The bit at the end where the guy just drops the charade and gets to what he really wants -- trying to outright pick a fight with the victim -- is really fucked up.
These people are stupid bullies getting off on harassing people.
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The Rise of the Crisis Actor Conspiracy Movement (VICE YouTube)
- Thread starter EdibleKnife
- Start date
The bit at the end where the guy just drops the charade and gets to what he really wants -- trying to outright pick a fight with the victim -- is really fucked up.
These people are stupid bullies getting off on harassing people.
It's just a tactic to shut victims down and prevent any sympathy for them.
They don't want a David Hogg.
There are, and it's not as if this exact issue is a matter of settled law, either. Westboro Baptist Church went all the way to the Supreme Court to (successfully) defend their right to wave offensive signs within shouting distance of funerals, and states and localities are still grappling with how to deal with things like anti-abortion protesters.
I guess my hot take is that I see stuff like this as one of the many consequences of media fragmentation, where institutions are no longer trustworthy and posts on social media that are much more individually appealing start leading people down dark rabbit holes. It's hardly exclusive to the political right, either. The Syria stuff (and things like the nerve agent attack in the U.K.) are maddening.
So why doesn't Youtube or Facebook or Twitter ban these videos and groups outright? There should be a billion dollar class action lawsuit by *all* victims families to force these entities to act and erase this damaging garbage off their platforms.
Great post, I 100% agree and I'll be sure to watch that video you linked to.
There's a reason why these beliefs are so disproportionally concentrated amongst people who have so little in terms of education and wealth, and we're not going to be able to sort this problem out until we address the structural issues that create the social conditions that allow this sort of thinking to take root.
That's not to say that the people who believe these things aren't causing real harm in the world obviously. People like Alex Jones are especially nasty pieces of work.
The problem with social media is that they make more money with more users, especially users who post controversial material that generates activity/responses. It's how Trump got cheap FB advertising.
Not much incentive for them to ban users, especially controversial ones.
Controversy generates activity, posts, sharing, replies(even if only trolling). That's their money maker.
You just know that if they actually did exhume a body to show the bullet holes, they would just say that the bullet holes were added by the FBI / Deep State / Illuminati. There's no satisfying these people.
For absolute proof that these are individuals that are too far out in their minds to be saved, try engaging with any single individual who believes David Hogg "contradicted" himself to say he wasn't at the school:
https://twitter.com/alxandro/status/979535719084511234?s=21
Logic and reasoning simply do not exist to them once you begin to show them how their arguments are fundamentally flawed.
For absolute proof that these are individuals that are too far out in their minds to be saved, try engaging with any single individual who believes David Hogg "contradicted" himself to say he wasn't at the school:
https://twitter.com/alxandro/status/979535719084511234?s=21
Logic and reasoning simply do not exist to them once you begin to show them how their arguments are fundamentally flawed.
Speaking of which, wtf are those ads I'm seeing for that Deep State FOX show?
They're just asking questions.
... and propagating lies, and harassing people, and threatening people...
If I were one of these parents and had some asshole look me in the eye and say my dead child never actually existed and I was faking, it would take an act of God to stop me from pounding their face into a creamy pudding.
We have them in other countries too, Americans just tend to be louder then anyone else.
The people in the video aren't young. They went through a relatively well funded education system in their youth and still turned in wretched cunts .
That's certainly a part of it. If you want to control a population, keeping them ignorant is definitely a good way to make that job easier.
Yeah I dunno. I feel like we've been underfunding schools and teachers for at least a few decades, but I don't have any research to back that up.
It would seem that way. But perhaps the simpler explanation is that if you want to cut taxes for extremely rich people (a major driving force in politics for generations), you have to make up that lack of funding somewhere. And schools are powerless to fight back.
Of course, nothing excuses what these fuckers are doing. There are plenty of perfectly decent uneducated people out there.
Well heck, when you put it that way, it's win-win. Not only do you save money, you also get a population that's a pushover to manipulate since all you have to do is throw out a few trigger words like "MAGA" or "Librul Tears!" and they let you run them through a meat grinder and thank you for it.
I'd do that, then deny the pounding ever happened and say that they're just crisis actors.
OP
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It's just that simple. That's why proof doesn't matter. They could see bodies, birth/death certificates, video, photos, interviews, etc. and none of it will matter. The only thing that matters is attacking the people that represent the change that they fear and the empathy that they lack. They want fights. They want violence, pain and fear. They want to feel like big strong men and women by resorting to bullying kids and torturing grieving parents. They want to feel like smart people for buying into a reality that doesn't exist but one where they stand on top. They want all this but cry like cowards when even the slightest consequence comes to meet their behavior. They believe they should be able to throw their weight around to hurt as many people as they want with total impunity. It's an absolute sickness and I have zero empathy for these gross human beings. They deserve some of the worst life can offer for being some of the worst life can offer.
I have (well, had) a friend who fell for this shit completely during the last election. He was always a 9/11 truther and scared of the government through the Bush and Obama years, but inexplicably he jumped right into the whole notion of Hillary/Illuminati/lizards planning all kinds of hideous futures for mankind and that somehow, Trump was the one guy not in on it...but then he randomly changed the narrative to "Trump is bad, but he's so bad that he'll inadvertently take down the system".
Either way, my experience of this from the outside (and occasionally peeking into the kinds of things he'd tell me about, mostly so I could figure out the exact nature of the lies and possibly how to help him see it for what it was) was that it was 100% about preying on the fears of ignorant people, often young white men. This guy in particular had also been subject to some pretty awful behavior from one of those "bad kid" camps as a teen, so he started off adulthood with a very strong fear or anyone with power or authority. The exploitation of that fear was incredibly simple, it seems. I ended up having to cut ties with him after Charlottesville. It'd been a long time coming, but his attitude coming out of that event was just so fucking gross that I couldn't deal with him on any level anymore.
I'm sorry to hear about your friend. It's hard to be around or even try to help someone who goes too far down the rabbit hole. One of the best things to help is to change the ignorance to understanding, but when the mind gets so warped it can feel like a brick wall being built right in front of you. I'm sorry you couldn't help your friend, hopefully he finds his way out of it before a permanent mistake happens.
Yeah, it was intense watching him just take every single thing in his life and reframe it as confirmation of everything that r/conspiracy told him. When he got kicked out of a rental situation, it was his "crazy black landlord" and not, you know, the fact that he was publicly supporting Trump in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore and putting a fucking sign in his window, failing to pay rent on time, and selling drugs out of her house. When a bunch of his random white friends told him they were no longer interested in having him room with them when they caught a whiff of his Trump support, that was of course them violating his rights instead of them not wanting to hang out with a guy who was supporting someone so clearly anti-LGBTQ, racist, sexist, etc. Most of his friends are liberal as fuck, and like me, have cut him off completely.
Last I heard, he moved out into western MD to be around more people who support Trump. So I'm not expecting any real change.
This is total absurdity. How do you develop a legal framework that can deal with these situations that doesn't potentially hinder free-speech itself or what it's actually meant to be used for? I don't understand how the world is going to fix itself from this kind of stuff. I've personally got to known people who eventually reveal how they believe this stuff, and it blows my mind. I think a "thought virus" is probably the perfect term. It's simpler to think the world is orderly and controlled in some way, even if it means bad things happen. I suppose it feels less intimidating that things are under someone's control rather than no one's control.
Unfortunately these conspiracy theorists fail to take into account how poorly humans cooperate, and how it would be virtually impossible to conspire on this scale. It would be obscenely complex to pull off, and nearly everyone would need to be in on it.
Unfortunately these conspiracy theorists fail to take into account how poorly humans cooperate, and how it would be virtually impossible to conspire on this scale. It would be obscenely complex to pull off, and nearly everyone would need to be in on it.
One of my parents believes in this truther crap, they have told me to my face several times that David Hogg is a crisis actor and that sandy hook was a staged tragedy to pave the way for the government to take away their guns. It is disheartening for me because there is no way to change their mind at all; no evidence I can provide that will sway their opinion, only their evidence is real and everything else is doctored or manufactured to help skew the narrative towards a liberal agenda.
It would be cheaper, easier, and harder to trace for the government to just go onto 4chan and radicalise people themselves.
The irony of these nuts is that their actions are the ones perpetuating this problem.
Unfortunately, people following this kind of shit are so far deep into the conspiracies that they probably can't be saved. I know some of these, and it's like, they literally can not take any "official" information on face value, even when it's easily verifiable and there's no real gain lying about it. Every shooting, every terrorist attack, every natural cataclysm, everything that ever happens is faked, staged, a lie, a hoax. Suddenly all experts of ballistics, engineering, thermodynamics, virology, telling us all on a daily basis how everything that the mainstream media tells is fake, with only a few real sources of news telling it how it really is. Somehow, coincidentally, these truth speakers are always aligned with Russia. Surprise.
Some of the funniest shit I've ever read was people convinced the Boston Bombing was staged. Before that, I couldn't believe people could be that spooked. Now, every tragedy is blamed on actors and the government. I like my fair share of conspiracy theories but when you can see a guy's bone sticking out after his leg was blown off and you are trying to convince people it's makeup...you need help.
...Trump winning really has become that much of an eye opener on humanity itself. Even with information at our finger tips at the most ready in this nation, so many still want a crusade to occur.
What as thought was a war of perception has actually been that of the soul...
This is the dangers of social media bubbles where everyone is living in their own Truman show with non stop positive reinformant for their actions. Other people are seen as literal actors affecting the world around them.
It's that, alongside the conservative entertainment complex's efforts to convince these idiots that they are actually the smart, moral 'real' Americans. So they take that, combined with the need to feel smart and be the 'good guys'. They can't understand the reality around them, so they reject it and live in their own version of reality that they can feel intellectually, ethically and morally superior.
It all goes back to Limbaugh and Fox News.
I don't even understand how these people think crisis actors could ever even work in the way they think they do. Do these actors just have no friends and family? Or is their entire family line in on it? Are they in it for life and just have to live in the area until they die? What about the people that died, who they think are actors as well? They're just erased from existence?
And its absolutely scary how many people think David Hogg is an actor because the man is good at publicly speaking.
Fucking morons. I really wish the Pastor didn't shake the guys hand near the end of the video when they met.
And its absolutely scary how many people think David Hogg is an actor because the man is good at publicly speaking.
Fucking morons. I really wish the Pastor didn't shake the guys hand near the end of the video when they met.
Same here.
Shame a bullet doesn't catch then instead of an innocent child.