Doomsday Preppers is my new favorite thing on TV. It’s a documentary-style show that features groups of survivalists who for a variety of creative reasons think some kind of apocalypse is imminent. It’s the kind of show that seems to be baiting people like me who are morbidly fascinated with grandiose, paranoid delusions. And now I can’t stop watching it.
I’d really like to be able to stop writing about crank websites like WorldNetDaily and Natural News, but they keep on being hilarious and so I can’t. For example, did you know that your kid might be a spy for the Russians Environmental Protection Agency? IT IS TRUE:
If your child suddenly starts marching around the house demanding that you turn off every light switch after leaving a room, or begins attaching hangers to door handles that grade your family’s energy use habits, he or she may have been recruited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a spy in one of its so-called “energy patrols.”
In what seems like part of a deliberate attempt to make me hate them less, Huffington Post is reviving the brilliant Get Your War On series in video format. The most recent one pokes fun at Donald Trump, and it reminded me of what seems like a neglected aspect of the Donald’s jackassery.
WND founder Joseph Farah.
There ought to be some kind of descriptive law describing the proportional lunacy of websites to its readership. If you read the comments section of your local straight-laced news organization, every once in a while some real crazy will stop by. As the news organizations or blogs or whatever else get more interesting, the commenters get exponentially crazier. And the truly demented are the commenters at really fringe sites. This is where the WorldNetDaily comes in.
In the movie Dr. Strangelove, a high-ranking US military officer turns out to be a paranoid Bircher-type who believes in lots of conspiracy theories involving the Russians. The one he talks about the most is how the Russians were somehow forcing Americans to fluoridate their water, which then weakens their “precious bodily fluids,” which in turn makes them more susceptible to invasion. Or something. He acts in accordance with his beliefs and starts a pre-emptive war, which sets off a chain of events that ultimately leads (spoiler alert!) to the end of the world.
This is a good case study in how the legit press works as opposed to ideological fanatics with websites who pretend to be journalists and how the average news consumer can tell the difference.
The men’s rights subreddit (r/mensrights) has the dubious distinction of being the only subreddit (and there are *lots*) that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Here’s how they describe it:
So it turns out that jerk who went on a shooting spree at a Sikh temple this weekend in Wisconsin was a white supremacist, which means the far right went into their usual hysterics about how he wasn’t really guilty or that he was brainwashed by the gubbamint to do it, or it was all just a dream, or something.
Reddit’s kind of impossible to pin down to one stereotype. It’s just too big. There are a few popular characteristics lots of redditors share (liberal politics and a love of smoking marijuana), but there are also entire subreddits devoted to their polar opposites.
So it’s kind of insincere for someone to say they love or hate Reddit as a whole since the people are all over the map on pretty much every issue out there. There are, however, subreddits that are just devoted to assholery on an epic scale. And that’s what this series is about.
Because the original Red Dawn just wasn’t goofy enough and there are apparently no other potential remakes to do, we’re now stuck with another movie about ruthless Communists plotting a painfully stupid ground invasion of Kansas or something. There was a trailer online in the past day or two, but the production company got butthurt about how everyone was laughing at it (probably!) and filed a copyright infringement claim with YouTube, so it’s gone now.
Atheist Hobos 