QAnon flopped in Japan because it's a piece-of-junk conspiracy theory

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Same in Korea. It would have been very odd to find anyone, young or old, with a positive view of Trump, until about a year ago I started to hear Q-Anon and Q-Anon-adjacent content from older Koreans, those who get a firehose stream of forwarded Youtube clips and had disavowed “mainstream media.” Q is never mentioned, because it would be a trigger word that would get their children to intervene. But it’s repackaged as “patriotic” news, for a conservative audience (that believes the current South Korean administration are secret puppets of the North Korean regime).

US Q-Anon material (especially stuff about China and Biden) spreads from older Korean American Church members to Koreans in South Korea, usually in the form of long texts, Youtube videos, and image memes, all forwarded through KakaoTalk. It can be easily argued that older Koreans were more receptive to this because of receptivity to “end-times prophecies” (carbon-copies of American Evangelical teachings on the subject brought in during the 80s and 90s) and because that generation believes America saved Korea from Communist takeover. (Hard to argue with that)

The dynamic may be different in Japan, but the tantalizing desire to have “secret knowledge” to the “one thing” that explains everything and promises that everything will be made right, is universal.

Especially to a generation that to some part have missed the boat to prosperity.

Meanwhile, Seoul’s mayoral race has this guy in THIRD PLACE. I am not kidding. You’d think this was a joke, but he’s already run for President, ALMOST got someone into the national legislature. He has a cult following, and in my estimation is definitely a cult. His organization is called the “Palace of Heaven”

I think we all learned from Trump that just because it’s unimaginable doesn’t mean the unimaginable can’t become reality.

His main platform is a Universal Basic Income of $1500 per month, plus other monetary perks (I think it was $100,000 per childbirth, and a monthly bonus stipend for dating singles) for cutting government way way down, and “leave the rest to the market economy.” His campaign slogan is “The government isn’t running out of money, it just has a lot of crooks!”

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The same Youtube recommendation AI funnel is creating whole generations of zombies. We should have a global class-action suit against Google for destroying democracy and stealing our parents from us.

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I am not at all surprised to see that in Korea too. Epoch Times has a really sophisticated multilingual media operation. My friends in Taiwan and Hong Kong are seeing a lot of the same thing too. They lean heavily into the anti-China, anti-Communism angle while promoting fascists in the west as “the answer.” The western media has done a few articles about Epoch Times here and there, but it’s impossible to ignore them here. People in the message boards are quoting Epoch Times verbatim and posting links to what appear to be actual professional news sources on YouTube from the media wing of Falun Gong.

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From Bill Bryson’s “In a Sunburnt Country”, the speculation that Aum Shinriko had developed an atomic bomb.

Consider just one of those stories [about Australia] that did make it into the New York Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. It happens that at 11.03 p.m. local time on the night of 28 May 1993 seismograph needles all over the Pacific region twitched and scribbled in response to a very large-scale disturbance near a place called Banjawarn Station in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia. Some long-distance lorry drivers and prospectors, virtually the only people out in that lonely expanse, reported seeing a sudden flash in the sky and hearing or feeling the boom of a mighty but far-off explosion. One reported that a can of beer had danced off the table in his tent.

[eta: source]

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I had a feeling this might be the case.

In the earlier days when Qanon was still gaining notoriety, a guy in Japan I follow on Twitter reposted a tweet, I think related to a hobby we mutually enjoy. Reading down through the replies to the original tweet, I came across a comment by someone, apparently Japanese, who had a QAnon hashtag in her profile. At the time I was vaguely baffled by this, as the bits I’d heard about QAnon seemed very U.S.-centric.

Still, it may not be that Matt doesn’t know what he’s talking about completely, so much as that his opinions may be informed by a particular incredulous segment of Japanese society. Or people who view it as an insult to national pride or an insult against all Japanese.

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His focus on Twitter (and Mu… which is like asking Fortean Times what they think about QAnon) suggests that, at the very least, he is not looking in the right places. He seems to have decided that QAnon flopped and then found sources to back that conclusion up, without doing a deep dive into the depths of the Japanese internet. He mentions 2chan, but he either hasn’t dredged through it or has written that off as the work of bots (which is technically possible - the rate at which pro-Q messages got likes suggests that at least part of it was bots).

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Anyone making that argument only has a passing familiarity with conspiracy theory and pseudo-academics. Both are shot through with political and racialist ideas, both are intimately political in their aims and effects.

More over Q is yet another warmed over take on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the many secret groups control the world (ie Jews) claims it spawned.

Take the moon landing hoax theory, this is almost always the comparison point. It’s “harmless”, it’s not political. Thus conspiracy theories are like that, and Q can’t be a conspiracy theory because it isn’t.

But the moon landing claims are deeply seated in broader conspiracy theories about One World Government, The New World Order, Illuminati, Majestic 12 and other “deep state” style claims of secret sinister groups controlling the world behind the scenes (ie Jews). As well as being very popular in Q itself.

Those same secret government ideas helped fuel the American Militia movement. Christian Nationalist and White Supremacist groups of which supported and lead to the OKC Bombings. These ideas have also been embedded in European far right and Fascist movements in Europe since the 80’s. Often sitting at the root of scary claims about Globalism and more explicitly Zionist influence.

UFO claims in isolation of government secrets. Paticularly of the Ancient Aliens sorts, are typically built around claims that non-white non-European people’s would be incapable of developing the cultures and civilizations they developed. Basically devolving into justifications for colonialism.

Even things like cryptozoology are inherently tied at this point to extremist religious movements. Particularly through the lense of young earth creationism. Anything involving late surviving dinosaurs is pushed mainly by Christian groups who see this as a way to disprove evolution. Even bigfoot is heavily pushed as part of attempts to find evidence for Biblical giants, Nephilim and Cain. And thus prove the bible.

And of course these also have their global secret government flavors.

The argument rests on comparing broader systems of conspiracy (Q) with it’s individual claims (voter fraud) and saying that one is “just” a conspiracy theory while the other is not because politics and movement. But this has always been the way these things work, and incorporation of such things has always been a feature of fringe political and social movements.

To the point where acceptance and promotion of conspiracy claims is part of our definition and understanding of fascism.

The discrepancy there is not that Q is something different. It’s that these commentators are looking at the simplest, most broadly accepted, visible ideas within a given conspiracy system or movement. And comparing it to the whole shebang.

It’s an inherent way these work. Simpler, more plausible claims sit at the forefront. The base level. For Q these are things like GOP voter fraud claims, old claims about the Clintons, the basic form of the deep state, and pedos are everywhere.

Those front line claims tend to engender broad, often casual belief in the broader public and serve as entry points and recruitment pitches. With more complexity, less plausible claims, and additional often borrowed ideas added as one becomes more involved and more dedicated.

If you look at stuff like Scientology they’ve actually systemized and monetized that structure. Cults and religious movements often do.

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The bloodtype zodiac is interesting. It’s actually a bit weird to see stuff like “the blood type diet” where folks think if you have O- blood you need different nutrition from someone with AB+ blood etc.

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This seems highly likely, given his profile. He’s a white Japanophile who’s “specialty” is “translating Japanese culture for white people”. This is someone deeply invested in the belief of the superiority of Japanese culture. He’s clearly starting with that premise and trying to cherry pick support for it. I mean, his book is “How Japanese Pop Culture Conquered The World” for fuck’s sake. A little on the nose.

The whole premise that a group of people defined by arbitrary cultural and geographical lines are immune to a particular cult because it’s “too stupid” is flawed from the start.

Cults and conspiracies are a result of sloppy thinking for which all of humanity is equally wired.

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So I’m curious about this. Constantine was obviously a major change in how Christianity worked. But for instance he was leading armies under its banner. That is so much a change from the early churches with their proto-communism and martyrs and so on, it seems hard to imagine there wasn’t some intermediate step. Were Constantine’s armies really the first time Christians were ok with killing people?

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If there were a nuclear explosion above ground, it’d have been noticed instantly by satellite observatories that are actively monitoring for such.

Also the fresh fallout would have shown up in airscrubbers all over the world within a few days.

Nuclear bombs can’t be hidden on earth by exploding them in remote places. They are too unsubtle.

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Oh, yeah! I don’t know why that didn’t immediately come to mind. I’ve actually heard sentences like, “Most teachers must be AB, because they’re weird.”

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I’m type A, so that must mean I’m a real go-getter!

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That particular piece of woo comes from Japan.

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In fact the results show up in everything. Many Boingers know how pre-WW2 steel salvaged from sunken ships is highly valuable for science because it has lower inherent radiation than anything made after the bombs. It’s also recently been learned than we can date individual cells in every human body by how much Carbon 14 is in them, another byproduct of the bombs. Radiolab just did a fascinating story on this. The ambient radiation of every single thing on the planet went up a tiny amount after the atomic age.

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Yeah, low background steel is very important in big physics experiments like Neutrino observatories.

Also fallout shows up in teeth. They did a study on pre and post hiroshima baby teeth and found that people’s teeth before atmospheric nuclear detonations had lower radiation levels.

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Yes, the story turned out to be wild speculation. An interesting bit of speculation, but wild nevertheless.

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