Radicalisation

[JellySlice]

I’m doing an OL Prevent training http://www.elearning.prevent.homeoffice.gov.uk/ and find the second video very striking - but possibly not for the reason the Home Office intended.

Partial transcription:

At first, the process of radicalisation might seem quite benign: developing friendships and passionate discussions...The radicalisers are normally very successful because they provide that emotional support that a person sometimes misses in life... The ideologies that we’re really concerned about are those that don’t see a place for others. These manipulate faith, history or politics, often blurring fact and opinion...The...ideology dehumanises a person’s humanity, meaning it makes the person who is a victim of it see the others who are not part of his ingroup as non-humans...But, while the ideologies may differ, the process is similar: an absence of protective factors allowing background vulnerabilities, influences and an ideological opening to combine, resulting, in rare cases...

Sounds familiar?

And yet the Home Office can't see the parallels.

he...ideology dehumanises a person’s humanity, meaning it makes the person who is a victim of it see the others who are not part of his ingroup as non-humans...

Thereby legitimising the expressed belief that those non human non believers should rightfully be deprived of ordinary human rights, and should rightfully be exposed to violence and death. A good example of this would be: 'die in a grease fire'.

Yup - it's all there at every stage. Especially with the deliberate cynical targeting of children and young people.

There are so many parallel situations - eg anorexia, County Lines, radicalisation. Why the difference in the Establishment's response?

Why indeed. It does worry me that in the future, we will be told what was actually going on, when we need the answer and solution now.

Why the difference in the Establishment's response?

Because it's an Establishment embedded project.

There are so many parallel situations - eg anorexia, County Lines, radicalisation. Why the difference in the Establishment's response?

Because of the mistakes made around gay conversion therapy and the fact the T was tacked onto the end of LGB, implying that sexuality and gender identity are similar experiences.

People who weren't gay/bi didn't appreciate what it was like for gay/bi people and their ignorance of that was what hurt gay/bi people.

So now, trans rights activists saying 'you don't understand but we will educate you' are welcomed.

The...ideology dehumanises a person’s humanity, meaning it makes the person who is a victim of it see the others who are not part of his ingroup as non-humans.

There have also been some very carefully sown DARVO seeds. The repeated pretence that we “deny their existence” paints us as the ones doing the dehumanising.

DARVO is an astonishingly effective tactic.

I've been saying this for ages.

But I'm guessing its 'wrongthink' 🙄

The repeated pretence that we “deny their existence” paints us as the ones doing the dehumanising.

And yet it is the trans lobby which denies that women (adult human females) actually exist.

The ideologies that we’re really concerned about are those that don’t see a place for others. These manipulate faith, history or politics, often blurring fact and opinion.

Plymouth Bretheren?

(Don't send their kids to school. Girls all married off at 16. Say computers are the work of the devil, etc.)

I was watching an episode of Explained on Netflix about cults and a lot of it stood out for me.
The idea that everyone outside your bubble of thinking is out to get you and wanta to cause you harm and so should be avoided was very interesting.

I always knew I couldn’t be a Plymouther, as my hair does the wrong thing. Theirs always look perfect.

On the topic of radicalisation (but not necessarily as per this thread) there's a useful Twitter thread criticising some research that's had a lot of play (I didn't bold it):

-

A new paper has been making the rounds with the intriguing claim that YouTube has a de-radicalizing influence. arxiv.org/abs/1912.11211

Having read the paper, I wanted to call it wrong, but that would give the paper too much credit, because it is not even wrong. Let me explain.

Radicalization via YouTube, as widely understood, is when someone watches a few partisan videos and unwittingly starts a feedback loop in which the algorithm gradually recommends more and more extreme content and the viewer starts to believe more and more of it.

The key is that the user’s beliefs, preferences, and behavior shift over time, and the algorithm both learns and encourages this, nudging the user gradually. But this study didn’t analyze real users. So the crucial question becomes: what model of user behavior did they use?

The answer: they didn’t! They reached their sweeping conclusions by analyzing YouTube without logging in, based on sidebar recommendations for a sample of channels (not even the user’s home page because, again, there’s no user). Whatever they measured, it’s not radicalization.

twitter.com/random_walker/status/1211263735999946752 [Thread continues.]