Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

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>Does anyone actually know a real "5g causes corona" person? I've seen them at marches, that's about it.

Social bubbles, man. Go to any place where "new age" people hang out. You'll find them by the dozen. They also - collectively - believe in a veritable smorgasborg of quasi-religious beliefs a la crystal healing. It's important to understand that "belief" doesn't mean the same thing for them as it does for you and I, for their in-group is determined by a staunch refusal to police any notion of objective truth. Maybe they don't all believe 5g causes covid, maybe only 5% of them do, but if someone pipes up with that at a gathering not a single person will challenge them. Instead what will happen is that someone will chime in with their own different, related conspiracy theory / piece of nonsense. Everyone gets to pick and choose which myths resonate best with themselves, and yet collectively they reinforce each other.

There are literally millions of these people. In my opinion they're also one charismatic leader away from being a fascist voting bloc.

I like your analysis, and it sounds reasonable and true to me. But in it, there are the seeds of an approach to better Turkey Day dinners.

Their reluctance to criticize sounds like a recipe for getting along at large seasonal family gatherings, Thanksgiving, etc. So many dinners are wrecked these days because, "Hey, I just gotta correct Uncle Billy's naive political beliefs." Maybe it's better to let Uncle Billy remember that he loves his seldom seen nephew than to engage him in what may morph into an irritating, demeaning argument in front of the whole clan. People are more influenced by those they love or like, than by those who mercilessly point out the weaknesses of their belief in front of others.

And how many people let grandma or grandpa say the absolute nastiest things in the name of "harmony".

I can assure you, the person being attacked doesn't think its very harmonious. And having even one person stand up and say "That's unacceptable" can help the mental state of that victim tremendously.

I will let most things pass until some gets targeted. Then I'm not so quiet anymore.

In addition, silence gives consent. If nobody challenges a belief, then it "becomes apparent" that everybody agrees. That may not be true, but unless a single person steps up, everybody else may stay quiet.

You only need a few vocal, motivated people willing to cow everybody into submission if nobody ever voices opposition.

Yep. Agreed. There comes a point at which silence is no longer an option. Navigating family gatherings has probably always been treacherous. Hard to know when to remain silent, and commiserate later with the obvious target of undeserved criticism, and when it's egregious enough to say, "No more!"

And I'm guessing they don't have much interest in learning statistics? I think statistical thinking is one of the best tools we have for sorting all this out on an individual level.

I wish universities would use statistics as the "weed them out" class instead of calculus. As one example, make the nursing students take statistics instead of calculus; I'm not sure they need either, but statistics will be more useful in their lives and career.

I think most BSN programs don't require calculus. They usually require some math, but it doesn't necessarily have to be calculus.

I remember a few nursing students being in my calculus 1 class, but this was several years ago.

fascist? Many of these types are hard core leftist hippie types, just as if not more liable to vote for deep green or progressive candidates. Please, not every stupidity need be attributed to the right. That's just absurd bias.

Nowhere did parent categorise these people as 'right'. Merely observed that this group is not far away (and IMHO in process of) being coopted, by largely fascist types (at least overhere in Europe).

That's the thing. The political "spectrum" isn't really real. Extremism comes in lots of fun flavors.

What the new-age hippie leftist types and the far-right evangelicals have in common, apart from a fairly casual relationship with objective truth and a deep distrust of the state, is that they favor a simplistic, absolutist Lord-of-the-rings-esque good-vs-evil style framing of the world. Fascism and vaguely occult symbolism have a long history of symbiosis. This renders New Age types with their laissez-faire attitude to new memes easy prey for propaganda merchants.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/22/leftwi...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-55957298

https://www.mironline.ca/beyond-the-qanon-shaman-the-disturb...

https://www.kunskapskonsult.com/eng/_fascism.html

https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far...

From personal experience, I've witnessed "leftist hippie types" become fascist assholes spouting batshit insane anti-semitic bullshit after watching a few youtube videos. If you care for the person, you have to treat them with respect and de-escalate through rational conversation. This takes time and considerable effort. What makes it so mind-numbing is that you know the person you're talking to is otherwise somewhat intelligent (they've lasted this long) and capable of thinking it through. I don't care what you're political views are, this bullshit is indiscriminate. As Rob Corddry once said, "The facts have a well-known liberal bias."

Many on the progressive or even classic left are indeed strongly anti Semitic due to their support for Palestine and the Arabs against Israel. Much of this is based in very valid arguments against Isreali government policies, but it can easily veer into the downright visceral against jews in that region. It's not just a fascist idea.

Being critical of the governance of Israel doesn't make you anti-semitic.

Fully agreed, which is why I specifically mentioned that there are valid criticisms and people who use those as a springboard for actual anti-semitism.

I only mentioned what I've witnessed. To say "Many on the progressive or even classic left" is hyperbole. Consider using a specific example instead of hearsay. You don't want people thinking you're a disingenuous shill, do you?

Historically, fascist movements have drawn strongly from the occultist/magic/science-skeptic communities.

Sure they have, no doubt, especially the Nazis, but aside from these extremes, most conservative movements (without necessarily being fascist, because it's a fairly specific ideology) tend no more towards weird and completely irrational conspiracy beliefs than do many new age hippie types with strong left-leaning tendencies. Did the whole bunch of you completely miss finding out about the late 60s to early 70s? It was full of cult movements, insane conspiracy beliefs and rigidly unreal dogmas that had a strong leftist or even marxist flavor. Having ideologically tendency shouldn't leave one blind to entire historical tendencies.

So, we agree: so-called "lefty" new age types are prone to whacko conspiracy theories and are dangerously politically unstable, in the same way as the "alt right" that gets so much more attention. That was literally the point I was making.

It's a little worrying that you got so defensive because I used the word "fascism".

In that case apologies, I misunderstood you to be claiming that this sort of emotional instability was uniquely the domain of people who fall into fascism.

"fascist" means "people I think are organized bullies"

That's an interesting viewpoint. Something I've been perplexed by is when I go to /r/conspiracy to see what the "other side" is saying, I see groups of commenters seeming to believe they agree with each other but they're expressing beliefs that are mutually exclusive.

For example that vaccines are subversive for an entirely different purposes. Microchips, financial greed, mass genocide, virus distribution, etc.

Irrational people aren't bothered by contradictions.

Well, yeah, those people sound mental to me.

I suppose I'm building a tautology in a sense.

I think the word "mental" is doing too much work. It's productive to distinguish between "a minority suffering from a medicalized cognitive dysfunction like schizophrenia who can be safely ignored in the public discourse" and "a substantial and quasi-organized fraction of the population which behaves in a dangerously unreasonable manner".

In other words, are religious fanatics "mental"? Is this a useful categorization, when they're everywhere?

I agree. I've been lazy with my use of language, I'm categorising both insane and unreasonable people together, I suppose because I see them as existing on the same spectrum (i.e. when people act in extremely unreasonable ways, we medicalise it, whereas when they're just a bit unreasonable, we consider it to be normal variance).

The effect seems to be the same though, that you shouldn't use their opinions to inform policy because they're not using causal reasoning. Basically, to listen to them would be populist. It might be a vote winner in the short term but it's a bad thing in the medium to long term.

Or, on a more individual level - I don't hang out with these people because well, it's pointless. We can't get on, we can't learn anything from each other, they're broken humans.

>> one charismatic leader away from being a fascist voting bloc.

Umm...

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