sufi

lala
Something similar between going conspiracy-bonkers and other ways of going bonkers. my next-door neighbor growing up was a reasonable guy, until one day he told his wife he planned to take a second wife in Uganda. She obviously divorced him, she kept the house, he went to Uganda and presumably learned that the second-wife in question was a scammer who needed assistance in paying school fees… maybe believing that the chemtrails are making the frogs gay is just a more controlled way to go through the same emotional process.

its more like the metaphors and fantasies that surround us all the time are so bogus its intolerable, so why not jump off in any another direction.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I think the main difference would be the scale and prevalence. Which is unsurprising given the actual president is virtually greenlighting it. It's going to have loads more reach. There's a Reddit here for Qanon Casulaties, comparing war wounds, family break up stories etc.: https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/
Something similar between going conspiracy-bonkers and other ways of going bonkers. my next-door neighbor growing up was a reasonable guy, until one day he told his wife he planned to take a second wife in Uganda. She obviously divorced him, she kept the house, he went to Uganda and presumably learned that the second-wife in question was a scammer who needed assistance in paying school fees… maybe believing that the chemtrails are making the frogs gay is just a more controlled way to go through the same emotional process.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If they're really serious they'd line their living space with it. Or maybe a beanie, to discreetly supplant the classic tin foil dunce cap.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
It's not odd she's a green *at all* - they lap this stuff up. Think of the Unabomber. Can all get v "modernity is a trap"/back to the land in an instant.
this, like JFK, is really just an aside, but the Unabomber isn't/wasn't a conspiracist in really any sense (that I'm aware of). his critique of "the industrial-technological system" is quite rational and really, common-sense, even if his solution is both infeasible and abominable (tho unlike most primitivists, he at least isn't starry-eyed about "the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society", i.e. death and suffering on an enormous scale, he just thinks the price is worth paying).

tbc I wouldn't endorse anything besides those specific parts of his critique - there are a lot of problems with his manifesto (for one, the way his heavily Freudian green anarchist critique of leftism and "leftist psychology" leads him into extremely dubious takes on racism, sexism, etc i.e. those parts that Anders Breivik literally just copied and pasted) - and ofc his methods, but it always bothered me that he was frequently portrayed as a lunatic, as if that made everything he was saying totally crazy. if you want to see the non-craziness of that critique, look no further than the much commented on culture of billionaires preparing rat lines and boltholes to escape and ride out societal collapse. he was in fact, by combination of his academic background and ideological beliefs, significantly ahead of the times in those predictions - for example a portion of his manifesto deals with AI and the automation of work in a way that's really only come into mass consciousness in the last few years.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
more generally, it's true that radical environmentalism has sometimes lead people into terrible views – there’s a philosophical question about critique of anthropocentrism vs misanthropy, but obv things like Dave Foreman's infamous ca late 80s comments on nativism, AIDS, and famine relief are indefensible, as is the modern cesspit of #ecofascism (more of an online alt-right/4chan subcult than a real thing, but in the world ca 2020 that’s enough to inspire mass shooters, so) but they’re hardly representative of environmentalism as a whole - Foreman was, rightly, chased out of Earth First - nor should they discredit its critique of industrial society which again, I think most people would basically agree with even if – inverse to Kaczynski – they think paying that price is worth its benefits. greens in my experience are no more prone to conspiracism than anyone else – a potentially reductionist good and evil view of the economic forces behind environmental degradation, yes (tho sometimes that’s justified – see the lobbying efforts of fossil fuel trade groups and the harm caused by the fake climate change “debate” they created over the last 20ish years) but wild-eyed conspiracy thinking, not really.

I’m admittedly biased bc it’s close to my heart but it seems unfair to blame environmentalism for @blissblogger's friend's long descent into irrationalism which seems - tbf, w/o knowing her thought processes - pretty clearly driven by a wider cultural movement that is mostly either indifferent to or openly anti-environmental
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
And wider than that, there are plenty of terrorists and suchlike where it's quite possible that lots of people would agree with all or even a lot of what they're fighting for, just not their methods.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
greens in my experience are no more prone to conspiracism than anyone else – a potentially reductionist good and evil view of the economic forces behind environmental degradation, yes (tho sometimes that’s justified – see the lobbying efforts of fossil fuel trade groups and the harm caused by the fake climate change “debate” they created over the last 20ish years) but wild-eyed conspiracy thinking, not really.
There's an interesting case of the snake swallowing its tail here, or something like that, in that when it comes to the fossil fuels/climate change issue, the conspiracy theory - "the 'climate change' panic is a hoax created by scientists so they can get more funding/the Chinese to hobble American industry" - is itself the conspiracy.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Not exactly a conspiracy but i got a great email scam the other day. An email that when you open it it said something like....

"This email has some spy software attached and as soon as you opened it, it hacked into all your stuff and it's downloaded your banking passwords and I've discovered that you like really weird pornography and unless you send 500 euros to this address I'm gonna post all the stuff you've been watching to all the people in your address lists and so on".

But the point is, they're claiming that the hack occurred after I opened the email, so when they wrote it, they can't have known about all that bestial filth can they.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I've had one of those and it actually posted one of my old passwords in the body of the email, so I had to change it in all the important places
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Ah, I've also had that one too. That one's a bit better cos you get a message and it says "Hello Rich, your password is ******" which is a bit scary and gets your attention straight away as it WAS a phrase I'd used as a password. And then it goes on to say "I know a lot of other stuff about you" and it demands a bitcoin payment. I'll admit that that one gave me pause for thought, but, it was an old password and I quickly saw that the rest of it was made up of very vague and generic claims which didn't really have any persuasive force - also I got another one a day or two later which made different and almost contradictory vague and generic claims.
I just deleted them but later I did read something about this, apparently there was a large leak from some server which contained lots of outdated passwords and personal data and so that became available to hackers. And they tried emailing everyone whose name was on the list with an email including the password (although they didn't know what it was a password to) to make think that they'd been personally hacked. So yeah I did a bit of a double-take with that one... but it was less threatening cos it was a) an out of date password and b) actually my one for dissensus which... obviously I was worried that some hackers might break into my account and start posting complete rubbish (ast happened to Mixed Biscuits that time... were you here when that happened?) but it did make it more obvious that, even if somehow, someone had gained some of my data, they didn't have any access to anything too important.
 

beiser

Well-known member
I appreciate the password ones—it's a service that automatically lets you know when a password has leaked! Very useful!
 

version

Well-known member
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