3 ms·

>the "plebes" saw a bunch of liars, fraudsters, careerists and also the complete opposite of scientific reasoning. Just like any other field... To me it was "T

>the "plebes" saw a bunch of liars, fraudsters, careerists and also the complete opposite of scientific reasoning. Just like any other field... To me it was "The plebs read a bunch of words that they don't understand, running the information through their everyday layman brain and coming to totally wrong conclusions" This happens all the time. Remember "cell phones will fry your brain"? There is a large subset of the population who will never be able to understand the difference between a microwave oven, microwave communication, radiation, and ionizing radiation. Which leads to situations where someone from that subset stumbles upon some internal AT&T memo's reads them and comes away with "Holy shit, internally they blatantly talk about building towers that emit radiation over the whole population. Literally building huge microwaves to radiate over massive population centers!" More often than not, the scientists, engineers, big brains, whatever, have a good grip and the general population is fucking retarded.

anigbrowl 4y ago
Remember "cell phones will fry your brain" There is a huge overlap between '5f panic', anti-vax, panic, and all kinds of other panics. A lot of people who wind up things like the Qanon cult end up there because they had some sort of technological or political anxiety, networked with other people who had similar uncertainties, and were drawn into a radicalization funnel. There is plenty of financial and political capital to be made by fleecing such people. Flat earth nonsense is another example of the same phenomenon. If you go down that rabbit hole you find a warren of religious fundamentalism, built on the idea that earth ain't flat, space is fake, the Bible explains the stars are tiny lights mounted on a firmament, NASA is a satanic conspiracy, and it's time to take up arms against the forces of evil. All radical funnels follow the same sort of pattern, which is derived from sales and marketing: goofballs > grifters > true believers > organizers> extremists > martyrs/terrorists. Of course, you can make similar observations about partisan politics, geopolitics and so on; institutions function as funnels for the production of future elites who maintain the status quo through increasingly coercive means. Radicalization funnels differ mainly in terms of transparency, accountability, visibility, and speed of transition.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  There's also the whole "half of america can't even read at a highschool level" thing.
xnx 4y ago
Also: Panic over "chemicals"

anigbrowl 4y ago

Remember "cell phones will fry your brain" There is a huge overlap between '5f panic', anti-vax, panic, and all kinds of other panics. A lot of people who wind up things like the Qanon cult end up there because they had some sort of technological or political anxiety, networked with other people who had similar uncertainties, and were drawn into a radicalization funnel. There is plenty of financial and political capital to be made by fleecing such people. Flat earth nonsense is another example of the same phenomenon. If you go down that rabbit hole you find a warren of religious fundamentalism, built on the idea that earth ain't flat, space is fake, the Bible explains the stars are tiny lights mounted on a firmament, NASA is a satanic conspiracy, and it's time to take up arms against the forces of evil. All radical funnels follow the same sort of pattern, which is derived from sales and marketing: goofballs > grifters > true believers > organizers> extremists > martyrs/terrorists. Of course, you can make similar observations about partisan politics, geopolitics and so on; institutions function as funnels for the production of future elites who maintain the status quo through increasingly coercive means. Radicalization funnels differ mainly in terms of transparency, accountability, visibility, and speed of transition.

mrguyorama 4y ago
There's also the whole "half of america can't even read at a highschool level" thing.

xnx 4y ago

Also: Panic over "chemicals"