First I’m not sure if this is the correct forum, could be GB, could be politics and elections, but though this would be a safe start.
Ok trying to follow the deep state stuff. So this secret society of old money rich families controls the world by a shadow Orwellian style government. They somehow can’t stop or identify a person from publicly posting on the internet (Q from Q-anon). Well does that point to the deep state is either not as powerful as they would need to be for Q to be correct, or Q is serving them (or Q is them) and their goals? The first case invalidates the deep state government as powerful enough for Q’s BS, um… q-tips, I mean q-drops, to actually make sense. In the second case it means that the right wing have been deceived by the deep state to doing their work to help preserve the deep state’s hold over power.
Other things like alternative energy/ EV’s is a deep state plot to control the population, however control of oil controls world economies and politics. Governments beg big oil as opposed to alternative energy companies begging governments for some handouts and subsidies. Again the right wing seems to be played to support the deep state thinking they are opposing it.
It seems so much more likely that if the right wing’s version of the deep state is true, they are not being let in on it’s operation but it’s far more likely being deceived by them into supporting the deep state.
But if the Deep State is really lizard people, what’s the likelihood that the Greys who run Atlantis would be able to send messages through Jewish space lazers to warn their advanced scouts?
If you start from crazy, there’s no way to assign meaningful probabilities.
I think the right-wing conspiracy nuts have misunderstood the “Deep State” and are attributing a lot more agency to it (as conspiracy nuts do) than it really has ever had.
I always understood the Deep State to be a sort of collective institutional inertia/momentum/attitudes prevalent in the Federal government at all levels and among the member of the higher echelons of power. The idea being that if someone comes in and tries to push too hard, this “Deep State” pushes back. Not with some sort of directed agency, but more in the idea that say… the people at the USDA are going to do their jobs the way they always have, and efforts to change that are going to get slow-walked in proportion to how disruptive they are / unpopular they are. Same thing for the government trying to get the people with power and money to behave differently. And so on and so forth. It’s not some giant conspiracy to resist change and enact the will of the Deep State, but rather resistance to doing things differently than the way that all the main participants have done business and feel like business should be done.
So to a reformer or someone who wants to disrupt things, this seems very ominous I’m sure, but it’s not a directed, conscious, or conspiratorial thing like the nuts believe.
Considering every description of the “deep state” I’ve ever seen perfectly describes rich right wing Republicans, I’d say it’s extremely likely. The assumption that this alleged “deep state” is pushing an extreme liberal agenda is asinine on the face of it, and only gets more idiotic the deeper you dig.
This is close to an idea that Robert Anton Wilson came up with: the strange loop.
IIRC, it states something like:
-If you believe in a conspiracy that manufactures mountains of false evidence, and your evidence for that conspiracy equals less than a mountain, it’s likelier that it’s your small amount of evidence for the conspiracy is false than that the conspiracy manufactured the greater amount of false evidence.
In other words, if you believe in a deep state that’s manufacturing a ton of false information, and your evidence for that deep state is a small amount of information, Occam’s Razor suggests that it’d have been easier for someone to manufacture that smaller amount of evidence.
You can get into the weeds with it as you can with any application of Occam’s Razor, but the basic idea is really useful, IMO.
Firstly I would push back against the logic that Q being able to post means that the deep state is not powerful, or Q is serving them. Being powerful doesn’t mean you can silence all voices always.
To Q believers, it’s the whole point. Q can’t have a TV show or newspaper, all he can do is pop up anonymously with cryptic messages here and there, and the deep state presumably don’t know who the leak is.
But secondly, and more importantly, this just isn’t a situation you can apply logic to. People who believe this stuff are not thinking rationally; they are unaware of what things like skepticism and standards of evidence mean (I mean, they might know the word “skepticism” but they don’t know what it means in terms of evaluating claims).
So it’s pretty pointless trying to reason with them and say stuff like “If you believe X, doesn’t it also entail Y?” because they had to use broken logic to even arrive at X.
This, like everything else involved in conspiracy theories, is coocoo for cocoa puffs. Of course it is vastly easier to come up with any amount of nonsense than it is to prove its falsity. It is the exact principle behind the Gish Gallop.
To elaborate: the comparison isn’t between “coming up with any amount of nonsense” and “proving its falsity.” It’s between “coming up with a big amount of nonsense” and “coming up with a small amount of nonsense.”
In other words, consider these two scenarios:
Some lying liars faked a moon landing. They faked thousands of hours of footage, enlisted tens of thousands of people in a fake NASA mission, faked entire campuses and rocket launchpads, faked reams of data, faked rockets and landing gear–and they kept it up for sixty years without anyone coming clean.
Some lying liars faked a hoax about the moon landing. They faked a few photos and mocked up a few websites explaining why the moon landing is fake.
If you use evidence from “The moon landing is a hoax!” websites to conclude that a conspiracy could fake all the evidence in #1, surely you must admit that it’d be much easier for a conspiracy to have faked the tiny amount of evidence in #2.
Believing in a massive conspiracy necessarily undermines the evidence that leads you to believe in a massive conspiracy.
What I’m misunderstanding, I think, is that there is a reason for making these statements in the first place, and then applying a name to them. Yes, it is surely easier to manufacture a small amount of crazy that people will believe in than a large amount. That’s common sense, not a strange loop.
However, the argument is not about the creators of nonsense but examining the believers they are trying to hook in. The logic is then reversed. Giving believers a huge amount of false evidence provides a better foundation for crazy than a small amount of evidence does. A few points may be swatted away; a mountain of fabrication will withstand almost any amount of scrutiny in the time allowed for providing it. Even better, a mountain of disinformation creates its own gravity. It pulls in any and all examples of real-world doubt and gives a snug home for multiple additional falsities to pile on the ever-growing ball of vicious lies. A mountain of crazy is harder to disprove than any smaller amount of crazy, even though it contains exponentially more idiocy. That’s the strange loop.
Like bump said, in a certain sense, a deep state does exist, in the sense that bureaucracy tends to be conservative - not ‘conservative’ in the political sense, but in the resisting-change sense, just like how Hollywood is ‘conservative.’
For instance, American foreign policy was always fairly predictable. Now if you’re Trump and you come along, and you say “Let’s embrace North Korea as our new ally and reject South Korea,” then of course the vast majority of the deep-state bureaucracy will object, and for good reason, since it’s a massive new change in policy and also a terrible one at that.
That’s very much the premise of Yes, Miniister, and its follow-up, Yes, Prime Minister, a British political satire from the '80s. The conflict isn’t between Labor and Conservative, it’s between the Minister for Administrative Affairs, a Member of Parliament chosen to head that ministry, and the entrenched civil servants who have worked there for decades. It was a great show, and surprisingly even handed. Neither side was always right or wrong, or always won or lost.
