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

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.

I feel like from a practical point of view people's personal vicissitudes rarely dislodge brainworms tho, sadly

true. they would 100% blame democrats and the "undeserving"--which, if you scratch the surface w them, is essentially racialized.

...and it's mostly because the TV man told them so. good times.

And seriously the real scumbags you're describing rush don't have real personal vicissitudes, I'll happily consider them not human

I'll happily consider them not human

― GK Chessington's World of Adventure (Noodle Vague)

no, of course not, they're made of string

of course i'm tempted. i mean when you get right down to it considering Them subhuman one of the most human qualities we have? that's not something i can quite manage myself, best i can say is that maybe being human doesn't confer rights or dignity or any of that stuff i was raised to believe in, which isn't any better.

and that's also why i'd settle for one. just an example. that would be enough.

i mean when you get right down to it considering Them subhuman one of the most human qualities we have?

i think it's the line breaks, i think i tend to leave out words whenever i hit a line break

Subhuman still implies the dignity of sentience. There are forms of hate that rule you out of subjectivity or something, idk

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, Thursday, 6 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Saw a good piece on Brexit that said something like this. "Left behind" in more ways than one.

I did see a point even if I didn't entirely buy it.

Radicalisation really needs repetition and reinforcement to work, and its set up perfectly for that

It also spends a lot of time telling them that we will berate them, cancel them and dismiss them

so i know this guy who posts on a board i sort of hang out, and he seems really cool, but it seems like lately he's been spending a lot of time on 4chan. when people on this board started putting down 4chan, he got kind of angry and defensive and started calling the board posters "closed-minded" and "reactionary". honestly i'm a little worried about him. he seems like an alright dude overall and while we were never particularly close the board, you know, it's an internet message board and it's getting smaller and smaller. what are y'all's thoughts?

You should lay off before you end up like me

ie it’s not worth your time and attention

i'm not sure i'm up to living a life where i only spend my time on things that are legitimately deserving of my time and attention, that sounds kind of hard

just had a call from a friend called Dave having a racist rant about his namesake at The Brits. When I kept dismissively shutting him down, because he was droning on with lots of bingo card qualifiers that make him avowedly non-racist, he said we are having two separate conversations here. So I said but mine is the good one and yours is the bad one and he put the phone down after calling me an arrogant cunt. I probably did that wrong!

I need to do that, but with my mum.

No, you were right.

xp

There is probably a more subtle way you can handle a conversation like that, but I've heard it so many times now it's a struggle to not let my internal voice out or I feel like I'm cracking up, no matter how rude and counterproductive the results of doing so are.

Can't believe how lucky I am to have none of these people in my life, worst I get is a colleague occasionally whinging about cyclists and extinction rebellion.

I get the extinction rebellion one occasionally. I just say I've never heard of them, who are they? If you're going to go down this path with me you best put the hard yards in and explain it to me because I've never heard of it

he was droning on with lots of bingo card qualifiers that make him avowedly non-racist

Ask him whats so wrong with being racist is it really that bad?

one of his examples was what a happy multicultural place the Asda he works at is and how his workplace acts as a sort of verifying microcosm of his theory that 90% of the UK population aren't racist at all and it is amplified too much by a few moaners amongst the minorities. And he doesn't want his teenage kids to come under the influence of this "criminal" rapper called Dave, even though he is called Dave and used to listen to Tupac and Biggie himself!

a choice quote I've remembered from him was "this isn't about politics ..it's about people" still trying to work out what that means!