FriendOfDeSoto

Let's not call it psy op then. We need a new term. BS op maybe?

I think you're looking at correlation more than causation. That's what the enlarged gas tank metaphor in another comment here is trying to hint at.

I don't mind your fiddling with that razor at all. I see what you mean.

Your intelligence isn't improved by calmness. Calmness may simply be the state when it is the most unimpeded.

I think what you're not picking up on is the whole Ms. Moos vibe on CNN. She is basically satire. She always jumps on the most outrageous stories and narrates them in that annoying pseudo journalistic voice and has done for decades. The stories may be actually true but you should never assume that they are. They are a knock knock joke for people who watch 24h news channels.

I don't know anything about this case more than having watched the CNN video. Mr. Fir-lung and his doctor needn't be actors. He could've really had it in his lung but played up the "haha, maybe I breathed in a seed" line because it got him attention on TV and paid interviews. And he doesn't mention how he was in a landslide being chased by a bear 5 years ago and that's when he accidentally inhaled the debris. The doctor may just have mentioned in a subordinate clause that it looked as if the sprig was growing in the lung but never actually claimed it did. Or he also believes in homeopathy. Or he also got paid for the interview. There are a thousand explanations why we get presented the story like that. But the biggest red flag remains that Jeanne Moos was reporting on it.

Psy op implies an amount of planning and the involvement of the military or the intelligence community. I think it is better attributed to chance that the cryptic pretentious musings of one person snowballed into a cultish internet movement. Because it garnered strength online, the musing person at the heart of it probably changed due to tiny power struggles.

People like to know there is a plan for everything. People always suspect a secret cabal behind everything. People are also dumb and impressionable. It doesn't take a general or CIA buffin to try to target the Venn diagram of those three groups. I think it had the results you describe, it contributed to what we see in the US today: a weakening of the rule of law and a slide into fascism.

Calling QAnon psy op is giving what basically started as a 4chan meme too much credit. If no one took a gun to find a nonexistent basement in a DC pizza restaurant, society at large may have never discovered this snowballed cult, and jumped on it like a cat does catnip, enlarging its reach. The secret "cabal" behind it is maybe a handful of people. Bored and slightly Machiavellian internet users with odd political views and/or the love of endorphin-inducing likes and reach. Never attribute to conspiracy what you can more likely attribute to stupidity. QAnon is stupid. Stupidity with disastrous cobsequences. But not a planned psy op campaign.

Are you getting inundated with JFK was anti Israel posits and hot takes? Because I sure aren't.

If illegal immigrants were possible to be identified easily by the IRS, ICE would have taken them over already.

The problem is two-fold. A lot of the immigrants who fall into this "illegal" category are not on the books, they get a brown envelope, and pay little to no taxes at all. And the more "sophisticated" ones look just like your average American. So if you taxed them more, you'd be affecting a lot of the "legal" population as well.

Also, the American economy is full of jobs that no "non-deportable" would like to do. Agricultural jobs come to mind. The current regime's idea of eradicating all illegal immigrants runs contrary to a lot of economic interests (and I read that they've done a lot less deporting on the farms recently. Curious ...) Even if you could just tax them more, you'd still mess with those interests as well.

And while I'm not a tax lawyer, I'm gonna go out in a limb here and say it's not going to be easy to make a tax law like that that isn't going to be heavily scrutinized in the courts because it is unabashedly discriminatory.

I think it's because these are people with the power to do more than thoughts and prayers. But they just stick with that while also taking health care off veterans and giving tax breaks to the rich.

Gaslighting

Sphinxy is mad then. Or poops prodigiously. Sphinxy is much, much smaller than any of the surrounding pointy poop parlors.

Art is a message. It has a sender and a receiver. The sender aka the creator has an idea and their synapses create the piece of art. The receiver - even when privy to the thoughts of the creator because they talked or wrote about it etc. - consumes it and has a response. It could be along the lines the creator had intended but it doesn't have to be. Both sides could be equally happy with their side of it while thinking completely different things.

So an artist can try to attach a certain meaning to their artwork but it is no guarantee the audience will see it that way. Is the person in Munch's The Scream screaming themselves or holding their ears to block out screaming they hear? I read what the artist intended and I can tell you I thought the other thing.

So far I've been talking about a single artist and a single consumer. That's not how this works. There could be a group who have differing ideas about the art they're creating, like a song. So it means different things to different people on the sender side already.

It gets really messy on the receiver side because ideally the art will be consumed by hundreds and thousands of people. In that group you will have opinion leaders tastemakers and they in turn will influence other recipients. History also filters artworks. I don't think Leo thought his postage stamp size portrait of a smirking Italian merchant's wife would be the most famous painting in the world if experts hadn't endorsed it, it hadn't forcefully changed owners, hung in Napoleon's apartment, was stolen and recovered. So there are biases built in and it isn't as clean cut as saying everybody interprets it their own way in most circumstances.