Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/14/excellent-atlantic-article-abo.html
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Sadly while Stewart Brand’s expression “Information wants to be free!” turned out to be largely true, it neglected to carry any warning about whether information wants to be accurate.
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Even if, Universe willing, we can get trumplethinskin out of office come November, IF he goes peacefully, a very big if IMHO, you just know he will immediately launch a radio/tv show and his base will eat that shit up. The conspiracies we see now will look like childs play in comparison.
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He forgot the corollary - “Bullshit also wants to be free!”
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“Ignorance Is Strength”
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I’m hoping for a heart attack or other fatal health malady. Then they’ll all scramble to see who can fill his ridiculous clown shoes.
I still can’t wrap my head around this QAnon bullshit. Every time I try to read an article on it, this one included, I get only so far in before I can’t take it anymore. I mean, it’s just so fucking dumb how can anyone take any of it seriously?!? That dude went to a pizza restaurant ready to liberate child sex slaves because someone on the internet said the words “pizza” and “pasta” meant “girls” and “little boys” in some intercepted emails from Podesta? That’s usually about the time my brain shuts down. If there’s more to it that makes any sense in the slightest I’ll never get there…
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Or more simply, “98% of information is bullshit.”
Reality is routinely twisted to accommodate chosen beliefs. We are all prone to that to some degree but those people turned it into a competitive sport. I think many if not most “normal” Trump supporters realize he’s a bastard, but he’s their bastard promoting their interests, as they see it. But this QAnon madness, it’s grotesque. How abysmally poor a judge of character do you have to be to see a greedy, sleazy, compassionless egomaniac as some white knight who stands alone against forces of darkness? It’s hard for me to wrap my head around that. It’s bizarre and it’s scary what human mind can do to itself.
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And thus, by definition, not information.
Bullshit ≠ information and vice versa
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Once Trump is out, hopefully but not certainly following the election this November, I expect that many, especially the Evangelicals will drop him like yesterday’s trash as he will no longer have the power to push their agenda forward.
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I think it’s a way to justify supporting Trump to yourself in the face of him being manifestly unfit for the job.
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None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.
Nonsense. By the turn of the century these were well-worn ideas in science fiction.
Consider this chapter from John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968):
HOW TO
"Hydroxy fuel-cells of the type used to power GM trucks up to 2 1/2 ton capacity and certain foreign imports, notably the Honda series ‘Fuji’ and ‘Kendo’, can be turned into either a flame-gun or a bomb. In the case of the GM version, a file-cut should be made at base of valve A (see diagram) and pipes B and C re-routed to follow the dotted lines. A slow-match attached to a piece of string should be placed at point D, suspending a carborundum whetstone. When this falls into contact with brake-disc E it will spark the leaking gas and
"The plastic insulation marketed by General Technics as ‘Lo-Hi Sleevolene’ is recognisable by its pink-pearl colour. Macerate each pound weight of the stripped insulation in 1 pt. absolute alcohol. The resultant doughy sludge is heat-stable up to 20?below the average flashpoint of commercial butane but thereafter dissociates with release of approx. 200 times its original volume of gases . , .
“A large number of recent manufactured products employ honeycomb aluminium sheet bonded with a European adhesive sold here under the name ‘Weldigrip’. This tends to fail when exposed to gamma. Radio Test Sources Inc.'s catalogue item BVZ26 incorporates a cobalt-60 emitter designed for inspecting high-carbon steel castings up to 9” thick. It should be placed close to a critical joint… .
"GT’s catalogue item RRR17 is a heavy-weather sealant applied to the underside of public transport vehicles. A little battery acid held in place with a sac of tackythene will cause it to attack the metal it’s in contact with …
"Minnesota Mining’s new sulphur-reclaiming bacterium, strain UQ-141, can be caused to sporulate simply by with-holdng sulphur compounds. The organisms can then be kept in a domestic freezer for up to two months. Suggested uses include …
"GT is currently offering lox in quart flasks at a price 10% below its competitors. Wind the flask with magnesium flash-wire (16 turns/inch) and connect suitable igniter and tinier. Applications will be numerous …
"Japind’s LazeeLazer monochrome unit can be modified as shown in the diagram. Depending on what grade of multiplier plug is incorporated in the circuit, voltages of up to 30,000 can be obtained. At full load the unit burns out in 1.5 sec., but careful pre-sighting will…
"A tailored bacterium from the British ICI list, catalogue . ref. 5-100-244, is exceptional in that it can be mutated at home. A solution of 1/1000 HC1 in distilled water breaks one of the RNA bonds. Application of the modified form leads to rapid plasticisation of virtually all thermo-setting plastics . . .
" ‘Sterulose’, Johnson & Johnson’s new medical wadding, makes an ideal stabiliser for home-brewed nitroglycerine. Wrap each wad in paper soaked and dried in a solution of potassium nitrate or use fulminate caps for detonators …
"The soles of Bally of Switzerland’s new ‘Stridex’ shoes are made of a compound that, ignited, emits dense clouds of choking black smoke. Certain grades of pot burn with a hot enough tip for the roach to start the process, to wit…
“Wrap a piece of flexion (preferably blue, as the dye helps) around 1 carton of 12 compressed-air bulbs of the type used in a General Foods whipped-cream dispenser. Coat with ‘Novent’ plugging compound to make a ball about 1” diam. The covering prevents the detectors at the garbage plant from reclaiming the metal of the bulbs. On a test run at Tacoma the resulting shrapnel put the disposal furnaces out of action for six hours …
"You probably heard the Bay Area Rapitrans was stalled for a full day. The diagram shows what did it Placed on the track-bed, the device emits signals that tell the line computer a train is permanently stuck in that station …
"A signal injector powered by two dry cells can be left in a public phone-booth and without interfering with normal operation of the phone (thus delaying detection) will cause up to 250 random calls per hour over the area served by the local exchange …
"A parasite emitter light enough to hang under a child’s kite or 2-ft. diam. hot-air balloon will repeat a 10-sec. slogan for up to 1 hour on regular TV sound wavelengths. See schematic …
"Empty one self-heating ‘Camp with Campbell’ soup-can by perforating it at the point shown in the picture, NOT conventionally at the top. Refill with any explosive or flammable compound flashing below 93°C. Close hole with surgical waterproof tape. On puncturing the can will become a grenade with a delay of 7 to 12 sec. according to contents
"The adhesive used to seal capsules containing GT alumi-nophage is vulnerable to acetic acid, A delay-timer can thus be made by mixing water and vinegar in suitable ratio …
"United Steel’s monofilament reinforcement yarn V/RP/ SU is magnetosensitive. A timer activating an electromagnet could give the stuff applications e.g. on power-lines or in computers, inducing random cross-connections . . .
"An aerosol suspension of Triptine in peanut oil acquires interesting electrical properties. Try smearing it on a dust-precipitator …
"There are static-dischargers on the metal frame of the bridge at Kennedy Loading Point, Ellay. There should be a use for two or three hundred unwanted volts . . .
"The missile-bombardment doors on the North Rockies Acceleratube are sensitive to gamma. The sensor is in a large black container at the eastern entry and at the western it’s in a green conical thing. Those doors weigh over a thousand ton apiece …
"Near the junction of Eleazar Freeway with Coton Hudson Drive the computer cables serving the traffic signals over 120 sq. mi. pass within a foot of the surface. There’s a hydrant sign …
"Eastman Kodak is offering an interesting new collapsed-benzene compound. Wherever there are strained bonds there’s energy waiting to be tapped. Pass the word when you find out how to spring the poor captives …
"Don’t scrap your last-year’s model Frigidaire! Units 27-215-900 through 27-360-500 employed a coolant liquid that was quietly withdrawn when they discovered it was capable of being mixed with Vaseline to make a gel - and the gel burns at over 500? We suggest using it for paint. It turns a nice pale green colour and will sustain its own oxidation in films thinner than .001 inch …
"If you have re-evacuation facilities, note that the electron gun in current Admiral TV sets can be modified to deliver a linear instead of a fanned jet, What it does to a sensitive circuit is nobody’s business, but it ought to be …
"Table salt in GTs solvent 00013 does very interesting things to copper, aluminium and brass …
"Try cross-connecting leads 12 and 27 on a Wontner electroplating unit. But make sure you’re not in the building when the power goes back on. Cyanide is fierce stuff …
"They’ve precautioned most traffic-carrying tunnels out this way against smoke, aerosol radio-sources, control-circuit jammers and incendiaries. They still haven’t coped with Minnesota Mining’s strain RS-122, which turns concrete into a fine powder, nor GTs ‘Catalight’. an oxidising catalyst for asphalt and related compounds. Thought you’d like to know
– From a selection of duplicated, photocopied, holographed, offset, lithoed and printed leaflets on file at Ellay police HQ
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The more you look into it, the more stupid it gets. These morons insisted that the child sex trafficking ring was being run out the Washington DC pizza restaurant’s basement when the restaurant has no basement.
That’s before you get into the whole concept of Il Douche as a secret crusading hero playing a 5-dimensional chess game against the forces of secular humanist evil.
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I read enough of this to see it for what it clearly is-
hot, steaming, fanatical bullshit.
So many gullible morons looking for a sign in this country, because their existences encourage practiced stupidity.
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It really puts the lie to the “marketplace of ideas” trope. Justice Holmes assumed the existence of a rational “market” where everyone had equal access to information, and the only thing that remained was to persuade rational-thinking people with your argument. John Stuart Mill made the same assumptions.
But what happens when people just make up information? Either negligently or maliciously? What happens when the people you assumed were rational are swayed not by the cogency of your argument, but by theatrics, hyperbole, anger, and jealousy? Clearly Holmes was being charitable—there were firebrand populists well before 1919—but the Internet, with its low barriers to entry, makes spreading disinformation (which is neither true nor false but exists to propagate what used to be called FUD) much, much easier.
This problem has long been recognized. See this Duke Law Journal article from 1972—although the author believes the marketplace skews the other way, toward entrenched institutions, which it probably did before the Internet democratized the ability to spew crap into the aether.
EDIT: From footnote 30 of the above-mentioned Duke Law article (citations omitted):
Holmes’s marketplace image does not necessarily emphasize the triumph of objective truth through rationality. The market can be viewed as a method of approaching truth that is preferable, in spite of its imperfection, to any method that relies on governmental determinations of the truth. A slightly different view of the marketplace posits that it does not matter whether any objective truth exists. Those views accepted in the marketplace are defined as true; those rejected are by definition false. This has been called the “survival” theory of truth. Viewed in this way, the marketplace is more egalitarian than rational. Individuals have the right to determine truth or falsity not necessarily because they are qualified to do so, but because it “is a deduction from the basic American agreement that public issues shall be decided by universal suffrage.”
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I think you my be overly optimistic in your assessment. For some, the urge to hurt the “other” is very strong, and having had a taste of it, they are unlikely to give it up unless forced. We have unleashed a beast (ironically, not Trump. He is just a symptom.) that will be very difficult to cage again.
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I confess I have never really had a firm grasp on what defines QAnon. I know it lead to the guy with a gun at a pizza place to save children from a non-existent basement. But beyond that, it’s a bit hazy to me how it started and where it sits on a Venn diagram with other right wing groups like the tiki torch bros, the middle age gray beards with big guns, the gamer gate assholes, etc…
I also confess seeing the unbridled hate of the right gives me a panic attack so I don’t typically muck around in that swamp for my own mental health.
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I have fantasized about Il Duce contracting the virus, but thinking it over I see that as the messiah of this BS Cult, Trump has a win-win with his worshipers. If he gets it and survived, he’s a superman and, see, it was no worse than the flu, like I said. If he gets it and croaks, he’s a martyr assassinated by the Deep Democratic State and it’s time to take your AK-47s to the barricades.
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