She’s almost 70, spend all day watching q-anon style of videos (but in Spanish) and every day she’s anguished about something new, last week was asking us to start digging a nuclear shelter because Russia was dropped a nuclear bomb over Ukraine. Before that she was begging us to install reinforced doors because the indigenous population were about to invade the cities and kill everyone with poisonous arrows. I have access to her YouTube account and I’m trying to unsubscribe and report the videos, but the reccomended videos keep feeding her more crazy shit.
Here is what you can do: make a bet with her on things that she think is going to happen in a certain timeframe, tell her if she’s right, then it should be easy money. I don’t like gambling, I just find it easier to convince people they might be wrong when they have to put something at stake.
A lot of these crazy YouTube cult channels have gotten fairly insidious, because they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips, then they will direct you to their affiliated Qanon style channels. You have to watch out for those too.
Holy crap. I had no idea. We’ve heard of a slippery slope, but this is a slippery sheer vertical cliff.
Like that toxic meathead rogan luring the curious in with DMT stories and the like, and this sounds like that particular spore has burst and spread.
Rogan did not invent this, this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading, and historical cults have always done similar things for recruitment. While you shouldn’t be paranoid and suspicious of everyone, but you should know that these things exists and watch out for them.
I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the “not stressed” end, so I’ve gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.
That isn’t the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn’t working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the “not stressed” end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren’t saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.
it’s a skin galvanometer. It measures sweating directly based on the fact that sweat is electrically conductive, then interprets more sweat as more stress. this is a fallacy as the fact that stressed people tend to sweat does NOT imply that sweaty people tend to be stressed. this works to the advantage of scientologists because genuinely stressed people will measure high, but so will a lot of unstressed people or people who are only stressed by the fact that they suddenly find themselves in an experiment. False positives and true positives are much more common than true or false negatives, and also much more profitable for scientologists. When you successfully beat the test, the person administering it insisted you go again because it’s kinda rigged and they assumed that a second reading would come back with the needle pointing strongly toward “give us a bunch of money”.
this is the central fallacy behind lie detectors as well, as they measure skin galvanic response, heart rate, and other things that are correlated with stress but can have myriad other causes, then they assume that people are stressed when they lie, then they take a flying leap to the conclusion that anyone displaying symptoms of stress must be lying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodermal_activity
It’s close enough to convince people. If there were no correlation between sweatiness and stress, the E-meter wouldn’t be a convincing recruiting tool. If it always just went to “stressed” no matter who used it or how, it wouldn’t be as convincing either. The fact that sweatiness and stress are somewhat correlated means that it can be used to bring people into the cult.
oh no one is doubting that it’s a good scam. it’s quantifiably a truly great scam, having bilked billions from a whole lot of people. but it is a scam, and the electroconductivity of your skin is not a measure of your spiritual state
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it took a total of one hour of youtube autoplay for me to go from “here’s how to can your garden veggies at home” to “the (((globalists))) want to outbreed white people and force them into extinction”
My sister always mocked her and starts to fight her about how she has always been wrong before and she just get defensive and has not worked so far, except for further damage their relationship.
No, don’t mock her, that’s the last thing you should do, don’t be emotional, be calm and ask her if she want to take the easy money if she is so sure about these things, it has to be provable, objective events where there is no wiggle room, like the natives with arrows for example.
Cults will always want to isolate their perspective members from their current support groups. Don’t let them do that past the point of no return.
See if you can convince her to write down her predictions in a calendar, like “by this date X will have happened”.
You can tell her that she can use that to prove to her doubters that she was right and she called it months ago, and that people should listen to her. If somehow she’s wrong, it can be a way to show that all the things that freaked her out months ago never happened and she isn’t even thinking about them anymore because she’s freaked out about the latest issue.
Going to ask my sister to do this, it can be good for both of them.
It’s not going to work.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. You have to use positive emotion to counteract the negative emotion. Literally just changing the subject to something like “Remember when we went to the beach? That was fun!” Positive emotions and memories of times before the cult brainwashing can work.
The good part about it is that once she writes her predictions down (or maybe both of them do), they can maybe move on, and talk about something other than the conspiracies.
Assuming all the predictions are wrong, especially if your mom forgot how worked up she was about them months ago but completely forgot about them after that, it can be a good way to talk about how they’re manipulating her emotions.