I mean, the difference is that QAnons are making it all the way to Congress. Which is what's so fucking insane about all this.
The GOP is supposed to be the tough as nails, iron discipline, money makes the man party. But any fucking yokle can wander in off the street and declare he's Trump's man, then win in a landslide.
Democrats are supposed to be this mushy populist feelings-first fruits and nuts party, but they will absolutely axe you off at the knees and piss on your corpse if you get anywhere near one of their incumbents in a primary.
I have to assume there’s something here to the class characteristic of the “outsider” candidates. Mostly that right wing lunatics are petty bourgeois and can fund an insurgent house/state senate run while our variety of fringe Dems are professional class at best and are still wholly dependent on donations and therefore the party to finance a campaign. When political strength is measured in wealth the left is naturally very weak
I think it has more to do with GOP/Dem media markets. While the GOP are petite-bourgeois, they tend to operate in the low-budget and prolific AM radio and religious circuit arena where advertising is incredibly cheap. Dem professionals tend to subscribe to a narrower and higher cost-to-access and more ostensibly non-partisan market of cable news and NPR and alt-rock radio, which are significantly more difficult to access.
Getting that initial bud of exposure and endorsement is going to be easier for the country club millionaire when all you have to do is show up on your buddy's ham-radio tier media network with 50,000 listeners.
I do wonder if the burgeoning Leftist Podcaster networks will change that into the future. Certainly, shows like Chapo beating the pants off Pod Save have some kind of effect on the shape of youth politics.
@spaceprole: the democrats had 2 years to create MAGA version of jimmy dore telling republicans not to vote because the elections are fake and they didnt even try
lmfao
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) by Mark Fisher
Hasn't it all but been confirmed it's the owner of the website and it's been him for a while now? The Watkins guy
I mean, Ron Watkins has/had control of the Q account that's correct; but there's a few people out there who find the idea it was all them (Ron & Jim Watkins) to be a bit incredulous because they're both kind of chan-brained dullards.
There's (allegedly) another angle to the story involving a kind of Discordianist tech-cult but noone has really shown up with the receipts for it.
Wow. If this whole thing is a Discordian op then it's definitely far and away the biggest prank they've ever pulled.
I don't believe it was Ron or Jim Watkins the entire time. It was probably a disconnected set of competing individuals for a while battling over tripcodes, then when it went to 8chan it was possibly one of those original posters, then at some point it became primarily Watkins or someone who worked for him. Any drop now though is 99% probably Jim Watkins himself writing it.
I haven't heard much about it being a coordinated group of individuals and I guess I find the idea unlikely, because I don't believe the Qanon conspiracy needed that. Something like it would have materialized out of that kind of chan board compulsive lying and roleplaying eventually. I also don't believe these kinds of dipshits can keep themselves quiet or coordinated for very long. I mean I'm supposed to believe the same people who told Tom Green to do a barrel roll also had a secret propaganda organization and no one has slipped up yet?
I haven’t heard much about it being a coordinated group of individuals
I am doing a poor job of communicating effectively and tried to make this more clear in my edit on the second comment. The Allegation in my first comment is simply that there is a second angle, Discordian-esque would have been better to use than Discordianist.
Aside from that allegation, what I think happened is that this is a phenomenon that predates the Q label, and started as a Discordian-esque effort to do posting magic not even necessarilly at the scale Q turned out to be. That it is metastasized at a certain point as Q under the Watkins, but there are other smarter shittier posters that are out there that are more responsible for Q than the Watkins are despite their more apparently direct involvement.
It was probably a disconnected set of competing individuals for a while battling over tripcodes, then when it went to 8chan it was possibly one of those original posters, then at some point it became primarily Watkins or someone who worked for him. Any drop now though is 99% probably Jim Watkins himself writing it.
Basically this, I don't think the original competing individuals were primarily channers rather out of a more niche tech cult. Discordia being an example to illustrate this.
Can you give any more info on the Discord angle? I just got my ADHD meds refilled and I'm looking to go down this rabbit hole tonight.
Someone might have juicier details, tbh I have a passing understanding.
Discordianism fancies itself worshipers of Eris (Discordia) or Chaos and are presented as a cynically developed antithesis to the "Order-based Religions."
Based on a book from the 1960's [1] , written by two dudes under pseudonyms [2] [3] there is a big mythos constructed around it that as you look into it you have to ask yourself how much of this is a cultivated facade, and by attributing any sort of meaning are you achieving their goals for them of sewing paranoia? There are a few published books other than Principia Discordia and make reference to alot of books that appear to have never been published. (Depending on who you talk to) they have taken responsibility for alot of wild shit including like the Manson family and JFK assassination, and they are encouraged to splinter so like there is no definitive belief system to nail down. I don't think it's something you could even call a religion and is more like a cult of self-importance but that's neither here nor there.
I personally haven't looked into it too deeply as far as who is involved with it, and have heard some spurious allegations.
E) Explained the Discord, forgot the angle: the angle is that Q was "an op" by a confluence of not-necessarilly-directly-connected communities (not just 4chan and the Watkins) trying to influence reality through social manipulation, specifically online social manipulation. This is not to imply there is a vast conspiracy, rather an intersection of interests; and these interests aren't necessarily some grand Machiavellian design but more like posters getting their rocks off. There is alot of hay being made about the absolute dumbasses Ron and Jim Watkins, and this runs interference for the more savvy participants in the confluence to skirt by unexamined.
I stumbled upon this tripe in my early twenties fresh out of college and flirted with it for like a week before I found a non-sabotaged strain of communism which had a lot more explanatory power.
And now I perfume myself with a fine mist of blood fresh from the guillotines during my morning routine.
I was always under the impression that Discordianism was in the same general sphere as the Church of the Subgenius in being a bunch of counter-culture shitposters from an era before greentexts replaced weird zines. I used to hang out in the Subgenius IRC back in the day which included Discordians, I had a printed copy of the Principia Discordia (that I printed myself in the college library), and I knew a guy who got really into that scene after I handed it and some Subgenius stuff off to him (he was someone who'd openly talk about 4chan in public, but then like half the people I knew in those days would and despite him being a piece of shit he was at least somewhat cynical towards the worst of the 4chan of that era).
It definitely had an overlap with the early 4chan lolrandom trolling scene where absurd all-encompassing irony was felt to be a license to do and say whatever, providing deniability to the worst shit someone wanted to say. I remember them being in general less problematic than 4chan, but I will admit my memories are going to be inherently skewed by the fact that I was an irony poisoned edgelord with brainworms back then, if not further than being the sort of socdem libertine chauvinist I rail against these days.
Based on that experience, I'd say if Discordianism was involved it's a result of its overlap with and adoption into parts of the early 4chan userbase, being the sort of grandiose shitpost that's intoxicating to a certain sort of them.
I never had much interaction with Discordianism and Subgenius, but I don't remember it being as aggressively cruel and racist as 4chan could be.
Yeah, the Subgenies (was that the form? Subgenii? I can't remember but it was some shitpost like that) always seemed decent enough, even less problematic than shit like Taibbi's The Buffalo Beast which I read at the time too (the editor of which went on to be a Green Party candidate and then an insane Gamergator IIRC).
Although it has to be said that in those days 4chan was still more counter-culture chauvinist libertinism than outright reaction, and while that's objectively a precursor to fascist ideals and a serious problem in and of itself it still hadn't yet transformed into the neo-reactionary movement that it is today. That is to say I think there were a lot of people in that general counter cultural sphere back then who weren't really animated by ideological malevolence at the time, but that they were objectively at high-risk of becoming reactionaries as soon as they started to perceive their precious treats as being threatened.
That's part of a more general counter-culture schism I perceive, where a lot of people I'd describe as chauvinist libertines were vaguely progressive, vaguely leftist, vaguely anti-imperialist but all in a very incoherent and unsure way, and when the right catalyst hit (I think Gamergate is a good marker for that, although it wasn't the only angle that reactionary propagandists were using imo) the ones who were more credulous or chauvinist or libertine went full frothing fash over the course of a few years while everyone else pulled back and filtered into a newly recovering left that was less tolerant of chauvinism than the western left was before (although still too tolerant of it). And I think that was a necessary step, because without all of the worst people from that time being explicitly turned into frothing reactionaries I think the old brand of edgy chauvinist humor would still be a dominating force on the left, that places like stupidpol would be more the norm and that this would be as toxic to leftist communities as it was before. In fact, I think that process is still ongoing with how the absolute worst quasi-leftists are sort of boiled away and forced to turn into reactionary grifters, like V**sh and Haz and before them the shitheads who formed stupidpol.
There's more that can be said about that, but I've already rambled enough about it.
This is kind of my understanding of it contemporarilly, but obviously not firsthand. That alot of it is people trying to do online "magic via Social Influence" which, correct; it is not too dissimilar from channers "meming things into reality."
Like I said in the original comment no receipts were brought up, but it seems to me that if you accept the premise that Q was some sort of op than it also seems like you need someone at least slightly more... sociology-politically literate? (or less stupid to be frank) than the Watkins involved, and as you said there is already the tangential connection. I think this is the case, but am not married to the idea it is Discordia specifically; that's just the allegation I used as an example.
That alot of it is people trying to do online “magic via Social Influence” which, correct; it is not too dissimilar from channers “meming things into reality.”
Yeah, I had an afterthought that the sort of ironic esotericism of it has parallels to the "hyperstition" or meme-magic ideas that originated in weird post-modern quasi-left ideology (I don't know how better to describe that because I have only a passing familiarity with it, mostly from people posting about Nick Land here) that then transformed into occult neo-reactionary tripe because it lacked any sort of actual grounding principles and was just a game for bourgeois edgelord failchildren.
But then that same ironic disbelief in causality also has parallels with shit like Lathe jokes or the Zone or calling dril a prophet, so it's not like it's inherently neo-reactionary despite them embracing it as part of their occult worldview.
I think the "all-encompassing irony" is just assumed as a given in any non-boomer internet community at this point, but people forget that it used to be constrained to obscure message boards. Sincere posting used to be the norm before 4chan and it was easy to get caught up in their irreverence if you were unlucky enough to discover it early.
Ahh could be, I heard about that Watkins guy but wasn't sure if it was still him
I thought a while back some people on 8chan were able to link a alleged Q post to him. This was after Q had been offline for a while, it seemed like he was making an attempt at reviving it but was too stupid to do it. If he had been behind it the whole time I think it's unlikely he would've botched it in the way he did.
Oh I don't believe it was him the whole time. It was probably multiple people impersonating one another for years before Watkins or his team started writing the drops.
It must be really insane to be one of those people and just have to go about your life, knowing that you've pulled off one of the greatest feats of mass brain-poisoning in recorded history.
Shouldn't they have created their own word by now? Why not "Qote"? It's right there.
If you're in line to stop the baby-eating pedo cabal, stay in line!
Me: There's a deep state and the government is powerless.
Also me: Vote.Q has obviously been compromised by the RNC, he used to be so much edgier
Always knew Q was a lib. Fucking CIA hiring Ivy League theatre majors
