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

Sorry its a bit unfocussed, Ive had this on the go for a while! quite hard to condense thoughts on the fly

One thing that struck me about this form of self-radicalization is how much its about repetition - simplification and repetition. For people making the mistake of engaging on some of these topics, its not about being on the right or wrong side of that topic, its about having that topic be the one with airtime, conversation time. A conversation about 'the BBC and the universities are brainwashing youth with cultural marxism, the police will come after you for using the wrong pronoun, Birmingham is now a no go city run by muslims". Really? This isn't a conversation that even deserves 'I don't see it like that", or any of my time! Its better to steer conversation elsewhere. Its better for this to be taking up less of their thought and talk time, and its certainly better for it to be taking up less of mine.

De-radicalizing people, i think is better achieved by getting them to think about some other damn things, engaging just hardens still further

(not saying your friend is or isnt radicalized, but when people talk and it sounds like their repeating the words of someone else, well)

I'm not a good enough person to try to save anyone, I write off people who go beyond dipping their toes in the waters of Peterson/Shapiro/et al.. I struggle to be comfortably social with even 'mainstream' Republicans these days, the American conservative worldview is so aggressively reactionary and hateful - your average suburban GOP voter just hasn't progressed to saying the quiet part loud.

sage stuff from anvil there

yep

also youre not his da, short answer

Repeating "I've never seen that" helps, as often it gets a "well, neither have I but" acknowledgement.

why not murder them

NAILS IT

get over it. people have opinions. furthermore people are more than their media consumption habits and painting somebody as "infected" because of their media choices is some weird dehumanization Othering that shouldnt impact a real life friendship. OP says they are irl friends that hang out w this person once a week. you don't feel comfortable discussing political topics with them in real life, yet you will make a big post on the internet and talk about them with strangers? this passive aggressive signalling through media choices has poisoned YOUR mind as well.

if it's a person you care about irl then talk to them. if you can't stand their social media posts you can hide them. it is like a two click action. if you need everyone of your friends to subscribe to the same media you do then it would seem the friendship is secondary to your social media feed. get over yourself.

https://i.imgur.com/1WU8ron.jpg

being into comicsgate is not about "media preferences"

To be honest, the main issue for me isn’t “can I change his mind?” That won’t happen. It’s more, “can I continue being friends with him?” If he stays confined to complaining about “SJWs” ruining the comics industry online, maybe, but if it devolves beyond that? I’m not sure it will, but I can’t tell anymore. It seems like a lot of seemingly sane people’s brains have been broken over the last few years.

Uh, x-post

Adam, your post is more than a little fucked. 'Dehumanization' and 'othering' is exactly what this shit is all about. It's informed by very thinly-veiled white supremacy, and that kind of reappropriation of the language of oppression is exactly what they use to paint themselves as victims. 'Victims' of people who just want to see their own perspectives represented in media which is overwhelmingly white and male and hetero. You don't get to champion a viewpoint like that and then brush it off with a 'but I'm a cool guy otherwise'.

I wasn't even aware of comicsgate before this thread but of course there's a comicsgate, and of course it's in opposition to the exact comics and creators I would've expected. Expected but depressing as hell.

I dunno, man, no one can really tell you whether to remain friends with someone or not. Personally, I couldn't, but then I've never had trouble disconnecting myself from toxic people. The employment of 'SJW' as a pejorative is so pernicious because that particular utterance is several steps removed from what it's actually saying. You pooh-pooh the SJWs, which means you're against the social justice warriors, which tells me that you're against social justice, which in turn suggests you're for social injustice. And if you're a straight white dude, that tells me pretty much everything I need to know.

Shunning and ostracization are underrated methods of letting people know that their antisocial (in the most literal sense) views/behavior are unacceptable, imo.

I dunno, they seem pretty popular right now and I don't see them having much of an effect. Not that you need the effect to be clear, I don't think I could remain friends with a comicsgater either.

won't somebody save the alt-right from dehumanization and othering lmao

Is comicsgate different than gamergate? I've cut off ties with most of my family because of their abhorrent views. I am not making small talk and sharing my life with them out of duty when they believe and say shitty things about women and other races. I put in my time trying to rationalize or have them try to restrain themselves. Out.

It’s basically Gamergate 2

From what I can tell, anyway

Lovely. Sigh.

it is absolutely a personal decision to make. personally i have enough problems in my life and i don't need "friends" who are continually spewing toxic bullshit, whether it's openly or on a passive aggressive level. i'm not equivocating here, but i haven't found this to be a specifically right-wing problem. leftists who spend most of their time, in 2018, complaining about how terrible hillary clinton is will get the chopping block just as surely as anybody who uses the term "sjw" pejoratively will.

i've said it before and i'll keep saying it - when i cut people off it's not because i'm judging them as inferior. if anybody is "inferior" it's me, because i haven't got the energy to put up with that sort of thing anymore. i'm totally occupied with my own crazy, and don't have time for anybody else's.

^^^ This too. I've had to put space between friends that I like but they spend all day texting me mundane complaints about shit everyone hates.

The Clintons are terrible tbf

This thread has really great clusterfuck potential

completely baffled by adam's post. latebloomer, you have my sympathies, i don't know what exactly i'd do. i'm on a weekly bar trivia team as a device to regularly see a certain cluster of friends and shoot the shit about movies, and i really can't imagine it being an enjoyable or meaningful experience if below the surface was the awareness that one of them is carrying water for alt-right talking points as a way of blowing off steam online or whatever it is. that's not a person i want in my life. but the exact etiquette and approach of making that cut, i don't know. for me personally, if they were really committed to this stuff i couldn't stay friends (and probably, we would have drifted apart long ago for not having much in common). we've spent a lot of time talking about this w/ regard to right-wing family, but friends are a slightly different matter in a lot of ways...

if it's not QUITE to that point... hrrrrrm. i imagine staging an intervention would only feed the "libs are out to shut us down" mentality, but is there some viable version of "hey, man, i noticed you've been expressing some intense feelings online, has everything been okay?" or maybe even a way around to discussing his emotional state/life situation without mentioning the political stuff --- you're not his therapist, but if you are his friend it is mayyyyybe conceivable that he's still early in being seduced by this stuff (or susceptible to it being a brief phase that he later looks back on with embarrassment). and that it might be genuinely useful to open up a channel to talk about whatever it is that's leading him to frustration and grievance and blaming-the-sjws. it depends what kind of friendship it is, how close you are, how much cred you have with him versus how much he feels the youtube mini-limbaughs really get him, how much work it's worth to you, all of that stuff.

I liked South Park's depiction of Kyle's dad staying up nights to troll online like it's his job while drinking red wine.

If you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time
People have opinions. Get over it.

I mean, wrt this particular sitch, I can hang with people who don't agree with me politically/philosophically/religiously/etc but there are certain uncrossable ideological lines and stanning for white supremacy is one of those. Maybe laying it out in terms of 'disagreement is fine, championing oppression is not' would be helpful?

Argh, this thread made me google comicsgate and now I hate knowing what it is. Tell your friend I blame him for that.

pretty sure most of the people i drink with are some kind of right wing but it's not like we spend much time talking about politics except when they accuse me of being a Maoist

and i agree with them and tell them they'll be up against the wall first

Also, one possible tack to take wrt comics creators in particular is to discuss the reappropriation of Pepe the Frog. Ask him how he would feel about people hijacking his own work to express political opinions completely counter to his own. And how he feels about a professional like Van Sciver in particular doing just that. Even divorced of the political implications, it's hugely disrespectful and unprofessional.

Oh man, I just read up on comicsgate too. This shit is so unbelievably stupid.

Yep :(

I think the thing these trolling dipshits don't get is that you don't get to claim "oh, I'm actually a nice guy in person, I'm just trolling" when 100% of your public persona is racist, sexist, garbage

if you genuinely believe the problem is that it's the "wrong people" getting work or acclaim based only on their ethnicity, gender, or views... then spend your time advocating for people you think are talented and help them find an audience

latebloomer, has your friend published anything before? there genuinely are some barriers to entry if you're not established, but I don't think any of them have to do with being a white man. I knew some people who genuinely tried to break into mainstream comics a number of years ago, and none of the reasons they failed to get a strong foothold had anything to do with this comicsgate horseshit.

Not to get too off track but was a picture of a bunch of young women enjoying milkshakes really a catalyst?

women can't be employed in a coveted field, happy, and pictured together. it just drives dudes completely insane

I also didn't know about Comicsgate (or I knew, but about the one a few years ago around "hey guys maybe don't put traced porn shots on comic covers") - the article here makes the point that it doesn't even have the figleaf of ethics in games journalism, it's literally just "we fear the rise of women and brown people"

https://www.inverse.com/article/41132-comicsgate-explained-bigots-milkshake-marvel-dc-gamergate

I am not sure if laughing is the right response to idiotic claims, but I snorted when I saw this gem from one of these comicsgate turds

good lord pic.twitter.com/S2aY5Fcnwg

— BAKOON (@BAKKOOONN) May 14, 2018

I think the ongoing collapse of legitimacy of liberal institutions, increasingly anxiety producing omnipresence of (social)media, increasing forgetfulness of 20th century totalitarianisms (and hence the taboos around them) and finally ambient stress from environmental collapse all push ideological identification closer to the Cult mindset than it's ever been since the 40s. Or at the very least the melding of Cult tendencies familiar from the mid-century with political discourse seems like a natural evolution of the form. Hence, you should take your cues from this guy:

https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-from-yourself/

All nerd media needs to morph into a wall-to-wall multicultural pansexual orgy until all the chuds are stricken with massive rage aneurysms, at which time we can return to business as usual.

xpost Yes, I feel like deprogramming techniques are probably going to be an increasingly-useful tool to have in one's belt, sadly.

even if it was, and it definitely is NOT the case, that writers/artists are getting gigs because of a hype cycle and not due to extraordinary talent, these guys have short memories. a lot of the so-called adults making the most noise are my age or older and came to age during the time when the superhero comics market was 90% hype, there was Wizard magazine and a couple knockoffs publishing lists of "hot artists" that had nothing to do with artistic ability, and the comics were pretty disposable

and nearly without exception, the "hot" writers/artists were young men in their 20s -- it was some weird confirmation that every kid drooling over their comics collection, if they were into it enough and practiced drawing misshapen women and big guns, could be a success in the industry in a few years

The biggest problem here is that there's 457 easy logical arguments against believing any of this dumb shit and none of them will take because this dumb shit isn't founded on a logical argument in the first place. It's people who mistakenly believe the source of their insecurities is external to them and who've found an echo chamber to point them in the direction of an easy scapegoat.

Like, no responsible professional is gonna say 'yeah, sorry, forget about getting into the industry at a time when probably thousands of different comics are being produced every month, and you can blame affirmative action' but at the same time these dopes are busy expressing butthurt on Twitter rather than asking responsible professionals for advice.

we don’t really interact online much

then what is the problem? you say you hang out every week and have known him since 7th grade, this seems like a very longstanding friendship.

when I took a closer look and saw that he’s been hobnobbing with a lot of alt-right adjacent type folks and actively arguing with “SJWs”. Now he’s apparently following dudes like Stephen Crowder and tweeting recommendations for books by Ben Shapiro. BEN MOTHERFUCKING SHAPIRO. Ugh.

okay i have no idea who these people are. please explain why this is some decades-old friendship killing thing. these people are media critics, right? why judge him on believing what you believe that these media people believe.

It’s just heartbreaking because he’s not a jerk at all IRL. He’s always been a good friend and has helped me out and had my back numerous times.

so he sounds like a real person in real life but you have a problem with his virtual avatar posting links. if he's a stand up fellow irl who cares?

But in his online life he’s kinda turning into a real “why won’t you let me debate you, coward” sort of douche

hide his offensive posts on social media & your newsfeed. don't respond to his posts, don't give him that attention, that platform. if you don't like it, and it seems like you don't, then don't do it. it is very simple. don't take the bait. it is the best way to deal w a troll. if you decide this is cowardly and you want to be a knight in shining armor defending whatever issue he is talking about then you are stepping right into whatever SJW role that linked story has prefabricated for you, it will be a useless endeavor, possibly giving you some ownage gratification but little else, and will harm your irl relationship in the long run.

for that matter, it is harmful to the society at large for progressives to cut off their "infected" friends. doing so sort of proves them right, that these ideologies have indeed taken away a very real relationship from them, that the other side is extremist and only interested in defending an ideology, etc. i mean, people really do sound like Warriors when they say shit like "they'll be up against the wall first"

Hey Adam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqH_0LPVoho

i haven't noticed a through-line from flat earth or antivax shit to communism

nothing he said was bigoted though! just crazy.

Yeah, doesn't say anything bigoted that I can recall. Its more about Liberals than anything else, though as we know they are simultaneously feckless and weak and unable to tie own shoelaces, while also being all-powerful with a sinister vice like grip on society

in 2023 if you have to wait for the sieg heil you're probably being over-generous

fascism weaponizes tons of shit, and imo it's a losing game to try to blame the hatred on the music, the hair, whatever. and re: flat earth, i think it's broadly fine for people to be downright weird in their worldviews. it's not like the neoliberal "We Believe Science" doctrine is any less racist.

like, if it's okay to be skeptical of "Science" or post-Enlightenment Western rationalism for the sake of understanding the racist and patriarchal assumptions that are baked into the system, then it needs to be okay to have the skeptical or even paranoid impulse in the first place.

like, if it's okay to be skeptical of "Science" or post-Enlightenment Western rationalism for the sake of understanding the racist and patriarchal assumptions that are baked into the system, then it needs to be okay to have the skeptical or even paranoid impulse in the first place.

― budo jeru

pretty hard disagree here. i don't think it's accurate or fair to draw an equivalence between the _very understandable_ skepticism demonstrated by victims of racist patriarchy and the people who adopt pseudoscience in order to perpetuate that racist patriarchy.

that's not what i'm doing at all. i'm pushing back against NV saying that all flat earthers are crypto fascists until proven otherwise

but they are

and i enjoy zany counter-rationalism as much as anybody

but they are

yeah i'm with noodle vague on this one

budo there is a more nuanced argument to be had here but what i'm saying is that if somebody tells you, in 2023, that they've got concerns about vaccines or climate change or 15 minute cities then self-preservation says assume they're fash and hope for a pleasant surprise if you've got the stamina to discuss it

like am i skeptical of the way white patriarchal science is implemented in practice? hell yes. i suffered severe, permanent, and irreparable harm from enlightenment science's universalization of "factual and objective" norms regarding gender diversity that, in reality, had nothing to do with gender expansive people's actual lived experiences but instead were based on the bigotries and prejudices of cis men presenting themselves as "experts". what _they_ said about us was the only thing that mattered. that, you know, that's post-enlightenment western rationalism, and you know what else it is? it's fucking _evidence-based_. flat earthers aren't. covid deniers aren't. trans eradication shares certain apparent similarities to conspiracy theories, but acknowledging and advocating for the dismantlement of hegemonic institutions of repression is not remotely comparable to blaming COVID on "the chinese". it's not.

xp fair enough but we weren't talking about vaccines or climate change, we were talking about flat earth

ok, i'm going to take a step back because i'm not talking about blaming COVID on the chinese ... i was talking about moon landing / aliens

you know, that's post-enlightenment western rationalism, and you know what else it is? it's fucking _evidence-based_.

that _skepticism_ is a skepticism of enlightenment-era western rationalism, and that skepticism is evidence-based. wow. is my whole post this incoherent?

well, it's not like it's a super topic, in fairness

*super easy

questioning enlightenment values is fine by me, i'm a kneejerk postmodernist

the issue is the specifics of how flat earthism plays itself out and aligns itself at this moment

ok, i'm going to take a step back because i'm not talking about blaming COVID on the chinese ... i was talking about moon landing / aliens

― budo jeru

ok, so trying to come down from my dander here, lol, this is one of my special interests, conspiracy theories, i've spent a lot of time with them.

and my argument is that people spend so much of their time focusing on whether or not conspiracy theories are _true_ and to me the interesting question is _why_ people believe them. for instance, the "ancient aliens" conspiracy theory, if you look at what motivates that it's the assumption that non-white people couldn't possibly design and build monumental architecture. again, this comes from a _critique_ of enlightenment rationalist assumptions. if you drill down far enough as to _why_ people believe these conspiracy theories, you're really likely to hit a racist and/or patriarchal core assumption underlying it.

when it comes to the abuses committed by white supremacist patriarchal rationalist institutions, there's not a question of _why_ people object to it. there's your qualitative difference, i'd argue.

budo there is a more nuanced argument to be had here but what i'm saying is that if somebody tells you, in 2023, that they've got concerns about vaccines or climate change or 15 minute cities then self-preservation says assume they're fash and hope for a pleasant surprise if you've got the stamina to discuss it

― da elephant in daruma (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, August 30, 2023 3:29 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also, i broadly agree with this, but this is the friend infected with right-wing brain worms ("What to do?") thread, so i feel like here if nowhere else it may be okay to put forth the notion that there might be something to acknowledging that people's conspiratorial / aggrieved worldview do have a basis in a reality of disparity and exploitation.

and by the way, i know anti-vaxxer anarchists who spend all their time doing mutual aid and passing out food at homeless encampments. it's weird and it is a thing!

and, to further clarify, what i'm putting forth is largely a rhetorical argument in service of minimizing harmful right-wing discourse. i don't blame anybody who shuts it down or decides to walk away. i'm just trying to propose a strategy that sees an essential truth at the core of the conspiratorial mindset and tries to use it and pivot it with actual, useful analysis

and Kate your most recent post is interesting but i'm struggling with focus at work and need to come back to it

i feel like here if nowhere else it may be okay to put forth the notion that there might be something to acknowledging that people's conspiratorial / aggrieved worldview do have a basis in a reality of disparity and exploitation.

In my case, it is definitely not rooted in anything like that, its based in transmissions from the internet. a woke liberal elite have captured the institutions, and are an existential threat. There's some fuzzyness about whether they're going to introduce communism if they ever get elected, or there already is communism, or both, or what communism is, but it is happening or has happened nonetheless

but there's a shape shifting quality to it. He got the vaccines, he was still wearing masks later than I was, was still doing covid tests later than most, so covid was definitely real but also fake and used by the liberal elite to control society but also real and a targeted weapon by China. All of these are simultaneously true, but not quite occupying the same space. Has never said anything negative about vaccines though

https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/28/live-worm-living-womans-brain-australia-depression-forgetfulness

Ah, posted a few days back. Still euwww

and by the way, i know anti-vaxxer anarchists who spend all their time doing mutual aid and passing out food at homeless encampments. it's weird and it is a thing!

― budo jeru

oh, absolutely, as a historical phenomenon anti-vax ideology is pretty interesting. i'm out here in pdx, it's a hotbed for new age "alternative science", which is where the anti-vax movement started out. honestly it's entirely possible that i'm in the pseudoscience pipeline myself. i get my hormones from a naturopath, which is legal in oregon and nowhere else, naturopaths are legally mandated to have parity with medical doctors. do i think naturopathy is evidence-based? not really. my provider, though, was the only one who would prescribe hormones for trans people back when nobody else would. nowadays you can get hormones from other people. sometimes. endos still tend not to listen to trans patients. i'm a fan of evidence-based medicine, however, when it comes to the actual effects of hrt, it's not really evidence-based, because _nobody is doing this fucking studies_. i take progesterone, for instance. does progesterone do anything? fuck knows! i think it does, but there's no fucking research out there to back it up. same way, i'm reading a book on somatics by someone whose experience with it comes from reichian bodywork. wilhelm reich, who in my mind will always look like donald pleasance, is a meme to me, somebody from hawkwind jams and the french band "zorgones". at the same time, i'm finding the book really helpful to me, not in a _scientific_ way, but it's helping me understand how to live a more embodied experience. embodiment means a lot to me. is there a medical basis for talking about dissociation and embodiment? not really.

i still think of myself as a proponent of evidence-based science, but someone could look at the stuff i do that's _not_ evidence-based and conclude otherwise. there's definitely some cognitive dissonance in my attitudes!

like, when it comes to vaccines, the people i know in the queer community are _strongly_ pro-vax, about the most pro-vax people i know. if you want to go to queer events here, even in public, you need to show evidence of being vaxxed and boosted. a lot of it comes out of disability politics and an understanding of the disproportionate effects of anti-vax ideology on marginalized group. we'll fight, fight hard, for access to preventative care. you do have to fight to get PrEP in a lot of cases, and you have to lie sometimes. my girlfriend when to a doctor and they asked her if she had receptive anal sex with multiple partners. when the monkeypox vaccine came out it was advised for "men who have sex with men" to get it. i'm an asexual woman who's intimate with other women. i'm just as at risk for monkeypox as MSMs. if i want to get PrEP, if a doctor asks me if i have receptive anal sex with multiple partners, i'm going to lie. if they don't have a right to know, yes, i'll lie, and i'll do it without guilt.

Looking back i'd say the Lancet "vaccines cause autism" study from 1998 was a fulcrum point. Not just, I think, because it mainstreamed anti-vax ideology. What interests me is that the article published in the magazine dedicated to Medical Science was an iteration of anti-vax ideology that just happened to dovetail quite nicely with the normative biases of the time. Anti-vax ideology ceased to become a form of dissidence against hegemonic norms and instead a movement aimed at perpetuating those norms in a more explicit fashion.

OK that's all a lot of rhetoric, to get personal on this... I'm autistic, and I'm also queer. Coming out as queer helped me to re-evaluated my understanding with autism and my relationship to it. Because I'm not just autistic, I'm self-diagnosed autistic, something that was heavily stigmatized earlier in my life. People were derided as having "self-diagnosed Asperger's" (Asperger's being a form of autism created by a Nazi scientist as a form of legitimizing certain forms of neurodivergence, while allowing socially unacceptable neurodivergent people to be exterminated through the Aktion T4 extermination process. It's not a current diagnosis in the DSM, but was taken seriously at the time.

Having recognized the necessity of self-determination in the case of my queer and trans identity, I started to question the norms medical science established around autism, the framework they had constructed to define it. Autism, for instance, was seen as a single "illness", one that was diagnosed almost exclusively in white AMABs from affluent families. Furthermore, experts writing on the topic frequently did so in a fashion that transparently perpetuated their own cultural biases. For instance, one of the foremost experts on autism is Simon Baron-Cohen, who characterized autism as "extreme male brain". You can imagine how pleased I was upon reading _that_ one. Baron-Cohen's work is actually a lot better than a lot of the other allistic perspectives on autism. I figured that if this was what one of the foremost medical experts said on the topic, I was OK to self-diagnose, that I knew myself better than Baron-Cohen knew me.

For autistic people, the Lancet paper is not just about the anti-vax thing - it's a pseudoscientific perpetuation of the pathologization of neurodiversity. Given the observable correlation between neurodiversity and queerness, I do personally think of this as kind of a big deal.

Anyway. That's just kind of the way I look at conspiracy theories, the social implications of how they develop and are perpetuated.

in autistic social circles I have known it's truly impressive how much SBC's work and associated assumptions from professionals have managed to *differentially* fuck up autistic people's lives based on their psychiatrically-assigned genders - thereby enforcing cisnormative genderness on and driving a wedge into a population which has always been deemed to have been misperforming their gender in some way, troubling enough to require such an intervention

I'm sure my liberal science believing acquaintances would think this is another crazy conspiracy theory (like those ones I have about the media lying to people or bosses exploiting their workers) and really who are they going to believe, my hysteria or published research by a bunch of scientists?

I really want to trouble the assumptions about a rational (if complacent and ineffectual) liberal establishment vs a crazy conspiracy theorist underground because I see it a lot in thinkpieces but it doesn't at all reflect what I see IRL

Has anyone read the new book _ Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat_? There are parts in there about what to do when people you have an existing connection with go down that road

I'm sure my liberal science believing acquaintances would think this is another crazy conspiracy theory (like those ones I have about the media lying to people or bosses exploiting their workers) and really who are they going to believe, my hysteria or published research by a bunch of scientists?

― your original display name is still visible (Left)

i don't blame anybody individually for their skepticism of anything that doesn't conform to liberal norms... when i was a liberal i was the same way. i once, pre-transition, tried to argue with a trans woman of my acquaintance that her lived experience didn't conform to transmedicalism... not my finest moment. obviously, in retrospect i would have benefited much more from listening to her. that's one of the big issues with it and one of the main frustrations i have as a leftist... it's really easy for people to act against their own interests, when it's part of a norm they've been taught. i mean, my only mistake was believing literally everything i'd ever been told about gender, you know?

but it's impossible to explain, because liberalism does equivalate every form of dissent from what it falsely considers to be "objective truth". "horseshoe theory" really emblematizes this tendency of liberalism.

at the same time, in order to get rights, we have to justify and convince liberals that we deserve rights, the onus is on us... when it comes to trans rights, in the us, liberals have mostly been convinced, in the uk, not so much. more than that, we have to convince liberals to support us to the _detriment of their distinguished opposition_, which is an _extremely_ tough ask and is the issue america is struggling with.

when it comes to neurodiversity... people who don't have the lived experience we do, they have no understanding whatsoever of neurodiversity. honestly, most of them, to the extent they're aware of neurodiversity at all, probably hold the autism speaks (ugh) approach to things, simply because they're not aware of anything else.

It seems covid and the lockdowns will be coming back on October 16th in order to ban in person voting. But there is some confusion as the election isn't until next year. So it looks like there has been a miscalculation

When I asked about this issue regarding the year, he responded with "well it doesnt always have to make sense". Something of a Motte and Bailey effect seems to be present.

There's a newish local band I've been wanting to see, but I just checked out the bassist's FB page and it's wall to wall Trump-loving, Biden-bashing, Qanon memes and now I think I've noped out of ever supporting them.

Surprised it’s not the drummer.

I vaguely know one guy in the band and I'm surprised he can be in a band with this fuckwit. They must have a "no discussing politics" understanding, but I don't think I could do it.

Especially when it's not an important member of the band.

Bassists aren't important?

Yeah wait what? I'm a bass player!

EXCELSIOR

LOL

My son is a bass player also. He and I had a good laugh over the Onion (?) article about the groupie being dismayed when she found out she had slept with the bass player. "If I'm going to sleep with someone, they'd better be important."

itt - Rockists!

Cries in drummer

real champions of shat-on instrumentalists are viola players

https://media4.giphy.com/media/kZD8cN1MycfKw/giphy.gif

Apparently libs are being owned by Sydney Sweeney wearing a revealing dress at a, uh, GLAAD event?