I'm not ex military but I find Alex Jones legitimately hilarious and I'm astonished people take him seriously. Before I left fb I had an ex-Marine old friend from elementary school on my list and he shared conspiracy memes relentlessly, very much mirroring the stuff Russia used in the 2016 election meddling. He actually believed it. I gave up trying to debunk it and played along.
Check out Stephen Colbert's "Brain Fight with Tuck Buckford" - not sure who's more ridiculous him or Alex Jones. Stephen is funnier though...
I use to love Stephen when be pretended to be a right winger. But doesn't seem able to do that anymore since Trump became president.
No less from theverge. It's amazing that people take theverge seriously after their "how to build a pc" fiasco. The one thing about the "fake news" hysteria is that one side consuming the fake news is accusing the other side consuming the fake news. As far as I can tell, it's all fake news and propaganda.
Donald Trump's presidency is weird because the "mainstream media" (a term used by many, regardless of their political spectrum) began to be treated as "real news" simply because Donald Trump was calling it "fake news". People have been talking about the issues with the "mainstream media" (in particular, whether their profit motives line up with their ethical duty) for a few decades, and it all it takes is one clown t…
My mother taught me to be autodidact. She would never answer my questions and instead told me to go get an encyclopedia (It was the 70's) and find out myself. When I spouted ignorance she would correct me. Now she's widowed. As my father declined with Alzheimer's he tuned into FOX news all day long. Oddly, he became less racist despite this because my wife is black. The more he fell in love with her as his daughter,…
"The Brainwashing Of My Dad" is a very personal documentary about this effect on the director's father. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh3TeTxgNVo
I found the documentarian to be more interesting than her subject which was an old white man listening to talk radio that appeals to old white men and agreeing with it. Her old man is just very agreeable having gone from the left to the right to the center seemingly just parroting the news source he's listening to at the time.
The documentarian on the other hand appears to have never listened to Rush Limbaugh before setting out to do this documentary since she knows so little that's non-controversial about the man. Such as his quirk of saying ditto. She seems ro have just decided who he was by osmosis by reading left wing news articles about him. Rather than try to genuinely understand the appeal of right wing radio she just dismisses it as naziesque brainwashing. The way she belittles her father while not appreciating the narrow range of political thought she has exposed herself to is just so incredibly smug and oblivious.
This documentary in a nutshell is what is wrong with political discourse.
This is not news! There's a certain brand of conservative baby boomers in the US who are obsessed with upsetting news, and they are extremely vulnerable to fake news. Long before this whole "fake news" thing on social media came to the popular consciousness, I was already getting e-mails about the Clintons being part of an assassination plot or a certain breed of poisonous spiders living in the toilet waiting to bite your butt and kill you. I called these "old person emails" because only baby boomers would send them. It's the reason we have snopes.com. Unfortunately I sent one of the snopes articles back in a response to one of these "old person emails", and the response I got was, "snopes is a liberal site!". In the US, the people from this generation grew up fearing death by nuclear attack by communists at any moment. Even though the world has changed pretty extremely since they were young, I think the psychological effect of it never wore off for some people. Unfortunately, I find Donald Trump to be the worst possible example of this type of personality: he's always angry, he refuses to believe news that doesn't fit his angry world view, and he says everything out loud that every angry baby boomer has always dreamt they could say out loud (thus many people see him as bold, not rude).
/r/T_D was such a strange mix of Russian bots, trolls, true believing incels, and meme spitting grandpas that I'm sure it could be studied for years by social scientists.
As could /r/politics, /r/srs and other extreme subreddits infested with bots, trolls and other societal rejects. How unfortunate that this generation's social scientists are interested only in grinding and swinging the axe in one political direction. ;-)
In no way is TD and politics the same. TD is a cess pit of stupidity.
It could be beginning dementia / Alzheimer's. At least that is the case for my father. Similarly to believing fake news, also lost his humour, he just doesn't get jokes any more, he takes them at face value. I hope this is not the case for your dad and I'm sorry if I scared you, but you could consider having him checked.
What's the use in getting it checked? It's not like early cancer detection in which an early diagnosis might have some effect on the outcome of the disease. (?)
Just to insert a single bit of anecdata here.
In my wife's case the treatments to help with a dementia type disease involved medications that did improve her condition for a very short time followed by a very sharp decline. The physicians warned us about this and in one of her lucid moments she stated she wished to undergo this therapy regardless of the outcome being that what was happening to her was so mindbendingly terrible that even a few more more days of a "shared reality" was preferred to her ultimate condition.
I guess my single point of reference here is that there are trade offs to this kind of therapy and family and PoAs need to carefully consider any type of treatment
Like other commenters, this study jives with my experience with older relatives. I mean 'forwards from grandma' has been a thing forever, right? 'Bill Gates will give a nickel every time this is read' (remember email chains?), 'naked women get shared, but this heroic child won't get a single like', 'Like and Share if you stand with politician X', etc etc. Combine this with the targeted scamming of elderly from variou…
Exactly right, except one of my grandmas only sends me articles from Snopes. It's kind of like reverse fake news. The only online contact I get from her is articles debunking fake news, but, never any actual real news.
If it was me receiving these things from my grandma- I would be so happy and proud.
Perhaps you could call her today and tell her you love her and thank her for her contribution towards your life