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

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.

― mott the hoopleheads (voodoo chili)

for fun while i was taking my driving school course i started reading the 3rd edition of adam jones' "genocide, a comprehensive introduction"

it's a really interesting book and i've learned a lot from it even though i've only finished the first chapter (to be fair that first chapter is a 100+ page overview)

some good talk about stuff like "we charge genocide", contested cases, and so on.

fun exercise for the reader: how many of stanton's 10 stages of genocide apply to the trump administration?

http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/

I got to six

more geared towards engaging with teh olds, but:

What To Do If The Older People In Your Life Are Sharing False Or Extreme Content

lol at John Cusack, 53, exemplifying this scourge

“There's a good chance your family member doesn't understand that and might be horrified at what they're sharing. And so there’s a point to intervene and let people know, ‘Hey, I know, this was probably not what you meant, but…’”

uh

not a bad article by any means, but it doesn't really address old people sharing hateful shit because they're friends with other old people who like hateful shit

(nb I am old)

“There's a good chance your family member doesn't understand that and might be horrified at what they're sharing. And so there’s a point to intervene and let people know, ‘Hey, I know, this was probably not what you meant, but…’”

my dad is like "you're right, i can't believe i accidentally shared this information about all the people on welfare in washington DC who received free "Obamaphones" in 2009 in a free giveaway on a street corner, which i totally saw, no i swear i saw it and heard about it, it happened. instead, what i meant to share is this more important information about how i heard a muslim in minneapolis is married to 8 women and no one will do anything about it because of political correctness. thank you son"

he fit all that in a tweet?

twitter character limit is now 280?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvnUOevwsKw

my dad prefers to send me these kind of messages via unexpected handwritten letters which close, "I love you my son"

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzY4NmY5MjYtMWMzMi00Y2QxLWI3NTctZTBlMzZkZjBhZTU4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_SY1000_SX1000_AL_.jpg

Karl sonned in a paternal love beef?

Here’s an unusual case -
In Scotland, St Andrews, I just saw a guy wearing a ‘Trump 2020 build the wall’ shirt. Now the American students are arriving this week, but this wasn’t them. I know the guy from psychiatric hospital: we’ve been in together a few times. I’ve never known him to speak. No idea what to do there.

I should have talked to him. Asked if he knows what the hard right does to people like us.

I would say anyone in Uk wearing a Trump 2020 shirt is purely. looking for reaction and don't give it to them or say "Oh I love that guy.too"

Sounds like your guy might be a different case though, if he's never speaking? Is it possible he's just wearing it for no other reason than he was given it?

It’s hard to say. He certainly does talk to people - it’s just that the times I’ve met him have been in hospital and he hasn’t spoken, dealing with a schizophrenic episode.

I think if I see him wearing it again I’ll engage and suggest that it might upset people.

One of the interesting things about younger trans people is that a lot of them do come from an alt-right background. I'd say that I've seen enough people with abuse, trauma, and/or mental illness issues who either support Trump or else say other alt-rightish things, dunk on other marginalized groups, that I'd hesitate even calling your case "unusual", at least here in America.

In a one on one environment I don't know what you can do, honestly. You can talk to him, but what's the clinical symptom they keep evaluating us on? "Insight"? A lot of us are bad at that, maybe he is too. Healing people who say and do things like this - and maybe it is a defense mechanism, maybe it is to keep people away - is a long process, it takes work and patience and, honestly, immersion in a healing environment where every time they say or do something cruel and hateful what they're doing is pointed out to them. One conversation, as long as you take sufficient precautions that it doesn't hurt you, might be part of that process, but you are a vulnerable person and your first priority needs to be to keep yourself safe.

It might be best just to ask him! just in a striking up conversation, in passing way. You don't actually have to say anything yourself on first conversation, just listen!

We think of situations rationally, or "rationally". Trump is a good case, we put people in boxes marked "economic anxiety", "racism", "manipulated", "family upbringing", and this probably covers the bulk of people, but there will be people out there with the strangest of reasons, reason you would never get if you had 50 guesses

All those boxes sort of bleed into each other as well, and not in a neat and precise venn diagram way.

Has anyone encountered anyone with centrist brainworms? Like, going to an extreme effort to find the most “balanced” or “neutral” take to avoid having a controversial opinion about anything?

pete buttigieg

Couple of those scaredy-cats on my Facebook feed, for sure. Usually they love talking about electability.

anvil seems to be our resident centrist brainworms ethnographer

My wife has the centrist brainworms. She’ll defend anyone’s opinion but mine.

Not those kind of centrist brainworms but I know a couple of middle-aged guys who definitely would have been Republicans up through 2004 or so who fetishize 'smart solutions' centrism.

*sigh* my "leftiest" friend from high school is a total Klobuchar/ Butteigeig ticket guy now.

i made a total shit-posty joke a few weeks back in a group text about a "unification" ticket w Romney/ Klob (Romney top of ticket for maximum UNITY -- Dems are congenitally illegitimate obv)... and he was totally into it. like, *ecstatic* about the idea.

he uhhh did inherit a ton of $$$ a few years back after both his parents passed and he and his sister sold off all the family land so

Centrist brainworms would be welcome in my family, I mean, my brother always tries to do this and his stupid in-laws' family has gone totally bonkers theocrat, and all they do is cut him off. I mean, brother and wife have loads of gay friends and they pull this shit. Like Trumpism has become this soul-sucking borg who ruins every holiday. We used to play cards and tell jokes and laugh and drink and now they make us watch "Dancing with the Stars". I mean, brother got chewed out for defending "homosexuals" at his church when he and their daughter go to gay weddings. I mean, I tried to butt in and say that gay weddings put dollars in the economy, but all of a sudden they're not capitalists now, either. Now the daughter wants prayer in schools when she never wanted that before and she's married to a libertarian.

My wife commented yesterday that every other post on that "Am I the asshole" reddit is people asking for permission to stop speaking to their relatives. I feel like this is the biggest fucking centrist brainworm in existence. Yes goddamn do you want me to text you a link to the fucking Kaddish, DO IT ALREADY.

ha yeah i'd kill for centrist brainworms in my immediate family and most of my aunts & uncles on both sides... some real prize chuds there. thankfully all the cousins are more or less centrist-y.

The thing was my dad was a total political crank who hated all religion but he was kind of a giant in the family, and in-laws are so insensitive, it's like they're saying like "yeah well he's dead now and now we have a new paterfamilias, Mr. Abortion All The Time." None of this divisive shit happened when my dad was alive. Not only is it insufferable, it's insensitive.

Both of my aunt/uncle pairs are complete religious nutjobs but I've discovered that none of my cousins turned out to be CHUDs, it's a minor miracle.

Has anyone encountered anyone with centrist brainworms? Like, going to an extreme effort to find the most “balanced” or “neutral” take to avoid having a controversial opinion about anything?

― flopsy bird (voodoo chili), 18. oktober 2019 01:58 (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think centrists are centrists because they want to avoid controversy, the people who want to be uncontroversial are followers of whatever the dominant political discourse is in their circles. There are definitely hardcore Trump'ists who mostly just go along with it. Milo is right about the 'smart solutions' crowd, imo, and those people also delight in feeling better and smarter than everyone else, and takes controversies as a sign that others just don't get it. There are always a couple of centrist brainworm movements bubbling up and then disappearing in Danish politics, the current one is based on 'what if we fight climate change with love instead of regulations?' and is called Alternativet, which of course is kinda the same name as the far right party in Germany.

'what if we fight climate change with love instead of regulations?'

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c6/cf/c4/c6cfc4546e84827ecb2b090b96eac88b.jpg

my family is p conservative but we don’t talk about politics and I love them all very much, not going to cut them off

There is no such thing as centrist brainworms. Centrists are naive maybe but they just fear change and controversy and are looking for a middle path. Brainworms imply an anti-social ideology, usually paranoia is part of the mix, most of all just a thirst for *drama*, a victim complex, i’m quoting the OED

my family is p conservative but we don’t talk about politics and I love them all very much, not going to cut them off

― blows with the wind donors (crüt)

cutting off family members is not, for me, a matter of "Death to all who do not support the Revolution!" It's about whether or not the people around me treat me with kindness and respect. If someone does that, I'm not going to stop talking to them based on who they vote for (though, again, if they vote for people who take actions to hurt me and the people I care about, we're not going to be friends).

I disagree Treesh. Believing that we are all basically good, that we would all be able to get along if we would just _talk out_ our problems, that there's nothing that can't be solved by compromise, that it's fundamentally OK to be silent in the face of injustice, to "go along to get along" with those in charge, no matter who they are or what they're doing... these are pretty core centrist beliefs, and for me the core of "brainworms" is the destructive and toxic nature of the delusions involved. I would argue that all of these beliefs, right now, are toxic.

Like, going to an extreme effort to find the most “balanced” or “neutral” take to avoid having a controversial opinion about anything?

i don't know anyone like this—the people I've encountered with this kind of performatively "balanced" perspective, have always seemed to delight in having "controversial" opinions. ("Sure vaccines are good, but maybe, just maybe, there's merit on both sides!") OTOH, my brother is maybe more of what I think of as "centrist." He's very "I'm busy, I listen to NPR, read the NYT, and vote, don't hassle me further, plz." He's a good dad and liberal and humane on a variety of issues, but tends to come to politics with both a belief in reasonable solutions and a discomfort with too much expressed passion or emotion.

And it's that attitude among liberal friends that I've found so frustrating over the last few years—this belief, implicit or explicit, that our current political circumstances are an aberration, bad, but not apocalyptic, and largely mitigatable by the next Democratic administration. I actually stopped talking about politics with a few friends with whom I'd always talked politics, simply because in every conversation I found myself shouting (or wanting to shout) "YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW BAD THIS IS!!" and I felt like I was *that* close to being one of those people.

A good reminder that to those afflicted with brain worms anyone not so afflicted appears to have them

^^^

VERY GOOD BRAINWORM-FREE POST MY FRIEND

lol

ILX brainworms are the best brainworms

I hear cyborg brainworms can help boost cogitation.

wrath_of_khan.jpg

There is no such thing as centrist brainworms. Centrists are naive maybe but they just fear change and controversy and are looking for a middle path. Brainworms imply an anti-social ideology, usually paranoia is part of the mix, most of all just a thirst for *drama*, a victim complex, i’m quoting the OED

― treeship., Friday, 18 October 2019 13:39 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I disagree with this, and have been saving up centrist brainworms for the inevitable thread. The middle path is often something of an illusion, but I distinguish between centrists and centrists with brainworms, just as I distinguish between right wing people and right wing people with brainworms - or any type of person from same but with brainworms

A relatively good indicator of whether someone has brainworms is "can they summarize the views of someone that thinks differently to them, in a way that other person would recognize and consider accurate"

My RW cousin cannot do this. If I ask him, some of the time he will just be flummoxed and say "I just don't get it", some of the time he will make up positions (I have had positions incorrectly attributed to me in the same conversation where I have stated the precise opposite). So its not actually that he's making things up, its that he doesn't listen, is unable to listen, and doesn't have empathy (in the practical sense - just cannot imagine what a person thinking differently to him would actually think, even at the most mundane and everyday level)

This is why there is such a binary them and us world. The reality of people thinking in a different way can only be explained by them being alien or bad

a 'them and us' world for brainwormed people (of any political type), I meant to say. No shades, no complexities

Rather a small addition to the thread but

"climate change is real but the best way to solve it is by giving entrepeneurs tax breaks to come up with innovative ways to fix it"

Whats interesting about this one is he doesn't even moot paying these entrepeneurs per se. It is tax breaks, but it is unclear what it is they are currently paying tax on. The free market and/or technology will save us just by their existence. I asked what kinds of ideas, but it seems it is only the entrepeneurs that have them, and are presumably keeping them hidden away until the tax breaks are forthcoming

A practical / non-political example of a brainworm is the fact he's brought beer for me a couple of times. And will say "I know you don't like those hipster IPA type beers in little cans"

I like those hipster IPA type beers in little cans very much! I will say this, and he will say "oh, when did that change?", but it doesn't register, and 10 months later or whenever the same thing will happen.

But its not the misapprehension, and its not the forgetting (because its not really forgetting). Its the resolute certainty of the incorrect belief. And the preference for the held belief over the truth. He prefers the original story to the reality, and the original story wins out, each time

This is why lies are believed, and why facts or corrections are irrelevant. Even if registered at the time, its gone again the next day (probably within the hour), not because the truth/correction is forgotten, but because the original story is preferred to the truth/correction

What type of beer I like is one of his brainworms