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.
I can respect that if your fundamental premise is not "Q is real" then it changes every downstream decision matrix. Not faulting you for that. The question is whether you are substituting "Q is NOT real" instead of "I have no idea".
It is the same problem I have with people who choose to identify as "atheist" instead of "agnostic". As soon as you identify as atheist, you are changing from a positive proposition "God exists" to a negative "No God exists". To take the agnostic position is the only reasonable position if you do not accept the proposition that God exists, otherwise you are choosing an equally indefensible logical proposition to the one you oppose, without even admitting that you are acting on faith, as a believer would freely admit.
Point being, there are plenty of reasons to think this is not just some kids trolling. First, there are 4953 total posts, many being extremely convoluted and using cryptographic codes which to this day have not been solved. Many which are using images never before seen as verified by reverse image searches. And there are countless coincidental correlations which beggar belief.
The exact minute of the announcement of John McCain's death, for one.
The fact that the first several Q posts explicitly linked HRC and Huma Abedin to Saudi Arabia, and then on 10/31/17 Q stated "Get the popcorn, Friday & Saturday will deliver on the MAGA promise" and then on Saturday, 11/4/17 Prince Alwaleed and several other princes were arrested in a massive change of power in Saudi Arabia.
Now, the casual observer would say "well yeah, but Q said HRC would be arrested, and that Huma and Podesta would be indicted." Sure, but Q also explicitly connected those people to the House of Saud, and then on the same day Q said a major action would take place, the House of Saud saw an unprecedented police action which took down the very people Q connected to them.
You might say "well yeah, but that isn't the same thing", and you'd be correct. But it also isn't something that a 20-year old basement dweller was likely to concoct out of thin air and then have the arrests in Saudi Arabia just so happen to occur on the same day, to keep the Q mythos alive and well.
And things like this happened over and over and over again.
So, while you are correct in that Q COULD be completely fake, your proffered rebuttal of it all being a casual LARP isn't nearly as likely as you make it out to be. I'd argue it is far less likely than that Q is real, tbh. There isn't any profit in it, by itself, and if it was just some kids having fun, 4953 often high detail posts over a 3 year period, including tons of obscure data points which have since been researched and confirmed, posts terminating for no good reason just before the election, with countless coincidental correlations to real world events, using original photos from inside highly controlled government areas, and garnering attention from the biggest mainstream news outlets and government officials all over the world without getting caught would be at the very least, the world's greatest prank of all time.
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.
I can respect that if your fundamental premise is not "Q is real" then it changes every downstream decision matrix. Not faulting you for that. The question is whether you are substituting "Q is NOT real" instead of "I have no idea".
It is the same problem I have with people who choose to identify as "atheist" instead of "agnostic". As soon as you identify as atheist, you are changing from a positive proposition "God exists" to a negative "No God exists". To take the agnostic position is the only reasonable position if you do not accept the proposition that God exists, otherwise you are choosing an equally indefensible logical proposition to the one you oppose, without even admitting that you are acting on faith, as a believer would freely admit.
Point being, there are plenty of reasons to think this is not just some kids trolling. First, there are 4953 total posts, many being extremely convoluted and using cryptographic codes which to this day have not been solved. Many which are using images never before seen as verified by reverse image searches. And there are countless coincidental correlations which beggar belief.
The exact minute of the announcement of John McCain's death, for one.
The fact that the first several Q posts explicitly linked HRC and Huma Abedin to Saudi Arabia, and then on 10/31/17 Q stated "Get the popcorn, Friday & Saturday will deliver on the MAGA promise" and then on Saturday, 11/4/17 Prince Alwaleed and several other princes were arrested in a massive change of power in Saudi Arabia.
Now, the casual observer would say "well yeah, but Q said HRC would be arrested, and that Huma and Podesta would be indicted." Sure, but Q also explicitly connected those people to the House of Saud, and then on the same day Q said a major action would take place, the House of Saud saw an unprecedented police action which took down the very people Q connected to them.
You might say "well yeah, but that isn't the same thing", and you'd be correct. But it also isn't something that a 20-year old basement dweller was likely to concoct out of thin air and then have the arrests in Saudi Arabia just so happen to occur on the same day, to keep the Q mythos alive and well.
And things like this happened over and over and over again.
So, while you are correct in that Q COULD be completely fake, your proffered rebuttal of it all being a casual LARP isn't nearly as likely as you make it out to be. I'd argue it is far less likely than that Q is real, tbh. There isn't any profit in it, by itself, and if it was just some kids having fun, 4953 often high detail posts over a 3 year period, including tons of obscure data points which have since been researched and confirmed, posts terminating for no good reason just before the election, with countless coincidental correlations to real world events, using original photos from inside highly controlled government areas, and garnering attention from the biggest mainstream news outlets and government officials all over the world without getting caught would be at the very least, the world's greatest prank of all time.