The experiment is over: RIP USA

I didn't know it was an experiment.

The fat, weak, and woke have won baby!!!!!!

Well, then take the time to educate yourself here:

We can tie this all back to the internet. Prior to the internet, these weirdo nihilists were basically loners. Now, they all gather together online and elect deranged leaders. The media loves them because they hate a well-functioning society without chaos. They want stories and characters. They want division. Loners online are looking to burn it all down, and the power-hungry leaders see that as an opportunity to grab more power.

What about the movies 2001 and 2010?

None of that happened.

I am grateful for the right sided internet news. I'm grateful for X. While there is very little truth in left sided or right sided media, it gives an individual the choice of what to think. AI may turn out to be the "Minister of Truth," but thus far we still have control of our minds. For now that is.

Also I don't think 1984 happened like it did in the book. I don't recall Eurasia, East Asia, or Oceania competing at the LA Games. I do remember Carl Lewis' four golds though! What a time to be alive!

Chaos is a ladder, as a well-known book says. Although frankly, we did plenty of damage to our political systems and societies long before DARPANET was ever a glint in anyone's eye. You would be surprised how quickly memes take off in cultures without social media or message boards. Weirdo nihilists have always been able to find their fellow tribe members (if you never hung out with a John Bircher/Objectivist/Christian Identity group in the 70s and 80s, trust me - they were an interesting place to spend a random Wednesday night instead of not getting laid with your more socially adept peers). Urban myths spread like wildfire - trust me, there was no Usenet group spreading the rumor about Richard Gere and the gerbil back in the early 90s, and that spread almost overnight to everybody.

You are 100% correct, but there were limits to the impact. Now, a comment on X can literally shift the tide of an election. An accusation can ruin a life or career. Also, for every person willing to show up to an Objectivist meeting in '73, there were 5,000 who would have never had the courage to leave the house. But your point is very well taken.

You tend to forget how much human misery is caused by people clearly identifying problems with others

— and then creating a monster to protect them from the monsters they see.

we have also gerrymandered the heck out of districts such that electoral pressure goes to the edges -- we will win, but how extreme am i to win the primary -- rather than towards the middle to win centrist or moderate opposing party votes.

i mean, as 2020 showed, in a nationwide vote governing to your base fails as strategy. what keeps the GOP competitive are drawing house districts and the electoral college.

i am not going to champion x because it's basically just a bulletin board for whatever. you may find an early nugget on there. when stuff initially is breaking, it may jump ahead a little and give you ideas what happened. but you won't know it's true til it runs through the authorities and the papers anyway.

i mean i don't know how many photos with names -- wrong ones -- i saw on x after the shooting claiming they knew who the shooter was. so you're digging through that pile of raw speculation, misinformation, and defamation looking for what's true.

do i trust folks without a college degree doing that as their primary/sole information source? heck no.

y'all can pretend colleges are irretrievably woke these days but when i went to college for history i did a thesis decades ago about how you could stack people's opinions on issues where we don't know all the truth by sex/race/age/politics piles. what i think actually happens is people go hunting for nuggets for their pile, not the truth.

eg with the benefit of time we see where the shooter may just have been a fame seeking crazy and his politics are schizophrenic. but the "piles" folks are more than happy to grab any morsel supporting this is a political opponent trying to assassinate his opposite, or even lefties hand-wringing that we have to condone political violence -- even if it turns out not to be that at all. the narrative takes over.

it is actually hard work, even with the MSM, pulling out what is narrative and what is nugget. and if i want nuggets i want professional nugget finders with some clue about discerning truth as opposed to people throwing stuff on x that might actually be intended as narrative-pushing. and i don't trust people who barely paid attention in school to ferret out one from the other. i have a degree in it and it's work for me.

i would like to see media pop up that are more nuggets than narrative, people need facts and not spin that assumes the answers. this is a scientific era where we can get at numbers for what is happening. i am amused we are still stuck on 18th century bumperstickers. we can tell over time what actually works or does not. we have numbers when we tried it before.

This is an interesting post. Would you mind expanding a bit more?

Some loners know it's been burned down for a long time and don't see most of the out front people AKA 'leaders" as anything but power and money hungry. Under these people, government from Cabinet Secretaries to bureaucratic drones and regulators have betrayed the country.