Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/23/mistaking-effects-for-cause.html
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If Nazi frogs could swing elections, wouldn’t we have seen a lot more Nazi frogs before now? (Not counting student council elections.)
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Maybe. But I think that there was sort of a mass mobilization during the Obama administration that culminated during the campaign.
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So what they’re saying here is “don’t feed the trolls”?
I can’t conceive anyone voted for Trump because they heard about the existence of alt-right trolls. And anyway the assorted false narratives Fox News created about emails or Benghazi seep into the dialogue no matter what, the point is to counter it with a rational opinion when you have the chance; “pizzagate” did more to hurt the alt-right than help it.
Another example: should the media stop reporting on Trump’s ridiculous tweets? On one hand it uses up valuable time on total bullshit, on the other hand it exposes Trump as being fond of total bullshit.
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WTF? Why can’t people just look at the goddamned numbers and see it was a pack of people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Clinton/woman/whatthefuckever and were lazy bastards who thought the rest of the US would just magically do it for them?
“I didn’t vote for either so I’m not to blame for anything the winner eventually does!”
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Remember early on in the 2016 election when it looked like it was going to be “Bush vs Clinton”? Remember the collective groan of disappointment and the snark about monarchies? Remember how effortlessly Trump wiped out Bush? Remember how effortlessly Sanders trounced Clinton?
Actually, I’m not sure I’m remembering the whole thing properly.
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I’m in that group, albeit in a comfortably blue state so it didn’t matter, but the truth is while I would vote for Elizabeth Warren, Michelle Obama, or any other female candidate that actually cares about the country, I could not bring myself to vote for Hillary because she reminds me too much of the elder George Bush. I think the email dump did more for me to approve of her than anything else, (for the lack of real dirt), but I still feel like she would be pulling strings behind the curtain for others to do her dirty work. In short, she’s slick like a professional politician, and with the last few decades of racing to the bottom that just scares the bejeebers out of me!
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their “God Emperor”
I believe you have made two mistakes.
It is “God Emperror With No Clothes”
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So you are more comfortable with the current administration?
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Weren’t all the collaborators under the Vichy government bad enough?
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Lol, no, not at all, and were I in a swing state I would most assuredly have voted against him. Being in a solid blue state I did the next best thing and contributed quite a bit of time and money to campaigning against him.
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Yeah, if we want to talk about stupid made up memes swinging the election for trump, you gotta go to the oldest memes in the book…
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A friend posted this excellent article about the /r Trump group’s effect and who they are:
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Despite the widespread belief that meme-warriors won the election through tactical shitposting of photoshopped Pepe the Frogs in Nazi arm-bands,
It is news to me ANYONE other than perhaps the people making the memes thought this.
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Great article, but it seems to be missing a summary section. After the triangle illustration at the bottom I expected to see a larger fleshed out version instead of trailing off into, well, nothing much more? Not complaining, just wanting more! 
Wow, that’s some handy analysis.
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Despite the widespread belief that meme-warriors won the election through tactical shitposting of photoshopped Pepe the Frogs in Nazi arm-bands, the reality is a lot more complicated.
Amen to that. After all, the Russian oligarchs won the election.
Yes, I can’t tell if maybe they are the type of people who are really just more interested in their approach to analysis than Trump and used the interest in him now to show what they can do, or if the article got cut, or what. It does seem to end oddly and then there is a whole bunch of tangental info about their data analysis that doesn’t really go there. I do think it was a good read, though. There’s all this talk about internet bubbles but some bubbles, like Reddit, play a bigger role than others. It seems that Trump’s people were aware of how influential this group was to their overall success.
