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

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

Mitch McConnell is Tad

anyone else see the state of the union last night when stephen breyer tossed his bass straight up in the air and it came straight down and bonked him in the head?

The Truss brainworm isn't gaining traction

Sad to report that my friend passed away in his sleep last October at age 40. The dalliance with scary politics was thankfully short-lived and while we hadn’t seen each other since the start of the pandemic, we were still on good terms. Appropriately enough our last interaction was reminiscing about the time we spent as kids seeing movies. I miss him.

RIP Sean 1982-2022

Ah man, that’s a rough age

So sorry to hear.

There’s an acquaintance from college who I’ve been friends with on social media for years, though we haven’t seen each other in person for ages. When I knew him he was a very sweet guy, iirc he was openly gay. In the last few years his social media has been filled with posts about becoming a born-again Christian, recognizing himself as a worthless sinner undeserving of God’s love, etc. As I understand it, he devoted himself to God at a time of total desolation while working in a remote area of the South Pacific.

I found his posts interesting sometimes, they didn’t usually map on to a specific ideology, though it seemed like he was following pretty hard-line people. Unfortunately he’s recently started repeating the most rancid transphobic shit, both the usual scary viral anecdotes and also really nasty things about Lia Thomas. And he seems to have adopted a version of Christianity that argues against even being nice and kind - because of course using someone’s pronouns, or just letting them live their life, is letting them continue in sin, and endangering their soul. So the very idea of accepting someone for who they are is enabling their damnation.

I should probably just unfriend him and not think about it beyond that, it’s not like we were close, there’s just something really sad about it, it feels like he’s upping the zealotry to hold onto the intensity that came with his conversion. He doesn’t seem like someone who is happy. I’m tempted to message him to tell him how upsetting I find his posts, and that his version of Christianity is one that repels me and basically everyone I know, but I can’t imagine it would get through at all. I would probably just get filed away as someone doing the work of Satan to tempt him away from what Christ demands of him.

When the brain worms have tunneled all the way to your fingers.

Jeffrey Epstein had some balls.

He found Bill Gates’ girlfriend, paid for her software course, and then emailed him asking to be paid back as a way to try to bribe Gates into funding him.

He was too much of a man for this feminized era. https://t.co/VI6aujHS1e pic.twitter.com/RXxYjcS5kO

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) May 21, 2023

xp Weird how so many people who profess to have grasped their own sinfulness are still so busy policing it in others. That strikes me as the wrong outcome.

xp I never know who these fuckwits even are.

Starting to see more and more progressives demand public swimming pools. Get ready for the next entitlement program.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 30, 2023

I'm ready

Asked an older friend of mine to tell me what she thought 15-minute towns were. "It's where the government puts you in planned places like Ballymun..." I had to stop her. This is a woman who started off her Youtube journey about ten years ago with Norwegian knitters and foragers, then moved through van life people to preppers and is now being served full-on conspiracy nutjobs. She just lets them play. I think she has this idea that YouTube is essentially a television channel and that you wouldn't be allowed to say these things on television if they weren't true. She told us today that she was amazed about the "undercover government stuff" involved in the fires in Hawaii. We had to tell her it wasn't true. Fundamentally this isn't my problem, and I know we've said it all before. But I wish there was some secret setting I could toggle on her Youtube account that just keeps her seeing harmless Scandi knitwear designers forever.

The level of credibility is astonishing. It's like they didn't learn even basic critical thinking skills however long they stayed in school.

That Erick "Erick" Erickson tweet is puzzling. Not sure what he's on about.

This may be insensitive, but I wonder if Sean (RIP) died from Covid.

Or was it the brain worms?

Covid is coming back later this year as the Democrats look to ban in person voting at the next election so they can make 15 minute cities and take cars away. There are also plans to take the guns away and introduce communism

A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in Australia says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain. “It continued to move with vigor. We all felt a bit sick,” surgeon Hari Priya Bandi added of her operating team. https://t.co/Wzm6dLkqG5

— The Associated Press (@AP) August 29, 2023

brain worms are real. wake up sheeple

There was something of a more interesting development though. These are what 'memes' on the internet are saying, is that what he really thinks, or its sort of true but not really and kind of funny. It feels a bit like he simultaneously thinks this, but also at same time knows its silly, and has built in some level of plausible "its just memes bro" deniability, to where the actual level of belief is uncertain

But it also feels like the distinction between 'I believe this to be true' and 'I don't really believe this to be true or maybe I do who knows' isn't contradictory, that these two things aren't separable like this.

Its difficult to find out more without running into "I don't know, do your own research"

Wolfin' it up

Wolfin' it up

Asked an older friend of mine to tell me what she thought 15-minute towns were. "It's where the government puts you in planned places like Ballymun..." I had to stop her. This is a woman who started off her Youtube journey about ten years ago with Norwegian knitters and foragers, then moved through van life people to preppers and is now being served full-on conspiracy nutjobs. She just lets them play. I think she has this idea that YouTube is essentially a television channel and that you wouldn't be allowed to say these things on television if they weren't true. She told us today that she was amazed about the "undercover government stuff" involved in the fires in Hawaii. We had to tell her it wasn't true. Fundamentally this isn't my problem, and I know we've said it all before. But I wish there was some secret setting I could toggle on her Youtube account that just keeps her seeing harmless Scandi knitwear designers forever.

― trishyb

i agree with you entirely, this friend of yours isn't your problem... the brain worms in general, though, this is exactly where they're coming from, trying to stop the brain worms through individual intervention is frustrating, hard work, and however much we do as individuals there's always more... it's like trying to save the environment by becoming carbon-neutral. it's not about individuals, it's about the corporations who are poisoning our environment and destroying our world... but that's not the way we've been taught to think, addressing the problem imo is less about addressing the brain worms other people have had and re-orienting our own individual worldviews from the "rugged individualism" a lot of us were taught (in whatever form, whether USAian or no) and learning how to act in solidarity with each other to oppose and dismantle the oppressive systems that are the cause of all this nonsense... youtube is _responsible_ for leading this friend of yours down the primrose path, they are _culpable_ for this. and they need to be held culpable imo.

i disagree strongly with jimbeaux's response on this thread... i don't think holding your friend responsible, trishyb, is helpful... because it's a cycle, people like your friend are helping to make the world a hostile environment for marginalized groups but at the same time they're victims. this isn't new... when i was young it was the old people who got fleeced out of their life savings by televangelists. and it's not that these people are _stupid_, it's that nobody fucking _cares_ about them... i heard all the stories when i was growing up about the seniors who lived on cat food, but it's not just that, it's the hoarders, the people who have plenty of money and won't spend a dime, the people who die with their houses packed full of crap, you can't get rid of anything, you never know when you might need it, nobody else is going to look out for you, you have to look out for yourself.

the thing i was most afraid of all my life was dying alone and unloved... and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, i drove away the people who cared about me out of my fear of being abandoned... i'm responsible for my behavior, just like the people who drive away the people around them with brainworms and abuse are responsible for their behavior. a lot of times it's awful, unbelievably awful, beyond what people are willing to talk about. if you're in a caring profession, working with older people on a daily basis, you've seen some behavior for sure...

my own dad, i knew he did some of that stuff, whenever the nurses would call i'd apologize, i was in oregon, he was in pennsylvania, there was nothing i could do about it. they were being paid a garbage wage to deal with people like my dad and what was there to do at that point? he'd spent the last thirty years waiting to die and it still hadn't happened... his body hurt and nobody reached out to him. well, i did reach out to him but he didn't answer the phone! so when someone came along to start talking about jesus, sure, he converted because there was nobody else. was that really who he was? should i think of him as a "christian" because that was how he died, because he has a cross on his grave marker? i don't think of him that way.

my mom, on the other hand, was always kind of an awful and abusive person... over the past couple of decades i've seen her get worse and worse, i look at her and all of the shit she says now, that's not what she taught me... it's weird, i'm kind of relieved, because it means that now other people are seeing what she did to us, me and my siblings, when we were growing up... it was something she hid, something other people didn't know about, and now they know... it's not that she was "that bad" when we were growing up, but her abusiveness has become more blatant, she doesn't need to hide it like she used to. people who live long enough in our culture do tend to die alone and unloved... i feel like the boomers are going to experience this maybe even more than other generations.

i'm less worried now about dying alone and unloved... it's not something that i can allow to define my life. worrying about it all the time is only going to make it more likely. caring for myself, loving myself, thinking of myself as _worthy_ of love now, no matter how people feel about me in 10 or 20 or 30 years, when i'm no longer considered a _valuable and productive member of society_ (and i certainly don't feel like a "valuable and productive" member of capitalist society now, me and my bullshit job), that's what i'm trying to learn.

There was something of a more interesting development though. These are what 'memes' on the internet are saying, is that what he really thinks, or its sort of true but not really and kind of funny. It feels a bit like he simultaneously thinks this, but also at same time knows its silly, and has built in some level of plausible "its just memes bro" deniability, to where the actual level of belief is uncertain

But it also feels like the distinction between 'I believe this to be true' and 'I don't really believe this to be true or maybe I do who knows' isn't contradictory, that these two things aren't separable like this.

― anvil

this is also something i don't see as new. they say "scratch an ironic fascist and you find a real fascist", but i think it's more complicated than that. the Constantly Repeated Moral of _mother night_, for me it's less that we _are_ who we pretend to be, it's that we are changed by the things we say and do. "pretend" vs. "real" doesn't matter to me, if people say i'm a fake person i don't care, if someone says i'm a fake _woman_ i get mad because that's bullshit, but fakeness in general?

one of the things i consciously do is that i overtly try to take everything someone says as if they mean it. someone makes a "joke" and i take it completely seriously. a benign example is what happens to me when i tell this joke i learned as a kid. the joke goes like this:

my dog has no nose!

how does he smell?

terrible!

the funny thing, though, is if you try to tell that joke in real life, if you tell people your dog has no nose, nobody's going to play along and ask how the dog _smells_. they're going to say "oh my god, that's awful, what happened to your dog?" so that's what i do, is i no-sell a lot of humor. it's particularly easy for me because it just means turning on autism brain and taking everything everyone says as if they mean it literally. i understand subtext and metaphor, sometimes too well, but a lot of times treating everything on a completely literal level is the only way i can keep from getting lost in a maze of ideas where i don't know what's true or false anymore.

and i think that's what happens with a lot of the "brain worm" stuff. the jargon file from back in the '80s talks about this phenomenon. they call it "ha ha only serious". something's a joke but you also believe it. there's some cognitive dissonance in there... we all have to live with extremely high levels of cognitive dissonance, it's a basic survival skill these days.

i'm from the generation they used to call "gen x"... i was raised on irony, irony-poisoned some people call it these days. young folks these days are hyper earnest and straightforward, and i think a lot of it is because they saw what happened to us. irony is a dead scene, these days.

i was involved in an "ironic" cult in the 90s, and the guy who founded it did a whole documentary where the whole point was to say "IT WAS A JOKE, I WAS KIDDING"... he seems like a good enough guy, but i don't know that he really understood what he was doing, what he was starting. because he started the whole thing after reading about jim jones, about the lengths people would go for religion, so he said "i'll start one of my own, if people will die for this surely people will give me a dollar for mine..."

but jim jones wasn't starting a real religion either! i didn't know this for a long time, he was a communist, he was trying to use religion as a trojan horse... he didn't get kicked out of indianapolis for being psycho, he got kicked out for not being racist enough... jim jones, i think he's a good example of brain worms, it wasn't even that he was lied to, it was that he lied to _himself_... his "religion" was fake, it was a con, until it wasn't... he got high on his own supply, he, uh, drank the kool-aid. quite literally in this case.

so i'm involved in this "joke religion" and suddenly it becomes not quite a joke. the same way, back in 2010 i went to washington for the jon stewart/stephen colbert rally... it was, again, a "joke" rally but when i was there with 300,000 people at the mall on washington it started feeling different, started feeling like anything could happen. it's not a matter of individuals... you get enough people together in one place and stuff starts getting a little crazy.

my dog has no nose!
how does he smell?

terrible!

Let's also never forget, Hitler tried to use this joke to kill people.