The Landstander posted:

Here's the easiest answer to your question:

Fushigi Yuugi fansub posted:

since the definition of the political right seems to be isolationist/nationalist nowadays, and the definition of the left is cosmopolitan/globalist, does it, then, follow that a capital globalist, who opposes any and all restrictions on the movement of capital and people (i.e. workforce), is in fact a leftist?

skasion posted:

It was a vision Hillary herself couldn’t articulate for them.

reignofevil posted:

Lol. What a president.

Pick posted:

Accretionist posted:

Is this book accurate? They ignored the rust belt on purpose?

That is unbelievably stupid.

Literally unbelievable.

I'm not sure I believe it.

That is stupid to the point of crazy.

Is this book accurate? They ignored the rust belt on purpose?

some goon posted:

The woman did everything right. She ran the campaign literally as well as it could possibly go. I cannot find a single flaw in the way she ran it besides
1. She's a woman
2. she's not Bernie

So yeah, this one is on us. I can't even loving vote and I feel responsible. Accept it and don't be a weasel.

The Landstander posted:

Here's the easiest answer to your question:

Homestar Runner posted:

but but i was reliably informed by D&D that

Accretionist posted:

I will never understand her personality cult.




Matching dystopic sci-fi uniforms

Accretionist posted:

I will never understand her personality cult.




Matching dystopic sci-fi uniforms

The Landstander posted:

Here's the easiest answer to your question:

Gammatron 64 posted:

You forgot social security and medicare. I'm sure all these things are probably going away and more!


I had to like unfollow most people on facebook and I quit twitter entirely.

Holy hell do people loving loathe each other these days and drat is it vicious. It's already gotten violent and it's going to escalate and get worse. It's like everyone is infected with a drat hate plague and has gone mad with complete unbridled rage.

One time I poked a beehive on these very forums and had people flipping out and telling me I'm human scum who should be dead. People be crazy these days.

But Rocks Hurt Head posted:

Speaking from a lefty perspective, left twitter is constantly eating itself (more than usual) post election and it loving sucks so bad. It was fun during the primaries and even throughout the GE, but between Syria, antifa protests and constant relitigation of the primaries it's totally unusable.

Maya Fey posted:

Testikles posted:

1. Humans have very short attention spans.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

and then you wrote umptillion more paragraphs

Testikles posted:

People will see those paragraphs and think, boy, he must really be smart about this. They'll skim to the end, think I'm right, and the rest of it was actually just me mashing my keyboard.

Dial-a-Dog posted:

that's amazing that's exactly what happened

anime was right posted:

i think robby mook is....... not very good!!!

Testikles posted:

People will see those paragraphs and think, boy, he must really be smart about this. They'll skim to the end, think I'm right, and the rest of it was actually just me mashing my keyboard.

Maya Fey posted:

Maya Fey posted:

Honky Dong Country posted:

As an energy feminist, I --

*Faaaaaaaaaaaaaart*

Pawl posted:

I hope the democrats double down on identity politics and eventually splinter into a good liberal party that isn't bogged down by gender/race nonsense.

CassandraZara posted:

I think it's a brilliant troll personally

bonerjam posted:

wait so being pro-choice is part and parcel of feminism?
you can't be a pro-life feminist?

maybe i'm overthinking this since if that's a real quote she has to be trolling the world at large.

bonerjam posted:

wait so being pro-choice is part and parcel of feminism?
you can't be a pro-life feminist?

maybe i'm overthinking this since if that's a real quote she has to be trolling the world at large.

The Landstander posted:

Here's the easiest answer to your question:

Testikles posted:

The internet is really what has made us all more rabid and hateful. These are my seven reasons:

1. Humans have very short attention spans. We like quick and easy digestible information. The listicle is only popular because it delivers information in an appealing format. Those short two minute UpWorthy videos are popular because they are easy to watch. Humans are lazy creatures and we enjoy getting the gist of things quickly. It take a lot of effort to sit down and read a book, and unless we're really interested in a topic, that's a high hurdle to jump over if there's something easy close by. The information delivered is less nuanced, more stark, and delivered in simplest terms.

2. poo poo that gets us riled up is more popular. For better or for worse, we like to feel things. Stuff that makes us happy, sad, angry, whatever, is going to be more popular than something overly clinical. Feelings are supposed to be quick summaries of complex information (we don't need to go over the many reasons why we should run when a lion jumps out at us, we just need to be afraid), and it's an easy system to hijack. We're therefore more inclined towards information that provokes a response, not necessarily something that is 'objectively true'.

3. There is too much information. We have near total information about the world. We always assumed that with total information we would make better choices, but now we are so flooded with it, that we can't tell what is actually important anymore. Now when faced with a complex issue we can literally bury ourselves in the details and miss the topic at large. To take a very low level example, if I wanted to go out and buy a car, in previous decades, I'd rely on the salesperson or the automaker for a select set of specs and maybe a magazine review. Maybe I'd consult a few people I know and trust and see what they think. I could mull it over and then decide. Now not only do I have that information, I now online ratings from multiple websites, I have youtube reviews, I have podcasts, I have facebook posts etc.The world is now able to weigh in on my car making decision. I now have to curate this information on my own and create trusted networks that were taken for granted before. But at the same time....

4. The gatekeepers have been bypassed. The internet has opened the floodgates for content creation. Where before we would really have to rely on a very select set of taste makers for our media, now anybody can produce content. Things that used to be hard to come by: the niche, the strange, avant-garde, conspiratorial and underground, are now very capable of being produced and delivered just as quickly as 'mainstream media.' What might have been a 'zine' trade between a few in the know, can suddenly blow up in a Vice article overnight. This has had the great advantage of bringing new talent and content to light that was missed by the gatekeepers. This served also to discredit them too. By intentionally or unintentionally missing information, the gatekeepers can appear ignorant or dishonest. It damages their credibility. People begin to ask why aren't things they find important being covered?

5. The internet destroys and creates tribes. Humans are tribal creatures. We naturally find reasons to cluster together, and they are arbitrary. In the past the easiest reason to form a tribe was by proximity. You lived in the same area and because you lived in the same area, you generally spoke the same way, dressed the same way, and did the same things. As civilization progressed, politics and economics helped shape that too. You could belong to a class, you could be part of a profession, and with proximity, and its offshoot culture, you could be an ethnicity or of a religion. So there were really only so many acceptable or reasonable dimensions of tribe. Regardless of how it forms, the tribe sets out many key things: mores and behaviours. The tribe tells you what to do, how to do it, and why it should be done. No person is completely immune to this.

On the one hand modernism and post-modernism has really screwed around with that. With the hyperfocus on originality and the individual, people feel dislocated from the world at large. People now have to find social meaning through other means and the internet has facilitated that. We can now bond over things that have stronger meanings to us like hobbies, experiences, or unsurprisingly sex. As people come together to discuss stuff, they start forming a community, and then eventually a tribe, complete with insiders and outsiders.

On the other hand, we are now exposed to how different we all are. Whereas before there were issues unspoken, and due to the limits of communication we could just assume that the world around us conformed to our expectations, with the rise of the internet, we suddenly are faced with the fact that people disagree. The large super tribes of government and nation are fraying because we can no longer take it for granted that other people elsewhere in the country, the state, the city, or even our own neighborhoods represent us. We start to cling to our fundamental beliefs in fear of losing ourselves. For conservatives, they might entrench themselves in religion, for liberals, it might be identity politics.

6. We all think we are the good guy. Nobody imagines themselves being the bad guy (excluding the rare case). At worst people might fantasize about being an anti-hero. They have unlikable qualities but these unlikable qualities are precisely what gives them an edge over their enemies. Now because who the good guys are, are defined by your tribe, there will be stark disagreement over who the good guy is in any scenario. Even groups of people who might otherwise agree will get into arguments because they are simply not the 'right' people. This might be fine if it wasn't for the fact that one aspect of being the good guys is often fighting the bad guys. The internet has created the perfect arena for this. With many clashing opinions and meeting tribes, you can now interject yourself into any fray you want to. If somebody is bashing your tribe anywhere at any time, you can be there instantaneously with little effort on your part, to fight the good fight.

Another effect is because we are the good guys, we tend to look for things on the internet that affirm our tribe and our identities within the tribe. It takes a lot to go out and challenge your own belief system and the path of least resistance is to ignore that. We build echo chambers for ourselves and even though many people might pride themselves on being open minded, they are usually only open minded to things that do not disrupt their tribal core beliefs.

7. Best of all, there are no consequences. Where tribal conflicts often meant the threat of violence or even death, the internet removes that from the equation. You can be as vile as you want with little or no repercussions. Things that you might never consider saying to a person's face are all suddenly kosher and because you will never meet this person, there is no reason to give quarter or relent. They are the enemy and their destruction can only mean affirmation of your beliefs.

The conclusion is that we have this scenario: we have rapidly reproducing unfiltered information often lacking nuance flooding the internet. It is difficult to sort through what is important and due to our tribal tendency and our own human faults, we will tend to select the easiest absorbable information, with the greatest emotional appeal, and what conforms to our beliefs. Other people are doing the same, and we are exposed to them. We realize we don't like them very much disassociate from them, and start to form our own social circles. We are constantly bombarded with contrary information, and begin to attack outwards against people who don't agree with us, because they are not like us and are bad people. On their own end they do the same. America is slowly filling up with warring tribes of people who do not follow traditional definitions, and the traditional definitions are falling apart. Everybody is splintering in every direction and there is no reason to compromise.

big time bisexual posted:

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/855136101119471616

big time bisexual posted:

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/855136101119471616