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

‪I honestly don’t know where else to talk to about this.

So a longtime IRL friend (we’ve been friends since 7th grade) of mine who I still hang out with fairly frequently
has enmeshed himself in the online circle of aggrieved man-children surrounding “comicsgate” and the Right-ish shithead politics involved with it. He himself recently finished a graphic novel and is trying to raise money to get it independently published, which I suspect was how he got sucked into this.

Recently I noticed a rightward slant to a lot of his social media posts but it wasn’t until today when I took a closer look and saw that he’s been hobnobbing with a lot of alt-right adjacent type folks and actively arguing with “SJWs”. He’s always been an opinionated, stubborn bastard (as am I) but his opinions were usually relegated to things like comics and movies. Now he’s apparently following dudes like Stephen Crowder and tweeting recommendations for books by Ben Shapiro. BEN MOTHERFUCKING SHAPIRO. Ugh.

Maybe I’m a shitty friend but that’s kinda beyond the pale, no? I can’t expect everyone in my life to share my politics but some kind of baseline “don’t be a right-wing piece of shit” rule still applies, right?

It’s just heartbreaking because he’s not a jerk at all IRL. He’s always been a good friend and has helped me out and had my back numerous times. But in his online life he’s kinda turning into a real “why won’t you let me debate you, coward” sort of douche.

So far this hasn’t come up because these days we don’t really interact online much (and in fact it was only today I realized how far down the rabbit hole he’d gone). We get together to do pub trivia once a week and that’s usually our hang out time.

He’s aware of my political leanings but then again I’m not sure he understands why his newfound preoccupation with owning “SJWs” online would be alarming to me. I feel debating him would be fruitless. I’m too thin-skinned anyway. I dunno. This is such a bummer to me.

I think lightly sticking to the “that’s not really my experience, why do you say that?” soft peddling of dissent works if you’re trying to remain friends. Being involved in his non-political social life helps, because sometimes this shit is contrarian internet junk where dudes lack a really social outlet and decide the best way to do so is to get really angry and blow off steam, which is where these outrage merchants really dig in

If you do feel the need to call out, be cautious and stick to issues and not widespread anti-whatever stances. As much as those types like to complain about identity politics, they tend to stick all of their issues together and anyone challenging one piece is an affront to their adopted conservative identity.

Being involved in his non-political social life helps, because sometimes this shit is contrarian internet junk where dudes lack a really social outlet and decide the best way to do so is to get really angry and blow off steam, which is where these outrage merchants really dig in

Yeah he’s always been the type to adopt an opinion and be extremely, rigidly adamant about it and then later adopt a completely different opinion and act as if he’d always thought that way. Being his friend for almost 25 years I’m pretty used to that but this time his gripes and resentments are being reinforced by a whole community of fellow agry nerds with which he networks. It’s kind of terrifying, to be honest.

The only remotely “comforting” aspect of this whole business is that most of my friend’s bullshit is currently confined to the world of comics. Which is probably why I haven’t noticed it until now.

I suppose, to add a minor point to what mh has said, stick to the talking about the ideas/behaviours rather than making it personal ("that idea doesn't ring true to me" rather than "you're wrong and bad, and here's why")? Possibly implicit too, but I often find that approach works better than personalising things too much.

I have this, though its a relative (in their 30s). Its been gradually increasing over the last few years, jordan peterson, ben shapiro, there are 37 genres now , snowflakes, virtue signalling, brexit, cultural marxism, jacob rees mogg, socialists. The own understanding or nuance isn't there, the straight repetition of right wing talking points.

What to do? the conclusion Ive come to, is...nothing. You have to look at yourself here, what is this debating you're imagining is going to happen. A debate is when two people accept the premise or framework of such. If you think you're going to go in their house and change their mind, it doesnt work like that. Any 'debate' should be initiated by them, not you, and only partake if they are asking you something, not if they are telling you something and putting a question mark on the end. Otherwise, you're being used by someone honing their opinion, you're fulfilling a role. The radicalized person never asks open questions.

But also you have to be honest with yourself - any kind of "yes, but dont you think that"....this is no good, for anyone!

I think when this happens you're dealing with something more existential than a debate really covers. 'Are you one of us, or not, anything else is just hot air'. I was once asked in email, by my relative, about my thoughts on the situation with Russia. I have a fairly detailed answer trying to cover as many bases as possible. Did it make any difference to anything? Ive no idea because there it was never mentioned again, it wasnt what they were looking for, they were looking for Britain good Russia bad - any detail on it, they saw as obsfucation, a dilution of the greater point. I will answer if they ask questions like this, and answer in good faith, but I wont push anything. Any such debate is framed around 'winning' (damn, all those videos on youtube where somebody is EVISCERATING or DESTROYING somebody else!)

I have a simple(ish) rule, if someone asks me openly or in good faith, I will respond the same. If someone talks at me, the best they'll get is "nah, not for me, dont see that at all", but they are more likely to get "ah, no idea, dunno owt about it mate". You don't have to be involved in statements masquerading as conversations!

Sorry its a bit unfocussed, Ive had this on the go for a while! quite hard to condense thoughts on the fly

One thing that struck me about this form of self-radicalization is how much its about repetition - simplification and repetition. For people making the mistake of engaging on some of these topics, its not about being on the right or wrong side of that topic, its about having that topic be the one with airtime, conversation time. A conversation about 'the BBC and the universities are brainwashing youth with cultural marxism, the police will come after you for using the wrong pronoun, Birmingham is now a no go city run by muslims". Really? This isn't a conversation that even deserves 'I don't see it like that", or any of my time! Its better to steer conversation elsewhere. Its better for this to be taking up less of their thought and talk time, and its certainly better for it to be taking up less of mine.

De-radicalizing people, i think is better achieved by getting them to think about some other damn things, engaging just hardens still further

(not saying your friend is or isnt radicalized, but when people talk and it sounds like their repeating the words of someone else, well)

I'm not a good enough person to try to save anyone, I write off people who go beyond dipping their toes in the waters of Peterson/Shapiro/et al.. I struggle to be comfortably social with even 'mainstream' Republicans these days, the American conservative worldview is so aggressively reactionary and hateful - your average suburban GOP voter just hasn't progressed to saying the quiet part loud.

sage stuff from anvil there

yep

also youre not his da, short answer

Repeating "I've never seen that" helps, as often it gets a "well, neither have I but" acknowledgement.

why not murder them

NAILS IT

get over it. people have opinions. furthermore people are more than their media consumption habits and painting somebody as "infected" because of their media choices is some weird dehumanization Othering that shouldnt impact a real life friendship. OP says they are irl friends that hang out w this person once a week. you don't feel comfortable discussing political topics with them in real life, yet you will make a big post on the internet and talk about them with strangers? this passive aggressive signalling through media choices has poisoned YOUR mind as well.

if it's a person you care about irl then talk to them. if you can't stand their social media posts you can hide them. it is like a two click action. if you need everyone of your friends to subscribe to the same media you do then it would seem the friendship is secondary to your social media feed. get over yourself.

https://i.imgur.com/1WU8ron.jpg

being into comicsgate is not about "media preferences"

To be honest, the main issue for me isn’t “can I change his mind?” That won’t happen. It’s more, “can I continue being friends with him?” If he stays confined to complaining about “SJWs” ruining the comics industry online, maybe, but if it devolves beyond that? I’m not sure it will, but I can’t tell anymore. It seems like a lot of seemingly sane people’s brains have been broken over the last few years.

Uh, x-post

Adam, your post is more than a little fucked. 'Dehumanization' and 'othering' is exactly what this shit is all about. It's informed by very thinly-veiled white supremacy, and that kind of reappropriation of the language of oppression is exactly what they use to paint themselves as victims. 'Victims' of people who just want to see their own perspectives represented in media which is overwhelmingly white and male and hetero. You don't get to champion a viewpoint like that and then brush it off with a 'but I'm a cool guy otherwise'.

I wasn't even aware of comicsgate before this thread but of course there's a comicsgate, and of course it's in opposition to the exact comics and creators I would've expected. Expected but depressing as hell.

I dunno, man, no one can really tell you whether to remain friends with someone or not. Personally, I couldn't, but then I've never had trouble disconnecting myself from toxic people. The employment of 'SJW' as a pejorative is so pernicious because that particular utterance is several steps removed from what it's actually saying. You pooh-pooh the SJWs, which means you're against the social justice warriors, which tells me that you're against social justice, which in turn suggests you're for social injustice. And if you're a straight white dude, that tells me pretty much everything I need to know.

Shunning and ostracization are underrated methods of letting people know that their antisocial (in the most literal sense) views/behavior are unacceptable, imo.

I dunno, they seem pretty popular right now and I don't see them having much of an effect. Not that you need the effect to be clear, I don't think I could remain friends with a comicsgater either.

won't somebody save the alt-right from dehumanization and othering lmao

Is comicsgate different than gamergate? I've cut off ties with most of my family because of their abhorrent views. I am not making small talk and sharing my life with them out of duty when they believe and say shitty things about women and other races. I put in my time trying to rationalize or have them try to restrain themselves. Out.

It’s basically Gamergate 2

From what I can tell, anyway

Lovely. Sigh.

it is absolutely a personal decision to make. personally i have enough problems in my life and i don't need "friends" who are continually spewing toxic bullshit, whether it's openly or on a passive aggressive level. i'm not equivocating here, but i haven't found this to be a specifically right-wing problem. leftists who spend most of their time, in 2018, complaining about how terrible hillary clinton is will get the chopping block just as surely as anybody who uses the term "sjw" pejoratively will.

i've said it before and i'll keep saying it - when i cut people off it's not because i'm judging them as inferior. if anybody is "inferior" it's me, because i haven't got the energy to put up with that sort of thing anymore. i'm totally occupied with my own crazy, and don't have time for anybody else's.

^^^ This too. I've had to put space between friends that I like but they spend all day texting me mundane complaints about shit everyone hates.

The Clintons are terrible tbf

This thread has really great clusterfuck potential

completely baffled by adam's post. latebloomer, you have my sympathies, i don't know what exactly i'd do. i'm on a weekly bar trivia team as a device to regularly see a certain cluster of friends and shoot the shit about movies, and i really can't imagine it being an enjoyable or meaningful experience if below the surface was the awareness that one of them is carrying water for alt-right talking points as a way of blowing off steam online or whatever it is. that's not a person i want in my life. but the exact etiquette and approach of making that cut, i don't know. for me personally, if they were really committed to this stuff i couldn't stay friends (and probably, we would have drifted apart long ago for not having much in common). we've spent a lot of time talking about this w/ regard to right-wing family, but friends are a slightly different matter in a lot of ways...

if it's not QUITE to that point... hrrrrrm. i imagine staging an intervention would only feed the "libs are out to shut us down" mentality, but is there some viable version of "hey, man, i noticed you've been expressing some intense feelings online, has everything been okay?" or maybe even a way around to discussing his emotional state/life situation without mentioning the political stuff --- you're not his therapist, but if you are his friend it is mayyyyybe conceivable that he's still early in being seduced by this stuff (or susceptible to it being a brief phase that he later looks back on with embarrassment). and that it might be genuinely useful to open up a channel to talk about whatever it is that's leading him to frustration and grievance and blaming-the-sjws. it depends what kind of friendship it is, how close you are, how much cred you have with him versus how much he feels the youtube mini-limbaughs really get him, how much work it's worth to you, all of that stuff.

I liked South Park's depiction of Kyle's dad staying up nights to troll online like it's his job while drinking red wine.

If you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time
People have opinions. Get over it.

I mean, wrt this particular sitch, I can hang with people who don't agree with me politically/philosophically/religiously/etc but there are certain uncrossable ideological lines and stanning for white supremacy is one of those. Maybe laying it out in terms of 'disagreement is fine, championing oppression is not' would be helpful?

Argh, this thread made me google comicsgate and now I hate knowing what it is. Tell your friend I blame him for that.

pretty sure most of the people i drink with are some kind of right wing but it's not like we spend much time talking about politics except when they accuse me of being a Maoist

and i agree with them and tell them they'll be up against the wall first

Also, one possible tack to take wrt comics creators in particular is to discuss the reappropriation of Pepe the Frog. Ask him how he would feel about people hijacking his own work to express political opinions completely counter to his own. And how he feels about a professional like Van Sciver in particular doing just that. Even divorced of the political implications, it's hugely disrespectful and unprofessional.

Oh man, I just read up on comicsgate too. This shit is so unbelievably stupid.

Yep :(

I think the thing these trolling dipshits don't get is that you don't get to claim "oh, I'm actually a nice guy in person, I'm just trolling" when 100% of your public persona is racist, sexist, garbage

if you genuinely believe the problem is that it's the "wrong people" getting work or acclaim based only on their ethnicity, gender, or views... then spend your time advocating for people you think are talented and help them find an audience

latebloomer, has your friend published anything before? there genuinely are some barriers to entry if you're not established, but I don't think any of them have to do with being a white man. I knew some people who genuinely tried to break into mainstream comics a number of years ago, and none of the reasons they failed to get a strong foothold had anything to do with this comicsgate horseshit.

Not to get too off track but was a picture of a bunch of young women enjoying milkshakes really a catalyst?

women can't be employed in a coveted field, happy, and pictured together. it just drives dudes completely insane

I also didn't know about Comicsgate (or I knew, but about the one a few years ago around "hey guys maybe don't put traced porn shots on comic covers") - the article here makes the point that it doesn't even have the figleaf of ethics in games journalism, it's literally just "we fear the rise of women and brown people"

https://www.inverse.com/article/41132-comicsgate-explained-bigots-milkshake-marvel-dc-gamergate

I am not sure if laughing is the right response to idiotic claims, but I snorted when I saw this gem from one of these comicsgate turds

good lord pic.twitter.com/S2aY5Fcnwg

— BAKOON (@BAKKOOONN) May 14, 2018

I think the ongoing collapse of legitimacy of liberal institutions, increasingly anxiety producing omnipresence of (social)media, increasing forgetfulness of 20th century totalitarianisms (and hence the taboos around them) and finally ambient stress from environmental collapse all push ideological identification closer to the Cult mindset than it's ever been since the 40s. Or at the very least the melding of Cult tendencies familiar from the mid-century with political discourse seems like a natural evolution of the form. Hence, you should take your cues from this guy:

https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-from-yourself/

All nerd media needs to morph into a wall-to-wall multicultural pansexual orgy until all the chuds are stricken with massive rage aneurysms, at which time we can return to business as usual.

xpost Yes, I feel like deprogramming techniques are probably going to be an increasingly-useful tool to have in one's belt, sadly.

even if it was, and it definitely is NOT the case, that writers/artists are getting gigs because of a hype cycle and not due to extraordinary talent, these guys have short memories. a lot of the so-called adults making the most noise are my age or older and came to age during the time when the superhero comics market was 90% hype, there was Wizard magazine and a couple knockoffs publishing lists of "hot artists" that had nothing to do with artistic ability, and the comics were pretty disposable

and nearly without exception, the "hot" writers/artists were young men in their 20s -- it was some weird confirmation that every kid drooling over their comics collection, if they were into it enough and practiced drawing misshapen women and big guns, could be a success in the industry in a few years

The biggest problem here is that there's 457 easy logical arguments against believing any of this dumb shit and none of them will take because this dumb shit isn't founded on a logical argument in the first place. It's people who mistakenly believe the source of their insecurities is external to them and who've found an echo chamber to point them in the direction of an easy scapegoat.

Like, no responsible professional is gonna say 'yeah, sorry, forget about getting into the industry at a time when probably thousands of different comics are being produced every month, and you can blame affirmative action' but at the same time these dopes are busy expressing butthurt on Twitter rather than asking responsible professionals for advice.

we don’t really interact online much

then what is the problem? you say you hang out every week and have known him since 7th grade, this seems like a very longstanding friendship.

when I took a closer look and saw that he’s been hobnobbing with a lot of alt-right adjacent type folks and actively arguing with “SJWs”. Now he’s apparently following dudes like Stephen Crowder and tweeting recommendations for books by Ben Shapiro. BEN MOTHERFUCKING SHAPIRO. Ugh.

okay i have no idea who these people are. please explain why this is some decades-old friendship killing thing. these people are media critics, right? why judge him on believing what you believe that these media people believe.

It’s just heartbreaking because he’s not a jerk at all IRL. He’s always been a good friend and has helped me out and had my back numerous times.

so he sounds like a real person in real life but you have a problem with his virtual avatar posting links. if he's a stand up fellow irl who cares?

But in his online life he’s kinda turning into a real “why won’t you let me debate you, coward” sort of douche

hide his offensive posts on social media & your newsfeed. don't respond to his posts, don't give him that attention, that platform. if you don't like it, and it seems like you don't, then don't do it. it is very simple. don't take the bait. it is the best way to deal w a troll. if you decide this is cowardly and you want to be a knight in shining armor defending whatever issue he is talking about then you are stepping right into whatever SJW role that linked story has prefabricated for you, it will be a useless endeavor, possibly giving you some ownage gratification but little else, and will harm your irl relationship in the long run.

for that matter, it is harmful to the society at large for progressives to cut off their "infected" friends. doing so sort of proves them right, that these ideologies have indeed taken away a very real relationship from them, that the other side is extremist and only interested in defending an ideology, etc. i mean, people really do sound like Warriors when they say shit like "they'll be up against the wall first"

Hey Adam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqH_0LPVoho

I recently found out this crackpot character I used to hero worship a bit in my formative years is a fairly typical bigot these days. Fuck knows how he justifies being a racist cos his biological dad was Afro-Caribbean. But he used to be funny as fuck and had a rep for breaking into local chemical plants to steal ingredients for his amateur pyrotechnics experiments and occasionally blowing up phone-boxes. He is welder these days and is Islamophobic, hates Eastern Europeans, rants about "benefits scroungers" (even though he was on the "rock'n'roll" himself for the best part of a decade). It saddens me that he is so fucking thick-headed these days, but I'd probably still talk to him and be civil. But wouldn't bother talking politics with him for sure.

not sure about your friend, latebloomer, but the red pill types i know have either been rejected at some point (because of their own issues, which they then blame on others) or they've been consistently unhappy and searching for answers, and this is just the latest place they think they've found them.

empathy can be pretty tough for people like this but it's important to try to hold onto it. i'm pretty tolerant of other viewpoints generally speaking, but for me it's not the opinions themselves that make me roll my eyes and ignore people (even though i may disagree strongly with them!) but rather the constant need to make waves, or always wanting to talk about every single little thing that the opposition is doing like it's the end of the world (which really does go for the left more and makes me want to quit a conversation immediately), or the trolling, or the clear need to intentionally hurt other people. so i mean i guess you can try to bring him back from the brink and talk about actual issues without the rhetoric or tedious right wing talking points. or lead by example, bring him out of the echo chamber.

he used to be funny as fuck and had a rep for breaking into local chemical plants to steal ingredients for his amateur pyrotechnics experiments and occasionally blowing up phone-boxes.

Tyler Durden was probably a key figure in the lives of many current "not as smart as they think" alt-right types and that's a pretty good example!

for that matter, it is harmful to the society at large for progressives to cut off their "infected" friends. doing so sort of proves them right, that these ideologies have indeed taken away a very real relationship from them

Foreseeing a backlash and a social cost to espousing antisocial ideologies doesn't make you 'right'. It just means you're able to identify basic cause and effect. 'See? I told you the maaaaaan would arrest me if I burnt down that warehouse! Typical!'

At any rate, this isn't even some conservative vs. liberal argument about how taxes should be allocated. It's a situation with zero benefit to anyone beyond the ego gratification of online sadists. Whose perspective we should consider with sympathy lest society-at-large be harmed...I guess...?

Like if you're going to argue that these people have a valid point to make, please tell me what is gained by the point they're making.

sez he like

https://78.media.tumblr.com/9a03aca158969fe68758babae8cced37/tumblr_ms6ariMAvh1s9kboko1_500.gif

To be clear that was aimed at old lunch re bruneau and doesn’t necessarily refer to latebloomer’s alt-right mate who may still be reachable

that harper's article that ryan linked to is good

Yeah, I know I'm failing to follow the 'do not engage illogic with logic' advice I gave upthread.

there was a recent episode of This American Life about a confrontation between one of the more assertive right-wing student groups and the students and faculty of a university that alluded to, but didn't spell out, the methodology of their confrontations

and that's really it in a nutshell: the politics are secondary to the provoking of a confrontation, and how to shape the views of the community by making it a strong us-versus-them conflict as opposed to a conversation. saying and doing the most offensive things in order to provoke a reaction in kind, which is then held up as some sort of breach of... I don't know, values or civility

setting yourself in opposition to people who, for the most part, just want to be treated fairly and equally by trolling them and making their lives hell is pretty weak

like, it's one thing to mock people for invoking "the patriarchy" but if you ask one of these alt-right kids "ok, there are 80% male faculty members at your school, and advocating for hiring based on merit alone isn't changing this, and it's been shown that students generally feel more valued when some of their teachers are a reflection of their own live experiences. what do you think we should do?" they have no answers. and the vicious part isn't that they want to uphold the status quo -- they're actively trying to provoke the people who are already exceptions to the rule to anger, so that they can drive them out and screw up the system

the long answer is that most of the people being taken by these hucksters aren't going to see any material gains, either. you could have an all white male staff and still fail all your classes because you refuse to learn, but they're not quite seeing that

going back to the comics thing, it's pretty much the same thing. the comics industry was dominated by white men, and guess what? not every kid who could draw a halfway decent spider-man was guaranteed a job then, either

had somehow never heard of comicsgate but jfc that is some deranged shit.

In my experience, or in my own personal case, I see some of what mh says. For my relative, the them and us is existential, and the 'them' will always be the 'them', discussion is obsfucation, its more deep seated than that, its not going to change anything, it is merely the sound of a petty criminal trying to avoid his fate in court.

In some ways it predates all this recent commotion in the media, thats just given it a structure, a framework. Predating all that was an outlook that was very black and white, anything other than that is perceived as trying to muddy the waters. My 'role' is either to agree with them, or failing that, act as the opponent should. You're with us, or you're one of them, a snowflake, a Putin sympathizer, brainwashed by the bbc, there isnt anything else but these two options.
it feels like a desire for certainty. They also only believe in the tangible, depression doesnt exist, anxiety don't exist, priviledge doesnt exist, simply cannot conceptualize them, they are made up excuses.

In some way, its the same thing about reading or learning. What does the university lecturer have to offer the aristocrat or businessman? If the lecturer is so smart, why doesnt he have any money. Who needs their notebooks and manuals, after all, how hard can it be

a lot of the materials are, like ryan alluded, very cult-like. they don't try to teach, they try to explain that you already know what is right and the people who say otherwise are your enemies. it's a self-protective hubris -- acknowledging that others may have perspectives that you could learn from, or that you might have been mistaken in your beliefs, is a blow to your sense of self. you always had value, you were always right, and here's this man to tell you those things. you just needed a little boost, to line things up to be more effective.

when i mentioned that people are unhappy and searching for answers, i think the subtext is that they're searching for answers that fit into their specific worldview rather than challenge their worldview. they've maybe been challenged to some extent before because of those views and have been seeking out their safe space, or waiting for a safe time to unleash them. it's obvious of course that the response many people have to being challenged for their views is to shift further in that direction rather than questioning themselves, and whether or not they were correct in the first place.

In lieu of full-scale education in critical thinking skills, the least we can do for kids is to promote the idea that the only version of being wrong that isn't totally 100% okay and natural is when you double down in lieu of self-reflection.

imo the hardest thing is acknowledging that life is complex and there's never one good right answer that is going to work for you forever, so you should probably think things through and accept a little ambiguity

the thing that blows my mind about the whateveronline-gate people is that a bunch of the twitter hustlers drifted right from that into the alt-right, and some have jumped ship and are -- I shit you not -- selling vitamins and diet supplements now

This is why, i think, the most effective way of not being pulled into .these weird conversations that actually arent conversations - is just not to go along with it, not to play the game.

I can't criticize anyone for cutting off or ostracizing, because each situation is different and you have to do what you feel is the right thing, but I think just not letting yourself get sucked in goes a long way. You're not obliged to discuss any particular topic, if I tried to bring every topic round to involve leopards, nobody would indulge me with that! They wouldnt debate me about the leopards, they'd just change the subject

the thing that blows my mind about the whateveronline-gate people is that a bunch of the twitter hustlers drifted right from that into the alt-right, and some have jumped ship and are -- I shit you not -- selling vitamins and diet supplements now

Yeah I heard Cernovich was getting into some kind of block chain-based mysticism? It’s all just so stupid.

It's like when my brother tried to open up a debate about why women made poor managers and he could never work for a woman. I am not debating. I call him an asshole and move on in my day.

they don't try to teach, they try to explain that you already know what is right and the people who say otherwise are your enemies. it's a self-protective hubris -- acknowledging that others may have perspectives that you could learn from, or that you might have been mistaken in your beliefs, is a blow to your sense of self.

its a lil too easy tbh

yea these dudes are all drifting into the Alex Jones zone, which, to be fair, is a hell of a lucrative grift

decidedly not what i was hinting at my man

As a general thing, people need to be reminded that the extent to which their own demographic info overlaps with that of a cisgender white Christian American male without some sort of physical or mental disability is the extent to which their problems are probably largely of their own making.

man, I wish there were easy answers

half of this shit is like, why are you even putting all this effort into it? get a job, maybe stop for a beer on the way home, watch some tv or read comic books or whatever. why does every person need to invest all this time in who is writing what and why?

I mean, that goes for me too, but I’m not crafting my identity around it, I’m just posting about it on a message board and shrugging

adam, seriously.... wtf. these are not just some random 'media critics' latebloomer disagrees with, though that is precisely what they want to define themselves as, in a tendentious gambit to deny that they're facilitating harassment campaigns as a wedge to keep women, minorities, and gender nonconforming individuals out of their field of interest. you're coming off a little like "so he posted a bunch of swastikas. what's the big deal? i've never seen that symbol before, is it a thing or something? from what i've been able to gather it seems like it's something to do with south asian religions. the guy's a good friend, why rock the boat over something like that?" etc.

Old Lunch just laid down more than the usual amount of wisdom there, holy shit

xpost to mh Particularly when, in this instance, the complaint is that those who've completely dominated 99% of the history of a particular medium dominate slightly less of that medium at this particular moment.

As a general thing, people need to be reminded that the extent to which their own demographic info overlaps with that of a cisgender white Christian American male without some sort of physical or mental disability is the extent to which their problems are probably largely of their own making.

this seems unlikely to convince people of the error of their ways, at least as an opening gambit? is there a third option beyond "blame SJWs" and "blame yourself"?

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P6AA1sBL7N8/hqdefault.jpg

Making it about blame is kinda the crux of the entire issue. If the mechanisms of society are skewed heavily in your favor (however unfairly), you can make the most of that fact or you can bitch and moan as if you've been personally affronted or had something taken from you when less privileged people succeed despite having the deck stacked against them.

most people end up as failures of one sort or another, making a point of reminding white males that their status as failure is wholly their own fault - what is the positive result you think will result from this? that a critical mass of white guys will accept that all their problems are because they objectively suck, and they'll then start supporting social justice?

If you were to show this thread to someone who has contracted brain rot from alt-right memes, it would probably comfort them in their belief system. But what does it matter, since barely anyone cares for dialogue at this point anyway? Perhaps a war will sort it all out at some point.

soref you may need to de-strawmannify this bit

wholly their own fault

pretty stubbornly mischaracterizes OL's post, which reads

probably largely of their own making

And IME it's not necessarily about a "positive result." More about discouraging the enormously *negative* results entailed by white dudes deciding that their problems can & should be blamed on women and nonwhite ppl

and the record will show that when men blame women for their problems, the results are very often highly asymmetrical (aka death)

similarly to how when white people blame people of color the results are highly asymmetrical (aka death)

i went to high school with two cisgender white christian males who were addicted to heroin and hung themselves at the ages of 15 and 17. must've been there own fault i guess

or possibly reliance on viewing the world through identitarian bromides is also a form of brain worms

ugh idbros

Reading comprehension is a useful thing for kids to learn, too, I find.

The earlier, the better.

In lieu of full-scale education in critical thinking skills, the least we can do for kids is to promote the idea that the only version of being wrong that isn't totally 100% okay and natural is when you double down in lieu of self-reflection.

― Delightful in Microdoses (Old Lunch), Monday, May 14, 2018 11:26 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I remember doubling down as a youth, no matter how trivial the stakes or how uninformed I was. The only way to win in life is to turn every conversation into an argument, and then get the other person to admit you have won that argument.

Hi, jim. A bad faith misreading of something someone says is not a counterargument.

half of this shit is like, why are you even putting all this effort into it? get a job, maybe stop for a beer on the way home, watch some tv or read comic books or whatever. why does every person need to invest all this time in who is writing what and why?

I mean, that goes for me too, but I’m not crafting my identity around it, I’m just posting about it on a message board and shrugging

― mh, Monday, May 14, 2018 3:09 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark

yeah this is how i feel about it. and it is true, different people come at this stuff w different levels of engagement, different levels of knowledge. some people genuinely don't care, or haven't spent all day long thinking it through.

these are not just some random 'media critics' latebloomer disagrees with, though that is precisely what they want to define themselves as

i am not and engaged as you are on this topic and the culture around these people. see, this is an opportunity for you to explain who these people are.

you're coming off a little like "so he posted a bunch of swastikas. what's the big deal? i've never seen that symbol before, is it a thing or something? from what i've been able to gather it seems like

ok this is bullshit. you are accusing me of things i am not saying. Dr. C i love talking with you about music or video games or movies or whatever but you need to rethink this hostility. peace out everyone.

Hi, jim. A bad faith misreading of something someone says is not a counterargument.

― The lovely and talented Loretta Switt and the irascible Jamie Farr (Old Lunch), Monday, May 14, 2018 2:36 PM (nineteen seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not bad faith, if you were trying to express something that wasn't entirely reductive and banal it doesn't come across to me no matter how many times i look the sentence over

and while i don't buy the whole "the rise of the alt-right is the fault of the tumblr left" argument - there's nothing that excuses being conservative, let alone alt-right imo - this kind of rhetoric is absolutely beloved by the online far-right

adam, i often enjoy your posts on those topics also! i have no global beef w/ you. my post came from, it was pointed out in response to yr first post itt that these was not just a matter of disagreeing with the media critics other people read. you came back with "okay i have no idea who these people are. please explain why this is some decades-old friendship killing thing. these people are media critics, right? why judge him on believing what you believe that these media people believe." i said that this came off "a little like" a person who's never heard of swastikas wondering what the big deal is. which is something it comes off a little like imo. i guess i could have just said "use google" or "go reread the gamergate thread and then take a guess as to what kind of content might be at stake here." maybe it wasn't the most charitable response i could have posted but when you've already been told that the stakes are high and there's white/male revanchist shit afoot, why adopt the "i need to know more to understand why this would be a friendship-killing thing" posture?

I very intentionally omitted any mention of fault or blame from what I wrote earlier. If you 'win' the demographic jackpot most favored by our society, you have decidedly more control over your fate than do those who are born or who self-select (eg, religion) into groups which have historically been othered and oppressed. This is not to say you won't face obstacles and hardships and all kinds of shit beyond your control, but you have a significantly better chance of overcoming those hardships than someone with a similar background who also happens to be brown or gay or a woman.

"you're coming off a little like "so he posted a bunch of swastikas. what's the big deal? i've never seen that symbol before, is it a thing or something? from what i've been able to gather it seems like"

ok this is bullshit. you are accusing me of things i am not saying. Dr. C i love talking with you about music or video games or movies or whatever but you need to rethink this hostility

Casino 100% OTM, since Ethan Van Sciver is the most significant proponent of gamergate2.

not bad faith, if you were trying to express something that wasn't entirely reductive and banal it doesn't come across to me no matter how many times i look the sentence over

I don’t think Dr. C was being at all hostile, either! just exasperated because these events and jerks are very readily searchable and most people seem to have a handle on what we’re talking about without describing them in detail in-thread

If you 'win' the demographic jackpot most favored by our society, you have decidedly more control over your fate than do those who are born or who self-select (eg, religion) into groups which have historically been othered and oppressed. This is not to say you won't face obstacles and hardships and all kinds of shit beyond your control, but you have a significantly better chance of overcoming those hardships than someone with a similar background who also happens to be brown or gay or a woman.

otmXten

No, white doodz (of whom I am one), it's not that you've had an easy life. Or that everything bad in your life is wholly your fault.

It's simply that the things that were hard for you would have been HARDER for someone coming from different circumstances. And if you're a reasonably well-adjusted, self-reliant individual, it does you no harm to recognize that.

this thread is very long and hard to read but nonetheless here's my experiences:

my friend from school J, who I didn't see for a good five years, moved to a flat beside mine a few years ago, and we ended up reconnecting. J is a good person - she is funny, and thoughtful, and honest. But she has also suffered in her life at the hands of abusive family and bullying for her weight. Her first proper boyfriend (who she met three years ago, at 28 years old) was a horrible man who dealt Class A drugs and told his flatmates that it wasn't a problem for them to walk in and watch them have sex. J has some really fucked up ideas about her own self-worth because of this, but she also has some horrible opinions about women and feminism, "she wore a short dress so she was giving off the signals she wanted it" basic horror stuff. Speaking with mutual friends, it's clear that J's problematic antifeminist views are a result of internalising shitty behaviour from men about her appearance and value and how she's processed some of the things that happened to her - I think its easier for her to believe it's her fault than she spend two years hung up on a bad bastard. I've tried to suggest the wrongness of this internal thought process but it doesn't work at all. Interstingly she loves RuPaul's Drag Race and from watching that has developed some of the most compassionate and supportive stances on LGBT issues. So when she says other problematic stuff, my belief is it's borne out of ignorance and fear, and the best way to deal with that isn't to hector her but to keep introducing her to culture that will unprovocatively change her mind.

my partner's cousin's partner is obsessed with Glasgow Rangers and of course all the accompanying sectarian chat. He is very right-wing. He is also 18 and his social life consists of travelling across Scotland to watch games. I think for him it's about the drinking and the community spirit, and from that he's developed some *interesting opinions* on a lot of things but mainly Catholics and Muslims. I'm not particularly close to him and so I don't have the opportunity to challenge him on it regularly, instead we do a lot of awkward squirming when we hear the conversation steer in any direction. I wish I could say something to him but the family dynamic isn't right for it to be my place.

my brother has had a lot of problems in his life - he took our parents splitting up hard and we've had other issues. At 13 he was drinking and smoking weed, and spent ten years moving through various uppers and downers as habits before deciding to get clean... which led to a gambling addiction to replace the substance abuse. He's moved on from all that and keeps himself occupied by drumming in a band he joined who recruited him via an online ad. The guys in the band are all in their 50s where my brother is not yet 30. They're a typical skinhead oi! band who sing songs about vigilante paedophile hunters. In other words my brother has joined a right-wing band. I don't think he ever realised because, by his own admission, politics isn't his thing. But he says things like "I don't think Tommy Robinson is racist, just Islamaphobic and that's understandable" and we've had full-on arguments in the pub over it. With my brother it's different - I know he's better than this and he's just so easily led astray. It's not an excuse - he chooses to invest time with these people who feed his head full of nonsense, and he says these things out loud by himself - but it's hard to stand back and let him just fall into this utter shit and I struggle to not fight him on it constantly, even though I know it does no good whatsoever.

The lack of a proper dad figures a lot into it for me, complex situation but the lack of a proper structure growing up, with no underlying feelings of security or safety, I think factored in a lot into wanting a black and white world of certainty where things are what they appear to be, and not unnecessarily complicated. So therefore, If you cant touch it then it doesn't exist and the people that are saying these things, are just trying to muddy the waters and deflect from what is obvious to them (no different to when people use overly flowery words that aren't appropriate to a situation and it feels like they are playing a trick) - a desire not for 'simpler times' but for solidity and certainty. 'Just get things done and stop whinging about it'

Some crossover with the 'masculinity' thread maybe?, which I haven't even looked at, but in terms of solidity and structure in the house growing up, and what happens if thats not something you can rely on.

This is why sometimes the things that sound like somebody else's words being parroted, is true! They are someone else's words, tried and tested with 28 million views on youtube or twitter or whatever. Those words appear solid, they got a million likes, then they got attacked which led to a million more likes, the security and certainty of being on the right side of a battle, knowing where you stand. Discussion and debate, and talking about stuff - these are all things which weaken that worked-for certainty, not strengthen it, so why would they want to open the door to all that again?

there's a difference between productive conversation and changing worldviews. discussions can be productive in that they develop and reinforce views or give a sense of purpose or engagement to the participants without being agreeable or polite or whatever (obv you can also get some of this from singing hymns, watching the worst youtube videos, or engaging w all sorts of culture that involves language; debate is not a totally unique activity imo). this will always happen down fault lines bc that's how discourse works.

but yeah in terms of changing ppl's minds I think it's best approached obliquely initially. humour is important, not so much in terms of witty takedowns or w/e but more just being good humoured, being yourself and being relaxed. more than anything I increasingly think that just being open and visible about what you believe makes a difference. seeing ppl thoughtfully and good-naturedly espousing their views grounds and humanises things, esp if they seem more appealing than yr radgy online culture warriors

As a general thing, people need to be reminded that the extent to which their own demographic info overlaps with that of a cisgender white Christian American male without some sort of physical or mental disability is the extent to which their problems are probably largely of their own making.

I know I know, the US, but the not seeing money/class in the list is very odd - Mark Zuckerberg's problems are more of his making than those of a coal miner - or those of the coal miner's teenage son, right?

Mo' money, mo' problems, iirc.

Yes, of course there are a myriad of other factors that open doors for people and allow them to create whole new sets of problems for themselves. And a lack of money, education, etc. definitely make for bigger hurdles, but the fact remains that those arenas are far more easily navigable for the demographics I mentioned.

aren't we talking a bit past each other when some ppl are mentioning problems like depression and addiction, but the comicsgate grievances are more "straight white men can't find jobs/representation in the comics industry any more"?

Like I can totally get being upset at anyone minimizing these issues, no matter how privileged the person affected, but when it comes to "discrimination" in the comics industry Old Lunch is totally OTM

xp that's totally true, but it'd also be true for any smaller collection of those attributes. I just think that if you're going to say "the more you match this list the more your problems are largely of their own making" - which is both true and an important point - then money needs to be on the list.

Daniel OTM about Old Lunch being OTM!

When people who have (and particularly people who've inherited the gains achieved by those before them) fail to appreciate how they got what they have, they begin to take what they have for granted, to expect. Expectation is bundled with the notion of deserving what you have, of having earned it. Which suggests that people who don't have what you have must not deserve it. And if they want what you have, it must entail something being taken from you, something you've earned. If you're stuck in this mindset of victimhood, under siege by some undeserving other, and the privilege you've enjoyed is compromised for any reason, the tendency may be to start laying blame upon that other. Because if you deserve and have earned what you have and expect it to continue unabated, if you're the unquestioned hero of your own narrative, then someone else has to be the villain. And this entire complex is further complicated by the fallacy of viewing privilege as some finite resource, of thinking that you're going to suffer some great loss because someone who doesn't look like you insists on asserting their personhood.

(NB, It's early yet and that may not be entirely coherent.)

There's also the aspect where resource is some finite resource, and privilege is what gets you more resource (CF 500 media studies papers about the rise in popularity of zombie movies (including particularly "grimy" zombie mobs) in a world starting to think about serious resources shortages in the medium term)

It probably goes without saying here, but a lot of the butthurt defensiveness on the part of the privileged when they feel their privilege being compromised is probably informed by their understanding, on some level, that they in fact did not earn much of the privilege they enjoy, that the disparity that enables their privilege was gained through oppression, by generations of those in a position of privilege gaming the system in their favor. That's a tough pill to swallow, so many opt for the red pill instead.

the whole blame argument is one i've not much stomach for anyway. is it my fault i suffer from severe clinical depression? no, not really, and christ it doesn't fucking matter. i can whine all day about how unfair it is that i'm depressed and nothing is going to change. i am still responsible for what i say and do, no matter how many cognitive distortions and outright delusions i have to deal with. these right-wingers today seem to lack almost entirely any sense of personal responsibility. whenever something goes wrong for them it's always somebody else's fault. until and unless that changes there's nothing at all i, or anyone else, can do to help.

and yeah, the just world fallacy needs to die in a fire.

on second thought, best bet is just hammering ppl over the head w generalised statements about privilege & responsibility, anyone that thinks this is useless has quit too soon

xxp Also a fear that the pendulum will swing back, and an appeal that it shouldn't swing back further than fair, because that wouldn't be fair! I mean in practice that means pointing at any move to the centre as the necessary correction that we can stop with now, right?

"True feminists want equality, but these fake feminists want to subjugate men"

on second thought, best bet is just hammering ppl over the head w generalised statements about privilege & responsibility, anyone that thinks this is useless has quit too soon

― ogmor

hey if you want to spend your time giving alt-righters the soft sell about why they should be decent human beings be my guest, i agree with you that it's probably essential to give people an out. i'm not trying to change anybody's mind and i'm not handing out carrots.

I read this in theroot yesterday and it seems applicable here. "Most people don’t want equality; they are simply seeking their opportunity to play the oppressor." I really hope that in the original post where lb is talking about his friend "owning sjw's" that only includes healthy debate and not, like, sending strangers rape threats.

i don't think that's true at all. i don't want to oppress anybody, i just have an insatiable desire for revenge based on real or perceived slights.

here is some ComicsGate BS, right on cue: https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/jawbreakers-comic-comicsgate-antarctic/

Oh, I totally have that too. But my basis for revenge is on specific people that I know.

I think there's something in the gulf between "these guys are just angry because people are paying attention to people who _aren't them_" and the anecdotes boxedjoy mentioned. All of those examples sound very familiar, but inherited attitudes and family dynamics or organically starting to absorb some political opinions from a new social group seem like a different animal from the mostly online gamergate/comicsgate groups.

There's something particular vicious about the pointed "punish the people we think are outliers" mentality when they're creating actual lists of names and attacking people. I guess it's completely on the table as opposed to glancing at a picture of women in an office and mumbling "oh, well you know how THEY got there" but honestly, the online mob is doing that, too. And that more insidious attitude, which occurs even in people who are otherwise reasonable, is where they gain ground.

ugh, that article. I mean it shouldn't be a revolutionary thought that white men's stories have been centered in this world for so long that it's utterly boring to always have them as a protagonist/writer. I don't know when it subconsciously changed for me but I have very little interest in consuming culture from that viewpoint. In this world, and me not being a white man, it is not interesting in the slightest.

yeah apart from all the other nonsense that comic looks appallingly bland and boring

Like, I am watching the second season of Billions right now and all these dudes are sooooo boring (granted I worked in finance for a decade so none of this is novel to me.) Thank goodness they put in a non-binary character to give it an interesting character.

I can only imagine that the industry's response will serve as a wake-up call to the creators of that comic, that they'll see this widespread repudiation of their viewpoint as a sign of its unacceptability, and that they will attempt to reign in their childish vitriol in the hope of being accepted as professionals that the industry will once again feel comfortable hiring.

Did u like my joke, y/n.

Or they can create graphics for dick supplements.

As a straight white cis American dude, I agree that pretty much all of the stories about people like me are unnecessary and played out.

At least like in Bojack, they had the good sense to make the depressed, alcoholic, ego/ennui-centric dude a horse.

Here's just one of the things about these Jawbreakers knuckleheads: you know they're going to have a massive tantrum over Antarctic cancelling their comic, but...fer chrissakes, you already raised $250 grand. Go self-publish your stupid, hateful little tract if you have to. I get the feeling they went through an established publisher in part to engineer a predictable situation they could then express butthurt about.

I do experience a mild enjoyment every time one of the idiots in this vein does something as a knee-jerk reaction that looks infinitely dumber than what they're protesting

I mean it shouldn't be a revolutionary thought that white men's stories have been centered in this world for so long that it's utterly boring to always have them as a protagonist/writer. I don't know when it subconsciously changed for me but I have very little interest in consuming culture from that viewpoint. In this world, and me not being a white man, it is not interesting in the slightest.

this post resonated with me enough to pipe up even though talking about this topic is akin to jumping into a cesspool. i realized this when i realized that i wanted to read to understand the stories of people who were not like me. reading about myself is pretty boring since i have to be myself every day for the rest of my life. i would much rather read about someone whose experience i would have no way of knowing unless i read about it. i was probably 12? reading men's stories was part of that, since i am not a man and was curious for a while about what they thought. that phase lasted about as long as my indie snob phase, maybe 3-4 years. i don't have a problem reading stories written by men as much as stories centered around the experiences of men.

and even then, there are plenty of interesting stories about men's experiences.
specifically i definitely don't ever need to read another author like richard yates again

The Root got their own Gamergater in the comments the other day, which was interesting:

https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/calling-the-police-is-white-peoples-applecare-for-black-1825954790 - search for SeriouslyMike

The vast majority of my reading over the past several years has been very pointedly about exposing myself to perspectives different than my own and trying to understand the historical context that informs the power dynamics we experience today. I feel like I learn something revelatory every day, and many of the things I learn are almost certainly part of the daily lived experience of someone in a less privileged position than me.

I'm sure it's surprising no one to note that the vast majority of comics DC and Marvel publish are still from the perspective of straight white males. And that even when high profile characters get turned into Not That - Thor, Cap, Iron Man - this usually lasts a short period of time before the original characters return. So it's not like ComicsGate is a reaction to any kind of real attempt to radically alter the demographic make-up of superhero characters, it's just now it's 85% straight white male protagonists as opposed to 95%.

i think a lot of it is being really, really mad that kamala khan ms. marvel is selling like gangbusters at barnes and noble, and there's nothing they can do about it.

I think there's a shade of now that the high profile characters have reverted, the SJWs responsible for the original aberration should learn their lesson and resign in shame. NB this is not how any part of that works.

I think that comfort and defining the edges of identity are huge when it comes to how comfortable people are with a diversity of writers. When I was younger, and had a lot fewer life experiences, my ability to relate to nearly any writer was pretty low. Because I was young, not that outgoing socially, and it was all somewhat foreign. But I did gravitate to writers with backgrounds that weren't that dissimilar to my own because there's this baseline where, especially if you're a novice when it comes to fiction, you can start to delineate your own views within those of characters. This guy is like me, but I'm more vocal, less outgoing, less worldly, more cynical.

You get something completely different from fiction, especially first-person fiction, when you're reading from the perspective of someone who has a much different background. And it's both liberating and enlightening, and I really don't think a lot of readers or even writers get that. Especially the writers who write characters who are different from themselves that come off as a caricature of what the writer thinks they'd be like.

It's been mentioned before on ilx but comics writer (among other professional works) Christopher Priest has written about his experiences in comics and his years of turning down work because he was only approached to write black characters. Which makes absolutely no sense, because he's a good writer and I've never read anything he did with a white male character and thought "wow, he got white guys completely wrong." But it's a low key indictment of everyone else in the industry -- editors really can't expect other people to write black characters and get them right

And this entire complex is further complicated by the fallacy of viewing privilege as some finite resource, of thinking that you're going to suffer some great loss because someone who doesn't look like you insists on asserting their personhood.

(NB, It's early yet and that may not be entirely coherent.)

― The lovely and talented Loretta Switt and the irascible Jamie Farr (Old Lunch), Tuesday, May 15, 2018 1:32 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As a straight white cis American dude, I agree that pretty much all of the stories about people like me are unnecessary and played out.

― The lovely and talented Loretta Switt and the irascible Jamie Farr (Old Lunch), Tuesday, May 15, 2018 3:31 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think your second post here kind of explains the 'fallacy' you mention in the first post - I think these comicsgate ppl know that there are still plenty of comics (and other forms of media) about white males, for the most part it seems like what they get defensive about is the idea that stories about white males are inherently worthless? and they see the idea that white male stories are unnecessary and played out as implicit/explcit in the celebration of the (still a minority of stories) that aren't about white men (which it is in some of the celebrations). like, if you agree these stories are 'unnecessary and played out' then you are talking about a finite resource, in terms of what stories are meaningful?

when white guys cheerfully agree that stories about white guys are 'unnecessary' I guess I ... just don't buy it at some level? It feels disingenuous somehow, like it's a way of transmuting self-effacement into smugness. when white guys say things like 'the vast majority of my reading over the past several years has been very pointedly about exposing myself to perspectives different than my own' - if a white male reads a story it's filtered through his white male perspective just as much as when a white male writes a story, regardless of whether the protagonist is a white male or not - you literally can't get away from the white male pov! if you accept that white male stories are unnecessary and played out then that applies to both output and input? the logical endpoint of accepting these seems like accepting the worthlessness of everything you think, say and do, not just what you write?

I think you are overthinking it, the bottom line is they are outraged by the existence of things that they personally do not want to read

This is a good article an ilxor posted today. "We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future."

https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-myth-of-real-america-just-wont-go-away/

otm. All this also entirely disregards the fact that women in many genres are expected to empathise with male protagonists and POVs. There’s a plurality of male perspectives and protagonists in most genres, and giving the argument any oxygen ignores the fact that they are angry that women/poc/lgbt people are present at all or reminding them of their existence.

Reaching back to omar's post a good 100 posts ago:

rants about "benefits scroungers" (even though he was on the "rock'n'roll" himself for the best part of a decade)

I've encountered this one enough times to see a pattern and it strikes me that this is usually based in shame about their earlier self, who they outgrew and now reject with a certain amount of self-loathing. Then they project that earlier self, who they now loathe, upon everyone else getting benefits. The fact that they were once in a similar position, far from making them more sympathetic, just reminds them how much they dislike remembering themselves as they were then.

"nobody came to help me when I was on food stamps!"

id say yere awful close to solving it now folks

Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future. White men, Protestants from the dominant culture are welcome, but as Chris Evans noted, the story isn’t going to be about them all the time, and they won’t always be the ones telling it. This country has room for everybody who believes that there’s room for everybody.

this is hard to square with

I don't know when it subconsciously changed for me but I have very little interest in consuming culture from that viewpoint. In this world, and me not being a white man, it is not interesting in the slightest.

As a straight white cis American dude, I agree that pretty much all of the stories about people like me are unnecessary and played out.

(obviously if you're not interested in these stories that's fine and you're not under any any obligation to - but this reads like you're saying that their redundancy more than just subjective. and I know this is all rhetorical and actually existing culture from a white male perspective is plentiful and not about to disappear any time soon, but I think a lot 'comicsgate' and similar is more about theory and principle rather than actual situation, both among supporters and detractors?

almost namechecked you earlier, darragh

the flak you point in my direction is, to a fault, true when it comes to dealing with people one-on-one, in real life. I talk trash about people, I worry about friends without cutting them off or explaining the flaws in their beliefs, I do all that shit. talking about this stuff, the macro scale of why people adopt these attitudes... it's not always applicable to every person

but really you come off as if we're being condescending amateur social scientists and you expect we should just go "well, the lads are trash" and knock off to the pub or just not talk about this shit at all

I mean, that might not be what you're getting at, but it's how I usually take it. which, fair, you've got to draw a line somewhere

for the most part it seems like what they get defensive about is the idea that stories about white males are inherently worthless?

It's intersting to me that the counterarguments to my posts itt seem to keep countering arguments I didn't actually make. I did say that stories about straight white dudes are (to me) largely unnecessary and played out, but I did not say they were inherently worthless. If you're looking for stories for, by, and about the adventures and travails of heterosexual men of Eastern European descent, you have basically the entirety of recorded history of Western literature to pick through. There is probably no demographic which has been chronicled more thoroughly in the history of the written word. The only white dude narrative tack that would be of genuine interest to me at this point is an honest reckoning of our relationship to the non-white dude world.

xpost Yeah, a lot of this discussion went sideways. Comicsgate, I don't know. If I had had more interesting female protaganists in comics when I was younger, I probably would've been more into comics rather, than say, Nancy Drew or Lucky Santangelo. But I also think that the white male protagonist story is boring, due to it's redundancy, and likely ratio of mediocre crap/excellence.

I was watching that David Letterman netflix interview with Tina Fey this weekend and I am really glad that Nell Scovell called out his blatant "oh gee, who me?" cluelessness about why he rarely had women and I think never a poc in the writer's room in over 3 decades. Paraphrasing Tina Fey, there is certain material or jokes that are funny or worthwhile to women or poc that would never even register to a room full of white men.

There's a kind of northeastern mid-20th-century straight white male coming-of-age story I've read enough of to last me pretty much forever (John Updike, John Cheever, John Gardner, Salinger, Carver). Even the more experimental postmodern metafictionalists (Vonnegut, Gaddis, Gass, Coover, Barthelme) seem a bit tired to me now.

Yr late-20th-century doodz also seem decently well heard from (Chabon, Franzen, Wallace, Coupland, Eggers).

I'm open to the thought that somebody out there is doing something new and I should consider it, but honestly I'm pretty tired so the bar is going to be high.

latebloomer, try substitution therapy and get your friend into something obnoxious with a broad following like chapo trap house that's comparatively benign

when white guys cheerfully agree that stories about white guys are 'unnecessary' I guess I ... just don't buy it at some level? It feels disingenuous somehow, like it's a way of transmuting self-effacement into smugness. when white guys say things like 'the vast majority of my reading over the past several years has been very pointedly about exposing myself to perspectives different than my own' - if a white male reads a story it's filtered through his white male perspective just as much as when a white male writes a story, regardless of whether the protagonist is a white male or not - you literally can't get away from the white male pov! if you accept that white male stories are unnecessary and played out then that applies to both output and input? the logical endpoint of accepting these seems like accepting the worthlessness of everything you think, say and do, not just what you write?

― soref, 15. maj 2018 18:48 (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the leaps of logic in this post?

Anyways, I don't entirely agree that 'white dude stories' are played out, exactly because so many of them have been so superficial and kliché-ridden. When Old Lunch calls for 'an honest reckoning of our relationship to the non-white dude world' then I'd say: Yes! There are so many stories to be told there, that I've never seen. However, I know from discussing this with my fellow film critics, that women don't agree. I loved the new film Damsel with Robert Pattinson, thought it was a tremendously inventive and new and honest and true depiction of how white dudes see themselves in relation to women - specifically the need to see ourselves as heroes and them as damsels. The critic I discussed it with, she pointed out that it was a wannabe-feminist film that failed the Bechdel test, and that everything I thought was new about the film was something she knew from real life, and that she had no use for it. So...

It's not entirely untrue that the solution isn't just less stories from a white dude viewpoint, but also more non white dudes / less white dudes in every part of the process, from artist to critic to audience. Which is a bit of a bummer, though I guess I should be fine.

I mean, many women don't agree :) Not blanket 'women'.

Everyone is coming from a different place on the spectrum constantly trying to move that window over. Even the black community has criticisms for Dear White People, that the main character of desire in the show is a half black, light skinned woman.

the real cognitive dissonance piece here is how many of these people complaining love anime

Paraphrasing Tina Fey, there is certain material or jokes that are funny or worthwhile to women or poc that would never even register to a room full of white men.

Yes, but would it be funny or worthwhile coming from a white man? 'Cause Letterman can hire all the writers he wants, from whatever background, and he's still gonna be David Letterman. I think Seth Meyers has had the best approach to this problem on his show; he has a segment called "Jokes Seth Can't Tell," in which two women - one Jewish, one black - from his writing staff come out and deliver some fairly good jokes, and then when he tries to deliver one (at their encouragement) they mockingly jump down his throat for being offensive. They recently did one with Michelle Wolf:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0MIYCLLOo0

almost namechecked you earlier, darragh

in what possible context

the flak you point in my direction is,

incorrectly imputed tbrrwu mayne

to a fault, true when it comes to dealing with people one-on-one, in real life. I talk trash about people, I worry about friends without cutting them off or explaining the flaws in their beliefs, I do all that shit. talking about this stuff, the macro scale of why people adopt these attitudes... it's not always applicable to every person

genuinely utterly lost as to what you think my attitude is towards this confession mh.

but really you come off as if we're being condescending amateur social scientists

hmmm, i should be coming off, iirc, as if youre all smelling yr own uninteresting farts for the tenth time this year on this topic without any actual insight except from a few ppl interested in the questions raised (beyond as the default opportunity to play selfloathing wite guy or dudeloathing wite girl)

and u expect we should just go "well, the lads are trash" and knock off to the pub or just not talk about this shit at all

i expect what we're getting, an actual resilt would be soref and anvil and silby and the couple of others with something to say on it thats more than flinging the emptiest of rhetorical brickbats in the safest possible place for that fraudulent realtalk from a position of profound and profoundly sought disinterest.

I mean, that might not be what you're getting at,

as stated, it isnt

but it's how I usually take it. which,

cant help that.

fair, you've got to draw a line somewhere

― mh, Tuesday, 15 May 2018 17:33 (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

u dont

so the point is "don't post so much about this shit?"

I mean, still fair, but I have no idea what you're getting at other than you think these threads are a waste of time

xpost Yeah, I brought up the Seth Meyers segment somewhere else when talking about the Letterman thing (Michelle Wolf used to be a writer there too).

Was literally just coming here to post something about how glad I am that everyone has engaged in this convo without fulfilling LJ's prediction of an impending clusterfuck, but, well.

darraghmac just give us the answers ffs

love

love, man

I've heard it from the Beatles and now you but I'm suspicious because, y'know...wite dudes.

im trying to be better at remembering that americans on the board only think about america when they think about wites tbh, i really am

what u mean is american wite ppl, tho, i think

beyond as the default opportunity to play selfloathing wite guy or dudeloathing wite girl
rude! and inaccurate/reductive

I have heard that love is all you need, however I have also heard that it is a battlefield.

american wite ppl and mostly men for sure, but there's this weird crossover in this topic space where there's the infowars dude who lives in the uk, a gamergate guy who has never left malaysia, and a bunch of people I see on twitter who feel they have to weigh in but live in ontario or something but 99% of their conversations are about how great american conservatism is

here is some ComicsGate BS, right on cue:
https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/jawbreakers-comic-comicsgate-antarctic/
― Neil S, Tuesday, May 15, 2018 2:06 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My friend regularly converses with those guys on twitter :(

I’m not shocked or sad anymore, just angry at my friend for being such a goddamn idiot.

I don't really see anyone employing superficial self-loathing as a momentary white liberal hairshirt ITT FWIW.

love

love, man

― gneb farts (darraghmac), Tuesday, May 15, 2018 11:43 AM (forty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihaB8AFOhZo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV8JFj17AtY

i don't really see why mh is calling out dmac btw

i think while he posts things that require people to fill in the blanks, his posts make sense

ilx seems to resent the fact that dmac says things matter-of-factly and speaks based on facts -- maybe facts that belong to a different country, sure

there is an american centrism to ilx that borders on arrogance, as if the truths arrived at from the culture/minority wars going on in the u.s. are universal truths, and that there can't be talk of poorer eastern european countries or something (was going to name a more extreme example, but i'm not trying to sound radical here), because these non-u.s. examples are exceptions and/or they undermine american exceptionalism

i just read an article on semiotics that talks about the russell conjugation, and it strikes me that most ilxors would probably agree with each other if their posts were filled in with more context

but this talk of the same related things over and over leaves no room for talks on other things happening around the world with different dynamics

thats an ok post imo but i just wanna say i dont feel mh was calling anyone out itt

1) This thread was created specifically to discuss the impact that American comics people were having upon an American friend of an American poster, so apologies if the discussion itt has been a little US-centric.
2) ILX does not resent deems. Please.

not the thread for it, you're right

but still wondering where mh is coming from then

On the plus side, the internet's unstoppable Americanization, including that of the self-flagellating variety, has led to my spending less time online. There's only so many 'lol 'Muricans' you can drop before moving on to quieter pastures. A world really does exist out there, and not all of it needs to be parsed through Trump or Jim Crow or whatever.

I was aggravated that darragh was quietly sniping instead of calling out some genuinely bad posts or commenting on the enterprise tbh

we've independently reconciled our positions and are in general agreement

and pomenitul otm, apropos of my previous post about those across the globe jumping on gamergate/comicsgate/whatever I have no idea why, outside of an imaginary american cultural hegemony, these hucksters are acting like there is One Culture to comment on

maybe because it's the most profitable, although moreso in online cachet than in dollars

outraged tbh

thought you were retiring

love is wise fellas

Some say it is a razor, though. FYI.

it is strange. many many people take it for a game.

i say love
it is a flower

If you're looking for stories for, by, and about the adventures and travails of heterosexual men of Eastern European descent, you have basically the entirety of recorded history of Western literature to pick through.

Wait, Easterm European descent?

Those literarily prolific Slavs, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs!

I mean, great literary/cultural traditions to be sure, but if we're talking hegemony here surely Western European would fit better?

i mean, there is a clear difference between "eastern european descent" and "eastern europeans"

"eastern europeans" didn't stop existing after some moved out of eastern euroope

Look, I'm geographically dyslexic, give a guy a break.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPA-vlfXUAArKX2.jpg

i had a friend who got increasingly like this during the end of the obama admin, fueled, I think, by living in a shit backward go nowhere town where he couldn't get a job. then he got married and got a job and became much less insane, and then trump got into office and I swear he's almost a liberal now. people's personal situations really do play into their weird opinions. they take their own experience as symbolic of the entirety of the world experience. they begin to mistake their opinion for fact. i mean, not always, but this happens. I don't know what to do about it. It's sad.

oh but my point was: I just stopped speaking to him when he got nuts and conspiratorial and super right wing. I cut him off entirely. he came back a year and a half later, with his head sorted out (mostly) and I started talking to him again.

I don't really see anyone employing superficial self-loathing as a momentary white liberal hairshirt ITT FWIW.

― The lovely and talented Loretta Switt and the irascible Jamie Farr (Old Lunch)

my self-loathing is anything but superficial or momentary

Well, yeah. But my self-loathing is more because I'm me specifically.

I thought about this some more yesterday, in terms of my relative, boxedjoys people (who all seems reachable to me, maybe not Rangers kid but then thats a whole other thing!) and latebloomers friend, who also seems reachable - at least if you want them to be, maybe you don't and thats something only you know deep down! - and I dont want to critizie anyone for ostracizing or cutting someone out, you'll know way more about your particular situations than any of us, its not going to be a decision taken lightly!

It sounds like boxedjoys brother, with arguments in the pub, is 'normal', in terms of the interactions themselves (he's conceding things, which normal conversations, debates, and even arguments have) - i mean it sounds like he/you/both are actually listening to each other? thats a lot! It doenst sound like he's parroting pre-formatted viewpoints with the 'him' lost somewhere within?

with my relative, and perhaps latebloomers friend, and situations where you feel you're dealing with someone who's talking at you, making statements..I think there's two choices, one is absenting self from that particular conversation, "sorry pal, no idea" or try move it from the existential to the tangible. I'm not American but if it was like a Trump conversation, I'd try move it to 'what do you think the key states will be? how will he do in Wisconsin next time". With the Russia/Uk stuff, I moved it away from "Britain great do you support putin or something?" to 'what will Uk do, how will russia respond, how will we respond to that". The conversation becomes more a level playing field. some level of measurability about it as well, existential stuff is ultimately fruitless, I dont spend any of my time debating Jehovahs Witnesses on the doorstep, every second I spend doing that is a personal defeat

its a way of having a better conversation (if you want one that is), though like I said above, what Ive found in my own case is that because these are seen as 'details', they prefer to shift it back to the existential, to the bigger point. What Ive also realized with this, is not just that we're both judging/assessing something differently, but often we're not even judging the same thing, or the thing that I thought you were. Its like having an argument about what to do with the garden, and realizing halfway through, they don't even think there is a garden and I've made a big assumption right from the off

I'm reminded a little about JRM's recent interview about the Irish border. He hadn't been there or talked to anyone who lived there, and didn't see the need to. He'd spoken to 'some people', and didn't see the relevance of what any of this had. Because he believed he was right, unshakeably right, no doubts, black and white - getting involved in anything like that is just fannying around. If you're right with the big picture, the details will sort themselves, no need to bother wasting time on them, "it'll be fine'. The unflappable belief. Details are for the small people

Surprising how difficult it is to put this into words! Partly I think because when you have this big picture of a personal situation, and then you're trying to condense, inevitably it gets reduced and lots gets left out, and the everyone else sees something slightly different than what you intended because of that. Then it gets distorted because they're then thinking of other people and it doesn't quite map the same so before you even get to agreeing/disagreeing/processing others have a different picture in their head

i think thats another thing, I think so many arguments in life aren't with the person you're having the argument with, but someone else lurking in your head that you didnt get to have the argument with at the time. The person in front of you, they're often just filling in for that person, and they're close enough, they'll do

all of that!

Oh great

Ye olde solipsistic argument

Had a guest over tonight. I mentioned one little thing about the economy and he says Obama ruined the economy for 8 years. I looked at him square in the face and said "Get the fuck out of my apartment".

Am I doing it right?

— MK Genest 🌊 (@MKGenest) May 16, 2018

Don't follow the twitter thread. Just don't. There's no point. But the initial tweet made me laugh.

I mean...there's just no argument to be had in a situation like that. Once someone has embraced a demonstrable falsehood as, like, just their opinion maaaan, what more is there to say? I'm not going to waste time arguing with someone that the sky isn't actually forest green. If you've divorced yourself from basic consensus reality, good luck navigating the world and not dying prematurely from something entirely preventable, I guess.

Well the fire went out of this one alright!

I couldnt think exactly where to put this but I was thinking about Graeme Souness yesterday - not exactly as someone who has this in the thread, but in terms of my relative and the seeming rigidity of thought, where details are obfuscatory and detract from the greater whole.

I cant find the clip but theres probably a bunch of them, he was talking about some player and how they didnt work as hard or cover as much ground as some other player, and then he was called on it and said actually he 's covered MORE ground this season, if we look at the stats. He didn't like it at all, fired back "you know what I mean". of course stats can be misleading but the greater feeling was that he knew he was right, absolute certainty and no facts, details, debate, statistics were going to change that. His source of certainty was himself, his gut, and his certainty was absolute. Not only that, his view was greater than the other analysts views, because it was self-evident, and also because he was the best player, a natural order. I'm wary of stretching a point, but I'd put good money on GS not only being a Brexit voter, but conceptualizing it in the same way - his authority in football carrying over to everywhere. He is right because how could it be otherwise, its obvious, self-evident, anyone can see it and theyre kidding themselves if not

My relative has some of this, absolutely unshakability, if its cold outside, its cold outside. If it warms up? still cold. The difference is, I think with Souness (and JRM), its their core, its ingrained. They are right not just because they are right, but because they are better than you and nothing is going to change that, not some jumped up poindexter with a bunch of stats about distance covered per game, and not some other poindexter with some flannel about the Irish border. Just excuses, get it done, how hard can it be?

I think its sorta where a conceptual truth comes up against an tangible truth. perhaps a tangible truth is one that can be changed and is therefore less solid, and, weirdly, less tangible

Oh wow just googled Graeme Souness Brexit

https://m0.joe.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/19080006/cats27.jpg

If you don't know who he is, he NEVER looks like that!

bah

https://m0.joe.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/19080006/cats27.jpg

https://i2-prod.liverpoolecho.co.uk/incoming/article10207197.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/MPP_LEC_061015_Blackstuff_10.jpg

"You're Graham Souness.... you look like me"

lol @ those pearly whites, what is the Souness mindset?

Here's the clip, its brilliant - never seen him so happy before when he gets to it. Missed this completely till just now

souness speaks his brexit brains pic.twitter.com/X7Ts3rk6xD

— Ken Early (@kenearlys) April 18, 2017

Kevin Kilbanes look halfway through clip as well!

he was talking about some player and how they didnt work as hard or cover as much ground as some other player, and then he was called on it and said actually he 's covered MORE ground this season

Wasn't Charlie Adam was it?

re: Souness, never trust a man who looks younger at 65 than he did at 25

he looks like the lovechild of dale winton and david warner in that screengrab anvil posted

he was good mates with dale winton!

As a straight white cis American dude, I agree that pretty much all of the stories about people like me are unnecessary and played out.

― The lovely and talented Loretta Switt and the irascible Jamie Farr (Old Lunch), Tuesday, May 15, 2018 3:31 PM

Who are you and what have you done with the Old Lunch that follows hundreds of instalments of ostentatiously unnecessary and played out stories about mostly straight white cis American dudes?

I can own up to being part of the problem.

(Also, Marvel stuff, as the angry chuds have pointed out, is pretty diverse these days, and I'd be thrilled to see it become even moreso.)

(Now excuse me while I return to my Gilmore Girls marathon.)

I think that books without pictures may benefit from the surge of interest in diversity and #own voices. In comics its hard to get a good writing and art team but in prose there's been an explosion of writers doing stories that probably wont be emulated on screen for quite some time. And there's more freedom for these writers to not have to make themselves palatable to a big audience.

Not to say there isn't publishers, editors and writers against the freedom.

In comics its hard to get a good writing and art team

super-easy to find comics by good racially diverse and sexually diverse and gender-diverse and background-diverse and geographically diverse authors that don't work on an assembly line for copyright thieves though

"Good" was the criteria I said but personally I find it hard to find many comics I like by anyone from anywhere. I'm sure lots of people looking for stories with social groups in mind will find it difficult to scratch the itch they want.

With prose books it takes much longer to find out if I like them. If was looking for afrofuturist comics, I'd know fairly quickly by the art if I wanted to read them, but there's so many more prose writers who do that stuff and if I came from a different background I'd probably have a bunch more criteria to be satisfied.
Some people will always find it hard to find anything they like.

I think its sorta where a conceptual truth comes up against an tangible truth. perhaps a tangible truth is one that can be changed and is therefore less solid, and, weirdly, less tangible

― anvil, Thursday, 17 May 2018 07:41 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree with this. but i think even narrative, and tribal affiliation, can change on a dime given enough personal motivation/resentment. i'm thinking about how eric greitens changed from republican to democrat. if our egos, in a time of rejection, can see a way to being flattered again even the power of conceptual truths can fold like paper.

this is a great book, though probably unhelpful on a practical level to those of us with people in our lives who have taken a long detour down Douchebag Boulevard: https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062

there's a lot of stuff about sports, how "hot streaks" don't exist even though we persist in thinking they do, etc. but there's also a great story in there about rewards and punishments. pretty much every psychologist will tell you that rewards work as a behavioral nudge far better than punishments do, yet we persist in believing the opposite. to illustrate this, an experiment was done where the participants role-played a teacher trying to get a hypothetical student to arrive at class on time, at 8:30, across 15 days. a computer would display the time that the "student" arrived at class. now, the participant didn't know it, but the time was actually completely randomized for any time between 8:20 and 8:40. for each of the hypothetical days, the "teacher" was told to decide whether to reprimand the student, praise the student, or make no comment. here's what happened: simple regression to the mean meant that after being praised for arriving early, the student usually arrived somewhat later the next day. and conversely, after being reprimanded for arriving late, the student usually arrived somewhat earlier. the vast majority of participants in the study concluded that the praise was worthless and the reprimands worked.

agree with this. but i think even narrative, and tribal affiliation, can change on a dime given enough personal motivation/resentment.

Agree with this, and how also this can change easily with no seeming contradiction, or how saying one thing one day and another another day isn't contradictory. Could also reframe Conceptual vs Tangible as Inherent vs Learned.

Sports are often a good analogy. Messi is the best and no amount of work is going to change that, if he changes his mind who are we to judge "You cant teach that". its the idea of going with gut feeling, big picture. no stats are going to change our view on that. the only thing that changes the view is when we decide to get a new view, and no nerd with a notebook is going to say when a new view is in town

I have a friend similar to the ops description albeit a little less extreme and he doesn’t use social media on any level.

His mom left when he was younger so he ended up raising himself and isolating into worlds of video games and conservative blogger YouTube videos. Years back he would force me to watch a conservative political humour video or something and we would often argue. He always claimed that the lesser popular opinion or different way of thinking should be considered, which would be fine if he wasn’t always just hearing out the YouTube suggested conservative videos that appeared to him.

I think he felt disenfranchised growing up and being a pothead loner made it pretty easy to be marketed to. He started off with Alex jones and prison planet years years back and lost his marbles, but these days he is far less extreme and goes to pains to say he doesn’t support alt right

Yet, any time I want to ask his opinion on something I can guess the answer. He likes Peterson and when I argued that Jordan would not use a pro noun to refer to an individual he claimed that this was not true. Yet I’ve seen videos where Peterson says just this.

Point tldr is I don’t think some people can change. He’s a flar earther too and I think he seeks to rebel against the norm

I mean, YouTube is social media for the right wing.

I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about this for a while but I let my morbid curiosity get the best of me and took another look at my friend’s twitter. He’s really mad about the new thunder cats cartoon. Lmao

are there lady cats in it or

Nah it has a cutesy animation style or something. Like, who cares! You’re 36, dude.

Looking at his comicsgate related tweets has made me realized that it really is like an alternate universe these guys live in. Also he’s into commie bashing now too, always a good sign. Hooray.

😀🔫

It’s all just so stupid and juvenile

Holy shit, he's 36??? I just assumed he was early 20s.

these dudes are the motherfucking Lost Boys

I have a friend a bit older than that who has found a second wind as an alt-right cartoonist of little skill but dumbly obvious enough to get some kind of following on SoCal media, and he’s always going on about Michael Moore and Karl Marx....in 2018. And he suddenly started caring about MS-13, it’s the damndest thing.

i just can't get over how impossibly dumb all these clowns are. like, i get how Buckley, George Will et al were never actually the towering intellects that their partisans and even detractors tried to portray them as... but guys like Ben fucking Shapiro or Peterson?? get the absolute fuck out of here.

maybe social media's making them stupid? i mean, it's made me stupid, too. but i don't get paid to be the Intellectual Dark Web.

“Have” a friend? xp

It's not the whole story but basically: a constant deluge of information (mostly noise) + a dearth of education wrt critical thinking skills that might allow one to parse and sort and filter that constant deluge of information (mostly noise) = the progressive decay of consensus reality and the need many feel, in response, to cobble together a substitute reality, however incoherent it may be.

“i just can't get over how impossibly dumb all these clowns are”

That’s the part of all this that sends me into despair. It’s like, these dudes aren’t even slickly packaged! They’re obvious hucksters! What is it that makes people like my friend subsceptible to their bullshit?

“It's not the whole story but basically: a constant deluge of information (mostly noise) + a dearth of education wrt critical thinking skills”

Yeah I think this is OTM. Also a contributing factor, especially with nerd types like my friend is an extremely limited frame of reference. Like, generally he’s a bright guy! But not the most curious dude when it comes to stuff outside the world of comics/games/tv etc.

You better believe he loved Ready Player One

aw man

“Have” a friend? xp

― valorous wokelord (silby), Monday, May 21, 2018 6:22 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i guess it's like how people refer to the recently deceased as if they're still alive.

That’s the part of all this that sends me into despair. It’s like, these dudes aren’t even slickly packaged! They’re obvious hucksters! What is it that makes people like my friend subsceptible to their bullshit?

This is what gets me about my one friend who's like this. If he realized how badly he's been had he'd be so pissed, except in a way I agree with instead of a "Muslims are taking over Europe and our country is next" way.

“It's not the whole story but basically: a constant deluge of information (mostly noise) + a dearth of education wrt critical thinking skills”

its ALL about the repetition.

I was talking to a friend about maybe working in Malmo for a while, and I'd been looking at cost of living stuff, and she said "are you sure? its not safe anymore, right?"

We'd mentioned a few months ago the ridiculousness of these stories about how Bradford, Birmingham and Manchester(and Malmo!) are no go cities, and how silly it is. But it had wormed it way in enough with her. Neither of us know Malmo at all, but I said "all those stories are from the same people that try and tell us Manchester isn't safe, c'mon, they're not credible or honest"

And the realization credibility is irrelevant, all that matters is airtime. Arguing 'well Manchester is safe actually because statistics actually show blah blah" doesn't refute anything in peoples mind, it just links the words Manchester, Crime, Muslims, together some more. If these guys get their brand and their buzzwords more and more airtime, thats all that counts, no publicity is bad publicity.

If there is a deluge of information (and there is!), the simplest and loudest and the most repeated will always stand out

There's some kind of argument over on the Mary Lattimore thread. I'm now more likely to check that album out. Without the argument popping up in blog view, I probably wouldn't have even noticed the thread as I've no idea who that is. Airtime

I had the same reaction, it led to me having some pleasant naptime this afternoon.

Anvil so otm about the effect of repetition. People don't think, they "believe" the loudest, most frequent, and most recent things they've heard

yeah this whole 'slick, polished, hipster-ish' thing does my nut in.. like *this* is the re-brand??

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ddth-_tV0AAdwHO.jpg

Also, Marvel stuff, as the angry chuds have pointed out, is pretty diverse these days

Stories featuring non straight white male protagonists written by straight white males are still coming from a straight white male perspective, and that's what much of Marvel's "diverse" line-up boils down to. Not that I think straight white males shouldn't be allowed to write those stories or anything like that, but let's not overhype Marvel's role here.

Hard to overhype Disney / Marvel’s role in completely pissing off chuds though

yeah it's not like 21st century politics wd've entered their world thru any other source

Chuds see any concession towards diversity, no matter how vague, as the end of western civilization. I think it's important to demand a bit more than that.

nah I go to the movies to trigger chuds that’s all I care about.

hnnging chuds

Stories featuring non straight white male protagonists written by straight white males are still coming from a straight white male perspective, and that's what much of Marvel's "diverse" line-up boils down to.

Be fair, their editor-in-chief is a Japanese man.

I will never tire of that sic burn.

I've been sitting here trying to come up with a more nuanced way to put it, but:
People want to be grifted

People want a daddy, someone to do the work of defining the parameters of the world to whatever extent their parents failed to do so. When the benefit is guidance through an uncertain world by someone with unwavering conviction, credulity is a small sacrifice to make.

It’s funny how a certain type of self-proclaimed extremely independent thinker results in probably the single most predictable series of talking points, led like an obedient dog by whatever a certain bunch of people are venting about that week on YouTube or Fox.

xp

thought i was in the controps thread for a minute

ime 97.9% of the time a self-proclaimed "extremely independent thinker" really just wants license to be racist free of consequences

that's a sign of the times

i remember when freethinkers were the progressives and open to diversity in the 90s and even early 2000s

i think there's a certain type of person who just always enjoys the friction of pushing back against authority or the status quo, which i understand bc i chafed under the status quo i grew up with, however i was happy to find a new more accepting status quo and didn't feel the need to push back anymore against it bc i don't have hate in my heart for women or minorities.

my ex-friend has been saying some "interesting" things about cultural differences w/r/t gun violence in places like, oh let's say, Chicago and D.C., vs the lack of gun violence in, for example, Vermont.

xxp ehh the atheist/freethinker contingent at that time still had a healthy overlap with libertarian types, it just that society caught up with 90% of their social concerns

wording it as society caught up to them means all their opinions have been static (since the 90s) and they were not influenced by the times they lived/live in

lots of freethinkers (don't know many atheists) that came from the 90s nowadays don't agree with racism, whether that was a conversion from 90s freethinking or they always held that view is difficult to prove, and probably useless to even argue

People want a daddy, someone to do the work of defining the parameters of the world to whatever extent their parents failed to do so. When the benefit is guidance through an uncertain world by someone with unwavering conviction, credulity is a small sacrifice to make.

― I cop this squat in the name of slack (Old Lunch)

of all the polite fictions of this time, i find the notion that people can be treated as adults is the worst.

I have no idea what freethinker association you're talking about, but nearly all groups using that are associated with atheist groups or groups advocating freedom from religion

oh forgot to switch to america

what country were you thinking of?

tbh the term gets lumped in with nonconformists and hippies but it's an actual centuries-old term connected to questioning religion

wording it as society caught up to them means all their opinions have been static (since the 90s) and they were not influenced by the times they lived/live in

lots of freethinkers (don't know many atheists) that came from the 90s nowadays don't agree with racism, whether that was a conversion from 90s freethinking or they always held that view is difficult to prove, and probably useless to even argue

The Waco siege was in 1993 - some odd streams have been flowing together definitely since then.

I think hicks’s hatred of women would draw him to trump and his hatred of rednex would draw him away

The freethinker’s conundrum

I’m happy to give Hicks the benefit of the doubt and say he’d have been Bernie until was was Robbed By That Bitch - indisputably Trump afterwards though.

i mean it's a fun thought experiment but ultimately useless

hixxx seems like he'd swing right of centre but given how dumb trump is, which is something he always made fun of, he'd probs swing radically left bc john stuart mill

rednex

what was his problem with swedish pop

Do you really have to ask?

split his vote between Cotton Eye Joe and Old Pop In An Oak

https://78.media.tumblr.com/f3545157acb134e42ed128ad69a20006/tumblr_mnhix34YDx1rpduwho1_500.gif

Anyway this is all a bit off topic, hicks is just infected with regular worms

are you suggesting you have dug up his corpse

hicks delivery so bad and awful

Unsuited to modern game, poor signing by Jol

this hicks talk is reminding me of a roommate of a friend from many years ago who was pre-law and smoked a lot of weed and loved hunter s. thompson and bob dylan and terry gilliam and definitely considered himself a free thinker, the archetypical western u.s. private-school debate-club libertarian choad, damn he was annoying.

archetypal can't even spell anymore

dammit anvil where u been all my ilxlife

lol, don't know if u could coach dead Hicks into a modern game 4-2-3-1 lone cig-lighter role, Alan.

map, I think I knew that guy too. well, one of those guys

My buddy described above definitely is afraid of women which is obviously where a lot of this shit comes from

Fear of rejection etc

Feeling threatened by their agency

a bunch of the twitter hustlers drifted right from that into the alt-right, and some have jumped ship and are -- I shit you not -- selling vitamins and diet supplements now

https://www.racked.com/2018/6/12/17442336/skin-care-alex-jones-mike-cernovich-joe-rogan-serums

If you’re looking for high-quality alpha male skin care, Cernovich’s Gorilla Youth Serum fits the bill. The “absolutely loaded” product consists primarily of aloe juice, a common but effective hydrator; two safe, hydrating solvents; and the star of the show, the humectant hyaluronic acid, coming in fourth.

An effective representative of the master race can't have blackheads and bags under his eyes. Try the new line of facial care products from Darn Teuton today!

Actually, this might be a really superb business idea. How carcinogenic can you make a skin care product before it's illegal to sell?

only one way to find out!

Wonder if the On Cinema narrative was somewhat inspired by this or was it coincidence...

It's totally a reference, Heidecker keeps close tabs on the alt right.

Him and Vic Berger are constantly relentlessly going after Cernovich so I figured.

Heidecker kind of fell into it after cracking one joke after seeing some ridiculous tweets a long time back. Once he dipped his toe in, the mob instantly provided him more than enough material.

humectant hyaluronic

*Pretty sure this guy is a transfer target for the new Arsenal manager.

(*wisecrack for Britishes only)

massively xp but

I think hicks’s hatred of women would draw him to trump and his hatred of rednex would draw him away

The freethinker’s conundrum

― Elonio Grimesci (wins), Tuesday, May 22, 2018 4:20 PM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is basically the hatred profile of a lot of this crowd, yet their disdain for, say, evangelical christians doesn't stop them from aligning with them

I get that it's not cool to like Hicks anymore but arguing that he would have aged into a reactionary conservative seems really off-base.

yeah he was already reactionary

sort of. but not conservative by any means.

The Iraq bits, abortion, pisspig Rush Limbaugh, "it's just a ride" not the mark of someone who'd move right IMO.

"smart fruit"

the gun control joke re: england

he was left wing politically, pretty progressive on race iirc, stunted in his relationship with pop culture and the opposite sex - at the very least i would have liked to see him wrestle with the contradictions as they revealed themselves. as a white southerner who was surrounded by right-wing assholes in the 90s his jokes meant a lot to me.

at least we can all agree he wasn't funny

person surrounded by right wing assholes is kind of the description of a lot of friends who enjoyed him. especially friends with kooky religious/conservative parents, it was like lashing out yet having to define yourself in terms of a specific norm

btw bill hicks succumbed to the worms, faked his death, and performs as alex jones (also a joke the friend who never quite distanced themselves from that norm have made)

at least we can all agree he wasn't funny

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver)

i won't even go that far! all i can say for sure is that he _isn't_ funny. which is just humor for you.

beyond that, of all the possible contrapositives in the world "what would bill hicks be like if he had lived" isn't anywhere near the top of the ones i'm interested in pondering.

Wouldn't right-wing skin care converging with Gwyneth Paltrow's goop-ness be a sort of moment of clarity for brain wormers?

btw bill hicks succumbed to the worms, faked his death, and performs as alex jones glenn greenwald

btw this isn't "what would 1991 Bill Hicks feel like if he was transported here now", but "how would the years have treated him"

Hah, the 'btw' looks like it's a direct response to the quote - it wasn't meant so.

I was sorta joking about hicks - if he were around today he’d probably still be doing the 5 or 6 bits he did all his life tbh, or maybe he’d go even further down the radical socialist path of sticking it to waffle waitresses - but it’s easy to see ppl with hicks’s “freethinker” profile (smartdumb, conspiracist, autodidact, burnout, misanthrope) finding their way into all sorts of terrible politics. But no, I don’t really think it’s likely that he’d be a trump guy in this speculative reality.

very very hard to imagine what his coffee in cars would be like

lazy and disconnected at best imo and norm mcdonald does that with a lot more charm

Wouldn't right-wing skin care converging with Gwyneth Paltrow's goop-ness be a sort of moment of clarity for brain wormers?

― Philip Nunez

wouldn't the entire misogynist "redpill" movement being inspired by a movie by two trans women be sort of a moment of clarity for brain wormers?

You might mean word rather than movement, there.

the halfassed joke only works because Jones looks like a bloated Bill Hicks imo

Bill Hicks stuffed with gammon

bill gaiman

My relative is now talking about how they are a cultural racist. I knew this was coming but paradoxically it makes it easier. Instead of thinking to myself, 'do they know where they are going with all this? how can they not see?" it captures position pretty well, is very into hierarchies of people. I'm still fairly surprised at self-defining with the R word even with the modifier as i didn't realize that was a thing in right-wing circles (maybe it isnt)

i’ve heard “cultural chauvinist” before as a self-descriptor for right wingers who believe the “west is the best.” I think this is an “out” for people who want to act racist and have racist opinions but then be able to weakly deny that they are actually racist. (“It’s not about race it’s about culture, bro.”) your relative might be trying to say this but is too dumb to formulate it correctly.

your relative might be trying to say this but is too dumb to formulate it correctly.

Or you could accept the idea that they know - and mean - exactly what they're saying.

Either way they are racist.

Well I'm fairly ok with accepting the idea if someone says they are racist that may be a strong indicator of such!

Yeah you didn’t need my Vox explainer for that I was just trying to give some context

Unnecessarily facetious on my part, wasn't intended. Ok it was intended a little bit because the submit post button said please press me before the other kermit regained control

fake plastic treesh

i’ve heard “cultural chauvinist” before as a self-descriptor for right wingers who believe the “west is the best.”

― Trϵϵship

yeah i think the proud boys describe themselves as "western chauvinists". right-wingers these days will sometimes occasionally attempt to use euphemisms, but they're really bad at it and fool nobody.

I was having lunch yesterday with my two identical twin gender neutral siblings, who had come in from Montreal to counter-protest the Unite The Right demo. It was a huge success, apparently, there were 300 protesters and the Unite The Right people cancelled, it was just a few stragglers. A Toronto Sun columnist (Sue-Anne Levy) wrote about it, from a "the anti-hate crew seem themselves to be quite hateful" and described a scenario in which Sue-Anne was being chased by a bunch of "leftist lesbians", which we all thought was really amazing and hilarious.

So I was eating lunch and my sibling Iz was talking about how a complaint was filed against them at university recently. Apparently a man in their class, named Barry, complained that Iz created "a hostile environment" in the classroom. The professor was unsympathetic and told Barry to grow up. I asked Iz what they'd done to be hostile to Barry.

Iz said that Barry was prone to asking extremely dumb questions in class. They said that the class was reading a work by Foucault, and that Foucault made it clear, right off the bat, that this work was a phenomenological examination-- the very first paragraph. Barry, criticizing Foucault in his question, asked about why Foucault might not have made some practical observations in this work. Iz rolled their eyes and Barry saw them do it. Barry said, "what is it, Iz?" Iz replied, "nothing, just that your question is really dumb."

Iz went on to talk about how Barry was always interrupting discourse about this topic or that-- cops, white people, etc.-- by talking about intentionality. "Oh, but they don't MEAN to act this way." Iz looked pointedly at me and said, "WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS." (It wasn't an accusation, Iz just knows that I always find ways to empathize with any argument.) We were on the sidewalk when they asked me this, smoking, and so I couldn't just pull an answer out of my ass, but I did tell them, "I know why, but I can't describe it just yet."

I saw this thread pop up and thought again about it. "Infected with right wing brain worms." I'd be interested to know if there are any neurological studies about people who assume "right-wing" views of thought. I think of my aging relatives embracing more protectionist ideologies. I think of my uncle, age 67, dating a black woman, who nevertheless takes issue with "black lives matter" and has a laundry list of excuses-- "we've come so far since the 60s, I was out marching, I hope you know"-- he's right! he was a big activist back then. I think of individuals I know with serious mental health difficulties, and their tendencies toward embracing enormous conspiracy theories, reading and learning and espousing deeply political feminist literature, but then turning around and testing "the limits of free speech" by posting pictures of Woody Allen and calling him "my hero" in a transparent move to initiate discourse about the nature of "allegations" and their binding power.

And what I wanted to say to Iz was that I want to speak to neurologists, or read up on it, because I've been tracking my own thought process. I can tell when my mind is in a state of objective, healthy processing. And I can tell when my mind is full-tilt amygdala fight-or-flight mode. Having dealt with trauma, and dealing now with aging, and the feeling that the language-of-progressive-politics is leaving me behind-- a woman recently told my bf that suggesting the consumption of alcohol to a potential consumer ("Come crack open a cold one with the girls," i.e.) was ableist-- I am still laughing about it--

--having dealt with all manner of mental situations that have transformed me from the normal, objective, book-reading, engaged person that I am at-least-half-of-the-time, I can absolutely positively identify with Barry. If the man is constantly feeling like the discourse is running against him, that he's made to feel stupid, that he might not sail through the class on the basis of his remarkable intellect as he'd hoped he would, that he might get a C+ to Iz's A, that I'm sure he is also aware that Iz is a genius and is at Columbia on a full scholarship.. and yet he's TRYING SO HARD... would he not feel inclined to defend people in positions of "oppression" because he is giving others the empathy he wishes he himself was afforded?

tl;dr: I think people become "right-wing" because of real-life trauma and/or the terrors of aging-- I instinctively believe it's a neurological thing.

I don’t know the neuroscience of it, but I think definitely people turn to right wing ideologies out of a sense of defensiveness. People who feel trapped and cornered are not inclined to feel generous and that extends to their thinking about the world in general. That’s why right wing media is so poisonous — it’s a whole packaged worldview built for people who are inclined to feel resentful and are looking for a target. Roger Ailes even said his target audience was “age 55 to dead” or something.

There are plenty of non-reactionary reasons to resist Foucault though. When I was undergrad and we read him and everyone kinda blandly nodded along and was like, “sure, society works this way,” I took it as evidence that they didn’t really do the reading or else were just trying to go along with what they thought the professor believed.

lots to think about in that post, fgti

I'm back in Tennessee this week for unhappy reasons and I'm stunned by the realization that all the middle-aged men i see, pot bellies, whitening hair, coach's shorts, etc, and all the middle-aged women i see, hair sprayed into immovable sculpted nests, hideous sweaters, jewelled bracelets, foundation makeup etc, are virtually identical carbon copies of the middle-aged people i knew back in the 70s and 80s growing up here but they're THIRTY YEARS YOUNGER than those people were and somehow they grew up to just replace them, their styles and mentality just morphed into them. you always hear "we just gotta wait for the old people to die off". but young people become old people. and they don't just become old they replicate everything about those old people. fuck, i got driven around by some of these people probably, smoking cigarettes, shooting pool, listening to, like, fishbone and faith no more, and now they look exactly like, i dunno, bill parcells

Interesting, Treeship, I'd never heard about that Roger Ailes thing lol. I don't want to talk about Foucault tho! I just felt that the whole story (gender neutral identical twin siblings, counter protest, Columbia, a debate in class about "phenomenological") was delicious with all the details

xp
maybe related, but those who are more likely to feel disgust easily are more likely to be conservative.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/caveman-politics/201203/are-you-easily-disgusted-you-may-be-conservative

Evidence suggests that harm avoidance and the need for fairness underlie people's moral judgments in a number of cultures. While liberals rely primarily on these two values, conservatives also rely on desires for group loyalty, authoritative structure, and, most importantly here, purity. Following this logic, Kevin and other researchers became interested in the potential for a relation between disgust and political orientations. They speculated that conservatives are more disgust sensitive than liberals as a result of their concern with purity-related norms and that this difference would manifest itself on issues that some may associate with sexual purity...

I think the number of people who are in a philosophy class that just don't understand the idea of phenomenological cases, even if they've made it through a prior course, and it can seem dumb. Dumb questions are kind of par for the course in some college classes, especially those where discussion is encouraged or mandatory. I'm still rolling my eyes, decades later, at a couple specific incidents but I can laugh them off now. And those kids weren't even professing any sort of conservative ideology! They were just dumb.

ugh. Tracer so much otm.

My cousin is early 30s, but the move has not been a drift rightwards - its been more a politicization of an existing thought model. He doesn't really have empathy (not in a 'mean' way, just has trouble seeing things from other points of view, or actually seeing anything that isn't tangible). Whats appealing to him I think is order and hieararchy, and knowing where you are. That certain things are objectively best, and also that objectivity and his own subjectivity are broadly the same thing, that it is self-evident that some groups of people are better than others.

he is more than ok with non-white people, as long as they are called James or Steve and not Sahir or Jamal. If they would conform and be a James, he wouldn't have a problem with them (this links in a bit with what Matt DC said on the 'white people' thread, about the group of white britons who are generally comfortable with black British people but can't really cope with Eastern Europeans or North Africans. Major desire for people to conform to a set way of being. The out group also includes liberals, people at university, labour supporters, artists, teachers.

For him theres a distinct hierarchy of groups and theres a large amount of leeway and deference to groups above, and very little to groups below, who are instrincally objectively bad, or at least, worse, and that this is a natural order and shouldn't be played around with

I mean, I feel like I'm just typing out a dictionary definition of conservatism. What is most striking is the removal of nuance, theres no give and take in conversation whatsoever, its more like a series of statements. I'm trying harder just to steer conversations away from where this absolutism has taken hold but there's less and less ground

But this all predates any political leanings! It was actually always there, just manifested differently. And.I see now that the difficulties in conversation were always there, a feeling of why is this combative? why does this feel like a battle to come out on top? Now it is the same but incredibly political, and I dread conversations as it is feels like they have prepared themselves for war and theres less and less ground on which to avoid this way of doing things

Anyway I hope my post wasn't interpreted by anyone as "BARRY IS A HERO!!!!" more like I'm just trying to map my own responses and observations about my own thought patterns on to people with right wing brain worms, to better understand why it's happening, and it might happen to all of us eventually

It feels like a 'do-er' mindset as opposed to a 'thinker' mindset. Just get on and get it done, don't sit around pontificating and listening and reading the manual and thinking', all just a waste of time, just get on with it. and that theres something untrustworthy about people who might want to find out whats in the ground first before sticking a pole in there

That can also come with fear of aging. You’re more aware that time is passing all the time, even when you’re pondering interminable questions.

I decided not to go to my (ex)friend’s wedding. I tried to engage with him of Facebook, but it was fruitless. He keeps sharing pro far-right stuff. ‘Free Tommy’ stuff, pro- French NF, anti-gay right’s, anti- feminism. He’s started sending me #walkaway crap. I want him to be happy, but I can’t imagine being in his company without it kicking off into a huge argument, which would not be great at a wedding.

There are notions like permanence and certainty and stark binaries which are valorized by our society but which are pernicious because they are ultimately illusory. It feels like the extent to which those notions pervade within an individual is the extent to which that individual is likely to create a bubble of resistance against a world that stubbornly refuses to conform to those notions. Particularly, perhaps, as aging and one's impending mortality serve to directly undercut those notions.

also that objectivity and his own subjectivity are broadly the same thing

this is a concept that's really hard to get past, and drives a lot of the dialogue about how some groups (mysteriously, the ones with valid complaints) are more driven by "emotion" as opposed to some objectivity

it's really easy to fall into rhetorical arguments where every fringe case comes in and it's evident in every stupid debate about human rights. "if we let people define their own terms, what's to stop me from marrying my dog?"-style flourishes. rather than addressing specific concerns, the "objective" mindset tends to question the entire validity of discussion, not the validity of argument. and that's where it becomes clear the so-called objectivity is a thin veneer over very subjective ideas about the status quo

the recurring concept that comes up as more objective is the idea of meritocracy. the word was coined in a satirical context, and that's been completely lost in its wholesale adoption. the entire point is that a meritocracy is like a utopia: a hypothetical perfect state that's never attainable, a nowhere. the reality is that human cognitive and social biases will always be at the forefront, and you have to identify and question those biases. but objective dudes, again, claim that they're above bias

I don't think the "drift rightwards" comes with aging so much as cohort -- there are relatives of mine well into their 60s, and their political views are still incredibly malleable. sometimes it seems like they depend entirely on who's in their circle of friends this year.

most definitely

my parents seem to have gotten tired of several of their neighbors who have gotten more defensive but are relatively open to whatever far-left political thing I bring up. there seems to be more groupthink among the others and they're just not into it

I decided not to go to my (ex)friend’s wedding. I tried to engage with him of Facebook, but it was fruitless. He keeps sharing pro far-right stuff. ‘Free Tommy’ stuff, pro- French NF, anti-gay right’s, anti- feminism. He’s started sending me #walkaway crap. I want him to be happy, but I can’t imagine being in his company without it kicking off into a huge argument, which would not be great at a wedding.

― Leaghaidh am brón an t-anam bochd (dowd), Monday, August 13, 2018 9:38 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's really easy to fall into rhetorical arguments where every fringe case comes in and it's evident in every stupid debate about human rights. "if we let people define their own terms, what's to stop me from marrying my dog?"-style flourishes

― mh, Monday, August 13, 2018 10:10 AM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Good god I just realized dowd's ex-friend is marrying a dog to own the libs

I think people become "right-wing" because of real-life trauma and/or the terrors of aging-- I instinctively believe it's a neurological thing.

Older conservatives have a saying they like to toss around, that if you aren't a liberal at age 20 you have no heart, but if you aren't a conservative by age 50 you have no brain. This is bullshit, but somewhat revealing bullshit, in that it reflects the fact that many older conservatives were liberals when they were young and this formula allows them to reconcile the two and even claim it is evidence of their excellence as humans to be endowed with a heart and a brain. (Note: you will never see them describing Young Republican types as "heartless".)

My theory is simple enough. Young people base their politics largely upon theory, because the majority of their lives they have been spectators on the fringe of the adult world and they've spent their young lives trying to piece together explanations for what they see. The 'liberal' point of view is based on explanations of society that allow room for social change and improvement. This is very appealing to a young person, who ardently hopes the world won't be so messed up in the future, and has confidence that everyone naturally wants to fix what is so clearly broken. This aligns well with the "heart" rubric cited above.

As one ages, it becomes excessively obvious that fixing the world is beyond their power. If progress is made is one area, it is just as easy to find regress in another. The stubborn fixity of greed, ignorance, selfishness and fear in society seem insurmountable. The apparent hopelessness of improving anything leads them to abandon hope and ideals. In the absence of hope comes cynicism, fear and selfishness. Thus, a conservative is born.

This is a very old story, but no matter what the aging conservative wants to believe, this does NOT align with "having a brain", but rather from stopping thinking because the problems got too hard and complicated. If you are turn conservative at age 50 it doesn't mean you gained a brain, but that you've lost heart.

Having kids makes you selfish. Mortgages and all that shit.

(should have kept that for the controversial opinions thread)

I think that premise comes from people who were always concentrated on their own interests, but their circumstances changed and they attribute most of it to their own success -- or lack thereof, but claim an understanding that self-agency is important.

like great, old guy, you're no longer going to get drafted to fight in a war and you own a house. worked for you, so I guess it works for everyone

a bunch of my parents' peers are late-era baby boomers who did reasonably well working in businesses started by their own parents' generation, and they've reached retirement age or are near retirement just as the industries they worked in have become irrelevant or defunct

"c ya! have fun with your 'renegotiated' pensions!!"

As one ages, it becomes excessively obvious that fixing the world is beyond their power. If progress is made is one area, it is just as easy to find regress in another. The stubborn fixity of greed, ignorance, selfishness and fear in society seem insurmountable. The apparent hopelessness of improving anything leads them to abandon hope and ideals. In the absence of hope comes cynicism, fear and selfishness. Thus, a conservative is born.

well, it's probably simpler:

"I'm older and I miss life in my twenties, it can't be that I'm not in my twenties anymore, it must be that the world has gotten worse since then," and then finding a scapegoat in people they didn't like anyway

also I don't think that "liberals are liberals because they're young and think the world will be better in the future" works anymore -- like, to take the big one, climate change virtually guarantees it will not.

The goalposts seem to have moved to something different, the 'friends(/relatives) infected with brain worms' were 20/30 something at the beginning of the thread, which implies a much quicker transformation. Older generations being more right wing is surely something separate from this

The world is changing faster and faster and faster and not for the better in many ways (austerity, climate, automation, etc). I can totally understand anyone wanting to accept ‘objective’ ‘facts’, hierarchies, etc etc in the face of instability and uncertainty. Can’t condone it though.

Aimless your assessment is spot on, from where I'm sitting

id imagine simply having the good shit as opposed to wanting all the good shit you dont have is worth about 60% of converts

So turns out that he is a genuine concern that the breakdown of society is imminent, due to 'activists'

On surface it feels like the stereotype of the 73 year old Fox Viewer somewhere in the US who lives in a world created and sustained by media. But this is a 31 year old who lives in a UK city and has a good job and no obvious potholes. The created world at some point seems to have taken over the experienced world

I can understand it if someone lives in the sticks and rely on the media to tell them what the world is beyond the end of the driveway, but its disconcerting to see it happen to someone who's lived experience doesn't tally with this increasingly apocalyptic vision. There are so many different 'theys' that are on the cusp of destroying society, but each 'they' is never really explained, where they are, how many they are, how - it feels incredibly existential

Another thing that is striking is the source of any story

CR: Some people did a bad thing why is no one talking about it

A: Where did it happen? Not heard about this story, where did you read it?
CR: Internet

A: Where on the internet?
CR: Twitter

A: What twitter, do you have a link?

I;m then given someones name, but no url, no specific story. that i have to find for myself, which i dont want to spend my time doing. But its like blood out of a stone, and invariably when/if the story is located, it doesnt say what it was purported to say at all. its almost like the facts of a story are window dressing around some more fundamental truth. 'a crime is happening', 'where is this crime happening"? 'i dont know but you can be sure there is one happening somewhere'

People want to belong. Orthodoxies supply rules for belonging. There are some orthodoxies on display in this thread that I strongly agree with that aren't self-evidently true, and if I questioned them I'd be 51'd so fast your head would swim (and there aren't 51 individuals left on ILX). Folks these days find the orthodoxy that fits their bias -- I don't like that trend and think it's dangerous regardless of your ideology, but it's not currently worth alienating people and getting labelled to talk about it.

On surface it feels like the stereotype of the 73 year old Fox Viewer somewhere in the US who lives in a world created and sustained by media. But this is a 31 year old who lives in a UK city and has a good job and no obvious potholes. The created world at some point seems to have taken over the experienced world

I had to sit through some LBC the other day and one of the callers started every sentence with a panicked "the far left agenda"; it struck me that a generation or two ago, the rhetoric would've been more along the lines of "bloody kids, why won't they get a job, why aren't they thankful for the society we've given them"...reactionary but much more mundane in its outview, activists seen as spoiled children. But now I much more often hear this cast as, like, apocalyptic.

there are always people who think they're not only living in the end times, but that the complete breakdown is imminent. it's a very self-centered view, in my experience, in that the person who's invested in this crap wants to think their time is somehow more important than any other in history

there are major crises that happen on a daily basis, both local and global, but they're not easily grasped or connected to a single cause. so they're only paid lip service in roll-up conspiracies claiming that there's a shadowy cabal

i'm very suspicious of conspiracy theories in general, but on the other hand that peter thiel sure does get around

as far as I can tell he's participated in a few really obvious conspiracies. they're all public knowledge and not theoretical!

Because the right has historically been pretty good at suppressing their minor differences in the service of the greater evil, they're under the laughable impression that the left can get over their intramural squabbles enough to comprise a unified coalition. 'The far left agenda,' lol.

Has the in-fighting among the pro-Qanon and anti-Qanon mobs changed anything I wonder? They've suddenly been quiet(er) since the whole thing was being roundly laughed out of the room on CNN etc

it's a very self-centered view, in my experience

lol, I enjoyed that

there are always people who think they're not only living in the end times, but that the complete breakdown is imminent. it's a very self-centered view, in my experience, in that the person who's invested in this crap wants to think their time is somehow more important than any other in history

A certain narcissism is part of this but there's also a very real not so well repressed desire for the world to end. Surely some clever Freudian has written on both the utopian left and apocalyptic right being complementary manifestations of the death drive.

Eric Voegelin has approached this from a no-freudian perspective as well I think.

I mean, I get the death drive. But it's better a solo journey.

they're under the laughable impression that the left can get over their intramural squabbles enough to comprise a unified coalition

I mean, no, not at all, if you actually read their posts/comments/plans for hoaxes (which I don't recommend) it's full of encouraging and/or mocking infighting

(enough, in fact, that commenting about "infighting" in the left is almost a tell)

Late to this thread but it my take on original question is, this situation as described in op isn't about 'friends who have different political opinions' but about lifestyles. It's about the poster's friend getting involved in online groups, adding to their swell by sharing and posting stuff, adopting lingo and jargon; it's about lifestyle in that sense and it's also about lifestyle in the sense that the poster's friend is getting closer to people whose lifestyle includes harassing and assaulting people. Because of this I think the take of, why can't friends be friends despite diff political opinions doesn't work here it's about whether you can or should maintain friendships with someone whose lifestyle is turning toxic. 'Infected with R/W brainworms' is an appropriate phrase for this reason.

The joining of many facebook groups, the sharing of alt-right clickbait, the getting on hashtags, re-statement of reified talking points ... this isn't the same thing as 'holding a political opinion'. That is something that people used to do in the old days.

I mean, there are those who vote republican but don't pay attention to things that are political but maybe tend toward fox news and other outlets

then there are the people who were glued to AM talk radio and their progeny who came up on 4chan and they unite by wearing Qanon t-shirts

one of my now-retired coworkers was one of the talk radio guys and was insufferable any time a conversation delved even vaguely into politics. apparently one of my work friends has bumped into him in recent years and the first thing he asks, every time, is "so you STILL think global warming is real?!"

xp Probably latebloomer's friend needs to think hard about how viable it is to have a career as a comic book illustrator or writer (not quite sure what the friend was intending to do exactly but it was comic artist of some sort). The answer of course is not very viable at all, this is a terrible career plan, like wanting to be a dramatist or movie director etc. Creative work is a difficult thing to get into, high probability of talent going unrecognised. Especially in a recession and especially in comics. Every comic fan reckons they can do some drawing and writing, there will be millions of people wanting to get into it as a career, and the companies can simply filter out all but the very, very best and most marketable and best connected artists and writers.

The sensible advice to the friend would be to rethink the 'creative career' aim and adjust expectations sharply. Easy to give, never easy to take as I'm sure most people here know. Probably more sensible and effective to give this advice than 'you are statistically privileged' (yes, and 'the earth is round', 'most chairs have four legs')

One thing I've noticed about 'these people', in my thankfully brief encounters with them, is they cannot wait to blow your minds with some inane garbage they've picked up second/third/fourthhand on the internet, they will shoehorn stuff in anywhere because they can't shut up about this amazing insight they've borrowed off someone else. I'm reading "The Authoritarian Personality" right now and it describes as a characteristic of fascists is they love to let everyone know that We've Discovered A Secret And We Are Now Going To Tell You About It Though You Probably Won't Understand It Or Appreciate It... Yet.

i was radicalised by ilxor dot com and now i don't see zings

Responding the OP and I haven't read the whole thread but my angle would be to never engage the right wing ideas but engage the notion that spending this amount of time doing any kind of online activism is a waste of time. No great comic book writer career started with feuding online with social justice warriors.

responding to OP again, the most nefarious aspect i have seen of this in my friend lately (who is a trump supporter) is that he does not always accept everything trump does, but he has found ways to justify pretty much anything he does, and also he focuses on weird political issues like
the time transgender individuals felt ousted from a women-only club, as if to say - this is PC gone mad. He has kind of tried to find ways around being an out and out conservative while still clearly being one

Tom D, how is that book - was thinking of giving it a go

I don’t know why you don’t just murder them

Too much lost productivity, when calculated using potential lifetime earnings and the multiplier effect.

There's a helluva of a lot explaining of the methodology used in the surveys and interviews carried out but once you skip past all that you're past that it's extremely compelling - it's dated, of course, and I'm not enough of a Freudian to be entirely convinced by all the arguments. (xxxp)

Some updates on this situation:

I told him what I thought and we had a mostly civil conversation but it became apparent that we are operating from different baseline assumptions about a lot of things. I still don’t think he realizes how much this stuff hurts and angers me.

Part of what makes it hard to explain my position to my friend is that I can’t point to anything overtly offensive that he has posted, apart from some stuff about “SJWs”. For me it’s more about who he’s supporting and making common cause with.

Another factor is that networking within Comicsgate twitter has actually paid off for him. He got his graphic novel funded very quickly once it was signal boosted by the right influencers. He’s now fully incentivized to continue participating in the Comicsgate “community”, which is depressing as hell.

It's hard to argue against shitty ideas when they're also lucrative (see: the history western civilization).

^ of

A key theme to the whole thing innit - cf Stephen Yaxley Lennon

This is what my friend posted on twitter recently

“Comics are for everyone.

There is no place for harassment, racism, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia or sexism in comics.

Everyone should be welcome to make great comics!

I am #Comicsgate - this is what we believe.”

I give up. My friend is deluded if he genuinely believes this is what his “movement” stands for

I... dont get how the first part of his comment marries to the second lol isnt it the opposite of that!?

It’s like saying Gamergate was really about “ethics in games journalism”.

It’s...disingenuous, to say the least

Like on some level I think most of them know that’s not true and that they’re being foolish, but it gives their underdog/victim complex a patina of legitimacy while also taking the wind out of the sails of “SJWs” by adopting their lingo.

They love to claim they’re misunderstood and that the harassment/threats by comicsgaters are due to either a few bad apples or outright exaggerations and lies by the sinister SJWs. It can’t *possibly* be a logical outgrowth of the Comicsgaters’ rhetoric, no sir.

But but.. "Everyone should be welcome to make great comics!" is entirely what they're whinging about happening, right?

Read between the lines and what they’re really saying is, “sure, everyone should be free to make whatever comics they want, but leave that PC social justice shit out of my Spidey-Man wahhhhh”

They’re mad at Mom for making them share their toys with baby sis.

I think the only appropriate response is for creators to diversify representation in comics to the extent that there are no straight white male characters left at all.

(PS, from what I've been able to glean, the comicsgaters' rallying cry seems to be 'actually, it's about declining comic book sales.')

I think theres a question of what we react to and how we react. In the case of the comic guys last statement it appears that he is saying something ostensibly ok on the surface, "There is no place for harassment, racism, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia or sexism in comics." but that latebloomer knows that really he is meaning something different that doesnt tally with the actual words.

this is common in my experience, and gets to the heart of a lot of the disconnect. In reverse I know, with my cousin, if I say anything that is say, two sentences long - he will interrupt after the first, "But thats not xyz". He's already decided what I'm going to say before I've spoken and is reacting to that. Its part of what makes the conversations draining, a sense of talking past each other, but it has made me more cognisant of trying to respond to whats actually said, not what i think/know is 'underneath', and just in general speaking less

but that latebloomer everybody in the fucking universe

Its not quite related but I couldn't find the appropriate thread, about the woman who pretends she has never heard of The Beatles, but is culturally aware or herself in relation to everything else. I'm not sure how seriously it was to be taken as a thing but I actually found it really useful!

The Beatles are a great example of something that a) I don't have any real interest in or particular opinion of, and b) that lots of other people really do, some of who may well categorize you based on your opinion to questions like "are they the best band of all time?". Which is a question I have no answer to

The only way not to take part in 'the beatles exercise' is to have never heard of them. I didn't really think about it until my cousin said something about burkas/niqabs. I can see this being one of those right wing brainworms / talking points. I said I'd no idea what he was talking about. Putting forward a counter-argument was just going to validate the whole thing, the brainworms are designed to work against resistance/opposition/reaction, not against neutrality/ignorance/apathy.

He's already decided what I'm going to say before I've spoken and is reacting to that.

I have often experienced this. If you do not make the argument they expect you to make, for which they have a ready-made answer, they still pretend you made that argument and deliver the same ready-made answer. It is fruitless to point out that you did not say what they pretend you said, and you do not need to answer their pat rejoinder, because it did not address your point.

Another approach I have frequently noted is that no matter what nuance or qualification you make in your statements about the world, they will be treated as if they were an extremely bald and simplistic. Then they proceed to demolish their version of your argument on the grounds that it is not accurate to the real world. Pointing out that their simplistic version of what you said is what is inaccurate, while what you did say is perfectly valid, does not penetrate their consciousness.

Lastly, they tend to think in dualities and constantly create false dichotomies, so to their minds, if any part of your worldview (which they have stripped down and warped to suit their prejudices) is false, it proves that the opposite is true.

It becomes maddening after a while. And it gets neither of you anywhere.

I guess its the faux-naif approach - I'm not saying its a good thing overall, but it DOES work with friends/relatives with brainworms as it takes the wind out of their sails. They have often turned up ready for battle, talking points honed and sharpened. Its powered by reaction, but not just words but feelings of irritation or annoyance. I noticed if i show any signs of annoyance this is perceived as good, that he must be on the right track. The value in his points is measured by the reaction if causes. If i counter anything about burkas it reinforces that he is in the right, and he takes energy from that.

I know from this thread and other like it, that many people avoid family members because they can't escape these kinds of conversations and end up in fights. I don't know why but certainly in my cousins case I feel he is looking for this to happen, because of the validation it provides. The existential fight between leave and remain, city and united, ronaldo and messi.

This misnomer that any of these things are about what is being said, when it is about who you are or identify as. He needs my reaction and he can't have it

do these conversations ever change any of your own opinions/thoughts?

I doubt it, because even when their interlocutor says something that appears reasonable, they're still wise enough to decipher what it really means.

I am not getting the impression, from the thread title on down, that reasonable is on the menu - this isn’t “Liberty vs Safety: debate”

I always find it quite liberating when ppl abandon the basic good faith of proper conversation, you can really let rip

^ New board description.

do these conversations ever change any of your own opinions/thoughts?

― lee guacamole (darraghmac),

Sadly never, but this is because they aren't conversations!! They are statements masquerading as conversations. They don't have the ebb and flow of conversations, which is why I don't like having them. I think in general its very difficult for anyone to have their opinions on anything changed in an exchange that doesn't have the give and take of a conversation

It makes me think a bit of those videos on youtube where someone DESTROYS someone else but whenever I have seen one its someone talking very fast and loud. I can see how it works when the person who's opinion is supposed to be changed is the viewer, but its strange in a one-to-one conversation when there is no audience to win over. But with my cousin it feels like there is an implicit or imagined audience that is being won over.

The thing is, I'm an indecisive person, I can have my mind changed fairly easily! but not like this!

it is making me think of a bad interaction with my brother recently. I probably could have dealt with it better, but he started talking in comments section quotes or something, and the type of shit that enrages me. And I pointed out to him that he is not quite the rugged individualist he thinks he is, especially when the main reason he's never ended up at a foodbank is the financial assistance he gets from his step-dad. I completely deflated him with that burn, but he'll just dig in deeper now!

regarding avoiding the "beatles exercise" i think there are other ways of doing it. i'm more than usually obsessed with them but if someone asks me if they're "the best band ever" i will actively call out that question as meaningless. constantly resorting to metadiscussion has its pitfalls, but i don't think it's inherently worse than the faux-naif approach.

i'm generally a big advocate of, in discussions, listening to what other people say, because it's frequently the only way to get those people to listen to themselves.

i am also a big fan of avoidance as a potentially useful metaconversational gambit.

i am also a big fan of avoidance as a potentially useful metaconversational gambit.

Like when you see someone coming toward you with an "I have something to say" look on their face and you very quickly walk to the other side of the room?

well, meta-relational, not really specific to a conversation. i'll talk to you but you have to make the invisible audience you're declaiming to go home first, that kind of thing.

on consideration this seems like it could be related to the effect of online discourse. anything one posts online does, of course, have an invisible audience.

Another approach I have frequently noted is that no matter what nuance or qualification you make in your statements about the world, they will be treated as if they were an extremely bald and simplistic. Then they proceed to demolish their version of your argument on the grounds that it is not accurate to the real world.

a fantastic (well, not "fantastic") example of this is playing out right now after the DeSantis comments, where commenters are spewing all kinds of disingenuous shit like "you can't say 'dog whistle,' because you already said 'dog' was racist when Trump said it about Omarosa"

(that is, sadly, a real thing I read)

ime faux-naif leads to more talking as if it’s a subject they feel well versed in, they may attempt to assume the mentor role, or if they know your general position on things may think you’re not well educated on the subject and see it as a path to conversion to their larger philosophy.

i like it only as a precursor to disengage with someone who I don’t have a close relationship with, or is in a position to do me harm if i really lay into them (i.e., boss at team happy hour).

Faux-naif isn't quite the right term, the beatles example becomes one because they were a giant thing, and its not so much about the viewpoint as the subject matter. At the end of the day I don't want to talk about burkas or John McCain with my cousin, or with anyone else - and find my anxiety levels in such interactions are directly related to how much of the speaking I am doing.

I always find it quite liberating when ppl abandon the basic good faith of proper conversation, you can really let rip

there's a lot of wisdom in this!

I don't "debate" (ugh) people unless there's a good faith assurance on both sides that we are open to changing our minds. This is almost never the case so I almost never engage in political discussions with conservatives.

But, as a hunch, I'd be tempted to say that you're always better off arguing over first-principles rather than "facts."

Tucker Stone had a strong editorial on ComicsGate the other day:

Elsewhere, the developments in the ongoing social media annoyance/terrorism campaign grouped under the term #comicsgate continues to showcase more of what seems like a near infinite supply of the same brand of knuckle-dragging stupidity that goes along with any campaign whose only real message is one of whining complaint. Be it a harassment campaign circling around Darwyn Cooke's widow, multiple con-artist-led crowdfunding campaigns for comics no one will ever enjoy, an endless cycle of arguments that demand one immerse themselves in never-ending strings of social media updates, unreadable blog posts & supremely boring youtube videos involving people who are indistinguishable from an eye-rolling 9-year-old simply so you can understand what in the fuck they're all talking about and, most recently, a guy sending a picture of his asshole to another guy he dislikes online.

...there isn't much to say about the people involved in this particular subset of "the culture". Like the gamergaters that seem to have served as their inspiration, comicsgate is the last cry of a dying breed. They've already been replaced by the millions--not hundreds of thousands, millions--of children who have been reared on Raina, Yang & Kibuishi, by the tweens and teens who bleed Viz. They're going to be offensive, hateful, and annoying while they sink, but even the most lazy of searches of their hashtags sees each of their attempts at insurrection drowned out by a chorus of people who, while they occasionally seem to only marginally care about comics and art, at least recognize that racism and homophobia behaviors to be shamed. This has been coming for a while, this reckoning--and it will probably be a little bit louder, and a lot bit stupider, while people like Ethan Van Sciver and Richard Meyer bleed it for whatever money it has left.

For what it's worth? More power to them. The sooner those guys burn out the financial core of this dipshit movement, the better. None of this has resulted in better comics, better writing about comics, or any good jokes. It's just eaten up lives, time and talent that could've been spent doing absolutely anything else, while ensuring that a large portion of interesting people spent way too much time online being batted around by a firehose of annoyance. And no, just to be clear, I don't mean the recent string of second-tier superhero freelancers, end-of-career bloggers and Image pitchmen who have made copy and pasting empty platitudes their latest attempt to brand themselves in a more appealing fashion so they won't be swept out of the door with the creeps when all those aforementioned millions who are growing up on comics, manga & middle-grade fiction that actually treats them like human beings with lives of value start deciding what the next wave of art is supposed to look like. The interesting people are the critics who didn't try, the artists who walked away, and the collaborations between groups that couldn't happen because of the constant poisoning of the well that comes from being a part of an industry that waits until the last minute, every fucking time, to get off its ass and make a moral choice to tell these losers to go a long time ago.

On one level I feel bad for my friend because this bubble of support is eventually gonna dissipate and he’s going to be left out in the cold with his participation in this bullshit tainting him forever.

Don't feel bad for him. This is the ideology he supposedly subscribes to, to the detriment of others. Meritocracy, free market, alpha white maleness, right? I don't get hanging on to people who are just lost by choice. If he was an addict or had recognized health issues, I could see putting in effort. Being around to hear or debate this bullshit is enabling. Say your thing and get out.

xxp good piece. too bad he has a name that suggests he'd be some kind of Fox News talking head

OMG, Kyle Baker is amazing.

So excited to be part of the new #comicsgate line of books. pic.twitter.com/o4Z1gxfHtw

— Quality Jollity (@KyleJBaker) September 4, 2018

going back and forth on whether I should add my right-wing trump loving family back on FB and then just refute every single idiotic meme they post with actual facts or whether that is not worth my time.

Don’t

it is not worth your time

thanks, that's what I was thinking. the majority of them have moved well beyond rationality into unhinged territory; also, I never have to actually be around them so it shouldn't matter to me as much as it does.

yeah, you have no real obligation to offer the milk of human kindness to cousins you don't ever see imho

involving yourself emotionally to the point of wanting to refute idiotic memes in this construction being a form of kindness.

Do not try to argue rationally with people who insist upon irrationality. It is a losing battle. I think shunning might be the best/only option at this point.

FB is a uniquely terrible platform for political convos, much less for trying to directly change someone’s mind

FB, twitter, instagram...that's where the idiot trolls are kings and you will never win.

all too true

why do people still use fb

Cousin-related guilt I assume

FB is a uniquely terrible platform

I've had zero second thoughts about hiding friends or family members who post obnoxious political stuff. I don't need to take up any extra space in my head contemplating their awful POVs.

fb grand except for ppl who think its for learning/instruction which is a terrible terrible terrible concept to have about fb or anything else rly

Dmac TT is mostly OTM, aside than the fact that ultimately this was what finally forced Jol out

Refuting anything said just reinforces the point. What greater seal of approval can there be than have one of the enemy turn up and refute it for you? Any kind of learning/instruction has to have their guard down and wanting to listen (and yours too). This does happen! it can even (possibly) happen on fb.

With my hardcore RW cousin, I never refute anything, I may ask questions but I never offer my own opinion unless asked. If asked a leading question I say "no idea, never heard of it". If asked an open honest question I give an open honest answer. This very rarely happens

One thing that has happened with my cousin is, deep levels of misreading - the sense that there is another conversation underneath the actual conversation that is taking place. I don't even think its wilful, and I aim for clarity in saying anything - but even in the simplest of exchanges something is misunderstood somewhere. And this extends well outside of anything political. e.g something as simple as "Will you get the train when you go?", leads to something like "what makes you think I'm going tomorrow?". And i'm flummoxed, how did "tomorrow" get in there? It feels like there are lots of unsaid levels to a conversation, its just more obvious in political stuff but happens outside of it too

all agreed, anvil in on a four year contract pls

I think whats happening is there is this "idea", but then only a part of it is communicated, and thats what I then respond to, but there's more to it than what I'm responding to so miscommunication is there right at the very beginning.

I also notice a deep reluctance to writing anything down, like in making a decision about something I suggest well ok write down the pros and cons and lets see what we've got. He is very reluctant to do anything like this, and the decision ends up being made more on a kind of instinct, and only at that point will the reasons come out - like after the fact. The answer must come first, and only then do the questions get a look in. Which leads to a strange sense of outcome being pre-ordained, almost as though questioning or analyzing the options is somehow upsetting the natural order. Thats why i think 'refuting with facts' is kind of a mugs game - at least with my cousin. actual 'politics' is tangential, its much deeper than that

The only time I stage an intervention on a right-wing post is when it’s made by my sister, where I respond in a way that’s guaranteed to have her remove said post.

I am a little surprised at the idea that Facebook is a terrible platform for politics - I've seen people have good nuanced conversations on it, usually in the context that they are both on a mutual friend's post. I literally can't imagine that happening on Twitter or - or on Instagram? on Bebo? on Ello? on Youtube comments?

haha dmac trenchant posts turning fatalistic in the last four words vmic

Yeah, I don't think Facebook is bad for political discussions except for the factors that make political discussions online bad in general.

it's not innately bad for political discussions, it's just way too easy to make terrible lies and malice proliferate. takes no thought or time to see something offensive and immediately, blindly forward it and connect it to dozens of more people. With no real repercussions. and Facebook in particular, it is not in the company's financial interests to limit this activity. though maybe things will change. Maybe Facebook tightening and better enforcing restrictions will be the equivalent of Amazon raising the minimum wage to $15.

But again what are you comparing it to? It’s 10 times better than Twitter on all those counts, and everything else is only better because it’s smaller.

I don't know, compared to actually having a conversation with someone? Because yeah, it's an innate problem with social media of all sorts.

It's just all so passive and mindless. Just wait till every American with a phone gets the not optional stupid ass emergency notice from the White House today. That's going to be the way of the future.

https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/

i don't think that facebook is uniquely bad as an internet discussion platform, and indeed it has some advantages other platforms don't, but its size, and the fact that consequently all the worst people use it, works to its disadvantage. i find there's a sort of gresham's law of internet discourse - bad speech drives out good.

the other problem with internet discourse, and it's been this way since the days of usenet at least, is that it discourages listening and encourages soapboxing. why have a back-and-forth with another person when you can instead play to the gallery? in this way the internet is frequently an asymmetrical form of communciation masquerading as a symmetrical form.

I still think the observation Louis CK (sorry) made is pretty apt. It's just so easy to say something mean and hurtful online, and not only will you not see the reaction of the person you're hurting, what you posted will just stay up there forever, for them and others to see and think about. So what took me a split second to do has a much bigger and longer impact.

There was someone else recently who made the prediction re: social media and cell phones that in the not too distant future we will look back on this era like we look back on everyone smoking or kids eating nothing but processed junk food. Like, "what were we thinking?!"

I still think the observation Louis CK (sorry) made is pretty apt. It's just so easy to say something mean and hurtful online, and not only will you not see the reaction of the person you're hurting, what you posted will just stay up there forever, for them and others to see and think about. So what took me a split second to do has a much bigger and longer impact.

― Josh in Chicago

that may be theoretically true, but in practice we're very good at forgetting the past. yeah i said some fucking awful stuff on usenet 25 years ago, but unless i run for public office, who gives a shit?

for me the problem is that negative feedback registers more powerfully than positive feedback, combined with the natural tendency on the internet to exaggerate for effect. if someone tells me i am the greatest person of all time, i shrug, say "thanks", feel good for a second, and move on with my life. on the other hand if someone talks shit about me, it stays with me for a while longer. maybe other people have different experiences, i certainly wouldn't want generalize that experience, but at the same time i don't feel like i'm wholly alone in reacting in such a fashion.

That is absolutely true. The internet magnifies everything negative and minimizes everything positive. I am no scientist, but that must have something to do with how our brains work. Reading something complimentary online, we just assume no thought was put into it, because no thought is needed. The same is true for something negative, but we dwell on it much more. Or at least some of us do.

fb grand except for ppl who think its for learning/instruction which is a terrible terrible terrible concept to have about fb or anything else rly actively undermining the functioning of global democracy and selling all of your personal info to deodorant companies and Steve Bannon

fb is a piece of crap for baby boomers and lames

(i deactivate it but keep fb messenger in case any person on there that i don't see much needs to get a hold of me)

Most of my family has had right-wing brain worms since forever, but, I mean, how do you even conceive of dealing with this level of crazy? (This is my mother-in-law.)

That's it, I'm done.. I know what I believe about Kavanaugh and I know I will never be able to convince any Democrat anything different than what they believe, because they will never change my mind... It's just a shame that the Democrats have been acting so mean and nasty about all of this and the way they have been treating us Republicans is a SHAME... I never thought they would ever be this mean to us... We are suppose to be a United country, I guess the Democrats don't believe that... The Democrats have become the party of Bullies. so sad.... and by the way, our country is a Republic, not a democracy... I cringe every time any person in our government calls us a democracy.... The end...

the whole "republic, not a democracy" thing is the dumbest shit ever

Yeah, well North Korea's full name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea whereas South Korea is just the Republic of Korea. Checkmate, libtards.

have her explain the differences between a republic vs democracy. be prepared to cringe.

Well, a republic is ruled by Republicans, see . . .

Rush and josh speak wisely. There is a whole thing (some) people do where it's tough for us to accept that there is a negative view of ourselves out there anywhere. And if anyone anywhere thinks ill of us, we need to confront and combat that perception. Even if (perhaps especially if) it's futile and the healthier thing would be to make like Elsa and let it go.

It happens here on ilx. It happens in my work life. It happens in my personal relationships, including my marriage.

ow do you even conceive of dealing with this level of crazy? (This is my mother-in-law.)

When she said this, who is she saying it to? if thats a fb post or something then its just an expression, there's nothing to respond to. Its a closer not an opener. Responding to closers is never a good idea. IF I were ever to respond, which I wouldn't, I'd try move away from the conceptual to the tangible, pick one small bit and respond to that, eg "I'd be ok with Kavanaugh, its just the perjury thing, I'm still having some trouble with it, perjury is a bit of an issue for me". In the unlikely event that I'd engage with this, that is as far as I could ever imagine going

have her explain the differences between a republic vs democracy. be prepared to cringe.

I really try and steer clear of ANY talk on a conceptual level, particularly with my cousin - almost certainly not talking about the same things even if using the same word.

And if anyone anywhere thinks ill of us, we need to confront and combat that perception.

Letting go of this is key. The first thing I think is, well, does this particular persons perception matter? Most likely its a no (it might even be that the person matters but their perception doesn't). If the answer is yes it does matter, confront and combat are still the wrong tools. If their perception matters, it might well be that they have a point, and I need to find out what that is

I liked the girl in the Sailor Moon outfit when she got ambushed by Infowars (at a Bernie event possibly?), and the interviewer bombarded her with "Socialism! Venezuela! eating Rats! Socialism!" in that really weird way of talking very fast at someone. And she replied "I just want free healthcare, honey"

"But I just told you they'r eating rats!"

Letting go of this is key. The first thing I think is, well, does this particular persons perception matter? Most likely its a no (it might even be that the person matters but their perception doesn't). If the answer is yes it does matter, confront and combat are still the wrong tools. If their perception matters, it might well be that they have a point, and I need to find out what that is

― anvil

This is the really tricky bit. If someone's perception matters to me, it's either because I love them, or because they have power over me (or both). Trump supporters are so extreme that the number of possible responses to them are limited. There's confrontation, capitulation, and avoidance.

I've chosen avoidance, and avoidance in a fairly extreme form. In the case of people I loved, I've concluded that someone's support of Trump necessarily changes them to the point where it is impossible for them to truly recognize and respect me as a human being, and that therefore the preconditions for a loving relationship are impossible, and so I've withdrawn strongly from them.

In the second case, I've taken active steps to remove myself from situations where Trump supporters have power over me. This is the difficult part because these steps aren't available to all people. It's extremely challenging when people who have power over you either implicitly or explicitly hate you and want to hurt you. If flight isn't an option, I guess that just leaves fight.

Trying to understand here (good luck, I know): for GOPers, does 'mean bullying' basically = 'why are you so vehemently opposed to us making unpopular decisions on your behalf'? 'Why do you have to make such a fuss about us dismantling civil society?' 'Why do you have to so forcefully point out that I've aligned myself with increasingly-unalloyed evil?' What? I can't square it.

In the case of people I loved, I've concluded that someone's support of Trump necessarily changes them to the point where it is impossible for them to truly recognize and respect me as a human being

How does this manifest? With my cousin it can be quite odd, its not even particularly clear if I am even considered one of the 'they' or not. sometimes yes but often no. Can it be that your loved ones are holding something similar, in some ways doing a form of mental gymnastics where you aren't part of the target group?

Also, your avoidance - Ive read plenty of people going down this route and its definitely understandable, but Ive found 'conversation avoidance' a better tactic than 'actual avoidance'. Granted I only really have the one person that is like this, but I've viewed this like, well, I do have a choice about the topic of conversation, I don't have to if I don't want to.

As for people in a position of power over you, that is much worse, your options are so limited, thankfully I don't (currently) have to face that. I'm not sure I'd be able to cope well with that at all

Few Republicans are actually card-carrying racists and torch waivers, in my opinion. They just have no consideration or awareness of anyone outside of their immediate circle. They can have gay family or black friends and be totally cool with both even while voting against their interests, because they are "the good ones." But they never seem to take into account that everybody has friends who are the "good ones," and there's millions and millions and millions of "good ones" out there, all of them have friends and loved ones, and just because your friends and family aren't being hurt, to the best of your limited knowledge, that does not mean there are not millions and millions of people out there who are suffering or at risk thanks to the GOP.

Or maybe they're all racists, etc.

The only success I’ve found arguing with right wing friends is Socratic inquiry. Just ask questions to try and understand what they believe and sometimes the questions force them to rethink their beliefs. “What’s the difference between a democracy and a republic and why is a republic preferable to a democracy” could be a good question. “Should we aim for representation as close to 1 person 1 vote as possible or should minority groups and elites be making the decisions for the rest of the country?” If nothing else it’ll illuminate their values. I’ve mostly had ppl walk back their craziness when we get into these kinds of questions but I’ve also had people admit that they’d prefer an authoritarian gov and no democracy at all which is a good thing to know. “I disagree that authoritarianism would be better than a democracy but I can certainly see the appeal.”

I'm watching Mindhunter rn and I have to say that this detailed exploration of the psychology of (almost entirely white male) serial killers, while nothing new, has been kinda revelatory at this particular political moment. Like they're really only distinguished from, say, bog standard MRA turds and conservatives in the violent manifestation of their worldview.

(Like the one killer who let a victim go because she said her dad had cancer, which reminded him of his brother's cancer. Empathy only exists when the direct mapping of someone else's lived experience onto their own allows them to briefly consider that other people might also have an interior life, hopes, dreams, fears, etc.)

if you don't interact with ppl with right-wing beliefs i can see how you might think that they are psychologically indistinguishable from serial killers but i think you might find that many of them share values with you and mostly disagree about what facts are germane / what systems can best accomplish those values / etc. that has been my experience. i don't get the impression that republican voters are sociopathic.

true. from personal experience, they're both hateful and fearful

There’s a stunning disconnect that I see irl bc the several people I know who are apparently mildly-to-deeply right wing have always been perfectly respectful and decent in person. Online it’s an entirely different story — to see one of the nicest dads I know going off on NextDoor about a fifth column and shooting people who trespass, or seeing the mild-mannered dude I knew turn into an alt-right cartoonist bullying anti-women conspiracy theorist, or my quiet cousin who came out of the closet and married his bf and goes off on thinly veiled racist meme rants (his husband is from Central America!)...I think it shows how the internet can turn people who may otherwise debate in better faith into seeming monsters.

I guess the question is, has the internet actually changed them, have they always been this way, has the black and white debate style of internet discourse irreparably destroyed them (and almost everyone else?)

I only have deeply negative feelings about one of those people now tbh, due to what does seem like a deep targeted cruelty that is different from a rant or two and dumb meme sharing.

i agree with you in that someone being polite and nice in their everyday life has nothing to do with the vile feelings and attitudes they carry inside. at least most of these right wingers i know have the sense to keep these views inside before letting it slip "accidentally" about how annoyed they are about black people are actually awful, but i also live in a fairly liberal area

I'm kinda at the point where I don't give a fuck how kindly and polite and gracious a conservative is with me personally. A tip of the cap and a 'howdoyoudo!' doesn't offset the measurable damage their ideology does to the wider world.

Some of you guys seem to have neverending tolerance for absolute bullshit people in your lives. Congrats? I am still completely in the shame and shun operating procedure. So far, no regrets and awesome perk that I no longer have to travel home for the holidays (or funerals).

believe me, if i was anywhere close to affording it i'd get away from my family. but escape is not an option, so tolerance is required

I think Mordy's generally otm here, the biggest hurdle (in my experience) is getting them to engage in that kind of Socratic dialogue in the first place. Like that "democracy vs. republic" line gives you an avenue to pursue, but sometimes it's hard to dig past a bunch of bs rhetoric to get at larger, underlying issues.

mind you i don't actually really think my cousin is a fully decent human being, but i also empathize w/his genuine pain when he came out (at age 35) to his right wing folks and his very anti-gay mom (who is now very pro-gay, what a country), and his husband is afaict pretty damned left wing, which makes it all pretty strange as a situation, him being such a pro-Trump guy in very selective ways. we spent time with my aunt and uncle and other cousin (not him) and i think he was on duty and couldn't make it. we see them all once every several years. it's family, i don't really feel like shunning them. my son likes them all, idk.

this dad i know, his daughter is friends with my son. never even knew he leaned hard right til he discovered social media and one night my w1fe asked, "have you seen....anyone we know posting...."interesting" things on NextDoor?" And here I only thought the guy got worked up over WW2 books and grilling burgers. eh I don't know if he even likes Trump. Probably. I know he's also friends with a vv liberal lesbian couple, not to mention all their other liberal friends. People are complicated, maybe they can also change?

mostly i feel like leading by ingratiating, tolerant example sometimes does work maybe very incrementally and even if it doesn't work, i don't think it turns someone *more* right wing.

I've happily cut off all my family who espouse this shit (while keeping around one aunt who believes it but keeps her mouth shut; and TBH i don't know what my mother thinks, she used to be super liberal, became an alcoholic and then kind of conservative as she got closer to catholic church again, then I sensed a drift and now I think she doesn't know what to believe); I just can't get over the urge to recontact some of them and argue. that's my problem

I don't think my life or the world will be enriched in any way by my cutting out people who disagree w/ my politics. As long as they aren't explicitly advocating for genocide I can deal with most abhorrent political beliefs and they certainly won't evolve / change their minds if I ignore them. There are Republicans in my life who I've been interacting with for years who I can see in demonstrable ways that they've modulated and changed their opinions on things because they've interacted with me in cool, rational exchanges over and over again.

I admire your patience, Mordy.

I haven't got the energy tbh.

Well they aren't "politics" friends. They're people who I socialize with in my community - I eat meals with them, I pray with them, I play board games with them, our kids play together, sometimes we work together. And sometimes politics comes up as it does. It doesn't define our relationship. If it did I'd probably be less interested in socializing with them. And I prefer socializing with people who share my politics bc it's just easier. But I gain enough from these relationships that have nothing obvious/explicit to do with politics.

The vicissitudes of federal service require that I regularly interact with both small-c conservatives and big-R Republicans in a professional context and I’m thankful that they leave their brain worms at home, although sometimes the water cooler chumminess with ideological foes who apparently hate everything I believe in can create a stressful dissonance when I’m away from work and have time to reflect.

Right now I’m in school with a bunch of career military folks who seem like they could definitely be insufferable right wing assholes if the uniform didn’t demand that they not identify with any party.

I respect their dedication to being unaffiliated but sometimes their bothsidesism and barely-concealed libertarian tendencies make me sad.

Separately - I estranged myself from my family for totally not political reasons. I have a hard time imagining putting myself through the emotional wringer of being, like, famous ILX poster and Twitch streamer Karl Malone, basically.

My parents, brother in law, and cousins are wonderful people around whom politics is a tripwire. They don't bring it up anymore. Yet when I visit these days I have to relax. At its worst my anticipating of a crisis that won't happen reminds me of my pre-out days.

Our family fight enough about stuff we basically agree on I can't imagine what it would be like if they were actually Tories.

Also I want to make a differentiation that it's not differing 'politics' that I have a problem with. I hate using that word as a standin when it's really, like, peoples' daily lives that we are talking about.

I shouldn’t leave out the fact that hacker and cybersecurity circles are chock full of gun-collecting fedora’d “individualists” dressed in all black tactical gear, shoulder to shoulder with transgender feminists and innumerable categories of hippie.

As I said, if they openly advocate for genocide I would disassociate from them. But if they believe in policy X and I think policy X will lead to people dying, but they don't think it'll lead to people dying, then what we disagree with is the consequence of the policy, not whether it's okay to do things that kill people.

And as long as none of you have to interact with these Schroedinger’s People, well then it’s just impossible to say?

I'm pretty ice cold on anything impacting women or poc. It's absolutely not acceptable to me.

Once you bring up consequences they just revert to their barbershop versions of deontology or virtue ethics. It’s a jello squeezing exercise.

Never forget that most political attitudes are strictly tribal and a little bit emotional.

Yeah, the guys in my barbershop are always going on and on about deontology and virtue ethics.

I try to change the subject to, like, the categorical imperative or to eudaimonism, but they won't let me.

mine are mostly shavians

Like that "democracy vs. republic" line gives you an avenue to pursue, but sometimes it's hard to dig past a bunch of bs rhetoric to get at larger, underlying issues.

I can't even get to the BS rhetoric because people who say this are fundamentally incapable of knowing what words mean.

Also in order to have a conversation about values, you often are expected to have 1000x facts at your disposal to prove or disprove whatever tangent your conversational partner goes off on. I don't currently have to have this conversation bc today's politics have forced some ppl I know to really distinguish what they believe, but in previous family discussions it has been like, Them: "I vote Republican because of the national debt--they believe in balancing the books. You can't spend money you don't have." Me: "You know that's not a thing, right? [Insert a water-tight explanation of modern monetary theory and all the reasons national debt is not like house-hold spending.][Which in real life I am not knowledgeable about.]"

At that point I ask them if they paid cash for their house and cars.

That seems like a non-starter because it's too clear to them that they are in a process of paying that debt down. The kind of thing that's hard to explain is why it's not undesirable for a nation to carry debt, that it's not comparable to household debt which we're always told is "bad." Etc. Anyway like I said this is not my area of expertise but it's the sort of situation where in order to get them to wrestle with the moral qualities they're going to need you to refute 100 things first. It's exhausting.

How does this manifest? With my cousin it can be quite odd, its not even particularly clear if I am even considered one of the 'they' or not. sometimes yes but often no. Can it be that your loved ones are holding something similar, in some ways doing a form of mental gymnastics where you aren't part of the target group?

Also, your avoidance - Ive read plenty of people going down this route and its definitely understandable, but Ive found 'conversation avoidance' a better tactic than 'actual avoidance'. Granted I only really have the one person that is like this, but I've viewed this like, well, I do have a choice about the topic of conversation, I don't have to if I don't want to.

― anvil

it doesn't usually manifest! that's the destructive thing, that's why i adopt radical avoidance, because most of the time, at least for me as a white and male-presenting person, one can get along with these people, pretend that the systemic prejudices and hatreds don't exist. god knows i did it for years and years, and if i'm thankful for anything about the current situation it's that it's finally given me the motivation i needed to stop doing it. i spent decades excusing and accomodating abusers, and if it was still possible for me to do it, i would.

I was beat up by an alt-righter and it seemed the way it manifested with him was past failures with women, leading to a bitter view of feminism gone too far and (I wasn't sure how the next part formed) but a frustration with transgender politics. With my good friend, as mentioned previously it seems to have started with infowars-alex jones years back, then a youtube full of auto-suggestions that led him on a path that was similar, all the while he would claim it was objective..

oh yeah I was beat up because I didn't agree with him, I just sat silently and he could TELL I didn't agree. Given that he almost killed me it was pretty fucking lame

I guess the question is, has the internet actually changed them, have they always been this way, has the black and white debate style of internet discourse irreparably destroyed them (and almost everyone else?)

― omar little

for what it's worth i think trump supporters have changed, continue to change, as a result of their support of trump. partly this is because i see how majorly i've changed over the past two years, but i think affiliation, sociality (i'm not going to say "internet", that seems too imprecise, it's just as much the churches) work in a way that we become more like who we associate with. yeah, i think trump has made republicans more hateful and more racist than they already were.

i don't blanket-hate them because a lot of them, _particularly_ women, are caught in that trap of victims defending their abusers. which makes me sad, but i recognize there's nothing i can do about that.

"Separately - I estranged myself from my family for totally not political reasons.

― El Tomboto"

the encouraging thing about right now is that the political being so deeply personal is leading to an atmosphere of more personal accountability. i think back a lot to the way weinstein insisted that he was one of the "good guys" because he voted for democrats. it doesn't work that way anymore, thank god. now it's only the republicans making the excuses for these assholes, but it used to be everybody. the people i've stopped talking to as a result of all this aren't just republicans; it's given me the strength to get myself away from people who, regardless of shared political ideals, have seriously fucked up my life.

My mother is definitely is NOT one of these people, however one trait she does share is credulousness, takes most things at face value and isn't that great at seeing through things or questioning - though thankfully she is also aware that this is the case. She read an article on Corbyn recently and said "Even I could see through that one!" (I think the gist was that a) he loves to go round playing to all these crowds and soaking up all the adulation and its gone to his head, but also b) no one likes him and there are no crowds), so she acknowledges that she doesnt always notice and it jumped out at her when she did notice

In some ways its actually quite good, she is genuinely open minded, but I can see how easy it can be to tell someone something and just have it accepted unquestioningly. Like my cousin, she can accept a piece that says "some people are doing some thing somewhere", but unlike my cousin if I ask anything about specifics she doesn't then cling harder to the story but goes "oh yea, good point, it wasn't that clear". Some conversations can start out similar.

"They are..."
"Wait, who's 'they'?"

but it isn't the same at that point. I think the similiarity is that she can be quite muddled but its not walled off. She will examine things, but its almost like she doesn't quite know how - even though the desire to is there

The GOP and their supporters have become such mindless ghouls that one can't even express solidarity about basic human/civil rights without it being labeled as partisan.

many of them share values with you and mostly disagree about what facts are germane / what systems can best accomplish those values / etc. that has been my experience.

All I can say, Mordy, is that you apparently interact with people who have an unusual ability to temper emotion with reason.

i mean, at this point if you’re a republican you’re aligning yourself with people who seem to ultimately want to lock me (female hetero-agnostic journalist), my sister (lesbian who works in a higher ed program targeted by devos), and her wife (lesbian who emigrated here from poland as a teen) up, and probably my nephew by extension. so they can all fuck off honestly.

like i don’t understand why i should “civilly engage” with people whose boots are on my throat and those of people who i love. fuck that.

The people who call for civil engagement with Trump supporters can't even fucking unfriend some toxic acquaintance on fb without thinking it's a monumental insult.

yes, we need to stop looking at this as a friendly disagreement over abstract ideas

Apparently my cousin has disengaged from social media as its getting him too agitated. He's definitely become very radicalized by it (I wouldn't say its changed his personality, but its definitely honed it), but I'm fairly surprised this has happened. The daily existential battle against the enemy has taken a toll. He's not changing his views at all, but hopefully this can at least help him calm down a bit (the levels of angst caused by the most innocuous of things was sobering. the last one was something to do with "you cant say Man Sized Tissues anymore")

as always, you can still say "man-sized tissues", it just prompts people to go o_O for some reason

i've had a good friend get into Joe Rogan lately. as if that wasn't enough, apparently Joe Rogan convinced him to start wandering around the woods of suburban San Diego looking for mushrooms to hunt. the mushroom hunting I actually think is kinda cool, and I joined him for some of that last week (we found nothing), but I just don't like that it was Joe Rogan that convinced him to take it up through the teevee.

mushroom hunting is way too cool for joe rogan to ruin it

"is it still cool after joe rogan does it" is a pretty decent litmus test, actually, kind of a Great Filter for possible things to do

this quote from the Red Scare profile was being discussed on the chapo thread

It seems increasingly likely that the rising generation is more likely to turn conservative not because they want to be rich, but because they want to be mean.

this seems partially true, but I think being on the left also offers you plenty of scope for being mean, if maybe more restrictions on who you can be mean to and how? idk, meanness seems key to understanding so much of online politics somehow, it's the engine that it all runs on

I was thinking about this tweet:

consistently across all contexts the core underlying philosophical position of the intellectual dark web is that its members should not be made fun of pic.twitter.com/pU5RjfGoVk

— Max Read (@max_read) October 25, 2018

you could rephrase "its members should not be made fun of" as "no-one is allowed to me mean to us" - and this is definitely true, but it's equally as true of a significant chunk of social justice-y twitter as it is of the intellectual dark web? something about the way that very online politics involves lots of arguing with your opponents on twitter or wherever, and this encourages people to be defensive and build up preemptive defenses that make any criticism of their position illegitimate by definition, and this ends up shaping the positions of political movements themselves

xpost Perhaps we just need to provide them with many object lessons in that old 'don't mistake kindness for weakness' saw.

Nah, neither #MeToo nor #BlackLivesMatter was about 'being mean', and those two are by far the most important leftist hashtags.

A friend of mine briefly switched to an all-meat diet. He denied emulating Jordan Peterson, perhaps because he assumed I'd be less likely to dismiss his lifestyle as a result. He appears to have given up on it in the interim (I wonder why?), though he's still alt-righty when it comes to certain specific topics and unapologetically liberal when it comes to others, which is a fairly banal phenomenon come to think of it. For instance, he has no problem pulling the MRA card when women are involved and freely trades in ethnic stereotypes but will take advantage of every opportunity to tackle anti-Asian American racism because it concerns him directly. His misogyny and anti-racism are intertwined, in fact, as he feels like women (including Asian women) are less attracted to him because of his race. When I tell him that while it is indeed demonstrably harder out there for Asian men on the Western dating scene, his attitude towards women might be part of the problem, he doesn't pay me any heed (he's also not a bad looking guy, incidentally). As expected, he strongly dislikes it when I bring up his economic privilege (upper-upper middle class, as it were) and will occasionally revel in it as a corrective to recurring episodes of guilt. I still very much value him as a friend, but it's hard, perhaps even impossible to positively navigate these issues.

It seems increasingly likely that the rising generation is more likely to turn conservative not because they want to be rich, but because they want to be mean

I assumed this was actually about Chapo / Red Scare.

xpost, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” -atwood

gotta love those dutiful libertarians, searching for alternate explanations to the official explanation that hasn't even been fucking provided yet.

but yeah, we should conjure up conspiracy theories and reverse engineer them to see if they are plausible. hey, it gave us Christianity.

this seems partially true, but I think being on the left also offers you plenty of scope for being mean, if maybe more restrictions on who you can be mean to and how? idk, meanness seems key to understanding so much of online politics somehow, it's the engine that it all runs on

― soref

the more radical one is the less conciliatory or "nice" one can effectively be. cruelty is a dangerous thing, and given a couple years it could consume much of the online left and become an end to itself, but there still remains a sense of purpose beyond cruelty for its own sake on the left. no such mediating structure appears to exist on the right. also, i'd argue that a lot of internet cruelty is motivated less by political goals and more by the medium of the internet being inherently cruel.

It seems increasingly likely that the rising generation is more likely to turn conservative not because they want to be rich, but because they want to be mean.

I thought this was a given, and a central part of alt-right thinking (and quite probably true of regular conservatism before that too, depending how you define it). You could easily replace the word "Globalist" with "Capitalist" and not notice any difference, in most contexts. "Becoming" rich doesn't seem part of any of this at all! Already being rich, sure. But economic stuff doesn't feature very highly. See it clearly in UK also, the brexit footsoldiers have no interest in the economy. That stuff is tossed aside in an instant when it suits - its some combination of nihilism and belief in hierarchy. The idea of 'getting rich' doesn't even come into it

Why isn't suicide preferable to living like that, is what I've been asking myself forever.

Like what even gets you out of bed when you're a shambling, joyless spite mummy.

The hope that your spite will destroy others and the jouissance derived from that hope.

I guess I can identify with the meanies of the world bc I wish ppl wld keep their cluelessness to themselves

the brexit footsoldiers have no interest in the economy. That stuff is tossed aside in an instant when it suits

funny that these people (or other annoying rightwingers with some overlap, anyway) spent decades saying voting Labour was reckless because the economy and we shouldn't have any kind of social safety net because it costs too much and now it's all, "Remoaners always just think about money, there are more important things, like ~sovereignty~" (whatever that means, something about not hearing Polish on the bus?)

also maybe not the same people any more but "we mustn't tax big business or they'll just leave the country" -> "who cares that businesses are leaving the country"

mind you I would also agree with both "banks and big business don't care about people and should be made to pay something back to the community and not destroy the planet" and with "...but we still need them and it's bad that the government is ignoring them over Brexit", so yeah, I'm sure they'd find that just as funny and illogical, and... maybe it is

(I guess I do have some caveats about still needing them only in the current universe and basically all foreseeable near-future universes, if that helps)

PS "shambling joyless spite mummy" <- this is p. much me in most human interactions, I fear; I do have trouble getting out of bed some mornings, but I do it to hear good music and in the hope of e.g. seeing a pink sunset or a heron on the way home and other solitary, misanthropic delights

some of these people I can't imagine having any corresponding little flashes of joy, but maybe there's something that does it except the Schadenfreude and the believed superiority, I don't know

my alternative to being consumed by hatred for certain people is practicing an utter lack of curiosity towards them. it's natural to have questions about people unlike you, questions like "what motivates them? how do they feel?" i don't care about the answers to these questions. the problems they present are insoluble by me, insoluble by anyone outside themselves, and thus i feel protective detachment is the best option.

You could easily replace the word "Globalist" with "Capitalist" and not notice any difference, in most contexts.

― anvil

Antisemitism is popular everywhere!!

The only people i absolutely hate are the super rich and violent. Like who could possibly waste time and energy on hating other groups.

lickspittles for the super rich and the violent tho

some inchoate thoughts about this lately and the role of group violence in post-colonial culture. something along the lines of violence being the structuring force and desire line of modernity. it's only real symbolically (even though it really effects the deaths of thousands of people every day) and there are two sides to it: a libidinal, group-binding thing and a practical, keep neo-liberal realpolitik fed thing. it's driven by desire but highly regulated. you aren't supposed to have direct access to it; mediated access is what's allowed, but that simply keeps the desire hot. everyone including liberals pay fealty to it but their ideal interface allows them a smooth existence in spite of it (they lean towards denying or repressing the group-binding element, or enacting the violence from within the structures and hierarchies of capitalist exploitation). conservatives are repulsed and infuriated by this repression of liberalism. in some instances there is an impulse to override the capitalist structure which could even be seen as progressive if it were turned toward ending violence, but the goal is to resurrect violence as a libidinal pleasure and try to enact it in a more authentic fashion, that's the appeal of neo-fascism, but they can't access a "deeper" more "authentic" violence because it's already been given legitimacy only when it's carried out as globalist, market-sustaining extinguishment of people who matter the least on that scale.

also like there's a moral imperative against violence of any kind in liberal culture that isn't coherent at all when you realize that sanctioned violence is more prevalent than ever, and the atomization of its causes is even somewhat driven by the puritanism of the no-violence commandment. the appeal of conservativism is it puts the violence front-and-center and puts it in an old-fashioned frame, where ironically it ends up being useless to society at large except as another way to keep groups of people from directing their ire at what's legitimately a moral wrong in society, the ruling class hierarchy and all of the tools it uses to sustain itself.

For clarification I hate ultra- rich, violent people not rich or violent people. Which I think you touch on above about capitalist exploitation.

I just permanently disassociated myself from some of the RWNJs in my family. My cousin, who is of my generation and with whom I spent a lot of time growing up, posted a dumb Facebook meme from -- :::rolleyes::: -- Turning Point USA, and all I did was correct a few of the facts that were very obviously wrong. I didn't expect to change her mind about anything, and she made it clear that I wouldn't; I just said I was a big believer in facts. Her son chimed in with a meme of Trump in a soldier's uniform (oh the irony) reading "How about rooting for America once, you liberal scumbag?" to which she replied "That's my boy!" I replied one last time and said, "I just achieved a moment of realization -- I don't have to have anything to do with you people just because we happen to be related and once got along. Have a nice life!" It's a very freeing feeling.

The aforementioned son, by the way, is a racist piece of shit who brandishes a Confederate flag (in Ohio ffs, we have relatives in our family true who fought for the Union in the WV infantry and were prisoners of war) who -- and I'm sure this is ENTIRELY UNRELATED -- is starting at the police academy this month.

Yeah, one of my brothers was a cop for 20 years, barely passed HS, did a ton of steroids, cheated on every gf before finally getting married. I never felt like that was a loss in not speaking to him when I barely spoke to him growing up anyway. People don't deserve an audience for their cruelty, no matter how passive or joking it may be.

Ugh, today in the pub there were a couple of guys chatting to the staff about how 'you can't even say snowman anymore!'.

why can't you say snowman?

global warming

'Snowman' was banned around the same time as Christmas iirc.

xxxp I have no doubt this second cousin of mine expects there to be a class at the academy called "How to shoot African-Americans for fun and profit."

Ugh, today in the pub there were a couple of guys chatting to the staff about how 'you can't even say snowman anymore!'.

did you give them all the clues

I'd presume that notion is based on the apocryphal "race board" holding an important meeting about stopping people from saying the word Snowman. Which is obv a dual white supremacy/western christianity symbol that is oddly made out of snowflakes, which are lefty libs in disguise!

nah, it's supposed to be "snowperson"

Just 'person', really.

I know this because my Indian mother-in-law forwarded an offensive Australian whatsapp meme that contained this very "joke" to my wife a few weeks ago

i'm still furious about all those SJW's swaying Lucas to call them "Sand People" and not "Sand Men"

I can't even find the Bitches & Hoes section of my local DIY store these days.

This is an interesting article by a woman who went to high school with someone I'm not familiar with, but who is apparently a fairly prominent alt-right/neo-Nazi spokesmodel. Sort of a "how did my friend go insane?" piece.

I got through most of that but she doesn't seem like much of a mystery really - a sociopath with daddy issues

reminds me of this twitter thread by someone who went to school with Lena Epstein, the now-defeated candidate who invited a messianic jew to speak following the recent synagogue shooting

This ad with my name on is going out in today's metro-Detroit Jewish News. We include Dems, libertarians, even an aide to a GOP rep. I wanted to explain why we purchased it, why most of us who grew up with @LenaEpstein are strongly urging voters to choose anyone else. pic.twitter.com/EmclPCkTQN

— Seth M. Fisher (@Misopogon) November 1, 2018

My extremely pro-brexit cousin now thinks that there may be some 'short term' economic issues, and maybe a recession but

a) This can lead to a short period of 'crisis capitalism', which is good because thats when disruption occurs
b) The EU is going to fall apart anyway

The second seems a more typical run of the mill viewpoint, its not enough for us to get our thing, our enemy must also suffer in some ways or the victory is hollow. The first feels out of the remit of this thread. Really doesn't sound like the language of the brainworm infected footsoldier at all! More the language of the infector than the infected! Though in some ways it reflects it. He, as one of the 'good ones', believes he will not suffer any of the ill effects. Its a change though, from 'there will be no ill effects' to 'there may be some ill effects but in fact this is actually good'

sounds like he's ready for you to cut him off for his own good and bring about the hallowed disrupting time

The EU is going to fall apart anyway....and the UK will rise like a phoenix from the ashes

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/i-gathered-stories-of-people-transformed-by-fox-news.html

That article is really something. All these Fox News orphans.

I called my mother two weeks ago and funerals, wills, things like that came up. She was very upset that I have absolutely no intention of returning for anyone's funeral. I People are alive now; any sentiments or changes can be made now. When you're dead, who cares.

This is really for the other thread, but this backs up my view that Bernie should absolutely go on Fox news (and that Katie Halper, Kyle Kulinski etc are right to do so as well - as long as you're going on there to push your message and not shit on the left like Greenwald did/does)

This is unfettered mainline access to a huge audience. We're so obsessed with no-platforming we do it to ourselves and encourage people to pass up one of the biggest platforms there is). If it is brainwashing people, then damn get on there asap!

yeah, the upside may be fairly small but I think the downside is even smaller. if Fox wants to demonize you they're gonna do that regardless. and I agree this is a separate issue from Greenwald types and also a separate issue from the argument over whether the DNC should let Fox host one of its debates, which I don't think it should do.

should probably murder them

I've got a cousin who has always been conservative, but was very, very vocally anti-Trump. Not sure what changed, but in the last two months he's turned into a super Trump booster and shares the most ridiculous anti-Muslim memes and talking points at a frantic pace. I just don't understand what happens to make these things happen so rapidly and so intensely.

if Fox wants to demonize you they're gonna do that regardless

Sure, but they don't have to do so with your permission and active participation.

I can barely understand it too. I haven't had cable tv since the early 2000s and only use youtube for music. I can't even imagine choosing to surround myself with conspiracy, bigoted trash all day long. The small amount of cable news videos I see online are enough. But of course I've been brainwashed by college.

I just don't understand what happens to make these things happen so rapidly and so intensely.

How often have I heard these same sentiments after some loser has carried out a terrorist attck.

Like those excerpts in the article about people choosing to be alone, in the dark, in their hate and misery instead of making another choice is so spot on.

I just don't understand what happens to make these things happen so rapidly and so intensely.

It isn't quick, it takes a long time, its happening in them without you noticing it. Its true in reverse too, people coming away from Trump and/or conservatism. Trump does something ludicrous and his polls numbers stay unchanged, then they seem to drop for no reason at all in a quieter period.

Fox works because of absolute hammering repetition. The only thing that matters is exposure and attention. A lot of the Fox audience are on that trajectory but they aren't all TooFarGones, and we shouldn't treat them as such - unless we want more TooFarGones. Fox plays the long game with its audience, and we don't notice. We think its overnight, it isn't, thats not how this works

my father-in-law just suggested on Facebook that the US begin the process of deporting Rep. Omar. rad.

How can you be fb friends with him without trolling the shit out of him all the time?

can't lie i'm actually a little shocked that politically motivated murders and attempted murders by fever swamp white nationalist trump fans have coincided with a solidifying of his popularity/ double-downing of yr avg republican voter in this country.

nope nothing bad'll come of that.

I thought this was a good look at how kids are getting groomed into the alt-right:

https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/05/05/what-happened-after-my-13-year-old-son-joined-the-alt-right/

first they're terrorized by the liberal state

First few paragraphs read like this story is entirely made up.

aw but anonymous stories are usually so reliable!

Short essay. “Then I had no son.”

So you guys are just fake-newsing this? Ok.

no, i dont doubt that her son had this dalliance with the alt right, but anonymous memoir pieces like this are susceptible to distortion

So you guys are just fake-newsing this? Ok.

― DJI, Monday, May 6, 2019 9:37 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i sure as hell am

the part i didn't believe was the happy ending.

maybe nagle wrote it to sell books to normie parents with shitty sullen teenage boys who won't shut the fuck up about rare pepes

/r/creativewritingprompts

"How I left the alt-right" seems like its becoming something of a cottage industry.

I saw the Faraday Speaks video, half a million views in 6 weeks. It was well done but alarm bells ringing. I've read people suggesting he's a troll/plant - 'be welcomed by the libs to own the libs'?, but I can't see to what end. A more likely reason is he is just a grifter

But also, I don't really see 'right-wing brainworms' and 'the alt-right' as quite the same thing. Overlapping, sure, but distinct enough

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

what

At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care.

i would be surprised if this really happened like this

but who knows

I absolutely believe that there are overzealous public school administrators who arbitrarily target kids over small stuff. I have an annual tussle with the attendance committee that has been enough to make me joke about voting Republican. However, I'm suspicious about this 'misconstrued meme' - was it as harmless as she claims? I would have appreciated the opportunity for the reader to take it to Meme Court.

it just fits too neatly into the narrative

Everything fits in too neatly, every single reference reads like "I just spent a couple of hours researching this" or even "I just read the Angela Nagle book" - I mean, much of it could be true, but it's so polluted by this bullshit that it doesn't matter.

I mean look at it, is she quoting her 13-year-old son?

“I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult. I was one of them,” he said. “I was participating in a conversation. They took me seriously. No one ever took me seriously—not you, not my teachers, no one. If I expressed an opinion, you thought I was just a dumbass kid trying to find my voice. I already had my voice.”

it would be interesting to read a real account by a parent who lost their kid to 4chan or whatever--and what they did about it.

I absolutely believe that there are overzealous public school administrators

oh for sure. i had a couple of weird encounters w admins and a school counselor in 9th grade that kind of shook my faith in the ability of adults in charge to properly adult. even my folks (who ALWAYS ALWAYS took the side of adults in authority) met with them and were kinda like "eh, keep your head down summer's almost here. they actually do seem kinda crazy."

i've shared this story way too many times but in high school circa 1999 me and a few of my friends shared a website that functioned as a protoblog/livejournal kind of thing, where we (esp me) overshared way too much about our depression and how terrible life was. the website got popular at school and the school counselor and admin decided to tell my parents, along with the parents of everyone involved with the site, that we were all suicidal and possibly homicidal, then contacted the true owner of the domain (my best friend's mom) to make her shut it down, all on the same day

i would be surprised if this really happened like this

I believe it. I’ve shared my story about a very similar situation. It was horrible. Especially since the report was made-up in retaliation.

I guess I lucked out by thinking “some people are bad” rather than “society is bad because of cucks.”

That story gets a little too florid toward the end but the part with school administrators being clueless authoritarians with a heavy hand lines up with my middle/high school experience. That was twenty-five years ago, now, and I'd like to think things are better, but progress isn't evenly distributed across the board.

Kids getting dealt with harshly for small or nonexistent offenses definitely makes them want to push back. I think "my son is moderating an alt-right messageboard" is something that's more of a real offense, though

The reason the story seemed false to me had as much to do with the combination of narrator omniscience (iirc she literally tells us what her son is thinking at one point) and lack of detail (as mentioned, what was the misconstrued meme? what subreddit? who are these people?) as the just-so narrative of the overreaching liberal state Kavanaughing a young person into the arms of the alt-right.

history is just the way we craft events into a narrative to sell good feelings

this story didn't ring true to me at all. the bit about how "the reporters and the nazis needed each other" struck me as especially bogus.

Later, my son and I shared a viewing of Christopher Nolan's 2009 The Dark Knight. "You complete me," snarled Heath Ledger's iconic Joker to his foil and counterpart, Batman (the titular Dark Knight). In a flash of excitement my son paused the UHD 4k Blu-ray. "Mother," he exclaimed, "this is a precise expression of the dynamic we observed playing out on the Mall between a cynical and nihilistic press and the brainwashed cultists I now renounce! I feel like such a dumbass."

(absolutely no trouble believing literally anything about school administrators tho.)