4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump (2017)
I would love to know how much of the toxicity on 4chan is a small set of people, or even how popular it ACTUALLY is.<p>I was in the Palin email hack thread (just watching, as usual, because I&#x27;m &quot;a creepy guy&quot; according to the folks I trained to get in and out of Russia and China with their skulls intact.)<p>I can remember how people moved around... LUE, Something Awful, 4chan... then 8chan or whatever and so on and so forth, as in parallel sites like Rotten went down.<p>It felt like some people... they went onto the net in the 2000s or so, found out what a snuff film or a tit looks like, got their fill for a while, and eventually stopped looking, and others... never could get their fill.<p>(I remember striding across... uh... Not MIT&#x27;s campus, with people doing that &quot;poll the autisit&quot; thing like I didn&#x27;t know they knew I was a former altar server... some... not MIT girl... had done an art project that disrespected the church, I think it involved a pope hat and no pants and possibly some kind of motorized scooter? I decided not to Bing it, since we were technically at &quot;work&quot;, whatever that means when you&#x27;re the assistant to a bunch of human computer interaction researchers who give each other buckets of marital aids as pranks)<p>I was like &quot;<i>well if the undergrads want to take off their pants, it&#x27;s a private university, and the bishop&#x27;s opinion shouldn&#x27;t matter, but maybe they should be more careful not to be visible from the road since some people are prudes</i>&quot; and went off to get a giant curry from a truck, because I was hungry.<p>Anyways, my magical townie view is that the rise of Trump centered around a bunch of policy people who did policy because they were too mentally ill, often specifically too narcissistic, to be lawyers, because there&#x27;s a character and fitness test.<p>Later on, because they&#x27;re narcissists, they would whine and whine even in the classes designed to TEACH THEM STATS about their horrible lives up until then (rarely did I hear things like &quot;my math teacher gave me a deviated septum&quot;), and thus... everything had to be an A&#x2F;B test, because they&#x27;d show up to everything with barely any actual quant knowledge and the US political system pretents to be a two party system when nowhere in the constitution does it say we have to have just two, or even any parties.<p>So then, you&#x27;ve got a situation where there have to be &quot;two sides&quot; to everything.<p>If you want a less gonza version of the above take, there&#x27;s also this great article from July 2016 (people hate to be told &quot;I told you so&quot;):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;how-american-politics-went-insane&#x2F;485570&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;how-ame...</a>