I Gotcher Conspiracy Right here

Hey, "conservatives", do you really wanna do that conspiracy thing? Here's one.

What if you make a political move that takes cops off the streets, and do it thru the unions, which kinda short-circuits the lefties' pushback?

Put this together with - oh, I dunno - that horseshit going on down there in Texas where they've legalized Vigilantism, and whaddya got?

The Guardian:

Police departments face a shortage as unions enable officers to refuse vaccines

Representatives say the mandates violate the officers’ rights while city leaders are trying to keep the public safe

Sgt Randy Huserik and all other officers with the Seattle police department who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 are prepared to report at 7am Tuesday morning to any of the city’s five precincts rather than their usual assignments. Some detectives could even be responding to 911 calls instead of following up on their case load, he said.

That’s because the city is implementing a vaccine mandate for officers on 18 October and preparing to fire hundreds of officers who refuse to get the vaccine, which could leave the department significantly understaffed.

“We will have additional bodies available to handle 911 calls but obviously there is going to be a backlash on that for all the officers assigned as detectives who then won’t be working on their caseload, which will then back up as additional cases come in,” said Huserik, who has been with the department for 28 years and works in public affairs.

The standoff between the city and officers is just one conflict among many across the United States, with city leaders stating that they are trying to keep the public safe and some officers and their union representatives saying that the mandates violate their rights. In Chicago, the issue has even led to the mayor and the local police union trading legal actions.

While the penalties for officers who decline to get the vaccine differ from city to city, there is a common resistance among police unions to various restrictions.

And policing experts warn that even if officers’ resistance to the vaccination is misguided, issuing mandates could further deplete departments that are already understaffed and thus hurt public safety.

“I think you should encourage them, but I don’t think you can make anybody do anything and think that relationship is going to be amicable and trustworthy down the line,” said David Thomas, a professor of forensic studies at Florida Gulf Coast University.

The resistance to the vaccines comes despite the fact Covid-19 has caused 473 deaths among law enforcement officers in the United States, making it the largest cause of death for the group in 2020 and 2021, according to Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks the deaths.

“You would think that is enough to encourage everybody to get vaccinated,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which advises police departments across the country. “It’s just mind-boggling to think that the creation of [police] unions was to protect officers’ rights and what could be more significant than the right to live a good life?”

Brian Higgins, a former police chief and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, attributes the resistance in part to the fact that police “are a little more skeptical” and “are not used to being told what to do”, he said.

And there it is - the cops "are not used to being told what to do."

Well then, you need to get used to it, fellas.

You are not the law.

You are not above the law.

You will comply with the fucking law.

It's The Lies, Stupid

Bullshit works because those who don't spend much time thinking in general aren't going to stop and think about much of anything in the specific.

To be fair - an awful lot of us were never taught to think - have never felt the need to learn much about it - while some have developed a Dunning-Kruger thing where they honestly believe they think really well &/or that there's nothing more to it than applying a little common sense cuz they're a very stable genius (or something else that excuses them from doing the actual work).

Many of us just don't have the time or the inclination to "delve into it" and do the navel-gazing thing or whatever.

There's a gullibility factor that grows out of a willingness to believe what we're told because we believe people are generally OK, or that there's some magical mechanism in place that protects us automatically without our having to do much for it all to work out in the end, pass the biscuits please, and how 'bout them Red Sox, eh?

Since we think of ourselves as mostly honest people, we tend to project that onto others, even as we learn they've been lying to us all along - which makes for some really harsh cognitive dissonance, which can resolve itself in very dangerous and even explosive ways as we become selective about who we believe and who we don't, which is the opportunity unscrupulous assholes look for so they can condition us to believe bullshit and reject reality.

NYT:

I Spoke to a Scholar of Conspiracy Theories and I’m Scared for Us

The big lesson of 2020 is that everything keeps getting more dishonest

Lately, I have been putting an embarrassing amount of thought into notions like jinxes and knocking on wood. The polls for Joe Biden look good, but in 2020, any hint of optimism feels dangerously naïve, and my brain has been working overtime in search of potential doom.

I have become consumed with an alarming possibility: that neither the polls nor the actual outcome of the election really matter, because to a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point.

If I sound jumpy, it’s because I spent a couple of hours recently chatting with Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Donovan is a pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation — the way that activists, extremists and propagandists surf currents in our fragmented, poorly moderated media ecosystem to gain attention and influence society.

Donovan’s research team studies online lies the way crash-scene investigators study aviation disasters. They meticulously take apart specific hoaxes, conspiracy theories, viral political memes, harassment campaigns and other toxic online campaigns in search of the tactics that made each one explode into the public conversation.

This week, Donovan’s team published “The Media Manipulation Casebook,” a searchable online database of their research. It makes for grim reading — an accounting of the many failures of journalists, media companies, tech companies, policymakers, law enforcement officials and the national security establishment to anticipate and counteract the liars who seek to dupe us. Armed with these investigations, Donovan hopes we can all do better.

I hope she’s right. But studying her work also got me wondering whether we’re too late. Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome. Every day I grow more fearful that the number of those Americans will be large enough to imperil our nation’s capacity to function as a cohesive society.

“I’m worried about political violence,” Donovan told me. America is heavily armed, and from Portland to Kenosha to the Michigan governor’s mansion, we have seen young men radicalized and organized online beginning to take the law into their own hands. Donovan told me she fears that “people who are armed are going to become dangerous, because they see no other way out.”

Media manipulation is a fairly novel area of research. It was only when Donald Trump won the White House by hitting it big with right-wing online subcultures — and after internet-mobilized authoritarians around the world pulled similar tricks — that serious scholars began to take notice.

The research has made a difference. In the 2016 election, tech companies and the mainstream media were often blind to the ways that right-wing groups, including white supremacists, were using bots, memes and other tricks of social media to “hack” the public’s attention, as the researchers Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis documented in 2017.

But the war since has been one of attrition. Propagandists keep discovering new ways to spread misinformation; researchers like Donovan and her colleagues keep sussing them out, and, usually quite late, media and tech companies move to fix the flaws — by which time the bad guys have moved on to some other way of spreading untruths.

While the media ecosystem has wised up in some ways: Note how the story supposedly revealing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop landed with a splat last week, quite different from the breathlessly irresponsible reporting on the Democrats’ hacked emails in 2016. But our society remains profoundly susceptible to mendacity.

Donovan worries about two factors in particular. One is the social isolation caused by the pandemic. Lots of Americans are stuck at home, many economically bereft and cut off from friends and relatives who might temper their passions — a perfect audience for peddlers of conspiracy theories.

Her other major worry is the conspiracy lollapalooza known as QAnon. It’s often short-handed the way Savannah Guthrie did at her town hall takedown of Donald Trump last week — as a nutty conspiracy theory in which a heroic Trump is prosecuting a secret war against a satanic pedophile ring of lefty elites.

But that undersells QAnon’s danger. To people who have been “Q-pilled,” QAnon plays a much deeper role in their lives; it has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network.

Donovan thinks QAnon represents a new, flexible infrastructure for conspiracy. QAnon has origins in a tinfoil-hat story about a D.C.-area pizza shop, but over the years it has adapted to include theories about the “deep state” and the Mueller probe, Jeffrey Epstein, and a wild variety of misinformation about face masks, miracle cures, and other hoaxes regarding the coronavirus. QAnon has been linked to many instances of violence, and law enforcement and terrorism researchers discuss it as a growing security threat.

“We now have a densely networked conspiracy theory that is extendible, adaptable, flexible and resilient to take down,” Donovan said of QAnon. It’s a very internet story, analogous to the way Amazon expanded from an online bookstore into a general-purpose system for selling anything to anyone.

Facebook and YouTube this month launched new efforts to take down QAnon content, but Q adherents have often managed to evade deplatforming by softening and readjusting their messages. Recently, for instance, QAnon has adopted slogans like “Save the Children” and “Child Lives Matter,” and it seems to be appealing to anti-vaxxers and wellness moms.

QAnon is also participatory, and, in an uncertain time, it may seem like a salvation. People “are seeking answers and they’re finding a very receptive community in QAnon,” Donovan said.

This is a common theme in disinformation research: What makes digital lies so difficult to combat is not just the technology used to spread them, but also the nature of the societies they’re targeting, including their political cultures. Donovan compares QAnon to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the priest whose radio show spread anti-Semitism in the Depression-era United States. Stopping Coughlin’s hate took a concerted effort, involving new regulations for radio broadcasters and condemnation of Coughlin by the Catholic Church.

Stopping QAnon will be harder; Coughlin was one hatemonger with a big microphone, while QAnon is a complex, decentralized, deceptive network of hate. But the principle remains: Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies.

https://mediamanipulation.org/

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.”

On That Fantasy Cult Trend

The short version is - people have moved away from traditional cults like Christianity, but still feel the need for the familiar comfort of the father figure.

Big takeaway: Looking at the "meta" is important, but people who get to these weird places in their lives - in their beliefs - all have an individual story on how it happened, and there's usually some kind of traumatizing event that instigates their transition.

My thing is that we're conditioned all our lives to look for stability and security in a world that we perceive to be randomly dangerous and ultimately uncaring and cruel (and to be sure, the world can be pretty fucking scary).

So we want that powerful presence in our lives. Something that makes us feel safe no matter what.

The problem is that our desire for that warm fuzzy feeling makes us willing to indulge in self-infantalization. So, in the relationship that we have to develop with ourselves as adults, we refuse to be the grownup, and we're then susceptible to manipulation at the hands of people who're looking to collect some kind of rent from us in return for telling us what to think rather than helping us figure out how to think for ourselves.

Something like QAnon is almost supremely insidious because it masquerades as "doing your own research and then deciding for yourself", while it's really just meaningless mental masturbation dressed up to look like intellectual rigor - with guns and a motivation to impose a kind of guided vigilante-ism that makes the Nazis look like an Amish picnic.

Think: The Three Stooges with automatic weapons and hand grenades.

QAnon

Axios:

How QAnon works like a video game to hook people

QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy theory that includes a vast galaxy of false claims involving everything from coronavirus to 5G to e-commerce, is seen by the FBI as a domestic terror threat. For some Republican lawmakers, it's a danger to be repudiated; for some candidates, a rallying cry. For its many followers, it's a great deal of fun.

The big picture: For all its real-world impact, QAnon hooks people by working like a video game. Game designer Adrian Hon has argued that Qanon is a lot like an alternate-reality game, in which players follow a trail of clues online and off, to solve mysteries or just discover more clues to chase.

But QAnon also echoes other game genres, mashing them together to become an all-encompassing, highly addictive experience. Intentionally or not, it has rolled up gameplay components from the past several decades of game design.

It's an adventure game.

Adventure games are built around puzzle solving, with players using exploration and trial and error to discover secrets and backstory and progress through the game. Many classics of the genre have the player unravel a sinister conspiracy.

At the center of QAnon are cryptic messages posted online by "Q," who claims to be a Trump administration official with high-level clearance. QAnon adherents pore over these posts, often written in phony spy jargon, to divine clues and secret messages and make fresh links in the grand conspiracy aligned against Trump.

"Do your own research" is a mantra for many QAnon followers. The idea is that QAnon helps freethinkers break from the hive mind — though their research leads them all ineluctably to the conclusion that most Democratic politicians and celebrities are cannibalistic pedophiles.

It's an MMORPG.

That stands for "massively multiplayer online role-playing game," in which players link up to go on quests, dispatching adversaries and discovering loot together. There's no end goal, just an opportunity to socialize online and to hone your own skills and status as a player. Raids — missions where groups of players coordinate an attack on an enemy — are commonplace.

QAnon gives many believers a sense of community and belonging, and many spend hours daily talking to each other and sharing discoveries over social media. They often swarm the online profiles of figures like model Chrissy Teigen — a frequent target of QAnon theories — with warnings of a reckoning to come.

QAnon is also friendly to newcomers. Most Q posts are intentionally enigmatic, but videos and other content from believers are often understandable to any dabbler, presenting claims about some discrete piece of the broader conspiracy, like coronavirus misinformation.

It's a roguelike.

Roguelikes send players through a game world of procedurally generated levels. That means the gameplay potentially never ends, as there's always some new piece of the map to explore and some new configuration of characters to encounter.
QAnon "intelligence" isn't generated by a computer — though algorithms have certainly helped spread it widely throughout social media and the internet at large.

But QAnon's scale and its followers' dedication to perpetually spinning out new claims and targets of attack creates a sort of crowdsourced simulation of procedural generation that ensures there are always more paths to go down, more clues to follow, more public figures to accuse.

The bottom line: People like solving mysteries and they like feeling privy to secret knowledge. QAnon gamifies those sensations at massive scale. And although tech giants are starting to crack down on it, there's no indication that its spread is slowing any time soon.

The Voynich manuscript is a book from the 15th century filled with strange drawings and writing in an unknown language. The simplest explanation is that it's just nonsense — either an intricate hoax or total gibberish. That hasn't stopped scholars, linguists and cryptographers from spending centuries chasing its mysteries.

Go deeper: QAnon's 2020 resurgence

Foil Hatters

I get really tired of debunking this shit.

Chinese lab conducted extensive research on deadly bat viruses, but there is no evidence of accidental release

WaPo:

On Thursday, the U.S. intelligence community released an assessment formally concluding that the virus behind the coronavirus pandemic originated in China. While asserting that the pathogen was not man-made or genetically altered, the statement pointedly declined to rule out the possibility that the virus had escaped from the complex of laboratories in Wuhan that has been at the forefront of global research into bat-borne viruses linked to multiple epidemics over the past decade.

“The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, using a common initialism for the U.S. intelligence community.

It goes on to tell of certain activities concerning genetic modifications of some viruses in order to make them easier to study - which involved making the viruses more capable of infecting hosts, including humans.

Most of us find this pretty alarming because it sounds like it came straight out of a Michael Crichton novel. But the real point is that because you have to acknowledge the "possibility" of something going horribly wrong - and things do go wrong with near-shocking regularity - you end up giving just enough daylight for the Foil Hat Brigade to run amok.

You can't say absolutely that there's no chance of something happening, so the nutballs seize on that and lickety-split, the villagers are destroying everything they associate with the monster, including all the information they need to make sure they can fight it and beat it.

They just burn everything and hope for the best.

"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

But wait - there's more.

WaPo:

Since the novel coronavirus pandemic began, misinformation has proliferated on the Internet — par for the course during a crisis. People took to social media in droves to share false claims that covering your body in chlorine or eating garlic were effective methods of fighting the virus, both of which were disproved by the World Health Organization.

The pandemic has also sparked a wave of more insidious conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that 5G mobile networks spread and worsen the coronavirus, which has led to dozens of instances of arsonists setting fire to cell towers across Europe.

Misinformation spreads online much like a virus itself. Though various types spread slightly differently, the transmission of the 5G conspiracy theory offers some insight into how false claims grow online.

A “calamitous event” like the pandemic creates a “very fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories,” said John Cook, an expert on misinformation with George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

The onslaught of information and misinformation on social media, on cable news and in general conversation may create confusion, but it’s made even worse by human discomfort with ambiguity, especially when our lives are at stake.

Kate Pine, an assistant professor in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University, is currently interviewing people around the United States on how they’re navigating covid-19. She said people “feel like they’re inundated with information, but they don’t have the information they want,” and as a result, they might be more willing to believe outlandish claims.

- and -

“When people feel threatened or out of control or they’re trying to explain a big significant event, they’re more vulnerable or prone to turning to conspiracy theories to explain them,” Cook said. “Somewhat counterintuitively, it gives people more sense of control to imagine that, rather than random things happening, there are these shadowy groups and agencies that are controlling it. Randomness is very discomforting to people.”

In the mean time - don't forget that 45* needs to make us look the other way. He's desperate to get the economy back up and running. And while he can easily blame COVID-19 for the economy going in the shitter, he has to get us thinking away from his total fuckup-itude, so he's desperately spinning the yarn about how COVID-19 is all China's fault.

He invites the inference that China "attacked" us with the virus and so none of the bad shit that happens as a result is his fault - everything he does is justified because he's just being a strong powerful leader - a wartime POTUS.

Seems A Little Odd

When you try to talk certain people out of their commitment to some conspiracy theory or another, the main thing to remember is that the conspiracy falls apart as soon as one of the conspirators spills the beans - or just slips up and reveals some bit of the secret that leads the whole thing to unravel. It's always somebody on the inside. It's never some random nerd who's spent way too many sleepless nights deep diving on the internet and thinks he's sussed it all out because he buys into some other random nerd's deep dive bullshit.

One ex-Air Force guy blabs and we all suddenly know there are aliens on ice in a secret locker deep underground in New Mexico - or something something weird shit something.

So if Climate Change (eg) is a conspiracy, then tens of thousands of scientists and researchers and all of the additional thousands of support people must be extraordinarily disciplined etc etc etc.

If there really is the kind of expansive "deep state" conspiracy that the QAnon dopes are convinced there is, then it would've been revealed by now - and not in the way they think it's manifesting itself now in the takedown of their beloved Cult45 idol.

Anyway, I'm going to try to land this fuckin' plane by saying this:

The Trump administration is a criminal conspiracy, and we're seeing some of it being acted out by the conspirators in real time and in public. We're also seeing the giveaway - the whistleblowers - some of the people inside the administration - who can't stand being in with the bad guys, so they spill the beans.

Watching this happen, why is there anyone left who still insists on being hung up on JFK and 9/11 and Marilyn Monroe and Apollo 11 and and and?

Seeing 45* commit felonies out in the open, how is anyone still not convinced that he's crooked, and that his crookedness is not the figment of anybody's imagination?

That Deep State Thing

Yes, there's a conspiracy against 45*.

Just as there was a conspiracy against Nixon.

And a conspiracy against McCarthy.

(And Al Capone and Ted Bundy - but that's a slightly different angle on the story)

If we're to have any hope of surviving as a republic, we have to insist on a government planted thick with career professionals "conspiring against" the liars crooks and losers who intend to use the law (specifically, the loopholes in the law - the Smarmspace) in order to rule over us instead of serving the greater good.

I've made plenty of noise about entrenched bureaucracies, but my beef is about people in government who get too cozy with the people they're supposed to be regulating - too much of an interlocking-interests kinda thing.

As Cult45 devotees continue to remove the support structure, we're seeing the implosion of our system of self-goverment, and it seems to be rapidly accelerating towards collapse - at which time we can either regenerate it, or kiss it goodbye forever.

The New Yorker:

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, told me that the Administration is propagating a long-held conspiracy theory to justify its behavior. “My understanding is that Trump, Giuliani, and others in the Administration believe that there is a deep-state conspiracy in the State Department against the President and that Masha Yovanovitch was part of this.” Her recall from Kiev, he said, “was a consequence of that conspiracy theory.”

The Deep State conspiracy theory is hardly confined to the West Wing, Murphy went on: “I hear this, too, from my Republican Senate colleagues. There is a belief that there is a group in every corner of the government that is out to get Trump. There really are morally centered people who find him deeply distasteful, and it is required of them to raise questions of corruption if they see it. The Trump Administration sees that as a conspiracy.”

I may be indulging in a simple Argument From Ignorance, but when I look at what has to be obvious - Trump's corruption and outright law-breaking - and I see a Republican party hellbent on maintaining solidarity with him - and perpetrating all manner of anti-democracy rat-fuckery - how do I conclude anything other than this being a deliberate effort to tear down the republic in order to replace it with plutocracy?

I Am Q

Bill Maher:

Q-Anon And JFK Jr

And no fucking kidding - these jagoffs are taking this shit seriously.

WaPo:

JFK Jr. didn’t die! He runs QAnon! And he’s No. 1 Trump fan, omg!!!
Now that everyone knows about QAnon — now that, ahem, a certain national newspaper has published at least a dozen articles about QAnon in the span of four days — we need to ask why not everyone is convinced the conspiracy theory is true.

Maybe it’s because QAnon is too true. Like, there’s just too much truth crammed into a single conspiracy theory alleging that President Trump is secretly waging war on an evil cabal of liberals who rig the elections, and run the CIA, and abduct children, and hid all the UFOs, and killed Princess Diana, and did Hurricane Katrina, and invented vampirism, and … [consults QAnon guide …]

(it's not really possible to follow it, but here's their "map" in case you wanna - whatever)

Some highlights:

⚡⚡ John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and joined Trump’s secret evil-fighting organization, where he writes 4chan posts under the pseudonym “Q”⚡⚡

⚡⚡ Liberals killed President Kennedy! ⚡⚡

⚡⚡ Then Kennedy Jr. was killed to make way for Hillary Clinton’s political career! ⚡⚡

And it just goes on and on and on.

PolitiFact

No, John F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t tout a Donald Trump presidency in George magazine

Conspiracy theories about the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy abound, but the 2010s have ushered in a new wave of claims, like one that President Donald Trump says a daily prayer to the old commander-in-chief. Other allegations center on Kennedy’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr. He died in a plane crash in July 1999. Depending on the source, though, he either faked his death or was killed to clear Hillary Clinton’s political path. And — according to an April 1 Facebook post — he once praised Trump as a formidable presidential candidate.

"If my dear friend Donald Trump ever decided to sacrifice his fabulous billionaire lifestyle to become president he would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice that Democrats and Republicans alike would celebrate," reads the text above a photo of Trump and Kennedy posted to Facebook on April 1. The quote is attributed to Kennedy and includes a citation: George magazine, June 1999.

Enough, Truthers

Yeah, but it's just science. So it just doesn't hold up against a well-cultivated deeply entrenched conspiracy theory.

Never forget this one simple thing: Arguing that George W Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11 is the classic Internal Contradiction. ie: You put "George W Bush" and "knowledge" in the same sentence. Your point is not valid.

Fever Swamp

Lies
Damned lies
Statistics
Politicians
The internet

Don't forget what we're up against.

WaPo, Craig Timberg & Drew Harwell:

Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.”

The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.

The posters on anonymous forums, a cauldron of far-right extremist politics, over the next few hours speculated about the shooter’s ethnicity (“Hope the kid isn’t white”) and cracked off-color jokes. They began crafting false explanations about the massacre, including that actors were posing as students, in hopes of blunting what they correctly guessed would be a revived interest in gun control.

The success of this effort would soon illustrate how lies that thrive on raucous online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of major events. As much of the nation mourned, the story concocted on anonymous chat rooms soon burst onto YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where the theories surged in popularity.

I see plenty of examples of spin -and some pretty hard spin - on "the left", but most of the nonsense that qualifies as truly toxic garbage is coming from "the right".

So don't fall for the Both Sides bullshit.

Today's Jiggery Pokery

Start Making Sense

They count on us being dumb enough to believe the crap story about a phony conspiracy like PizzaGate, so we won't be smart enough to believe the true story about the real conspiracy of Putin & his partly-trained orangutan.

That Thing That Isn't Really

New Republic:

Wikileaks’s tweets conjured dark and menacing conspiracies, but these are not borne out by the emails themselves. Take the group’s claim that the “DNC knew of Hillary paid troll factory attacking Sanders online.” The highlighted email isn’t some secret communication laying out nefarious plots. It’s a summary of a panel discussion on Fox News Sunday.

But forget the emails for a second. The main problem with the notion that the DNC rigged the results for Clinton is that it requires one to assume the improbable. The DNC had no role or authority in primary contests, which are run by state governments. Clinton dominated the primaries. The DNC, through state parties, had a bit more influence over caucuses … where Sanders dominated Clinton.

None of the thousands of leaked emails and documents show the DNC significantly influencing the results of the nomination. Furthermore, if it is true that last fall Clinton campaign chair John Podesta tried but failed to have DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz sacked, the underlying premise of the entire WikiLeaks dump—that Wasserman Schultz machinated to deliver Clinton the nomination—is hard to believe.

So, yeah - bad news for the DNC Truthers, except that truthers usually believe the conspiracy no matter what.  Not that this one's anywhere near the weirdnesses of JFK or 9/11 - there is some little bit of substance to this - but then again, that's always the case, and it's also always the case that once it's in the bloodstream it prob'ly won't be going away any time soon.

The handful of (known) emails so far, indicate to me something along the lines of: tired staffers who hit the hotel a little late, and about halfway thru their 3rd mini-bar scotch are suddenly seized by the revelation that they possess the most amazing political chops, and they're having such a flood of genius ideas they just have to share them ASAP, so they fire off a few brainstorm emails etc etc etc.  You tell them to knock off the shit; you discipline them; you fire them; you force them out - kinda like what happened.

What I'm really not shocked about: Democrats "conspiring" to nominate a Democrat.  C'mon, guys.

Today's Nostalgia

The more things change, the more they stay the same?

It shouldn't come as a big surprise that people start thinking in terms of "vast conspiracies" when the things most of us want to see change don't change.

Today's PodCast

From You Are Not So Smart: What's up with all that conspiracy theory shit?



It goes along with the Type 1 Error I posted about earlier.  We take a certain bit of information, it makes us skittish, and at some point (feeling the need for reasons and explanations), we ascribe Agency or Intent to it.

Nobody's saying there can't possibly be anything to any of what you think is a conspiracy regarding certain events or conditions.  But while there are (and have been) in fact many conspiracies to commit various acts both heinous and heroic, The Grand Conspiracy has so far been thoroughly delusional.

Oh yeah - in case you're wondering about the Ant Death Spiral mentioned in the podcast:



The ant gets a bit of info and, since he can't apply any reasoning to the problem, he can only follow along dutifully ("thinking" this is how he gets to a safe dry place that his little ant-sized brain calls home).  Eventually, they all die of starvation and/or dehydration, never even knowing they were acting on insufficient evidence.

The real difference of course is that the ants can't reason their way thru it, while we actually choose not to.

One last bit, for all you Randites out there, I'll paraphrase from The Fountainhead:  The evil at work in the world is when a man recognizes Truth and Beauty as they are, and denies them.

Truthers Beware

Paraphrasing Bill Maher: When you say "Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11", I know it to be bullshit because that sentence contains the two words 'Bush' and 'knowledge' together.



I know some really smart people who believe strongly that there's just too much about 9/11 that doesn't add up quite right.  And recently, somebody I respect deeply revealed she was among them - at least to a certain extent.  So I won't just point and laugh, because I continue to be curious and confused and doubtful, but also willing to look for new information and consider different angles where conspiracies are concerned, cuz...



So yeah - maybe there really is some fire at the bottom of all that smoke(?)

God Love The Onion

Popular Children's Book Author Reveals The 'Spooky Truth' About Creepy Conspiracy Theories