I wish people would get over this idea that people who fall into cults or conspiracies are “dumb” or “ignorant” somehow. It’s literally a dangerous thought, a way to other them so you can feel superior. Intelligent people fall into these things. You could easily fall into them.
Aum Shinrikyo had chemists and physicists making sarin gas because a fat dork on LSD told them murder was good karma. They did it because they had been caught at the right time and led down a slow path to a point where that made a lot of sense.
Heaven’s Gate was full of teachers, former ad executives, people with successful lives. They were looking for some spiritual enlightenment and ended up through a series of increasingly strict routines and social conditioning brought to a place where they happily killed themselves
We’re social creatures, but the way we interact socially can be hijacked and perverted. We’re pattern seekers trying to make sense of chaos who can absolutely become convinced of higher meanings in random noise. No amount of intelligence frees us from this.
Saying cultists or conspiracy theorists are dumb is like saying all people who commit suicide are cowards or all poor people are lazy. You’re just describing your own insecurities at that point, not any kind of reality.
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So Powell’s closed but......didn’t actually close their doors in this video (the ropes are for limiting customers due to COVID and have been their for awhile), and didn’t announce it on their Twitter or their website, and no one else is reporting they closed?
Andy Ngo supporter lying about what’s going on in a video they didn’t take is pretty on the nose.
A group of amped-up dorks standing in the rain yelling at you doesn’t mean much to most Portland businesses, particular one that used to get bomb threats for carrying Salman Rushdie novels.
I’ve spent the last couple weeks reading about the reign of Col. Qaddafi and one of the things that has struck me is he came to power with maybe a few hundred guys essentially walking into the halls of government and kicking the old leaders out. It took almost nothing.
The monarchy he booted out was so disinterested in governing that a trillion-dollar stockpile of oil was snatched up by a guy in his early twenties whose coup almost failed when some of his men took a wrong turn on a dirt road and left him driving alone to the capitol
He took over because he arrested a handful of military leaders, told the king to basically fuck off and got on the radio and said “This is a revolution” and everyone just sort of rolled with it.