Maybe she's got like a tremendously great butt?
I'd like to say no butt is so great as to compel tolerance for QAnon-style nonsense but history is full of counterexamples.
History shows again and again,
How butts point out the folly of men.
In the article she talks about having gone from being a Bernie supporter to a QAnon conspiracy theorist. But it also made me think about the pattern (previously discussed on unfogged?) of conspiracy theories spreading within the wellness movement.
Several New Age spiritualists in Southern California interviewed by The Times said they knew a total of more than a dozen former friends and colleagues at the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol with ties to yoga, meditation, energy healing and dietary supplements hawked by multilevel marketing companies.
...
"It has fostered an enormous amount of mistrust," said Seane Corn, a L.A.-based yoga instructor and co-founder of "Off The Mat, Into the World," a nonprofit organization that bridges yoga and social activism. "It has ended friendships."
Corn was among the wellness leaders who shared a statement in September warning that QAnon's tactics resembled cult psychology and that the ideology would sow confusion, division and paranoia. Corn estimates she knows at least 10 people who embraced "hardcore QAnon," including two people who participated in the attack on the Capitol -- and is aware of more than 30 colleagues and peers who subscribe to some forms of the ideology, as well as a "countless" number of yoga students.
Corn said she has watched bots and real-life QAnon devotees try to harness her social media comment sections as a recruiting ground, using "wellness language and nonviolent communication" in an attempt to lead her followers toward more conspiratorial thinking.
I mean, obviously there are people very deliberately trying to pull society apart and destroy social trust as a political maneuver to lower the income tax. There are going to be unexpected effects.
But it also made me think about the pattern (previously discussed on unfogged?) of conspiracy theories spreading within the wellness movement.
It seems like an extension of the fact that conspiracy theories tend to cluster together. Woo begets woo, and to a somewhat lesser extent woo begets conspiracy theories and vice versa (see for instance all the pseudoscientific crap that gets sold on InfoWars et al). If you're predisposed to distrust conventional authority and/or norms of evidence in one arena, it's not hard to see how it would spread to another.
7: It's also that most people don't evaluate evidence piecemeal -- they rely on their communities to do a lot of the filtering and quality control on it. This is why MLMs spread so much in Utah -- 'x goes to my church' is a proxy for 'x is good and we should support x' and so everyone winds up more susceptible to affinity fraud as a result and we had to endure a year of everyone selling shitty leggings.
This kind of filtering happens everywhere. I'd like to pretend that I sat down last year and judiciously decided that the best option for the Calabat was to send him to school in a mask, but if I'm honest about it, I'm using the barometer of my peer group and trusted friends as a filter. Fortunately I have pretty smart friends, but I'm entirely certain my sister's refusal to vax has everything to do with her new bad trad church.
So, if your community of friendly yogis and like-minded political allies suddenly become obsessed with a new secret conspiracy, you're likely to go along with it, just because you're accustomed to your community having sensible beliefs.
I'm using the barometer of my peer group and trusted friends as a filter. Fortunately I have pretty smart friends
I agree completely. The older I get the more conscious I am of just how much thinking is social -- in the sense that our social group forms a sort of extended cognition in that it helps us keep track of things or prioritize information that we don't have time & energy to sort through ourselves.
The linked article in the OP doesn't really touch on that -- it doesn't tell us anything about the friend who sent her the links.
As I write that, I wonder if those peer group dynamics are the context for this part of her conclusion (which otherwise feels a little too facile for me):
Since I left, I sometimes feel frustrated and disheartened that I can't fit into either the political "right" or "left." I still don't trust the government that much. I no longer identify as red or blue -- I wish I could be purple, but there is too much red in the purple for my liberal friends and family, so I mostly have stopped talking about politics. Reading news can be disheartening and stir up old QAnon associations, so I generally avoid it. I have almost completely exited all forms of social media. That was essential to my recovery..
If "left" or "right" are partially stand-ins for, "using peer group and trusted friends as a filter" it would make sense that she would feel wary about that at the moment.
11: She doesn't touch on the friend. But she does explain that her previous beliefs included a deep distrust of government and institutions, and she does blame 'social media' for her craziness. It's significant, I think, that QAnon is a community, not a whitepaper.
This was the part that seemed most remarkable to me
Initially, believing in Q felt amazing, like being in some sort of mystical state or euphoria. For about six weeks, my fears about impending doom because of Covid-19, climate change and what I perceived as the threat of fascism were gone. The world felt safe and I felt energized, confident, creative and brimming with love. I'm not religious, but I kept thinking "Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Thank you, God." I heard "Amazing Grace" playing in my mind. I was so relieved to stop hating Trump, whom I used to see as racist, sexist and a Hitler-wannabe
Is this what Saul of Tarsus experienced?