Opinion of the Dropouts: MT Treasurer

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

they hate memes

No one hates memes, they hate IndyRep's memes. Which were mostly never funny, and he took the time to bash the few that were into the ground until they weren't funny either. There's a place for funny content on this website — lord knows not every post I make is "serious" — but if you want to do that you have to actually be funny sometimes. Spamming the same stale, unfunny posts is the opposite of that.

Also his memes had a tendency to derail actually serious threads and drown good discussion. You can probably blame the copycats more than him, but a couple threads with serious intent became unreadable due to this.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

To elaborate on what was so annoying about his memeing: He posted in his farewell post defending that it wasn't a strawman, but even per his own explanation it wasn't an accurate summary of anyone's actual takes. The pattern would usually go like this: Someone makes a fairly out there or fairly uninformed take, him and the other crew who did so would seize on it and make a meme mocking it, and then for the sake of irony and supposed humor greatly exaggerate it, and then start mocking that exaggerated version. Maybe not exactly a strawman, but not very intellectually honest either. It's actually kind of like how when QAnoners would cite some obscure federal law as proof that Trump was going to overturn the election results or return to the White House and then you read it what it's referring to and there's a kernel of truth at its core but their interpretation and everything else surrounding is complete laughable bullsh!t.

But what made it extremely annoying is that the memes would then grow so far beyond the original post that they would start to develop "spin-offs" of sorts and mock related things using the same terminology and whatnot, even if not one ever claimed that. Like this whole most recent one of Abby Finkenauer being some sort of populist queen...I don't recall anyone ever saying that, or anything beyond that she was a competent candidate who was able to get a victory in a very favorable year but couldn't replicate that against a strong opponent in a year with heavy coattails against her. But that's a pretty dull take, so they decided to construct this narrative out of existing "populist" memes. It's a lot like that joke about half of discourse on Twitter is coming up with some person in your head that you've never actually encountered anyone like but theoretically could exist, and then getting angry that this hypothetical person might actually exist somewhere without ever meeting someone like that. It's the same exact same thing, except for political takes.

It gets even more annoying when you consider that often the original take wasn't even made by a prominent or regular poster but one of those types who pops up around election time and then vanishes after the election (I know that Young Kim's homophobia meme dates back to a post from a poster that has literally something like 12 posts total), or sometimes not even on the forum at all but a line from an op-ed or blog entry or something (like that "Bipartisan Bills" thing he was absolutely obsessed with for a couple weeks) and often countered with that beyond irritating habit of themed display names/avatars/signatures to represent this totally absurd voter that someone somewhere might actually believe exists (hell we have a very example of this posting in this very thread in the third post), which are especially annoying because then the meme is displayed in every single post that poster makes, and often even targets cases where the mocked take wasn't even exactly wrong, all the Kentucky Governor election memes are the most known and notable example, but for another I remember when him and IceSpear kept jerking each other back and forth about how Jon Tester is some sort of populist hero (I refuse to use the obnoxious hashtags and emojis accompanying this sort of memes even when referencing them), which while probably a pretty shallow take if anyone actually made it is a pretty awful example because Tester won. So what's there to mock?

And his repeated defense of "if the meme is annoying the #analysis is moreso" isn't really a defense at all, even if the things these obsessive memes were mocking were all 100% accurately portrayed and genuine....then why bring them more attention? Why not just laugh at them being dumb, and then maybe bump the thread after they're proven wrong or whatever? Trying to be as annoying as an annoying person to prove how wrong they are really isn't some sort of own.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Also this forum in general (and well before him for that matter) seems to not really understand the very short shelf life of memes. Great example: remember that Bernie Sanders at the inauguration meme? Less than 48 hours after that photo was posted an emo/hardcore Facebook group I post in banned it because about half the posts were just variations of it with in various album covers. The first couple were amusing, but then once everyone had to do it it became basically spam. After less than 48 hours. But here when that sort of thing happens instead of just being like "OK this was kind of fun at first but it's clearly stale now, let's move on" which generally happens on most internet communities the reaction instead is to double, triple and quadruple down on it even when it's about as fresh as Rickrolling and no one is claiming it has any humor value remaining (assuming it ever did to begin with.)

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Mixed. Had some good insights for sure, but his memes just got so old and annoying. We get it, you think there's absolutely no way Mark Kelly and Chris Sununu could simultaneously win.

I don't even know what he was trying to get at with all of this Finkenauer s**t. I'm pretty sure almost everyone on here thinks the Iowa Senate race is Safe R. Okay maybe it would be Likely R if Grassley retires, but even then, Likely does not mean Tossup.

It's a perfect example of a narrative that he constructed in his head and found so absurd it had to be constantly and endlessly mocked even though no one had actually said it. The source is basically that in 2018 Finkenauer had a few very good polls showing her up by double digits so some people expected that...but she ended up winning by "only" 5 points. So therefore a lot of people initially assumed she was a strong candidate but they ended up overestimating her slightly. This is a rather dull situation and not particularly mockworthy, so to create a meme because that's the only way he's able to communicate, he invented this notion that the people who overestimated Finkenauer's margin of victory believe that she's some sort of populist queen who can win over WWC voters that most Democrats can't, and therefore she must be unbeatable in a Senate race in these people's views and so he was going to mock people who though that she was favored in the race. But as noted basically no one was saying this so it was kind of him talking to himself in an extremely irritating fashion.

There's also the question as to if believing someone who would win by 10 points but they only won by 5 and/or believing that someone would be narrowly re-elected but they actually lost by 3 points is some sort of massive prediction failure that even needs meme mockery to begin with. I mean if we're going to use that standard that virtually every race will have an incorrect prediction that needs to be beaten like a dead horse. The worst thing is that if you apply that standard to a race where him and the meme crew got it wrong (like infamously the KY-GOV election), they'll come up with some excuse about why it wasn't really that off, or that it was close anyway so it doesn't matter, etc. sort of ignoring the simple fact that predicting Finkenauer would win by double digits in her first race/win at all in her second is objectively not as mathematically incorrect as predicting that Bevin would win by double digits.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Mixed. Had some good insights for sure, but his memes just got so old and annoying. We get it, you think there's absolutely no way Mark Kelly and Chris Sununu could simultaneously win.

I don't even know what he was trying to get at with all of this Finkenauer s**t. I'm pretty sure almost everyone on here thinks the Iowa Senate race is Safe R. Okay maybe it would be Likely R if Grassley retires, but even then, Likely does not mean Tossup.

-snip-

It's also about having some sense of humility. KaiserDave, I think, had the best prediction for the 2020 presidential election, but you don't see him going around mocking people for believing in red Georgia or blue Florida. If you dish it out, then you should be able to take it back, but he never could do that either.

Indeed. It's one thing to bump or bring up really stupid predictions (like Beet's prediction Tulsi Gabbard would be the nominee or anything about Kanye West playing spoiler), but "HAHA YOU THOUGHT THIS PERSON WOULD WIN BY 7 POINTS AND THEY ONLY WON BY 3!" isn't a mega-own. So to make it sound like one and justify a meme you have to really distort it. And in this case keeping beating the dead horse that's that distorted version.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Was possibly the most irritating poster on the forum. Glad to hear he's left.

For all the good words about his #analysis, the core of it was that he was a nakedly partisan Montana Republican who hated Democrats winning in red states.

Honestly that's possibly correct. He loved to create memes mocking Jon Tester, which is a pretty odd target since via his performances Tester is objectively one of the most talented campaigners and electoral performers in the Senate.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I'm sorry to see him go, although his explanation would suggest that was a sensible decision. This place is worse without him and without his memes.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/21/politics/chuck-grassley-des-moines-register-poll/index.html

Cillizza strikes again lmao

Moments like these demanded them.

The proper response to Chris Cillizza saying something stupid is not to derail threads and spam multiple pages of meme nonsense when no one on the forum buys it anyway. His "method" of dealing with such things is a good example of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The take I'm not understanding at all is the notion that his memes somehow provided a countermeasure of sorts to bad takes and #analysis. I do not possible see how they did and even if they did somehow it would be like a gang member shooting another gang member in a crowd so in response the other gang sprays fire and kills the shooter along with a ton of innocent bystanders. Perhaps the best analogy is that they were a sort of Dr. Strangelove-style doomsday device in that they rendered entire threads unusable wastelands or discussion of certain races almost impossible, but even then the analogy would only work if they served as a deterrent, which they did not, and especially not against people like Cillizza who do not post here. In that case the analogy would be if the Polish Army's response to Germany invading would be to start massacres in Warsaw.