Today's Fantasy

Posted on Reddit (r/parlerwatch)

"...shed vaccine particles..."

There seems to be nothing these idiots won't latch onto.

Once it became an acceptable thing to dismiss everything "from out there" (ie: the Librul-dominated universe of fake news and egghead elites - anywhere outside the confines of the fantasy-based multi-cult), something had to fill the vacuum and provide "information" for the rubes.

And of course, there's never a shortage of scamsters looking to make bank on people who just wanna feel comforted in a big scary world.

The night is dark and filled with terrors.

👻 👺 ☠️ 👽

There's an army of kids who are soon to be headed off to college, who will be able to build rewarding Nobel-level careers on the study of the weird shit that's going on now in this unbelievable rat's nest of conspiracy, paranoia, and groupthink.

Reuters:

Claims that COVID-19 vaccines have been designed so that recipients can transmit their inoculations have revealed misunderstandings of how these vaccines work. Vaccines against the novel coronavirus are not infectious and cannot be passed from person to person.

The claim was initially made in a Facebook post comprising several screenshots from webpages that discuss the potential of future “self-spreading vaccines”. In the post’s caption, the user writes: “It’s not shedding, it’s intentional transmission.” (here)

Comments left underneath the post reveal a further misconception: “Help me understand does it mean donated blood from vaxxed/jabbed people will transmit the spike protein and consequently the patient gets to exhibit all the auto response immune system symptoms?” one user asks.

“Yep. They transmit it through their pores, saliva, faeces, blood etc. They are time bombs,” another replies.

“Shedding” is a term that was frequently used in the early days of the pandemic to describe people transmitting or emitting coronavirus particles. However, experts have told Reuters that people cannot “shed” COVID-19 vaccines. This topic has been addressed (here) and (here).

Meanwhile, the suggestion that COVID-19 vaccines have been designed for “intentional transmission” is also false.

While the possibility of researchers creating self-disseminating vaccines has been discussed in scientific literature (here , here , here) , this is not something that has been rolled out in humans. It would involve genetically engineering a vaccine so immunity spreads through an animal population like a disease, rather than the disease itself spreading. Scientists note the potential risks associated with this (here).

Transmission would also require the vaccine to be live – and to be able to replicate and infect its host. This is not possible. None of the COVID-19 vaccines have this capability.

The mRNA shots developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna “contain only instructions for making spike protein and are incapable of generating virus particles, so nothing can be shed”, said Dr Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of the infectious diseases division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, one of the world’s top teaching hospitals and part of Harvard Medical School, in a statement emailed to Reuters.

Likewise, the Johnson & Johnson (also referred to as Janssen) vaccine “is based on a replication-defective adenovirus, which means the adenovirus is incapable of reproducing”, he added. The Oxford/AstraZeneca jab uses the same mechanism (here).

Kuritzkes also pointed out that the mRNA vaccines are degraded within 24 to 48 hours. As explained (here), that means they disappear from recipients’ bodies within a day or two. Similarly, the J&J vaccine “gets taken up into cells where it is injected, makes spike protein, and is degraded. It cannot disseminate to other tissues or be shed”, Kuritzkes said.

VERDICT

False. COVID-19 vaccines are not infectious, and they cannot spread between people. The mRNA vaccines authorised for emergency use do not use a live virus, while the Johnson & Johnson and Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs use a harmless adenovirus that has been modified to prevent replication.

PolitiFact:

• Medical experts and the CDC said it’s not biologically possible for the COVID-19 vaccine to “shed” or affect unvaccinated people, despite what anti-vaccine activists claim.
• The misinformation about “vaccine shedding” has had a real-world impact. One Miami private school recently instructed immunized teachers to stay away from students, citing the baseless claim that unvaccinated people can experience menstrual irregularities and other reproductive harm simply from interacting with vaccinated people.
• There is no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines cause fertility or menstruation problems in people who get them, let alone in their close contacts, experts said.

Hard to imagine why we should have to spend any time on this shit, but here we are.

Today's Q-publican

AC360: These are her words - her lies. Her bigoted and delusional views.

A young mom in So Carolina pulled herself out of it.

BBC

What Is QAnon

VICE TV - QAnon 101, episode 1

When The Game Is Playing You

From Business Insider (via MSN):

Angry response to Hawaii Republican Party's defence of QAnon supporters from ridicule and its claims they are motivated by a 'deep love for America'

Hawaii's Republican Party posted a series of tweets that appeared to defend followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The eight-part Twitter thread on Friday night, concluded with a call not to ridicule QAnon supporters.

The tweet read: "We should make it abundantly clear - the people who subscribed to the Q fiction, were largely motivated by a sincere and deep love for America. Patriotism and love of County should never be ridiculed."

In earlier tweets, Hawaii's GOP described the origins of the conspiracy theory that is thought to have fueled the deadly siege of the US Capitol building.

One tweet focused on the conspiracy theory's central belief that a 'deep state' engage in coordinated plots to undermine former President Donald Trump.

It read: "What is the truth? There are highly networked groups of people with specific agendas. Factions and individuals within Government do abuse power - Peter Strozk, Steele Dossier, James Comey, FISA courts, and on."

It continued: "Powerful people do engage in abusive or predatory behavior."

Another tweet said: "People who followed Q don't deserve mockery, the world is a complex place, there are bad actors, injustice, corruption."

The tweets drew criticism from people who felt the Hawaii Republican Party's tweets were attempting to rationalize the disproven QAnon conspiracy theory.

Adherents of the conspiracy were on the front line of the insurrection on January 6.

A QAnon influencer - the 'Q Shaman' - played a highly visible role in the Capitol siege. He has since been arrested and charged with federal crimes.

Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot during the attempted coup, also appeared to be a supporter of QAnon.

Some of the conspiracy theory's adherents believed that storming the Capitol could trigger an event that would result in Trump overthrowing and executing anti-Trump elites.

First, beyond basic respect for them as fellow humans, I don't owe these idiots one fucking thing.

Second: "The defendant, having posted video of himself murdering his parents, thinks he can get off by begging for mercy because now he's an orphan?"

Fuck 'em. Maybe the prison shrink can help unfuck their little pea brains. There are people among us who simply must be removed from the general population - at least until they can figure out how to behave like normal adults.

Today's QAnon Thing

NPR - 

Their Family Members Are QAnon Followers - And They're At A Loss What To Do About It

 

Modern Miracles

I've only done Ketamine twice. And I can say without fear of contradiction that they remain among my most pleasant memories of drug-induced euphoria - or they would be if I hadn't been blissfully asleep both times.

🎶 Deep and restful, sleep...sleep...sleep 🎶

PsyPost:

Ketamine may ease depression by restoring the brain’s sensitivity to prediction error, study suggests

New research suggests that electrophysiological brain signals associated with neural plasticity could help explain the rapid, antidepressant effects of the drug ketamine. The findings, European Neuropsychopharmacology, indicate that ketamine could reverse insensitivity to prediction error in depression.

In other words, the drug may help to alleviate depression by making it easier for patients to update their model of reality.

“Ketamine is exciting because of its potential to both treat, and better understand depression. This is largely because ketamine doesn’t work the way ordinary antidepressants do – its primary mechanism isn’t to increase monoamines in the brain like serotonin, and so ketamine gives us new insight into other potential mechanisms underlying depression,” said lead researcher Rachael Sumner, a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Auckland School of Pharmacy.

“One of the major candidates for the mechanisms underlying ketamine’s antidepressant properties is how it increases neural plasticity. Neural plasticity is the brain’s ability to form new connections between neurons and ultimately underlies learning and memory in the brain.”

“Rodent studies have consistently shown that ketamine increases neural plasticity within 24 hours,” Sumner said. “However, there are major challenges when attempting to translate what we know occurs in rodents to determine if it occurs in humans. Sensory processing mechanisms of plasticity, like the auditory process we examined in this study, provide an important means to meet this challenge of translation.”

The double-blind, placebo-controlled study included 30 participants with major depressive disorder who had not responded to at least 2 recognized treatments for depression. Seven in 10 participants demonstrated a 50% or greater decrease in their depression symptoms one day after receiving ketamine.

“In this case we used what’s called an ‘auditory mismatch negativity’ task to assess short-term plasticity and predictive coding, or the brains adaptability and tendency to try to predict what’s coming next,” Sumner said.

The researchers used electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to measure brain activity as the participants listened to a sequence of auditory tones that occasionally included an unexpected noise. The brain automatically generates a particular pattern of electrical brain activity called mismatch negativity (MMN) upon hearing an unexpected noise.

Sumner and her colleagues found that ketamine increased the amplitude of the MMN several hours post-infusion, suggesting that the drug increased sensitivity to prediction error.

“We found that just 3 hours after receiving ketamine the brains of people with moderate to severe depression became more sensitive to detecting errors in its predictions of incoming sensory information,” she told PsyPost.

“To provide context, the brain creates models or predictions about the world around it and what is most likely to come next. This is largely thought to be because it is an efficient way to deal with the massive amount of information hitting our senses every moment of the day. When something is constant and stable in the world these models can become very rigid. It has been suggested that these models can become too rigid and unchanging, underlying negative ruminations and self-belief that people with depression often report.”

“As an example of how this might look in depression — it is often easy for friends and family to point out to their loved one errors or the harm in their thought patterns,” Sumner explained. “A counsellor will often work with a person to change their harmful ruminations or beliefs, such as with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). However, the person experiencing depression may find this difficult to see, or to take on because of how rigid their models (belief about themselves, the world around them, their future) have become.”

The participants also completed a visual task to measure long-term potentiation (LTP), the ability of neurons to increase communication efficiency with other neurons. An analysis of that data, published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, found evidence that the antidepressant effects of ketamine were associated with enhanced LTP.

“Ketamine may be working by increasing plasticity (the ability to adapt and learn new things), as well as increasing the brain’s sensitivity to unexpected external input that is signaling errors in its own rigid expectations,” Sumner said.

The main limitations of the new research are the lack of a control group and relatively small sample size. But Sumner and her colleagues hope that their future research will shed more light on whether ketamine can help to defeat harmful cognitions.

“The task we used involves presenting beeps through some headphones, and while it provides a highly controlled way to measure plasticity and sensitivity to unexpected input, it is pretty far removed from the complexity of the experience of depression itself. The next study should replicate our finding, and aim target and relate the change in the mismatch response and connectivity to higher level brain functions,” Sumner told PsyPost.

“Building on this finding may help provide evidence for the use of ketamine to facilitate or enhance people’s ability to engage with and benefit from therapies like CBT, by putting the brain into a more plastic state, ready to update its models.”

The study, “Ketamine improves short-term plasticity in depression by enhancing sensitivity to prediction errors“, was authored by Rachael L. Sumner, Rebecca McMillan, Meg J. Spriggs, Doug Campbell, Gemma Malpas, Elizabeth Maxwell, Carolyn Deng, John Hay, Rhys Ponton, Frederick Sundram, and Suresh D. Muthukumaraswamy.

Maybe we should try putting this stuff in the public water supply - might could go a long way to fixing what's gone wrong with the MAGA QAnon bozos. Can you thinking of a more apt description of their moronic beliefs than "inaccurate models and predictions"?

I think it's worth a shot.

QAnon Update

Isolation - the kind you get with a pandemic - is the perfect incubator for shitty ideas.

We've even adopted the propagandists' favorite technique by self-segregating into small factions - bubbles.

But we have the intertoobz to keep in touch, and that's the opportunity for the bad guys to find lots and lots of SmarmSpace® to thrive in.

They broke us down into bite-sized chunks, and then they got busy knitting together the base elements of a mob willing to support a ruling minority.

That's how 72 million rubes looked at 4 years of fucked-up-ed-ness and decided, "Yeah, let's have some more of that shit".

Trevor Noah - The Daily Show

About That QAnon Thing

Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The term was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.

He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections, accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".

He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

From a poster going by the handle Rabbit Rabbit at Medium:

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
Playing with reality

I am a game designer with experience in a very small niche. I create and research games designed to be played in reality. I’ve worked in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), LARPs, experience fiction, interactive theater, and “serious games”. Stories and games that can start on a computer, and finish in the real world. Fictions designed to feel as real as possible. Games that teach you. Puzzles that come to life all around the players. Games where the deeper you dig, the more you find. Games with rabbit holes that invite you into wonderland and entice you through the looking glass.

When I saw QAnon, I knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people. (cue ominous music)

QAnon has often been compared to ARGs and LARPs and rightly so. It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards. It has a game-like feel to it that is evident to anyone who has ever played an ARG, online role-play (RP) or LARP before. The similarities are so striking that it has often been referred to as a LARP or ARG. However this beast is very very different from a game.

It is the differences that shed the light on how QAnon works and many of them are hard to see if you’re not involved in game development. QAnon is like the reflection of a game in a mirror, it looks just like one, but it is inverted.

Guided Apophenia

In one of the very first experience fictions (XF) I ever designed, the players had to explore a creepy basement looking for clues. The object they were looking for was barely hidden and the clue was easy. It was Scooby Doo easy. I definitely expected no trouble in this part of the game.

But there was trouble. I didn’t know it then, but its name was APOPHENIA.

Apophenia is : “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)”

As the participants started searching for the hidden object, on the dirt floor, were little random scraps of wood.

How could that be a problem!?

It was a problem because three of the pieces made the shape of a perfect arrow pointing right at a blank wall. It was uncanny. It had to be a clue. The investigators stopped and stared at the wall and were determined to figure out what the clue meant and they were not going one step further until they did. The whole game was derailed. Then, it got worse. Since there obviously was no clue there, the group decided the clue they were looking for was IN the wall. The collection of ordinary tools they found conveniently laying around seemed to enforce their conclusion that this was the correct direction. The arrow was pointing to the clue and the tools were how they would get to it. How obvious could it be?

I stared in horror because it all fit so well. It was better and more obvious than the clue I had hidden. I could see it. It was all random chance but I could see the connections that had been made were all completely logical. I had a crude backup plan and I used it quickly before these well-meaning players started tearing apart the basement wall with crowbars looking for clues that did not exist.

These were normal people and their assumptions were normal and logical and completely wrong.

In most ARG-like games apophenia is the plague of designers and players, sometimes leading participants to wander further and further away from the plot and causing designers to scramble to get them back or (better yet) incorporate their ideas. In role-playing games, ARGs, video games, and really anything where the players have agency, apophenia is going to be an issue.

This happens because in real games there are actual solutions to actual puzzles and a real plot created by the designers. It’s easy to get off track because there is a track. A great game runner (often called a puppet-master) can use one or two of these speculations to create an even better game, but only as much as the plot can be adjusted for in real time or planned out before-hand. It can create amazing moments in a game, but it’s not easy. For instance, I wish I could have instantly entombed something into that wall in the basement because it would have worked so well, but I was out of luck!

If you are a designer, and have puzzles, and have a plot, then apophenia is a wild card you always have to be concerned about.

QAnon is a mirror reflection of this dynamic. Here apophenia is the point of everything. There are no scripted plots. There are no puzzles to solve created by game designers. There are no solutions.

QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.

There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at. More about this later.

Everyone on the board agrees with you because it’s highly likely they were the ones that pointed it out to you just for that purpose. (more on this later)

“Hey, what’s that?!”

“It looks like an arrow, pointing at the wall.”

“Why do you think it’s there? Do people just leave arrows pointing to things randomly? What does your common sense say about that?”

“It says there must be something there.”

“Yes. You are right. Maybe you should look at it more closely?”

Every cloud has a shape that can look like something else. Everything that flickers is also a jumble of Morse code. The more information that is out there, the easier it is to allow apophenia to guide us into anything. This is about looking up at the sky and someone pointing out constellations.

The difference is that these manufactured connections lead to the desired conclusions Q’s handlers have created. When players arrive at the “correct” answers they are showered with adoration, respect, and social credit. Like a teenage RP, the “correct” answer is the one that the group respects the most and makes the story the most enjoyable. The idea that bolsters the theory. The correct answer is the one that provides the poster with the most credit.

It’s like a Darwinian fiction lab, where the best stories and the most engaging and satisfying misinterpretations rise to the top and are then elaborated upon for the next version.

Even Q-Anon was only one of several “anons” including FBIanon and CIAanon, etc, etc. Q rose to the top, so it got its own YouTube channels. That tested, so it moved to Reddit. The theories that didn’t work, disappeared while others got up-voted. It’s ingenious. It’s AI with a group-think engine. The group, led by the puppet masters, decide what is the most entertaining and gripping explanation, and that is amplified. It’s a Slenderman board gone amok.

Let’s go back to the arrow on the ground again.

It was not an arrow on the ground, pointing to a clue in a wall. It was just some random bits of wood. They did not discover an arrow. They created it. They saw random pieces of wood and applied their intelligence to it, and this is everything.

It’s easy for people to forget that they are not discovering the story, but creating it from random data.

Propaganda and Manipulation

Another major difference between QAnon and an actual game, is that Q is almost pure propaganda. That IS the sole purpose of this. It’s not advertising a product, it’s not for fun, and it’s not an art project. There is no doubt about the political nature of the propaganda either. From ancient tropes about Jews and Democrats eating babies (blood-libel re-booted) to anti-science hysteria, this is all the solid reliable stuff of authoritarianism. This is the internet’s re-purposing of hatred’s oldest hits. The messaging is spot on. The “drops” implanted in an aspic of anti-Semitic, misogynist, and grotesque posts on posting boards that, indeed, have been implicated in many of the things the fake conspiracy is supposed to be guilty of!

Q is also operating in conjunction with many other initiatives as documented by other sources and other developers. The coordination is consistent.

A game helps the people who play build an internal world that best serves them. Q helps players develop an internal world that best serves Q’s initiatives.

Let’s look at how that works.

Game Play - Q is a fictional character

I’m afraid this needs to be said. Q is not a real person, but a fictional character.

QAnon uses the oldest trope of all mystery fiction. A mysterious stranger shows up and drops a strange clue leading to long-hidden secrets which his clues, and your detecting power, can reveal.

Let’s think about this for a minute. How many great movies, books, and TV shows would have been forever ruined if the mysterious stranger just laid it all out for the protagonists in the first meeting. “Jim did it. It’s Jim. He’s laundering money for the mob. Check his bank records. Never mind, I have them right here.” The X-Files would be a lot shorter if The Smoking Man had just used his words!

It doesn’t work that way. The fictional mysterious stranger already knows, but instead of telling you the answer in the first ten minutes, they give you clues. Hard to follow clues. Ambiguous clues. They say things like “Follow the money. Don’t let them fool you. This goes all the way to the top.”

There is no reason for this in reality, but fictionally, this is what creates the whole plot, the sense of mystery, and everything entertaining that is to follow. This is the white rabbit. This is the breadcrumb trail out of the forest.

It doesn’t work for reality. Real people in the government with important information to disseminate deliver it as fast as possible usually all in one go. They don’t make you solve things. They try to be as specific as possible. They are whistle blowers. Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers). Edward Snowden. Chelsea Manning. Etc.

Q is NOT a whistleblower. Q is a “plot device”. Q is fictional and acts exactly like a fictional character acts. This is because the purpose of Q is not to divulge actual information, but to create fiction.
dO tHe ReSeaRcH

The fictional reason Q doesn’t just tell the world what they know is that Q wants you to “do your own research” and come to your own conclusions. How polite…

This is not a real reason. Q does not want you to come to your own conclusions. Q is feeding you conclusions. This is VERY important and here are several reasons why this is included in the verbiage of almost every fictional conspiracy theory ever.

1: Follow The Breadcrumbs

Telling people how and what they should think is the path of most resistance. Ideas that challenge us can do just the opposite of convincing us or enlightening us, but further engrain our old ideas. Even when presented with factual evidence.

“It is well known that people often resist changing their beliefs when directly challenged, especially when these beliefs are central to their identity1,2,3,4,5,6. In some cases, exposure to counterevidence may even increase a person’s confidence that his or her cherished beliefs are true7,8.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589

Strongly held beliefs are literally a part of us. As such, attacks on core beliefs are treated very much as attacks on us, even as strongly as a physical attack.

“The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body,” Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, tells me. “The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.”

Why we react to inconvenient truths as if they were personal insults.
By Brian Resnick

If the ideas are generated by us, however, then these are the ideas we defend. If we “create” the ideas in our own minds, they become fused much more intently into our personality. They’re OURS. There is no friction. Guiding people to arrive at YOUR conclusions is a perfect way to get people to accept a new and conflicting ideology.

Getting them to arrive at the destination can be a little tricky. You have to guide them there one little step at a time.

In QAnon parlance, these steps, or trail markers leading you into the forest, are called breadcrumbs. Little morsels Q disperses that are easy to digest that lead the players towards wherever Q is guiding them. One little bite at a time.

But the breadcrumbs are not facts, they are questions. Puzzles and clues for the “investigators” to uncover.

This leads us to another reason Q would really like you to do your own research.

2: The Eureka Effect

Puzzle-solving is a special way to learn and it encodes information into the brain in a different way than other learning. Puzzles and knowledge gained through our own efforts are incredibly rewarding and also come with a hit of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure drug, as a reward.

As far back as 1978, it has been known that having an “Aha!” moment increases retention of memories.

Recently, a report published in 2018 in the journal Human Brain Mapping found that Aha! moments also activate the brain’s reward systems.

Aha!-moments are characterized by hyperactivation in (a) nucleus accumbens, which has been shown to be involved in the feeling of relief, ease, and joy, (b) VTA, which is related to the encoding of certainty about a decision, (c) the posterior hippocampus, responsible for memory reorganization following an insight, and (d) aSTS/STG associated coarse semantic coding.

As those structures are part of a dopaminergic pathway, associated with reinforcement, we suggest the Aha!-Moment as a special form of fast retrieval, combination, and encoding process.

Basically, that “AHA!” moment when puzzle solving (even when incorrect) is extremely pleasurable and also may help encode what we learn in a new way.

It also helps reinforce the desire to seek out and solve new puzzles.

In other words, solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us.

3. Lamestream Media

Another extremely important “reason” for propagandists to get people to “do the research” is to instill a natural distrust for society and the competency of others.

There is no need for QAnons to do the research because the fact is, the research has already been done and been done by thousands of trained professionals. The FBI, CIA, and countless non-profits dedicated to solving the issues of trafficking and abuse have already been working on these issues for decades. If anons really wanted to do the research they should research getting a license in social work, psychology, criminal justice, or really anything that might actually be considered research.

Do your own research means. “Don’t trust other people. Don’t trust institutions. Listen to me.”

The conspiracy plot always has the same logic. The reason no one knows about the conspiracy is because of the conspiracy. Not because it doesn’t exist.

Then initiates are given the tools to arrive at “their own conclusions” which are in every way more compelling, interesting, and solve more problems than traditional conclusions. Because they are wrong and fictional.

4: Community

Solving puzzles together is a great way to form community and to join community. ARGs are famous for this. Everyone has something to focus on, a shared interest, and something to do. The puzzles are often just a way of getting together. If Q drops some clues, then you have something to do and you have people to do it with. It’s bonding. The same reason puzzles are used in corporate team building exercises and party games.

Especially if those people are there with the intent to make you feel and think something specific. To befriend you and make you feel special. Working together on something is a great way for that to happen.
Gameplay Example:

Several Q drops insinuate that the ruling class of occultists have the mandate to tell each other who they are through symbolism. A requirement even.

This is a way of creating a rich set of random data that can be linked together by group-think to support the main theory. It’s simple, compelling, and there is plenty of precedent to this idea too. Everyone “knows” that there are symbols associated with magic, occult, and closed societies. Like the mason compass and the pentagram. One of the groups that love to use symbols to alert others they are a member is actually QAnon so the practice is familiar. #wwg1wga

Here are a couple of “drops” in a similar vein.

Their need for symbolism will be their downfall.
Follow the Owl & Y head around the world.
Identify and list.
They don’t hide it.
They don’t fear you.
You are sheep to them.
You are feeders.
Godfather III.
Q

Here is another example.

Identify symbolism (Owl / Y).
Which performers/celebs supported HRC during the election?
Who performed during her rallies?
What jewelry and/or tattoos present?
What other events do they attend together?
What does HRC represent to them?
What celebrities have owl / Y head symbols?
What politicians have owl / Y head symbols?
What powerful people have owl / Y head symbols?
What powerful groups have owl / Y head symbols?
Why are they worn/shown openly?
Their need for symbolism will be their downfall.

Each breadcrumb amounts to a creative writing prompt. A conspiracy connect-the-dots.

It gives players a doable task they can all collaborate on.

Is this real? Are Hollywood celebrities and political figures really making occult signs like owls and yacks? “Investigators” head out to Google to find out. Here is what they come back with.

QAnon went digging and found hundreds of images. Maybe you didn’t see it before, but now you can’t STOP seeing it.

This isn’t the first or the last symbolism meme either. Some QAnon, some pre-dating Q. They certainly aren’t hard to find once you start “researching”.

Here is the “666 symbol”

Here is the Illuminati “one eye” “eye of providence” symbol, like the one on the pyramid.

Now, like in traditional ARGs, participants get to look at the world a little differently. They can go on the boards, watch the videos, ask questions. They can submit their own “research” and get kudos, encouraging comments, and make friends. They don’t have to believe it all, but now when they see a new music video, maybe they begin to notice just how many weird things are in them? Could it be that they aren’t just filler, but have a real meaning?

From Fiction to Reality

Already, the game mechanics have begun to turn on the participant.

The participant is having fun looking around and “solving” riddles reinforced by dopamine rushes and the feeling of being involved in something that no one else knows. They are also now part of a growing, active, and friendly community. Everything they see and hear creates further doubt about people and things they already doubt. Every new theory is easy to understand, compelling, and arrived at through their own ability to reason. Now to doubt certain ideas is to doubt themselves, their ability to see the truth, their community, and maybe the world around them. Quickly, the game is creating an alternate POV that is immensely psychologically satisfying and seems to be supported on all sides as the truth. Celebrities, senators, and even the President are all supportive.

The implications in the Q prompts are one-sided and designed to cast doubt, not offer proof. Once doubt is cast, it is incredibly hard to dispel.

It’s very hard to prove something doesn’t exist. You can’t prove there are no aliens for example. Aliens scientifically could exist so you will never be able to prove that they don’t. You can’t prove someone isn’t in a cult either. No matter what they say. Doubt can not be dispelled easily. It can be grown easily, however.

Every creepy picture of a celebrity making devil horns or dressed up in a bloody gown.

Imagine the participants looking through hundreds of images of the people they distrust acting completely like they are in a cult.

Rock stars are always trying to shock people. They throw the hand-horns all the time. Their videos are riddled with the skulls of steers and weird tattoos and conscious occult references.

“I don’t know if I believe it, but it IS weird, right? It does kind of look like they are in a cult. I don’t wear a goat’s head! Why would anyone do that? Could some of them be rich freaks? I’ve heard so much about the Rothschilds…”

Then the idea gets force-multiplied in thousands of sites, YouTube videos, ads, comments, Instagram influencers, tweets, etc. It’s everywhere, and every place you go (in your bubble), keeps telling you it is true. Even places you go outside your bubble tell you it’s true (because that’s how ads work).

People might dig up all the articles about Beyoncé being the head of the Illuminati along with Jay-Z flashing the Illuminati sign. And then you learn that Jay-Z actually IS interested in the Illuminati and has been flashing the sign for six years.

I mean, it can’t be true, can it?

And then there are the sad facts. There are abusers in Hollywood. Rich, weird, Hollywood Jews too. Harvey Weinstein. Epstein. Why not the Rothschilds? Can you get the image out of your head of that creepy old rich guy and his wife wearing a devil head?

The doubt grows every day.

Until it isn’t doubt.

Until you’re “pretty sure”.

Of course, Q knows these images of the Rothschilds are out there and knows they are out of context (a surrealist costume ball). Same with the abundance of occult imagery in modern music videos. They are leading you to unrelated information that fits their narrative. Fits the story.

What about these images?

QAnon is anxious to get into everything! It’s a gathering place. A local pub for conspiracy theories. It’s also a great way to indoctrinate people or “red pill” them.

QAnon is now a force-multiplier. An army desperate for “puzzles” to solve with a clear focus and a broad addiction to the conspiracy community. Anti-Covid, Anti-Vaccine, 5G, and who knows what else?

Right now QAnon is hijacking the #savethechildren hashtag for themselves. People go out to save the children and maybe ask innocently about why some of the signs say #thestormiscoming or #wwg1wag

It is increasingly hard to separate Q from those worried about postal voter fraud or Bill Gates. It’s just latching itself onto anything.
Indoctrinating

Indoctrination is obviously not a game mechanic.

There is “going viral”, and there is active training and recruitment. Advertising’s goal is to be so entertaining, useful, or uplifting that people pass on the information to their friends. Games seek to be so engaging that people want to play and they want to play with their friends.

To some extent that is happening, there is a viral quality to Q, but there is also something else in addition that is highly troubling. Q is teaching QAnons how to proselytize.

Q gives instructions that both points to the QAnon theories, but also hides from others that it is QAnon until they have been indoctrinated. This is the replication of rabbit holes and breadcrumbs.

On the posting boards where QAnon grows are lists of memes and instructions for how and where to post them as well as invitations to create and collect them. There are lists of technical resources about how to track individuals through their social media footprint, hack information to reveal poster’s locations, and use a wide assortment of tools designed to gather “information”.

Q also gives specific instructions about how to “red pill” friends and family. How to get people to ask them questions. How to distribute rabbit holes, get people to ask them questions, start bread crumb trails, and spread Q ideas without linking directly to Q.

This is very “cult”. It’s a very clear danger sign.

There have been many good articles on this phenomenon including how Q spreads.

Not Organic

“It’s probably some guy who posted a few things on 4Chan and it just took off!” or “This thing came out of nowhere! It’s gone viral!” People think QAnon is viral and organic because that is the intent of QAnon. It’s part of its own story and propaganda.

As a producer of ARGs, this stuff is hard to produce and maintain and keep interesting. QAnon works, again, in an opposite manner from a regular ARG.

Normally, if an indie ARG or interactive story goes unexpectedly viral, the creators begin to struggle. They have less money to spend on more people, more interactions, and a story that gets consumed faster and faster. They have no more time/money/staff and eventually, they have to wrap it up. Even commercial ad-based ARGs are exhausting to run. It’s a sprint from the first post and no matter how short, it feels like a marathon. (Ok, mine did, I’m sure there are better producers out there)

This thing goes the reverse way. The more people join it, the more money goes into it. The more effort, the more PR, and the more content.

The more people try to shut it down (Google, FB, Reddit, Instagram, service providers, TikTok, etc.) the more the Q runners double down, getting ever bigger endorsements from the top politicians in the world.

There is money here and it’s not grassroots. It’s not a huge amount of money, but this is a system from which Facebook said had removed:

“ 790 groups, 100 Pages and 1,500 ads with links to QAnon. It’s also blocked over 300 hashtags across Facebook and Instagram and restricted 1,950 groups and 440 pages on Facebook and over 10,000 accounts on Instagram.”
- The Verge

The same week Facebook did this, President Trump got on camera during a press release and endorsed them. He called them a growing, popular movement, and said he appreciated them. When asked if he believed the basic premise that he was “secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals” he replied with “is that supposed to be a bad thing? If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it, I’m willing to put myself out there. And we are actually, we are saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.”

This is not a loner on the internet that started dropping a few posts and suddenly went viral. I’ve met those people. I’ve been on those projects. It doesn’t happen like this.

This is a media campaign. This is a coordinated propaganda campaign.

800 groups? An ARG with an endorsement from the President? An ARG with physical demonstrations organized for multiple countries and over 200 physical locations. These are not “organic”.

There is even a full-length movie out, paid for “out of pocket” that is being distributed FOR FREE to spread the word. Hundreds of publications for sale on Amazon. This is a lot of work. This isn’t how games work. This isn’t how anything but media/advertising/propaganda campaigns work.

QAnon needs this kind of media saturation BECAUSE it is not a natural movement. People need to be surrounded by it on all sides. It needs to seem popular even when it absolutely isn’t. It needs to seem like everyone is talking about it. They need to see it on YouTube, TikTok, in the papers, in the news, and hear it from their friends. This is all part of making it feel “real”.

This Is Not A Game (TINAG)

TINAG is an acronym for This Is Not A Game, and it is often associated with the method of running games like ARGs. These games have a theater-like quality to them which can be distracting if disturbed. It’s similar to the way that if an actor is missing a prop, they’ll just try to roll with it, because stopping the play and going out to get a new fake sword will ruin the immersion. You’re supposed to be in the world of the play, not the real world. You could just as easily say the same for most fictions.

But everyone who plays these games, like everyone who watches a movie or uses VR, knows it’s not real even if they are very immersed in it.

That is the fun. Yes, games like AI (the Beast) and ilovebees ARGs pretended to be “real” but they were also games set in the future and could not be mistaken for reality. Knowing what is “in-game” is a huge priority of game designers and players alike no matter how life-like the game. At least, if people don’t know if a clue is in a game or not, the result has to be harmless.

People call the actual police if they think there is an actual crime, so your players have to know they are playing a game, or else.

Of course, again, this is the opposite of the stated purpose of Qanon. TINAG is literal.

QAnon seeks to uncover the real story. That’s why people are calling the police, their state reps, and trafficking hotlines. Solving a tough puzzle in a game is a huge rush, but in Q it’s even more-so because IT’S REAL. They’re writing about you in every magazine. You’re on the news. Participants haven’t solved a game, they’ve solved reality! But how does the sense that the false connections the Q participants are making are REAL develop?

It’s not that strange actually. In fact, the difference between apophenia and science is just the scientific process and the reliance on proof. People make the connection before they know for a fact if it’s real or not. Maybe it is apophenia, maybe not. It’s a hypothesis. A theory. THEN YOU TEST IT. The facts determine the outcome and then, whether it feels good or not, you accept them. Even scientists may not want to let go of a good theory that just isn’t panning out. The feeling of correctness is over-powering. This is why people need to have peer-reviews. Colleagues need to be able to replicate results. Solutions need to be tested and the facts harnessed.

In Q, the proof is more apophenia! Another arrow in the dirt in an endless cycle back to the central propaganda. It has to because there is no truth. The answer is whatever feels the best, makes the most sense, and helps the story. Any truth is just fuel for the propaganda and reinforces the conclusions of the apophenia and central narrative.

It feels like it’s really happening. It especially seems so when cheered on by a curated fake “community” clapping you on the back and telling you you are a hero for every radical leap into the void you make. If you begin to lose faith or interest, you can flip on Fox News and have Senators, public figures, and even the President of the United States cheering you on by name in your efforts to produce a credible and intriguing narrative from the random bits of data all around you. Just like the narrative said would happen.

In fact, “alternate reality” is highly fitting here.

Qanon is an attempt to create a new reality that can be acted on, lived in “as-if”, and manipulated, but does not match actual reality. Because if they can do that, then they can do anything they want and blame the outcomes on any fictional plot point they choose. One tentacle of a many-pronged attack of boogaloo bros, Qanons, Anti-maskers, Fake News, Alex Jones, etc. Scattershot programs all with the same message and the same end-game. To doubt reality. To create the fog of war without the war. To create a collectively shared reality that they directly control.

How easy is it to live in a fantasy world?

Pretty easy actually. Love, civilization, honor, good/evil, religion, money, etc. What is real and what is a fiction that we have created and agreed to live as if they existed? Maybe you don’t believe your religion is a fiction, but what about everyone else’s? Are they all equally real?

Being able to share and believe in our fictions, acting on them as if they are real, may even be one of our evolutionary advantages.

Once you accept that the tenets of QAnon are real, or mostly real, it is just as likely to become a religion, a cult, a political movement, or anything else. But definitely not a game!

Sound far fetched?

I’m not sure how much difference there already is between what believers in Q feel now and what people who belong to a religion feel. Already the gist of the mildly religious is present.

“I’m a QAnon/Catholic/Jew and I like the community and I like the activities, but I’m not sure I really believe EVERYTHING is literal. I agree with the basic ideas though.”

But honestly, it could be apophenia I’m experiencing.

Let’s end this with the words of Q themselves on how to indoctrinate new members.

How many people are unaware of the ‘truth’ due to the stranglehold?
How must people be made aware of an alternate reality?
What are crumbs (think H-wood/DC)
Define ‘lead-in’ (think play)?
What has been occurring recently?
The stage must be set.
Crumbs are easy to swallow.
Q

A Few Links:

• Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful (pay wall)
• Why Someone You Love Might Join QAnon
• How QAnon Conspiracy Theories Spread In My Colorado Hometown

Last bit - I'm not going to call it a theory anymore, because the word 'theory' carries the connotation that what's being postulated could be true.

QAnon has no such probability. It's not a theory at all - it's a fantasy.

You might as well try to convince me that garden gnomes come to life at night to keep the skunks outa my back yard.

QAnon Illustrated

It begins

And it ends

The QAnon Thing

Let's be clear - when we're talking about QAnon and Alex Jones and AM Hate Radio and (most of) DumFux News, we're not talking about "conspiracy theories". There's no theory to it - this shit is purely a childish indulgence in fantasy.

These fuckin' fuckwads seem to be watching movies like Enemy of the State, and TV shows like 24 - and even pro wrestling - as if they're documentaries.

Which I think must have something to do with their willingness to accept a washed-up has-been game show host as the leader of their death cult.

WaPo:

Q.

There was a time not long ago when the letter held no special meaning for Jacob, a 24-year-old in Croatia. The 17th letter of the alphabet, usually followed by “u” in English words. What else was there to know? He certainly never expected it to end the tightknit relationship he shared with his mother.

But Jacob, who grew up in the United States, told The Washington Post that he has cut all contact with his mother now that she’s become an ardent believer of the QAnon conspiracy theories.

Though they long held different political beliefs, they had “a really, really strong relationship,” he said. “We were inseparable.” He had no reason to think anything had changed. But during the holidays in 2019, “our relationship just completely tanked.”

QAnon can be traced back to a series of 2017 posts on 4chan, the online message board known for its mixture of trolls and alt-right followers. The poster was someone named “Q,” who claimed to be a government insider with Q security clearance, the highest level in the Department of Energy. QAnon’s origin matters less than what it’s become, an umbrella term for a loose set of conspiracy theories ranging from the false claim that vaccines cause illness and are a method of controlling the masses to the bogus assertion that many pop stars and Democratic leaders are pedophiles.

The choose-your-own-adventure nature of QAnon makes it compelling to vulnerable people desperate for a sense of security and difficult for Twitter and Facebook to control, despite their efforts. It’s becoming increasingly mainstreamed as several QAnon-friendly candidates won congressional primaries. And the FBI has warned that it could “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”

As QAnon has crept into the news, it’s become a testament to our age of political disinformation, not to mention easy online comedic currency. But what’s often forgotten in stories and jokes are the people behind the scenes who are baffled at a loved one’s embrace of the “movement,” and who struggle to keep it from tearing their families apart.

According to Jacob’s recollection, his mother spent her days browsing these various theories on YouTube and Twitter. “I told her, ‘I came here to visit you,” he recalled. But she refused to stay offline.

“I finally got her to turn [her phone] off once, and it was unreal. She treated it like a chore,” he said. “It’s like she’s addicted. It feels like she’s been swallowed up by a cult."

“Finally, I realized that my relationship with her had brought me nothing but stress and unhappiness for, at that point, really years,” he said. “That smart, awesome person that I used to know just didn’t exist anymore. So I decided to cut my losses and cauterize the wound.”

Jacob hasn’t spoken to her since February, but she continues posting conspiracy theories multiple times a day to Facebook. She declined a request for comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is using only Jacob’s first name.

“It’s devastating,” he said. “It really, really does feel like my mother abandoned me. She implicitly chose QAnon … over me.”

Jacob is one of many who have turned to makeshift online support groups, the most prominent of which is the subreddit r/qanoncasualties. “Do you have a loved one who’s been taken in by the QAnon conspiracy theory? Look here for emotional support and a place to vent,” reads the group’s description.

It had fewer than 3,500 members at the beginning of June, the earliest iteration captured by the online archival website the Way Back Machine. It now has more than 28,000. “I have been completely isolated from other friends and family members because of this cult,” one user posted recently. “You guys have definitely been a lifeline, reminding me that sanity does still exist in this world. Thank you guys, very much.”

The loneliness of losing loved ones to QAnon is something Kerry, of Oklahoma City, knows well. “QAnon” meant nothing to him, he recalled, when he found a stockpile of water and food in his house, which his then-wife told him was “because she believed Trump was going to be declaring martial law any day in order to effectuate a mass arrest of Democrats,” something known to QAnon believers as “the storm.” (His ex-wife declined to comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is only using Kerry’s first name.)

Kerry dug deeper, trying to understand his wife’s beliefs. They would debate. Eventually they started avoiding it “to keep peace in the house,” but she eventually grew more assertive and “what was once a taboo topic became something we were arguing about all the time.”

Still, he empathized.

“She was getting frustrated that nobody in her immediate family was buying in and supporting her,” Kerry said. “She felt like she was alone in this crusade. … And I know this was extremely frustrating and hurtful for her.”

He and their then-18-year-old son held an intervention. It failed. “We were together a very long time. We managed to get past a lot of things I’ve seen end other marriages,” he said. “But this was the thing we couldn’t get past.”

Their 20-year marriage ended.

His is one of a flood of stories. There’s the South Carolina doctor whose mother blocked him on Facebook and no longer trusts his medical knowledge. The Florida woman who thought her mother — a physician in Canada who refuses to wear masks when not seeing a patient and tried to persuade her daughter not to vaccinate her grandchild — was senile when she began hawking QAnon theories. The woman whose unemployed aunt is quarantining alone and suddenly began diving into QAnon because it “gives her life meaning.”

“I love my mother, but she sucks the life out of me with her conspiracy theories,” said one Florida woman via email. (Many interviewees spoke on the condition of anonymity, which they requested for a variety of reasons, including fear of violence from QAnon followers, pending legal action and the worry that speaking would hinder their attempts to repair relationships.)

This is not strictly a U.S. phenomenon. Users from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand and the Netherlands all shared similar stories.

One recurring theme is how often people who fall into QAnon aren’t digital natives. A 30-year-old Sacramento resident said his stepmother of 20 years “has always been not really an Internet person,” until the 2016 election. She soon stumbled upon radical aspects of online politics on outlets such as 4chan, “going from a zero to a 10.” Soon enough, she was seeking “Q drops” (supposedly when Q reveals new “information”), telling others how “there are children in bunkers under Central Park who are being trafficked” and telling her stepson he was “brainwashed because you went to college.”

When this person spoke to The Post last month, his mother hadn’t left the house in 16 weeks because she refused to wear a mask after watching the viral “Plandemic” conspiracy video, which made the false claim that billionaires aided in the spread of the coronavirus to further the usage of vaccines and made the baseless and dangerous assertion that wearing masks is harmful.

“This same person who told me not to believe strangers online, her entire worldview is informed by strangers online,” he said.

Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said often people’s point of entry into a conspiracy narrative is the fear of something specific, such as illness or violent crime. Maybe they seek out answers on the Internet, only to find conspiratorial ones.

“If you have someone in your family in this mode of inquisitiveness, who is trying to figure something out, then rather than coming at them judgmentally or accusingly, there is a window of opportunity to reorient their thinking to understand why they perceive something in a certain way,” Donovan said.

That window might eventually close, though, as they find community among other online conspiracy theorists, many of whom create massive amounts of text, memes, videos — you name it — to sift through. “It’s not necessary that you convince your friends or family to join, because you have a whole separate set of friends … It’s the kind of community where you could be lost in it for hours and hours a day and still not see everything,” Donovan said.

How to talk — and ask — about QAnon

When someone goes too far down the rabbit hole, it’s unlikely that anyone will convince them otherwise. “My main advice is not to get into a debate about, say, how many politicians are secret satanists,” Donovan said. Instead, she suggests trying to help someone “see how much of their life they’re missing out on and how much it’s impacting your relationship. … And if they can’t have a conversation about someone else, a conversation that’s mutually beneficial and interesting, then there’s a different kind of problem going on.”

“The one-on-one approach of trying to understand where someone is coming from and where their fears are … works,” Donovan said. If someone is “willing to take on the burden of trying to get one of their family members to change their mind, I hope they approach them with passion and concern.”

The situation can become increasingly difficult when a child is involved. A Florida firefighter said his ex-wife fell hard for every QAnon theory in the book, from a complicated plot connecting UFOs and the Illuminati to the (false) idea that prominent celebrities, entrepreneurs and politicians are lizard people disguised in human skin. Her obsession with conspiracy theories helped lead to their divorce.

“Her intentions are to do good, but it’s just not real,” he said. “It’s like living in a fantasy world. It’s a need to believe in something.”

Her beliefs wouldn’t matter to him much at this point if they weren’t co-parenting a son. He found out that his ex-wife told the son to avoid banks because the Federal Reserve would put microchips in him.

His father said that he and his ex “do a pretty good job of trying to raise him,” but added, “I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a child to be a functional adult while living so far outside reality.”