What is #Pizzagate?

[brekin]

Again, about the art...

There is a qualitative world of difference between 1) some RA survivor creating art therapeutically or some art school depressive being obsessed with a grim RA motif, versus 2) some DC power elites who hobnob with the Epsteins and Clintons of the world obsessed with the same art. CAN WE STOP FORGETTING THIS DISTINCTION, PLEASE. If you don't socialize with creepy power elites, no one is going to suspect you of anything just because of your taste in art, however disturbing the art.

So what you're saying is that the art itself is not an indicator of perversion or criminality, but rather it's a person's association with the Clintons and Epstein (both creepy, I agree). So if this is the case, then why try to use the art as evidence at all?

@ OP ED, hell yeah! Although Astro-Creep 2000 was my personal favorite at the grand age of 16.

Why? Because most people are going to look at art of abused children tied up en masse in bathrooms with their buttocks bright red from whatever they've been subjected to, and art of children's dead-eyed bodies lying in swamps, and poor skinny children hanging up in shower stalls and think "why the FUCK would you want that hanging in your house/office/poolroom unless you are either a fucking sicko or you think it's "cool" to ironically celebrate your acceptance of the reality of organized pedophilia abuse. I mean it's supposedly a free country and all but these people make their RICHES literally from "perception management." They know exactly how this "looks"! And they don't care. It's almost like they are thrusting this into people's faces in a rebellious way, like "hey we're such PR badasses we can collect art that would make Josef Mengele blush and people still will hire us!"

I mean that's at the very least.
At the worst, well, everything pizzagate believers suspect them off. Does the truth fall somewhere in between?
What did Podesta do on his trip with Dennis Hastert? "Fishing and Camping" maybe? Is anyone naive enough to believe nobody knew about Hastert's secrets? He was like Liberace or Truman Capore. Or Elton John. Or Jimmy Saville. Everybody fucking knew.
Podesta is guilty as hell. Of something. A lot. What we're arguing about are the details.

And I have to say it really rubs me the wrong way that people here seem to be of the opinion that somehow we should "tone it down" due to "gosh we don't know how crazy people might respond". RI is RI. This is what we do. It's what we've always done.
At the same time my admiration and respect and affection for PW is extraordinarily high.
So I'm conflicted.
But I don't think we should censor ourselves as far as basic research and brainstorming. As long as we're not coming to actual conclusions and and making accusations that we're not able to back up.
I almost wish this site was totally private. I tend to forget that it isn't. Maybe we all do.

Some good points. A few thoughts. Back in the day I went to Victoria and in this arty/hip pizza joint there were three identical prints of increasing size with a circuit board pattern titled bit, byte and megabyte. It kind of looked like a city map. It was only after staring at it for a bit did you realize that it was a dick and scrotum in profile. The guy who ran the place who seemed to be the proprietor was kind of leather looking "rough boy" old guy who had zero customer service skills who openly despised paying customers. So, weird, but a lot of places have strange edgy art. A lot of business owners are seemingly dodgy people with possibly connections to strange people. Some art can be misconstrued (what did the "bit" print represent?) or being taken as not commenting but promoting something. I doubt the pizza joint had sex trafficking dungeon though. It could have. I would guess people involved in that wouldn't advertise even covertly though. But the point is the people who worked at that pizza joint, the owner, the regular patrons were probably completely innocent of any wrongdoing. But now in the age of the internet all it takes is a few webposts with possible/dubious threads and connections and people are harassed, death threats, their livelihood and reputation sacrificed and of course a lone gunman (who actually tried to recruit friends three days before) descend to expose and bring justice. None of us know what happened. I agree there are some dodgy people involved but there hasn't been anything to point conclusively to a conclusion that should jeopardize these peoples reputations and lives. The police have investigated and haven't come up with anything. Even fox news has passed. Sure that may be part of the "conspiracy" but people seem to forget that this involves real peoples lives who are being tied to something that so far is just a lot of smoke. Its like saying because the Catholic Church has numerous priests that abuse if you've emailed one sometime in your life, using certain "keywords", your connected to their crimes and even possible larger cover ups and misdeeds.

[Novem5er]

Yes, the art you (Nordic) mentioned above was some of the most disturbing I've seen. It definitely adds to the creepiness vibe of Podesta and made me sick to my stomach to look at. However, I think it was argued very well many weeks ago that there as a line between buying and displaying art for the sake of fetish, and buying that same art to support the artist who's work one believes is important. I simply cannot attribute motivation to people that I don't know. We could look at Munch's "The Scream" and attribute many nefarious attributes its collector, especially in the time of 1893.



Who would support such melancholy? Such despair? Who would take delight in displaying such obvious human suffering? What would it say for a peasant to own such a painting compared to a monarch? My point is that we could speculate on motivation forever.

But I don't think we should censor ourselves as far as basic research and brainstorming. As long as we're not coming to actual conclusions and making accusations that we're not able to back up.

I almost wish this site was totally private. I tend to forget that it isn't. Maybe we all do.

As to what I quoted from you above, I 100% agree. I see RI as a place of research and brainstorming, where questions are posed and are rarely answered. I see very little danger on speculating what crimes public figures might be involved with, from 9/11 to sex rings and cults. They are public figures and speculation is just an occupational hazard. I have a problem, though, when non-public figures are brought into the public opinion courts, tried and convicted, and then an army of trolls is unleashed upon them.

We've seen this with the families of Sandy Hook victims. We've seen this with survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing. We had a link to a story in the other thread where one of the mural artists from Cosmic Pizza had been identified and harassed and threatened online. I am not okay with this. Public officials have security and make their living in the public eye. Family members of victims, survivors, and simple bystanders cannot defend against 4chan unleashed.

In this sense, I think we must be careful. Not only "we" as in RI, but "we" as a culture. Dennis Hastert is fair game. John Podesta is fair game. Joey the Wall Painter is not fair game without some big fucking evidence that would result in an actual warrant. Joey the Wall Painter or Timmy the Logo Designer can have their lives ruined, and let us be clear, 4chan has a history of ruining people's lives for the lolz. It's scary to think what they might do when they actually feel righteous in their trolling.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10897474/Paedophile-slut-criminal-how-trolls-can-ruin-your-life.html

“It was talking about what might be wrong with me psychologically," she says. “There were accusations that I had fantasies that I want to be raped. It was really disgusting. That was the first thing I found out and I heard about it through my father.”
The comments marked the beginning of five years of intensive abuse. Miriam had defended another woman on an unmoderated forum after anonymous bloggers accused the woman of promiscuity and said her boyfriend was a rapist. Following the comment, Miriam was attacked - by people she doesn't know but believes are strangers - every week for six months, and was the subject of fresh abuse every six months for the following years.

[FourthBase]

Again, about the art...

There is a qualitative world of difference between 1) some RA survivor creating art therapeutically or some art school depressive being obsessed with a grim RA motif, versus 2) some DC power elites who hobnob with the Epsteins and Clintons of the world obsessed with the same art. CAN WE STOP FORGETTING THIS DISTINCTION, PLEASE. If you don't socialize with creepy power elites, no one is going to suspect you of anything just because of your taste in art, however disturbing the art.

So what you're saying is that the art itself is not an indicator of perversion or criminality, but rather it's a person's association with the Clintons and Epstein (both creepy, I agree). So if this is the case, then why try to use the art as evidence at all?

@ OP ED, hell yeah! Although Astro-Creep 2000 was my personal favorite at the grand age of 16.

Why? Because most people are going to look at art of abused children tied up en masse in bathrooms with their buttocks bright red from whatever they've been subjected to, and art of children's dead-eyed bodies lying in swamps, and poor skinny children hanging up in shower stalls and think "why the FUCK would you want that hanging in your house/office/poolroom unless you are either a fucking sicko or you think it's "cool" to ironically celebrate your acceptance of the reality of organized pedophilia abuse. I mean it's supposedly a free country and all but these people make their RICHES literally from "perception management." They know exactly how this "looks"! And they don't care. It's almost like they are thrusting this into people's faces in a rebellious way, like "hey we're such PR badasses we can collect art that would make Josef Mengele blush and people still will hire us!"

I mean that's at the very least.

At the worst, well, everything pizzagate believers suspect them off. Does the truth fall somewhere in between?

What did Podesta do on his trip with Dennis Hastert? "Fishing and Camping" maybe? Is anyone naive enough to believe nobody knew about Hastert's secrets? He was like Liberace or Truman Capore. Or Elton John. Or Jimmy Saville. Everybody fucking knew.

Podesta is guilty as hell. Of something. A lot. What we're arguing about are the details.

And I have to say it really rubs me the wrong way that people here seem to be of the opinion that somehow we should "tone it down" due to "gosh we don't know how crazy people might respond". RI is RI. This is what we do. It's what we've always done.

At the same time my admiration and respect and affection for PW is extraordinarily high.

So I'm conflicted.

But I don't think we should censor ourselves as far as basic research and brainstorming. As long as we're not coming to actual conclusions and and making accusations that we're not able to back up.

I almost wish this site was totally private. I tend to forget that it isn't. Maybe we all do.

[guruilla]

Cross-posting this, since we now have two current threads on same topic.

Hats off to tapitsbo for keeping alight the last tiny flicker of reason at this forum thread.

With Pizzagate I don't see a lot of debunking, actually. More like deflection - attempts to evade and avoid scrutiny of the materials so far gathered and anything further yet to be dredged up.

Yes, a seemingly endless dirge of denials, deflections, & dissemblings, a few loose & sweeping theories, and a consistent avoidance of most or all of the more cogent arguments being made. It's a bit like RI has turned into CTR.

It's insane that some in this thread are so concerned about the probable false flag "gunman" actor who didn't hurt anyone

so much more concerned than about everyone the clintons appear to personally have had murdered (like seth rich)

....
i don't understand the energy this board is putting into covering for these scumbags given how merciless you all have been with many other powerful people

It's worth thinking about. There are several possibilities, including, to be comprehensive, that you & I, Nordic, 4B, coffindodger, and several other posters have all jumped the cognitive shark without knowing it and are being rudely dragged back to reason. That's the really scary possibility. The rest are just creepy & depressing.

These people are flamboyantly, openly involved in some "very spooky shit" as kool maudit put it earlier in the thread.

All sorts of people are no doubt involved in these sorts of crimes but very few are giving a public wink and nod to them.

What is the media blitz about Pizzagate (fake news and all the rest of that crap) other than a wink and a nod?

Yep; it's actually a rare and golden opportunity: we are seeing glamor magic/perception management in action by its effects.

I think the main effort at this board is to bombard the discussion with derision & denial relentlessly enough that it inspires, or obliges, mimesis. It's basically bullying aimed to intimidate those who are merely questioning either into ceasing to do so & siding with the deniers (with their rather sad excuses for debunking), or double and triple down and start defending positions that we don't actually hold.

If every attempt to say "Look at this" is met with a "Nothing to see here, grow the fuck up," the temptation is to TELL people what they should be seeing, overstate it, hyperbolize it out of all reasonable meaning, and so confirm the bias of the bullies and earn our whupping.

Pizzagate undoubtedly contains a weaponized component, but so do a lot of these stories and ideas. We all have our own investments in the conflict over our reality. The importance and nature of "truth" to that investment varies depending on your perspective

Discussion of the Clintons, Bushes, Kissinger, royal families, and associates need not be Manichean, in fact it had better not be if we are to rise above Icke/Jones style conspiratainment.

It's hard to deny that these figures play an important SYMBOLIC, one might almost say "magical" role that differentiates them from the run of the mill "elite"

The MSM is full of talk of armed retaliation against anyone who questions their narratives on subjects like Pizzagate. I'd be more worried about that than a bunch of hot air from people who have a track record of hardly ever doing anything...

All good points.

My guess as to why so much energy and denial is going into this topic here & elsewhere is that it is simply too close to home. At least one poster has even eaten at CPP, but even without such concrete examples of the familiarity of the hunting ground, this is no longer an attempt to scrutinize the predations of the elite but to see how the culture of totems & taboos, of control and permissiveness, created by these same elite has now fully and utterly owned us. People will fight to defend that culture until they have sufficiently extricated themselves from it, at a deeper emotional, psychological, energetic level.

The rubber of conspiracy theory just met the road of cultural reality, so right now, yeah, there's a whole lot of yelling & barfing going on.

Speaking of which:

PS - This is yer old pal Jerky.

& here was I thinking we had a new satirist in our midst.

Jerky was banned for one month, on Dec 8. Just to be clear, if I ever get banned from RI, all I need is to create another ID & carry on posting?

[tapitsbo]

Final thoughts for now (since there has been some hot air and hyperbole from my corner, sure)

we all know it's not as simple as "finding the bad guys" - the cultural rubber hitting the road is exactly what needs to be understood

there's been a significant effort to hinder either of these things happening of course

nobody is omnipotent or "utterly" owns us but I know that's probably a figure of speech guruilla. the symbolic ecosystem will never be completely airtight...

[Novem5er]

Guruilla is making the great mistake in thinking that anyone is expending any energy defending elites. I don't think hardly anyone is defending Podesta or others. They are defending against hysteria and cultural witch hunts. They are defending rigor by demanding more from people who bring ideas and accusations. That's rigor: question, analyze, and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Oh, the Twin Towers were brought down by an alien-tech laser beam? Make your case.

Also, I would say that people have expended energy in coming to their conclusions, but that they aren't always the conclusions that Guruilla wants. Take the "chicken lovers" Instagram post that was used as evidence. It was originally posted that Chicken Lovers was pedo-code. Myself and a few others, I'm sure, expended energy in researching if that were true. Guess what? With "chicken lovers" and a few other supposed codes, the original sources were freaking 4chan itself claiming that those words were pedo-code. No other sources can be found!

That was energy expended, not to defend elites, but to gather more data. Is it easier to dismiss ideas for lack of evidence than it is to find evidence to support ideas? Yes, but that's the way of reason.

I hope Guruilla keeps posting. Good for him. I don't dislike the substance of his posts so much as the reactionary attacks on people who disagree with him. I think it's obvious to many posters that this is just what he does.

Knowles/Cohen/Levenda/Strieber/Crowely/Cern/PizzaGate, etc.

The Pattern
1. gman seems to have his mind made up about issue
2. makes a specific argument about the big conspiracy, (basically, if it could happen, it did.)
3. seeks confirmation,
4. people disagree,
5. they become part of the argument,
6. evidence never materializes,
7. changes original specific argument into a meta "social studies" lesson, "Forget specific argument and lack of evidence, what is it really about?" etc

[tapitsbo]

Another point of view would be that the responses to guruilla are similar to the responses to AliceTheeKurious' claim that the account of the 9/11 hijackers were full of holes: more distraction and deflection than testing or debunking.

Nobody really engaged with her arguments on that subject, instead a few posters threw endless curveballs trying to confuse and derail the significant content and context of her take on things.

There may be hysteria around Pizzagate but there's hysteria about a lot of things, and witch-hunts about a lot of things. A few of the posters here specialize in witch-hunts.

It's more than obvious to me though that guruilla isn't going on a hysterical witch-hunt.

He's the one who is going over the "big picture" here and trying to sift throught the data. And he isn't jumping to conclusions! Certain others seem to be attempting to play a laser-pointer and cat game of bringing up random data points is a random and unconnected manner and stringing together all sorts of inaccurate claims about what's going on here in an attempt to make the case that Pizzagate is something you just don't talk about.

Maybe it seems like guruilla and me are "allies" here but I hardly know the guy. I wish I was able to pursue this stuff as thoughtfully as he is. I hope he isn't alone in exploring this topic more though.

The thing about the DC "players" targeted by Pizzagate is that no "witch hunt" is necessary to tarnish them given the stuff a lot of these people have been associated with or done right out in the open.

So attempts to dissuade a "witch hunt" read to me more like anxious stage whispers asking us not to let our gaze linger on the emperor's (lack of) new clothes

[liminalOyster]

I think the main effort at this board is to bombard the discussion with derision & denial relentlessly enough that it inspires, or obliges, mimesis. It's basically bullying aimed to intimidate those who are merely questioning either into ceasing to do so & siding with the deniers (with their rather sad excuses for debunking), or double and triple down and start defending positions that we don't actually hold.

I genuinely don’t follow how trying to discuss would be equated with derision, much less bullying. I’d just like to hear how you and others with your view respond to the "Fully Sourced Executive Summary of Pizzagate Evidence" over on Voat. I've asked twice. That page seems the closest extant thing to a comprehensive dossier. I have never before heard of a multi-perp pedo ring allegation that did not begin with victims, witnesses or investigations into suspected perps and so barring evidence, allegations, reasons for a strong felt sense, I don’t really get how or why anyone believes this particular thing, except as a sort of proof-of-concept for investigating episodes for which there is more damning evidence.

My guess as to why so much energy and denial is going into this topic here & elsewhere is that it is simply too close to home. At least one poster has even eaten at CPP

CPP is a popular place and it's right by Politics and Prose, a decent if establishment indy bookstore that I like to visit when I pass through town. It's no more familiar to me than a diner I've eaten at on a road trip, really. So, if there were even one child claiming it was the location of their abuse, my meal there wouldn't particularly bear any influence over my taking them seriously.

[tapitsbo]

There's allegations by survivors in the threads on RI alone let alone elsewhere... survivors of abuse by people in the Pizzagate orbit

Ultimately unlikely that this stuff is too separate from guys like Epstein, Hastert, and many others...

Rather than the "perps" though - because organized abuse is so central to society that there won't be any easy way to "root it out" or "get to the bottom of it" - closer to home by far is the cultural dynamic at work here - much strangeness going on - the way it is processed by the consensus/collective consciousness is most interesting

The official story doesn't work by means of blanket denial - that would be too crude - instead there's a sophisticated, strident defense of a fragile and obvious untruth, swaddled by a rich gradient of grey areas where suppressed aspects of reality are entertained and pressure can be blown off as hot air, it seems

[liminalOyster]

Allegations about PG? Can you link to them? TIA.

[tapitsbo]

I thought you were a long-time lurker? There's specific stuff naming a couple of the same notorious individuals over and over again over the years

I already told myself to disengage... let's see how I do with that.

I'm not going to be playing fetch for you though. Cheers

[Burnt Hill]

I thought you were a long-time lurker?

I already told myself to disengage... let's see how I do with that.

I'm not going to be playing fetch for you though. Cheers

That's incredibly weak, and not the first time you have done it.
If you can't substantiate your claim, then don't make it.

[tapitsbo]

If you guys have been following along then we should be on the same page on this one. I wasn't the one who made the claims originally, are you guys denying they're there?

[Burnt Hill]

If you guys have been following along then we should be on the same page on this one. I wasn't the one who made the claims originally, are you guys denying they're there?

No, you are being asked to point to the information that substantiates your statement.
So that those of us who may have missed it, don't remember it, or misremember it, can review it.

[FourthBase]

If you guys have been following along then we should be on the same page on this one. I wasn't the one who made the claims originally, are you guys denying they're there?

No, you are being asked to point to the information that substantiates your statement.
So that those of us who may have missed it, don't remember it, or misremember it, can review it.

If you missed anything, how about you scour the 90 page WH?I? thread from start to finish, just like everyone else has to do. You are not special, you do not deserve an endless reiteration of the basics handed on a platter to you.