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

fans of this thread may (or may not) like this pretty wild story of a guy who got brain-wormed by youtube in a number of different ways over time

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/podcasts/rabbit-hole-internet-youtube-virus.html

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Saturday, May 9, 2020 3:00 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've just listened to this series.

* It is important / overdue for someone to do a podcast about this stuff
* The production quality / sound collage stuff is superb
* A lot of care and attention has gone into it
* On the whole it was a fascinating listen and worth checking out

but

* There is (unsurprisingly) an underlying assumption behind it that big media companies like NYT are just doing their best and have been misunderstood
* There is zero accountability for either the people spreading this stuff (chummy interview with Pewdiepie was very annoying) or the political / media / social world which has made people feel desperate, frustrated and ready to believe this shit in the first place
* And not really the scope of the thing, but the 4chan shitposting style of humour was not explained, and it's a huge part of why this stuff is so bad and so hard to fight

There are a ton of other interviews on Youtube with this Caleb guy (and he has his own channel). There is a reasonable amount of such content, though how usefully each is explored is open to question.

The basic underlying theme seems, unsurprisingly to revolve around offense and reaction. Its one of the reasons I offer neither to my RW cousin. This doesn't mean I am "understanding" or "sympathizing", as those are both emotive reactions also. The reactions I give my cousin are more in line with the reactions I would give a person asking for directions on the street.

A large part of the information transmitted isn't in the words but in the delivery. Negative reaction is received as validation, I try and remove all dopamine hits from these interactions. The dopamine is the fuel.

lol ur so triggered

* There is (unsurprisingly) an underlying assumption behind it that big media companies like NYT are just doing their best and have been misunderstood
* There is zero accountability for either the people spreading this stuff (chummy interview with Pewdiepie was very annoying) or the political / media / social world which has made people feel desperate, frustrated and ready to believe this shit in the first place
* And not really the scope of the thing, but the 4chan shitposting style of humour was not explained, and it's a huge part of why this stuff is so bad and so hard to fight

extremely otm

Also been thinking about how it takes left wing channels like contrapoints openly fighting fire with fire by using memes, etc. and sneakily implies that this means they are just a left wing version of alt-right edgelords and part of the same rubbish we should all abandon for the safe professional hands of the NYT, ugh.

Yes, that's what I think about when I find myself agreeing too hard with one of those left-wing videos, tbh. Too much confirmation bias? Kidding myself?

The echo chamber is a real thing, and obviously everyone needs to question themselves, but still, no, there is still a huge difference between these two things, one is cynically using sexual/social frustration and anti-intellectualism to promote an agenda of hate, the other is not doing that.

For the most part, I don't follow the far right / red pill / internet conspiracy culture. A few months ago I couldn't've told you more about Gamergate than that a bunch of right-wing trolls harassed a group of women bloggers in 2016, that Pewdiepie was a starter fascist, and that Pizzagate was bonkers. But I rent in a two-family house and my landlady has become a radicalized Infowars goof in the past few years. She cornered me in March to talk about the 5G towers, monkey trials, Somalians, and FEMA. I figured I'd better read up on whose beliefs she was parroting. I enjoyed the "Rabbit Hole" series because it wove together some threads I'd been reading about as separate phenomenon. Like CAL, I had some issues with the podcast, but it gave me a coherent course through the paranoid conservative miasma.

Because I'm late to the game, I wonder if there are other 'big picture' takes that are worthy of reading? Long-form is fine.

Left channels have improved markedly after a very slow start. I think for a long time there was a lot of "go read a book", "its not my job to explain shit to you" from the left - the left pipeline was bricked up. The right didn't give a fuck about any of that, "come on in let's ride!" - which gave them a real head start

would also like to listen to a really good long-form podcast on this topic, something like "How 4chan has poisoned discourse throughout the western world and how we can go about eradicating every fucking trace of it from our culture"

The Atlantic has a whole cache of articles about the conspiracy stuff.
https://www.theatlantic.com/shadowland/

I'm interested in conspiracies insomuch as there are kernels of truth to some of what these wingnuts believe, but their ideological approach is all fucked up and so their response to these kernels of truth is overwhelmingly one of paranoia and racism.

yeah, a friend used to be into a conspiracy podcast and I enjoyed listening to it for the way out ones which sounded like a dramatisation of a Philip K Dick story, these new ones are just boring and racist.

From Behold a Pale Horse to 5G is Killing Our Police Force

Left channels have improved markedly after a very slow start. I think for a long time there was a lot of "go read a book", "its not my job to explain shit to you" from the left - the left pipeline was bricked up. The right didn't give a fuck about any of that, "come on in let's ride!" - which gave them a real head start

― anvil

my feeling is that there's more of people engaging with left ideas in good faith. i don't see that the left were any worse in the past at communicating their ideas, it was more a matter of your famous Overton Window - leftists would make predictions and people would argue with them or come up with talking points or just not take them seriously, dismiss them as "wingnuts", especially since leftist thought doesn't really correspond to the preconceived liberal-centrist "rational" worldview a lot of people (me included) were taught.

well, for more and more of us, questioning liberal-centrist assumptions has become kind of important to our survival, and even for people whom that's not true, honestly, leftist narratives are more congruent with people's lived experiences than liberal-centrist narratives are.

notably liberal centrism just cannot explain "brainworms" at all.

I co-sign that, Kate. As someone who has been a part of radical left politics on and off since I was a teenager, the number of more liberal people who have been coming into the fold during the past few years has been noticeable.

i don't see that the left were any worse in the past at communicating their ideas, it was more a matter of your famous Overton Window

Is there an argument that people on the left improving communication and being more accomodating is part of what helped shift the Overton Window? (I'm not necessarily subscribing to this view, could all be part of a virtuous circle of sorts)

Is there an argument that people on the left improving communication and being more accomodating is part of what helped shift the Overton Window? (I'm not necessarily subscribing to this view, could all be part of a virtuous circle of sorts)

― anvil

i'd certainly be open to such an argument were someone to attempt to make it! it's not the impression i've gotten, honestly - if anything i've grown _more_ skeptical of left media like breadtube and chapo over time.

It might just be that its grown larger, there's more of it? Even the fact that there is a breadtube?

Can argue there are now different problems, infighting (to an extent), the combative debate over seemingly narrow difference (yes can say this has been a feature of left since time began), the need for constant content. But on the other hand the current format seems constructed more for hoovering people up without really asking anything of them

Has anyone argued with a right-winger about Hasan Minhaj/The Patriot Act (where they might be bemoaning why they're 'not allowed' a right wing equivalent in msm)?

no, that sounds bad

I just suddenly felt this curiosity about whether our opposites hate-watch and handwave everything that comes up in it.

"seemingly narrow difference" is a really good phrase i think. one of the more exhausting things about leftism is that we're not uniform in experience, approach, or belief. there are differences among us that may not even affect anybody you know and it's tempting to dismiss that as "the left destroying itself", _particularly_ since we all know that any difference of opinion will be immediately seized upon and weaponized by the right.

i've certainly talked to any number of cis people who don't understand why so many non-binary (and non-binary allied) people have issues with natalie wynn. to some extent "intersectional leftism" means "caring about things even if they don't affect you personally", and there are a shit-ton of things that don't affect me personally, a shit-ton of marginalized peoples who could probably use allies.

i wish there were better answers. any time i try to figure it out, best i can come up with is having some sort of central committee that can make clear, unambiguous, binding rulings on who's with us and who's against us, on behalf of the entirety of the intersectional left.

i think that idea's been tried before, though.

I just suddenly felt this curiosity about whether our opposites hate-watch and handwave everything that comes up in it.

― nashwan

jeez, that sounds a lot like intellectual curiosity to me. why would they want to watch opinions that are different from theirs? they already know everything they need to know.

ok less sarcastic response because one of the interesting things as that there are some people i talk to who comes from like, right and right-adjacent spaces, and if they're talking to me, i mean, my assumption is that they're working on transitioning away from that. it's social, it's who you associate with, and at the beginning their entire view of reality has no relationship to anything i've experienced. i was talking to someone the other day who's sort of traveling that path who was panicked that tucker carlson was going to run for president in 2024, which would be a DISASTER because if he did he would OBVIOUSLY WIN and he would be SO MUCH WORSE THAN TRUMP...

i don't even know what the fuck to say to something like that, you know? people are trying to be better but when you're being fed this constant stream of paranoid bullshit, you know, it's really fucking hard, and the people who are feeding them the bullshit, very often, they're extremely convinced that those people are the only ones who really love them and care about them.

like, to me, that's straightforward cycle of abuse shit. on the other hand, that almost certainly says more about my own experiences and biases than it does about empirical reality.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/american-boogaloo-meme-or-terrorist-movement/613843/

Disturbingly, the boogaloo movement is at least the third example of a mass of memes escaping from 4chan to become a real-life radical political movement, the first being the leftist-libertarian hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged in 2008; the second was the far-right fascist group of angry young men called the alt-right, which formed in 2015. (The conspiracy theory QAnon might be considered a fourth, but it is more than a political movement.)

Wearing an "I can't breathe" hat (and a few firearms) #BlackLivesMatter activist "Pops" said that "If George Floyd would have been a blonde hair blue eyed white guy, I still would have been pissed." pic.twitter.com/EK3VhBEjP5

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) July 5, 2020

Some Boogaloo/BLM crossover here

lmao at characterising anonymous as "leftist"

"seemingly narrow difference" is a really good phrase i think. one of the more exhausting things about leftism is that we're not uniform in experience, approach, or belief. there are differences among us that may not even affect anybody you know and it's tempting to dismiss that as "the left destroying itself"

Yeah, i put 'seemingly' because who is to decide what is actually narrow or not. The key seems to be how difference is handled, how much difference is ok, whether its possible to contain multiple strains of thought which may sometimes be in contradiction, whether coalition of thought is a positive or not. On the scale of pragmatism to idealism we fall.

Ultimately that comes down to how difference is handled, in regard to people that may be in coalition. There's talking it out and trying to build on the areas of shared values, and there's canceling and kicking out of the tent altogether. In different scenarios maybe either is appropriate

which honestly has some pretty good parallels with the "right wing brain worm" situation! the liberal idea i was taught is that everybody deserves to be loved and accepted for who they are, and i love that idea, i wish i could put that into universal practice. however, i have some difficulties reconciling that with radical self-determination. there are people who decide that their core identities are, say, racist, or perhaps "gender critical". i guess the liberal response would be to say "nobody's _really_ a racist" and whether or not that's true, you know, i just don't feel comfortable telling anybody else who they _really_ are or aren't.

the choice a lot of us have these days is to walk away from people we love or try to love people who don't respect or accept us. which often i guess means trying, implicitly or explicitly, to change our beliefs to fit theirs, to say that, like, "family comes first" or whatever even if that means being ok with racism.

The question I have asked myself for years is a simple one: "If I wasn't related to you, would we be friends? Would we spend any time together at all?" If the answer is no, act accordingly.

There's something here in the role of individualism vs communality, which is a by-product of our Western societies rather than any particular personal failings. We're prone to focusing on the character or morals of a particular person in and of themselves and our relationship to them more so than in terms of community, something that seems somewhat Protestant - a focus on the moral rather than the pragmatic.

This isn't to say walking away in any given scenario is the wrong thing to do! But in many cases this isn't always possible (although admittedly less so in atomized situations), we don't always have the ability to do this, and pragmatism comes first, even if not by choice.

yeah, a friend used to be into a conspiracy podcast and I enjoyed listening to it for the way out ones which sounded like a dramatisation of a Philip K Dick story, these new ones are just boring and racist.

― Anti-Cop Ponceortium

very otm!

disagree, racism is fundamental to the nature of conspiracy theories, even the "way out" ones. i've seen francis e. dec's rants.

I dunno, the folks over at the Portuguese UFO sightseeing group on FB I'm on seem to be pretty kumayaba in their hopes of alien intelligence helping us all ascend to higher states of being.

that feels less conspiracy theory and more gonzo paranormal stanning

yeah simply saying "there are ufos" isn't a conspiracy per se. a conspiracy theory, to me, consists of a to-the-believer obvious truth that would be universally known and acknowledged if not for the malicious intervention of Them. (note that some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true!)

conspiracy theory today is almost always based on a protocols of zion model regardless of who the conspirators are claimed to be so it's always racist as well as a drain on actual resistance to the status quo

the new agey crystal side of this stuff is far from immune from this

the conspiracy theories I enjoyed hearing about were either some sort of aliens, "we are in a collective dream" or ancient Egyptian mystical things, basically not fitting the definition as you're giving it at all, Kate. all the same it was clearly labelled as a conspiracy theory podcast. Even some of the stuff which would fit the description blamed everything on George W Bush, this was not long after 9/11 and they had ridiculous ideas about him being some sort of genius, that always seemed more ludicrous than the alien stuff. I did hear some antisemitic stuff on there from time to time, but they would be embarrassed and try to move on from it, very much unlike now.

i saw someone on twitter say they thought conspiracy theories were basically a subconscious transference of a wound inflicted by the ancestors/culture/inheritance of the believers, or the believers themselves. they linked to an article comparing alien abduction narratives to disappearances of native americans. i think there's probably some truth to that idea. e.g. 5g conspiracy theorists transferring the negative social effects of the internet. i'm thinking of an acquaintance who is a 5g conspiracy theorist and also an airbnb host as his primary source of income.

heh I like that

Left and Kate otm. The Venn between 'crystal New Age hippies' and 'racist conspiracy quacksalvers' is quite large. I lived in Mt. Shasta and worked at the organic grocery store in town, and let me tell you some stories about that experience....

Table I have family in Mt. Shasta and this is (some of) them...! Not racist maybe but chem-trailers/Loose-changers

How long ago did you live there? I wonder if you ran into my cousin at that store.

Hadrian, I lived in the area from September 2015- August 2016, first in Weed and then in McCloud. Worked at ye olde Berryvale from December 2015 til a few days before I left.

I actually really love a lot of people whom I worked with and in that area generally, but the wingnut factor was really high.

There were Trump supporters in 2016 who also believed in magic fairies that lived in dew coming and blessing their blankets at night. They'd explain all this and then literally yell at people speaking Spanish in the store cafe. It was shocking and insane.

Also the reactions when Prince died on one of my shifts was 'who?'

my 40 year-old cousin took us to a crystal shop that sold chai. He talked to me and my daughter for a while about the Lemurians or whatever that live inside the mountain, then on the walk back to my aunt's house he threatened a passing stranger that he would break his kneecap with a "socket wrench." Cool place.

It was while living in that area that we started living with a loaded shotgun next to the bed, so yeah, I get the vibe.

when Prince died on one of my shifts

Lol yeah, I read that after posting it and realized it was a bit off.

I enjoyed going up there occasionally to escape Redding's heat, but I couldn't have lived there without biting my lips off.