Open Thread

I'm tired. Long night last night.

I guess you can read this -- at the Detroit debate, they'll be giving 400 tickets to party bigs and only 50 to the public.

Whatever.

Ignorant is those who don't know. Stupid is those who won't learn.

We'll see how this shakes out -- this could just be a blip or bad poll -- but if it's true that Christie has lost six points of job approval since he endorsed Trump, that throws a great big beautiful question mark behind claims about his cross-party appeal. If Trump is a popular tribune of the people, shouldn't he have gone up a bit?

Oh, by the way, Establishment/Rubio Shills (But I repeat myself):

How about you stop talking about Cruz's hopes from five months ago to sweep the SEC, before Trumpmania became a full-blown pandemic, if you're not going to mention Marco Rubio's 3-2-1 strategy (a total failure) which was predicted a mere month ago?

I am so sick to death of braindead spin passing for "thought."

They keep bringing up Cruz's hopes -- from five months ago! -- of doing very well in the SEC to poor mouth his actual showing.

And net yo mention of Rubes' 3-2-1 Strategy, which was still being talked up after Iowa, turning into 3-5-2-2-2-3-3-3-2-3-Minnesota caucuses.

The guy didn't even make the minimum threshold in Texas, and just barely inched past it in a couple of more states.

But yeah, keep talking about Cruz's plans from last year to really do well in the SEC.

How do you maintain a position of intellectual prominence by doing nothing but repeating the tired attack lines they got from some other Conventional Wisdom spinner, who himself got it from Marco Rubio press releases?

It's bad enough I had to hear this ten times from the Miami Soundbite Machine twenty times in each of his canned interviews last night -- now I have to hear it repeated robotically by each of his Zombie Computers, five thousand more times the next day?

Can we at least ask of ourselves to try to say some things that are new-ish, that we thought of ourselves? Or, if we're going to quote Mario Romo press releases -- can we at least be honest about that?

Or is this just what it takes to be a writer at a conservative magazine-- the endless regurgitation of talking points written by someone who, while not exactly clever, at least has the advantage of having thought of his non-clever line first?

Shouldn't there be some justification for one's continued feasting at the never-ending Professional Conservative buffet line?

Is that all this is from now on? Forever managing expectations for the underperforming Rubio?

The only presidential skill I've seen this guy exhibit is Managing Expectations. That's all he seems to do. And apparently that's enough for his zealots.

I'm Sick to Death of Goddamn Brain-Dead Stupid Twitter Memes. That's my larger complaint -- what passes for thought, increasingly, is non-thought.

We're not seeing debate. We are seeing people voluntarily self-lobotomizing themselves to be nothing more than living, breathing, Walking Commercial Advertisements, doing nothing but repeat Snappy Zingers I Got From My Guy's Press Release like they we're serenading each other with fucking McDonald's Jingles because, Idiocracy-like, that's our High Art.

This is now our world: People choosing to become Meme Whisperers. Not thinking of the memes, in the main (though that's pretty stupid too, but at least there's some trivial creative effort there).

No, that's too hard. We're just going to RT dumb shit all day, and then take the dumb shit we get from press releases and stick it into an "essay," and just sing commercial fucking jingles to the world all day.

Most of us have stopped watching TV commercials, due to Netfilx and DVRs.

So what do we do now that we're finally liberated from 30-second bursts of non-thought propaganda?

Why, we choose to Become the Commercials Ourselves.

I guess we just couldn't live without them.

We missed them so much we just turned our brains into 140-character Propganda Retweeting Units.

Thinking About It: The internet is just a box of commercials, I guess. That's all it ever has been. It's for Selling Shit, and Porn. Oh, and Identity Theft.

But I guess it's the nature of the internet that this is always going to be a shabby ten billion terabyte Box of Commercial Advertisements. And everyone coming to this arena of Commercial Advertisements must interface with the Commercial Advertisements and, Tron-like, become a Commercial Advertisement Warrior himself.

posted by Ace at 07:37 PM

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