Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.

It’s a very friendly neighborhood

Mhm, sure seems like it.

I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

Alex Jones and others have been pushing this notion for over a decade, that Planned Parenthood actually operates a black market for baby parts and organs.

I think they used some shitty, vastly out if context stealth footage from Project Veritas, if memory serves.

Hell, the whole crazy Q Anon adrenochrome shit at least partially spawned from this: Live, scared babies have more or more pure adrenochrome, therefore thats how we know they do post birth abortions!

Its a delusional reinforcing loop of explanations for things that are not happening leading to explanations for those explanations… evidence is no where, but if you’re prone or susceptible to the idea that there is a true, objective, hidden evil in this world, then uh, well facts don’t care about your feelings and if you feel scared and angry, any ‘facts’ will do.

I mean… on the right side, we have what you are describing, as well as many conservatives just outright being pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some now literally moving to the former Soviet Union they despised 30 years ago so that they can legally beat their wives and never have to see an openly gay or trans person.

This is fairly straightforward: They’re religious, traditional conservatives who love hierarchy and hate and fear ‘weird’ people as an animating drive in politics. Y’all Qaeda, just another flavor of fundamentalism.

On the left side, you have people who take their support for anything standing against American dominance and imperialism so far that they are openly in favor of China taking over Taiwan, totally denying or massively downplaying the Holodomor or Uighur encampments/persecution, saying they support Yemeni pirate-terrorists just shooting missiles at any cargo ship of any nation or destination that cruises nearby.

A person I used to be close to, and thought I had reasonably similar politics with, described Hu Jintao being basically arrested and disappeared extremely publicly as part of a CCP conference as… him being placed into witness protection due to a threat on his life.

That makes literally 0 sense.

Hell, I myself started in a conservative family, got lost in the ancap sauce for a while, then discovered oh, there’s basically nothing anarchist about any kind of capitalism, capitalism’s prime function is to aggregate power, replace all ‘free markets’ with monopolies and oligopolies, ancapism is basically total bullshit that stole the word anarchist from left wing movements, and then I read Baukunin and Kropotkin.

Now I’m just tired lol.

Horseshoe theory is sadly real, for a small number of hypervocal people.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

Obligatory reminder that Dick Cheney literally does not have a heart or pulse: his heart was replaced by a continuous flow pump.

Obligatory reminder that Dick Cheney literally does not have a heart or a pulse, as his heart was replaced by a continuous flow pump.

So… ghoul indeed.

Not sure about his rejected screenplays but uh well he has definitely written a book or two with comically offensive depictions of black americans, and well now he got his dream come true in the most insane way possible and produces movies that are astoundingly tasteless like Lady Ballers.

In terms of containerized solutions for apps/programs?

Better than the alternatives.

In general?

I feel like they’re exes for Linux, and would greatly prefer to not have multiple different installations of the same or slightly different versions of dependencies wasting space.

Shockingly similar to Ben Shapiro, who seems to have wanted to be a concert violinist and later screenwriter, but had his screenplays rejected and found more luck telling the world that basically all Arabs and Muslims are savages and deserve to be collateral damaged.

At this point I wonder if Rush Limbaugh secretly wanted to be a painter but was rejected from art school.

And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…

… because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.

They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.

In case people forgot:

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/active-listening-marketers-smartphones-ad-targeting-cox-media-group-1235841007/

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

They (basically any large online retailer or advertiser) are, in fact, listening to everything you say near your phone, near your alexa, your echo, your smart device.

Linking heard words and phrases with your known shopping activity + a gigantic dataset + statistical analysis = they can predict all kinds of things about you, with shockingly high accuracy, and thus aim products at you.

You know how archaeologists and detectives can make a decent profile of a person or group’s daily lifestyle by analyzing your garbage?

Welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia version of that.