My dad’s always been an anti-intellectual prick but now he’s a smug one having his worst impulses reinforced by assholes on the internet and his workplace.
My dad’s always been an anti-intellectual prick but now he’s a smug one having his worst impulses reinforced by assholes on the internet and his workplace.
My own dad has gone into a weird one. Ue watches a Mexican youtube channel about UFOs a lot. Guy who runs it was involved with that kerfuffle last year with the mummies. But here’s the thing: you’d think UFO cranks just tend towards right wing politics because of how detached from reality they are, right? You know, the cryptozoologists from Disco Elysium, Qanon, etc. But this channel also does a news report on like, real world news, and it’s surprisingly solid, at least most times that I’ve happened to hear it. They are super critical of Israel, they cover climate events and always connect it to American greed causing climate change, I think I’ve heard them be supportive of MoReNa (Sheinbaum’s party) too. A little whiplash inducing when they’ll show a video of a supposed UFO flying out of a volcano then a report of Israel bombing a hospital.
But get this, despite how anti-imperialist this news source that my dad watches regularly is, he still thinks the US is the best country in the world. I think this is basically just brain worms that can’t be much avoided for the period in time and space he lived in, and it’s crazy because he was a left wing separatist when he was my age. US = wealth = good is such a powerful cliche that permeates the Global South.
No? UFOs signal exploratory thinking, which is not what right wing is
right wing is offended by anything that isn’t mayos
UFOs being occupied by aliens is an affront to mayos because it means there are more technologically advanced beings. This is why right wingers are increasingly anti–belief-in-aliens
this tendency has been going on for several years now, maybe even a decade
Look, I could’ve phrased it better because I recognize that there are some legitimate reasons to think alien life has reached earth. But the stuff I’m talking about is not “exploratory thinking” it’s flat earth tier stuff. As I said, videos of UFOs flying out of volcanos, urban myths about places on the Earth where gravity is backwards, that kind of thing.
Really?
Or they could pull an “Ancient Aliens” and just claim any other non-western civilization’s technological innovations are made by those Ancient Aliens (notice how it’s not really applied to western ones as much; this feels like how Hitler claimed his “own Aryan race” invented lots of these things in other lands)
yes. “project bluebeam” is way more popular now than it was 10 years ago
they do that too but only for ancient stuff
The rise in “okay UFOs might be real, but if they are, they’re actually demons, not aliens” has been wild to see.
my family consists of both. my dad believes in aliens, my mom and other family members don’t believe in aliens and my inlaws believe they are demons in disguise
also dad believed he was an alien (and still does for some reason)
i have this weird memory of an alien sighting cd that played a low quality version of the xfiles theme and i think was in spanish, i have no fucking clue how i got there but i was fascinated by the dark green and black color palette
aliens are funny, i like alien’s :)
yea the transition from “new age spirituality” to “new age christianity” is strong