Where Do I Sign Up to Be a Lizard Person
Jul. 9th, 2023 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingMy first impression of the QAnon Anonymous podcast wasn’t great. I admired the quality of the reporting, but the on-air persona of one of the hosts really bothered me. I got back into the podcast after that host did an interview with the Dark Souls podcast in which he dropped the persona and was really sweet and chill, which helped me get over the Gilbert Gottfried obnoxiousness he occasionally projects. Some of the QAA episodes are hit or miss, but I appreciate that they take the real-world political implications of internet culture seriously.
Anyway, one of the older hosts of the podcast, who is a professional fact-checker, has a healthy view of people who make their living as performers and artists. Namely, he says he expects people who make art to hold fringe beliefs, or at least to be more open to fringe beliefs. Politicians and journalists and talent management staff need to be grounded in reality, but “grounded in reality” shouldn’t be what you want or expect from people who create fantasy.
And I was thinking, like, do I have any fringe beliefs? I don’t think I do.
I don’t hate any particular group of people, and I don’t think space aliens or secret underground cities are real. I don’t think 9/11 or the covid pandemic was an inside job. I think government bureaucrats are mostly competent, and they’re just that: mostly competent bureaucrats. I think vaccines aren’t a magical cure-all disease-prevention technology, but they’re not turning us into lizard people.
I mean, I think we should forgive all student debt and guarantee universal basic income right here right now, and maybe we can legalize marijuana and cancel the criminal records of people arrested for minor drug offenses while we’re at it. But I wouldn’t call any of that “a fringe belief” or “a radical political position.” I mean basically that’s just like… New Jersey. You know, the most mid of all states.
I guess the fringe beliefs I do have are related to Japan, but they’re less “fringe beliefs” and more “things almost universally agreed on by academic specialists.”
To give an example, there used to be an urban legend going around that the Tokyo Marathon changes its route every year because it’s a test for evacuation measures organized by the city government. And that may be an urban legend, but it’s also true. It’s not a secret that this is the purpose of the Tokyo Marathon. They don’t put it in the promotional materials for the race, of course, but the city government publishes a report (called a “white paper”) online every year analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of that year’s marathon route. The marathon is also a training exercise for the city police and the Shōbōchō (Fire and Disaster Management Agency), which is Japan’s equivalent of FEMA.
There’s also a persistent rumor that the Imperial Household Agency won’t allow archaeologists to enter the giant kofun burial mounds in western Japan because they’d find clear evidence that the Japanese imperial family is Korean. I don’t think anyone can say what the Imperial Household Agency is thinking, but it’s almost universally agreed on by scholars that yes, the Japanese imperial family is partially Korean. I mean, we’re talking about political marriages that happened two thousand years ago, so “Korean” is an anachronistic marker of identity, but yeah. It’s not a secret.
Also, I guess I also don’t think this is so much a “belief” or a “political position” as it is a basic fact of recent human history, but the United States didn’t need to drop atomic bombs to end the Pacific War. This isn’t even that complicated. Japan was going to surrender as soon as Russia entered the conflict. Everyone knew this, because they talked about it in plain English. The United States knew this, and Russia knew this. They knew this because that’s what Japan told them, and that’s in fact what they did. All of the military documents pertaining to these communications were declassified in the 1990s.
The reason the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan was to see what would happen. Because the thing was: nobody knew what would happen. Dropping an atomic bomb wouldn’t scare the Japanese into surrendering, because the Japanese didn’t know what an “atomic bomb” was. Nobody did. As you might imagine, Hiroshima was absolute chaos after the bomb was dropped, and it took people years to understand the extent of the damage.
On top of that, even if everyone somehow magically did know what an atomic bomb was, the United States didn’t have to drop two of them. Hiroshima would have been enough. The reason the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to collect scientific data, and the reason those two cities were chosen was not because they had strategic importance – they really didn’t – but because both cities had large populations of children. The reasoning was that the effects of radiation on the human body could be studied as the irradiated children grew up. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes.
This is common knowledge in most parts of the world, so I’m always surprised when American college students treat it as a conspiracy theory and try to argue with me. What the hell did these kids learn in high school?
Speaking of weird fantasies, I do think that anyone who goes to watch the Oppenheimer movie, even out of curiosity, is a bad person who should feel ashamed. Based on what I’ve seen, it’s like somebody made a Hollywood blockbuster out of the Protocols of Zion. Like, it doesn’t matter how good the movie is; it shouldn’t have been made. Even worse, it’s tone-deaf to make a movie about “how a time of crisis inspired humanity to do a terrible but great thing” during the current political climate when normal rational people are struggling to hold militant ultranationalism in check… and mostly failing.
So I guess that’s my fringe belief: Godzilla was not wrong.
Idk, most of the horror writers I know are fairly chill and sane people in real life. If I had to guess, I’d say that we get our trauma out on paper so we can get on with our lives, and it’s surprisingly effective.
Anyway, one of the older hosts of the podcast, who is a professional fact-checker, has a healthy view of people who make their living as performers and artists. Namely, he says he expects people who make art to hold fringe beliefs, or at least to be more open to fringe beliefs. Politicians and journalists and talent management staff need to be grounded in reality, but “grounded in reality” shouldn’t be what you want or expect from people who create fantasy.
And I was thinking, like, do I have any fringe beliefs? I don’t think I do.
I don’t hate any particular group of people, and I don’t think space aliens or secret underground cities are real. I don’t think 9/11 or the covid pandemic was an inside job. I think government bureaucrats are mostly competent, and they’re just that: mostly competent bureaucrats. I think vaccines aren’t a magical cure-all disease-prevention technology, but they’re not turning us into lizard people.
I mean, I think we should forgive all student debt and guarantee universal basic income right here right now, and maybe we can legalize marijuana and cancel the criminal records of people arrested for minor drug offenses while we’re at it. But I wouldn’t call any of that “a fringe belief” or “a radical political position.” I mean basically that’s just like… New Jersey. You know, the most mid of all states.
I guess the fringe beliefs I do have are related to Japan, but they’re less “fringe beliefs” and more “things almost universally agreed on by academic specialists.”
To give an example, there used to be an urban legend going around that the Tokyo Marathon changes its route every year because it’s a test for evacuation measures organized by the city government. And that may be an urban legend, but it’s also true. It’s not a secret that this is the purpose of the Tokyo Marathon. They don’t put it in the promotional materials for the race, of course, but the city government publishes a report (called a “white paper”) online every year analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of that year’s marathon route. The marathon is also a training exercise for the city police and the Shōbōchō (Fire and Disaster Management Agency), which is Japan’s equivalent of FEMA.
There’s also a persistent rumor that the Imperial Household Agency won’t allow archaeologists to enter the giant kofun burial mounds in western Japan because they’d find clear evidence that the Japanese imperial family is Korean. I don’t think anyone can say what the Imperial Household Agency is thinking, but it’s almost universally agreed on by scholars that yes, the Japanese imperial family is partially Korean. I mean, we’re talking about political marriages that happened two thousand years ago, so “Korean” is an anachronistic marker of identity, but yeah. It’s not a secret.
Also, I guess I also don’t think this is so much a “belief” or a “political position” as it is a basic fact of recent human history, but the United States didn’t need to drop atomic bombs to end the Pacific War. This isn’t even that complicated. Japan was going to surrender as soon as Russia entered the conflict. Everyone knew this, because they talked about it in plain English. The United States knew this, and Russia knew this. They knew this because that’s what Japan told them, and that’s in fact what they did. All of the military documents pertaining to these communications were declassified in the 1990s.
The reason the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan was to see what would happen. Because the thing was: nobody knew what would happen. Dropping an atomic bomb wouldn’t scare the Japanese into surrendering, because the Japanese didn’t know what an “atomic bomb” was. Nobody did. As you might imagine, Hiroshima was absolute chaos after the bomb was dropped, and it took people years to understand the extent of the damage.
On top of that, even if everyone somehow magically did know what an atomic bomb was, the United States didn’t have to drop two of them. Hiroshima would have been enough. The reason the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to collect scientific data, and the reason those two cities were chosen was not because they had strategic importance – they really didn’t – but because both cities had large populations of children. The reasoning was that the effects of radiation on the human body could be studied as the irradiated children grew up. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes.
This is common knowledge in most parts of the world, so I’m always surprised when American college students treat it as a conspiracy theory and try to argue with me. What the hell did these kids learn in high school?
Speaking of weird fantasies, I do think that anyone who goes to watch the Oppenheimer movie, even out of curiosity, is a bad person who should feel ashamed. Based on what I’ve seen, it’s like somebody made a Hollywood blockbuster out of the Protocols of Zion. Like, it doesn’t matter how good the movie is; it shouldn’t have been made. Even worse, it’s tone-deaf to make a movie about “how a time of crisis inspired humanity to do a terrible but great thing” during the current political climate when normal rational people are struggling to hold militant ultranationalism in check… and mostly failing.
So I guess that’s my fringe belief: Godzilla was not wrong.
Idk, most of the horror writers I know are fairly chill and sane people in real life. If I had to guess, I’d say that we get our trauma out on paper so we can get on with our lives, and it’s surprisingly effective.
