Their Brains Have Turned To Porridge!

[Jim McLean's Ghost]

Idk I think JK Rowling was always a bit bonkers.

She wrote a children's book where one of the plots was that slavery was fine, and in fact the slaves like it!

[velo army]

10 minutes ago, Jim McLean's Ghost said:

Idk I think JK Rowling was always a bit bonkers.

She wrote a children's book where one of the plots was that slavery was fine, and in fact the slaves like it!

And the banks were run by grasping goblins who looked like Jewish caricatures from Der Sturm.

Gasp! She was a Death Eater all along.

Edited January 26 by velo army

[19QOS19]

Social media has a lot to answer for. I've had conversations with folk (work colleagues/extended family) and thought they were fine. And am later told (by folk who have FB) about some of the batshit crazy stuff they write on said site. Things they never brought up in my company. Two separate colleagues truly believed the vaccines were inserting chips into our arms. Fucking idiots. 

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

1 hour ago, RiG said:

Wings Over Scotland. Was he always a bat shit mentalist? He used to be a good source of information for pro independence types but he seems to have imploded over trans rights.

He was always mental, yeah, but I think he got away with a lot/restrained himself a bit more in the past. I think it was the dearly departed MixuFixit (left the forum, not dead) who summed him up best in that his stuff often looked very well researched but as soon as he got onto a topic you knew more than the average person about you could start to see that he was predominantly a very good presenter of information rather than always right like his followers used to claim

[HeWhoWalksBehindTheRows]

3 hours ago, Hillonearth said:

Roger Waters is another one who seems to have embraced his inner moonhowler in recent years.

A man who made a concept album from the point of view of an autistic disabled computer genius young boy from the Welsh Valleys, who speaks via a computer to an American radio station as he's hacking the world's nuclear missile computers and about to start WW3? 

Who'da thunk it!

[oneteaminglasgow]

15 hours ago, velo army said:

 being unable to separate the art from the artist is the calling card of a moron. 

 

I can’t agree with this at all. I think the reality is that if the ‘artist’ in question is continuing to make money from their ‘art’, and that money is being used to cause harm then it’s impossible to meaningfully separate the art from that harm. JK Rowling is an absolutely prime example of this.

[oneteaminglasgow]

Anyway, one in the other direction is that I believe that the Foo fighters are no longer committed to denying the link between HIV and AIDS. Which is good of them. 

[GAD]

I genuinely don't think there is a single person who got internet famous during the independence referendum that hadn't completely fucked it now.

The internet, and especially social media has obviously been a big part of it, especially with the Boomers and Gen X. Stuff that was mostly limited to the late night ramblings of your mate's stoner big brother is now mainstream, with constant validation of your batshit mental views available 24/7 from, what can feel like, millions of people. Politicians see how powerful it is as well and if stoking a conspiracy theory, or attacking a minority can get you elected, then obviously they will do this, it's easier than having policies and doing work.

 

[welshbairn]

9 minutes ago, Genuine Hibs Fan said:

He was always mental, yeah, but I think he got away with a lot/restrained himself a bit more in the past. I think it was the dearly departed MixuFixit (left the forum, not dead) who summed him up best in that his stuff often looked very well researched but as soon as he got onto a topic you knew more than the average person about you could start to see that he was predominantly a very good presenter of information rather than always right like his followers used to claim

He cherry picked facts and quotes and made huge and fraudulent logical leaps to present convincing arguments to the unwary. 

[ICTChris]

1 minute ago, oneteaminglasgow said:

Anyway, one in the other direction is that I believe that the Foo fighters are no longer committed to denying the link between HIV and AIDS. Which is good of them. 

HIV denialism is something that's kind of fascinating in a grim way.  Many disperate groups ended up at the conclusion that HIV did not cause AIDS.  There were groups of gay men who saw the AIDS crisis as homophobia and a way for mainstream society to push back against the newly emerging gay community.  If you've ever seen the film And The Band Played On, about the AIDS crisis in San Francisco gay men reacted very negatively to being told to curtail their recently won freedoms at the start of the crisis and some continued this stance even as the deadliness of AIDS became clear.  A good example of this would be the British magazine Continum, run by gay activists for people affected by AIDS which came to push a denialist line.  It is no longer published as all the editors and contributors died of AIDS. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(magazine) ).  If anyone watched the series It's A Sin, there were references to AIDS denialism among gay men in the UK in that.

It was also pushed by political conservatives in Britain and the USA, who in the 1980s were openly homophobic.  Probably the most prominent AIDS denialist is Peter Duesberg, who is an eminent scientist in his field of cancer research, but has devoted a significant amount of his career since the 1980s to arguing that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and that AIDS is due to people's immune systems being overwhelmed from too much anal sex and drug use.  I think Duesberg once said that the AIDS epidemic was caused by behaviour that was illegal until a few years before.  In the UK Andrew Neil gave a lot of space to AIDS denialism while he was editor of the Sunday Times in the 1980s and 1990s - a couple of the journalists who wrote about that became Covid conspiracists in the last couple of years.

Most damagingly the theories reached the high levels of the South African government, when Thabo Mbeki became convinced that the AIDS epidemic in Africa was exaggerated and based on racism.  Influenced by Duesberg and others Mbeki reduced funding for anti-viral medication, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths and further babies born with HIV - Mbeki limited prescription of AZT, a drug that while limited for treating AIDS was effective in preventing infected mothers passing it to their children in utero.

There is also the hippy-dippy, yoga and raw vegan to cure AIDS stuff, which is where the Foo Fighters got on I think. 

It parallels the Covid conspiracism in many ways - lots of people in prominent positions took AIDS denialist positions and lots of the rhetorical tricks used by Covid conspiracists and contrarians were also used by AIDS denialists - appeals to fairness, rhetorical flourishes about how repressed people are, asserting the right to their own opinion over backing it with evidence etc etc.  Interestingly, the guy who invented the PCR test was an AIDS denialist.

I can only imagine if the AIDS crisis had happened now what the reaction would have been.  Doesn't bear thinking about.

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

18 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

 

I can only imagine if the AIDS crisis had happened now what the reaction would have been.  Doesn't bear thinking about.

There was some interesting echoes of it when monkeypox started breaking out in the UK 

[craigkillie]

1 hour ago, Genuine Hibs Fan said:

He was always mental, yeah, but I think he got away with a lot/restrained himself a bit more in the past. I think it was the dearly departed MixuFixit (left the forum, not dead) who summed him up best in that his stuff often looked very well researched but as soon as he got onto a topic you knew more than the average person about you could start to see that he was predominantly a very good presenter of information rather than always right like his followers used to claim

That was borne out when he posted some stuff on here about Scottish football after the demise of Rangers. Just a combination of ludicrous assertions and total fantasy.

[ICTChris]

16 minutes ago, craigkillie said:

That was borne out when he posted some stuff on here about Scottish football after the demise of Rangers. Just a combination of ludicrous assertions and total fantasy.

Did Wings Over Scotland post on here?

[welshbairn]

27 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

Did Wings Over Scotland post on here?

Aye, he got laughed off the site. 

[Shotgun]

I'm friends with a guy who was a fireman, and one of the few liberals in a traditionally conservative profession. He told me how serious the Covid pandemic was going to get, having attended to some of the first victims in Colorado. He was frustrated that so few people were taking it seriously at that time and campaigned to raise awareness. At the height of the pandemic, a work injury required him to take early retirement and he moved his family to Florida, where he was originally from.

Within about 6 months, he became a full on Trump supporting, anti-masking Covid denier. I just don't get it.

[Hillonearth]

7 minutes ago, Shotgun said:

I'm friends with a guy who was a fireman, and one of the few liberals in a traditionally conservative profession. He told me how serious the Covid pandemic was going to get, having attended to some of the first victims in Colorado. He was frustrated that so few people were taking it seriously at that time and campaigned to raise awareness. At the height of the pandemic, a work injury required him to take early retirement and he moved his family to Florida, where he was originally from.

Within about 6 months, he became a full on Trump supporting, anti-masking Covid denier. I just don't get it.

Think you just answered your own question...Florida Man in action

[GNU_Linux]

Luc Montagnier was co-discover of HIV & was co-recipient of  a Nobel prize much later in 2008 for said discovery. At some point went off the deep end into pseudo-science such as DNA teleportation, vaccines causing autism, homeopathy & SARS-CoV2 being man made.

As a side note Montagnier isn't the first Nobel winner to hold scientifically unsound views in a phenomenon dubbed Nobel disease.

Edited January 26 by GNU_Linux

[Moomintroll]

5 hours ago, HeWhoWalksBehindTheRows said:

A man who made a concept album from the point of view of an autistic disabled computer genius young boy from the Welsh Valleys, who speaks via a computer to an American radio station as he's hacking the world's nuclear missile computers and about to start WW3? 

Who'da thunk it!

Good album mind.

[Michael W]

6 hours ago, RiG said:

Wings Over Scotland. Was he always a bat shit mentalist? He used to be a good source of information for pro independence types but he seems to have imploded over trans rights.

He was always a bellend - unnecessarily abusive and unpleasant, though probably got away with it as it was limited to unionists initially. Eventually, it seeped over elsewhere, which was bound to happen as he became increasingly unhinged and the grift money started drying up. 

Russell Brand sprang to mind as he was knee-deep in conspiracy nonsense the last time I happened across him, but he's had a pretty weird life hasn't he? I'd probably go off the rails as well if I was married to Katy Perry and fucked it up tbh. 

[Venti]

My brains turned to porridge playing RE4