https://www.axios.com/fighting-online-radicals-extremism-90b8dcb6-31a7-4321-a53a-c8be5643f7d6.html

«One idea, courtesy of Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi leader who founded the Free Radicals Project, which works to help people leave violent extremist groups: a “single entry point” akin to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline “that people recognize, that people trust, that people understand.”

• Something like a national hotline or online portal could steer people to local resources to help them or loved ones escape the radicalization pipeline, he said.

The bottom line: “Any sort of solution is going to have to be holistic and is going to have to have empathy at its core,” said Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow with the Atlantic Council.»

The blurb from 5calls after I made my calls. Took, like… 2 minutes.

«I just called my rep to Convict Donald Trump for Inciting an Insurrection — you should too: https://5calls.org/issue/impeach-trump-coup-insurrection »

I actually spoke to a human being at Tillis’s office. (Burr always goes to voice mail; Tillis actually has humans answering the phone.)

https://twitter.com/Pennamiriel/status/1358797034539646976?s=20

Not a hypothetical. Who decided to have the family gather for Thanksgiving & Xmas? Classic case of those with the power to make change, starting w/politicians and public officials, shifting responsibility to those without power.

This whole thread is good.

Linn Marie (@Pennamiriel) Tweeted: Then we can note the sickening individualization of responsibility here, and how it’s being transferred from one generation to another. Children, apparently, are to blame for having left the house and brought the virus into family gatherings hosted by … whom, exactly?

https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1359088687422836736?s=20

Perspective.

Charlie Stross (@cstross) Tweeted: To clarify: Musk, Bezos, Gates etc have leverage on the order of tens of billions of dollars (without cannibalizing their corporations). Developed nations have leverage on the order of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. Billionaires are small fry by SLA standards.

[SLA = State Level Actor, I guess.]

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1358473810232676353?s=20

Lovely. Another aspect of lots of coronavirus in the population I hadn’t thought of but should have (especially since I’ve played Plague): mutations. We really need to beat this thing worldwide and fast. I wish it would just kill the stupid humans, but that ain’t how it works.

Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) Tweeted: 10) Here is what is going to happen… currently R is ~0.9 in many places, but with the more infectious #B117, the R will jump 50% approximately. And it is inevitable (all CDC and Danish models say this) that B117 will take over as the reigning dominant variant soon—Alberta 🇨🇦 https://t.co/cBqB1BE9wT

WOW.

https://twitter.com/matthewremski/status/1358008161400152065?s=20

The whole thread follows:

An interviewer asked me: “Does the yoga world have a conspiracy problem?” My short answer was yes, but it forced me to step back and really try to encapsulate why. I’ve got a boiled-down answer using 4 different lenses: historical, ideological, political, and technological. /1

History Nazis. Loved. Yoga. The roots of modern yoga, alt health, and New Age spirituality are tangled with fascisms of the early 20th century. I.e.: Nazis were enthralled by the fantasy of the mystically powerful body, self-sovereign, free from foreign influence. /2

The 3rd Reich drew on a physical and natural-remedy fervor that was panicked about white genocide and the devitalization of cities, and sought to strengthen ties of blood and soil through body-building, “pure foods”, and fetishes with reproduction and milk. /3

Ideology Conspiratorial thinking follows 3 axioms: 1) Nothing is as it seems. 2) Everything happens for a reason, and 3) Everything is connected. These are Venny with modern global yoga and New Age spirituality. QAnon biohacks the operating system of this subculture. /4

Politics The US is the primary exporter of conspirituality and QAnon content. This reflects profound institutional neglect combined with constant, consumerist, neoliberal propanganda that tells citizens they are on their own, especially in terms of health care. /5

Alt-health marketing sells distrust of public health: reasonable in a country that abuses its citizens. As a protective response against the cruel ambivalence of the state, wellness/yoga easily aligns with conservative, libertarian, or sovereign citizen movements. /6

The yoga teacher is the priest of this global state, sanctifying the culture through bodily flexibility, going with the flow and ritualizing beauty, believing and teaching that consumerism can be virtuous, vacation = pilgrimage, and that the enlightened transcend politics. /7

But these are priests with no stability in their gig economy. Most are stretching on fumes, arugula, and a tyrannical sense of confidence. The profession trends towards the anti-social, based on intuition and personal truth, threatened by science and consensus building. /8

Technology Social media is the combustible jet fuel of unregulated yoga and alt-health influencers, who, because they work in unregulated professions, rely on charisma to be seen. Charisma accessorizes. It must always scour the landscape for distinctive content. /9

The more inflammatory, emotionally engaging, or manipulative the content, the more it will amplify charisma. Conspirituality and QAnon content offered a devil’s bargain of viral engagement and transgressive messianism in the influencer’s wheelhouse of bodily obsessions. /10

They can sell gong bathing as an antidote for 5G contamination.They can hint at QAnon through savethechildren, which is plausibly feminist and wholesome. These provocations are gold for the algorithm, and difficult to forgo in a competitive attention economy. /11
This is a tragic gateway between yoga/wellness and conspirituality. Influencers might want to step back from these addictive attentional factors. But to do this they’d have to settle for returning to the banal pretense of changing the world through handstands and smoothies. /end

Thanks for the interest everyone. My co-hosts @derekberes and Julian Walker @embodiedsacred thrash this stuff out every week on the pod at conspirituality.net. The site has some resources, such as…

A naming names “redpilled” page: conspirituality.net/redpilled/. A lexicon of conspirituality-to-Cue-Anon keywords: conspirituality.net/keywords-and-p…, and…

… basic concepts in the cultic dynamics at play: conspirituality.net/cult-dynamics-…. We also post reporting on key conspirituality figures like Plandemic’s Mikki Willis: conspirituality.net/transmissions/…

https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/publications/520482

TIL a new word. 10 years late, but hey.

«The female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics) may seem antithetical. There is a synthesis of the two, however, that we call ‘conspirituality’.»

https://newrepublic.com/article/161266/qanon-classism-marjorie-taylor-greene

Lots of QAnon people are not dumb:

«Those who think such voters will inevitably doom the party would do well to remember the 2010 midterms—despite the Tea Party’s rhetoric and antics, Republicans took the House in a historic wave.»

«Doing something about the power of the Republican Party seems more plausible—as long as those fighting it frame the battle as right against wrong rather than smart against dumb.»

https://twitter.com/beeeeeers/status/1358141547057848320?s=20

Data viz. Such fun!

Andrew Beers (@beeeeeers) Tweeted: Here’s a thread on this graph I made, which has been bouncing around Twitter a bit. Broadly, it shows the connections between “influential” Twitter accounts during the election. But it’s always more complicated than that with networks! Here’s some insights you might be missing. https://t.co/OSpxS2aR7c

Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) Tweeted: Employment Division v. Smith is effectively dead. The five ultraconservative justices have established a new rule that if a law exempts ANY secular business or activity, it MUST exempt churches and religious exercise. This has huge ramifications for claims of “religious liberty.”

https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1358113320025419776?s=20

Nice job, Republicans. You have made “churches” havens for America’s worst people. And you wonder why church attendance is declining.

This seems appropriate:

And the LORD said to me: The prophets are prophesying lies in my name; I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds.

Jeremiah 14:14 (NRSV)