Octopus Overlords

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Sun Aug 23, 2020 3:07 pm The neighbor behind me has a workshop/garage/"entertaining" area that abuts my fence, and I noticed he put up this huge flag last week, which I didn't recognize. It was blue and had some writing around the logo which I couldn't make out without going to my fence and just gawking (thankfully it's hidden from view from my yard unless you are real close to the fence). I finally made out a huge "Q" in the middle. I don't even want to know what the phrase around the Q is.
Probably E Plurubus Anus (Anum?)

Kraken wrote: ↑Sun Aug 23, 2020 9:01 pm Have you even TRIED cannibalism yet? If you're a REAL liberal....

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Sun Aug 23, 2020 5:28 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Sun Aug 23, 2020 3:07 pm The neighbor behind me has a workshop/garage/"entertaining" area that abuts my fence, and I noticed he put up this huge flag last week, which I didn't recognize. It was blue and had some writing around the logo which I couldn't make out without going to my fence and just gawking (thankfully it's hidden from view from my yard unless you are real close to the fence). I finally made out a huge "Q" in the middle. I don't even want to know what the phrase around the Q is.
Probably E Plurubus Anus (Anum?)

Was it "WWG1WGA?". That's their motto. "Where we go one (1) we go all."

Journalists need to get this right, immediately. QAnon is an *antisemitic* *mainstream* Republican conspiracy theory embraced by the *national party.*

Stop calling this a fringe thing. Stop pretending it's just wild crazy nuts. The national GOP believes this and is spreading it.

The White House specifically directed the National Institutes of Health to cancel the multimillion-dollar research grant after President Donald Trump promoted an unfounded conspiracy theory that the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was released from a lab in Wuhan, China—a lab that collaborates with the nonprofit.

Now, the NIH has told the nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, that it may have its funding back—if it collects and hands over materials and information about the Chinese lab, which is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)...

... The list includes:

A sample of the SARS-CoV-2 isolate the Wuhan lab used to determine its genetic sequence at the beginning of the pandemic
An inspection from an outside group that would give “specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019”
An explanation of purported restrictions at the WIV, including “diminished cellphone traffic in October 2019, and the evidence that there may have been roadblocks surrounding the facility from October 14-19, 2019”
An explanation for the “apparent disappearance” of a scientist who worked in the WIV coronavirus lab and was claimed by some on social media to be “patient zero” (the WIV has said in earlier statements that the person in question was a graduate student who went to work somewhere else after earning her master’s degree)

QAnon followers will often repeat a commandment they learned from Q: that in the presence of doubt, you should “do your own research.” And that impulse will feel especially familiar to evangelicals, says William Partin, a research analyst at Data & Society’s Disinformation Action Lab, who has been studying QAnon. “The kind of literacy that’s implied here—close reading and discussion of texts that are accepted as authoritative—has quite a bit in common with how evangelicals learn to read and interpret the Bible,” he says.

Around a quarter of American adults identify themselves as evangelical Protestants, including parts of the Baptist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian denominations. This makes evangelicalism larger than any other religious stream in the US, including Catholicism or mainline Protestantism.
...
[Kristen Howerton, a writer and family therapist who grew up evangelical,] believes it’s no accident that QAnon has taken hold among evangelicals now: they are facing tremendous cognitive dissonance. “I was raised evangelical Christian Republican. There is nothing that makes sense for Trump with any of the values that I was raised with,” she says. “There’s a part of me that thinks that this is a very elaborate false narrative to explain their continued loyalty to Trump.”

Wheaton College’s Ed Stetzer says that QAnon resonates with Christian religious thought by presenting itself as a force for good, designed to destroy evil. But Jason Thacker, chair of research in technology ethics at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, says Christian followers of QAnon are wrong about what side it’s on. “QAnon is not about sex trafficking,” he says, but “taking advantage of gospel conventions and manipulating them for purposes of power.”
...
Right now, the evangelical leaders who are concerned about QAnon and misinformation in their communities are running to catch up. Many of them are too busy helping their congregations deal with the direct impact of the pandemic to spend much time countering conspiracy theories. Howerton thinks they’re just beginning the process of figuring out what to do about QAnon. She was planning on writing a newsletter to help her readers understand what’s going on with their relatives who have fallen into this. But a bigger, organized effort still hasn’t formed.

Something interesting, troubling, and important is happening. This weekend there's an NBC special about online disinformation campaigns and recruitment pipelines for right-wing radicalism. On one level it's good; the media has historically ignored the complexity of the problem. There's a pretty serious problem, though: This isn't a new, emergent issue. The roots go back to the earliest days of the social web, and the specific networks they're covering in Sunday's special predate Trump.

A handful of Black women — writers, scholars, artists, thinkers — were at ground zero for the rise of those disinformation and radicalization networks before anyone else took the issue seriously. 2013, 2014, 2015… long before mainstream reporters knew a chan from a flan. It's not an exclusive list, but @Blackamazon? @so_treu? @sassycrass? @Karnythia? I was just online enough to notice ~weird stuff~ spilling onto Twitter in that era, and discovered they were doing the work of untangling "lulz-driven" disinfo campaigns that predated today's Q shit.

They wrote explainers, they mobilized of realtime bot-spotting networks, they wrote articles, explained exactly what was happening, got brigaded and harassed and threatened… and they kept waving flags and warning people: "Marginalized communities are just the training ground." And here we are. The networks have metastasized into nightmare shit straight out of cyberpunk dystopia. They've recruited your uncle and your grandmother and your failson cousin and they've built lucrative, militarized cults. They're a nontrivial component of resurgent fascism.

I'm not just angry because *those women have been doing the research and the documentation and warning everyone from @jack to @chrislhayes for years*, and I'm not just angry because mainstream journalism isn't centering their experience and input as the story finally """breaks""". I'm angry because one of the *reasons* this cluster of smart as fuck extremely online writers and researchers and thinkers was at ground zero was because they were *already* shitlisted by cliquey swaths of Obama-era white liberal digital media.

They called bullshit when one of the golden boys of hip-white-guy-feminism turned out to be a predator — and launched really significant critiques of the race-and-class gatekeeping in some of the most popular digital media outlets of the time who shielded him. 4chan didn't come up with the idea of exploiting racial fault lines in hashtag-feminism to power and protect harassment; Schwyzer did the R&D for them, they just ran with it. And it worked because the black women sounding alarms were inconvenient.

And then we got #endfathersday and #yourslipishowing and christ almighty g*mergate, which you still can't mention by name *six years later* because it became the model for mass-monetized hatemobbing that Q only refined. And those same women are still writing and researching and pitching and interviewing because they're smart as fuck and they have work to do. Writing them out of the story of what is happening right now isn't *failure to cite* — it's a refusal to engage with what's goign on.

That deep, consistent thread of exploiting pre-existing fault lines of racism, mysogyny, and xyonophoia is still baked into campaigns of disinfo and recruitment. No coverage can untangle it without pulling off the painful scabs and looking at how the shit snowball started. It will keep happening. It will keep growing. It will keep turning your loved ones and your coworkers into hate machines. It will keep putting literal 4chan cultists into Congress. It will keep destroying lives for lulz and patreon subs and the dream of ethnostate.

So yeah, tune in Sunday.

Read @Karnythia's books. Back @so_treu and @sassycrass's work on Patreon. Hire the ever-loving *fuck* out of @Blackamazon for your thinktank, because she'll turn your busted systems inside out. And demand that our journalists stop pretending the story started when Hillary lost. Okay, one more shot. The next time you hear the White House spokesbot of the week whinging about "cancel culture" to deflect critique of the day's latest atrocity?

Take a long hard moment and remember that didn't start as a right-wing talking point. hand-wringing about "Toxic Callout Culture" started as a way to frame black feminist critiques of all that shit upthread as "mean" and "unforgiving." The radical right isn't full of geniuses. They pick up whatever tools are at hand, and they're happy to use 'em.

We need to ask why those tools keep working.

coopasonic wrote: ↑Fri Sep 11, 2020 10:51 am The quote "we're living in an alternate reality" is very self-aware.

Skinypupy wrote:I'm really hoping someone can do a welfare check on the Frank's children on Nov 3.

That casual "I'll just take them out to the garage, turn the car on, and be done with it" comment is horrific.

pr0ner wrote: ↑Sun Sep 13, 2020 2:17 pm Sounds like they believe all the lies Trump tells them.

Alefroth wrote: ↑Mon Sep 21, 2020 6:51 pm Q identified?

Grifman wrote: ↑Sat Oct 03, 2020 11:37 am The latest Q conspiracy is that Trump is not sick but is hiding out at Walter Reed in anticipation of massive arrests of the Deep State and other bad actors in the coming days.

Facebook has banned all accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement from its platforms.

"Starting today, we will remove Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts," the company said on Tuesday.

The move is a significant escalation to Facebook's earlier decision to remove or restrict groups and accounts sharing and promoting QAnon material.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory that says President Trump is waging a war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Facebook said its staff had begun removing content and deleting groups and pages, but that "this work will take time and will continue in the coming days and weeks".

"Our Dangerous Organizations Operations team will continue to enforce this policy and proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports," the statement added.

Freyland wrote: ↑Tue Oct 06, 2020 11:18 pm So, wait until the political wind direction is more obvious, *then* do it? I imagine the reason it will "take a lot of time" is so they can back track if necessary.