It is beyond dispute that social media is a malign presence on our collective consciousness. It is a pox in ways obvious and inimical (like the spread of Q Anon and the easy clustering of right-wing reactionary militias) and ways more benign, but no less pernicious (like the collapse of good faith reading of questionable comments on social media and our learned desire to attack any and everything).
And, above all, it has given every single person who logged on with poster’s brain.
Poster’s brain is the near-pathological need to weigh in on every little thing consuming the world, where often times the need to take an antagonistic or contrarian POV leads the world’s “greatest thinkers” to espouse some incredibly dumb opinions.
I hope you had better sense than to watch the debate live last night, but even if you didn’t, you are aware it was an incoherent mess thanks to the current President ranting and raving like a Donald Trump and Chris Wallace’s feckless moderating. Anyone who has a) a brain and b) paid any attention to the past few years would clearly see that Trump’s salacious behavior would not turn off any of his voters because they love his hostility to decorum, but wouldn’t court any undecideds because he’s fucking unhinged. But that’s boring, seemingly vapid thing to to say. So we get things like this.
I had to take a screenshot this because your boy deleted his entire thread, promising the space provided by an essay would provide more clarity. The world is connected and large, and people rich and poor, black and white have encountered a Trump and a Biden and everything in between. Politics rules everything these days, and it is a fraction of people who have not been perpetually exposed to the behaviors and opinions of the candidates that could be widely surprised by last night’s hijinks. Even if you wanted to believe the above premise, the evidence of people who love Trump but want him to tone done his tweeting and belligerence is expansive. Those who love Trump believe he is fighting for them and even those who live to own the Libs consistently express their preference he tone things down. In short, there is no good evidence for the above post, but yet the guy “felt” it enough to post it.
While poster’s brain is omnipresent and evidence everywhere, it takes a truly iconic example to drive home my point.
Judge, I give you exhibit A:
Exhibit B, coming a mere hours before exhibit B:
Nate Silver rose to prominence as an underpaid data guru at the New York Times where he accurately predicted Obama’s 2008 victory to an eerie degree. The Times, of course, is a publication in which the poster’s brain disease originated in the Editorial section and has now infected the news, which now often avoids data and all good sense to put the weight of the nation on the random musings of three random diner patrons in Wisconsin. Or one lesbian in the UES.
Meet a Secret Trump Voter
‘Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.’
Opinion Columnist
Silver used his Obama cache to start FiveThirtyEight (the number of electoral college voters, get it), subsequently prompting ESPN to acquire him (he also has a big interest in analytics in sports).
Now some people like to clown on Silver by lumping him in with the rest of the world that got Trump wrong. Not me - he was pretty upfront that Trump had a better chance than most were giving him because the data said so. This postmortem is Silver at his best. Give Nasty Nate a ream of politics data and room to write, he is illuminating. But then there’s Twitter and the daily grind of political football.
What annoys me is either the data is not enough or his poster brain is just too overpowering that he will posts the above, the first of which you may notice is a) not really data-based, b) not remotely the correct take, and c) was obviously going to be contradicted by Trump’s inevitable statement on the matter.
When one of the greatest data scientists minds of our generations feels the need to nebulously weigh in on any pressing issue, we are in trouble.
Poster’s brain is more insidious now considering we’re talking about fascism arriving to our towns. It didn’t so much wash up on our shores, as that would imply it just arrived. But rather it has been slowly oozing up from the ground since the foundation of this country, but well, ole’ Trump repeatedly stuck a pickaxe in a seeping pool.
But our leading intellectuals are always trying to explain it away because of American exceptionalism.
The reality is we crossed the rubicon, and for many people, it occurred too slowly to perceive or did not feature an official change of policy declaration.
For others, the American project is too established; it’s guardrails too fortified for fascism to hit our soil.
Fascism is here; Trump is the latest architect. And we, its subordinates. And if the brightest minds of our generation are convinced it’s something else or that Trump’s deranged thinking can still four year later sway undecideds because he doesn’t talk like a country club member, well, we are in even worse shape.
The data scientists are not going to save us, and the data scientists who are somehow also writers are bound to doom us.
And if anything is wrong or delusional or mockable in the above paragraphs, dear Reader, I undoubtedly have poster’s brain and so do you! So think on that!