Thursday, April 4, 2019

'The Great Awakening'? How Does A Piece Of Q-Anon Conspiracy Garbage Make It To No. 1 on Amazon?

Can any sane person really believe this Amazon ranking for this piece of trash?  People interested in conspiracies - REAL ones - are better served going to my book on the JFK assassination:
THE JFK Assassination: The Final Analysis
My book is the product of  35 years of research into the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, incorporating acoustic analyses, image analyses as well as exposing the sundry deficiencies of The Warren Report. In other words, it's grounded in reality,  not fantasy.

By contrast, 'The Great Awakening' was hatched by QAnon freaks,  likely on an all night bender of booze, bennies and  opioids, mixed with  MJ candy .  It is designed to appeal to the  indiscriminate Pizzagate conspiracy trolls and gullible gobblers,  the ones who believed (in 2016)  Hillary Clinton had a stable of child sex slaves.   I would say also  similar to  the wacko  delusions of Alex Jones of Info Wars fame, but even he has now admitted his false flag ideation about the Sandy Hook massacre was a result of severe mental illness.  What excuse do these latter dispensers of toxic mind rot have?
The Amazon book, which says it was written by a dozen “anonymous Q followers, decoders and citizen journalists known collectively as Where We Go One We Go All (WWG1WGA),” takes up where the Pizzagate rubbish left off. It claims that Democrats murder and eat children and that the government created AIDS, polio and Lyme disease. Then there’s the belief that the world is run by a Satanic cabal led by Hillary Clinton.
NBC News, which first reported on the book's placement on the Amazon charts, noted that the book received an algorithmic boost from product recommendations. The book, written by an anonymous author, averaged 4.5 stars and has been flooded with positive reviews.
Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy-theory expert, told NBC that the book is just another way for the QAnon movement to cash in on its gullible followers, calling it “a bold new step in the endless grift at the heart of Q.
Nevertheless, the book keeps selling and racking up questionable glowing reviews, which Jason Kint, CEO of the trade association Digital Content Next, chalks up to manipulation and the lack of oversight on Amazon’s part.  As Kint explained to NBC:
To be clear, they absolutely shouldn’t be censoring the availability of books like this. But the fact we’re left only with the publisher’s own description of the book and a clearly gamed set of 5-star reviews — how is the average shopper supposed to know this is toxic garbage?
Uh, how about critical thinking? How about having an I.Q. that exceeds room temperature digits? 
Amazingly,  even Reddit now appears to be coming to its senses.  Last September it banned a forum dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, saying users repeatedly violated its content policies.   This isn't difficult to parse because after Pizzagate nearly incited a tragedy (unhinged Trumpie entering D.C. Comet pizza parlor with loaded rifle to "liberate Hillary's child sex slaves")  there can be no issue these are dangerous loons.

Let's also get it very clear from the get go that the assorted nonsense being peddled does not qualify as conspiracy theories. They are conspiracy claptrap or refuse. In  previous blog posts I noted Barbadian psychologist Pat Bannister's categorization of those who invoke conspiracies and how she differentiated them. As part of her construction of a theory of mind, specifically showing the role of lying in young children, she also noted adeptness at detecting lies was linked to accurate detection of real conspiracies.

Dr. Bannister's classification was simple:

1- Conspiracy analysts

2- Conspiracy theorists

3- Conspiracy crackpots or cultists


At the top of the hierarchy were conspiracy analysts, such as Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Harold Weisberg, Richard Charnin and others (like yours truly)).  These were serious people possessing some measure of intellect who brought their scientific, mathematical and other aptitudes to the investigation of multiple aspects of a putative real conspiracies like Iran-Contra and the JFK assassination.  These people put in real man hours and actually published their work in authoritative media (e.g. BOOKS - real books!) and respected forums as opposed to spreading bunkum through half-assed posts in the lowest dreg regions of the net, like 4chan and 8chan.  


By contrast, the 'conspiracy theorist' put forward conspiracy conjectures but didn't back them up with evidence. Or, if evidence was provided, it didn't meet elementary scientific standards for acceptance, such as consistent selection, coherent and accurate data assessment, and avoidance of confirmation bias.
The bottom feeders of the classification scheme were conspiracy crackpots or clowns, like Alex Jones.   Jones is most famous for his off the wall bunkum that the Sandy Hook/Newtown massacre was a federal "false flag" operation. Those slain  kids weren't really dead, they were merely actors- as well as the teachers- in an elaborate script to befuddle the public and make them demand gun confiscation across the land.  Jones claimed he'd watched "films over and over and just seen those kids walking in circles".  At least now he's admitted to being mentally unbalanced.  We now await the authors of The Great Awakening to do likewise.


How would Dr. Bannister, if she were alive today, describe a convoluted, paranoid -infused mental mosh pit like "The Great Awakening"?   Basically, she'd probably call it a psychotic's phantasmagoria and schizoid ideation attempting to make sense of disparate, suspicious elements in the contemporary U.S. - driven by social media. 

 She'd also make note that such fever dreams don't need a whole lot of external memetic fuel to get started: a coincidence here, a loaded word from Trump there, an obscure reference to "deep state" there- oh  and some "genius" who first puts it all together in his mother's basement and posts it on 4chan. Whereupon a susceptible brain will be infected and spread it on to other gullible souls, searching for meaning in their vacuous lives. Well, to be sure, it's probably a bit better than using opioids!

 It would be great if we could just ignore these looneytunes-  or dispatch them to an asylum for general ECT and lithium therapy. But alas, their fevered baloney can have real world consequences and act outs - especially when a virulently infected zombie gets activated - like the guy who fired a round into the D.C. pizza parlor looking for child sex slaves. Or the other screwball who tried to block traffic headed for the Hoover Dam.

These people desperately need help, but it seems there are just too few professionals around now to get the job done.   Where is Dr. Bannister when we need her?

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