Wait, Q started with a clear and verifiable prediction that a thing was about to happen very soon, and then that thing 100% did not happen? And then it grew from there? I thought I understood how the scam of fortune-telling worked, but apparently I do not!
Not the first time a religion was started on the basis of a prophecy that failed to deliver. A spin off of the Millerite Church predicted the end or the world in 1844. The fact that it did not come to pass, a non event that later became known as the Great Dissapointment, had many consequences including the founding of the 7th Day Adventist church.
As soon as I heard the stuff about satanic rituals and drinking babies' blood I immediately thought of the McMartin trial. Sorry to hear you were caught up in the SRA mass hysteria, hope it is not still affecting your life.
Sadly its had a very profound effect on my life. From external appearances I am a successful individual. On the inside, I am a depressed, anxious mess and have trust issues with relationships.
The issue is that you have all these people who are willing to believe in something getting connected. The prophecy can fail but the connections remain.
I guess it's a problem that has been exacerbated by information technology: distance from other believers no longer inhibits your ability to create an echo chamber to the same degree it use to.
Purportedly, Q is a military intelligence operation. Some of the posts are supposed to be information releases that get around the secret classifications. Some of them are supposed to be intended to mislead their enemy and manipulate them into committing actions desirable to the Q cause.
Remember, the US Military is the true defender of the Constitution. Q is supposed to be coordinating the restoration of constitutional control of the government to the American people.
There's nothing in US law, the Constitution, or really tradition that calls the military the "true defenders of the Constitution." Indeed, the US government intentionally subordinates military interests to civilian authority by having the President assume the role of Commander-in-Chief.
There have been dozens if not hundreds of governments where the military wrested control from elected officials as "true defenders of the Constitution." We call those military coups. They generally represent the death of a Constitutional republic.
Unless I've misunderstood what you meant by "true" in your previous post, nothing in the oaths says what you say they said. They aren't any kind of sole defenders, nor would the American people want that.
America was founded partially to escape rule by military might.
“I [state your full name], Do
solemnly swear (or affirm)
that I will support and defend
the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic; that I
will bear true faith and
allegiance to the same; and
that I will obey the orders of
the President of the United
States and the orders of the
officers appointed over me,
according to regulations and
the Uniform Code of Military
Justice. So help me God
(optional).” [1]
Yeah, I've read it. And the Navy one. And the Army. What do you think I said that contradicts that? How do you think the Air Force would be upholding that oath if it overthrew the elected government or did something to the "deep state" (which is just the bureaucracy)?
I have been. It's been fascinating to watch so many members of the President's advisory circles go to prison. Campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, personal lawyer, national security adviser, political adviser, foreign policy adviser.
If I didn't know better, I'd guess the American people elected someone to "drain the swamp" who brought a swamp with him.
The real hilarious conspiracy is how the media latches onto these troll communities with breathless reporting. One of the founding beliefs of the "movement" is that birds aren't real, they're government drones.
I can't wait until The New Yorker is telling me about how a new dangerous cult is worshiping meme magic and praising at the altar of Kek. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that's already happened.
It reminds me of when the NYTimes caught wind of the NPC meme* and their initial reporting was along the lines of "ARE THESE RUSSIAN BOTS? IS OUR DEMOCRACY BEING ATTACKED?." No you out of touch ivory tower fools, it's kids in their 20s with too much time on their hands who love the attention you give them.
As a side note, I know someone who fell deep into the gamergate hole as it was happening and then realized how toxic it was and did a complete 180. Now they spend all their time arguing with conspiracy theorists on the internet about how their logic is faulty. There's a certain type of person that is susceptible to this kind of stuff in general, for or against.
And the US seems to have a supporter already sitting in the oval office.
Frankly this group is not interesting. It is just another group of conspiracy theorists that are spewing out a even more ill defined and crazy theory than most have before.
What would be more interesting to look into is why they are getting traction with people that previously were seemingly well informed ([n=1] the man in the article that had watched CNN for years before switching). That is more important. Why is it happening more and more that people get sucked into these 'obviously' lunatic groups and beliefs, and what can be done to make sure it doesn't happen.
Deep diving into the nitty gritty of the posting history of this Q person was way too much detail that did little to nothing for the article in my opinion.
I have no reason to believe these Q conspiracies but I understand why people believe them, when we know about all the past shady activities like COINTELPRO, MKUltra, WMDs in Iraq, all the involvement South America, NSA spying, etc.
I have to admit, i've stayed away from the Q conspiracies, knowing where they all came from and just generally hearing the nonsense of the few things I have heard.
But, I have to admit, had I read more of it at the time, I would have been ready to believe it.
Ever since then, I don't like writing this comment, people completely dismiss me after that, but a friend of mine actually did apply for a job about a year before that all came out, at a pizza place, not a chain, some tiny little hole in the wall in a seedy neighbourhood, and was shown a back room with some matresses where she was told she could 'make extra money'.
The thing is, there are dark, terrible seedy things that go on in the world, but, unlike what people like Q and the people that believe him think, it's not some grand unified conspiracy involving every level of government and large companies.
It's places in your neighbourhood, apartments where women are trafficked from foreign countries by gangs and pimps to make them money, or they run hidden brothels out of businesses they own.
Conflating these things to a giant conspiracy though is wrong and takes attention away from the people actually doing terrible things and lets them keep getting away with it while everyone's busy going after this shady non-existent shadow network.
your bar is pretty low if you think the fact that actual conspiracies exist justifies engaging in believing arbitrary conspiracy theories.
This is akin to believing that all women cheat just because it actually happens to be the case that you met one that actually did, or thinking all Jewish people are trying to get your money because you were once defrauded by one.
The problem with paranoid mindsets is not that they're always incorrect, it's that they're pathological in their structure.
Conspiracy theories also obscure the big reasons why things are messed up in society. The root causes often boil down to human frailty and/or bad luck--things that require a lot of plodding work to fix. Commercial aircraft are pretty safe because we've spent decades fixing problems one by one. At this point there are not many left.
So what, we should disbelieve all conspiracy theories by default? In the rare case it happens to be true, it'll probably be too late to act upon, just like COINTELPRO and MKULTRA.
We can assign the possibility of Q being true without actually taking a side and acting on it. I can say "this is both compelling and unlikely to be true, but as I long as I don't have to act on it, it doesn't matter if I believe in it or not". We can let the evidence over time build a stronger case for it or destroy it.
The only reason I can see not to do that is if it introduces unacceptable consequences in the meantime, as the article is suggesting, but it seems like the reporting against it is ridiculously cherry picked and disingenuous. There's probably a much stronger case for stopping BLM as a organization at the moment, but I don't think I've seen an Atlantic article suggesting that.
For the time being, Q seems like a harmless movement. It would be a red flag if Q denounced a group of people without justification, but Q has been pretty specific about the things and people it denounces, and if things go according to Q's plan the people it's denouncing are going to have their chance in court .
>It would be a red flag if Q denounced a group of people without justification
Which they have. Only well-known Democratic-party-affiliated personalities are implicated. The blatantly partisan narrative creates great potential for political violence.
And like many other conspiracy theories, the narrative is full of antisemitic tropes:
https://www.adl.org/qanon
Finally, there's the obvious logical difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact. The latter has actual evidence supporting it.
And the probability of this menagerie of preposterous claims actually turning out to be true would be close to zero due to the vast number of participants who would have to keep silent. The more people who participate in any given conspiracy, the less time it can be kept secret on average:
The point of my first post was to say we don't have to assign any probabilities at the moment.
I'm just viewing it as compelling entertainment. Outside of this thread, I haven't mentioned it to anyone. It's probably premature to unwaveringly denounce or support it. When we have to actually act on it, or if it causes actual crime in the real world, that's when it helps if you take a stand.
If knowing for certain one way or the other would influence one’s choices, a truly rational agent (which humans only approximate) must always at least implicitly assign a probability.
Some people are appealing to people who believe it in their political campaigns. I think this is sufficient to make it relevant.
I'm turning your argument around: why go around and invent fake conspiracy theories when actual conspiracies are a thing and are nothing like the fake ones?
The public will usually not have to tools, expertise, or mindset to perform more technical kinds of intelligence gathering/sharing. The public is, therefore, generally limited to relying on human intelligence operations like Q.
However, human intelligence has consistency and credibility problems which make it easier to attack and undermine. The problems are magnified by anonymity and the resulting lack of accountability.
I am not sure how to solve those problems. The Q faithful should remember the inherent instability of that type of operation and work to solve it, not attack anyone who is in any way critical of it.
This type of fractured epistemology, where subgroups derive truth from truly weird conspiracy theories, while other groups in society continue with a connection to reality, is how a society falls apart, or becomes easily prayed upon by dictators or outside forces.
When people no longer have any idea about what could be true, they have to trust, usually a strong-man leader. This is how Putin maintains such control of his country. It's how he spread discord in eastern Ukraine, with wild stories about "they want to kill and eat your children." You hear Lukashenko say the same sorts of things as he struggles to keep power in Belarus (the villain being NATO forces...)
I beg of everybody on HN in the US: if you have family that starts to fall into these conspiracy theories, hold on to your relationship with them and try with all your night to bring them back to reality. We are at a scary stage with a pandemic and economic disaster, and many people are quite vulnerable to the false sense of order that these conspiracy theories provide. I think that familial connections might be one of the only things stronger than the strange pull of these conspiracy theories.
The situation in the US is exceptional. To put it mildly, US big corporate media would prefer that the current government executive be someone else, and their reporting is guided by that animus.
This creates an appetite for alternative sources of information, even if those sources are of very low quality.
What scares me about Q is what the narrative enables. If Trump overthrew the institutions of democracy, and had his enemies killed and jailed, then all Q would need to do is whisper is that the cabal has been defeated, and all the Q-adherents would cheer.
I'm starting to think that the media's breathless anti-Q reporting is more dangerous than QAnon itself.
Okay Q is a wacky conspiracy theory. What's the headline real-world event here though? Some kid walked into a pizza joint with a rifle. That's pretty much it. He didn't shoot anyone, didn't explicitly threaten anyone, didn't break anything. But that makes this cult a massive danger?
Meanwhile, hundreds of nationwide riots have been going on for months, burning down thousands of businesses, destroying livelihoods, but don't you dare even question the legitimacy of that.
> Okay Q is a wacky conspiracy theory. What's the headline real-world event here though? Some kid walked into a pizza joint with a rifle. That's pretty much it. He didn't shoot anyone, didn't explicitly threaten anyone, didn't break anything. But that makes this cult a massive danger?
People are red-pilling. Once they are awake, they cannot be put back asleep. This is what makes this cult dangerous.
And its not just conservative America that's red-pilling:
Red pills are what they hand out in cults when Kool-Aid is too expensive.
When reality contradicts beliefs, the mind would rather adjust its filters on reality than adjust its beliefs. I've spent enough time chatting with flat-Earthers to watch the process in action.
Hopefully not. The "deep state establishment," i.e. the bureaucracy, is there for a reason.
America tried "fire everyone back to the postmen" in their first few years. It was terrible. It's why we instituted laws limiting executive authority to fire.
Q is probably infiltrated by secret CIA operatives and will probably be dismantled soon, and will take on a new guise. Anyone remember the hacktivist group Anonymous in their heyday? Completely infiltrated and dismantled, by who knows? CIA?
Notice how only 1 post out of thousands by the so called Q we're shown in the making this article?
Notice how immediately they point to one case of violence which was denounced by Q. Seems like an attempt to emotionally connect Q with a single nutjob.
Do you think it would be fair to write articles about everyone based on the actions of a single supporter with clear mental illness? Why the double standard?
If what Q is saying is so dangerous then why not actually show that material and debunk it directly?
Just like the podesta emails the content is always completely ignored because the people writing these articles don't want you to be informed here. Ask yourself why? What is their agenda here? Is it in your best interest?
Read the drops qmap.pub and think for yourself.
If you haven't read any of the drops how can anyone take your opinion seriously on something you know nothing about?
Was there a defining a moment that made you believe in it, if you do?
I'm not going read drops or maps, I'm not even sure what that means and don't plan to spend my weekend figuring that out, there's only so much time and we have to pick and choose ya know, so if you could expand, please do.
"If what Q is saying is so dangerous then why not actually show that material and debunk it directly?"
Probably because the "material" is generated faster than anyone could possibly analyze it, which is why there are so many variants of the conspiracy theory floating around and why more seem to appear with each passing day.
"think for yourself"
Sure, let's start with, "Does this seem realistic?" If not, let's try, "Is there extraordinary evidence for these extraordinary claims?" Thus far the answer is "no, not even close" and the entire thing looks like a desperate attempt on the part of Trump's supporters to deny the plainly obvious fact that the man is an inept moron with deep insecurities and no conscience.
(Edit: the first thing I saw on website you provided was an assertion that the DNC logo looks like the satanic baphomet symbol. I do not even see what can be properly debunked there -- it is an opinion and there is no actual conclusion to be drawn even if the logo looked kind of like baphomet. I could claim that Trump's left eye looks like the meta key on an old Lisp machine keyboard, and demand that you debunk my claim.)
Exactly. I'm am very sad to read the grandparent comment. It's not pleasant that anyone could be so misguided, and especially to see such lunacy on HN. It's not incumbent on anyone to continually engage with and point-by-point knock down Q: bullshit can be generated much faster than it can be fact checked (putting truth at a structural disadvantage), and engaging in this stupidity confers it legitimacy it doesn't deserve. I am despondent for humanity, that so many of us are so (1) easily confused (2) incapable of actually doing their own research (instead castigating people to "do their own research", which if they did in any reasonable way would show the absurdity of belief in Q) (3) related to 2, so commonly projecting their own flaws and insisting they are those of others. I hate being a misanthrope, but there's no way to be informed nowadays and not be deeply disappointed in our species.
We can only hope (as we always have) that our ability to evolve (our software first, hardware next) will stay just ahead of our ability and desire to destroy ourselves. I sure hope I didn’t make a huge mistake having two kids. But I hope that by raising them in a loving household they will be good people in the world to balance the bad.
I very much agree with your general hope, and I also worry about bringing children into this world, though I haven't yet.
I'm not as hopeful for technological solutions to societal ills, though -- it seems to me that most problems are matters of historic and current national/global philosophies (as instantiated by norms of personal action), ie the problem really just has to do with how we are as a species, and technology in and of itself can't breed the empathy and unity of purpose (for the progress of human knowledge and standard of life, the stewardship of our planet, the continual growth of our species' sphere of concern to hopefully come to recognize all of our universe for the real wonder and treasure that it is) as would be necessary for the real flourishing of our world. Of course, technology could be useful for this, provided it did in fact disseminate such ideas. But these ideas run counter to those most easily spread (hate, fear, etc) and so (as it stands) the infrastructure of the internet allows the latter to spread more easily than the former. I guess (after all this ramble) that I hope that technology in the future can be built with these goals of universal progress in mind, and that such ideas can spread to their users. But such a thing must be done intentionally, as otherwise technology often has the opposite effect.
> I'm am very sad to read the grandparent comment.
> I am despondent for humanity, that so many of us are so [..] (2) incapable of actually doing their own research (instead castigating people to "do their own research", which if they did in any reasonable way would show the absurdity of belief in Q)
These two statements are contradicting each other. You should be happy about that comment, because it has a link to the full content of Q's posts, allowing people to actually do their own research. And for that matter, is actually advocating for it!
"reading the drops" isn't the sum total of the "research" one would do to see Q for what it is, and anyways, their content is not something I'm unaware of. I don't even know why I'm dignifying this with a response, since it so clearly misinterprets my previous comment. What a morass, what a mess. I hope that the future is better for you.
"That same day, she shared a separate post suggesting that Michelle Obama is secretly a man. Someone responded with skepticism: “I am still not convinced. She shows and acts evil, but a man?” Shock’s reply: “Research it.” There was a post claiming that Representative Adam Schiff had raped the body of a dead boy at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles"
What research should I do here? So many "claims" from QAnon look exactly like this, and it looks like random garbage. There is nothing to "research" here because it is impossible to research all this BS. But apparently I am a "sheep" unless I prove Michelle Obama is a woman? Or any other insane claim they make up regularly every day?
Sorry, no, QAnon is garbage. No need to "research it" to know that.
I read the article and it examines multiple QAnon claims made over time. I have also seen lots of QAnon claims not on this article and it seems the "thousands" of posts from supporters of QAnon is just mass-generated garbage with no truth. Made out of thin air.
I am thinking for myself, and when I see QAnon, I don't see a group that is doing any thinking at all. The "drops" you talk about are meaningless garbage.
