storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
So let me tell you a little story.
Way back in the early 1990's, I was subscribed to Sears's Prodigy service, which was a lot like America Online, which was a lot like pay-by-the-month Facebook. *smirk*
And I was on a bulletin board for They Might Be Giants fans. And one day out of the clear blue sky, somebody posted a long breathless rant about how they'd "proven" the song "Spider" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmQYICF7ExU ) was about WW2.
Their theory was absolutely airtight: "Spider" was the Nazis. The second voice was the Japanese saying they"d "get rid of" their enemies. The voice saying "must stop" was the victims of the Holocaust.
And the TMBG board went WILD. It dominated discussion for days. People were shocked they'd never thought of it before. They filled in the rest of the story to show where Italy and Russia figured in. They found further clues in other songs. One guy, who had innocently picked the handle "SCHPIDER!" apologized all over himself for his insensitivity towards the victims of genocide.
Except, of course that this whole theory was all complete bullshit. I have NEVER seen anyone seriously espouse this theory outside of Prodigy, and the composers are on record as saying: "Spider is the product of an idle afternoon messing with the sampler." It's just a spy-jazz riff with a bit of pulp comics action.
All I'm saying is... false pattern-matching is a real thing that happens. It doesn't mean that every dog whistle or easter egg you find is unreal nor unintended. But you should be real, real careful what patterns you trust, and you should always consider the possibility that the five-pointed star you see is nothing more than five dots. (See page 00053 [84/121 on pdf]: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/downloads/Principia%20Discordia.pdf)
Or that the 666 you see is nothing more than 13 stars. ( https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trademark-of-the-devil/ )
This is a real big deal for me guys. I'm not trying to pick fights with anyone, but I will not shrink from using the word "triggering" here. This kind of apophenia is exactly the tactic that the vile folks at the Trinity Broadcast Network used to convince me of Biblical inerrancy and the Fundamental Evilness Of The Queers And Commies when I was a teenager.
I was real, real lucky to get out, and when I see any signs of similar thinking on my own current side, my first impulse is always to run away screaming in self-defense. It genuinely scares me. And maybe my threshold for it is too low, but... that's what happened to me, that's what I am, and dammit, I am never looking for Numbers Of The Beast nor faces in tortilla shells ever again.
rant, re: storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
I also want to clarify: it's not about whether this guy turns out to be a Nazi or not. Let's face it: these days, the odds are not that low. And it's still entirely plausible that this is what this guy was doing.
What bothers me is both the logic used to defend it—"well, this stuff does happen, so it's definitely what's happening here"—in the original Twitter thread, and the character attacks on anybody who advised caution, asked for more evidence, or expressed skepticism.
And the flimsy evidence that was originally presented. ( https://twitter.com/_Anunnery/status/1158584553952272384 -- WARNING MEMETIC HAZARD) Besides the assembly-kit numerology, it was stuff like "they mentioned a fence" and "there was a gun in it" and "they used the word 'solution'."
If it had been something like "Listen, they have a Pepe icon and constantly complain about immigrants, here are the relevant tweets," that would have been the end of it then and there. I would not have been particularly alarmed nor skeptical.
Also, it really weirds me out that through all this, nobody could ever explain exactly how participating in the "30-50 hogs meme WOULD HARM ANYBODY." The user who started it even admitted that it wouldn't. The whole logic was "Nazis hide secret Nazi number in meme, and we repeat it, and..." And what, exactly?
I know I'm making too big of a deal about this, but... do you see at least some of why this worried me? If this was invented out of whole cloth—and I don't know for sure that it was, but nobody's shown me otherwise yet—then there's no limit to what Earnest Young Leftists could invent. This is not the first time I've seen it. And it's not the first time I've seen them attack someone just for being skeptical of it.
storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
Sometimes, I stop to think about how dumb we are as a species.
And then I stop and take stock of the situation a little more critically, and realize that's an unfair generalization.
We're not dumb. We are SO VERY DUMB.
*Waves a little raccoon pennant.*
storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
I just view this as a failure of their education. they need more games where there are reasonable patterns that are overtly proven wrong in the course of the playing, to get them to understand that you must detect pattern, test pattern, and then discard or adjust if wrong.
re: storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
@001zlnv I've seen some interesting scientific studies that have tried to do just that. I'll see if I can dig it up sometime—there was an edu-game a bunch of researchers made to inoculate people against manipulative "fake news" strategies... AND IT WORKED in clinical trials.
re: vent, SECRET OCCULT MATH, pretty trivial peeve
@zebratron2084 Yeah as someone said in reference to this elsewhere "For dogwhistles to work, someone has to be able to actually hear it."
re: vent, SECRET OCCULT MATH, pretty trivial peeve
@mmsword It's... it's... it's just so consarned closed to sorcery in its logic, it's maddening, you know? It's so fucking reminiscent of the fundies of my adolescence, who genuinely believed that if we so much as TOUCHED a D&D book—or for that matter, a Quran—we'd get contaminated by Forces Of Evil.
re: vent, SECRET OCCULT MATH, pretty trivial peeve
@zebratron2084 Yeah, which is further complicated by our current crop of Nazis really loving the whole "Let's decide to do a stupid thing to see if we can get people to call us Nazis for doing the stupid thing instead of calling us Nazis for being fucking Nazis."
re: vent, SECRET OCCULT MATH, pretty trivial peeve
@mmsword Or as they """ironically""" put it, "FIFTH DIMENSIONAL CHESS."
Thanks, guys, I hate it.
storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
@zebratron2084 wow seriously that’s what happened? I thought it was intended thought out Spider Man references to the extent I thought “I promise not to kill you” was Doctor Doom and “Step on Spider” was Rhino or possibly Hulk.
re: storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
@Leucrotta That's seriously what happened. *nod* We live on a real crazy planet.
re: storytime, psychology, personal issues, vent
@zebratron2084 This is a little like how I keep thinking Cure songs are about really horrible serious stuff and inevitably they're just random fluff clonking around in Roger Smith's head at the time.
I think the weirdest song thing I know offhand is how Michael Stipe felt he had to explain https://youtu.be/HIkTg9y2psw was not about someone throwing their kid out of a window. When nobody else seems to have thought of this interpretation.
re: vent, SECRET OCCULT MATH, pretty trivial peeve
You know what else really pisses me off?
Christians who see The Number of the Beast in places where it's just three sixes, not the number "six hundred and sixty six."
IT DOESN'T EVEN FUCKING WORK THAT WAY. That would be utterly meaningless in the original Greek, because Greek DIDN'T HAVE PLACE VALUE. The Greek for 666 is χξϛ (600+60+6). You CAN'T GET 6+6+6 out of that, period.
So, like, a good 80-90% of Christian hysterics over THE BEAST doesn't even have a Biblical basis. It's taken on a life of its own, and so many innocent things have been rejected and demonized, from UPC symbols (whose check-digits vaguely resemble the code for sixes) to Barack Obama (don't even get me started), because these people won't take ten fucking minutes to do some fact-checking about the document that's supposedly the whole center of their world. >_<
Bad memetics. It's like wildfire. Or a plague that constantly spreads and mutates. A bad idea like this takes on a life of its own. And after a while, people don't even remember or care why it was associated with Raw Elemental Evil in the first place. And they defend it with strategies that have everything to do with social connections and personal honor, and nothing to do with fact. This is why this stuff tends to scares me so much.
And yeah, this is about that "30-50 hogs = Nazi dog whistle" thing. If you don't know what I mean, good god, don't ask, because it's what made my brain hurt so much earlier that I was tempted to flee. I still haven't seen any link to evidence that the meme originator had any warning signs *besides* the "30-50 is awfully specific" argument.
Even if they did find one, it still wouldn't explain how the hell spreading those numbers would have caused any real harm, or what it was supposed to accomplish for the Bad Guys. And it looks like the original accuser has walked their case back on Twitter, too. I just... got a real bad feeling from the whole thing, and given my aforementioned history, I think I had a right to.