Very excited to read this. Hopefully it won’t keep me up past my bedtime.
UPDATE: it gets off to a surprisingly environmentalist start, but ALSO says “the Jew” twice *before chapter one.*
UPDATE 2: “CHART ONE” turns out to be all the way over on page 144.
I, too, used to read military history books, Hal Lindsey.
UPDATE 3: this book has a whole-ass chapter called “The Yellow Peril.”
“A terrifying prophecy,” writes Lindsey, “is made about this Asian horde.”
“For centuries,” he adds, “Asia has had a tradition of backwardness.”
I’m gonna stop quoting this now bc you get the idea. Man.
Page 110 has a section titled “Emergence of the One-World Religion,” which will be familiar to anyone who’s, uh, read or heard *one syllable* of conspiracy-theorist ideation.
Also, from the Department of Things That Definitely Happened:
Oh hey, look at this. I have the 1977 edition, but here’s the back-cover copy.
We think of the Satanic Panic as a phenomenon of the 80s and 90s, and it’s commonly linked to cultural anxieties around the growing number of women in the workforce (hence the day-care panics). But…
It seems pretty likely you could write a good book covering conservative Christian anxieties about hippies, drugs, and the counterculture being the seeds of Satanism, and argue that *this* was the real cause of the panic, & the daycare stuff got bolted on after it was underway.
I have to go to bed now. But before I do, let me take you on a tour of [Citation Needed] moments:
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There's a new report making the rounds, from Georgetown's Center for Emerging Technology, on AI and disinformation.
Essentially the takeaway is that human-machine teams can generate fairly effective disinformation right now, BUT it's computationally & financially expensive...
So *for now* all we have to worry about is state adversaries using GPT-3 or something similar to spread disinfo.
Or very wealthy people who can just blow $200K on creating ONE system, or tens of millions per year to generate content equal to, say, 1% of all activity on Twitter.
Except... I think the report is wrong about it being confined to state actors for now. *Political parties* already spend a lot of money on their digital operations. Why not more for this?
Maybe they don't think the cost-benefit is there *yet*, but remember:
So @kunstderfuge1 made a graphic re: what we do and don't know based on pictures from the drops.
The gist of it is, as I mentioned elsethread, that *if* the person who took the screenshots is *also* the person who made the posts,
*then* we know what timezone the post is from.
If they're separate people -- if someone is taking that screenshot and then emailing or texting it to Q, who THEN posts -- all we know is that Q has a confederate *in that time zone.*
To me, this is a somewhat academic distinction. If you're providing content for the Q drops...
well, then you're Q, right? Q is the person *or team* that creates the drops.
And if, OTOH, Q is a single person just going through their old photos and screenshotting good ones so they'll be right at the top of the list when they go to make a phonepost on 8kun... 'kay, great.
This couldn't go into the piece, BUT: y'know how all the photos we looked at were screenshots?
In my *opinion*, Q was sitting on their couch, scrolling through old photos 'til they found one they wanted to use; screenshotting to put it @ the top of the list; and phoneposting.
So my /personal take/ is that Q was probably physically in, and posting from, the places where the screenshots were created.
However, we can't *rule out* the possibility that someone else screenshotted the photos and texted them to Q (or emailed or whatever).
Which is why the piece very carefully does not say that the place the screenshot is taken was the place the post was made from. We don't *know* that.
I am pleased to announce the first forensic evidence of Q’s whereabouts, discovered by my colleague Abigail X (@BobPythonic) with help from Robert Amour (@kunstderfuge1). The full story is up @Bellingcat; we summarize our work in this thread.
Using image metadata, we have been able to geolocate Q to a specific part of the world. Highlighted below are the only two time zones where, in our sample, two or more of Q’s images were taken.
The *vast* majority, ~68%, were from the Pacific time zone.
So… how did we do it?
Most images in Q drops don’t have enough useful metadata to analyze, but a specific subset, images which are phone screenshots, do. In the “DateCreated” field, we found a series of timestamps that reveal the time when Q took these screenshots, just before posting the drop.
Here are some replies to GhostEzra’s “100 million armed patriots… synagogue of Satan” post, from the “peaceful research movement” that is QAnon
And yes, that IS a closet full of ammo in image 3: image 4 has it in detail.
More replies, including from a gentleman who claims to have lots and lots of “ghost guns,” which is… not especially legal, last I heard.
This dude is on some Rwanda shit.
Rwanda is my darkest scenario for how the current political situation ends. The right DOES have a lot of heavily-armed people who think of liberals as monstrous and subhuman. It could happen here.
If I were a conspiracy-theory *evangelist,* I would think long and hard about decoupling the slavery claim from the genocide claim, bc you can point —for instance— at how Amazon treats its workers and delivery drivers, which is basically a 21st-century version of 19th-c BS.
2/4
But, happily for all of us, conspiracy theories aren’t really crafted to *spread as rapidly as possible.*
They’re crafted to meet the emotional needs of their adherents.
So lots of plausible lines of attack get left on the cutting-room floor bc they *don’t* meet those needs.