I don’t think they’re desperate. I think they’re just following the road ahead, taking the next obvious step. As each parcel of extremity gets poured out and only gets a small amount of traction outside their weird bubble, we’re not seeing how normalised this shit is for them. None of them is surprised or doubtful that people from overseas are “eating our pets”.
Desperate implies that there’s some sort of deliberate machination at play when they come up with these absurd stories.
Like that weird story about Wayfair taking orders for children and shipping them out in wardrobes. Remember that? I had to explain to someone that it wasn’t happening because she was genuinely frightened and outraged by it. It was pointless explaining the impossibility of it (where do these children come from, how come no one is reporting their children missing, why are they being so complicated, what happens to the children in transit…). The thing that helped in the end was demonstrating the algorithm to her: we both looked up the same thing, something she chose, and my phone took me to debunking sites and hers took her to doubling down stuff.
It’s called doubling down for a reason: there’s a logarithmic scale, an exponential increase of the bullshit as you go along the story. It’s bizarre to us but it’s the next step that gets them into the necessary state of froth and fury.
It’s the same as needing a bigger more extreme hit of porn or violence when you get accustomed to it.
www.independent.co.uk
en.wikipedia.org
