I know that you are struggling with your father and my heart goes out to you. I know there aren't a lot of things I can do to help you out, but I can answer this question. There are a couple times when the brain changes drastically in adult life--once in your early 20's when everything gets cemented in, and again, in old age--around age 60-65.
The most consistent change is cognitive slowing. Age-related slowing is also evident on certain attentional tasks, such as trying to grasp a telephone number when someone rattles it off quickly. Overall, cognitive slowing is thought to be a contributing factor in elderly people’s higher rate of automobile accidents per miles driven.2
Age hinders attention, particularly when it is necessary to multitask. When switching from one task to another, the elderly have more difficulty paying attention to multiple lanes of traffic, for example, or noticing if someone is about to step off a curb at a busy intersection. Processing information rapidly and dividing attention effectively are cognitive skills that peak in young adulthood. How fortunate it is that college and vocational students are typically at an age when the brain is working with optimum efficiency.
Similarly, the ability to keep multiple pieces of information in mind at the same time is another skill that peaks around ages 18 to 20 and becomes more difficult thereafter.
Articles, interviews, and announcements on topics related to the intersection of neuroscience and society.
www.dana.org
The Pew Research Center recently found that more than 60 percent of people between the ages of 50 and 65 are now on at least one social network. And, according to some studies, baby boomers, typically defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, now spend even more time online than millennials.
Most revealing, though, is what studies have found when it comes to how baby boomers use the internet and social media. Boomers take action based on what they see and read online. They are 19 percent more likely to share content than any other generation, especially when it comes to political content. While boomers are most likely to seek out more information on something they come across on the internet, a study found that only 10 percent of them share information with the intent of educating their online audience. Boomers are opinionated and share content as long as it's meaningful to them.
However, boomers, a majority of which voted for Donald Trump, didn't grow up with the internet, and didn't develop their relationship with technology in the same was as subsequent generations. They're soaking up the latest tech but they may not necessarily be as skeptical of less mainstream platforms like 4chan and 8chan (another, even fringier platform where Q now posts his/her/their latest updates), places where trolls reign supreme and people often fabricate events out of thin air just to get a rise out of others. Boomers are looking for political content to share, and these forums have plenty to give. Whether or not it's factual often takes a backseat to whether or not it's provocative.
When it comes to acolytes of the QAnon conspiracy, there's a definite pattern.
mashable.com
I think with your dad, it's a combo of age coupled with the fact that boomers aren't the digital natives that millenials are. Older people have more problems with working memory but when you add in the realizations that our parents are less savvy internet users than we are, you start to get how they have issues. Older people have more trouble figuring out what articles are sponsored content and which are not. They have a tougher time weeding through the fake and the real, because they've never really been put in a position where they had to question news sources as much as us digital natives.
THANK YOU!!
Yes, yes, yes.
This is about as useful as the GOP calling Dems "snowflakes". How do you expect these people to listen to anything you are saying if you start with "Hey Stupid".
From the literature on cults:
Unprecedented escalation of secular and religious cults has necessitated further inquiry into more precise conditions under which individuals develop vulnerability and become converted by these groups. The present discussion focuses on a number of factors which seem to influence individuals' susceptibility and recruitment by cults. These variables include (a) generalized ego-weakness and emotional vulnerability, (b) propensities toward dissociative states, (c) tenuous, deteriorated, or nonexistent family relations and support systems, (d) inadequate means of dealing with exigencies of survival, (e) history of severe child abuse or neglect, (f) exposure to idiosyncratic or eccentric family patterns, (g) proclivities toward or abuse of controlled substances, (h) unmanageable and debilitating situational stress and crises, and (i) intolerable socioeconomic conditions.
Factors related to susceptibility and recruitment by cults - PubMed
So yes, but this is multifactorial. I would say that the most susceptible people are the forgotten, marginalized and those who are unable to adequately meet their needs economically and emotionally. While this does include some abused people, I think it has a much broader net and much more nuanced. I think that anyone could become susceptible if they don't have community and family support.
Biden hasn't put a timeline on this. I think it's wishful thinking. I really hope it happens, but I won't believe it until I see it.
I was musing with my husband the other day about products and inflation.
I pointed out that most of our inflation calculations and justification for (not) paying people what we do had to do with the price of certain consumer goods. However, our supply chains have fundamentally changed since the 1970's when corporations started shipping jobs overseas and taking them away from Americans who were paid living wages. In the past 20 years, prices have not changed drastically for inexpensive consumer items (thus we as workers don't need that much money, right?) but the way these products are made--in sweat shops by exploited people--has changed. I argued that if we tried to price something like a t-shirt today, but made sure that everyone was fairly compensated for their labor or cotton, that the price of said shirt would be much greater. Our whole system is propped up on exploiting third world workers in order to keep the wheels on this consuming machine we call the US. The problem arises now that corporations have exploited workers in the third world to their breaking point, so they have decided to create share holder value by exploiting people here in the US.
