I feel like you may be giving short shrift to the “lying media,” “fake news,” and “enemy of the people.”
That story … 'bout your wife’s phone call …
Dude.
I think we can combine “lying media” and “fake news” - they’re the same barrel of monkeys. And you know who’s behind them?
DEEP STATE!
If you deny the existence of “Deep state”, then this proves that the Deep State is powerful, and got to you.
Oh; that’s easy to explain, actually. It’s partially because of the drug rush and partially because of the sense of acceptance and belonging. The drug, by the way, is dopamine.
QAnon is a “game” that is playing with life.
Qanon is an Enormous Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Run by Malevolent Puppetmasters
Jesus, this makes me want to cry. I hope she finds her way.
This stuff isn’t new. The internet just makes it easier to spread widely and quickly.
Yeah, me too. Last week I essentially got got called “stupid” and “a sheep” for not believing that the upcoming vaccine isn’t part of some huge Bill Gates-centric conspiracy. I declined to ask for details.
Hah! the Illuminati could kick the Deep State’s butt left, right, up, down, and sideways.
Neither group comes close to the Stonecutters!
Right, conspiracy theories aren’t new, but the stakes are much higher now. People have lost faith in experts, and they are trying to find meaning in alarming ways. QAnon is their way of finding meaning. If expertise can’t produce satisfactory results, the outcome isn’t just that the experts are wrong, but that they are deliberately misleading you. So that is I think what groups like QAnon offer some people: the experts are misleading you, and we are telling you the real truth.
In reality, the experts aren’t necessarily wrong and they’re not discredited; they find themselves in an unfortunate position of being asked to solve complex problems, some of which aren’t even in their wheelhouse. Take, for instance, the frustration over public safety precautions. There’s no better example right now than that. You have Drs Fauci and others, along with fact-minded public officials, asking for people to cooperate with a variety of restrictions. Public health doctors know how to control the virus. They don’t know how to make people happy while in self-isolation. They don’t know how to bring back a restaurant that someone invested their life savings in. They don’t know how to bring back someone’s job that they just lost or how to keep them from being evicted.
In the minds of many, particularly until they get personally impacted by COVID themselves, these are the more immediate priorities. So when someone says “Wear masks and stay out of bars,” the experts are speaking to one set of problems but not the wide array of challenges that people are dealing with right now, and in fact, these experts may be seen as either wittingly or unwittingly complicating their lives even further with each new bit of advocacy or advice that they give.
I think this is where groups like QAnon fill a void: they jump right in and offer a solid, no-holds-barred explanation for what is really fucking with their happiness, who is doing it, why, and how. Even if what they say makes absolutely no sense to supposedly rational people like us here on SDMB - again, we’re part of the problem, as far as they are concerned, because we believe in these experts who are ruining their country and their ways of life.
I know you know this, but this cancer in your life will not get better absent medication or surgery.
Best of luck whatever you decide to do. But do not make the mistake of thinking that if today is tolerable that means that all future days will also be tolerable. Both as to immediate circumstances and as to the ever-incrementing total opportunity cost of sticking with those immediate circumstances.
I don’t have your specific problem, but I feel for ya’ bro.
I guess the only thing I’m disagreeing with is that it’s a modern age thing that “People have lost faith in experts, and they are trying to find meaning in alarming ways.”
People have always been fearful and ignorant and distrustful of expertise, and have latched on to comforting, bizarre notions. I think that a lot of people, throughout our history, had no faith in experts, and they signed on to what we now call conspiracy theories and occasionally took horrific action, but technology has amplified the trend’s scope.
That’s all I’m saying. That nothing about the problem is new except the application of new technology to viralize it.
Domestic terrorism in Lewes, Delaware:
Maybe there is unexercised part of Pence that is capable of being embarrassed, and he just wants to get away. I detest him, but I don’t blame him.
Remember the show Lost and the online “game” that went with it, with clues we were supposed to suss out of the background of the show, and cryptic videos online and even IIRC a meet-up?
That was fun. That was silliness run by some responsible people with a broadcast TV contract and no political consequence.
This QAnon shit is the exact same thing only with, as that blog post writers, malevolent puppetmasters.
Does that mean that we are all already dead?
I wouldn’t be disappointed if that were the reality of the situation, to be honest.
Understood and agreed - not a new thing. But the stakes are new. The generation or two that was birthed since 1973 is observing and living through a declining America broadly, and white working class people are now living through two generations in which your job today may be gone tomorrow, which is not what they remember their fathers and grandfathers talking about in their experience. Conspiracy theories are fringe when people can live in a world in which things are stable, in which facts matter, in which research and data can be trusted to improve the quality of life.
We have lived through dizzying and amazing technological advancements in recent years, but the standard of living for the average person isn’t keeping pace. While I acknowledge that this idea is not enshrined in any constitution I know of, I personally believe that each member of a society has the right to benefit from the technologies that are developed enough to be enjoyed by upper income earners. I don’t think everyone is entitled to gourmet concierge-level medical care with celebrity doctors and private, almost hotel-like hospital rooms, but each person is entitled to affordable access to life-saving care. Each person is entitled to an affordable mobile phone contract, to affordable water, housing, education, skills training, and basic safety. Increasingly, these things are not affordable for a growing number of people, and the people that we trusted to give us good things are instead creating a serious societal cleavage. When information or expertise is no longer regarded as having the ability to change life for the better, anti-information and anti-expertise becomes one hell of a lot more attractive. This is why Trump got elected.
And going back to a point that I made earlier about talking to these Trump voters who might seem out of reach, I agree that many of them are out of reach, but the way you make them more reachable is to be more visible and accessible to them. I think what it will take to potentially reach some Trump voters is someone who comes off as comfortable in his/her own skin even when being heckled and dogged by Trump supporters and someone who could stand in front of them or go on Sean Hannity’s show and go toe-to-toe. One of the things that supporters admire about Trump is his gladiator politics. He gets panned a lot because he goes on air and says stupid things, but critics are missing the point - the point is that he is fighting liberals. Believe it or not, that even wins over people aren’t necessarily inclined to like Trump all that much. I think that is what it will take for someone like Biden or another Democrat to succeed. They will have to enter the arena - their arena - and somehow try to get their point across, even if they don’t succeed. But go into it knowing that they might not ‘win’ a debate and that the debate itself doesn’t always matter; it’s being there in front of someone, speaking to them, and being authentic.
Remember when Barack Obama did a sit-down interview with Bill O’Reilly right before the Super Bowl one year? Not long after that, he decided he wasn’t doing Fox News anymore, and I was actually among those who supported that decision. It seemed to make sense at the time. Why bother trying to debate with facts when you have a network that’s just going to cut and splice what you say, right? I think times have changed. I think people just want to see someone articulate some kind of vision in snippets and bullet points, but they want it done authentically, even if it means looking like you got heckled or jeered. At least you fought. But I think it would take someone special to do that, someone with a lot of energy and passion and who can relate to today’s audience, and I’m not sure yet who on the left can really do that.
So something was alive and thriving, then someone put Trump on it, and now the parts touched by Trump are dead…
yup, sounds about right. (Vandals really gotta think through their metaphors better…)
There was even a book written about this. 