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[wierd]

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-17/liberate-michigan-trump-tweets-2nd-amendment-coronavirus-pandemic

Fearless leader's desire to "Reopen the country" once again compels him to send ENTIRELY the wrong message to people desperate to have their lives return to normalcy.  Instead of sending a calming and reassuring message to stay home, and sustain the quarantine in a time of global crisis, what does he do?

"that's some fine gasoline you have there, would you like a book of matches? Hell yeah!"

[Lord Shonus]

What...wow, it seems people get crazier and crazier with each tweet that’s posted

Twitter and Facebook and 4chan remain something new in the world. Never before was the barrier to mass media so low - even the Internet of 20 years ago required a significant bit of work to make a webpage to spread whatever message you wanted to deliver. Once, you had to get your conspiracy theory to a level that Coast To Coast or the fringe newsletters would publish before anybody would take you seriously, and the deserved of those publications prejudiced most people against them. Now, conspiracy crap comes in through the same channels as normal news, and the tools most people learned to use for evaluating a source (either in school or through experience) are now ludicrously unsuited for the task.

Nowadays, a single person can easily drop an idea in five or six places, and have it spread like a kerosene fire. It doesn't help that a pretty sizable chunk of people will hold on to an idea no matter what evidence is presented - witness the longevity of the "9/11 was a controlled demolition" notion when such a thing is borderline impossible.

[Reelya]

https://www.wonkette.com/qanon-idiots-very-concerned-about-mole-children-now

Since the very beginnings of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, believers in Satanic Ritual Abuse have been obsessed with tunnels. One of the most memorable features of the investigation into McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were reports of underground tunnels where the McMartins brought children to sexually assault them. The McMartins, of course, were found innocent after a three year trial and no one ever found any damn tunnels. Including Gloria Steinem, who helped fund an excavation of the area around the preschool searching for them.

Well the Gloria Steinem connection wasn't something I was expecting, and looking into it brought up another interesting point:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/books/review/we-believe-the-children-by-richard-beck.html

From Beck’s own evidence, feminists themselves were vital players in the hysteria. Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation, and Ms. Magazine ran a 1993 cover article “BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists,” even though, by that time, the general public had grown increasingly skeptical of the idea.  In part because of her aggressive pursuit of child abusers — and conviction of a number of people later exonerated — A relatively unknown Dade County state attorney named Janet Reno was picked by President Clinton to become the nation’s first female attorney general.

So, you had people on both sides of the political aisle using the 1980s satanic abuse panic to build their careers or profile. Janet Reno especially, a quite respected figure in Democratic circles seems to have built her whole career on sketchy prosecutions arising from the satanic panic.

And it's worth noting that in the 1980s, the crazy underground tunnels stories weren't limited to fringe conspiracy publications, this stuff was nightly news on all the channels, and in literally all the newspapers, reported as fact. So, that opens up other questions about how this works. Maybe fringe stuff appearing on the internet isn't the "new" thing, it's that the fragmented nature of the internet actually inoculates the mainstream press from some of this stuff. A lot of people in the 1980s believe the conspiracy stuff that was being put out there at the time, because all the media was reporting it. It just took one "expert" to claim some of this was true, and every newspaper and TV channel reported that an expert said it, and you had no way to check otherwise. These days, an "expert" says something, and 20 other experts will immediately tweet disagreement.

It really wasn't the case that crazy bullshit *didn't* get into all the mainstream media back in the past. Back when I was a kid the TV was full of "news" about Yuri Geller's psychic abilities and mediums channeling aliens and people with 57 personalities who would be interviewed, and asked to change personality (all since debunked as hoaxes, generally). The shit was *far weirder* than mainstream TV is these days.

[scriver]

https://twitter.com/ElBartoArmy/status/1248655349210628101

This is the level of crazy we're dealing with. ^

Some of those tweets scream "joke" though

Then again the whole Qanon thing is still outlandish to me

What even is mole children supposed to be?

[Naturegirl1999]

https://twitter.com/ElBartoArmy/status/1248655349210628101

This is the level of crazy we're dealing with. ^

Some of those tweets scream "joke" though

Then again the whole Qanon thing is still outlandish to me

What even is mole children supposed to be?

i think it refers to children trapped underground?

[Reelya]

They're kept there by the Deep State, naturally. From what I gather they're being kept to harvest their special children fluids, probably as anti-aging serum to keep the Liberal Vampires in Hollywood young.

According to my scant research one of their locations is supposed to be in a secret underground bunker in Central Park, New York. For about 1/10th of a second that sounds reasonable that there could be something under a park, until you actually think about it and realize what a dumb idea that would be if you really were going to build a secret underground lair, in the park would be the last place you'd want to build it - people could just dig it up, and where would you even hide the entrance?

Whoever made that shit up is probably hoping hordes of people will go to Central Park and just start digging the whole thing up looking for the secret base.

Warning: link may include QAnons saying things:
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/qanon-anonymous-podcast-episode-86-saving-the-mole-children-from-tunnels-under-central-park
EDIT: no these guys are ok, not crazies. Worth checking out.

[wierd]

Well, Since Fearless Leader thinks that the protesters protesting the lockdown are "Very Responsible", I am wondering when the meltdown will occur.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/17/trump-liberate-tweets-coronavirus-stay-at-home-orders

[Reelya]

Well well, turns out they put up COVID-19 (testing?) tents in Central Park, and the QAnons think the tents were a cover for Trump's special forces units to secretly save the mole children from the tunnels under the park.

That's the sort of divorced from reality stuff we're talking about here. Though you have to feel sorry for people who'd believe that since it seems to break physical reality, in quite a number of ways.

You'd have to assume anyone buying a story like that has some kind of mental illness / impairment. If you come across people who believe this type of conspiracy theory then you should immediately just stop bothering to try and reason with them since they have a number of deficiencies that will prevent any sort of logical argument getting through to them.

EDIT: Y'all really have to listen to that podcast above. This stuff is amazing. Apparently the mole children were born in the tunnels are "deformed" and "sex slaves". Exactly why anyone would want deformed sex slaves is never questioned, nor is it explained what happened to the mothers of the supposed children. And there's a lot more! The navy medical vessels were actually sent by Trump to help the rescued mole children. It's going down! Operation Mole Children is happening.

EDIT2: makes more sense now, some of the QAnon mole children believers also believe the deformed children are spliced with alien DNA from the Roswell aliens, and may be telepathic mutant "tomorrow children". The plot of Akira basically. So no surprise, this stuff overlaps with Roswell / Area 51 believers, probably chemtrails, moon landing hoax and flat earthers too.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, Qanon Anonymous is great stuff, as well as demonstrating the infinite well of madness that makes up Qanon cultists. I'd recommend their updated first episode, Liberal Qanon for a look at how this stuff has infected the libs too, and the one about Miracle Mineral Solution for literally drinking bleach.

[Bumber]

My mom was watching some QAnon videos today and said she believes pretty much all of it. Apparently time travel is where she draws the line.

[Reelya]

We had a case here (Australia) where a practicing psychiatrist was found to have uploaded QAnon posts all over his clinic's official website. He got investigated and lost his medical license, as they were concerned that he was exposing vulnerable clients to this crazy stuff. As part of it he was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and he turned up with a sheaf of papers over 600 pages long and spent the whole time trying to convert the other psychiatrist to QAnon. He's been loudly doing the whole "you can't silence me! the system is silencing the truth!" act all the way through this whole incident.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/07/psychiatrist-struck-off-for-posting-bizarre-qanon-conspiracy-theories

[wierd]

True Belief (tm) is a terrible thing to witness.

I prefer as close to objective reality as my brain permits me to enjoy, personally.  It never ceases to amaze me how strongly humans seem to favor illusions and myths though.

[Trekkin]

True Belief (tm) is a terrible thing to witness.

I prefer as close to objective reality as my brain permits me to enjoy, personally.  It never ceases to amaze me how strongly humans seem to favor illusions and myths though.

They'd say exactly the same thing, you know, and mean it with just as much fervor.

[wierd]

The subtlety is not lost on me, you know.

There's a reason why I stated "as much as my brain permits".


If it actually were possible to live in true objective reality, and not to exist as a subjective state machine*, I would favor that form of existence. It would be very nice to be free of such sources of internally generated bias.

However, since that is not currently possible--

 Being mindful that one is indeed, such a subjective state machine, is essential to taking measures to counteract it, and to be as close to that objective reality as is possible to achieve.

* It is not well established exactly what mode of computation a human brain uses primarily. It could be likened to an assembly of state machines, each being supplied, and simultaneously supplying inputs to and from other state machines, however. This is a very simplified (and thus wrong) view, yet, it should get the point across about how such a system can develop glitches arising from persistent states inside its operation, leading to systemic biases in its outputs. The devil most certainly does live in the details, but getting to the nitty gritty cellular morphology, electrochemical potential energy, and potentiation and reinforcement subsystem levels of operation are not necessary to make this point. "Bias" is an integral component in the logical operation of how a human makes decisions and choices, because of how it stores states. The point is that this model of operation relies inherently on bias generation, which is counter-intuitive to operating in true objective problem space.  Human perception and cognition is forever bound within the impenetrable bubble of subjective experience and memory.



Rather than interpret the statement I made as "I foolishly think I live in objective reality! Herpa derpa!", Think instead "When made aware of the inherent bias-generating nature of one's own existence, and that this internal perception of reality is forever divorced from a real, objective one that exists outside of that experience, why do people consistently choose to favor their internal, and known flawed models of that objective reality, rather than seeking objective means of verifying and correcting their internal models regularly?"

This is especially vexing to me, when one considers that "Simply because I believe something to be true, does not mean that it is."  along with "No matter how much I wish for something to be true, my internal model will never directly influence the actual objective reality it represents-- The objective reality is what underpins the operation of the simulation of my subjective reality, not the other way around."


I just said it in a significantly less verbose manner.

Clearly it was not sufficient.

[Teneb]

-snip-

Perhaps we could not liken gullible and moronic people to those with actual mental conditions?

Because, trust me, you don't need no mental conditions to believe in stupid shit, and implying otherwise is ableist as fuck.

Sincerely, a poster with at least two mental conditions who does not believe in this bullshittery.