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.
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.
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."