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Comment by Bjorkbat | Hacker News Reader

Since the pandemic started I've found myself believing less-and-less in mundane, worldly explanations for things.

My favorite example is the 2016 presidential election. While there are many who would like to believe that Trump won due to Russian interference, I actually believe he won due to meme magic. A bunch of social misfits got together, sharing frog memes, while listening to Shadilay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadilay), and memed their candidate into office.

I just think that objective, material reality is less objective and less material than I thought all along.

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Surely it didn't have anything to do with the media pimping him nonstop during the primaries, giving him disproportionate airtime, or that the democrats ran one of their least likable candidates of all time.

Not to mention running a terrible campaign that spent all of its time hanging out with megadonors instead of actually visiting the swing states that decide elections...

I have to admit I didn't vote at all during that election, half because of how unlikable both candidates were.

But the other half of the reason was that I kind of figured Hilary had it in the bag. She was simply better resourced in terms of money and in terms of the groups and individuals who were supporting her. How could she not win? Especially against Trump? Sure, she made some mistakes along the way, but Trump also mocked a disabled reporter during one of his campaign appearances. One could argue that he made just as many mistakes, if not more.

I don't really think Trump had any unfair advantages one could consider substantial (if anything he had a lot of disadvantages) nor do I believe that Hilary made any mistakes that were really damaging to her campaign. Its nuts, but the most convincing explanation I can think of is the weirdest and most esoteric one.

Just can't ignore those spooky synchronicities.

It’s near impossible to believe around these parts, but I think people liked his incorrectness, and also liked his general policies.

That he was a showman helped the memes. But I encourage you to consider mundane things like maybe people were tired of status quo globalism and willing to take a bitter pill to try and fix it.

> It’s near impossible to believe around these parts, but I think people liked his incorrectness, and also liked his general policies.

I think a lot of people were just done with the current political system which had been failing them for generations and wanted an outsider to come in and shake (if not break) up the system. Sanders gained a huge following attracting massive crowds and passionate supporters for the same reason. People wanted actual change but the DNC wasn't having it so they did everything they could to undermine sanders before the primary. Republicans threw everyone they could think of into the race.

Trump wasn't a politician, didn't act like one, and no one in power wanted him to be elected. His election meant that I lost a lot of faith in Americans, but I gained a lot of faith in our electoral system. People can vote in someone even when the most powerful don't want them to.

Yes it really is as simple as what you just said. I find it funny and sad when opponents of Trump do all these weird mental contortions to explain why he won, from “trump voters are brainwashed rednecks” to Russiagate. Turns out some people do want lesser taxes, lesser regulation, don’t care for abortion and simply don’t mind trumps buffoonery. And no, not all of trump voters are racist. I might even say a negligible fraction are actually racist.

> not all of trump voters are racist.

I am reminded of a comedian's favorite response to this statement.

> Not all trump supporters are racist, but ALL racists are trump supporters.

It's blatantly false, but hey, gets a laugh from the in-crowd right?

Very cute but that’s why he’s a comedian I suppose.

Trump surely didn’t think it was a negligible fraction.

> She was simply better resourced in terms of money and in terms of the groups and individuals who were supporting her.

Hell we even learned from leaked documents her campaign instructed the major networks to focus more on Trump as they thought he would be the easiest candidate for her to beat.

Maybe they were correct, and a non-Trump canidate would have won by a larger margin.

Are you suggesting that Trump being president was Hilary's fault? Like... we could have had a better president than Trump if not for Hilary?

I don't know if Trump would have gotten the Republican nomination if he hadn't gotten so much extra airtime and coverage during the primaries- not only from news media, but late night news comedians praying he would get it so she had an easy win.

Likewise, her campaign had some phenomenal missteps, like never visiting a fairly rural swing state because they just assumed (wrongly) that she would win, while wining and dining megadonors in states that would never have voted for Trump like California.

Her and president Obama's obvious disdain for rural people (as evidenced by the "bitter clingers" and "basket of deplorables" quips among other incidents) made democratic establishment politicians rather disliked.

Personally, I think there are quite a few democrats who could have beaten Trump in 2016.

Russian interference had little to do with his victory in 2016, which was an establishment vs outsider election (and Hillary was quite unpopular and unlikable), where a very famous populist outsider won by telling his rabid audience whatever he thought they wanted to hear (little of which he actually followed through on). One of Trump's few talents is reading an audience and feeding it whatever it wants to hear; it makes him dangerous as a potential demagogue authoritarian type.

Trump nearly beat Biden in 2020, and he would have beaten any other Democrat candidate that year, which overwhelmingly points to it not being Russian interference as a major influence. Everyone knew what Trump was by the 2020 election and he still attracted more votes than Barack Obama got in either election (and Obama was a widely popular President).

He did actually keep quite a few of his campaign promises. Where he really got stymied was lack of cooperation from the house under Ryan (early days of the dossier hoax).

I made a habit of trying to count broken campaign promises starting in the Clinton years, and it is pretty much universal that presidents over-promise during the campaign and do the opposite once they get into office. I haven't really kept accurate numbers, but it certainly wasn't unique to trump by any means.

Could you provide any data? I don't know anyone whose claims I trust less than Trump.

Saying everyone breaks some campaign promises is like saying that everyone lies - there is an enormous range.

I don't have the data, but let's just say that campaign promises are not credible, regardless of the politician. A whole lot of the promises made are outside the baliwick of the position, and should be rediculed when made, not when broken (mayoral candidates often promise to fix schools in jurisdictions where the schools are accountable to school boards and not city governments, for example. Presidential candidates promise things that would need to be enacted by the legislature. At the same time, a presidential candidate that promises to suggest legislation sounds unambitious).

But what makes me less likely to trust Trump's claims and promises is his consistent denial of claims he made previously that he no longer wishes to make. It's hard to trust someone when they change positions and deny that they had a different positon. Gives very We were always at war with Eastasia vibes.

> let's just say that campaign promises are not credible, regardless of the politician

That assertion is unlikely to be meaningful, IME. Specific politicians are more and less credible in specific ways. To say 'all are not credible' is no more true or meaningful than saying 'all are credible'. Off the top of my head: All food contains water, but that tells us almost nothing about any food.

Respectfully, Bernie would have won.

In 2016, definitely. In 2020, after several troubling compromises, I'm not so sure?

Ya I'm 44 and have had multiple personal experiences around the metaphysical that science simply has no explanation for. Now that I'm older, I realize that it's the models that are wrong, not reality. So I'm open to substantially more spiritual explanations than I used to be.

I'd even go as far as the say that stochastic and emergent behavior is what forms our reality, not determinism. And that consciousness itself is the emergent behavior of the chaos working at the lowest levels of reality. At the end of the day, emotion and love and magic and all of that woo woo stuff is at least as real as atoms.

But we don't have good language today to talk about the physics of our own personal realities. The things that are true in my life may not be true in yours, and vice versa. We just assume that the true reality is the one we all agree with, but I have not found that to be the case.

So we talk past one another about, I don't know, critical race theory or whatever the flavor of the week is. When it's really about, how is my reality impacted as I learn the truths of your reality and our shared reality? If I'm wrong because I don't know something, does that mean that my reality is wrong? What happens if I make decisions over years of my life based on incorrect information? What does correct mean if it diminishes my quality of life? Can I be correct without hurting anyone else?

Some of these questions in the end aren't answerable. In my own reality, I struggle with having to eat meat because that's what my body was designed to do. I carved a rotisserie chicken last night, divided the breast into portions and consumed it. There was almost no separation between the chicken's life and my own. How do we solve something like war when an awful lot of people haven't even stopped to think about the violence their own survival requires?

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real." - Niels Bohr.

If we're at the point in physics where string theory is the answer to "what are atoms?", it doesn't seem that woo-woo to ascribe some kind of reality to consciousness and the other abstracts that come with it. Unfortunately, as with string theory, there doesn't appear to be any empirical proof.

About the first paragraph...

I know this might go a bit off topic. I used to be a hardcore-non-spiritual until the recent few years of scratching the surface of the possibility of there might more more to reality than we see.

I'd love to hear any of your experiences that led you to turn to metaphysics, if it's appropriate to share of course.

I also sometimes experience phenomenon which can't be eliminated away with physics, or weird coincidences that can't be explained with confirmation bias or selective attention, and trying to pinpoint a pattern, so anything that you'd think worth sharing in that direction would help.

Could you please detail some of these phenomenon?

Weird synchronicities, sometimes just too much. As I've said in the comment, I know about confirmation bias and selective attention. I always try to be completely skeptic and try to dis and explain with psychological/behavioral phenomenon, until I reach a point that I can't, over and over.

Even with the knowledge of our brains are subconsciously processing incoming information from everywhere and considering the possible bias by the fact that I'm seeking for something and want to believe, I still find many of the synchronicities with no possible scientific/statistically remotely plausible explanation.

I won't call it "quantum" or any buzzword. I don't call it anything. I'm still skeptic and I just see some patterns emerging and believe there's something beyond what we have discovered about life and consciousness.

I have no special knowledge, but ya I think that coincidence without obvious causation might be the basis of magic (spirit, consciousness, meaning, etc). It's also the basis of quantum mechanics. Pauli and Jung noticed the uncanny similarities a century ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Basically, science can only puts bounds on this stuff, it can't predict the outcomes of stochastic/emergent processes. Which is where I believe free will resides.

Which might sound like hand-waving, except that it's fundamental:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy

People have tried to explain away stuff like quantum entanglement and failed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory

Basically it comes down to: either the quantum decision was made before the experiment started and stored in hidden variables, or there's a nonlocal connection over a 4th space dimension which we don't understand, or the quantum way of talking about these things is the only description that works. Which unfortunately (fortunately?) seems to be the case. Maybe someone who groks this can explain it with better words. My gut feeling is that this is the physical manifestation of incompleteness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...

Anyway, I'm starting to believe that macro-scale effects like social interactions follow the same rules as quantum mechanics. Probably what we'll find is that it's waves and energy all the way down. Like if every person is an antenna, and our interactions play off one another in a vast multidimensional space we aren't aware of, like ripples on a pond. I suspect that this is what's going on inside atoms, and a real-world effect of this is that quantum computers will be limited by noise, and building a simulation of the Hamiltonian and running it would give the same result as flipping coins a bazillion times. This might be yet another hidden variables interpretation though so I'm almost certainly wrong. Probably.

In my own life, I mostly journal any synchronicities, which tend to happen about every 5 days for me, then weeks or months of nothing. I have about 50 written down, but feel that I've only caught maybe 10% of them.

In the last entry, I wore a bowtie to an event to try getting outside my comfort zone, then we came home and the TV was showing the scene where he makes the guy with the goldfish and bowtie leave the office in Wolf of Wall Street. Now what are the odds of that, since I've never worn a bowtie before and may never again?

I've had more intense happenings like that, but unfortunately a lot of them are negative around tragedies so I don't want to get anyone down. Mostly bad feelings before bad things happen. I think that has a lot to do with my disposition, so I've started watching more for angel numbers, and more love-based synchronicities, which seems to help. I believe that our sensitivity to the quantum chaos foam or whatever it is gets more attuned the more we tune out, dissociate, meditate, etc and turn the volume down on our egos. So anyone can do this stuff at any time, it's just that western culture doesn't really have a place for it yet.

You could really enhance your understanding of the world by finding out why hypothesis testing was decided on as a good idea for science.

Just for posterity, I'm not arguing against reproducibility or the scientific method. I'm just saying that there's an upper bound on how deterministic something can be, and that science largely fails to explain how stochastic systems like brains and economies work, so our shared reality is a fantasy. This article popped up in my Facebook feed and explains it better:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-spookiness/

No amount of science can predict when an atom will decay. Just like no amount of capitalism can guarantee that everyone is safe and has a full belly.

Excuse me, I should have said that I was responding to your recording of synchronicities, not those other things.

You seem to decide what to notice in an ad-hoc way which means you'll be heavily influenced by what you want to notice. If you had made a hypothesis after wearing a bowtie, that you would see a bowtie wearing person on TV when coming home, then you would also have noticed the times when there was no synchronicity and could isolate your personal sensitivity to it from its actual occurrence. As it is, I don't think you can make any conclusions about nature from that record and the 5-day cycle might be nothing more than your fluctuating interest in finding them.

Actually I've read your comment days ago but I was too baffled about what I've read because you've literally wrote what I can't tell anyone because no one would truly understand without actually experiencing themselves (which, I also would have called complete BS and would have dissed with simple explanations), so sorry for the late reply.

I have synchronicities exactly as you have described in the same temporal pattern: happening in an extremely/unbelievable frequency within a short period like days or a few weeks, then complete silence for a few weeks or months. I've been observing this very pattern for years and the pattern is super clear for me. Yet, I have no idea why it's happening. Is it always the way it is and I just sometimes switch my focus, or is it really something that happens from time to time regardless of my focus, I honestly have no idea. But the pattern is there.

I, also, keep a journal of my synchronicities. It's almost four years now and whenever I open, read a few and remember it it gives me goosebumps and a feeling that I can best describe as "being connected to the universe and knowing there's more to it". It feels like "something" is trying to show me something.

The only data I have worth sharing is two things:

- Those weird coincidences generally happen when I need them: like, being mentally a bit off from my core and needing an "anchor feeling" to return to my presence and remember that "there's more to it".

- I have no idea why and this is definitely not a recommendation for a diet, but, they tend to increase when I intake too much sugar. Yeah, I know it sounds weird and I definitely know sugar is super-unhealthy, but this correlation is worth mentioning. Especially if I'm light on sugar but consume too much sugary food/desserts etc in a short "burst" period of days, I tend to have these synchronicities' "period" more. Again, this is NOT healthy as it involves eating sugar but the pattern is there.

Also your antenna analogy is very similar to what I had in mind for YEARS: maybe we're pure consciousness (or whatever the correct word might be) and not limited to three dimensions. Yet, we are "picked up" with bodies in the right state (with the chemistry and nervous system) acting as an "antenna that is tuned to our consciousness" and our brain waves like theta/delta etc. states might be the different "tunings" for "resonating in correct frequencies that match/react with consciousness". I've used all the words in quotation marks because they don't necessarily need to be actual "frequencies" or "resonance". They might be, or they might not be, but regardless of what their true nature is the analogy applies. Maybe they are somthing fundamental as vibration and electromagnetic waves but just simply isn't discovered yet, perhaps because we've been looking things the wrong way (at least in this connect) for a long time especially in western culture.

I know many people who read this would just think that I'm delusional and I totally get it: if I haven't experienced all of these through all the years as a skeptic who tries to dismiss it with confirmation bias and selective attention, I'd definitely call someone saying what I've been saying, a delusional, maybe even paranoid or someone with serious mental disorders. But I equally see the western culture totally dismissing anything that can't be explained with current science. I'm pretty much sure that we'll learn a lot about the eastern culture, shamanism, all the mystics, NDEs, and other similar metaphysical phenomenon but until we get there I think we should be open to some ideas that we culturally deem "impossible".

I don't give any special name or say that this phenomenon, but it acts in "weird ways" and science should definitely focus more on these instead of dismissing as BS.

What do you mean by 'metaphysical' here? I'm under the impression that metaphysics is a pretty deep branch of philosophy -- more like Descartes saying "how do I know I can know things", less like us saying the physics is probably magic. You seems to have landed on a particularly intense form of relativism, which is a fine way to run your life, particularly if it leads you to be open to the experiences of others. But I think it is different from metaphysics (although I'm not very educated in philosophy, generally).

With respect to atoms -- the standard of 'realness' science seem to use is whether we can make reliable predictions about the behavior of a thing, and atoms seem to have put quite a few points up on the scoreboard compared to the woo-woo stuff. Now, if a real philosopher were here they'd probably point out that all of science suffers from the 'problem of induction' and that gathering a preponderance of evidence doesn't really prove anything, but c'mon we're mostly engineers at best here. Our models aren't wrong, they are just limited to a subset of the entire universe of possible phenomena (the ones people will pay to exploit, obviously).

Why not both?

Russia employed a bunch of trolls, who helped create and amplify the memes.

I think reality is a lot more complicated and humans just look for the simplest possible explanation, like “Russia did it!” Or “Meme’s did it!” Or “Racists did it!” When it was all of them and many other reasons. See Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth” video for a genuinely brilliant breakdown of this idea and how it relates to Flat Earthere and other nonsense.

And so there's still definitely a part of me that realizes that, yeah, rationally, you can't just ignore the influence of Russian interference or the flaws in modern polling. Looking back, it's obvious that we underestimated how politically motivated working-class white voters could be.

The thing about meme magic though is that there's so many spooky "synchronicities" woven throughout that I can't help but take it seriously.

A relatively new to me concept I've been running into is that of "memetic virus", intentionally constructed by human hands, that, if implanted at opportune times in the right minds would cause a conflagration of an irrational thought to spread around the world.

Richard Dawkins mentioned something alike this in his "viruses of the mind" essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind but his discourse was limited to denigrating the religious and seemed to miss out on the bigger picture, that being, that if it were possible to ingrain a meme onto people's minds that one day, someone would use it as an instrument of mental war.

I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary.

How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years?

If it were one person or a certain group of people, it might make sense, but this memetic virus seems to have spread worldwide, infecting almost everyone, and since our frame of reference is also infected we can't see that we're infected with it.

Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know.

I really don't know if this is true, but I suspect that if you brought a group of average people from 2000, 1990, 1980, & 1970, I feel like they would all agree that the world has gone mad and that there must be some reason for it.

> Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know.

I don't know about a cure, but a likely defense is the same damn thing as slows the spread of an actual virus - slow down the spread of information. Social media that promotes viral content is to a memetic virus what globalization, international travel, and high-density cities are to an actual virus.

So, social distance & vaccinate by exposing yourself to balanced information and knowledge so that you have a defense against crazy fringe thoughts?

If it works in meatspace then it should be somewhat effective in the mental realm, right?

How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years?

It depends on your values for most of the words in this statement. For example, sure things ebb and flow, but I don't think we can say things were relatively peaceful in the 90s. So, for most values, the answer is likely that things haven't changed as much as you think; you're just more aware of everything now. You can life by the adage, "ignorance is bliss", or live a less blissful life aware of everything going on, or even try to take advantage of those who are living blissfully.

I feel that this kind of response isn't very helpful. "Oh, it's always been bad, you just didn't know any better" is the same thing that has always been said in response to emergent issues.

America was not politically unstable in the 90's. It may have been rocky, but not unstable. Saying it was just as bad then as it is now is false.

Only a fringe element would have cheered John Hinckley Jr's attempt to assassinate Reagan in 1981, but today an attempt whether successful or not on either the Democratic or Republican front runners would get a resounding cheer from a not-insignificant section of the population.

I would hazard to say that, under the right circumstances, a single bullet could spark an internal American Conflict between the groups of people who can best be identified not by what they stand for but by what they stand against.

Trying to say that the tensions the country are facing today are equal to the tensions of the past glosses over the amplification of the screaming masses thanks to technology, the financial whirlwind created by the internet, where unimaginable fortunes can be raised and erased faster than you can blink, the lancing of the pus-filled boil of human misery that education and awareness brings, the struggle of the lowest-paid and lowest earning members of society to simply survive when the financial ladder of arbitrage no longer reaches their grasp.

Many of these things existed in some proto form in the 90's, yes, but they have grown since then and, like an abused child who becomes a sulking and angry teenager, may reach the point where they start to swing back. You can't treat the teenager like you treated the child, you're far more likely to get a black eye.

>America was not politically unstable in the 90's. It may have been rocky, but not unstable.

The 90's laid the groundwork for our current instability. Newt Gingrich showed that fiery and aggressive politics could win in an era of CSPAN and 24-hour news.

>Only a fringe element would have cheered John Hinckley Jr's attempt to assassinate Reagan in 1981, but today an attempt whether successful or not on either the Democratic or Republican front runners would get a resounding cheer from a not-insignificant section of the population.

I don't remember anyone noteworthy celebrating, even as a joke, the congressman shot during a baseball game in Washington. People may fantasize and joke about something happening, but stay solemn and respectful when that specific turd hits the fan.

>amplification of the screaming masses thanks to technology

The masses never needed amplification. They had large and loud crowds. Technology amplifies the screaming meagers, who sound like masses but still only have one vote each.

This is a major plot point of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

> How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years?

I would speculate some combination of these (plus some things I'm missing):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/heuristics

https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2022/02/is-reality...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

> I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary.

And I've interacted with hundreds and observed tens/hundreds of thousands of "right thinking" people who suffer from the same inability to substantiate their "correct" beliefs, or the ability to address legitimate criticisms of their claims/logic without resorting to rhetorical wildcards like "that's pedantic".

My intuition is that you just demonstrated a substantial portion of the cure: the ability to implement Unknown() - it is an amazingly rare ability these days. If you don't believe me, read internet discussions for one week deliberately looking for instances of people noting uncertainty in their beliefs, and the opposite: instances of people claiming to have knowledge of things that are unknowable (such as the contents of other people's minds, the future state of reality, etc), knowing the "correct" answer to subjective questions, and various other highly irrational behaviors that are typically excused as "you know what I meant" or "that's just people being people".

> Russia employed a bunch of trolls, who helped create and amplify the memes.

As long as we all agree that it's a bunch of literal trolls. The kind who live below bridges.

The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

I especially like the title of the section, "Russian Propaganda Is Not Committed to Consistency".

Essentially every national election in a two-party system will be close. Candidates are incentivized to move toward the middle, to try and claim the undecided voters.

Because the elections will always be close, they are extremely sensitive to relatively small effects. Something that moves the needle by 1% or 0.5% one way or the other can decide the election.

I think the 4ch-spawned memewar was one of those factors, though I also think foreign interference played a role as well.

IMO, those undecided voters in the middle are probably the least, uh, savvy as well. The type most easily swayed by memes, clickbait, etc.

But many elections aren't determined by undecided middle voters. They are a small minority of the voting population, and most effort spent convincing them is wasted.

Elections are often determined by how successful the get-out-the-vote campaigns are, to get the base to show up and vote. It's both much easier, and much more profitable to bring a lazy member of your base to the polls, than to badger someone who doesn't care much either into voting for you.

Bases are getting much smaller; there are fewer registered D/R vs independents.

This makes the “swingable middle” rather large, and they’re not all rubes.

Campaigns seem to be iterating on scalable/personalizable social strategy. Obama figured it out better than Romney, Trump (maybe disturbingly) better than anyone before.

Prediction: some future candidate will go “next level” and piss everyone off even more, but it’ll work and they’ll be elected.

There are fewer registered D/Rs, but there is a massive swell in 'independents' who, without fail, when they show up to vote, vote single-ticket (or close to it) all the way down the ballot.

Being a registered party member provides very few advantages, and a lot of disadvantages (mostly in the form of unsolicited correspondence). There's also social caché to be gained in some circles from claiming to be an enlightened independent that has transcended the petty two-party duality, who just happens to consistently vote like a dyed-in-the-wool partisan.

My wife is one such person. She has very little respect for the Democratic party, and views most of it as an actively harmful waste of oxygen, but she will be damned if she gives team red a seat.

Barring a catastrophic change in party alignment, nobody is going to convince her who to vote for - but they do need to convince her to show up.

> Bases are getting much smaller; there are fewer registered D/R vs independents.

While this is true, the evidence seems to be that most independents actually have a party preference in their voting patterns -- they're what political scientists sometimes call "leaners", e.g., they register (and identify) as independent, but they have a clear lean toward Democrats or Republicans. From the authors of the 2016 book Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction: "The problem with leaners is that there is almost no difference between people who identify as partisans and people who say they are independent and then say they lean toward a particular party. More often than not, we can count on leaners to vote for that party, support the party’s positions, and sometimes even donate money to the party’s candidates. What’s more, leaners consistently support their party from election to election."

https://www.vox.com/2016/1/22/10814522/independents-voters-f...

I think the truly swingable middle -- folks who, for example, voted for Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020 -- is actually a pretty small group. And, it's a small group that's got both disproportionate power at the ballot box and a fairly low engagement with actual political issues. I think I (somewhat reluctantly) agree with your observation about campaigns iterating on social strategy, though, because that tends to be the best way to reach those swing voters: they aren't motivated by ideology or policy preference, but by star power and charisma.

One thing to maybe help, whenever you read “Russian interference” just replace it with “Russian Facebook Ads” and see how ridiculous it sounds. The argument is that US citizens were swayed by shitty Facebook ads to vote differently? This does not reconcile with the historically small fraction of US swing voters, and also leads to a flawed mindset of “I’m smarter than those dumb people over there”.

The winner in 2016 pitched themselves as an “outsider” for the masses, and sure was propelled by memes which are non-traditional. Even if you disagree with the winner, sometimes excuses like blaming Russia are just lies told to feel better.

Not just swing voters. A lot of the effort is increasing voter turnout for your favored side.

It wasn't Facebook ads. It was an army of trolls creating, sharing, and upvoting "fake news" articles tricking gullible people into thinking that Hillary molested children underneath a pizza parlor and tricking other suggestible people into thinking people said the problem was Facebook ads. I was on Reddit at the time, and 90% of commenters believed that the Correct the Record PAC was illegally astroturfing Reddit, despite lacking any evidence, or were trolls pretending that they believed the PAC was astroturfing.

> It was an army of trolls

Colloquially known as '/pol/'.

The Senate intelligence committee found otherwise: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

It explicitly called out GP's misunderstanding: "The Committee found that paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity, and moreover, are not alone an accurate measure of the IRA's operational scope, scale, or objectives, despite this aspect of social media being a focus of early press reporting and public awareness."

People didn't need whackjob conspiracies to hate Clinton, she earned that over many years in the public spotlight. If Trump hadn't said so much offensive stuff that directly insulted me on multiple levels, I would have voted for him just to be sure she didn't win. I think a lot of D-leaning people really don't understand how abhorrent the establishment politicians and foreign policy of their party are to anti-war, non-nationalist leftists.

Except Clinton was wildly popular before the trolls amplified attacks against her with crazy conspiracy theories about her emails, having by far the highest approval rating among the field in July 2015. https://news.gallup.com/poll/185324/hillary-clinton-favorabl...

What conspiracy? It's an absolute fact that she illegally used a private email server for official correspondence.

The conspiracy theories were the wild claims about the contents of the emails.

Measured against other political scandals, the fact that she did unclassified email correspondence (as all email correspondence in the State Department is) on her own email server was minor enough to not warrant charges as Comey's investigation concluded. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/17/politics/state-department-ema...

Ukranian president played Ukranian president on TV before actually becoming him. He also used to dance topless in latex pants, and now he's symbol of a true modern wartime leader.

We live in South Park episode now.

Surely the idea that a young motivated constituency used the most modern communication methods available to them to campaign for their preferred candidate, successfully moving the needle somewhat, is pretty mundane?

> I just think that objective, material reality is less objective and less material than I thought all along

When people say "objective, material reality" they normally mean ... well, things like the gravity and chemistry and stubbing your toe being painful. What story you want to use to describe the aggregate behaviour of 100 million human voters has very little to do with that, surely

Also, so this isn't just about politics, I think astrology is...interesting.

I mean, rationally, it's hard to take it seriously. So, what, you mean to tell me that the planets, which are an unfathomable distance away from us, somehow impact human personality and how we behave? Doesn't exactly help things that the stars over our head are not the same stars as the one's over the heads of the ancient Babylonians.

And yet, once I took the time to actually look at my full star chart, I found that it described who I am to uncanny levels of accuracy.

Rationally, probably just a coincidence that my personality actually happens to align to what my personality "should" be, astrologically speaking. My alternative theory is that when enough people believe in something, that something becomes, well, "real-ish". So even if astrology is a bunch of made-up nonsense, it becomes real-enough simply because a lot of people believe in astrology.

Did you check all possible outcomes of the chart? It might be that most of them are quite apt.

A lot of those memes came from Russia. There's a large amount of evidence that Brexit and Trump were fueled by Russian disinformation campaigns. Quite a bit of the polarization we've seen in the US has also be fueled by them.

The sad thing is that Russia didn't even need to make anything up to make this happen. They poured fuel on our existing divisions, until we couldn't even talk to each other, then poured resources into social media to prop up one candidate while attacking the other. Our hatred made us too blind to see it happening.

When you say "our hatred", do you include yourself personally or are you judging others while exempting yourself?

Did you see that recent meme where a right wing "influencer" with tens of thousands of followers only got 13 likes on a recent tweet? would be interesting if true!

EDIT: https://imgur.com/gallery/cZwNWup

"While there are many who would like to believe that Trump won due to Russian interference, I actually believe he won due to meme magic."

There's at least one book on this theory, such as Gary Lachman's "Dark Star Rising":

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Rising-Magick-Power/dp/0143...

This actually looks really interesting. I was worried that the positive reviews might be due to a right-leaning echo-chamber, but it seems like the praise crosses political lines. I'll have to check it out.

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