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.

I haven't really had the inclination to find out from my cousin just why Trump isn't actually doing the things he's saying and doing, but I wonder how long the contradiction can be maintained before it has to break one way or the other.

Broken with Trump, just like that. Always kind of had cake and eat it with the "I don't like everything Trump does but the woke..." angle, but the spell seems to be broken now

Good to hear, we needmore of that...

fuckin hell when youve lost imaginary cousin youve lost the entire midwest

pundit infected with technological determinism brainworms

fuckin hell when youve lost imaginary cousin youve lost the entire midwest

― tuah dé danann (darraghmac)

for the record all my relatives in the midwest support me, except for That One Branch that we don't talk to.

Pretty funny that the denizens of the Internet Archive are also watching Kurosawa’s adaptation of The Idiot next to old porn and Alex Jones shit.

of the 30 or so Kurosawa films The Idiot is one of the few (1? 2?) that's out of print

archive.org sometimes feels like the old golden age of file sharing, so much random television and comics and movies from around the world

we don't have stats to back this up but sadly I imagine the nazi shit was a considerable part of what ppl downloaded in the old days too

Pretty funny that the denizens of the Internet Archive are also watching Kurosawa’s adaptation of The Idiot next to old porn and Alex Jones shit.

― Crack's Addition (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, March 22, 2025 5:55 PM (yesterday)

i would posit that the people going on the Internet Archive for Kurosawa films are, overall, categorically different from the people going on the Internet Archive for Nazi shit

the last couple things i grabbed from the Internet Archive were the Phantomwise reconstruction of the 1949 Alice in Wonderland and the 1980 film Dragon Connection, an English Language dub of _Scorching Film, Fierce Wind, Wild Fire_ most notable for being scored pretty much _entirely_ with John Williams' 1977 score to _Star Wars_. A lot of post-1977 martial arts films Williams' score pretty freely, but few of them to the extent of Dragon Connection. (Incidentally, I was just watching some of the old Godfrey Ho-Joseph Lai ninja films yesterday and was impressed by the prog deep cuts they stole for the soundtrack. There's one scene where two ninjas are fighting to the sounds of Gong's "Master Builder". They also use the start of Heldon's "Bolero", from _Stand By_, as a sting frequently.)

I've seen enough Nazi bullshit for several lifetimes.

archive.org sometimes feels like the old golden age of file sharing, so much random television and comics and movies from around the world

we don't have stats to back this up but sadly I imagine the nazi shit was a considerable part of what ppl downloaded in the old days too

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

I think it's... more complicated than that. The main reason there's so much Nazi shit on the Internet Archive is that, well, the Internet Archive allows Nazi shit. If the Internet Archive allowed CP (I know that can stand for a lot of things... in this case I'm talking about visual depictions of CSA), the site would be flooded with that as well. The existence and distribution of CP on the Internet, to me, gives the lie to the claims of a lot of "free speech" absolutists. It's why I won't go on the dark web. I know that stuff is there. I want to be as far away from it as possible. Frankly, I think Nazi shit on the Internet should be treated about the same way CP is. It's pretty clear that it isn't. Nobody's going after the Internet Archive for hosting Nazi shit - they're going after the Internet Archive for copyright infringement. And in fact a lot of cool stuff that used to be there isn't there now. There used to be a really good compilation of material from Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker - I cited it in one of my blog posts a long time ago. I don't know if I downloaded it at the time, and it's not viewable now.

I never left the "golden age" of file sharing in some ways. Unfortunately this is proving to be a benefit to me, as more and more stuff vanishes. To me, the best representation of the Old Internet is slsk. I see slsk as a _very_ Old Internet place. For over 20 years it's gotten by on security through obscurity, as best I can tell. That's one of the reasons I keep using it - nobody really targets it.

I know there's Nazi shit on slsk. Occasionally I'll run across someone's shares and they'll be sharing stuff like that. Only very occasionally. It's only a very small subset of the user base. I see someone with Nazi shit I block them. It's not prosocial behavior, sharing that shit.

There is a question of organization. It seems like on the Internet Archive, whatever I search for I get Nazi shit. I don't on slsk. When I browse the files of people who turn up things I like, it's mostly radical stuff. The only time I turn up Nazi shit is when I'm looking for Palestinian media. At least it gives me a chance to block them. Few things piss me off than people "supporting" Palestine when it turns out they're just anti-Semites.

Anyway, back in the Old Old Days, there wasn't as much overt, in-your-face Nazi shit. I'm sure it was there, but I wasn't looking for it. Mostly this stuff disguised itself in ways that weren't immediately apparent to the mostly white, straight, cishet Internet userbase. Back then... I think I was talking about this on the incel thread, but there was a certain amount of security through obscurity. On Usenet, the main gay newsgroup was called soc.motss - "members of the same sex". This minimized the number of Christian fundamentalists who drove by telling them they were going to hell. talk.origins was also a popular group - that was where people debated evolution. People spent a LOT of time on the early Internet arguing this shit. It bled over, too, via "crossposts". From the beginning the net was built around freedom of information. There might be a certain ideological basis for this, but I also think there's a certain amount of... like the focus was on getting this shit to actually _work_. The focus was on enabling conversation, and not on keeping people from conversing. I'm not sure the first generation of Implementors gave a lot of consideration given to the social implications of connecting several billion people on a many-to-many basis.

I remember the first genocide denialism I came across on the Internet. I first got on the net in September of 1993 - the very beginning of the Eternal September - and there was, in fact, an early Internet spammer who went by the name of Serdar Argic. Argic was also one of the very early spammers. The stuff he spammed Usenet with were a variety of claims that no, no, actually, it was the _Armenians_ who genocided the _Turks_. These days, I know what DARVO is - it makes perfect sense that a genocide denialist would make those claims. Back then? Back then I was mostly confused. This was, actually, how I heard about the Armenian genocide - from people saying that Argic had it backwards, that actually the Turks had genocided the Armenians.

Anyway it was tremendously difficult to disconnect his machine from the Internet... upstream hosts kept giving him accounts. I somehow feel like if he'd been a straightforward neo-Nazi, it would have been less difficult for them back then. Nowadays? Nowadays I guess that's not as much of a problem.

Yeah I dunno, I don't get nazi shit when I search archive.org much but that's probably just random luck with search terms.

A friend of mine found CP during the old days of file sharing, I don't remember what the service was but it was while browsing someone's files. He instantly sent an e-mail to the service informing them, hopefully that dude got caught and kicked out

i usually don't, to be fair... "dare to believe" is a particularly "could be anything" kinda search term i think. which is probably what the people making the show were going for!

Back on the island I grew up on, ran into an old school friend. He shared a lot of grievances concerning local corruption, the destruction of the environment, house prizes going up to insane levels, local govt placing tourism over all else, all concerns I share.

Terrifying how smoothly the conversation then turned to immigration on the mainland (can't really pretend there's much here), "we need stronger borders", the police have their hands tied, all clearly far right talking points + the impressions left by a couple short trips to Lisbon and the Alentejo. I managed to push back as much as I could while staying friendly, but feeling pretty wound up now.

Obviously this shouldn't be surprising, we all know how effective the far right is at hijacking ppl's legitimate anger at their material conditions and channeling it towards their agenda, but...it just sucks, I'm sad my friend fell for it and I guess this is the thread for that.

:(

I fell out with a very longstanding friend of mine over RW brainworms. ffs, our friendship survived his heroin addiction, during which he ripped off an uncle of mine and did a botched burglary at my mum's house. I should have murdered him at this point, but instead I helped get him a job at a company I worked at after he had detoxed. We often had good repartee and had decades of friendship, it felt like a substantial friendship. It was in the 2010's I started tiring of his hackneyed right-wing talking points. And then finally, I think it was in about 2018 I just told him bluntly that I actually preferred him when he was a smackhead to the bigoted boring dick he'd turned into. Ironically he is called Dave and was him having a racist rant about a rapper called Dave that was the last straw!

the impressions left by a couple short trips to Lisbon and the Alentejo.

I've noticed Lisbon is getting some attention from the far right media sphere, in the way that Malmo did a few years ago

Within the Portuguese far right sphere it is obviously the best target, it has the highest levels of immigration, a long history of antipathy between poc communities and the police and a collapsing social tissue due to huge tourism and digital nomads (which some handwaving can easily be blamed on Nepalese uber drivers instead).

This is international in the way Malmo was, with not just far right influencers, but normie-presenting influencers 'exposing the reality'. Lisbon getting a lot of it at the moment, London to a lesser extent too, relative to size. Chongqing getting it in reverse

Ex-Navy coworker who had two kids before 20 and is now an empty-nester by 45, his wife has never worked because they agreed on a "traditional marriage," unironically talks about the "manosphere" accounts he watches on TikTok during downtime and sometimes just starts whining about how great women have it and the evils of feminism. Surreal to see these brain worms up close.

ugh has he got daughters?

great in that "they get to be at home" or great in that "they always get promoted"?

i was wondering if Daniel or somebody else could share a place to start in terms of getting a handle on immigration and politics in sweden. it's something that interests me a lot, and it's something that actually came up in a conversation i was having with a neighbor the other day. i found myself pretty much unable to add anything and realized i was kind of ignorant of the immigration situation in europe generally

xp - more the latter, I think, a general "women in this society have it great"/they're the most privileged class POV. Two adult sons (he's 47, did 20 in the Navy then washed out of being a financial planner and racked up 60k in credit card debt before starting here).

He seems to not be even remotely religious (could be a now thing rather than in the past, though) and isn't openly insane about anything else.

Has anyone noticed this shit appearing in WhatsApp groups of larger numbers of friends/acquaintances?

There's one I'm in, a group of men I would know from going to clubs, used to very PLUR. But one guy has slowly gone absolute nut case full hate-spewing Maga despite living in a suburb in Ireland, and tho the three or four others who have sort of drifted his direction aren't as bilious as him the general tone of the group, as others leave or stop commenting, has settled on right wing.

The main guy is an odd case - he just full on spouts hatred at any opportunity now but I think it's to force people to respond to him, not that that exonerates it.

TLDR I sort of think not much is said about these private incubators versus public social media.

budo, I don't really know much about immigration in Sweden, one of my best mates is from there tho so I've visited Gothenburg a fair amount. Seems to have been a lot of immigration from Bangladesh, also one time I got a cabby that was from Iraq. I will ask my friend if he has any resource along the lines of what you're asking.

The very broad strokes of immigration in Europe you probably know already: a combination of an aging population and a certain level of quality of life even amongst the working classes resulting in a lot of ppl coming over to work the jobs the locals don't, thus becoming the new de facto underclass. Often if it's a former colonial power most immigrants will be from former colonies, for linguistic and legal reasons. Also worth mentioning this played out within Europe first - Portuguese economic migrants used to go to France, Italian migrants to Germany, etc. Still the case amongst certain working class communities.

I've heard there's a fair amount of gang-like violence in Malmo with the kids of immigrants living in housing projects... not sure how real it is or just a right wing talking point

I've been to Gothenburg and Stockholm and there many many non-caucasians in both cities, and they generally are speaking swedish

My friend once took me to "the most dangerous street in Gothenburg" (according to tabloids), kinda as a bit, it was a totally nondescript suburban street but I guess someone got stabbed there that year?

there were all those bombings a couple years ago, that was pretty wild

yeah. i mean, it's obvious on some level that the situation has caused real issues. but it can be hard to suss out what is more or less the objective reality and what is the psychotic fascist talking points. i don't feel comfortable going around and telling other people that the problems in their communities are imaginary and they are just taking the right wing propaganda bait. but i also don't feel comfortable regurgitating worrisome blips i see out in the wild, because i don't know their provenance or the broader context. it seems obvious that such mass societal shifts would cause issues. still, others i see are content to dig their heads in the sand and act like if you're not experiencing the multiracial utopia that they have in their heads, then you're some kind of crank. idk, it's confusing

and i guess what i would add to that, in a #onethread kind of way, is i do think it's important to have these intensely uncomfortable conversations, and to expose yourself to data points that don't have an obvious place to sit in your (in this case, my) belief system, both in terms of personal growth but perhaps more importantly in the interest of building a leftist coalition -- rather than downplaying or outright shaming, which i think sometimes can play into the right wing rabbit hole/echo chamber since there is a (not entirely true) perception that the right is the only place where these kinds of negative outcomes can be discussed openly

byt maybe this would be better for the islamophobia thread, if we have that. although, on the other hand, i'm not sure if i have the energy to open that can of worms

not that i'm trying to give the impression that there is some kind of awful truth that isn't being discussed. it's not that. it's more like a rhetorical thing. but also a genuine curiosity about what is known in terms of sociological knowledge or whatever else. idk, hopefully my posts make sense

I will say that my experience is North Americans tend to overrate the culture shock we experience in Europe and to underrate how long multiculturalism has been a thing - my kindergarten class in late 80's West Germany was majority Turkish. Not a long time in the grand scheme of things, just pointing out many my age and younger will not ever have seen their country "before" immigration, depending on the place. Also what might come across as "unwillingness to discuss" is often more frustration at how the terms of the discourse are set, which in mainstream media (which I would accept counts as right wing, though ppl on the European right certainly don't!) is always the most exploitational and disingenuous way possible.

But these are very broad strokes, I will ask my friend about Sweden specifically.

The first time I was in Stockholm my cab drivers were a Polish guy (grumpy) and a Persian woman (friendly, helpful). The second time, my hotel was close enough to the place I was interviewing (didn't get the job, obviously) that I just walked there.

mass societal shifts would cause issues

Genuinely not trying to troll you, but I genuinely believe that these issues are entirely the fault of racist, xenophobic sentiment embedded within many western national projects.

good post from local garda. chats & whatsapp & for the younger discords etc are places where people are sharing bad intel with one another. viral incubation old school

budo, my friend likes this academic - https://scholar.google.se/citations?user=jPzlFPgAAAAJ&hl=sv - but says he'll look for something that works better as an intro

thank you! will check that out

Genuinely not trying to troll you, but I genuinely believe that these issues are entirely the fault of racist, xenophobic sentiment embedded within many western national projects.

― czech hunter biden's laptop (the table is the table), Friday, July 11, 2025 3:53 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you're preaching to the choir here but my point wasn't about who is at fault but rather facing up to the realities of the issues themselves, if they are in fact real, and figuring out what to do about them without legitimizing or galvanizing the psychotic right-wing machine that thrives on any information that could potentially make immigration seem like a "bad idea"

Do non-western national projects typically have less racist, xenophobic sentiments?

uh, not Japan

Are national projects not an inherently Western idea, taken up by the remaining world because this was how the West organised power?

It's all a bit irrelevant to table's larger point I guess.

i think a lot of these concepts and frameworks are only useful insofar as they've been meticulously extracted from so much data and history and theory, and i definitely sympathize with people who become frustrated when they are thrown around in a facile way, as if they precede any kind of need to acknowledge the facts of a particular local situation. i think there are probably important distinctions between western and non-western nationalism, and when it comes to xenophobia in particular i think there are worthwhile questions to be asked about inclusion and exclusion in those projects of nation-building that precede what we've come to understand as "nations" in the modern sense. however, i agree that it's not really relevant

however, i agree that it's not really relevant

― budo jeru, Friday, July 11, 2025 3:29 PM (five hours ago)

hmmm, i'm not speaking for table here, but i think the way western imperialist/colonialist political systems foreground systemic racism and xenophobia is extremely relevant to, well, _many_ different forms of brainworms

a lot of what today gets termed "brainworms", for instance, comes back to conspiracy theories. and if you look at the history of conspiracy theories, it becomes pretty clear that a huge number of conspiracy theories - probably the vast majority, i'd say - are reducible to some form or another to racial and/or religious bigotry. for instance, a lot of the theories about ancient aliens are nearly always, when you get down to it, grounded in the racist belief that people of color are "primitive" and thus unable to create the works attributed to the "aliens". people's prejudices, _particularly_ racial prejudices, are often deeply rooted enough that they will come up with all kinds of fascinatingly arcane ideas to attempt to justify their prejudices - and those ideas, "conspiracies", spread widely and rapidly within a systemic framework which privileges and encourages racism.

so yeah, i do think a lot of "brainworms" do just basically come back to a lot of people being really fucking racist, so much so that we will adopt and support ideologies that are clearly of strong detriment to us personally rather than, like, do the work to challenge our ingrained racist beliefs. i say "we" because i absolutely don't think that excluding myself from that critique is of benefit to me. a lot of my framings of queerness did treat whiteness as normative and were at least implicitly racist, and internalizing that framing was absolutely _not_ to my benefit.

I think there are two things which get conflated into the idea of brain worms, and they're not quite the same.

I think the first is a form of pattern recognition, which is to make connections that aren't there. This can and does serve a purpose, in an evolutionary sense of there might be a snake hiding behind that tree even though I can't see the snake, but also making discoveries and breakthroughs today that others didn't see. I feel like thats the same mechanism that manifests as brainworms, its high energy and activated

The second is a more passive acceptance that things are a certain way and we can't explain them and we shouldn't explain them, they just are. And those things are whatever the big man says they are and shouldn't be questioned. I feel like this is more like being drawn to a compelling figure and putting faith in them

They definitely overlap, and I don't know if the second sucks the mental energy out of the first, or the first is more prevalent in the abscence of a compelling figure to coalesce around. I feel like the seconds potential is bigger, it demands much less of its adherents, they don't need to espouse or invest that much in any of the theories, they can just be like "that king guy, he's got a point", they just need to invest in king good people who like king strong like me, people who don't like king weak

And I feel like people in the first group tend to draw out bigger things out of not very much and over-complicate, and people in the second group over-simplify, with the second group more common. Everything is self-evident and absolute

chats & whatsapp & for the younger discords

I’m not even sure about the younger part. I talked to a friend at work who occasionally would do some online gaming with a former manager of mine, who has to be near 50 years old at this point, and after said friend made an offhand comment about the president being nuts, former manager went off on some tirade about how it was good we’re doing something about the bathroom-obsessed blue-haired liberals or something. I don’t really see the guy as a Fox News person, but he definitely is into video gaming. I assume he was partially always like this, but likely fell down a rabbit hole of noxious game-adjacent content

he always had a stridently confident thing going on, which mostly works because he’s a very technically competent person at work (but not a good manager, which he no longer is) but over time it became clear a lot of that is a very defensive part of his personality. I know he was adopted as a child, and the way he framed that was always in terms of his individualistic, strong identity. Sometimes that route leads you to denigrating anyone who takes a different path in life, or explores their own identity in a way that makes you uncomfortable. I think the guy just clings to the idea of certainty

The funny part is that the last meeting I had with the guy, I was able to use that to my advantage because I just had to throw out a few breadcrumbs to lead him to the conclusion I knew he’d jump on, which I was hoping for. He was stridently telling everyone else it’d be trivial to do things the way I was hoping (his preferred approach) and stopped short of calling everyone idiots for not doing things that way.

hmmm, i'm not speaking for table here, but i think the way western imperialist/colonialist political systems foreground systemic racism and xenophobia is extremely relevant to, well, _many_ different forms of brainworms

i actually wasn't saying this, i was saying that making a distinction between how xenophobia manifests in western vs. non-western nationalism might not be super necessary if your point is just that wealthy developed nations rely on a whole set of racist ideas and practices as a component of nation-building and that this accounts for a significant share of the problems "caused" by immigration. i mean, to make it more concrete, i'd imagine there are important differences in the way e.g. pakistanis who emigrate to china vs. germany are treated, but my point was just that i wasn't sure how useful it was to explore this, since that topic is already a significant departure from the thread topic, and i fear i'm making it even worse! sorry, i'll drop it and maybe pick it up elsewhere

so i clicked on one of those boomer nostalgia clickbait videos, this one called "Shocking Secret About 'TWO-LANE BLACKTOP' Revealed; Near Disaster for Star and Director!"

why the fuck would you make a boomer nostalgia clickbait video about TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

anyway i figure probably somebody wrote some code to make that video, it has like, 21 views. i have _no_ idea how YT determines virality but it's so, so, so fucking broken

anyway the sidebar link on that gives me this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz8QT8KcXVI

and i gotta know if this is like, one of those clickbaity titles that conceals a deep, profound meditation on systemic misogyny or whatever

nnnnnnope

look at this shit

http://www.youtube.com/@psychrypt

again, i don't know to what extent human beings are involved in this "content", god knows i didn't actually _watch_ any of it. i only opened it in a private window. cuz i'm afraid of what Content is gonna show up on my sidebar next, what's gonna show up saying "click me! eat me! drink me!"

but DAMN, those AI slop thumbnails

and ok schopenhauer was a fucked up dude

idk, maybe if you gave schopenhauer access to LLMs he'd make shit like this

and it's like, it's just like one video that gets sidebarred. he has dozens of videos churned out like this, and most of them have, like, 10K views, 3K views. and this one has 1.1 million views.

and i don't know what to make of it. part of me wants to say i mean men don't _really_ think like this, they don't _really_ hate women that much, and i'm coming to... ok this is gonna be _nuanced_, ok?

i do think this is of a piece with AI nostalgiabait, SHOCKING SECRET ABOUT or SAD LAST DAYS OF or w/e... it's manipulative but a lot of it is saying the quiet part out loud, because they can, and a lot of it is... it's not saying anything new. i'm starting to realize... once i realized how much racist bullshit i'd internalized, i started seeing that a lot of other white people have also internalized racist bullshit. the underlying, quiet distortions that make the overt racism _possible_. nobody ever TOLD me to believe racist shit just like nobody ever TOLD me to believe transphobic shit. i did, and whether i was better or worse than anybody else isn't really the important thing for me, it's not _about_ me personally. it's that i see a _lot_ of people who have been _taught_ biases - not born with, have been actively _taught_ - and yeah i more and more tend towards "culmination" rather than "aberration". patriarchy, racism, other forms of bigotry.

it makes _sense_ to me that most of the stuff he cites are the Classics of the Western Philosophical Tradition. i mean Sun Tzu's in there, well, Orientalism is also part of the Western Philosophical Tradition IMO. i'm not well-versed in the Western Philosophical Tradition. all i know about schopenhauer is that he was Really Smart, that whatever he says is worthy of considering seriously. which isn't true, because i look at these videos and oh yeah schopenhauer i guess was an incel who hated women. right _now_ my value system isn't based on the innate and eternal wisdom of dead white dudes. that didn't used to be the case, for a long time. in retrospect that value system was fucked up. that value system made the world a worse place, hurt a lot of other people who don't deserve to be hurt, and incidentally didn't really do me any favors.

-

if someone wants to accuse me of having left-wing brainworms, i won't dispute the charges. my core beliefs, honestly, they're pretty moderate. moderation just isn't _practical_ for me right now. it doesn't _benefit_ me. five years ago i didn't call myself a faggot, i didn't think of myself as a faggot. that's a calculated decision, a response to the circumstances we're living under, not just, or even necessarily, transphobia, but the other forms of bigotry underlying it. even if bigotry isn't directed at me, it doesn't benefit me to not challenge it. and when people are saying the quiet part out loud... it's really easy for me to share psychrypt's thumbnails and say "hey look at this shit, this is fucked up". it's a lot harder to challenge a tenured college professor who teaches classes and argues passionately that schopenhauer's beliefs about women are objectively correct.

the paradox is that i couldn't have started estrogen and come out and all that if people like donald trump didn't define the discourse. i couldn't have done it in the 90s, under clintonism. that narrative had to fail first. that narrative had to collapse. and people who still believe in neoliberalism, people who still support neoliberalism, i don't trust them to truly have my back, or to have _anybody's_ back. people can and do change, of course, but it's a lot harder than we often think.

a lot of marketing is finding out what people want and giving it to them. it's not just "find a need and fill it". it's "find a PERCEIVED NEED and fill it". putting psychrypt videos on the sidebar of gen x nostalgia bait is propaganda, but it's not like it's come out of nowhere.

every perceived need, though, i believe that arises from a real need. "i can't give you brains, but i can give you a diploma", as the joke goes. i'm watching... i mean TEDx videos, i don't think of them as categorically different from psychrypt. i don't think of it as good or bad. i was talking about it on the TED shitpost thread, terry kupers asking "What happens to your brain without any social contact?" and it's advocacy, it's advocacy for ending solitary confinement, which is good, which i agree with. i mean i'm in favor of the complete dismantlement of the carceral state and defunding the police and banning cars in cities, all that stuff.

and the reason i do vibe with a lot of the TEDx, TEDEd or whatever videos, cringe as a lot of them are, is because a lot of the time they do make me think about things. what i'm going through is nowhere near the torture people in solitary confinement experience, and at the same time... i know i'm doing this to myself. i fucking know it. i'm not against COVID precautions, i do still require masks at the support group meetings i run and if somebody challenges me on that well they can stop coming to the group. it's not a topic for conversation.

and at the same time i went WFH for COVID and yeah. it fucked with my head. and i don't _blame_ that on my ex, whatever happened, i mean, it happened, and at the same time i did, at the time, think of it as more of a "folie a deux". she was afraid to leave the house, because COVID, because Republicans, and it's not like I was ever great at leaving the house. what that video talks about is that a lot of people in solitary weren't exactly doing too great to begin with. i've been here since 2011, i mean, it's a matter of record. i've had Problems for pretty much all my life.

the situation... the situation didn't help. i have low self-esteem and i have struggled with depression and yeah sure getting on estrogen helped in some ways, at the same time, i'm isolated except for my now-ex and i am literally going through puberty. and the video says isolation makes someone more emotionally driven anyway, and i've spent my whole life repressing my emotions...

of course people are all really emotionally, and people... particularly cis guys, aren't ever taught to value their emotions, to express their emotions, i got friends who talk about "free to be you and me" with marlo thomas and that was before my time. that wasn't what i grew up with, that wasn't what i was taught. i worked alone once before. i was basically a glorified night watchmen for a warehouse, 2002-2003. i did start "hearing voices". to this day i don't think of it as being schizophrenia or whatever. you just don't have external stimuli and whatever is in my head just gets louder. it wasn't "solitary confinement" like they're talking about in the video, and it fucked me up. i had what you might call a "nervous breakdown". i went into my first IOP. and since 2020, well, i've done a lot more. i don't know, three? two DBT programs? the first couple while i'm "working" but working conditions, they've gotten worse and worse, finding jobs has gotten harder and harder. i haven't worked since september. i'm trying to find a job, and just.. applying for jobs is brutal. it fucks me up. i know there's nothing wrong with me. and the people who are having trouble finding jobs, there's nothing wrong with them. and if they're cis guys, most of the people who are telling them that are telling them some other things that aren't true.

i do what i can. i do what i can to get out of the house and you know, most of the people i know, we got problems too. i want to live a "normal life", but damn i don't know how. so it is scary to leave the house. portland, i love portland and it's a fucked up place and a lot of fucked up shit happens here. and i want to minimize my involvement in fucked up shit. but if i don't _get out_, if i don't get to the grocery, if i don't go to social events, if i don't have _meaningful activities outside my apartment_, my world gets smaller and smaller, things get harder and harder, i get more and more out of touch with "consensus reality". and of course there isn't such a thing as "consensus reality", anymore. half the weirdos i hung out with when i was younger are communists, and half of them are nazis. communism is evidence-based, but that doesn't make our lives any easier.

it's a delicate line to walk.

wound up kateposting. the tl;dr is shit is fucked up and the people with right-wing brainworms, they made a choice - a bad one. doesn't make it their fault. they are responsible for their choices, though. we all are.

ps sorry for ghosting the thread a week ago, just got busy with life

I own this T-shirt:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/B1pppR4gVKL._CLa%7C2140%2C2000%7C819zU8tUgJL.png%7C0%2C0%2C2140%2C2000%2B0.0%2C0.0%2C2140.0%2C2000.0_AC_SX679_.png

I haven't watched the video you linked, and I'm not going to, but I think Schopenhauer's misogyny was the 19th century equivalent of trolling, as his sister was a poet and artist, and his mother wrote literally dozens of books. She also wrote this infamous letter to him in 1807:

You are not an evil human; you are not without intellect and education; you have everything that could make you a credit to human society. Moreover, I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.

All of your good qualities become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others; of wanting to improve and master what you cannot command. With this you embitter the people around you, since no one wants to be improved or enlightened in such a forceful way, least of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are; no one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection.

If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.

So I kinda think his most overtly anti-woman writings were a long way of saying, "Fuck you, Mom!"

fuckin hell that's a great remonstration all the same