Corona Conspiracies.

[luka]

I would say you don't take enough drugs Tea but actually you take loads or used to anyway.

I used to find conspiracies interesting, still do in a way but encountering the human cost makes me much less likely to give them time.

Also, it seems really out of date in a way like pre-millennium Robert Anton Wilson books or something. It's pretty close to the mainstream now and the cutting edge seems to me to be the open source people deconstructing this stuff in real time. But proving things - how boring. What a bunch of squares.

again, this is interesting in terms of resistance. the need to attack the exercise as a way to avoid doing it.

 

[luka]

it's old hat, it won't teach me anything new, its irrational, its dangerous, so on and so forth. i don't want to get into a tug of war over that. i do want to register and draw attention to those resistances though. they're instructive.

 

[DannyL]

Oh the grand old man pose again. The high horse.

Again, this is interesting as resistance to people pointing out their distaste for your ideas and their cliched, boring nature.

 

[luka]

Oh the grand old man pose again. The high horse.

Again, this is interesting as resistance to people pointing out their distaste for your ideas and their cliched, boring nature.

very aggressive.

 

[luka]

Danny is raging. again, very interesting.

 

[luka]

as padraig pointed out this is a quarintined circumscribed thread dealing with a specific and universal portion of human experience. it is not about 'what is true' it is about some of the places our minds go. there's nothing threatening in that. it is part of the sum total of data, a specific subset of that data, and we can learn from it. no need to be afraid.

 

[luka]

what has happened over the course of this year is unprecedented and we are all full of foreboding and unsubtanitated fears. nobody knows what the future will bring. none of us has any faith in our leaders. none of us is even very sure of whos in control, if anyone is.

it's natural in these circumstances that some of these fears congeal into specific forms, coalesce into narratives and pattern. we might, for instance, start thinking that this is a coordinated global response to climate change, under cover of a pandemic.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

tbf @luka isn't aiming, it seems, for wild corona speculation but using corona conspiracy as a medium to look at how paranoia functions

which is relevant to the situation we find ourselves in - why do so many people believe in such obviously outlandish things?

or more specifically, why do so many people believe in such outlandish things now? why this surge in conspiratorial thinking?

what about these or recent circumstances lends itself to that?

there are many possible answers, some of which we've been over here.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

very interesting

if you really want to facilitate discussion why do you also going out of your way to try to rile people up?

I mean, I'm immune to it through long exposure, like most of the old hands probably

it's not like you need me to tell you this, you obviously know what you're doing

you're only sabotaging yr own discussion (which is, as you might put it, "very interesting")

it's a legitimately interesting topic - paranoia as related to corona, not self-sabotage - why not just let it breathe

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the open source people deconstructing this stuff in real time

point us to some good ones, Dan? here or via DM/email, whatever you prefer

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

what has happened over the course of this year is unprecedented

is it?

technology's better obviously, but how different is it from govt responses to prior pandemics?

that's not a rhetorical question, idk and would be curious to find out

 

[luka]

its twofold. im interested in how paranoia functions, and more generally, how pattern forming and meaning making and interpretation of events functions, paranoia being linked to those processes and not always easily seperated from those processes.

and im also interested in the range of possible interpretations of the ongoing events, and getting a sense for how we, as a group, are understanding these events and reacting to them. my cousin is somewhat of an outlier, but it's a fairly natural and not a patholigcal response. i want to get a sense of the whole field by studying everyone here, not just our rational explanations, but also our dark, fearful, fantastic reactions.

im not going to force anyone to join in who doesnt want to, i cant do that.

 

[luka]

i dont think you can overstate just how strange this year has been and the dislocation its caused. and the assumption is its only just begun. winter could be completely dystopian.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

i dont think you can overstate just how strange this year has been and the dislocation its caused

in terms of our lives and recent memory, that's true

in the greater course of human history, not so much

the Black Death was a truly cataclysmic event orders of magnitude worse

life went on - taxes were wrangled over and collected, crops were sowed and harvested, wars continued being fought

it certainly had massive short-term and longer-term effects but life went on

 

[luka]

i mean in terms of our lives yes. but again, i don't want to get distracted, even by very interesting questions and discussions.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

fear outstrips reality

which is certainly a question that could be explored - why does fear outstrip reality?

presumably some significant part of it is people in developed countries never having had to deal with these kinds of conditions

as they haven't really existed since WWII

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

that's why it's not a tangent, but directly related to your questions

 

[luka]

it's a thread which proposes an exercise, not an unreasonable exercise, not an offensive or difficult exercise and all i want it total obedience, i mean, cooperation. or just ignore it. but i think it's more fun to play the game personally.

 

[DannyL]

The Conspirituality pod is the best thing I've seen discussing the intersection of Covid, Qanon and conspiracy culture. They're particularly interested in how this stuff has spread via "wellness" influencers. The guys behind it seem to have yoga bakgrounds so there's some interesting commentary about cross-culture borrowing.

For the OSINT stuff, Bellingcat is great. Their podcast on the downing of MH-17 was a brilliant piece of investigate journalism. I follow a few of the individual researchers on Twittr - Aric Toler, Christaan Triebert with Elliot Higgins being the head honcho, for snapshots of ongoing investigations.

Peter Pomerantsev has written a couple of great books about this strange new world, and is always tweeting interesting stuff with a focus on Russia/Eastern Europe.

There are various OSINT podcasts, depending on how nerdy you want to get. This one is a kinda breakdowns of the new tech being used - I like the way that Bellingcat and others are sharing tools that people take out into the world and use -a friend was telling me recently about how some people have been digging in the UK noise scene and outing guys with links to white supremacists orgs. It seems like the cutting edge of journalism to me.

 

[DannyL]

point us to some good ones, Dan? here or via DM/email, whatever you prefer

Sorry btw - I owe you an email but lyffffeee keeps happening and getting in the way.