Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The US government was expressly not designed to have two-party rule (even just having parties was not supposed to happen), the founding documents and their writers just assumed a looooot of good faith for participants in government. Sadly, that government was built to let human beings govern human beings, which mean all that good faith shit was an astoundingly stupid idea that we've spent the last few centuries having to try and rectify; if we hadn't spent over two hundred years fighting the massive shortcomings of the original government design and combating the people and groups looking to exploit and damage that system even more in order to help themselves, we might actually have a decent government by now.
About the only excusable part of the situation was that the US was something of a trendsetter at the time in taking the growth of democracy to the next logical step, but it didn't really have any good examples to build off without going back several centuries. I can't help but feel like a silver lining to that is other new democracies looking at the mess of the two-party system and making actual rules to prevent it instead of having any trust at all in people.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Iirc Washington complained about parties. Or was that Madison?
And yet it was inevitable given the way it was setup, and frankly, given any attempt to organize people.
Way to go, dipshits.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
The American government was not designed for a two party system, a two party system was inevitable because of how it was designed.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
First Past the Post makes sense in an 18th century context: it's quick, it's simple, and a representative democracy kind of makes sense when you're a group of 13 independent nations. The representatives from Virginia are meant to represent Virginia, after all.
Unfortunately it doesn't make as much sense two hundred years later, when voting technology is more advanced, people are more informed, news travels faster, and the United States are more United.
Basically, it's a Sovereign Citizen thing that the US stopped being a country in 1871 and became a corporation. Therefore, every law and amendment passed since then, including changing inaugurations from March 4th to January 20th, is invalid. Come March 4th, Trump is going to take control of the ACTUAL country, not the corporation.
So we've got about a month reprieve while they wait for their messiah's glorious return.
ArcTangent on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited January 2021
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Ninja Snarl P on
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Basically, it's a Sovereign Citizen thing that the US stopped being a country in 1871 and became a corporation. Therefore, every law and amendment passed since then, including changing inaugurations from March 4th to January 20th, is invalid. Come March 4th, Trump is going to take control of the ACTUAL country, not the corporation.
So we've got about a month reprieve while they wait for their messiah's glorious return.
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
The US isn’t a monarchy, so it takes some special mental gymnastics to do it on a generational basis, but the idea isn’t that unusual.
Edit: also to give the founding fathers a bit of the benefit of the doubt on the two party system, while it was obvious that it would be a thing within a few years of the constitution actually being adopted, there wasn’t really a lot of reason for them to believe that beforehand. Parliament didn’t really work like that at the time, it was basically a patronage system where a few “big men” would form coalitions around themselves rather than an organized party. The continental congress was similar, it was really the presidential election system that quickly pushed things into the 2 party system.
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
The US isn’t a monarchy, so it takes some special mental gymnastics to do it on a generational basis, but the idea isn’t that unusual.
I mean it’s less that they believe the government is illegitimate and more that they believe that by saying or doing certain things that government will be bound or forced to behave a certain way. Ie, when people fight against an illegitimate government, they still contend with the reality of that governments power, and are either willing to be arrested or die on that principle. But with sovereign citizens and the whole “the government is a corporation” thing they seem to believe that the government will be unable to arrest or hurt them because if this. Like there’s a difference between not recognising the authority of a government as legitimate and genuinely believing that because you can “prove it” you will be immune from its power
The 1871 incorporation act only applied to the cities of Washingon and Georgetown in the District of Columbia (at the time there were still two of the original three cities left in DC, Washington didn't comprise the entire thing until 1974), not the federal government... and involved the revocation of the existing incorporated charters for both cities because they were already incorporated. The federal government is also incorporated, but that happened somewhat too early in the country's history to fit the narrative.
Should go without saying that an incorporated government is not the same thing as a corporation.
. I can't help but feel like a silver lining to that is other new democracies looking at the mess of the two-party system and making actual rules to prevent it instead of having any trust at all in people.
Yep... A lot of comparative politics studies is basically seeing every 19th-20th century democracy say "hmm let's not do that"
In post-war Europe and east Asia it was even American advisors explicitly saying that
Eddy on
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
The US isn’t a monarchy, so it takes some special mental gymnastics to do it on a generational basis, but the idea isn’t that unusual.
Edit: also to give the founding fathers a bit of the benefit of the doubt on the two party system, while it was obvious that it would be a thing within a few years of the constitution actually being adopted, there wasn’t really a lot of reason for them to believe that beforehand. Parliament didn’t really work like that at the time, it was basically a patronage system where a few “big men” would form coalitions around themselves rather than an organized party. The continental congress was similar, it was really the presidential election system that quickly pushed things into the 2 party system.
Ur-example, which I never get tired of citing, right here:
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
The US isn’t a monarchy, so it takes some special mental gymnastics to do it on a generational basis, but the idea isn’t that unusual.
I mean it’s less that they believe the government is illegitimate and more that they believe that by saying or doing certain things that government will be bound or forced to behave a certain way. Ie, when people fight against an illegitimate government, they still contend with the reality of that governments power, and are either willing to be arrested or die on that principle. But with sovereign citizens and the whole “the government is a corporation” thing they seem to believe that the government will be unable to arrest or hurt them because if this. Like there’s a difference between not recognising the authority of a government as legitimate and genuinely believing that because you can “prove it” you will be immune from its power
There are two things I find interesting about the whole SovCit worldview
The first is this belief that the world is governed by arcane and real, actionable metaphysical rules that can be subverted/ignored if you have the correct Knowledge in your head and the right Words to express them.
I feel like the main part of this may simply be mental illness and/or the natural conspiratorial/human desire to have the world make sense and for you to secretly be a special wizard, but it feels to me like an inevitable byproduct of the 20th century's rapid ad hoc refashioning of absolutely everything, where not only nation-states but ideologies literally fought for power, where abject totalitarianism became truly implementable and thus plausibly conceivable for the modern paranoiac to both be stuck in and to wield, and where neoliberalism thought it won a final victory in the West and preened in the ultimate (in every sense) investiture of power into the individual.
I understand the loss of any given government's sense of legitimacy to a disaffected layman. I think I can empathize with finding it hard to conceptualize an abstract organization's supreme power within a land border, and what that reifies into (monopoly on violence). I can also empathize with resenting being assigned a citizenship at birth depending on arbitrary parameters of blood and/or soil.
That warps into the second thing that is so fascinating: the idea that they are immune to the repercussions of power.
It is a really weird and interesting thing that postmodern philosophers loved thinking about during the height of navelgazing at the end of history (Baudrillard, Debord). If you do something ironically, is it authentic and/or prosecutable and/or real? (Post-postmod thinkers and the judicial system: yes, obviously. SovCit thinkers: maek u think.) This combines with the first thing about Words: because we are so loudly beholden to a legal framework based on words, surely they can use their own words to combat them. At some point I could see how, especially due to my background as an attorney, semantics became the arena to them, not real life.
Eddy on
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
I mean sure, we can gallavant around post-modern political theory. Or we can look at shamans conducting rituals that make you immune from bullets, and remind ourselves that magic is in fact a pretty goddamn old way of thinking.
Of course the US Gov could just do what it wants, but enough people know where you are and what you're doing that disappearing you would just make the problem worse. The US is a country of laws, and governed by laws (that make no sense to the layman), so it's better to just leave the odd loophole open for those that don't really push the envelope and force their hand than make a big fuss.
All set against the whole "got off on a technicality" mindset that is a staple of most crime genres. Only now, rather than the rich and powerful doing it for a murder, you're following the same weird trick to get out of parking tickets.
It's less magic words to control the Beast, more doing the stuff they see every week in some way, just done in a way they can use.
Obviously you're not going to get away with serious crimes by doing this, but even dragging out lawsuits is seen as a way that you can get out of a charge on TV (usually by the villain)- a rich guy just being too much work to catch etc.
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
This reminds me of a popular conspiracy in the Catholic church that alwayskeeps appearing every century: the Pope isn't the real Pope and everything new introduced in the past 100 years isn't REAL Catholicism.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
This reminds me of a popular conspiracy in the Catholic church that alwayskeeps appearing every century: the Pope isn't the real Pope and everything new introduced in the past 100 years isn't REAL Catholicism.
Do the same people have an uncle who works at the Vatican?
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
This reminds me of a popular conspiracy in the Catholic church that alwayskeeps appearing every century: the Pope isn't the real Pope and everything new introduced in the past 100 years isn't REAL Catholicism.
Do the same people have an uncle who works at the Vatican?
You wouldn't know him because he goes to another diocese in Canada.
I think the most laughable part of that is that they claim everything that's happened since 1871 is invalid because it's not the "real" country doing it, except that, as far as government goes, if you have a "fake" government doing everything in place of the government it replaced and has the power to enforce the laws it makes, then there is actually no difference between the "fake" and "real" governments.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
This reminds me of a popular conspiracy in the Catholic church that alwayskeeps appearing every century: the Pope isn't the real Pope and everything new introduced in the past 100 years isn't REAL Catholicism.
Do the same people have an uncle who works at the Vatican?
This is a great reference list for signs that a viral social media post is hopium, rather than news.
quoted tweet:
This. I keep seeing more and more BlueAnon content bubbling up. Some quick tips for identifying AnonCrap:
-Magical thinking
-Fortunetelling
-Vague predictions of future events
-Implied but withheld insider knowledge
-No sources
-Sensationalist rhetoric
-Stringing audience along
Quote Tweet
Mike Rothschild is a conspiracy theory book writer. Yes, he has a funny name.
Dunno who the other guy is.
I don't see why a 'BlueAnon' would even get traction. It's not necessary. There's plenty of sourced, well-documented, thoroughly-investigated wrongdoing coming out in major news sources about "powerful Republicans". Other powerful figures are publicly calling for investigations, resignations, and expulsion. The former President's impeachment trial is starting in a couple of weeks.
QAnon took off because Trump was not obviously doing anything useful to his base and they desperately wanted to believe he was, somehow, a genius making highly-classified maneuvers to benefit them no matter how much it looked like he was a lying liar who lies a lot concerned with very little besides grift, his golf handicap, and retaining power.
From where I sit that looks like a feeble attempt at ~both sides~. One Twitter account overhyping the possibility of charges does not a conspiracy theory make.
Because unlike Qanon everything in that tweet does have a chance of happening, they're just deeply overconfident about it.
+8
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I ZimbraWorst song, played on ugliest guitarRegistered Userregular
From where I sit that looks like a feeble attempt at ~both sides~. One Twitter account overhyping the possibility of charges does not a conspiracy theory make.
Because unlike Qanon everything in that tweet does have a chance of happening, they're just deeply overconfident about it.
I like to think the left is less susceptible to conspiracy thinking than the right but, like, Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and those "Alt/Rogue staffer" twitter accounts all found an audience over the past four years. We're definitely not immune.
From where I sit that looks like a feeble attempt at ~both sides~. One Twitter account overhyping the possibility of charges does not a conspiracy theory make.
Because unlike Qanon everything in that tweet does have a chance of happening, they're just deeply overconfident about it.
I like to think the left is less susceptible to conspiracy thinking than the right but, like, Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and those "Alt/Rogue staffer" twitter accounts all found an audience over the past four years. We're definitely not immune.
Oh, sure. There's the possibility of something developing. I just haven't seen any evidence for it beyond one overenthusiastic tweet.
9/11 was mainly on the left for a while, back in the days when it was merely "it was a foreign attack but the government is hiding something" and not "holographic teleporting Jew planes" it was more a matter of trusting or not trusting the Bush administration.
And antivaxx leaned more left than right in the days before dying of the fucking plague became a partisan position.
There's also less obvious bunk that the left buys into all the time. Take for example the WWF's annual mathematically dubious calculations about what percentage of nature we've destroyed and beyond-worst-case climate predictions. And generally speaking, conspiracy believers start as people accepting unverified facts that reinforced their worldview.
I don't see why a 'BlueAnon' would even get traction. It's not necessary. There's plenty of sourced, well-documented, thoroughly-investigated wrongdoing coming out in major news sources about "powerful Republicans". Other powerful figures are publicly calling for investigations, resignations, and expulsion. The former President's impeachment trial is starting in a couple of weeks.
QAnon took off because Trump was not obviously doing anything useful to his base and they desperately wanted to believe he was, somehow, a genius making highly-classified maneuvers to benefit them no matter how much it looked like he was a lying liar who lies a lot concerned with very little besides grift, his golf handicap, and retaining power.
Yep, Qanon only works when you have nothing else to hang your hopes on. Like Trump did so little governing and passed so few things(while making such huge promises that where never going to be possible), that the only way out of the sunken cost was that he was busy doing more important stuff. Admitting that he was a mortal man, would have been a huge climb down for most Trump supporters considering his rhetoric.
Trump's plain spoke saying it like it is persona was not predicating on telling the truth, it was predicated on saying the quite parts out loud. To a generation used to hearing dog-whistle racism with carefully crafted code words and phrases, hearing somebody say racist shit out loud came off as very plainspoken. Refreshing and new(despite being old rehash of the deep south segregationist talk). Problem was that once you signed up with somebody saying very racist things, you look the double fool once it turns out he is incompetent. That the reason he says racist shit out loud is because he is too stupid to use dog-whistles. That your preferred candidate is a Chauncey Gardner situation.
So faced with reality, you double down. Everything he says is profound, the crass tasteless jokes where brilliant satire and the Emperors clothes are actually the finest you have ever seen.
And his failure to get anything done was because he was fighting a cavernous deep state across multiple dimensions using every bit of his brilliance that left him with no time to pass such mundane things a legislation.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Further to the above, regardless of whether you fall on the right or the left, no one in a democratic system should be praising the idea of things like secret indictments, military tribunals, or people being replaced with body doubles. These are attacks on the very notion of an accountable and responsible government.
From where I sit that looks like a feeble attempt at ~both sides~. One Twitter account overhyping the possibility of charges does not a conspiracy theory make.
Because unlike Qanon everything in that tweet does have a chance of happening, they're just deeply overconfident about it.
I like to think the left is less susceptible to conspiracy thinking than the right but, like, Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and those "Alt/Rogue staffer" twitter accounts all found an audience over the past four years. We're definitely not immune.
The thread talks about Seth Abramson in the replies. He's such a bullshitter that tweets from him are banned in DnD. And people still post stuff from him saying "I know he's a bullshitter but listen to what he has to say here..."
I remember people on the left telling me Bush did 9/11 and being 100% serious. They thought it was planted charges.
Absolutely, the big difference is they werent being elected to Congress because of holding those beliefs, or being regularly invited guests on network broadcast programs to spread those beliefs.
From where I sit that looks like a feeble attempt at ~both sides~. One Twitter account overhyping the possibility of charges does not a conspiracy theory make.
Because unlike Qanon everything in that tweet does have a chance of happening, they're just deeply overconfident about it.
I like to think the left is less susceptible to conspiracy thinking than the right but, like, Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and those "Alt/Rogue staffer" twitter accounts all found an audience over the past four years. We're definitely not immune.
The difference is we get annoyed at them constantly crying wolf, rather than making up a new religion based on their teachings.
From where I sit that looks like a feeble attempt at ~both sides~. One Twitter account overhyping the possibility of charges does not a conspiracy theory make.
Because unlike Qanon everything in that tweet does have a chance of happening, they're just deeply overconfident about it.
I like to think the left is less susceptible to conspiracy thinking than the right but, like, Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and those "Alt/Rogue staffer" twitter accounts all found an audience over the past four years. We're definitely not immune.
The difference is we get annoyed at them constantly crying wolf, rather than making up a new religion based on their teachings.
I mean there are conspiracy theorist leftists, but we generally don't elect them to congress/the presidency. Like that's the difference, the left has crazies and we go "oh we need better mental health care" the right goes "this person sound great for senator!"
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
The Democrats also hold members to some level of account. If you look at the backgrounds of the Q-tier crazies on the right and then the history of disgraced Democrats being told to resign and fuck off to some hole somewhere you'd see they would never have gotten where they are with the support they enjoy.
The Democrats also hold members to some level of account. If you look at the backgrounds of the Q-tier crazies on the right and then the history of disgraced Democrats being told to resign and fuck off to some hole somewhere you'd see they would never have gotten where they are with the support they enjoy.
Yeah. If Katie Hill and Al Franken were Republicans they would still be seated today.
You don’t even have to whatif it. Kevin McCarthy was accused of the same thing essentially Katie Hill was and is the Majority leader right now.
(Not to say either had done anything equivalent to supporting a violent insurrection but just pointing out the double standard).
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
On a totally different note, I was talking to a coworker who once met a moose denialist.
Yes, as in, the guy claimed that moose weren't real, all the stories of these giant deer-things in the wooded northlands were lies and hoaxes, like people claiming they saw Bigfoot or had mounted jackelopes or something.
The coworker thought this was a bit the guy was doing, but found out it was real when there was a gap of a few months when he didn't see the guy, and then after the gap the guy was all "MOOSE ARE REAL! THEY'RE HUGE!" in tones of awe and discovery. Turns out, other people around the guy got tired of the denialism and took him on a hunting trip north so he could actually see a dang moose out in the wild. And he did, and he was cured of this one conspiracy theory.
If only the rest of them could be fixed so easily.
Posts
About the only excusable part of the situation was that the US was something of a trendsetter at the time in taking the growth of democracy to the next logical step, but it didn't really have any good examples to build off without going back several centuries. I can't help but feel like a silver lining to that is other new democracies looking at the mess of the two-party system and making actual rules to prevent it instead of having any trust at all in people.
And yet it was inevitable given the way it was setup, and frankly, given any attempt to organize people.
Way to go, dipshits.
Unfortunately it doesn't make as much sense two hundred years later, when voting technology is more advanced, people are more informed, news travels faster, and the United States are more United.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/88akpx/qanon-thinks-trump-will-become-president-again-on-march-4
Basically, it's a Sovereign Citizen thing that the US stopped being a country in 1871 and became a corporation. Therefore, every law and amendment passed since then, including changing inaugurations from March 4th to January 20th, is invalid. Come March 4th, Trump is going to take control of the ACTUAL country, not the corporation.
So we've got about a month reprieve while they wait for their messiah's glorious return.
So it's a conspiracy where they claim the government isn't real when the government clearly does exist and is real and no amount of "gotcha!" conspiracy explanations is going to magically make it all melt into a puddle of embarrassment at getting found out. And who would even fucking run the "real" country if it suddenly came back? All government folks would be from the fake government (and presumably have some dire fate like execution in store for them), leaving a supposedly real government with nobody to actually run it... and everything about how it works would be massively outdated and completely incapable of operating in the modern world.
I guess there is some kind of underground US population, literally living somewhere between the surface world and the domain of the lizard people? And said underground citizens have been updating the "real" US to match the modern world before rising up to cast off the fake government?
Oh just pack it in you silly bastards.
Yeah it’s always struck me as insane. Like it’s a fake government, but technically it still does everything a real government would do, including democratic representation and voting. It’s like saying “you can’t murder me you’re only pretending to be a murderer by murdering everyone!”
It’s like, if I’m murdering people to pretend that I’m a murderer, you’re not going to get out of being murdered by shouting gotcha!
If a governing body has popular support and a monopoly on violence over a country, sorry guys, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporation or a country club, it’s the government
Remember, these guys are not above literal insurrection. Civil War 2 a.k.a. "the Boogaloo" is very much in their wheelhouse.
Washington "complained" about parties in the sense of "every right thinking person is a Federalist."
Its been pretty common throughout history for that kind of thing to happen though. “The King/emperor/caliph isn’t real, soandso is the real one whose ancestors were screwed out of it”. Most of the time it was done just because a social movement needed a mascot to provide them legitimacy (which backfired in a few instances when they were successful, installed the new king, and he proceeded to not give a shit about whatever his supporters pet cause was and do whatever he wanted.)
The US isn’t a monarchy, so it takes some special mental gymnastics to do it on a generational basis, but the idea isn’t that unusual.
Edit: also to give the founding fathers a bit of the benefit of the doubt on the two party system, while it was obvious that it would be a thing within a few years of the constitution actually being adopted, there wasn’t really a lot of reason for them to believe that beforehand. Parliament didn’t really work like that at the time, it was basically a patronage system where a few “big men” would form coalitions around themselves rather than an organized party. The continental congress was similar, it was really the presidential election system that quickly pushed things into the 2 party system.
I mean it’s less that they believe the government is illegitimate and more that they believe that by saying or doing certain things that government will be bound or forced to behave a certain way. Ie, when people fight against an illegitimate government, they still contend with the reality of that governments power, and are either willing to be arrested or die on that principle. But with sovereign citizens and the whole “the government is a corporation” thing they seem to believe that the government will be unable to arrest or hurt them because if this. Like there’s a difference between not recognising the authority of a government as legitimate and genuinely believing that because you can “prove it” you will be immune from its power
Should go without saying that an incorporated government is not the same thing as a corporation.
Yep... A lot of comparative politics studies is basically seeing every 19th-20th century democracy say "hmm let's not do that"
In post-war Europe and east Asia it was even American advisors explicitly saying that
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Ur-example, which I never get tired of citing, right here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardiya
There are two things I find interesting about the whole SovCit worldview
The first is this belief that the world is governed by arcane and real, actionable metaphysical rules that can be subverted/ignored if you have the correct Knowledge in your head and the right Words to express them.
I feel like the main part of this may simply be mental illness and/or the natural conspiratorial/human desire to have the world make sense and for you to secretly be a special wizard, but it feels to me like an inevitable byproduct of the 20th century's rapid ad hoc refashioning of absolutely everything, where not only nation-states but ideologies literally fought for power, where abject totalitarianism became truly implementable and thus plausibly conceivable for the modern paranoiac to both be stuck in and to wield, and where neoliberalism thought it won a final victory in the West and preened in the ultimate (in every sense) investiture of power into the individual.
I understand the loss of any given government's sense of legitimacy to a disaffected layman. I think I can empathize with finding it hard to conceptualize an abstract organization's supreme power within a land border, and what that reifies into (monopoly on violence). I can also empathize with resenting being assigned a citizenship at birth depending on arbitrary parameters of blood and/or soil.
That warps into the second thing that is so fascinating: the idea that they are immune to the repercussions of power.
It is a really weird and interesting thing that postmodern philosophers loved thinking about during the height of navelgazing at the end of history (Baudrillard, Debord). If you do something ironically, is it authentic and/or prosecutable and/or real? (Post-postmod thinkers and the judicial system: yes, obviously. SovCit thinkers: maek u think.) This combines with the first thing about Words: because we are so loudly beholden to a legal framework based on words, surely they can use their own words to combat them. At some point I could see how, especially due to my background as an attorney, semantics became the arena to them, not real life.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Of course the US Gov could just do what it wants, but enough people know where you are and what you're doing that disappearing you would just make the problem worse. The US is a country of laws, and governed by laws (that make no sense to the layman), so it's better to just leave the odd loophole open for those that don't really push the envelope and force their hand than make a big fuss.
All set against the whole "got off on a technicality" mindset that is a staple of most crime genres. Only now, rather than the rich and powerful doing it for a murder, you're following the same weird trick to get out of parking tickets.
It's less magic words to control the Beast, more doing the stuff they see every week in some way, just done in a way they can use.
Obviously you're not going to get away with serious crimes by doing this, but even dragging out lawsuits is seen as a way that you can get out of a charge on TV (usually by the villain)- a rich guy just being too much work to catch etc.
This reminds me of a popular conspiracy in the Catholic church that alwayskeeps appearing every century: the Pope isn't the real Pope and everything new introduced in the past 100 years isn't REAL Catholicism.
Do the same people have an uncle who works at the Vatican?
You wouldn't know him because he goes to another diocese in Canada.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
No but I have an aunt who does potpurri.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Dunno who the other guy is.
QAnon took off because Trump was not obviously doing anything useful to his base and they desperately wanted to believe he was, somehow, a genius making highly-classified maneuvers to benefit them no matter how much it looked like he was a lying liar who lies a lot concerned with very little besides grift, his golf handicap, and retaining power.
Because unlike Qanon everything in that tweet does have a chance of happening, they're just deeply overconfident about it.
I like to think the left is less susceptible to conspiracy thinking than the right but, like, Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and those "Alt/Rogue staffer" twitter accounts all found an audience over the past four years. We're definitely not immune.
Oh, sure. There's the possibility of something developing. I just haven't seen any evidence for it beyond one overenthusiastic tweet.
And antivaxx leaned more left than right in the days before dying of the fucking plague became a partisan position.
There's also less obvious bunk that the left buys into all the time. Take for example the WWF's annual mathematically dubious calculations about what percentage of nature we've destroyed and beyond-worst-case climate predictions. And generally speaking, conspiracy believers start as people accepting unverified facts that reinforced their worldview.
Yep, Qanon only works when you have nothing else to hang your hopes on. Like Trump did so little governing and passed so few things(while making such huge promises that where never going to be possible), that the only way out of the sunken cost was that he was busy doing more important stuff. Admitting that he was a mortal man, would have been a huge climb down for most Trump supporters considering his rhetoric.
Trump's plain spoke saying it like it is persona was not predicating on telling the truth, it was predicated on saying the quite parts out loud. To a generation used to hearing dog-whistle racism with carefully crafted code words and phrases, hearing somebody say racist shit out loud came off as very plainspoken. Refreshing and new(despite being old rehash of the deep south segregationist talk). Problem was that once you signed up with somebody saying very racist things, you look the double fool once it turns out he is incompetent. That the reason he says racist shit out loud is because he is too stupid to use dog-whistles. That your preferred candidate is a Chauncey Gardner situation.
So faced with reality, you double down. Everything he says is profound, the crass tasteless jokes where brilliant satire and the Emperors clothes are actually the finest you have ever seen.
And his failure to get anything done was because he was fighting a cavernous deep state across multiple dimensions using every bit of his brilliance that left him with no time to pass such mundane things a legislation.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
Absolutely, the big difference is they werent being elected to Congress because of holding those beliefs, or being regularly invited guests on network broadcast programs to spread those beliefs.
MWO: Adamski
The difference is we get annoyed at them constantly crying wolf, rather than making up a new religion based on their teachings.
I mean there are conspiracy theorist leftists, but we generally don't elect them to congress/the presidency. Like that's the difference, the left has crazies and we go "oh we need better mental health care" the right goes "this person sound great for senator!"
pleasepaypreacher.net
Yeah. If Katie Hill and Al Franken were Republicans they would still be seated today.
You don’t even have to whatif it. Kevin McCarthy was accused of the same thing essentially Katie Hill was and is the Majority leader right now.
(Not to say either had done anything equivalent to supporting a violent insurrection but just pointing out the double standard).
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/marjorie-taylor-greene-penned-conspiracy-theory-laser-beam-space-started-deadly-2018
One of the posts she sanitized the other day was one blaming Jewish space lasers for the California wildfires. Which is silly, because scripture clearly shows that Jewish space lasers will only burn one bush at a time.
Yes, as in, the guy claimed that moose weren't real, all the stories of these giant deer-things in the wooded northlands were lies and hoaxes, like people claiming they saw Bigfoot or had mounted jackelopes or something.
The coworker thought this was a bit the guy was doing, but found out it was real when there was a gap of a few months when he didn't see the guy, and then after the gap the guy was all "MOOSE ARE REAL! THEY'RE HUGE!" in tones of awe and discovery. Turns out, other people around the guy got tired of the denialism and took him on a hunting trip north so he could actually see a dang moose out in the wild. And he did, and he was cured of this one conspiracy theory.
If only the rest of them could be fixed so easily.