@DyDave Gas(oline)lighting.

Don't know what made me think of this track, but a reminder that there is also beauty, joy and fun in the world.

I needed to Jeff Coffin and Derek Brown performing Chunk today. Maybe you do, too.

https://youtu.be/suxmw5GsqEw

@DadeMurphy @brainwise You just contradicted yourself.

"Don't make this political!" -- an ironic acknowledgement that the matter at hand, whatever it is, is already political.

@Ubiety @LnzyHou The US constitution and the Bible are similar in that they are regularly appealed to as the authoritative founding core of intents and values, and both are seldom read, and much more seldom understood.

@ErFlynnArt Yes, exactly, it speaks directly to the value of life.

In this view, the value of life is weighted toward the people who have the power, and the presumed will, to end it.

It's both the root and the fruit of the might-makes-right doctrine, which is itself infused with paranoia.

Ensuring all paranoid people have access to death machines is pretty obviously not the best public policy. But questioning this as a (God-given) right feeds their paranoia, which is layered and complicated.

@LnzyHou There is no legitimate backing. There is simply belief, and like many other examples, it is deeply believed that belief makes a thing true.

There are thick, interlocking layers of culture and conditioning protecting people from examining stuff like this.

When people break through all of that to ask probing questions -- and this is happening more and more -- they often suddenly find themselves in an out-group.

The system isn't set up to answer questions. It's set up to exclude askers.

The single most facile, reductionist and dangerous example I can think of which conflates church and state is this phrase:

"God-given right to own guns."

The instant people embraced this sentiment as not just normal but immutable, there ceased to be any limit to what they can believe or justify.

#politics
#religion

@n8evans No, they really haven't. Like I said in a previous bit on here, they're driven by confirmation bias.

A politician who confirms their bias is deemed worthy of their power (vote). (Populism is the exploit by which democracy is hacked.)

Democracy functions on values, but this populism isn't about shared values. It's about supremacism. Many have never had to think about how hollow or dangerous supremacism (or populism) is. They've just convinced themselves that they've been its victim.

@n8evans In a staggeringly strange twist, the ones who are the most afraid of democracy, and who are doing the most to undermine/destroy it, are ushering in the totalitarianism they've convinced themselves they're experiencing in democracy.

@AskTheDevil Well, y'know that doesn't surprise me too much, given your handle. ;-)

If they were the only ones affected by their beliefs, I might concede that. But laws are being pushed forward to legitimatise and enshrine the antagonism of people who are proud of not understanding what they're doing.

@sirgeefive I've been in it my whole life to some extent, but the mainstreaming of extremism is new.

It's bizarre to me that the people who were always wagging their fingers at radicalism are now the ones swallowed up in it, and becoming its champions.

Loud, politically-motivated Christians just strip-mine the Bible long enough to feed their confirmation bias, and then weaponise their twisted, nonsensical beliefs like they're running on rocket fuel.

They do this with such consistency and regularity that they have somehow convinced themselves that they are the moral majority.

Serious question: how do people like this ever wake up -- especially when you factor in that they actively and wilfully denounce self-awareness?

#religion
#politics

@MLClark That was an informative summary of a very complicated situation.

There seems to be very little concern at the highest levels of gov't in Texas (and elsewhere) for overbreadth. Especially republican politicians are in the habit of making partisan laws that set up bizarre and dangerous legal paradoxes.

What the legislature in Texas fails to understand is that when it makes overly broad rulings, it leaves the easiest (maybe only?) option for SM corps to exclude Texas.

@nonayadambidnes I think the 3D chess bit (or 4D, or 5D depending on the speaker's obsequiousness) is particularly fascinating.

Trump spouts dots. He's a dot dynamo. His dots are antagonistic, demeaning, self-aggrandising yet also saturated with martyr-complex.

His audience connects those dots however they see fit, and it makes them feel like they're part of it -- insiders with special code-breaking abilities.

So many cults have operated on this paradigm. Nonsense merely adds to the mystique.

@matuzalem @Graci I think you mean a person who menstruates.

When that language is used, it is used to be as inclusive as possible. Her wilful and bad-faith mischaracterisation of that as dehumanising is pouring fuel on all the wrong fires.

Nobody is actually trying to take away her woman card. Her whole schtick that that's happening is adding to the paranoia being spread by propagandists about transgender people.

I've been really enjoying the Art21 channel on YouTube. They're finding interesting artists, who can also talk about their art compellingly.

It feels instructive, I mean beyond the artists they feature, to how to tell these kinds of stories.

I just saw a headline stating that Tinder is requiring video selfies as profile pics now to fend off the AI invasion.

This week I just watched someone put together a video clip by animating an AI-generated "selfie," and match it to a Chat-GPT-generated script. It was ~80% seamless, and 100% synthetic.

If AI is invading Tinder, this won't stop it.

@CJLavoie Glad you were able to offer them a solution!