Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
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User ID: 297
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2hr ago
No one is telling you how to feel your feelings. You know that having feelings and how you express them are two different things.
You get cut more slack than you know because people (including me) actually like you quite a lot, despite your inability to control your feelings and your tendency to respond to even the least little bit of poking with explosions. So be assured that the contempt you are showing me now and have shown me in the past is not taken personally.
That said: replying to a mod telling you directly to stop doing something with a foot-stamping "No, not gonna, you can't make me, you're not the boss of me" temper tantrum is an escalation with a response that you clearly chose. So yes, banned.
I don't need or want to deal with this nonsense right now, so I will let the other mods decide when or if to end your ban.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
3hr ago
My dears, my darling, my honey, my sweetie-pie:
Stop this.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2d ago
Getting bogged down in the details of what Scientology, as an organization, is capable of today is totally beside the point that they prove a conspiracy of the type I outline is possible, and easier than ever. Maybe not for them, as they aren't what they used to be. But for someone sufficiently motivated.
The details are relevant because you're claiming that "Scientology once succeeded in conspiracy shit" is evidence that someone else could do the same thing today, and I don't think that sort of conspiracy (a literal cult trying to destroy an individual with social engineering) is so easy to do today, especially in the dispersed online way you are proposing.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years people will be leaving the Current Year cult, spilling the secrets of the things they were "forced" to do at the time.
There is no Current Year cult. There's trans activism, BLM, Free Palestine, whatever else you want to categorize under the broad umbrella of "wokeism," but I am fundamentally disagreeing with you that these things are engineered by shadowy cabals somewhere or being manufactured by a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds doing A/B testing on memes. You don't need to wait for anyone to "spill secrets" - we already know how it happens, through social pressure and conformity and agreeableness, not because someone did some Ludovico conditioning on them or inserted fnords into their social media. There are plenty of people who have "escaped the Woke cult" and talked about how and why they bought into it in the first place.
People like Crowder have been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology.
Basically anyone has been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology. The result is Twitter pileons, sometimes deplatforming, but
Imagine some "rogue employee" at Facebook deciding "LOL, I'm going to manually add Crowder and Mrs Crowder's accounts to the 'hate algorithm' list."
You seem pretty invested in a very science fictional notion for someone saying you don't really believe this. "Facebook can plug you into a hate algorithm and pretty soon you and your wife are heading for divorce" is kind of like Shiri's Scissor - it's a great concept, works for a short story, but I've seen too many people (including here) take this kind of dystopian brain hacking far too seriously and literally.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2d ago
As it happens, I've read several books about Scientology also (including the one by David Miscavige's niece), and the problem Scientology has today is the same one a lot of your hypothetical conspiracies would have: yes, in theory the technology exists to do all these nefarious things, but the pulling it off secretly and without opposition is a lot harder. Scientology nowadays has a real recruiting problem and almost all growth is via next generation members raised in the cult, because anyone can get on the Internet and look up "Xenu," and for every dirty trick Scientologists try to pull online, there are thousands of motivated opponents ready to fight back in kind.
Scientology used to run these operations against reporters and succeeded in bullying the IRS into giving them tax exempt status, but it's not likely such tactics would work as well today (if you've seen their attempts to discredit ex-Scientologist critics like Leah Remini, they just look lame and desperate).
Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman, is very critical, and yet the church was actually pretty cooperative with her (and to my knowledge, never attempted to intimidate or harass her).
People like conspiracy theories because they have a pleasant explanatory power: things I hate are engineered by shadowy, evil cabals acting in secret. If only they could be exposed or fought! Clearly these things cannot happen organically, or because thousands of factions often acting at cross-purposes bring about a lot of the things I don't like. But people just aren't that organized, they aren't that efficient, they aren't that secretive. The same reason you should be afraid of the state of the world (because there are no "grown ups" in charge somewhere, who have the will and the means to pull a few levers of power and keep shit from getting out of control, the economy and global politics are all basically running on daily ad hoc decisions far more than long-term planning) is the reason you should not get too wrapped up in the idea of Illuminati conspiring to make your life worse.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2d ago
I haven't read the Prince of Nothing series, but surely you've read Neal Stephensen? "We used to be p-zombies until (some of us) actually became sentient (maybe)" is the premise of a couple of his books.
While I sympathize with your take in general (I too know people who will just swallow The Latest Thing uncritically and there's no point talking to them about it), it's not stupidity and it's not new. People are largely group-thinkers and want to go along to get along and also lack the necessary time or energy to dig deeply into the particulars of whether a particular claim is true. Even here on the Motte we see people sometimes show up and plaster a laundry list of highly risible deepity-sounding assertions in a wall of text, and they rarely get much more than vibes-based pushback because who wants to hunt down each and every bullet point to dispute it? And on the rare occasions when someone does that, the deepity-poster disappears and returns after a while to do the same thing.
Jesse Singhal is slowly driving himself mad on Twitter because he keeps doing this with trans activists: "No, look at these fifteen studies I have carefully analyzed which show that what you are saying is not actually true!" he says for the fifteenth time, thinking that this time, Facts and Logic will make them stop calling him a transphobic Nazi.
There isn't some "elite" class of human capable of actually thinking. What we have are agreeable people who don't think most battles are worth fighting (especially at the cost of career and reputation and friendships) and a few highly disagreeable people (often on the autistic spectrum) who absolutely will fight over these things. I hesitate to say that the latter actually have much to do with building bridges and advancing civilization, even if we probably do need a few of them around.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2d ago
The subtext here seems to be that women specifically can be socially influenced to dump their husbands because they see other women dumping their husbands. Am I wrong?
I think as a "jk... unless?" theory, this is about as plausible as any conspiracy theory. Could "Silicon Valley" theoretically target some individual and try to destroy his marriage? Yeah, I guess there are enough people with the social engineering and technical skills, and the money, to engineer some sort of anti-Crowder campaign. But, uh, who, exactly? And why? Crowder might have been targeted on social media; we know this doesn't take a whole lot of coordination, just a few activists in the right places at Facebook and Twitter. But deliberately trying to destroy his marriage? With this level of deep psychological warfare? What boardrooms and labs was this plan cooked up in, and is Stephen Crowder really the lowest-hanging (or most hated) fruit for them to target?
It doesn't add up, on so many levels.
Let me recommend another book to you: Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, by Ryan Holiday.
It's actually really good, and interesting. As you may recall, Peter Thiel set out to destroy Gawker, for a variety of reasons (not "because they outed him" - that is covered in more detail in the book), and he did so by secretly funding a lawsuit against them brought by Terry Bollea, aka Hulk Hogan. The details are fascinating, but the point I am making in recommending this book is that Peter Thiel, an actual Silicon Valley billionaire with the money to fund James Bond villain schemes, engaged in an actual conspiracy to destroy an enemy, and even his "conspiracy" was fundamentally just mundane lawfare with an extra layer of intrigue. Now, maybe some other billionaires are in fact funding secret projects to sow divorce amongst their enemies via social contagion, but when you look at what we can see real people actually doing, it seems very difficult and very unlikely (even for billionaires!) to pull off these sorts of shower thought Illuminati schemes.
Are you saying Peter Thiel was a lone wolf, or are you claiming Gawker was not a leftist media outlet?
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