Every time I see memes about hight I ask myself why are americans so fixated on that. It’s like this is the major thing american women look in a man. Never seen that anywhere else.
Really great question in which I have spent a decade, maybe two, pursuing the answers for, among many other absurd social issues. This comic alone represents a very real phenomenon that didn’t exist in the US prior to the rise of social media.
Left to its own devices, social media would have made this kind of thing a non-issue. Without outside interference, social media broadly would have become a reflection of our society in many ways, the less relevant voices would have been drowned out by people ignoring them or talking over them. Contention would be drowned out by more reasonable voices.
Then I read the KGB handbook for destabilizing democratic nations and states and a lot of things became clear. The idea that you can get your enemy to welcome you in and open the gates for you without firing a shot. The tactic of getting an enemy state to dissolve from within as the people start fixating on each other instead of actual threats.
The tactic is simple and it’s been being used on the USA since as soon as large numbers of people started browsing the interwebs every day. Get a busload of people together, pay them and get them laptops and celphones just like you’re setting up a call-center type scam operation, but instead of fishing for money, you pay everyone to make accounts all over American social media and forums, find every single post or comment that has any level of social controversy or division, and then you amplify the most extreme views on both sides of every goddamn thing.
Argue against yourself on two different accounts, playing up both how much women “hate short men” while at the same time play short men who are toxic and irate and hate women and make them start a sect of equally hateful men. But of course, not at all limited to height, basically anything that men in particular feel sexual insecurity about gets ramped up in overdrive, because this makes “ground soldiers” and every fascist movement in history has started with sexually insecure young men feeling frustrated and joining forces. Do all this while playing up how dangerous and threatening these angry men are, make people feel unsafe, make people push back with equal vitriol and threats of violence. Logs on the fire. Gasoline all over the structures of democracy. It eventually gets so bad that people tune out, they stop taking sides about anything, they stop paying attention to news stories because they don’t know who to believe, they default to doing whatever the state tells them to do because they don’t have better answers for anything and just want stability. They stop participating in democracy.
It’s not hyperbole, it’s something I watched from the earliest days of Somethingawful banning their low-effort image posters and those people going on to form 4-chan and the insular cult-like, society-shaping force that it became, and I was there watching all the demons whispering in people’s ears. I modded huge forums and subreddits over the years, I’ve seen the bots and the armies waiting to subvert every place where people talk. They’re not just russians, but they all have the same goal and the USA was not at all prepared for this kind of attack. Parents told their kids “it’s not real, don’t believe anything online” as more and more of life moved to the internet and people stopped socializing in person.
Bud, you need to take a breath. This was a thing before social media, I promise you. It’s not a psy op.
It’s simple, toxic masculinity throughout the post war period led to a lot of men lying about their height (same for women and their weight during the same period). Over time public perception of what a tall person looked like shifted, and now every woman thinks that 6 ft is average height.
This phenomenon came out of American advertising, not Russian agents.
Here’s more, the evidence is massive and every major institution is reporting on it, but people like you are tuning out and not caring because it just seems like more “gender war nonsense” or “internet arguing” which is exactly the point of what they’ve been doing for decades, making it so people get mad at anyone who raises awareness of outside influence in our social discourse because you’re all tired of caring. I get it. You are not “talking reason to a conspiracist” here, you’re a victim of warfare.
Your personal feelings are irrelevant, this is a huge issue that you can google and get avalanches of reports, stories, data, evidence and facts. But for some reason people aren’t caring as much about facts anymore… hmnnn, interesting.
I’m highlighting how this is a huge issue, they’re downplaying it and saying male height insecurity hasn’t been played up by Russian and other national interests, and I not only know for a fact they were, I have had firsthand access to the scenes behind the curtains where people have been on the frontline of tracking and stopping foreign online influence. A lot of great people did a lot of great work we’ll never hear about, but enough of the shit bled through and took hold in American culture that it will never be shaken now. We have several generations of backwards, dark-ages masculinity bullshit and gender division ahead of us because we were too tolerant of intolerance and we didn’t take threats seriously. Like the user above.
I appreciate you understanding the issue, but to say we’re both right is a contradiction in this context.
And I’m saying that bad actors from a variety of opposing sources have been exploiting our existing social vulnerabilities. Don’t be obtuse, you either know exactly what I’m referencing and it’s making you mad, or you’re dense and ill-informed.
Yes it’s always been a “thing” but over the last couple decades there have been organized efforts to boost and amplify every small social contention, which is why you have the rise of the “men’s movement” and all the stupid nonsense that came with like redpill BS and incel talking points getting amplified across the world. It’s not conspiracy, it’s been documented and we have had a whole operation in our national security agencies to monitor and track down these subversive efforts.
Here, while I’m “taking breath” maybe you can get yourself up to speed:
“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election. Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in the machinery of government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans. While Russia may have been the first to hone the modern disinformation tactics outlined in this report, other adversaries, including China, North Korea, and Iran, are following suit.” - https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/senate-intel-committee-releases-bipartisan-report-russia’s-use-social-media
Don’t be ignorant how vulnerable you are to outside influence. They DEPEND on people like you to keep making people shrug and not pay attention as they use our emotions and social issues as weapons to destabilize democracy. What, are you worried you have to DO something about it? Don’t worry, you can keep zoning out and staring at your social media and dumb youtubers being paid by foreign nations to scream about things nobody actually cares about in an effort to make people enraged. You don’t need to feel any feelings of guilt or responsibility here, just don’t keep working for them for free.
Really great question in which I have spent a decade, maybe two, pursuing the answers for, among many other absurd social issues. This comic alone represents a very real phenomenon that didn’t exist in the US prior to the rise of social media.
Left to its own devices, social media would have made this kind of thing a non-issue. Without outside interference, social media broadly would have become a reflection of our society in many ways, the less relevant voices would have been drowned out by people ignoring them or talking over them. Contention would be drowned out by more reasonable voices.
Then I read the KGB handbook for destabilizing democratic nations and states and a lot of things became clear. The idea that you can get your enemy to welcome you in and open the gates for you without firing a shot. The tactic of getting an enemy state to dissolve from within as the people start fixating on each other instead of actual threats.
The tactic is simple and it’s been being used on the USA since as soon as large numbers of people started browsing the interwebs every day. Get a busload of people together, pay them and get them laptops and celphones just like you’re setting up a call-center type scam operation, but instead of fishing for money, you pay everyone to make accounts all over American social media and forums, find every single post or comment that has any level of social controversy or division, and then you amplify the most extreme views on both sides of every goddamn thing.
Argue against yourself on two different accounts, playing up both how much women “hate short men” while at the same time play short men who are toxic and irate and hate women and make them start a sect of equally hateful men. But of course, not at all limited to height, basically anything that men in particular feel sexual insecurity about gets ramped up in overdrive, because this makes “ground soldiers” and every fascist movement in history has started with sexually insecure young men feeling frustrated and joining forces. Do all this while playing up how dangerous and threatening these angry men are, make people feel unsafe, make people push back with equal vitriol and threats of violence. Logs on the fire. Gasoline all over the structures of democracy. It eventually gets so bad that people tune out, they stop taking sides about anything, they stop paying attention to news stories because they don’t know who to believe, they default to doing whatever the state tells them to do because they don’t have better answers for anything and just want stability. They stop participating in democracy.
It’s not hyperbole, it’s something I watched from the earliest days of Somethingawful banning their low-effort image posters and those people going on to form 4-chan and the insular cult-like, society-shaping force that it became, and I was there watching all the demons whispering in people’s ears. I modded huge forums and subreddits over the years, I’ve seen the bots and the armies waiting to subvert every place where people talk. They’re not just russians, but they all have the same goal and the USA was not at all prepared for this kind of attack. Parents told their kids “it’s not real, don’t believe anything online” as more and more of life moved to the internet and people stopped socializing in person.
Bud, you need to take a breath. This was a thing before social media, I promise you. It’s not a psy op.
It’s simple, toxic masculinity throughout the post war period led to a lot of men lying about their height (same for women and their weight during the same period). Over time public perception of what a tall person looked like shifted, and now every woman thinks that 6 ft is average height.
This phenomenon came out of American advertising, not Russian agents.
Here’s more, the evidence is massive and every major institution is reporting on it, but people like you are tuning out and not caring because it just seems like more “gender war nonsense” or “internet arguing” which is exactly the point of what they’ve been doing for decades, making it so people get mad at anyone who raises awareness of outside influence in our social discourse because you’re all tired of caring. I get it. You are not “talking reason to a conspiracist” here, you’re a victim of warfare.
https://www.queensu.ca/artsci/news/how-russian-gender-based-disinformation-could-influence-the-2024-u-s-presidential-election
Your personal feelings are irrelevant, this is a huge issue that you can google and get avalanches of reports, stories, data, evidence and facts. But for some reason people aren’t caring as much about facts anymore… hmnnn, interesting.
You’re both right, though. Russia is amplifying the toxic masculinity culture, which absolutely started in the pre-internet era.
Thank you
I’m highlighting how this is a huge issue, they’re downplaying it and saying male height insecurity hasn’t been played up by Russian and other national interests, and I not only know for a fact they were, I have had firsthand access to the scenes behind the curtains where people have been on the frontline of tracking and stopping foreign online influence. A lot of great people did a lot of great work we’ll never hear about, but enough of the shit bled through and took hold in American culture that it will never be shaken now. We have several generations of backwards, dark-ages masculinity bullshit and gender division ahead of us because we were too tolerant of intolerance and we didn’t take threats seriously. Like the user above.
I appreciate you understanding the issue, but to say we’re both right is a contradiction in this context.
And I’m saying that bad actors from a variety of opposing sources have been exploiting our existing social vulnerabilities. Don’t be obtuse, you either know exactly what I’m referencing and it’s making you mad, or you’re dense and ill-informed.
Yes it’s always been a “thing” but over the last couple decades there have been organized efforts to boost and amplify every small social contention, which is why you have the rise of the “men’s movement” and all the stupid nonsense that came with like redpill BS and incel talking points getting amplified across the world. It’s not conspiracy, it’s been documented and we
havehad a whole operation in our national security agencies to monitor and track down these subversive efforts.Here, while I’m “taking breath” maybe you can get yourself up to speed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/18/how-russia-weaponized-social-media-got-caught-escaped-consequences/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-politics-social-media-facebook
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/17/russia-used-all-major-social-media-platforms-to-aid-trump-report
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-covert-russian-government-sponsored-foreign-malign-influence
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/04/nx-s1-5100329/us-russia-election-interference-bots-2024
Don’t be ignorant how vulnerable you are to outside influence. They DEPEND on people like you to keep making people shrug and not pay attention as they use our emotions and social issues as weapons to destabilize democracy. What, are you worried you have to DO something about it? Don’t worry, you can keep zoning out and staring at your social media and dumb youtubers being paid by foreign nations to scream about things nobody actually cares about in an effort to make people enraged. You don’t need to feel any feelings of guilt or responsibility here, just don’t keep working for them for free.