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This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I don't think that proves your point at all.
When people elected Reagan, they saw an articulate, charismatic man offering easy to digest solutions that sounded plausible. They had no context to know that neoliberalism was bullshit that only made rich people richer with each successive failure.
Any dissenting voices were (at best) saying "I don't agree with their guess, so here is my guess instead".
Meanwhile, what do we have now? Donald fucking Trump. A man who is barely coherent. A man whose inherited wealth has shielded him not just from multiple dogshit business decisions, but extremely serious charges of being a traitor to his country. And of course, a staunch neoliberal in the modern "don't say it out loud" movement.
Every piece of information people needed to make a better choice was out there and freely available. There was no excuse for not knowing who he was or that his economic ideas had failed to deliver on their promises thousands of times the world over.
But people continue to enthusiastically support him. They would kill and die for a man who is openly revolted by having to interact with them.
Yes, they're louder.
But they're stupider too.
Andrew Tate is a role model for millions of boys and young men.
Okay, maybe they don't have the context needed to understand that he's just a rapist who is desperately trying to pretend his father's abuse was love in disguise.
But the man claimed he was the world's first trillionaire. That's the kind of lie a literal toddler would tell, yet grown men believed it.
Are they the majority? No, probably not.
But I can't remember another group of people so deliberately, unapologetically stupid as modern reactionaries, nor a time where they've wielded so much power.
Articulate the group of people you're talking about then so we can actually discuss them, rather than you just insisting they're everything you pinkie promise they were.
Because you're awful confident about who they are, what their numbers are, what they believed and how much power they weilded without actually articulating who "they" are in any meaningful way.
Okay, so you don't actually know who you're talking about, but you're certain you're correct.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in case it was a miscommunication and we were talking about entirely different groups of people.
But nope, you're just saying any old bullshit with absolute conviction because you want to look like the smartest person in the room.
Reading back, it's actually pretty obvious that you didn't experience Reagan nor the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. You're just extrapolating your 5 years of adulthood backwards 50 years and assuming you've nailed it.
Oh yeah, you're clearly talking about Andrew Tate followers and have been this whole time. Good lie you fucking clown. The internet has clearly made you smarter.
Whatever helps you self soothe kid.
But the funniest part of all of this, is that I wasn't even talking about Andrew Tate supporters. They were an example of the embarrassingly stupid shit that people believe, despite your claims that the internet has made everybody better informed than pre-internet relics.
And I could pull out 100 more examples. They supported a president that suggested injecting bleach or "finding a way to get sunlight inside the body" as potential COVID cures both before and after. They've literally killed people based on the cold-reading of a shit-tier, 4chan Nostradamus. There are people who genuinely believe the earth is flat. There is a sitting politician that talks about "Jewish space lasers" and "peach tree dishes" and people donate money to help her keep her job.
But you can't, because you don't actually know shit about the world before the internet, the people who lived in it or if the claims about them you pulled from your ass will hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
Wasn't a thing on my 2000s internet. Maybe it's just because you were 3?
I'm sure that would have really hurt my feelings if I knew absolutely nothing about myself.
Not a thing I actually claimed and not actually evidence of the thing I never claimed. Do you need me to put it in a Spongebob Squarepants meme for you?
Your insults are even worse than your hot takes. Are you sure you want to branch out into armchair psychology as well?