16 ms·

A son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories

82 points by js2 2y ago

bell-cot 2y ago
Very informative, but painful to read. Hopefully neither of the children inherited their father's mental issues.
ProcNetDev 2y ago
I listened his This American life episode on Monday morning and had to compose myself before my stand up. It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men.
- gosub100 2y ago
  What do you mean men? It's not confined to one gender.
  - ryandvm 2y ago
    Not to stir anything up, but my own observations have been that it is mostly men falling for the political conspiracy theories and _often, but not always,_ their wives follow them.
    - gosub100 2y ago
      women are just as gullible.
- nataliste 2y ago
  >It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men. Uh-huh. Which of these predictions made in 2015/2016 came true by 2020 when Donald Trump left office? * Donald Trump will cause a stock market crash. * Donald Trump will start WWIII. * Donald Trump will kill or jail journalists, leftists, and members of the LGBTQ community. * Donald Trump will ban all Muslims from entering the country. * Donald Trump will never allow another election to occur as he will become dictator for life. * Donald Trump will create internment camps for immigrants. * Donald Trump will outlaw gay marriage. * Donald Trump will ban abortion nationwide and institute a Handmaid's Tale-type dystopia. The answer? None of them. I await the replies that these aren't the same thing and they all Really Happened or are Totally About to Happen: >"I'm going to admit I was wrong about the timeline on all 10 things," he assured me. >"See how you prefaced it?" I said. "You're just saying that you're wrong about the timeline." >"Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth." You can also see the mirror-image of Q-anon currently alive and fermenting at /r/somethingiswrong2024 on reddit. This isn't a male issue (or female) or a right wing (or left) issue or a social media (or mass media) issue. It's a perennial human issue. It preceded mass media. It succeeded mass media. It will succeed social media. One apocalypse or another has been at hand for more 2,500 years, always heralded by mouth-foaming prophets with dire predictions of imminent disaster. And their failure to materialize always blindly waved away by certain demographics of the earnest and gullible. And there's always a Qoholeth to every Jeremiah shouting as loudly "Nothing ever happens." Babylon didn't fall for centuries after its prediction of imminent destruction. Jesus didn't come back in that generation's lifetime. The Mashiach is absent. The Mahdi is missing. Capitalism is still around and the Proles still in chains. There has been no Malthusian Great Starvation. There are still snows on Kilimanjaro. Obama remains an American citizen. Trump remains an American rather than Russian liability. JFK Jr is still dead. Kamala Harris still lost. If there's one lesson to be perennially learned, it's that there's nothing perfectible about humans and their relation to culture. The delusional will always be with us and they'll always claim it's really the other side that is deluded, akshually.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    These things all seemed like possibilities, but not certainties. And some of them did at least partly come to be: there was an attempted Muslim travel ban, and abortion was banned in vast swaths of the US. The internment camps are definitely being talked about seriously. Further, the 2016 list wouldn't have possibly guessed "will badly mishandle a pandemic, turning the US into one of its worst victims", but that is indeed what happened. He didn't outlaw gay marriage, but he did ban trans people from the military. We did benefit from one important thing: his incompetence prevented him from accomplishing much of anything in his term. He has now had time to prepare -- or rather, the right-wing think tanks have had time to prepare. He's implementing their priorities as fast as he can.
generj 2y ago
This is a really sad story. Frankly I’m shocked the conspiracy theorist paid up. Him then immediately doubling down and finally killing his marriage isn’t a shock. I both admire and detest the son for sticking with his Dad, the other family members being done is probably a more healthy approach.
- leftcenterright 2y ago
  Wouldn't you say that the approach taken by the son is what we need as a society though? polarization and parallel-universes do not seem to be helping at all.
ARandomerDude 2y ago
Shame on the author for writing a nationally syndicated article belittling his own father, regardless of how much they disagree.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  This is playing out in a whole lot of families, and has been for some years. Collective recognition of this illness, an understanding that we’re not alone in struggling with it, reflections on how to cope with or reverse it or at least eke out a few decent moments with these once-normal people (even if it’s just things that didn’t work) are very much needed.
- generj 2y ago
  How is he belittling his father? The piece is incredibly emphatic to his father. If anything, the author’s fault is agreeing with his father too much, to the possible exclusion of the rest of his family. I doubt his sister and mother will let him hang out in the middle ground forever.
- ncr100 2y ago
  I disagree. It's a way to talk about fear which is not a little thing. We're all afraid. We're humans. It's a great skill, to be afraid, because it allows us to avoid so many dangers. There's no shame in being a human. :-) The point is the father is afraid to die. And he's coping with it by spending a lot of energy thinking about other things that he thinks he can control. He simply factually wrong in this case but the work effort, the strength that he's exerting is admirable. He's got his list, it's 10 things, he's organized $10,000, he says he's thought about this, "a million times". I think it's actually pretty useful and helpful as an article. A cautionary tale in some ways. Plus it seems factual. They are not saying that the father is little, or belittled. They're saying that the father's perspective is rigid. And that it causes external problems when changes happen around that father. Q: Am I overlooking something in the article? Did they actually say, "my father is worthless etc etc?" Eg When the daughter needs to talk about the part of her identity that she's been hiding for decades, the father doesn't want to hold that conversation, which proves to be an insurmountable amount of distress for the daughter as she needs support, so she has to separate. And This rigid rejection is because of the issues that are discussed in the article. In a way it's interesting to see how a functioning family can fall apart. In that way it's a cautionary tale: Don't expect the way that you relate to your father or your father relates to you will remain a stable constant throughout their lives. People change. Fear of death is pretty distracting and devastating for many.
ncr100 2y ago
That's really tragic. Mental health. Emotional intelligence is not something we're born with. Sounds to be like the guy, the father, knows he feels things but then quickly equates them to the intellectual IRL truth. That's where emotional intelligence can come in and say well no these are just feelings. Super tragic that the whole family had to push him away from themselves, because of the guys intolerable behaviors. Counseling can be pretty helpful, though the people going to it need to want to go, otherwise counseling is a no-go.
louwrentius 2y ago
That was a well-written piece, very moving.
boomboomsubban 2y ago
That cursive is perfectly legible. One bit of particular note is the father bet $1000 in cash for each prediction, while the son would owe him $1000 in "podcast services." I wonder if that part is covered in the podcast, it could be a father unwilling to take money from his son or a man trying to gain a platform to further spread his views.
zeroCalories 2y ago
Very sad, have some of these types in my own family. I agree with the assessment that this is a form of emotional coping. All of these conspiracy theories are strangely comforting, despite how apocalyptic they might seem. Not only can you externalize all blame, they are fun to think about, they have a very sticky epistemology, and a high degree of consistency that lets you feel superior to the non-believers. It's actually very hard to debate someone that's really into flat earth, since there is always some esoteric argument about physics, and the conspiracy always goes deeper. You find this type of thinking everywhere, but somehow we've gotten the most comically extreme versions as mainstream beliefs now.
- gosub100 2y ago
  Well said. I have an aunt that is into this. And I think your point about a superiority complex has merit. She uses it as a psychological instrument to disparage other people in her family who don't share her views. Every conversation it comes back to "I just hope I can reach him/her [with bogus views] before it's too late". What's interesting is her choice of bogus views. She's never gone flat earth, but she thinks radio waves cause all health issues. And satellites started wildfires, and the gov controls the weather, and drops chem trails. And the vaccine makes everyone sick. It's remarkable how anti-science it really is. She doesn't care about inverse-square law of radiation. If I did a blind test with 10 trials of a wifi transmitter on/off behind her back, she would fail the test and still not be deterred. She wants to believe the vax caused every single sickness people have, but doesn't acknowledge the source of sickness before the vax. Finally, I know the sources she follows have a massive amount of anti semitic tropes, yet she is Jewish. I know she's seeing people in these communities blame Jews, yet she ignores it and still consumes the conspiracy. Nothing would convince her that she is wrong.
  - devchix 2y ago
    Michael Lewis' (author of Moneyball, The Big Short) podcast Against the Rules had an episode about why we question experts, this was during the tail end of COVID. He asked, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, why is it we don't have people who argue that you could jump off bridges and tall buildings and lived, but so many people arguing that you don't need the vaccine. Perhaps because no one had jumped off tall structures and lived, but there are lots of stories about how someone who got the vaccine died anyway, or didn't get the vaccine, got COVID, and is still alive and thriving. There's also a lot of "Dad was a pack-a-day smoker and lived to be 95", "Every year that I got the flu shot, I got the flu, this year I said the hell with it and skipped the shot, no flu." Every time I hear that I desperately want to correct the person, but nobody wants to hear the "akshually ... there's no correlation" bit. I don't want to be "that guy". But the more these pithy sophism are said and heard, the more it becomes ingrained in the aggregate of common beliefs. There's not even a scientific nuance there, it's utterly wrong. To erase those beliefs one has to wipe away years of repeated exposure and reinforcement to this casual sort of ignorance. No one has the time to do that. In this story, the son also exposed the father to ChatGPT hoping it can overcome his father's beliefs with an overwhelming amount of facts, and it didn't work. Sometimes a hot stove must be touched. If I were the son, I would ask the father to double down for another $10K, or even $20K. I believe that somewhere deep inside the father, there is a ghost of an understanding where the line of reality exists. He's just so deep into his world that he can't see where he mixes up the hope that these things will happen, vs the belief that these things will happen. But if you ask him to put real stakes on the line, say, even $100K if he has it, he will not be so unwavering in his belief.
guardiangod 2y ago
Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level. At some point, you have to make a decision- do you continue to maintain a relationship with your father, or do you choose to sever your relationship like most people he knew. If you choose the former, then you will accept that he will never change, and some day he will even harm you, if he has to choose between you and his beliefs. It's not that your father is out to do bad things- an aggressive dog does not intentionally try to bite your legs off. It's just doing what it believes is best for itself. You will have to learn to accept it, hard as it might be. If you choose the latter, then realize that your father spent decades of his best life holding behind his beliefs to raise you, and that the least you can do is to make sure he doesn't die alone. From my armchair research, this kind of change stems from a deep-seated sense of paranoia/threat, that was seeded by childhood traumas. A schizophrenic sense that everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him. When the person was young and was trying to make a living, he can keep those thoughts away. But as he gets older and can see the end of his life, these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him. Having all the sudden free time post-retirement doesn't help either.
- kayo_20211030 2y ago
  Are you not being a little simplistic, and wholly presumptuous, here? This is a sad story and, from your armchair, you can explain it all? The man has beliefs; they might be slightly nutty, but he seems unlikely to bite your legs off. He's not a dog. What's your justification for believing that he has any sense that "everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him"? There's no evidence of that in the original post. What make you think that "these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him"? Again, not supported unless you turn your head and squint a little (lot). If you dropped all the paranoia/trauma/threat threads, maybe you could weave a whole cloth from something you do know.
  - mingus88 2y ago
    This is a story of a man becoming radicalized. He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children. I will drop an observation here that many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path. Friends and family knew something was up, but nothing could be done. My view is that there is a straight line from this guys story to a catastrophe where this guy harms himself and others. At a certain point he has lost everything that matters and will be consumed by this paranoia
yathaid 2y ago
Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality. I have theorized some root causes: - They cannot differentiate between well-meaning friends and high quality information i.e. there is a fallacy of "this person is honest, hence this forward they just sent me is true". - Starting from at least my generation (born in late 80s), there is an understanding of "echo chamber effects", personalizing newsfeeds for engagement etc. There is some inoculation against content meant to trigger/resonate with specific sub-groups. I have found this to be completely lacking in discussions with my parents/their generation. All these make it hard to move them out of the dis-information locus they fall into.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  > Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality. Perhaps you just haven't registered them doing so, but every day, people of all ages who feel clear and confident in their own convictions say the same thing about others of all ages: their peers and coworkers, their children, their elders, the youth. For most people, it's just the nature of conviction to believe that you believe what you believe for good reason and the people who disagree with you are misinformed, stubborn, or both. While you might be able to find surveys and polls that show some nominal bias about purported "wrong thinking" when segmented by this demographic or that one, the differences are always relatively marginal, with whatever "wrong think" worht investigating almost always slicing throughly through all segments in a substantial way. Susceptibility to "wrong think" is not meaningfully generational, and nobody's especially immune -- it seems to be just part of life that different people get convinced of different things and can sometimes be quite stuck to their convictions. It's tragic when entrenched disagreement divides families and communities, as in this story, but it's something we can identify throughout all of history and there's no particular evidence to suggest we're likely to escape it any time soon. It may not even be wise to aspire towards it, as deep and stubborn conviction almost certainly has great merit of its own.
  - vacuity 2y ago
    You're quite right. We all develop a bias about the world, and even as I say that I'm pretty good at "critical thinking", there's no telling whether I actually am. Anyone at any level of knowledge, experience, or culture can plausibly come to an implausible belief. It's easy to think ourselves correct and others, if they disagree, incorrect. Always keep that in mind. I am not the beginning. I am not the end. I have my views and my veracity will be perceived diversely by others with their own rich worldviews.
cranky908canuck 2y ago
"Multiple generators?" (later says two). Given the age and family history described, I wouldn't rule out dementia.
- toast0 2y ago
  Two generators could be pretty rational. I've got two generators, one an automatic standby generator that covers the house, and another portable generator for my well (because it's on a different meter). We just had a ~ 30 hour utility outage this week, and it's nice to be able to take a shower. There was a longer outage a few months ago. It doesn't seem unreasonable to have two generators if you have frequent outages, and the generators might need maintenance during an outage. Of course, most people buy generators, ignore the maintenance, don't have frequent outages, and then the generator won't start when they need it to. Having a second generator doesn't help with that, because it's likely if you don't maintain one, you don't maintain the other either, or you only ever run the primary and never the secondary, and it doesn't start when you need it to either. I've got to start and run my portable generator once a month; it doesn't like to start if you let it sit two months, and I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't get it to start without rebuilding the carburetor if it sat for three months. (My 1981 VW has fuel injection, not sure why small engines from 2020s don't have it :P) I'd love to replace my portable generator and a vehicle with a replacement vehicle that can power the well, but I'm waiting for the invisible hand of the market to figure out that I'd buy a hybrid/PHEV single cab truck with a 240v/30a output if it's available. All that said, age related mental decline affects a lot of people, even before it becomes clinical dementia. :(
  - cranky908canuck 2y ago
    Fair enough. I guess the original post doesn't give that amount of background. You're discussing the hard details about managing a farm of generators, the original article suggests something more like generator hoarding.
billy99k 2y ago
I'm hearing conspiracy theories all the time now from many of my liberal friends. I'm wondering how we finally stop all of it.
- leftcenterright 2y ago
  Any top ones you might like to share? I have not seen far-right-level of belief and sticking to false predictions even when proven wrong among people who might be called far-left.
  - AlexeyBelov 2y ago
    Read their other comments. You may not like the list of conspiracies, if they reply at all.
hnpolicestate 2y ago
[flagged]
mgdev 2y ago
"I may be early, but I'm not wrong."
- leftcenterright 2y ago
  Tthat's exactly what a good friend of mine said when predictions from 2021 - 2024 failed to materialize. I do care about him a lot but its getting harder over time because nothing seems to change the convictions.
standardly 2y ago
This resonates with me heavily, except it's my entire family. Much worse.
11thEarlOfMar 2y ago
Here's a thought process: Dad was trying to make sense of things that did not make sense to him. These things that did not make sense to him were seen by him as ultimately dangerous, even to his own family. That compelled him to seek to find the truth about whether they are real threats. Along that journey, he became convinced that they were in fact real. He sought out the long term implications and those implications became his 10 predictions. As a concrete example, he heard there was massive illegal immigration into the US. His first encounter with this information could have come from many places, Fox news, a Republican senator, RFK Jr.'s report from the border, or a story in the New York Post. He wondered, is it true or not that millions of people entered the US through the southern border, and, that this had been happening for many years? Was it also true that there was a fleet of 'NGOs' that were providing aid to these millions of people as they made there way to the US? Was it also true that these people were being further aided and extorted by cartel membership along the way? Was it also true that hundreds of thousands of children were 'missing'? Finally, was it true that the US was funding logistics to fly hundreds of thousands of Haitians into the US? There is information on both sides of these questions. Plenty of accounts on X have information that it's all happening, and worse. But those who would know with authority, like Secretary Mayorkas, President Biden and VP Harris conclusively stated it was not happening at all. Dad's sources from his investigation led him to believe there was a preponderance of truth. The son's that there was not, (presuming that he did an investigation). It's too bad that the different opinion became a wedge between them. I am confident that most disagreements among people are an outcome of their differing sources of information during their lifetime. It's self-evident, but if they endeavoured to agree on what was true and what was not true first before developing opinions about those truths, the schism can largely be averted.
stormfather 2y ago
Smugly dismissing all conspiracy theories is as stupid as believing them all. Epstein didn't kill himself. And he didn't work for himself either.
- leftcenterright 2y ago
  > Epstein didn't kill himself. You sound quite certain here, how come?
  - stormfather 2y ago
    An intelligence asset whose job was to blackmail the rich and powerful dies in his cell before he can testify when cameras stopped working and both guards fell asleep. Come on.
    - AlexeyBelov 2y ago
      The "cameras stopped working" thing is not true, but often repeated. People really don't want to do their homework and just repeat what they've already heard elsewhere.
      - stormfather 2y ago
        From the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205 A letter filed by Assistant US Attorneys Jason Swergold and Maurene Comey said "the footage contained on the preserved video was for the correct date and time, but captured a different tier than the one where Cell-1 was located", New York City media report. "The requested video no longer exists on the backup system and has not since at least August 2019 as a result of technical errors." And from NPR: After first reporting that the video had been preserved, prosecutors told the court that further investigation shows "the MCC inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC." As a result, the pertinent video "no longer exists," prosecutors wrote. Are you saying this is untrue? Or is this an "akshually it was a data entry error not a malfunction" type of thing?
jfengel 2y ago
Did he actually get the money? I couldn't find any reference to it one way or the other.
- usednet 2y ago
  > And for those of you wondering, yes, I took the money. Absolutely.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    Thanks. I managed to glaze over that.
usednet 2y ago
Its unconscionable to me that the author would take $10,000 from his own father who is clearly not only mentally vulnerable but not rich as the author states. The father is very much at fault for what happened here, but something is deeply wrong with American society normalizing the annihilation of what should be sacred familial bonds over political matters. As somebody who generally aligns with the left, the last 10 years of overzealous liberal woke-scolding has done nothing but further increase this alienation of others that results in a complete mental split between families. The son being an NPR correspondent and the mother moving out of their room on the day after Trump's election is highly indicative of this. To the author's credit, he is somewhat aware of this and mentions it in the article.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  What about the familial bonds the other way? No respect for the wife’s opinion on how to spend the family money? Telling the daughter her lifestyle is wrong/immoral. The daughter should suck it up?
waltercool 2y ago
Please don't post trashy articles from trashy media, government funded. I know there are weirdos everywhere, but not much related to "Hacker News"
binary132 2y ago
It is so strange to me that some people find this revolting and other people think it’s quite nice. I wonder if the audience roles would be reversed if the subject roles were reversed.
ckemere 2y ago
Something that I was quite surprised not to see in this story were questions about mental illness. There’s obviously a huge modern tendency to medicalise things, but the link to the grandfather made me wonder. What we call mental illnesses like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety are all obviously extremes on a continuum. (I’d love to see evidence to the contrary, but seizures or infarcts are probably one of the few binarized events related to the brain and even those have micro-versions.)
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
Often the need to be right is a sign of a hurt ego overcompensating.
ashoeafoot 2y ago
It helps to stop seeing it as a conspiracy but as a projected inebt negotiation of people ready to defect on civil society. Its not a THIS will happen , but a "if we do not renegotiate a not working social contract, to be more fair, something like THIS will be happening, brought on by my fellow defectors. We might not have cultural air superiority , but frankly what have we to loose. It cant be worse than THIS." And defect they did. In germany the youth basically mass seceeded from liberal democratic society during the last vote. If you refuse to negotiate and compromise in a society, you fight and society ends- with digit number signs to come.
anenefan 2y ago
Very sad to read (I think the grandfather isn't relevant to conspiracy theories though, it was IMO a different though similar problem of feeling alienated with a perspective certain people (institutions, authorities, local govt, health dept, etc) were not there to help him.) Much of this emerging problem of conspiracy and BS mania the last decade IMHO is psychological manipulation capitalising on a less well educated / informed population than it was in the 70s, and the older population now more often not being as sharp as they once were or not equipped to deal with the information overload that the near endless News in various forms can be. Roughly summing up, for the many people dealing with a family member who has gravitated to news items and other stories that have a very different narrative: more often it's the appeal of a seemingly simple answer all wrapped up as being some person or group's is to blame, any logic pointed their way is met with denial, cognitive dissonance or wishful thinking syndrome. (What I've experience with my own father it's most often in the form of they don't like ... anyhow, this validates it.) I refer to the psychological manipulation more often as zombie grooming and less sheep grooming which aims to slowly transform the more vulnerable into zombies / sheep that'll do their bidding even if it's the lowest level, it still counts to their greater aspirations and motivations which are 99% political or involving the big money end of town. People are quick to blame the net / web / online crapfest but I see the problems starting more in certain tv and radio media areas which can expand to other more reputable news if folks there haven't engaged their thinking caps. One would think the manipulation would be easily spotted and dealt with when a stitch saves nine, but much is designed to fly well under the radar, what most of us might disregard as some poorly informed news team, is actually something aimed just for their targeted audience they plan to groom. The problem is akin to saturating the air with alarm bells or sirens a person is familiar with, and that the faint voice nearby saying it's just some DH with their finger on a button doesn't seem at all important or relevant.

82 points by js2 2y ago

Very informative, but painful to read. Hopefully neither of the children inherited their father's mental issues.

I listened his This American life episode on Monday morning and had to compose myself before my stand up. It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men.

gosub100 2y ago
What do you mean men? It's not confined to one gender.
- ryandvm 2y ago
  Not to stir anything up, but my own observations have been that it is mostly men falling for the political conspiracy theories and _often, but not always,_ their wives follow them.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    women are just as gullible.
nataliste 2y ago
>It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men. Uh-huh. Which of these predictions made in 2015/2016 came true by 2020 when Donald Trump left office? * Donald Trump will cause a stock market crash. * Donald Trump will start WWIII. * Donald Trump will kill or jail journalists, leftists, and members of the LGBTQ community. * Donald Trump will ban all Muslims from entering the country. * Donald Trump will never allow another election to occur as he will become dictator for life. * Donald Trump will create internment camps for immigrants. * Donald Trump will outlaw gay marriage. * Donald Trump will ban abortion nationwide and institute a Handmaid's Tale-type dystopia. The answer? None of them. I await the replies that these aren't the same thing and they all Really Happened or are Totally About to Happen: >"I'm going to admit I was wrong about the timeline on all 10 things," he assured me. >"See how you prefaced it?" I said. "You're just saying that you're wrong about the timeline." >"Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth." You can also see the mirror-image of Q-anon currently alive and fermenting at /r/somethingiswrong2024 on reddit. This isn't a male issue (or female) or a right wing (or left) issue or a social media (or mass media) issue. It's a perennial human issue. It preceded mass media. It succeeded mass media. It will succeed social media. One apocalypse or another has been at hand for more 2,500 years, always heralded by mouth-foaming prophets with dire predictions of imminent disaster. And their failure to materialize always blindly waved away by certain demographics of the earnest and gullible. And there's always a Qoholeth to every Jeremiah shouting as loudly "Nothing ever happens." Babylon didn't fall for centuries after its prediction of imminent destruction. Jesus didn't come back in that generation's lifetime. The Mashiach is absent. The Mahdi is missing. Capitalism is still around and the Proles still in chains. There has been no Malthusian Great Starvation. There are still snows on Kilimanjaro. Obama remains an American citizen. Trump remains an American rather than Russian liability. JFK Jr is still dead. Kamala Harris still lost. If there's one lesson to be perennially learned, it's that there's nothing perfectible about humans and their relation to culture. The delusional will always be with us and they'll always claim it's really the other side that is deluded, akshually.
- jfengel 2y ago
  These things all seemed like possibilities, but not certainties. And some of them did at least partly come to be: there was an attempted Muslim travel ban, and abortion was banned in vast swaths of the US. The internment camps are definitely being talked about seriously. Further, the 2016 list wouldn't have possibly guessed "will badly mishandle a pandemic, turning the US into one of its worst victims", but that is indeed what happened. He didn't outlaw gay marriage, but he did ban trans people from the military. We did benefit from one important thing: his incompetence prevented him from accomplishing much of anything in his term. He has now had time to prepare -- or rather, the right-wing think tanks have had time to prepare. He's implementing their priorities as fast as he can.

generj 2y ago

This is a really sad story. Frankly I’m shocked the conspiracy theorist paid up. Him then immediately doubling down and finally killing his marriage isn’t a shock. I both admire and detest the son for sticking with his Dad, the other family members being done is probably a more healthy approach.

leftcenterright 2y ago
Wouldn't you say that the approach taken by the son is what we need as a society though? polarization and parallel-universes do not seem to be helping at all.

ARandomerDude 2y ago

Shame on the author for writing a nationally syndicated article belittling his own father, regardless of how much they disagree.

alabastervlog 2y ago
This is playing out in a whole lot of families, and has been for some years. Collective recognition of this illness, an understanding that we’re not alone in struggling with it, reflections on how to cope with or reverse it or at least eke out a few decent moments with these once-normal people (even if it’s just things that didn’t work) are very much needed.
generj 2y ago
How is he belittling his father? The piece is incredibly emphatic to his father. If anything, the author’s fault is agreeing with his father too much, to the possible exclusion of the rest of his family. I doubt his sister and mother will let him hang out in the middle ground forever.
ncr100 2y ago
I disagree. It's a way to talk about fear which is not a little thing. We're all afraid. We're humans. It's a great skill, to be afraid, because it allows us to avoid so many dangers. There's no shame in being a human. :-) The point is the father is afraid to die. And he's coping with it by spending a lot of energy thinking about other things that he thinks he can control. He simply factually wrong in this case but the work effort, the strength that he's exerting is admirable. He's got his list, it's 10 things, he's organized $10,000, he says he's thought about this, "a million times". I think it's actually pretty useful and helpful as an article. A cautionary tale in some ways. Plus it seems factual. They are not saying that the father is little, or belittled. They're saying that the father's perspective is rigid. And that it causes external problems when changes happen around that father. Q: Am I overlooking something in the article? Did they actually say, "my father is worthless etc etc?" Eg When the daughter needs to talk about the part of her identity that she's been hiding for decades, the father doesn't want to hold that conversation, which proves to be an insurmountable amount of distress for the daughter as she needs support, so she has to separate. And This rigid rejection is because of the issues that are discussed in the article. In a way it's interesting to see how a functioning family can fall apart. In that way it's a cautionary tale: Don't expect the way that you relate to your father or your father relates to you will remain a stable constant throughout their lives. People change. Fear of death is pretty distracting and devastating for many.

ncr100 2y ago

That's really tragic. Mental health. Emotional intelligence is not something we're born with. Sounds to be like the guy, the father, knows he feels things but then quickly equates them to the intellectual IRL truth. That's where emotional intelligence can come in and say well no these are just feelings. Super tragic that the whole family had to push him away from themselves, because of the guys intolerable behaviors. Counseling can be pretty helpful, though the people going to it need to want to go, otherwise counseling is a no-go.

louwrentius 2y ago

That was a well-written piece, very moving.

boomboomsubban 2y ago

That cursive is perfectly legible. One bit of particular note is the father bet $1000 in cash for each prediction, while the son would owe him $1000 in "podcast services." I wonder if that part is covered in the podcast, it could be a father unwilling to take money from his son or a man trying to gain a platform to further spread his views.

zeroCalories 2y ago

Very sad, have some of these types in my own family. I agree with the assessment that this is a form of emotional coping. All of these conspiracy theories are strangely comforting, despite how apocalyptic they might seem. Not only can you externalize all blame, they are fun to think about, they have a very sticky epistemology, and a high degree of consistency that lets you feel superior to the non-believers. It's actually very hard to debate someone that's really into flat earth, since there is always some esoteric argument about physics, and the conspiracy always goes deeper. You find this type of thinking everywhere, but somehow we've gotten the most comically extreme versions as mainstream beliefs now.

gosub100 2y ago
Well said. I have an aunt that is into this. And I think your point about a superiority complex has merit. She uses it as a psychological instrument to disparage other people in her family who don't share her views. Every conversation it comes back to "I just hope I can reach him/her [with bogus views] before it's too late". What's interesting is her choice of bogus views. She's never gone flat earth, but she thinks radio waves cause all health issues. And satellites started wildfires, and the gov controls the weather, and drops chem trails. And the vaccine makes everyone sick. It's remarkable how anti-science it really is. She doesn't care about inverse-square law of radiation. If I did a blind test with 10 trials of a wifi transmitter on/off behind her back, she would fail the test and still not be deterred. She wants to believe the vax caused every single sickness people have, but doesn't acknowledge the source of sickness before the vax. Finally, I know the sources she follows have a massive amount of anti semitic tropes, yet she is Jewish. I know she's seeing people in these communities blame Jews, yet she ignores it and still consumes the conspiracy. Nothing would convince her that she is wrong.
- devchix 2y ago
  Michael Lewis' (author of Moneyball, The Big Short) podcast Against the Rules had an episode about why we question experts, this was during the tail end of COVID. He asked, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, why is it we don't have people who argue that you could jump off bridges and tall buildings and lived, but so many people arguing that you don't need the vaccine. Perhaps because no one had jumped off tall structures and lived, but there are lots of stories about how someone who got the vaccine died anyway, or didn't get the vaccine, got COVID, and is still alive and thriving. There's also a lot of "Dad was a pack-a-day smoker and lived to be 95", "Every year that I got the flu shot, I got the flu, this year I said the hell with it and skipped the shot, no flu." Every time I hear that I desperately want to correct the person, but nobody wants to hear the "akshually ... there's no correlation" bit. I don't want to be "that guy". But the more these pithy sophism are said and heard, the more it becomes ingrained in the aggregate of common beliefs. There's not even a scientific nuance there, it's utterly wrong. To erase those beliefs one has to wipe away years of repeated exposure and reinforcement to this casual sort of ignorance. No one has the time to do that. In this story, the son also exposed the father to ChatGPT hoping it can overcome his father's beliefs with an overwhelming amount of facts, and it didn't work. Sometimes a hot stove must be touched. If I were the son, I would ask the father to double down for another $10K, or even $20K. I believe that somewhere deep inside the father, there is a ghost of an understanding where the line of reality exists. He's just so deep into his world that he can't see where he mixes up the hope that these things will happen, vs the belief that these things will happen. But if you ask him to put real stakes on the line, say, even $100K if he has it, he will not be so unwavering in his belief.

guardiangod 2y ago

Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level. At some point, you have to make a decision- do you continue to maintain a relationship with your father, or do you choose to sever your relationship like most people he knew. If you choose the former, then you will accept that he will never change, and some day he will even harm you, if he has to choose between you and his beliefs. It's not that your father is out to do bad things- an aggressive dog does not intentionally try to bite your legs off. It's just doing what it believes is best for itself. You will have to learn to accept it, hard as it might be. If you choose the latter, then realize that your father spent decades of his best life holding behind his beliefs to raise you, and that the least you can do is to make sure he doesn't die alone. From my armchair research, this kind of change stems from a deep-seated sense of paranoia/threat, that was seeded by childhood traumas. A schizophrenic sense that everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him. When the person was young and was trying to make a living, he can keep those thoughts away. But as he gets older and can see the end of his life, these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him. Having all the sudden free time post-retirement doesn't help either.

kayo_20211030 2y ago
Are you not being a little simplistic, and wholly presumptuous, here? This is a sad story and, from your armchair, you can explain it all? The man has beliefs; they might be slightly nutty, but he seems unlikely to bite your legs off. He's not a dog. What's your justification for believing that he has any sense that "everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him"? There's no evidence of that in the original post. What make you think that "these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him"? Again, not supported unless you turn your head and squint a little (lot). If you dropped all the paranoia/trauma/threat threads, maybe you could weave a whole cloth from something you do know.
- mingus88 2y ago
  This is a story of a man becoming radicalized. He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children. I will drop an observation here that many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path. Friends and family knew something was up, but nothing could be done. My view is that there is a straight line from this guys story to a catastrophe where this guy harms himself and others. At a certain point he has lost everything that matters and will be consumed by this paranoia

yathaid 2y ago

Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality. I have theorized some root causes: - They cannot differentiate between well-meaning friends and high quality information i.e. there is a fallacy of "this person is honest, hence this forward they just sent me is true". - Starting from at least my generation (born in late 80s), there is an understanding of "echo chamber effects", personalizing newsfeeds for engagement etc. There is some inoculation against content meant to trigger/resonate with specific sub-groups. I have found this to be completely lacking in discussions with my parents/their generation. All these make it hard to move them out of the dis-information locus they fall into.

swatcoder 2y ago
> Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality. Perhaps you just haven't registered them doing so, but every day, people of all ages who feel clear and confident in their own convictions say the same thing about others of all ages: their peers and coworkers, their children, their elders, the youth. For most people, it's just the nature of conviction to believe that you believe what you believe for good reason and the people who disagree with you are misinformed, stubborn, or both. While you might be able to find surveys and polls that show some nominal bias about purported "wrong thinking" when segmented by this demographic or that one, the differences are always relatively marginal, with whatever "wrong think" worht investigating almost always slicing throughly through all segments in a substantial way. Susceptibility to "wrong think" is not meaningfully generational, and nobody's especially immune -- it seems to be just part of life that different people get convinced of different things and can sometimes be quite stuck to their convictions. It's tragic when entrenched disagreement divides families and communities, as in this story, but it's something we can identify throughout all of history and there's no particular evidence to suggest we're likely to escape it any time soon. It may not even be wise to aspire towards it, as deep and stubborn conviction almost certainly has great merit of its own.
- vacuity 2y ago
  You're quite right. We all develop a bias about the world, and even as I say that I'm pretty good at "critical thinking", there's no telling whether I actually am. Anyone at any level of knowledge, experience, or culture can plausibly come to an implausible belief. It's easy to think ourselves correct and others, if they disagree, incorrect. Always keep that in mind. I am not the beginning. I am not the end. I have my views and my veracity will be perceived diversely by others with their own rich worldviews.

cranky908canuck 2y ago

"Multiple generators?" (later says two). Given the age and family history described, I wouldn't rule out dementia.

toast0 2y ago
Two generators could be pretty rational. I've got two generators, one an automatic standby generator that covers the house, and another portable generator for my well (because it's on a different meter). We just had a ~ 30 hour utility outage this week, and it's nice to be able to take a shower. There was a longer outage a few months ago. It doesn't seem unreasonable to have two generators if you have frequent outages, and the generators might need maintenance during an outage. Of course, most people buy generators, ignore the maintenance, don't have frequent outages, and then the generator won't start when they need it to. Having a second generator doesn't help with that, because it's likely if you don't maintain one, you don't maintain the other either, or you only ever run the primary and never the secondary, and it doesn't start when you need it to either. I've got to start and run my portable generator once a month; it doesn't like to start if you let it sit two months, and I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't get it to start without rebuilding the carburetor if it sat for three months. (My 1981 VW has fuel injection, not sure why small engines from 2020s don't have it :P) I'd love to replace my portable generator and a vehicle with a replacement vehicle that can power the well, but I'm waiting for the invisible hand of the market to figure out that I'd buy a hybrid/PHEV single cab truck with a 240v/30a output if it's available. All that said, age related mental decline affects a lot of people, even before it becomes clinical dementia. :(
- cranky908canuck 2y ago
  Fair enough. I guess the original post doesn't give that amount of background. You're discussing the hard details about managing a farm of generators, the original article suggests something more like generator hoarding.

billy99k 2y ago

I'm hearing conspiracy theories all the time now from many of my liberal friends. I'm wondering how we finally stop all of it.

leftcenterright 2y ago
Any top ones you might like to share? I have not seen far-right-level of belief and sticking to false predictions even when proven wrong among people who might be called far-left.
- AlexeyBelov 2y ago
  Read their other comments. You may not like the list of conspiracies, if they reply at all.

hnpolicestate 2y ago

[flagged]

mgdev 2y ago

"I may be early, but I'm not wrong."

leftcenterright 2y ago
Tthat's exactly what a good friend of mine said when predictions from 2021 - 2024 failed to materialize. I do care about him a lot but its getting harder over time because nothing seems to change the convictions.

standardly 2y ago

This resonates with me heavily, except it's my entire family. Much worse.

11thEarlOfMar 2y ago

Here's a thought process: Dad was trying to make sense of things that did not make sense to him. These things that did not make sense to him were seen by him as ultimately dangerous, even to his own family. That compelled him to seek to find the truth about whether they are real threats. Along that journey, he became convinced that they were in fact real. He sought out the long term implications and those implications became his 10 predictions. As a concrete example, he heard there was massive illegal immigration into the US. His first encounter with this information could have come from many places, Fox news, a Republican senator, RFK Jr.'s report from the border, or a story in the New York Post. He wondered, is it true or not that millions of people entered the US through the southern border, and, that this had been happening for many years? Was it also true that there was a fleet of 'NGOs' that were providing aid to these millions of people as they made there way to the US? Was it also true that these people were being further aided and extorted by cartel membership along the way? Was it also true that hundreds of thousands of children were 'missing'? Finally, was it true that the US was funding logistics to fly hundreds of thousands of Haitians into the US? There is information on both sides of these questions. Plenty of accounts on X have information that it's all happening, and worse. But those who would know with authority, like Secretary Mayorkas, President Biden and VP Harris conclusively stated it was not happening at all. Dad's sources from his investigation led him to believe there was a preponderance of truth. The son's that there was not, (presuming that he did an investigation). It's too bad that the different opinion became a wedge between them. I am confident that most disagreements among people are an outcome of their differing sources of information during their lifetime. It's self-evident, but if they endeavoured to agree on what was true and what was not true first before developing opinions about those truths, the schism can largely be averted.

stormfather 2y ago

Smugly dismissing all conspiracy theories is as stupid as believing them all. Epstein didn't kill himself. And he didn't work for himself either.

leftcenterright 2y ago
> Epstein didn't kill himself. You sound quite certain here, how come?
- stormfather 2y ago
  An intelligence asset whose job was to blackmail the rich and powerful dies in his cell before he can testify when cameras stopped working and both guards fell asleep. Come on.
  - AlexeyBelov 2y ago
    The "cameras stopped working" thing is not true, but often repeated. People really don't want to do their homework and just repeat what they've already heard elsewhere.
    - stormfather 2y ago
      From the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205 A letter filed by Assistant US Attorneys Jason Swergold and Maurene Comey said "the footage contained on the preserved video was for the correct date and time, but captured a different tier than the one where Cell-1 was located", New York City media report. "The requested video no longer exists on the backup system and has not since at least August 2019 as a result of technical errors." And from NPR: After first reporting that the video had been preserved, prosecutors told the court that further investigation shows "the MCC inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC." As a result, the pertinent video "no longer exists," prosecutors wrote. Are you saying this is untrue? Or is this an "akshually it was a data entry error not a malfunction" type of thing?

jfengel 2y ago

Did he actually get the money? I couldn't find any reference to it one way or the other.

usednet 2y ago
> And for those of you wondering, yes, I took the money. Absolutely.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Thanks. I managed to glaze over that.

usednet 2y ago

Its unconscionable to me that the author would take $10,000 from his own father who is clearly not only mentally vulnerable but not rich as the author states. The father is very much at fault for what happened here, but something is deeply wrong with American society normalizing the annihilation of what should be sacred familial bonds over political matters. As somebody who generally aligns with the left, the last 10 years of overzealous liberal woke-scolding has done nothing but further increase this alienation of others that results in a complete mental split between families. The son being an NPR correspondent and the mother moving out of their room on the day after Trump's election is highly indicative of this. To the author's credit, he is somewhat aware of this and mentions it in the article.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
What about the familial bonds the other way? No respect for the wife’s opinion on how to spend the family money? Telling the daughter her lifestyle is wrong/immoral. The daughter should suck it up?

waltercool 2y ago

Please don't post trashy articles from trashy media, government funded. I know there are weirdos everywhere, but not much related to "Hacker News"

binary132 2y ago

It is so strange to me that some people find this revolting and other people think it’s quite nice. I wonder if the audience roles would be reversed if the subject roles were reversed.

ckemere 2y ago

Something that I was quite surprised not to see in this story were questions about mental illness. There’s obviously a huge modern tendency to medicalise things, but the link to the grandfather made me wonder. What we call mental illnesses like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety are all obviously extremes on a continuum. (I’d love to see evidence to the contrary, but seizures or infarcts are probably one of the few binarized events related to the brain and even those have micro-versions.)

deepfriedchokes 2y ago

Often the need to be right is a sign of a hurt ego overcompensating.

ashoeafoot 2y ago

It helps to stop seeing it as a conspiracy but as a projected inebt negotiation of people ready to defect on civil society. Its not a THIS will happen , but a "if we do not renegotiate a not working social contract, to be more fair, something like THIS will be happening, brought on by my fellow defectors. We might not have cultural air superiority , but frankly what have we to loose. It cant be worse than THIS." And defect they did. In germany the youth basically mass seceeded from liberal democratic society during the last vote. If you refuse to negotiate and compromise in a society, you fight and society ends- with digit number signs to come.

anenefan 2y ago

Very sad to read (I think the grandfather isn't relevant to conspiracy theories though, it was IMO a different though similar problem of feeling alienated with a perspective certain people (institutions, authorities, local govt, health dept, etc) were not there to help him.) Much of this emerging problem of conspiracy and BS mania the last decade IMHO is psychological manipulation capitalising on a less well educated / informed population than it was in the 70s, and the older population now more often not being as sharp as they once were or not equipped to deal with the information overload that the near endless News in various forms can be. Roughly summing up, for the many people dealing with a family member who has gravitated to news items and other stories that have a very different narrative: more often it's the appeal of a seemingly simple answer all wrapped up as being some person or group's is to blame, any logic pointed their way is met with denial, cognitive dissonance or wishful thinking syndrome. (What I've experience with my own father it's most often in the form of they don't like ... anyhow, this validates it.) I refer to the psychological manipulation more often as zombie grooming and less sheep grooming which aims to slowly transform the more vulnerable into zombies / sheep that'll do their bidding even if it's the lowest level, it still counts to their greater aspirations and motivations which are 99% political or involving the big money end of town. People are quick to blame the net / web / online crapfest but I see the problems starting more in certain tv and radio media areas which can expand to other more reputable news if folks there haven't engaged their thinking caps. One would think the manipulation would be easily spotted and dealt with when a stitch saves nine, but much is designed to fly well under the radar, what most of us might disregard as some poorly informed news team, is actually something aimed just for their targeted audience they plan to groom. The problem is akin to saturating the air with alarm bells or sirens a person is familiar with, and that the faint voice nearby saying it's just some DH with their finger on a button doesn't seem at all important or relevant.