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#qanon casualties
gingerthegreat · 1 year
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I know people are laughing about this, but I actually find it quite sad. She’s literally been brainwashed.
We really should talk about what’s wrong with our society that people have been driven to buy into these crazy conspiracy theories
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man-bear-thing · 1 year
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Bruh my mother is screaming about the election and how we’re “murdering innocent babies” and how “we’re all going to eat bugs because the liberals are going to take everyone’s access to meats away” and fucking Christ this woman supports DeSantis??? In Massachusetts?????? Jesus I’m going to throw up I can’t fucking stand this I’m actually gonna cry
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musingsbykb · 1 year
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(via Hey Snowflake, Trump Lost. You are in a cult. Cap by KBwiththeTees)
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Remember when conspiracy theorists were considered crackpots rather than elevated to positions of power? I do. It wasn’t that long ago.
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My Monsters are "Real"
I think of that Five-Finger Deathpunch song line "My monsters are real."
People, especially poor people, live in a world of a constant stream of traumas both large and small that literally start before they are born. It is a constant series of shocks to the system that dulls the stress response then dulls our responses to natural hormones in our brain designed to help us in fight or flight situations. Abuse, hunger, fear, coldness, sickness, and pain all lead to those as well as the big one - neglect.
These are the real monsters and the people behind them, the mother, the father, the community leader, the teacher, and others are normalized sources of stress, terror, and trauma. The abuse they render is compartmentalized and normalized into "normal life" even though deep in our hearts we know that people aren't supposed to act like this toward each other and specifically toward elders, children, or teens.
So they have to invent boogey-men to manipulate these people. The hackers, the social engineers, the marketers, and the terrorists have to create MONSTERS that are fanciful, near supernatural, and plausibly real if you live in a world full of terrors and traumas that really have no reason outside of outright meanness, callousness, or selfishness.
And one can't accept their mother or father, or rich, beneficent leader, no matter how cruel, rude, or nasty they has more of a negative effect on their life than fanciful, larger-than-life, fantasy monster/conspiracy against them.
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misterjt · 1 year
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Even if you think that she's a scam artist, even if you think she's a conspiracy theorist, you can't look at her eloquence and her teachings and deny that she is one of the greatest teachers that's ever lived during our time.
—As quoted by Emily Guerin in her story about the Yoga Queen of Conspiracy Theories
If that's not a great promo for the latest season of Imperfect Paradise, I need to find out what is.
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comradecowplant · 1 year
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I just learned Hulu is making a King of the Hill reboot and I have never thought Ted K maybe had a point more than I have right now
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mariacallous · 3 months
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On Boxing Day pro-Palestine demonstrators met customers at the Zara sale in the Westfield shopping centre, in Stratford, east London. They were not there to wish them the compliments of the season.
‘Bombs are dropping while you’re shopping,’ they chanted, as police stood by to make sure the protests did not turn violent. ‘Zara is enabling genocide,’ their placards read.
Quite what they wanted bargain hunters to do about the Israeli forces bombing the Gaza Strip, they never said. Lobby their MPs? Politicians are on their Christmas holidays. Join the Palestinian armed struggle?  It was unclear whether the shopping centre had a Hamas recruitment office.
But on one point the demonstrators were certain: no one should be buying from Zara. Even though the fashion chain has not encouraged Israel’s war against Hamas, earned income from it, or supported Israel in any material way, it was nevertheless “exploiting a genocide and commodifying Palestine's pain for profit”.
Zara, in short, has become the object of a paranoid fantasy: a QAnon conspiracy theory for the postcolonial left.
The Zara conspiracy is an entirely modern phenomenon. It has no original author. Antisemitic Russians sat down and wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 20th century. There was an actual “Q” behind the QAnon conspiracy: a far-right activist who first appeared on 4chan message boards in 2017 to claim that a cabal of child abusers was conspiring against Donald Trump.
The Zara conspiracy was mass produced by social media users: an example of the madness of crowds rather than their supposed wisdom. The cause of the descent into hysteria was bizarre.
In early December Zara launched an advertising campaign featuring the model Kristen McMenamy wearing its latest collection in a sculptor’s studio. It clearly was a studio, by the way, and not a war zone in southern Israel or Gaza. McMenamy carried a mannequin wrapped in white fabric. The cry went up that the Spanish company was exploiting the suffering of Palestinians and that the mannequin was meant to represent a victim of Israeli aggression wrapped in a shroud.
The accusation was insane. No one in the photo shoot resembled a soldier or a casualty of war. Anyone who thought for 30 seconds before resorting to social media would have known that global brands plan their advertising campaigns months in advance.
Zara said the campaign presented “a series of images of unfinished sculptures in a sculptor’s studio and was created with the sole purpose of showcasing craft-made garments in an artistic context”. The idea for the studio setting was conceived in July. The photo shoot was in September, weeks before the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October.
No one cared. Melanie Elturk, the CEO of fashion brand Haute Hijab, said of the campaign, ‘this is sick. What kind of sick, twisted, and sadistic images am I looking at?’ #BoycottZara trended on Twitter, as users said that Zara was ‘utterly shameful and disgraceful”’.
To justify their condemnations, activists developed ever-weirder theories. A piece of cardboard in the photoshoot was meant to be a map of Israel/Palestine turned upside down. Because a Zara executive had once invited an extreme right-wing Israeli politician to a meeting, the whole company was damned.
Astonishingly, or maybe not so astonishingly to anyone who follows online manias, the fake accusations worked. Zara stores in Glasgow, Toronto. Hanover, Melbourne and Amsterdam were targeted.
What on earth could Zara do? PR specialists normally say that the worst type of apology is the non-apology apology, when a public figure or institution shows no remorse, but instead says that they are sorry that people are offended. Yet Zara had not sought to trivialize or profit from the war so what else could it do but offer a non-apology apology? The company duly said it was sorry that people were upset.
“Unfortunately, some customers felt offended by these images, which have now been removed, and saw in them something far from what was intended when they were created,” it said on 13 December, and pulled the advertising campaign
That was two-weeks ago and yet still the protests in Zara stores continue. On 23 December activists targeted Zara on Oxford Street chanting , 'Zara, Zara, you can't hide, stop supporting genocide', even though Zara was not, in fact,  supporting genocide. On Boxing Day, they were at the Stratford shopping centre.
Zara has apologised for an offence it did not commit. There is no way that any serious person can believe the charges against it. And yet believe them the protestors do. Or at the very least they pretend to believe for the sake of keeping in with their allies.
Maybe nothing will come of the protests. One could have argued in 2017, after all, that QAnon was essentially simple-minded people living out their fantasies online. Certainly, every sane American knew that there was no clique of paedophiles running the Democrat party, but where was the harm in the conspiracy theory?
Then QAnon supporters stormed the US capitol in January 2021. Will the same story play out from the Gaza protests? As far as I can tell, no one on the left is challenging the paranoia. I have yet to see the fact-checkers of the BBC and Channel 4 warning about the fake news on the left with anything like the gusto with which they treat its counterparts on the right.
To be fair, the scale of disinformation around the Gaza war is off the charts, and it is impossible to chase down every lie. But when fake news goes from online fantasies to real world protests, from 4chan to the Capitol, from Twitter to the Westfield shopping centre, it’s worth taking notice.
Sensible supporters of a Palestinian state ought to be the most concerned. No one apart from fascists, Islamists and far leftists believes that Israel should not defend itself. And yet the scale of its military action in Gaza is outraging world opinion. Mainstream politicians, who might one day put pressure on Israel, remain very wary about reflecting the anger on the streets.
They look at the insane conspiracy theories on the western left and see them as no different from the insane conspiracy theories that motivate Hamas, and they back away.
The Palestinians need many things: an end to the Netanyahu government, and an end to Hamas. But they could also use allies in the West who do not discredit their cause with dark, gibbering fantasies.
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mysharona1987 · 6 months
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Reddit’s Qanon Casualties continues to be a harsh but necessary read.
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saywhat-politics · 2 months
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The Justice Department released a 575-page report last month detailing law-enforcement failures that exacerbated the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The document identifies groups that were first to respond to the shooting, with one glaring omission: a citizen militia called Patriots for America.
Shortly after the gunman was killed on May 24, 2022, members of the Texas-based militia posted footage approximately 40 feet from the shooter’s truck — revealing a loaded semi-automatic rifle that investigators had not yet recovered — and 50 feet from an incident command center. Newly verified footage shows that militia volunteers spent at least eight minutes beyond the established police line, recording videos and spreading conspiracy theories from the scene, unimpeded by law enforcement.
Far-right responses to mass shootings create personal safety risks and advance harmful conspiracy theories. When extremists frame themselves as humanitarian or “neighborhood watch” groups, they sow distrust in government agencies and make it easier for sympathizers to mobilize. Previously, emboldened militias and neo-Nazis cosplaying as humanitarians have targeted public officials, threatened unarmed civilians at gunpoint, and even been convicted of murder.
Extremist mobilization to mass casualty events appears to be an emerging pattern; in October 2023, armed neo-Nazis responded to shootings in Lewiston, Maine, and gained access to the gunman’s address after officials claimed a secure perimeter was established.
The Response
Founded in 2015, Patriots for America (PFA) is a right-wing militia that operates along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Texas-based group claims to defend the border while “working together with law enforcement to rescue minors and children from sex trafficking.” The militia was active in neighboring Zavala County when, according to PFA volunteer Natly Denise, its members responded to reports of an incident in nearby Uvalde.
The militia has released footage that shows heavily armed PFA volunteers intercepting migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border as far back as 2021. These videos typically feature camo-clad volunteers, armed with long guns, hiking through remote swathes of southern Texas. In footage of one patrol attributed to PFA’s leader, Samuel Hall, and shared by the Western States Center, five migrants are instructed to empty their pockets and unlace their shoes — a harsh tactic employed by immigration enforcement agents to prevent detainees from traversing rough terrain, according to former senior Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd.
Patriots for America volunteers regularly espouse QAnon conspiracy theories online, according to the Tech Transparency Project. This rhetoric often targets migrants and promotes false narratives regarding secret child-exploitation rings. PFA leader Hall even traveled to Juárez, Mexico, to investigate baseless claims that a Christian charity was involved in an international child sex trafficking scheme.
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tanadrin · 11 months
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good posts about overuse of “developed” and “failed state”. what do you think about “terrorism”?
as a professional opinion-haver, noam chomsky is often wrong, but he was correct about this one: "terrorism" and "the war on terror" were an enormous boon for authoritarians. even in the US after 9/11, the specter of "terrorism" was used to justify an enormous range of authoritarian policing, among the worst of which was the Patriot Act. it was a clever bait and switch: the word then evoked for the american public the concept of islamic terrorism, a foreign and racialized threat external to the body politic, despite the fact that home-grown right-wing terrorism had been killing people for years. i know i said in an earlier post political violence was at a low level in the 90s, compared to other historical periods in the US, and it was--but what episodes of political violence there were included some significant acts of right-wing violence: the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Eric Rudolph's bombings, several murders of abortion providers, etc.
a big difference between these acts of right-wing violence and other episodes of political violence in U.S. history is that they didn't have any kind of real elite support. these were, in some ways, the Qanon and MAGA chuds of their day, the craziest of the alienated far-right fringe. and it would be churlish to deny that 9/11 was a high-water mark for casualties: there is no universe in which airplanes being turned from a subject of terrorism to a weapon of terrorism doesn't deeply fuck up how we think about certain aspects of security and policing.
but how states react to terrorism also has an ideological basis, and it felt to many people in the aftermath of 9/11 that, even as incidents of right-wing terrorism continued to be an issue, and 9/11 itself proved to be an extreme outlier, US law enforcement and US policy was focusing on the latter to the detriment of preventing the former, as though terrorism by christians simply didn't count. morons like sam harris remained terrified of muslims, and proposed some truly stupid policies to combat islamic terrorism, which would have done less than zero good.
and of course the word "terrorism" rapidly expanded in meaning: the actions of the US government post-9/11 signaled that this word was the justification you needed for almost any suspension of normal rights and protections, and this had both a domestic and international effect. the international effect was the worst one, by some margin: because the US was now ideologically committed to a "war on terror," you could avoid any nagging about your human rights record by classifying any opposition political activity as "terrorism" and banning it under "anti-terrorism" laws.
that said, i think the word "terrorism," at least as i encounter it, still has a pretty specific meaning; most people don't think a nonviolent protest is terrorism. attempts to redefine it from the right never really went anywhere--if anything, its scope got restricted temporarily in anglo political discourse to mean mostly foreign terrorism. but certainly the discourse around the word has been pretty bad for a while now, and isn't really getting better.
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baelpenrose · 2 months
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Nihilus Rex 11: First Capture
Here it is everyone, the long awaited heist. Cowritten, per usual, by @canyouhearthelight, and once again, cautionary note: this has not even been theoretically possible since 2017, and it was only possible in theory even back then. Do not try it IRL.
Artificial amateurs aren't at all amazing
Analytically, I assault, animate things
Broken barriers bounded by the bomb beat
Buildings are broken, basically I'm bombarding
Casually create catastrophes, casualties
Canceling cats got their canopies collapsing
Blackalicious, “Alphabet Aerobics”
Nils
30 days Until the Heist
“Icebreaker is ready - how’re the fake notaries coming?” 
“Worry about your gun nuts and about the databombs. We’re milling them out as fast as Bishop can find them.” 
15 Days Until the Event
“GODDAMNIT! How is the worm still too big?”
“Okay, is there any way we can shave just a few lines of code off of…”
10 Days Until the Heist
“Yes, you have that right, the Iconoclasts are handling all the intelligence gathering and the digital end. You just have to get a magnet on a computer, burn some paper records, and get a gun to one guy’s head and get him to press a button. Get it done.”
“Weasel got back to us with the icebreaker, it looks solid and small.”
“Okay, do we have any confirmation on the last of the…”
One Week Until the Heist
“ARE WE GOING TO WIND UP PACKING THIS IN BECAUSE WE CAN’T GET ONE FUCKING COMPONENT TO FUNCTION?!”
“Nooo more coffee for Nils….”
“Think he’d notice if I slipped him a fistful of Ambien?”
“I think a nap might actually kill him.”
Five Days Before
“Okay. To the great thanks of the hacking gods, the worm finally works and is an appropriate size, we have all the data bombs we need, and enough extra servers and slave CPUs to deploy extra icebreakers and databombing to county records around the country. Fuck yes.”
“About 75% of the releases we faked got recorded according to the botnet, assume we’re probably going to have a few more losses and a few more accepted by the day of, but probably not much after,” Harvey said, slowly. 
“Alright. Crash. Get ready. It’s gonna be the real test day of.”
I barely caught Lash muttering. “Telling US to sleep, like he has since this started… PAH!”
Day of the Heist
In the hacker lair, we were all sitting in beanbag chairs. We had dosed heavy on coffee, the good shit Lash had brought, and I had communicated orders to my idiots. They were en route to the big bank centers that we needed them in, and would be there in less than an hour. We had a series of slave CPUs ready to go, but we couldn’t fire them off until after we’d breached the bank - there was a really precise sequence we had to run. Another one, a live feed of the security feed for the bank, was on the wall.
We couldn’t fire it off, not yet. We needed the chaos. 
Jessie, sorry I didn’t sooner. I wish I had. I abruptly felt guilty. I had barely thought about her in the last month or so - as though keeping myself busy had let me forget a friendship that had kept me sane for years. Like it had been that easy to move on. It shouldn’t have been. I should have done something to take the burden off you sooner. I should have done more, sooner. But I can do something for people like you. Just watch. I’ll take care of all of it. You and I used to argue, up all night about what would fix the world, and I don’t think you’d ever have agreed with how I’m doing it. But I think you’d have been proud of what I’m doing.
As though reading my thoughts, Harvey looked over to me. “Hey, Nils. Just curious.” I started as though slapped. He’d never actually used my name before. It was always my handle. 
 “You talked about doing this before. Said it was impractical. What changed? Can’t just be the obvious crush on Lash.”  I flushed, but he ignored it. “No, I saw something a few months ago. Someone who looked like you, dressed way too formal, getting beat up by a bunch of QAnon dicks. Seemed like something you’d have been too smart for. But maybe if something happened…”
“Drop it.”  Harvey wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t the kind of person I’d talk feelings with. More of a work friend. 
Harvey tipped his head. “Okay.”
The message came up on the digital phone. 
LtGOATBarret504: @Nothing, we are almost to the objective. I was told the Iconoclasts were going to be doing digital shit and hacking for this job.”
I messaged back: “Correct. We are in process. Remember, orders for this: we are limiting collateral damage. No fire unless fired on. You’ve been fed your target for a hostage to get access to the manual deletion, and you know what to tell him. Get people out of debt, torch the records, smash the harddrives. Make an exit. We’ll take care of the digital end. We’re taking back property for the average American today. Fuck the banks, fuck the capital, fuck the government.” 
Barret: “Can’t believe I’m working with commies.”
I allowed myself an evil smile, knowing my pawn would never see it. “Welcome to the shadow war. Neither of us wants the circle in power. Do your job, we’ll handle ours. We can hash out our problems later.” 
“Alright guys, they’re almost there, start firing off Weasel’s icebreaker. We’re gonna get that shit in and start kicking this off.”
Harvey started typing and entering the commands, and I for just a moment found myself looking at Lash as we began preparing to launch the worm and set the delay sequence for the databomb. “Let’s see if this key was worth what we paid for…”
“We’re in. Launch the worm.” 
I slammed on my keyboard, setting the sequence for the databomb as fast as he could as Lash primed the worm and sent it winding down the long journey across the fiber optics of the internet and into the banking system, and Nils sent the databomb in as the chaser. 
“Alright, now set the music, we are timing this out the instant they hit the door.”  We didn’t have to wait long, the joke we’d made about Inception had actually taken off, and we’d actually timed the whole nightmare to music. And because you can’t beat the actual classics, we went with Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.  Thus, when the door got kicked in by a bunch of armed lunatics who were actually showing a surprising amount of self control - and we were slipping through nets, watching our worm pop open leases and flick them to counties - we kept watching.
I decided to delay the police response by having delayed the phone lines, just to give them enough time to respond, Harvey had already come up with the brilliant idea of a dial up bot to overload the police dispatch for a minute, which we were keeping running from one of the slave CPUs that would probably crash after about 15 minutes of sustaining that, but it didn’t need to last a lot longer than that.  We’d already given them a floor plan, so they had an easy enough time finding the physical records and setting them all on fire. One manager was dragged out with access cards, and pushed towards the TSYS machine with a gun to his head, told to release everything. 
The data bombs were in full swing, the worms staying ahead of what was collapsing by where we’d released them.
Once the machine had had the records released, one of the men shoved a magnet towards the hardware. I let out a sigh of relief, since I was afraid he’d shoot the thing, which I absolutely could not afford. 
We were already ahead of where I thought we’d be. “Alright, we have confirmation of most of the East Coast hitting the digital releases. Fire off the hacks there -” Lash moved to begin that set of slave CPU, and when we got the proof of the next wave, I ran for it, even as the one suppressing the alarms died and our idiots started making an exit, having finally torched the records they were looking for. 
They would doubtless be cut off quickly, and I was already operating on multiple cylinders.
Harvey was hurrying up dozens of slave CPUs to get the county records in another state, I was looking over the one in - Colorado, of all places, looking at three screens at once - and was barely paying attention to wherever these idiots were contacting me. 
“Come on, come on.” 
The alarm blared, the one we had to listen to the police bands, that reported the people who’d attacked the bank were now surrounded, and had engaged the police in a firefight, and I started snickering.  If they hit a cop, there was no way the cops would take them alive, and we’d have no chance of being ratted out. Better yet, it was going to freak out the police about the white supremacist wing nuts.
Alright, alright. Keep going. Focus. 
“Georgia releases received, databomb in.”
“Arkansas, received. Get records clearing.”
“Colorado Records cleared.”
“California, records cleared.”
Firing them off, one after another. Harvey took a breath for a moment, and for a second no one breathed as we heard the police bands, and one of our pet idiots was audible screaming some choice anti semitic slurs over our hacked police bands, with a few officers shouting “Officer down! Goddamnit!” more rattling fire, and a few more of the brave, bigoted, deluded bastards continuing to trade fire.
“Lash, you have them for…Yeah, okay.”
“Nils, focus on yourself. We got the hard part done, how’s the databomb doing in the bank?” 
“Ongoing, almost done, their database is basically ruined.” 
“Holy shit, that fast?”
“We overbuilt the shit out of it.” I spared a quick grin. “When you absolutely, positively need a database ruined in an hour, build yourself a custom spore, there is absolutely no alternative.” This was exhilarating. We could do this! We could take the system on and win! We had done this, we hadn’t done collateral damage except to the enemy! We’d ruined the banks and we’d helped millions of people like Jessie, like Lash’s family, holy shit.
“Keep working, Creampuff.” Harvey’s voice brought me back to reality, but I found myself laughing madly as the music blasted to a crescendo. “We have hours to go.”
***
By the time it wound down - and our idiot pawns had finally lost their gunfight - we had securely released all the liens and digitally torched all the records we could. All the student loans were gone. Millions of mortgages, liens, all of it, returned to the people. 
Holy fuck. We had managed it. We had probably committed the single greatest heist in the century. We’d pissed off incredibly rich and powerful people and they were going to be looking for who did it and it wasn’t that we hadn’t left finger prints but that the places that they could find them were so utterly in disarray that there was nothing recoverable to find. 
“We win. We win! Lash, we won!” I gave a mad laugh, sounding crazy to myself. “Harvey! You son of a bitch, who’s crazy now!?” 
Harvey looked more concerned than relieved. “We definitely started something. Now comes the worst part: waiting to see how much of what we did sticks.”
“We proved a point.” I said, still staring. “Like it or not. We proved people can do it. Which means even if not all of it sticks, some of it does. And someone’s going to try again. And in more places. Someone’s going to follow up, if we don’t get caught. We can build on this.”
He rubbed his chin, thinking. “The more we got this time, the better. After the government investigates - and they will be looking so far up everyone’s ass that some of them better clean their teeth - the banks will not just want to put better measures in place, they’ll be required to.”  He tapped his laptop emphatically. “Our best hope was Weasel’s shit. That company? They won’t admit they got hacked. Not in a million years, not with something like this.  I don’t think they’ll be allowed to, honestly.  But you’re right. People will keep trying now that it’s been done.” With that Harvey leaned over and looked at both me and Lash. “And every time they do, the walls will get higher, and it will get harder, and dumber people than us will get caught.  So we need to watch and hope that we got as much as we could in one go.”
I got it. “Yeah. I know. I get that it isn’t over.” I wished I’d done it sooner. I’d just proven to myself it was doable. That I could have acted sooner to make a difference. That it just took not waiting for permission. Just acting.
Harvey took Lash aside and said something quiet. Whatever he told her, she looked at her feet and nodded for a second before looking back up at his face and nodding again, more confident this time, squeezing his hands between hers. She turned to me. “Let’s run a botnet or two for the next few weeks… headline scrapers, maybe a little deeper.  Press will be doing it anyway, looking for anything once this gets out, so the net will get hidden in the chatter.”
“Agreed.” I wondered what she was worrying about. “Everything okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Just want to make sure everything sticks, like Bishop said.” She glanced at her cellphone. “It’s too soon to know, right? So we need to keep an eye out, for ourselves if nothing else.”
I nodded, gently. “Alright.”
She started gathering her things. “I’m going to head home, get some sleep.  Probably doesn’t need to be said, but the last thing we need is to be seen together, so wait an hour or whatever before either of you head out.”
I sat down for a minute and let the tension slowly bleed off. “So, Bishop. How’re we feeling?”
“I feel like you’re an idiot and you should go after her, you FUCKING MORON. She’s in her twenties, wandering an abandoned mall, at 1AM, alone. No one is looking for us yet. Dumbass.”
I jumped up. “Right, shit.” I ran after her and waved. “Hey, Lash. Uh. No one is looking for us yet. Far as anyone would even suspect, we’re seen walking around here right now, we’re a couple of dumb college kids whose worst crime is sneaking off to get high together. Probably. No one would suspect anything too bad about this. Want to go get something to eat, bleed off the tension a little bit?”  I sounded nervous, and realized that my habit of normally just going along with whatever Lash said without checking if there was an obvious subtext might have led me to make some really stupid mistakes.
She shrugged, but it looked numb, unenthusiastic. “I don’t know what’s open this late. Early? Late? Now, whatever now is.”  She blinked kind of owlishly. “Is there any breakfast around? Pancakes sound really good.”
I paused. “I mean. There’s probably an IHOP open 24/7 nearby if we want to go looking. If you feel adventurous, there’s a Mediterranean gastropub-thing that has honey cakes and decent gyro, also a bunch of pastry and eggs. I’ll cover either. I’ve had the Mediterranean one. It’s really good, and the honey cakes are amazing. They’ve even got Turkish coffee. Not as good as what your un…Uncle, sells, but really good.” 
“Coffee and honey cakes sound amazing. Do they do spanakopita?”
“Seen it on the menu, never ordered it. You’d have to find out if it's good for yourself.” I said. “Like I said, that’s the adventurous option.” 
She hooked a hand through my elbow and patted my arm with the other hand. “I’ll test the spanakopita, and if it’s good, I’ll let you try it. Can’t have you trying bad food.”
“I can tell you with assurance you do want to avoid the kebabs. They use a really weird rub. Entirely the wrong combination of spices. The dolmades, on the other hand, are excellent, if you are in the mood for them.” I said, with a faint smile. “Thanks for joining me.”
“Feed me, Seymour. Feed me.”
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man-bear-thing · 1 year
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Kill your mother
Yanno, i appreciate the suggestion, but unless you’re gonna pay my legal fees I think I’ll just bode my time until I can leave
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svartikotturinn · 1 month
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I couldn’t stand to watch Shaun’s latest video, so I started reading the transcript instead. I got about 15 minutes in before I just had enough.
The good: I don’t think he’s legitimately antisemitic. I think he’s just a contrarian dipshit who took his anti-Israeli stance mostly because he had an excuse to go against what his government was saying (along with other Western governments) and didn’t bother to look deeper. So he is a lot of things but antisemitic does not seem to be one of them.
Also, I should commend him for pointing out actual cases of Israeli disinformation, such as an outright lie by the IDF spokesman, and brings up the violence towards mourners and even pallbearers at Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral, which he rightfully condems (no, chanting slogans does not justify it).
The bad: The sheer one-sided laziness, up to and including outright lies (which, I hope, for his sake, were based in ignorance and not malice), starting right at the beginning. He says what got him doubting the narrative of ‘Israel good, Palestinians bad’ was a photo of Israelis sitting on chairs they’d brought watching the Gaza Strip being bombed from a safe distance in 2014—he neglects to mention that those are people from nearby Sderot, a town that had been subject to repeated rocket strikes from Hamas. He offhandedly mentions that the other side does it, too, but barely gives this thought much weight. Worse, he certainly does not consider that Israelis can at least claim that they’re cheering for the death of mlitants out for their blood hiding in the destroyed buildings, while Palestinians cheer for the deliberate killing of civilians: stabbing and shooting random civilians, launching rockets indiscriminately at civilians (no, Israel doesn’t do that, that’s what intel and GPS systems are for).
(Pro-tip: check out what your favourite pro-Palestinian influencer’s page for what they said while the October 7th Massacre was still ongoing. I bet you’ll be horrified. Shaun himself, for example, retweeted an infographic about the asymmetry of casualties in both sides over the years and blocked me when I called him out on his callous ‘well, numerically…’ attitude. That was last October, not 2014.)
Then there’s Abu Akleh’s death, which he also discusses. I’m using this term charitably, because he says it was definitively proven as murder and says any claim to the contrary has been proven to be a mendacious cover-up. No, he does not provide any sources countering, say, the official US position. (For the record: fuck then-Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s reaction. He is a prime example of the problems Israel actually has.)
Then he had the sheer audacity to claim that the claims of tunnels under As-Shifā’ Hospital were unfounded. What fucking nerve.
I was hoping to reach the point where he talks about how Hamas treats the Gazans, and point out that the disparity of casualties has to do in large part with the fact that Israel actually cares for its civilians (something he didn’t even hint at up to where I got), but that bold-faced lie about the hospital made it too much for me.
Fuck you, Shaun.
…Oh, and one last thing: he talked about the Western position being one of resistence to the implied barbarism of Islam. So, Shaun, I’m here to say it’s not fucking ‘implied’, you dolt, it’s emphatic. Read the fucking Qur’ān and tell me that shit doesn’t sound like any other cult leader’s insane ramblings. Listen to opinions Muslims express in polls. Talk to them about history, especially the history of the region. It’s cultish shit on par with MAGA/QAnon and Russian propaganda, but you start hemming and hawing when brown people say it, like a stereotypical Westerner who dismisses their country’s superstitions but gladly adopts those that come from China or India. How utterly disguting.
EDIT: I should’ve stopped listening to this prick back when he made his inaccuracies-ridden video about Harry Potter. I guess maybe in his view, there are indeed good and bad sides rather than actions…
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creature-wizard · 1 year
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Am I in a cult ? If yes, is there a specific name to this kind of pipeline ? Is that some kind of domestic-abuse-survivor-to-antivax-wellness pipeline ?
Sorry for the massive ask, it's very long, I'm planning to talk to a therapist about that.
For context : I live outside of US, in Europe, english isn't my native language. I've spent my early years in a very religious christian environment, then teenhood in New Age type of environment (they say it's not New Age, but I don't see any differences with that, it's repackaged Eastern spiritualities and religions mixed with pseudo-science self-help wellness cure-for-all-sickness).
I think I might spend all my childhood and teenhood in a cult environment. Very isolated. Very us-vs-them, we're specia and they're borinfg, mindset.
Multiple trauma layered within each other, school, home, medical, family, youth movements, deaths, suicides, being forced to watch horrific stuff for "good benevolent samaritan savior" reasons, other horrific stuff happened.
I'm still in it. This situation got worse with time since 2020.
My parents keep saying they're not partaking in cult interactions, they're skeptical and free thinkers, wich makes me even more confused. I mean it's like they're in a cult but it doesn't look like a cult and they say it's not a cult.
I'm not sure about it since it doesn't look like what I've seen portrayed online and in movies.
We don't go to church, attend public events. The only information sources and interactions are on social medias like youtube. Politicians talking about pfizer and "big pharma corruptions" and how freedom patriots will save everyone. That kind of tropes. But apparently it's not social media because it doesn't look like Facebook or Instagram. I stopped doing that very recently, 2021-2022. Seriously it was so hard to quit this habit, I'm so glad I did it.
Every time I learn about post traumatic stress responses, new age psychology cults, wellness spiritual healing mlm marketing, cult behavior, codependent issues, white supremacy pure blood tropes, I get terrified because I relate a bit too well. I'm living in this ideological nightmare. I had similar experiences in a different context.
I've been fed all kind of conspiracy theories (they're not "conspiracists" just skeptical and free thinkers), spiritual "healing", "I choose what happened to me and I'm a special soul" kind of karma tropes, had forced exorcism on me while having a mental crisis because I had "bad spirits" controlling me, heard all the time about apocalypse scenarios where vaccinated people would die within a few months, heard horrific stories about covid vaccines side effects, red-pill "we live in a society and others are mindless NPCs" stories, I can't even describe all the things I've gone trough those last three years.
I'm still really scared of the idea of escaping this pipeline. I don't even know what exactly it is, how to escape this, what to expect and how to leave properly when my parents will learn about that. It feels like it's been all my life. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just me being "psychotic" like they say.
How do I make sure I'm not interpretating and making false assumptions ? Most of the time, I don't even know how to check my own stories, beliefs, opinions from actual facts. Am I in a cult or am I making things up ?
Thank you for reading to the end.
Cults in real life rarely look like the ones on TV, which are based more on conspiracy theories about cults. Real cults look like the kind of thing you're describing. You are absolutely in a cult; you're literally describing the same stuff I'm talking about when I write about the bullshit that New Agers/QAnons/Q Agers are into.
There are support groups for people in your shoes, including ReQovery and QAnon Casualties on Reddit.
Maybe some of my followers have more ideas?
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Desperately seeking tradwife...
It is more of a numbers game right now & a there is a cultural block to boot.
There are much less women who want the trad-wife life because due to early marriages and early toxic relationship/assault experiences they are pretty turned off by the type of men seeking that concept.
And that's the second deal - it is a conceptualization of a Christian traditional marriage. I was raised in the Pentecostal church and raised up to be a wife. I focused on learning on all the things wives were supposed to learn and learned too much about theology to boot, hoping to be the wife of a missionary or pastor. We were taught to look for men who embodied Jesus (me, personally, was looking for Jesus on earth.)
You can't be a porn-addicted, alpha male type with a aching, well-jerked wee-wee who somehow thinks they deserve the world's most beautiful and subservient Russian-model-type and find satisfaction with a woman raised in the Christian Church who is looking for Jesus-on-Earth, the Godly husband, who rules with a gentle, but iron fist and has sex only for procreation (as "god" intended.)
#1 it means you have to go to CHURCH and integrate with a church community. And despite religions bad record on vetting toxic people, sick-weird-mental single dudes don't play well in ANY organized community (LARP, Church, LGTBQIA, BDSM.) Humans, despite our stupid ways of belief, still can sense a sick animal and unless you can find a codependant type who wants to fix you, quickly find the functional males circulate and herd the females away.
So basically Alpha males want sexy, beautiful, but chaste, but horny stay-at-home wives, but aren't willing to go to church 3X a week and do the hard work of repentance, clean living, and service to the community to get one and keep one.
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