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I don't understand the underlying presumption that data and statistics are how you deradicalize people. People become radical when they really want something th

I don't understand the underlying presumption that data and statistics are how you deradicalize people. People become radical when they really want something they feel they can't get, and the most effective way to fight that is to offer some of what they want. There's no argument that can prove your father isn't allowed to want less immigration, even if you and I might prefer more. It's a genuinely hard problem, of course, because there are lots of people in the Democratic coalition who are radicalized the other direction. They feel - equally genuinely, and equally strongly - that excluding or deporting an immigrant is a grievous moral wrong which we can't tolerate for mere political expediency. That's what it means to say that there's not a consensus on immigration.

yxhuvud 2y ago
I don't buy it. Nazis don't get less radical if you change your laws to get more in line with their thoughts, they get emboldened and want even more.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  What makes you think the original commenter's dad is a Nazi?
dmvdoug 2y ago
That’s kind of sweet that you think radicalization is about policy preferences. Like the GP, my elderly parents have turned into Trump partisans. They listen to Fox News all day and night. It’s constant exposure to and participation in Two Minutes of Hate. My dad’s actually a sweet guy, and when I can address some of the crazy shit he’s clearly hearing from somewhere else, and ask him to take a step back and talk to me, not at me, we often get to a place where he’ll acknowledge that what he said/repeated really doesn’t reflect his own thoughts or feelings about something, but then it’s just right back into the vortex of propaganda, lies, and hatred spewing out of the TV, and it’s like we never talked at all.
- Eextra953 2y ago
  I sometimes wonder if Fox goes beyond extreme partisanship and into a sort of pavlovian training of their audience. I've watched Fox before and whenever there is a negative or scary story they follow it up with a story about Democrats. At what point does that association get burned into the audience so that Dem\Prog = bad?
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    The issue is it’s not just Fox News. It’s all right wing media from almost 24/7 AM radio (which is what radicalized my dad) to basically all organized social media pipelines to local broadcast television and even YouTube. Spotify drives you to Joe Rogan who drives people to right wing radicals. It’s pervasive. You have to literally insulate yourself from it or it creeps in from every direction. It’s no surprise that our county is where it is. There is far more profit in driving right wing propaganda (including liberals) than there is left wing propaganda because left wing propaganda is anti-capital by definition. And capital owns everything.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  I wasn't there and I don't know your parents, so I can't claim to know for sure what was going on. I've been on the other side of a similar conversation with my parents. I was a big Andrew Yang booster, going around ranting about how we obviously ought to establish a UBI immediately and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. As my parents correctly identified, I didn't really believe that, because I knew there were serious practical problems with funding such a program. But that doesn't mean that I was logically compelled to become a deficit hawk, or that I was brainwashed for not doing so. I was embracing the hyperbolic form of a problem I did (and do) see as quite important: we have enough resources to ensure that everyone in the US can live a decent life and ought to use them accordingly.
- Jetrel 2y ago
  My radicalization came from an incident a few years ago where some brownshirts yelled "trump won" and emptied a clip into my sister's friend's house party. They were uninvolved with politics, and had no obvious "marks" like gender shit, ethnicity (white); just anything that conceivably would have made them a target. Just normal, innocent 20-somethings. I got to hear about how (name I won't doxx) was being told how he was gonna be okay when he was obviously bleeding to death from a gut wound that wouldn't stop. It's the kind of story you hear about soldiers in a warzone. 7 people got shot; he was the one who died before paramedics could stabilize him. Mass shootings are barely newsworthy anymore. They plopped the usual couple of sentences about it, and didn't mention the political angle on it, probably for fear of death threats. All these societal institutions, politicians, churches - everyone that's supposed to give a shit; they all just collectively shrugged. "So it goes", as Vonnegut would say. - It's that grotesquerie, that banality of people just pretending it's all social hysteria, or bothsides, or "it's not really happening" or any number of ways of just ... gaslighting it as not being real. That's what's so vile. It's a level of cowardice and dishonor I have no words for. At least own your deeds like actual men, don't weasel out of it like spineless worms.

yxhuvud 2y ago

I don't buy it. Nazis don't get less radical if you change your laws to get more in line with their thoughts, they get emboldened and want even more.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
What makes you think the original commenter's dad is a Nazi?

dmvdoug 2y ago

That’s kind of sweet that you think radicalization is about policy preferences. Like the GP, my elderly parents have turned into Trump partisans. They listen to Fox News all day and night. It’s constant exposure to and participation in Two Minutes of Hate. My dad’s actually a sweet guy, and when I can address some of the crazy shit he’s clearly hearing from somewhere else, and ask him to take a step back and talk to me, not at me, we often get to a place where he’ll acknowledge that what he said/repeated really doesn’t reflect his own thoughts or feelings about something, but then it’s just right back into the vortex of propaganda, lies, and hatred spewing out of the TV, and it’s like we never talked at all.

Eextra953 2y ago
I sometimes wonder if Fox goes beyond extreme partisanship and into a sort of pavlovian training of their audience. I've watched Fox before and whenever there is a negative or scary story they follow it up with a story about Democrats. At what point does that association get burned into the audience so that Dem\Prog = bad?
- tstrimple 2y ago
  The issue is it’s not just Fox News. It’s all right wing media from almost 24/7 AM radio (which is what radicalized my dad) to basically all organized social media pipelines to local broadcast television and even YouTube. Spotify drives you to Joe Rogan who drives people to right wing radicals. It’s pervasive. You have to literally insulate yourself from it or it creeps in from every direction. It’s no surprise that our county is where it is. There is far more profit in driving right wing propaganda (including liberals) than there is left wing propaganda because left wing propaganda is anti-capital by definition. And capital owns everything.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I wasn't there and I don't know your parents, so I can't claim to know for sure what was going on. I've been on the other side of a similar conversation with my parents. I was a big Andrew Yang booster, going around ranting about how we obviously ought to establish a UBI immediately and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. As my parents correctly identified, I didn't really believe that, because I knew there were serious practical problems with funding such a program. But that doesn't mean that I was logically compelled to become a deficit hawk, or that I was brainwashed for not doing so. I was embracing the hyperbolic form of a problem I did (and do) see as quite important: we have enough resources to ensure that everyone in the US can live a decent life and ought to use them accordingly.
Jetrel 2y ago
My radicalization came from an incident a few years ago where some brownshirts yelled "trump won" and emptied a clip into my sister's friend's house party. They were uninvolved with politics, and had no obvious "marks" like gender shit, ethnicity (white); just anything that conceivably would have made them a target. Just normal, innocent 20-somethings. I got to hear about how (name I won't doxx) was being told how he was gonna be okay when he was obviously bleeding to death from a gut wound that wouldn't stop. It's the kind of story you hear about soldiers in a warzone. 7 people got shot; he was the one who died before paramedics could stabilize him. Mass shootings are barely newsworthy anymore. They plopped the usual couple of sentences about it, and didn't mention the political angle on it, probably for fear of death threats. All these societal institutions, politicians, churches - everyone that's supposed to give a shit; they all just collectively shrugged. "So it goes", as Vonnegut would say. - It's that grotesquerie, that banality of people just pretending it's all social hysteria, or bothsides, or "it's not really happening" or any number of ways of just ... gaslighting it as not being real. That's what's so vile. It's a level of cowardice and dishonor I have no words for. At least own your deeds like actual men, don't weasel out of it like spineless worms.