And revolutionary societies such as Revolutionary France or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Once all the real enemies of the revolution are gone, attention turns to revolutionaries who are not revolutionary enough.
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The nicest thing I can say about Putin is that he’s repaired his nation from the harm we did in the 90s installing Yeltsin in power and that he makes the most of soft power since Russia is actually pretty weak. So, to coin a phrase, no fan of the Rodina and its maximum leader.
That said, how is Russia’s interference in our elections worse than the disinformation and worse we get from our leader and the establishment media in normalizing him and echoing his awful statements with minimal criticism at best? The latter has an official endorsement that the former can never have. Bonus: Our elected officials are now putting on social networks fake videos and false quotes – everything Russia (and China and Iran) is doing. So… the establishment line is that that’s comparably okay.
Maybe I’m just a little offed up in the head, but I think the domestic BS is worse than anything any foreign power’s doing but it seems I’m wrong there.
I know all about that because of the IWW, who opened their membership to those who were turned away from the other unions. The other unions spent a lot of time and money fighting them too.
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They are coming from the same place; they coordinate with each other and amplify each-other’s messages. They are on the same team, at least when it comes to disinformation.
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It goes way beyond calling Biden a poo-poo pants and saying Trump is a great guy.
Russia has also been hacking into election systems. Potentially changing vote counts (or not registering certain votes), or removing people from the roles (granted, that one is also a Republican strategy, and possibly only done after Trump specifically asked them to).
They also send disinformation about things like voting locations, voting times, etc, to try to trick certain people into missing deadlines, or failing to vote because they showed up at the wrong location or the wrong time, or not being able to vote because they brought wrong identification, or thinking they cannot vote because they were told they require some other identification that they do not have. (granted these are also republican strategies, including sending out “official” dis-information directly from the post office lying about dates aimed at causing people to miss deadlines)
So, on the face of it, I guess you are correct, Russia is really only doing what Republicans already do (or try to do) but providing technical expertise for things like computer hacking and targeting that Republicans otherwise lack the capability of.
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actually Ive read that part of the early persecution of christians actually was some of this idea of eating babies and drinking blood. not surprising if you worship a baby god and talk about the body and blood as being literal rather than just symbolic like the catholic church does. and just imagine them doing this stuff in secret back in the early days. thats not to say this is totally separate from antisemitism… in the early days christians were more obviously an offshoot of judaism.
“Go nowhere among the Gentiles,” Jesus said.
That’s not entirely true. My father and his brothers Anglicised their name so that they could do business in areas they thought might be antisemitic, and I’ve lived in some places at some times where I’ve been grateful for my father’s decision.
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Hacking voter records and election machines is not what the media are focusing on; far more focus is the social network BS. Of course, a heavy focus on voter records and machines risks noting how vulernable — that is, crappy — our systems are. The implicit message would be that we can’t protect our own systems. Which maybe is actually design, not bug.
As an addendum to that. Jones had more than once over the preceding couple of years ordered large groups of followers to drink Koolaid and wine that he said was poison. Only to reveal it wasn’t afterwards. Both before arriving in Jonestown and after. Once in Jonestown he regularly gave speeches claiming the US government was coming to kill them all, and laid out options for how to escape, including “revolutionary suicide”. IIRC he at various points ordered his inner circle to murder other members, only to rescind the request.
It’s considered a mass murder, not a suicide. And it’s definitely more complex than the simple story a lot of people get. But it’s a way better example for this sort of thing when you get the full detail. Jones spent years getting these people on board with the idea of killing themselves and others. The residents at Jonestown were the “base”, the true believers. There were thousands more members who weren’t privy to Jones directly, and who weren’t at Jonestown. Many left as Jones’ “tests” escalated.
Much of the resistance in the moment seems to have been driven by the fact that a lot of Jonestown residents had been insulated from Jones’ escalation while he was in the US. There was a split between those who had stayed with Jones as he traveled around, and those who’d been in Jonestown away from it for several years. But everyone knew what was happening, and that it was coming. Many of those children were forced by their own parents.
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“White Nights”, according to this source.
Yeah. That article doesn’t quite hit it though. The level of Jones’ paranoia, how long he worked this particular angle. And that while he framed it as a political message, the obsession with suicide and murder had more to do with Jones mental state and intense control of these people.
It’s definitely a more apt metaphor than most give it credit for. And I think the “not accurate” correction misses it as much as the blind obedience read. I mostly use, and hear it used, to refer to the internalization and acceptance of misinformation and bias. Often to the point of self destruction.
Which is exactly what happened.
Jonestown is a crazy good example of the way false and extreme belief propagates and is accepted in a group. With all the different levels of involvement that go with that. From the small group of hardcore followers who accept it all, the broader group that balks at the most extreme elements, and the complacent whole that accepts the broad strokes while looking the other way on all the damage.
If anyone is interested in a full, deep breakdown of the whole nasty story I can’t recommend Last Podcast on The Left’s series on Jonestown enough.
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That sounds like AOL on child-safe lockdown mode!
Sadly even YouTube Kids isn’t all that appropriate for kids.
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My bad. I reflected on this on the wake of all the stuff that people had to do after 9/11 to survive in America like pretending to be Italian etc and I can see how crazy people can be motivated on acting their violence just by seeing a name they deem too “foreign”. It’s terrifying.
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They are not crazy, just hateful and extremely privileged.
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Has anyone ever identified the actual idiot “Q”?
Imagine what outing that moron and how they made it all up would do to shut down their idiocy movement.
Anyone know plausibly how one could do that? What would it take?
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Full name is Qvujo. One of those alphabetic cypher things where you just shift the letters a bit.
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Re: Jim Jones. Back in the day, I occupied a cheap room just down the street from Fillmore Auditorium and People’s Temple. My depraved social circle included some of Jones’ flock but I didn’t join. If they’d had more free meals, I might have been tempted.
Conspiracy theories destroy lives. Beware.
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Typically it’s accomplished by checking IPs, domain registration, or tying other identifiable accounts to the posts. By language use, personal references etc. Then basically corroborating by trailing through publicly available information about suspected sources, social media activity and the like.
The other angle is targeting known people involved with publication. Leaks from that direction or things like private communications often reveal they know who it is.
It’s complicated with Q because of how 4chan works, there are no logins. So posts are not neccisarily tied to a particular poster or series of posts. As the Q identity was simply signed at the end of posts, pretty much anyone could do so. And so long as they mimicked the style well enough it would pass. Because of that it’s a lot more complicated
The going theory is there were many people posting as Q, with “real” Q determined more by which posts were accepted than any connections to a particular poster. There were a lot of “fake” Qs, numerous claimants and other “leakers” claiming to corroborate that have been identified. But it’s entirely possible that the original Q never made more than one post or was part of a coordinated group troll that took off.
Once everything moved to 8chan a main Q took to identifying themselves with a particular, difficult to fake tag. Which makes it more feasible to tie the series of posts to something else. Current thinking seems to be that the 8chan founders themselves are either Q or know and coordinate with Q directly. And the 8chan Q has been tied to most of the most influential Q posts in various ways. Though not neccisarily the earliest ones.
It’s likely that if we did identify exactly who current Q is, some other subset of Q posts would suddenly become “real” Q.
There are all sorts of unidentified, anonymous sources like this in conspiracy. Because at base it’s as simple as sending a letter or dropping a line to a particularly active or prominent member of the scene. If it garners their interest, and they put it out and generate popularity. Others will pick it up and expand on it, even if you never involve yourself or give it another thought. Often enough it’s that initial contact that does so to satisfy demands for more information and keep the positive attention they themselves get going.
Q is just a faster, messier, internet bound version of that.
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