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

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

also in my case those things feel more like accidents than some kind of clever strategy for relating to people and there are things i can't or don't want to hide or tone down even if that would make communication easier in some situations

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

Of course, and many other signifiers too, it depends on the context. Its a route I've gone down largely for the reasons of this thread, dealing with right wing relatives with brainworms). But "Speaking as a prominent leftist" is of limited utility and generally counter-productive

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

After a bit of a pause, I'm back into Mike Duncan's Revolutions Podcast at the moment, the bit on the peasants in 1870s France is reminiscent of some of the themes in this thread!

I'm still in 1948, looking forward to getting to the bits I remember from Zola novels, the shopkeepers in Le Ventre de Paris do remind me a great deal of a certain kind of English people in the modern day.

1848 sorry!

thanks for the reminder. I've not been back to the Russian Revolution since he took a break last year and there are a lot of new eps.

one for my fellow tankies - the Bolshevik Bank Heist - Stalin as a swashbuckling countercultural hero!

An old boyfriend of my sister has just contacted me via Facebook to ask me to say hello to her - I don't know why he couldn't contact her directly as she's never off Facebook. Anyway, I remember this guy, all those years ago, as a really good looking if rather vain sort of gothy punk guy but he's been living in New York for years - I assume he's now a US citizen - and his Facebook page is full of pro-Trump, anti-BLM stuff. I don't think I'll bother telling her.

Sounds like she blocked him before.

Yes, that's possible. She's had to block at least one other person from her past who has turned into a racist, right wing wanker - that one lives in China btw.

i'm up to the massacre of champ de mars in the mike duncan revolutions pod (since it's mentioned just upthread for some reason)

i think it's p good but i have to make some kind of comment and/or protest re duncan's french pronunciation, which is in my opinion PECULIAR lol

the radical parisian district of cor-dell-YEE!

(Pssst mark, check out this thread, it's a good 'un: Political/History Podcasts - Recommendations)

thank you :)

I preferred it when he was plugging harry's razors rather than the dodgy hair restoring treatments at the start of his recent Russian revolution eps!

tbh i just skip all that stuff

I've signed up for audible, my male pattern baldness is in retreat, got some really great suitcases and I only shave with the finest German steel now.

tmi tbh

I listen to it on spotify and just leave it running ep by ep, plugs and ads included. It's usually when I'm cooking.

a good thing about US podcasts is you usually wouldn't be able to get the services that advertise on them here even if you wanted to

the "audible" that duncan talks abt is presumably also the "audible" that lanchester refers to in his very bad ghost story

so you can definitely get it in the netherworld

'loose term' friend has been asking me to go over and sort out his laptop because he's been 'hacked'. Further questioning of other friends turns out he's been heavily into T3legram for the past year and was also looking at "Jews who hate white people" sites! Further questioning and he believes earth is flat and street-lights are all secretly embedded with 5g spy robots. Think I'll pass and let his laptop rot.

How much of eg flat earth belief do you think is real?

Flat eartherism has been gradually on the rise for..10? 15? years. And for a long time I'd put it down as kind of pseudo-real, partly affectation. Maybe interesting but not consequential or of wider relevance. But I feel like it became more real over time and/or there was never that much pseudo about its growth

Your friend can't be all that distant if he's asking you to go over and help? Any signs before this?

waht

Lads, most of the people you meet or are forced together with in this life are worth ignoring

there is a young lad I sometimes talk to who's got an adorable little Manchester Terrier called Romo. Anyway t'other week he starts going on about "The Great Reset" ... and that's it I'm gone!

Ben Shapiro: "Joe Biden is the Kurt Cobain of politics. He put a shotgun in the mouth of the American body politic and then pulled the trigger. And the brains are on the wall" pic.twitter.com/7om4KwvAbv

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 2, 2022

So, wait, who is the Kathleen Hanna in this metaphor?

Pretty sure that Nancy Pelosi is the Dave Grohl.

Bernie Sanders is the Eddie Vedder.

Chuck Schumer is the Butch Vig.

Beau Biden is the guy from Green River

Ben Shapiro is the Andy Rooney.

Okay as long as Bill Clinton is the Chad Channing and Kamala Harris is the Kurt Loder, I am satisfied that the metaphor works.

Hunter Biden - Silverchair dude