
What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon - adrianhon
https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qanon/
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12xo
It was inevitable that the internet would birth a new religion or two...

~~~
api
I find Qanon fascinating in the abstract. It combines elements of conspiracy
culture, the new age, and New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) Christianity.

These are three things that historically didn't go together, with the new age
in particular being not entirely incorrectly associated with the occult. Of
course new age is itself an odd hodge podge of occultism, spiritualism, new
thought / "the secret" / prosperity gospel, appropriated native beliefs, and
hippie counterculture stuff.

I also find Qanon deeply disturbing for its totalitarian tendencies, such as
cheerleading for mass arrests and martial law. The combination of fringe
Christianity with the new age has a not so great history with groups like
Heaven's Gate and The Solar Temple. It's a combination that seems to self
destruct as the new age and occult/magic(k)al influence brings out a strong
tendency to try to immanentize the eschaton.

~~~
flunhat
> cheerleading for mass arrests and martial law

One of the darkly hilarious parts of the latest "Q" drops was that the entire
cast of Friends had been arrested and executed. (Why? One can only imagine it
had something to do with laugh tracks.)

It feels like "Q" predicts "marshall" law (his acolytes can never get the
spelling right), executions of public figures, or impending power grabs/coups
every month or so. None of them pan out, but his followers will usually call
those predictions "intentional disinfo."

I imagine the only way this kind of hysteria ends is with a new conspiracy
theory. And that gets uprooted by yet another conspiracy theory. And so on
until the heat death of the universe.

~~~
jberryman
Someone I was close to was a former Seventh Day Adventist and I remember
riding in a car with their father listening to an audio book retelling of the
story of the beginnings of the religion, which consisted of a series of wild
predictions of the date of rapture followed by disappointments and a new
"corrected" date. I couldn't understand how the modern church could so openly
embrace an origin story that seemed to me to undermine the legitimacy of the
entire religion, paint it as founded by charlatans. But for believers the same
facts seemed to have the opposite effect. I still don't really understand it
but I think about it often in situations like this Q stuff.

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flutterdude420
I would caution people from dismissing it as a too-crazy-to-matter fringe
group.

Trump's rise was certainly boosted by his involvement in birtherism.

The Trump equivalent of 2024 or 2028 is probably tweeting about QAnon right
now.

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spiderfarmer
Birtherism was rooted in racism. It would not be a stretch to say Trump won
partly because there are an awful lot of racists in the US.

~~~
flutterdude420
Birtherism exploited racism. It was fundamentally a political tool used to
identify true believers and to galvanize them to political action.

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untog
Birtherism was inherently racist in and of itself, though. If Obama was white
it simply wouldn’t have been a factor. It relied on suspicion of an “other” as
a key component.

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tuesdayrain
There's nothing inherently racist about attempting to claim your political
opponent cannot legally be president.

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acdha
That might be true in the abstract but anyone who had more than the slightest
awareness knows that what was directed at Obama was based racism. The same
people made racist comments about Africa in general, said he was inarticulate
in ways straight out of minstrel shows a century ago, refused to accept his
Christianity insisting that he was secretly following their favorite Other
religion, and used various threats and rhetoric from the Jim Crow-era south
against someone born in Hawaii.

You don’t lynch someone in effigy because you’re trying to say that you don’t
think they aren’t 35.

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ryanmarsh
Qanon has made a few thousand posts. If one were to analyze it/them why not
include some of the posts as evidence/criticism?

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ed25519FUUU
Q has made those posts. Qanon is the amalagamous sea of adherents who have
theories totally detached from Q. It’s much easier to critique qanon because
their theories are insane.

I would recommend checking out the Epstein stuff and the spygate stuff, since
that looks like it’s unraveling now (will we learn soon that Cruz campaign was
also spies on?)

Qmap.pub

~~~
untog
Hasn’t Q made plenty of posts that turned out to be totally incorrect ? I’ll
admit, the whole thing baffles me: Q makes incredibly vague posts that
sometimes end up somewhat matching reality and everyone decides they’re an
insider clued into every nefarious thing going on in the world. If they were,
why be so cryptic? It doesn’t pass even a simple smell test.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Q is an ocean of possible interpretations. Which seems like a drug for humans.
Watching this closely for ~3 years has been a fascinating study of people and
the internet.

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236dev
Interestingly enough liberals are more likely to know about QAnon than
conservatives. I listen to both right wing and left wing podcasts+news and the
times I hear about QAnon are on left wing ones. I'm not sure what to make of
this.

Edit: genuinely curious why I'm being downvoted, I found this pretty
interesting

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/30/qanons-
cons...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/30/qanons-conspiracy-
theories-have-seeped-into-u-s-politics-but-most-dont-know-what-it-is/)

~~~
JadeNB
> Interestingly enough liberals are more likely to know about QAnon than
> conservatives. I listen to both right wing and left wing podcasts+news and
> the times I hear about QAnon are on left wing ones. I'm not sure what to
> make of this.

Doesn't that just show that liberals are more likely to _talk_ about it, at
least in the sources to which you listen, than that they are more likely to
_know_ about it?

For example, one explanation—which seems plausible to me, but which I do not
claim is the truth—of the observed facts is that conservatives who aren't
QAnon believers don't want to discuss what they see as a fringe position
within their party, whereas conservatives who are believers only discuss their
beliefs with those they feel are, or might become, initiates. I can also
believe that liberals would be both more frightened by these beliefs, hence
more likely to talk about them, and more motivated to highlight what they
perceive as fringe or embarrassing beliefs of their ideological opponents.

~~~
236dev
The more a podcast or news station talks about something, the more their
listeners know about it.

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ed25519FUUU
Qanon is a funny thing to me. The actual things written by the person or
people under “Q” are almost completely detached from what I see people share
and post on social media.

But as someone who followed the spygate saga, Q seemed to know just enough
inside baseball to make it interesting and keep me curious. I thought maybe
some foreign intelligence op or something.

To give Qanon credit though, they were taking about Epstein for two years,
when Epstein was still considered untouchable. Apparently their cohort isn’t
so untouchable anymore.

~~~
Theory5
>But as someone who followed the spygate saga, Q seemed to know just enough
inside baseball to make it interesting and keep me curious. I thought maybe
some foreign intelligence op or something.

You ever see a psychic or other con-person work? Think more like that.

~~~
ed25519FUUU
Based on what I've read, I think I can safely rule out a con- _man_ unless
they seem to have intimate understanding and knowledge of the inner workings
of the FBI, though a "con" is certainly on the table.

Among the intelligence people I follow (such as Rich Higgins, former NSC
staffer), the consensus seems to be that Q is a psyop _against_ POTUS, from
either a foreign or domestic intelligence[1]). People can decide for
themselves.

I can't point to any concrete "predictions" from Q other than Ted Cruz's
campaign was also spied on. The only "prediction" with a date turned out
totally false.

[https://twitter.com/RichHiggins_DC/status/126075222668070093...](https://twitter.com/RichHiggins_DC/status/1260752226680700934)

~~~
acdha
That guy is currently repeating predictions that teen angst over losing TikTok
will lead to a Pol Pot style uprising and comparing the protests in Portland
to Nazis. I wouldn’t trust him on anything without a credible source.

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ryanmarsh
I can’t tell what’s sloppier, the theories promulgated by supposed Q
followers, or the debunkers.

Why is it so hard to find a thoughtful, technical, ripping to shreds of Q’s
posts?

~~~
RugnirViking
Why would you want such a thing? It's clearly wrong, correcting it is just
like people 'debunking' flat earthers or strong atheists arguing with
fundamentalist Christians.

Its only value is a sick kind of entertainment - "I am so much more clever
than these idiots". I say this as somebody who has consumed this kind of media
myself in the past.

~~~
ryanmarsh
I think if you look closely you’ll see that it’s something entirely different.

