Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?
By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.
The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren’t pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.
Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to.
Nicotine provides a short term mental stimulus that’s great for people who feel exhausted or have trouble staying focused.
That’s why lots of people start smoking in school and lots of professionals continue smoking well past the point at which the health effects are obvious.
I know a pulmonologist who smoked until he was in his thirties. Literally “how do you expect me to do my job without this?” was his response when I pressed him on it. Lawyers still smoke like chimneys and for the same reasons
For me as a non-smoker, but vaper, it’s not as if I “fell” into anything. I actively choose to vape and like it. I quit before and did not like it. I get way more benefits from nicotine than downsides. These are factual benefits.
It’s a poor analogy for right-wing political beliefs which don’t really work. They do not really lead to the goals they claim.
Would i wrong to venture the guess that you didnt like quitting vaping because you were suffering from nicotine withdrawal? I swapped to vaping after years of smoking and eventually quit vaping. It was not enjoyable to quit but i feel a million times better not being beholden to the habit. My lungs feel better, my brain feels better, my stress levels are lower.
What benefits does nicotine bring other than satifyi g your craving for nicotine.
Nah. I quit for quite a few months and my withdrawals largely passed, I no longer had any nicotine cravings by that point.
Then I started having serious problems with academic performance, insane mood swings, etc.
My stress levels were much higher, I had brain fog constantly and was either restless or super low energy.
I experienced zero benefits to quitting vaping in terms of physical wellbeing also, my lungs felt no different before or after, but I never smoked, but I did almost become obese after quitting due to the lack of hunger suppression.
I didn’t connect it to quitting nicotine at first and searched for psychological explanations, but I had no actual reasons to be struggling at the time, eventually I realized it started a few months after I’d quit vaping. When I started using nicotine again via patches, after some time I started feeling like myself again.
Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD - now professionally diagnosed so I actually was genuinely way better off on nicotine than off of it, it does the same thing as Adderall (Amphetamine) does as well, but more subtle and in a slightly different way, a combination of both has really made me a much better person, far more rational and just generally way calmer, but also way more productive. I now have an MSc and a decently paying IT career, a stable and healthy relationship, healthy weight and I’m always working on self-improving through exercise, learning or minimizing other vices like cutting out all sugary foods, no more snacks, more veg, less alcohol etc etc. I wouldn’t have had any of this without good ol’ nicotine.
From my discussions with the diagnosing psychiatrist, this is a relatively common thing amongst folks with ADHD.
There are a number of studies that suggest Nicotine’s potential usefulness in “neurospicy” people:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758075/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8741955/
One study suggested that poor cognitive performance overall being a good predictor for relapse among smokers could actually be explained by rhe fact that nicotine being a stimulant has wide ranging helpful effects for cognitive function:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6018192/
ADHD or not I can certainly relate. If I had to put a word to how I felt off nicotine, I’d say I primarily just felt like I was dumb.
Here’s also a science direct article that mentions cites a range of studies, including on that of its positive effects on people with Alzheimer’s;
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027858462300009X
Drugs are drugs. YMMV. Assuming that chemical X is always bad when this isn’t the case isn’t useful to a productive discussion. Even if you want to dissuade people from nicotine absolutely - an approach that works far better to actually getting people on board is being honest.
On Reddit, subs like quitvaping and the caffeine quitting one are full of misinformation that is transparently a bunch of people RPing the war on drugs infomercials of the late 80s, not much different from the semen retention pseudoscience folks.
But also don’t smoke. Obligatory disclaimer but Inhaling combustion smoke just isn’t worth any benefit of anything, not nicotine, not devil’s lettuce.
Vaping is far far safer and so far is not known to cause any issues, (unless of course you count the tainted dark market unregulated american weed vapes which will give you popcorn lung), though as always, we can’t be sure, so best use something like patches.
You mentioned it turns out you have ADHD (turns out so do i) and that you began medication for that and it reads that this medication began at around the same time as you started on nicotine again.
I am inclined to ask the question. Do you think perhaps you are associating the effects of the ADHD treatment to nicotine use?
There certainly are some documented benefits to nicotine use. And much of what you say is verifiable. However, many of the benefits you describe can be associated with the treatment of ADHD aswell.
I accept i dont know your personal situation. I only read your comment and noticed the timing seemed to be a bit close.
On the subject of vaping, i personally experienced some sticky phlegm and trouble coughing this up as well as issues with lung capacity and the dependance on the nicotine made me extremely irritable and unable to concentrate until i vaped.
Also it takes longer than a few months to break a nicotine addiction. I still uphold the idea that there may have been some withdrawal going on there.
However i am happy to conceed the point if you genuinely disagree. As i said i have no idea about your personal situation.
and it reads that this medication began at around the same time as you started on nicotine again.
No, there was at least a few months between these two events. I should’ve phrased it better.
Do you think perhaps you are associating the effects of the ADHD treatment to nicotine use?
No. They’re wildly different in feel. I can tell when my meds wear off and when they kick in most days. That’s why I like having both.
i personally experienced some sticky phlegm and trouble coughing this up
This is far more likely due to the fact you used to smoke. I have anecdotally heard of some people who have issues with feeling like their throat is irritated, but they usually have crazy setups, like 300w 4-coil 0.24ohm temple RDAs with 1.5mg nic on a noisy cricket II in series or w/e. I have a hunch that the reason for it. Those were fun AF but I wouldn’t use it long term, it’s the equivalent of thinking that because a bar of chocolate doesn’t hurt you, then neither can a giant dump truck.
I’ve long switched to the rechargable elfbars with high strength (relatively) nic salts and low vapour volume which I’ve had no issues with.
and the dependance on the nicotine made me extremely irritable and unable to concentrate until i vaped
That’s true for sure. If I know I’m not gonna be able to vape I just use nicotine patches, I have no psychological addiction to vaping itself, only a physiological dependency on nicotine, if the patches match my nicotine intake levels, then I tend to forget vaping is even a thing at all haha.
Also it takes longer than a few months to break a nicotine addiction.
Yes, in terms of cravings, and those did pass actually, but in terms of such acute withdrawal effects? Nah - something is definitely going on there that wasn’t just pure withdrawals.
As i said i have no idea about your personal situation.
You do now that I wrote it out :)
Either way, have a good day!
The guy wasn’t talking about vaping though, but smoking. The one we know for sure gives you a ton of issues and health problems.
Whilst I agree it’s not a great analogy for right wing beliefs, I’d say it works as a good analogy for incel behaviour. I knew a guy who had fallen into that trap but managed to find his way out. When I asked him about it, he said it helped him cope, that it was easier to believe that it wasn’t his fault things were so shitty.
I really respect how he was able to realise that the things he and the people around him were saying was bullshit, and it made me realise that a lot of these people are being taken advantage of by “influencers” spewing this harmful rhetoric.
They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.
Probably generally starting with either an inferiority complex, or being a sociopath.
Garfield is wise. I vote for Garfield as dictator for life.
Lisan-al Gahib!!
Armok and Alad at Anagra.
Social media algorithms present different things to different people. So if you fall for a grift, the algorithm will just show you things that support the grift and never show anything that debunks it.
Someone going down a weird rabbit hole will stay on that for a long time, watching many ads along the way. Someone that starts to think “hey maybe there’s something to this thing” then immediately sees something debunking it may conclude “well that last video was a waste of time” and may decide to go do something else that’s a more worthwhile use of their time. End result, they watch fewer ads. Less revenue for the social media companies.
Weird internet rabbit holes are more profitable than seeing contradicting opinions. So the algorithms are tuned to send people down rabbit holes and not offer information contradicting them.
I just confronted a guy I know who told me with a straight face that poor people struggle with budgeting and that’s why they’re poor.
I asked him where he got that info. He then sent me a bunch of YouTubers.
Payday loans sort of suggest this. Bit it’s more how society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Payday loans don’t suggest this. Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
When you’re one month from disaster and you break a leg, it’s a payday loan or your family doesn’t have a home/food when you work a job without paid leave. And good luck with the disability approval, because even if it eventually comes through, you are on the hook until it does.
Being poor has very little to do with budgeting. I’m sure a substantial portion, if not the majority of them, could figure out how to budget with a $100k income instead of a $30k income.
I agree. My point was that rich people don’t take payday loans, but i recognise that not being able to afford a safetly cushion doesn’t necessarily imply bad planning.
rich people don’t take payday loans
Some do, depending on their circumstances. But when you’ve got a big income it’s easier to get out from under the debt.
Most rich people just use credit cards, though. They’re arguably worse than payday lenders, since the credit limits are much higher. But they’re also very risk averse, so they don’t extend credit to the lower income groups.
Payday lenders and other loan sharks have to spend more on collections and run tighter margins as a result. Far easier to be a credit card company and simply wage a finger at someone’s credit rating to extort payment than to actually execute a repo.
Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Seems like you agree
Yes, but it’s important to note that confirmation bias is always present in our views of the world because our brain tends to keep things simple by prefering confirming to contradicting information. It just has been amplified by recommendation algorithms meant to increase engagement by showing you “more of the stuff you like”, thus trapping you in a filter bubble you might not even be aware of.
Fascists provide easy (but often fake) answers to hard problems. Loneliness, the fear of replacement, that kind of thing.
Emotions are stronger then intellect, much stronger. And most of these people suffered in bad childhoods and were drilled or neglected into disempathy. (That’s not the necessary reaction to such childhoods but it’s a common reaction.)
suffered in bad childhoods
Just to say, but what causes those things are hate and fear.
The second one doesn’t require trauma.
Fear is a general human trait woven into our existences and should/could be reduced in a loving and supporting childhood. If love and support are missing in your childhood you don’t learn to handle your fears in a mature and stable way.
(I know I’m painting this picture with a very broad brush. It’s to point in the general direction of feelings as the most plausible and applicable answer to OPs question.)
To be fair, those involved in the bad childhoods also are likely to have bad childhoods themselves (the adults I mean).
Transgenerational stuff, victims becoming offenders and the likes.
Yep, you’re right, that’s what’s meant here.
Ok so your telling me since when I was bad in my childhood and spanked with a switch that I can become one?
No. Your response to such childhood is very individual. It’s a very common stance to live your life the opposite way of your parents lifestyle. That’s what produced the 1960s air of change in culture - hippies lived the very opposite of their parents ideals.
I simply point out well researched patterns in childhoods and their influence on character traits. Look up developmental psychology and transgenerational patterns. In Germany there’s a lot of research and publication about “war children” and “war grandchildren” (Kriegskinder und Kriegsenkel) which in general attributes a lot of the countries troubles and shortcomings to the upbringing of kids in a war and post war society with a lot of shame and guilt.
Anyone can become filled with hate.
It’s weird how some people turn into neo-nazis or incels after that and I just pay sexy Russian dom mommies to beat me within an inch of my life.
That’s certainly their rationale.
I was raised in a left-leaning, progressive, atheist, LGBTQ+/minority-accepting household, but one surrounded by a white, largely conservative exurban community. I was raised to be inclusive of others, to be thoughtful, to be curious, to be polite and empathetic. I had good* parents who supported me, and taught me to treat others well.
In the middle of fifth grade, I transferred to a magnet program focusing on STEM concepts. It took me from a school that was almost entirely white, to a school which was very much multi-racial. I was really small for my age, nerdy, and the new kid. I’d always been bullied at school, but after the transfer it got a lot worse, and got pretty severely physical. A lot of the people who harassed me the worst were black. I honestly never understood the social circles enough to know what their deal was, and it certainly wasn’t only a race thing, but the fact that many of my tormentors were black wasn’t lost on me, to be sure.
When I was 11 or so, I used all the savings from a lifetime of cumulative birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc. to buy a laptop to play games on. Pretty quickly, gaming became all I did. It was an escape, and I enjoyed it. I played whatever F2P games I could. Diablo clones, random MMOs, shitty pay-to-win FPS games, whatever. My parents didn’t supervise my activities very closely, and to be blunt, I quickly became way more savvy than them about subverting any surveillance they tried to put in place anyways.
Eventually I started looking into hacks for games. I found a really large forum (think 25k members) for sharing game hacks, and joined up. By the time I was maybe 13-14 or so, I was one of the highest-ranking moderators on the forum. I hung out in their IRC server (which definitely isn’t the internet chat-rooms you’re supposed to be careful about, those are different) all day, dabbled in making my own (occasionally illicit) software and hacks, and was firmly in the community. These weren’t good people, but I didn’t know that. When I got home from school and got online, they asked me how my day was. They cared about me, they played games with me, they were my friends. I remember I was gone for like 2 weeks when I was seriously ill, and one of them tracked me down and called my house to check in on me. I didn’t think anything of it, because of course they could do that. I’d been in a Skype call with one of them who was screen sharing the array of webcams they had access to through their botnet. I didn’t realize at the time that they were probably blackmailing people, or holding their data ransom. We just hacked in video games, none of that actually serious stuff. The malware I was toying with was just because I was interested in it, and of course, my friends must have been too, right? Just a learning exercise. I figured I might try to go into cybersecurity when I started high school and could actually start taking courses in computer topics. Programming was SO fucking interesting!
My parents didn’t know what was going on. They should have. I was barely a teenager, I can’t possibly have been hiding my tracks all that well. But then, their marriage had started to fall apart, and things were bad a home. I didn’t know anything about that then, I was in my room gaming and running communities for terrible people. The headset kept their fighting far away from me. My parents didn’t know who I was hanging out with. They had raised me well, but now they weren’t doing what they should have been. So when my friends shared hateful content with me, “interesting” videos they’d found about how terrible women were, how violent minorities were, who was I to question it? They were speaking as those with knowledge. They taught me stuff, they knew better than me. And besides, I’d been physically harassed by black people before. I’d seen it for myself, right? My U.S. history teacher was REALLY smart, and she told us (in a MN classroom) that the civil war wasn’t actually about slavery either! That was super interesting to learn! And the women they complained about weren’t me. Just because a lot of the guys I hung out with had bitches for girlfriends didn’t mean they hated women, it was just bad luck with shitty women. Right?
I was a good person. I mean, I was a weird socially outcast nerd, but I wasn’t a bad person. My family was still caring. Still accepting. My Mom’s apartment was always a refuge for any of our friends, even (and especially) the queer ones who had been kicked out by their own terrible parents. They had a place to come and be safe and be themselves with us. So I was a good person too, right? Good people, smart people, they keep their online lives separate from their personal lives. They don’t talk about their online activities with others, and they don’t talk about their personal information with internet strangers in chatrooms. The only people I talked with were my FRIENDS. I ran their Minecraft servers. I discussed the Jordan Peterson videos they shared. He sounds so fucking smart after all. I hardly understand what he’s talking about, but I’m sure one day I will. And the parts I don’t understand, other people can explain to me. I laughed at their racist memes. After all, it’s just a joke. And of course, overt bigotry got stomped on. I was in charge, and I was a good person. I wouldn’t tolerate that sort of thing. But a dog-whistle is just a tool for training a pet, and we’d only ever kept cats.
I eventually joined a different gaming group on the side. We played Jailbreak in CS:S. I got really good at it. Really into it. And I stopped hanging out as much with my older friends. I still kept in touch, but I’d found a new hobby. These people weren’t good people either, but I mean, the fact that they liked my voice on mic wasn’t that they were creeping on a 15 year old who they wanted to fuck, it was because I had gotten a new microphone a few weeks ago and must have sounded good on it. I had gotten lucky though. These people weren’t great people, but they weren’t nearly as bad. They weren’t literally cybercriminals, just asshole kids on the internet. So when I became a moderator in THAT community and started running things, the community actually improved. But eventually that community collapsed, and I moved on again. And again. And again. I ended up with some Brits for a while, and “mate” settled itself into my vocabulary in a deeply unwelcome way.
I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’m 28 now. The last 14 years of my life, I’ve slowly climbed from one community to another, and mostly through random luck each of those have been better than the one I was leaving. I am surrounded now by some of my favorite people. They are TRULY good people. They care about others, and stand up for good causes. Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too. I wasn’t a good person. I fell WAY down the alt-right rabbit hole. I’m sure that I’ve hurt people, and I’ve made countless decisions that sicken me now. But I’ve been incredibly lucky. If I hadn’t been, I have no idea where I’d be now. Or what nonsense I’d still be believing, because everything around me told me it was normal.
You know how they say “Show, not tell” when writing? Excellent job mate, thanks for it
I’m glad you appreciated it! I think I can forgive the subtle jab xD
Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too
You sound like a good person to me. That level of self reflection rarely / never leads to being a shithead in my experience.
Crazy story but a very interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
That was quite a read.
Thanks for sharing.
Don’t Be a Sucker
This is an anti-fascism film made by the U.S. in the 1940s. It pretty much focuses on answering your exact question. It’s a decent film too.
Feels > reals.
External locus of control.
Bad things in someone’s life is not their fault, but the fault of whatever scapegoat.
Can’t get a girlfriend? It’s women’s fault.
Can’t get a job? It’s illegal immigrants.
Can’t afford to do the things you like? It’s the government taking too many taxes.
Whatever problem someone has, they are looking to blame someone rather than make any changes in their own life.
Naziism and fascism are broadly a response to the same material conditions as communism and anarchism (to an extent).
Liberalism does not put forth a response to those conditions because it created them and has no internal process to relieve them (instead it externalizes them) or stop perpetuating them.
When faced with a choice between communism or fascism people generally don’t perform an in-depth analysis of what’s best for them or their cohort but instead attach to the group that provides some relief or aid.
That’s why it’s important to always help people around you when you can.
Mutual aid is anti-fascist activism!
As I’ve continued through life, my political and economic ideology has shifted a lot from Marxism and Marx-derived ideologies into a personal interpretation of collectivism that basically is just, “how can we make everything mutual aid?”
Fuck yeah we can 🤘
How does liberalism create material conditions leading to nazism and fascism?
I think that’s a stretch to paint with such an unconditional broad brush.
You may know this, but if not…
Keep in mind they’re likely referring to the philosophy of liberalism, not the United States “liberal=progressive/left leaning”.
The comment seems pretty muddy as far as what aspect of liberalism we’re talking about. The poster is saying that liberalism “created the conditions”, a direct act, vs any aspects of liberalism as a philosophical concept creating socioeconomic rules and conditions that lead to the results specified.
I’m trying to sort out what the poster means. I’d like to know what the gap they’re leaping from liberalism to fascism contains. Is it just generic anti-liberalism sentiment this poster is displaying? Or is there a distinction between liberal philosophy ( an incredibly broad concept to just pin unqualified blame to) and liberalism as a modern concept in social policy and governance in their statement?
Both movements broadly point to the material conditions created, perpetuated and encouraged by liberalism as their impetus. Scholars within both movements have written extensively cataloguing the precise ways different conditions came to pass and how it’s the fault of liberalism.
Generally speaking your communist will say liberalism sprang from the class relation under capitalism and the bourgeoise, while your fascist will say it was “‘da joos”.
E: I tried to click preview but replied instead but it’s fine because I don’t want to summarize two centuries of political thought anyway.
If you have a specific example you want clarification on I’d be happy to give it but if you truly feel befuddled that a person could say that liberalism creates the conditions (perhaps, contradictions 🤔) for communism or fascism I can point you at a bigass pile of books instead.
You keep saying “because liberalism” but you don’t specify why. You repeating yourself and using bigger words isn’t answering the question other than pointing the finger at liberalism.
You didn’t ask why, you asked how. It’s really broad question so I was gearing up to answer how by starting with what the two (overly broadly classified) schools of thought called the why.
Then I pushed reply instead of preview and realized while editing my post that I don’t want to reply to you the way I started because it would be long winded and you probably aren’t interested in reading that and I’m certainly not interested in writing it.
Liberalism creates the conditions for revolt and reaction in a lot of different ways but primarily it’s through a combination of pursuit of profit leading to unaccounted for externalities buttressed by primacy of the powerful disguised as freedom in the marketplace and in word and deed.
If you want specific examples or you want examples related to a time, place or event you’re already familiar with just let me know.
It’s hard to summarize hundreds of years of history and philosophy in just a few sentences while on break so please do me the courtesy of not nitpicking my overly broad statements.
Liberalism creates the conditions for revolt and reaction in a lot of different ways but primarily it’s through a combination of pursuit of profit leading to unaccounted for externalities buttressed by primacy of the powerful disguised as freedom in the marketplace and in word and deed.
The only place I can find such an association with pursuit of profit and liberalism is specifically in the capitalist-liberal perspective, and that is conjoined with neo-liberalism, basically “free market” that isn’t really free.
I can find no connection with liberalism, as a philosophy or a socioeconomic choice in governance, where the pursuit of profit (other than oligarchy or other authoritarian regimes that pay only lip service to liberal concepts, but that’s the end result, not the philosophical precursor) is the focus or result of liberalism.
If all you care to do is mic drop and gesture aimlessly in the direction of history, I’m afraid your point is lost.
Do you think the philosophy of liberalism can be separated from the atomized individual acting in a market?
Those ideas underpin all philosophical liberalism that I’m aware of. We can’t have liberal social relations or philosophy without a market to act as a replacement for the often feudal social relations and theocratic philosophy that existed before liberalism.
Consider Protestantism if you want a great example. It was only possible because the market allowed a class of people access to a new social relation and they needed a new system of beliefs that fit it.
You can’t separate any part of liberalism from the elevated position of the market.
I’m really not trying to be aggressive or only make pithy, in your words mic drop replies. The question you asked is very broad and I’m not able to summarize it without glossing over lots of stuff. I also don’t have the time to type, source, check, proofread and edit a reply that covers the last 800 years.
Like I said, if you want something more specific or that you’re familiar with just name it and we can talk in those terms.
Ok. You continue to make connections between liberalism to religion, markets, personal economics, and more…clouded by words like atomize, feudal, and “elevated position of the market”.
Frankly, you don’t make sense. If you are incapable of reducing the connection between the philosophy of liberalism and the direct path to fascism due to plain text tenets of that philosophy it very much sounds like you don’t understand it yourself. Or you’re just making shit up.
You have expended extraordinary paragraphs waving your hands at every point of the compass while claiming you can’t be bothered to expend effort to type an explanation. I spent a good 20 minutes searching for papers, academic, historic, or otherwise, that could connect your claims - in effect I was attempting to prove you right. There are none.
I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation, you make lots of claims using fun words, but nothing to substantiate them.
Classic bloodfart ‼️ banger
One of my closer friends is on a weird path atm. He’s full into Russian propaganda, anti-western stuff, flat earth, anti vaxx and whatnot.
I tried to reason with him. Turns out he doesn’t even know how to verify something he’s read online. Check sources? Nope. Google something you’ve seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
I came to accept that he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation, propaganda and lies.
Check sources? Nope. Google something you’ve seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
Those are hardly panacea, as you need a reliable frame of reference for verification.
I remember during the heyday of WikiLeaks, how conservatives and liberals alike dismissed the info dumps as misinformation and edited images/video. You couldn’t talk about PRISM with anyone over 40, because all the Cable News outlets were claiming it had been debunked. You couldn’t talk about Collateral Murder because it was endlessly getting blocked on social media as “disinformation”.
And that was before the advent of AI generated images and whole books churned out with LLMs. What do you say to the guy who is hip deep in “evidence” from the Heritage Foundation? What do you say to a TERF quoting from the Cass Report? What happens when you get a rebuttal in the form of a Tucker Carlson Interview from Moscow?
Yeah, you can just wave that off as “Fake News, doesn’t count”. But then so can they, and we’re back to Square One on validating any kind of underlying truth.
he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation
None of us are immune to propaganda. Thinking this is a matter of simple intelligence is the first trap you fall into when evaluating a source.
It’s so easy to tell yourself “I’m smarter, therefore you must be wrong” and work backwards from there.
now, this’n right here kids is a prime specimen of what those highfalutin desk jockeys call a “global citizen.”
I’ve been called worse
It’s surprisingly easy to teach racism and sexism. Parents do it all the time very effectively. Not long after MLK was killed there was a classroom experiment done, which was later made into a documentary called Blue Eyes Brown Eyes. The whole documentary is an hour long, but I think even watching a shorter 5 minute clip from it will show you just how quickly kids pick up on bad behavior when authority figures feed it to them.
And there are so many other good answers that other people have already written. It’s really neat to learn from so many perspectives.
When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don’t get (or can’t give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.
One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.
Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything’s shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don’t, change is a loss of control, and that’s scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what’s rightfully ours from those we’ve been forced to share it with.
Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.
Yes, there’s horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn’t take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.
As for incels - I don’t think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn’t get to form stable relationships, who didn’t get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no ‘third place’ to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.
And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don’t have to be painfully awkward, you just have to… not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don’t try and don’t get practice.
And then it’s the same situation: the world doesn’t work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they’ve heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn’t.
For some of them, they feel like they’re getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it’s a big club and they aren’t in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they’re the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.
Fantastic summary! Thank you!
It makes a lot of sense when you put in like that, and makes me feel like helping people instead of ignoring/hating/looking down on them. How did you get these insights? Are you in the field of psychology?
As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.
As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.
Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?
Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.
A little empathy goes a long way. There are some truely shit evil people in the world, but most people are good people who werent given the same chances, lost their way, etc.
As a young person who grew up on the internet, with no parental oversight, I can say it’s because there is a lot of right wing bullshit online that media companies love to push on their users. When I was a tween I got suckered into it hard when one day youtube decided to put mgtow videos in my recommended feed. I never initially searched for them. I did eventually get out of it, and I’m not entirely sure how, but I remember as a 13yo seeing trump in 2016 bully that disabled reporter and it really put a sour taste in my mouth. And then over the next few years that led to me leaving catholicism, becoming a socialist, and realizing I’m transgender and very gay.
With me being transgender and pan, that adds another aspect to it, because I think I knew subconsciously that I was queer as a tween, but growing up in an environment where I was repeatedly told those things were wrong led to me feeling absolutely miserable about myself, and misery loves company. And this also makes me wonder how many nazis are queer and don’t even realize it or refuse to recognize it.
