What makes JP crazy besides his suits?

The merovingian made it into that coffee clatch of paranoia the matrix

The AI that is dan brown has another tome about a secret society set in prague hm thats curious

Eco’s book came out about 15 years before The Da Vinci Code. As Eco later said,

Dan Brown is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.

Some of the conspiracies retailed by QAnon, and before them about Satanic cultists, are very similar to the legends about the Templars. Eventually someone who gets into those things makes the connection.

For example

“Do or do not, there is no try” –Dumbledore

accompanied by an image of Gandalf, is posted by a troll.

This “Shakespeare” quote, is posted by an idiot:

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

The commenter who probably kicked off this discussion, “David Clayton”, seems more likely to be in earnest than to be a troll. He doesn’t know what any of us actually think and so he reacts to what he thinks we think based on his carefully filtered news feed, and he seems to think that we just haven’t heard the sound bites he shouts at us and if he increases the volume a bit more we’ll get it.

But one never knows. Poe’s Law applies to a lot of trolling despite its originally narrow application.

Umberto Eco’s taxonomy of idiots–morons, cretins, fools, and lunatics–is possibly of service. Only lunatics and morons are found online, usually.

A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idee fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and
by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

I was talking to the person who had trained me, a young woman who fit the TV Tropes term of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In a conversation about Kanye, who was just leaning into his anti-semitism, I expressed the opinion that social media has been a colossal mistake. When she asked me to explain, I said that the anonymity prevented the kind of punishment men deliver to one another when one goes too far in an argument: physical violence.

As her brow furrowed, I explained what I cribbed from Jordan Peterson (pre-crazy suit Jordan Peterson), that men punish each other with violence, and women punish each other with emotional violence, like gossip and character assassination. Consequently, the discourse in social media is female-coded.

She checked out of the conversation and the next day I had a chat with my boss, who suggested Manic Pixie Dream Girl might be a little too sensitive to deal with what I said, and I agreed to keep it strictly business from there on out, not hard because I was disappointed with the weakness she’d displayed.

I don’t think I’m wrong, though. Men feel handcuffed by combat online because our only recourse for bad behavior is ignoring it. You can’t put your fist in the face of a troll.