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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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politics
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I sometimes wonder if I live in an alternate reality where a significant subsection of the population has gone absolutely insane. The insanity all seemed to take off around 2016.
I blame social media. Mainlining outrage and confirmation bias through your smart phone is one hell of a way to get high
Social media is a turbocharger to the misinformation engine that is corporate media (especially Fox 'News' and shit like Limbaugh, Beck, Infowars, Rogan, et al) post-Fairness Doctrine.
The idea that the FCC shouldn't A) reinstate the doctrine, and B) have its regulatory boundaries extend to ubiquitous cable and streaming services is fucking nutballs. Thanks, Reagan!
Some day we’ll look back at rage bait (and social media, in general) the way history looks back at opium. The tech and connectedness have remarkably advanced humanity - but unchecked, the algos and constant need for engagement have been ruinous and criminally detrimental to society.
As far as I’m concerned, tech companies are no better than Phillip Morris peddling tobacco to children. Checking your “likes” is the new age version of smoking.
I'm gonna have to disagree. No one has died because they didn't get likes.
Not counting the suicides, cyber bullying and countless psychological disorders amplified by social media…sure, nobody has died because they didn’t get “likes” lol
That's not the same thing
There's a town hall video with John McCain around 2008 where an elderly woman tries to suggest to him she's worried about Obama because he's not white. John McCain shot her down and defended Obama and stressed we should only focus on the political differences of opinion, and his own supporters booed him. This all had been coming for so long.
Edit: I was corrected, she did not exactly state what her problem was with Obama, but it's clear that it was bigotry.
If we're thinking of the same clip, you're slightly misremembering it. The woman was insisting Obama was a Muslim, and that's what McCain was shutting down. But yes, the crowd booed him for clarifying that.
You are correct. I was poorly trying to say it was bigotry.
February 4th, 2004, was when the slow boil started.
It was from at least Reagan. But it was when we elected a black man that got things sped up pretty quick, and then when we elected a fuckind Cheeto that's when things really got super charged and turbocharged and all the other charging until what we have today
You could go back to Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
Feb 4, 2004, was the beginning of Facebook and the beginning of foreign powers using the platform to undermine democracy.
It actually started really ramping up in 2008-2009. Tea Party, birthers, so on. It's amazing what happens when someone who wasn't white was elected president.
It actually started with Newt and his bullshit back in '96....well, actually it started with fucking Reagan and his trickle down bullshit back in '80...then again, maybe it started when
This is the correct answer. It's just that the crazies, racists, and terrorists in the Republican party stopped being scared to come out in public around 2008 and even more in 2016.
Nah, Reagan proved how far racism could destroy things long before that.
From an outsiders perspective if you really want a catalyst point I always look to the failure of the Union to subject the slaver capitalists of the Confederacy to Nuremberg style trials for sedition and treason.
Instead there was compromise and appeasement. The problem was swept under the rug.
There's a lot of truth in this. The elites at the top of the South weren't rooted out after their civil war and all of the bullshit going on in US politics today is a direct consequences of that failure.
It would have existed regardless of who you got rid of. An argument can be made that fierce retribution by the North would have only further sowed anger in the South and a divide.
There's also the possibility that the chance at a productive reconstruction era likely died right at the start the minute Johnson became president.
Nah, that shit was already bubbling over during the Revolutionary War. Remember the Three Fifths Compromise? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
People forget or never learned how much this country was arguing before it even began, and has been arguing since then. People who idealize the past and think there's a period of peace where everything was superb (like those that point to the 50s) are showing privilege and ignorance of various affected groups that suffered and fought our entire history. We've never had a moment where we all got along.
We can go back further, but that's where I put my finger on the map.
Fox News was a conservative news outlet until then. Overnight they went batshit crazy.
Between them and social media, we spiraled down into where we're at now.
I think it was even earlier... 9/11 really broke the safety of America (and even the "western" world) and pushed so many people down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Social media amplified this fear and brought them together giving them power.
My head canon is that the fixed point event in earth history is that humanity should have ended in nuclear war with the cuba crisis and the timeline has been unravelling ever since.
Sometimes I think the end of the world actually did happen in 2012, it's just that the fallout is happening over a longer time scale than anyone anticipated.
Rapture bombing wasn’t a prank, 99.99999999999999% of us just didn’t make it :-)
That's what I keep saying. That the world ended, but to save humanity some brave but misguided hero somehow ported us all into this slightly different but really fucked up reality. This is my explanation for the Mandela effect, that we remember our old timeline but when we look things up the research shows what happened in the new timeline so it's all wonky lol
The most soul crushing part is when you realize it’s not an alternate reality; this is where you’ve been all along and you feel betrayed by everyone you’ve ever known for hiding it from you, even about their own stupidity.
Confirmed. The worst possible timeline.
As someone who came of age during Reagan's presidency, y'all just ain't been around long enough.
In a weird coincidence a show came out in 2016 before the election called BrainDead and the plot was that alien bugs are eating parts of our brains and causing hyper partisanship.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrainDead
Good show just the right amount of Tony Shalhoub ;-)
That show was great, was pretty disappointed to see it got cancelled.
Well, Harambe died
Dicks out.
Never went away.
Started to gain major traction around the Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck days. The Tea Party was the beginning of the end
That evergreen college insanity clued me in
I had to understand wtf was wrong with those people, now it’s like everyone is an evergreen state college student.
This world fucking sucks
I think it started the moment Obama was elected, or at least the moment the ACA was able to pass. It just took a time for the 'batshit crazy' to scale up to mass adoption among conservatives.
For me, it started right after 9/11. Republicans were quick to use the general fear and anger from the attacks to justify wars, spying on citizens, eroding personal freedom, etc. They've been using this same playbook ever since, just with a different boogyman, e.g. Antifa, BLM, trans people.
It really probably was all the lead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7lxwFEB6FI