31–36 of 36 posts
I find the father and the writer to be insufferable. The father for, as portrayed, his clutching ignorance, the writer for being a born-again snob.
What's important is you found a way to be superior to both of them [1] [1] https://xkcd.com/774/
From my perspective, the faulty programming being pumped into the older white guys (my dad included) is not the content of the message, but the methods of how to manipulate ideas to transform them into other ideas, and transform those into actions. For example, in my dad it started out around age 67 as the "bird people", the "green weenies", or the "save the whales" people. How they were ruining everything, stopping…
I love playing Devil's Advocate. Perhaps I have been participating on the Internet for too long, but I tend to think that anyone who cannot maintain composure in the face of dissent needs to be trolled hard and often. A lot of the rhetorical arsenal that works well in person, like the array of ad hominem attacks used to emotionally undermine the opponent's credibility in the eyes of a specific audience, just don't fl…
It feels like trying to paint a 3d rotating gif onto a canvas with a large brush. You may be able to paint one frame fairly well, but it will not rotate. The spirit of the gif cannot be hosted on this canvas. You can host subsets of it, but not the entire spirit of the duality of ideas.
The "dance around the issues like a butterfly" is not something you teach. And trying to teach it, you just make the other person angry or depressed they can't do what you do.
Fox News is a reasonable focal point for this piece, but it's only one small contributing factor. The sad thing is that purveyors of fear and distrust are all over the internet. I lost my dad to some combination of Glen Beck, Fox News, and the "Gold, Guns, and God" crowd. I caught glimpses of it via his emails from time to time. The first major one being links to radiation pills after Fukushima. Then the obsession wi…
I don't know if that is common knowledge (or how old your father is), but there is a specific kind of paranoia which is quite common after a specific age. In Germany it's called Altersparanoia, informally (which translates to paranoia of the old ). What you describes doesn't sound like the radicalization caused by manipulating (and fascist?) propaganda, but more like that (maybe triggered or fortified by that thought…
Why was Fox News so able to induce such hysteria in these people, though? (Admittedly, that's less comfortable to think about than just complaining about what Fox does.)
There's a human 'set point' for fear. If there aren't enough real things of which to be afraid, the mind will latch onto the next-most-credible things, even if relatively farfetched. With current long lives, lower crime, domestic peace, reasonable prosperity, and social insurance, there's a lot less to genuinely fear, in the US, than ever before. Without the challenges and stresses of full-time, market work, the reti…
I find the father and the writer to be insufferable. The father for, as portrayed, his clutching ignorance, the writer for being a born-again snob.
What's important is you found a way to be superior to both of them [1] [1] https://xkcd.com/774/