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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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How big is that stuff, really? I am not American, so I have little sense of it -- do these people really exist in significant numbers, or is it another case of progressives calling anyone who thinks they're acting even a little bit dishonestly a conspiracy theorist? When people say "X has gone full QAnon" do they mean "X genuinely believes that elites blend up babies into a smoothie to keep them young" or do they mean "X voted for Trump"?

deleted

Where are you from?

Your story is interesting to me because no one in my family is like yours but you and I are still here and probably both concerned about the sudden appearance of the Orz.

I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.

He was just rendering onto Trump the things that are Trump's.

According to the latest ACX post, a QAnon-type newsletter is the top Substack in the "International" section.

I'd say "official" QAnon folks are pretty rare, but the ideas from that community have definitely gained a strong footing in US conservative circles. You won't find "X genuinely believes that elites blend up babies into smoothies," but you will find a lot of "X genuinely believes media and (liberal) political elites harbor a large number of pedophiles who are trafficking children."

"X genuinely believes media and (liberal) political elites harbor a large number of pedophiles who are trafficking children."

Heck, I'm pretty close to believing that, if you take out "liberal" and "large."

I'd say it's simultaneously bigger than you'd think and smaller/less relevant than a lot of people online try to paint it as. Just about every family has that one drunk conspiracy crank uncle who will take any excuse the can to go off about their hobby horse and this is just [current year]'s flavor of it.

I am an American, and honestly, I don't think there's a way to tell. I don't know of any polls trying to measure this stuff, and even if there were, their accuracy would be quite questionable given the lizardman constant. From my own personal experience, I don't know of anyone who buys into QAnon, but that's 99.9999% a function of the insularity and polarization of where I live, which is basically filled with and run by people I would consider to have QAnon-like beliefs in terms of epistemic rigor, but has no actual QAnon believers AFAICT.

Given the patterns of progressives and the lesson many of us learned from The Boy Who Cried Wolf, gun to my head I would guess this is just the umpteenth example of a tiny, inconsequential portion of the population being blown up like the boogeyman for a politically convenient narrative. But that guess of mine is itself a politically convenient narrative, so should be taken with at least one ocean's worth of salt.

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