Linguistic and Memetic diseases: Viruses of social thinking.

[johnny9fingers]

And so we come to QAnon.

With the internet, we no longer need ergotised rye for St Anthony's fire to inform our sensory perceptions. QAnon seems to be like some mad Bond-villain neurolinguistic programming scam designed specifically to deflect attention from actual corruption with lurid tales of outright depravity.

But that's just an opinion from a chap on the sidelines; looking on in amazement.

However when I find QAnon is gaining traction in the UK just at the same time as the UK is going through the greatest intense administrative corruption in over two centuries; it makes we wonder if the folk promoting it, bankrolling it, and fomenting social schism have some sort of ulterior motive beyond money.

Maybe all the money: the procurement contracts, the shorting of the currency and investments, the looting of the treasury, etc was just a bit like the Provisional IRA doing bank jobs in the '80's. A quick way to finance things.

I mean to say, what do you do if you're an extremely right-wing sort of person and you've just beggared your nation to the point of social unrest in order to line your pockets? (A chap has to have a hobby, after all.)

My guess is, as the riots erupt, you pose as the person to save the nation from all of this with extremely strong and firm government. And you walk on the grateful shoulders of the people all the way to Number 10 for life. (General Franco, here we come; but in our case it will be Roderick Spode.)

As the UK descends into quasi-fascism may I suggest that for most of Her Majesty's reign we at least tried.

Watch on YouTube

The Belief in Conspiracy Theories

[tcpip]

We often discuss issues related to fake news and conspiracy theories in this group, and for good reason. They are very important for the development of appropriate public policy, and especially so in a democratic system. Late last year the following article was published which is worthwhile reading:

Belief in conspiracy theories: The predictive role of schizotypy, Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy (Dec 3, 2019)

"The total regression model indicated odd beliefs/magical thinking, trait Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy were significant, positive predictors of belief in conspiracy theories. No other predictors reached significance. Results of the current study highlight individuals who might be more susceptible to believing conspiracy theories. Specifically, these results indicate that the individual more likely to believe in conspiracy theories may have unusual patterns of thinking and cognitions, be strategic and manipulative, and display interpersonal and affective deficits."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0225964

Some things I like about this study on an initial level:

* It looks at something that is a critical issue in our society today, i.e., the propensity for "fake news" to circulate where media sources are treated as equivalents.

* Testing against multiple personality traits to determine if there are correlations between belief in conspiracy theories and other personality traits. Use of regression analysis to determine the accuracy of those traits (e.g., corroborating previous research for Machiavellianism), thus removing spurious correlations which were indicated in previous research (e.g., trait narcissism).

* Identification of the traits with positive predictors, which suggests means of identifying conspiracy theorists as a type, but also ways of approaching such encounters (the desire for avoidance is quite strong, I admit)