Maybe it’s just me, but I expect every aging white man to eventually become some species of crank (myself included). At some depth I understand it. On the other hand, I am shocked (perhaps naively) at the women who are so eagerly lapping up the tripe from Fox news. What does a 60-year-old woman have to gain from jumping on the Benghazi conspiracy bandwagon?
Victimhood? Everyone wants to be the one oppressed… Gay marriage is not about civil rights, its about suppressing religious freedom, see… Affirmative action isn’t about leveling the playing field, its about keeping whitey down.
I have a former colleague on Facebook who is an very religious, conservative white man. The reek of victimhood that comes off his posts are staggering. He is wallowing in the oppression! :rolleyes:
In addition to all the mental changes that have been mentioned, the one that troubles me most is that they become immune not just to facts, to be very simple logic itself. No need to Google something. You can point out the very error in the argument using logic alone. This doesn’t change their mind at all.
And no matter how clearly and totally you’ve refuted their argument, they will just continue to repeat it over and over.
When someone’s mind locks up like that, and is basically under the control of other people, it’s scary.
I could’ve written this myself. I’ve tactfully steered her towards Snopes several times. Once I wrote, “If you’re emailed anything by a friend that sounds too good to be true, or is so outrageous that you just can’t believe it’s true, check it out on Snopes before you send it any further.” Would that she did.
‘It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.’ - attr. to Mark Twain
“Well, I gotta take off now Dad, I’ll be seeing you later. Hope you know I love you, even if I don’t share your politics sometimes, or ever. And I really want to thank you for keeping this guy (a titch intolerant, a might angry and bitter and even sometimes bordering on the hateful) hidden inside when I was a child. I’m very grateful to you for finding your way to providing me with a Dad I could see as heroic, through a child’s eye. It was an awesome thing for you to do, truly! Bye!”
(Rush and Glen ARE the Koolaid, I think.)
Another silly and, given the comments in this thread, patently ridiculous retort.
FYI: I don’t call people names and I’m not impressed by your chest pounding.
I too have seen this happen with my grandfather. For the past 10 years, he has done nothing but sleep and sit in his recliner watching Fox News. Increasingly, he spouts off there hateful, bigoted opinions to everyone in the family. It’s reached the point where none of us really want to talk to him and when he does get going we just nod and don’t engage him. It’s such a loss. The man is 98. He’s a WWII and Korean War vet. He worked for NASA during the space race. But he won’t talk to any of us about that. Instead he wants to rant about how Obama is ruining the country by providing healthcare to welfare queens.
In contrast, my 94 year old grandmother (other side of the family) sat in her recliner and watched nothing but CNN and MSNBC. She couldn’t wait for us to come visit so she could ask us our opinions on the latest political developments. She was just as involved, but instead of being hateful and scared, she was thoughtful and excited.
As others have said, it’s not about the political stance, it’s about the hate and fear that Fox News uses to keep it’s audience coming back. Yes, I know that these are just anecdotes, but in my family, Fox News is correlated with general intolerance.
How do others deal with this? Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes I get sucked into ‘debate’ but I ignorantly treat it like a debate here. On boards like this, people examine the facts (more or less) and discuss their views. With right wing family members the logic and evidence is invented/ignored to support a narrative revolving around the persecution of heterosexual white christians, Obama being a communist, etc. Pointing out hypocrisy, flawed evidence, logical consistencies is like telling someone with depression to ‘be happy’. My understanding of authoritarian psychology is there is a strong need for cognitive closure and a desire to avoid gray areas. So maybe that is part of why they think like this.
So what do other people do? Does changing the subject always work? I try that, but sometimes they just change it back. Sometimes it really strains my relationship with my parents.
My dad is one of these hate-spewing fox news heads. I live in another state, so I don’t see him often, and we both hate talking on the phone. That means we really only talk a few times a year, at best. This helps.
When he starts up, I generally find something to do in another room. There is no point in attempting to reason, for I am merely one of the ignorant sheep woefully blind to the ruin Obama is leading this country into. Nothing I say is valid.
What I find really difficult is the conspiracy theories. We’ll be talking about a safe topic and all of the sudden he’ll throw some random bit of lunacy out that I’ve never heard of. And he’s all “What about that!?” And I’m like “Huh?” which only reinforces how uninformed I am. Thank god for alcohol, is all I can say.
In the midst of all the leftists here diagnosing conservatism as mental illness, I’ll again point out that not only is unprovoked, non sequitur broaching of politically charged topics confined to the right, but neither is a tin ear for basic logic. The following is a fairly accurate transcription of an unsolicited political argument my left-wing father launched into two Christmases ago:
Dad: …since these right-wing Republican gun nuts have this paranoid delusion that someone wants to take away their guns.
Me: But there really are people who want to ban private gun ownership.
Dad: And they should!
Me: That’s not the point. You said gun-rights advocates’ belief that some people want to take away their guns is a paranoid delusion…
Dad: They are paranoid and delusional!
Me: But it’s not a paranoid delusion if there really are people who want ban guns…
Dad: We should ban guns!
Me: Dad, you’re telling me that gun rights advocates have a paranoid delusion, meaning a false belief, that some people want to ban guns, while in the same sentence telling me that you want to ban gu…
Dad: We should ban guns!
Me: :smack:
I usually just let my dad rant (my mom sometimes does it a little bit too) and ignore it. Sometime I engage and it usually ends with him shouting or both of us just trailing off. Most of the time, I try not to engage and my mom tries to keep the peace because she doesn’t like his ranting either. I guess I spend more time with my mom. My dad prefers to golf or spend time outside when he can.
I’ve had to break it down to the absolute basics with my mom the last time we had a talk about religion. I asked her to summarize in one sentence what her beliefs came down to. When she said, “love one another,” I said she should think about that.
I try to back the argument up and have her analyze her own statements critically, repeating things in a different way so I know she’s actually re-thinking as she goes, not just repeating the same things over and over and not really getting how little sense she’s making sometimes. I often have to research stuff and email links to her, and re-explain how to determine legitimate sources before she starts to change her mind. It can be exhausting.
My mom is one of the smartest people I know. I feel that since she retired she’s just not working her brain as much as she used to, she’s not around as many people every day, and things she and my dad find on the internet lead to insular conversations between them that reinforce each other’s false thinking.
My God, it all makes sense now… Fox News is to seniors the same way that satanic gothic heavy metal is to teenagers. (Rush Limbaugh = Ozzy Osbourne, I guess)
Which again, isn’t happening, but apparently it’s a right wing talking point now…
Who said that?
This has been said, but I’ll repeat it again: Conservatism is not the problem. Obsession with something and having that thing take over a person’s personality and all communication is the problem. In this case, the thing happens to be conservatism and the drug of choice that is being used to spread it is fear.
My dad and my uncle are both conservative. My dad is good about discussing things without turning every conversation into “OBAMA IS THE DEVIL!” but my Uncle takes every opportunity to ridicule the left, call Obama communist, etc. My dad’s conservatism is no problem whatsoever with our relationship.
Heh, classic case of the lack of logic often used by people repeating the political one-liners they hear from the talking heads. You gotta try to keep it simpler for these people. Though it seems like you are being clear, I could see how your Dad was still confused. To keep it ultra-simple, you just gotta say something like,
“So you want to take their guns away, right?”
“Yeah…”
“So when they believe you want to take them away, they’re correct, right?”
Once you get into X is true and X is opposite of Y therefore Y is not true… a lot of people just lose you. I’ve found analogies are the same way. Never bring up an analogy with a confused person.
It was said upthread, you can search yourself if you like. There’s no excuse for saying that. There’s nothing wrong with taking comfort that some intransigent problems will “work themselves out” in 20-30 years, but you never say it out loud.
Fox is about to get some competition. I guess they are becoming RINOs.
Newsmax wants to compete by being more Boomer oriented.