My Dad was a highly intelligent guy. Business and history teacher, business owner and then finally President of a small town banking system the last 20 years of his working career. Still very vulnerable in his old age. Fell for a couple of internet scams. He forwarded me some conspiracy type shit and thankfully when I responded back he believed me and would sometimes forward things to me to ask if things were true or not.
He was alway an R and voted for trump in 16 (all that Clinton hate) but he clearly regretted it by 20. But some of his buddies at the town coffee tableā¦
My Mom passed in 15. She was a Trump hater from forever. She could smell a rat from 10 miles away.
This is the tried and true method for getting people out of cults. By far the number one reason people leave cults is because the cultās promises to them go unfulfilled. The best thing family members can do for cult members is keep emphasizing that the better world the cult promises is not materializing.
this was my earliest view on it but has since changed drastically - even if you could somehow mount a convincing campaign that had any chance of success, the potency of social media and idiots like zuck and musk gleefully turning up their signal by a factor of a bazillion, youāll never punch through their bubble and thereās too many of them. You also reinforce their persecution complex.
Unfortunately I came to the conclusion that they need to be confronted on the basis of their own ideas and see for themselves how ludicrous they are - pointless for a large % of them but I do believe a lot of people have some line where they go āwhoa, this is too muchā but it requires some self reflection they seem pathologically incapable of - my efforts and challenge now, at least with loved ones, is to get otherwise seemingly intelligent and empathetic people to see how absolutely batshit stupid the things they believe are. Iām making small gains, but it requires empathy for people that quite honestly deserve none.
Believe it or not there are some baseline things that I think deep down most democrats/republicans could agree on - like, at least in theory, cops shouldnt just choke people to death because they feel like it, or that we should have functioning infrastructure. thatād be a big win if we could agree on such simple things. wedge issues like gun control and abortion are much more firmly entrenched, but there are very basic things everyone can agree on that for whatever reason right now we donāt, because the republican default position is to take the opposite whatever the sane one is.
I like how these mythical traffickers see a target and just leave the equivalent of a post it note to remind them. Instead of using their phone to take notes or ,you know ,trafficking right then.
Iāve fought some battles both as administrator of this site and on other projects to get registration emails past spam filters, gmail is/was so fucking god damn annoying with it, and is the only email provider Iām aware of that will āblackholeā emails - meaning that it wont even send it to spam, the message just never gets there because gmail decided it shouldnāt. itās a really shit email provider, in my opinion
great book - I grew up in an āend timesā church from a very early age by an early megachurch founder that made several predictions like this before i was even born and throughout the course of my life, becoming more involved in the church led me to believe he was completely FOS, but it always fascinated me how people can buy into it again, like a weird application of sunken cost fallacy
