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If this Flammenwerfer wished to eradicate all traces of his(?) participation, why did he think it was a rational idea to leave a single message stating that he'd done so? :loopy:
 
I don't know if this paints a realistic picture but anyway... Qanon followers disillusioned by lack of success in stopping Biden.

Biden inauguration leaves QAnon believers in disarray

Followers of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory are divided after Joe Biden's inauguration confounded their predictions that Donald Trump would remain president in order to punish his enemies in the "deep state".
Many reacted with shock and despair as Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th US president.
 
I don't know if this paints a realistic picture but anyway... Qanon followers disillusioned by lack of success in stopping Biden.

Biden inauguration leaves QAnon believers in disarray

One can but hope.
Whilst I suspect many followers or Qfolk just tag along for a bit of an anti-establishment laugh - rather like Flat Earthers, the fundamental tenets of the movement are deeply unpleasant, including extreme anti-Semitism:

https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2021/january/anti-semitism-capitol-riot-sarna.html
 
I saw a meme - on Tuesday, I think - that said Joe Biden and a lot of influential people had been arrested on Sunday, court-martialled and then released on the understanding that Biden would be sworn in as President whilst Trump remained in charge behind the scenes, so that everything that happens over the next 4 years can be attributed directly to Trump.

In my understanding, court martials are purely military courts, and civilians such as the new President could not be convicted by them. So how would this work?

I was going to say, you couldn't make this up, but someone did!
 
... In my understanding, court martials are purely military courts, and civilians such as the new President could not be convicted by them. So how would this work? ...

Your understanding is correct (in the US legal context). The person making the surreal claims you cited was no doubt referring to a military tribunal rather than a court-martial. A military tribunal is a judicial process in which enemy combatants or POWs accused of war crimes are tried. Such tribunals are associated with offenses arising during war (including war-like engagements such as the so-called 'war on terror').

Military tribunal trials of US citizens are generally prohibited, because the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional following the Civil War. US civilians acting as enemy combatants in a recognized war (or war equivalent conflict) can be detained, but they cannot be tried by a military tribunal because the tribunal process falls short of observing the citizen's constitutional rights.

As long as the US civilian court system is functional in the given jurisdiction, a US civilian basically cannot be tried by a military tribunal.
 
Your understanding is correct (in the US legal context). The person making the surreal claims you cited was no doubt referring to a military tribunal rather than a court-martial. A military tribunal is a judicial process in which enemy combatants or POWs accused of war crimes are tried. Such tribunals are associated with offenses arising during war (including war-like engagements such as the so-called 'war on terror').

Military tribunal trials of US citizens are generally prohibited, because the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional following the Civil War. US civilians acting as enemy combatants in a recognized war (or war equivalent conflict) can be detained, but they cannot be tried by a military tribunal because the tribunal process falls short of observing the citizen's constitutional rights.

As long as the US civilian court system is functional in the given jurisdiction, a US civilian basically cannot be tried by a military tribunal.
Either way its complete nonsense as what he is being accused of is none of the above lol
 
https://theness.com/neurologicablog...jVwOaeWgAQpv2VMciYd_G3ZzafIv6uWcCneFSDgNn_3ik

Trump slinked away to Mar-a-Lago, and Biden is now president. No one should be surprised that Q followers will not just put down their signs, take off their Q T-shirts, shrug and go on with normal lives. The press is reporting the shock of this disappointment but saying that some followers are disillusioned. Give it time. Motivated reasoning sometimes takes a day or two. They’ll get there. (Mostly – it is possible some people may quietly give it up.)

The Washington Post, for example, reports on a Q-believer named Tiffany:

But after a night of processing the day’s events by reading QAnon promoters’ posts, she said she believes that everything is still humming along according to plan — and that Trump’s election loss was all part of Q’s master strategy to expose the evildoers who corrupted the vote.
“Things have just started,” said Tiffany, who spoke on the condition she’d be identified only by her first name for fear of harassment. “They had to ‘commit’ the crime to fully lock the deal.”
And she sticks the landing – and is rewarded with a nice shot of dopamine as a massive rationalization washes over Tiffany’s brain, erasing all that nasty cognitive dissonance. How long can this be sustainable? Indefinitely – the Q-conspiracy will evolve, adapt, and morph into whatever its adherents can make up to keep the narrative going (people are clever this way – just look at the final season of Lost). This is a real concern, because Q has already demonstrated a willingness to engage in violence and to undermine our democracy. They have been radicalized, and are now a loaded weapon ready to be exploited by the next puppet-master.
 
I don't get how this wasn't crawling with intelligence people monitoring it for years, to be honest. Did they seem like such fruitcakes that they weren't even perceived as potential terrorists/a threat?
 
I don't get how this wasn't crawling with intelligence people monitoring it for years, to be honest. Did they seem like such fruitcakes that they weren't even perceived as potential terrorists/a threat?
They should have. As far ago as 2016 a man armed with a shotgun entered a Washington pizzeria looking for kidnapped kids (y'know, the ones Hillary kidnapped), which could have turned very nasty.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/...ng-pizza-shooting-fake-news-consequences.html
 
I did some QAnon (re-) search in academic literature. The harvest is very meagre:

Structural conditions make individuals affectively vulnerable to misinformation.
Disinformation campaigns draw heavily on affective tools.
Misinformation solutions undermine community and values without replacing either.
Radical solutions are needed to address these affective geographies.
The paper makes this argument by reviewing core areas of study within misinformation studies and placing current research into conversation with Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism.
Disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism: A critical intervention in misinformation studies - ScienceDirect

That concept of "cruel optimism" is quite good actually. I didn't know it yet:

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”
Duke University Press - Cruel Optimism (dukeupress.edu)

Conspiracy theories claim that a powerful group is secretly pursuing an evil goal.
Conspiracy theories can foster anti-democratic social movements.
Conspiracy theories attract people with both their content and qualities.
Content and qualities appeal to people differently based on their motivations.
Social change does not always equal social progress—there is a dark side of social movements. Research has linked conspiracy theory beliefs to anti-democratic attitudes, prejudice and non-normative political behavior. We argue that conspiracy theories comprise at least two components – content and qualities—that appeal to people differently based on their motivations. Social identity motives draw people foremost to contents of conspiracy theories while uniqueness motives draw people to qualities of conspiracy theories.
The dark side of social movements: social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories - ScienceDirect

This is quite cool, method-wise:

To better understand the specific characteristics of hydroxychloroquine misinformation, we used big data approaches to analyse Twitter user conversations before and after President Trump's misinformation retweet on July 27. We chose this event because it was the first time Twitter removed a tweet from the President for being associated with COVID-19 misinformation.
Application of unsupervised machine learning to identify and characterise hydroxychloroquine misinformation on Twitter - ScienceDirect

The last five years has seen a sharp rise in anti-science rhetoric in the United States, especially from the political far right, mostly focused on vaccines and, of late, anti-COVID-19 prevention approaches. Vaccine coverage has declined in more than 100 US counties leading to measles outbreaks in 2019, while in 2020 the US became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the anti-science movement in America has begun to globalize, with new and unexpected associations with extremist groups and the potential for tragic consequences in terms of global public health. A new anti-science triumvirate has emerged, comprised of far right groups in the US and Germany, and amplified by Russian media.
Anti-science extremism in America: escalating and globalizing - ScienceDirect

This paper considers two examples of contemporary future thinking: Millennial utopians and preppers/survivalists.
The analysis is based on texts in the Millennial utopian genre, and interview and ethnographic research on survivalists.
The findings show that attempts at future oriented action are pushed to the fringes of the left/right political spectrum.
The article highlights optimism, pessimism, hope and nostalgia in the politics of future thinking.
There is a common feeling that the apocalypse is not as abstract or far away as it once was (Riederer, 2018; Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian, & Calhoun, 2013). This paper will unpack the utopian and dystopian elements of both movements and decipher their appeal in an age of increased anxiety about the future.
Millennial utopians and prepper subcultures: Contemporary utopianism on the left and right - ScienceDirect

Fake news and disinformation can covertly modify the behavior of individuals
It can do this by manipulating implicit attitudes and emotions
Current mitigation methods do not prevent behavior modification.
It is urgent to address this threat to democracy and individual autonomy
A lab-based randomized controlled experiment was conducted with 233 undergraduate students to investigate the behavioral effects of fake news. It was found that even short (under 5-min) exposure to fake news was able to significantly modify the unconscious behavior of individuals. This paper provides initial evidence that fake news can be used to covertly modify behavior, it argues that current approaches to mitigating fake news, and disinformation in general, are insufficient to protect social media users from this threat, and it highlights the implications of this for democracy.
Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformation - ScienceDirect

This paper explicitly targets the risk that increased partisan identities may lead to stronger intentions to engage in violent political behaviors from an individual difference perspective. This paper integrates insights from the literature on political violence and personality psychology. It understands partisanship as social identity and focuses on the influence of the dark triad. In three original, population representative cross-sectional and experimental studies of adult Americans (total n = 3797), the paper shows that stronger partisan identities drive stronger intentions to engage in political violence, but that this effect holds for partisans with the callous, manipulative personality indicated by high dark triad scores only.
Dark triad, partisanship and violent intentions in the United States - ScienceDirect

The "dark triad" was also new for me and quite interesting:
Dark triad - Wikipedia
 
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I don't get how this wasn't crawling with intelligence people monitoring it for years, to be honest. Did they seem like such fruitcakes that they weren't even perceived as potential terrorists/a threat?

The focus of counter-terrorism had very much shifted to threats posed by Muslim extremists post 9/11. If that had not happened and if the Oklahoma Bombing had remained the number one terrorist attack on US soil maybe things would have been different.

Also, Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc were often handled badly and had pissed off a large number of people - I think there was a reluctance to keep poking a stick at that particular ant's nest.

Couple this with the usual incompetence of large organizations that will not address the often very large elephant in the room and it's actually not that surprising that this was largely ignored.

Why go after your own people, (who let's face it, vote a certain way and are backed by a very influential lobby), when you are fighting two wars over the other side of the world?

That's my take on it.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/photos/2016/01/history-standoff-militia-government
 
Sorry for some (unavoidable) politics, but this hypothesis might be valid:

A decade ago, we learned Cleek's Law: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.

QAnon warps that for a conspiratorial age: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what we think liberals want today. They always thought we wanted to take their guns and subject them to an anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-God, anti-heterosexuality totalitarian dictatorship. That's what they believed before QAnon. Now they think we want to rape and mutilate children for the adrenochrome, and so we can wear their faces as masks. Someone in the Q-sphere, I assume, will tell them we want even worse things.

They'll keep believing. Maybe they'll decide that the hero who'll rescue them from us isn't Trump, but Mike Lindell, or Greene herself. But as long as they hate us, QAnon will never completely die.


No More Mister Nice Blog: CLEEK'S LAW EXPLAINS QANON'S POST-TRUMP SURVIVAL
 
Sorry for some (unavoidable) politics, but this hypothesis might be valid:

A decade ago, we learned Cleek's Law: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.

QAnon warps that for a conspiratorial age: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what we think liberals want today. They always thought we wanted to take their guns and subject them to an anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-God, anti-heterosexuality totalitarian dictatorship. That's what they believed before QAnon. Now they think we want to rape and mutilate children for the adrenochrome, and so we can wear their faces as masks. Someone in the Q-sphere, I assume, will tell them we want even worse things.

They'll keep believing. Maybe they'll decide that the hero who'll rescue them from us isn't Trump, but Mike Lindell, or Greene herself. But as long as they hate us, QAnon will never completely die.


No More Mister Nice Blog: CLEEK'S LAW EXPLAINS QANON'S POST-TRUMP SURVIVAL
It's probably best not to conflate Qanon nutter types with ordinary conservative people.
 
It's probably best not to conflate Qanon nutter types with ordinary conservative people.

What you say is correct of course. But the text above makes an interesting and even testable prediction on the future of QAnon. And it makes an interesting distinction between resistance to "what progressives think" and "what QAnon thinks progressives think". That's why I posted it. I suspect ( and secretly hope) we'll get to enjoy "jewish space lasers" for some time to come :)
 
What you say is correct of course. But the text above makes an interesting and even testable prediction on the future of QAnon. And it makes an interesting distinction between resistance to "what progressives think" and "what QAnon thinks progressives think". That's why I posted it. I suspect ( and secretly hope) we'll get to enjoy "jewish space lasers" for some time to come :)
'Jewish space lasers' gets a WTF reaction from me.
 
You haven't heard of them? It's all over the internet. And it comes from the QAnon corner. And maybe it's not really funny:

Jewish organizations and lawmakers are roundly calling on Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to be punished or removed from office after it emerged she magnified antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories, including accusing “Rothschild Inc” of starting a deadly forest fire with laser beams from space.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jewish-space-lasers-as-funny-as-blood-libels/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-hiding-your-jewish-space-laser-now-qbqpgn90h
 
Profiting from the latest QAnon nonsense.

QAnon, like any good conspiracy movement or cult, adapted quickly to failed prophecy. Adherents now believe that the date of the second coming of Trump, and his reinauguration as president, is March 4. To profit from this, Forbes reports, Trump's D.C. hotel has hiked prices on that date. Would you pay $1,331 for privilege of spending the night there on the big day? Suzanne Rowan Kelleher:

Whether you call it price gauging or simply opportunistic marketing, big rate hikes make sense on several levels. For starters, the hotel may be leveraging its appeal with QAnon followers to bring in more money during these tough pandemic times. ...

https://boingboing.net/2021/02/08/t...-qanon-thinks-hes-being-sworn-in-as-pres.html
 
Profiting from the latest QAnon nonsense.

QAnon, like any good conspiracy movement or cult, adapted quickly to failed prophecy. Adherents now believe that the date of the second coming of Trump, and his reinauguration as president, is March 4. To profit from this, Forbes reports, Trump's D.C. hotel has hiked prices on that date. Would you pay $1,331 for privilege of spending the night there on the big day? Suzanne Rowan Kelleher:

https://boingboing.net/2021/02/08/t...-qanon-thinks-hes-being-sworn-in-as-pres.html

The Don never knowingly turns down the chance to gouge.
 
QAnon does not seem to be lying down at the moment...

QAnon Thinks Trump Will Become President Again on March 4 (vice.com)
QAnon has started to merge with even more extreme conspiracy theories, including the “sovereign citizen” movement.

"Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 19th president of the United States on March 4, 2021.
This is the latest conspiracy that QAnon followers have embraced in the wake of President Joe Biden’s inauguration last week, and extremist experts are worried that it highlights the way QAnon adherents are beginning to merge their beliefs — about the world being run by an elite cabal of cannibalistic satanist pedophiles —with even more extreme ideologies."

How supporters will deal with yet another disappointment on the 4th remains to be seen.
 
QAnon does not seem to be lying down at the moment...

QAnon Thinks Trump Will Become President Again on March 4 (vice.com)
QAnon has started to merge with even more extreme conspiracy theories, including the “sovereign citizen” movement.

"Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 19th president of the United States on March 4, 2021.
This is the latest conspiracy that QAnon followers have embraced in the wake of President Joe Biden’s inauguration last week, and extremist experts are worried that it highlights the way QAnon adherents are beginning to merge their beliefs — about the world being run by an elite cabal of cannibalistic satanist pedophiles —with even more extreme ideologies."

How supporters will deal with yet another disappointment on the 4th remains to be seen.
Waiting for the Triggered/Crying videos on Youtube.
 
Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 19th president of the United States on March 4, 2021.

How can he be the 19th president when he's only just finished being the 45th? Colour me confused. I know this is QAnon but even so, their number work is rubbish!
 
How can he be the 19th president when he's only just finished being the 45th? Colour me confused. I know this is QAnon but even so, their number work is rubbish!

Maybe they believe some of the past presidents don't count. Or more likely, you are right and their arithmetic leaves a lot to be desired.
 
How can he be the 19th president when he's only just finished being the 45th? Colour me confused. I know this is QAnon but even so, their number work is rubbish!
Who ever said Qanon ever made any sense, of course he is going to succeed Ulysses S. Grant :hahazebs:
Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg
 
How can he be the 19th president when he's only just finished being the 45th? Colour me confused. I know this is QAnon but even so, their number work is rubbish!
I suspect it's the Vice.com reporter evidencing carelessness. Doesn't seem to be a quote.
 
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