An interesting psychological insight

Adam Conover notices that an awful lot of far-right weirdos and fanatics are addicted to group chats, and speculates that maybe the group chats themselves are responsible for the increasing insanity of our government. It’s clear that some people seem to be literally addicted to their phone chats — Mike Waltz was caught chatting under the table at a cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth seems to have replaced alcohol with his phone, and Marc Andreesen has a reputation for non-stop chatting with multiple groups at all times.

It’s an interesting suggestion that group chats are wrecking the brains of all the participants, but it sounds a bit like the accusation that video games are damaging the youth. I am quite willing to consider an alternative, that all of these horrible people were fucked up in the head before they picked up an iPhone. Maybe certain kinds of personalities are simultaneously authoritarian and demanding a constant feed of approval and dominance?

The experiment is straightforward: enroll typical, normal people in one of these group chat thingies, and see if they turn into raging stupid assholes under their influence. I’d be a candidate, because I’m not involved in any of these real-time kinds of online conversations, and never have been. I’ve got a couple of email groups that are closed and confidential, but those tend to be low-key and focused on business. My biology discipline at the university has one — it’s all boring announcements and questions about classes and that sort of thing, there’s absolutely nothing particularly juicy about it, and if anyone tried to salt it with digressions and abuse they would be shut down with a face-to-face complaint.

I wonder if Facebook might have suffered from this phenomenon. It’s not quite real-time, but some people do have their strange little subgroups that they hover over, constantly refreshing, and they do get quite nasty and personal…and also some of them are annoyingly obsessed with their status. I left Facebook because of that ingrown stupidity having free reign.

Maybe the real problem is obsession with social dynamics, which is a real problem when the online tool’s purpose is to facilitate a real, practical project, like bombing Houthis or discussing classroom assignments.

No, don’t put me into your group chat. I might turn into a monster.

The Pope has a surprise for us all

Pope Leo XIV is a trans man.

X, of course.

You don’t doubt this conclusion, do you? How can you question a guy who has dedicated his life to superimposing the outlines of skulls on celebrity photos and deciding what sex they are? Also, they’re a Christian.

Bones never Lie, but people do ~ wake up from their Lies ~
Genesis 1:27, 2 Timothy 3:13 ~ Glory to God and praise to Jesus.

Browse his Xitter feed and you will discover that practically no one is the the sex they say they are.

Almost there!

Today is the day, the last day of finals week. My students will soon be finishing up their final exam, as of precisely 12:00 noon today, and then I spring into action and grade everything, and then plug the last numbers into a spreadsheet to calculate the final letter grade, and then I submit them to the registrar. Done! All done! No more teaching obligations until January!

To cap it all off, tomorrow is commencement. I’ll be putting on the silly cap and gown and saying goodbye to the students (and immediately after rushing home for a podcast).

But today…one last push.

Vandals get punished

That is a lovely tree. It’s been posing in a scenic location near Hadrian’s Wall for 150 years.

Then a pair of idiots came along with a chainsaw and did this to it:

The two vandals have been found guilty. They did it for a “laugh” and to fetch a souvenir for one of the men’s newborn daughter — I don’t think she’ll be taking pride in that as she grows up fatherless.

In a bit of good news, saplings have sprung up from the stump and a new tree may arise.

We have a new Pope, same as all the old Popes

It’s some American guy named Robert Prevost who has now accepted the purported mantle of infallibility and divine favor from an imaginary god. Just once I’d like to see one of these clerical nobodies admit that they don’t have any special powers and therefore need to turn down the unjustified honor. But no, this one is calling himself Pope Leo XIV and is already spewing pious declarations.

He does meet one of the necessary prerequisites to be a Catholic authority figure: he does have a distinguished history of concealing child-rape accusations against the priesthood.

OK, everyone, we can go back to ignoring and occasionally sneering at the ridiculous man at the top of the hierarchy.

I gotta get a better hobby

Huh. I woke up this morning to do as I usually do, browsing the news and commenting on it, and I just can’t. Nope. Nothing inspires me today.

My mistake might have been first reading about RFK jr’s policies.

Death is the policy

I can’t expand on that. The man is a walking catastrophe, an incompetent buffoon who has been shielded from the consequences of his actions by wealth and privilege, and now he’s inflicting his uninformed, insane opinions on everyone else. He’s a madman, given control of HHS and NIH and dictating policy on everything from autism to infectious disease, while we sit around gawping at the spectacle. Our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop the disaster, and in fact rubber-stamped his appointment. What am I supposed to do?

I have to wonder how such a pathetic creature could acquire so much power. Naomi Klein explains that we must blame the rich.

What they want is absolutely everything

Klein recently co-authored an essay for The Guardian, sounding alarm about the dark worldview of politically insurgent tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Klein views these men — who are guiding Donald Trump’s presidency — as abandoning any positive vision for our collective future, and instead retrenching in preparation for a dark, nearly end times-level social collapse, from which they and other elites emerge unscathed, and all powerful. “The governing ideology of the far-right in our age of escalating disasters,” she writes, “has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”

So the guys with billions of dollars are telling people like me, who is facing existential uncertainty about personal issues like retirement and health with virtually no financial backup, that we don’t matter, that there is nothing we can do, that we might as well die and get it over with. I’d be happy to do so if I weren’t so full of rage and frustration. Unfortunately, writing on the internet does not relieve my anger. We need to literally destroy these monsters of greed.

None of us are going anywhere anyway

Today is the day everyone is required to have that RealID/enhanced ID if you want to fly anywhere. It’s an incompetently managed sham.

I applied for mine two months ago, when I went to the DMV to renew my driver’s licence. I’m still waiting. Today I received email from the DMV saying they were rejecting my application, because I hadn’t included enough bank account information. Apparently you now need a verified bank account to drive or travel anywhere, so I’m going to have to resubmit the entire application all over again, and wait a few more months. This is particularly galling because I did go in person to the local license bureau (not any problem at all, this is a small town, no waiting) and had everything verified right there. I have a valid passport, so I could fly if I wanted to, but the airports are so chaotic that I don’t want to.

My wife has been struggling to get her realID for a while now, but she keeps getting rejected. She showed up at the license bureau with her birth certificate, social security card, etc., but she made the terrible mistake of changing her name when she got married, so they won’t accept it. We ordered a certified marriage license from King County, but they just sent us a photocopy, which doesn’t count.

On the bright side, ladies, I guess I’m now single and available. Except you can’t travel anymore.

This nation with the impressive interstate freeway system and huge airports in every major city is now effectively killing travel within our borders. We’re also not going to be getting much traffic from international travel, either. Tourism, who needs it? Next stop will be armed guards at the boundaries for each state, and you’ll have to show your papers if you visit any city…except that you can’t, because the bureaucracy is too incompetent to issue them.

Stay home, everyone.

I may be in Fargo for Flag Day

Mark your calendars. Donald Trump is planning a gigantic military parade — $90 million dollars sunk into rolling tanks and missiles down Pasadena Avenue — but the rest of us should be planning to rise up in protest on Saturday, 14 June, instead. There will be No Kings rallies all across the country on that day. Right now, the nearest event near me is in Fargo, so I’m planning on trooping north on that day to wave a sign and chant angry slogans. Look up the rally nearest you and try to hit the streets on that day!