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

Yeah but there have been better and worse answers to the question of how to get back there. This is a worse one.

It's much easier to believe that the past was a golden a era if you weren't alive for it. Or if you were a child (with a decent childhood). It's no coincidence that the "good old days" of the 50s were when boomers were kids.

I used to think these reactionaries could be flipped by a Bernie type who emphasized a return to the “american dream” of prosperity, opportunity and stability. (Which never really existed, but in the decades of the postwar boom felt more attainable for white blue collar workers). Such a message need not be divisive or racist or mystical or even nostalgic—it could be tailored to an inclusive vision of a new working class that was disproportionally black and latino and more in service Industries than industrial jobs.

But now i think these people aren’t interested at all in material stability. They want transcendence, meaning, all the things one shouldn’t look for in politics, which is why racial grievance is more interesting to them than like shoring yo social security for a new generation. It’s very fucked and it honestly seems like this is a nation of spoiled children.

Millennials, my cohort, are open to social democracy as seen in the rise of the squad and others. The future lies with them but they’re always going to have to fight these people it seems—I don’t think we can ever have a unifying class politics.

I don't think we should expect millennials to maintain their core beliefs over the next few decades.

I don’t see us turning right unless we actually acquire savings and assetts

Maybe this kind of Q Anon fantasyland right, I guess. No one is immune because it’s not related to material reality.

Don't jinx it… a couple of decades is a long time.

xp yes, that's what I had in mind.

If that stuff grows though the country is fucked.

You'd be amazed trís a mhic but ppl do, yknow

do they want transcendence or do they want whiteness which does give them significant material / psychological benefits

I still think a leftish national populism could "work" on some of these people if it ever managed to cut through the noise but it couldn't ever not be racist (see: UK 2015-2020) because in order to be inclusive of such a heterogenous working class it would have to downplay (reproduce) the divisions that exist within the class and across (unquestionable) national borders

this is very much a problem within millennial socialism which is sadly still the most convincing alternative to this mess (liberals seem to believe in absolutely nothing these days)

Millennials, my cohort, are open to social democracy as seen in the rise of the squad

This framing irritates me because half the Squad (Pressley, Tlaib) are Gen X, who were previously thought to be the generation who would usher in a wave of progressive change and well... we are now here

Well, idk

Point taken. As is left’s. I think the key thing is for the left to act locally a put people in local government where they can work with constituencies united by geography as well as class interest. Starting at the top with a national candidate didn’t work—it fractured due to these competing interests. The left didn’t have any real roots. That’s my theory anyway

People don’t have local newspapers or unions anymore though mostly so this bottom up strategy will also be a struggle

In other words, solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us.

This part of the article is something I've been thinking about since it was used as a plot device in some novel I read years ago - the villain throws people off the track by planting false information but well hidden as though it's not meant to be found *and also* planting more easily disprovable false information weakly pointing to the opposite effect - the 'investigators' need to work harder and smarter to find the hidden info and therefore place far more value in it and are less inclined to disregard it whatever else happens. (It's not really akin to the 'the baddie is somehow always one step ahead and knew we'd do xyz so was constantly doing things to their detriment just to trick us' that seems to form the basis of loads of detective/spy tv shows)

Yeah that bit is cool. I'd love to hear more about how/why discovered (or "discovered") ideas are particularly special.

I’ve been reading (listening to) The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer, written in the Bush years & shows its age a bit as well as being a bit too smug. Still useful to understand why pointing out their hypocrisies or destroying them with facts & logic (TM) will never ever ever ever work — their minds just don’t think like that. It’s all, 100%, about tribal loyalty. No real revelations in the book but it’s crystallized some of my recent thoughts & concerns.

this is from September 2020 and was probably posted here already (can't find it but am on my phone) -
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5

Facts and logic will always be a dead end. As you say its now about what is said, its about who says it. But even within that, it's about how its said. But also why start from the area of disagreement instead of starting out with establishing where there's consensus, and build up from there. Building up is always easier than knocking down. Stories are always better than facts

But really, we all know people to varying degrees who have this. If you want to know, just ask them! But you have to remove not just any judgement, but anything at all, if there is anything to react to, they'll go there instead. There has to be nothing to react to for it to work. This is good to do anyway, with anyone

I'd love to hear more about how/why discovered (or "discovered") ideas are particularly special.

In general, learning in general works better this way because the dots are connected and cemented in a way that works for that particular person. Again, stories are more memorable than facts, less abstract, more connecting. Isn't this the case with following online tutorials vs having to work something out where the tutorial doesn't quite fit?

The Game design article is really good

Dr Bob Altemeyer is writing an updated book with John Dean

So, I'm not terribly close to my extended family, not for any particular reason, just that we're not a terribly sentimental bunch. My dad (who died back in 2014) grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood, the child of a bartender and a homemaker; he and his brother (my uncle) were the first to go to college. Needless to say, my dad harbored some reactionary (at best) conservative tendencies his whole life, even if he usually kept them to himself, but he was a smart guy and far from doctrinaire, so was always at least open to debate and discussion. His brother (my uncle) and my aunt, on the other hand, apparently kept creeping farther and farther to the right, a transition I never really witnessed, because they live somewhere else and I never interact with them, though my mom told me she more or less had to cut them off in recent years. Now, I always suspected one of my uncle's daughters, my first cousin, to at least lean Republican, but she stopped posting any remotely political stuff to social media years ago. Her sister, my other first cousin, isn't on social media at all, so I have no idea. But I just learned that cousin's husband, it seems, follows all these assholes on Instagram (extended Trump clan, NRA, etc.), which I find kind of shocking, since he's a nice, smart guy, but also makes me sort of assume my cousin must lean that way, too. Which is too bad and makes me kind of shocked and saddened that that entire side of my small extended family might be right wing assholes, which is ... weird. The entire other side of my family, on my mom's side (and my wife's own entire family), are lifelong liberals, which just goes to show there must be some sort of nature/nurture thing going on here. I kind of feel like my sister and I dodged a bullet having a dad that could have pushed his opinions but instead encouraged us to come to our own conclusions about stuff.

An acquaintance who was otherwise normal (if libertarian) up til now has been infected by brain worms after Twitter/etc. banned Trump.

He still hates Trump (seemingly) but the tech lords powers seem to have him ready to start stockpiling MREs.

i don't know which numb nut racist / right wing thread to put this on and i didn't want to spend a minute more searching tbh (bundy is not my friend).

this is honestly so fucking bizarre i can't make my brain go in any of these cursed directions

2. Bundy, who occupied a federal wildlife refuge by force in 2016, has created a new org called People's Rights

People's Rights wants to enable people to "call a militia like they’d call an Uber and stage a protest within minutes."https://t.co/GCzcMppofD

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 11, 2021

hear me out:

an uber .. for don't tread on me

the netflix of assholes

kids like that uber and i like the name plus i love armed stand-offs win win! fascist takeover? there's an app for that. nice ring to it. i'm sure any tech platform will gladly make this brilliant app available. well maybe in idaho only *hick*. god i hate this motherfucker. it would feel SO GOOD to punch his face in.

Goons mashing the People's Rights Uber app whenever a prius parks in their space... And i trust the police aren't being defunded in this nazi paradise?

the conspiratorial mindset’s distrust of cooperation creates a pretty fucking sad worldview, like the nature of humans is to be in conflict and problems are not meant to be solved but destroyed.. plus the whole q thing has made me think these people just want life to be a tv show or something. plus racism.

yeah it's super stunted. like just whole swatches of the population who have been conditioned from birth to behave like cooperation is a vice and domination a virtue

swathes lol

Cooperation may not get you a Rolex, but it will definitely get you a Swatch.

The "Working Class = Over 60s with house paid off and money in the bank" worm has been gorging itself even more than usual lately.

I don't think its even worth countering this one. I've been using Working Age instead of Working Class. Briefly thought about Working Age Low Income, but just plain Working Age is better I think, just as a straight replacement

has Precariat gone out of fashion now?

Our local Precariat has been a BetFred since 2017

I think Precariat is a good catch all, that can include "non-trad" iterations of working classness like university graduates on zero hour contracts and exclude bigots with regional accents who have holiday cottages in Provence.

this was the pivot moment for my friend too, finding out conservatives can be very polite to you if you aren't challenging any of their ideas

Disorienting AF - I’m meeting a lot of conservatives, libertarians and...I LIKE them. Former are ladies and gentlemen, and very hospitable. The latter are a pleasure as they don’t try to control your opinions or actions! What to do?? I was trained to fear, dread non-liberals...

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) May 26, 2021

The fact that libertarianism is seen by anyone as a serious philosophy is so sad.

xp. i think a big factor is that political opinions form part of personal identities, come all bundled-up together, and largely decide who we socialize with. it's hard to change your opinion on any one thing if it would alienate you from your "tribe", but if you find out you don't actually kind of like the other guys the whole old bundle can be jettisoned and a new one formed

a stray "don't" in there for some reason

this reminds me of some years ago when a certain then-up-and-coming far-right troll was hanging out with a relatively prominent leftish-feminist broadsheet columnist and they apparently had a whale of a time together "despite their differences" and incidentally they were both privately-educated white brits

Yes, funny that.

i think a big factor is that political opinions form part of personal identities, come all bundled-up together, and largely decide who we socialize with. it's hard to change your opinion on any one thing if it would alienate you from your "tribe", but if you find out you actually kind of like the other guys the whole old bundle can be jettisoned and a new one formed

This is the root of a lot of this definitely. If you explicitly code or present as an opponent, you set the bar that much higher. You're explicitly and pre-emptively endorsing their rejection of anything you might say. It puts people in reactive mode, 10 men behind the ball

Not doing that goes a long way

is this irony, how does one not do that

Depends on the context.

In 2019 I was out somewhere in the run up to the election and I got talking to various people who were Lib Dems, with all the comes with that. I didn't say I was pro-Corbyn, I said I was an undecided traditional LibDem but thinking of possibly maybe voting Labour this time

Remove the labelling and talk about whats underneath, but taking off your own label makes that a lot easier

guessing the catch here is that belonging to a certain ethnicity or religion already marks you out as an opponent to many, so not as easy to go incognito

i guess being anti-brexit and anti-EU has made it easier for me to talk to "both sides" since the usual labels don't fit and people are more likely to at least talk before they can identify as the enemy. not being in a party and not being pro-corbyn maybe helped me a little with challenging the worst aspects of anti-corbynism. at least some corbynites were more receptive to my criticism when they worked out i wasn't a tory or centrist. there is some level of privilege at work here since some identities are harder/impossible to just peel off

xp yeah exactly