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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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The trial of Darrell Brooks is set to start this coming Monday, October 3. Brooks is accused of running over 77 people at the Waukesha Christmas Parade.

Brooks will be representing himself. His motion to do so was granted today. There have been a few entertaining / exasperating videos of Brooks and the Judge going back and forth on this matter.

Brooks believes himself to be a sovereign citizen. In one of the videos he's crossed out the words "I understand" and replaced them with "I have been informed of." These were on a form he had to sign that warned him of the perils of self-representation. It turns out this is a sovereign citizen thing. They believe that to say "I understand" means that they "stand under" the court and are subject to its authority. In the video granting his motion the judge finds that "I have been informed of" is functionally equivalent to "I understand" and Brooks objects, saying he never said those words.

Culture war angle: this was a big culture war story last year as people perceived the attack as both under-covered and when it was covered, downplayed. The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.

Additionally, on the videos I discovered that YouTube tacks on a link to the sovereign citizen movement page on Wikipedia, giving it the same treatment as COVID-19 misinformation.

Hot take:

The partisan games of the two parties are particularly harsh on those with mental illness or some weakness. While I think a lot of American politics today is a heavy dose of Larping the mentally I’ll can’t differentiate.

Either that or Biden is serious and not Larping that half the countries an extremists KKK nazi fascists Hitler in the flesh. Scared that I’m not positive he’s just Larping.

and lots of far right beliefs are borderline schizophrenic?

Eh, I get schizo posting for funsies but what do you mean? Just examples? I'm curious, not trying to nail you.

I'm no expert, but what little I've heard about QAnon sounds like the most deranged rantings about the Bilderberg Group/Elders of Zion/NWO dialled up to 11.

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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