This stuff is as fascinating as it is horrifying, but I worry about reading too much of it in case it somehow gets on me.
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More than anything, the current state of things reminds me more and more of the Locke/Demosthenes subplot from Enders Game. Who would have thought Cards vision of an internet where savant teenagers could have outsized influence on real political movements would be so on point?
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This is critical to the humanist ideal – understanding and sympathy for all humanity, and especially for the oddball, the outcast, the Other.
And not just in a philosophical sense.
When we marginalize the Other, alienate and cast out the Other, we risk making ourselves into monsters. To pick a dire example: serial killers were typically abused and neglected as children.
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Ah, THAT usage of the term ‘information’ 
“Information wants to be free, but bullshit pays.”
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I have a lot of conservative ideas about arts and humanism and such*, so maybe this is where the following comes from. But here goes: it feels good to think you know things. And the world is more confusing than ever. And by confusing I mean rich in data related to existence, not just random stuff, but all this data which poses some sort of threat or asks for a decision. So we “cling” to what we know. And, sadly, if I don’t know very much, am ill-educated, where education includes contact with the Other, then I can cling to some pretty stupid shit.
This is how I self-talk myself through video chats with my mom, who has Fox News Brain Syndrome (pronounced /fun bees/).
*these ideas are things like “reading the right sort of stuff is good for you” and “intellectual effort is more or less an (ha-ha) an absolute good,” and “popular art can be appreciated like fine art if one makes the effort” but “fine art is probably better”; these ideas are flawed/challenged/vexed and so on, and I’m not sure I can defend my beliefs. But it beats the hell out of watching Fox News and reading Facebook.
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I particularly like the scientists and writers they interview in it. At one point, the flatearthers come up with a really great experiment to prove for sure one way or the other the shape of the Earth, and one guy is like “Wow! That’s a really, really, really good experiment.” Then the realization visibly sets in. “Oh man, they’re about to be disappointed.”
I definitely came away from the doc with more empathy for everyone involved. They just want to be special and have a community. And none of them come off as ingnorant or moronic. Just unaware of their cognitive biases.
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I have seen this and choked on the comments about how they want a leader “who would not give his daughter to a Jew.” Antisemitism, sexism and stupidity all rolled into one short statement. That pretty much sums it up, I guess.
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IIRC the big idea of QAnon is that Trump went undercover to investigate the globalist elite paedophile network, which would explain away any evidence that emerges of Trump molesting children .
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The same technique used by abusers in domestic violence is used in cults. You never start beating the shit out of your partner, you first get them seduced and convinced that they get you, share core values, care about you. Then they start chipping away objections and gaslighting your doubts about the red flags that start showing, introducing new stuff that would be shocking if they did at first and sunk cost bias carry on.
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I know, what pisses me off is that the real creepy powerful pedo gets excused while people walk heavily armed into pizza shops filled with families because fuck logic.
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He’s an expert on saying things that aren’t true, empowering the deranged, covering up official crimes?
While on his second Vietnam tour of duty from 1968 to 1969, the 31-year-old Army major was given the assignment of investigating the My Lai massacre. In this incident, more than 300 civilians were killed by U.S. Army forces. Colin Powell’s report seemed to refute the allegations of wrongdoing and stated, “Relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”
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'zactly. Actually didn’t know about the My Lai story. Wonder if he’s haunted by any second thoughts of what was enabled/justified by that legacy at this point. In a certain sense I do see where there is sort of a twisted (tragic) logic in listening to the perspectives of those who’ve experienced major mistakes first hand, or even been in charge of them - if they are trustworthy and have learned anything from them, (unlike the current current serial bank-rupter-in-chief).
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Let’s add Jacques Vallée to the mix.
Caveat: this is not a riff on UFOs, set that to one side. Vallée of course is known for his UFO research and theories, but he proposes that UFOs are examples of some larger phenomenon. (Ezekiel saw a Wheel of Fire in the sky.) From Wikipedia:
Vallée proposes that there is a genuine UFO phenomenon, partly associated with a form of non-human consciousness that manipulates space and time. The phenomenon has been active throughout human history, and seems to masquerade in various forms to different cultures. In his opinion, the intelligence behind the phenomenon attempts social manipulation by using deception on the humans with whom they interact.
They’re not sending us their best bits!
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Like most of the mainstream media critique of Q-Anon, this article fails to mention a crucial point: One of the key assertions of Q - that the Deep State intelligence apparatus had it out for Trump, as seen in the now thoroughly-discredited Russiagate conspiracy theory – turned out to be essentially correct.
This doesn’t mean that Q isn’t also full of lunatic and far-out theories that are unlikely to have any basis in fact whatsoever but – as Cory likes to say – the reason people believe in outlandish conspiracy theories is because so many of them are in fact true.
To really understand just how disastrously the mainstream media failed us on the Russiagate story I recommend everyone who spent the last several years in an MSNBC bubble check out the latest episode of System Update with Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald in which he comprehensively dissects “The Sham Prosecution of Michael Flynn.” https://youtu.be/xB26jj0jrjc
Matt Taibbi & Katie Halper’s Useful Idiots podcast with Izzie Award-winning journalist Aaron J. Mate is another good place to get the overview: https://youtu.be/Pq1tzjGUgpQ?t=1917
Mate: “The more evidence comes out the more it shows intelligence officials who started this whole thing & kept it going knew that they had no evidence of Trump/Russia collusion, and committed basically fraud to keep their investigation going.”
The irony! The Democrats and the intelligence services, with their loyal mainstream media courtiers, actually fed Q-Anon by pushing an evidence-free conspiracy theory for political ends. If Trump wins reelection this systemic failure will be at least partially responsible.
Note 1: The mainstream media starts with an assertion: that Q-Anon is simply a wacky conspiracy theory group with no basis in fact. In general, they don’t feel the need to defend this assertion; they just say it and expect (probably correctly) that their readers will accept it a priori. From what little I know personally about Q-Anon (I have a few friends who are into it), it appears to be a genuine collective intelligence organism, albeit a very primitive one overly populated by grifters and far-right fringe types to the point that it’s hard to extract anything useful from it. Others I respect believe it’s likely a counter-intelligence project designed to distract a group that could otherwise unite into a meaningful political force. I don’t know the truth and neither, presumably, do you.
Note 2: Please do not make any assumptions about my political allegiances – or lack thereof – based on the above discussion. I believe the “Left” and the “Right” both have major pathologies and my goal is to explore those and help everyone evolve to more integral thinking before it’s too late.
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That is nowhere near where QAnon started, don’t let people change the initial 4chan posts’ content to suit their own personal political pandering. QAnon began as a random shitpost that was 100% false on /pol/, period. It was literally just an extension of pizzagate to make it seem more legitimate, and the focus originally was not on a deep state but on Donald Trump personally outmaneuvering an entrenched ring of powerful Democrats who were a part of a child sex ring to put them all in jail while they tried to get Donald Trump for colluding with Russia.
It was literally anti-factual and contained no proof, and no matter who wants to refine the conspiracy and twist it to fit a better written and less obviously false political point it will always be a random screed on /pol/ with no legitimacy.
Anyone saying otherwise is at best someone who is too egotistical to allow themselves to be wrong about anything, but most likely it someone who will make their living off of stroking people’s entrenched conspiratorial beliefs.
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Sometimes the most helpful thing to say to facilitate healing and growth is… Nothing. Saying nothing shows respect. Saying nothing suggests you have something you could learn. The best way to mediate between the right and left is likely to avoid overtly trying to do so. Ymmv but this is my experience
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