John Fetterman tweeted a picture of fictional dad Homer Simpson in response to conspiracy theorists who just won't stop believing he uses a body double.
I sometimes wonder if I live in an alternate reality where a significant subsection of the population has gone absolutely insane. The insanity all seemed to take off around 2016.
Social media is a turbocharger to the misinformation engine that is corporate media (especially Fox 'News' and shit like Limbaugh, Beck, Infowars, Rogan, et al) post-Fairness Doctrine.
The idea that the FCC shouldn't A) reinstate the doctrine, and B) have its regulatory boundaries extend to ubiquitous cable and streaming services is fucking nutballs. Thanks, Reagan!
Some day we’ll look back at rage bait (and social media, in general) the way history looks back at opium. The tech and connectedness have remarkably advanced humanity - but unchecked, the algos and constant need for engagement have been ruinous and criminally detrimental to society.
There's a town hall video with John McCain around 2008 where an elderly woman tries to suggest to him she's worried about Obama because he's not white. John McCain shot her down and defended Obama and stressed we should only focus on the political differences of opinion, and his own supporters booed him. This all had been coming for so long.
Edit: I was corrected, she did not exactly state what her problem was with Obama, but it's clear that it was bigotry.
If we're thinking of the same clip, you're slightly misremembering it. The woman was insisting Obama was a Muslim, and that's what McCain was shutting down. But yes, the crowd booed him for clarifying that.
It actually started really ramping up in 2008-2009. Tea Party, birthers, so on. It's amazing what happens when someone who wasn't white was elected president.
It actually started with Newt and his bullshit back in '96....well, actually it started with fucking Reagan and his trickle down bullshit back in '80...then again, maybe it started when
I think it was even earlier... 9/11 really broke the safety of America (and even the "western" world) and pushed so many people down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Social media amplified this fear and brought them together giving them power.
My head canon is that the fixed point event in earth history is that humanity should have ended in nuclear war with the cuba crisis and the timeline has been unravelling ever since.
Sometimes I think the end of the world actually did happen in 2012, it's just that the fallout is happening over a longer time scale than anyone anticipated.
That's what I keep saying. That the world ended, but to save humanity some brave but misguided hero somehow ported us all into this slightly different but really fucked up reality. This is my explanation for the Mandela effect, that we remember our old timeline but when we look things up the research shows what happened in the new timeline so it's all wonky lol
The most soul crushing part is when you realize it’s not an alternate reality; this is where you’ve been all along and you feel betrayed by everyone you’ve ever known for hiding it from you, even about their own stupidity.
In a weird coincidence a show came out in 2016 before the election called BrainDead and the plot was that alien bugs are eating parts of our brains and causing hyper partisanship.
I think it started the moment Obama was elected, or at least the moment the ACA was able to pass. It just took a time for the 'batshit crazy' to scale up to mass adoption among conservatives.
For me, it started right after 9/11. Republicans were quick to use the general fear and anger from the attacks to justify wars, spying on citizens, eroding personal freedom, etc. They've been using this same playbook ever since, just with a different boogyman, e.g. Antifa, BLM, trans people.
I wish we had more of him. The OG can stay in PA and make a clone to be senator for every other state. I know I'd vote for him.
Why the fuck can't we get more elected Democrats like him? He's personable. He's down to earth, and he's willing to make fun of the right wing wackos instead of cowering in fear. A good 3/4 of all the other elected Dems are a bunch of pussies who have the wit of a goddamn potato.
And can you blame them? You get attacked from all sides if you enter the politics as a Democrat. You'll obviously get attacked by Republicans, but you also get attacked by people on the Left as well. On the other hand, elected Republicans, to a large degree, don't get attacked by their own people, and lord knows that Democrats rarely go on the offensive, so they'll rarely attack their Republican opponents.
Love that shit. I rarely have even the faintest idea what the answer is but I still have fun thinking about it. Haven't seen the Simpsons since it initially aired so the mind's a bit fuzzy.
Oh yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of body doubles available out there for 6' 8" dudes with incredibly distinct facial features and skull geometry that would keep a 19th century phrenologist in business for years.
Didn't you hear, she's actually the one in charge, and he's just a puppet who can't think? That's why she posts photos that have his face out of frame, not because it's funny. /s
I honestly thought he was a former WWE performer for a decent amount of time, and by decent I mean I only recently found out that he wasn't a former WWE performer. It was a wild assumption, but at the same time I can also picture him jumping off the ring to give the peoples elbow.
Maybe it is too obvious, I am not sure:
You all know that his name originates from the German expression "fetter Mann", which translates to "fat man"?
I can vividly imagine his ancestors arriving at Ellis island and getting their new surname. :D
Got it. Intitite a meme to get people to post pictures of fetterman. In a year they have a trove of fetterman pictures to meme to discredit anything he does.
He is anti-conspiracy. He's such a dysfunctional child that all conspiracy's seem reasonable when compared to reality that he's a brain damaged moron who can't dress himself.
What is the deal with this guy? He plays the every man but he's a wealthy silver spoon baby. He runs for office and immediately goes on leave, which makes me wonder if he's cut out for this. He seems like he's all talk but doesn't actually get anything done
Imagine making this fucking comment after having that assclown for an adversary. Tell me you ain't from Philly without telling me you ain't from Philly