Originally published at: DeSantis press secretary fooled by funny fake screenshot of Washington Post "Homophobic Dog" story | Boing Boing
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By now, it’s hard not to believe anything from the Death-Sentence team, they are very capable of just about any new low in the arena of shitty politics.
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I honestly have trouble understanding who is being trolled for what here. Is it me because my only reaction is, “that’s a Lab, not a Dachshund?”. I guess I’m old.
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I’m not sure what the joke is here, either. There’s nothing in that headline that is obvious satire - I’ve seen many similar stories about memes getting out of control and being a problem for their subjects. Is it supposed to be funny? What am I missing?
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These people live in a cartoon world where what 15-20 years ago would have been an exaggerated/cartoonish depiction of conservatives is now reality. So it doesn’t surprise me their understanding of the rest of the world is also exaggerated and cartoonish.
They literally believe “the left” hates America and wants to destroy it.
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Yes. In this story, everyone is an idiot. “I made up some junk” is not satire.
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The key to this:
The original image lampoons the way right-wingers think about Taylor Lorenz’ tech culture reportage. It’s sharp not least because it has an ambigious, Poe’s Law quality to it. You could imagine a smart, funny right winger making this to parody Lorenz herself.
So DeSantis’s press officer falling for it is funny because she’s walking on stage, at the exact right moment, to play the idiot right winger who confirms that this is about them, not her. She picked up this ambigious trolling and jammed it into her own head.
And this allows Lorenz herself to take up that ambiguity and the relative sophistication it represents with a “yeah I’ll write this!” line. Voila!
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This reminds me of the old EB White quote, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.”*
*I’ve always been puzzled by the end of this quote; as, if you are chopping up a living frog, you are vivisecting it, not dissecting it; and you are a weird, cruel bastard.
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Pushaw’s claim that she is the one making the joke could be plausible I guess, the “more cutting edge journalism” bit is obviously sarcastic, but that doesn’t automatically mean she knew the story was fake/satire.
Anyway, does it matter? The conservative troll-o-sphere falls for satirical Onion headlines all the time, and even repeats false claims knowingly to suit their purposes. The very phrase “fake news” applies to actual facts every time they spit it out.
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Zooming out there is the basic “news” thing too: a governor’s press officer who constantly whines about fake news getting punked by fake news
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I don’t really get it.
Didn’t pizza-gate already show how gullible/easily riled up to hate and violence so much of the right it?
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As recently as 1981, my Jr. High biology class frog dissection was done with live frogs. Step 1: pith the chilled frog (i.e. run a needle up its spine into its brain before it wakes up.) Step 2, use pins to spread out the still-twitching frogs’ limbs, then follow the actual cutting/dissection steps for the assignment. I believe the next year’s class had pre-killed, preserved in formaldehyde frogs, for what it’s worth. With one frog per two students, that was a lot of frogs. I don’t recall anyone being too skittish to kill their frog, but its not like I was focused on much other than “is this squidgy bit the pancreas, or spleen?”
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LIke an Inception fake news. A fake news item, inside a fake news item, inside another fake news item.
Problem is at no point there is any truth.
The lesson for me: everybody lies on Twitter for fun and profit. I hope Musk buys the cesspool and it quickly goes the way of Myspace.
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What you are missing is that the governor’s office of the third most populous state in the US is so preoccupied with homophobic dogs that they are and not, like, governing or something. Is this the best focus of senior government officials time and energy?
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What does this mean?
This reminds me of the “Rape culture in dog parks” hoax scientific paper:
It’s a riff on Desantis’ name, and a reference to his murderous policy regarding Covid. He killed a shit load of Floridians with his policies. He’s also seeking to drive up the number of suicides of LGBQT+ kids, and to ban teaching the facts about racism in America. Plus, he’s pro-death penalty. He can fuck right off.
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We have a long haired cream coloured dachshund. He is old and a bit too heavy. If he was short haired and put in a few more pounds he might look like that picture. (In the thumbnail- I have not clicked through)
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Our politicians and news outlets want you to believe it is R vs D when in reality it is the powerful driving trollies the powerless.
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