Something I've always found fascinating is social media troll bots, because on paper they shouldn't work at all. Every US election, a bunch of the US' adversaries spin up call centers where they register social media accounts pretending to be Americans. The goal is to basically drive a wedge between the left and right by taking up the other side of any political debate, while being as annoying as humanly possible. In theory it shouldn't work, because the people running the accounts are minimum wage employees in foreign countries who aren't Americans and have zero understanding of American culture or politics. It should be a "how do you do, fellow kids" type situation, where they immediately get clocked by any actual American. But it works fairly well, and I think a big factor in why it does is the existence of MAGA. Their politics are so inflammatory, simplistic, and devoid of nuance, that it's actually really easy for someone with little understand of US culture to replicate their talking points and debate style. So essentially what you get is a situation where the left can't discern MAGA trollbots from actual MAGA voters, the right can't discern MAGA troll bots from actual MAGA voters, MAGA voters can't discern MAGA trollbots from themselves, and MAGA voters can't discern left wing troll bots from their own mental caricatures of how the left behaves. The left wing troll bots seem a lot more apparent to everyone, except for MAGA, but the MAGA ones blend in almost perfectly. As a result it turns a "this person clearly has no understanding of the US, US politics, or US culture" type situation into a massive raging debate where nobody's really sure who's real.

For those with a short term memory: You really don't need to wonder how Trump would have handled the Middle East. On his 6th day in office he signed an executive order banning Muslims from entering the US. 3 months later he dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb the US has ever made on Afghanistan for no reason other than he really wanted to drop the biggest bomb they had. Then to round out his first year in office, he gave Jerusalem, the most religiously significant place on earth for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, to Israel, resulting in the UN calling an emergency security meeting where every single member voted "wtf, no", only to get overridden by the US' veto power. Sure, Biden and Netanyahu absolutely deserve to be dragged kicking and screaming down to The Hague to face a war crime tribunal, but if you think Trump isn't going to make things 1000x worse, just go ahead and save me the time by writing "I told you so" on a sticky note and stapling it to your forehead.

Swing voters really be like "hmmm, I just can't decide what to have for breakfast this morning. It's between this cereal I don't really like and an entire raw chicken I found in a dumpster"

Polymarkets in a nutshell: I bet my friend $10 Kamala wins the election, they bet me $100 she doesn't. Trump now has a 90% chance of winning the election. For some reason (unknown to neither man nor god) the mainstream media then reports this statistic.

US democracy is so wild because a lot of the ideas were really well thought out and deeply rational, several hundred year ago when they came up with them, but then they never reassessed anything and now the entire system makes no sense. The electoral college was designed to balance representation of different interests, but now basically just amounts to affirmative action for low information voters. Like "oh your entire understating of the economy is gas less expensive under Trump, gas more expensive under Biden? Here, have 7 votes. Also, everyone please shoot each other."

Whoever made that Chrome "sign in with Google" prompt which can only be closed from whichever tab originally spawned it. Jail. Your whole team and manager too. All of you, right to jail.

I still think the absolute funniest tax policy was what Ireland did. They basically became a tax haven for foreign corporations to attract all the rich multinational tech companies and generate a ton of tax revenue in the process. The EU wasn't happy about it, so they sued Ireland and won. The outcome of the lawsuit was that Ireland had to charge back taxes + interest to the companies it gave tax breaks to, making the country even more money in the process. Probably the most "don't hate the player hate the game" economic policy I've seen in a while.