Q Go Home…to that pig farm in the Philippines

The Black Death inspired the flagellants — it seems to be a common human response to extremes of stress, that they may fall into religious manias and magical thinking. Our modern American equivalent, in response to a threat nowhere near as severe as the Black Death, seems to be QAnon and the cult of Trumpism. The cult of Q emerged from an unlikely place.

Yet, a consensus of leading researchers and critics who study and debunk QAnon disinformation told ABC News that a key to identifying “Q” has been hiding in plain sight for years — on a pig farm south of Manila in the Philippines — at least until recently.

And now it’s growing fast.

At least 24 candidates who have “endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content” — 22 Republicans and two independents — have secured a spot on the ballot in the 2020 congressional elections, according to the media watchdog Media Matters, though it remains unclear how many could actually win their races. Last month, one candidate who pollsters say is almost certain to win her heavily GOP district in Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, appeared to rescind her previous support for QAnon, telling Fox News that “once I started finding misinformation, I decided that I would choose another path.”

We also know who Q is now. It’s Jim Watkins.

This is the deranged conservative wackjob so many people have been following, hanging on his every insinuation, “prophecy”, and whisper. The cult is already doing real harm, beyond just seducing people into a loony religion. People have been murdered over this, crackpots have been threatening people, all over this nonsensical claim of “saving the children” from imaginary pedophiles. Most commonly, it’s been destroying families as individuals get lured into kooky conspiracy theories.

I think I’d prefer flagellants. If you’re a Q enthusiast, just go away right now.

Let’s try this again

On Sunday, I put out a video about Kent Hovind, which sounded fine to me, but I got a lot of complaints that the audio sucked royally. I couldn’t hear a problem, until I tried listening on my iPhone…and yeah, it sucked. I got suggestions that it was a phase cancellation problem, so I tinkered and tried to fix it.

I’ve uploaded what I think is a corrected video. Try it! Let me know if it works!

The solution was an inelegant brute force fix. I took my file, split out the audio and video into two separate files, loaded the audio into Audacity and saved it back out as a mono mp3, and then fused the two files back together. This copy seems to work fine on my phone, anyway.

Pssst: the loons have all moved to YouTube

If you’ve been missing the heady old days of creationists popping onto the blog to make outrageous claims, I smoked a few out in my last video. Here’s one who jumped in to tell me that all of science agrees with the Bible and that there’s tons of science in the Bible.

The Meek
The Meek
6 hours ago (edited)
There is more science in the Bible then in your head! You follow prooven liars who lost court cases for fruad all throughout history and we are the ones who are wrong? Nah, all the observable science agrees more with the Bible than with your science textbooks! How many debates do you guys have to loose, before you figure it out? We are all presenting the same evidence, but just interpreting it differently through our favored worldview! You have to look past your bias and go deeper into the false assumptions being taught in science in order to see through all the lies! The real issue is you just hate the idea of a God telling you how to live! Good luck with that when you die!

PZ Myers
6 hours ago
Cool. What chapter of the bible contains Maxwell’s equations, or Newton’s laws of motion, or a discussion of signal transduction in neurons? Or maybe something basic, like the importance of hygiene in preventing disease.

Hey! is the germ theory of disease in there?

1popblocker9er
1 hour ago
@PZ Myers The answer is not in said “which chapter,” it is in the actual event of following the instructions given as a whole and seeing the obvious results. We have literally been doing that for thousands of years. You will find that in the Bible, there are explanations for some of those very questions you just mentioned such as hygiene to prevent disease. Do you not understand homeopathic medicine, or how long it’s been successfully curing diseases and ailments? Of course logically you’re not going to see “theory” like newton’s own, or maxwells equations. I mean what kind of a silly question is that? The Bible has been here for thousands of years before those people were born, and it’s still the way of life provably, while everyone else is arguing over theories that were literally disproven many years ago, and on top of that it has been proven these men perpetuating these ideas and “scientific theories” were occult practitioners, and were steering their own beliefs and views onto the public domain, which were met with great resistance. I mean that is all public record sir. What reality are you living in my friend, you seem interested in intelligence so let’s utilize it shall we?

His answer is … HOMEOPATHY! Homeopathy is in the Bible. Therefore, it’s science.

I haven’t seen this degree of lunacy for a while.

Maybe the botox has leaked into his brain?

I really can’t stand listening to Sam Harris — he is a dreadfully boring speaker whose schtick is to reduce racism to a bland, boring mediocrity that we’re supposed to just accept. I managed to get all the way through this interview on BBC Hardtalk because the interviewer actually pushes back on him. I almost bailed, though, at seeing Harris, who looks chillingly botoxed or processed by some video filter, matching the plastic quality of his arguments.

For instance, he goes off on the Black Lives Matter movement, accusing it of “identity politics” and seeing racism everywhere, even where it’s not. To back up his claim that concerns about racism are overblown, Harris says out of his emotionless white face that Black Americans are roughed up by the police far more often than white people, but on a per incident basis, black people are less likely to be murdered.

No, really, he says that.

That’s right. If cops beat up white people robbing gas stations, and they also beat up black people robbing gas stations and jaywalking, then black people are less likely to get shot in any particular encounter with the police. Gosh. What a triumph of statistical bullshit.

If you want an example of a calm, polite racist holding odious views while denying that he’s a racist, just tune in to Harris. Or don’t. You’ll be less angry if you don’t.

He is truly a worthy successor to Kent Hovind

I made another Bad Science Sunday video, this one about Matt Powell. He claims to have debunked evolution in 50 seconds, and in that short claim he makes one of the dumbest creationist arguments ever…and he presents it in total seriousness in the style of a high school debate team point. The smug ignorance has to be something he got by aping Hovind.

At the end he claims to have refuted evolution using science and logic, neither of which are on display in his argument.

The sleep of the innocent

I sleep fairly well — as I’ve gotten older, I sleep less, but most nights I go to bed, read quietly for an hour or so, and within minutes of turning out the lights, I’m out. Then I’ll typically wake up around 5:30am. I get between 6 and 7 hours of solid sleep most nights, which is about what I need. That’s my pattern, I’m sticking with it.

Clearly, the reason I sleep well is because I’m an atheist — you know, unconflicted by storms of Catholic guilt or Protestant sanctimony. At least, that’s the implication of a study. After all, when it’s called a “study”, you know it’s serious business.

A new study out of Baylor University finds that 73% of atheists and agnostics sleep at least seven hours a night, compared to only 55% of Baptists and 63% of Catholics. Atheists and agnostics also reported fewer difficulties falling asleep at night. The findings held even after controlling for details like age and socioeconomic status.

Gosh, it fits my personal experience as an atheist, so I get that little buzz of confirmation. I don’t have any personal experience sleeping as a Baptist or Catholic, but I still get a little buzz at the idea that the Others are tossing and turning at night. And now, when my religious friends (if I had any!) show up at work tired and red-eyed, I get the smug satisfaction of being able to tell them they ought to become an atheist so they can get a good night’s rest for a change.

If I were an idiot.

I took a look at the study. They’re just mining a bigger data set for correlations, which is not a kind of science I care much for. In other words, there was a survey that asked a large collection of semi-random questions of religious and non-religious people, and then afterwards they fished for anything that might show a difference. It could maybe be useful if they followed through and figured out what caused the difference. But they don’t; this is just a cold wet plop of an observation from a data set.

Another thing that always bugs me is that when a study is reported in the popular press they always strip out important qualifiers that at least the original work includes.

Religious affiliation was associated with sleep duration, but not in the predicted direction. Atheists/Agnostics (73%) were significantly more likely to report meeting consensus sleep duration guidelines than religiously-affiliated individuals (65%), p< .05. For example, Atheists/Agnostics reported better sleep duration than Catholics (63%, p< .01) and Baptists (55%, p<.001). Atheists/Agnostics also reported less difficulty falling asleep at night than Catholics (p=.02) and Baptists (p< .001).

Notice the word I highlighted: these are the results of a self-reported survey. They don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. It could mean that atheists are very insecure and like to lie positively about their health and confidence. Go ahead, Baptists! You can read it that way! Even if I know in my heart that you are tormented by your god-belief.

That’s the only thing that jumped out at me about this trivial and mundane study. It’s a great example of how the press likes to file the serial numbers off a paper: they report “atheists sleep better” when the actual paper says “atheists report that they sleep better”. In this case, they’re making a change that’s favorable to the godless, but it’s also what they do with studies that go the other way. This paper even begins with a statement of the common presupposition!

The psychology of religion literature indicates that religious engagement is beneficial to physical and mental health.

I don’t trust that interpretation any more than I do the suggestion that atheism is beneficial to your sleep.

Also, it’s a Templeton funded study.

I’m an atheist, so there’s no way I’d fall for QAnon

They misspelled “disinformation”

Ha ha, I’m joking. QAnon sounds like the perfect bait to capture a subset of atheists — you know the ones, the same ones that got addicted to culty anti-feminism and regularly logged on to 4chan and regressive reddit message boards and spent a few years telling the world I was a tyrannical pussy-whipped cuck who was anti-free speech. You know the ones. They still pop up on YouTube and FaceBook in my comments.

I think the 4chan/8chan link is the real giveaway. The people there tend not to be your usual evangelical Christians and did preach a lot about anti-authoritarianism, but evolved into a significant groupthink mentality (amusing, since that’s what they accuse SJWs of) that has wider appeal, and has since absorbed evangelicals and New Agers without schism. 4chan/8chan has obviously had deep rifts — the founders are tearing at each other even now — but they spawned a remarkably stable loony cult.

It’s clear that QAnon is a creature of 8chan, birthed from the diseased mind of Jim Watkins, one of the founders of the chan group.

Unlike many cults—which rely on the charismatic appeal of the leader—QAnon works because of the leader’s anonymity. It allows followers to imagine Q as a perfect embodiment of their ideals, working deep inside the structures of government power.

In this framing, Q must conceal their identity and communicate through coded messages in order to continue operating in the upper echelons of the American government. If Q instead turned out to be a pig-farming smut peddler living in the Philippines…that might change things.

As it turns out, the founder of 8chan (since rebranded as 8kun)—where Q has posted those coded messages since abandoning 4chan in November of 2017—has been claiming to know the identity of Q for some time now. According to him, Q is in fact a pig farming smut peddler living in the Philippines—and also the current owner and operator of 8kun…

Ironically, QAnon, which got some life from its anti-pedophile #PizzaGate nonsense, is a product of a guy who distributes child- and Asian-fetish porn.

Since then Watkins has moved to the Philippines, got married, started a pig farm, founded a conspiratorial right-wing news outlet called The Goldwater (that also fetishized Asian women), hijacked the domain of 2channel, and took over 8chan—which has since been under scrutiny by the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation for allegedly enabling the distribution of child-abuse materials.

Why would a government informant working to expose a global pedophile ring choose to operate on a website that has itself been labeled as a pedophile ring?

It’s been enlightening to see godless 4chan evolve into godly, sanctimonious, delusional QAnon over time, and atheists should take it as a warning — you’re also susceptible to conspiracy-thinking.

I make a bold prediction: David Silverman is burrowing down into the muck, and when he finally openly adopts a religion, it will be Q.

An AiG apostate!

Well, this is fascinating: a former employee of Answers in Genesis comes out with her story.

What I found unsurprising is that AiG is an authoritarian tyranny that abuses its workers, with people monitoring social media of employees outside of work hours and threatening them with firing if they step out of line, on top of all the oppressive requirements to get a job there in the first place.

She came from a faith tradition that thought AiG was too liberal (I shudder to imagine it — some of her fellow employees even wore pants, which surely put them on a slippery slope to atheism). But she did not hurtle into godless evilutionism herself. What led to her breakaway from AiG was the exploitive work conditions and her growing awareness of the hypocrisy of her religion, and she now calls herself an agnostic who is on the fence about evolution vs. creation.

That’s all we can ask for, that people think honestly about their beliefs and avoid dogma.

Oh, man, Ken Ham is going to be so pissed off about this video.