As in, not known to you IRL.
I’ve occasionally brought it up before, but a while back in my reddit days I was in a thread where a “professional deprogrammer” had popped in and was talking about how to “deprogram” conservatives and get them to shift left in their views. It centered around restoring their sense of community and belonging with more balanced viewpoint folks IRL and away from their online echo chambers.
I asked them if they had any way to convert someone you encounter wholly online and they said that it was basically impossible, IRL you have a decent chance, but not online.
I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit, so now I’m curious if anybody here has actually gotten an online conservative to come to the dark side light side?
I don’t argue with conservatives online to try and change their minds. I argue with them to change the minds of people reading the argument. For every social media user that posts content, there are a thousand lurkers. I post arguments so hopefully some of those lurkers might change their mind away from nationalist authoritarianism
Confronting them with the flaws in their thinking only makes them double down:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202401/why-do-people-double-down
I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.
This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.
I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.
I was also right libertarian, although I have been called a fascist for that, , anyway I shifted from that slowly into anarchocristianism and I will stay here. I just don’t believe in government anymore only in communities and obviously in God but that’s another story.
I just want people to have their needs covered, to have strong sense of communities (love your neighbors) in non violent environments and I think human government is inherently violent either physically violent or economically violent. Jesus spoke of all this.
What I think people needs to understand is it’s not the same to be left in the US than in Spain for example, different countries have different kinds of issues caused by different ideologies. So it’s easy to understand why someone in Germany loves worker unions but in Spain don’t because in Spain the biggest ones (UGT and CCOO) work for the government (the so called Leftist Psoe)
