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QAnon Casualties

[DHT]Osiris said:
Invent a time machine.
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Hmm, 1979 or so?

My scenario for fun: Have John Anderson win the 1980 presidential election and successfully break the 2 party duopoly into a true multi-party contest going forward; retaining the Fairness Act among other minor side-effects. Which would have limited the brain-washing effect and growth of conservative crazytalk radio in 80’s, which then also stunts the growth of the Federalist Society in the womb.

And then we ultimately don’t end up with an insane Divine Supreme Court of a Republican God appointed to run the country for life.
 
Dave_5k said:
Hmm, 1979 or so?

My scenario for fun: Have John Anderson win the 1980 presidential election and successfully break the 2 party duopoly into a true multi-party contest going forward; retaining the Fairness Act among other minor side-effects. Which would have limited the brain-washing effect and growth of conservative crazytalk radio in 80’s, which then also stunts the growth of the Federalist Society in the womb.

And then we ultimately don’t end up with an insane Divine Supreme Court of a Republican God appointed to run the country for life.
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It sounds like we’d simply be slowing down when the inevitable happens.

Would eliminating Fox News before it begins as well as prominent radio figures like rush Limbaugh, have any impact? Or would something else have popped up?

Would handling the Soviet Union differently after its collapse changed things? Should we have been more supportive during their rebuild?
 
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ivwshane said:
I’ll play along…

Ok so we have a time machine, now what? When do we go back and what do we alter?
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I think we have a thread for this.....

When do you think America was/is great?

I personally think America became great during Clinton, although I do not remember much about the times when he was president as I was just a baby and 4 your year old when he left office. But what I do remember is that America became worst and worst as GWB stayed president. Obama did make many...
forums.anandtech.com
 
There's more. For example, this guy killed his two year old son and 10 month old daughter with a spear gun because he decided they were lizard people.

www.vice.com

A Year After QAnon Surfer Killed His Kids, Members of His Church Fear More Violence

Santa Barbara surf instructor Matthew Coleman confessed to killing his children last year, telling the FBI he thought they would “grow into monsters.”
www.vice.com www.vice.com

It also appears that he was radicalized in church.
 
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Dave_5k said:
Hmm, 1979 or so?

My scenario for fun: Have John Anderson win the 1980 presidential election and successfully break the 2 party duopoly into a true multi-party contest going forward; retaining the Fairness Act among other minor side-effects. Which would have limited the brain-washing effect and growth of conservative crazytalk radio in 80’s, which then also stunts the growth of the Federalist Society in the womb.

And then we ultimately don’t end up with an insane Divine Supreme Court of a Republican God appointed to run the country for life.
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Disagree. You need to go back to Reconstruction and the presidential election of...1890? Somewhere around there.

Basically, a deal was made to smooth over the election in return for withdrawing union troops from the south. This is why the corpse of the confederacy was able to rise from the grave.
 
ivwshane said:
How do we fix this?
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Unless we start admitting and addressing mental health issues, this will not stop. No sane person does this on conspiracy theories alone.

I have a pretty offensive opinion regarding people who are very religious as well. It's something I have mulled around for some years. I think people who are more prone to being (very) religious are more prone to believing conspiracy theories. I believe this is due to the 'faith' aspect. The no need of any proof of such beliefs other than the faith itself being the key here. Obviously, I do not think this applies to everyone who has religion or spirituality, but I do think that a large portion of them are more easily manipulated. Obviously I have no scientific testing that I am aware of to back this up.

There are obvious reasons I might suggest this, but it still leaves the question: Are easily manipulated people also the type who would kill others and themselves, or is there some other piece that pushes them over the edge, while others would choose not to act.

For this person, there may be more to the story that we are not aware of yet. What was the actual catalyst that set him over the edge.
 
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This sucks. It sucks because it both shows how awful conspiracy thought is, but also shows exactly what we've been saying about guns. Gun owners are fine upstanding law abiding right up to the moment they kill their loved ones. And their loved ones are overwhelmingly the victims. Add in the fucked male bullshit where he believes he's "protecting" or "saving" his family by murdering them.

This almost perfectly covers modern right wing lies and the hysteria it creates.
 
People susceptible to psychosis meets cultish movement with autonomous infrastructure and no leading management, spun up in its own social media virality.

This is not what we had in mind when we invented the internet but god damn it should have been predictable.
 
GOP painted a false picture of reality for their supporters to live in and made it real for them. When that picture started to peel away revealing glimpses of what the real world actually was, many of their members reacted to that by denying what was real in order to keep living in the fake world they preferred, the one where they are always right about things when these things they believe in is nothing more than a mirage that solely benefits their corrupted leaders and not themselves.

In order for their corrupted leaders to keep their followers under their control, the fake world of theirs had to become a world where their strongest emotions were exploited to the point where these folks had to leave their common sense and situational awareness of reality behind them in order to keep the faith and the false sense of security that fake world they lived in gave them. This conflict of living in a fake world while denying the evidence the real world was constantly shoving in their faces is to me the reason why so many conservatives are angry and confused, a condition that their leaders exploit with glee by blaming the liberal baby killers and border crossers for their illnesses.

Having no basis of reality to rely on for guidance, anything was now possible in that contrived world of theirs, where people like Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'reilly, Hannity, Carlson et al could spout lies and disinformation at will 24/7 and all of it was real to their followers because nothing was actually real for them to begin with.
 
tweaker2 said:
GOP painted a false picture of reality for their supporters to live in and made it real for them. When that picture started to peel away revealing glimpses of what the real world actually was, many of their members reacted to that by denying what was real in order to keep living in the fake world they preferred, the one where they are always right about things when these things they believe in is nothing more than a mirage that solely benefits their corrupted leaders and not themselves.
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Yep. People in the right-wing echo chamber have now resorted to saying "you're watching a movie, none of this is real."

I shit you not.

Conspiratuality is the new religion.
 
ivwshane said:
How do we fix this?
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Not with freedom of speech, I think.

Or rather... the problem is human psychology and we took "sanity" for granted. We assumed we would be good people if only we were educated and "shown" the truth of the world. Taught science, history, etc... so long as truth was public it would prevail. We were wrong. Institutions only work if people trust them. Place their faith into them. The solution, my dear fellow, is to have our own indoctrination.

Faith needs to be used, and weaponized like a vaccine against a disease. Our enemy is human nature and we need to develop methods of overcoming it. To maintain our civilization and our Democracy. We can no longer just assume they will continue without an effort to fix them.
 
I know people like to think that more people kill now than before, but it really isn't true. Historically humans have been slaughtering humans non-stop, just under different pretense and in much larger numbers. That is what we do and have always done.

The population has exploded in the last 100 years. The internet makes everything in your face the moment it happens, whereas historically, it would have to be the worst of the worst for it to make national news. You only knew about your local area, and you probably got 3rd hand information (gossip) for anything beyond that. Add to that that weapon technology has advanced (for some of this, I mean hell what about the people in Canada that just stabbed a bunch of people to death?)

That doesn't make any of this seem less tragic though. Supposedly we are supposed to be evolving to become smarter, better humans. That is what our consciousness is supposed to afford us. We are supposed to rise above our primitive instincts.
 
Jaskalas said:
Not with freedom of speech, I think.

Or rather... the problem is human psychology and we took "sanity" for granted. We assumed we would be good people if only we were educated and "shown" the truth of the world. Taught science, history, etc... so long as truth was public it would prevail. We were wrong. Institutions only work if people trust them. Place their faith into them. The solution, my dear fellow, is to have our own indoctrination.

Faith needs to be used, and weaponized like a vaccine against a disease. Our enemy is human nature and we need to develop methods of overcoming it. To maintain our civilization and our Democracy. We can no longer just assume they will continue without an effort to fix them.
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While I agree with you I will say that had our education system not been co-opted by the right and the trope of liberal indoctrination accepted as truth, I think our education system could have done more to combat misinformation. Could you imagine now if we were to start requiring classes to teach how to recognize and combat propaganda as well as how to think critically better?

I wonder if, historically speaking, if George bush sr was the canary in the coal mine when he spoke out against “voodoo economics”. Even a republicans Republican like bush sr couldn’t convince his party to ditch the fairytale.
 
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