Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“woke” is the new caravan.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Consistently wrong since 2002

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

This really is a full service blog.

Republicans do not trust women.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Fight them, without becoming them!

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Late Night WTF Open Thread: Dank

Late Night WTF Open Thread: Dank

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That’s the candidate’s official Twitter feed, so there’s at least two humans who found this entertaining — assuming it was a human who assembled it in the first place.

I do not pretend to be aware of all internet traditions, but I am willing to opine that this is the sort of “humor” that a very white, upper-middle-class candidate for president should know better than to embrace, for reasons.

Maybe it’s that innate caution that keeps me a Democrat instead of a True Progressive.

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  6. 6.

    ruemara

    Yeah, upper middle class academic has a connection to “dank” memes. Lord, it’s like when my soon to be ex-boss and the trust rep started talking about “bling”. Shut up, Dr. Heather, you’re not hip and you can stop trying.

  10. 10.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne: I was puzzled too. I guess, if you are going to do an ultra weak ‘spit-take’ gag, why not make it offensive in general and racist in particular.

    Stein on the bottle or what. Probably she is trying to show she is a ‘hep cat’.

  13. 13.

    BR

    Folks have been giving her a hard time about her Cuba tweet (about Cuba’s agricultural transition post USSR) and while she makes it ridiculous in the usual way, there’s actually something to it. Cuba did make a real transition post USSR and its food system is known to be a great model for how to move away from hyper-industrial agriculture. What she doesn’t mention is that it’s not so hard for a tropical place like Cuba to achieve that vs. someplace like North Korea which is often cited as a failure post USSR (and has a terrible climate, and poorly managed soils).

    Anyway, I hate seeing sensible research on agriculture getting associated with Stein’s nonsensical campaign.

  14. 14.

    Major Major Major Major

    A “dank meme” as far as I can tell is any meme that fulfills the following criteria:
    – sufficiently far-left to annoy me
    – thinks it’s clever
    – is not

    “Bernie Sanders’ dank meme stash” was (is?) a popular facebook group. Now the same crowd is posting Wokémon. Yawn.

  15. 15.

    Mnemosyne

    Meanwhile, Hillary is sending out emails with a sweepstakes to let you meet Barbra Streisand.

    At least somebody’s campaign knows who their audience is.

  16. 16.

    jl

    @BR: I didn’t see the tweet, but there is a bad habit of identifying anything said by a person you don’t like with the person, so you automatically disagree with whatever they said. A kind of guilt by association. It’s hard to resist. I do it sometimes, and have to catch myself.

    Even Trump has managed to say a couple of true things during his campaign. Might be a case of enough random output and you get a true statement once in a while.

  17. 17.

    Ruckus

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:
    I didn’t have to click on it to know it wouldn’t be working. Stein is an idiot. People who can not see the forest because they think their cranial rectal inversion was a total success are fucking idiots.

  18. 18.

    Troublesome Carp fka Geeno

    I just don’t get what I’m supposed to make of the meme, and so her approval of it makes her seem alien to me.

  23. 23.

    sukabi

    @Major Major Major Major: I had to look it up on urban dictionary so it could either be a “cool or hip meme” or “a trite or cliche meme” or anything in between.

    Obviously urban dictionary should limit the people posting definitions to the folks who are actually urban.

  24. 24.

    Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    O.0….. O.o….. o.O…. oo;….. >.<7……

    I'm not aware of all internet traditions, but there are some traditions that shouldn't be allowed to live due to the embarrassment of other white people. I mean really, what is going on with that? I have no clue,

  25. 25.

    Librarian

    I highly doubt that Trump and Clinton are watching Jill, or giving her any thought at all.

  26. 26.

    ruemara

    Wokemon belittles the idea of being politically aware, whether intentional or no. Kinda wish people understood that the mocking, is mocking.

  28. 28.

    Anne Laurie

    @Major Major Major Major: And here I thought the /reddit boards had stolen all the ‘dank memes’ from 4chan…

    Definitely seems like one of those “once the mundanes are trying this, we proud adolescents will never use again!!!”

    So… useful, insofar as now I know never to use ‘dank meme’ ever again, yes?

  29. 29.

    cmorenc

    Well, I’ll give Dr.Stein credit that she has a good sense of humor – but one dangerously ill-suited for a political candidate to publicly broadcast e.g. on Twitter because it’s so easily misunderstood or misused by others to be offensive or clueless, without any worthwhile compensating political or personal return to Dr. Stein (at least outside her own cozy personal social circles).

  30. 30.

    Major Major Major Major

    @ruemara: They think they’re being the mostest awarest people on the planet, though. It all stems from something I might start calling the grad schoolification of the Internet. I don’t know where it came from, but I think it started with Twitter, and now everybody’s an armchair intersectional radfem anarcho-environmentalist.

    @Anne Laurie: They’re not adolescents, they’re thirty. But yes, you should never ever type or say that.

  33. 33.

    magurakurin

    Jill Stein? Whatever. Pat Paulsen’s campaigns were actually more serious than Stein’s ego trips….and his campaigns really did have funny jokes.

    Jill Stein. does. not. matter.

  35. 35.

    Ruckus

    @jl:
    Fast and well are 2 entirely different things. Besides as I understand it this doc is a gastroenterologist, does this mean that Trumps mind passes gas at an alarming rate? And yes that is possible, considering the location it has been in for decades.

  36. 36.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    WTF, isn’t she supposed to the Purity Pony and she is finding a black …stereotype…funny… I mean, fuck, I am an old suburban white guy and know better…

  38. 38.

    Bobby Thomson

    @Major Major Major Major: a fairly highly rated definition at Urban Dictionary:

    “Dank Memes” is an ironic expression used to mock online viral media and in-jokes that have exhausted their comedic value to the point of being trite or cliché. In this context, the word “dank,” originally coined as a term for high quality marijuana, is satirically used as a synonym for “cool.”

  41. 41.

    Steeplejack

    @sukabi:

    My forthcoming monograph will conclusively show that 40-50% of all Urban Dictionary content is generated by sugared-up tweens on unsupervised sleepover parties.

  43. 43.

    evgen

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I do not think anyone supposes ‘dank’ was created to describe good weed, but high-quality bud is often sticky and moist from the oil that contains THC so the term was applied and via that it entered the popular lexicon. Now it is the only reason most people have ever heard of the word.

  44. 44.

    Joel

    Plus ca change, c’est la meme chose

    Can we kill the word “meme” now? Has it been sufficiently dorkified, yet?

  45. 45.

    Applejinx

    @ruemara: I don’t agree. The thing that’s hard to remember for people my age and older (I’m 48) is that there is no context for ‘politically aware’ anymore. That presupposes at least a half-working system with choices and legitimate positions.

    How can anyone say we have legitimate choices right now? People are pretty much aware we get to pick ‘establishment’ or several flavors of ‘ridiculously unreasonable choice’. I’m pretty sure a lot of millenials thought they could actually have Sanders, but he turned out to be not ready or appropriate for the national stage or for seriously leading this country. Trump is a nuclear whoopie cushion. Nobody thinks Jill Stein is going to win anything. This is not politics, this is triage.

    If this is what we get, I don’t have a problem with younger people co-opting Pokemon to ‘ironically’ spout socialist and revolutionary rhetoric. I’m not the only one watching changes in things like Twitter, Facebook etc. and seeing a steady narrowing of discourse, like everybody’s being corralled into their own little intellectual veal-fattening pens. ‘Wokemon’ echoes Situationist thought: none of this is terribly new (which is to say, it’s not like this is a new problem or a new reaction). I think it’s just what you get when the leftist harangues end up strongly supported by the actions of rampaging capitalists themselves. Justify too many of the rants, and you get this type of rebellion, which can escalate surprisingly far when it really has to.

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International

    Now, is Hillary Clinton necessarily a bogeyman requiring this type of response, and eventually full-on revolution just to survive the world she means to enact? NO, because it’s become pretty obvious that reform is needed and she’s actively running on that as a platform. The whole ‘revolutionary’ energy could rapidly dissipate just by supporting the lower classes and getting redistributionist, plus that is an incredibly powerful solution right now: Europe is looking at a desperate need to export to somewhere in order to survive, and the winning geopolitical strategy could well be ‘expand like a mofo, shower people with money with which to consume, and leave the rest of the world wholly dependent on your wellbeing and piggish consumer ways, for their survival’.

    If Hillary and/or her people get that, we could be looking at a pretty classy (middle-classy) existence. If they decide America needs to compete on equal footing with Indonesia as robots come on line to drive all human labor’s worth down to zero, which is sort of the Republican position if they can be said to have one, that would be mighty stupid.

    I’ll happily accuse Hillary of being greedy and power-mad: that’s a job requirement for any Presidential candidate or indeed politician, even Saint Bernie is not immune, if Stein isn’t greedy and power-mad it’s because she’s bonkers (and bonkers is not a good qualification). But I don’t think Hillary is clueless. Maybe if she’d won against Obama, she’d have been clueless, but twice now she’s had to deal with populist forces and I can’t believe she intends to ignore all that upon election, and end up a one-termer. She pretty much has to show quality, and that’s not wrong (even if it seems terribly unfair to her fans).

  47. 47.

    SFAW

    OK, I freely admit that my IQ has dropped somewhat in recent months/years, but WTF does “Trump and Clinton Watching Jill Like” even mean? Is it supposed to be “watching Jill like a hawk,” with “the hawk” understood? Or is it “they’re watching Jill, like, man, do stuff ‘n’ shit”? Or is the person in the first three pictures someone I would recognize, were I a Young, and that’s one of his famous phrases/lines? (And, for those commenters superior to me in all things Internet: I’ve Googled the key phrase in quotation marks, it returns zero hits, and “watching Jill like” returns one (which used to be a game, i.e., getting exactly one hit, five or ten years ago).

    And that picture of her tee-hee-ing is just too fucking precious for words. What is she, 15? If you have to demonstrate your “cool sense of humor” by showing yourself laughing at some kewl thing, then you don’t really have that “cool” sense of humor. Just a tip.

  48. 48.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @SFAW: They’re reacting to what Jill is doing. The important part of that photo is the protective way the person is clutching the money.

  49. 49.

    SFAW

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:

    Oh.

    I guess I’ve lost my sense of humor, because it didn’t seem that funny.

    But on the plus side, based on some cursory googling, Stein seems to be carrying on the glorious Naderesque tradition of “The Dems are much more eviler than the Repubs because reasons.” As Molly Ivins (and others) said: What an asshole.

  50. 50.

    The Other Chuck

    Oh look, Stein still has delusions of relevance. Wonder what the meme for that looks like.

  53. 53.

    mike in dc

    Stein will perform worse than Nader in 2000. Sub-2 percent is my guess. They still have almost no money for ads, staff, minimal free media, etc.

  57. 57.

    Ajabu

    If they hadn’t followed that incomprehensible picture (just looks like low end hip-hop wannabe to me) with a tweet from Dr. Jill Stein I would have had no idea who the elderly white woman sniffing her fingers was. WTF???

  58. 58.

    Miss Bianca

    Well, this whole thing is certainly “dank” by the standards of the oldest meaning of the word…drippy and smelly.

  61. 61.

    SectarianSofa

    Jill Stein is all like ‘i be down wit it’ and throwing fake gang signs, because she’s #woke.

  62. 62.

    Miss Bianca

    @SectarianSofa: And I’m such an Old and Pale that I have only the vaguest notion of what “woke” might mean…is that what we would have called “hip” or “with it” back in Tha Day?

  64. 64.

    Andrey

    @FlipYrWhig: To expand on that, it has strong connotations of piercing some kind of veil of misinformation and ignorance. It’s not so much “I know current fashion and trends”, it’s “I have seen past the BS that is trying to sell me.”

  65. 65.

    Brachiator

    The Jill Stein thing is pretty funny. The only thing funnier was all the people trying to figure out what it meant.

  66. 66.

    Doug

    I like that she asked her supporters to follow an account that posts memes that reference the Clinton body count and alleges election rigging. That’s pretty cool and not irresponsible at all.

  67. 67.

    Gemina13

    @SFAW:

    Yep. She’s an elitist carting around a stale vanity project, and every time she she starts in on her ideas, I want to go read Zero Hedge’s archives to find her source.

  69. 69.

    Original Lee

    Also, I think she was trying to underline the satire by posting the meme photo 3 times. Most of the successful dank memes have three different photos with the same phrase and then the money shot is the fourth. It comes across as “doesn’t know how to do dank memes” more than heavily sarcastic dank meme, though.

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