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

I'm guessing a) with a little bit of b). In other words, an exaggeration of an exaggeration.

tweeting is a symptom of brainworms

How bout d) Head of Program does not have brainworms, but wants to avoid awakwardness of telling Bluetick he's shit at his job/not what they're looking for and knows that getting him to feel like a victim of PC culture is a good way of deflecting.

Funny how the "Head of Progam" will reveal this information after 'a few drinks' but not how many people they've hired recently or the actual ratio of PoC and women. Maybe they need to be on 'a few grams' to get that far in the Q and A.

"FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE INSERT DRUGS NOW"

tweeting is a symptom of brainworms

― jesus is zing (symsymsym)

tweeting is a cause of brainworms

NEW YORK — Four days after pulling off the most high-profile mob killing in decades, Anthony Comello sat down with New York Police Department detectives and told them that the CIA had infiltrated the Mafia. And, he added, the government was spying on him.

He had put his phone in a copper bag to protect it from “satellites,” he told them, and Democratic operatives in Washington were doing business with Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo.

In the nine months since that conversation, Comello, 25, has claimed to his lawyer that he killed Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali because the mob boss was part of “the deep state,” a member of a liberal cabal working to undermine President Donald Trump. At one court appearance, Comello scrawled on his hand a symbol and phrases associated with the far-right conspiracy theory “QAnon.”

Now, Comello’s paranoia is being a litigated in a Staten Island court, where he is charged with the murder of Cali. His lawyer has taken the first steps in a legal battle that hinges on a question made for the internet age: At what point does belief in a far-right conspiracy theory make you legally insane?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/does-belief-qanon-legally-insane-131615136.html

tweeting is a symptom of brainworms

― jesus is zing (symsymsym)

tweeting is a cause of brainworms

On the gambling angle, certainly billions have been made shorting GBP off Brexit. My personal benefit has been restricted to cheap region B blu-rays. On US brainworm nonsense, I'm aware of a handful of mining companies whose projects are a go/no-go based on the 2020 election outcome. Obviously private health insurers/hospital companies are in a similar situation. And for some, one can leverage one's bets to the hilt with options.

i need to start buying more R2 stuff from Arrow

On the gambling angle, certainly billions have been made shorting GBP off Brexit. My personal benefit has been restricted to cheap region B blu-rays. On US brainworm nonsense, I'm aware of a handful of mining companies whose projects are a go/no-go based on the 2020 election outcome. Obviously private health insurers/hospital companies are in a similar situation. And for some, one can leverage one's bets to the hilt with options.

― полезный инструмент (Sanpaku)

risk management is an important part of any healthcare entity these days but most of the people i know in the industry these days have concerns which are both more immediate and more far-reaching than who wins in 2020. maybe that's different in the c suites, i don't know!

At what point does belief in a far-right conspiracy theory make you legally insane?

This is like asking 'at what point does swallowing water become drinking?'

I drink and I disagree with your analogy

i think it's a good analogy because listening to right-wing conspiracy theorists does in fact drive me to drink

I feel like the difference is much greater than that between avocation and career. Declaring insanity in a criminal trial is careerism at its highest, if you think about it.

Okay then if you strike 'legally' then my analogism is rendered unimpeachable.

Regarding the guy who heard a guy say white males won't get hired. The fascinating/disturbing thing with that is, whatever actually happened, that one tweet will be taken as evidence of a real and widespread trend by people who already believe in it

I suppose an interpretive mistake we might be making is to see these things as claims, when they're more like mantras or rallying cries - I think that's what's going on with the Jeremy Corbyn IRA Terrorist stuff that gets posted to my local fb group. Time and again the post, time and again the refutation, same people keep posting it.

The fascinating/disturbing thing with that is, whatever actually happened, that one tweet will be taken as evidence of a real and widespread trend by people who already believe in it

― Never changed username before (cardamon)

i guess it's disturbing if you still assume that people are fundamentally motivated by logic or reason. that ship sailed so long ago for me.

i don't know. probably the implications of "you just have to assume a lot of people are being fundamentally intellectually dishonest and not just don't want to but are _incapable_ of being any other way" are disturbing, but i'm more disturbed at the increasingly desperate "moderates" trying to treat white bigots in "good faith" despite the mounds of evidence that doing so is, in fact, a bad idea

My cousin went to a 'Brexit Party' last night. I haven't heard directly from him directly, but indirectly I have heard there were Churchill masks, people wearing Union Jack outfits, some comedy, and some singing of world war two songs.

My cousin is possibly now wise to my research and may not give up the details as readily as he would have a year ago

Does your cousin have EU friends who aren't dual UK-EU citizens?

Its possible, but his life and connections are completely alien to me (he earns a lot of money in the city). There's not a great deal of empathy (in the practical sense rather than the moral sense per se). He has said his reason for voting leave is 'trade' but its difficult to get any further than that other than standard Conservative dislike of any form of regulation. I think the existential aspect is difficult for him to express (especially as I don't give him any kind of reaction to bounce off)

I went to a party yesterday thrown by a dual citizen specifically so all of us non-brits could distract ourselves from the thing - like 75% EU citizens in the room - and apparently someone still brought someone who voted leave

oh, also, at the same party a french dude who works in finance told me his boss went around ascertaining everyone's nationalities, then had a big cake made with the flags of all those countries surrounding a giant Union Jack to celebrate Brexit Day (said boss voted leave + tory). Alien is right.

My cousin is possibly now wise to my research and may not give up the details as readily as he would have a year ago

Intrigued as to what makes you think he's aware that the game's afoot.

oh, also, at the same party a french dude who works in finance told me his boss went around ascertaining everyone's nationalities, then had a big cake made with the flags of all those countries surrounding a giant Union Jack to celebrate Brexit Day (said boss voted leave + tory). Alien is right.

jfc

That would've been a nice gesture actually if it was to commiserate Brexit day! And if the boss wasn't an arse.

You know what would've been an even nicer gesture? Not voting Leave.

well yeah, I said if he wasn't an arse

Intrigued as to what makes you think he's aware that the game's afoot.

― Daniel_Rf,

This starts to get back to the deeper, psychological question that the thread is about rather than any specific topic (which is only ever a vehicle). My cousin's lens of 'them and us' over any issue doesn't just invite kickback and reaction, it requires it. And if it doesn't get it...its like dropping a glass on the floor and it not smashing, something has gone wrong.

Its not that he is necessarily looking for a reaction, but reaction provides validation and reassurance (left wing people are supposed to splutter, get emotional, facts don't have feelings etc, or even just argue back). I don't provide my cousin with any of this, I just ask questions, the kind of questions a researcher might ask. For a while this was maybe ok but I think lacks the confidence of ideas if reaction to them isn't there to validate, so possibly feels undermined.

I could be imagining this - we don't really have any disagreements as such because he doesn't ask my opinion and I only ever give my opinion to someone who asks

I think he suspects some kind of trickery, that interactions involving open 'non-judgemental' questions, perversely are more threatening because the guardrail of reaction isn't being provided.

the last two lines in that post are the wrong way around for some reason! I must have left and come back and started writing in the wrong place!

Unfortunately this means I am now less likely to hear about the details of a Brexit party because without the promise of snowflake tears the lure of telling the story is less appealing. I had a pretty good run though before he twigged (if he has twigged).

You get so much more out of people by listening instead of rebutting but maybe eventually the well runs dry

That would've been a nice gesture actually if it was to commiserate Brexit day!

Yes, though the little flags from around the world arranged around a hueg union jack would've still raised some eyebrows.

Feels like it's imposing a value of patriotism on people. "Look I included YOUR flag on the cake, I value you as a foreigner"

If it hadn't been specifically baked for 'Brexit day' and if the Union Jack was a spoke among many rather than an imperial circle drawn smack dab in the cake's middle, it could have been a nice gesture, maybe.

Nothing with a Union Jack on it is, er, getting anywhere near, er, my mouth.

Dunno man, I just had a gammon steak and it was a warm feeling, devouring my enemy.

there was never very much audible political discussion in my home growing up, although it was evident to me that my dad was conservative and voted republican. my mom always had even less to say than my dad and something, i know not what, made me surmise for a while that she was less conservative than him.

my dad has been subsisting on a constant stream of talk radio and cable news for the past 20-30 years, and my mom's been right there beside him most of the time, reading when he was the one in charge of the remote.

they're not very online but as they've gotten a bit more used to facebook they've taken a little to meme-sharing, as boomers and retirees do. and as the trump presidency has gone on they've both inclined more toward 'we support our president', 'americans need to be united', 'take THAT haters of freedom!!' type junk.

but it has so dismayed me this past week to find that my mom recently shared an image circulating that purported to identify the ukraine whistleblower, with text about the suppression of the information and urging people to share before facebook deleted it. not only morally thoughtless but actively malicious.

this is not the sort of thing she ever would have undertaken to concern herself with, to voice an opinion about. she's a modest, commonsensical, warm-hearted, non-confrontational person.

i can't help but feel that the corruption is spreading.

I mean. I don't like to use words like "corruption" but people change based on who they associate with. We adapt to our environment.

I'm sorry you're losing your mom.

it's mild, it's just…

It hasn't happened to my mother but I could see how it could. She is a mix of impressionable and open-minded. Its interesting to hear when speaking where her own thoughts end and are replaced by media created (usually when "I" is replaced by "people", but she mixes up what she thinks with what 'people' think and its easy to see how they get muddled. "electability" is the most obvious one in general

I can usually bring her back out just by asking questions or to explain. She's open minded so hasn't fallen into any of this but I wonder how long that would last if exposed to a steady right wing diet rather than a comparatively mild centrist one (though seeing how that works up close, its not as dissimilar as I might once have thought)

These narratives aren't beaten by challenging head on. They're given these worms in a particular way, with constant re-inforcement and if the only counter to that is recrimination then we lose. Effective constant communication can't be countered with periodic outrage and dismissal. That in itself is a reinforcement of worms, because they've been told to expect it. one some level doing that fulfils the role of the 'histrionic blue haired SJW" that's already been created for them by this machine

If they're hearing these guys x number of hours a day, and we're countering it with 1% of that time which we use to tell them they're flat out wrong and dumb, thats never going to work

TLDR but the media machine spends a lot more time talking to our parents than we do and that gives them a hell of an advantage

i've found since 2016 that staying in your room 362 days a year and going outside to feast on the living the other 3 is the only way to survive

braains

woorms

TLDR but the media machine spends a lot more time talking to our parents than we do and that gives them a hell of an advantage

― anvil

it's a lot easier for them, they don't actually fucking care about our parents, they don't have to listen to them, they don't have to deal with the consequences of seeing the people who taught you how to live right slowly turn into monsters because they were always fucking monsters, to them this is what is good in life

anvil you have the patience of a saint, i don't, i want to hurt the people who stole the minds of a generation, i want to make them suffer, i want to give back to them one billionth of a billionth of what they've done to us

confusing and imprecise pronoun usage, what the fuck else is new, too tired to explain coherently

Can't speak for anvil but yeah I get those feelings and they're not aimed at the poor saps that have absorbed the message, usually

damn right, rush

in my darker moments i'm like yeah, take my parents' medicare away. they profess to hate it and everything the govt has ever done. so let's see how they, without a dime to their names (other than a minuscule STATE pension from my mom's years teaching in Mississippi PUBLIC schools and their SS checks), fare. let's see some reeeeeal bootstraps in action. obv my inclination to administer some tough love on my folks isn't worth the immiseration of hundreds of millions of ppl.

but goddamn it's frustrating

ok so to clarify starting with the "they were always fucking monsters" the "they" does in fact refer to the media machine and not to anybody's parents, unless i guess you're one of rush limbaugh's kids or something, the actively evil powerful and influential people. i don't even need to see them all suffer, really, though i sure as hell wouldn't mind were that somehow to happen. no, i'd settle for one. one murdoch, one limbaugh, one thiel, being held meaningfully responsible for what they've done.

i don't see that happening in any country i'm aware of today.