One thing recent years have highlighted is that we’ve been substantially kidding ourselves about the answer to the puzzle of why so many people vote & are otherwise politically engaged. radicalclassicalliberals.com/2021/02/02/wha…
The “puzzle” had been that from the POV of narrow self-interest, investing time & energy in learning about politics & voting can seem irrational. The probability of your individual engagement as a voter affecting the outcome in a statewide or national contest is virtually nil.
So why do people do it? Why invest the time & energy when, for 99.9% of people, it makes zero difference to the outcome? The optimistic answer is OF COURSE people aren’t just narrowly self-interested and act out of civic duty.
And that’s... part of the truth. But the less sanguine answer is that people DON’T actually behave as though their votes will determine policy outcomes, but instead politically engage for other psychological reasons, like entertainment or a feeling of belonging.
But of course, if those are your reasons, it makes no difference whether your polical beliefs are even remotely accurate. It’s not like buying a car, where you individually bear the consequences of having objectively correct or incorrect information.
And it also means that the rewards to being a SUPPLIER of political information don’t need to bear much relationship to the accuracy of that information either. A cable news bloviator has no more market incentive to be factual than WandaVision.

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More from @normative

2 Feb
I assume enough time has lapsed to talk about WandaVision ep 4? Fun detail I spotted on rewatch. When Wanda yeets Monica out of WestView, she crashes through an interior wall of the house, exterior wall, fence, and finally the force field around the town/TV world...
In other words, when Monica exits the sitcom realm for “reality” she... breaks the fourth wall.
Also, they tweaked what SWORD stands for. In the comics it’s “Sentient World Observation & Response Department.” The show makes it “Sentient Weapon...” and the director drops a line about how they’re increasingly relying on developing their own “sentient weapons”...
Read 9 tweets
22 Jan
How QWorld is coping (so you don’t have to wade into the sewer yourself): (1) Biden’s inauguration was faked, possibly with a lookalike, and all the images you’re seeing of Biden in the Oval Office are actually from a movie set. You can tell because the wallpaper changed.
(2) The United States was transformed into a private corporation in 1871 (don’t ask) but then secretly dissolved & restored to a real government by Trump, so Biden has been cleverly switcharooed and is only “President” of this now-defunct corporation.
The second hallucination, as far as I can tell, is based on an inexplicable misreading of a statute “incorporating” a government for the District of Columbia as somehow transforming the entire United States into a corporation. Yeah.
Read 6 tweets
20 Jan
I’ll court embarrassment by making a prediction: Over the next few weeks & months, QAnon is going to shrink significantly as it becomes clear Biden’s just getting a normal term. But the core who remain via whatever story they make up will be even more dangerous & nuts.
More nuts because any moderating influence from people even tenuously connected to reality will be gone. More dangerous because “Trust the Plan” had a convenient soporific effect. Trump’s people were going to round up the evil satanist pedophile cannibal Elites, after all.
If you keep the Cabal fantasy minus the notion that the people in power have a Plan to stop them, some percentage are going to conclude THEY are the true Plan & need to “fight back” directly.
Read 4 tweets
20 Jan
QBler-Ross Stage 1: Denial
QBler-Ross Stage 2: Anger
QBler-Ross Stage 3: Bargaining
Read 8 tweets
19 Jan
As with Powell’s “Spyder,” I wonder if this stuff gets traction in part because it’s so OBVIOUSLY absurd to anyone technical that the folks who could easily debunk it can’t imagine it’s worth the time to do so.
It’d be like writing a long essay explaining the world isn’t actually run by Lizard People. Who could fall for that in the first place? And if they did, well, they’ve probably got a screw loose and writing a rational response ain’t going to help.
Except it turns out NOT to be so obviously gibberish to the non-technical, for whom it all sort of sounds like gibberish, and the absence of a response gets interpreted as “the MSM is AFRAID to talk about the evidence."
Read 4 tweets
19 Jan
This is apparently the “100% evidence” Mike Lindell is relying on to claim Dominion voting systems were “hacked” by foreign adversaries. It’s a screed from a crank site called The American Report, obviously written by tech illiterates, containing no actual evidence.
The article claims unsourced “raw data analytics” obtained by the crank site prove that various “IP addresses” associated with election offices were “hacked” by “IP addresses” in various foreign countries. It is word salad with gibberish croutons.
The article ends with an unsourced list of foreign IP addresses, paired with the domestic IP addresses they supposedly “hacked”. (You don’t “hack” an IP address, but whatever.) There is no reason to think this list represents… well, anything.
Read 15 tweets

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