Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

Does anybody like me make the idiotic mistake of reading Youtube or Twitter comment sections on videos or posts about political subjects right now? It's some of the most depressing reading I've ever seen. I was tempted to make a thread about it but it's so bleak I don't know if I even want other people to start polluting their minds with that shit.

If it's a tweet or a post about coronavirus you can be sure to find loads of stuff about "plandemic" or how the scientists are lying and we need to all be taking hydroxychloroquine as it's proven to cure corona. Or there will be messages about how Bill Gates is trying to wipe out the population with his vaccines and you can be sure the commentors don't intend to take any of those new world order vaccines.

I was sent a video a couple of months back of Madonna singing along to one of her sons playing guitar. The comment section for what I thought was a pretty innocuous video was such a vile outpouring of hate, I couldn't believe it. Turns out that most of Madonna's tweets have a similar level of vitriol right now. I didn't realise this but apparently she's a pedo and a child torturer who uses a chemical extracted from suffering children to keep her looking youthful. And it's not just her either! Tom Hanks and Barack Obama also take this drug (adrenochrome). This is the same mad conspiracy shit as the pizzagate stuff as it goes. I fell down this Qanon rabbit hole and it left me feeling no hope for society whatsoever.

Anyway the reason I mention all that shit is because I started to look at the profiles of a lot of these accounts and I was startled by the amount of them that have Trump/MAGA stuff in their profiles, often along with bible verses. And they're SO angry ALL THE TIME. I really think that there is a serious element of mental illness that binds a lot of Trump supporters, maybe because he often baits people with conspiratorial mindsets, think #obamagate etc.

I don't really know the point of this post. I guess I have seen enough of this stuff that I now don't really believe there's any way that Trump doesn't get a second term. The one thing that Trump supporters have is a shit load of conviction in what they believe. The opposition doesn't really seem to have that as much.

never read the comments. it's always awful. 

side note.if you need some wholesome detox after too much awful then go watch some tabitha brown on tiktok which is the only reason i've ever looked at tiktok.  i heard her get interviewed on NPR and had to investigate. she has a great voice. she had something go viral for wholesomeness and now has millions of followers. it's mostly vegan recipes. she talked about int he interview how she didn't know how to cook and only learned when she got married.. then she went vegan.  

https://www.tiktok.com/@iamtabithabrown/video/6827323030595816709

  On 5/21/2020 at 8:58 AM, Blir said:

Does anybody like me make the idiotic mistake of reading Youtube or Twitter comment sections on videos or posts about political subjects right now? It's some of the most depressing reading I've ever seen. I was tempted to make a thread about it but it's so bleak I don't know if I even want other people to start polluting their minds with that shit.

If it's a tweet or a post about coronavirus you can be sure to find loads of stuff about "plandemic" or how the scientists are lying and we need to all be taking hydroxychloroquine as it's proven to cure corona. Or there will be messages about how Bill Gates is trying to wipe out the population with his vaccines and you can be sure the commentors don't intend to take any of those new world order vaccines.

I was sent a video a couple of months back of Madonna singing along to one of her sons playing guitar. The comment section for what I thought was a pretty innocuous video was such a vile outpouring of hate, I couldn't believe it. Turns out that most of Madonna's tweets have a similar level of vitriol right now. I didn't realise this but apparently she's a pedo and a child torturer who uses a chemical extracted from suffering children to keep her looking youthful. And it's not just her either! Tom Hanks and Barack Obama also take this drug (adrenochrome). This is the same mad conspiracy shit as the pizzagate stuff as it goes. I fell down this Qanon rabbit hole and it left me feeling no hope for society whatsoever.

Anyway the reason I mention all that shit is because I started to look at the profiles of a lot of these accounts and I was startled by the amount of them that have Trump/MAGA stuff in their profiles, often along with bible verses. And they're SO angry ALL THE TIME. I really think that there is a serious element of mental illness that binds a lot of Trump supporters, maybe because he often baits people with conspiratorial mindsets, think #obamagate etc.

I don't really know the point of this post. I guess I have seen enough of this stuff that I now don't really believe there's any way that Trump doesn't get a second term. The one thing that Trump supporters have is a shit load of conviction in what they believe. The opposition doesn't really seem to have that as much.

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oh and LOL at adrenochrome.. it's something hunter s thompson made up in Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas. i wish he was still alive so he could savage some of these fucks. 

  On 5/21/2020 at 9:32 AM, ignatius said:

i wish he was still alive so he could savage some of these fucks. 

I don't think HST would have made it past 2016. I know this wasn't the cause of his suicide but if he couldn't take dubya running the show, no way he would have mentally been able to handle what is there now...

  On 5/21/2020 at 9:06 PM, zero said:

I don't think HST would have made it past 2016. I know this wasn't the cause of his suicide but if he couldn't take dubya running the show, no way he would have mentally been able to handle what is there now...

he did savage that group of hacks and cronies though.  but yeah.. i should add a  qualifier.. "I wish he was still alive and in fighting shape" because he wasn't really in fighting shape even though his mind was pretty sharp and his commentary insightful and unique to the end. 

his voice is missed and it's hard to see anyone who's taken up the slack

big T tested "positively towards negative" this morning. 

  On 5/21/2020 at 9:44 PM, ignatius said:

he did savage that group of hacks and cronies though.  but yeah.. i should add a  qualifier.. "I wish he was still alive and in fighting shape" because he wasn't really in fighting shape even though his mind was pretty sharp and his commentary insightful and unique to the end. 

his voice is missed and it's hard to see anyone who's taken up the slack

he was an alcoholic and a drug addict. the world could be a different place if he had sobered up.

  On 5/21/2020 at 10:44 PM, very honest said:

he was an alcoholic and a drug addict. the world could be a different place if he had sobered up.

maybe. he did have a very long run of keeping his shit together during long states of altered consciousness. i wonder what would've happened had he won the election for sheriff.  the book put together by Jann Wenner "Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson" is a really interesting look of who he is. It's a look at him from perspective of all the people in his life. long interviews put in chronological order.

Hunter S. Thompson: I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

^stupid/ignorant framing. 'dont tell Donald how rich Brad is!'  ....except that's exactly how Trump and his cronies work. they all expect to benefit and for others that are 'on their side' to benefit and project a strong/similar facade. it's basically the same as a MLM scheme. 

  On 5/21/2020 at 10:44 PM, very honest said:

he was an alcoholic and a drug addict. the world could be a different place if he had sobered up.

naw

  On 5/22/2020 at 12:10 AM, ignatius said:

maybe. he did have a very long run of keeping his shit together during long states of altered consciousness. 

his son and others said he was

  Quote

I think it was dependency, especially in the case of booze – he was an alcoholic, he had to drink.

If he were to stop drinking, he would have been very uncomfortable. Why he never wanted to stop drinking, I don’t know. He didn’t drink to get drunk, though; I never saw him drunk in a conventional sense, like slurring or staggering or anything. He drank because his body needed the alcohol, same with cocaine – that was a maintenance thing. Other drugs, like LSD and stuff, I think that was for fun. Personally I think that over time the alcohol and the cocaine undermined his ability to write.

https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/busting-myths-hunter-s-thompsons-son/

https://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/hunter-thompsons-daily-routi.html

@auxien

oh shit that was e jean carroll who wrote that book

he had some good stints, most in the distant past.

  On 5/21/2020 at 8:58 AM, Blir said:

Does anybody like me make the idiotic mistake of reading WATMM posts about political subjects right now?

nope.

  On 5/22/2020 at 1:02 AM, very honest said:

his son and others said he was

https://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/hunter-thompsons-daily-routi.html

 

not disputing that he was an addict..  just saying "perhaps" to the world being that much different if he'd had sobered up. i'm sure his personal life would've been different for sure. that book Gonzo takes a really hard look at his relationships w/secretaries/assistants/girlfriends etc. and how cocaine and alcohol took a toll on them. also, he was in near constant pain for a long time because of a hip/thigh was bone on bone and worn down to a slope according to some reports. 

  On 5/21/2020 at 8:58 AM, Blir said:

I didn't realise this but apparently she's a pedo and a child torturer who uses a chemical extracted from suffering children to keep her looking youthful.

She needs to ask for a refund.

^what ignatius said basically. he was just a dude who wrote some 'outrageous' shit, cool. world-altering tho? naw.

  On 5/22/2020 at 1:23 AM, auxien said:

^what ignatius said basically. he was just a dude who wrote some 'outrageous' shit, cool. world-altering tho? naw.

he worked at exposing the bushes and nixon. certainly was gifted. he seemed to flirt with greatness journalistically but not really participate as many more commonplace journalists do. 

  On 5/22/2020 at 1:23 AM, auxien said:

^what ignatius said basically. he was just a dude who wrote some 'outrageous' shit, cool. world-altering tho? naw.

he did change the world of journalism. no one has done that as well as he has since then. but it has its critics too since some stuffed shirts never got over the journalist being in the story. he had a powerful insight and could turn that lens on america and what it means with greater accuracy than most. he knew how to communicate and he struggled a long time before he found that voice. and he was pretty fucking hilarious at times. he was indeed a fucking mad man in a lot of ways and he knew it. he often quoted Samuel L. Johnson "A man who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being human".

he probably had as much affect on the world as a journalist can have other than bringing down a president like woodward/burnstein with watergate. 

i enjoyed a lot of what he wrote. some wild stuff and some sweetly sad things and lot's of "here's america as a meat grinder"

anyway.. HST RIP.  it'd be fun to see him get under trump's skin in some way. seems like the kind of guy who's buttons hunter could push pretty well.

  On 5/21/2020 at 8:58 AM, Blir said:

Bill Gates is trying to wipe out the population with his vaccines

Bill Gates wants a Certificate Of Vaccination ID. Do you get it? 
 

An actual comment I read on Twitter. 

  On 5/22/2020 at 1:02 AM, very honest said:

his son and others said he was

https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/busting-myths-hunter-s-thompsons-son/

 

 

https://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/hunter-thompsons-daily-routi.html

@auxien

 

oh shit that was e jean carroll who wrote that book

 

he had some good stints, most in the distant past.

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I believe Thompson dropped acid every night like I believe trepanning is good for you. And I love Thompson. 

  On 5/22/2020 at 1:02 AM, auxien said:

^stupid/ignorant framing. 'dont tell Donald how rich Brad is!'  ....except that's exactly how Trump and his cronies work. they all expect to benefit and for others that are 'on their side' to benefit and project a strong/similar facade. it's basically the same as a MLM scheme. 

naw

It was sarcasm. Or rather, Sarcasm with a capital S. It's supposed to be stupid/ignorant. 

  On 5/21/2020 at 8:58 AM, Blir said:

Does anybody like me make the idiotic mistake of reading Youtube or Twitter comment sections on videos or posts about political subjects right now? It's some of the most depressing reading I've ever seen. I was tempted to make a thread about it but it's so bleak I don't know if I even want other people to start polluting their minds with that shit.

If it's a tweet or a post about coronavirus you can be sure to find loads of stuff about "plandemic" or how the scientists are lying and we need to all be taking hydroxychloroquine as it's proven to cure corona. Or there will be messages about how Bill Gates is trying to wipe out the population with his vaccines and you can be sure the commentors don't intend to take any of those new world order vaccines.

I was sent a video a couple of months back of Madonna singing along to one of her sons playing guitar. The comment section for what I thought was a pretty innocuous video was such a vile outpouring of hate, I couldn't believe it. Turns out that most of Madonna's tweets have a similar level of vitriol right now. I didn't realise this but apparently she's a pedo and a child torturer who uses a chemical extracted from suffering children to keep her looking youthful. And it's not just her either! Tom Hanks and Barack Obama also take this drug (adrenochrome). This is the same mad conspiracy shit as the pizzagate stuff as it goes. I fell down this Qanon rabbit hole and it left me feeling no hope for society whatsoever.

Anyway the reason I mention all that shit is because I started to look at the profiles of a lot of these accounts and I was startled by the amount of them that have Trump/MAGA stuff in their profiles, often along with bible verses. And they're SO angry ALL THE TIME. I really think that there is a serious element of mental illness that binds a lot of Trump supporters, maybe because he often baits people with conspiratorial mindsets, think #obamagate etc.

I don't really know the point of this post. I guess I have seen enough of this stuff that I now don't really believe there's any way that Trump doesn't get a second term. The one thing that Trump supporters have is a shit load of conviction in what they believe. The opposition doesn't really seem to have that as much.

Expand  

a lot of that content is disinfo from fraudulent accounts. twitter was suspending a million inauthentic accounts per day in 2018. that story cites twitter estimating as much as 5 percent of users are fraudulent and 8.5 percent use automation tools. think about how many twitter accounts must be inactive - half? two thirds? so 5% trolls and 8.5% bots may be like a third of active users. that estimate is not hard to believe, when you watch the content feeding in real time for a hashtag on tweetdeck.twitter.com. you see a lot of copied text from multiple accounts. they push qanon, obamagate, pro-trump shit. all the worst right-wing nonsense, they love. they keyboard-mash cheap, easy, juvenile crap that doesn't seem like something a real person would post, while pushing political messaging. they chip away at democrat support and inject confusion. information warfare means disrupting the enemy's information supply and it is effective. you look at the accounts and you see overtly american, christian, patriot, veteran, trump-loving account usernames and descriptions. they want to create an appearance of a demographic believing certain ideas, as well as get things trending. they want to prop up counter-narratives. you can neutralize facts by denying them consensus and providing a counter-narrative, especially when you have right-wing media, GOP congress members, and who-knows-what kinds of foreign operations all in alignment, reinforcing each-others' plausibility vectors. you look at the tweet history of these accounts and you find they tweet during asia daytime hours and just hammer out artifical-sounding replies all day. early morning, US time, all the disinfo shit is trending. and they come to each-other's aid, if you battle them. they try to swarm and flood those who challenge them so they give up, and to prevent an appearance of having been corrected. they always want the last reply because that is what shows when twitter folds a long back-and-forth.

of course many posting the shit are real people. but many are not. looking at their account history can often give you a sense of whether they are likely authentic or likely inauthentic. 

big T woke up to lots of patriotic biking love this mawnin

I just realized that Chump won't get the virus because he doesn't touch his face. There so much Jersey Shore on his face that he doesn't want to disrupt the delicate balance.

his hands are caked in that shit too.

hell, maybe that's a possible solution to this whole mess. cover ourselves in spray tan that the virus can't penetrate

That 1200 check plus the notice thereof that I received in the mail have his name prominently displayed on both, as if he is the harbinger. And letter he "wrote" was obviously too coherent to be his words.

I highly doubt that he came up with this whole idea on his own. But thanks anyway Chump, I appreciate it.