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Comment by vnchr | Hacker News Reader

Who here has actually read these “QAnon” posts? Any thoughts?

It's a good example of the Nostradamus effect. Just make more and more vague predictions until one of them ends up true. Confirmation bias leads people to only remember the ones that came true, even if the rate of successful predictions is low.

Never followed it on a daily basis but come across them once in a while. Most are pretty in line with mainstream right wing commentary just more vague and hyperbolic. Then you've got some crazy claims. But these too seem to be sourced from what's already out there, rather than strictly original. In fact many of these posts just link to stuff on Twitter.

As far as I'm concerned it's just somebody very into politics with a peculiar writing style and a penchant for fantasy.

I've never read any, mainly because everything I've read about them leads me to rate their likely veracity as somewhere considerably below the writings of Erich von Däniken, Graham Hancock, and Jim Marrs.

Yeah. I don’t understand the massive cross-platform banning of what amounts to some random political commentary/conspiracy. I found the most recent post[1], seems benign enough:

    January 15, 2020:
    1. USA CHINA Phase I deal executed [China bad day]
    2. Impeachment articles released by Pelosi _walked [delivered] to Senate [attack v POTUS?][coordinated/planned for a specific day?]
    3. 1st C19 case lands @ Seattle-Tacoma Airport [attack v POTUS?]
    Mathematical probability [same day][natural vs controlled?]
    WHO BENEFITS THE MOST?
    Evil surrounds us.
    Q

[1] https://8kun.top/qresearch/res/10957492.html#10957834

I think that's only benign if you've got your nonsense detectors calibrated properly. If you're a paranoiac, that's candy.

You can ask yourself why was Unity2020 banned as well.

> random political commentary/conspiracy

> seems benign enough

Shouldn't these be evaluated in the context of the actual real world consequences of this conspiracy theory?

It's because time after time people have committed violent acts like showing up at the pizza place in dc with guns, but many more claims to be violent in the future.

The general consensus is that it's a psyop run by some intelligence agency.

It's far too wild, bizarre and creative to be from an intelligence agency. I've followed it off and on for a few years and there's just no way that any pentagon boardroom dweller could have thought up half of this shit.

Also, whoever qanon is, they don't understand cryptography and were unable to figure out PGP, based on some old posts on 8chan before that site went down. I assume it's just the work of some masterful troll

You may be correct, but you also have to remember that a HUGE amount of the US's intelligence has been outsourced and contracted. Maybe that has pulled back some since Snowden (I have no idea), but there are still hundreds of thousands of contractors working on behalf of US military, intelligence, etc.

They're more accessible than content at bloombergquint.com.

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