Oh good grief, a conspiracy theorist about the Nigerian kidnapped schoolgirls. Yes really. He says he’s getting flags (by which he seems to mean warnings) from “those familiar with events inside Nigeria.” Oooooooooooh that sounds important – until you look at it and realize it doesn’t. He says (this is in a Facebook group) “some” compare it to the Kony 2012 campaign. Oh yes, I totally see that, except that that was a movie and this is a whole bunch of news reports, including from people who are actually there, like the BBC’s correspondent and CNN’s reporter and the local history teacher whose article I blogged about a few hours ago.
I asked some questions, like who are these people and why are you suspicious of the story, and he replied that “We are going through details right now” – and I said “who’s we?” and he got all coy. This went on for awhile – increasingly annoyed questions from me and pompous bullshitting from him. It might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that this is real people’s real lives AND the fact that the people involved want the story given more attention and here’s this self-important asshole trying to convince people it’s a fake. Ugh.
Can’t people just stick to the Loch Ness monster and leave the serious shit alone?
Wait, the “conspiracy” was to fake these events? W.T.F?
Sorry, this is still deep in analysis, reports are still coming in, so I can’t really say anything about it. Except to promote a claim that maybe this incident is fake.
Jerk.
I think this is a somewhat predictable and somewhat normal reaction to an intolerable situation. Ophelia, look how many stories have left you shaking with fury. Some people can’t handle that! So they make up details, change things around, so that they take on a form that those people can make some sort of psychic peace with, in existential terms.
This Nigerian schoolgirls story is a nasty business, all the more because nobody who’s RIGHT THERE seems able to do anything about it! What could one of US possibly do??? That’s terribly disturbing, and the awareness leaves people feeling frustrated, impotent, and ashamed. Nobody likes feeling that way.
So they tweak the details, making it into something they’re more comfortable with. For example, with the disappearance of Amber DuBois, 14 years old. EITHER she was the victim of foul play (a horrible scenario) OR she decided, of her own volition and for her own reasons, to run away. Guess which scenario most people are more comfortable with?
So while I can understand why this guy is thrashing about, trying to find a way to make it less horrible while still believable, I think he should keep all that to himself and STFU, FFS.
Amber DuBois’ remains were found a year or so later, if memory serves: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/03/07/california.amber.dubois/
@2,
I’m all for giving people the benefit of generous interpretations wherever possible. And what you are saying is plausible on some level.
But on another level, there seem to be an awful lot of these people who need every one of these school shootings or rapes or … whatever the hell you would even call this situation, let’s hope it doesn’t happen every again so we don’t need to name the category… to be some kind of “false flag” operation run by nefarious liberals who just want you to believe that there are lunatics/rape-culture-proponents/religious-fanatics out there so that they can, well, do something nefarious and conveniently unspecified. (I can’t really back this up with anything but anecdotes, admittedly.)
So I would submit that maybe the thing that some of these people psychologically can’t handle, under your thesis, isn’t necessarily the horror and intolerability of these situations as compassionate humans appreciate them, instead it’s the intolerability of the threat it poses to some of their warped ideological positions.
I’m taking no position on whether or not this is the case for this specific individual (whoever he is, the OP isn’t specific probably for very good reasons).
(It’s also possible that you meant this same thing by your comment and it was between the lines, in which case oops.)
In other news, the Malaysian airliner has been spotted in low earth orbit surrounded by an alien force field.
Keep it under you hat for now.
Blanche, I think that it is, as you say — unhappily — predictable, but I don’t think that it’s normal. I think it’s deranged. It’s not the product of a mind that is trying to find a way to make it less horrible while still believable, but the product of a mind that is looking for thrills and which wants to find other people who will reinforce those thrills — to such a mind, shared opinion is reinforcement, and reinforcement is justification. Actually, the latter is what most people think, so to that extent he’s “normal”, rice crispies help us.
This is more horrible than perhaps you would like to think, and I am truly sorry to have to say it, but I have come to believe that no degree of possible cruelty or selfishness is beyond human kind, and that a person who can write the stuff that Ophelia has found is neither moral nor sane — by which I mean that he cannot engage with human hopes, nor have any understanding of human growth and development, nor understand the human response to the situations of life with all its fear and hope and trust and confusion, because he has never engaged or been able to engage empathetically with any other person. He is unable to imagine the consequences of his blogging, and unable to understand why he should care about them. He lives entirely in his head.
This is a sick man, for whom “compassion” is just a noise. Let us hope that he can be cured.
Yeah that’s not what’s going on, Blanche. It’s some sort of political thing, not a psychological one. It’s hard to tell exactly what political thing, because he’s been so infuriatingly coy and evasive about it, but it’s some kind of political. The Neo-cons? Oil? Racism? I don’t know. He now has an ally, who said “I as a brown woman doubt the story is totally true for many, many red flag reasons” but she too fails to say what the many many reasons actually are. She also doesn’t explain why being a brown woman is a reason to doubt the story, given the large number of brown women who are the victims in the story.