Lying Memes And Quotes

Four out of five dentists agree: lying through your teeth does NOT count as flossing. —Meme

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted. There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.

I just hired two BearPaw Duck Farm customer service reps, Tom and Arnold, and together they're pretty funny, like Tom Arnold. I tell a lot of True Lies, but this isn't one of them.

the biggest bubble that I participate in is Conservative Facebook. It's a world where whatever Trump says is gospel, any criticism is an obvious lie and all other perspectives are Marxist. All absolute positions with no room for discussion with memes used as a foundation of fact (9/11/2020 on Twitter)

The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.

The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

I would dance all day in my basement listening to Off the Wall. You young people really don’t understand how magical Michael Jackson was. No one thought he was strange. No one was laughing. We were all sitting in front of our TVs watching the “Thriller” video every hour on the hour. We were all staring, openmouthed, as he moonwalked for the first time on the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. When he floated backward like a funky astronaut, I screamed out loud. There was no rewinding or rewatching. No next-day memes or trends on Twitter or Facebook posts. We would call each other on our dial phones and stretch the cord down the hall, lying on our stomachs and discussing Michael Jackson’s moves, George Michael’s facial hair, and that scene in Purple Rain when Prince fingers Apollonia from behind. Moments came and went, and if you missed them, you were shit out of luck. That’s why my parents went to a M*A*S*H party and watched the last episode in real time. There was no next-day M*A*S*H cast Google hangout. That’s why my family all squeezed onto one couch and watched the USA hockey team win the gold against evil Russia! We all wept as my mother pointed out every team member from Boston. (Everyone from Boston likes to point out everyone from Boston. Same with Canadians.) We all chanted “USA!” and screamed “YES!” when Al Michaels asked us if we believed in miracles. Things happened in real time and you watched them together. There was no rewind. HBO arrived in our house that same year. We had

Almost all the real journalists are gone. Even the successful are in danger of being squashed by mainstream platforms for reasons other than their commitment to a sustainable business model. Many real journalists self-publish on Substack or put out content, free of interference, on Locals, Rumble, or Telegram. These outlets hopefully will continue to promote freedom of speech and allow the mainstream to continue promoting innocuous travel images as well as cute animal memes, providing a kitty’s smirk isn’t deemed to be too subversive that it undermines the electorate’s faith in our government or our media. Don’t ask the mainstream companies what they think of independent platforms. They lie, a lot, and you’ll probably get the answer you suspect. Replace them. All of them.

My dream lies not in the money. MONEY CAN'T FETTER MY DREAMS पैसा मेरे सपनों की ज़ंजीरें नहीं

But it is undeniable that Trump harnessed and encouraged the antiestablishment energy found online, and that his status as president helped this energy move from the wires to the weeds. Stop the Steal, Trump’s last gamble, showed him ready to exploit the very people who had voted for him and who he surely knew were susceptible to his lies.

WE LIVE WE LOVE WE LIE

In the meantime, President Biden has worked hard to limit the what the public believes by promoting the meme that “For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.

For some inexplicable reason, Trump supporters hanging out in political chatrooms began using a green cartoon frog named Pepe as their symbol, pumping out pro-Trump memes with the image. Many of them were also World of Warcraft fans who have long used the word “kek” in place of “lol” for reasons too obscure and nerdy to go into. Then, oddly enough, they found out that there actually was an Egyptian god named Kek who was depicted as a man with a frog’s head. Some thought it was a mystical coincidence that shouldn’t be ignored, or at least should be made into a delightfully kooky storyline. They decided that Trump was a living version of Kek, hence the nickname “God Emperor.” Mostly for fun, a canon was created around the Cult of Kek. Adherents claim heritage to an ancient kingdom called “Kekistan” that was overtaken by “Cuckistan” and “Normistan.” They created their own flag, inspired by the German Nazi war flag, which is sometimes spotted at pro-Trump events.

Dawkins’s memes are relatively trivial patterns with a lim- ited “life span”; an attractor, in its very definition, is possessed of a profound (deep) geometry that lies outside of temporal considerations.