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

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 recently found out this crackpot character I used to hero worship a bit in my formative years is a fairly typical bigot these days. Fuck knows how he justifies being a racist cos his biological dad was Afro-Caribbean. But he used to be funny as fuck and had a rep for breaking into local chemical plants to steal ingredients for his amateur pyrotechnics experiments and occasionally blowing up phone-boxes. He is welder these days and is Islamophobic, hates Eastern Europeans, rants about "benefits scroungers" (even though he was on the "rock'n'roll" himself for the best part of a decade). It saddens me that he is so fucking thick-headed these days, but I'd probably still talk to him and be civil. But wouldn't bother talking politics with him for sure.

not sure about your friend, latebloomer, but the red pill types i know have either been rejected at some point (because of their own issues, which they then blame on others) or they've been consistently unhappy and searching for answers, and this is just the latest place they think they've found them.

empathy can be pretty tough for people like this but it's important to try to hold onto it. i'm pretty tolerant of other viewpoints generally speaking, but for me it's not the opinions themselves that make me roll my eyes and ignore people (even though i may disagree strongly with them!) but rather the constant need to make waves, or always wanting to talk about every single little thing that the opposition is doing like it's the end of the world (which really does go for the left more and makes me want to quit a conversation immediately), or the trolling, or the clear need to intentionally hurt other people. so i mean i guess you can try to bring him back from the brink and talk about actual issues without the rhetoric or tedious right wing talking points. or lead by example, bring him out of the echo chamber.

he used to be funny as fuck and had a rep for breaking into local chemical plants to steal ingredients for his amateur pyrotechnics experiments and occasionally blowing up phone-boxes.

Tyler Durden was probably a key figure in the lives of many current "not as smart as they think" alt-right types and that's a pretty good example!

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

Foreseeing a backlash and a social cost to espousing antisocial ideologies doesn't make you 'right'. It just means you're able to identify basic cause and effect. 'See? I told you the maaaaaan would arrest me if I burnt down that warehouse! Typical!'

At any rate, this isn't even some conservative vs. liberal argument about how taxes should be allocated. It's a situation with zero benefit to anyone beyond the ego gratification of online sadists. Whose perspective we should consider with sympathy lest society-at-large be harmed...I guess...?

Like if you're going to argue that these people have a valid point to make, please tell me what is gained by the point they're making.

sez he like

https://78.media.tumblr.com/9a03aca158969fe68758babae8cced37/tumblr_ms6ariMAvh1s9kboko1_500.gif

To be clear that was aimed at old lunch re bruneau and doesn’t necessarily refer to latebloomer’s alt-right mate who may still be reachable

that harper's article that ryan linked to is good

Booming.

Powerful post. Thanks for sharing, Kate.

I firmly believe the deficit of IRL community is one of the biggest crises in society today, especially in the post-social media era. The need for communal, inclusive, and non-predatory Third Places feels more vital than ever as the 2nd Place, work, has merged with the home.

I haven't checked this but I read recently that the majority of people who protested against the stealing of the election on January 6 didn't actually vote in the election itself. I don't know if this is a manifestation or form of the above or not, but I thought it was interesting.

What I kind of got from it was the elections were rigged not necessarily in a factual sense but in a conceptual sense, and that all elections are rigged by their very nature (and possibly not even necessarily just by 'the other side'). This kind of conceptual conspiratorialism had a dampening effect on behaviour (they didn't vote, though it wasn't clear if they had in the past), but obviously also not a dampening effect on behaviour (they turned up to protest the results)

The latter is, admittedly, more exciting, and as stated or implied in a couple of the previous posts, why should we care so much about the truth, what has the truth ever done for us anyway

The question or whether one is harmed by believing a falsehood is central to Pascal's wager, isn't it?

Things can get muddied and conflated. I remember helping an older relative once who was struggling with a website. "Nothing happens when I click the button". Eventually it turned out they never clicked on the button, it just didn't look like something you could click on. But from their perspective even after the truth was revealed, "it didnt work" and "it didn't look like it would work" remained conflated . The factual part (was the button clicked or not) was part of a larger whole, not a fact that could be considered in isolation.

With the Democrats bringing back covid to win the election, I think "they are going to do this" and "its the kind of thing they would do" also occupy the same space, intertwined in a similar way. Something happened and something could have happened become enmeshed

The factual part (was the button clicked or not) was part of a larger whole, not a fact that could be considered in isolation.

i can confirm that it could tbh

Had an old friend I really admired message me recently about my "ramblings" on Israel to accuse me of "stoking the coals of hatred". It didn't make me feel good. It really sucks. I called him out for engaging with personal attacks rather than good-faithed questions/discussions, to which he denied any personal attacks. Maybe I'm being a little soft about it, but whatever, it sucks, I don't enjoy it.

Said "ramblings" are insta-story shares of The Guardian, CNN and Al Jazeera with minor commentary on "Hey, kinda funny the western world seeks no accountability for this and rewards it with billions in military aid ain't it?"

What makes it not good faith? He won't have perceived it necessarily as an attack?

From his perspective, you made a reductive and definitive statement, he messaged you about it, and then you said stop it with the attacks. I happen to agree with your statement but when I come across highly definitive statement I don't agree with, its actually kind of tough to know how to respond

anybody you blame is on some level going to be a scapegoat. soros, murdoch, bezos, these people are not _people_ the vast majority of people, they are _ideas_

This is interesting I think partly because those ppl are also being 'punished' in some way for not being media-friendly. So to varying extents the media encourages their targeting for not being accessible (for the wormed "If you're really famous you must not have reeeal power")

Trump and Musk, indeed Putin (and his , avoid this with their regular albeit v controlled media appearances. That extends to less powerful but still influential likes of Bannon and Farage, others discredited but who aren't allowed to fail or be media pariahs.

xp being accused of "stoking hatred" for pointing out there's a genocide going on is bad faith, yes

The Koch bros to me seem way more media-allergic than Soros, Murdoch, Bezos. Maybe a good test is if you could make a caricature of all of them from memory and see if someone else could match the names to them.

My mental image of the main pair of Koch Bros was always the two old man Muppets but wrinklier and with scowls.

Xp Anvil. What Rob said. When someone asks you to "take a good hard look in the mirror" for the crime of condemning the bombing of 13,000 kids.... I dunno if there's room for good-faith discussion? I've had conversations with people far on the otherside of how I view this, and was able to because they didn't come at me with "rambler, hatred stirer, have a look at yourself mate?" Garbage. I could even talk with 70yo far-right telegrams conspiracy "don't trust the media" types who didn't believe a word of anything I shared and saw it all as "pollywood". I don't even need good-faith! I just need a bare minimum of "I have enough respect for you as a person to at least pretend ill listen to you".

Thats fair enough! I'm judging second hand as I don't have the context of your friendship as you do. I had felt from your post that the combination of it being someone you admired and the fact they had messaged you suggested there was enough there to work with, but that doesn't make it necessarily the case

With things like this I think its good to try and reach for the most charitable interpretation possible and just not really acknowledge the other parts, but at the same time recognise sometimes it isn't possible, they're seeing something I just can't see or vice versa

fwiw H.P from the context you initially gave i read it as your friend being shitty and engaging in bad faith... not that you were even asking people to judge whether or not you were in the right, i was assuming that anyway haha

Xp we hadn't talked or seen each other for 5+ years. Fair point re: charitability. I try to do the same. But this was the second time he'd messaged and I didn't see it going anywhere after trying to engage fruitfully the first time, without finding a listening ear.

Thanks Kate

I really do think charitability and trying to dialogue is a good deed, something to always aspire to. But also, you can't burn yourself out on someone that hasn't proved willing to engage in dialogue previously (especially when their position to dialogue from is "I don't think we should criticise genocide because Hamas")

There's definitely no requirement to engage (especially if you hadn't talked in 5+ years which I didn't realize). But IF you do engage, I think you just kind of have to act as though they're in good faith regardless of whether they are

That being said, I don't really like this bad faith idea, I don't think it really gets us anywhere and it too easily digresses into perceived motivations of each party away from the thing itself, moving into the conceptual realm

I think thats partly a consequence of not seeing issues or topics as things in themselves, but as manifestations of much larger topics (feminism, capitalism, patriarchy, globalists, woke - depending on which meta-framework is subscribed to)

That being said, I don't really like this bad faith idea, I don't think it really gets us anywhere and it too easily digresses into perceived motivations of each party away from the thing itself, moving into the conceptual realm

I think thats partly a consequence of not seeing issues or topics as things in themselves, but as manifestations of much larger topics (feminism, capitalism, patriarchy, globalists, woke - depending on which meta-framework is subscribed to)

― anvil

i don't _like_ the bad faith idea either, but i kind of feel like it's the essence of brainworms, "right wing" or otherwise. to me, the definitive brainworm statement is "facts don't care about your feelings". when having feelings is a _fault_, one presents everything as a "fact". that's where a lot of _fragility_ comes from, it's people who can't just _feel_ things, they have to pour those feelings into _facts_ and then defend those facts as if their entire self-worth is based on it, because _that's the situation they've created for themselves_. that's how my existence somehow becomes a threat to someone else's womanhood - _i'm_ somehow responsible for _their_ feelings.

the israeli leadership is doing the shit they're doing to the palestinian people and it's terrible and if the 'friend' doesn't want to be reminded of that, he can fucking say so instead of making h.p responsible for the _friend's_ emotions. i guess that's what i'd say "bad faith" means to me.

it's people who can't just _feel_ things, they have to pour those feelings into _facts_ and then defend those facts as if their entire self-worth is based on it, because _that's the situation they've created for themselves_

well put

Yeah, that's a really good point

I wonder what happened to latebloomer's friend...

Good points Kate.

I think the terms "good faith" and "bad faith" have a lot of currency.
Good faith = willing to believe the most generous interpretation of what someone has said and willing to listen
Bad faith = believing the least generous interpretation of what someone has said and not willing to listen.

If something genuinely hits the "bad faith" criteria, I don't think it's a cop out to move on and not engage in a fruitless dialogue. Rather, I think it's wisdom. Obviously no one is a "perfect" judge of that criteria, and things aren't so black and white. Approaches to speech are always somewhere on the spectrum of good-bad faith. And everyone has a different line for where things cross over into bad-useless-to-dialogue faith. I try to keep mine as extreme as possible. But like everything, it depends which side of the bed I woke up on

These things are all judgement calls, I don't think there's a right or wrong to handling it.

In this particular exchange with the person, at what point did you decide they were in bad faith? And, while you can't see inside their mind it seems like their interpretation of what you posted was that you fell into the criteria of bad faith.

It feels like this is always going to lead to the same destination, that once one person concludes the other has acted in bad faith, they will act in such a way as to then lead the other to conclude the same about them. What we don't know here is who came to that conclusion first

(I'm not saying you're right or wrong to conclude that per se, obviously I have much less to go on here than you do)

Statistics prove that under conservative governments, murder and suicide rates go up

It would be nice if such statistics mattered to conservatives and had the power to guide their thinking, but they don't. They just want their perceived enemies to suffer because that's what they deserve.

Yes, presumably the 'right' people are dying under those circumstances.

(Which is to say the left people, ofc)

great post, as always, kate.

I think a lot about how the information age has transformed the way people argue, even when you're not doing it electronically. I watched a friend and a stranger argue about Palestine/Israel the other day and the stranger accused the friend, who shared an article and referred to another bit of reading, of bad faith arguing since she didn't lead her to exact sentences/paragraphs in the article and couldn't read the book in the middle of a conversation. basically wanting a screen grab of appropriate places in the book.

but like, this is what arguing was pre-internet! you'd have having a conversation in public, and you reference a book you read, or research you read, and the person arguing against you probably hasn't read those books so they just argue what they know, but maybe later on they read those books, and either dismiss them outright, or change their view. weirdly, that's how I wound up a leftist, simply because I started from more right-wing and centrist positions and over time, evolved.

now, arguing is treated as if there are definite, immutable facts for every topic known to man, they are all somehow miraculously stored in bite-sized internet articles that one can read within 5 minutes, and that posting the magic link instantly wins the debate. and if you can't do that, you're 'dodging'. posting a link to an article that editorializes and draws the conclusion for you so that you can instantly acquire the requisite expertise on a topic you knew nothing about five minutes ago...seems to be seen as the superior method. that's why I hate when people say "got a link?" in response to claims made - it presupposes that every topic has a ready made link that can answer every question and you don't have to, y'know, actually spend hours reading up on the topic.

when it comes to 'emotion' vs 'facts', it's of course another way conservatives have perverted the meaning of what an "emotional argument" is. an "emotional argument" is one where you solely rely on your feelings and biases to form a position, and you don't have factual basis for it. like someone saying "zipper merging is bad because you're cutting in front of me, jerk" when it's actually established as the most efficient way to merge.

conservatives, however, mean 'emotional' in the misogynist, patriarchal sense, they use it to mean a form of weakness. they mean "you're too sensitive and that sensitivity is clouding your thinking", just like an asshole husband tells his wife "oh, you're always too emotional" when she gets angry at him for something fucked up that he said or did. or insinuating the 'emotional' person is childlike and naive, that the 'adults' are the ones who have the 'real answers'. it's rubbish, too, of course, because almost all conservative moral panics are rooted in emotional outbursts, i.e. those idiots that believe there are no-go zones in Detroit ruled by Sharia law.

kate, the part of your post that spoke to me is pointing that this is intentional, these bad-faith assholes are trying to force people to debate their own existence because then they get to be hateful on their own terms. a gay comedian that performed a lot on the Fringe Festival cycle did a show back in 2012, around the time SCOTUS was ruling on same-sex marriage, and he said some woman who learned he was gay said she didn't know if she agreed with his 'politics', and he said "what fucking politics? I'm a gay man who's just trying to live. You are the one who made it political".

another friend (pansexual) also tried to start a conversation among peers decrying the inclusion of a known asshole TERF musician at a local music festival, and was told to keep "politics" out of the board, that it was 'out of bounds', and she replied "politics? all of you know someone who is trans. this is personal.", and basically got bullied out of the discussion.

bigots try to commodify those they oppress and force them to defend their own existence because it's how they win.

I watched a friend and a stranger argue about Palestine/Israel the other day and the stranger accused the friend, who shared an article and referred to another bit of reading, of bad faith arguing

arguing is treated as if there are definite, immutable facts for every topic known to man, they are all somehow miraculously stored in bite-sized internet articles that one can read within 5 minutes

I think the problem in these cases is that everything becomes bad faith, a different opinion isn't just a bad opinion (which could potentially be changed), its a bad faith opinion (which cannot be changed because its not even real). It isn't the facts that are considered immutable, its the beliefs (or rather the perception of others beliefs). The facts are flexible and malleable. People are never mistaken, they're flat out wrong - and not just wrong, but bad and wrong, its just the way they are and nothing can be done.

My dad is obsessed with rail strikes. There is always a rail strike, regardless of whether there is one or not. He is genuinely animated about this, even if there is no rail strike on the website its best to leave early because a rail strike could happen at a moments notice

A rail strike is currently happening and a rail strike could happen are the same thing. This means there is a rail strike every day of the year

Oh, to have rail infrastructure worthy of a strike!

really good thoughts as well, neando

honestly, i think for me it's more that the information age _hasn't_ transformed the way we argue, that people still argue the way we always have even though theoretically we can be, like, much better informed than we used to be.

i've been thinking about... well, i was remembering, for instance, the Old Days, that people used to argue endlessly about evolution on usenet. people would go on talk.origins and like... it's this tradition, i think is shitty, this tradition of Debate or Discourse... like, it's all emotional. it's just people throwing excuses at each other, trying to persuade each other emotionally, and coming up with all kinds of lies and excuses to do so. it's why people always used to hate lawyers, because if a good lawyer makes an argument it's not about determining Objective Truth. do people still hate lawyers? i don't know. i'm not sure if i ever hated lawyers. i don't hate lawyers now.

like someone saying "zipper merging is bad because you're cutting in front of me, jerk" when it's actually established as the most efficient way to merge.

zipper merging is fine as long as you _merge when everyone else does_ instead of driving so far ahead that you nearly run into someone just so you can cut in 50 feet later. that's my hot take.

conservatives, however, mean 'emotional' in the misogynist, patriarchal sense, they use it to mean a form of weakness. they mean "you're too sensitive and that sensitivity is clouding your thinking", just like an asshole husband tells his wife "oh, you're always too emotional" when she gets angry at him for something fucked up that he said or did.

and yeah for me this is also... like, you know, i think sometimes people still say "hysterical" as a put-down. i try not to do it but it comes into my head sometimes, when someone (probably me) is being really emotional. there's this whole field of argument in the humanist tradition centered around "the woman question", these very enlightened rational debates about the question of whether women should be _allowed_ to read and write, whether or not women have some _nature_ which precludes, or ought to preclude, our being _educated_. of course, most of the people taking part in these debates were men. that, to me, is emblematic of humanist, enlightenment thought, the way it _works_. i do see in internet arguments more continuity than change. debates over "the woman question" prefigure debates over "the gay question", "the trans question"... many others, no doubt, past and future - woman/gay/trans are just the examples that stand out as being particularly relevant to me.

i find that there's... kind of an upside to my existence being "political". i was going for a walk at a local park yesterday, and the folks i was with made it to a local landmark at the same time as some kids and their parents. i don't know what age. 11? 12? at least one was wearing a boy scout uniform. so i said "i used to be a boy scout", to nobody in particular. it wasn't a _debate_. it wasn't a _discussion_. politics is as simple as continuing to assert my existence. that's what allows people to _question their assumptions_. these parents see a middle-aged lady, older than them, who used to be a boy scout. more importantly, there's this kid who sees this old lady and _she_ used to be a boy scout. and that, i believe, is how people start questioning about what is and isn't true, what is and isn't possible.

the internet, when i was younger, opened my eyes and my mind to a whole new world of experiences and now, idk, i guess my mind ain't so open in that particular way. i'm still open in a lot of other ways. i just... i just am not sure what the internet has to _offer_ me right now... besides convenience, which is no small thing, or rather, many small things that add up to a great deal.

I got an ad for Brilyn Hollyhand, I don’t know if that’s a candidate or just a right-wing grifter but wtf “Brilyn.”