sympathizes with regimes in places like cuba, venezeula and paramilitary organizations like hamas and hezboillah consequently if he were elected we might expect him to make changes that would make us more like those places"

I guess it depends on your definition of radical. To me, the notion that the British government would be promising to protect soldiers who’d shot children and used civilians’ skulls as ashtrays might have seemed a touch too far even by the depressing standards of human rights in Northern Ireland, but I’d argue that’s pretty fucking radical bearing in mind the PM before this one apologised & acknowledged that the crimes were crimes.

Mordy has a talent for speculative fiction and you guys shouldn't suppress it like this.

Ah, my mistake. He’s just perfectly calm and idly speculating as he always does.

My pt is that you could say the same for trumps imminent genocide but ilxors don’t feel compelled to explain how it would actually go down

― Mordy, Monday, July 15, 2019 11:48 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

1. gridlock in congress means the right to a hearing within a reasonable time isn't enforced, and the allocation of more immigration judges never happens
2. with the judicial branch's hands tied and a huge backlog, DHS/ICE are told to push their boundaries
3. said agencies have already started aggressively picking up undocumented immigrants who aren't criminal offenders, and have "accidentally" picked up citizens who weren't carrying proof of citizenship -- which is somewhat nebulous in that we don't have a national citizenship card
4. conditions in the camps continue to degrade, judges continue to see fewer people, access to lawyers is further restricted

you could write this all up to left-wing brain worms, especially if you view some of the arrests as fringe cases and not common, but...

tbc the left does the same thing to the right where they extrapolate from their first principles and their seeming commitments to all kinds of horrors that the right-wingers themselves would blanch at and of course then the left finds some right-wingers who do want the US to be an ethnostate or liquidate all minorities or whatever horrors so it's easy to see how this thing works. you believe X. i think X would lead to Y. some ppl who vote similarly to you explicitly want Y. consequently you want Y too. maybe the process is more obscure with your friend but i don't think anyone is totally immune to this particular ideology game.

tl;dr = both sides do it