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By David Futrelle
Candace Owens — self-proclaimed “Red Pill Black” conservative — is having a bit of a moment, hanging out with new Trump fan Kanye West, posing for selfies with Don Jr., getting an effusive Twitter shout-out from Don Sr,, threatening to sue people who talk about her in what she considers the wrong way.
A lot of people have been left wondering just where exactly Owens came from. Well, there’s a bit of a story there.
Long-time readers of this blog first met Owens back in the days of Gamergate, after Zoe Quinn criticized her ill-conceived plan for an “anti-bullying” site that would have basically doxed a bunch of teenagers. After Quinn spoke out, Gamergaters spouting conspiracy theories quickly abandoned their own critiques of Owens and rallied around her. Owens began spouting conspiracy theories of her own, and, well, let’s just say things got very weird very fast, as they generally seem to do when Owens gets involved in anything.
In several posts, I tried my best to make sense of the whole surreal mess. I’m linking them here because I think they may illuminate a few things about Trump World’s newest heroine.
This post describes what happened immediately after Owens first heard from Quinn. Trust me, the headline (and the snippet from the post below) don’t fully capture the weirdness of the story.
Instead of listening to Quinn, Owens declared war on her, spewing forth dozens of angry and accusatory tweets, charging that Quinn and fellow anti-harassment activist Randi Harper … were somehow the puppetmasters behind a barrage of abusive, threatening, and often blatantly racist anonymous messages that Owens (who is black) started getting not long after news of Owens’ plans hit Reddit and 4chan.
Owens quickly began to sound like every other internet crackpot who sees conspiracies in every Twitter mention.
SocialAutopsy-Turvy: Candace Owens’ Twitter Trainwreck, Part One
(APRIL 24, 2016)
And quite a trainwreck it was. The story continued to get weirder, and at such a pace that I never had a chance to write part two.
In this episode, Owens writes an angry diatribe against an article she imagined that Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey had written about her. No, really. She accused Dewey and her editor of attempting to libel her in an article that the Post never published and that as far as I know Dewey never even wrote.
Naturally, Gamergaters were thrilled to have such an, er, original thinker on their side.
NOTE TO READERS: Sorry for being MIA the last couple of days; I’ve been dealing with the double whammy of migraines and some really nasty lower back pain. Doing a little better today.
Actually, you didn’t quote me at all. In the link you provided I don’t say anything. I just merely copy and pasted Prabhupada’s words. And there’s no “Hinduism” in them either.
WWTH-
And that’s bad?!?! The world is overpopulated. How the hell is a lower birthrate a bad thing? All it means is that we have got things under control. Nothing to worry about. But women choosing what to do with their wombs is misandry, of course.
For the longest time, I sort of subconsciously assumed that the Latin letter ‘x’ was a stand-in for ‘cross’, which again would be stand-in for ‘Christ’. It was a slip-in from my native Finnish, where the word risti (cross) is derived from Kristus (Christ, as seen in crucifixes). Why, it makes perfect sense!
AFAIK, Jesus and his followers used Aramaic for everyday business and for their revising of Jewish religious tradition. Aramaic was a Semitic language that in the previous centuries had replaced Hebrew as the the native language of Palestinian Jews, and was also spoken by many other peoples in that region. The Jews still used Hebrew for religious ritual and scholarship.
By late first century, a major formative period of Christian teaching, many/most Christians were from non-Aramaic backgrounds across the Mediterranean, often native Greek speakers, and Greek had certainly become the most commonly understood lingua franca in Christian community.
Early Christian writing was done largely in Greek, but also in Aramaic, Coptic, Hebrew, etc., and there was some early translating back and forth. The later standardization of books that became the New Testament was done in Greek, selecting almost entirely original Greek writing (some of it had been translated from Aramaic text that was since lost).
So Christianity was developed in several languages, but mostly Greek.
@ lumipuma
Yeah, we know that because the early Greek gospels actually quote some of the Aramaic and then provide a translation.
I seem to recall that ‘Eloi Eloi Lama Sabuchani’ (sp?) is one of them (My god my god, why have you forsaken me)
Source: O level RE! The synoptic gospels was part of the syllabus.
Ah, didn’t know that.
idly, you quote and reply to yourself now?
@ Idli
You want quotes? Sure!
Emphasis mine.
To paraphrase someone else in that thread (which is why I linked the thread instead of quoting, to provide context) saying that your linked post never mentioned Hinduism is like me saying “Hey, this guy giving a lecture on the Book of Matthew is saying some super sexist shit! …What? No, my post had absolutely nothing to do with Christianity! I never mentioned Christianity!”
There’s plenty of words that can refer to a religion without actually mentioning the name of that religion. But yes, you are correct that we did go through this 2 weeks ago.
@PeeVee, ah the dramatic reading!!! It’s hilarious. “Wait a minute. Does he have six fingers?” 😀
That’s fascinating. I love that kind of detail.
This is a bit complicated because our economies are completely based around a continuously growing or at least not shrinking population. At the same time, for the sake of the environment, it would be great of populations began to shrink, primarily in the western world since we’re the ones doing the most of the depletion of the planet’s resources and emit the most greenhouse gases, with the US as the number one offender.
@bluecat
I’ve only just seen your post after reading back through this thread, so I don’t know if you’ll even see this, but I’m so sorry to hear the bad health news (and the bad financial news). I hope you’re both coping as well as you can, and that the festival gives you some fun relief. Hugs.
No Catalpa, I don’t want wiki quotes. You said “I” bashed Hinduism. So quote me bashing Hinduism then. My original post mentioned The Hare Krishnas, who by the way are not Hindu. You may be under the impression that they are, but that impression is wrong. You obviously missed the post where I explained all this. Just let it go.
Valentin, sigh, it’s called a “correction”, after the edit time is up.
I was thinking all about that yesterday because NPR had a segment discussing how the US birth rate is now carried by immigrants because citizens who were born here just aren’t having enough kids at population replacement rates.
@Catalpa, et al:
As others have noted, the language under which Christianity most became a thing was Greek (it was a major tongue for trade and academic discussion at the time). And, as I noted, the word ‘Christ’ itself comes from Greek.
For that matter, ‘Jesus’ is basically the Latin transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the original name; to my understanding, a more direct transliteration of the original would probably be something like Yeshua.
The more modern transliteration of the same name would be ‘Joshua’.
(Now remember the old movie War Games, where the pacifist scientist nick-named his extremely powerful computer after his dead son Joshua… yeah, I would be very surprised if that name choice weren’t deliberate by the writers.)
@ jenora
Surviving records from the time indicate that around one in four men was called Yeshua back then. So all those “We’ve found Jesus’s tomb/ossuary/credit card!” stories need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
There’s loads of subtle little things in War Games. Next time you watch it, see how many references to the people in charge of the nuclear being stoners you can spot.
Well, yes, Yeshua was a pretty common name. Even just narrowing it to ‘known itinerant preachers in the right time period’ still leaves a non-unitary set.
And War Games is a favourite movie of mine, if for no other reason than it has one of the most accurate depictions of hacking ever put to screen: mostly boring stuff, trying random things until something works, finding things left open because someone thought obscurity was enough security, social engineering, and research into ‘what would this person have likely used as a password he could remember’?
Yesterday NPR played a recording of a recent talk Candace Owens gave at a university and I listened to some of it. She made the standard conservative claim that leftists don’t have the facts on their side and only “reason” emotionally – she and her allies always make decisions based on logic and facts, of course. Then during the Q&A session, a guy asked her to give her thoughts on QAnon and she dodged the question with “I haven’t read much of them” before moving on.
Now, you’d expect a person who’s committed to rationality to use that opportunity to explain that QAnon is peddling a conspiracy theory and that people are not attracted to conspiracy theories for logical reasons, but because they want to feel special – that they possess secret knowledge most people can’t understand and are fighting against a powerful evil cabal just by posting on the Internet. But I guess Owens doesn’t really care about rationality.
I don’t know about that. Doesn’t it start out wanting to get to the bottom of possible cover ups? Like in researching the JFK, MLK, X, etc assassinations and from there looking into other things?
looked like almost you are replying to yourself ?
but anyway it is still wrong because you did talked about the topic of Hinduism, as catlapa shows.
Recent studies here and here find a link between a “self‐attributed need for uniqueness” and a belief in conspiracy theories. Uscinski and Parent have also found that conspiracy theories are more appealing to “losers” – that is, “People who have lost an election, money or influence [who] look for something to explain that loss.”
Not only do conspiracy theories appeal to the desire to feel unique, they also help people cope with horrible events outside of their control. If JFK and MLK Jr. were killed by a shadowy cabal and not a couple of angry randos with guns, then all we have to do is kick the cabal out of power and there won’t be any more political assassinations. If vaccines cause autism in children, we just have to get rid of vaccines and there won’t be any more children with autism. If 9/11 was an inside job, we just have to kick out the government conspirators and boom, no more terrorism. Simple solutions for simple problems, right?
In short, conspiracy theories are not about finding the real truth at all, just about feeling like you have.
@MrsObedMarsh:
Eww.
Oh, dear Ghu, why???
I don’t think any of them do, beyond the extent to which they can use pretension to it as a shield from criticism or a ladder to credibility.
My husband told me about it and I wanted to have a conversation about it. Laughing at dumb conservatives is one of those hobbies we share <3
@Ildi
The wiki quote was to provide context, since a large portion of this site is likely unfamiliar with the relationship between Śrīmad Bhāgavatam and Hinduism. The quote before that? About the Lecture on Śrīmad Bhāgavatam? This one?
That one you wrote, in the comment that I linked. I left out the parts about how a guy lecturing about the Srimad Bhagavatam thinks that syphilis is caused by women sleeping with dogs, because I didn’t really feel like repeating that part, and it was available in the link I provided. I quoted that snippet to prove that you indeed did mention Hinduism in previous threads (despite claiming not to), even if it was obliquely.
I’ll agree that this discussion is no longer productive. Interacting with you doesn’t really seem to be, in general. So I’ll stop, sure.
They did no such thing.
The comment may have been deleted by David but I had quoted some pretty horrible things about women said by the leader of the Hare Krishna society. I also kind of warned people to do some research into this sort of stuff before they get involved with that society, if they were thinking to. From there someone said I was bashing Hinduism even though none of the quotes were from a hindu or a hindu scripture, but from the leader of the society, named Prabhupada, who has made it clear to the world and to his followers that he is not a hindu and that his teachings are not hindu. If Prabhupada reads a book that hindus also read that does not make him hindu. I’m not familiar with the book myself but even in the quotes I provided, the bad stuff was not from the book but from Prabhupada (who again, is not hindu).
The accusation that I bashed hindus (being proudly from a hindu family and culture myself) is ludicrous. If anything you should be mad at Prabhupada for giving hindus a bad name, since you and probably a lot of other non-hindus don’t know the difference.