I think you should add the very simple fact that audits aren't simple recounts. If the votes are counterfeit, counting the same votes again isn't proving or disproving anything. If the fraudulent ones were counted, wtf does counting them again solve? Do they think auditting companies is as simple as asking them to calculate everything and see if all the ones were carried over? No, lmao.
An ice cream analogy for a recount would be asking the ice cream store owner where he bought his ingredients from, then going to the manufacturers and asking them if they've had any similar issues.
An audit would be actively testing the ingredients both at the manufacturer and the ice cream store for anything sus (and I don't mean pcr tests, cuz with a high enough cycle, you could test AOC for any signs of intelligence and actually test positive) and then reporting your findings.
That kind of logic doesn't get through to the types of people who were g r 0 0 m e d to think they could never do wrong, though. To them, any form of corruption on their side is too tinfoil. I also don't think it's semantics. It's apples and oranges, or rather apples and eggs. Audits include actuaIforensics whereas recounts don't. If audits were lnvestig ations, recounts would be reading the poIicereport. It shouldn't be treated as one in the same.
The funniest part is that they specifically chose independents to do the work. It's not like we enjoy Republicans over here, which is my litmus test for bias. I may be conservative (technically a classical liberal, but these terms mean nothing to the politically illiterate) but I'm not foolish enough to believe it's team A vs team B. It's the people vs corruption. It always has been. Ideology takes a backseat because, as I see it, it's ultimately about collectivists for the individual vs individualists for the collective.
But I'll stand by what I've said without debate for now, EXCEPT for the fact that I'm looking for dopamine hits. Because that would imply that I am emotionally invested in seeing the Q movement fall apart.
Like I've said before, I'm not here to prove you guys wrong. I am here to figure out how we can both look at exactly the same thing and come to wildly different conclusions. It seems pretty obvious to me (and probably you) that "proof" can only come from time, either for the Plan to work, or for you to realize there is no Plan.
If I am wrong, then I lose nothing and get smarter as a result. If I am right, I gain nothing and move on to the next thing, I guess. I stand to gain and lose absolutely nothing for my views here.
So, unfortunately, I have to figure out other outlets for my dopamine adventures than Q people.
EDIT: Also, I have absolutely no loyalty to Reddit as a platform. If they're hosting child porn, then they should get hit hard for it. But I've been hanging out with Q people since you guys were still on 8chan, and except for pre-8chan 4chan, no non-dark site comes close to the amount of random, anonymous posting of child porn that 8chan had. There's a reason that I bring that up as a weird place for Q to decide to find an audience.
The point I'm making about 8chan is that is exclusively where Q decided to recruit members for an anti-pedophile organization. On a site which really only existed because 4chan, a site also notorious for child pornography, started coming down on stuff like that and was labeled as too restrictive.
I remember, because I was on 4chan when 8chan was created (r9k, ftw). I started following stuff on 8chan exclusively when Q started to become a thing.
It just boggles the mind how a high level military or intelligence operative would see a website like that and say, "Sure, that seems like a good place to anonymously recruit for my army of digital anti-pedophile soldiers. This is the place where I'll commence a Great Awakening. The place where the pedophiles hang out."
Not 4chan, which was basically the same thing except with less child porn. Not creating their own server which could serve the same free-speech anonymity. Nope, just use a site which did poorly everything 4chan did except the criminal part.
That just is a very weird place for Q to find attractive. There were so, so many better options for him if he had the resources he must have had. Hell, I had better resources, and I was definitely not a high level government official.
Like I said, I'm not defending Reddit's admins. As far as I know, the sub in which I have power has never had a problem with child pornography. I can't do anything about the porn subs, as I am not a moderator on any of them.
But Reddit's problems with failing to stop revenge porn, child porn, and other stuff doesn't in any way counter the problem that Q's entire origin story doesn't make sense. Not why he was on 8chan. Not why he decided that a site full of child predators would be a good place to recruit his believers. None of it. It's never made sense to me.
I mean, if your biggest issue is why Q chose 4chan as the place to drop crumbs, then the outcomes seem to answer the question for you. The message spread like wildfire, and is still culturally relevant today as a result of that choice.
I think you would agree that IF there is a Cabal, then they likely control most mass communications networks.
That significantly cuts down the pool of potential places where Q might be able to safely operate, especially early in the operation. It would assume that once its messages began to proliferate, it would be resisted by those it was trying to expose. (I use "it", because we don't know how many people Q consists of.)
So, that leaves only places that exist in the dark corners of the internet. Places with enough traffic so that it might gain traction, but yet also places which weren't controlled by the opposition and which held freedom of speech and anonymity as being of utmost importance. Finally, you'd want a place where the people are wary of authority and likely to take seriously comments critical of the establishment power structures.
4chan was one of those places, and became even moreso in the leadup to the 2016 election as Trump supporters, memesters, and trolls began being censored off of other social networks and sought refuge there (Q first appeared in 2017). Also, if 4chan was the kind of place where child porn was commonly encountered (I never used it, so I am taking you at your word on that), then it would be the kind of place where people would likely BELIEVE that child trafficking networks exist. Just because a small percentage of people in a forum participate in an unsavory activity doesn't mean that most people in that forum wouldn't oppose that kind of activity. And the results speak for themselves; Q began on just such a forum as you've described, and yet has proliferated and grown into a movement of millions of supporters who vehemently oppose sex trafficking.
So, if your concern is that you wouldn't have predicted it to happen, and yet it happened, that only means you don't understand the complex system well enough to have predicted it, not that it COULDN'T have possibly been predicted.
4chan, 8chan, I don't know. If I got wrong where it started, it doesn't change my point, I just never used those forums so I don't know exactly where it started or all the backstory behind its move from one to the other to 8kun or whatever.
I just know that wherever it began, it DID proliferate, and so you can't say "well I wouldn't have predicted it, so it couldn't possibly have been predicted."
I was done posting for the day, but you write like I do and I wanted to respond as appreciation for the detail.
The issue I have with what you've suggested is that 8chan was NOT a big deal when it was first out there (like I said, I remember it personally, and 4chan was still the ruling class at the time). 8chan was famous only for being less regulated than 4chan, and nothing else before Q found it.
So compared to 4chan, or the many other chans out there that could be chosen, I don't understand what could have convinced a high-level anti-pedophile government operative to choose 8chan over the hundreds of other sites that do exactly the same thing, without the child porn but with all the same anonymous protections.
If it were on 4chan, I still would be skeptical, but the "reaching a wider audience" argument would hold up. Unless things have changed drastically in the post-Q years, 8chan never got close to surpassing 4chan's audience and reach.
Further, if Q is the person he claims to be, then he could have CREATED a better site specifically for his purposes. If he has the ability to create a Plan so nuanced and complicated and all-encompassing that NCSWIC and it will defeat an international cabal of criminals that have run the world...
...then creating a popular chan that doesn't have a heavy pedophile presence shouldn't be out of his reach, should it? There was literally no other option here for someone of Q's reach and resources?
Sorry, but the Plan that you guys believe must be occurring on an international scale cannot coexist with a man who lacks the resources to build a non-pedophilic means of informing keyboard warriors about said plan. There are literally so many other options for someone with even a modest understanding of how these sites operate and a few thousand bucks to burn.
Sorry, but the Plan that you guys believe must be occurring on an international scale cannot coexist with a man who lacks the resources to build a non-pedophilic means of informing keyboard warriors about said plan. There are literally so many other options for someone with even a modest understanding of how these sites operate and a few thousand bucks to burn.
Right, but once again; it worked. The results mean that the outcome was possible, and therefore predictable if you understand the system well enough. You don't have access to the variables which made it possible, and so you are concluding that it wasn't predictable. That's faulty logic, no matter how you look at it.
It's like a reverse "God of the gaps" argument. "I don't understand why this happened, and so therefore there is no reason for it."
I can literally think of dozens of reasons why it could have happened. Maybe the complete lack of oversight was the ONE thing Q required. Maybe Q had operatives strategically placed in certain other forums and outlets that could drive attention to the "crumbs" so that they would draw eyeballs... You know, all the blogosphere articles in the early days with headlines such as "Mysterious entity on 8chan claims there is an evil cabal of Satanic pedophiles", etc.
And I already answered the child porn thing. If you post in a place where the readers could easily come into contact with child porn, it makes them more likely to accept that there are human trafficking networks all over the place.
I know people that have never been molested and never come into contact with any of that kind of material, and they are the hardest people to convince that it is a massive problem. It's the same concept as us privileged Americans finding it hard to understand that there are large swaths of the planet where people have no electricity, no food, no clean water, and where slavery still exists.
Out of sight, out of mind...
Once again, your inability to understand doesn't equate impossibility.
But it does allow me the reasonable accommodation of filtering the massive amount of information I have to absorb as I go about my day.
Right now, I have not seen a single Q post that could not have been written by a 20 year old nobody. I am not yet convinced that Q is any more important than any random nobody standing on a trash can screaming about aliens. I do not believe Q is anyone other than a random internet troll who got lucky.
I can choose to believe that there's some convoluted world in which Q was REQUIRED to use a child porn hosting chan in order to spread the message that would save the world.
But I'm already stretching my imagination by accepting that Q is even a legitimate source of literally any information about anything, and not a 20 something year old loser on the internet like everyone else claiming to be important.
So until I have actual proof that Q is worth listening to besides him having a message that aligns with the world that Trump has convinced his base exists (which I am not convinced DOES, in fact, exist), then it's pretty hard to convince me to do any mental gymnastics for explaining incredibly improbable means by which Q might have had to do things, IF Q actually exists as the person he claims, IF this Cabal even exists the way Trump says it does, and so forth.
I personally am willing to read your stuff because I have always had interests in talking with people I disagree with, but I say this with humility, there aren't a whole lot of people like me. Most people won't give Q the time of day.
I only care about Q because of the following he's amassed, but amassing a following doesn't mean that you haven't lied your way to getting one, just like every cult leader in history.
How am I supposed to answer a question that does not involve my sub and that I have had nothing to do with?
Like I said, I'm not here to defend Reddit. If the whole platform got shut down, it wouldn't make a difference to me. I'd still be hanging around GAW.
Neither of us disagrees that child porn is bad. But I also haven't claimed to meet a man on Reddit upon which I've based an entire belief system.
You've made that kind of claim for a man you guys met on 8chan. And 8chan was WAY worse than anything Reddit has to answer for.
I'm going to be honest, this feels kind of like a deflection from the fact that you don't really have a good answer why Q would use a site like 8chan for The Great Awakening. If there was a good answer to this question, I feel like I would have heard it by now, but I'm always up to learn new things.
First off, is this a recent graph? Because it's meaningless post-Q. Before Q, 8chan was just one of a hundred chans that broke off of 4chan.
Second, how does showing me the most popular sub in 8kun demonstrate the reason why Q would choose ANY site that hosted child pornography as opposed to one that did not?
If Q was who he claims, then he could have made his own. Ron Fucking Watkins can run a chan, but Q can't make one himself and reach out to True Believers without worrying about the pedophiles? That wasn't an option for someone as high-level as Q?
I think you should add the very simple fact that audits aren't simple recounts. If the votes are counterfeit, counting the same votes again isn't proving or disproving anything. If the fraudulent ones were counted, wtf does counting them again solve? Do they think auditting companies is as simple as asking them to calculate everything and see if all the ones were carried over? No, lmao.
An ice cream analogy for a recount would be asking the ice cream store owner where he bought his ingredients from, then going to the manufacturers and asking them if they've had any similar issues.
An audit would be actively testing the ingredients both at the manufacturer and the ice cream store for anything sus (and I don't mean pcr tests, cuz with a high enough cycle, you could test AOC for any signs of intelligence and actually test positive) and then reporting your findings.
That kind of logic doesn't get through to the types of people who were g r 0 0 m e d to think they could never do wrong, though. To them, any form of corruption on their side is too tinfoil. I also don't think it's semantics. It's apples and oranges, or rather apples and eggs. Audits include actuaIforensics whereas recounts don't. If audits were lnvestig ations, recounts would be reading the poIicereport. It shouldn't be treated as one in the same.
The funniest part is that they specifically chose independents to do the work. It's not like we enjoy Republicans over here, which is my litmus test for bias. I may be conservative (technically a classical liberal, but these terms mean nothing to the politically illiterate) but I'm not foolish enough to believe it's team A vs team B. It's the people vs corruption. It always has been. Ideology takes a backseat because, as I see it, it's ultimately about collectivists for the individual vs individualists for the collective.
Ugh, the text is SO TINY. :)
But I'll stand by what I've said without debate for now, EXCEPT for the fact that I'm looking for dopamine hits. Because that would imply that I am emotionally invested in seeing the Q movement fall apart.
Like I've said before, I'm not here to prove you guys wrong. I am here to figure out how we can both look at exactly the same thing and come to wildly different conclusions. It seems pretty obvious to me (and probably you) that "proof" can only come from time, either for the Plan to work, or for you to realize there is no Plan.
If I am wrong, then I lose nothing and get smarter as a result. If I am right, I gain nothing and move on to the next thing, I guess. I stand to gain and lose absolutely nothing for my views here.
So, unfortunately, I have to figure out other outlets for my dopamine adventures than Q people.
EDIT: Also, I have absolutely no loyalty to Reddit as a platform. If they're hosting child porn, then they should get hit hard for it. But I've been hanging out with Q people since you guys were still on 8chan, and except for pre-8chan 4chan, no non-dark site comes close to the amount of random, anonymous posting of child porn that 8chan had. There's a reason that I bring that up as a weird place for Q to decide to find an audience.
Eh, no?
The point I'm making about 8chan is that is exclusively where Q decided to recruit members for an anti-pedophile organization. On a site which really only existed because 4chan, a site also notorious for child pornography, started coming down on stuff like that and was labeled as too restrictive.
I remember, because I was on 4chan when 8chan was created (r9k, ftw). I started following stuff on 8chan exclusively when Q started to become a thing.
It just boggles the mind how a high level military or intelligence operative would see a website like that and say, "Sure, that seems like a good place to anonymously recruit for my army of digital anti-pedophile soldiers. This is the place where I'll commence a Great Awakening. The place where the pedophiles hang out."
Not 4chan, which was basically the same thing except with less child porn. Not creating their own server which could serve the same free-speech anonymity. Nope, just use a site which did poorly everything 4chan did except the criminal part.
That just is a very weird place for Q to find attractive. There were so, so many better options for him if he had the resources he must have had. Hell, I had better resources, and I was definitely not a high level government official.
Like I said, I'm not defending Reddit's admins. As far as I know, the sub in which I have power has never had a problem with child pornography. I can't do anything about the porn subs, as I am not a moderator on any of them.
But Reddit's problems with failing to stop revenge porn, child porn, and other stuff doesn't in any way counter the problem that Q's entire origin story doesn't make sense. Not why he was on 8chan. Not why he decided that a site full of child predators would be a good place to recruit his believers. None of it. It's never made sense to me.
I mean, if your biggest issue is why Q chose 4chan as the place to drop crumbs, then the outcomes seem to answer the question for you. The message spread like wildfire, and is still culturally relevant today as a result of that choice.
I think you would agree that IF there is a Cabal, then they likely control most mass communications networks.
That significantly cuts down the pool of potential places where Q might be able to safely operate, especially early in the operation. It would assume that once its messages began to proliferate, it would be resisted by those it was trying to expose. (I use "it", because we don't know how many people Q consists of.)
So, that leaves only places that exist in the dark corners of the internet. Places with enough traffic so that it might gain traction, but yet also places which weren't controlled by the opposition and which held freedom of speech and anonymity as being of utmost importance. Finally, you'd want a place where the people are wary of authority and likely to take seriously comments critical of the establishment power structures.
4chan was one of those places, and became even moreso in the leadup to the 2016 election as Trump supporters, memesters, and trolls began being censored off of other social networks and sought refuge there (Q first appeared in 2017). Also, if 4chan was the kind of place where child porn was commonly encountered (I never used it, so I am taking you at your word on that), then it would be the kind of place where people would likely BELIEVE that child trafficking networks exist. Just because a small percentage of people in a forum participate in an unsavory activity doesn't mean that most people in that forum wouldn't oppose that kind of activity. And the results speak for themselves; Q began on just such a forum as you've described, and yet has proliferated and grown into a movement of millions of supporters who vehemently oppose sex trafficking.
So, if your concern is that you wouldn't have predicted it to happen, and yet it happened, that only means you don't understand the complex system well enough to have predicted it, not that it COULDN'T have possibly been predicted.
4chan, 8chan, I don't know. If I got wrong where it started, it doesn't change my point, I just never used those forums so I don't know exactly where it started or all the backstory behind its move from one to the other to 8kun or whatever.
I just know that wherever it began, it DID proliferate, and so you can't say "well I wouldn't have predicted it, so it couldn't possibly have been predicted."
Faulty logic.
I get it. I addressed it in my post. 4chan was the big one, and a bunch of smaller chans, like 8chan, existed after.
I was done posting for the day, but you write like I do and I wanted to respond as appreciation for the detail.
The issue I have with what you've suggested is that 8chan was NOT a big deal when it was first out there (like I said, I remember it personally, and 4chan was still the ruling class at the time). 8chan was famous only for being less regulated than 4chan, and nothing else before Q found it.
So compared to 4chan, or the many other chans out there that could be chosen, I don't understand what could have convinced a high-level anti-pedophile government operative to choose 8chan over the hundreds of other sites that do exactly the same thing, without the child porn but with all the same anonymous protections.
If it were on 4chan, I still would be skeptical, but the "reaching a wider audience" argument would hold up. Unless things have changed drastically in the post-Q years, 8chan never got close to surpassing 4chan's audience and reach.
Further, if Q is the person he claims to be, then he could have CREATED a better site specifically for his purposes. If he has the ability to create a Plan so nuanced and complicated and all-encompassing that NCSWIC and it will defeat an international cabal of criminals that have run the world...
...then creating a popular chan that doesn't have a heavy pedophile presence shouldn't be out of his reach, should it? There was literally no other option here for someone of Q's reach and resources?
Sorry, but the Plan that you guys believe must be occurring on an international scale cannot coexist with a man who lacks the resources to build a non-pedophilic means of informing keyboard warriors about said plan. There are literally so many other options for someone with even a modest understanding of how these sites operate and a few thousand bucks to burn.
Right, but once again; it worked. The results mean that the outcome was possible, and therefore predictable if you understand the system well enough. You don't have access to the variables which made it possible, and so you are concluding that it wasn't predictable. That's faulty logic, no matter how you look at it.
It's like a reverse "God of the gaps" argument. "I don't understand why this happened, and so therefore there is no reason for it."
I can literally think of dozens of reasons why it could have happened. Maybe the complete lack of oversight was the ONE thing Q required. Maybe Q had operatives strategically placed in certain other forums and outlets that could drive attention to the "crumbs" so that they would draw eyeballs... You know, all the blogosphere articles in the early days with headlines such as "Mysterious entity on 8chan claims there is an evil cabal of Satanic pedophiles", etc.
And I already answered the child porn thing. If you post in a place where the readers could easily come into contact with child porn, it makes them more likely to accept that there are human trafficking networks all over the place.
I know people that have never been molested and never come into contact with any of that kind of material, and they are the hardest people to convince that it is a massive problem. It's the same concept as us privileged Americans finding it hard to understand that there are large swaths of the planet where people have no electricity, no food, no clean water, and where slavery still exists.
Out of sight, out of mind...
Once again, your inability to understand doesn't equate impossibility.
You are correct about that.
But it does allow me the reasonable accommodation of filtering the massive amount of information I have to absorb as I go about my day.
Right now, I have not seen a single Q post that could not have been written by a 20 year old nobody. I am not yet convinced that Q is any more important than any random nobody standing on a trash can screaming about aliens. I do not believe Q is anyone other than a random internet troll who got lucky.
I can choose to believe that there's some convoluted world in which Q was REQUIRED to use a child porn hosting chan in order to spread the message that would save the world.
But I'm already stretching my imagination by accepting that Q is even a legitimate source of literally any information about anything, and not a 20 something year old loser on the internet like everyone else claiming to be important.
So until I have actual proof that Q is worth listening to besides him having a message that aligns with the world that Trump has convinced his base exists (which I am not convinced DOES, in fact, exist), then it's pretty hard to convince me to do any mental gymnastics for explaining incredibly improbable means by which Q might have had to do things, IF Q actually exists as the person he claims, IF this Cabal even exists the way Trump says it does, and so forth.
I personally am willing to read your stuff because I have always had interests in talking with people I disagree with, but I say this with humility, there aren't a whole lot of people like me. Most people won't give Q the time of day.
I only care about Q because of the following he's amassed, but amassing a following doesn't mean that you haven't lied your way to getting one, just like every cult leader in history.
How am I supposed to answer a question that does not involve my sub and that I have had nothing to do with?
Like I said, I'm not here to defend Reddit. If the whole platform got shut down, it wouldn't make a difference to me. I'd still be hanging around GAW.
Neither of us disagrees that child porn is bad. But I also haven't claimed to meet a man on Reddit upon which I've based an entire belief system.
You've made that kind of claim for a man you guys met on 8chan. And 8chan was WAY worse than anything Reddit has to answer for.
I'm going to be honest, this feels kind of like a deflection from the fact that you don't really have a good answer why Q would use a site like 8chan for The Great Awakening. If there was a good answer to this question, I feel like I would have heard it by now, but I'm always up to learn new things.
First off, is this a recent graph? Because it's meaningless post-Q. Before Q, 8chan was just one of a hundred chans that broke off of 4chan.
Second, how does showing me the most popular sub in 8kun demonstrate the reason why Q would choose ANY site that hosted child pornography as opposed to one that did not?
If Q was who he claims, then he could have made his own. Ron Fucking Watkins can run a chan, but Q can't make one himself and reach out to True Believers without worrying about the pedophiles? That wasn't an option for someone as high-level as Q?