Dealing with Politics and Family
Obepawn
Well-Known Member
Because Masons understood a long time ago that by eliminating the two great dividers , the brotherhood remains intact.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
This is what I am trying to figure out how to get beyond. If you read the posts by @Padawanbater2 you can see the mentality of the 'far left' that is just as propagandized and in a bubble as the right has been (although there is not a Fox news on the left (regardless of how much people try to paint CNN as that)).
The inevitability of this is it becomes easier to micro target people with online analytics so that these bubbles stick and become reinforced. Then with some simple propaganda at the district level, outside influencers can pick the candidates by driving the votes to the people they want elected and away from the people that they want to lose.
If we can't have honest conversations about this stuff with the people we know and care about, how do you get people out of their bubbles?
HashBucket
Well-Known Member
It boils down to these two words: People suck.
All people.
Democracies can't last forever. When "the people" figure out that they can vote themselves raises ... they do. The politicians that 'lead' them learn that they can be bought, and influenced with money and the root rot begins.
We are witnessing the beginning death throes of two powerful political institutions: Democrat and Republican. Started about 10 years ago. Dunno how long it will take to finish.
People get wound up in that and choose sides. Happened during the civil war in the US. Brothers fought each other.
What can you do about it? Nothing. You have to protect yourself first ... Do you know why the airline stewardess tells you that if the mask falls down to put YOURS on first before the kids? Because if you're knocked out, you can't take care of the kids. Take care of yourself first, and if that means that you have to isolate yourself from the madness, then do so.
You're not going to change people (they suck, remember?) and you're not going to change someone's propaganda infected mind.
Protect yourself. At some point even a family member must be abandoned.
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
Speaking of which, why are you so much in love with having your right to vote taken away from you?
Chunky Stool
Well-Known Member
Politics for Dummies
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
I did that in 2013 when it started to get really bad, I knew the game that the trolls were playing. Unfortunately that did not work.
You can call me a sheep all you want, but at the end of the day it is important that we all start making as much noise as the Russian military is to our most vulnerable communities online. It is impacting our society and needs to be stopped. As fruitless as it is arguing with these sock puppet accounts online, it is still important and needs to be done.
I made this post when I came back to this website to explain why I feel the way I do.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
This is something I have been dealing with myself (which is why I am bumping this thread with this).Thank you for the good information, I seriously appreciate you looking out. I know everyone on my FB and they use all those degrading words too and I don't understand why either. Lol.
Thanks, I'm sure I'll stick around. I've watched this site for many years from googling and learning stuff. I finally decided to make an account and be social. Its gonna be a long road for awhile but getting trump out will be a great start..
There are many examples of what is happening is because people have been taught to respond that way as soon as they get triggered by whatever it is that they have been programmed to get worked up over.
That was why I posted the video (here) about how repeatedly providing stimulus you can trick the brain into actually thinking things that are not true.
For example let's say person A from your family cared about NFL kneeling and eventually posts something about it.
Right there that should be a red flag as to what it is that they have seen that they felt the need to discuss it on a forum (not just Facebook at this point too (so if you are on Facebook, your postings on this site are likely being added to your personal data, along with any other information you have online (which is pretty much a complete list of everything you have ever done since about 2012). Hours of hearing about it from hate radio, bitching about it with friends, watching it on TV when Fox would use it. But the reality is that it is Russian military campaign aimed at causing fights about very real issues in our nation and attacking people from every angle online so that they can teach people through repetition how to respond when they want to end the conversation. Screaming is what I find most people get elevated to, but we have a small portion of people who are extremely vulnerable to online radicalization turning them into domestic terrorists.
But once they post, what happens, someone inevitably attacks them for what it is that they are saying (lets say they are against kneeling and come from the Fox-Trump narrative), the 'left-troll' jumps in and calls them racist triggering them into arguing back, then right-troll jumps in and shows the actual person in the middle how to escelate the argument until it is at the angry level and they let fly the 'lib-tard' rhetoric.
Trump's idiot kid was even doing this during the holidays to try to get families to argue during them.
abbreviate family exposure (stay an hour or less) because you know what's going to happen or don't go all together..you're not going to get him to think any differently than you can get fogdog to. it will be peer/community/other old people that will convince him, if ever. there's nothing you can do, i haven't spoken to my father in 20 years.
wasn't this the guy with spray painted on hair?This is something I have been dealing with myself (which is why I am bumping this thread with this).
There are many examples of what is happening is because people have been taught to respond that way as soon as they get triggered by whatever it is that they have been programmed to get worked up over.
That was why I posted the video (here) about how repeatedly providing stimulus you can trick the brain into actually thinking things that are not true.
For example let's say person A from your family cared about NFL kneeling and eventually posts something about it.
Right there that should be a red flag as to what it is that they have seen that they felt the need to discuss it on a forum (not just Facebook at this point too (so if you are on Facebook, your postings on this site are likely being added to your personal data, along with any other information you
have online (which is pretty much a complete list of everything you have ever done since about 2012). Hours of hearing about it from hate radio, bitching about it with friends, watching it on TV when Fox would use it. But the reality is that it is Russian military campaign aimed at causing fights about very real issues in our nation and attacking people from every angle online so that they can teach people through repetition how to respond when they want to end the conversation. Screaming is what I find most people get elevated to, but we have a small portion of people who are extremely vulnerable to online radicalization turning them into domestic terrorists.
But once they post, what happens, someone inevitably attacks them for what it is that they are saying (lets say they are against kneeling and come from the Fox-Trump narrative), the 'left-troll' jumps in and calls them racist triggering them into arguing back, then right-troll jumps in and shows the actual person in the middle how to escelate the argument until it is at the angry level and they let fly the 'lib-tard' rhetoric.
Trump's idiot kid was even doing this during the holidays to try to get families to argue during them.
Sir Napsalot
Well-Known Member
"Well Hillary was just so corrupt..." My BIL losing 35 years of respect
Sir Napsalot
Well-Known Member
My mom is appalled by Trump
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
I'm appalled by Trump too. I'll never change my mind on that.
Sir Napsalot
Well-Known Member
People who aren't appalled are the problem
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
This thread (like in the OP , and here) explains a lot of the reason of why I am here posting in this forum. It pisses me off that our citizens are under a constant attack by online trolls (foreign and domestic) and I am here trying to help people understand what is going on. And you are spot on about what you have noticed. But it is not just this forum, it is anything with a chat feature is under constant assault.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/qanon-families-support-group/
Q.
There was a time not long ago when the letter held no special meaning for Jacob, a 24-year-old in Croatia. The 17th letter of the alphabet, usually followed by “u” in English words. What else was there to know? He certainly never expected it to end the tightknit relationship he shared with his mother.
But Jacob, who grew up in the United States, told The Washington Post that he has cut all contact with his mother now that she’s become an ardent believer of the QAnon conspiracy theories.
Though they’ve always had different political beliefs, they had “a really, really strong relationship,” he said. “We were inseparable.” He had no reason to think anything had changed. But during the holidays in 2019, “our relationship just completely tanked.”
QAnon can be traced back to a series of 2017 posts on 4chan, the online message board known for its mixture of trolls and alt-right followers. The poster was someone named “Q,” who claimed to be a government insider with Q security clearance, the highest level in the Department of Energy. QAnon’s origin matters less than what it’s become, an umbrella term for a loose set of conspiracy theories ranging from the false claim that vaccines cause illness and are a method of controlling the masses to the bogus assertion that many pop stars and Democratic leaders are pedophiles.
The choose-your-own-adventure nature of QAnon makes it compelling to vulnerable people desperate for a sense of security and difficult for Twitter and Facebook to control, despite their efforts. It’s becoming increasingly mainstreamed as several QAnon-friendly candidates won congressional primaries. And the FBI has warned that it could “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”
As QAnon has crept into the news, it’s become a testament to our age of political disinformation, not to mention easy online comedic currency. But what’s often forgotten in stories and jokes are the people behind the scenes who are baffled at a loved one’s embrace of the “movement,” and who struggle to keep it from tearing their families apart.
According to Jacob’s recollection, his mother spent her days browsing these various theories on YouTube and Twitter. “I told her, ‘I came here to visit you,” he recalled. But she refused to stay offline.
“I finally got her to turn [her phone] off once, and it was unreal. She treated it like a chore,” he said. “It’s like she’s addicted. It feels like she’s been swallowed up by a cult."
“Finally, I realized that my relationship with her had brought me nothing but stress and unhappiness for, at that point, really years,” he said. “That smart, awesome person that I used to know just didn’t exist anymore. So I decided to cut my losses and cauterize the wound.”
Jacob hasn’t spoken to her since February, but she continues posting conspiracy theories multiple times a day to Facebook. She declined a request for comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is using only Jacob’s first name.
“It’s devastating,” he said. “It really, really does feel like my mother abandoned me. She implicitly chose QAnon … over me.”
Jacob is one of many who have turned to makeshift online support groups, the most prominent of which is the subreddit r/qanoncasualties. “Do you have a loved one who’s been taken in by the QAnon conspiracy theory? Look here for emotional support and a place to vent,” reads the group’s description.
It had fewer than 3,500 members at the beginning of June, the earliest iteration captured by the online archival website the Way Back Machine. It now has more than 28,000. “I have been completely isolated from other friends and family members because of this cult,” one user posted recently. “You guys have definitely been a lifeline, reminding me that sanity does still exist in this world. Thank you guys, very much.”
The loneliness of losing loved ones to QAnon is something Kerry, of Oklahoma City, knows well. “QAnon” meant nothing to him, he recalled, when he found a stockpile of water and food in his house, which his then-wife told him was “because she believed Trump was going to be declaring martial law any day in order to effectuate a mass arrest of Democrats,” something known to QAnon believers as “the storm.” (His ex-wife declined to comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is only using Kerry’s first name.)
Kerry dug deeper, trying to understand his wife’s beliefs. They would debate. Eventually they started avoiding it “to keep peace in the house,” but she eventually grew more assertive and “what was once a taboo topic became something we were arguing about all the time.”
Still, he empathized.
“She was getting frustrated that nobody in her immediate family was buying in and supporting her,” Kerry said. “She felt like she was alone in this crusade. … And I know this was extremely frustrating and hurtful for her.”
He and their then-18-year-old son held an intervention. It failed. “We were together a very long time. We managed to get past a lot of things I’ve seen end other marriages,” he said. “But this was the thing we couldn’t get past.”
Their 20-year marriage ended.
His is one of a flood of stories. There’s the South Carolina doctor whose mother blocked him on Facebook and no longer trusts his medical knowledge. The Florida woman who thought her mother — a physician in Canada who refuses to wear masks when not seeing a patient and tried to convince her daughter not to vaccinate her grandchild — was senile when she began hawking QAnon theories. The woman whose unemployed aunt is quarantining alone and suddenly began diving into QAnon because it “gives her life meaning.”
“I love my mother, but she sucks the life out of me with her conspiracy theories,” said one Florida woman via email. (Many interviewees spoke on the condition of anonymity, which they requested for a variety of reasons, including fear of violence from QAnon followers, pending legal action and the worry that speaking would hinder their attempts to repair relationships.)
This is not strictly a U.S. phenomenon. Users from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand and the Netherlands all shared similar stories.
One recurring theme is how often people who fall into QAnon aren’t digital natives. A 30-year-old Sacramento resident said his stepmother of 20 years “has always been not really an Internet person,” until the 2016 election. She soon stumbled upon radical aspects of online politics on outlets such as 4chan, “going from a zero to a 10.” Soon enough, she was seeking “Q drops” (supposedly when Q reveals new “information”), telling others how “there are children in bunkers under Central Park who are being trafficked” and telling her stepson he was “brainwashed because you went to college.”
When this source spoke to The Post last month, his mother hadn’t left the house in 16 weeks because she refused to wear a mask after watching the viral “Plandemic” conspiracy video, which made the false claim that billionaires aided in the spread of the coronavirus to further the usage of vaccines and made the baseless and dangerous assertion that wearing masks is harmful.
“This same person who told me not to believe strangers online, her entire worldview is informed by strangers online,” he said.
How to talk — and ask — about QAnon
The situation can become increasingly difficult when a child is involved. A Florida firefighter said his ex-wife fell hard for every QAnon theory in the book, from a complicated plot connecting UFOs and the Illuminati to the (false) idea that prominent celebrities, entrepreneurs and politicians are lizard people disguised in human skin. Her obsession with conspiracy theories helped lead to their divorce.
“Her intentions are to do good, but it’s just not real,” he said. “It’s like living in a fantasy world. It’s a need to believe in something.”
Her beliefs wouldn’t matter to him much at this point if they weren’t co-parenting a son. He found out that his ex-wife told the son to avoid banks because the Federal Reserve would put microchips in him.
His father said that he and his ex “do a pretty good job of trying to raise him,” but added, “I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a child to be a functional adult while living so far outside reality.”
Q.
There was a time not long ago when the letter held no special meaning for Jacob, a 24-year-old in Croatia. The 17th letter of the alphabet, usually followed by “u” in English words. What else was there to know? He certainly never expected it to end the tightknit relationship he shared with his mother.
But Jacob, who grew up in the United States, told The Washington Post that he has cut all contact with his mother now that she’s become an ardent believer of the QAnon conspiracy theories.
Though they’ve always had different political beliefs, they had “a really, really strong relationship,” he said. “We were inseparable.” He had no reason to think anything had changed. But during the holidays in 2019, “our relationship just completely tanked.”
QAnon can be traced back to a series of 2017 posts on 4chan, the online message board known for its mixture of trolls and alt-right followers. The poster was someone named “Q,” who claimed to be a government insider with Q security clearance, the highest level in the Department of Energy. QAnon’s origin matters less than what it’s become, an umbrella term for a loose set of conspiracy theories ranging from the false claim that vaccines cause illness and are a method of controlling the masses to the bogus assertion that many pop stars and Democratic leaders are pedophiles.
The choose-your-own-adventure nature of QAnon makes it compelling to vulnerable people desperate for a sense of security and difficult for Twitter and Facebook to control, despite their efforts. It’s becoming increasingly mainstreamed as several QAnon-friendly candidates won congressional primaries. And the FBI has warned that it could “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”
As QAnon has crept into the news, it’s become a testament to our age of political disinformation, not to mention easy online comedic currency. But what’s often forgotten in stories and jokes are the people behind the scenes who are baffled at a loved one’s embrace of the “movement,” and who struggle to keep it from tearing their families apart.
According to Jacob’s recollection, his mother spent her days browsing these various theories on YouTube and Twitter. “I told her, ‘I came here to visit you,” he recalled. But she refused to stay offline.
“I finally got her to turn [her phone] off once, and it was unreal. She treated it like a chore,” he said. “It’s like she’s addicted. It feels like she’s been swallowed up by a cult."
“Finally, I realized that my relationship with her had brought me nothing but stress and unhappiness for, at that point, really years,” he said. “That smart, awesome person that I used to know just didn’t exist anymore. So I decided to cut my losses and cauterize the wound.”
Jacob hasn’t spoken to her since February, but she continues posting conspiracy theories multiple times a day to Facebook. She declined a request for comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is using only Jacob’s first name.
“It’s devastating,” he said. “It really, really does feel like my mother abandoned me. She implicitly chose QAnon … over me.”
Jacob is one of many who have turned to makeshift online support groups, the most prominent of which is the subreddit r/qanoncasualties. “Do you have a loved one who’s been taken in by the QAnon conspiracy theory? Look here for emotional support and a place to vent,” reads the group’s description.
It had fewer than 3,500 members at the beginning of June, the earliest iteration captured by the online archival website the Way Back Machine. It now has more than 28,000. “I have been completely isolated from other friends and family members because of this cult,” one user posted recently. “You guys have definitely been a lifeline, reminding me that sanity does still exist in this world. Thank you guys, very much.”
The loneliness of losing loved ones to QAnon is something Kerry, of Oklahoma City, knows well. “QAnon” meant nothing to him, he recalled, when he found a stockpile of water and food in his house, which his then-wife told him was “because she believed Trump was going to be declaring martial law any day in order to effectuate a mass arrest of Democrats,” something known to QAnon believers as “the storm.” (His ex-wife declined to comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is only using Kerry’s first name.)
Kerry dug deeper, trying to understand his wife’s beliefs. They would debate. Eventually they started avoiding it “to keep peace in the house,” but she eventually grew more assertive and “what was once a taboo topic became something we were arguing about all the time.”
Still, he empathized.
“She was getting frustrated that nobody in her immediate family was buying in and supporting her,” Kerry said. “She felt like she was alone in this crusade. … And I know this was extremely frustrating and hurtful for her.”
He and their then-18-year-old son held an intervention. It failed. “We were together a very long time. We managed to get past a lot of things I’ve seen end other marriages,” he said. “But this was the thing we couldn’t get past.”
Their 20-year marriage ended.
His is one of a flood of stories. There’s the South Carolina doctor whose mother blocked him on Facebook and no longer trusts his medical knowledge. The Florida woman who thought her mother — a physician in Canada who refuses to wear masks when not seeing a patient and tried to convince her daughter not to vaccinate her grandchild — was senile when she began hawking QAnon theories. The woman whose unemployed aunt is quarantining alone and suddenly began diving into QAnon because it “gives her life meaning.”
“I love my mother, but she sucks the life out of me with her conspiracy theories,” said one Florida woman via email. (Many interviewees spoke on the condition of anonymity, which they requested for a variety of reasons, including fear of violence from QAnon followers, pending legal action and the worry that speaking would hinder their attempts to repair relationships.)
This is not strictly a U.S. phenomenon. Users from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand and the Netherlands all shared similar stories.
One recurring theme is how often people who fall into QAnon aren’t digital natives. A 30-year-old Sacramento resident said his stepmother of 20 years “has always been not really an Internet person,” until the 2016 election. She soon stumbled upon radical aspects of online politics on outlets such as 4chan, “going from a zero to a 10.” Soon enough, she was seeking “Q drops” (supposedly when Q reveals new “information”), telling others how “there are children in bunkers under Central Park who are being trafficked” and telling her stepson he was “brainwashed because you went to college.”
When this source spoke to The Post last month, his mother hadn’t left the house in 16 weeks because she refused to wear a mask after watching the viral “Plandemic” conspiracy video, which made the false claim that billionaires aided in the spread of the coronavirus to further the usage of vaccines and made the baseless and dangerous assertion that wearing masks is harmful.
“This same person who told me not to believe strangers online, her entire worldview is informed by strangers online,” he said.
How to talk — and ask — about QAnon
The situation can become increasingly difficult when a child is involved. A Florida firefighter said his ex-wife fell hard for every QAnon theory in the book, from a complicated plot connecting UFOs and the Illuminati to the (false) idea that prominent celebrities, entrepreneurs and politicians are lizard people disguised in human skin. Her obsession with conspiracy theories helped lead to their divorce.
“Her intentions are to do good, but it’s just not real,” he said. “It’s like living in a fantasy world. It’s a need to believe in something.”
Her beliefs wouldn’t matter to him much at this point if they weren’t co-parenting a son. He found out that his ex-wife told the son to avoid banks because the Federal Reserve would put microchips in him.
His father said that he and his ex “do a pretty good job of trying to raise him,” but added, “I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a child to be a functional adult while living so far outside reality.”
after you join Q, your next assignment is to purchase a Tamagotchi and take care of it- if it dies a child's essence is consumed by Hillary Clinton under your local pizza shop..so be careful.
blu3bird
Well-Known Member
I was going to buy two just to let them die, but they're $60 lol
Fk that
one persons trash is another treasure only $17.99 in the 90s
