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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 t

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.
    - BizarroLand 5y ago
      I feel that this kind of response isn't very helpful. "Oh, it's always been bad, you just didn't know any better" is the same thing that has always been said in response to emergent issues. America was not politically unstable in the 90's. It may have been rocky, but not unstable. Saying it was just as bad then as it is now is false. Only a fringe element would have cheered John Hinckley Jr's attempt to assassinate Reagan in 1981, but today an attempt whether successful or not on either the Democratic or Republican front runners would get a resounding cheer from a not-insignificant section of the population. I would hazard to say that, under the right circumstances, a single bullet could spark an internal American Conflict between the groups of people who can best be identified not by what they stand for but by what they stand against. Trying to say that the tensions the country are facing today are equal to the tensions of the past glosses over the amplification of the screaming masses thanks to technology, the financial whirlwind created by the internet, where unimaginable fortunes can be raised and erased faster than you can blink, the lancing of the pus-filled boil of human misery that education and awareness brings, the struggle of the lowest-paid and lowest earning members of society to simply survive when the financial ladder of arbitrage no longer reaches their grasp. Many of these things existed in some proto form in the 90's, yes, but they have grown since then and, like an abused child who becomes a sulking and angry teenager, may reach the point where they start to swing back. You can't treat the teenager like you treated the child, you're far more likely to get a black eye.
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".

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.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    I feel that this kind of response isn't very helpful. "Oh, it's always been bad, you just didn't know any better" is the same thing that has always been said in response to emergent issues. America was not politically unstable in the 90's. It may have been rocky, but not unstable. Saying it was just as bad then as it is now is false. Only a fringe element would have cheered John Hinckley Jr's attempt to assassinate Reagan in 1981, but today an attempt whether successful or not on either the Democratic or Republican front runners would get a resounding cheer from a not-insignificant section of the population. I would hazard to say that, under the right circumstances, a single bullet could spark an internal American Conflict between the groups of people who can best be identified not by what they stand for but by what they stand against. Trying to say that the tensions the country are facing today are equal to the tensions of the past glosses over the amplification of the screaming masses thanks to technology, the financial whirlwind created by the internet, where unimaginable fortunes can be raised and erased faster than you can blink, the lancing of the pus-filled boil of human misery that education and awareness brings, the struggle of the lowest-paid and lowest earning members of society to simply survive when the financial ladder of arbitrage no longer reaches their grasp. Many of these things existed in some proto form in the 90's, yes, but they have grown since then and, like an abused child who becomes a sulking and angry teenager, may reach the point where they start to swing back. You can't treat the teenager like you treated the child, you're far more likely to get a black eye.

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".