A QAnon supporter used her car to attack random strangers who she suddenly decided were Satanic pedophiles

Your example is, unfortunately, a rallying cry for QAnon, and is one of the very few topics they are actually even slightly correct about. No, it’s NOT a good example to be using, frankly; you were using it to show how “silly” QAnon types might be, yet it’s far more plausible than you apparently were aware.

No I won’t take anything rushed through testing for a political goal. I like my vaccines the old fashioned way. Tested and approved by the FDA.

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Who are now co-towing to a President desperately to puff up any good news about a pandemic he’s done ass all about. For the moment, I think the majority within the FDA are good people trying their best after decades of being slowly dismantled by the GOP apparatus (media & political). But the top of that chain has buckled under pressure and done something the FDA has never done before: politicized medical treatment information. As with every agency under Trump, the cracks begin at the top, and pretty soon the agency sheds dedicated, honest career employees like a leaking sieve.

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If it’s any consolation any vaccine will be thoroughly tested by other agencies as well, such as the EU’s medical and pharmaceutical agency and you should be able to trust those at least.

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Again, that’s the point: they are slightly correct. That they are slightly, and only slightly, correct is what makes the subsequent deranged, derailed web of nonsense they’ve weaved from that fragment as a rallying cry to incite attacks on uninvolved everyday individuals (this, Comet Ping Pong, etc) so dramatically dangerous, not “silly” as you put it.

We are in agreement, and I am not unaware.

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A cabal of pedophiles, eh? Like the kind of people who rip children away from their parents and put them into unhygienic cages for months on end with no oversight and rampant sexual abuse?

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They’re MORE THAN “slightly correct” about Bill Clinton and Epstein, undeniably so, that’s the exact problem. It’s a terrible example to use against QAnon types, that simple, and it won’t somehow become better; it just feeds back into their delusions.

Is it crazy to think that the purpose of QAnon is to explain away Trump’s ties to Epstein by framing them as part of an undercover investigation?

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What is it with right wing cults and Waco?

Those poor locals. :frowning:

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My point is kinda that at least the non-ironic goatfucker has the courage of their convictions, whereas the ironic goatfucking troll is just a coward trying to game the system so that they can retroactively point at the mess and say, “I told you so.”

Of course, they ignore all the times they said “I told you so” and were wrong as well as the fact that they still fucked a goat.

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Maybe they want to reenact the Cleansing of the Temple? Someone has to play the villain.

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Or you know, you could just shoot them in the back 7 times.

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Fair. Tough, but fair.

It may. You’re entirely right.

I think there may be an optimistic belief that with a new case rate of about 3 in 100,000 (and a test positivity rate of about 0.8% supporting the argument that the case rate hasn’t been gamed), NY might get away with it. The numbers in the Northeast don’t look too different from those in European countries that are also reopening cautiously.

So, NY might also get away with it. We’ll see.

Or a goat song?

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I think this is the wrong tactic, massively so. I think it is a lot more useful to think of QAnon in light of what we know about how cults and fringe violent political groups snare and radicalize people. One of the tactics they use is to weaken ties to outside sources of knowledge and validation causes the participant to fall deeper in with the group. Cutting off those people is likely to lead them to a more radical and dangerous place than even the most frustrating engagement.

Maybe, but it almost doesn’t matter. Every leader of a violent movement starts as just some person. If we found out the people behind Heaven’s Gate got into it as part of a complicated real estate scam, the participants would still be dead.

Unfortunately we’ve also built a well poisoning machine. We’ve built a set of media platforms and outlets that isolate and amplify things. It is now possible to hypertarget a susceptible group and feed them information that fits their biases, without anyone outside that group seeing the effects until the group is too big and deep to ignore.

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I doubt that’s the WHOLE purpose but it’s easy to believe that’s one of their goals; why not? A lot of the FUD they spew certainly makes that plausible. One of the main hallmarks of QAnon is the ability to glom almost anything onto its framework, willy nilly, no matter how batfuck insane and contradictory it is to the rest of their idiocy.

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My bone to pick with QAnon is that they are actively enabling an admitted sexual predator (“locker room talk” or no) in the name of stopping sexual predation. Most of them are authoritarian cult followers who would, if Trump asked them to, traffic children to Trump themselves, convincing themselves they were still doing the right thing to combat child abuse.

If they want me to meet them halfway and say the Clinton probably abused children, I don’t really think I’d be feeding their madness to admit that truth.

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Don’t confuse hatred for child molesters with any sympathy regarding abusing women. A staggering number of people on the right are still just fine with the idea women as subservient beings. It is still enshrined by a great many christians as the godly way to live.

I stumbled on a christian site recently that went to great pains to explain how a husband spanking a wife to correct her behavior is a godly thing. Browse, but have a barf bag handy:

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The great irony being that, as far as I know, regulatory compliance across the world in pharma is based on US protocols. Sure there are EU agencies but a lot of the documentation I see referred to is US. Yet again the current US administration is actively undermining international trust in the US and its institutions.

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