No more trick questions, no more arugula! (Updated)

Here's Tbogg, explaining some of the ins and outs of signing up for "Reaganbook," a Facebook wannabe (modestly called "Facebook for Patriots") whose birth was recently announced by the president of the anti-LGBT group Faith2Action.

Be forewarned though, there is a trick question to get you through the door:



If you can answer “what color is the ocean,” you are not a bot.

Or Reagan in his second term…

I feel slightly guilty lifting both the line and the image – it's Tbogg's gag, after all – but it redlined my Milk Out The Nose Meter and in the end I simply had no choice. Read the whole piece, in which he marvels that rightwingers have the free time to launch a project like this, what with the amount of effort already being expended rejecting Obama, and all his works, and all his empty promises.

It's fascinating that rightwingers still work so hard to create media in which they have, by design, no one to talk to but one another – as if that hasn't already been the case for well over a decade. There was the launch of Fox News Channel in 1996, followed by Conservapedia in 2006 (when Wikipedia proved itself too "liberal" for them), followed by Twitchy (the "groundbreaking Twitter curation" site, because Twitter has too much stuff founder Michelle Malkin doesn't agree with) in 2012. And I haven't included talk radio, right-wing web-sites, right-wing vanity presses and imprints, and so on.

Perhaps eventually the day will come when they've duplicated all political, news, social, cultural, and crowdsourcing institutions as simulacra in which only they can participate. Their own music awards (no Dixie Chicks!). Their own grocery stores (no arugula!). Their own elections (no – oh, wait a minute . . . ).

Update: Well, that didn't take very long:

ReaganBook, the conservative social networking site that recently pre-launched, has already been taken offline. [...]

According to The Verge's Colin Lecher, who joined the social network while it was still up, the site's design was highly susceptible to trolls. The site did not require individuals to prove their identity and status updates could be viewed by anyone on the site, not just those you were friends with. This gave way to chaos.

"[E]veryone seems to be either using real names, the names of famous conservatives, or the names of famous conservatives paired with sex acts. Some are earnest; some are parody," Lecher wrote.