I’ll be very, very surprised if it doesn’t result in deaths, multiple. Hell, one qanon dupe already got arrested in some plot that involved blocking a bridge with a homemade armored car while carrying an AR-15.
Yeah, I absolutely think so. Like other mythologies, it gives simple order to a complex, disordered world and an illusion of control. The amount of information that’s required just to understand the modern world is daunting, impossible to access and absorb, even. All the different actors with different motivations are impossible to counter. If a malevolent conspiracy is in charge, that’s weirdly comforting - at least there’s order (and provides the conspiracy theorist a chance to understand the world and even potentially counter the single conspiracy). It’s all very attractive if one is anxious about the state of things but doesn’t want to do all the intellectual work required to try to understand the world.
That’s all you really can do. Keep pushing them, but much like something like drug addiction, sometimes you have to wait for people to hit rock bottom before they’re ready to change.
I hope so, too. But I think it’s also important to be firm and stand up for your morals, you know, including not accepting prejudice and being firm on that.
Probably. And we will arrest these idiots after they commit a crime. The pizzagate gunman got 4 years in prison for what he did. (inciting violence is also a crime, so there is some hope to take these guys down before people are hurt)
That’s an extraordinaryly normal thing for conspiracy theory. With both conspiracy and things like apocalyptic cults. Failed predictions. Actually increase dedication and belief among believers. At least in the short and middle term.
There’s a couple of dynamics involved. One of the major ones is the ability (like psychics and other bunk artists) to just shift the story. The world didn’t end because our rituals worked. Podesta didn’t get arrested because he flipped and so forth.
But it’s always stuck me that the “I’m special their all out to get me” dynamic of these things can feed so easily off these failed predictions. Just as debunking things often causes believers to entrench. A big failed prediction does the same. It gives skeptics something really big. That’s really easy to point to. Which let’s believers double down on their defensive, tribal position.
Generally the bigger the prediction. And the further it is from what actually happens. So the bigger the failure. The bigger the entrenching effect.
In the long term repeated large, failed, predictions tend to drive off most believers and they grow dissatisfied with the lack of results and the repeated embarassments, disappointments, And shifting terms. It creates a serious recruitment problem. It’s difficult to convince other to believe in something that’s been demonstrably wrong over a long period. But it tends to leave a core that are absolute believers who will never change.
There’s absolutely a making sense of things, control aspect when you at the psychology of it.
But there’s also a huge self agrandizing aspect. People seeking to feel important. They’re important because they know something most don’t. They’re important because they’re doing something about something important. It’s like moral and social Viagra.
Okay, he played a godlike trickster on TV, but in real life he’s an amazingly multi-talented individual.
He’s had a varied career that loads of people would envy. Actor, Voice artist, Writer, Musician, Sailor. and more. All after being written off at a young age because of his dyslexia.
Of course, in real life, he’s more likely to be found resolving disputes than causing them. There’s one story about him that doesn’t get that much publicity- he actually resolved a trade dispute in France while he was in Provence on holiday.
What happened was, there was an ongoing dispute between the monks of Ganagobie Abbey, and the local flower sellers, represented by the Fédération Française des Artisans Fleuristes. They were annoyed that the monastery was dominating the flower trade in the area, as the monks were able to undercut the traders’ prices, by selling the produce of the monastery gardens. The Abbey, on their part, saw flower sales as a vital part of the income needed to sustain their secluded way of life, and to fund their charitable efforts. John de Lancie managed to step in as a neutral third party (while he was still on holiday) and broker an agreement that saw the abbey becoming the supplier to the local traders, an acceptable compromise which secured everyone’s livelihood. It sounds improbable, doesn’t it. that an outsider was able to resolve a long-running dispute during a brief stay in the area. I guess it just goes to show that only Q can prevent florist friars.
My bet this is some ploy by someone trying to weaponize memmetics. It was inevitable that someone would take the first steps to this process. I’m just surprised they haven’t contracted Susan Blackmore and company to work on it. Like forget Project Manhattan, Qanon might be much more devastating to the species for centuries to come if others follow suit with similar weaponized memes.
I think QAnon is a creative writing club and competition for title of King Wacko. It’s resume building for aspiring trolls to get in on the big money in the right wing media industry with FOX the ultimate prize. That’s probably how Hannity got his start.
This fits in really well with Trump and his appeal. I realized that Trump’s constant need to talk about how terrible everything is - every deal, every law, every situation the government finds itself in is bad - wasn’t just a way of tearing down Obama. It’s his way of building himself up - no one else was astute enough to see how bad things were (and therefore, no one else could possibly solve the problem, as no one else was delusional - er, perceptive - enough to have even seen it in the first place). He’s the first conspiracy president, and his followers, in supporting him, are buying into his conspiracies and feeling special as well.
This whole “maybe QAnon is a leftist prank” is QAnon-grade wishful thinking that would be virtually impossible to prove and really easy to fake. While on vacation this past week, I came upon different novel, by Peter Benchley, that could just as well been the inspiration of whatever nihilist started this meme, called ‘Q Clearance’.
This is just a thirsty, predictable turn by 4chan shitlords to disavow their glib, nihilistic dumb-assery now that you can really smell the fascism in the air.
I don’t think that the problem in this instance is so much deference to authority, as is is confirmation bias. These people embrace that which confirms their preconceived beliefs and discount any evidence that challenges those beliefs. A recognition of one’s own personal biases and fighting against them is a critical skill.
Yeah once you’re familiar with the broad strokes of how conspiracy and BS claims function, and the psychology running through it all. And you read a couple of the classics on the way this all functions on the right (https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/). This isn’t new. And it isn’t a function of Trump. If anything Trump is the culmination of a half century right wing tradition of working with the crazies. Conspiracy and irrational thought are completely endemic to the modern conservative movement, basically having been hard wired into the thing as it was forming.
And all makes a terrible lot of sense.
You have a group of people. Who over the course of the last half century have seen core social and ideological beliefs steadily move from good and right and morally superior to being unfashionable and just wrong by every measure. Much of the conservative position has shifted subtly from preserving something, or stalling change. To actively rolling things back. At the same time their kids or grand-kids are not doing as well as they were at the same stage in life (or they themselves are not doing as well their parents and grandparents did). And you’ve got that erosion of privileged that they can’t seem to distinguish from genuine opression. They’re not getting the special treatment they used to, or they imagine they used to be due.
In that situation people are going to cast about for something. It can’t be that you were wrong. Or that so many people genuinely disagree with you. It can’t be that factors beyond your control are responsible for where you’re at. Rather than your socio-economic position being earned, permanent and hereditary. It can’t be that the politics you pushed bit you in the ass.
You’re gonna start looking for something that gives you that moral high ground and that sense of superiority back. You’re going to look for an excuse. A simplistic, responsibility absolving, outside factor. That did this to you. You’re going to do it in a way that allows you to preserve as many core beliefs as possible.
And hey conspiracy is there! It almost doesn’t matter what it is. Psuedo-history, crypto-zoology, UFOs. The classics are nearly as shot through with right wing and white supremacist ideas and connections as the political ones and all this alt right shit.
So yeah. Trump is a product of that dynamic rather than the other way around. Though he is basically telling those people he’s going to give them back their precious bodily fluids.
