Edited by solidar ()
pogfan1996 posted:maybe q was right
I downvoted this by accident Pogman..... but I think poster Tractor Factory was right when they said, QAnon helped the Capitol clown car think they didn’t need any plan, any guns, any idea of what to demand or how to get it. It helped make sure that no real insurrection happened, if there were ever even a chance of it happening.
QAnon’s main impact was to reify the current far-right view of “revolution”, that it doesn’t happen because of anything in the world and doesn’t take any mass mutual effort to achieve. Instead, “revolution” is a magical event that occurs when the proper signs and rituals are invoked in the right place. Every recent act of public violence from the far right, real or planned, has followed this notion. “Lone wolf” shooters have penned their manifestos and stuck to their politics in custody because they think they will “spark” something that will end with them broken out of prison and carried aloft on the shoulders of the grateful white “small business owners”.
Rather than QAnon leading to firearm-toting mobs in the streets, it helped prompt a bunch of unarmed, unprepared goofs to rush a building they could only enter (being as open-minded as I can here) through either cop complicity or unprecedented unpreparedness built from the idea that rich crackers always do what cops say. One clown, clad in absurd “tactical” gear, brought a fistful of cop-style zip-ties. The DA says he planned to cuff some Congress people... okay, you zip-tied a Congress person... then what...? Sit around and wait for someone else to make it stick, that’s what: the president, or the “good” Congress men, etc., someone to imbue your act with meaning through power you don’t have. The “insurrectionists” moved in and right back out again like McDonald’s drive-thru customers, content that they were legitimate representatives of a power that didn’t even truly devolve on them from above, the only power that could really DO anything, a power they sought only to invoke, not to employ. So they left as quickly as they came, pun intended, believing they’d completed the magic ritual of Watering the tree with the blood of patriots, and necessarily, the President of Coins would have to respond with the rite of Draining the swamp. So it had been written!
And now... betrayal, the only possible outcome. Trump got on TV to defend his own capital, to reduce his $$$ liability after leaving office, by disclaiming and denouncing the riot. Left-liberals compare this to the Beer Hall Putsch, as though Ludendorff had cast aside the Nazis for their loony dead-end conspiracy theories rather than the exact opposite. As for the wannabe “party” itself, those far-righters not present at the Capitol did not wait even half a day before denouncing their fellows as gay Communists, as frauds and spies, because to fight the state was not the Q way; in the ruling far right pseudo-theology, the Cop, the Troop, would gratefully and happily do all the dirty work once the runes were cast, and to stand against the power of the state was to deny the righteous sorcery of the cause. “Fighting back” was supposed to stop when the fighting started. That was when the true believers were supposed to sit on the couch and wait for their future to be delivered to them by those already in power, as had been promised to them by the signs and signals they had divined. Anything else was sin, “antifa”, gay Communist crossing of “the thin blue line”.
The party now taking power in United $naKKKe$ will do what it has always done since at least when it became what it is now: use what has happened to enact policies it already supports. It will be the ultimate rush to lick the boot from the cocktail-circuit party faithful that dictates what’s acceptable in public conversation. Any resistance that was previously heroic will become villainous, because we can’t be too careful now! Violent state repression and security-state informants, usefully portrayed as oppressive evils under the Bad Guy, transform themselves into patriotic virtue under the Good Guy, the guy whose handlers know they’re supposed to frown thoughtfully as their paramilitaries advance on the reserve labor army in cities all across the country, pig-troops armed to the teeth and ready to kill, because this time the mob isn’t well-off and white and half made up of the enforcers themselves.
cars posted:so many people turning to CIA-seed “privacy” application Signal that its servers went offline for a day. Or that happened for another reason lol. Anyway, “use Signal” -Elorn Musk
I heard that this was due to large amounts of people in India switching away from Whatsapp because they changed their terms of service
Our unnamed protagonist's face is obscured as he does synchronized moves on stage, but takes a moment to think back to his mission at the Capitol. Was he MAGA posing as antifa or antifa posing as MAGA, or did he work for both sides... or was he just there for the party?
That's about 30 bucks worth of oxygen. A normal patient would use one per 24 hours, but a covid patient could use 10 of them. That's pretty bad, but it's still 300 USD per patient/day. The fact this hospital- in a city of 2 million people- is struggling to get its https://t.co/BhNKBMXHmC
— Linecook (@LLinecook) January 21, 2021
Edited by solidar ()
solidar posted:some real lazy shit posting above me. i dunno folks, maybe be more skeptical of the narrative that amerikkkan capitalism is just "doing it's best and accidentally killed some folks" irt covid? at least in the fucking conspiracy thread?
i wouldn't go as far as that linecook twitter account in saying that it was a planned release of a virus to push the world to this state. but short of that last bit (planned release), i'd say their points would read as something closer to: large scale capitalists, the gates/bezos and the related corporate orgs and capitalist state orgs have worked and coordinated together on how to manage the public, public perception, and long term planning during this crisis. is it really so unthinkable to suggest that some capitalists might try to corner the market of a valuable commodity and then limit it's release to maximize profits (deaths and health not given any consideration)? is it really wild to think that amazon and the fucking spook filled silicon valley goons might have been less than honest in public, maybe even purposefully spread fear so that they could get some additional property and profits for cheaper? what alternative vision of the world are you all even putting forth here? that the capitalists as a whole are just completely disorganized, have/had no plan, and for some reason decided not to try to take advantage of this crisis for their own gain?
fauci did such a bang-up job with aids under regean, that bush 2 gave him a lead role in his "compassionate conservatism" state dept run african aids program, so i'm sure with that experience he was really helping trump do the absolute best for the public with covid. you barely have to dig at all into the lead names of folks pushing this or that response/cure/approach to find equally illustrious backgrounds - if you don't find immediately find that they are massive grifts.
this thread isn't "blaming all negligent covid homicides on bill fucken gates" i would at least read it as trying to dig into the exact specifics of "capitalism's negligent covid homicides"We spent April paying public hospitals to exterminate mostly poor old black people by admitting worried-well to "rule out covid," warehousing them until they got it, then bullying them into execution by vent by telling them covid had an 80% CFR.
— Linecook (@LLinecook) January 16, 2021
Makes sense they don't trust vax https://t.co/yfDYa3I6nX
we've at least all moved on to accept that the wuhan wet market wasn't the origin right? we can admit that that was just a big anti-china racist media narrative? at least we would be looking at that as the first super spreading event, although there have been various reports claiming that it was already global by the fall of 2019.
only the anti-communist far right is crying out that the CCP manufactured the virus. the wuhan institute of virology had partnerships with various US academic institutions, got NIH funding through western charity orgs like EcoHealth Alliance. lets take a look at the facts we know. the wuhan institute of virology has been working with corona viruses from bats for 15 years or more. they have been putting them into human cells, into humanized mice, and doing gain-of-function work. all the reports i've seen claiming that the virus isn't "man-made" break down into pointing out that the virus was not the result of some kind of CRISPR like direct manipulation of viral dna or whatever. any type of more "natural" change to the virus from doing types of research that has been openly admitted to being conducted would be excluded from those claims.
besides a more general point: that i'd argue that we should be seriously opposed to any gain-of-function work or any of the more dangerous research (i did some digging around into RNA vaccines at one point during all of this and the main take away i had afterwards is that 100%, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind, DOD/DARPA/etc are heavily investing into biological warfare through grants and the like that look exactly like the work being done in wuhan/its partner academic institutions) - i don't think it really matters all that much where the virus came from. but that said - in my mind, it's something like 50/50 that it was an 'natural' crossover event from a bat into a human somewhere in southern china vs it being an accidental release from corona virus researchers in wuhan. but hey the WHO is sending a group to wuhan to investigate and the US made sure to include the president of EcoHealth Alliance so i'm sure they'll tell us the whole truth. (i say 'natural' because i think it is important to highlight how much these exposures are the result of capitalism. humans coming into contact with new diseases like this are almost always the result of something like capitalist motivated expansion of agricultural land into wild ecosystems where there was previously very minimal contact between humans and the wildlife)
nah
Finally hearing that!! #Wuhan Seafood Market "is likely to have been a point of amplification. It's clear that there are cases that preceded that event at the Wuhan market." "The case zero may not be the case zero." According to @WHO's latest media briefing on #COVID19 👇 pic.twitter.com/5GzcmLRJU3
— Jingjing Li 李菁菁 (@Jingjing_Li) November 26, 2020
Most people in the world who have even heard of the Wuhan market, though, probably still think "Wuhan market = case zero" is confirmed, including most doctors out there, since most doctors are not scientists or public health officials. Probably everyone coming up with conspiracy theories involving WIV still thinks that's confirmed too.
A plot involving deployment of a new SARS virus by WIV doesn't make sense given what we know now, because it would mean a WIV-complicit conspiracy started by making everyone think that case zero, the jump to humans, was conclusively linked to the Wuhan market, unnecessarily drawing attention directly to Wuhan and to WIV. Studies of MERS and SARS (COVID-19 is SARS-CoV-2, effectively SARS round 2) didn't reach conclusions about mutation rates, or jumps from animals to humans, that required deploying a new SARS virus in Wuhan to make it look like the novel virus appeared in the wild without human intervention. If anywhere in China, it would be expected to happen in Guangdong province in the south near Hong Kong, or even in Hong Kong itself.
The idea that WIV deployed SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon didn't make a lot of sense even when public health experts assumed case zero had to have come from the Wuhan market. If WIV deployed the virus on purpose, especially if they intended for it to become a global pandemic, why would they deploy it in Wuhan at all? To draw attention to themselves as the people deploying it? It would be very easy just to transport and release a coronavirus bioweapon somewhere else. Given what we know about transmission in the earliest identified cases, there'd be no real reason for WIV's supposed bioweapons deployment team to jog down to a local market and let it loose, drawing attention to Wuhan, and a lot of reasons why they wouldn't.
Most conspiracy theories involving WIV push a different theory: that it was an accident, that SARS-CoV-2 was a result of WIV's study of SARS, and lax procedures and controls let it slip out, followed by a global cover-up (by groups that weren't working with WIV and would have no reason to let China off the hook). Those theories tend to focus on how Wuhan is China's first BSL-4 laboratory and achieved that in part because SARS was big news just as the Wuhan lab's project was being spun up. Those conspiracy theories, which are mostly promoted by hardcore anti-Commie John Bircher types, bring those two things up together, BSL-4 and the current virus. Then, they sort of slide from those to the conclusion that all of the above means a novel coronavirus would have to come from WIV.
The problem with that theory is that WIV isn't special at all here, because you don't actually need BSL-4 to work with coronavirus. Coronavirus is studied in non-BSL-4 labs in China and all over the world, especially in places virology research concludes are likely to see a novel coronavirus emerge spontaneously. WIV was just an instance where headline stories about the SARS outbreak in the 2000s resulted in one of China's labs accelerating its BSL-4 project, a project that was a goal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences before SARS, the same way space missions were and are, because they advance China as a research hub. But SARS led to a bunch of labs across Asia studying coronavirus or dedicating more resources to existing study, not just BSL-4 labs. There were probably more labs in Beijing studying coronavirus at the time the virus was recognized than there were in all of Hubei province.
The truth is that almost anywhere a new SARS variant was likely to emerge spontaneously would have a lab studying SARS nearby. That lab would likely be located in or near a big city such as Wuhan, and it would almost certainly work with hybridized coronavirus or something similar. The biggest reason for that should be obvious, and it has nothing to do with any new SARS virus in the wild getting built by one of those labs, let alone deployed by that lab as a bioweapon.
It's the same reason WIV achieved BSL-4 so quickly: because studying SARS became a top priority in the parts of the world most affected by SARS, and also in places studies of SARS deemed likely to see the next novel coronavirus in humans. Those were largely the same places. Concerns over SARS led to public funding of virology research, especially into coronavirus, and that involves testing mutation rates, hybridization, and so on. Wuhan's lab would have been one of those labs anyway.
So unless there's direct and conclusive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab, and none has emerged so far, the reasoning that "implicates" WIV is exactly backwards.
If you took all the locations a new SARS variant was likely to emerge spontaneously according to research on coronavirus (almost all in Asia) and arranged their names randomly on a dartboard, then threw a dart blindfolded, the nearest location to the dart would be pretty likely to have a coronavirus research lab somewhere nearby, studying SARS. That's because it's easy to secure funding for a lab studying coronavirus if a spontaneous, non-engineered novel coronavirus might appear nearby and impact the national economy and embarrass the country in front of the world. SARS-CoV-1 didn't have anywhere near the global reach of SARS-CoV-2, and it managed to do that much, though a lot of officials in the West (at least outside of Toronto) forgot about SARS-CoV-1 almost instantly.
And now, experts who are still paying attention know they can't even link all of the Wuhan cluster of SARS-CoV-2 cases to the Wuhan market. So even if public health experts in the U.S. had concluded publicly, as pure propaganda, that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released by WIV and found its way to the market, they wouldn't have any sound case for that anymore. Saying that it was released on purpose by WIV makes even less sense.
solidar posted:some real lazy shit posting above me. i dunno folks, maybe be more skeptical of the narrative that amerikkkan capitalism is just "doing it's best and accidentally killed some folks"
literally noone ITT is saying that although i apologise if you misunderstood what i meant by negligence
Edited by solidar ()
swampman posted:I'm totally fine with that coming out the debunking kiln as a poorly glazed heap of crackpottery but I also reserve the right to blame Bill Gates for millions of deaths.
solidar posted:is a really bad take imo. a global pandemic that has had massive effects in various markets, spawned some nearly unprecedented gov responses, and has dominated news and our collective minds for a full year now is definitely a unique and large opportunity and i don't think that anything even resembling a bumbling empire narrative is useful starting point of analysis and would much rather read some shitty attempts to piece together what directions things are getting pushed by the bourgeoisie than another "wow can you believe how stupid the united states is" post
bumbling empire isn't at all how im looking at this, more like an empire ideologically incapable of putting humans needs above profit, whose instinctive reaction to any and every crisis is do act in a way that looks like fucking up from the perspective of someone who wants life and society in general to be healthy and fulfilling. i don't think gates et al slowly gaining control of & privatizing international public & charitable health infrastructure is deliberately nefarious or part of a plot to kill for profit, i also don't think incompetence is what makes the outcome look the same anyway
U.S. nationalists also tend to avoid mentioning the much more significant problems handling infectious disease on the part of United States federal agencies and their public-private partnerships, including an incident where the CDC exposed lab workers to live anthrax, a disease that’s actually been weaponized, around the same time CDC virologists studying influenza shipped out a deadly H5N1 strain to another lab by mistake. NIH also announced in recent years that it had socked away smallpox somewhere decades ago and completely forgotten about it, causing a minor global incident, since there are supposed to be only two highly secure locations in the world that store the virus for study.
Bringing up those shocking incidents now still gets called “whataboutism”, in old Cold War-speak, by the English-language news sources that initially reported the incidents themselves. Meaning: it’s embarrassing for them to acknowledge that, if we ever do see a virology lab’s experiments turn into a global pandemic, current evidence suggests the United States is far more likely to be ground zero than China. The bleak comedy here is that the same organizations behind those failures also confidently identified the U.S. as one of the countries best able to handle a pandemic among its citizens, while saying the opposite of China. The same English-language “health news” sources “reported” that as fact for years and were parroted by much of the U.S.-friendly global press.
I expect a lot of people on planet Earth will be asking What About that for a good long while, since gravestones and memorials to the dead are usually built to last.
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant https://t.co/dmEaWcrreL pic.twitter.com/s1yXbdaa1c
— Guardian news (@guardiannews) January 27, 2021
trakfactri posted:Thinking back to this post at the Rhiz
*nodding from my wizards abode but i forgot im drinking lemonade & the straw goes in my throat & im making horrible barf noises as i nod*
........that guy really has turned out to be a late Christmas gift to this thread
Court transcripts present Tarrio as a rat-of-all-trades, a Prolific and multitalented FBI plant deployed for all sorts of highly organized, long-term, deep-cover fed-pig operations. Then someone threw a ninja bomb at the ground & when the smoke cleared Tarrio had become the leader of a new United $naKKKe$ nationwide brownshirt movement. Ok. Except for when Tarrio's brownshirts rioted at the Capitol building though, because the FBI busted Tarrio right before that, then released him with a gold-plated reason for the brownshirts' leader not to appear in person at the most important event in their history. Now Tarrio and the FBI are trading statements in the press about whether the FBI successfully prevented Tarrio from getting in more trouble that day (and now the FBI says they suspected the riot was going to happen??) or whether Tarrio decided on his own to be innocent in a hotel room "100 miles away" from Washington. Oh. Oh ok
Proud Boys are an FBI op and CIA “veterans” are here for us.https://t.co/jC0qhtsBIe
— Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) January 29, 2021
Here's another thing: A few weeks before the big show, you pump up the War Boys by going on a livestream wearing an FBI hat and boast about how the deep state isn't going to take us down and nothing can stop us. See, that proves he's a tough guy and a true alpha dog who will also punch your dad for you. Go buck wild! This is definitely NOT something a deep-cover agent would EVER do to play mindfuck games with these guys.
I also think it goes back to the point about the psychological dependency the far right has toward various (what they perceive as) authority figures, such as cops and their dads (and cop dads), and their dependency on the state, while simultaneously being in denial about it. He is dressed up like a cop and is wearing aviator sunglasses, because he is a cop, and that signals authority, so these dopes follow him because they couldn't find their own asses with their own two hands without someone like him telling them where to look.
There is a Sakai interview where he talks about cops and how they will manipulate men using chauvinism as a tool to break down prisoners in interrogations. Like straight-up, "I was in the military and now I'm a cop and I can do whatever I want, so if you're a real man, you'll snitch." But with cruder and more denigrating language than that, using homophobia as a weapon, etc. And that works on men who have that junk in their head.
cars posted:if Navalny somehow ended up running Russia the countdown would immediately begin to the CIA assassinating him for making them look bad when they put him in charge. I don't know maybe they need target practice.
i would expect them to wait until navalny pawns off all the state assets first
cars posted:if Navalny somehow ended up running Russia the countdown would immediately begin to the CIA assassinating him for making them look bad when they put him in charge.
Literally this. And that might seem to indicate that they learned nothing from every other time this has happened, but what they learned was that it's basically impossible for them to lose, no matter how bad they fuck up. Look at the timeline of US involvement in postwar Iraq, right up to the present day. A series of more and more serious fuckups and reactions from which they have lost nothing that concerns them. In fact maintaining the country's INstability appears to have been the goal over the past 15 years or so. This strategy will continue to work wherever it's applied right up until it doesn't anymore, which is not a moment the US is capable of seriously contemplating. So yeah Navalny's Russia fuck it why not what could go wrong
But it really just seems like it's telling them what they wanted to hear anyways, or as a way to shape domestic U.S. propaganda and getting everyone on the same page. The premise is that openly calling for tossing out the Communist Party isn't working, so they should focus their propaganda on Xi so the party will replace him with another guy because there's just, like, so much dissent within the party... trust us. But I'm pretty sure that's what the Atlantic Council has been saying about Russia by turning Putin into a bogeyman. That doesn't seem like a very effective strategy if you ask me.
This might be wishful thinking on my part, but maybe they don't want to emphasize "Communist Party" in domestic propaganda because Americans might start associating communism with rapid economic growth and national pride and so forth.
Also the Long Telegram had this part where Kennan is like, yeah, well, Soviet propaganda is pretty negative so we need to boost positive propaganda for our side. But as long as I remember, U.S. propaganda about the rest of the world has been really negative. Not sure what the attraction toward America is supposed to be. But when I consume Chinese propaganda, it's really positive and optimistic and it makes me feel good. China = green happy face. U.S. = red frowny face. Tables turned. Checkmate. They win. You lose.
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:Literally this. And that might seem to indicate that they learned nothing from every other time this has happened, but what they learned was that it's basically impossible for them to lose, no matter how bad they fuck up. Look at the timeline of US involvement in postwar Iraq, right up to the present day.
Yeah as one of the backers of that idea of U.S. "intervention" strategy on this forum for years, vs. deadken/Lessons and the other "U.S. foreign meddling isn't important because it's too incompetent" types who used to post here, I can see how something similar might be happening with this stuff... I've just always tended to think about that in terms of sowing cyclical chaos in places where cities were already literal war zones or very soon about to be thanks to U.S invasion or proxy forces, not figuratively but as in people fighting street to street with bullets and RPGs over city blocks of literal ruins... but I can see the parallels to sending a bunch of born losers charging at Moscow only to get arrested instantly, it forces the media there to change the story to focus on it every time it happens.
tears posted:Serious question: does anyone have any advice for how to organise a huge pdf "library" using all the power of modern computer technology. Looking for some sort of tagging and indexing system but utter noob at the moment: its all in a messy windows folder hierarchy
edit: i basically want music tagging and a music player but for pdfs
if you're still looking for information on organizing a library, the following workshop proposal for amateur librarians looks right up your alley:
https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=Amateur_Librarian_-_A_Course_in_Critical_Pedagogy
i don't think a recording or transcription of the workshop itself is available, but the text and links to further reading might be of use. it looks like the key to their setup is using calibre with this plugin
https://github.com/marcellmars/letssharebooks
it's described as: "a widget for Calibre called ‘Let’s Share Books’, which allows users to share their library of books with others online, through a temporary URL. "
also, this monoskop wiki page on 'shadow libraries" has tons of links to writing on this stuff, though it looks like they're oriented towards theoretical reflection rather than technical know-how. nonetheless, you might be able to find something in there
https://monoskop.org/Shadow_libraries
Edited by radical_dave ()