This is funny, defeated Republican Congressman Bob Inglis talking about his meeting with teatards:
I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, ‘What the heck are you talking about?’ I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, ‘You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!’ And I said, ‘Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.’ And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.
I may try this stuff out in my local Tea Party mailing list, see what people have to say.
jeffreyw
I looked at the back of my card, only number on it was “42”.
c u n d gulag
@jeffreyw:
OMG! That means you’re Jackie Robinson!
c u n d gulag
Why is it when I read things about the Teabaggers beliefs, I think someone gave steroids to Birchers?
dmsilev
Thank you, targeted advertising systems. “The Bankers Don’t Want You to Know About THIS Debt Relief Secret!”, along with a picture of a SS card (*) with a ‘BREAKING’ banner on top.
dms
(*) Do you know who else had an SS?…
El Cid
This clearly means that Inglis is a hard-core racist for daring to suggest that simple yeoman farmer patriotic Teatardia could possibly be racist or conspiratorially minded in any fashion. I think the NAACP and ACORN may be behind this.
dmsilev
@jeffreyw: Mine just said ‘fnord’.
dms
beltane
What? You mean they didn’t show Inglis their head x-rays which proved that the CIA implanted microchips in their brains. Back when I was a lowly clerk at a federal appeals court, all the best pro se litigants were quick to provide this evidence. Oh yeah, most of them were also into the Bilderberg, Jews control everything schtick as well.
The GOP has mainstreamed mental illness to a degree never before seen in this country.
Nick
How can banks own you and it be socialism at the same time? These people are freaking lunatics, and unfortunately, powerful lunatics.
Omnes Omnibus
I do not understand this at all. I think that is a sign that I am not insane.
El Cid
@c u n d gulag: True, but I think it’s even more similar to the hired anti-New Dealers known as the American Liberty League. Always the same imagery, though.
If we’d had this many patriots in the Revolutionary War, maybe we’d have beaten England that much faster. (Or maybe not, depending on the military effectiveness of pitchforks, plows, and small trade. I dunno.)
beltane
@c u n d gulag: Not steroids. More like someone gave them an LSD/Methamphetamine cocktail.
ErikaF
I wonder how many of the sane Republicans that lost their primaries will have the cojones to buck the GOP whips, and actually vote for their constituents and the people.
I know, I won’t hold my breath waiting. But its a good fantasy, right?
SRW1
@dmsilev:
Adolf H., but it was not a card. (And the number was a bit larger than 42.)
Bill E Pilgrim
I thought paper social security cards were all replaced by rectal implants now?
Of course that makes “If you turn yours over and look on the back for the number” even more vivid an image but I think I’ll just skip thinking about that thanks.
Bnut
@Bill E Pilgrim:
My number is a big zero.
Glenn Beck's Chalkboard
@El Cid:
You forgot the New Black Panthers.
NobodySpecial
I think I speak for most of us when I say:
WHO?
Was this guy ever a guy to break ranks on a ‘critical’ vote for the GOP? Ever?
No?
Fuck him.
Continuum
Teh CRAZY have overwhelmed the sane people of the conservative side, and are now eating them for breakfast.
And, perhaps, not surprisingly, our MSM like ABC, CBS, NBC, and NYT treat these tea bag wingnuts as reasonable people, with reasonable thoughts.
The MSM has failed to provide real information and insight, instead the MSM considers “he said, she said” as if that real reporting. The MSM have replaced analysis with ‘gotcha sound bytes”.
And, so does the Republic finally fall.
steviez314
When my parents opened up a CD, the bank had run out of toasters, so they got me.
flukebucket
I don’t think I have even seen my social security card in 35 years. I have no idea what is on the back of it. It is in a drawer somewhere. I might try to find it this afternoon just for the hell of it.
NonyNony
Jesus fucking Christ – did they quote out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion too? Or perhaps give their elaborate theories on how the Queen of England and the Pope are secretly manipulating the world using their armies of Reptoids disguised as humans and their Orbital Mind Control Laser Satellites?
Their conspiracy theories don’t even make any sense. Why would there be some kind of secret fucking number on your SS card when you carry a goddamn credit card in your wallet?
QDC
You just have to roll with it. “That’s why, if elected, I will introduce a bill to provide parents vouchers to buy their children back from the banks who hold them as collateral.”
See, how hard was that? I could totally win that primary.
Bill E Pilgrim
@flukebucket:
Be careful, it might be THE TINGLER.
Best to leave it in that drawer.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: When I was clerking, I had a case where a defendant explained that he had robbed the bank because aliens had asked hin to do so. You see, they were testing his, and by implication all humanity’s, ability to do tough things to see if humanity was worth recruiting into an alliance against a cosmic enemy. The defendant’s ability to withstand hard time was supposed to show toughness. In view of that, my private view was that he had failed the test by filing the post-conviction motion. Other grounds were relied upon in denying the motion. Oh, he had been found to be mentally ill but not insane.
Kryptik
Sadly, I don’t share Oliver’s optimism that this is going to backfire like in ’64, for all the reasons @Continuum stated. The media is in on the fix, at least in a significantly worse way than they were back in ’64.
KCinDC
Is there a revival of the idea that road signs along highways have markings on the back that are secret signals for the invading UN troops?
SpotWeld
Every group will have it’s nuts and flakes that spout this kind of nonsense. Left, right, top bottom, whatever.
It just feels like it’s a recent thing where a group has been created specifically without those internal automatic checks that limit the nutty members to the lowest levels of responcibility.
The Tea Party really feels like a party that prides itself on ignorance (not in the “nod and wink” way of the “Know Nothings”). They really seems to activly seek out the knowledgable members and expell them.
El Cid
@Bill E Pilgrim:
You mean cellphone activated vaginal rectal implants?
Anoniminous
Wasn’t it Brick Oven Bill (what happened to him, BTW) who thought the flow meter on his sewage pipe was spying on him?
In a Reality Based society these people would be given psychological counseling for their hysterical paranoia and, as needed, psycho-pharmaceuticals to help tide them over from the adverse affects of their glue huffing.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s actually indicated on the card. If the last two numbers are odd, then well, so are you.
Chat Noir
@Omnes Omnibus: Me too. I read the quote twice and I have no idea what it means.
I looked at my SS card and there’s no number on the back of it. The only # on the card is my SS#.
R-Jud
@NonyNony:
Maybe you and the other sheeple carry credit cards in your wallet, citizen. I put all my money into chickens, tin foil, and ammo a long time ago.
El Cid
@Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard:
Holy crap! They must’ve gotten to me too! I think they must have sent out their Shadow People agents to send rods out of the contrails to cloud my mind!
demo woman
The entire Mother Jones article is worth reading.
Somebody should send Ed Schultz this article. Maybe he’ll think twice about using his forum to tell people, democrats and republicans are alike.
MattF
My usually-reliable snark generator is failing me here. Folks, we’re doing psychopathology. With, y’know, guns.
flukebucket
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Nah. I think that is what my wife keeps in the drawer on her side of the bed.
NonyNony
@SpotWeld:
I’m not sure. The Birchers have been around for a long time, and they’ve pretty much always been like this.
I think the more recent thing is that a group like this gets taken seriously, rather than ignored. The media used to pretend that folks like this didn’t exist – and when they couldn’t pretend that they didn’t exist they made sure to emphasize that they were “fringe elements”. Now the same number of these folks seem to exist, but the media is playing it like a “large movement” rather than “fringe elements”.
I suspect that it’s because they’re more organized because of the Internet. The Internet is great for pulling together groups of people who have always been isolated subgroups spread all over the country and allowing them to build a community on-line. That combined with the 24-hour news cycle and the switch away from the “media as gatekeepers” and back to the “media as muckrakers” model of “journalism” have as much to do with it as anything else.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill E Pilgrim: Both of the last two number are even. Moreover, the numbers are the same. What does that tell you?
norbizness
That sounds like it’s right outta the Alex Jones playbook. For those that don’t know Alex Jones, he’s the screaming lunatic with the red face in Richard Linklater’s ‘Waking Life.’
beltane
@Chat Noir: It’s written in invisible ink. Duh. If you watch Glenn Beck’s show you’ll probably see ads for special decoder glasses. They’re only $29.95 and if you order within the next ten minutes, they’ll throw in an extra pair for free. Hurry, the offer is only good while supplies last.
Bill E Pilgrim
@El Cid: Yes exactly what I was referring to.
Turning over one of those microchips to read the secret number on the back evokes a scene right out of “A Beautiful Mind”. And then some.
Re: SS, I just wish they’d stop calling it “So Skirty”. It’s like they install a microchip that creates a speech impediment the moment anyone takes office.
Preznit. So Skirty. Sennr.
It is somewhat descriptive that way though, it’s true.
Nick
@Continuum: our local morning news show here in NYC had the father-in-law of a 9/11 victim on this morning opposing the “mosque” at “Ground Zero” (which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, but anyway).
He said, openly, on television, that “Islam attacked us” and that “Muslims were taking advantage of freedom of religion and using it against us”
He said this with no one countering him. It was presented as a legitimate feeling. Bigotry, ignorance and hatred, showed openly on network TV, with no counter argument. The media lets it be known that these opinions are ok.
I’m telling you, if our MSM existed in Germany in 1938, they’d have a debate on whether or not the Jews were to blame for Kristelnacht. If they existed in 1865, we’d be hearing about how Lincoln was killed because he was too partisan in freeing the slaves.
El Cid
The nut squads are always insistent that the conspiratorial forces aligned against you have to put some special mark or code on you or in your possession somewhere, I dunno, maybe to give you an entertainingly sporting chance to discover their plots.
During the 1990s militia / shortwave right wing paranoia fest (you know, the one that spun off McVeigh et al), a common meme was that Hillary was planning a Russian / UN invasion of the USA to make us soshullist etc., and for this reason you saw bar codes on the backs of stop signs because this somehow designated travel paths or something.
Really? A gigantic modern invasion force capable of conquering one of (certainly not the, but still) largest, most populous nations on the planet couldn’t get around well enough without stopping to peer at the backs of stop signs?
What kind of invasion force is that? No wonder the rightards love to imagine themselves running out in their Revolutionary war cosplay outfits and their home guns and defeating these confused, lost Russian-UN forces.
Recently there was another big paranoid thing going around the now-normal-but-still-crazy right about how a picture of dozens of white-painted Hummvees in an airport with UN logos meant that the Hillary-UN-Kenyonesian martial law / Amero detention center thing was imminent.
JGabriel
I confess to finding it perplexing when conservatives express bewilderment at the conspiracy theories and xenophobia of the right. I mean, what the fuck did they think they were signing up for?
Those things have been hallmarks of the right at least since FDR took power, and probably as far back as Taft. But it’s not ancient history either. One needn’t look any further than William Buckley’s National Review or Nixon’s Southern Strategy or Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Mississipi, to document conservative racism, or the John Birch Society and the militia movement for its conspiracy theories.
How the hell can any conservative still pretend to be surprised by it? How can anyone find it believable or let conservatives still get away with feigning ignorance?
.
cmorenc
@Nobody Special
Careful – the future of this country may depend on whether enough onetime true-believer GOOPers come to the radical epiphany that they’ve wasted their energy and allegiance on a group of people who are either amorally selfish, cynical, and predatory or else insanely delusional beyond reach of facts and reason? Think of our own host John Cole….
Yes, I’m pissed off at people like this GOP congresscritter for his past history of destructive votes, just like I’m pissed off at Alan Greenspan for his timely support for the Bush Tax Cuts back in 2001. But would you rather Greenspan have never come around to repudiating tax-cut kool-aid on MTP last Sunday? Or would you rather John Cole still be a red-state type blogger?
And yes, it’s true that Inglis hasn’t quite yet arrived at a political sinner-coming-to-Jesus kind of moment. But when enough GOP politicians have enough encounters like his with insane tea-party folks, the conditions for epiphany and eventual conversion to the forces-of-light are much more favorable.
Bill E Pilgrim
@flukebucket: Heh.
I actually got curious after I posted that and Googled the movie, god that was hilarious, I actually remember it as a child, though not in a theater, just on TV:
Chyron HR
@Omnes Omnibus:
It means you’re EVEN odder. After all, what do you get when you add two odd numbers together, eh?
Bill E Pilgrim
@Omnes Omnibus: I think you can buy gas on Thursdays.
merrinc
Inglis must be really pissed to give an interview to a left wing commie pinko rag like Mother Jones. Interesting article, though – nice of him to develop a conscience about the Lewinsky nonsense several years after the fact.
Haven’t been around for awhile so I don’t know if this has been posted but Jesus’ General has proclaimed Burn a Confederate Flag Day on September 12. What’s that I hear? Teatard heads exploding? Glenn Beck crying?
El Cid
@Nick:
My guess would be that anyone familiar with the archives of the day would tell you exactly that. I don’t think that’s a hypothetical, I mean, excluding the time-travel of our modern establishmentarian nincompoops.
Cat Lady
Back when Phil Donahue was on every day he had on some guy from the Wiesenthal Center to push back on “teh Jooz secretly run the world” meme, and I clearly remember a member of the audience standing up to say that it all started with killing Jesus, and when Donahue pointed out that Jesus was a Jew, the guy started yelling that that was blasphemy and that Jesus was persecuted cuz he was a Christian. That guy, if he wasn’t locked up long ago, is showing up to vote in November.
beltane
@NonyNony: An example of this can be found in the career of Anthony Martin-Trigona aka Andy Martin. For decades he was notorious in legal circles as a certifiable kook, antisemite, and chronic abuser of the court system. No one, not even conservatives, would have considered taking this person seriously until last year, when the media rolled out the red carpet for Martin and his conspiracy theories. The media is literally plucking people out of mental institutions and legitimizing their paranoid ravings; I’ve never seen anything like it before.
daveNYC
This isn’t that funny. The problem with having the Republican nominee be a crazy person is that there is a non-zero chance that they could win.
It might be nice to think about a Palin led ticket now, but if we double-dip and U-3 is greater than 10% when 2012 rolls around, we’re going to be hoping that the Republican ticket is non-batshit, because they’ll have a good chance of winning.
Sly
Speaking of wacky teatards, this shit gave me a good chuckle.
4tehlulz
@Nick: Charles Lindburgh pretty much went there in ’41.
MTiffany
@NonyNony:
Thus proving the conspiracy is real. Any conspiracy which easily makes sense to large numbers of people would quickly be discovered and destoyed. Therefore, only the most incomprehensible conspiracies could survive for the centuries needed to achieve world domination – to whatever unknown but certainly dastardly ends, and therefore only the most, uhm, special minds could penetrate the thicket of contradictions and reductio ad infinitum which obfuscate said insidious plots and see the evil truth lurking beneath.
El Cid
@JGabriel:
Some sort of Superfriends team of Edmund Burke, Sam Adams, Adam Smith, George S. Patton, Winston Churchill, Robert E. Lee, and of course the Creator of Heaven and Urf, Ronald Reagan.
Stefan
You just have to roll with it. “That’s why, if elected, I will introduce a bill to provide parents vouchers to buy their children back from the banks who hold them as collateral.”
You know, these people are so damn stupid there has to be some scheme we can come up with to separate them from their money. (Hell, Beck’s already doing this with Goldline). Thoughts?
NonyNony
@MTiffany:
Is that an accidental channeling of Hagbard Celine, or did you do that on purpose?
I have to say – if the Tea Parties were all a giant Discordian plot the world would suddenly make a lot more sense.
(I need to read those books again – perhaps they’ll give me new insight into our current levels of stupid…)
Origuy
I cannot load that Mother Jones article. The Bavarian Illuminati must be jamming the site.
kc
Bob Inglis was one of the more conservative GOP’ers. Let’s face it, these are his people. These are the people the GOP has been cultivating and inciting for years.
So now it’s biting them in the ass, I’m finding it hard to feel real sorry for the Bob Inglises of the world.
Frank
@Continuum:
I am still waiting for the MSM to ask the racist tea baggers why they weren’t protesting government spending when we had a Republican President. Furthermore, when will they be asked if they have such problem with government spending, then why are they OK with limitless defense spending?
Dave S.
@Cat Lady: Showing up to vote? Hell, he’s on the ballot!
Stefan
our local morning news show here in NYC had the father-in-law of a 9/11 victim on this morning opposing the “mosque” at “Ground Zero” (which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, but anyway). He said, openly, on television, that “Islam attacked us” and that “Muslims were taking advantage of freedom of religion and using it against us” He said this with no one countering him. It was presented as a legitimate feeling. Bigotry, ignorance and hatred, showed openly on network TV, with no counter argument. The media lets it be known that these opinions are ok.
Hey, this is now the ADL’s position, that bigotry is OK if you just feel it strongly enough. As Abe Foxman said in an interview with the Times last week, just as “[s]urvivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” so also with the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims “[t]heir anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
No word though on whether, say, the anguish of a Palestinian in Gaza entitles him to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted….
Frank
@Nick:
Using that dwarfed logic, does he also think Christianity attacked Iraq in 2003? Does he think Christianity murdered Dr Tiller and other abortion doctors?
There are extreme, insane people in pretty much all religions.
blahblahblah
The stuff about banks holding US citizens as colatoral on their future earnings, with a bank routing number associated with a citizens social security number, is all rhetoric from the “Freeman Movement”. It’s basically a right wing anti-tax party that advocates destroying all identifying documents and living “off grid”.
Google it. These folks are highly organized, well armed, and definitely dangerous.
GregB
Has any tried selling tri-cornered hats wrapped in tin foil yet?
shortstop
Collateral, huh? I’m depreciating as fast as I can, sir. That’ll show the bastards.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@NobodySpecial: And that’s what makes this scarier. If the Clinton witch-hunt types aren’t crazy enough for the party, who is?
Hugin & Munin
Y’know who else thinks that Jews control the media?
GregB
El Cid,
I recall one report that the Chinese were training Ghurka troops in in underground military base near the Mexican boarder. They would then use the secret markings on the signs in order to navigate a foreign land.
More recently there was a defunct airport that was housing overstocked Hyundai’s or Mitsubishi vehicles in Florida or Georgia. The Google Earth picture showed a large number of what appeared to be white vehicles on the runway.
This morphed into a theory that they were UN vehicles laying in wait.
This country is heading into a bad space.
In related news there was a military exchange between Israel and Lebanon today.
War is coming.
Karen
@jeffreyw:
Then you definitely know where your towel is.
blahblahblah
Here’s some discussion on the James Randi forum regarding the Freeman’s Movement:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=137231
Kryptik
@Nick:
That’s what frustrates me so goddamn much about the whole thing. It’s pretty much just another issue used to help mainstream bigotry and racism once more, so it’s ok enough to bludgeon people over the head with. Just enough to get people to ignore the real issues because HEY, THERE’S SOME SCARY BROWN PEEPLE WANT TO BUILD A CULT HOUSE ON SACRED 9/11 GROUND!
Not to mention the total utter historical blindness to think that somehow, Islam is and was the only religion to ever have violence done in its name.
Booger
Back in the day when Bill & Hill were the cause du jour of what have now devolved into the TeaTards, I had a discussion with a dude at the shooting range (hey, libruls gotta shoot, right?).
He was earnestly warning us in dire terms about the imminent black helicopter forced relocations, about the microchip he had forcibly implanted in his butt (that buzzed periodically…TMI), about the “weather stations” along the highway that broadcast information about population movements directly to the U.N., and about the threads implanted in the currency that could be read by overhead signs so the gummit knew exactly how much money you had in your wallet and where exactly it was located.
At the last point, all I could say was “…our government? you really think they could pull that off?”
He was dead humorless serious. And he was toting a big-ass gun that cost $7.50 a round to fire, so I dialed the snark right back down.
Scary, how a mind can end up in such a gordian knot.
El Cid
@Kryptik: You scoff at the work by patriots to stop the construction of an Al Qa’ida suicide hang-glider center atop One World Trade Center. But your treason will out.
Cat Lady
@GregB:
If I were a dentist, I’d totally offer filling replacements to remove the transmitting locating beacons put there by the black ops hygienists trained by Soros-funded abortion-loving public health “instructors”. The first one is free of course.
Brachiator
@NonyNony:
Maybe the Internet and other media just intensifies this stuff. Like urban legends, a lot of this crap seems to float around until someone can put together a story, inevitably involving a conspiracy, that rearranges the pieces.
I couldn’t sleep, turned on the radio and caught some of the station that usually deals with alien abduction theories. But since Obama’s nomination and presidency, they have become the repository for white anxiety. For example, they helped keep the fires smoldering over birther nonsense after it had temporarily fallen out of the mainstream media. This time they were on an illegal alien (aka Mexicans) riff. The lowlights put forth by the guest:
At least 150,000 illegal aliens illegally registered to vote, shifting the balance in an unspecified number of close elections.
Illegal aliens were primarily responsible for the mortgage crisis, buying homes they could not afford and then allowing foreclosures.
But this is the good part: Millions of illegal aliens (aka Mexicans) have ATM cards which will shift billions of dollars to Mexican national banks. This has been specifically set up by “the globalists” and the Federal Reserve.
I suspect that fallout from the Arizona immigration issues is causing these folk to revise old conspiracy theories. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of this stuff bubble up into tea bagger rhetoric in the near future.
El Cid
@Booger:
I don’t think there’s much in the way of ‘population movements’ in the US outside what you could find from the US census, daily commuting reports, and the real estate market.
It’s not like there are seasonal migrations of Iowa residents into new homestead territories or Louisianans to training camps in New Hampshire, or one region of the country following the monsoon rains in order to plant rice or something.
Kryptik
@El Cid:
Joke now, but realize that tomorrow a conspiracy theory at least 1.5x as nutty will be repeated in earnest and probably given coverage by the media as a ‘genuine concern’.
GregB
The website MyRightwingDad posts all of the rightwing nut job e-mails.
It posts them without comment.
It is pretty scary that a lot of people get such a diet of rabid hate day in day out.
Bulworth
I think MexicanMuslimSocialists have replaced The UN as the secret force behind the takeover of America.
c u n d gulag
@beltane:
Good point!
Bill E Pilgrim
TT is on the case this week, on this topic.
Poor guy can barely keep out in front of the actual Wingnuts these days. He’s still really funny and takes it to an extreme, but– not that extreme, given that reality has become satire and vice versa.
El Cid
@Kryptik: The entire upper floors of One World Trade Center will be for Iranian nuclear program development and deployment?
jinxtigr
To me it’s always reassuring whenever anyone talks sense, on either side of the aisle.
There’s this terrible fear of ‘all the crazy, stupid people’ and mob psychology is very real, but when you get down to individuals, each has a capacity to think. To them the mob THEY ARE PART OF is ‘other people’ except when they’re in it.
You want to give people chances to think ‘I’m not a crazy person’ because then they can start questioning what ‘being a crazy person’ means. The crazier the mob beliefs are, the more fragile they are.
It all comes down like a house of cards, like the dotcoms or housing bubble, in the end. Even when you stand to gain everything from continuing the shared insanity, it eventually breaks…
Linda
True, gotta admire Palin for saying whatever comes into her mind.
However, she is now part left-right paradigm of the “establishment”, when she endorsed the two “elites”, John McAmnesty and Rick Perry, (who only postures on illegals, while supporting their in-state tuition and anti- HB1070, not to mention his huge efforts using eminent domain for the NAU Superhighway), she lost all respect, in my book.
She’s just another political hack, trying to get her “side” fired up…. she dumped her principles when she endorsed the two RINO’s and showed herself to be just another party hack.
Also, she just up and quit the job she was elected to do. That tells me enough about her. I actually think she is unstable.
NonyNony
@Booger:
This is the thing that always gets me about these kinds of conspiracy theories – the black helicopters and secret trains coming to take you away to a Death Camp crowd tend to also believe that the government is incompetent. The cognitive dissonance it takes to believe these complex conspiracy theories is astounding.
@Brachiator:
I think the media tends to legitimize it. And once it gets legitimized it opens the door for weirder stuff to take up the space on the fringe that the previously weird stuff was taking up before it got mainstreamed. Too many people have the attitude of “well, if it weren’t worth talking about the newspeople wouldn’t talk about it would they” – which means as soon as the press really starts taking it seriously – even to debunk it – it becomes a legitimate topic to debate.
But the Internet communities are exactly the place where the stories get put together. You can almost watch it happen in real time too – the birther crap grew up that way as various people threw out various beliefs and they congealed together into a common narrative. Now, it’s rare for two birthers to agree about what all of that narrative is (notably you can’t pin them down on why anyone would go to the lengths gone to to smuggle a secret African into the Oval Office) but the core of it is shared among all of them.
Kryptik
@El Cid:
Maybe not One World Trade, proper, but I’m sure they’re expecting the Cordoba House to be a front for exactly that, with snipers posted in the WTCs direction and everything. After all, the place is obviously housing Islam which everyone knows is a psychotic cult bent on world domination and sharia law. Hysterical folk that jump at every brown person know this in their gut!
Kryptik
@NonyNony:
Like how Obama is simultaneously a weak, effete limp wristed nancy boy, and the worst dictator and oppresor in the history of ever?
Ed Marshall
It’s a fucking audit control number that tracks the paper. I had never noticed it before. They have the style of number on bonds…because it’s a security control and they print them on the same paper.
Not that any of it makes sense in the first place, but that’s where they got it.
JGabriel
Chat Noir:
Hmm, mine DOES have a number on the back. Let’s see what happens when I do a search on it:
OH MY GOD! THE GOOGLE IS IN ON IT!
.
debbie
I’m not sure what it means, but the number on the back of my SS card is 1 letter followed by 8 numbers.
It’s also not the first time I’ve heard nefarious rumors about the “real” significance of SS numbers. People used to say that if the middle 2-number series of your SS number was even, it meant that you were a Jew and, of course, subject to all kinds of discrimination.
Brachiator
@NonyNony:
Not too sure about the media legitimizing conspiracy stuff. After a certain point, wingnuttery becomes self-sustaining because the people who push it have a deep psychological need to keep believing despite any evidence to the contrary.
Great point that the Internet lets you track the formation of some conspiracy nonsense.
But if you look at some of the stuff at snopes and other urban legend sites, you often see that much of this not only predates the InterTubes, but that some stuff has been ported almost intact onto the Web, with names and organizations updagted to make it contemporary.
Hah! Logic and plausibility, not a feature of conspiracy nonsense.
JGabriel
NonyNony:
World’s. Worst. Kept. Secret.
.
Hob
@Booger: he was toting a big-ass gun that cost $7.50 a round to fire
I realize this isn’t the most salient part of your story, but dang, what did that thing fire– frappuccinos?
Allan
Be sure and read the rest of the article. Inglis says that anyone who calls Obama a soshulist is violating the Ninth Commandment.
El Cid
@Kryptik: It was suggested that I crank it up a few notches. I tried my best.
Chris G.
@debbie: Well, that explains the time I was asked to hold the chuppah at a wedding.
bago
“Monitor population movements”.
So the dude is complaining about traffic reports?
Booger
@Hob: It fired rounds as big as my d*ck. Must have been gold-plated .22’s or something.
Davis X. Machina
Wow. Richard Hofstatder’s estate brought out a special “The Paranoid Style” edition of Refrigerator Poetry Magnets™
kommrade reproductive vigor
Got into a huge, nearly relationship-ending argument about this with the S.O. the other day.
I still maintain that there are some things so patently stupid (and not a little anti-Semitic) that you shouldn’t spend .5 seconds thinking about them. And,you should, in fact instantly leave any listserve where it is being discussed as a serious matter of concern.
peej
All I have on the back on my SS card is a government form number (with revision). Must mean I’m owned by the Federal Government (but I knew that already).
SRW1
@Nick:
Actually, that is not that far away from what happened. The official line the Nazis used at the time was that the Jews were responsible for Kristallnacht because they had provoked the German people incessantly. The assassination of the German diplomat in Paris by a German-born Jew merely had finally broken the Camels back. In line with that, German Jews were forced to pay 1 billion Reichsmark compensation in form of confiscated property to the German government.
Nick
@SRW1: Oh well good, so our media is not much different than the Nazi propaganda machine.
Epicanis
I also have the Secret Number on the back of my SS card. I’m guessing it’s a serial number for the card blank upon which they later printed my actual SS#.
(So the bank-sale thing is kind of a lottery, the banks don’t get to choose which of us they get. At least, not until they bundle our numbers into securitized security financial products and are resold into slavery to the Intergalactic Bank of Marklar.)
Bill Murray
@SRW1: Also, recent journalism in many ways marks a return to the yellow journalism of the past. Scare headlines, rampant use of pseudo-science and false learning from so-called experts, great sympathy for the underdog fighting the system all point to Murdoch as the new Hearst
MTiffany
@NonyNony:
Only a like-minded conspirator would know for sure. Or would they? But if I knew that they knew, and they knew that I knew that they knew, then I would have to know that they knew that I knew that they knew that I knew that they were aware, unless of course they weren’t, in which case…
***agh!***
(Falls down rabbit hole,)
***Crash***
(and breaks neck)
If only all conspiracy theories ended thusly…
MTiffany
@KCinDC:
You mean secret markings on the back of highway signs — only visible with a special ultraviolet light that only the Reptoids and the Reptoid human hybrid clone army under UN control (and Earth bees) can see…
But I hear that the Chinese invented a special pair of glasses that lets human see these markings too. But they have to smuggle them in covertly. The lenses are actually being sold as Fushigi “gravity balls.”
And they’re a real steal, too! Only 19.99 Ameros for one, or 29.99 Ameros for two! That’s a 25% saving! Hurry! Order now! While supplies last.
Porlock Junior
@c u n d gulag:
You must be kidding. Clearly, he’s the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Cereative Anarchy
I wonder if this business with the SS card is somehow related to the “Race Card” that Teabaggers allways go on and on about when I tell them its not ok to call black people Porch Monkeys.
Tuxedo Slack
@Linda:
Paying the houseowners in ameros, I assume?