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.
