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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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This 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!!!"

If you don't think Alex Jones' gay frog song is funny, well then I just dont know what funny is.

Of 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.

I'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.

/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.

It alway felt to me like an enormous, manually-computed Markov chain.

As 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. ;-)

In no way is TD and politics the same. TD is a cess pit of stupidity.

Same 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.

I 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.

4chan hasn't really changed much, /pol/ (where most of the right-wing memery and conspiracy posts are) was always awful; it was created years ago to keep those kinds of posts away from other boards.

I was on the site a little over ten years ago too, and see the same affinities, in retrospect.

I love the Kurt Vonnegut quote "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." I think people who decide to like a thing "ironically" generally progress to liking it unironically without realizing it. Some continue to claim it's ironic, but when all their actions (including voting) are fully consistent with someone that likes the thing unironically, you have to wonder if the word "ironic" still has any meaning.

> "...you have to wonder if the word 'ironic' still has any meaning."

This is perhaps the most ironic thing.

Pretty sure most news agencies consider anything remotely conservative fake news now. I rarely ever see corrections or retractions from ANY of the big outlets. It's largely become infotainment, and everyone drinks from the fire hose of their own perspective. It's no wonder there is so little tolerance of any other perspective.

This will likely lead to another push for controlling the internet/media a la net neutrality, because we all know people can't be left to do their own research, use any amount of discernment, or have an alternative viewpoint.

Bring forth the gulags, the people need jobs...

This makes no sense, but is a common talking point. How is net neutrality "another push for controlling the internet/media"? If anything, it's the pure opposite, ensuring that all views can be accessed equally.

The old "net neutrality" did nothing directly for end users. It did not ensure anything for all views. Before it was even terminated, mass censorship (privately by the internet giants) had already started.

Instead, it benefited the likes of Netflix at the expense of the telecom industry. It also put the internet in a legal classification that would allow more government control of speech, though this had not yet been much of an issue in practice.

None of the above seems to have made much of a difference to end users.

It would be great to have a new sort of net neutrality, focused on end users. A nice thing about the end of the old one is that a new one could replace it, giving people what they mistakenly thought they had.

This is true. The same thing happened with the r/pcmasterrace subreddit-parody subs that were taken over by people not getting the joke.

I'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?

I'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.

Check out Stephen Colbert's "Brain Fight with Tuck Buckford" - not sure who's more ridiculous him or Alex Jones. Stephen is funnier though...

I 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+c...

I 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.

He 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.

This is so relatable. Virtually all "news" is entertainment these days. And entertainment is, at its core, a matter of subjective preference.

Well, maybe in the US. Come to Germany and I'll show you the snorefest of the news media here.

Boring 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.

I'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).

Quite 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.

That 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!

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