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

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!

he also does this "I work 45 hours a week" thing where I think the subtext is that a f/t carer/benefits bludging scumbag like me is getting way above my station by having an opinion!

45 hours? shiftless part-timer imo

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

― anvil

don't do that, then he'll come out to you as racist

calzino there's no right way to handle those kinds of conversations unfortunately. when people start talking stuff like that to me i give it a shot to see if they're really serious about that crap and if they are i immediately start disengagement procedures. some people might say i give up too easily, but ahh, everybody deals with racists assholes in their own way.

it's quite awkward because even though he's a terrible bigot, and very boring and hasn't really got many positives tbh. I've known him 41 years + there is some bond of friendship there and I feel like sometimes I could get better results by being a bit superficial and change the subject or something rather than maybe make him angry and possibly keener to dig in even more where he is at. On the other hand fuck him tbh!

i have a friend like this. we usually start talking about '80s/'90s wrestling to get away from sensitive topics

even though he's a terrible bigot, and very boring and hasn't really got many positives

These people are best eased gently out of your life.

Loyalty's a helluva drug. Sometimes you just want to give people a chance till the bitter end.

If you have a boring friend
Now is the time now is the time etc

If you have to work 45 hours a week you're doing work wrong. Tell him that.

i'm sorry – what is "extinction rebellion"?!

respect existence or expect resistance

Right now as far as office chat goes, Extinction Rebellion are this - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-51534446

"Why can't they respect the law?"
*fossil fuel companies strip-mine the Arctic*

"I agree with them, but they really aren't going to win anyone over by inconveniencing working people"

Friend update! He has considerably cooled down on the stuff that was worrying me.

I finally revealed to him that I am trans, and although I could tell it was awkward for him, he handled it well. There’s always going to be stuff we don’t see eye-to-eye on but he has proven to be a good and loyal friend where it counts.

Contrast that with the two other supposed friends (both cis women who don’t know each other) who completely cut me off after I came out to them last year. One even told me that she felt my revelation ”invalidated“ her womanhood, which of course really, really fucking hurt to hear. This was in the context of a very long email where my friend regurgitated a bunch of TERF/“gender critical” talking points that she had apparently been absorbing online. Talk about brain worms!

She then stated she was cutting off contact and threatened legal action if I responded. What the fuck?

The other friend was initially polite when I told her, but indicated that she had “reservations” about trans issues and that if I wanted to hear them I should let her know.

Ok, but...how is one supposed to respond to that? I was already in a very vulnerable place after coming out to my family. I was not going to entertain objections to my life choices or identity. But even so, I wasn’t ready to lose a friend just yet. I tried to respond in a diplomatic way but it came out sounding rather rambly and meandering, which she took as me “talking down” to her.

Eventually she revealed that her ex (who was abusive to her) had turned out to be trans after their breakup.
Which...ok, but what was she saying? How does her ex being a piece of shit have any bearing on their or my trans-ness? I’m not them! Of course, it transpired that like my other friend, she had also been absorbing “gender critical”/TERF propaganda from reddit and other places online. In so many words she said that my being trans was an insult to her womanhood and the suffering she had gone through as a woman. From this point on things deteriorated rapidly. She wrote an email indicating that she was cutting off contact to “protect herself” and wished me the best (gee, thanks).

Both of these friend breakups happened within the space of a week. The same week, in fact. It was very strange and upsetting and it kinda ruined me for a while. I think about what happened almost every day and it still stings.

I’m really sorry to hear that lb, you know you will be better off without them in the long run but it still fucking hurts. It’s really fucking out of hand and melting brains everywhere. I’m glad your other friend has accepted you though.

stay strong latebloomer!

My old boss was a super right wing guy (in the abstract) but something never sat right. He was never like that in his actions. It was jarring to me to hear the same old same old dogma (from someone that was clearly bright) and then to see him act in completely the opposite way in the way he stood up for people. I wouldn't say he was brainwormed exactly...it was more like his abstract understanding of the world and his empathic understanding of the world were polar opposites (unlike my RW cousin who doesn't possess empathy at all in an imaginative sense, which I think is one of the preconditions for brainwormery)

Just because someone is wrong in the abstract, doesn't mean the same will be true in reality, just as someone who's right in the abstract can turn out to be made out of paper when it actually matters.

much love to you latebloomer

that's one of the things about coming out as trans that's so hard to explain to people who haven't had that experience, having to be willing to lose basically anything and anyone in your life, at random, for no reason at all. people whose love you have never doubted for a second in your life suddenly reject you, even though acceptance costs them nothing and we risk fucking everything just to be who we are.

i legit just don't fucking get that

They will come up with an interim solution, a kind of halfway house to a vaccine. This will keep the economy functioning until a useable vaccine is ready.

A vaccine for the brain worms, now?

what if the brain worms are the only thing that's protecting them from the corona

I was talking to my friend last night and she said that her two year old son has not had any vaccinations and she's concerned that if a Covid-19 vaccine is produced then the government will force people to take it. She said that she's not an anti-vaxxer but she just didn't want her son to be vaccinated (she was a bit vague on her reasons for this).

I didn't challenge her on this (maybe I should have) because I'm not a parent and I'd imagine that having people who aren't parents telling you how to raise your child must be annoying, and I was worried that being too confrontational could be counter-productive. However I definitely think she should get her son vaccinated for obvious reasons. Should I raise this with her, and if so what's the best way to go about it?

She said that she's not an anti-vaxxer but she just didn't want her son to be vaccinated