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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4117 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 20, 2023

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I've been wondering lately to what extent the whackadoodle ideas are being deliberately seeded as a tool to discredit more cogent complaints.

I realize that this sounds fairly whackadoo itself, but there seems to be a bit of a pattern with recent government actions that might reasonably be criticized:

  1. Mandatory vaccination as an infringement on civil liberties --> "Bill Gates/5g/microchips"

  2. Unauthorized Chinese spy-balloon overflights --> "I'm not saying it's aliens..."

  3. Inadequate/bungled wildfire response + possible manual arson by crazy people --> "Jewish Space Lasers!"

  4. Unprecedented and technically illegal changes to election procedures --> "Dominion/Italian satellites/German servers changing vote tallies"

and so on...

I just now notice that most of these involve space vehicles of some sort -- is it a tell, or am I whackadoodling?

I think it’s an attention getting strategy along the lines of some of the crazier PETA stuff. If you’re not getting attention, nothing else matters. And like it or not, crazy gets attention. If people weren’t talking about 5G nanotubes or whatever, the question of mandatory vaccination would have been a minor issue.

Yes but no IMO.

I think they are seeded, but not as a tool to discredit cons. They are probably seeded by people with a financial interest in creating a media sphere distinct from reality; so people get locked into the conspiratorial universe where Hilary Clinton isn't a made-man venal corporatist stooge but a literal satanic pedophile blood drinker.

The same exists on the left; from tankies and such who aren't content with the boring Marxist critique of capital and has to make the further leap that rich people and the US personally crush third worlders in wine presses for entertainment.

It's the same everywhere and forever 99% of the time 100% of the time: there is no grand conspiracy or narrative; there are individual actors reacting to market forces attempting to maximize profit and therefore coordinating with no coordinator.

I think that is why a lot of these dudes that I am familiar with on the left conspiratorial media sphere spend no time at all attacking Trump/Desantis/the Reps; and all of their time and energy attacking AOC/ "Elites"/ the Dems: because they aren't primarily trying to steer politics. They are trying to lock their audience in by providing a unique product; so their main competition isn't the right, it's the left.

I knew people who were repeating 5g nanotechnology bill gates sterilization vaccines back when the public’s view of antivaxxers was still hippies with scented candles and children with misspelled names. There might have been some amplifying of narratives going on, but I highly doubt that particular constellation of ideas came from the government.

It seems very possible. Though the fertile soil for growing your own Dale-Gribbles is pre-existing, I've noticed a strong personality type among the conspiracy theorists in my life. There's a natural tendency in any extremist community to play "more extreme" as a trump card, so it wouldn't be hard to play into this tendency by offering ever more extreme stories.

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