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Since the pandemic started I've found myself believing less-and-less in mundane, worldly explanations for things. My favorite example is the 2016 presidential

Since the pandemic started I've found myself believing less-and-less in mundane, worldly explanations for things. My favorite example is the 2016 presidential election. While there are many who would like to believe that Trump won due to Russian interference, I actually believe he won due to meme magic. A bunch of social misfits got together, sharing frog memes, while listening to Shadilay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadilay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadilay), and memed their candidate into office. I just think that objective, material reality is less objective and less material than I thought all along.

aliswe 5y ago
Did you see that recent meme where a right wing "influencer" with tens of thousands of followers only got 13 likes on a recent tweet? would be interesting if true! EDIT: https://imgur.com/gallery/cZwNWup https://imgur.com/gallery/cZwNWup
drakythe 5y ago
Why not both? Russia employed a bunch of trolls, who helped create and amplify the memes. I think reality is a lot more complicated and humans just look for the simplest possible explanation, like “Russia did it!” Or “Meme’s did it!” Or “Racists did it!” When it was all of them and many other reasons. See Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth” video for a genuinely brilliant breakdown of this idea and how it relates to Flat Earthere and other nonsense.
- Bjorkbat 5y ago
  And so there's still definitely a part of me that realizes that, yeah, rationally, you can't just ignore the influence of Russian interference or the flaws in modern polling. Looking back, it's obvious that we underestimated how politically motivated working-class white voters could be. The thing about meme magic though is that there's so many spooky "synchronicities" woven throughout that I can't help but take it seriously.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    A relatively new to me concept I've been running into is that of "memetic virus", intentionally constructed by human hands, that, if implanted at opportune times in the right minds would cause a conflagration of an irrational thought to spread around the world. Richard Dawkins mentioned something alike this in his "viruses of the mind" essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind but his discourse was limited to denigrating the religious and seemed to miss out on the bigger picture, that being, that if it were possible to ingrain a meme onto people's minds that one day, someone would use it as an instrument of mental war. I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary. How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years? If it were one person or a certain group of people, it might make sense, but this memetic virus seems to have spread worldwide, infecting almost everyone, and since our frame of reference is also infected we can't see that we're infected with it. Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know. I really don't know if this is true, but I suspect that if you brought a group of average people from 2000, 1990, 1980, & 1970, I feel like they would all agree that the world has gone mad and that there must be some reason for it.
    - 3np 5y ago
      This is a major plot point of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
    - dfxm12 5y ago
      How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years? It depends on your values for most of the words in this statement. For example, sure things ebb and flow, but I don't think we can say things were relatively peaceful in the 90s. So, for most values, the answer is likely that things haven't changed as much as you think; you're just more aware of everything now. You can life by the adage, "ignorance is bliss", or live a less blissful life aware of everything going on, or even try to take advantage of those who are living blissfully.
- Yoric 5y ago
  > Russia employed a bunch of trolls, who helped create and amplify the memes. As long as we all agree that it's a bunch of literal trolls. The kind who live below bridges.
- mcguire 5y ago
  The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html I especially like the title of the section, "Russian Propaganda Is Not Committed to Consistency".
emmp 5y ago
Surely the idea that a young motivated constituency used the most modern communication methods available to them to campaign for their preferred candidate, successfully moving the needle somewhat, is pretty mundane?
zdragnar 5y ago
Surely it didn't have anything to do with the media pimping him nonstop during the primaries, giving him disproportionate airtime, or that the democrats ran one of their least likable candidates of all time. Not to mention running a terrible campaign that spent all of its time hanging out with megadonors instead of actually visiting the swing states that decide elections...
- adventured 5y ago
  Russian interference had little to do with his victory in 2016, which was an establishment vs outsider election (and Hillary was quite unpopular and unlikable), where a very famous populist outsider won by telling his rabid audience whatever he thought they wanted to hear (little of which he actually followed through on). One of Trump's few talents is reading an audience and feeding it whatever it wants to hear; it makes him dangerous as a potential demagogue authoritarian type. Trump nearly beat Biden in 2020, and he would have beaten any other Democrat candidate that year, which overwhelmingly points to it not being Russian interference as a major influence. Everyone knew what Trump was by the 2020 election and he still attracted more votes than Barack Obama got in either election (and Obama was a widely popular President).
  - beepbooptheory 5y ago
    Respectfully, Bernie would have won.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      In 2016, definitely. In 2020, after several troubling compromises, I'm not so sure?
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    He did actually keep quite a few of his campaign promises. Where he really got stymied was lack of cooperation from the house under Ryan (early days of the dossier hoax). I made a habit of trying to count broken campaign promises starting in the Clinton years, and it is pretty much universal that presidents over-promise during the campaign and do the opposite once they get into office. I haven't really kept accurate numbers, but it certainly wasn't unique to trump by any means.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"While there are many who would like to believe that Trump won due to Russian interference, I actually believe he won due to meme magic." There's at least one book on this theory, such as Gary Lachman's "Dark Star Rising": https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Rising-Magick-Power/dp/0143132067 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Rising-Magick-Power/dp/0143...
- Bjorkbat 5y ago
  This actually looks really interesting. I was worried that the positive reviews might be due to a right-leaning echo-chamber, but it seems like the praise crosses political lines. I'll have to check it out.
zackmorris 5y ago
Ya I'm 44 and have had multiple personal experiences around the metaphysical that science simply has no explanation for. Now that I'm older, I realize that it's the models that are wrong, not reality. So I'm open to substantially more spiritual explanations than I used to be. I'd even go as far as the say that stochastic and emergent behavior is what forms our reality, not determinism. And that consciousness itself is the emergent behavior of the chaos working at the lowest levels of reality. At the end of the day, emotion and love and magic and all of that woo woo stuff is at least as real as atoms. But we don't have good language today to talk about the physics of our own personal realities. The things that are true in my life may not be true in yours, and vice versa. We just assume that the true reality is the one we all agree with, but I have not found that to be the case. So we talk past one another about, I don't know, critical race theory or whatever the flavor of the week is. When it's really about, how is my reality impacted as I learn the truths of your reality and our shared reality? If I'm wrong because I don't know something, does that mean that my reality is wrong? What happens if I make decisions over years of my life based on incorrect information? What does correct mean if it diminishes my quality of life? Can I be correct without hurting anyone else? Some of these questions in the end aren't answerable. In my own reality, I struggle with having to eat meat because that's what my body was designed to do. I carved a rotisserie chicken last night, divided the breast into portions and consumed it. There was almost no separation between the chicken's life and my own. How do we solve something like war when an awful lot of people haven't even stopped to think about the violence their own survival requires?
- can16358p 5y ago
  About the first paragraph... I know this might go a bit off topic. I used to be a hardcore-non-spiritual until the recent few years of scratching the surface of the possibility of there might more more to reality than we see. I'd love to hear any of your experiences that led you to turn to metaphysics, if it's appropriate to share of course. I also sometimes experience phenomenon which can't be eliminated away with physics, or weird coincidences that can't be explained with confirmation bias or selective attention, and trying to pinpoint a pattern, so anything that you'd think worth sharing in that direction would help.
golergka 5y ago
Ukranian president played Ukranian president on TV before actually becoming him. He also used to dance topless in latex pants, and now he's symbol of a true modern wartime leader. We live in South Park episode now.
TheJoeMan 5y ago
One thing to maybe help, whenever you read “Russian interference” just replace it with “Russian Facebook Ads” and see how ridiculous it sounds. The argument is that US citizens were swayed by shitty Facebook ads to vote differently? This does not reconcile with the historically small fraction of US swing voters, and also leads to a flawed mindset of “I’m smarter than those dumb people over there”. The winner in 2016 pitched themselves as an “outsider” for the masses, and sure was propelled by memes which are non-traditional. Even if you disagree with the winner, sometimes excuses like blaming Russia are just lies told to feel better.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  It wasn't Facebook ads. It was an army of trolls creating, sharing, and upvoting "fake news" articles tricking gullible people into thinking that Hillary molested children underneath a pizza parlor and tricking other suggestible people into thinking people said the problem was Facebook ads. I was on Reddit at the time, and 90% of commenters believed that the Correct the Record PAC was illegally astroturfing Reddit, despite lacking any evidence, or were trolls pretending that they believed the PAC was astroturfing.
  - sweetbitter 5y ago
    > It was an army of trolls Colloquially known as '/pol/'.
    - lern_too_spel 5y ago
      The Senate intelligence committee found otherwise: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... It explicitly called out GP's misunderstanding: "The Committee found that paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity, and moreover, are not alone an accurate measure of the IRA's operational scope, scale, or objectives, despite this aspect of social media being a focus of early press reporting and public awareness."
  - t-3 5y ago
Bjorkbat 5y ago
Also, so this isn't just about politics, I think astrology is...interesting. I mean, rationally, it's hard to take it seriously. So, what, you mean to tell me that the planets, which are an unfathomable distance away from us, somehow impact human personality and how we behave? Doesn't exactly help things that the stars over our head are not the same stars as the one's over the heads of the ancient Babylonians. And yet, once I took the time to actually look at my full star chart, I found that it described who I am to uncanny levels of accuracy. Rationally, probably just a coincidence that my personality actually happens to align to what my personality "should" be, astrologically speaking. My alternative theory is that when enough people believe in something, that something becomes, well, "real-ish". So even if astrology is a bunch of made-up nonsense, it becomes real-enough simply because a lot of people believe in astrology.
- rocqua 5y ago
  Did you check all possible outcomes of the chart? It might be that most of them are quite apt.
JohnBooty 5y ago
Essentially every national election in a two-party system will be close. Candidates are incentivized to move toward the middle, to try and claim the undecided voters. Because the elections will always be close, they are extremely sensitive to relatively small effects. Something that moves the needle by 1% or 0.5% one way or the other can decide the election. I think the 4ch-spawned memewar was one of those factors, though I also think foreign interference played a role as well. IMO, those undecided voters in the middle are probably the least, uh, savvy as well. The type most easily swayed by memes, clickbait, etc.
- vkou 5y ago
  But many elections aren't determined by undecided middle voters. They are a small minority of the voting population, and most effort spent convincing them is wasted. Elections are often determined by how successful the get-out-the-vote campaigns are, to get the base to show up and vote. It's both much easier, and much more profitable to bring a lazy member of your base to the polls, than to badger someone who doesn't care much either into voting for you.
  - cobbzilla 5y ago
    Bases are getting much smaller; there are fewer registered D/R vs independents. This makes the “swingable middle” rather large, and they’re not all rubes. Campaigns seem to be iterating on scalable/personalizable social strategy. Obama figured it out better than Romney, Trump (maybe disturbingly) better than anyone before. Prediction: some future candidate will go “next level” and piss everyone off even more, but it’ll work and they’ll be elected.
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      > Bases are getting much smaller; there are fewer registered D/R vs independents. While this is true, the evidence seems to be that most independents actually have a party preference in their voting patterns -- they're what political scientists sometimes call "leaners", e.g., they register (and identify) as independent, but they have a clear lean toward Democrats or Republicans. From the authors of the 2016 book Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction: "The problem with leaners is that there is almost no difference between people who identify as partisans and people who say they are independent and then say they lean toward a particular party. More often than not, we can count on leaners to vote for that party, support the party’s positions, and sometimes even donate money to the party’s candidates. What’s more, leaners consistently support their party from election to election." https://www.vox.com/2016/1/22/10814522/independents-voters-facts-myths https://www.vox.com/2016/1/22/10814522/independents-voters-f... I think the truly swingable middle -- folks who, for example, voted for Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020 -- is actually a pretty small group. And, it's a small group that's got both disproportionate power at the ballot box and a fairly low engagement with actual political issues. I think I (somewhat reluctantly) agree with your observation about campaigns iterating on social strategy, though, because that tends to be the best way to reach those swing voters: they aren't motivated by ideology or policy preference, but by star power and charisma.
circlefavshape 5y ago
> I just think that objective, material reality is less objective and less material than I thought all along When people say "objective, material reality" they normally mean ... well, things like the gravity and chemistry and stubbing your toe being painful. What story you want to use to describe the aggregate behaviour of 100 million human voters has very little to do with that, surely
ryan_lane 5y ago
A lot of those memes came from Russia. There's a large amount of evidence that Brexit and Trump were fueled by Russian disinformation campaigns. Quite a bit of the polarization we've seen in the US has also be fueled by them. The sad thing is that Russia didn't even need to make anything up to make this happen. They poured fuel on our existing divisions, until we couldn't even talk to each other, then poured resources into social media to prop up one candidate while attacking the other. Our hatred made us too blind to see it happening.
- sacrosancty 5y ago
  When you say "our hatred", do you include yourself personally or are you judging others while exempting yourself?

aliswe 5y ago

Did you see that recent meme where a right wing "influencer" with tens of thousands of followers only got 13 likes on a recent tweet? would be interesting if true! EDIT: https://imgur.com/gallery/cZwNWup https://imgur.com/gallery/cZwNWup

drakythe 5y ago

Why not both? Russia employed a bunch of trolls, who helped create and amplify the memes. I think reality is a lot more complicated and humans just look for the simplest possible explanation, like “Russia did it!” Or “Meme’s did it!” Or “Racists did it!” When it was all of them and many other reasons. See Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth” video for a genuinely brilliant breakdown of this idea and how it relates to Flat Earthere and other nonsense.

Bjorkbat 5y ago
And so there's still definitely a part of me that realizes that, yeah, rationally, you can't just ignore the influence of Russian interference or the flaws in modern polling. Looking back, it's obvious that we underestimated how politically motivated working-class white voters could be. The thing about meme magic though is that there's so many spooky "synchronicities" woven throughout that I can't help but take it seriously.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  A relatively new to me concept I've been running into is that of "memetic virus", intentionally constructed by human hands, that, if implanted at opportune times in the right minds would cause a conflagration of an irrational thought to spread around the world. Richard Dawkins mentioned something alike this in his "viruses of the mind" essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind but his discourse was limited to denigrating the religious and seemed to miss out on the bigger picture, that being, that if it were possible to ingrain a meme onto people's minds that one day, someone would use it as an instrument of mental war. I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary. How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years? If it were one person or a certain group of people, it might make sense, but this memetic virus seems to have spread worldwide, infecting almost everyone, and since our frame of reference is also infected we can't see that we're infected with it. Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know. I really don't know if this is true, but I suspect that if you brought a group of average people from 2000, 1990, 1980, & 1970, I feel like they would all agree that the world has gone mad and that there must be some reason for it.
  - 3np 5y ago
    This is a major plot point of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
  - dfxm12 5y ago
    How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years? It depends on your values for most of the words in this statement. For example, sure things ebb and flow, but I don't think we can say things were relatively peaceful in the 90s. So, for most values, the answer is likely that things haven't changed as much as you think; you're just more aware of everything now. You can life by the adage, "ignorance is bliss", or live a less blissful life aware of everything going on, or even try to take advantage of those who are living blissfully.
Yoric 5y ago
> Russia employed a bunch of trolls, who helped create and amplify the memes. As long as we all agree that it's a bunch of literal trolls. The kind who live below bridges.
mcguire 5y ago
The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html I especially like the title of the section, "Russian Propaganda Is Not Committed to Consistency".

emmp 5y ago

Surely the idea that a young motivated constituency used the most modern communication methods available to them to campaign for their preferred candidate, successfully moving the needle somewhat, is pretty mundane?

zdragnar 5y ago

Surely it didn't have anything to do with the media pimping him nonstop during the primaries, giving him disproportionate airtime, or that the democrats ran one of their least likable candidates of all time. Not to mention running a terrible campaign that spent all of its time hanging out with megadonors instead of actually visiting the swing states that decide elections...

adventured 5y ago
Russian interference had little to do with his victory in 2016, which was an establishment vs outsider election (and Hillary was quite unpopular and unlikable), where a very famous populist outsider won by telling his rabid audience whatever he thought they wanted to hear (little of which he actually followed through on). One of Trump's few talents is reading an audience and feeding it whatever it wants to hear; it makes him dangerous as a potential demagogue authoritarian type. Trump nearly beat Biden in 2020, and he would have beaten any other Democrat candidate that year, which overwhelmingly points to it not being Russian interference as a major influence. Everyone knew what Trump was by the 2020 election and he still attracted more votes than Barack Obama got in either election (and Obama was a widely popular President).
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  Respectfully, Bernie would have won.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    In 2016, definitely. In 2020, after several troubling compromises, I'm not so sure?
- zdragnar 5y ago
  He did actually keep quite a few of his campaign promises. Where he really got stymied was lack of cooperation from the house under Ryan (early days of the dossier hoax). I made a habit of trying to count broken campaign promises starting in the Clinton years, and it is pretty much universal that presidents over-promise during the campaign and do the opposite once they get into office. I haven't really kept accurate numbers, but it certainly wasn't unique to trump by any means.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"While there are many who would like to believe that Trump won due to Russian interference, I actually believe he won due to meme magic." There's at least one book on this theory, such as Gary Lachman's "Dark Star Rising": https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Rising-Magick-Power/dp/0143132067 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Rising-Magick-Power/dp/0143...

Bjorkbat 5y ago
This actually looks really interesting. I was worried that the positive reviews might be due to a right-leaning echo-chamber, but it seems like the praise crosses political lines. I'll have to check it out.

zackmorris 5y ago

Ya I'm 44 and have had multiple personal experiences around the metaphysical that science simply has no explanation for. Now that I'm older, I realize that it's the models that are wrong, not reality. So I'm open to substantially more spiritual explanations than I used to be. I'd even go as far as the say that stochastic and emergent behavior is what forms our reality, not determinism. And that consciousness itself is the emergent behavior of the chaos working at the lowest levels of reality. At the end of the day, emotion and love and magic and all of that woo woo stuff is at least as real as atoms. But we don't have good language today to talk about the physics of our own personal realities. The things that are true in my life may not be true in yours, and vice versa. We just assume that the true reality is the one we all agree with, but I have not found that to be the case. So we talk past one another about, I don't know, critical race theory or whatever the flavor of the week is. When it's really about, how is my reality impacted as I learn the truths of your reality and our shared reality? If I'm wrong because I don't know something, does that mean that my reality is wrong? What happens if I make decisions over years of my life based on incorrect information? What does correct mean if it diminishes my quality of life? Can I be correct without hurting anyone else? Some of these questions in the end aren't answerable. In my own reality, I struggle with having to eat meat because that's what my body was designed to do. I carved a rotisserie chicken last night, divided the breast into portions and consumed it. There was almost no separation between the chicken's life and my own. How do we solve something like war when an awful lot of people haven't even stopped to think about the violence their own survival requires?

can16358p 5y ago
About the first paragraph... I know this might go a bit off topic. I used to be a hardcore-non-spiritual until the recent few years of scratching the surface of the possibility of there might more more to reality than we see. I'd love to hear any of your experiences that led you to turn to metaphysics, if it's appropriate to share of course. I also sometimes experience phenomenon which can't be eliminated away with physics, or weird coincidences that can't be explained with confirmation bias or selective attention, and trying to pinpoint a pattern, so anything that you'd think worth sharing in that direction would help.

golergka 5y ago

Ukranian president played Ukranian president on TV before actually becoming him. He also used to dance topless in latex pants, and now he's symbol of a true modern wartime leader. We live in South Park episode now.

TheJoeMan 5y ago

One thing to maybe help, whenever you read “Russian interference” just replace it with “Russian Facebook Ads” and see how ridiculous it sounds. The argument is that US citizens were swayed by shitty Facebook ads to vote differently? This does not reconcile with the historically small fraction of US swing voters, and also leads to a flawed mindset of “I’m smarter than those dumb people over there”. The winner in 2016 pitched themselves as an “outsider” for the masses, and sure was propelled by memes which are non-traditional. Even if you disagree with the winner, sometimes excuses like blaming Russia are just lies told to feel better.

lern_too_spel 5y ago
It wasn't Facebook ads. It was an army of trolls creating, sharing, and upvoting "fake news" articles tricking gullible people into thinking that Hillary molested children underneath a pizza parlor and tricking other suggestible people into thinking people said the problem was Facebook ads. I was on Reddit at the time, and 90% of commenters believed that the Correct the Record PAC was illegally astroturfing Reddit, despite lacking any evidence, or were trolls pretending that they believed the PAC was astroturfing.
- sweetbitter 5y ago
  > It was an army of trolls Colloquially known as '/pol/'.
  - lern_too_spel 5y ago
    The Senate intelligence committee found otherwise: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... It explicitly called out GP's misunderstanding: "The Committee found that paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity, and moreover, are not alone an accurate measure of the IRA's operational scope, scale, or objectives, despite this aspect of social media being a focus of early press reporting and public awareness."
- t-3 5y ago

Bjorkbat 5y ago

Also, so this isn't just about politics, I think astrology is...interesting. I mean, rationally, it's hard to take it seriously. So, what, you mean to tell me that the planets, which are an unfathomable distance away from us, somehow impact human personality and how we behave? Doesn't exactly help things that the stars over our head are not the same stars as the one's over the heads of the ancient Babylonians. And yet, once I took the time to actually look at my full star chart, I found that it described who I am to uncanny levels of accuracy. Rationally, probably just a coincidence that my personality actually happens to align to what my personality "should" be, astrologically speaking. My alternative theory is that when enough people believe in something, that something becomes, well, "real-ish". So even if astrology is a bunch of made-up nonsense, it becomes real-enough simply because a lot of people believe in astrology.

rocqua 5y ago
Did you check all possible outcomes of the chart? It might be that most of them are quite apt.

JohnBooty 5y ago

Essentially every national election in a two-party system will be close. Candidates are incentivized to move toward the middle, to try and claim the undecided voters. Because the elections will always be close, they are extremely sensitive to relatively small effects. Something that moves the needle by 1% or 0.5% one way or the other can decide the election. I think the 4ch-spawned memewar was one of those factors, though I also think foreign interference played a role as well. IMO, those undecided voters in the middle are probably the least, uh, savvy as well. The type most easily swayed by memes, clickbait, etc.

vkou 5y ago
But many elections aren't determined by undecided middle voters. They are a small minority of the voting population, and most effort spent convincing them is wasted. Elections are often determined by how successful the get-out-the-vote campaigns are, to get the base to show up and vote. It's both much easier, and much more profitable to bring a lazy member of your base to the polls, than to badger someone who doesn't care much either into voting for you.
- cobbzilla 5y ago
  Bases are getting much smaller; there are fewer registered D/R vs independents. This makes the “swingable middle” rather large, and they’re not all rubes. Campaigns seem to be iterating on scalable/personalizable social strategy. Obama figured it out better than Romney, Trump (maybe disturbingly) better than anyone before. Prediction: some future candidate will go “next level” and piss everyone off even more, but it’ll work and they’ll be elected.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    > Bases are getting much smaller; there are fewer registered D/R vs independents. While this is true, the evidence seems to be that most independents actually have a party preference in their voting patterns -- they're what political scientists sometimes call "leaners", e.g., they register (and identify) as independent, but they have a clear lean toward Democrats or Republicans. From the authors of the 2016 book Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction: "The problem with leaners is that there is almost no difference between people who identify as partisans and people who say they are independent and then say they lean toward a particular party. More often than not, we can count on leaners to vote for that party, support the party’s positions, and sometimes even donate money to the party’s candidates. What’s more, leaners consistently support their party from election to election." https://www.vox.com/2016/1/22/10814522/independents-voters-facts-myths https://www.vox.com/2016/1/22/10814522/independents-voters-f... I think the truly swingable middle -- folks who, for example, voted for Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020 -- is actually a pretty small group. And, it's a small group that's got both disproportionate power at the ballot box and a fairly low engagement with actual political issues. I think I (somewhat reluctantly) agree with your observation about campaigns iterating on social strategy, though, because that tends to be the best way to reach those swing voters: they aren't motivated by ideology or policy preference, but by star power and charisma.

circlefavshape 5y ago

> I just think that objective, material reality is less objective and less material than I thought all along When people say "objective, material reality" they normally mean ... well, things like the gravity and chemistry and stubbing your toe being painful. What story you want to use to describe the aggregate behaviour of 100 million human voters has very little to do with that, surely

ryan_lane 5y ago

A lot of those memes came from Russia. There's a large amount of evidence that Brexit and Trump were fueled by Russian disinformation campaigns. Quite a bit of the polarization we've seen in the US has also be fueled by them. The sad thing is that Russia didn't even need to make anything up to make this happen. They poured fuel on our existing divisions, until we couldn't even talk to each other, then poured resources into social media to prop up one candidate while attacking the other. Our hatred made us too blind to see it happening.

sacrosancty 5y ago
When you say "our hatred", do you include yourself personally or are you judging others while exempting yourself?