You know, I don’t really talk politics with my parents. They don’t have cable, so I don’t have to worry about Fox news, and they don’t do the internet much. I am sure they have their biases, but not down the rabbit hole so to speak. I can’t say the same about my mom’s old boss and her cousins I am friends with on face book. They aren’t horrible, but still spreading bad memes…
Finding something to believe in?
Right; if the messages people are exposed to didn’t have any influence on their opinions and behavior then businesses wouldn’t be spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on advertising.
That doesn’t absolve people of responsibility for their actions, but it does explain how media like Fox News can have a profound influence on the way a population thinks and behaves.
Like this here:
This must be heartbreaking for people who go through it. I think there is a synthesis between the positions of “maintain a relationship because they are family” and “cut the cord with toxic people.” I’ve cut off contact with members of my family in the past because I was tired of them, so I’m not preaching to anyone what they should do.
I feel a bit like showing up to just “maintain the relationship” and simply avoid the politics issue might be kind of enabling. Sort of like showing up to just “maintain your relationship” with your uncle who is drinking themself to death and not talking about the drinking. If that’s the best that can be done, then that’s the best that can be done, sometimes palliative care is the only option.
It makes me think of a conversation I had with my kid about going to great-grandma’s place. The kid yelled, “Why do we have to go to great grandmas?!?” In the past I might have said something like, “Great grandma loves to see us,” but the last time I said, “I know you are afraid of the subway.” Because that’s why they were shouting.
So if I were going to sit down for a slog like this, I’d focus on talking about emotions whenever they talk about politics. And I’d be ready for the person to find that intolerable and to drop me rather than feeling what they feel. But I think that’s what at least giving it a try looks like. It doesn’t look like trying to compartmentalize the problem.
More like being confronted, daily, by the fact that our country’s led by an incompetent, deeply bigoted bully, which infuriates most people to the point of speaking out, but seems to empower a small number of people to express their own pent-up worst qualities.
Political Propaganda is a whole field of study. It uses psychological techniques to get results. It’s VERY effective.
Mostly, Fox and meme warfare use stuff that has been developed during cold war but now with big data weaponized to manipulate people’s emotions in the most effective way.
People like Steve Bannon and companies like Cambridge Analytica are directly involved in the sudden turn for the most extreme right that many countries are experiencing, there’s a lot of money involved.
What I don’t see is effective counter propaganda. I worry about the next decade, because so much progress is coming undone so fast that there’s no way this won’t lead to a global crisis.
I have the nicest, tiniest little aunt: my aunt, Joanne. Everybody in my family is artistic but her and her daughters are amazing. They speak several languages. They knit, prolifically. My cousin once crocheted her friend the entire cast of Star Trek TNG for his birthday: https://janafordknits.blogspot.com/2010/08/star-trek-next-generation_09.html?m=1
Anyway, my aunt doesn’t really watch news but she has every single one of Anne Coulter’s books. Many of them signed.
It’s the most bizarre thing in my otherwise wholly progressive family and she doesn’t like to talk about it. We tried for awhile but now, if you even hint at bringing up politics, she will just leave. I’ve talked to my cousins about it but even they are at a loss to explain it.
It’s like the Allegory of the Cave, where everyone in the cave is troubled by those leaving it.
Oh shit, just…wow. I know none of that was actually directed at Trump because they would never say any of this about him so it has to be from Obama era, and that makes all of this ever more damning. Just stunning, absolutely stunning the hypocrisy at Fox
Where’s the Lucas approved “specialized” version?
Hug ^ This hits me where I live. We had a similar experience with my brother in law. We worked for years to try to temper his proclivity toward discrimination of all kinds. We bent over backward to try to educate, and have thoughtful discussions with him in hopes that he just needed to see how his views were harmful to others. Then Trump happened, and it was like a switch was flipped, and any progress we had made with him evaporated. Now he speaks almost completely in hate filled talking points he gets from conservative YouTube, and has dropped any pretense about his misogyny, homophobia and racism. It sucks. It also has left this feeling that we had never made any progress in the first place, and that he had just learned to hide the hate he felt when he was around us.
I could have written that myself. My BIL went from a fairly thoughtful never-Trumper to a raging trumpist over the course of the first 6 mos. Now I just avoid him when possible and avoid anything even remotely political or current events when I can’t.
I’ve often wondered if the bumper music thar Rush Limbaugh plays on his radio show is meant to do something similar. It’s this hypnotic guitar riff that just repeats constantly, and makes me wonder if there are subliminals in therr to reprogram the dittoheads.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
