Jenner posted:

How did you know this vague relative I mentioned but did not define was my racist uncle?!! Are you stalking me? Oh noooooo.

Regarding poverty and poo poo life conditions being a factor in think this is a really solid point of consideration. It seems to me that the bulk of people on the extreme left and right come from poor or working class backgrounds. They're often also under educated and many live in lovely cities with little to no job opprotunties.

But at the same time, poverty rates and quality of life are the highest for racial minorities yet the crazy extremists seem to be, for the most part, white.


I bolded the part of your post that I want to focus on. It is that fact alone, that they can't be reasoned with or talked down, that is the most distressing to me. They are immune to facts, logic and reason.

Most psychological help comes in the form of counseling and therapy and many therapists are taught and trained to question and challenge absolutist, extreme, or black-and-white thinking. While I was studying Psychology in college we discussed how talking and debating people with different beliefs rarely brings them around but instead actually intensifies their own beliefs. So trying to treat this issue with traditional/conventional mental health care approaches might not work.

Can we actually help these people? Short of improving their life situations, as stated in the quoted post, there doesn't seem to be much to do to bring them around.

And while social isolation is still a factor/consequence of extreme belief I feel its effect has been significantly mitigated with the onset on the Internet. Now extreme left and right wing people can find many forums full of hundreds to thousands of users who share their beliefs or hold even more extreme ones. This confirms their beliefs and can even drive them to become even more extreme.

And there is a whole political campaign in the United States right now that has swept up and incensed this group.

I had a friend from college, we never really talked about politics or religion but she was a nice, friendly, and caring person as far as I could tell. We met because she helped me carry a heavy bin of clothes into my dorm room while dozens of other people just walked past me. The whole time I knew her she gave me the impression that she was just a good person. We became Facebook friends and kept kinda sorta in touch after I moved states.

For the past few months she has been spamming her Facebook with emphatic pleas to vote Trump and support Trump. Reblogging and sharing news posts from Fox News, Drudge, and such. Going on long diatribes about how illegal immigrants are ruining this country (with lots of racist statements laced throughout,) how all Muslims are terrorists and hate America and railing on about Benghazi and Emails. I was completely broadsided, this poo poo came out of nowhere.

Fool that I was in tried engaging her, to talk her down off the building. I sourced my arguments, I linked to Politifact and to news articles from NPR and the New York Times. I made sure not to link to MSNBC, DailyKOS, or Huffington Post (all of them have liberal bias AFAIK) and also did not link to CNN because she had, in previous posts, called it the Clinton News Network (even though CNN has a conservative bias AFAIK.) Her response was to tell me the media was controlled by Hillary Clinton and that not only did my facts not matter but that I didn't have the facts. I quickly blocked her and disengaged.

But I'm devastated. I did not see any of this when I knew her. Was she always this crazy and just hid it well or did something snap? I feel like I've lost a friend and there is nothing I can do to bring her back.

Most curiously she doesn't really seem to fit the usual group. By her own admission her family life was relatively comfortable and she was middle class. (Though a lot of working class people think themselves middle class when they're not so )

She has not sunk so far into the madness yet to start believing that Obama is a Muslim or not a real American citizen or that Michele is a trans woman and their children are kidnapped, etc but she is probably heading in that direction.

And data says this is a reaction to fear? What are they afraid of? Can you link to some of these articles and findings for me?