Thoughts on Q

Of late, everyone seems to be polarizing regarding the cryptic anon known as "Q".

If you are a binary thinker, Q is either horrible, or the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The problem with Q though is that when there's no room for "maybe he's wrong about some stuff and right about other stuff, and maybe that's on purpose", it should set off an alarm in your head that there is a false dichotomy being forced onto the situation.

It's odd because, in the election cycle back in 2016, a lot of folks cited how Trump was good at saying something that fell into the category of speech called "rhetoric". In short, rhetoric is largely about emotional impact, and its contrast "dialectic", is about informational impact.

When you use facts and data to try and persuade, you're using dialectic when the circumstances more likely demand rhetoric. So when Trump says he had some 10 billion in assets or whatever, and he literally only had 3, it was rhetoric because what you're left with is "he's not quite as rich as he claimed, but he is still rich."

While factually, literally, inaccurate, rhetoric is not quite the same as lying, which is yet another concept difficult for binary thinkers to grasp.

This oddity is multiplied when you account for the fact that Trump is a negotiator, and you never open negotiations at the price you want. If you're selling, you start high. If buying, you start low. You then haggle towards what the final price would be. Your opening offer isn't a lie, it's an offer, a possibility.

This is where the value of rhetoric comes from. It forces you to consider a possibility, whether true or not, and so someone skilled with rhetoric will make an opening offer that is exaggerated, but sets a starting point for negotiation.

With that in mind, if you think of Q as a negotiator, by default some of the things shared are not going to be true. They're going to be an opening offer, a first stab.

We're in the midst of a cold civil war where a faction of the existing government has been working behind the scenes to secure great power and control for them and their buddies. If you wanted to avert making a cold civil war go hot, because the people whose priorities you share are still blissfully unaware and woefully unprepared, how do you still make progress? How do you "claim territory" in a way which doesn't provoke an escalated response that will not be handled in a calm, rational fashion?

Well, if your enemy has worked behind the scenes, using public narratives to distract, your most viable option is to do the same thing. In such a manner, the enemy can't really blow your "cover" without also blowing theirs. You fight behind the scenes in hopes that, securing victory there, the conflict doesn't spill out into the streets.

So from the outside, to those who are just "awake" enough to realize something is going on, it's going to look like you're doing nothing. And it may be that what you are trying to do might even fail!

The degree to which people loathe or love Q comes off as being tied to their natural level of impatience. Even folks much more intelligent than me haven't successfully resisted the urge to take potshots, apparently unaware how closely their criticism echoes that of the liberals regarding Trump's behavior in public.

Again, though, if Trump is trying to negotiate a  peaceful "civil war", one which avoids wanton bloodshed, he's not going to try and use logic, facts, data, etc. He's going to use rhetoric.

Q acts like a personification of rhetoric. The information may not be accurate, but if that's what you're looking for, you're making a "category error" in understanding the kind of information being presented. For the same reason that facts and data aren't very persuasive, opening bids and disinformation aren't very informational.

The goal isn't to dictate the future in explicit and accurate detail, but to shift narratives and influence possibilities. For example, if a liberal was going to do X, but there is enough clout with Q that something Q posts dissuades the liberal. How would you "prove" that Q did anything at all?

If your opening bid were smaller, how would that have affected the final negotiated price? What about if bigger?

What this "means" is that folks are trying to use the nature of indeterminacy to claim that something someone else is doing is wrong, misleading, or even hurtful, because of how they interpret the cause-effect relationships and the consequences which follow, while hopefully distracting you from the fact that they'll offer no better alternative.

If nobody can predict the future, does that mean Q is "wrong" for trying to influence it to make certain possibilities more probable based on the information that whoever is behind Q has?

Are other prognosticators and translators of current events any more reliable than Q when it comes to details, or are they likewise most accurate when it comes to broad strokes?

Some of the things Q says are true. Some of the things Q desires I also desire.

Some of the things Q says are false. Some of the things Q desires I don't also desire.

But this is true of everyone I know, and not just Q, so why should I or anyone else be forced to "denounce" or "pledge allegiance to" whoever is behind the computer screen?

The shortest answer is "because someone believes their interests are best served by what they are doing regardless of how what they do impacts your interests."

Sure, there are people who have a desire for a messiah that will make too much of Q, but that's the codependent case anytime anyone shows up and claims that they can help solve an issue. If folks are so lazy as to think that a single source of information is all they'll ever need in life, then the problem is those people, not whatever the functional savior it is that month or year.

They're merely someone exploiting the foolish better than anyone else at the time, and are we really going to begrudge them for doing that?

If someone wants to help, immediate acceptance or rejection is foolish. If someone claims to have truth, immediate acceptance or rejection is foolish. Being forced into a binary when there are other viable options is foolish.

The whole circumstance is rather disappointing because, in the need to gain social status, folks have made a claim one way or another with respect to Q, and in so doing, have invited the very opportunity for being exposed as a fool that they believe taking a stance on Q was supposed to have helped them avoid.

Q puts out a lot of opening bids and it is very difficult to see what the counteroffers are, or whether negotiations on a topic have settled, or been responded to directly at all, because this game isn't being played out in the open for all too see. The signals and counter-signals are not meant for the people whose job it is to distract you from what's really going on, and they're not going to send a clear signal back as a response either.

We don't know for sure, and we may not live long enough to know for sure, so be wary of anyone who does know for sure and has follow-up suggestions to you on what you should do next based on their conclusions.

Don't be lazy, test and grow in understanding. Know your options and be willing to stand by the choices you make, regardless of what is popular. Cling to truth and not social status.