8Chan Deposition

I've posted every couple of months for almost a year about the internet message board 8Chan, perhaps the most wretched hive of scum and villainy on the internet, which is saying something. Child porn, conspiracy whackaloonery, neo-Nazi recruiting, manifestos from mass shooters (accompanied by the cheers of the CHUDS who egg them on)... it was all to be found on 8chan, which has been offline for three weeks since it was dumped by its DDoS security provider Cloudflare.

The current owner of 8Chan was summoned to give a deposition before the House Homeland Security Committee. While the deposition took place behind closed doors, the owner of 8Chan prepared a statement (PDF) claiming that his platform adhered to 'free speech' principles, pretty much ignoring the torrent of death threats which aren't protected speech. The joint statement from Chairman Bennie G. Thompson and Ranking Member Mike Rogers after the deposition was noncommittal.

In the fever swamps of conspiracy pushers, the takedown of 8Chan is seen as a 'Deep State' plot to derail the 'QAnon' phenomenon- the huckster/hoaxster behind the lunacy informed followers not to trust 'outside comms' (though there may be a loophole). It's a bit maddening not to know the substance of the deposition, and the lack of transparency will play into the hands of the paranoid, but it looks like the site is down for the count, which is music to the site's founder's ears.

The Internet's Augean Stables

Ah, 8Chan, how does one describe it? It's a festering heap of child pornography, Gamergate misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, conspiracy mongering, and exchanges between mass shooters, wannabe mass shooters, and fans of mass shooters... you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. 8Chan is the Augean Stables of the internet, the shittiest of shitposting shitholes... it is also the subject of a recent search warrant:

lmaooooooo 8chan just got search warranted pic.twitter.com/Rhi6g2OWKo

— shoshanot at cannes, pls stop asking 🛸 (@swodinsky) June 14, 2019

It will be interesting to see how the Chan Klan handles the prospect of being outed after having assumed anonymity on the imageboard... how many anime-Nazis are sweating over the prospect of their employer finding out that they are egging on potential mass shooters? What is 8Chan's biggest 'celebrity', the anonymous hoaxer(s) known as "Q" going to do if anonymity is compromised? Ben Collins of NBC speculated about this as well...

Reading over this post, I realize that I need to step away from the internet for a bit- it's a beautiful summer night, with an almost full moon... that beats a shitstorm anytime.

Draining an Ocean of Piss

One of the big stories of the day, a story at the nexus of politics, technology, and crime, is the dumping of 8Chan by Cloudflare, a provider of protection from DDoS attack’s. Subsequently, 8Chan has largely been down.

8Chan, an Internet message board notorious for violent content, racism, and child porn, forms a common thread running from Christchurch to Poway to El Paso. There are posts encouraging mass shootings and exhorting would-be shooters to win a ‘high score’ by killing a high number of people. It’s the message board that shitposters too toxic for 4Chan migrated to.

It’s nice to see that this Ocean of Piss, this wretched hive of scum and villainy, is being driven off the t00bz. It has been a hotbed of radicalization, and with a mounting body count, not even a free speech argument has any merit concerning the site.

As an added bonus, 8Chan was the home of the QAnon conspiracy theory, so there is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth among a subset of the far-right.

Time to Get Smart About Stupidity

In a somewhat disturbing turn of events, law enforcement officials really don't know much about 8chan, the anonymous imageboard on which the Christchurch and Poway shooters appear to have self-radicalized.

First amendment limitations do bind the hands of law enforcement officials as far as online content goes, but I sure as hell hope that someone is monitoring threads on imageboards, trying to glean information about where anonymous posters could be located in case one of them decides to carry their threat over into the real world. We've had two 8chan related mass shootings so far this year, I can easily imagine that this trend continues unless it is nipped in the bud, and I don't think the 8chan moderators care about doing so.

H8Chan

This morning, I had every intention of following up my Thursday post on science, but that all went to pieces when I read about the latest terror attack on a house of worship, a mass shooting in a San Diego metro area synagogue. Like the Christchurch mosque shooter, the perpetrator of this attack wrote a manifesto on 8Chan, one drearily similar to the other shooter's manifesto, also posted to 8Chan. Additionally, the responses to the manifesto were encouraging the violence.

It seems that this current shooter was radicalized online by reading about the 'white genocide' conspiracy theory, and that his family wasn't involved in his turn towards terrorism (I am reminded of the two suicide bombers in Sri Lanka who were sons of a wealthy spice merchant). It's a shock when people 'from good homes' commit heinous crimes, but a sober look at the evidence reveals that many terrorists come from monied backgrounds. Poor people don't have the money for arms, and working stiffs don't have the time to spend on radical sites.

I have a nauseating feeling that these 8Chan massacres will continue. There's a toxic synergy of social isolation, bigotry, and nihilism that occurs online, and impressionable people will be 'blackpilled' and see violence as the answer to the problems they believe afflict them.

Four Years of Q-Lunacy

The QAnon conspiracy compendium (it collates a whole bunch of conspiracy theories into one unified whole) turns four years old today.  To understand the QAnon phenomenon, one must know that it started as one of many 'insider anons', anonymous shitposters claiming government insider status on the imageboard 4Chan.  Before QAnon, there was White House Anon, FBIAnon, CIAAnon, Highway Patrol Anon, and the like.  Even QAnon's first post, four years ago, was a response to another anonymous shitposter who claimed that Hillary Clinton's arrest was imminent:

It should have been an inauspicious start, because Hillary Clinton is still at large, haunting the imaginations of Trump rank-and-filers.  Even other 4Chan anons pegged 'Q Clearance Patriot' as a fraud, but the whole thing took on new life as a small coterie of Trumpers amplified it on larger platforms, such as reddit and Facebook, exhorting older Trumpers to avoid the confusing sewers of 4Chan in favor of other aggregator sites. Later, the Q-poster took his schtick to 8Chan, 4Chan's even more toxic counterpart, and 8Chan's proprietors Jim and Ron Watkins, took the reins.

QAnon's success is largely due to two things- it is an optimistic fantasy for awful people, portraying Donald Trump as a competent, even genius leader, and themselves as heroic 'digital soldiers' winning a 'meme war' against their enemies by posting stupid images online... and it is a game in which participants seek meanings for the cryptic puzzles and allusions posted by the mysterious Q.  Since most of the actual content was created by the marks, the conspiracy complex absorbed all sorts of whackaloon material- aliens, a living JFK Jr (who might be a schlubby paisano from PA), mole children, vampiric elites, Democratic sex cults, demon worship, time travel... all have a place in the big Q umbrella.

In an evil genius move, the Q-poster, criticized for failed predictions, told his followers: "disinformation is necessary."  This thought-terminating cliché could be spouted by QAnon adherents as a counter to all criticism... whenever Q messed up, it was a calculated move to throw off adversaries.  Now, THAT is a Get Out of Jail Free card.

If you want a deep dive into this material, the go-to guy is Mike Rains, Poker and Politics, whose 'Q Is Always Wrong' thread is the most comprehensive debunking of the whole sorry mess.  Other debunkers are listed by Sara, a grad student studying extremist movements.

Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with this topic.  I am fascinated by conspiracy theories, though I hate the fact that they destroy families and relationships, and always seem to boil down to antisemitism.  This topic is interesting, but the phenomenon has done incalculable damage to our society.  It's been four years, four stupid years, of this nonsense, and tragically, it doesn't seem to be going away, no matter how many of its predictions failed.

Evil and Banality

As I am sure you have been, I have been following, appalled, the news of the mass shooting at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques that resulted in the deaths of 49 innocent individuals. Much of the coverage post-attack, has concentrated on the manifesto that the terrorist posted online, that odd blend of actual right-wing conspiracy, 'dank memes', and red herrings that is the hallmark of 'chan' culture. The manifesto was calculated to baffle.

The thing that strikes me is that this is the first 'Gamergate/4Chan/8Chan' mass shooting... it was announced on 8chan, livestreamed like a 'Call of Duty' tournament, and accompanied by a hard-to-penetrate metanarrative meant to obscure what is pretty much a bog-standard white supremacist campaign of terror. It's the metastasis of the path of radicalization of many alt-righties... 'ironic' 4chan racism and misogyny leads to earnest racism and then action, which most of them keep limited to putting up racist flyers in multicultural neighborhoods and an occasional street brawl. Predictably, the very right-wingers who push the 'invasion' narrative which helped to radicalize the shooter are backpedaling as quickly as they can, with a lot of them pushing the idea that talking about the shooter's radicalization is somehow 'what the shooter wants'. Weird, I didn't hear any of them questioning media outlets' attempts to suss out the radicalization of Western-born people who ran off and joined ISIS.

The important thing here is that forty-nine people are dead, and forty-eight more people grievously injured. This sort of tragedy is unprecedented in New Zealand, which is the home of several of my bloggerhood friends. To the people of New Zealand, Kia Kaha.

From Angst in Japan to Alt-Right Rage

I've long maintained that the rise of the alt-right, and ultimately the rise of Donald Trump, were birthed by the misogynistic Gamergate tantrum.  Put succinctly, Gamergate was a backlash against female videogame designers and critics under the ludicrous guise of a call for 'ethics in gaming journalism'.  It metastasized into a broader misogynist backlash, with added racism of course, against any female participation in 'nerd culture'.

The latest QAnon Anonymous Podcast has a great rundown of the 'chan' culture that led to the birth of the online right.  Beginning in Japan with the post-recession nihilism of youth-in-Asia, this farrago of shitposting, 'ironic' bigotry, and one-upsmanship in being outrageous, this culture infected the US in a big way with the creation of 4chan by American teenager Christopher Poole.  When 4chan banned Gamergate related content, many of its more extreme users migrated to 8chan, created by American teenager Fredrick Brennan, who became disgusted by his own creation after it became a venue for mass shooters to post their manifestos.  He features prominently in this podcast.  Also featured in the podcast is Dale Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful, which also chronicles this phenomenon.

It's a good listen, a relatively short explainer about the online radicalization that led to the election of America's first shitposter president, built in the misogynistic, cartoonish image of the internet message boards themselves.

The Internet's Augean Stables

It's a herculean task, but it looks like Twitter is finally banning the most obnoxious QAnon accounts. The platform, used by individuals who wouldn't be able to access the fever swamps of 8chan/8kun, has been one of the major vectors of QAnon lunacy. Well, the day of reckoning for the trolls, grifters, and cultists is coming soon, but not soon enough:

We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 22, 2020

The responses to the upcoming ban are nothing short of hilarious, such as this imprecatory prayer against a social media platform:

Lord Jesus, I beg you. In your holy name! Please Lord. Bring Twitter to its knees in the next few weeks. Debilitate the platform and raise up Parler and others, in its place. Amen!

— AMABLACKPATRIOT (@DrShayPhD) July 22, 2020

Sorry, lady, Parler is just not where it's at. This is basically a prayer to make 'fetch' happen:





The bulk of the comments from the 'anons' are claims that the Techbros of Silicon Valley, prominent Democrats, and celebrities are running scared, and are trying to silence the QAnon movement in order to save their skins, but the simple fact of the matter is that the swarms that the conspiracy theory pushers are sending to harass verified accounts have made the platform untenable for people with genuine followings- Tom Hanks is more valuable to Twitter than PepeCucksSoyBoys1488.

Broad Spectrum Banning

Holy crap, Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and Youtube have all banned Alex Jones in a multi-site deplatforming which can be likened to a decapitation strike against the Right Wing Conspiracy Industrial Complex. I would love to know what final straw caused multiple avenues of content distribution to drop Jones like a hot rock. I suspect it has to do with lawsuits against Jones by sympathetic plaintiffs- what company wants to be seen as a party to defamation of victims?

There is a lot of wangst among the Jonestown Flavor-Ade drinkers regarding Jones' First Amendment rights, but nobody has a right to a platform provided by a private entity such as Facebook or YouTube. Jones and his minions have no more right to a soapbox on Facebook and YouTube than Emma Gonzalez has a right to a soapbox on InfoWars... and I don't see Jones giving her or David Hogg access to his site. Regarding assertions that Facebook is a monopoly, those are bullshit as well- Myspace never went away, and Right Wingers are free to come up with their own social media platforms- they are just really bad at it. Also, there are always cesspools such as 4chan and 8chan for Jones to use for distribution... he's just mad that he is now relegated t:o a nutjob circle jerk.

One bizarre byproduct of the Jones ban is that most of his YouTube exposure will now be in the form of remixes... eventually, he may come to be seen as a alternative EDM act:





Seriously, these things are addictive:





If this entire sub-genre of electronica is Jones' legacy, then maybe his damage to the public discourse will have been worth it.

A Preview of 2022

I've predicted that next year's Republican primary elections are going to be an absolute nightmare as the terrible Tea Party politicians are primaried by an up-and-coming class of full-on QAnon conspiracy theorists.  For those unfamiliar with the QAnonsense, it's basically a mashup of the ancient antimsemitic blood libel conspiracy theory with Illuminati/Freemasonry conspiracy theories, and the added twist that Donald Trump, of all people, would bring down the Cabal that secretly runs the world, using the rest of the population as cattle.  It's bad, and it's violent, and it's taking over the GOP, starting at the local level:

QAnon conspiracy theorist Tracy Beanz has been elected to a leadership position in the Horry County GOP in South Carolina after being endorsed by Michael Flynn (also, Lin Wood was a keynote speaker.) https://t.co/vEgNcFAxSn pic.twitter.com/HGoH0tBiNG

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) April 25, 2021

Tracy 'Beanz' Diaz was instrumental in moving the original 'Q Clearance Patriot' shitposter from the fever swamps of 4Chan to the 'normie' precincts of the internet, such as Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook:

Tracy Beanz (also known as Tracy Diaz), one of the 3 main figures who reportedly popularized QAnon, has been elected to a position in the Horry County, South Carolina, Republican Party. https://t.co/8OxYK5i69I https://t.co/4TPJjAEDbH

— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) April 25, 2021

Diaz, a YouTube poster and Pizzagate proponent, basically acted as a 'midwife' for the QAnon bullshit, and is reputed to have authored some of the Q Drops before the whole Qit-and-Qaboodle moved to 8Chan, where it was most likely taken over by Ron and Jim Watkins, the proprietors of that online filthfest. 

Now, she's an official Republican apparatchik in a South Carolina county.  It's not really a case of the serpent eating its own tail, the Quroboros is a snake with its head wedged up its ass, by which I mean cloaca.  Expect the electoral processes in the Republican Party to descend into a maelstrom of madness in the runup to the 2022 midterm elections.

A Killing Joke

There are a lot of elements of the QAnon conspiracy complex, which absorbs and assimilates other conspiracy theories, which are darkly comedic, such as lurid tales of mole children and evil reptilian aliens posing as the rulers of the planet.  The whole farrago is one big joke, but one with deadly consequences.  In short, Morrissey pretty much nailed where this joke has gone.

This story about a QAnon adherent/victim locking her children in their rooms and setting fire to her house is pure horror.  The truth behind her arson, attempted murder came out gradually, as recordings made by the first responders were made public:

The helmet cam caught Corliss screaming, "Get the f--- away from me, I've had wormwood, you'll all die," the affidavit stated. The captain accused her of pushing him away when he tried to keep control of her.

Later, she was lowered by a ladder but was accused of grabbing onto the ladder and attempting to keep firefighters from taking her out of the home.

After being led to safety, Corliss was unstable, the report said. When one firefighter stated she was acting crazy, she heard the comment and yelled she was not crazy, the affidavit stated. 

A Boscawen police lieutenant carried Corliss to an ambulance, but she was accused of being combative with him, too. Corliss hit the lieutenant in the face with her bloody hand and said he was now infected, the report said. The lieutenant accused Corliss of screaming about her body being "poisoned" and "you'll die if you eat me," as well as blaming her father for selling her into slavery, calling herself by other names, and admitting to trying to kill herself.

"At no time during the incident did Corliss tell anyone that the children were inside the room," the investigator stated. 

This attempted murder is eerily similar to the April murders of three California children by their mother, in what seems to be a terrifying combination of post-partum depression and conspiracist derangement.  The daughter of the New Hampshire woman recounted her mother's reason for attempting to burn her to death:

The investigator said EMTs spoke with the girl while she was being taken to Concord Hospital. The girl told the EMT that her mom told her that "bad guys broke in" and "my mom set the fire to protect us," according to the affidavit. At Concord Hospital, a doctor also heard a similar statement from the girl. 

I am firmly of the belief that the whole QAnon thing began as a LARP on 4Chan, an internet bulletin board on which anonymous shitposters often try to outdo each other with tales told while posing as government insiders, and was taken over by the owners of the 8Chan/8Kun board in order to drive traffic to their website, and incidentally to inspire MAGA morons to worship Trump.  It started off as a joke, then took on a life of its own, and eventually led to something deadly.

Post title taken from the name of an influential post-punk. proto-industrial band from London.

Cuckoo Coup

 In a year of disquieting news, here's another disquieting item, just in time for Christmas... Trump had a meeting with 'Kraken' crackpot Sidney Powell, who he wants to retain as a counsel for his 'election fraud' cases.  Things took a particularly worrisome turn as Trump inquired about deploying the military in a bid to stay in offic ploy suggested by disgraced former general Michael Flynn:

During the meeting, the president asked about Flynn’s suggestion of deploying the military, those briefed said. That was also shot down.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) December 19, 2020

Thankfully, our military personnel take an oath to serve the Constitution, not to serve a president. The odds of having the Marines serve as his personal Praetorian Guard are slim-to-none. The real problem is that Trump has always gotten high off his own supply, and his ego is being fed by Powell and Flynn, who occupy a strange, liminal role between the grifter and the True Believer.

Meanwhile, the fever swamps are abuzz with sedition, with calls for Trump to cross the Rubicon, notably from 8chan/8kun administrator, probably 'Q' contributor, and total creep Ron Watkins, who Trump has retweeted.  Notably, Watkins resides in Japan, so he's basically the kid yelling from across the street for two other kids to beat each other up.  The rank-and-file seem to have caught the rally cry, and have responded as they always do, by making ridiculous 'memes' and posting them:

No one tell them how Julius Caesar died pic.twitter.com/phkiPdwsAb

— Coping MAGA (@CopingMAGA) December 19, 2020

The real tell here is that, by crossing the Rubicon with a legion, Caesar was considered to have treasonously declared war on Rome. This forever put an end to the Roman Republic- do the MAGA morons really want Trump to declare himself dictator?  Caesar is said to have uttered 'the die is cast' as he crossed the river... and we all know that Trump failed at running casinos. More cogently, we all know how Caesar ended up, even right-wingers know that. If Trump does decide to cross the Rubicon, casting that losing die, who will be the senator to stab him? Will his last words be Et tu, Marco?

MTG Is Not Playing With a Full Deck

 Ah, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Cloudcuckooland)... what can we say about this QAnon obsessed freshman congresscritter?  She has come under intense scrutiny for her role in the 1/6 Capitol invasion, having amplified the 'stolen election' narrative, even stating that House Speaker Pelosi should be executed, but she's always been trash.  A decent human being does not stalk and harangue a youth whose classmates were murdered in order to push an anti-gun control agenda.

Greene has never met a conspiracy theory she doesn't like, from 9/11 trutherism to the Borg-like QAnon conspiracy complex which has assimilated other conspiracy theories in a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.  Perhaps the most outré conspiracy theory that Greene has pushed is straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Cylon, an assertion that the Rothschilds and George Soros used lasers to ignite the 2018 California wildfires:

 

Conspiracy theories always eschew the solutions with the most parsimonious explanation, operating not on the principle of Occam's Razor, but of Jones' Gluegun... the wildfires could not have been caused by a cigarette carelessly tossed out of a moving car, or lightning, they were started by Jews in Space.  Yeah, conspiracy theories inevitably end up in antisemitic tropes, which makes them cease to be fun.

As I noted, Greene has always been trash.  It's noteworthy that she ran unopposed in the general election because her Democratic opponent dropped out of the race due to the death threats he received.  I doubt that she will be ejected from Congress, a two-thirds vote being needed to accomplish that.  Also, she's the face of the Republican party now, the culmination of decades of conspiratorial-minded lunacy begun by the John Birch Society, and spiraling downward through Bill Cooper and Alex Jones to the current 4Chan/8Chan/8Kun ecosystem of anonymous shitposters.  She'll be the House minority leader by year's end.

About the post title, I realize that Marjorie Taylor Greene is dubbed MTG on Twitter in order to save characters, but the abbreviation also smacks of an odious attempt to cast her as a right-wing 'counterpart' to AOC.  MTG is also the abbreviation for the collectible card game Magic the Gathering, wildly popular in the 1990s.  I never played it, but it sounds like a Pokémon game for the Dungeons and Dragons set... it's adjacent to my nerd interests, but not among them.  From what I've heard, victory in the game depends on some extent to the size of one's collection of cards, which causes a consumption spiral as fanatic players stack their decks with new purchases.  At any rate, the MTG of the post title clearly isn't playing with a full deck.

Dotard Deputizes Deplorables?

I had meant to turn off my phone as a rejection of Vulgarmort's policies, but last night was pretty rough, so I forgot to do so. I was awakened at 2:18PM by an 'emergency alert' from a man who I consider the greatest emergency these United States has ever faced. I immediately cleared the alert message and, cursing myself for leaving my phone on, went back to sleep.

The message awakened the lunatic fringe of Trump's deplorable base- the QAnon freaks interpreted it as a prelude to Trump declaring martial law against a shadowy cabal of Democratic 'elites' who sacrifice children and consume their flesh to get high. The fact that they are busy defending the SCotUS nomination of a guy alleged to have preyed on teenage girls, nominated by a guy who used to creep on teenage girls is lost on these knuckle-draggers.

The QAnon crowd positively thirsts for bloodshed in the streets- these are the folks who fantasize about the execution of John McCain by a military tribunal. They long for the streets to flow with the blood of the nonbelievers:4





The fever swamps of 8chan were abuzz with the jubilation of the Deplorables who believe that Dotard has deputized them. Personally, I am not concerned with a mass movement of QAnons, the majority of whom are trolls, the rest of whom tend to be out-of-shape baby boomers. The one concern I have is that some nutbar, emboldened by this inferred clarion call, will shoot up a pizzeria or harass the staff of a donut shop. For the most part, the QAnon crowd is a bunch of ineffectual numbnuts, fantasizing about being the Big Damn Heroes in a bloody action movie. Each QAnoner is a super shitty Walter Mitty, but there's a chance that an occasional live-wire will decided to bring the fantasy to life. It's times like this that I am glad I live in the Northeast.

Leave the Gun, Take the Adrenochrome

One of the weirder recent local stories here in the NY Metro Area is the murder of the capo di tutti capi of the Gambino crime family by a sfacim on March 13th. While the conventional wisdom concerning the crime is that the killer murdered the don because the don warned him to stay away from his niece, the killer had a couple of QAnon conspiracy theory related terms inked on his palm.

QAnon is the 'one conspiracy theory to rule them all, one conspiracy theory to find them, one conspiracy theory to bring them all and in the darkness bind them in MAGAland, where the edgelords lie'. It's the unified field theory of conspiracies, with a basic premise that the Democratic Party and Hollywood elites are committing ritual child abuse and cannibalism on a global scale. It's Pizzagate on a combination of steroids and meth, the ancient blood libel trotted out for a 21st Century audience, with a lot of accumulated baggage, such as Ickean lizard people, Flat Earth lunacy, and a ton of Satanic Panic and eschatological evangelical fantasies. A lot of it is rooted, though believers may not realize it, in pop culture, with one central tenet of the conspiracy theory, the consumption of adrenochrome as a drug by the elite 'cabal', coming from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and depicted in the movie based on the book:





Adrenochrome-as-drug is also alluded to in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, with 'drencrom' being an additive to the moloko-plus favored by the book's villainous main character. For the record, I'm not a fan of Kubrick's film adaptation, which traded in the gritty, grotty milieu of the book for an all-too-clean aesthetic which I feel glorifies the 'ultraviolence' the book portrays:





Adrenochrome being oxidized epinephrine, the easiest way to obtain adrenochrome is to let an epi-pen go bad. According to the conspiracy theory, though, regular adrenochrome doesn't cut it for cannibals such as Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks- the good stuff has to be sourced from victims subjected to torture and murder. This is a major plot point in the first episode of the BBC police procedural Lewis:





The Sisters of Mercy weren't particular about sourcing their adrenochrome:





At any rate, the world is a weird place when a mob boss gets gunned down by a guy who believes in a hoax perpetrated by a 4chan/8chan shitposter. The idea of the Mafia sending a couple of bone-breakers to send a message to a couple of online grifters is surreal, the very sort of grotesque lunacy which seems to be a hallmark of this particular era.

Post title based on my favorite line from The Godfather.

This Is Actually About Ethics in Video Gaming Journalism Culture

Another day in these here United States, another mass shooting, this time, at a video gaming tournament in Jacksonville, Florida. The shooter, who killed himself, was a competitor who lost a match, then returned to the venue and shot up the place. I imagine that the horrible people at 4chan, 8chan, and the various incel forums are already proclaiming him 'an hero'.

As exposed in the whole Gamergate fiasco, nerd culture is a cesspool of misogyny, racism, and general nastiness. The abuse, including rape and death threats, that women gamers face is horrific. The usual shit-talk that accompanies gaming has occasionally metastasized into something more sinister, including terroristic acts as 'SWATting', which have ended in fatalities.

I'm shocked, but not surprised, that toxic gamer culture has claimed its first mass shooting directly related to video gaming... though I in no way subscribe to the Conservative trope that violent video games 'cause' mass shootings- it's a distraction from the real issue of regulating access to firearms, and in this particular case, the video game the shooter played was a football simulation, not a First-Person Shooter. The culture of casual cruelty and entitlement that prevents a lot of these angry young nerds from handling setbacks in an emotionally appropriate fashion is the problem. Was it inevitable that this toxicity would lead to a case of mass lead poisoning? More importantly, will this mass-shooting be the start of a larger movement to defuse dangerous nerdrage?

The Right-Wing Data Breach Keeps Widening

The data breach at web hosting company Epik, which infamously tried to keep internet cesspool 8Chan afloat after the Christchurch shooter posted his manifesto there, keeps getting worse, with a second round of leaks to the public being announced:

BREAKING: hacktivists with Anonymous release a second round of data from the Epik hack. A security researcher who was able to verify the extent of the leak to me described it as "a complete own." At over 300 gigabytes worth of data, this leak is larger than the first.

— steven monacelli  (@stevanzetti) September 29, 2021

Three hundred gigabytes of data released, including passwords, addresses, names, and even credit card numbers associated with right-wing operators and organizations. Entire disk images have been obtained: 

“Files are one thing, but a virtual machine disk image allows you to boot up the company’s entire server on your own, We usually see breaches with database dumps, documents, configuration files, etc. In this case, we are talking about the entire server image, with all the programs and files required to host the application it is serving.” 

This pretty much lays bare huge swathes of the online right-wing presence, exposing connections between organizers and the astroturf groups they funnel money to. This series of data breaches will be paying dividends to extremism researchers for years to come. Nothing like a proverbial solar flare to illuminate dark money!

A Fistful of Q Drops

Every once in a while, I post about Ron Watkins, the problematic proprietor of 8Chan, probable Q drop poster, and election audit partisan.  Watkins has a new grift, he's running for Congress in Arizona's 1st congressional district, and his new ad is a doozy:

Ron Watkins has just posted a new video.
I can’t even take this seriously at this point. pic.twitter.com/2gFmjY2ybx

— 2022 Karma (@2022_Karma) February 9, 2022

I can't even tell if he's serious or if he's trolling, but that Morriconesque soundtrack and washed-out, overexposed look add up to Pure Comedy Gold.  This is the worst Spaghetti Western I've ever seen- the Magnificent Seventeen starring in A Fistful of Q Drops.  The fact that his campaign website is CMZ Army (standing for CodeMonkeyZ Army but looking like CumZoneArmy) only makes the whole thing look more ludicrous and grotesque.

The 2022 GOP primaries are going to be a shitshow, all least there will be some comic relief now and again.

Three Years of Q-nacy

 Three years ago today, the weirdest conspiracy theory I have encountered, which is more like a conspiracy aggregator which can absorb other conspiracy theories, was birthed.  The first prediction was  ambitious. predicting the fall of the right-wing's most hated figure, but not auspicious, having not come to pass in the ensuing three years... oddly enough, the first 'Q Drop' was actually a response to another 'insider anon' on 4chan:

Apparently, it was common for various shitposters to claim inside knowledge about intelligence or law enforcement matters, and would engage in games of one-upsmanship.  Oddly enough, the shitposter who came to be known as 'Q Clearance Patriot' beat out other figures such as 'FBI Anon'.

The QAnon phenomenon had its start on 4chan, but migrated to the even more problematic imageboard 8chan (now rebranded as 8kun after several mass shooters posted manifestos on the imageboard).  The poster(s) known as Q painted themselves into a corner by claiming that no other sites would be used for communiques.  That's a total genius move by a 'team of high ranking military intelligence operatives'.

Most of Q's drops in the first couple of years consisted of cryptic missives written in a mix of jargon and code that functioned as an Alternate Reality Game for believers.  They could decode these 'drops' and compare notes to piece together a narrative, which typically involved the arrest and trial by military tribunal (followed, naturally, by execution) of high-ranking Democrats.

QAnon is really the Unified Field Theory of conspiracies, capable of absorbing other conspiracy theories.  Elites drinking the blood of children to get high and regain their youth?  Check!  Aliens manipulating humanity behind the scenes?  Welcome aboard!  Mole children raised as slaves in underground military bases?  You got it!  JFK Jr faking his death to fight Hillary Clinton?  Yeah, there's a sect for that.  The one thing that unifies the true Q believers is the belief that Donald Trump, the most corrupt person to occupy the White House, and a man credibly accused of being a sexual predator, is humanity's last hope in the war against the sinister cabal that rules the world behind the scenes, employing most of Earth's people as cattle to prey upon.  Yeah, it's pretty much Cult 45, seasoned with more than a touch of antisemitic Blood Libel.  I have to confess that the whole rigmarole fascinates me, but then again, I am a huge fan of Foucault's Pendulum and Illuminatus!

If you're unfamiliar with this conspiracy complex, a good place to familiarize yourself with the basics is the irreverent QAnon Anonymous podcast, and a real thorough debunker of the whole mishegas is Mike Rains, who posts as Poker and Politics (he probably knows the 'comms' better than anyone).

It's been three years since the first prognostication by Q was made, and it still hasn't come true.  Next week, the God Emperor that the Q-loons worship stands a good chance to lose the presidency in a landslide.  I don't think that will end the QAnon phenomenon, most cults survive failed prophecies.  What the movement morphs into remains to be seen, but watching the phenomenon unfold over three years, I have the distinct feeling that I was watching the birth of a new religion in realtime.  Who the hell knows what it'll morph into over the next three years?