Q is Joe Biden, another non-US Politics thread (Q Anon, Qanon, Q_anon, Joe Biden is Q)

What else did Sean Davis say

The satire is generally more real than the dull reality, it's true

this part in particular, (as well as several others in the story) is eerily similar to some of my experiences. there is a relentlessly horrifying feeling you get when a family members says something completely and obviously wrong, you spend a ton of time trying to prove it so conclusively that there can be no doubt, and then you get a link to the dumbest thing of all time as their response. it's a really sinking, awful feeling.

not a family member but a pretty good friend got deep into this fake outrage hellhole during the trump years and esp during the pandemic. he thinks I live in a city under siege by antia death squads or something and sometimes sends me obv bullshit that anyone with a normally functioning brain would be able to spot for what it is. I walked down to the supposed scene of a riot one time and snapped some pics. nothing had happened, of course. sunny day, people shopping and hanging out.

called him on it the next time he brought up some new nonsense. said something like "your sources are bad, you shouldn't trust them, here's an example that I personally disproved." but response was similar... he just found yet more videos from these garbage twitter accounts and sent me those. "maybe you didn't get there in time, windows can be repaired" etc. instead of, you know, just believing your friend that literally lives there and just sent you photo evidence.

shit sucks.

and this person used to have cool and weird hobbies that were a lot of fun to talk about! all of that now almost entirely displaced by... this updated and only barely different riff on... 'the war on xmas'? arghhh.

just like hobbies form part of your identity, so does associating with qAnon, except instead of becoming part of your identity, it IS your identity. and then they can't shut it off.

I hear their meaningless lives are imbued with meaning now.

except instead of becoming part of your identity, it IS your identity. and then they can't shut it off

yea, even when I try to talk about normal stuff and diffuse the politics, I can just tell he really wants to talk about whatever is going on in maga land at the moment instead. and I'll eventually get a link to, like... an article about how sacha baron cohen is a hypocrite or something, zzzzz

I hear their meaningless lives are imbued with meaning now.

Fighting for the redemption of the world, it's the same job as superheroes!

and the best superheroes are the ones that are also persecuted and not even thanked for their efforts

My mom has some...odd beliefs, but I'm blessed that I know absolutely no one that fits these profiles, or that I cut them off years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/qanoncasualties

for all your horrifying QAnon testimonial needs

Am I naive to ask if this level of delusion is unprecedented in human history?

One I cut off years ago was a high school friend. He exists in the area where left-wing hippie spirituality shit mixes with libertarian anti-vaxx racism. Judging by his open profiles on the internet, he's still on that beat.

Sad. I used to love getting stoned and listening to dub with him.

Halfway, I mean...not to sound glib, but there are billions of people who believe in a literal skydad.

Yes, but most religious people have been able to reconcile belief and reality to the extent that they could exist in society with those who didn't believe.

Am I naive to ask if this level of delusion is unprecedented in human history?

Remember the Children’s Crusade?

Sure, and that turned out OK! No worries.

I think the difference between generic SkyDad belief and Q cultism (or any such niche belief) is that a lot of people grow up within SkyDad belief systems and just accept them as the natural way of the world — which is easy to do, when the majority of other people you interact with also adhere to some version of SkyDadism. Whereas with Q, you have to really do the work — do the research! — to get immersed, it's not going to just happen passively. (Although algorithms I guess allow it happen somewhat passively. But you still have to click and keep clicking.)

don't worry we'll have entire Q households with second generations of Q pilled weirdos before long

'God-Emperor' will no longer be a metaphor a couple of generations from now.

most religious people have been able to reconcile belief and reality to the extent that they could exist in society with those who didn't believe.

don't know if that's historically accurate

There have definitely been instances of greater mass delusion but they mostly belong to an era before rationality (or at least some half-hearted simulacrum thereof) became a primary driver of human society. Like back when the execution of suspected witches was an everyday thing.

I feel bad for the people who take all the time to meticulously assemble counter-cases like the one above, but that’s not really how you change someone’s belief system, is it?

If you try to directly attack a closely held belief that someone forms part of their identity without addressing the underlying belief(s) that supports that one and giving them a more cogent replacement, they’re just going to re-cement their belief in deeper.

Like back when the execution of suspected witches was an everyday thing.

Pfft, implying Trump wasn't the victim of the greatest witch hunt in the history of America.

Who needs QAnon when you've got Sabmyk?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/20/revealed-man-behind-fast-growing-cult-becoming-the-new-qanon-sabmyk-network

Ok I havent read this thread but did scan it; anyone watching the Qanon doc on HBO? Two episodes so far and lengthy time spent in the home of JIm Watkins and his son. Jesus christ these people are weird. Dude who started 8chan (hotwheels) seems like a paragon of normality compared to both of them.

Meanwhile, what’s really on that ship ????

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8n9q/suez-canal-qanon-cargo-ship-conspiracies-are-getting-wild

ark of the covenant

We've watched I think almost three episodes of the doc. Like most of these things it's a little too padded out but it's ok. Works as well as a doc about the seedier, grosser side of the internet and the people that keep it running and, to a lesser extent, why they do that. It's telling that this Q bullshit is so connected to 8chan, but many the interviewed Q adherents claim to avoid 8chan if not outright claim not to even know what kind of cesspool it is. Lot of compartmentalization going on.

I watched the first episode. I feel like I've listened to enough of the QAA podcast that I'm not learning anything.

We just made it to episode 4, where it shifts from hypothesizing one of the Watkins is behind it all, to ... Bannon. Unless that is the younger Watkins misdirecting attention to protect himself.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/prowrestling/images/b/b8/StanLane.jpg

Boebert's biological dad (allegedly)

Good read

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/scaachikoul/qanon-believers-turning-away-from-trump

I feel like a certain amount of the driver for phenomena like QAnon has to just be boredom. Like the impulse to believe that there's a hidden world underlying the world in front of you must partly come from a sense that the world in front of you is hopelessly banal and dreary.

I've definitely seen that argument more than a few places. It makes a certain sense.

Who knew we’d be nostalgic for valium

Hey babe, tale a walk on the Q side

https://www.rawstory.com/qanon-suez-canal/

re: the article Ned linked above, I really don't get how Obama voters could've deluded themselves into following Q to vote for Trump. It always seemed to me that most Q followers were just Trump supporters looking for moral cover because Trump was so obviously terrible. Like, yeah, he's bad, but he's going to take down something much, much worse going on in the deep state.

But then they go on about how Trump is connected to Q through the number 17 because Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, and he said that he visited DC exactly 17 times before he was elected, such a detail must mean something! And they immediately follow that by saying that they can't support Biden because he reversed 17 of Trump's executive orders that afternoon. Hello? 17 is your magic number, dummy, shouldn't that mean that Biden is taking up the Q mantle? But no, for some reason it only works for Trump.

I find it hard to believe that these people would've been Biden voters if only they hadn't started tying everyday coincidences into a framework that demands Trump as president forever. Wanting Trump as president forever seems like it would've been starting point of their Q journey, whether they realized it or not before jumping on board, it doesn't make any sense that they just ended up there as the destination.

[content redacted per user request - mod]

^^ flagged, encourage all others to do the same

What was it??

Filmmaker doing a reddit AMA right now. One of the first exchanges:

mjayultra
51 minutes ago
What does Jim Watkins smell like

cullenhoback
14 minutes ago
Sweat

Finished the doc, was pretty entertaining, if only as a chronicle of the evolution of the seedier corners of the internet. Also, I think maybe the ... fourth thing I've seen this year that ends with the arrival of the pandemic?

Hey guys... got some tats I need to change. Any ideas? pic.twitter.com/70d2dBTr5J

— Quello Holbeck (@HolbeckDavid) April 7, 2021

https://i.redd.it/lyl9ieiumdc61.jpg

yea this was good, highly bingeable & i am trusting of hbo's docs & what they choose to buy/air/produce whataver

ron watkins reminds me of my finacee's cousin whos a p cool guy

Goddammit, I used to like this guy. Person of Interest was a great show.

Actor Jim Caviezel appeared at a right-wing COVID conspiracy theorist conference yesterday and promoted the QAnon blood-harvesting conspiracy theory (https://t.co/9RgU0ORDVI) about "the adrenochroming of children." (clip 1/2) pic.twitter.com/JZWxpFbjFY

— Eric Hananoki (@ehananoki) April 17, 2021

I'd always heard he was a right-wing religious zealot, going back to when he played Jesus in Mel Gibson's tortureporn Passion.