I was just gonna say. I’ve said before that peolle have no ability to discern reality. Exposing people to an idea will cause them to believe it solely based on whether they want to believe it. Weaponizing Q may rile up the libs, but it’s a lock to make Q bigger. The only way to beat this kind of thing is to deplatform.
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That’s putting it mildly, double-oh-seven.
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This is a super dangerous part of “debunking”. I use to be massively involved in the skeptic movement but kept running into research showing debunking is either preaching to the choir or simply platforming and amplifying the terrible idea. It’s lose lose.
In order to neutralise Q you need to address why things feel like they’re getting so much worse and why america (and babby america the UK) failed the covid test so badly compared to the rest of the world. If you don’t provide a reason or worse pretend it isn’t happening like the republicans people need a way to reconcile their certainty that USA is #1 with the reality they are inhabiting. Some (most) will choose to disregard reality if no other alternative presents itself. I mean “our country would be the best but those damn jews/immigrants/lizards/pedos are ruining it” isn’t exactly a new one.
Unfortunately there is no mechanism to address this question. It’s not a conversation america is set up to have.
It’s why Richard Dawkins stopped debating theists. He didn’t want to give the Ken Ham types a platform to speak on to spread their bullshit.
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Yep. Dragging QAnon onto discussion panels on CNN will result in them both sidesing it because the journalistic dogma in 2020 is Thou Shalt Not Declare Anything to be True or False.
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I’m sure I’ve said before but my brother/heritagenothate is a legit Q believer.
Things off the top of my head that i remember:
He believes Mccain and Bush Sr were put to death by secret military tribunal
Last time i talked to him before i cut him off he was telling me about the chrissy teigen deleting her tweets thing, claimed that she deleted tweets talking about sex with children and shit, i asked for proof and sent me an article showing a few where shes talking about toddlers and tiaras or some shit like that, i’m like yea and where are the bad ones? He said he had seen them but couldn’t find them now or they were deleted etc. and who knows what was in the other ones that she deleted before they found them.
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But why not? Is it any more absurd than the idea that cutting taxes brings in more government revenue? That started out as a joke to fool the rubes but now its gop (and basically dem) orthodoxy.
and I don’t know how much he talks about this shit with people outside of facebook other than myself so i dunno about that but he’s def posted and continues to post plenty of it online.
My aunt messaged me the other day asking if there was something wrong with him because he was posting Qanon stuff in response to her making fun of it to my uncle, not even mentioning him or on his page. He then went on to ask if she had actually researched it or just read “hit pieces” about it and made some posts about how no one can stop whats coming…
There’s a damn good chance he actually believes this, even though we know that the certainly never existed.
No he definitely does because in the last few days before i stopped talking to him, he did that with like 2-3 different things.
One was a meme where Fauci said that masks were dangerous, i said he never said that and HnH swore that the video existed but when he couldn’t find it he said it was probably buried by google 30 pages deep or censored but he knows for a fact he saw the video. One was the Teigen thing, i forget the other.
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One thing going against the whole Q phenomenon is there is no central authority and no consistent dogma. Cults need a charismatic leader and they can’t even decide if Q is one person or a group. And his coded communications are completely opaque and inconsistent and have to be “interpreted”.
(On the other hand, having codes that have to be interpreted probably adds to the mystique and makes believers feel smart and accepted and special.)
Maybe things have changed in the past couple of years, but the inconsistency among various Q factions should be a problem that prevents any serious traction.
I couldn’t find this the other night when I was looking for it, but this bit (from 2 years ago today!) not only ridicules their beliefs but points out the lack of cohesion. These morons spend more time arguing with each other than explaining what’s going on and come across as total imbeciles.
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Its really quite alarming the confluence of events that have brought us to this point:
Decades of training people in school that what they read on the page is a fact, read it back to me for a smiley face sticker, no need to teach critical thinking at all.
Then boom here’s the internet and a tidal wave of content, no controls on what people can put out there, just blasted 24/7 into peoples eyeballs.
Then boom again, we make a bunch of sociopaths rich by having them create algorithms to harvest predictive data about people’s online activity and program the people to click buttons for dopamine.
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I disagree with this. This is exactly like the sovereign citizen movement where there is no one leader, all of the views are internally inconsistent, and they vary widely across the country, and yet that movement is growing as well. I think one of the most fascinating elements of the SC movement is that it is embraced both by far-right white supremacist militia groups, and by some black power groups.
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Aren’t they just libertarians?
This New Yorker article has some good info about the nexus between SCs, militias, white supremecists, and anti-maskers.
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To the extent that SC movements are inconsistent, don’t you think this has to prevent their widespread adoption, almost by definition?
And are they really growing? I honestly don’t know, but I thought they more or less peaked during the Obama administration. There aren’t any “citizen grand juries” handing down indictments and executing people in my part of the country, at least not yet.
One thing that amuses me is that as Q-awareness has grown over the past few days, the cannibalism aspect is being consistently mentioned along with the pedophilia. It just highlights the complete ludicrousness of the whole thing.
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Everyone will have heard of it within a couple years, if not by November 3. Trump is going to mainstream it the next few months.
Q is going to get bigger either way.
In this case it’s a freeroll, the President of the United States is going to platform it, we might as well hammer him for it and land the first blows.
Do we need a Q thread? I know Rick Wilson is not to be spoken favorably of but he does have a good saying for stuff like this, which is ‘not today Satan’
HnH being a Q believer is the least surprising development in the history UP adjacent drama.
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