Social Qanon Megathread V1

Sketch said:
Do you think there is any other elements at play?
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Sure.

Right wingers have been primed for radicalization for decades by irrational belief systems like fundamentalist Christianity (the woman in the OP was "very religious") and outrage porn media like Beck and Limbaugh (especially influential for male demographics). Then Trump came along and convinced them that any information that might keep them tethered to reality was "fake news." Into this emotionally fraught vacuum insert social media algorithms and voila.
 
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Sketch said:
Baby boomers are the worst people on the planet.
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hiya Sketch,

maybe.

you could blame their parents, though. you know, the "greatest generation"?

they were the ones who raised the baby boomers.

- IGIT
 
[QUOTE="luckyshot, post: 163549890, member: 505615"
Right wingers have been primed for radicalization for decades by irrational belief systems like fundamentalist Christianity (the woman in the OP was "very religious")...[/QUOTE]

hi hi luckyshot,

lol.

you caught that too?

as i read the OP, i that part stuck out to me, too. the woman needed God to help find her way out of Qanon.

really?

its my belief that with or without Qanon, she remains a wingnut with deep seated cognitive issues, regarding what is and isn't real.

- IGIT
 
luckyshot said:
Sure.

Right wingers have been primed for radicalization for decades by irrational belief systems like fundamentalist Christianity (the woman in the OP was "very religious") and outrage porn media like Beck and Limbaugh (especially influential for male demographics). Then Trump came along and convinced them that any information that might keep them tethered to reality was "fake news." In this emotionally fraught vaccum insert social media algorithms and voila.
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Warmer
 
luckyshot said:
I will assert one comparison though: while Democrats and Republicans doubtlessly both have many stupid voters, on the Republican side the dumbest also see to be the most politically engaged.
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Excellent observation.
 
PolishHeadlock2 said:
The GOP is intellectually dead and most people don't support their actually policy agenda.
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This gets said a lot but I never see evidence of it IRL. Only certain polls of anonymous "republicans" ever appear to bear it out.

Aren't the many right-leaning posters in this very forum evidence of support for the GOP's policy ideas?
 
I highly recommend the documentary the great hack which deals with this exact topic. It talks about Cambridge analytica and how they used social media algorithms to put people in power in various parts of the world, and were also hired by the Trump campaign to help them as well in 2016.

It was really eye opening to me to see how successful these targeted campaigns on social media really are, and there is nothing to stop any rich/powerful person from employing firms such as these to bend the masses to whatever issue they want them to support.
 
@IGIT

Probably. I think she is just a blind follower. There are a lot of them out there. They wouldn't be such a problem if there wasn't so much crazy out there today. If fact, these "followers" were, in a lot of ways, the backbone of society in better times. But they are being turned into an unbearable dead weight by the quality of the information they are now consuming.
 
good evening, luckyshot,

luckyshot said:
@IGIT

Probably. I think she is just a blind follower. There are a lot of them out there. They wouldn't be such a problem if there wasn't so much crazy out there today. If fact, these "followers" were, in a lot of ways, the backbone of society in better times. But they are being turned into an unbearable dead weight by the quality of the information they are now consuming.
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i much preferred the days when blind followers got their news from Dan Rather, Tom Brokow, and Peter Jennings (if they were in a superwonky mood, they might read Time magazine). there was normalness to the news that prevented the blind followers from getting too strange (on a national level).

*muses*

its not the fact that there are blind followers out there that bothers me...its that there is so much bad information out there nowadays, easily available, that they glue themselves to.

why can't more blind followers listen to NPR and blindly follow that?

- IGIT
 
She was radicalized in the same way millions of people were radicalized into TDS.

You may laugh but CNN, Facebook and Twitter did the same thing to you.
 
Oceanmachine said:
It is not a conspiracy to believe the election was rigged.

Many outsiders believe it was. Trump still does

You calling the former President a liar?
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I'm still not sure if Trump is crazy enough to believe it or he's just bullshitting to mess with everyone, both options are equally likely at this point. Make no mistake though, after all the recounts, audits, certifications and court cases, wide spread election fraud is absolutely a conspiracy theory at this point.
 
blaseblah said:
What helps is that they start off with half truths before they go full on into insane conspiracy.

The government is corrupt and in the pocket of corporations - this is pretty obvious, lobbying deregulation made sure of that. However QAnon takes that premise and turns it into the deep state.

There are pedophiles and predators in positions of power in Hollywood. Epstein and Weinstein are examples of that. QAnon takes that premise and turns it into the Democrats and Hollywood are a Satan worshipping cult of pedophilia.

Trump used some of these same half truths to rise to power. He called out the elites, he talked about draining the swamp. What he left out is that he is also part of that swamp and doesn't give a shit about people. But the QAnon folks turned him into their savior. People who do not trust the government and hate liberals are more susceptible to falling into the cult. You've even got spiritual hippy types with left wing beliefs falling into the cult.
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i listened to a podcast by people who practice ken wilbur's "integral spirituality". they were trying to get to the bottom of how it is that a surprising number of their own people had gone down the trump cult route.

this group is typically quite educated and often also affluent and the "integral" approach is a very solid innovatoin of spirituality that incorporates multifaceted dimensions of the human being.

one of the postulations about how this could happen in their group was that in an attempt to get people to not live in their heads and be more in touch with body and heart (something i think is profoundly valuable) they may have placed too much emphasis on feeling your way through life and that made people vulnerable to things that are not true, but can feel true.

q anon is just a bad mythology but it plays upon archetypal themes that are pretty embedded in human consciousness and that are fed to us in revised and updated form in movies and books (think the battle between good and evil). a false narrative that deals with these themes can feel true because of the truth of the themes even though the details of the story are completely fabricated (think garden of eden).

when a false narrative impregnated with archetypal and mythological themes is presented as fact it can feel true to many people because there is truth in it even though the narrative is completely fabricated.

it was very interesting listening to them come to terms with it happening in their camp when presumably that is a system that would be the less vulnerable to magical thinking.

the podcast also dealt with the fact that human kinds ability to know, to know when you actually know, and to digest the kind of scientific information available to us is very limited. on top of that our institutions really do lie to us.

they basically said that we are just not yet able to navigate all of this very well and can and will err all over the place as we move forward.

it also made me think of the new age movement and also today's evangelical christian movement which i think (and i now a lot of people from those groups) are completely out of touch with reality and whose teachers are often the most obvious of con men and women and who have encouraged people to trust their intuition and spirit guides or angels or jesus in ways that are profoundly dangerous and anit reason.


the challenge of today is to keep and preserve the deep body of wisdom and path of spiritual growth contained in the great non dual traditions while embracing fully the newer development of scientific thinking, reason and logic and incorporate all of that into a cohesive whole that neglects neither nor handicaps either one.

personally i think in this age of lying and manipulation practiced by all of our institutions and the corruption of them and the economic disparity and injustice this produces, (the primary cause of the hunger for ct theories and gullibility) and faced with humanities limited ability to know on just about every level, a deep admittance of our limitations and acceptance of them and embracing of them and the precarious place that places us in on this planet could go a long way towards stemming the fear that leads to cult like fanaticism.
 
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