Real Science Hurts Brains: Crow Edition

Didja know real life is ridiculously complicated?  Even simple things involve a lot, if your observation runs close enough – one classic example of baking a pie from scratch requiring the creation of a universe.  Causes are often multifactorial, because how could they not be?  The pie example runs through the ingredients, the cultivation of apples and wheat and cows to make butter etc., but that pie also needs a human to put it together, who must be educated from societies that had to evolve all the way up from monkey grunting, besides the hundreds of millions of years since we diverged from our last common ancestor with apples, and the billions of years of natural selection running to the two minutes after the Hadean magma cooled.

So I say that if you’re genuinely trying to arrive at the truth of a given thing, you need to wrack your brain for all the considerations, contingencies, and possibilities.  If you wants tha Real Science, you gots ta be willing to come up with a lot more than a single hypothesis.  Yes, to test, you have to narrow things down to the ideas you’re going to test, but to make that test as rigorous as possible, you should really try to think of every possible factor that could confound the results.  Stretch that brain.  Presumably that’s why you went into science, right?  To feel smart?

But no.  It’s easier to feel smart if you blithely whistle past all the ways you could be wrong, like evopsych assholes and scientific racists (how much overlap those fields possess).  One hypothesis.  A few cheesy tests.  Maybe squint and look at the data sideways, and by jove, you’ve cracked it!  Now go get as many women pregnant as possible, to share your genetic genius with the world.

Over here in the real world, you could be like me, and know just enough to be sure you’ll never fully understand anything.  Don’t throw your hands up and veg out watching George Michaels videos on yewchoob until you die.  Stay wondering.  Be frustrated forever by the fact real science hurts, and take your cold solace in the awareness at least you aren’t an evopsych fucko, or qanon, or moon landing truther, etc etc.

Here I come to the actual point of the article.  Does anyone know why crow populations are skyrocketing in the Pacific Northwest?  I could be wrong about this, but to my slightly-less-than-casual observation, they may have doubled or tripled in population within the last few years.  This was well after a documented boom they had back in the late twentieth century.

A possible point of failure in this question:  observational bias.  Most of my travels in a given week range from Auburn to Federal Way and back – up and down the west side of one little valley.  Maybe there are more crows here than elsewhere.  Maybe I had poorer observation of their numbers in previous years because I wasn’t paying as close of attention.  Maybe my mind is exaggerating, and they always gathered by the hundreds on the edge of the mall, sunning themselves in the morning light, in preparation for the daily hustle.  Maybe if I’d been driven down the west end of Main Street before, at the right time of day, I would have already seen them dotting the little lawns and parking lots and rooftops and trees, in groups ranging from dozens to hundreds, block after block.  Maybe they would always gather in megaflocks in the south of Auburn somewhere, making a cacophony that can be heard a mile away.

Sounded like I was trying to convince myself my observations were accurate toward the end of that paragraph, but I absolutely do recognize this perception could be flawed.  It literally could be a matter that I was never in the right place or time of day or time of year to see these crow convocations before.  In which case, there’s no phenomenon to wonder about.  But assuming there is a phenomenon, what’s causing it..?

Here’s where the range of possibilities starts to hurt the brain.  If I was a shit scientist instead of a vexed layperson, I would just cook up one hypothesis and a single test to run for it, then congratulate myself in print and get quoted in popular science magazines.  Instead, I sit here realizing how complex this can be – maybe even unknowable.  Some things I’ve considered:

Food explosion.  I learned from Abe Oceanoxia that invasive European earthworms have taken over the USA in huge numbers, and crows happily eat a lot of worms, whatever their proclivity for french fries.  Maybe earthworms are having a population explosion for reasons I can’t even begin to guess at.  Or maybe they’re just more available, because long years of drought seem to have ended here, and rain drives them to the surfaces of lawns and sidewalks.  Any given rainy day, you’ll see robins and crows both going for the wriggly pink smorgasbord, crows most of all.

Or maybe there’s another food altogether that has increased.  As covid and the ascent of global fascism have fostered a sense of doom in the younger generations, increasing deaths from despair, it has certainly increased the amount of litter.  Is the food explosion mostly human trash?

Predator decline.  I’ve heard that owls are the most prolific predators of crows.  I imagine cats and dogs take their share as well.  Well, we’ve no shortage of cats and dogs, but maybe the species of owl that eats crows has taken a population hit – or altered their behavior based on availability of a different prey animal or animals.

Or maybe a competing predator of the food they eat has experienced a decline, like worms becoming overpopulated due to a mole plague.

Natural selection.  Maybe a disease that had been killing crows had winnowed the population to those crows with a resistance, and those crows in turn had a big population boom?  Maybe crows had only bred at certain times of year to avoid competing with themselves but that was an obsolete limitation and year-long breeding finally won out majority expression in the population?  Maybe something crows eat had an evolutionary breakthrough and exploded.

Cultural selection.  Maybe crows figured out a cool trick they hadn’t done before.  I was once impressed by watching a crow use a tool, but since then have seen it again several times.  What’s interesting is the tool is the same – a short straight stick, just a few inches.  Was the technique of crafting this tool communicated, or were they all learning to go for the same source for the tool, or have I just seen one crow who packs its tool everywhere it goes, and gets around?

I haven’t seen this so often that it could make that big a population difference, but maybe there is some other behavioral trait they’ve increased.  Maybe they mob raptors and ravens so often now that they are being preyed upon less often, or are competing less for food.  Maybe they’ve increased the frequency of the food call.  There’s a tension in crow instincts between the desire to have food all to oneself and the desire to call a bunch of crows in to share.  If they’re all doing the food call more often, they’re eating food before any competing species can get to it.

My husband saw a yewchoob vid where some weirdos left a mound of peanut butter in the woods and crows ate almost all of it, beating out bears and coyotes and raccoons and more, strictly because of this instinct to call in your friends.  Well, that and having less hesitation about strange food sources.  The coyote missed out because he was too scared of the blob to eat it.  Maybe the hesitation recently reduced even more.

Commensalism.  Human population in the region has also exploded.  The town I live in has three times as many people as it did when I first moved here as a child.  More people, more lawns with worms, more fast food places and restaurants producing food waste, more rats and mice and pigeons and starlings to eat.  I’ve seen them eat pigeons and starlings before.  Hell, an increase in predatory behavior could drive population, or even cause an evolutionary split between crows with different feeding habits.

Niche partitioning.  Maybe that last one is it.  Maybe there’s been an invisible split along behavioral lines in food gleaning, which is the beginning of a speciation event that may or may not ever reach completion before it collapses back in on itself due to climate change or other human issues.

Some or all of the above.  The cause is multifactorial after all.

None of the above.  Phenomenon isn’t real.  I’m tripping and all this thought is for nothing.

Hell, all this thought assuredly is for nothing because I will never know the answer, whether it’s knowable or not.  And yet the thoughts still happen.  At least it shows I’m smarter than an evopsych dick.  That’s nice.

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The Discourse Continues

You could call this a pro-AI post because it’s just a reblobbed conversation with the LLM known as Claude.  Haters do not interact please.

I began this conversation with Claude because HJ had an article up that was annoying me.  You can see the beginning of it in my comment section.  I randomly came back for more discourse, and was kinda impressed by how the ol’ bot is performing.  This seemed like it might be edifying for other humans to witness, so I post it here…
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America’s Gravestones

As I posted 9-11ly, I believe bin Laden won.  I believe he killed amurrica, like a hunter convincing buffalo to stampede off a cliff.  This has a ramification I didn’t initially consider:  any and all 9-11 memorial monuments are functionally gravestones to the US.  There’s a line in that SNL sloths video “they eat cocaine off america’s gravestone,” which is objectively hilarious, but was not a thing you could do in real life… or was it?  Call up your local sloths, score some coke, and pay your respects.

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Ya Talk Too Much

When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps.  Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions.  This song was especially popular.

The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now.  I love the use of white people in this video.  It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks.  They gots my number.

In more ways than one.  In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much.  I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude.  Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in.  This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them.  Anybody else, have at it.

Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants?  I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.

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Lemme At Im

I wanna kill Jesus.

You know, I’d love to be a nicer person to all the good people of the world who happen to also be christian, but it’s mighty hard.  Mighty hard.  Shitbird preachers like to unfairly characterize atheists as all hating god &/or jesus, but I’m sure it isn’t true for most of you.  It is true of me.  Very true.

There is, on balance, more justification in the words of jesus for progressive ideas than for conservative ones.  Twisting that shit into prosperity gospel and gaybashing is twisting.  But I don’t care about the feelings of some ancient dead guy.  I care about the monster he created, and if I am to take his continued supernatural existence as true – as christians want me to do – then if I were to meet this superghost?

Fuck that motherfucker.  It’s on.

I’m that Dexter-flavored hypocrite who wants to kill the killers.  Atrocities make me mad, make me feel like doing something atrocious, and there are now millennia of horrors that happened on resurrected jeezy’s watch.  Culturally christian people who wanted to believe they could point to something older and better within their ancestors invented wicca, which – in culturally christian fashion – positions one’s people as the real victims in all of this.

Well, your people are the real victims in all of this, wiccans, but witches aren’t your people any more than they are mine.  Your people have been christian for a very long time, like their oppressors.  Christians oppress christians more than the Romans ever had a chance to.  These are the atrocities of which I spoke.  Of those that were tortured and killed for witchcraft, how many had any cultural context for being anything other than christian (or atheist, which can come into existence without being taught)?  Europe was utterly dominated by christianity during all of the witch hunting times.  Their victims were christian.  (oh yeah just remembered the muslims and jewish people, lol.  anyway…)

That’s not mentioning the much more frequent form of historical oppression they engaged in – sectarian warfare.  Genocidal violence, mass slaughter, women and children hung from the walls, cities burned – all for believing in jesus wrong.  I look at that shit and cannot feel schadenfreude about jerks I disagree with killing each other.  I see the torture and murder, and it infuriates me.

Somebody’s gotta pay, and if I try to pin down which sect shot first, that’s playing their game.  No.  I can do them one better.  These sects wouldn’t exist if jesus wasn’t a real supernatural guy that rose on the third day yadda yadda, right, Kenneth?  Only the magic version of jesus could have inspired these millennia of obscene cruelty.  And therefore, magic jesus must die by my hands.

Gimme the spear, centurion.  It’s time to stick this pig again.  For old time’s sake.  Just a jesus murdering party, me and my besties.  Who’s in?

Guys?  C’mon, it’ll be fun.  Guys?

 

 

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A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens.  That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I.  That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign.  Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.  If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy?  Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people.  When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard.  I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them.  Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well.  Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism.  Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?  Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy?  Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question.  Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA.  That broad tent is wild as hell.  It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better.  The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances.  We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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Selection Selection

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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Zoroastrian Optimism

I was looking up monsters and some chain led to motifs from Middle Eastern art, which led to an article on Zoroastrianism, which led me to get confused about their concept for the soul.  I remember once reading some outdated conventional wisdom about the origin of religion, wherein the concept of the soul emerged from the observation that the living breathe and the dead do not – that a soul must be an immaterial thing that is in your body and subsequently leaves.  Simple enough, but a lot of supernatural ideas from older religions leave me scratchin templez.  More complicated.

If I got this right, the main part of your zoroastrian soul exists outside of the material world.  It sends a piece avatar-style when you are born, animating you, and that part returns to the source four days after you die, bringing with it the wisdom of your time spent on Earth.  As you spend various lives on Earth, you’re making your main soul more wise and powerful.  Juiced-in soul points.  Power ups.  I presume when you hit your limit break, you can do a special finishing move.

The concept of the soul that most amurrican christians believe is less ornate.  Your soul is born when you’re born, it goes to heaven or hell when you die.  I think most of the denominations preach something more like you stay in the dark until judgment day when the helling and heavening will actually happen, but that doesn’t stick in the heads of the laity.

Still, these are the conceptions I’m most familiar with, and you gotta admit, they’re more streamlined than that zoroastrian stuff.  Why the extra steps, zoroastrians?  I have to admit tho, I find their take appealing.  While you are alive, you are fighting against evil.  When you die, your main soul gets the XP, making you more powerful against evil.  We’re all getting better at fighting evil all the time.

Whenever the zoroastrian end of days comes around, we’ll all be 99th level paladins, kickin’ ass on the angra-mainyu-something-whatever.  That’s optimistic.  That’s some “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice” kind of shit.  I can’t believe it, but it’s nice.

This is the part when people raised under the cruel repression of the zoroastrian bible belt come into my comments and explain how it isn’t nice.  As you will…

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Purple Pill Poppers

Red pill, blue pill.  Why so biney, Morpheoose?

I’ve gotten self-righteous about it from time to time, as have most of the people on this network – bloggers and commenters included – but fundamentally I am an atheist because it feels real to me, based on my predilections in combination with my experience of life, and not because I was moved to this position by Reason and Enlightenment.  In the Matrix metaphor, to me, atheism is the blue pill – the world that has been “pulled over my eyes.”  Comforting, tho often a cold comfort.

What then would be the red pill?  Anything that was capable of overthrowing that idea of reality, replacing it with something new.  In The Matrix that would be the Truth.  In my ill-conceived thesis, I’ll just treat the red pill as an alternative view of the world, different from what you’ve previously known and not necessarily true.  With that being the idea, red pills are rare things indeed.

We have a sense of what’s real built on the stuff of our lives.  For some people that’s jesus and paranoia, for others, well, there’s a lot of ways people can be, regardless of how polls aim to simplify it all.  But across the board, we are not easily convinced of anything that falls outside our biases.  Some of those biases are good and fine, even factually correct like atheism, but that doesn’t keep them from being biases.  The bias is the thing you are predisposed to believe.  What can overcome this?

Believers in society as a great discourse between rational minds, they’d say debate and discussion can overcome incorrect beliefs.  The truth will inherently emerge from a true socratic dialogue.  Does it though?  Seems to me we almost never change what we believe to something directly opposite.  Those who went from cookie-baking grandma to goose-stepping Q-creep were building on whatever their baseline was.  The flaw was there, waiting to be nurtured.

The gradual creep of US fascism over the last hundred years, while it involved intentional propaganda by malevolent masterminds, those masterminds themselves were thralls of propaganda they’d been fed, as much subject to manipulation as anyone they sought to manipulate.  We’re all just following a course of social entropy.

Within that, there are ways to bend people, to ourselves get bent.  Like that fascist grandma, take a pre-existing belief or point of view and elaborate on it, build it into something new.  Not a red pill because it’s not a total jailbreak of the original firmware, call it a purple pill.

In The Matrix, Joey tha Rat had the same choice about what to believe that Neo was given, chose red, then changed his mind.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Change your beliefs on a dime, to whatever felt the best in a given moment?  Not to say I want to change my own beliefs, just using a lil’ reflection on my relationship to those beliefs as a way to understand some people whose thoughts are nigh unimaginable.  Do your own research, as they say.

What I’m interested in, like anybody else living in a society that isn’t living up to their ideals, is how to alter the beliefs of those who seem dead set on ruining everything.  They got purplepilled into that point of view, and maybe we can purplepill them into a point of view that is less ruinous somehow.  It’s not like looking for a “weak spot” to exploit.  Those that indoctrinated them into fascism did not seek to dominate, they fertilized the soil and watered it.  It’s a process of nurturing, I think.

What is left in a fascist that is good enough to build on, to encourage them to become something less bad?  I don’t know, but it could be worth thinking about.

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Postmodernism Eating Itself

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: If a society tolerates all types of speech and political expression it will be challenged and subverted by those who wish to suppress freedom and tolerance.  In order to defend the tolerance of a society, one must be intolerant of intolerance.  If I’m reading the article right, he said that while outlawing intolerant speech would be undesirable, rational discourse should be used to help maintain the popular dominance of tolerant principles – that intolerance defends itself by suppressing rational discussion.  But that at the end of the day, a tolerant society must reserve the right to say a dangerous enough expression of intolerance is illegal and can be suppressed.  I expect the way that was written into post-WWII German law would sit well with him, whether the actual application of those laws would or not.

I’m not here to discuss the plus and minus or the exact nature of how to best adjudicate the tolerance v intolerance in an ideal society.  Taking the paradox only on its face but not going all the way to the conclusion he offers.  And having done that, I want to look at a phenomenon affecting modern politics that can serve as an example of the paradox in action.

The current flavor of fascism is a direct result of the very postmodernism that it postures against.  There are other factors and influences, especially the “therapy culture” that emerged in the boomer generation, but in the course of my life, this is the one I’ve seen time and again.  The tolerance that was used to justify this intolerance was grounded in postmodern values.

Postmodernism has many aspects, but I’m going to use the broadest version here.  Modernism was the idea there are right ways to do things, truths that can be discovered and known.  Postmodernism was about uncertainty, vagueness, and especially the idea there are multiple “ways of knowing” – functionally, that opinions can be as valid a view of reality as facts.  The cry of the postmodern fascist, when they have lost the bully pulpit and know they’ve lost the argument as well, is a Lebowksian, “That’s just, like, your opinion, maaan.”

The Sokal hoax was, on its face, convincing enough.  Given that Sokal himself is part of that raft of neo-nazis and enablers in Epstein Pal Krauss’s new book, I suspect there are valid arguments that his stunt was bullshit from go.  It was meant to illustrate that postmodernism bad, reality is in facts and concrete things.  And yet the Krauss cohort is a clown car of people who habitually and fiercely ignore good strong science that refutes their biases, and that use flimsy and handwavey science to support what they want to believe.  “Facts don’t care about your feelings” cries lil Benny Shaps on monday, “Your intolerance hurts my feelings” on tuesday.

Faux News popularized opinion-as-reality.  It’s possible to cherry pick reportage of factual things to support ideological positions, but it’s so much easier to spew propaganda when you realize “somebody said a thing” can be “news.”  Then it’s Editorial Page: the Ostensible News Network.  You can’t say anything anybody says is wrong, because that’s just, like, their opinion, man.  I’m using my freedom of speech! You hates freedom?

I’ve heard this play out so so so many times at the street level.  In my high school classrooms in 1993, in the arguments of randos on buses, in arguments with people I know.  Person expresses factually wrong idea, is shown to be wrong, and says it’s an opinion, or even cites the first amendment.  Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels to me like a natural extension of the idea that all opinions about truth have some validity – an essential postmodern idea, embraced by the masses without ever acknowledging the source.

There were variations on this that predated my youth, but based on the attitudes of teachers and adults and opinion-havers of the world as I observed back then, it seems to me that it was an idea whose promotion began with 1960s mysticism, developed into therapy culture in the 1970s, and stayed with us in that form ever since.  Liberal schoolteachers were big fans of the idea, trying to encourage kids to debate because that’ll make us smorter.  I got smortified off having to hear what skinhead Ron thinks about the just society.

The funny thing is, I don’t even think the idea is wholly lacking in validity, nor is postmodernism itself as a larger package deal.  We’re all so powerfully influenced by our cultural environment and personal situations that assumptions about the nature of any given phenomenon can seem like Objective Truth when they are no such thing.  And yet, those feelings and perceptions have a power that creates a sort of reality, a sort of truth, which is in some ways the only truth we can truly apprehend.  Agnostic shit.

But the postmodern justification of and promotion of fascism shows the weakness of this liberal idea, employing it to ultimately work against itself.  Fascist propaganda was just opinions which are all valid, until fascists won control of the media, the government, the church, big business, etc etc.  At that point, all opinions are no longer valid.  Fascist propaganda is “fact” – and fascist control of science publication and journalism means there is no official source you can point to that isn’t soon to express only the facts that the Aeternal Reich wants you to see.

It’s sad how George Orwell, Karl Popper, and any number of other intellectuals going back to the dawn of the written language can call these things out, illuminate them so clearly and simply a child could understand them, and yet collectively we fall for the trick unto the end of (our) time.  Fascists working against education is certainly part of that, but there is a flaw in the human animal that is doing no small amount of the work for them.

We’re not as smart as we like to think we are.  When you see the fancy talking heads spouting big words in defense of callow bigotry, using lofty language to make it seem like black is white, bad is good, up is down…  You’re seeing smart people outsmarting themselves.  The flaws in their thinking are obvious as all hell to you and I, but they are fucking impervious to truth.

Reality is what we make it and we are what that reality makes us.  The vast majority of this country’s media is painting the picture of reality the Kochs and the Murdochs and Muskerbergs want people to see.  It’s everything around them.  They are swimming in hate speech and propaganda nonstop, all day all night, cradle to the grave.  It used to just be radio, TV, and newspapers.  Now it’s algorithms in social media sorting people into camps that can be marketed to more effectively, fueling division and strife, and even genocide if it makes the page views go up, makes money for the shareholders.

As much as they’re my hated enemies, I don’t blame US conservatives for having shit ideas about basically everything.  It’s the world as they know it.  A perversion of liberal principles, unashamedly hypocritical.  Contradictions don’t mean a thing, because this stuff thrives on goldfish memories.  The human animal is not as smart as we’ve wanted it to be – as every flavor of modernism supposed we would one day be able to achieve.

But being unintelligent does not mean you deserve to be misled.  Blaming fools for being fooled is letting the foolers off the hook, and in this situation, those foolers are just the worst motherfuckers in human history.  Hook their fucking asses.  I don’t know that we can ever really beat this type of shit, but I do know we have to keep trying in any way we’re able for as long as we can.

If the world goes nasty, you owe it to yourself and the people you care about to make your own piece of that world as nice as possible.  Just sucks knowing what you’re up against in that fight.  But power on my people.  I love you.

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