Sex or social media? The sacrifices we’re willing to make to stay online

 Catchy thread title that, but now that I have your attention.............

Your alarm clock goes off, it’s time to start your day. What’s the first thing you do? What about right before you go to bed? If your answer is scrolling social media, you’re not alone. People are spending increasing amounts of time on social media, with reports from 2023 suggesting an average worldwide usage of two and a half hours a day. (f*ck, seriously?)

With 4.8 billion social media users worldwide as of 2023, social media has become a mainstay in everyday life, particularly among younger generations. Some adolescents even describe feeling a sense of stress and poor emotional well-being when not online. So much so that terms like FOMO (fear of missing out) and Nomophobia (No Mobile Phone Phobia) have been popularized to explain the feelings and thoughts some people experience when disconnected from their smartphone or their social media.

As researchers who study societal relationships with these technologies, we began to wonder the lengths young adults might go to maintain their connection to social media. To answer this question, we conducted a study of 750 Canadians, aged 16-30 years old, who regularly use social media. We asked them about their social media usage patterns, their relationship with social media and the sacrifices they would be willing to make to remain on social media.

Our findings showed that smartphones were the most used method for accessing social media and approximately 95 per cent of participants had access to at least two social media accounts, with Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube among the most popular.

NOW FOR THE SCARY PARTS:

What trade-offs are young adults willing to make?

Respondents were asked to consider what they would be willing to sacrifice to maintain their social media presence. Trade-offs fell into the following categories: food/drink, hobbies, possessions, career, appearance, relationships, health and life.

When asked to make more serious trade-offs relating to their relationships, health, or life, fewer were willing to make the sacrifice. For example, fewer than five per cent of participants said they would be willing to contract a sexually transmitted infection, or be diagnosed with a life-threatening illness like cancer rather than give up social media.

However, nearly 10 out of every 100 participants did say they would accept being unable to have children, give up sex or give up one year of their life to maintain their social media connections. When asked to give up more years of life, almost five out of every 100 and three out of every 100 participants said they would give up five or 10 years of their life, respectively.

(Give up sex for social media? WTF?)

https://theconversation.com/sex-or-social-media-the-sacrifices-were-willing-to-make-to-stay-online-208270

While interesting, the above article doesn't suggest solutions? Legislation? Thought police? Public education? What are YOUR thoughts?

News bits: Biden corruption witness surfaces; The power of capitalism over the public interest; Etc.

House Republicans have been foaming at the mouth for months to get Joe Biden impeached and him and Hunter jailed. The Independent reports about the identity of a witness against both Bidens. House Republicans claimed the witness got "lost" somewhere: 

A “whistleblower” who has repeatedly accused the Bidens of corruption has been charged by the Justice Department with arms trafficking, acting as a foreign agent for China and violating Iran sanctions.

Gal Luft, who is a citizen of both the United States and Israel, is accused of paying a former adviser to Donald Trump on behalf of principals in China in 2016 without registering as a foreign agent.

Prosecutors say that Mr Luft pushed the former government employee, who is not named, to push policies that were favorable to China.

They also allege that he set up meetings between officials of Iran and a Chinese energy company to discuss oil deals, which would violate US sanctions.    

[T]the now-indicted think tank founder claims that there is no basis for the charges and has accused the Biden Administration of targeting him because he is one of the alleged whistleblowers who Republicans have held up as having evidence that President Joe Biden and his family are corrupt.

In a bizarre video first reported by the New York Post, Mr Luft claims his arrest in Cyprus was meant to stop him from appearing before the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee about alleged payments the Biden family allegedly received from Chinese intelligence-linked individuals.

Mr Luft, 57, was arrested in Cyprus in February on US charges but fled after being released on bail while awaiting extradition and is not currently in US custody.  

The fugitive also claimed that he offered evidence backing up his claims to the FBI in March 2019, and said it was never followed up on. .... Mr Luft also said he jumped bail and fled after his arrest because he did not believe he could receive a fair trial in New York.

Well, now we know why Luft got lost. He doesn't want to get tossed into the slammer for spying for China. One can see how this will play out with America's radical right authoritarians. They and Luft will accuse the DoJ of being weaponized. Luft will play the innocent, persecuted martyr card and the Republicans will play it up. That kind of crap is the new normal.

American politics: A never-ending clown show.

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: The NYT writes about parked choo-choo trains blocking public roads:  

Blocked Rail Crossings Snarl Towns, 

but Congress Won’t Act

The industry has used its muscle to prevent federal, state and local governments from penalizing companies that park freight trains across roads for hours or days

Freight trains frequently stop and block the roads of York, Ala., sometimes cutting off two neighborhoods for hours. Emergency services and health care workers can’t get in, and those trapped inside can’t get out.

“People’s livelihoods are in jeopardy because they can’t get to work on time,” said Amanda Brassfield, who has lived in one of the neighborhoods, Grant City, for 32 years and raised two daughters there. “It’s not fair.”

Residents have voiced these complaints for years to Norfolk Southern, which owns the tracks, and to regulators and members of Congress. But the problem has only gotten worse.

Freight trains frequently block roads nationwide, a phenomenon that local officials say has grown steadily worse in the last decade as railroads run longer trains and leave them parked on tracks at crossings.  

The problem has persisted despite numerous federal, state and local proposals and laws because the freight rail industry wields enormous political and legal power.  

Courts have thrown out several state laws seeking to punish rail companies for blocking traffic, ruling that only the federal government can regulate railway crossings. No federal laws or rules penalize railways for blocking crossings, and congressional proposals to address the issue have failed to overcome opposition from the rail industry.  

In a response to questions, the Association of American Railroads attributed blocked crossings to local governments, which, it said, had routed roads across railway tracks rather than over or under them, an approach that other industrialized countries had taken.

It's hard to have much sympathy for people who vote for Republican politicians. This is the face of the radical right Republican Party's brass knuckles capitalist wing. So here's a possible solution: Stop voting for Republicans or stop complaining because you got what you asked for.

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AI solving problems in biology and medicine: The NYT writes about an AI program designed to predict protein folding:

In 2020, Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold, an A.I. system that uses deep learning to solve one of the most important challenges in all of biology: the so-called protein-folding problem. The ability to predict the shape of proteins is essential for addressing numerous scientific challenges, from vaccine and drug development to curing genetic diseases. But in the 50-plus years since the protein-folding problem had been discovered, scientists had made frustratingly little progress.

Enter AlphaFold. By 2022, the system had identified 200 million protein shapes, nearly all the proteins known to humans. DeepMind is also currently building similar systems to accelerate efforts at nuclear fusion and has spun off Isomorphic Labs, a company developing A.I. tools for drug discovery.

I knew a guy who got a Nobel prize for doing early pioneering protein folding work, Chris Anfinsen. He was a super nice guy, not an egomaniac. He worked with folding and unfolding a protein called RNase A (ribonuclease A). That enzyme is a tough little bugger. It causes all kinds of heartburn for people who worked with RNA, including me once upon a time.

This is why intact RNA is so hard to  

prepare and work with in the lab

News bits: Potential new PTSD treatment and deep immorality; More Clarence Thomas corruption

A WaPo opinion writes about one of those possibly too good to be true mental health treatments and a very dark side of the US military:

All around the conference room in Atlanta last fall, jaws were dropping. Michael Roy, a physician from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, had just revealed to the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies the preliminary results of a study comparing two treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder: Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy, long regarded as the “gold standard,” and a novel approach called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories or RTM.

In such a study, effectiveness is indicated by a complete remission of symptoms, a loss of diagnosis. Roy’s trial was ongoing and still double-blinded, so he could report only the outcomes of the two treatments combined. But the success rate was a stunning 60 percent. Every expert present knew that PE’s known remission rate hovers at 30 to 40 percent, so the 60 percent combined figure could only mean only one thing: The new RTM treatment was tracking dramatically higher.

From the back of the room, PE researchers glowered at Roy: Way too good to be true, dude.

Except it wasn’t. 

Given the stakes, this fight is one worth picking. Roy’s final, unblinded results are expected later this year, and they will likely mirror those of four previous clinical studies. Many people in the trauma care community aren’t waiting: More than 300 therapists from private practices to local health centers to Vet Centers have already adopted the RTM protocol to treat PTSD. It’s currently in front-line use in Poland as well as in besieged Ukraine, which has a 160-person waiting list of therapists scheduled for training.

Results summary from a small 2017 RTM study

[Bourke] and several colleagues continued to hone the protocol, achieving a 90 percent remission rate for PTSD symptoms and diagnoses, surpassing even his results with the 9/11 patients. In 2010, as the U.S. military was still heavily engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bourke contacted the armed services’ top PTSD researchers to present his findings.

It did not go well. After a respectful but futile hearing at the Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick, the lead scientist followed Bourke out to the parking lot for a word. If his team supported a treatment as apparently effective as RTM, he told Bourke, they would jeopardize their own careers; the Defense Department had already invested more than $1 billion to study more conventional PTSD therapies. The message was clear: Bourke was on his own.  

Of particular interest to lawmakers should be the tremendous savings in PTSD treatment costs for military populations — over $25,000 in annual costs per individual with traditional therapies versus RTM treatment at $1,000 per individual.

This is a total hoot. Frank Bourke, one of the authors on the study shown above, was dealing with PTSD in survivors on the 9/11 attacks in New York. He designed RTM based on existing treatments for phobias. The RTM protocol consists of 89 steps that can be learned online to train therapists. 

It worked quite well. Then a series of pilot studies with military vets was conducted and RTM again worked quite well. So now, they are in the middle of a much bigger confirmatory study where the data is still double blinded. But the interim analysis strongly indicates that RTM is amazingly fast, low cost and effective. 

As indicated in the abstract of the paper shown above, the RTM treatment constituted 3 therapy sessions, each lasting 2 hours. Think about that. About 6 hours of therapy and most patients can no longer be diagnosed with PTSD. That's about as close to a miracle as mental health science can get. No wonder some experts thought this was too good to be true.

Waddabout the US Army? 

Not to stupidly restate the obvious, but is it sad and infuriating that the US military was outrageously corrupt, arrogant and incompetent in dealing with Bourke and his RTM treatment protocol. Bourke had the data in 2010. Now it's 2023 and the protocol is just starting to gain traction with the experts. The army guys didn't want to jeopardize their pisspot little careers by testing a possibly effective protocol. And, as usual, us dumbass taxpayers foot the bill for such insulting corruption, arrogance and incompetence. Those US army jackasses are responsible for all the deaths that RTM could have saved. That's thousands of lives needlessly lost. Those morally rotted army people betrayed our mentally injured veterans for their own sake.

They should be court-marshalled.

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The Hill reports finding more unreported corruption by Clarence Thomas:

A New York Times investigation revealed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was brought access to the wealthy through relationships he built with members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.

The Times reported that just months after Thomas joined the bench in 1991, he was welcomed into the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit scholarship organization, where he forged relationships with a select group of largely wealthy conservatives. This organization granted him access to wealthy friends who gifted Thomas with vacation retreats and V.I.P. tickets to sporting events, as well as invited him to parties, according to The Times.

The Times noted that Thomas declined to respond to detailed questions.

Not commenting is no surprise for Thomas. The KYMS (keep your mouth shut) tactic is fun, easy and effective. By now, he's expert at it.

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The democracy and the rule of law in Israel continues to fall to authoritarianism. The NYT writes:

After a three-month hiatus, Israel’s far-right government was set on Monday to move forward with part of its plan to limit judicial influence, a project that critics say will undermine the integrity of Israel’s democracy.

The dispute is part of a wider ideological and cultural standoff between the government and its supporters, who want to create a more religious and nationalist state, and their opponents, who hold a more secular and pluralist vision.

Parliament is set to hold a nonbinding vote on a bill that would limit the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down decisions by elected officials. The bill would prevent the Supreme Court from overruling the government on grounds of “reasonableness” — a flexible and contentious legal standard that currently lets the court intervene in governance.

Another democracy is falling to corrupt, bigoted tyrants and theocrats.

News bits: Thoughts on SCOTUS; Bipartisanship; Some Christianity bits; Psi musings

Observers are in the process of dissecting what the end of the last Supreme Court term means. Most or nearly all of the radical right appears to be happy with how it turned out. Most non-extremists are not happy. Some are quite scared. Slate writes:

How to Sum Up This Supreme Court Term

Sherrilyn Ifill: I have so many thoughts rushing through my head that it’s hard to pick which one. But I think as a top line, it is calling me back to the very first opening session of the Biden Supreme Court Commission. .... we were doing this task of performing on this commission without seriously engaging the charge for change. And I think we see the consequences of that this year. Obviously, this was a devastating term, but I think really important for our maturation as a democracy in understanding that things are out of balance. And I think it’s time for us to take a very close look at the way in which we have allowed the mythology of the Supreme Court to set itself on top of our democracy, as opposed to being within our democracy.

Steve Vladeck: I’m going to pick a slightly provocative word, but the more I think about it, the better I think it is. The word of the term, for me, is arrogance. This is a profoundly arrogant institution, and I mean that in multiple respects. Arrogant from the sense of sort of picking and choosing the cases it wants in ways that are not necessarily advancing what the lower courts need, as opposed to the agendas of the justices. Arrogant in the sense of handing down decisions in major cases that really are punts, making you wonder why they took the case in the first place. Like what was the point of granting cert in Moore v. Harper if that was the decision we were going to get out of the court?

Arrogance in sort of turning its back collectively and individually on the idea that it ought to be accountable as an institution, and the justices ought to be accountable. Chief Justice Roberts’ letter in response to Chairman Durbin’s invitation to testify is, I think, actually one of the more important single documents of the term.

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From the Hypocrisy Files: There's a few things politicians on the two sides agree on. One is spending federal government money in their voting districts or states, even though they fought against the spending in the first place. The WaPo writes:

Republicans have cheered the arrival of new federal money to improve local roads, bridges, pipes, ports and internet connections, nearly two years after voting against those very investments

When the Biden administration awarded Alabama roughly $1.4 billion in late June to expand high-speed internet access across the state, its senior Republican senator rejoiced.

“Great to see Alabama receive crucial funds to boost ongoing broadband efforts,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville wrote on Twitter, without acknowledging the money originated in a law that he — and dozens of other Republicans — had voted against.

Nearly two years after Congress finalized the first in a series of measures to improve the nation’s aging infrastructure and combat climate change, some of the GOP lawmakers who originally tried to scuttle the spending are now welcoming it. They have privately courted newly available federal money to improve their local roads, bridges, pipes, ports and internet connections, and publicly celebrated when their cities and states have secured a portion of the aid.

Where's all that vaunted pulling one up by one's bootstraps family value? Darned Republican socialist communists.

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Bits about Christianity: A news source recently asserted that worldwide there are about 45,000 different Christian denominations. . . . . . That's a lot of denominations. One can wonder how many of those denominations believe their doctrine and dogma is the only way to live a truly Christian life and get to heaven.

Humans are social creatures and hard wired for spirituality. That usually manifests as affiliation with a formal religion like Christianity or Islam. Some federal courts suggest that even atheism is a religion: According to the Kaufman court, “when a person sincerely holds beliefs dealing with issues of ‘ultimate concern that for her occupy a place parallel to that filled by ... God in traditionally religious persons, those beliefs represent her religion.” So I'm a religion-adjacent person?

The WaPo writes about a Baptist pastor in rural Georgia who has increased church attendance by being inclusive. That includes inclusive of people that the aggressive, theocratic Christian nationalist wealth and power movement has publicly targeted for legalized oppression and discrimination. The WaPo writes: 

A small-town Georgia preacher fills pews by leaving no one out

At night, the worn sign looks like a beacon in the darkness out front of the modest, red-brick Mt. Hebron Baptist Church.

The tired, it reads. The poor. And huddled masses. Welcome home.

In this small town in the rural northeast corner of Georgia, it’s the kind of message that assures Teri Massey she is loved for being who she is — a message 180 degrees from the one she heard in the Baptist church where she spent her teens into her 40s, where her grandfather, father and brother all held leadership positions.

Teri Massey, right, with her wife, Elisa, on the front porch of their home in Elberton, Ga. They say that they returned to church because of how they were greeted and treated at Mt. Hebron Baptist Church.  

When Massey came out in 2004, shortly after meeting the woman she later would marry, the congregation in that other small Georgia town responded by campaigning to send her to conversion therapy and holding prayer vigils outside her home.

Ah, it's nice to see something good about at least some of American Christianity for a change. Apparently, not all Christians are supporters of the bigoted, cruel Christian nationalist brand of theocracy. So, who truly needs conversion therapy here, Teri Massey or the Christians who wanted to send her to conversion therapy?

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Musings about a hypothetical source of psi: Mainstream science rejects psi phenomena as not real. It is dismissed as a collection of alleged observations that are in fact mirages. Psi phenomena are the aggregate of parapsychological mental functions including dualism (consciousness residing at least partly outside of the brain-mind), extrasensory perception, precognition, psychokinesis, ghosts, demons, evidence of reincarnation or past lives, and etc. As far as I know, known forms of energy cannot explain psi. 

Some psi believers posit that some or all of consciousness comes to us via some form of energy akin to light waves or electromagnetic radiation. According to NASA, radio waves, gamma-rays, visible light, and all the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation can be described in terms of a stream of mass-less particles, called photons, each traveling in a wave-like pattern at the speed of light. So far, science has not detected signs of consciousness in regular light. If consciousness does reside at least partly outside the brain-mind, some other source of influence, usually posited as some kind of energy, probably has to exist.

One candidate for psi energy is dark energy. I don't know if that has wave properties akin to light or if wave properties are even necessary. Dark Energy is a hypothetical form of energy that exerts a negative, repulsive pressure, behaving like the opposite of gravity. 

Another is gravity waves (GWs), which were first detected in 2015. More recently, tiny GWs have been found to be flying around all the time. They stretch and compress us in little ripples of space-time. Humans and most everything else in the universe are a bit like a jello mold constantly being wiggled by tiny gravity waves. Since humans can now detect GWs to some limited extent, scientists can begin to probe them for signs of consciousness, presumably some discernable form of non-random wave pattern(s). Maybe GWs carry consciousness to the brain-mind somehow. Or maybe not.

A WaPo opinion piece by physicist Katie Mack comments on the tiny GWs: 

I’m a physicist. Last week’s gravitational waves 

announcement sent me reeling.

As a physicist, I’m used to knowing that an invisible world of particles and waves moves through the universe. I’ve made peace with being constantly skewered by neutrinos and cosmic rays. I blithely submit to X-rays at the dentist and to radio waves everywhere.

But a gravitational wave? That’s a distortion of space-time itself — a stretching and squeezing of the fabric of reality, a wave of deformation tearing through the cosmos, warping everything in its path. The monstrous denizens of the intergalactic deep reveal themselves not through the light they emit but by how they stir the space-time we share. When a gravitational wave moves through you, you are, for a moment, a different shape.

In June, for the first time, astronomers revealed they had picked up traces of a background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves. It was embedded in 15 years of data from naturally occurring cosmic metronomes across the galaxy.

These metronomes, called millisecond pulsars, are the spinning remnants of dead massive stars. They sweep beams of radio waves with every rotation, hundreds per second — and keep near- perfect time. Tiny discrepancies might be because of individual stellar idiosyncrasies or could be a sign that gravitational waves have changed the distance each pulse travels on its way to us. By monitoring dozens of pulsars, astronomers hunt for correlations in timing errors that are a smoking gun of passing gravitational waves.

And that’s just what they found.

The discovery is not going to revolutionize science in one fell swoop. For one thing, it is not entirely clear where the hum comes from, though it looks very much like what we expect from the combination of gravitational waves generated by all the supermassive black hole collisions across the cosmos. If it is, it’s a first step toward a whole new way of seeing the universe that will give us fantastic insights into the formation and growth of galaxies.

An artistic interpretation of an array of pulsars 

being affected by gravitational ripples in a distant galaxy

Darn those gravitational ripples

It feels right: An essay about the modern, anti-rationalist radical right

A commentary that Salon published makes some good points about America's radical right. The commentary was written by Mike Lofgren, a former congressional staff member and the author of "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted." One has to like that book title. Lofgren writes:

There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power

From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen (a recent DP post on Deneen is here), we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible

The hundreds of conservative book titles that have geysered out of Regnery, Broadside and other right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation cribbed from Republican National Committee talking points and Heritage Foundation issue briefs. The fact that they sometimes hit the bestseller list is principally due to the well-funded conservative media-entertainment complex's bulk-purchase scam[1].

However much modern theorists have elaborated upon the ideas inherent in conservatism during the two centuries since Maistre[2], they all seem to me to boil down to three simple points:

1. A desire for hierarchy and human inequality. This belief derives from the medieval religious notion of the Great Chain of Being, whereby there is a place for everybody and everybody must know his place. It justifies economic exploitation and denial of political rights. Conservative writers propagandize on its behalf with a straw-man argument: Any gain in equality costs society an equal or greater loss in freedom; egalitarianism is the mere soulless equality of the gulag, where we cannot own property and must share toothbrushes. This sentiment pops up consistently in the works of American conservative theorists, from Buckley's "Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom," to David Brooks' hankering for rule by a wise elite. American-style laissez-faire economics and libertarianism are largely based on this idea.

2. The only acceptable society is based on Christianity. Never mind the establishment clause of the First Amendment; conservatives will forever try to smuggle in more and more official endorsement of religion until the United States is effectively a theocracy. The rationale is that some sort of divine or transcendental dispensation is the sole basis for a just temporal order. Translated into the bumper-sticker mentality of American Christian fundamentalism, that means that if people don't believe in God, there's nothing to stop them from running amok and killing people. 

3. We must obey tradition. For some unexplained reason, our ancestors were infinitely wiser than us, and apparently they get a vote on present affairs. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, if we're going to have democracy, let's extend it to the dead. Scratch someone who fancies himself an educated conservative and you will often find a person who reveres the past; unfortunately they leave out details like slavery, witch burning and childbed fever. Many psychologists consider this mentality to be a cognitive bias in brain function, but whatever its source, the political utility of the attitude is obvious: Utopia only exists in an ever-receding past, progress is impossible, and future generations shall profess bygone superstitions. And tradition, in this case, means the folkways of a specific, favored culture, thus denying the universality of the human spirit. The idea is well expressed by Buckley's statement that conservatives must "stand athwart history yelling 'stop.'"  

Conservative theorizing on politics, civil society or ethics and morals is very likely derived from one or more of these three axiomatic rules. A notable example is Michael Oakeshott, a British conservative much esteemed by Buckley, Andrew Sullivan and other figures in the conservative movement for his suggestion that rationalism in politics ultimately leads to police states and concentration camps.

Rationalism in democratic politics ultimately leads to police states and concentration camps? I don't think so. Irrationalism in all politics, pro- or anti-democracy, tends to do that, not pro-democracy rationalism. This is the radical right explicitly rejecting rationalism. That dogma gives radicals license to deny inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning in the name of the greater whatever, God, dogma or corporate raid. In my firm opinion, rejecting rationalism is the epitome of deep corruption, unprincipled moral rot, and authoritarianism. 

A quibble that's appropriate to voice here is, as usual, Lofgren does not really understand what he is dealing with. He just doesn't get it. It is not conservatism that's in play now in America. It is radical right, anti-democracy authoritarianism. It is the powerful urge that is always present among some people for the promised, comforting simplicity of tyranny. Too many people want and need a dictator, powerful capitalist plutocrats and/or powerful Christian theocrats to comfort them and make the cognitive dissonance of inconvenient truth go away with partisan fantasies and faux realities. Calling radical right authoritarianism 'conservative' masks and distracts from the far more dangerous reality. That's a big, unjustifiable mistake.

Qs: Is it necessary for modern authoritarians to reject rationalism in politics because there is just too much inconvenient fact, true truth and sound reasoning to accommodate in building and maintaining tyranny? Could that be the reason why America is being torn apart by two Overton Windows, one for the center-left to center-right and one for the extremist radical right authoritarians, assuming one believes there are two open Overton Windows?

Footnotes: 

1. In 2021, the WaPo wrote about the Republican's book scam: 

Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s memoir and social critique, “Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage,” soared to the top of the bestseller lists when it was published last year. The book helped raise the former Navy SEAL’s profile and burnished his credentials as a rising star among freshman congressmen.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect GOP candidates to Congress, spent nearly $400,000 on bulk purchases of the book. The organization acquired 25,500 copies through two online booksellers, enough to fuel “Fortitude’s” ascent up the bestseller lists. The NRCC said it gave away copies as incentives to donors, raising $1.5 million in the process.

Good grief, even the bestseller list has been hacked by RRRAs (radical right Republican authoritarians). Can one trust anything any more? Yes, indeed. One can trust there will be lots more lies, slanders, crackpottery, dirty tricks like hacking the bestseller list and lunacy from the RRRAs in coming years. Some rising RRRA stars get their stardom in part by hacking the bestseller lists. In my firm opinion, the Republican Party is an shell devoid of morals, principles and restraining norms. Only winning power and wealth matter.

2. Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." That's all the essential points of the present conservative mind. 

Woof! That's harsh by golly.

Little bits: Opting out of ads, or not; About Boris; Republican Party authoritarianism

From the Lying to Consumers Is Fun & Profitable Files: The Digital Advertising Alliance runs a website that allegedly lets people opt out of being tracked by the 123 companies that track people on the internet and then use or sell the stolen information for profit. I went there to opt out of all of them. I apparently successfully opted out of 48, but 75 of the opt-out requests were "not completed." I tried to opt out of those 75 four more times, but was unable to do so each time.

While opting out was underway

Opting-out was done

Final result, oops 75 won't let me escape their 

capitalist clutches, bwahahahaha!

Trying again does not work

Some of the ones that kept me trapped

Companies starting with letter A

Temporarily unavailable means 

permanently unavailable 

Oooh! Google kept me trapped

So did FreeWheel, GroundTruth and GumGum

So did Xaxis, Yahoo, Yieldmo & Ziff Davis

(Yieldmo = yields more profit)

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About Boris: At the Safari Park north of San Diego, there's a part of the park that has lots of different cacti, aloe and other interesting succulents and caudiciform plants from all over the world. One of the cacti we walk past to get to that area is Boris. 

See why we call him Boris?

The other Boris

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In another sign of increasing anti-democracy authoritarian sentiment among Republican elites, the GOP in Florida has imposed a loyalty pledge on Republican candidates before they will be allowed on the ballot. Radical Republican hostility toward free and fair elections could not be much clearer. The Hill writes:

Former President Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and their fellow Republican candidates vying for the White House in 2024 will have to pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee in order to get on the primary ballot in the Sunshine State, the state GOP said.

“The pledge – which is the word-for-word the same language as the RNC pledge – was requested and passed by our members to ensure maximum unity heading into the General Election,” Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler told The Hill.

“The days of party grifters such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger using Republican Party resources to secure a title and then weaponize that title against our own team must end. Contested primaries are part of the process, but we must always remember that the Democrats are the true threat to the America we love, and we must be unified to defeat every single one of them,” Ziegler said.

If that isn't blatant authoritarianism with Party über alles in der Welt as the guiding moral value, what is it? Tolerance of honest dissent? 

Even worse, those hypocrite elites have the gall to call Cheney and Kinzinger grifters. That is the pot calling the kettle black. Voters put those two in power, but Republican elites do not care what voters want. They care about what they want first and foremost, mindless, blind loyalty to the morally rotted authoritarian GOP. Other than campaign contributions, most everything else is just silly froth to the elites. 

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The AP writes about a split in the Methodist Church over the LGBQT issue:

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.

Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year.

Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.   

But amid increased defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches, many conservatives decided to launch the separate Global Methodist Church, saying they believed the sexuality issues reflected deeper theological differences.

A lot of Christians do not love LGBTQ people. One might even say some hate them. One can only wonder what those "deeper theological differences" might be? Did God say that LGBQT people should be discriminated against?