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My dad was similar, but he thought it was all a joke. He thought sites like rense and infowars were today's equivalent of the counterculture political satire f
by dkarl 8y ago
My dad was similar, but he thought it was all a joke. He thought sites like rense and infowars were today's equivalent of the counterculture political satire from when he was young. He knew there were people on those sites who weren't in on the joke, and people with mental illness, but I think he thought it was maybe 5% or 10%, and it just added to the fun for him. He got reverse-pwned by Poe's Law. Yet still he found it absolutely compelling, more fun than following the real news. Underneath a layer of gallows humor he always seemed really patient with humanity's stupidity, much more so than me, but I think late in his life his patience started to run out and to stave off despair he decided to find some nihilistic fun in it.
- bilbo0s 8y agoI'vs seen this proclivity in a lot of older military guys. Korea and Vietnam vets. They just split their sides laughing at this stuff. Also, at least in the case of my father and uncle, the fact that people believe a lot of this stuff is what makes it all funny. I honestly don't believe they would be at all interested if no one believed it. I wonder if your dad is ex-military? Of course, all of that's older enlisted guys, (think vietnam era NCOs), which are the only ones I know. It would be interesting to find out if ex-military older commissioned guys find the same humor in any of what the country's going through. I'd like to think they wouldn't, but who knows?
- aswanson 8y agoI'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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ticmasta 8y agoCheck out Stephen Colbert's "Brain Fight with Tuck Buckford" - not sure who's more ridiculous him or Alex Jones. Stephen is funnier though...
- michaelchisari 8y agoI don't think mainstream comedy has really nailed the intensity and anger of the conspiracy theory alt-right. Their interpretation always has a certain snideness and lacks the sincerity of the real thing. A little known comedian named Connor O'Malley had a series of comedy sketches about a fake website called truthhunters.com that I think captures it dangerously well. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=truth+hunters+connor+o%27malley https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=truth+hunters+c...
- blarg1 8y agoI 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.
- dkarl 8y agoHe taught college history at a small state school. Definitely equivalent of enlisted; same sense of institutional powerlessness and futility. Officers would be the university administration. He used to circulate ("anonymously") humorous hand-drawn posters and pamphlets about their policies, and they did not appreciate his sense of humor at all.
- theseatoms 8y agoThis is so relatable. Virtually all "news" is entertainment these days. And entertainment is, at its core, a matter of subjective preference.
- tnolet 8y agoWell, maybe in the US. Come to Germany and I'll show you the snorefest of the news media here.
- maxxxxx 8y agoBoring news is a breath of fresh air once you have lived in the US for a few years. Last time I visited my sister I was amazed how much information the Tagesschau gets across in a few minutes.
- AceyMan 8y agoI'm a yankee and I like the boring, straightforward take the Germans have wrt news. I've recently added DW.com to my regular news scan, joining the BBC and the trad USA outlets (AP, Reuters, NPR).
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoQuite a few years ago, someone at The Economist pointed out that you should pay attention to what went on in the US because it would get around to the UK/Europe in about 15 years.
- mensetmanusman 8y agoThat was true until the Spiegel affair. I laughed hard when I read he described as fact fictional acounts of older American women who would travel the country to watch executions. Ha!
- aero142 8y agoI'm pretty sure /r/the_donald started out as a joke and slowly turned real at some point. I still don't quite understand what happened. It would make an interesting investigation.
- mcbuilder 8y ago/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.
- gumby 8y agoIt alway felt to me like an enormous, manually-computed Markov chain.
- atypicaluser 8y agoAs 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. ;-)
- russdpale 8y agoIn no way is TD and politics the same. TD is a cess pit of stupidity.
- pcwalton 8y agoSame with 4chan, from what I've heard. There's a lesson here about social media: if you tolerate people pretending to be Nazis "as a joke", then you will soon become overrun with actual Nazis.
- pasabagi 8y agoI can confirm. I was on 4chan a lot as a teenager (some ten years ago, now), and the Nazism was generally more a joke about how nasty and intolerant the board was. There were even 'raids' (essentially cyber-bullying) on racists. I can only guess that things must have gone downhill when the site was taken over by Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has some pretty right-wing political views. That said, there's also a kind of natural affinity in the humiliated-outsider-mentality that 4chan had that fits with Nazism in a way that I feel has become more and more clear in recent years.
- beetwenty 8y agoThis is definitely where my mom has gone. She thinks Alex Jones is very funny, but then ends up buying the books of conspiracy theorists and interjecting paranoid right talking points into everyday conversations. Given that it happens so commonly around retirement, I think this is a function of not wanting to struggle or achieve anything anymore, and therefore succumbing fully to a convenient view, one which gives you a thing to worry about apart from your age and declining health, something participatory without being difficult. "Never mind my hip! What about those DEMOCRATS!!!"
- vibrato 8y agoIf you don't think Alex Jones' gay frog song is funny, well then I just dont know what funny is.
- ryandrake 8y agoOf the people I know who have fallen into this right wing vortex, regardless of age, all of them are retired. But it’s not everyone who’s retired! I know retirees who travel, stay engaged with hobbies, etc who did not end up in the vortex. It’s the ones who just sit there in retirement, immersing themselves in this stuff all day long, doing nothing else, that are getting sucked in. I’m getting up there in age and I’m worried about this myself. My criteria for retirement is not just that I have enough money to stop working, but that I also have enough to travel or do a hobby and stay mentally engaged with something.