Molly Noise 🌙 @MollyNoise@shrike.club

this is mid him updating my name on the system

feigning ignorance (really this is a great thing to do) I asked if it was something about muscle loss (the trainer had literally watched my deadlift weight increase the prior year)
he said something to the effect of a "natural advantage" , I just laughed and said I'd be lucky to lift 2/3rd of what I'd been lifting before after 1yr hrt

he wasnt hostile, he wasnt bigoted, he literally just nodded and assimilated this new info

circling back, its been odd to see Alex Jones rise and fall, it did only seem a matter of time till he went just a bit too far

others, on a line of continuum with him, like joe rogan (et al) seem to at least manage to not transgress too far and keep the money coming in

i remember getting my new gym badge in work and the FIRST thing the trainer asked me was if i'd heard joe rogan talking about trans women in sports

ive taken a long time to root out bad ideas that were just *sitting there* in my head (but rarely coming to the surface and interacting with the world), received wisdom, imposed views of the world and so on

i dont think people truly appreciate interpellation , we are fish who dont even know we are wet , ha

anyway, I've met people who actually sincerely think tarot or horoscopes or whatever have some kind of use beyond amusement but have good politics

the reason that doesnt cause me problems is because its *mostly* harmless

but its still a kind of odd thing to encounter people who believe something for no other reason than its *claimed* to be true, right?

not really, were you taught how to assess the possible truth of something, you spend a lot of time thinking about epistemology?

obv now anti-vax stuff is seen as exclusively the domain of new world order-5g-transvestigations right wingers but I think its worth bearing in mind thats a convenient brush off of an uncomfortable truth ; stated political stance doesn't make immunise you and some otherwise left-wing people have moved rapidly right (or tried to pretend they are still left wing) while whole-throatedly voicing their support for these things

the contemporary antivax movement, at its rebirth (wakefield) had otherwise left-wing people indulging themselves on conspiracies about Big Pharma while rubbing shoulders with the "crystals and vitamins" set and pretty naked reactionaries

you had people who really had never had made efforts to winnow truth from lies suddenly finding themselves adrift looking for answers, and they clung hard to whatever seemed compelling and confidently delivered

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

i think 'paranoid style' also accurately highlights how there can be a degree of left-right syncretism in the case of the politically naive

so in this context, I think a lot of people really just grew a begrudging distrust for any kind of authority figure

obv the american (and allies!) invasions of afghanistan and iraq using our country partially as a stopover (and for rendition flights 😬) obv didnt help

INTO THIS CONTEXT
a lot of conspiracy stuff really found a fertile ground in which to grow

and of course the magdalene laundries, a whole slew of medical scandals (a contaminated blood scandal which featured *allegedly* a health minister threatening a dying woman to sign a settlement on her deathbed) and like

it just never stopped

I honestly think that in the 90's "the faithful" really just wanted the abuse stuff to disappear but it *KEPT* coming out, and more and more revelations that our small island was mired in shit and had been for decades

the massive revelations of child sexual abuse facilitated and covered up by church and state was not the *beginning* but it was a beginning and people began to find it an unassailable reality that the people in power had been not only protecting a cabal of utter monsters in the catholic church preying on the young but that it was top to bottom; the "holy" orders, bishops, ministers, taoiseachs (prime minister) , popes and the Garda (irish police) all did their part

the generalised and vague "anti-authority" stance most people in the US take now (and probably the last 70 or so years) doesnt really have great paralells in ireland until the 2000's

not only had the soviet union definitively ended and the neoliberal consensus shown itself the only game in town, there *seems* to have been a rather sharp decline in trust in institutions

material circumstances creates belief. more narrowly, peoples material circumstances can drive them to trying to answer certain questions / fill in blanks in their knowledge and the answers they then find are what form their worldview

im not elaborating a whole argument for ideology formation or anything but I want to be clear that I dont think alex jones, in a different context, would have had anywhere as much traction as he does now

I remember having a lecturer, an american "libertarian" who's brain seemed to turn to swiss cheese over about 6 months as he started getting REALLY into infowars

(fuck, I've really avoided talking about so many things publicly because I dont wanna deal with word searching weirdos)

anyway, mid 2000s (?) you'd see infowars stickers appearing in places, train stations and the like, and people outside of internet weirdos started knowing who alex jones was

to think i was worried I might get sued over this one
(was commissioned for a youtube video essay)

https://soundcloud.com/mollynoise/that-is-most-definitly-a-crank?si=49c06eecfd954fee9cadf081bc90694f&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

i am applying the joker makeup

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

I need to stop myself from indulging old habits

I dont need to know how many times the EU has passed regulations relating to a single chemical compound.... and yet

she* has range

(*ammonium chloride is a beautiful name for a girl )

my dutch friends brought me back several types of salmiak , I love them so much 😭

would there even be old street maps of Tübingen from the late 1700s showing bakeries?

how would i found out what they made??

no, im not doing this, I'd have to like, figure out how to access historical documents in a german city I've never been to just to begin to proceed

this way lies madness