Wow, this sounds interesting. I want to try it too. Thanks.
Lady Gaga's broach was like a 1:1 scale real sized gold pigeon.
My brain right now:
https://youtu.be/VX80zwkdEjo?t=7
I'm just going to enjoy the day. I'm so relieved.
remembering when MSNBC had a body language expert analyze Bernie‘s mannerisms to determine he commands a lurking horde of misogynists, but now he’s very nice and cute sitting in his chair.
i wish there were a body language expert around who could tell me what kind of lurking hordes i have inside of me
credibly advance a political effort that openly aims to redistribute material resources to poor people and I‘m sure you’ll find out!
cw csa conspiracy theorists, you know who it is, who else is disgusting enough to make conspiracies about this
This seems the most appropriate place to share this (both this post on this forum but also this forum) quite interesting and more than a little chilling free form analysis of QAnon as a malevolent reverse ARG (more coherent and relevant than that may sound maybe)
@Gaagaagiins#15024
I dont want to alarm anyone but the "Qanon as ARG" angle is one I've been exploring a lot. And it's an idea that seems to be catching on, people are taking note of this, and that makes me feel a little less crazy.
ARG makers have long worried about this culture and its relentless, wild-eyed nature. If players solve one puzzle, they crave the fun of tackling more, more, more. But they can wind up seeing puzzles that aren't puzzles. After the online group solved The Beast, one member suggested “solving 9/11.” Hon and the other mods quashed that rearguard action. But it showed how easily ARG culture can be hijacked toward delusional ends.
I find it facinating that this scary underside of ARGs has been a known issue in the community for almost 20 years, but only recently have we seen (or maybe noticed) that logic trick being weaponized. I've been doing a lot of digging into some very strange ARG projects over the last 15 years, focused on using these games to build "virtual tribes" (AKA "vibes", "vibecraft" [silly name, I know]) to organize action groups that can operate both online and in the real world (ARGs often have real world elements like having to travel to a specific place). Heady stuff and I'd mostly write that kind of thing off as people "LARPing" (spolier: I'm not really sure there is really such a thing as "LARPing", really. Often you can become what you pretend to be), but being able to draw even tenuous connections now between Qanon & something like Cicada 3301 is facinating and alarming for a few reasons, one of them being the feeling that by doing this kind of research I am now being drawn into a kind of ARG of my own creation, about ARGs. The recursion is maddening.
Anyway, apophenia:
This full court press of misinformation, sometimes referred to as "flooding the zone with shit" has long been a component of internal Russian domestic misinformation. The idea is not even to try to directly convince or misinform, but to flood your critical faculties with so much information, so much of it garbage, that you sort of give up trying to analyze it. In this atmosphere, what is true is what you want to be true, and anything that conflicts with that is instantly disregarded as misinformation. There are like four differnt Adam Curtis documentaries I'd recommend you watch to make the argument that this has been a long time coming, and the chickens have finally come home to roost (primarily Hypernormalization and The Power Of Nightmares).
For some very obvious and some less obvious reasons over the last two years I've grown interested in the subject of cults and cult like thinking. While I wouldn't call it gospel, I've found this "narrativist framework" very useful for understanding the kind of person who becomes an extremist. While it begins with talking about Trump people taking over the GOP, the framework attempts to be politically agnostic, and gives examples of how all sorts of extremist groups adhere to a surprisingly similar "grand narrative" (this "inner narrative" is frequently protected from the view of outsiders by an "outer narrative" that they dont actually believe but keeps people off their backs, which might help explain why it always seems like these people are arguing in bad faith). I highly recommend checking out the whole thing if you're cusious about this sort of thing (or at least click around a bit).
http://prestersperspective.blogspot.com/p/narrativist-framework-glossary_12.html?m=1
@Moon @Gaagaagiins Hang on, so if I understand this correctly, the idea is that people inside of Qanon are being controlled like so many Zerglings by some ARG designer(s)? I need to read more into this, but this is indeed a chilling notion, albeit a fascinating one.
Well no, it's not like a marionette on strings situation, it's that they've encouraged a kind of faulty thinking that allows the "participants" in the "game" to see clues everywhere, like trying to find and decode messages inside years old Q drops in same way people once looked for predictions encoded in the bible.
That's why some of these articles refer to it as an "ARG in reverse".
But my unfounded supposition is that once that machine got rolling, it probably didnt need much prodding to start heading in the direction "Qanon" people ended up in, because these "narritivist" groups have a kind of story that they are already very predisposed to, even without outside influence.
@Moon Thank you. Now I understand how the theory is operating. Still fascinating though. I need to read more about this.
@whatsarobot Hmmm, sort of. QAnon are much more autonomous than Zerg. And it‘s hard to say whether or not there are actual specific/dedicated individuals running this show with a deliberate and masterful hand, although, it’s not unlikely there are at least a few central figures who definitely have some sorta goal.
I think if I had to sum up the overall thrust of the argument being made in the article, it's that QAnon as it has been cultivated is so dangerous because it is self perpetuating. It obviously isn't someone revealing truths but what it is, is probably some unspecified number of extremely bad actors have whipped a crowd of conspiracy theorists into a uniquely dedicated craze, by using techniques of manipulation that seems to be very successful at motivating people to go out and seek truths, as well as feel confident about truth that is not there.
QAnon is much less a single or even coherent network of conspiracies so much as it is a conspiracy replicator and conglomerator. It collects conspiracies to add to itself while also sowing the seeds for more conspiracies.
@Moon I highly recommend checking out the whole thing if you’re cusious about this sort of thing (or at least click around a bit).
http://prestersperspective.blogspot.com/p/narrativist-framework-glossary_12.html?m=1
This is deeply fascinating even at a glance. I'll be going through this for sure.
I think there is some evidence to suggest 8chan founder and Top 10 World Scumbags Jim Watkins may have been one of the said people to intend to get that machine rolling, but nothing concrete. And yes, I agree, once it's started it doesn't need any central figures to keep perpetuating itself. Just semi-regular posts that people end up believing are "Q drops" which really could have been written by anyone, and I imagine there were a lot of junk ones that were initially "suspected" to be Q Drops but were later "concluded" to be "fake"
Tangential video:
Those bad actors you talk about (some of whom are now freshmen congress members), I sincerely believe are mostly just grifters trying to ride the tiger for money and clout. Some of them might actually be insane, but I think a good portion of them are making a very fucked up but clearheaded calculation of how to take best take advantage of the rest of the freaks
Also hugely agree.
I see this tendency of the Right Wing Grift tracing back to the sort of nascent right wing alt-intelligentsia and then pseudo-intelligentsia and then hard faux-intelligentsia of right wing academics who suddenly found that the internet contained a bunch of total goddamn saps with a surprising amount of disposable income due to being white and latched on to the teat of the status quo, willing to hang on their every word if they also occasionally justified the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq because they were Islamophobes or who thought it was brave to corner and harass a women on an elevator, you know, the kinds of right wing punk rock "controversial" opinions (sponsored by Lockheed Martin) as espoused by the likes of grifters who could prop themselves up as intellectual authorities on account of possessing degrees in fields not related to the things they gained a following for talking about. Like the nu atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) and today exemplified by Jordan "The Stupid Person's Smart Person" Peterson
Not to get too off topic but I think a lot of this kind of thought can be traced back to, firstly, cold war Mccarthyism, and secondly the fever pitched bloodlust our country entered after 9/11. Both of which were only loosely based on reality.
It's just the "small business owner entrepreneur" version of what weve been doing to ourselves for a long time. Weve lost the gatekeepers so gatekeepers aren't the only ones who get to play these games anymore. And when the non-establishment gets to play it turns out they dont really give a shit if the establishment survives the game, unlike before.
Highly recommend "The Power Of Nightmares" for a in depth look at how this relates to the start of our Forever War in the middle east.
But whatever. It's an enormous subject and theres lots of things you could say to try to unpack it. I guess I'm just trying to explain why I'm not totally shocked by this?
I‘d guess that one of the long term consequences of “the war on terror” and the USA/NATO’s perpetual empire-maintenance “police actions” is the (false) lesson that war has no material consequences, and that it‘s just a pageant/means of emotional or social validation. It’s only a vanishingly small fraction of the population that do any actual fighting, and even that is outsourced to drones and ideologically incoherent patchworks of local militias.
And this almost total lack of consequence or material change extends to the political process. Liberalism in the US for example is mostly a means of emotional self-regulation rather than ethic seeking any material or ideological change to fit its declared values. And the Q stuff is also I think about meeting emotional and social needs. That's why so many of the assholes at the capital never seemed to think they'd actually get in trouble for any of that shit. They were wrong of course on the dumb schmuck level, a lot of them are super fucked with some of those federal charges, but correct in the macro sense - Ted Cruz isn't going to face any real setback, I doubt trump will get convicted and if he does it will be because he's regarded as a spent force politically.
The democrats could go clear of all this with open and credible redistribution of wealth and resources, and giving the public something positive to engage in. I guess we'll see. Everyone did what was asked of them, electing the safe choice in biden, holding the house, winning the senate, donating like a trillion dollars nobody really has to spare. Guess we'll see if there's any reason to engage with the political world as presented, but I'm also not surprised that more gullible people choose at least a faintly validating fantasy world
people like pro wrestling both when they believe it‘s real, and they find a way to like it after they discover it’s fiction
When I was in Kindergarten I thought Gilligans Island was real.