The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon | Hacker News Reader

The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

krebsonsecurity.com

217 pointsheadalgorithm258 comments

It's an interesting find. The difference between these sites and spam sites is that they are mostly self-contained comment boards. You have to actually go do them to interact with them, where spammers were breaking the internet.

What clicked for me in this article is asking why I ever thought the internet was about ideas, what it might have meant pre-internet for people to be free of a "mainstream" in the old music and style subcultures, and what the consequences of "eternal september," really were.

When we say mainstream, I think we mean aligned to the dominant power, and the culture that comes with a mainstream is based on litigating rules for incremental advantage. Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people, and then antagonize others using those dominant rules as a cover. The same can be said for trolls. What it comes down to is this calculus of self permission to act like a piece of shit because you identify as the underdog.

It's not the platforms, it's the single idea that identifying as an outsider, resister, pariah, defender, or challenger, justifies cruelty because being "good," is defined by your chosen bugbear. The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer, and the only things that float in it are turds. It's not a right/left thing, it's a conflict between people competing for mainstream power and people trying to find freedom from that mainstream's domain, with some of each self-identifying as beneath decency.

The conspiracy-sphere of alternative internet platforms isn't the problem. I would defend the necessity of their existence because trying and failing and building new things requires real privacy away from the mindless predation of both the mainstream and the pariah net. Sure, take them down as a forcing function to make the new private sphere stronger with a higher bar to entry that is cryptographically enabled, but it's not solving the problem they think.

> Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people, and then antagonize others using those dominant rules as a cover. The same can be said for trolls. What it comes down to is this calculus of self permission to act like a piece of shit because you identify as the underdog.

> It's not the platforms, it's the single idea that identifying as an outsider, resister, pariah, defender, or challenger, justifies cruelty because being "good," is defined by your chosen bugbear. The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer, and the only things that float in it are turds. It's not a right/left thing, it's a conflict between people competing for mainstream power and people trying to find freedom from that mainstream's domain, with some of each self-identifying as beneath decency.

What a great insight.

My opinion is that this comes down to the fact that we cannot be good in public. The more "in public" we are, the more dishonest we are.

The private sphere -- family, close friends, personal intimacy, etc -- is where people are at their best. We can be honest there. We can show weakness, we can apologize, we can compromise and we can forgive.

The internet has made lots of things public that used to be private. It is also taking things that were public and making them more public. This is making the world worse.

Since I know you've read Hannah Arendt, this matches up well with her assertion that "in politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy" and "hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private". She insisted on glory -- not goodness or justice or love -- as the sole criterion for political action.

Thanks, her whole thing on private/public is something I'd like to read next, as I have a hypothesis that there is a thread of continuity between the collapse of the Private and the scale of cruelty in the 20th century. These conflicts about chans and censorship and conspiracy theories are artifacts of categories I think we've all seen before.

I'd agree that truth in public is as welcome as truth to power, perhaps because they are related. The point of a separate public is to keep the ball in the air so we can coexist under conventions and merciful pretenses, whereas when it becomes overpowering and breaches the private sphere, it's just Hobbes' war of all against all.

Feminist critiques I read at school back in the day about the Private sphere as the origin of patriarchy bring the division into a modern context. If we imagine the current trend in global internet culture as an extension of that revolt against the private sphere, it yields some uncomfortable questions about what the endgame looks like if that animus swings out of balance. Hence, I see a lot of the crazy online stuff as people expressing their instincts for what's going on and what they fear is going to happen to them, but they don't have the critical tools or the privacy to develop and articulate them.

HN provides the closest thing we have to an elevated semi-private discourse to raise this stuff.

there is nothing elevated about HN, that is your brain playing tricks on you. Privacy is an illusion, self is an illusion. smart people are manipulated just as easily as dumb people, by people who have been studying how to do it, and now with mass social media, have the tools to do it.

Well, I would say here on HN at least the general bar is higher.

And sure, anybody can be manipulated, but also, with different amount of effort.

Tricking my young family teenage members into buying something shiny they don't really need?

Not too hard, show a cool ad or pay some influencer to feature the product in a way. Getting people of the HN crowd to buy somehing shiny they don't need? Lets say, the new KI assistance?

I would say, that is a lot harder, as most people here understand how (political) marketing works. And once you understand, you don't fall for it so easily.

> Getting people of the HN crowd to buy somehing shiny they don't need? Lets say, the new KI assistance? I would say, that is a lot harder, as most people here understand how (political) marketing works.

Maybe easier actually, but different. Bigger flats, Apple products, travels, cloud services ...

The arguments used may appeal to meaning, sense, evolution, progress ... instead of comfort, fear, luxury ... just as easily and probably more profitably.

The idea that we are “good in private” is a cultural statement. In fact, I’d have argued against it only a few months ago before I became aware that this is the norm for most of the world. In my world, all the dirty lies and secrets are kept private. We “put our best foot forward” and “manage our personal brand”. I think that this idea alone is worth discussing more, especially as it relates to justice. In my world, if you act out in public the police get involved. The police carry guns here, and they use them. On the internet, if you act out... ... ...honestly, I can’t finish that. It’s liberating to those of us who have suppressed ourselves, but it’s also culturally devastating to be so viciously attacked openly by people in public. It makes me want to shut down the offenders, with a violent righteousness of a public super-hero. Yet, I’m as helpless ever.

I assume 'your part of the world' is America. I can flip somebody the bird for obeying the speed limit and nobody calls cops with guns to stop me from being a shithead. I think it's generally true that people are more willing to be assholes to strangers than their close acquaintances. This has certainly been my observation of American culture at least. People are ruder to people the further removed from those people they are and are very rarely ever ruder than they are in public. I've heard similar sentiments from people who work in public facing jobs, particularly retail.

There is a longstanding acknowledgement of the "rude tourist" effect where people behave less respectfully when outside of their hometown, even if it's one town over. It just becomes more of a caricature when it's an entirely different language and culture and tourist is like, "well, that's not how we do things where I come from".

The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

There's a fair bit of back and forth on it, here's wiki to start it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sphere

Most of the criticisms of the ideas of the public/private sphere root back to Aristotle, and unfortunately, Google has elevated more recent, post Marx criticisms of it (imo) since setting it up as an evil is the basis of popular current cultural theory, but it's a foundational concept that predates the view of history as progress.

The idea of the private has more relevance today now that it's so rare.

I was responding to this:

> The private sphere -- family, close friends, personal intimacy, etc -- is where people are at their best. We can be honest there. We can show weakness, we can apologize, we can compromise and we can forgive.

It family where publicly charizmatic people stop trying to be charizmatic and start being abusive. Also, it is not rare, both private part and abuse part went up during lockdowns.

Aristotle and Marx have zero to do with it and the way people on HN bring super old classics in completely unrelated context is getting obnoxious.

> Aristotle and Marx have zero to do with it and the way people on HN bring super old classics in completely unrelated context is getting obnoxious.

The Greeks are the source for a lot of our language and a lot of how we think about the world. Marx turned much of that upside down.

It's fine if you don't agree with the idea of "intellectual heritage" (or the influence of that heritage). But I (and others) do, so clearly we're going to talk about it.

It seems, uh, strange to fail to notice Marx's influence in particular given what happened in the 20th century and what continues to happen in China. Furthermore, the idea of the government as an instrument of violence used by the ruling class (which is so common these days, on HN too) is clearly straight out of Marx.

> The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

Certainly plenty of abuse happens in the private sphere. My original post was hasty.

My opinion is more complicated than "everyone is good in private". It's more like, at a certain point, "publicness" becomes a problem. And things that we can do in private (like goodness, love, and hatred) do not work in public. And yet we seem to be reaching for them anyway.

The geeks were not exactly experts in domestic violence and abuse. Not that it did not happened in their world, they did not really cared and victims had little options.

The greeks also used goverments as intruments of violence. Quite a lot actually, freedom was reserved for small minority of people. The goverment was used as instrument of violence long before Marx. Fuedalism, whether German or Russian was kept by violence.

Maybe the greeks are your source of how you think about world, but dont project it on rest of us when we are talking about abuse of people Greeks generally looked down at.

This isn't a question of idealizing people who lived thousands of years ago, it's just an observation about how ideas pass through the centuries. Also, philosophers who wrote thousands of years ago are relevant today. It's not like we've answered questions like "what is knowledge?" "what is good?" and so on.

I never said that "only since Marx" was the government an instrument of violence owned by the ruling class. I said that idea is a Marxian idea. And it is. Also, I never meant to imply that it's a wrong idea (I think it's wrong, but you don't have to).

The fact that you're mouthing ideas from Marx without even realizing it while denying the concept of intellectual heritage is stunning.

I did not mentioned not implied idealization. I said they are irrelevant to topic at hand.

Also, I think that you don't really know what Marx actually wrote. Nor do you know much about historical context surrounding Marx. Or Lenin and Stalin for that matter. Makes me think you likely dont have such a deep knowledge of Greeks either.

Aristotele is completely irrelevant to topic of domestic violence. So is topic of "what is knowledge".

"Mouthing ideas from Marx" is completely absurd mischaracterization of what I wrote. It is more of your manipulative attempt then an argument.

I at least have read Marx. The idea that the government is a tool of class warfare is distinctly Marxist, as he's the one that made an argument for why this is. This is why Marx advocates for the State, before it is dissolved, to be put into the control of the proletarian class, the do callee Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which isn't a dictatorship in the common sense of the word).

At least from what I read, I don't think that they were arguing that Marx wanted the State to be an instrument of violence, just that he observed that the state was an instrument of violence for the ruling class, and made a good argument for why it would always be unless class itself was abolished. I think that they were referring to this intepretation, which is also compatible with what you said.

While the government was essentially always the organ of violence of the ruling class, Marx is essentially the first one to make that idea. The idea of the State as an instrument of class warfare is a Marxist idea.

And indeed, the concept of ruling class and of class in general in the sociological sense of the world also comes from Marx.

As for the Greeks, while they of course had a violent State (as we've seen, all States are organs of violence), they didn't view the State that way. The conception of the private/public sphere that they were discussing distinctly comes from Greece.

The whole Marx and state violence somehow came to be mentioned as response to following:

> The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

> It family where publicly charizmatic people stop trying to be charizmatic and start being abusive. Also, it is not rare, both private part and abuse part went up during lockdowns.

There was literally no mention of class warfare. And the fact also is, feudalism had whole philosophy of classes and keeping them in place too.

For that matter, John Brown said that slavery is war against own people (meaning blacks), so really, while exact rhetoric he used may be marxist, the general simple idea of conflict between classes of people is not.

But most importantly, it is completely unrelated to what I wrote.

That might indeed be unrelated to the very central point, but I'm going to be slightly pedantic since this HN anyways.

So, you might not realize this, but actually the modern view of feudalism as a class system arising from the need of one class to control various factors of production, thus necessitating class warfare, is also Marxist. Marx did not just write about capitalism, he was basically one of the first sociologists writ large.

The general idea that the purpose of the government is to assist in class conflict is 100% Marxist. In fact, the definition of class in the modern sense that allows class warfare as a concept to really make sense is also Marxist. Indeed, the Marxist idea of class warfare wasn't just to explain capitalism, but also as an analysis of history, it provided the insight as of why changes in systems of governments seem to coincide with major economic developments, and so the first example of class warfare according to Marx goes all the way back to the invention of agriculture.

I don't mean this in a derogatory way at all, Marx's definitions here are generally accepted to be true even today in social sciences in general. In fact, I generally agree with your point, that the private sphere is not inherently good and the public sphere not inherently bad.

It is not just unrelated to central point, it is unrelated to completely anything. Even domestic violence aside. And I still find the way HN started to bring up old Greeks lately all the time completely obnoxious (which is my another central point).

> It seems, uh, strange to fail to notice Marx's influence in particular given what happened in the 20th century and what continues to happen in China. Furthermore, the idea of the government as an instrument of violence used by the ruling class (which is so common these days, on HN too) is clearly straight out of Marx.

This is not even mentioning class warfare, biggest issue right now in China is that genocide they have. The origin of "class warfare" expression is not relevant to anything, that is just later attempt to move discussion toward different topic.

Second, they had "estates". Three estates system in French and four estates system in Russia. Those had different legal code, different rights, different justice system, different duties to people based on which group they were born into. We can completely avoid the word "class" or "class warfare". The violence between them did happened. They did thought about them as about groups and even legalized that.

We can talk about John Brown and slavery and still have group of slaveholders against slaves. He interpreted it as a war, but no one called it class war. In practical terms, as socioeconomic group of people being dominated or killed by other group of people, we really do not have to wait for Marx to start figuring this out. We can talk about French revolution and old regime, we can talk about slavery, we can talk about estates.

Even freaking Greeks had groups of people, which I will not call classes, dominating other groups of people doing a lot of violence to them. And we can see that even tho opinions of their slaves or women or non-citizen males are unavailable to us.

> The conspiracy-sphere of alternative internet platforms isn't the problem

This phrasing doesn't really make sense to me. I've never seen anything conspiracy-esque said about platforms and centralization, generally it's just that people have found legitimate problems with them and their effects.

I subscribe to the ideas of permeable and fractal boundaries. The former is one I attribute to Heather Marsh's writing - the idea of being able to move across a boundary fluidly and express different selves at different times and places. The latter is an original variant, using a fractal as the specific metaphor of self, and where you define your boundary is always "true until you look at the details" - then you find the exceptions, and exceptions to those exceptions.

In this light, societal boundaries like public/private tend to act as hard cuts to the fractal of self, pruning it into a perhaps uncomfortable shape.

In both mine and Marsh's framing, power structures represent a human health issue in that they channel the self into an element of the system, depriving it of a natural development pattern.

But even so, this model allows a criticism of fringe conspiracy groups in that they represent an inflammatory response: an "anti" to the body politic. In this they differ from epistemic study groups, because the study goes nowhere, employing all the facts towards question-begging conclusions. Their collision with the "mainstream" acts to throw both into greater doubt. You want some of this inflammation, but as with inflammation in the human body, not continuously or at high levels.

All of that said, I do believe that on the whole, power structures are loosening these days, because the angles of attack on them are so varied, like a horde of descending insects. Control exercised in one place causes inflammation in another. The "social media meltdown" - the typical result of an actor who has lost their place in the power structure - has grown so common as to be unremarkable. Meanwhile, people who work in between the boundaries, finding those cracks through which they can slip, seem to thrive.

This is lucid as fuck and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Will read up more on Heather Marsh.

"When we say mainstream, I think we mean aligned to the dominant power" hegemon/hegemonic is the word I use to describe this. Others have written about the Internet and "counter hegemonic discourses" which I encourage the curious to look into.

> why I ever thought the internet was about ideas

There was a time when the exchange of knowledge fostered education. I say this ironically, because that is what education is. Human civilisation exercises language to exchange ideas. It records this knowledge to extend education.

The Internet was/is a medium for exchange. In the historical view, the Internet is a sophisticated medium without precedent.

> When we say mainstream, I think we mean aligned to the dominant power

The word means prevailing discourse, or some perception of the prevailing discourse. It is healthy to question prevailing discourse -- or any discourse. But it is not healthy to abandon reason and the tests (and self-tests) of validity.

Wild assertions and unfounded accusations may divert weak minds, but they also seem to thrill fanatics.

> the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media.

People who favour their vanity over reason and truth are in deep trouble intellectually. Anti-intellectualism, if it becomes the prevailing discourse, will destroy a society.

> The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer

This is a sign of societal decline.

"Social media" is vulgar business. It is not about education, intelligent discourse, or even civilisation.

Pay close attention to social media companies and privately run social networks and forums. I used to work for a major social media network that was growing and eventually stalled.

If you run a social network and it gets popular you're going to run into major problems that no one talks about.

1.) Multiple governments, private organization and luddites send people to your company to compromise the source code.

2.) People eventually find out they can use the social network as a covert advertising platform. They end up trying to make side money using the platform to slip ad campaigns as normal human interactions.

3.) Eventually someone figures out they can control the behavior of people on the social media platform in strange ways. One guy figured out he could create sock puppet accounts and automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went. Don't do this!!! If you start slipping covert advertising in the platform and you get caught you're eventually going to run into organized crime, the govt or both.

4.) And my favorite, people start offering your best employees obscsene amounts of money to try and stop you from starting another social network.

> automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went

So what is that exactly? Somehow these women would show up to meetups or something? Or were the sockpuppet accounts 'women'?

Surprisingly, they were real women that fell for sock puppet accounts.

So whenever they arrived somewhere, would they be very confused and then leave because mr.sockpuppet wasn't around? You got to give more details, otherwise this story is pretty confusing.

Not at all. More like, pretend to be a woman in a sock puppet account and eventually let them know there is a discount on clothing at XYZ department store. Then they just show up at the location.

I didn't understand the 4th. Besides competitor networks, what would anyone have against another social network being started?

Keeping track of communication channels. It is what governments and private security firms do all the time. No one wants to have to keep track of the activities of another social networking platform and figure out how to compromise it. They also have to keep track of anyone else who has compromised the platform.

Just a further note, the entire internet is comrpomised in one way or another. The worst offenders are linkedin, amazon and facebook. The US govt and various organizations have the complete ability to monitor any account, control what shows up on the user interfaces and replace the content however they please. A ton of people arent even aware their accounts are being used to control their behavior via reinforcement learning. Its just advertising but when people use it effectively it is a destructive tool.

See for how these kinda of techniques are used. https://www.amazon.com/Psychological-Operations-Principles-C...

I didn't understand any of it, especially the organized crime bit.

Methinks OP has had a few too many pints this evening.

Could you please give more details on how your company was stalled?

Was it through the legal ways as in a government entity said that it must be shut-down or through some other methods from third parties?

This is how it works in reality. People take over parts of your company and do everything to make employees feel bad about the company. They then do everything to make your employees feel good about something/anything else to keep them distracted.

You start seeing really strange things like a severly overweight coworker suddenly having a trophy gf who starts talking poorly about everyone. People suddenly start becoming lazy out of nowhere because someone outside of the company has made them believe they are guaranteed millionaires when they haven't even IPO'd. People who used to be focused on their jobs suddenly start slending money wildly on ridiculous garbage.

While everyone is distracted in different ways people who had nothing to do with the success of the company silently takeover key parts of the company and start firing people that figure out what is happening.

That is very interesting. Did you ever catch any spooks trying to manipulate your source code?

You're never going to see the government walking in the door modifying source code. Those are tales they tell ppl. They are going to just blackmail someone or make some poor kid believe he/she can be a hacker by slipping backdoors into the software.

Does anyone recall the person who got a call in the middle of the night from the 'FBI' requesting a source code handover?

Yup. But I thought it was the NSA for an encryption program?

Ain't that the truth

Are ip address blocks registered to defunct companies a relatively common thing? Clearly ARIN isn't regularly checking whether the owners of ip address blocks are still in business, so I'd imagine there are plenty of other blocks that belong to defunct companies.

I know that the company I used to work for held on to a modest block for years after it went out of business. (IIRC it was a /20 of IPv4. It has since been recovered by RIPE.)

Similarly, I wonder about internet ports assigned to dormant or defunct companies. I used to work for a company back in the '90s that had their own IANA port assignment for a proprietary database product. Of course, they don't use it anymore as the company and product are both long gone.

Err, presumably the product still works for existing customers?

This is an obsolete, 25 year old product. I very much doubt there are any existing customers anymore. The company and the product literally no longer exist.

I understand that being articulated around old school paper administrations rather than automated APIs that stuff can easily be ignored (especially in places like the US where legislation is highly fragmented), but you'd think that the starvation for IPv4 would be a good enough incentive for people to go after those low-hanging fruits.

We started "running out of land" long before IPv4 addresses even existed, yet lots of land is listed as being owned by entities that were acquired/merged/reincorporated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876963

That doesn't mean the land, or the IP addresses, are abandoned.

Regarding ARIN listing a defunct entity as owner: keep in mind that TONS of telecom infrastructure is listed as being owned by defunct companies that were acquired/merged into other companies, or simply reincorporated in a new jurisdiction.

For example, the concrete blockhouse where my neighborhood's DSL modems live sites on land owned by an entity that hasn't existed for a decade. This is according to the county auditor, who is the highest non-judicial authority when it comes to real estate ownership. When CenturyLink bought the old telco they never bothered to update the deed.

That doesn't mean I can go squat on that land.

It just means the records weren't updated when the acquisition happened.

Acquired isn't defunct. The archaically named entity that owns your local telco cabinet almost certainly still exists:

http://www.centurylink.com/static/PDF/AboutUs/DoingBusiness/...

It really is defunct. The corporation "US West" is no longer registered.

Acquirors don't keep their acquisitions' corpses registered forever.

All of US West’s assets were acquired as part of the merger transaction.

In this case, there’s no evidence of a similar acquisition.

No evidence that you're aware of.

Because they're not a publicly-traded company like US West.

This is unsurprising.

It doesn't matter whether I, personally, am aware of this. It matters whether the organizations with whom the acquired entity did business are aware of it. It's the responsibility of the acquiring entity to keep those parties informed. And since some of these parties publish public information, it seems logical that we would be able to determine such acquisitions by looking at their public records.

> The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Using legal tactics to stop text on the Internet seems folly to me.

Derouting obsolete IPV4 blocks is as technical as it gets.

I have to say that I find the amount of effort that's put into silencing these particular weirdos scary - and it's also deeply hypocritical because conspiracy theorists are being shushed down for believing in imaginary and impossible to prove things, while say religious and supernatural folks are free to promote their ideas freely, although they share many of the same elements, and historically have caused much more hate and violence and terrorism.

For things to be said here.

First, Ben Bagdikian's media monopoly highlights how we now have very concentrated media companies and almost every company that calls itself "the mainstream media" is actually part of 4 or 5 companies that are I think are best deemed an oligopoly of influence brokers in the US. Much of the reason those companies have been targeting the current incumbent president for the past 4 years with a ferver that the Bushes, Clinton, or Obama never were attacked with is largely because when a rich person is threatened with losing their money, they'll simply spend it all to stop it from being taken away. Great example of how that works is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGIYU2Xznb4

(This is older, we're down to 5 now). https://producertales.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mediamogul...

Second, you make more money as a "news" org if you foster an unquestioning, guillable audience that doesn't question what you're putting forward much. Hence, the use of naming and shaming, guilt tripping, heckling and otherwise berating their own audience through innuendo and sleight of hand. The MSM has repeatedly crossed the line in the last year of attempting to incite their audience to violence. A great majority of americans at this point, by polls, consider those orgs to be trash news and tabloids; what these large news orgs are attempting to do is to stop competition from taking root. Some of that is supported by the US Government; psyops are a real thing and having media control is an effective means to stopping them. Much of that is revenue assurance. The problem today is, people are turning off the TV and Cable news broadcasts and are going to 3rd parties because they've gotten wise to big media pissing in the soup.

Finally, 8chan has been, for a long long time, targeted by social engineering groups including spooks from the US government. The internet has this funny issue where unregulated, anonymous boards tend to get targeted by social engineering threat groups in foreign governments and that has been pretty well documented. Even HN gets targeted. The problem with psychological warfare is, much like any WMD, it doesn't differentiate between target or target audiences, and as a spook org, you have no idea who really uses 4chan or 8chan. So you end up with these platforms being used to attract and radicalize certain broad audiences, then SHTF such as e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, the courts and governments are left to pick up the pieces and save face.

Pretty much at this point there's no more face to save, and the burden of proof is now a hell of a lot higher for audiences going forward. The game of building trust in an org then using people is prooving less and less effective.

Krebs did an excellent job at following the money down on what looks like a fairly sophisticated psyop. Interesting to me he'd do that.

I'll admit, I spent some time on 8chan both before and after jim Watkins took control. The story behind it all is actually pretty fascinating.

One big thing I did notice though after a hiatus browsing there and going back. Watkins did something to that site.

It was always pretty bad, a lot of the people there were pretty awful, but there wasn't an organized right wing presence pushing Nazi ideals and anti-Holocaust propaganda.

Most of the people there just tended to be misfits who didn't even fit in on 4chan. A lot of people I remember talking to in those early days were pretty normal people who just liked the idea of a censorship free anonymous community.

Don't get me wrong, there were definitely some pretty deplorable people and posts back then, I mean they were the people that got banned from 4chan after all, but it wasn't the same. I even remember a few threads where hotwheels came on and joked around and stuff. Overall it had a more harmless, if a bit sociopathic and hateful, vibe to it.

Fast forward a few years to just a few months before it got shut down, I remembered it existed and went and checked it out again. It was fairly different. Every board got constant spam from white supremacists and Nazis, the content was 99% race baiting type stuff, there was a huge MGTOW presence on there. The hate towards women had sky rocketed. Everyone on there was just angry and totally hateful towards society.

Jim and his son would pop on and off spouting nonsense, the nazis would regularly go unbanned and were allowed free reign.

I'm fairly convinced Jim and Ron purposely led the site that way. Whether by their own decision or maybe even government persuasion.

The fbi had an active presence on there by that point

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201868

And were even caught out instigating what ended up being and active shooter.

The whole community there and all this saga around it has always kind of fascinated me. The people there came from all places and walks of life with more beliefs and ideals you could shake a stick at.

And it's surprising the kind of actual heartfelt stuff you could find on there filtered between all the shit if you looked.

Every place on the Internet that has free speech becomes nazi. Make of that what you want.

Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them.

I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere.

I'm not from the US, the only mentions of those sites I have ever encountered was journalists making a few articles about them.

The goal is not to convince conspiracy theorists that they are wrong, the goal is to prevent them from hurting people or society and, to that end, keep the dangerous ones from organizing anonymously online in large numbers (I honestly don't know if that's possible).

If I'm not mistaken the NZ killer was on 8chan?

It's the same argument with serial killer movies (at the risk of showing my age there was a strong controversy with "Natural Born Killers" at the time): you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie.

You kill people because you had it in you. The things you were exposed before might color your act but that's it.

> It's the same argument with serial killer movies

Hollywood is infamous for misunderstanding psychology. At best, Hollywood has outdated notions of psychology (favoring long outdated ideas like Freud, because such ideas are exciting). Hollywood sells movies, not understanding.

What we're discovering today is that there's a "pathway to radicalization". People are NOT born radical, they realign themselves as radical over time.

Yes, so how is giving internet trash cans like QAnon huge amounts of exposure and thus free advertisement supposed to help?

With QAnon politicians reaching mainstream status (Jo Rae Perkins), we're long past that point. QAnon is reaching mainstream, the question is what do we do about indicating that its message should not be tolerated.

> What we're discovering today

We who? This was known at least as far back as since Scientology and Holocaust.

> you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie.

There is this pervasive idea lately a crazy youtube video or text can't actually be harmful, which just isn't true. Ideas can inspire wars, murder, revolution, they can warp minds. People previously productive can end up obsessed with crazy junk. It is important to protect each other and ourselves from bad ideas. The question is how, of course. Some people violently oppose any form of curation, whether it be censorship by government, or choices made by companies like facebook. Others insist the solution to bad speech is good speech, but I've been seeing that fail on the internet for 30 years. Perhaps higher quality education can help, perhaps improving economic inequity can help. Other ideas are welcome!

Could not disagree more.

Pure information is harmless, beliefs are not. Crazy beliefs emerge from the lack of critical thinking, not from the "dangerous information".

Therefore censorship is only good as part of "divide and conquer" strategy.

He was on Facebook too.

You can get radicalized by people you communicate with via internet. Especially when you are isolated irl.

He left a manifesto which explained why he did it, citing both racist conspiracy theory from chan culture and "mainstream" racist Melanie Phillips.

I've long been sympathetic to ideas like this - I remember as a little kid, blowing off the big stigma around the (then-novel) 3d shooters that had just come out, like Doom. Ironically I agree with exactly what you said, but simultaneously think you might miss something in the analysis. I think that maybe a better way to phrase the idea is:

In the rare case that you're positive for a trait, you can be incited to it by stimuli.

For example, if you have an anger-management problem, you can live quite peacefully, left alone, but you are uniquely dangerous to provoke. Behaviors and stimuli that are harmless to other people cause a violent outburst from you. Same thing with alcoholics and, for example, pedophiles - stimuli that provoke no negative behavior from other people will provoke it in someone positive for a trait. Violent media left us with a tiny driblet of actual killers because only a tiny fraction of people are positive for a trait of being stone-cold killers.

So what are we afraid of? We have barely any actual killers. We're afraid of enablers.

We have a tiny, tiny group of people that will dare to do crimes (say, shooting up a synagogue) when there are clear and present consequences for it. I'm quite sure, however, we have a still small, but much, much larger group that are "latent" trait-positive for violence. They'd do it - if they could get away with it.

What we're really scared of is a third group - which might be a group so large that it could be anywhere from 30-60% of our society. People who could be coerced into not caring about the violence. That third group is the people who are trait-positive for gullibility (and several other related traits). I think it could very well be "most people" - a plurality if not a majority.

These are what enable horrible things. People who have bought into propaganda really don't do anything, and that's exactly what's so horrible about them; because they don't express some sort of obvious, negative externality in their neighbors and coworker's lives, nobody really cares if they believe horrible things. Because they don't really "act on" those beliefs - they don't go out and do things that hurt people.

But they also don't intervene when a crime aligning with their beliefs is perpetrated.

And that's what's so scary.

When a black man would get lynched in the old south, the real thing that made it possible was the hundreds of other bystanders who felt like the black guy deserved it. If they didn't exist, such a killer would rapidly be brought to justice. But instead, since so many were okay with it (and even cheered it on), not only would the killer get away with the act, but quite a few much more "minor" trait-positive people participated in it - people much less naturally driven to kill, but who could work up the courage to do so if they could get away with it.

In addition to your excellent point, the fact that there is such a groundswell of people who tacitly buy into these destructive theories is incredibly demoralizing to many.

The fact that there are so many Americans who accept this is enough to make me rethink my participation in society here. Who are we if we've become enablers of this? I can't fight this, there's no "there" there.

>Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them.

All this work to shut them down by various organizations can even accurately be described as a conspiracy. (Though more of a conspiracy-fact since they're so shameless about it)

> At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere.

Please do a little more research and thought before posting such things. There is no "trash can", it IS SPILLING EVERYWHERE. We even have a QAnon supporter most likely headed to Congress. People are dead because of these hate-filled groups. Shutting them down saves lives, not only in the US but throughout the world.

You can't just "leave these groups alone" because the last thing they will ever do is keep to themselves. Hate groups only want two things: to spread their hate and to get rid of the people they hate. To let them be is to support their agenda, and in doing so, people die.

I wonder how many Qanon believers are hate-filed extremists, people going through mental health issues, or just edgy kids/teenagers. I doubt that the people who would actually commit a public shooting are in the majority, and I strongly doubt that taking down their website is going to kill the group. If anything, it will just strengthen the beliefs of the paranoid people who frequent it.

What we should be doing is going after Youtube and other companies that are actively radicalizing people and turning them into Qanon crazies with their irresponsible recommendation algorithms. If Youtube stopped recommending conspiracy theory videos, Qanon and other communities like it would stop growing and would likely die a slow and uneventful death as people simply lose interest.

> going after Youtube

So... actual government-mandated suppression of free speech?

Allow me to reframe this. Considering they are both now considered groups posing a terrorism threat according to the FBI we would hold a platform like YouTube to the same standard on QAnon that we do on ISIS.

You can’t host propaganda from either group because they both have an extremely high likelihood of leading to real world violence based on historical evidence.

That isn’t an unreasonable standard.

when I was growing up, genocide is not free speech, war is not free speech

Qanon believers are, by definition, people with mental health problems.

> I wonder how many Qanon believers are hate-filed extremists, people going through mental health issues, or just edgy kids/teenagers.

There are enough who are simply run-of-the-mill angry white men to be terrifying.

I sympathize with this view, but visit Reddit /r/qanoncasualties for a counterpoint.

On one hand I am pretty close to a free speech maximalist. On the other hand, I do believe in the “fire in a crowded theater test.” I am starting to think that certain forms of public speech, namely that which harms large numbers of mentally ill people or has the potential to create a huge outburst of stochastic terrorism, may fail that test.

The Internet changes things because now you can have a billion people in a crowded theater and one person can yell fire.

On the stochastic terrorism front: a less ethical person hacking the President’s Twitter account could have tweeted “The storm is upon us! Where we go one we go all!” followed by some instructions and probably killed more people than the 9/11 attacks.

One person. All they would have had to do is guess “maga2020!” as a password if reports are to be believed. Meanwhile we spend hundreds of billions on defenses to prevent such attacks... which would have been worthless in the face of one person guessing a dumb password and leveraging a meme-plex to mass trigger the mentally ill.

This is what is possible today. Attacks only get better.

We do have a problem. I am not sure going after the platforms is right or will work, but I can’t think of anything else.

Sure they can move to Tor, less popular boards, etc. but the point is to shut down the mass scale propagation machine that depends on access to wide platforms. This will at least contain the cult to a smaller and thus less dangerous group.

You can't stop attacks. You can only defend against them. Which means; treat the mentally ill, reduce ignorance (education), and widely and pervasively teach critical thinking skills.

I'm of the opinion that going after the places these people are known to congregate is a bad idea. It pushes them underground, and strengthens their bubble more than even Youtube's or Facebook's algorithms can accomplish. I agree that there is a problem here, but I don't think isolating them more is the solution.

My friend's wife went off the rails on the flat earth conspiracy. Thankfully, it's mostly benign as far as conspiracies go. She got in with a certain crowd and started cutting ties with those that gave her grief about it, or that she thought might. She knew the truth, the government was covering it up, etc. It was only through the actions of her husband, patiently bringing up questions and referring to science and hearing her out over a long period of time, that she came clean that she had finally come to the conclusion that she was wrong.

The quote about "sunlight being the best disinfectant" has some truth to it.

>I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins.

I think it's because the busybodies don't have a way to stand down without losing face.

Journalists have the real world savvy to not consider it important what political ideas are exposused by piss smelling disheveled streetpeople. But otherwise-"serious" jorunos have been spent the better part of a decade locked in a conflict with people who are mostly 12 years old and/or just trying to wind them up.

They can't admit to themselves that they completely dropped the ball on understanding the internet. Even journalists who knew what the internet in the early 2000s seemed to forgot the lay of the land once high-status people got the internet on their cellphones and were shocked that the content on the screen that didn't instantly cater to them.

So they will either push enough baddies off the internet to declare victory, or have to accept that they're a fucking embarrassment.

You may not be able to fully understand the scope of the problem precisely because you’re not in the US. You’re not seeing the affect and effects it’s having in day to day life.

I’m a white guy. Last week I went through a grocery store after forgetting my mask in my car. I needed to use the restroom badly and didn’t realize I had forgotten the mask until I was mid-stream. That’s when I understood why people were looking at me like a potential threat with fear in their eyes. They probably assumed I was “yet another” anti-masker there to threaten and attack them verbally or worse. (I quickly left to the car and got my mask.)

Lol, I highly doubt people are giving you weird looks because they think you're a Q acolyte. They're much more likely to think you're inconsiderate for voluntarily increasing their risk of catching covid. I follow Q for fun, and I barely think about it day to day. The average person probably thinks about Q less than once per week, when someone brings it up in the news.

You're likely right about the mask. I would give the guy weird looks because of his lack of consideration for others, not because I fear a crazed killer.

That said, your experience with Q is not universal. There are many people who take it much, much more seriously than you do and have alienated friends and family members and lost jobs as a result. And, of course, fired a gun in a pizza shop, shot and killed protestors, etc.

The “casual followers” of conspiracy theories aren’t doing anybody any good. They’re just increasing the spread of the disinformation. This stuff needs to be fought, refuted, and relegated to the dustbin of history. “casual following” is the sort of thing that lets this win a place in the core of public discourse and culture.

Something for historical consideration is that - if we just go full Godwin's law here: in Nazi Germany, most citizens were just "casual followers" of anti-semitism.

You don't have to be gung ho to let someone ELSE do something horrible. You just have to be just on-board enough to let them sit in the driver's seat.

> Lol, I highly doubt people are giving you weird looks because they think you're a Q acolyte.

If you go into a thread on Reddit where the topic of conversation is related to anti-maskers/lockdowners, not only is there plentiful evidence of people enthusiastically confessing what it is they believe about people who do not wear masks (stated as what these people actually(!) believe, as opposed to an estimate of* what they believe), if one was to compile stats, one would often find that the majority of participants think this way (if you take their words literally - if one asks for confirmation or reasoning, post-hoc rationalization will typically ride to the rescue).

The memeplex/matrix that is The Internet seems to be having extremely interesting cognitive effects on broad swaths of the public. And while most people have no problem seeing this behavior in their outgroup (say, conspiracy theorists), awareness of this (mainstream, well studied) cognitive phenomenon* in oneself is extremely rare. As is people who are willing to discuss it from an abstract perspective, using sound logic and epistemology (aka: actual critical thinking).

I think this line of thinking is absolutely correct when conspiracy theories are fringe or harmless. You don't believe we landed on the moon? Okay, buddy, have a nice day.

Occasionally, though, conspiracy theorists escape the harmless fringe and become actively harmful to society, which is what many of us believe is happening in the USA today. A racist conspiracy theory that posited, contrary to all evidence, that our previous president was born in another country, combined with some conspiracy theories popular among "the Tea Party movement" as they were known, propelled our current president into office, where the theories have snowballed and escalated into shots fired in a pizza parlor, protesters murdered by car, protestors murdered by gun, illegal voter intimidation, and a significant chunk of the population not quite ruling out the possibility that a huge chunk of elected officials and others are part of a cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts who drink the blood of children.

Faked moon landings this ain't. Crazy Uncle Roger this ain't.

I do live in the US, and I encounter the results of this weekly, sometimes more often. It doesn't take visiting 8kun to be affected by this here.

Update: There are people on this page, right here at HN, stating misleading nonsense tangentially related to QAnon. The spread of this stuff is pervasive already.

Note that Obama's birth was a conspiracy around 2008, before 8chan existed. I would argue that "the Donald" on reddit was a driver of Trump's online popularity. This argument is not for striking down individual websites as much as it is for pervasive rumor-quashing.

One could look toward China's internet policy to measure the success of playing "whack-a-mole" at the rumor-level. Propaganda there still gets made and spread, it just stays online for minutes at a time before deletion, and so by the time people see it they have no way of asking for clarification on its truth.

I sincerely hope there's some effective middle ground between allowing the kind of unrestrained rumor/conspiracy propagation that puts unhinged people in public office and Chinese-style ubiquitous law enforcement. Neither option is particularly attractive.

> Occasionally, though, conspiracy theorists escape the harmless fringe and become actively harmful to society

To some degree, of both "frequency of escape" and "magnitude of harm", both of which are valid variables to be considered within the aggregate of all(!) variables related to conspiracy theories (of which these are but two, contrary to popular consensus).

> A racist conspiracy theory that posited, contrary to all evidence, that our previous president was born in another country, combined with some conspiracy theories popular among "the Tea Party movement" as they were known, propelled our current president into office, where the theories have snowballed and escalated into shots fired in a pizza parlor, protesters murdered by car, protestors murdered by gun, illegal voter intimidation, and a significant chunk of the population not quite ruling out the possibility that a huge chunk of elected officials and others are part of a cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts who drink the blood of children.

This is an interesting sentence, and certainly a popular story. The interesting part is that it uses epistemology as a tool for dismissal ("contrary to all evidence"), but then proceeds to assert several other complex ideas that involve coordinated behavior between multiple people (there's a word for this sort of thing: conspiracy theory), and does so with no concern whatsoever for whether evidence actually (and entirely) supports it.

> There are people on this page, right here at HN, stating misleading nonsense tangentially related to QAnon. The spread of this stuff is pervasive already.

There are various forms of misleading nonsense on this page. For example, numerous people asserting that QAnon, and conspiracy theories (conspiracy theorists) in general, "are" or "believe" certain things. If one pays close attention to these threads every time they appear on HN (or elsewhere, be it social media or formal media), one may notice that the asserted descriptions are always very vague, and always only include the very worst/silliest of ideas that exist within the communities - very often, ideas that really don't have high consensus agreement in the actual communities themselves. And again, with no with no concern whatsoever for whether the assertions are actually true.

The same talking points can be observed in every thread on these subjects, but one talking point you will rarely make an appearance: what is actually true? What is the actual(!) truth of what is discussed/believed among actual conspiracy theorists, as well as what is the actual(!) truth of of each discrete idea (and the sub-ideas within each)?

It is very concerning to me how easily such a powerful subconscious heuristic can be mass installed into the minds of the populace, even those of the relatively competent critical thinkers here on HN. This heuristic is roughly:

if [an idea has been labelled a Conspiracy Theory], then therefore [the epistemic status is FALSE]

How often does the output of this heuristic make an appearance (as a rhetorical, unchallenged axiom) in this thread (and in all others)? I would say: extremely frequently.

How often does the fundamentally more important heuristic make an appearance: what is actually true, at a discrete level? I would say (as an understatement): rarely.

If truth and rationality is truly on the side of the "anti-conspiracy" side of the divide, you'd think it would be child's play to "destroy conspiracy theorists with facts and logic". And yet, what accompanies the heuristic seems to be an inoculation to any epistemic challenges: circling of the wagons, typically via insubstantial/rhetorical dismissals (ad hominen character attacks), appeals to ends justifying the means, or simply downvoting + silence.

Please pay attention to what is really going on in your countries, and in your media. I do not ask that you believe anything specific, but only that you always ask: what is the actual truth? And also, when forming your worldview, do not consider only what you see (or are told, often without any actual evidence), but also what you do not see.

Pay attention to what portions of reality are freely discussed in the media (and in turn on social media), and the manner in which they are discussed (watch out for framing via a small set of perspectives that are not inclusive of all details). Observe the nature of the ideas being asserted (are they specific, and supported by logic and evidence, or vague conspiratorial slurs?). Compare specific claims (like "X's believe/say Y") to what is actual reality - which requires going and seeing for yourself. It is regularly recommended that climate change "deniers" "educate themselves on the facts" - be careful that you are not holding them to a standard that you are unwilling to meet (or even acknowledge) yourself.

That's a lot of words that could be replaced with "I don't understand the phrase 'contrary to all evidence.'"

Although I suspect you know that, the rules around here say I should assume the most gracious possible explanation, so:

My long sentence did not in fact suggest any coordinated behavior at all, nor is there any known evidence to suggest any part of the sentence is wrong.

That's the difference between something being proven false, like racist birtherism, and a lack of evidence to support your misreading of my assertion. Do I need to provide links for "shots fired in a pizza parlor" or "protesters murdered by car" or "protestors murdered by gun" or "illegal voter intimidation" or "not quite ruling out the possibility that a huge chunk of elected officials and others are part of a cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts who drink the blood of children," really?

You go on a bit suggesting that the only reason any of the above might possibly be considered bad is that it's labeled a certain way, but I think you've got that very, very backward. All of the above are considered bad, and it turns out that all of them seem to be linked to a somewhat popular and growing source which happens to fall into a category popularly known as a conspiracy theory. Call it that, or call it harmful garbage, I don't care.

This sentence is the one that would give away your game, by the way:

> If truth and rationality is truly on the side of the "anti-conspiracy" side of the divide, you'd think it would be child's play to "destroy conspiracy theorists with facts and logic". And yet, what accompanies the heuristic seems to be an inoculation to any epistemic challenges: circling of the wagons, typically via insubstantial/rhetorical dismissals (ad hominen character attacks), appeals to ends justifying the means, or simply downvoting + silence.

That's a doozy, and wrong both in fact and in what I think is its clear intent.

> That's a lot of words that could be replaced with "I don't understand the phrase 'contrary to all evidence.'"

This statement is objectively incorrect. The "lot of words" contained within my comment cannot, in fact, be replaced with "I don't understand the phrase 'contrary to all evidence.'"

This is the sort of response that interests me, especially on a high-intellect site like HN.

> My long sentence did not in fact suggest any coordinated behavior at all

This statement is objectively incorrect.

You wrote: "...combined with some [ [conspiracy theories] popular among ["the Tea Party movement"] ] as they were known, [propelled our current president into office].

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/conspiracy

- the act of conspiring.

- an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.

- a combination of persons for a secret, unlawful, or evil purpose: He joined the conspiracy to overthrow the government. Law.

- an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.

- any concurrence in action; combination in bringing about a given result.

> nor is there any known evidence to suggest any part of the sentence is wrong

This sounds like you believe that you can assert anything, and the onus is on others to disprove it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

> That's the difference between something being proven false, like racist birtherism, and a lack of evidence to support your misreading of my assertion.

I don't think it's actually true that I've misread or mischaracterized your assertion. I have provided some information above upon which my reasoning is based.

More likely, I suspect your objection is that I have interpreted it literally, as opposed to "knowing what you mean" - the issue with the latter approach is, it has a dependency on the manner in which each individual reader unpacks the text you have written into complex ideas in their mind. The advantage of speaking explicitly/precisely/literally is that it is far more immune to errors during transmission. Of course, this can also e a disadvantage, such as when endeavouring to persuade people to believe certain ideas, that are not actually (known to be) True (which is why I suspect my style of writing is so unpopular - it interferes with that process).

> Do I need to provide links for "shots fired in a pizza parlor" or "protesters murdered by car" or "protestors murdered by gun" or "illegal voter intimidation" or "not quite ruling out the possibility that a huge chunk of elected officials and others are part of a cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts who drink the blood of children," really?

No, but it would be preferable if you speak in more precise terms (less vagueness, less rhetoric), or at least acknowledge the form in which you are speaking. But of course, you are free to do whatever you would like.

> You go on a bit suggesting that the only reason any of the above might possibly be considered bad is that it's labeled a certain way

Not quite. I did point out that this labelling is bad, but I also pointed out some specifics of why it is bad. And, I did not suggest that this is "the only thing that is bad" - that is your interpretation of what I've said, an interpretation that is distinctly different than what I actually said. It is this phenomenon (and the increasing frequency of it, on certain important topics) that bothers me.

> but I think you've got that very, very backward. All of the above are considered bad, and it turns out that all of them seem to be....

When you say "they seem to be X linked to..." - what information is your perception of this linkage based on? Did you roll up your sleeve and do the associative backtracing yourself, or did you outsource that to a third party, and accepts the resulting assessment at face value, with no concern for its relative, quantitative accuracy?

> ...linked to a somewhat popular and growing source which happens to fall into a category popularly known as a conspiracy theory. Call it that, or call it harmful garbage, I don't care.

Some of us care. Firstly, I care about what is actually true. Secondly, I care that so many people exhibit signs of not caring about what is true, while simultaneously accusing other people of doing that very thing - and seem to be completely unaware that this phenomenon is occurring. Based on my (admittedly imperfect) understanding of history, the long term consequences of this sort of mindset is often unpleasant.

> This sentence is the one that would give away your game, by the way

That you consider truth to be some sort of a game is similarly concerning.

> That's a doozy, and wrong both in fact and in what I think is its clear intent.

Are you able to point out what is factually wrong with it (and if so, could you please state explicitly what that is)? I am also very curious to know what you think my intent is, as well as how that belief formed in your mind, but that's purely optional.

Lest you allow your intuition that I am "up to something", or "trying to gaslight you" dissuade you from addressing the points that I have actually made (as opposed to addressing inaccurate, non-comprehensive interpretations of them), I would like to preemptively point out that the thinking style I am using here is no different than that which most of us use all day long when we are writing code: disciplined, fact-based (consistent with observable reality) logic. If we write unsound code based on incorrect premises, will our programs not produce incorrect (inconsistent with reality) results, and do we not exert significant effort to ensure that we avoid that? Well then, if that is appropriate for matters in the workplace that affect only small slices of the world population, is there some logical reason that this style of thinking becomes inappropriate when dealing with arguably more important matters: events in the real world, many of which have complex cascading effects on very large slices of the world population?

Two things. First, you know you're on extremely weak rhetorical ice, and also kind of outside the norms of our community, when you start quoting the dictionary as a rebuttal. The person you're debating told you what they meant; what they meant is no longer a part of the debate.

Second, it is very much out of the norms of HN to do email-style alternating quote/response the way you are. It's also very difficult to read on this site. Try just writing paragraphs? We can all read the comment you're replying to; we don't need to read it twice.

> First, you know you're on extremely weak rhetorical ice

a) You do not know what I know

b) I would say that I am not on "rhetorical ice" at all - rather, I am combating rhetoric with precise, non-rhetorical ideas

> and also kind of outside the norms of our community

This is my very complaint. It may be true that I am "outside of the norms (Overton Window) of the community", but have I violated the HN guidelines? Is strict epistemology (disciplined adherence to that which is actually true) a formal violation of explicit community rules, or an undocumented, culturally imposed one?

> when you start quoting the dictionary as a rebuttal.

Adherence to formal, broadly accepted definitions of words (upon which someone else's argument is based) is improper behavior?

> The person you're debating told you what they meant; what they meant is no longer a part of the debate.

How does one know what portions of reality are acceptable to discuss, and which ones shall not be discussed? I see nothing in the guidelines. And I would strongly disagree to objections based on "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." It is a fine guideline, but when it starts being used as a wildcard to suppress true ideas, the discussion of which may not to be some people's liking, I think that crosses an important line.

> Second, it is very much out of the norms of HN to do email-style alternating quote/response the way you are. It's also very difficult to read on this site.

Certain forms of communication (precise, non-narrative) lend themselves to different writing styles.

Do you have any objections that are based on the actual content of the ideas I have written? Or might your objection be not to the ideas themselves, but that I am stating them out loud?

Does it matter to anyone what is actually True any longer, or have we mass adopted a culture of "the ends justifies the means" to managing and discussing the affairs of the world? Should bad ideas be fought with better ideas, or with censorship (formal, or informal) and pretending they do not exist?

Based on how I see events unfolding in the world, now seems like an opportune time to be discussing just what exactly we humans are actually up to on this planet (as opposed to what we like to tell ourselves we are up to), from a more philosophical/abstract perspective - this facilitates the ability to rise above the repetitive loop of object-level "he said, she said" conversations, and ascend to a level of more thoughtful, less combative/partisan communication and sense making - at least in theory. Are we formally opposed to that level of conversation, is that "outside the norms of our community" - or not? This is not my decision to make, I am only asking the question.

I think this is the kernel of what you are saying, and I hope that it finds its way above all of the noise about specific websites or conspiracy theories:

> Does it matter to anyone what is actually True any longer, or have we mass adopted a culture of "the ends justifies the means" to managing and discussing the affairs of the world? Should bad ideas be fought with better ideas, or with censorship (formal, or informal) and pretending they do not exist?

And I believe this is your end goal:

> the abilty ... to ascend to a level of more thoughtful, less combative/partisan communication and sense making

Is that a fair set of summary quotations?

Very much so!

Second, it is very much out of the norms of HN to do email-style alternating quote/response the way you are.

I've seen such used before (though with italics to help the eye find the breaks), when a comment makes too many points or is too complex to reply to without making it clear which part of the comment is relevant to which part of a reply.

Is there a better way to format conversations on HN when comments reach this level of branching complexity?

I really think the right way to do it is just to write a natural paragraph that refers to what the parent was saying. But what you did, with a single italicized reference at the top, is an HN idiom as well.

A long back-and-forth of quote and rebuttal though is definitely not the style here. That style makes sense in Email and Usenet, because you're often using readers that don't show the parent comment at the same time or in a thread. It makes very little sense here, where we're essentially reading the same comment twice.

People can edit comments here. It makes no sense to permit the commenter to whom you are responding to recontextualize your words by editing their post after a response is received.

Anyway, there is nothing in the site guidelines defining "the style here," as you call it. Are you the sole repository of the style here, or are there others?

It's mostly just me.

> It makes very little sense here, where we're essentially reading the same comment twice.

For standard/default conversations, I agree that it doesn't make sense (as is the case with many standard situations). But for non-standard situations, sometimes non-standard approaches are more suited.

> it is very much out of the norms of HN to do email-style alternating quote/response the way you are.

Counterpoint (with the quote for irony): I find that in politicized discussions like this one, when I want to jump in to correct something, it is horrifyingly common to find that the original comment has been editted to sneak around the point I wrote. The quotes act as protection against bad faith discussion.

Any observers still unclear on what the walls of text might be designed to do should note that anyone not in favor of letting Qanon run amok is required to produce incontrovertible evidence of every single assertion they make, held to an impossible standard if anyone is being dishonest, while on the other side, statements like 'it's mostly "the left" doing the censorship these days' can be dropped without any supporting evidence at all.

For all the appeals to objectivity, the sea-lioning[0] is very much one-sided.

0 http://www.wondermark.com/1k62/

> Any observers still unclear on what the walls of text might be designed to do...

Knowing(!) what the walls of text are "designed to do" requires ESP abilities (are you suggesting these exist, and you possess them?), and is also inconsistent with what they are actually designed to do (I know, because unlike you, I happen to have direct access to my mind) - a more accurate motivation was arrived at (and confirmed by me) by one exceptionally skilled thinker if you care to read the thread.

> ...should note that anyone not in favor of letting Qanon run amok is required to produce incontrovertible evidence of every single assertion they make, held to an impossible standard if anyone is being dishonest

Observers should "note" this "fact"? Well, it's your claim, not mine. Not only have I not claimed this, I do not believe or agree with it - I consider this idea incredibly unrealistic, to the point of categorizing it under silly.

> ...while on the other side, statements like 'it's mostly "the left" doing the censorship these days' can be dropped without any supporting evidence at all.

"While on the other side" sounds like you're referring to me. Have I made any such claim about the left? Why are you speaking as if I have? Is that an honest mistake, or are you perhaps using deceit to implant invalid invalid ideas into the minds of other readers? This is actually the essence of my very complaint: the implanting of ideas that are not supported by evidence into vulnerable minds of other people - which ironically, is the very thing QAnon and conspiracy theorists do!

> For all the appeals to objectivity, the sea-lioning[0] is very much one-sided.

I find it very interesting (and ironic/hypocritical - see my other comment in the thread on this) that the collective brainpower of HN is not able to come up with a single argument that does not consist of rhetoric like this (individual sentence, and overall comment). I also find it interesting that when I point this out, it is only responded to with more rhetoric.

> http://www.wondermark.com/1k62/

I notice the author has posted some interesting followup errata comments on that comic:

http://wondermark.com/2014-errata/

> It has been suggested that the couple in this comic, and the woman in particular, are bigots for making a pejorative statement about a species of animal, and then refusing to justify their statements. It has been further suggested that they be read as overly privileged, because they are dressed fancily, have a house, a motor-car, etc. This is, I suppose, a valid read of the comic, if taken as written.

> But often, in satire such as this, elements are employed to stand in for other, different objects or concepts. Using animals for this purpose has the effect of allowing the point (which usually is about behavior) to stand unencumbered by the connotations that might be suggested if a person is portrayed in that role — because all people are members of some social group or other, even if said group identity is not germane to the point being made.

> Such is the case with this comic. The sea lion character is not meant to represent actual sea lions, or any actual animal. It is meant as a metaphorical stand-in for human beings that display certain behaviors. Since behaviors are the result of choice, I would assert that the woman’s objection to sea lions — which, if the metaphor is understood, is read as actually an objection to human beings who exhibit certain behaviors — is not analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics.

> My apologies if the use of a metaphorical sea lion in this strip, rather than a human being making conscious choices about their own behavior, was in any way confusing.

As you can see, the point of the comic is about behaviors: "Since behaviors are the result of choice, I would assert that the woman’s objection to sea lions — which, if the metaphor is understood, is read as actually an objection to human beings who exhibit certain behaviors".

So in the context of this thread, the behavior that can be observed is people choosing to broadcast specific ideas [1] for which they do not have evidence, and are unwilling to defend with anything other than rhetoric. An overly imaginative person might also pick up a whiffs of things like intellectual superiority (the ironic kind), groupthink, peer pressure, tyranny of the majority, chilling effect, Overton Window enforcement, etc. Luckily, I am not such a person, I am simply making that observation.

Although, I do take exception with: "Since behaviors are the result of choice...". If one studies psychology and neuroscience, it becomes not so clear how much choice or free will people have when it comes to what they believe. At times, some beliefs seem to be (so they say) intertwined with the very identity of the person who holds them, and consequently, these beliefs can be very stubbornly held (within the subconscious mind) and if not formed via a logical process, cannot be dispelled with logic (and are often not defended by logic,or cannot be). Probably the most famous example of this type of belief is religion, which can come in many forms.

[1] ...which can affect belief formation in other people's minds, which can then infect other minds, rinse/repeat - this "virality of ideas" phenomenon can be more easily recognized by observing QAnon type subcultures rather than subtler instances like this thread.

https://www.google.com/search?q=case+study+propagation+of+me...

> Have I made any such claim about the left? Why are you speaking as if I have?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24811209

Oh my....well I certainly deserve that one!!! Sadly, I have but one upvote to award you, and of course my respect for your keen eye!

Although, considering the content of the conversations in this thread, could I not simply invoke evidence-by-mind-reading? Is what's good for the goose not also good for the gander?

Regardless, while I have your attention....I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the ideas (specifically, "ESP" and "sea-lioning" nuances) in my previous comment? I think these sorts of things are quite interesting ideas.

I highly respect the way you have articulated this. Well done, and I learned a few things about the power of an even keeled approach.

> and I learned a few things about the power of an even keeled approach

That it is an excellent attractor for downvotes and rhetoric? :)

"Destroying people with facts and logic" isn't how human psychology works (in fact: attempts to do that often harden existing beliefs), and without that axiom I think the rest of this analysis falls apart.

> "Destroying people with facts and logic" isn't how human psychology works

Completely agree that this isn't how human psychology works. However, in debate (which is what is happening here), facts and logic can indeed be used to vanquish one's counterpart. When the facts are in favour of one side of the debate, it is fairly typical that they will leverage them in the debate. If you observe a debate where one side does not use facts but instead opts for pure rhetoric, it is often (but not always) a sign that they do not have facts on their side. If you ask them about the abstract notion of facts/truth, repeatedly, and the response is, repeatedly, as if they did not see the question, this may be considered another sign.

> ...and without that axiom I think the rest of this analysis falls apart

This is interesting - are you able to articulate how you consider this to be the case?

I in no way considered "Destroying people with facts and logic" to be a key component of my overall argument, it was mostly just an off the cuff bit of snark.

Nah. You were referring to the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and the ease with which they could be dispelled by logic, were they of such little grounding as we say Qanon is. You weren't referring to HN, or any debate in particular; that's a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this site.

> You weren't referring to HN, or any debate in particular; that's a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Reading someone's mind and then asserting it as what they are doing and knocking that down (a classic strawman argument) is the rhetorical sleight of hand (and also an innate capability that develops from a very young age, as far as I can tell).

In fact, what I was actually referring to was the particular angle I am arguing in this thread, here on HN, an argument that has been opposed by nothing other than rhetoric.

> Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this site.

Framing the argument via semantics (cherry picking one word, that was placed within quotation marks to explictly* indicate that it is being used in a figure-of-speech manner) to (again) turn it into a non-representative proxy of the actual argument and then sidetracking the discussion onto that, is another clever rhetorical slight of hand.

What remains, unaddressed, is the original argument.

The tactics are annoying, but I don't mind so much - seeing them on full, unapologetic display is actually kind of the point of the whole exercise from my perspective.

Disrupt everything? Software eats the world?

> For example, numerous people asserting that QAnon, and conspiracy theories (conspiracy theorists) in general, "are" or "believe" certain things. If one pays close attention to these threads every time they appear on HN (or elsewhere, be it social media or formal media), one may notice that the asserted descriptions are always very vague, and always only include the very worst/silliest of ideas that exist within the communities - very often, ideas that really don't have high consensus agreement in the actual communities themselves. And again, with no with no concern whatsoever for whether the assertions are actually true.

Wikipedia defines Qanon as "QAnon[a] (/ˌkjuːəˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy theory.[b] It alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against US President Donald Trump, who is battling against the cabal"

The ACTUAL TRUTH is that... there is not a cabal of Satanic pedophiles plotting against Donald Trump.

If you want to claim that there's isn't a firm consensus around Qanon supporters about the exact definitions of this conspiracy theory, I'm still going to go ahead and say anyone in this vague ballpark is missing a few marbles. Qualifying that Conspiracy Theory != False is not a valid argument to deny that this theory, and many others, are obviously false. Debating the semantics of what a theory is or isn't to each subjective viewer is tiring and false and not a real debate.

I say missing a few marbles, and that's rude, because most conspiracy theorists are genuinely suffering from a degree of paranoia and extreme distrust. They believe that others are lying to them, and affirmation of that belief is appealing. But they're still terribly incorrect.

This happens on every type of definition, from Feminism to Socialism, to Nazism. If you want to have a nuanced discussion about aspects of QAnon in the context of what it means to you, you need to recognize that there's not point in pushing the brand. You need to state specific issues with their own identity.

All the logic in your great wall of text is nullified and is more or less amounting to a reverse straw man. Implying that an outrageous claim has merit because a severely watered down version of it might be accurate.

I actually thought the comment you replied to made a good point, but I think I can explain it differently (with examples), which might make it easier to understand.

I browsed some conspiracy sites back in the day, including 4chan and /r/conspiracy. There seemed to be three levels of thought about Jews. A small number of people thought that Jews had a conspiracy whereby they coordinated with each other to run the world (active collusion). A larger number of people thought that powerful people generally ran the world in a way that actively benefited the powerful and hurt the poor (without active collusion) and that a disproportionate portion of those powerful people were Jewish. A third, even larger group, didn't really think it was about Jews - like the second group, they thought powerful people subtly colluded to benefit themselves, but they weren't really interested in the religious background of those people, or recognized that the disproportionate representation of Jews among the powerful is more likely a result of a higher than average interest in education and a lower rate of divorce among Jews - just normal population demographics playing out.

One of the things that was interesting is that all three groups (even those that disavowrd anti-Semitism) used "anti-Semitic" memes like (((globalists))) and that the vast majority of contributors (from the second and third group) looked down on the first group. Thinking that Jews actually got into a secret room and actively conspired - this was low-brow - and you'd see comments mocking such views - the village idiots of conspiracy village.

It's my observation that the media often describes conspiracy groups as the first group only. E.g. with Pepe in 2016, the media described a green frog as an anti-Semitic symbol. But on conspiracy forums, commenters were saying "no, Pepe doesn't refer to Jews, it refers to globalists / illuminati."

I think a similar thing is going on the Q. I have one friend who has been watching and describes himself as a fan - he doesn't believe it all, or even most of it - but he does believe that powerful people conspire to evade laws that is common people follow and that powerful people in particular often engage in illegal sexual liasions, including prostitution and in some cases, prostitution involving minors.

The larger point is - there's a spectrum here that ranges from literally believing Clinton and Trump hang out in the same pizza parlor raping children, to believing that powerful people are generally aware of the availability of prostitution and the prostitution of minors at expensive hotels (hello, Russia Ritz Carlton, can I get a room in the presidential suite). Many of the softer versions of these "conspiracies" don't seem too far fetched to me - after all, we know that powerful people were aware of Epstein and purchased services from Epstein well before the rest of us knew. On sites like 8chan, you see the whole range - with, frankly, the majority of the commenters on the softer end - but the media represents those sites as dominated or exclusively the harder versions. And it's misleading. Such misleading descriptions attached to an attempt to restrict free speech are very dangerous IMHO, as they can be used to restrict legitimate speech e.g. about the extent of complicity of major hotel chains and just general awareness of rich people and illegal sexual transactions.

I don't disagree, but it's more or less what I meant by this line

> All the logic in your great wall of text is nullified and is more or less amounting to a reverse straw man. Implying that an outrageous claim has merit because a severely watered down version of it might be accurate.

If you think there may be some rich people who engage in with underage prostitutes, you are almost certainly correct. It's kind of dumb to make that a salient issue in your day to day if you don't have any specifics, but sure, it's probably still true somewhere. But let's say you, for whatever reason, still think its really important to make sure people ask the question, are there rich pedophiles.

It should be patently obvious that aligning yourself at all with stupider ideas, even if they share a similar vein, is a bad idea. It harms your credibility to defend QAnon and then qualify that you only mean your portion. If you want to have a discussion, all you need to do is say "pizza parlor stuff is dumb, QAnon is dumb, but there is some merit to rich pedophiles somewhere.

The weakness of conspiracy theorists is that they align themselves with other conspiracy theorists who offer some form of affirmation to their beliefs because they think a larger force is telling them lies. And maybe they are being told some lies. Because that's really all it is. You can adjust your level of craziness but the entire point of a conspiracy theory in-group is getting affirmation from others. If you had a genuine interest in an issue that you wanted to raise in public awareness or do something to combat it, the route of the conspiracy theorist is an awfully dumb way to do it. The spectrum is, at worst, dumb as rocks, and at best, unwise and lacking in self awareness.

I see two issues with what you're saying.

First, it's not just that some rich people are pedophiles. It's called a conspiracy theory for a reason - there's conspiring going on. The CEO of the Ritz knows that his hotels offer underage prostitutes. The personal concierge directs the CEO to club which is known to be "good for rich people." The club owner knows that the company they outsource to for renting table dancers on the weekends also has dancers doing some prostituting on the side. The other rich attendees of the club (who are not purchasing) can see that that girl is clearly not 21. There's more than just pedophilia going on here - a system of winks and nods whereby powerful people are offered the opportunity to engage in illegal behavior and make no moves against the powerful people who facilitate these opportunities.

The second thing is that you're missing the point around alignment. These people DON'T align themselves with each other. They frequent the same forums as each other (e.g. 8chan) and disagree with each other on those forums. It's only in the eyes of the media and in people influenced by the media that the various flavors of conspiracy people are actually aligned.

Edit: was thinking about this line.

> If you had a genuine interest in an issue that you wanted to raise in public awareness or do something to combat it, the route of the conspiracy theorist is an awfully dumb way to do it.

What is the right way to address e.g. the widespread availability of illegal prostitution in hotels owned by American companies in foreign countries? I saw a few news articles in the press exploring the phenomenon a few years back, but nothing changed. Am I supposed to found a non-profit? A newspaper? Do the investigation myself and publish it to LiveLeak? Write a letter to my congresswoman? I'm honestly not sure how to work that problem, other than just talking to other people about it.

> First, it's not just that some rich people are pedophiles. It's called a conspiracy theory for a reason - there's conspiring going on. The CEO of the Ritz knows that his hotels offer underage prostitutes. The personal concierge directs the CEO to club which is known to be "good for rich people." The club owner knows that the company they outsource to for renting table dancers on the weekends also has dancers doing some prostituting on the side. The other rich attendees of the club (who are not purchasing) can see that that girl is clearly not 21. There's more than just pedophilia going on here - a system of winks and nods whereby powerful people are offered the opportunity to engage in illegal behavior and make no moves against the powerful people who facilitate these opportunities.

And? Is the claim made more meaningful by these specifics?

> The second thing is that you're missing the point around alignment. These people DON'T align themselves with each other. They frequent the same forums as each other (e.g. 8chan) and disagree with each other on those forums. It's only in the eyes of the media and in people influenced by the media that the various flavors of conspiracy people are actually aligned.

People who regularly meet and discuss things are aligned on the part that counts. They might not be organized, but they're definitely aligned

> And? Is the claim made more meaningful by these specifics?

Yes? It's a different claim. Somebody doing X and a culture where many people turn a blind eye to and enable X aren't the same thing.

> People who regularly meet and discuss things are aligned on the part that counts. They might not be organized, but they're definitely aligned

We're talking about forums on the internet. Are you an I "aligned" because we had this discussion here?

Also, please do respond to my edit. I'm still pretty clueless as to the better way to work the problem of powerful people turning a blind eye to and enabling lawbreaking by other powerful people other than just talking about it.

> Yes? It's a different claim. Somebody doing X and a culture where many people turn a blind eye to and enable X aren't the same thing.

I don't think it makes a huge difference tbh.

> We're talking about forums on the internet. Are you an I "aligned" because we had this discussion here?

No. But this is a forum that generally frowns on and downvotes conspiracy theories. If you go to a forum that's primary function is discussing them, then I would say yes.

> Also, please do respond to my edit. I'm still pretty clueless as to the better way to work the problem of powerful people turning a blind eye to and enabling lawbreaking by other powerful people other than just talking about it.

>What is the right way to address e.g. the widespread availability of illegal prostitution in hotels owned by American companies in foreign countries? I saw a few news articles in the press exploring the phenomenon a few years back, but nothing changed. Am I supposed to found a non-profit? A newspaper? Do the investigation myself and publish it to LiveLeak? Write a letter to my congresswoman? I'm honestly not sure how to work that problem, other than just talking to other people about it.

Well given that your theory could be wrong, yeah, you should probably either do the investigation yourself, fund someone else to do the investigation, or find a different problem to solve that is within your power to affect. Raising awareness of something in the form of a conspiracy theory delegitamizes it.

For example, how legitamite anti human trafficking non-profits have had a harder time doing productive things due to conspiracy theory influence: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/qanons-obsession-with-s...

You said:

> If you had a genuine interest in an issue that you wanted to raise in public awareness or do something to combat it, the route of the conspiracy theorist is an awfully dumb way to do it.

I said:

> What is the right way to address e.g. the widespread availability of illegal prostitution in hotels owned by American companies in foreign countries?

And you said:

> find a different problem to solve that is within your power to affect.

You clearly haven't answered the question. "There are better ways to solve this problem." "What are the better ways to solve this problem?" "You should solve a different problem." This is not engaging in good faith - you've made assertions and then refused to back them up.

Fwiw, I read the 538 article a few weeks back. They get more phone calls and also more donations and complain about the extra phone calls. I'm fairly certain the funding is worth more than the phone calls cost. So QAnon has actually helped here, if not in the way they intended, or as effectively as they could have. Claiming that a cost of a few phone calls significantly outweighs extra donations is just silly - and seems like the sort of political head-in-the-sand fake news that partisans publish constantly.

I said "you should probably either do the investigation yourself, fund someone else to do the investigation, or find a different problem to solve that is within your power to affect."

> The larger point is - there's a spectrum here that ranges from literally believing Clinton and Trump hang out in the same pizza parlor raping children

One of the things that shows the total bankruptcy of QAnon is that despite the long history of trump sexual abuse and several credible rape claims and the fact that Trump peeked on underage teenage girls changing at a miss teen usa contest, almost none of these conspiracy theories accuse Trump of anything. Instead it's always perceived enemies of trump Democrat or Republican or celeb that doesn't like Trump accused almost always without any evidence

> The ACTUAL TRUTH is that...

No, the actual truth of what Qanon -is-, is what Qanon is. There is that which exists in reality, and then there is mankind's best efforts to measure and describe it (what you read in Wikipedia, history books, scientific textbooks and papers, etc). These things are related, but they are not the same thing.

> If you want to claim that there's isn't a firm consensus around Qanon supporters about the exact definitions of this conspiracy theory, I'm still going to go ahead and say anyone in this vague ballpark is missing a few marbles.

The difference between you and I is that I base my beliefs on what is known to be true, rather than on what others tell me is true, or on my subconscious heuristic predictions of what is true (ie: what I "want" to claim). What the "firm consensus" of what Qanon (or anything, for that matter) is may be interesting, but I am more concerned with what is actually True. If the "firm consensus" of global warming was that it's not happening, would your mind willingly accept that with no complaints? If not, why not?

> Qualifying that Conspiracy Theory != False is not a valid argument to deny that this theory

a) I have not denied this story.

b) Is "Conspiracy Theory != False, necessarily)" logically correct, or incorrect?

> and many others, are obviously false

"Obvious" falseness is a heuristic prediction - it has not been objectively established what is known(!) to be False (or True, or Unknown) in many instances - rather, it has only been asserted (typically with little if any evidence) what is False. Again, apply your same logic to climate change and see if your thinking changes.

> Debating the semantics of what a theory is or isn't to each subjective viewer is tiring and false and not a real debate.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if you took this philosophy into the workplace when implementing software, or if a new hire brought it to you.

> I say missing a few marbles, and that's rude, because most conspiracy theorists are genuinely suffering from a degree of paranoia and extreme distrust. They believe that others are lying to them, and affirmation of that belief is appealing.

You have no way of knowing what most conspiracy theorists are, or are not, or what they believe, just as a racist has no way of knowing the same about people who have a different skin color than them. This should be fairly easy to realize: ask yourself what the literal source of that knowledge is. Is it a broad, accurate survey of a large number of conspiracy theorists, or is it a subconscious heuristic operating on a dataset of some anecdotal personal experiences combined with large numbers of news articles and forum conversations that are also not based on direct evidence?

> But they're still terribly incorrect.

If you were to attempt to compile a substantial list of their beliefs and their correctness that is consistent with measurable reality, I propose that you would immediately notice a problem - a severe lack of specific content.

> This happens on every type of definition, from Feminism to Socialism, to Nazism.

Indeed it does, including right here on HN.

> If you want to have a nuanced discussion about aspects of QAnon in the context of what it means to you, you need to recognize that there's not point in pushing the brand.

Completely agree, and I do realize this, and I am not "pushing the brand" - rather, I am discussing abstract principles like the value and importance of truthfulness, and the possible consequences of a culture that decides to turn its back on such principles. These are not exactly easy conversations to have, but that's why they are so important.

> You need to state specific issues with their own identity.

Actually, this is what I am requesting of others who are asserting that reality is composed of a specific state - my disagreement should not be considered an assertion of the opposite, because it isn't - that is undisciplined, non-logical thinking. In fact, I am simply following the "critical thinking" advice suggested by the media: do not accept things you read at face value - ask questions, challenge assertions (especially those that lack evidence, especially when their proponents are opposed to discussing evidence, preferring instead to use rhetoric), etc.

> All the logic in your great wall of text is nullified

Oh? What was it nullified by?

> and is more or less amounting to a reverse straw man.

Pure rhetoric.

> Implying that an outrageous claim has merit because a severely watered down version of it might be accurate.

Implying that I have implied that is yet another example of the very thing I am protesting: a lack of concern for what is true.

> If you were to attempt to compile a substantial list of their beliefs and their correctness that is consistent with measurable reality, I propose that you would immediately notice a problem - a severe lack of specific content.

Why don't you list them for us then and give us your opinion on whether something is Provably True, Not provable but probably true, not provable but probably false, and provably false.

Let's say top 5 beliefs to keep it simple.

> Why don't you list them for us then and give us your opinion on whether something is Provably True, Not provable but probably true, not provable but probably false, and provably false.

Here's why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

When two parties are in a discussion and one [makes a claim] [that the other disputes], [the one who makes the claim typically has a burden of proof to justify or substantiate that claim] especially when it challenges a perceived status quo.

This is also stated in Hitchens's razor, which declares that "what may be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed without evidence."

The claim in question:

"...most conspiracy theorists are genuinely suffering from a degree of paranoia and extreme distrust. They believe that others are lying to them, and affirmation of that belief is appealing. But they're still terribly incorrect."

The context:

>> If you want to claim that there's isn't a firm consensus around Qanon supporters about the exact definitions of this conspiracy theory, I'm still going to go ahead and say anyone in this vague ballpark is missing a few marbles. Qualifying that Conspiracy Theory != False is not a valid argument to deny that this theory, and many others, are obviously false. Debating the semantics of what a theory is or isn't to each subjective viewer is tiring and false and not a real debate.

>> I say missing a few marbles, and that's rude, because most conspiracy theorists are genuinely suffering from a degree of paranoia and extreme distrust. They believe that others are lying to them, and affirmation of that belief is appealing. But they're still terribly incorrect.

So my questions to you are:

1. How is it that you know(!) the mental state and epistemic quality of the beliefs held by not only one person, but most conspiracy theorists? (Note: you are the one who made the claim, my inability to disprove it does not constitute a proof of your assertion.)

2. Are you averse to touching upon the abstract idea I have mentioned many times: What is actually true?

These conversations are always rather ironic: right-thinking critical thinkers can regularly be observed opining at length about the intellectual inferiority of their out-groups, how they believe things without the need for evidence, how they refuse to listen to logic, how their beliefs do not stand up to scrutiny, and so forth and so on.

All of this is very often true, and perfectly reasonable criticism. But what people seem to not realize is that this behavior is not derived from <out-group membership>, but rather from a more universal place: the human mind. Challenge any individual's axioms (a self-evident truth that requires no proof), and they will exhibit the very same behavior, if perhaps with more sophistication and a better vocabulary.

If anyone was actually curious why <group x> believes what they do, or was truly concerned about the alleged "danger" they and their ideas impose upon society, you'd think they might perhaps have a little genuine curiosity about what is actually going on. However, as can be seen in this thread, there is not only no interest, but extreme aversion to touching the topic in a serious, non-rhetorical way.

Something to maybe keep in mind for the next time you find yourself criticizing those who you do not actually know much about.

You are claiming that because something cannot be proven false, it cannot be assumed false. That's fine, but just because something can't be proven false, one doesn't need to assume it has merit beyond a random statement.

My statement about mental health of conspiracy theorists is based on a journalist who interviewed dozens of conspiracy theorists and found that almost all of them had suffered an incident where they were betrayed in their personal lives and believed that most people were lying about them. I found that compelling. He wasn't god though. Maybe he was wrong.

> You are claiming that because something cannot be proven false, it cannot be assumed false.

Not quite - it can easily be assumed false - I offer this thread as evidence. And I am certainly not making that claim - it is being inferred that I am making that claim, but if you read the text I have written, you will find no sign of it. Isn't that interesting...what might be going on here?

What I am complaining about is that everything that has had a "conspiracy theory" label attached to it, is asserted as being(!) False.

> That's fine, but just because something can't be proven false, one doesn't need to assume it has merit beyond a random statement.

No one here has done that. But plenty of people have done essentially the opposite: if something hasn't been proven True (regardless of any actual effort), then therefore it --is-- False. This is such comically flawed logic, it is near impossible to believe that it is being simultaneously followed by so many people who rely upon strict logic for their daily job. I would say that this paradox hints at the potency of the power that is in play.

> My statement about mental health of conspiracy theorists is based on a journalist who interviewed dozens of conspiracy theorists and found that almost all of them had suffered an incident where they were betrayed in their personal lives and believed that most people were lying about them. I found that compelling. He wasn't god though. Maybe he was wrong.

Maybe his report didn't quite line up with reality. Are journalists ever wrong? Do stories ever appear in the newspaper that are "a little" sensationalized?

What matters, is what is true. Or, at least, that's what should matter, and what used to matter. But it seems like a new post-truth culture is developing, and that culture can be found in very high concentrations right here on HN.

It has also destoyed families. I know people whose parents have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the outcome is absolutely insane. They can't have a 20 minute conversation without the vast pedophilic conspiracy in Washington intruding (Because the parents cannot understand why their children could possibly be acting in accord with it.)

Another one of my friends can't even see his mother, because she doesn't believe that coronavirus is real, and is actively refusing to get her symptoms tested.

Edit: It's interesting to see how this is not a popular opinion to express here. Do folks disagree with me about this being a bad thing? Do folks actually think there's an iota of value in the Augean pile of QAnon crap? Do they think that this madness elevates the level of discourse in their society? Are they made uncomfortable by a mention of a human-scale anecdote of the observable harm that this movement is inflicting?

Speaking as someone who deals with a fair amount of this in their extended family, I honestly think a blind spot the human race has is a struggle to believe this can really get "that bad".

I've had relatives (now deceased) who were way down the rabbit hole, long before the whole QAnon thing, and given the sort of destructive effects it has on their life, to me - it's in the same bucket as alcoholism or addiction. It did the same sort of things that joining a "cut ties" cult like scientology or 7th day adventists did; you'd lose friends, spouses, even your job, etc.

None of this is a new phenomenon - it's just, people don't join the moonies or hare krishna anymore - they join weird internet cults now like QAnon.

(In my case, we essentially lost a family member who went on a deep-dive into anti-semitic nationalism back in the 60s.)

I haven't (and won't) downvote you for expressing an opinion I disagree with - but I do disagree with you.

Whether or not there is value in QAnon is beyond me. There is value in people being able to say what they want, even if it is baseless, or disturbed, or hateful. One example that comes to my mind is the Rotterham child rape scandal[1], which, were it not printed in the most reputable newspapers world wide, would sound like something out of the QAnon fantasy. Even worse than this scandal itself, which is saying something given that this scandal describes an organization of men raping children for decades with the tacit knowledge of local police and city government, is the fact that there are many similar occurrences in the UK. That is, this is not a one off horrific event, but part of a terrible and disturbing pattern.

Why I bring this up as an example, is, that it seems to me part of the problem the UK has in getting the organized rape of children under control, is an unwillingness to speak about it and be open about it. The UK is so determined to control speech and avoid offending people that they kept secret the organized rape of hundreds if not thousands of children across their country for decades. I would much rather err on the side of allowing people to indulge in dark, even if absurd, fantasies (e.g. QAnon) than forbid or punish people for going public with imperfectly firm accusations (as happened in Rotterham - victims and their families reported the ongoing sexual abuse and rape to the authorities through the many years it was ongoing and the authorities ignored them for fear of being offensive[2]).

The organized sexual abuse of children clearly does happen. Sometimes the government is intimately involved. For example the case with Jeffrey Epstein. It's worth it to let people talk about it and make accusations. Sometimes disturbed people will go too far and make baseless claims. That's not ideal, but preventing people from making anything but perfect accusations leads to a culture where horrible crimes are covered up for fear of not having enough evidence. I think it is a better balance to let mean people say mean things and expose whatever evidence there may be of things as soon as possible.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

2 - https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/police-ignored-child-s...

The horrors in Rotterham weren't exposed by conspiracy nuts, though. It was exposed by real investigative journalism and law enforcement work.

That's the whole point here: it's not that bad things don't happen, it's that this fact is not sufficient evidence for other bad things happening.

The suppression here is of baseless conspiracy theories about child abuse because they're baseless, not because they're about child abuse.

The victims in Rotterham went to the police and were turned away because the police considered what they were reporting to be potentially offensive. You're right that it wasn't exposed by conspiracy nuts, but that's because it was a real thing and the people with flimsy evidence were ignored. That it wasn't exposed by people with flimsy evidence is my point. In a different context and with different laws they would have the circulated the story and it would have gained attention, credibility, and scrutiny. There is a reason why "Grooming gangs" are common in the UK compared to the US. I think the suppression of speech is one of those reasons.

It's basically gaslighting to praise the work of the government by saying "It was exposed by real investigative journalism and law enforcement work". Absolutely not. Multiple victims reported it to the government and were turned away. The government and journalists ignored it for decades. That's hardly "real investigative work". The government and journalists managed to detect the organized rape of hundreds of children after only 30 years!

The other reason to bring up Rotterham is to point out that conspiracies like this aren't purely fantasy. Sometimes the government is involved in the organized rape of children. Prohibiting people from talking about the possibility because you feel their evidence is insufficient is not a trade off I think should be made.

> to point out that conspiracies like this aren't purely fantasy

You're doing it again!

You can't justify belief in a baseless conspiracy theory by saying that some other vaguely related thing was true! You can't. The logic doesn't work.

And it's expressly harmful, because now that "justified" belief can be weaponized to hurt your political enemies. Stop it.

I don't think it's appropriate to say things like "Stop it". Please do me the courtesy of not treating me like a child and acting like you are instructing me.

The QAnon conspiracy is about pedophiles in government. The Rotterham scandal is about pedophiles enabled by government. The Epstein case is a mix of pedophiles and government. It's not crazy to suggest that pedophiles are mixed up with the government. We have multiple contemporary cases of this happening now.

Furthermore, it is exactly the tendency to censor speech which enabled the Rotterham scandal to endure for so long. Because people were censored for fear of causing offense hundreds of children were raped and victims were ignored. That's an extremely relevant example to a case where people are saying we must not permit people to talk about offensive things.

This makes no sense.

Trump has several claims of rape against him, has been known to be on Pedophilia flights and private trips with Epstein and walked in on pageant changing rooms and other things.

If QAnon was about pedophilia, it would be about pedophilia. BUt its not.

It's really about projection. Make enemies of people with baseless claims so they believe its true.

Sad really.

He's using your desire to not be censored to fill your desire for hate. And anyone who disagrees with your hate violates your freedom to talk about it. Everything you don't believe in is fake news.

It's a reality distortion field.

Since you can't even spell Rotherham, I'll not give much weight to your analysis of the reasons behind the police failure there.

Since you evaluate arguments based on the spelling of proper nouns from foreign places I'm afraid I can't bring myself to care about the esteem with which you regard my analysis.

It's not just any foreign place is it? It's the foreign place you've been spouting off about so authoritatively

Odd, that in a conversation about balancing the benefits of free speech with the harms of it, and when discussing the example of an organized conspiracy of child rapists acting in the UK with the tacit consent of the government for decades, you've chosen to fixate on a minor spelling error.

> It's not crazy to suggest that pedophiles are mixed up with the government.

Yes. It. Is. Because that suggestion requires evidence, which Q Does. Not. Have. Rotherham is not evidence for Q. Epstein is not evidence for Q. Rotherham and Epstein existing in history are not a license to make shit up about democrats and pretend it's the truth.

I've not said Epstein and Rotherham were evidence for Q. I've said they're examples of pedophiles intermixed with governments and examples of where holding high standards for what is appropriate to say resulted in the rape of innumerable children.

My point is not "Because Epstein therefore Q" but rather "We should allow speculation and conspiracies, even hurtful, hateful, or baseless, because the alternative is restricting what people can say, and such restrictions enabled and perpetuated some horrible crimes of a similar nature that happened recently."

> It's interesting to see how this is not a popular opinion to express here.

I've noticed that random comments which go against the shibboleths of the -- for lack of a better term -- 'orange man good' narrative can be subject to strange downvoting behavior.

Some of the posts that get hit by this, such as yours, are so innocuous that I'm not convinced that the targeting is organic as opposed the effects of some strongly opinionated s---head with a botnet and nothing better to do with his time.

> …drink the blood of children

This is an echo of another conspiracy theory, that culminated in its heyday into a world war.

Exactly. There are limits to the crazy. In moderation, giving people an outlet for frustration is fine. UFO abduction, all that stuff.

But when the crazy gets weaponized for the benefit of actual policy actors, which is what has clearly happened here, we need to start getting it under control.

It's not that Q and adrenochrome and pizzagate and birtherism and even the The Protocols are that dangerous per se. It's that people with power discovered they could use the nuts who believed that stuff to get more power.

And social media in the past decade has enabled lateral communication channels to mobilise the crazy mobs. Now you don't need to convince the journalists to get your drivel through out. You don't even have to be in the same country at all.

"Contrary to all evidence" is not quite true. There were a couple of places where Obama was stated to have been born in Kenya:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/promotional-booklet/

https://web.archive.org/web/20091020224623/http://www.npr.or...

I think the preponderance of evidence shows that he was born in Hawaii, but it's not "racist" or a "conspiracy theory" just to ask questions about it. It's more disturbing, IMO, to be a "status quo theorist" and refuse to even entertain one idea or another.

QAnon material has been retweeted by Trump and a QAnon-connected person is expected to be elected to the US congress. A QAnon believer was convicted for blocking a major dam while making terroristic threats[0]. Another believer was arrested for attempting to bomb a religious display in Illinois. [3] A believer in the QAnon predecessor, Pizzagate, shot up a pizza restaurant[1]. The recent attempt to assassinate the Canadian Prime Minister was perpetrated by an individual with Qanon leanings[3]. These incidents are not isolated and are part of a larger pattern of QAnon-connected violence[2][3].

QAnon is, politically, an auxiliary of the Republican party. This, combined with the willingness of QAnon followers to use violence, means that the movement has the potential to be a proto-brownshirt movement. This is not something to dismiss lightly.

QAnon is not a self-contained trash bin, it's a cancer that has metastasized into both violence and into the mainstream of American politics.

Hello, QAnon downvoters.

[0] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/02/1...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-man-with-assault-rifle-d...

[2] https://www.ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-secur...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violen...

Article doesn't mention any bomb and "shot up" is stretching things.

Updated. The QAnon bomber was, indeed, a different incident in Illinois. The Hoover Dam incident only involved firearms and an armored vehicle.

And what term other than 'shot up' would you use to describe a deranged person recklessly discharging a firearm as part of a targeted attack?

He shot a locked door three times trying to open it. You know "shot up" is misleading, that's why you've already downgraded it to reckless discharge.

The question of what constitutes 'shot up' is too pedantic to be worth considering further.

Why are you so invested in defending an extremist conspiracy theory from criticism?

> I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. The options aren't (1) whack-a-mole or (2) trash-binning. The options are (1) whack-a-mole or (2) whack-a-mole with trash-binning. When you remove the trash bin, you stymie the discourse.

Someone should grow some balls and advertise their routes on BGP.

I'm a conspiracy theorist, I'll admit it. Not the kind who spouts nonsense (at least I try not to), but who has spent a long time understanding the real big picture at a geopolitical and geostrategic level to the best of my limited ability. More on this later.

These calls for censorship are dangerous in so many ways not being addressed. There are two primary issues at hand in my eyes though. One, that the censorship engine that many think will only apply to those "crazy crackpot conspiracy theorists" will eventually be turned on them at some point in the future. Two, is that instead of actually filtering out "crazy conspiracy theorists" it will only filter out the "individual crazy conspiracy theorists", while the other entities at play will have (more) free reign to run amok than they already do and have.

I'm trying keep this meta, and not get into particulars for obvious reasons, but as a singular example to make a point; I particpated in one of the largest conspiracies in the last two decades, but it was a state and mainstream media sponsored one; the Global War on Terror (GWOT). If the deep state (in the original Peter Dale Scott sense of the term) wanted another Iraq equivalent today, how do you think this would be applied to people who fought against it? To ask the question is to answer it. As a matter of fact, this has happened more recently in a few cases, but most Americans just are completely unaware of the massive amounts of death and destruction being carried out in their name... because the media doesn't talk about it, and those that do are labelled... you guessed it... So for those who constantly clamor to use the "but these conspiracy theories are dangerous because of real life consequences!" angle are focusing on outliers (that should still be addressed) while ignoring the thousands of deaths of people of a different color half the world away, either at our hands, at the hands of those we finance, or at the hands of those we supply weapons to.

The bottom line is everyone is a conspiracy theorist, it's just that some people don't like certain ones, and clamour to silence those voices, not just for them, but for everyone. The term itself was brought into the perjorative by the CIA in an attempt to discredit anybody who questioned the Warren commission. The entire history of the world is a history of conspiracy! I tend to lean towards Michael Parenti's disdain heaped on what he calls "coincidence theorists", because thats what so many rebuttals and "debunkings" end up being.

By taking this ridicule and censor approach, instead of addressing things like half-truths and limited hangout psyops (of which Qanon certainly is), what happens is those who question things of this nature are forced further into isolated, filter bubbled communities that then become extremely defensive. This is not the way to address these things... but to be honest I think the pendulum may have swung too far already. It's too popular (even if much of it is manufactured popularity, a nice play on words of Chomsky's manufactured consent) a position. It's just another in the long line of boogeymen the state and other actors love utilize for other purposes. Communism! Terrorism! Protect the children! ... Conspiracy Theory! I suggest you don't fall for it. I also try not to blame too harshly those who do... after all, I fell for the GWOT in my younger and dumber days, as many of us did in the months and years after 9/11, and didn't get my brain back till I got out of the military.

A few quotes from old comments of mine: "One issue is that people seem to have completely forgotten what inductive logic is, and how powerful it can be. Of course evidence (deductive logic) is preferred wherever possible, but in the arena of intelligence agencies and billionares who spend a lot of time covering up their tracks (especially by degrees of seperations), you aren't going to get that evidence except in the most rare cases. Even in the cases where the evidence does show up, it is often covered up, destroyed, lost, inadmissable, gag ordered, blackbagged, etc."

"my anecdotal experience has been from starting with only one maxim. That I would rather know the truth than the lie, in particular the ugly truth over the beautiful lie. What started out for me just as the meager attempts of a USMC Iraq combat vet to understand his own place in what could truly be called a vast conspiracy (the war), became a lifelong journey of transformation in understanding the bigger picture of the realities of this world. Let me tell you, it is so much more conspiratorial than most would ever want to know (and I base this upon good, strong evidence, and where that is lacking, good inductive logic). I think most people honestly would prefer the beautiful lie. My problem always has been and probably always will be when those who prefer the lie try to tell me the lie is truth, and then attack when incredulity inevitably rises as a reaction."

I keep thinking about doing an hn "I am a conspiracy theorist, ama." right before I burn this account. Is now the time? I think I would need to discuss how to approach that delicately with mods first.

I don't see anything that's a conspiracy theory though. Like, the fact that there's corruption in the high levels of government that willfully enable war... Sounds like something Britta said on Community. The fact that there may be specific groups of long tenured employees in the State Department doing it isn't that noteworthy either. They work there.

The way you've written and described your views, experiences, and assumptions is what makes it seem like an offputting conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy has a legal definition. People are prosecuted for it quite frequently.

"An agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement's goal."[1]

If the wars in the middle east, (I would say Iraq moreso than Afghanistan, as at least Afghanistan actually harbored Al Qaeda/Taliban), don't count as a textbook definition of conspiracy, I'm afraid nothing does. Indeed, I would even disagree with the statement about the DoS (a subsection of the government), their entire job is supposed to be diplomacy, not war, thats what DoD is for. This is why I strongly disagree with the now common knowledge among those in the realm, that intelligence agencies embed and use DoS as cover so frequently, as it undermines diplomatic initiatives heavily. As for dismissing something as "something Britta said on community", it isn't even worth addressing.

"What happened on 9/11 is that we didn't have a strategy, we didn't have bipartisan agreement, we didn't have American understanding of it, and we had instead a policy coup in this country, a coup, a policy coup. Some hard-nose people took over the direction of American policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us. Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, if you're an American you ought to be concerned about the strategy of the United States in this region. What is our aim? What is our purpose? Why are we there? Why are Americans dying in this region? That is the issue." - General Wesley Clark

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/conspiracy

Conspiracy has a legal definition. "Conspiracy theory" has a different meaning. It is the sort of theory that resists evidence, since any evidence that opposes the theory is instead proof of the conspiracy. It is a form of magical thinking.

No, thats just the definition you want to apply in order to dismiss anything that makes you uncomfortable or disagree with. Like I've said before the history of the world is a history of conspiracy, and often the people who were calling out those things were labelled as "conspiracy theorist" as basically a form of ad hominem attack. I can't tell you how often I was talking about the NSA et al prior to Snowden, but was called the same thing. Then almost all of those people now bend over backwards to say stuff like "well, we all knew it, why are you surprised?" etc, but it's just dismissing the fact that many conspiracy theories have truth to them.

Like I said, everyone is a conspiracy theorist, they just want to get to pick and choose which ones they like. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory that the mainstream media and many people pushed for 4 years, for example. We literally just had a "billionare" pedophile sex-trafficker assassinated in one of the most secure prisons in the world, with connections and likely blackmail material on tons of high up businessmen and politicians. Memory holed - these are not the conspiracy theories you are looking for.

> If the wars in the middle east, (I would say Iraq moreso than Afghanistan, as at least Afghanistan actually harbored Al Qaeda/Taliban), don't count as a textbook definition of conspiracy, I'm afraid nothing does. Indeed, I would even disagree with the statement about the DoS (a subsection of the government), their entire job is supposed to be diplomacy, not war, thats what DoD is for. This is why I strongly disagree with the now common knowledge among those in the realm, that intelligence agencies embed and use DoS as cover so frequently, as it undermines diplomatic initiatives heavily. As for dismissing something as "something Britta said on community", it isn't even worth addressing.

The Britta joke is entirely my point. I believe there's corrupt actors in the state department who hawk war for profit. You believe the same thing, but have added some specifics that you probably can't support any better than the general statement about corrupt actors. Maybe that's not true and you DO have more evidence for the specifics than the average conspiracy theory, I don't care much. But either way, you've assigned great importance to something that most people would agree with at a high level but doubt at the very low level. The fault with conspiracy theories is they vastly overindex on specifics they can't defend, which makes generic problems sound much more urgent than most people would interpret them

> I don't care much.

Well I think we know who is arguing in good faith here then...

The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate.

This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor. It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out).

I feel like this is such a bad precedent and will not end well. It will embolden the crazies. It's also not clear where this is supposed to end?

Flat earthers? 9/11 truthers? Who's next?

> The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate.

I've been on the internet for decades. I fully disagree with this. EDIT: Mass bannings, aka an "Exodus Event", was the solution to almost all major conspiracies I've witnessed.

1. When GameFAQs LUEsers gained conspiracy theories against the website and other reckless behavior, to the point of harming the website, the solution was to cut off LUE and prevent the public from viewing that message board.

2. I never visited SomethingAwful, but clearly the toxic subset of that community was banned and eventually moved to 4chan.

3. 4Chan's prominence in the late 00s / early 10s was clearly toxic and always was. 4chan was just focused on hitting "safe" targets, such as harassing Scientology / Scientologists. As soon as 4chan's toxic behavior was unleashed to more mainstream ideas, it was clear that the toxicity had to be stopped, and 4chan moderators stepped up their game.

4. 8Chan was created in response to the Gamergate conspiracies, as was some legitimate sites like Resetera (though they took the less conspiracy-minded side).

----------

For the most part, the bannings on 4Chan worked. We don't see Gamergaters pushing their silly conspiracy theories today, or other vile attacks on people. Furthermore, the doxing / swatting mostly stopped on that subject.

> This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor.

Yes, that's called an exodus. But as various websites gain prominence, they discover again-and-again that with prominence comes responsibility.

When you have a group of doxers and swatters visiting your website, you start to punish that subgroup. That's just what must happen. Yeah, its a temporary fix (doxers / swatters will move elsewhere), but at a minimum, it sends the message that such behavior won't be tolerated.

> It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out).

Tell me: when a child is misbehaving and thinks "Adults are out to get me", do you go more lenient on them?

EDIT: Adults are just like children: you have to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. That's just the basis of building a modern society.

There's 9 hits for the hard-R N-word on 4chan's /pol/ board right now.

>We don't see Gamergaters pushing their silly conspiracy theories today

According to a 4chan archive site, there have been 4,845 mentions of "gamergate" this year alone. So that's absolutely false.

Only 9 basically proves OPs point. I haven’t been near 4chan for over a decade but it was more like 9 times per post back in the day(a slight exaggeration)

> According to a 4chan archive site, there have been 4,845 mentions of "gamergate" this year alone. So that's absolutely false.

At the height of the Gamergate conspiracy, there were constant Doxxing and Swatting of game journalists. That behavior (knock on wood) seems to have stopped.

MOOT publicly condemning the practice made a huge difference. It set lines in the sand, and people do trust their leaders. (And yes, 4chan's leader at the time was MOOT).

*moot

There's a very significant difference between website operators moderating content and banning users, versus coercing ISPs to block access to those sites or revoking ownership of IP numbers or DNS names.

The issue being raised is that the 8chan IPs here are owned by nobody.

> Both the Nevada-based web hosting company owned by 8chan’s current figurehead and the California firm that provides its sole connection to the Internet are defunct businesses in the eyes of their respective state regulators.

> In practical terms, what this means is that the legal contracts which granted these companies temporary control over large swaths of Internet address space are now null and void, and American Internet regulators would be well within their rights to cancel those contracts and reclaim the space.

Goodness! Someone else who remembers LUE. It's refreshing that someone else has noticed the repetitive cycle of the Internet. There were white supremacists taking advantage of usenet from the beginning. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is useless pablum to someone like me who has seen the same people acting in bad faith pushing the most pernicious ideas on each communication platform that comes and goes for decades.

So, the banning worked. There is no opinions you don't like on the internet anymore?

And all the reporting and exposure from protesters and activists, and portrayals in media aka sunshine. Hasn't reduced racism and gender bigotry over last 50 years.

I've been alive 50 years. Everything is better now than in the 70s 80s or 90s.

There are louder fringers, amplified by internet et al. But, society at large has, is, and will continue to progress to less bigotry.

> So, the banning worked. There is no opinions you don't like on the internet anymore?

The "exodus" events were never about silencing __opinions__. They were about destroying __actions__.

In the case of 4chan and Gamergate, the Gamergaters were constantly Doxxing people and Swatting people online. Because these doxxing events and swatting events have mostly stopped, I can absolutely say that it was a success.

-----

In the case of GameFAQs LUEsers, it was a matter of "mods are asleep, post pornography" on child-friendly sections of the site (Like Pokemon and whatnot). Large scale coordinated efforts to troll and harass.

That behavior largely stopped once LUE was silenced. Everyone agreed that free-speech was important, but not when that speech was used to disrupt and destroy the community. (IE: Coordinating widespread trolling efforts).

Twitter, Facebook, and other mainstream sites are finally coming to terms with this reality. Heck, even Reddit had its exodus events when it banned /r/TheFappening, /r/jailbait, /r/WatchPeopleDie, /r/CreepShots, and other groups.

Everyone is for freedom of speech, but the line is drawn at obviously abusive behavior. And guess what? Banning those communities works. People stopped making /r/CreepShots when the community was banned.

------

Success? Yes. In every instance. Limited albeit: it forced the trolls and /r/CreepShot groups off the site and into worser corners of the internet. But it absolutely curtailed the growth of these communities.

Its a limited success, but one that has clearly worked. More so than naïve hopes of "engaging in debate" with these deplorables. Debate works on reasonable people. But when people decide to be unreasonable, you must enact stricter actions. An exodus event should never be taken lightly, and should only be used as a last resort.

The new webmasters would accept the nomadic group (ie: LUEsers went to Something Awful IIRC), but when their toxic behavior became apparent, the exodus continued (ie: to 4Chan, and then finally to 8chan today).

I'm no "internet historian": there are other people who have far better understanding of how these groups moved about. But from my casual perspective, the pattern of "harass -> banning -> exodus to new website -> harassment -> banning" is cyclical and almost predictable.

--------

Under no circumstances have I ever seen "debate" actually work to fix the poor behavior of a group. Absolutely never. Period. When a group has reached "critical trolling mass", its no longer about debate, but about harassment, and online intimidation. When you move in to try to engage in a friendly debate, they'll work to release your IP address, your phone number, your Facebook accounts... and harass you in the real world (and may even start Swatting you).

> LUEsers went to Something Awful IIRC

Most went to an invite only board called LUELinks / ETI.

> The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate.

This is only true when people participating in the debate operate in good faith and are able and willing to genuinely consider other ideas. Conspiracy theories often have more to do with faith than facts, there are no ideas to debate, so giving them room to breath becomes an opportunity for believers to proselytize. Traditionally, this has been somewhere between funny and annoying, but this is different.

> Flat earthers? 9/11 truthers? Who's next?

Well that's the thing, as far as I know, the big tech companies clamping down on QAnon haven't gone after flat earthers or 9/11 truthers because those believers haven't been connected to multiple violent crimes. Flat Earth "thought leaders" aren't telling believers that elected officials are cult members who kill children, urging them to action. So to your statement, "It's also not clear where this is supposed to end?" I'd say that the response to QAnon is a demonstration of the end -- it is the destination reached when one starts with more benign conspiracy theories.

The recent converts to qanon have been on instagram. Before that it was Twitter. Maybe people get on the dark web to keep following it, but it's going to be really hard for it to keep growing if it's not allowed on the open web.

The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate.

Folks have tried this - multiple times - with anti-vaxxers. And flat earthers. And other anti-science folks. Yet, it has spread. THe other party has to be willing to actually accept the facts: Unfortunately, the very nature of a conspiracy is that they don't accept the facts that others have.

Good. You know what happens when the information isn't easy to access? They have less reach. It gets harder to radicalize and convince others. It gets harder to stumble across the content. It isn't like we can avoid them thinking they are onto something: Everything against them is a sign to that.

It isn't like we really monitor them well enough to prevent all attacks, anyway.

I feel like this is such a bad precedent and will not end well. It will embolden the crazies. It's also not clear where this is supposed to end? Flat earthers? 9/11 truthers? Who's next?

Folks whose conspiracies harm others. Most flat earthers aren't going to cause harm to you unless you work in the right field. Some folks might just need watched from time to time. However, anti-vaxxers hurt others. Not only do they convince others not to vaccinate, but they put folks that can't be vaccinated or the immunocompromised at risk.

In any case, it will end somewhere, like things always do.

> The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate.

Have you actually tried that? I have. I spent quite a while when I was in law school on some Usenet groups where tax conspiracy theorists hung out, thoroughly refuting their arguments (it was a good way for me to practice legal research).

The problem was that the people who were coming up with the totally false but believable to people who only have a layman's understanding of law claims were easily able to do so faster than I and the other people also doing this could refute them.

Yes, debate doesn't seem to work very well. The "persuaders" just pivot to another nonsense claim, and you waste a ton of time debunking it.

It has to start with public culture. People should be a little embarrassed to be wrong; they should strive to be right. They should demand evidence.

We're losing that. The rise of anti-intellectualism is allowing this fungus to grow and spread.

Are you proposing we censor and ban discussion of flat earth theories?

You seem to be implying it didn't work, but how do you know? Sure, the other person didn't go "I admit defeat", but the ideas can sit and percolate. Also, your messages may have had an effect on lurkers.

Great point.

People saying "You know what, I was wrong" is incredibly rare in public internet forums. Nearly non-existent in a lot of places.

But it doesn't mean that they didn't shift their beliefs. And if nothing else, they may not spread it again.

You'll just likely never know.

In all the time I have spent on the internet, I have never seen facts or logic convince someone who believed in truly beyond-the-pale, completely-outrageous, not-even-a-matter-of-opinion bullshit.

You can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. That's not how human brains work - and Homo Rationalus only exists in economics textbooks.

> hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan

not as hate-filled as Twitter. I don't think people like him have actually been on these sites.

I have, a lot. Your comparison is nowhere near realistic.

The difference is that people on Twitter are chasing a real commodity called clout. Never underestimate what people are willing to do for clout.

In comparison, 8chan was downright comfy.

As someone who spent a decent amount of time on 8chan and boards like it in high school, this comment legitimately confuses me.

Can you expand please?

It depends on who you are on what you define as hate. The sites both have a very clear political preference. And both are harsh towards the other. But the chans due to the way the work have less of a vendetta style activism and mostly ignore or ridicule outsiders.

There's some rough language - I would say on average the chans are certainly more direct and less signaling, but the lows are pretty equal for both sites. Death wishes are very common on both.

And of course what you interpret as hateful is massively defined by your beliefs. If you define using wrong pronouns as such, then you're gonna have a bad time on the chans. But so would you on Twitter for having a photo with a MAGA hat.

The chans can be surprisingly humane and supportive. Truly so and not just for social points. Their usual dismissive description is not matched by the actual content. Which is understandable since honestly at the moment, a very good chunk of the content is by bots and organized groups.

Related: I recently posted a long article on all sorts of c++ stuff on a technical Reddit. It also contained criticism of Git. People got their god damn pitchforks! They told me to give up my job, told me I'm a bad coder, they went through reddit and git histories, looked up accounts on other sites and sent me things to my private E-mail that carry a prison sentence in my country. And the mods didn't even remove any of it. Because I criticized Git. But they do insta-ban people for using the wrong pronouns.

Things are not like they seem if you're not in the 'in'-group. Deviate just a little and people come for you - on Twitter like on Reddit. There's no such thing on the chans.

One regularly talks about killing Jews and one doesn't.

In South Africa, twitter users make regular calls for the killing of white people, about as regularly as 4chan/pol has calls for killing jews.

The other day twitter refused to remove of an extremely hateful image of 2 white people's decapited heads being held up by 2 black women.

So no, they are about the same. One platform will ban hate speech from some groups but not from others.

Twitter does all the time, just with a different target. Someone even set up a satirical subreddit to take all the hateful messages posted on Twitter and replacing "white/men/etc" with "jews" just to prove the point.

https://old.reddit.com/r/menkampf

Twitter talks about killing men, white people, Trump or conservatives. It's honest to god not much different.

I’m pretty sure that anyone who is willing to swallow massively implausible theories like qanon is not the kind of person who will be amenable to logical arguments and fact checking. You can’t just argue those people out if their positions because it’s not about truth for them, it’s about feeling like one is a member of the elect. Denying reality is not a bug, it’s a feature of every millenarian belief system. Facts are ineffective, you just have to shut them down.

Downvoted! Look: we here on hacker news are used to thinking about the world in a logical way. We test our ideas against reality and reject what doesn’t fit. We have rational enlightenment ideals about democracy and reason. Well some people don’t! They really don’t. They have a prescientific, premodern understanding of the world. I know this is hard to accept but it’s clearly true. And every time they turn on the tv and see gay people and atheists, they get furious and they want all those people to shut up and be silent, so the world can go back to being the comfortable, familiar place that they think it is without all the complexity and uncertainty that the real world contains. So if you don’t understand the world, and it’s scary, you’re going to latch on to some belief system that says that some cabal of devil worshippers is responsible for everything you don’t like. Logic has nothing to do with it.

HackerNews is just as vulnerable to confirmation bias and reactionary behavior as any other group of people. Being an engineer does not make one magically immune to cognitive bias.

As the recently-departed James Randi pointed out repeatedly, scientists are among the easiest people to fool with magic tricks for this very reason.

Vulnerable, but resoundingly not "just as vulnerable." Just this year, this community is where I learned that COVID-19 was going to be huge and devastating to the world as early as mid February, with lockdowns, financial devastation, masks and social distancing are required, etc. Meanwhile people like us had to argue with relatives and friends for a whole 'nother month as they thought we're overreacting, masks are useless, "just wash your hands, nothing to be too concerned about." For all its faults, HN is better informed on reality than most groups of people.

I've been able to avoid it entirely. Can you point to a good primer on qanon? Not an opinion piece or a takedown or anything, just an explainer.

The only thing I know is what I've heard from MSM, and that has been that there is a secret cabal of pedophiles, and many members occupy powerful positions.

Yeah it has this millenarian aspect too from what I can gather where Donald trump is a savior figure who will purge the cabal and issue in a new golden age of some kind. The basic structure is that everything about the world that q followers don’t like us the fault of this cabal of Bad People and once they are removed then everything will be great. Very fascistic. Q made predictions of certain people being arrested, such as Hillary Clinton; when this didn’t happen the explanation became that they had been replaced with clones.

Google can probably find you better summaries of you dig more but heres one:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22646546/q-anon-trump...

I’d recommend this podcast episode on the origins of QAnon from Media Roots Radio.

https://mediaroots.org/media-roots-radio-the-origins-of-qano...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-n...

https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2020/10/qano...

You can read what the person or people who write as Q post (http://qposts.online/), then you can read the is written about Qanon (https://www.google.com/search?q=Qanon). Warning, they live in different universes.

Thanks

The movement according to itself: https://www.neonrevolt.com/2018/07/11/who-is-qanon-an-introd...

Man, I never cared much for QAnon, but the way so many mainstream institutions are joining together, using the exact same misleading talking points, to censor something off the internet makes me wonder if they're onto something after all.

It's amazing how skeptical people are of the idea of a paedophile ring among the elites when only recently Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for running one (and mysteriously died in custody).

This is what I don't understand about qanon, which I assume is because what I know of qanon is only this surface-level premise.

Where does it go off the rails?

Because--if we're being real with ourselves--we have to contend with the fact there is a pedophile island, and heads of state, royals, and other elite are credibly implicated the sex trafficking that sustains it.

AIUI, the key part of QAnon is "the storm", the idea that some secretive group in the Trump administration is preparing some kind of mass indictments, possibly involving military tribunals, to bust all of the secret pedophiles. This is "the plan" that QAnon people implore us to "trust". No matter how bizarre and disconnected the happenings in various Government agencies seem, it's all supposedly part of "the plan" that we're supposed to just trust.

Pedophile rings in the highest levels of Government and high society seem disturbingly plausible. I have no idea who's connected to it or how it all works, but I bet we'd all be pretty disturbed if it ever really came to light. But I'm not about to buy that there's a secret plan that's going to make it all work out, and everything is actually happening according to that plan.

I was doing some reading on Qanon. The weirdest part to me was how FEW correlations they have to offer.

If I give a large group 4,000+ pieces of random information and a multi-year block of history, I'd expect the number of interesting and surprising coincidences to be staggering. Instead, the "deltas" and obsession with 17 is weak at best. One could say that it is more interesting that so many Q posts somehow have so very little in common with anything at all.

>we'd all be pretty disturbed if it ever really came to light.

It did, though. I would've expected more attention.

Edit: so what, then? Did a massive sex trafficking ring that delivered underage girls to some of the world's most powerful people just get exposed? Did the head of it just die in a Manhattan jail. Was his partner just finally found after months on the lam? Or am I crazy?

What's already out there is disturbing enough, but I don't think even 10% of what's really going on has come to light yet. Ex - how did Epstein die in jail? No way that's a legit suicide IMO. Some very powerful people must have arranged that. To expend so much energy on that, there must be a lot of powerful people who have a lot to lose if he were to ever talk.

Who else might be out there involved in this? What sort of evidence is hidden away out there somewhere, waiting for somebody's dead man switch to flip? Exactly what is it that these people have been up to that they're so afraid of everybody finding out? I don't have any idea. Possibly it could be nothing, but I think there's way too many suspicious coincidences that look like somebody powerful pulling some strings for there to be nothing else there.

Also, voting on Q related stuff gets really weird sometimes. No sense worrying about it.

To be honest it sounds like a way to build a groundswell of populist support before arresting vast swaths of political prisoners. The same thing happened in Germany with Jews -- they were called enslavers and disease spreaders. So that people who didn't hate Jews could still get behind the violence because slavery and disease spreading are bad.

Well the actual Q posts routinely give false predictions - I think I recall one where he said that hillary clinton would be arrested on date X, which obviously never happened. Also there was some kind of thing earlier this year about coronavirus being a hoax to scare the elites into saying indoors to make them easier for trump to arrest them (lol)

But that said the general idea that powerful people can get away with pedophilia and probably all sorts of other crazy stuff should be undeniable by now given Epstein and his associates

I can explain. Its psyops techniques at play, one of the most blatant displays in a long time. There are a myriad, but the primary one at play is called "limited hangout". The example I usually use to illustrate this in conversation is flat earth conspiracy. Its so laughable, but what one will notice, with more analysis, is that many of the same people or sites that purport this genuinely ridiculous notion will also talk about things that are much more legitimate. The primary design is to discredit the genuine/legitimate " conspiracy theory" as crazy by association. In essence, qanon(the group and the boards that host believers), by giving a false outlet to those who would otherwise be digging into some very dangerous places, and then going on ridiculous tangents/assertions, essentially gets in front of the problem, so to speak. There are many more techniques at play with fun names regarding qanon, and it is highly likely there are gov and private intelligence agencies behind this. With an added benefit of being one of the best honeypots for conspiracy theorist metadata in the world. I could go on...

This is the premise behind entertainment outlets like Info Wars

And Donald Trump has been the chief investigator going back a decade or two now? His recent trip to Walter Reed was just cover for his actual purpose which was a trip to hunt and kill some of these cannibalistic paedophiles? You aren't skeptical of that?

I don't believe any of that literally but Fred Trump (Donald Trump's father) was supposedly a member and financier of the John Birch Society: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/John_Birch_Society

It's pervasive in the French political elite.

They even wrote books praising the practice in the 1970s, before people started freaking out and they had to walk it back.

A former minister of education (and a philosophy professor, so not some random quack) said in a TV interview that a senior French politician was arrested in Morocco while having sex with children, except of course he could not name the actual culprit for legal reasons.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/31/former-french-...

Paying attention to the evolution of media and narrative over the past several years, it's as if every "mainstream institution" is fusing into one enormous superorganism mega-institution occupied by the same people, putting out the same stories and messages.

It's sort of disturbing but also really fascinating.

What misleading talking points? How does the media mis-represent what QAnon is?

QAnon is consistently claimed to be "dangerous" and "violent". The only justification for this is the guy who went into Comet Ping Pong with a rifle in search of a supposed basement dungeon. But Comet Ping Pong is a Pizzagate thing, which is a different theory than QAnon.

Pizzagate is based off of people taking deep dives into the leaked DNC emails and trying to follow up on some suspicious looking things. Just the kind of people who would be up for doing their own investigation into Comet Ping Pong.

QAnon is based off of people obsessively following and examining every detail of the posts of the pseudonymous Q on 8chan/8kun. A key part of QAnon ideology is that everything is already happening according to "the plan", so there is nothing for individual followers to do. Some of the most anti-Q people I know believe that it's some kind of psy-op to convince people to do nothing in the face of massive corruption because everything is actually under control.

Also worth remembering is that the CPP guy didn't actually hurt anyone. He scared the crap out of a few people, then was peacefully arrested.

So linking QAnon to violence is extremely dubious at best. If anything, the opposite is more true. So why does everybody just push those talking points endlessly and nobody publishes anything skeptical of it? Why is it so incredibly dangerous that we must bust out all the stops against it? This very post is talking about trying to do a hostile purchase of the IP addresses their host uses - who ever heard of the need to do that?!? We don't even do that for ISIS, Al-Quada, etc.

Meanwhile, Antifa and BLM are rioting and burning down cities across the nation, but nobody dares to even publish that, much less start to question their ideology and intentions. Perish the thought of even trying to investigate their links to the mainstream media, basically every major corporation, and Democrat party.

99 goofball sites on the net. Take one down, pass it around. 101 goofball sites on the net...

> The public face of 8chan is Jim Watkins, a pig farmer in the Philippines who many experts believe is also the person behind the shadowy persona of “Q” at the center of the conspiracy theory movement.

It’s funny to me that people think Jim is capable of leading a worldwide movement and has enough opsec not to get caught. Have you seen the guy on YouTube? Give it a watch and decide for yourself.

I followed Q (not qanon) in relation to spygate, and let’s just say I was surprised. It’s not some basement mouth breather, it’s state level. Have the people who followed Q also considered it could be some Russian or other country’s psyop against us? Again think for yourself folks.

Anyway, I’m convinced Q at this point is out of the bag. Even if you banned it on the clear web it would spill out from the dark web into every public space. The only way to attack it effectively now is to get transparent about some of the central claims Q says control the levers of power:

1. What was happening on Epstein’s island?

2. What evidence does Assange have regarding the source of hacked emails?

3. What were the deleted emails on HRC server and how did the Clinton foundation amass so much money?

Interesting enough just now after two years of Q, we’re getting some more information about these, so it really is going to be do or die for “qanon”.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/09/poli...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17318376/united-states-...

What about it makes it "state level"? Dozens of failed predictions. Vague, open-ended insinuations that can be interpreted by anyone in totally different ways. No legitimate information that can't be found with a search engine.

Whoever made up Q is similar to Trump in that they identified a group of people with real problems (loss of faith in institutions, fear of losing social power) to whom they could spread propaganda, but have no real solutions to any of the identified problems.

I find it ironic that you say "think for yourself" while repeating nonsense propaganda that has little to no impact outside of made-up scandals targeting the Clintons.

"made-up scandals"

If I had the choice of a superpower, whether flight, or invincibility, or setting things on fire with my mind, I wouldn't be all that disappointed if I had to settle for a superpower where I could force half the population and the vast majority of journalists to simply give me the benefit of the doubt of any situation and not question things too much beyond that. There's almost nothing I could do wrong and be punished for by society.

I think the point of Q is to prevent conservative American boomers from organizing, by duping them into thinking that 'their guys' are already winning and they don't have to do anything.

> The only way to attack it effectively now is to get transparent [...]

I think you're right. Looney theories flourish when authorities are perceived to lack credibility. It's little wonder that politicians of any persuasion are popular focal points for such doubt; either because they are known habitual liars or because they are simply perceived as such by those on the other side. Transparency and blind justice are key to stopping the spread of loony theories. If Jeffery Epstein hadn't received preferential treatment when he was convicted in 2008, I think few would remember him today (much less harbor so many suspicions about what politicians may have been involved with him.)

Consider moon landings: Many people doubt they occurred because the American government lost a ton of credibility during the cold war. I considered the possibility that it was faked, but easily concluded that it was real because NASA is very transparent with the details. The information they've made public about it has breadth and depth; for nearly any little tiny detail of those missions you can think of, a little bit of research will reveal information about it. Autistic detail of anything from the helmet visors to the guidance computers is all available for anybody who chooses to look; to fabricate a story with such breadth and depth is simply inconceivable. The truth of the moon landings is apparent because NASA is open with it.

> If Jeffery Epstein hadn't received preferential treatment when he was convicted in 2008, I think few would remember him today (much less harbor so many suspicions about what politicians may have been involved with him.)

The Epstein saga, I think, is providing the most fuel for the fire right now. Just yesterday Ghislaine Maxwell's 2016 deposition was unsealed, and it mentions Clinton and Prince Andrew, among others[1].

The conspiracy burned for 2 years, and when more information is unsealed it only confirms things people believe. Anyone watching knew something was up with Epstein, his sweet-heart deal for sex crimes against children, and that island, and his untimely death. Until everything is unsealed and in the light, things are only going to get more intense.

Furthermore, there seems to be a lot of bipartisan appetite for truth in regards to Epstein, partly because many believe it also implicates Trump. How powerful is something that unites Qanon and Trump's critics under the same flag?

1. https://free.law/pdf/gov.uscourts.nysd.447706.1137.2_2.pdf

Did you mean to link to another PDF? There's only one page of deposition in that file and it doesn't name any Epstein clients. It's just a bit of back-and-forth between the plaintiff's attorney and the defendant's attorney.

Maybe this one? https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7274479/Maxwell-D...

People have been working on unredacting it: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/ghislaine-maxwel...

The unsealed depositions from yesterday, as well as future unsealed documents can be found on courtlistener[1]. The new ones were released on the 22 of October.

Judge Peska gave Does 1 & 2 two weeks before they depositions are also unsealed (conveniently November 4th).

1. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4355835/giuffre-v-maxwe...

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” —John Gilmore

“The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as wickedness or weakness and attacks it.” —me

Please note that the above two statements do not contradict each other.

I read 8chan and 4chan sometimes, not /b/ and not /pol/, I am more interested in the other boards that often care for or start open source projects.

I am very disappointed with people that want to shut down these places, often because of false allegations (for example the attempt to shut down 8chan for child porn, that later were found out to be a false flag, the person accusing them were also the one that posted the porn in first place)

I also spend a lot of time on 4chan, and visit 8chan occasionally. There is a universe of difference between them, and calls to shut down 4chan are much rarer and more ignorant of the content than calls to shut down 8chan. It's important not to conflate them.

Could you go into more detail?

8chan was created when 4chan disallowed child pornography and their owner bought it when all this QAnon stuff started.

Would downvoters please explain why you're doing it? Is this statement untrue? Serious question- I have no idea.

It is completely untrue. That's been disallowed on both sites since day 1.

>I came up with the original concept of 8chan while on a psychedelic mushroom trip. I was past the peak and was on the tail end of the trip, and I just decided to browse 4chan because that's what I did when sober. I was still tripping pretty bad though so I kept seeing these fractal patterns and I wrote down the words "infinite chan" to remember for later.

>The next day, I was able to put into words more of what the site would be like. I was inspired partly by the admin of 4chon.net, savetheinternet, who routinely refused to make requested boards for users. I wondered what it would be like if there were a Reddit-style imageboard where anyone could make a board without express admin approval, and began hacking on the imageboard engine I knew best to make it a reality: vichan. I decided to expire boards after inactivity so that it didn't get full of dead boards like Reddit does with dead subreddits, and released version 1 of 8chan two days later.

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/interviews/qa-with-fredr...

Thank you.

8chan doesn't officially allow child porn, but they have sexualized images of children which are 100% illegal.

That's why Google delisted them for child abuse content. A lot of people on HN seem really eager to defend 8chan for some reason.

CP has never been allowed on 4chan or 8chan. The reason 8chan can about was because 4chan started banning gamergate stuff.

That's not actually true. In fact, Google delisted 8Chan due to child abuse content.

Many tech companies ban things for political reasons and provide these types of explanations as cover. Similar to how Reddit banned the_donald because of supposed anti-cop violent threats on the subreddit which is of course completely and utterly absurd.

Do you have a source for that claim? Reddit admins were quite vocal about the many noncop reasons for banning TD

https://www.dailywire.com/news/reddit-bans-the_donald-subred...

A source?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-quarantines-pro-trump-s...

Not really. Chans will turn a blind eye to all kinds of things but not this. It was never allowed on any chan. Posting that stuff would get you permanently banned, maybe even IP range banned. I've read examples of chan administrators complying with the authorities too. There's even a completely separate illegal content reporting option which is no doubt dedicated to this. 8chan's only rule was "don't post anything illegal in the US".

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