02-20-2021, 10:46 AM
A Humanist approach:
I write this while listening to this video.
Part of the fault lies with an algorithm that drew her and many others into an insidious cult. She had her problems, but note well that the Internet can draw people into a comprehensive system for understanding everything... even if the source is catastrophically wrong. It is easy to let the algorithm lead one in one direction, and sometimes the algorithm might lead one into something innocuous or even enriching, like bird-watching, ancient Greece, or the music of J S Bach. Having a fascination with the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, a civilization whose clear-headedness became a model for modern Humanity, and music more daring than any other composed for over a century after his death is harmless. Even such pseudoscience as UFO's, young-earth creationism, and a flat earth is comparatively harmless (although I would steer a child away from such for being as detrimental for his intellectual development as pornography is for his moral development). Developing a passion is a good thing. So you end up getting some costly wader boots and driving to swamps where the cranes are. Or instead of going on a predictable trip you end up traveling to see the Bach Museum in Eisenach and the Parthenon in Greece.
Q-Anon is horrible. It distorts the world into a dangerous arena in which dangerous conspiracies prevail (even though I can safely state that competent people do not use conspiracy when they can achieve their ends by some less troublesome means. The typical conspiracy is more like the fictional "Phyllis Diedrichson" (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity seduces an insurance agent to sell her a policy on a husband that she considers expendable and bribes others into being accomplices after the fact in the plot. The plot unravels because the conspirators don't know what they are doing. Nobody does conspiracy well; people have to be clever and ruthless enough to think that they can do the dirty deeds but have the illusion that they are wise enough to get away with it. It's easy for me to refute the Protocols, the infamous libel of Jews as part of some insidious plot from birth through senescence due to some 'racial' origin on the ground that the successful Jews that I have encountered personally or by learning about have mostly gotten what they have without any need for conspiracy. No conspiracy made Lauren Bacall a great actress, Beverly Sills a great singer, Richard Feynmann a great physicist, or Itzhak Perlman (or Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Fritz Kreisler, or David Oistrakh) a great violinist... and any highly-successful Jew in public office in America is successful largely for winning the votes of gentiles in states, none of which has anything like a Jewish majority. (At this point I can debunk the conspiracy theory that Jews were underrepresented as victims on 9/11: New York City, long renowned for a highly-visible Jewish minority, is even more Puerto Rican, Italian-American, and Irish-American than "Jewish". Carl Sagan may have been Jewish, but Neil DeGrasse Tyson isn't, and they are obvious parallels in their achievements.
Conspiracies are mostly for losers.
Let's start with the pedophile angle. Everybody seems to hate pedophiles except pedophiles themselves, and I would suspect that most pedophiles loathe themselves for what they are, as they know how hated they are. . They are not heavily concentrated in one part of the political spectrum, as would be so with the KKK or Trotskyites. The people involved in the circle of the late and unlamented Jeffrey Epstein is a small group of high-profile people. (And to Hell with them! That includes one of my favorite movie makers and a member of the British royal family). Cannibalism? Spectacularly rare... and disgusting.
......................
She was looking for spirituality and natural healing, which are not harmful in themselves... but Q-Anon hijacked her search. If I am to guess what Q-Anon really is, it has at most murky leadership capable of creating its own parallel culture in secretive opposition to the mainstream.
I write this while listening to this video.
Part of the fault lies with an algorithm that drew her and many others into an insidious cult. She had her problems, but note well that the Internet can draw people into a comprehensive system for understanding everything... even if the source is catastrophically wrong. It is easy to let the algorithm lead one in one direction, and sometimes the algorithm might lead one into something innocuous or even enriching, like bird-watching, ancient Greece, or the music of J S Bach. Having a fascination with the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, a civilization whose clear-headedness became a model for modern Humanity, and music more daring than any other composed for over a century after his death is harmless. Even such pseudoscience as UFO's, young-earth creationism, and a flat earth is comparatively harmless (although I would steer a child away from such for being as detrimental for his intellectual development as pornography is for his moral development). Developing a passion is a good thing. So you end up getting some costly wader boots and driving to swamps where the cranes are. Or instead of going on a predictable trip you end up traveling to see the Bach Museum in Eisenach and the Parthenon in Greece.
Q-Anon is horrible. It distorts the world into a dangerous arena in which dangerous conspiracies prevail (even though I can safely state that competent people do not use conspiracy when they can achieve their ends by some less troublesome means. The typical conspiracy is more like the fictional "Phyllis Diedrichson" (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity seduces an insurance agent to sell her a policy on a husband that she considers expendable and bribes others into being accomplices after the fact in the plot. The plot unravels because the conspirators don't know what they are doing. Nobody does conspiracy well; people have to be clever and ruthless enough to think that they can do the dirty deeds but have the illusion that they are wise enough to get away with it. It's easy for me to refute the Protocols, the infamous libel of Jews as part of some insidious plot from birth through senescence due to some 'racial' origin on the ground that the successful Jews that I have encountered personally or by learning about have mostly gotten what they have without any need for conspiracy. No conspiracy made Lauren Bacall a great actress, Beverly Sills a great singer, Richard Feynmann a great physicist, or Itzhak Perlman (or Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Fritz Kreisler, or David Oistrakh) a great violinist... and any highly-successful Jew in public office in America is successful largely for winning the votes of gentiles in states, none of which has anything like a Jewish majority. (At this point I can debunk the conspiracy theory that Jews were underrepresented as victims on 9/11: New York City, long renowned for a highly-visible Jewish minority, is even more Puerto Rican, Italian-American, and Irish-American than "Jewish". Carl Sagan may have been Jewish, but Neil DeGrasse Tyson isn't, and they are obvious parallels in their achievements.
Conspiracies are mostly for losers.
Let's start with the pedophile angle. Everybody seems to hate pedophiles except pedophiles themselves, and I would suspect that most pedophiles loathe themselves for what they are, as they know how hated they are. . They are not heavily concentrated in one part of the political spectrum, as would be so with the KKK or Trotskyites. The people involved in the circle of the late and unlamented Jeffrey Epstein is a small group of high-profile people. (And to Hell with them! That includes one of my favorite movie makers and a member of the British royal family). Cannibalism? Spectacularly rare... and disgusting.
......................
She was looking for spirituality and natural healing, which are not harmful in themselves... but Q-Anon hijacked her search. If I am to guess what Q-Anon really is, it has at most murky leadership capable of creating its own parallel culture in secretive opposition to the mainstream.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.