That reminds me, Jade Helm is scheduled to wind up today, so how’s life under your new military overlords. Oh wait…
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To me, its cheapening the real bad stuff that happens in the world by turning it into pulp fiction. Simplifying the motivations and events into a bad James Bond movie.
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The fact that the term exists at all – as a shorthand for “All the things you sheeple think you know about $X are a myth, what fools you are to believe the media sleight-of-hand” (choosing event $X according to personal taste) – is a symptom of something weird. Or the “truther movement”. As if it’s a coherent, legitimate philosophy.
Hey Johnny, what are you Truthering about?
Whadda you got?
UPDATE: And then there is the phenomenon of the Conspiracy Cruise, where passengers can encounter other Truthers with completely different, incompossible conspiracies, and all have a good time together with their shared sense of access to esoteric secrets.
“Belief” in these theories does not seem to be the objective. Rather, they are ideas to play with. For entertainment purposes only . A Conspiracy Cafeteria, with a long list of catered conspiracies — presented as a range of alternative realities, all equally valid and equally plausible — It’s like, how much more post-modern could this be? and the answer is none. None more post-modern.
Tss, tss, tss! Logic is the instrument of choice of the manipulators.
Pretty sure my first post to be censored on boingboing happened in response to your original, much shorter post.
Really unfortunate. as much as i disagree with your original sentiment, and still do with your second (albiet a little less so), i don’t think deleting my comment without warning’s really not the way to go.
kinda reminds me of the little paper shoots winston used to use at his work.
I’d counter that “Battlefield America” offers far less challenges than the Middle East theater (or almost anywhere else in the world).
- We already speak the language
- We have a functioning infrastructure
- We don’t have to establish global logistical chain
- The US is mapped and plotted with established addresses
- We have access to all existing information on US citizens’ identities
- To tack on to the last point, the strongest proponents gun rights and anti-establishment elements have not been shy about identifying themselves on Facebook, forums, and other arenas
- The borders aren’t as porous as Syria / Iraq / Afghanistan, and there won’t be droves of foreign fighters seeking a jihad for “the gun”, praise be its ammunition
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If the NRA could sell them guns directly, they would.
This is an interesting insight; some denialists are political - they have an agenda that predates the denialism, and they are intentionally and knowingly trying to spread falsehoods to support their political agenda. I would count many holocaust deniers in this category. Then there are others for whom the political agenda is secondary, even contrived and often confused. These people seem to be mostly driven by mental illness - a mind that is disconnected from reality but scurrying to find the connections between things, the purpose and the explanation of things their minds can’t quite grasp. It would be comforting to think this is somehow a reaction to tragedies that are just so overwhelming that this denialism is just a protectionism, but I don’t think that’s the origin. It seems instead to come from a real inability to think sanely or rationally, and instead attribute (as you put it) events to a “higher power” that, instead of the usual God/Satan, is some other external force like aliens or government, which take the place of Satan in the belief system. The origins of these beliefs do seem to be of the same irrational type - denialism is almost an extreme, twisted version of religion. It’s a faith-spectrum disorder of a sort. I think you can see the connection in someone like Kim Davis, who is clearly unhinged and right at the cusp of believing that God is commanding her and that the “gays” are behind this great conspiracy to ruin this nation. I don’t know what it says about the human brain that we have this part of us that, though sometimes generating good outcomes, is often the origin of so much hate, but it’s interesting to explore philosophically if not medically. Perhaps someday we will find a treatment for denialists, and in doing so, also be able to cure religion.
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Also, while we have what I consider an unreasonable number of firearms kicking around, there aren’t hundreds to thousands of unacconted for 10-20 year old, functional war machines kicking around from previous conflicts. We don’t have tens of thousands of cluster munitions and artillery shells just waiting to be scavenged for IEDs, and we generally have excellent security where such equipment is warehoused.
I mean when was the last time you’ve seen just some dude who isn’t a collector or anything showing off his AA battery setup with a few thousand rounds of 70mm shells?
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Remember, we’re discussing a country where a presidential bid is impossible without professing superstitious belief.
Clearly rational analysis isn’t a highly respected behaviour
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They are?! Those sneaky lizard fucks!
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Isn’t the quote “those albino shape-shifting lizard BITCHES”?
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This seems like a situation where a slippery situation-specific straw-man “They” is at work.
If by, “They”, you merely mean people and politicians opposed to the current liberal state of gun access; “They” can’t just take your guns because they’d never manage to pass the necessary laws and don’t have sufficient support within the military, police, or assorted clandestine agencies to just do it extralegally.
However, if by “They” you mean some sort of sinister conspiracy capable of faking multiple spree killings without anyone(except a few brave truthers) being the wiser; then you do have to wonder why they can’t just use their Illuminati powers and Obama Youth to round up the gun owners and send them to the FEMA camps.
The dodgy bit is that the conspiracy theory requires having it both ways: a political force that can’t get anything done in Congress, and has inadequate extrajudicial resources; also has an extremely capable psyops arm that can easily generate highly plausible spree killings, with enough accuracy or enough clout to silence even first responders and entire communities.
Aside from its frankly nasty effects(encouraging keyboard warriors to harass victims of these events, to protect their guns!); that’s what annoys me about this conspiracy theory, and those like it.
Any time you need your enemy to be both nigh-omnipotent in their ability to pull off sophisticated schemes and sufficiently feckless in just doing things the obvious way that they need those sophisticated schemes; you start to have a really incoherent theory.
There are conspiracies; but they don’t tend to straddle this contradiction: the good ones usually come out of situations where the conspirators have vastly insufficient legal authority to get what they want; but substantial resources(usually the allegiance and assets of military and/or intelligence figures if in government, criminals, terrorists, revolutionaries, etc. if out of government) to work extra-legally. If you have both, though, or even just sufficient legal authority, it’s not a ‘conspiracy’ anymore, and doing sneaky wet-ops stuff is just self-indulgent. You pass some laws and call it a day.
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Gilbert, Gilbert. Don’t talk that way about the Royal Family. Don’t you love our queen?
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Normally, I’d agree; but Trump is doing pretty damn well among evangelicals with his ‘open enthusiasm for Mammon and carnal indulgence’ platform, so who can tell?
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No, I would sack her and turn Buckingham palace into flats for key workers. She can have a council flat in Peckham and a standard state pension.
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Well said.
Though the “sure I’m paranoid; but am I paranoid enough?” crowd will say that the apparent ineptitude is just part of their cover story.
The brighter among them will just keep developing more extensive delusional systems for fun and profit. Especially the latter.
Not sure this would apply to drone pilots sitting a thousand miles away behind their joysticks…
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They called off actually taking over Texas because “the people” were on to them. They’ll cook up some other way to take over Texas…
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