Long time for something to go wrong (On the contradiction of conspiracy theory, part one.)

They say most of your brain shuts down in cryo-sleep. All but the primitive side...the animal side. No wonder I'm still awake. Transporting me with civilians. Sounded like 40, 40-plus. Heard an Arab voice. Some hoodoo holy man, probably on his way to New Mecca. But what route? What route? Smelled a woman. Sweat, boots, tool belt, leather. Prospector type. Free settlers. And they only take the back roads. And here's my real problem: Mr. Johns, blue-eyed devil. Planning on taking me back to slam...only this time he picked a ghost lane. A long time between stops. A long time for something to go wrong. ~Riddick, from the film Pitch Black.

I just saw this not too long ago.

Some fake account on Gab, claiming that MacDonald's is in on the big Cabal Q-conspiracy now. I've seen this one enough to notice that "Art Raven" doesn't write like a girl, and doesn't seem to hold the sort of views girls named Raven usually do...and yes I've known more than one over the years, strangely enough.

Now, I'll be the first to tell you there's a lot of bad shit and dark and dangerous places in the world. People, as a general rule, are evil shits.

But if you think that there's some global Cabal that's secretly running things (and that if it really existed people like Donald Trump wouldn't be balls deep in the whole damn thing) you're more than a little crazy at this point. I'm sorry, but when your conspiracy theory bullshit starts getting so big that everybody but you and your particular idols is in on it, the problem most likely is you and you're just a paranoid loser.

Conspiracies end up with a lot of loose lips, a lot of moving parts. The more people are involved, the more of a chance that there's going to be a leak...this is generally one of the more easily provable reasons why conspiracy theorists are full of shit. Lots of people involved? Lots of time for something to go wrong.

Also have you ever noticed that the people who say this kind of shit are almost always the exact same types of conspiratorial far-right conservative types? I'm just saying, that looks a little suspicious to me.

And in any case, given the historical behavior of white conservative wealthy people in general and of fascists or aspiring fascists in particular...not conspiracy theories, actual history, including that of recent years...the whole comment just reads like projection.

And I'll bet you ten bucks that whoever runs this fake "Art Raven" account doesn't give a goddamn about oppressed Chinese Muslim people.

Or any real oppressed peoples, for that matter.

And while I'm at it, it seems to take an average of five minutes these days for any talk of "Cabals" to devolve into blatant anti-Semitism...of which blood libels and allegations of cannibalism have always been a significant part.

Don't forget that.

Shortly after I saw the first post, I saw the second.

Boeing workers protesting the company's mask and vaccination mandates.

I actually just happened to pause the video to snip the post at this particular spot. But the sign kind of jumped out at me for obvious reasons.

First off, all the ferrets didn't die. My little Buddha Belly is fine. Of my former ferrets, those whose current humans have contacted me so far report all is well. Some of the ferrets have a better life with their new people than I was able to give them and that's saying quite a bit since I put so much into keeping them.

Second, since ferrets have a respiratory system that is similar to humans, if they had all died wouldn't that be a reason to get vaccinated and mask up?

It's the contradiction in that, that gets me.

Trust me, the ferret community was on edge over COVID-19, still is. Had all the ferrets (or even a significantly large number of them) died, I'd have heard about it.

I think what this idiot's sign is referring to is the commercial Mink culls in Denmark after Danish fur farm Minks started testing positive for the virus on a large scale, and those were big news in the ferret community, on a global level, at the time. 

Also, it was around the internet for a few days that Marshall Ferrets had diverted all their pet stocks to providing test animals for COVID-19 research. This was disproven over the course of the next few weeks by several regular deliveries of the normal numbers of kits (baby ferrets) to my then-local pet store. (Test animal lines and pet animal lines are kept separate for a variety of reasons, legal not being the least of these factors.)

But I'll bet sign guy isn't a ferret guy. I'll bet he doesn't know any of that and is just repeating something he heard on the internet. That's always how it is.

That's the thing with conspiracy theories. They're set up to be hard to disprove using the rules of logic. But here's the thing, usually they fall apart in the face of knowledge and observation. It doesn't usually even take all that much.

I feel like...given that this is Boeing workers protesting their own company's safety measures here...we are going to hit a point soon where this conspiracy theory bullshit starts to become a threat to national defense and national security, not to mention transportation networks and shit.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it won't be too long after that before this crap starts to impact the pocketbooks of the wealthy people who ginned up this garbage and allowed it to fester in the first place, in the hope that it would help elect right-wing governments that would be favorable to business interests. Usually, when something starts to affect the profits of the wealthy that's when the hammer comes down and whatever it is gets cracked like a walnut.

But that's the thing, isn't it?

In a world where robot dogs can have assault rifles mounted on their backs now, and where worries about increasing automation have prompted serious discussion of things like universal basic income...and where fear of a changing world is a direct contributing factor to an increase in fascist ideologies and this is known to be being manipulated by certain people...it's also a safe bet to say that with a certain clique of wealthy-mostly white-people, if it comes down to Eugenics vs. Profits, there's a decent chance that Profits might actually lose out.

Because it's a death cult and they want to kill people. 

Just looking at FOX News (and for that matter, who's vaccinated and who isn't on the conservative side of the fence) you can see it. You can see where the line is, the people who know it's all bullshit vs. the people shouting "Freedom" while protesting measures intended to save their own lives. You can tell who's who in the power structure...and who's stupid enough to just accept all this bullshit.

And yes, Eugenics is absolutely a factor in conservative ideology regarding the virus. Hell, I've heard people...conservative working people who are certain to be the ones on the losing end of this thing, who'd realized they couldn't just ignore it and hope it went away...just accept it saying "If I die, I die."

As a former-conservative working person I think that's insane.

Republicans and wealthy conservatives are killing their own supporters, and their supporters applaud them for it. 

It's the bald-faced, open contradiction of it all...and the fact that the only consistent ideology AT ALL is loosely defined as "Own The Libs"...that I don't get. 

I don't understand the point of going out there to Kamikaze yourself for assholes who don't give a fuck about you, who don't give a fuck about your culture wars except for how they can use that shit, and who'd gladly massacre their own supporters physically rather than metaphorically if they could get away with it and doing so would save them a dollar.

I don't understand the logic of basically doing anything, up to and including killing yourself, just because you think it might make somebody [you think] you don't like unhappy in some vaguely undefined way.

If somebody doesn't want me to die, I'm not going to kill myself just to prove some moral point that exists only in my own head. But then I was never that kind of conservative. I don't want me to die either, and given that I just had a bout of depression upend my life that's saying something.

The urge arises to say that it's not conservatism itself that's the problem, but rather the current interpretation of it. My feeling is that there were never actually all that many people who were ideologically conservative. They had to bring in the crypto-fascists, the nuts and the racists to get enough people to vote for their side to win elections at all. Along the way, the people who were really the conservatives seem to have been crowded out of their own tent...and the ideology that's resulted doesn't look the least like what I was taught conservatism was.

But then, the seeds of this mess were always there, the whole time. This too is verifiable historical fact, and it's only made worse by the tendency of a large minority of Americans toward fanaticism for its own sake.

The truth is, the internal logic of conservatism collapsed a long time ago. Maybe not that long, chronologically. Call it a decade or so, maybe. But on the scale of things these days, that's a long time for something to go wrong.

And I think we're just about there.

We need to start doing something about this bullshit.