What Hunting Bigfoot Taught a Republican Congressman about Misinformation, Political Extremists, and Grift (washingtonpost.com) 180
Republican congressman Denver Riggleman was once a defense contractor for America's National Security Agency. But in 2004, he paid more than $5,000 to join an amateur expedition searching for Bigfoot. Not because he believed in the mythical ape-like creature said to live in the woods, according to the Washington Post, but "to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people — what kind of people — believe in Bigfoot?"
"Now in one of his last acts as a Republican congressman from Virginia, Riggleman is asking the same questions of QAnon supporters and President-elect Joe Biden deniers." Months after his ouster by Rep.-elect Bob Good (R) in a contentious GOP convention, Riggleman has become one of the loudest voices in Congress warning of the infiltration of conspiracy theories into political discourse... To Riggleman, the book, "Bigfoot... It's Complicated," mirrors the way pockets of the country are falling into conspiracy wormholes — everything from extremist fringe groups such as QAnon and the "boogaloo" movement to President Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud. Like the Bigfoot hunters in the Olympic National Forest, they see what they want to see...
Bigfoot believers have plenty in common with political extremists on both the far right and the far left, Riggleman said, lambasting a political ecosystem where, oftentimes, "facts don't matter."
"They're all bat---- crazy. Right?" he said, not really joking. "All of them ascribe to a team mythology that might or might not be true. And they stay on that team regardless. And that is what's so dangerous about politics today. That's what I've been trying to say."
Riggleman also criticized political operatives "asking for donations to help in a mythological quest of things that can't be proven," arguing this shared mythology can turn into a grift.
"I saw it with Bigfoot. I'm seeing it with QAnon. It's about money. And sometimes crazy and money live in the same space."
"Now in one of his last acts as a Republican congressman from Virginia, Riggleman is asking the same questions of QAnon supporters and President-elect Joe Biden deniers." Months after his ouster by Rep.-elect Bob Good (R) in a contentious GOP convention, Riggleman has become one of the loudest voices in Congress warning of the infiltration of conspiracy theories into political discourse... To Riggleman, the book, "Bigfoot... It's Complicated," mirrors the way pockets of the country are falling into conspiracy wormholes — everything from extremist fringe groups such as QAnon and the "boogaloo" movement to President Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud. Like the Bigfoot hunters in the Olympic National Forest, they see what they want to see...
Bigfoot believers have plenty in common with political extremists on both the far right and the far left, Riggleman said, lambasting a political ecosystem where, oftentimes, "facts don't matter."
"They're all bat---- crazy. Right?" he said, not really joking. "All of them ascribe to a team mythology that might or might not be true. And they stay on that team regardless. And that is what's so dangerous about politics today. That's what I've been trying to say."
Riggleman also criticized political operatives "asking for donations to help in a mythological quest of things that can't be proven," arguing this shared mythology can turn into a grift.
"I saw it with Bigfoot. I'm seeing it with QAnon. It's about money. And sometimes crazy and money live in the same space."
Bigfoot trip was research? (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds a bit like "I buy Playboy for the articles"
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Paying $5k to go on a Bigfoot hunt, but then saying it was really to study the other people? Sounds a bit like "I buy Playboy for the articles"
Trust me, you are never going to find a Playboy bunny on a Bigfoot hunting expedition, it's nothing but ugly smelly nerds.
People believe what they want to believe. BFing? (Score:4, Interesting)
I really cannot tell whether or not you're being trolled. I think that OP was trying to make an FP joke, but my own sense of humor is so weak that I have to rely on the moderators. Sometimes they recognize humor when it hits them hard enough, but so far the OP has no Funny mod points on that one. If there was a minimal MEPR extension to karma, then I could check if OP has a history of being moderated as funny. I believe that one-byte karma is part of Slashdot's legacy from the days when storage on Slashdot was so so expensive that they didn't want to allocate any extra bytes to karma. Heck, they may have been carefully allocating each bit in the user profiles.
How is that for a segue to my search for a deeper perspective? But why is what I want to believe any better than what the Bigfoot believers want to believe?
Time to report on my own hunt for Bigfoot thumping a Bible. I studied the religious fanatics in their natural habitat. What they wanted to believe was quite interesting. But insanely stupid. Evangelicals of a militaristic stripe. Also many coppers and wannabe authoritarians. Squirrel bait. And yet they gathered in their thousands night after night and twice on Sundays to get more words to copy into their personal gospel notebooks. I studied them for some months, basically for the cost of the gas to drive out to their grand church. They also believe they could "save" me. They were wrong. They would have had better luck saving postage stamps.
That was also when I was first told "People believe what they want to believe". Quite true. Probably too true for democracy to survive in America now.
I have never heard of this Riggleman before, but he sounds like a rinosaur. Not quite as extinct as the dinosaurs. Yet. The summary doesn't say why he's leaving Congress, but the GOT probably kicked him out. That's Gang Of Trump, nee GOP, where the greatest heresy is questioning THE WORD of "He whose name need not be mentioned".
My next belief is in brainphishing. I think some people are actually using personal information to manipulate other people. For example, Q of Qanon infamy. Quite possible that scam was designed using the personal information "borrowed" from Facebook via Cambridge Analytica starting in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Not sure who Q is. I actually think Q is most likely a committee. And Q isn't sure who is being affected by the fake conspiracies, but the fake conspiracies are skillfully crafted and they are working. Qanon says what they want to believe and believe it they do, and then they act on those crazy beliefs. Roughly 80 million Americans believe "He whose name need not be mentioned" anymore is the next step on the road to Jesus. Gawd save America.
Me? I think Jesus saves postage stamps. Websearch proves me right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] That's what I want to believe, eh? Rather than believe that I, too, am subject to brainphishing.
Did you read over 500 words? TL;DR on Slashdot 2020, right? That's another part of the big problem (per my set of beliefs). Few people have time for books these days, and yet I persist in reading them anyway. Most relevant of the current crop is The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder, explaining what went wrong in Russia as Putin's kleptocracy took over. (I believe) I'd never heard of Ivan Ilyin before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] And (I believe) I get insight into an author's way of thinking by reading an entire book. And does that make me more or less vulnerable to brainphishing as I practice swapping various authors' brains in and out of my personal mental cache? Neophilia? Neophobia? Neomania? Take your pick?
Re:People believe what they want to believe. BPing (Score:2)
*sigh* Subject corrected for me.
Re:Bigfoot trip was research? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Considering it was used in writing his book about the experience, I'd say it qualifies as research.
I guess my skepticism comes from the 16-year gap between the Bigfoot trip and the book. I may very likely be wrong, but it still feels to me like he went on the hunt, but now years later he realizes it was a scam. And then says he wasn't one of the people who believed, it was the others.
real curiosity takes some effort (Score:5, Interesting)
I've gone on ghost hunts for nothing just out of curiosity; always creepy old buildings. I operated a camera and was probably the only one who passed high school. Two were small time con artists; in jail last I heard, and the old man who funded the whole thing was a PhD and believer. I don't think he was a sucker; in fact, he seemed to be yanking their chains while actually looking for ghosts. Lots of expensive BS tech which leveraged your imagination to make sense out of random input. The night and IR cams were fun to play with and borrow to chase rodents around the park. They kept getting set off by the IR leds bouncing off things and showing up on camera.
Worst part was the psychic lady. Oddly, they kept saying to avoid interpreting things that weren't there while trying to setup as much random noise as they could for misinterpretation.
Never believed; I just was curious and I never saw a ghost hunter TV show before so I had no idea. The only ghost there was honesty. I can see similarities to conspiracy groups. The way they made up ignorant shit on the spot reminds me of today's White House.
Re:Bigfoot trip was research? (Score:4, Interesting)
Paying $5k to go on a Bigfoot hunt, but then saying it was really to study the other people?
Sounds a bit like "I buy Playboy for the articles"
I realize you're trying to make a point, but you do realize the breadth of well known writers [bbc.com] who did stories for Playboy, don't you? Hunter S. Thompson also wrote several articles over the years for them.
And this doesn't include the "help" articles on such topics such as how to properly entertain guests, what to wear, how to wear it, and, something sorely missing from today's society, how to be a true gentleman.
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MDMurphy sneered:
Paying $5k to go on a Bigfoot hunt, but then saying it was really to study the other people?
Sounds a bit like "I buy Playboy for the articles"
Prompting quonset to respond:
I realize you're trying to make a point, but you do realize the breadth of well known writers [bbc.com] who did stories for Playboy, don't you? Hunter S. Thompson also wrote several articles over the years for them.
In addition to articles, Playboy has published notable interviews [foxnews.com] with various public figures, as well as some truly outstanding fiction [wikipedia.org].
Once I graduated high school and acquired some experience of the world, I was never much of a fan of Playboy pictorials, myself. The poses, lighting, hair, and makeup that are standard for pictorials (and especially the centerfold) are boringly whitebread, and the models are airbrushed to the point they look artificial to me. I suppose blow-up
Re: Bigfoot trip was research? (Score:5, Funny)
I read slashdot for the.. unh... stories :)
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Even if so, he at least carries the distinction that when it didn't pan out, he was able to learn something rather than doubling down.
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Sounds a bit like "I buy Playboy for the articles"
You joke, but some of those articles are actually quite interesting and... and...
... I'm getting old :(
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Researching other people is interesting though, it's not that different from observing animals in their habitats in an attempt to understand them. There are whole fields based on it.
Playboy articles are not interesting, and there's no fields dedicated to their appreciation.
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Journalism? I think that's the field you're looking for. Or "creative writing"? Either of those two match.
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Errr are you pretending zoology doesn't exist?
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I suppose paying $5k and experiencing it first hand was a good way to find out what kind of people are willing to pay those $5k.
Even if it were the case that the $5k trip initially wasn't for research and Riggleman actually believed in Bigfoot, that doesn't invalidate it if has been used as a basis for a book years later.
Re:Bigfoot trip was research? (Score:5, Informative)
There used to be a braille edition of Playboy in our small town library. Not a single picture in it anywhere, or embossed images, or any color other than beige stock paper. So apparently, some people do read it for articles.
Re:Bigfoot trip was research? (Score:5, Informative)
The guy who replaced him seems to be a bog-standard, hard right Christian fundamentalist. The fact he was educated almost entirely at Jerry Falwell's religious indoctrination camps tells me he knows nothing about anything useful.
Bob Good is quite anti-gay too, so he'll probably be caught with a rent boy at some point.
He exists, duh. (Score:2)
Criticized Asking for Donations (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah - if he doesn't give his book away free then he's clearly part of the Big Coverup.
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He has the floor of the House of Representatives until the next Congress is sworn in on 3 Jan. 2021. He has previously used that platform to defend the 2nd amendment [house.gov], defend capitalism [house.gov], and warn about the danger of Iran [house.gov]. If he is truly concerned about the future of his party, he has a soapbox waiting for him.
At which point you'd complain about him using his work hours on a purely party matter.
Yawn.
Just a reminder (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just a reminder (Score:5, Informative)
Under 1902, everyone thought gorillas were a myth and anyone describing them was called crazy. 3.5% of the US's land is populated by humans. Oh and let's not forget the 1000+ year "myth" of the giant squid, which was found in like 2007 or whatever.
It was a single subspecies of gorilla that was thought a myth until 1902. Missionaries sent back gorilla skulls in the 1840s. Even before then they were only considered possibly mythological by Europeans, the native Africans that shared space with them of course knew they were real.
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BTW I'll add at the time that some considered gorillas a myth, that part of Africa had only been visited by a handful of Europeans and at the time it was basically a given that in travel writing of the time, authors very frequently inserted fantastical claims about exotic lands, whether using local myths or just inventing themselves, so it's not surprising that the audiences back home took a very skeptical view.
Compared that to the Bigfoot phenomenon where for decades now we've had literally many thousands
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Not quite true. I have a plan for either proving or disproving the Loch Ness monster. The plan is simple if not expensive. Just pump out all the water from Loch Ness. If the monster actually exists it will be easy to determine at that point. If after draining it, you find no monster then it does not exist.
That said recent DNA screening of the water shows no DNA from unknown species. There is no Loch Ness monster.
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Wrong. All you do by draining Loch Ness is prove that Nessie has a previously-unknown ability to burrow deep underground, which is her instinctual response when water levels drop too low.
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So, Santa Claus IS real?!
Obviously. However we all still know Slash isn't real.
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It's a good reminder but worth analysing a bit. What separates the other myths from bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster is that as technology has advanced we found increasing evidence of those myths which happen to be real. Not so much with the latter. For the many blurry photos that claimed to depict a bigfoot or a Loch Ness monster as we've joined the 21st century, a century where not only is the population larger but it is also armed with the ability to document anything instantly as we carry cameras on o
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armed with the ability to document anything instantly
I think this is why the UFO hysteria is dying down too.
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Yes. Consider the number of mountain lions picked up by trail cams. Those things are super elusive, but people still see them. No way any creature as large as a bigfoot could continue to stay 100% hidden and off film.
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Just a reminder that you are also a moron. Everyone has HD video cameras in their pockets but still zero evidence of bigfoot or aliens. Not like the 80s or 90s when you had bulky VHS cameras to tote around.
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Ball lightning was dismissed by "reputable" scientists well into the 1960s.
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Let me guess (Score:2)
Nothing?
This is why.... (Score:5, Insightful)
With the exception of a small number of senators (Romney) and a few competent conservative governors (eg. DeWine) the current crop of republicans show NO SPINE. The Dems have plenty of problems but they arent going to sit there and worship at the feet of Biden the way the republicans got down on their knees and su... I mean all hail the great Trump.
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That's your own personal bit of irrationality.
Re:This is why.... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, the republicans turned down multiple moderate candidates and went for this clown. And they've given Trump zero pushback while he.... I'm not even going to type out the list. Maybe you genuinely think he's as great as apple pie and he's the "best leader in teh world, bigly, evar" just like he claims. On the other hand, more likely you quietly realize that he's a massive blowhard, infantile liar, and you just kept your mouth shut and supported him because he represented your team .
Which is EXACTLY MY POINT. One of these parties is intellectually much more honest than the other one. And willing to engage in the public debate that's really quite central to democracy. For the time being, my vote goes to the Dems even though I have no use for their far left wing.
Re: This is why.... (Score:2)
On the other hand, the republicans turned down multiple moderate candidates and went for this clown.
That's not what happened. There weren't any serious Party contenders because nobody serious wanted to run against Hillary. It was obvious that she was positioned to be POTUS, and if Trump hadn't come out of the woodwork and basically got lucky, she would have been.
Now in 2020, nobody in the GoP wants to clean up the mess especially with Covid in the mix. They'll let the Democrats run with it for a Term and in 2024 there's an extremely high chance we'll see the GoP in control of Congress and the White House
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Woah, history being rewritten? There were 12+ candidates, some of whom were quite serious and some of those more authentically conservative and Republican than the newbie Trump. Jeb, Marco, Ted, etc.
Reagan's 11th Commandment (Score:5, Insightful)
For better or for worse the Dems are about policy. The R's are about Power. Obtaining it and wielding it. Usually for the purpose of obtaining wealth. This is why the R's could cheerfully block Obama's SCOTUS nominee for a year then seat their own in a few weeks before an election.
If you've read 1984 you'll remember that The Party was all about obtaining and using Power. This isn't a coincidence. The current Republican party's tactics are exactly what Orwell was critiquing (that and Television).
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Yes, but the party was about controlling and using power by revising the past and removing language, so that people lost even a frame of reference into which to debunk the lies they were being told. Which applies far more to the hard Left which is currently quite strong.
In US terms, I'd be a moderate Democrat most likely, but definitely wouldn't be able to get behind that party in the current state of some of its policy (I mark it as a block). Though that'd not be a Republican vote either, as some of thei
Go look into the rise of right wing media (Score:2)
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For better or for worse the Dems are about policy.
Seriously? The party that just spent four years trying to get power back from Trump? The party of the candidate whose policy was "not be Trump"? You've had more reasonable ideas than that.
It's ok to favor one party over the other, but don't deceive yourself into thinking your party is somehow morally good. It's just a group of people trying to get what they want.
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Why is it relevant that AOC was not kicked out of office? It doesn't mean Biden supports her views, it just means that she didn't do anything illegal yet and the voters in her district like her. AOC is not the head of the Democratic Party and does not represent the views of the majority of the Democratic Party. She just holds some views in the far liberal wing, just like the GOP has some far conservative wings, and a nutball evangelical wing, and a patient face-palming fiscal conservative wing, and a lib
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Sorry, but there does appear to be a quantifiable difference between the parties at this point. Of course the Democrats have some real clunkers here and there, but the GOP has a rather large contingent bending over backwards to ignore reality because the person they TWICE put up for the Presidency can't accept that he didn't win (behaving much as I might expect of a toddler). Only one of the parties is filling the internet with evidence free conspiracy theories that make the Bigfoot true believers look well
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The problem about your argument is that I was talking about the people actually elected to office or holding higher positions within the party, not the rank and file. Of course the rank and file will include idiots, the general population includes idiots.
It is notable that #NotMyPresident was, in part, a reaction to the disagreement between the EC and the popular vote. Of course, other parts were just idiots. But note how Hillary didn't rally behind the #NotMyPresident people or egg them on in any way. They
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I see, I offered substantial objective differences, all fact checkable and you would rather not face it. Got it!
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The only question now is whether you'll get over biases or wallow in them.
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I think there's a pretty big difference between a pack of idiots who have latched on to a movement (which you seem to agree affects both sides), and the movement's leadership embracing and egging on the idiocy, and worse, joining in.
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Care to present an example or two?
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You gonna acknowledge that about Biden?
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Of course they are.
Except the Left does it differently. The Right asserts something and baldly goes hunting for something, brashly proclaiming it to be true and quite arrogantly "standing up to be counted" over it. It's largely less refined and more brash than the Left disinformation.
The left dress it up in pseudo-science to make you believe it's got an intellectual basis and surrounds it in sophistry, then has a bunch of people arrogantly "standing up to be virtuous" over it.
What I like (in the seeming
He published the book BEFORE getting elected (Score:2)
> All these Republicans who suddenly get all reasonable and moderate, AFTER they lose office.
He did his first book about Bigfoot believers before he was elected. He was elected in 2018; his book was out by 2015 (maybe before that).
He would have been writing his latest book during his two y are in office.
> the way the republicans got down on their knees and su... I mean all hail the great Trump.
#nevertrump
>
Don't be fooled by Romney (Score:4, Insightful)
He's still the same old Romney that ran Bain Capital, was in love with how he could pay Chinese workers a fraction of American ones and wants to ship your job overseas. He's the same as all of them, he's just polite about it.
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Why didnt you say stuff like this WHEN YOU ACTUALLY MATTERED?
It mattered that they didn't say stuff like that. The republicans (and to an extent the democrats too) are incredibly partisan echo chambers. Your leaders don't represent your interests, they only exist to push a party line.
Re:This is why.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Today's republicans would think Reagan era republicans are leftists. This quote predicted it. https://www.goodreads.com/quot... [goodreads.com]
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Because politics is like being in a club devoted to team sports. And it's a job. Lie to get the job, lie to keep the job, and change your ideology regularly so that you keep and maintain the voters. Cheer for your team, demand that the opposing team be sent to jail. If the team captain tells a lie, then cheer him on and repeat the lie and gather in the votes.
RINO (Score:2, Funny)
A Republican who stubbornly refuses to accede to conspiracy theories?
No wonder he was given the boot.
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A Republican who stubbornly refuses to accede to conspiracy theories?
No wonder he was given the boot.
You sort of joke but this has been a problem in the RNC since the rise of the Tea Party. The far-right has been taking over the party by taking out incumbents in primaries in "safe" republican districts. In most areas, primary turnout is pretty low compared to the general election, and it gives them the opportunity to push their agenda, so they throw money into those primary elections and get their core to vote in the primary, knowing that if they win there, they are likely to win in the general election ev
Nice to see Republicans remaining in the GOP (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nice to see Republicans remaining in the GOP (Score:5, Interesting)
We need more republicans to go back to the GOP. RIght now, the GOP is nothing more than a far right wing fascists group. It is NOTHING like what Lincoln, Teddy, and IKE thought of it.
For that to happen, people who don't want that in the GOP really need to turn out of primary elections and fund primary campaigns for more centrist Republican candidates, especially in the House. The current GOP is the result of well funded and organized segments like the Tea Party taking out centrist republicans during primary elections going back to GW's first term. It scared the shit out of the rest of the party and you started to see the more reasonable Republicans start to change their platforms to conform to the far-right in fear of getting taken out in a primary. I was involved as a party official at the local and state level in the GOP during that time and it's the reason I, and a lot of people like myself, left the party. It is absolutely heart breaking to see the second largest vote count in history go to someone like Trump. It's frustrating as hell to see people buy into the bullshit they are peddling, but they are well organized and well funded and it's hard to stop. Now we have the Justice Democrats trying to do the same thing on the Democrat side, and it only fuels the far-right elements as these groups get more press time, which will in turn do the same thing on the Democrat side as the GOP becomes more and more far-right in the eyes of the press. I'm afraid it's only going to get worse before it gets better. I honestly feel bad for Biden. He's an old school Dem and he's going to be fighting his own party if he tries to reach out to Republicans on anything. We are already seeing this infighting and he's not even in office yet.
Another problem is the press itself. They seem to have broken to the extremes on both sides (granted, this started on the GOP side with outlets like Fox, but we are seeing it more and more with the traditionally left leaning press over the past 4 years as well). We are seeing moderates being driven out of publications like the NYT for daring to question anything the progressive elements put forth. Although it is funny to see the right turn against Fox as being "liberal" right now. Schadenfreude is a nice feeling sometimes, but it's not always healthy in the grand scheme of things I guess.
Mod Parent up please (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, Fox backed the extremists, but you look at CNN today. I no longer watch them because they have become a far left version of Fox ( I would pay good $ to get back the old version of CNN HLN). Pretty much only look at on-line and leave most of it alone because so many idiots out there.
And the idea of backing Goon Squad
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I no longer watch them because they have become a far left version of Fox
You've got to be kidding.
CNN was the network that even more than FOX made Trump a mainstream politician in 2016. They would cut away from Hillary Clinton giving a major speech in order to show an empty stand where Trump was scheduled an hour later to speak. Dozens of studies were done about how many billions of dollars worth of free media they gave him. The relationship only began to sour when he started lying about THEM, instead of
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With RCV, ppl like myself can vote Libertarian or even better yet, Lawrence Lessig, and then still vote FOR one of the major parties, as opposed to having to decide whether to 'waste' a vote on indis/3rd parties.
With ppl like Lessig and Libertarians getting votes, it will force others to the foreground and cause the 2 major parties to have to rethink things.
As it is, the GOP are able to use 3rd part [cnn.com]
Breaking News: Other Peoples' Religions Are Weird (Score:2)
If hunting Bigfoot doesn't convince you other peoples' religions are fucking weird and they must be out of their minds, then look into any of their other preferences. They're insane. Why can't people just agree that my religions are the objectively correct ones?
Okay (Score:2)
I'll say it again, it is democrats who are obsessed with "Qanon".
There are kooks in any large group. "Qanon" is irrelevant and had no effect on why Trump was elected in 2016 and why so many voted for him this time as well.
It's yet another convenient way (remember "Russia, Russia, Russia"?) to avoid grappling with the real reasons.
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I'll say it again, it is democrats who are obsessed with "Qanon".
If so, it's only because it's scary as hell that 33% of Republican voters believe it to be "mostly true" [forbes.com].
Thanks God (Score:2)
Re:Hating conspiracy theories makes idiots feel sm (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean FFS, I am NOT a believer in QAnon, but give them a break. If you know about the stuff surrounding Epstein and you seriously claim "there is no evidence our elites like to fuck kids" then I don't know what to say to you because you are basically too stupid to understand the difference between "evidence" and "proof."
There's an issue around the "elites" part. It sells a story.
Here's a different story: My ex was a social worker in one of the poorest areas of the UK - if not the poorest. Among other things she was involved in breaking up a child porn ring where the kids were abused and video tapes of the events passed around within the family of the kids as well as friends. We're talking "Here's Billy fucking little Mary while Grandma films it" here. There was no Internet in those days so it was physical tapes, quite a labourious and relatively conspicuous process which also required equipment not many people had. How much of this is now filmed on phones and passed around silently over the Net these days is something I try not to think about.
Fucking kids is something that happens all through society at all levels. The "elites like fucking kids" schick exploits paedophilia in order to project a distorted view of one class of people, implicitly saying that poor, salt of the Earth people would not do such things because they've not lost their decency etc. etc. Which of course makes it easier for the latter to get on with it.
Re:Hating conspiracy theories makes idiots feel sm (Score:5, Interesting)
It's taken me about 40 years on this Earth to realize.
Facts actually don't matter that much.
First and foremost, TRUST matters.
It's for a very simple reason, you don't get to experience very much first hand in life. So most of what people say is facts, is really just believing what others tell them. You get a lot of people saying a lot of things, so really it boils down to who do you trust.
So Facts only matter if the people involved all TRUST each other. Two engineers trying to build an airplane can talk about facts, because they trust each other in wanted to build a safe airplane.
Certain groups like to think they deserve trust. Scientists like to think people should trust them. But all kinds of stuff comes out of academia that various people might find questionable. Gender issues, history, economics...
You also look at money. Anytime someone is asking for money (or anything in return), you right fully start to look out for deception and you start questioning their trust. Climate change is real... so we need more of your money? Big foot is real... so you need money so we can look for him? God is real... so you need money to build temples for him?
I guess I should say for the record, I believe climate change is factual :) I'm just talking about this recent appeal to 'facts'.
There is a certain irony in things. You've probably seen those power-points by various groups that 'rationality' and 'facts' or whatever are actually part of white supremacy. As silly as it sounds, there is a kind of truth to it.
I'm of Indian ancestry. So you know, if Hindus and Muslims don't trust each other, all kinds of crazy stories and conspiracy theories are abound. You can't use facts to stop it. I'm sure anyone who has lived overseas in an ethnic conflict can relate. I'm just used to crazy talk being around me.
Huge parts of our society don't actually care about truth. I'm talking here from a psychology point of view. Nothing to do with left and right here. Truth just matters much less to some people. It really came as a revelation to me personally. I suffered from PTSD from trauma (overseas ethnic violence) and held strongly to rationality and facts to ground me, so I didn't literally lose it. I used to get viscerally worked up about lying. My therapist actually had to work me through parts of that and see how vastly different people are.
Through therapy, I really started researching psychology and just to see how malleable the human brain is with memories and everything... it's scary. If you want to be freaked out, google the Mandela effect.
Anyways, I try and focus on trust first these days and I really wish our politicians would too. Because at the end of the day if two groups don't trust each other, facts have never mattered. I almost feel western people have almost lost their connection to the rest of humanity in some sense. Anyone who has lived in an area of ethnic strife knows that facts don't really matter.
Trust is simply where you need to focus 95% of your energy. Facts just smooth the last 5%.
That's a hard lesson for people like myself to take in, but it's absolutely true :)
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The shark gets jumped when you don't qualify which elites fuck kids. This turns it into the bottomless Qanon conspiracy that sees all elites as pedophiles.
That rich and powerful people engage in sex scandals is hardly a conspiracy.
Re:Hating conspiracy theories makes idiots feel sm (Score:5, Informative)
If you know about the stuff surrounding Epstein and you seriously claim "there is no evidence our elites like to fuck kids" then I don't know what to say to you because you are basically too stupid to understand the difference between "evidence" and "proof."
There's a huge difference between "our elites like to fuck kids" and "A secret Satan-worshiping cabal is taking over the world. Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. The cabal held the American Presidency under the Clintons and Obama, nearly took power again in 2016, and lurks in a 'Deep State' financed by Jews, including George Soros, and in Jews who control the media. They want to disarm citizens and defund the police. They promote abortion, transgender rights, and homosexuality. They want open borders so brown illegal aliens can invade America and mongrelize the white race. Donald Trump will rescue America from this Satanic cabal. At the time of 'The Storm,' supporters of the cabal will be rounded up and executed.".
That myth should be familiar to anybody who studied history, it's a modernized rehash of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Specifically "the Blood Libel", which was a core story of the N party and was spread through their newspaper "Der Stürmer". It is now a core story of the Republican party, with multiple QAnon supporters running for congress in 2020 and the Texas Republican Party changing its slogan to "We are the Storm".
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Mod parent up, though he should have separated and isolated the ironically quoted Q stuff more clearly.
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Epstein was an equal-opportunity sleazebag, he ferried around plenty of Republicans as well. Anyone who could get him more money or power would do.
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Re:Hating conspiracy theories makes idiots feel sm (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority them are accusations of criminal conspiracy. So basically you're shrieking "you dumb cuz you believe rich and powerful men do bad things."
You should give gave sane people the same break as Qtards, because you've woefully misunderstood the source of the shriek. The shriek, such as it is, is not from a belief that powerful people are good--but disbelief that a group of all-powerful people with diverging interests are fooling the nearly the entire world about a matter of public importance (ritualized satanic and sexual abuse of staggering numbers of children). Qanon believers have allowed their paranoid end-times notions of how the world operates to paralyze whatever native intelligence they have. Belief in the conspiracy makes them elect (somehow seeing what others fail to see) and righteous (standing against satanic powers and principalities).
This is Hale-Bopp territory. So to use that analogy: seeing an object in space is technically evidence that supports the notion that a spaceship is coming to pick-up the faithful. Nonetheless, I am comfortable saying that there is no evidence to suggest that the Hale-Bopp cult was actually correct.
Mockery is unkind, but kinder than trying to make a buck off them.
Re:Hating conspiracy theories makes idiots feel sm (Score:4, Insightful)
If you know about the stuff surrounding Epstein and you seriously claim "there is no evidence our elites like to fuck kids" then I don't know what to say to you because you are basically too stupid to understand the difference between "evidence" and "proof."
You have so easily fallen in to the trap where you can't separate a simple statistical matter from some giant conspiracy.
Our elites like to fuck kids. Of course they do, as elite as they are they remain none the less a group of people, and for any group of people of sufficient size you'll find a subset of them want to fuck kids.
That one fact about elites can easily be applied to blue collar workers, school teachers, church ministers, well dressed accountants, toothless rednecks, you name it.
If you believe Qanon was right about this I'm sure you also believe in astrology since it does after all use the same principle whereby the accusation is so general as to easily turn up evidence.
Re:large flaw in the story (Score:5, Insightful)
What percentage of political conspiracy theories were eventually proven true? What percentage of bigfoot sightings were proven true? Oh and how would bigfoot existing or not existing affect the average person's daily life? How about the same question for political corruption?
Just another idiot comparing two dissimilar things, trying to convince everyone that everything is fine, don't question anything. We're in control and you can trust us!
I feel safe asserting that exactly zero political conspiracy theories have proven true when they involved such complete and utter fantastical demonization of the offender(s) in question. And you've done yourself what you're supposedly complaining about. You've taken the very real sort of political corruption that does happen and conflated it with absolute nonsense.
Rather you should be asking yourself who benefits from floating such codswallop and it's clear that the conspiracy theory claims is the conspiracy. Companies that make stuff sold to preppers benefit from people believing society is about to collapse. Those in the gold industry benefit from selling the notion that only a return to a gold-standard will save us from economic ruin. People in the "natural health & wellness" industry benefit from selling the notion that science based medicine is corrupt. And the list just goes on and on and on until we get to QAnon and it's ilk, the Republican leadership benefits from selling the notion that Democrats are devil worshipping child molesters and that no matter how bad a Republican is, he/she is always preferable to that!
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Watergate.
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It was outed by a member of one of Yale's secret societies (Book & Key, IIRC), who had worked for Naval Intelligence, and with no experience managed to land a job that Pulitzer Prize winners would have sold their children to have at the Washington Post, headquarters of Project Mockingbird. He then worked with a very highly placed FBI operative who had reported regularly directly to J Edgar Hoover until his death, to first remove the vice president and replace him with a member of the Warren Commission
Re:large flaw in the story (Score:4, Interesting)
I feel safe asserting that exactly zero political conspiracy theories have proven true when they involved such complete and utter fantastical demonization of the offender(s) in question.
President Reagan's Star Wars effort and capability.
An official government conspiracy to mislead both American public into feeling safer & Russia into believing USA had greater capability than they had. This was a conspiracy. Many people demonized Reagan and his policies and his actions. At the time there were people doubting and questioning it who were muffled. This conspiracy has now been proven and confirmed.
One case that disproves your absolute claims.
That is perfectly ordinary defense industry corruption that yes has been uncovered numerous times over the years. Or arguably, a successful counter-intelligence operation that did in fact succeed in getting the Soviet Union to waste time and resources they couldn't afford trying to match us. And even though that involved a trivial number of people they couldn't even keep it secret for 10 years. And while the results were faked, the desired outcome wasn't entirely fantastical and probably given enough time and resources, they would have gotten there for real. The real argument against pursuing SDI wasn't technology, it was practical politics in that progress towards SDI would be met by an escalation of hostilities with the Soviet Union and actually increased the chance of nuclear war since they might have been inclined to try to beat us to the punch since their interpretation of us successfully implementing SDI would be now we could afford to deploy nuclear weapons against them as mutually-assured-destruction no longer applied.
Further as someone who was alive during the 80s, I can tell you that claims that SDI was impractical and would never happen were in fact quite common on the news and the idea that such naysayers were muffled is laughable. Discussions about the political considerations were also constant and was in fact the primary pushback from the left and our European allies.
In short, it doesn't even enter into the same galaxy as baselessly asserting that half the leadership of the USA are devil worshipping child molesters AND that hundreds of thousands of people over many decades have helped keep that secret.
Re:large flaw in the story (Score:5, Interesting)
How would bigfoot existing or not existing affect the average person's daily life? How about the same question for political corruption?
This is a bit long, but let me try to answer that based on my own experience, and tie that to the book.
I used to get emails from family members asking me if various internet urban legends were true. Things like "Is Bill Gates really tracking this email? If I forward it to 10 people will I be put on a list to win a free computer?" [snopes.com] or "Did you know that NASA discovered the missing day in the Bible?" [snopes.com] These were so obviously false to me, but the internet was new to them and I happily did the research and explained how email, cookies, and the laws of physics worked. I shook my head asking myself why they didn't just type it into Google or check Snopes or something, but I kinda enjoyed being the fact checker.
20 years later, those sample people believe that Hydrochloroquine cures Covid but "Big Pharma" (they literally use that term) is hiding it, that doctors collaborate with the state health institutes to inflate Covid statistics because they get paid by the number of cases, and various other Covid conspiracies. They say masks are a conspiracy of some sort. They tell me that Trump would have won Pennsylvania but the post office is hiding Trump mail-in ballots. They still believe the birther conspiracy. As I look back over the decades, I see that every time I lost contact with them for a period of time, they became more radicalized. Fortunately, they were sane enough to stop one of their kids from buying a gun to shoot BLM protesters.
I know an alcoholic who believes these things in direct proportion to how much they drink. It's weird to see their political beliefs shift (or maybe they just lose the ability to pander to me so that they look more reasonable.)
Only too late do I see that those silly hoax emails and urban legends were indications of an underlying problem. I suspect that people who believe in one kind of hoax are more likely to be duped by a hoaxes in general. Looking back over the years, I kick myself for not realizing that this wasn't just a lack of tech know-how. I should not have just disproven this thing or that thing. I needed to teach them skepticism - although I'm not 100% sure how. What seems to happen is that if they find a single source like an anonymous Facebook post that aligns with their political leanings, they tend to believe it by default, not matter how illogical it seems. And it takes a preponderance of evidence to show them otherwise - even if the claim is totally inconsistent with reality. And over time, they build an alternate reality to compensate. It gets deeper and deeper with new conspiracies required to backup the old ones. It seems like now it is going to be nigh impossible to back them out.
Reading the reviews and summaries of the book, this is what the author shows too, but in a funny way. From one picture of BigFoot, comes legends about him liking women singing, or what kinds of foods BigFoot likes, etc. That's what is happening with radical political believes - to believe one thing, you must concoct another, and another, until there is a web of belief that must be untangled in order for the person to get their objective reality back. And the older people get, the more ingrained those beliefs are.
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My finding is that different people use different methods to establish "the truth".
Some of us go for an alleged "scientific" approach - where we expect a series of logical arguments to establish the truth. Some of the more engineering based of us take a version of this described in the Old Testament (Torah) where "someone" with a theory needs two witnesses (these might be logical arguments, rather than hum
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What percentage of political conspiracy theories were eventually proven true?
Close to zero when you discount the conspiracy theories that were intentionally formed to be vague enough as to apply to any part of the general population. Qanon's problem is the conspiracy theories are as ludicrous as they are specific. People's problem is that they are dumb enough to attempt to generalise the conspiracies in a way to validate them against what they saw.
Example:
Qanon conspiracy: Hillary and Bill Clinton are pedophiles who kidnap kids, rape them, kill them, and drink their blood to gain et
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Who think AntiFa is just an ideology.
It is to the extent that Al-Qaeda is just an ideology. The primary difference being that the leadership of the Anarchists (now using the AntiFa brand name) have had since the late 1800's to learn the folly of advertising the identities of their leadership.
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Anarchists are people that don't believe in leaders. That is what the word means.
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Anarchists are people that don't believe in leaders,
So they say. It started out as the militant wing of Marxism. The necessary step to a revolution being the overthrow of the existing government. But they were ejected from the movement as being too bat-shit crazy (nobody likes assassinations and bombings as a part of their daily life). And Stalin showed how much he appreciated the revolutionary arm of the Communist party once they were no longer needed. Gulag or line them up and shoot them. They regained a foothold for a time in Germany in the 1920's. But a
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