Archive for 2019

THE DARK PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL NETWORKS: Why it feels like everything is going haywire. “At its inception, social media felt very different than it does today. Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook all appeared between 2002 and 2004, offering tools that helped users connect with friends. The sites encouraged people to post highly curated versions of their lives, but they offered no way to spark contagious outrage. This changed with a series of small steps, designed to improve user experience, that collectively altered the way news and anger spread through American society. In order to fix social media—and reduce its harm to democracy—we must try to understand this evolution.”

You could start here.

PETER HITCHENS ON “BIG DOPE:” How marijuana benefited from one of the slickest PR campaigns in history.

Loughner’s supposed political views are incoherent drivel of the sort that makes the average Klansman sound like Socrates. He had no politics worth the name, and if he had, the murder of six people including a nine-year-old girl could not possibly have advanced them.

For the killer was officially crazy. Or at least not officially sane. Pima Community College, where he was a constant menace, eventually asked him to get a certificate showing he was mentally OK. He never did. It took this bizarre step after he repeatedly caused noisy and worrying disruptions. One classmate, Lynda Sorensen, told friends that Loughner was ‘mentally unstable’ and ‘scares the living crap out of me’. She added that he was the sort of person ‘whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon’.

This kind of individual madness was rare before 1960. Why is there now so much of it? Well, we know that Loughner, described by a high-school classmate as a pothead, had been rejected by the US Army in 2008 because of his admitted marijuana use. It was not minor. Pima police picked him up in 2007 because his car stank of marijuana. The offense was recorded, but, as so often in the alleged War on Drugs, nothing happened to him. Much of this information emerged some time after the shootings, when interest had cooled.

Earlier: Second Thoughts on Pot: “‘Yeah, they all smoke.’ ‘Well . . . other things too, right?’ ‘Sometimes. But they all smoke.’”

OPEN THREAD: Talk about stuff.

HMM: Model said she didn’t know she was pregnant until giving birth in the bathroom. “Langmaid, who told the news outlet that she had been using birth control injections throughout the unsuspected pregnancy, said the entire labor and birth was ‘over in about 10 minutes,’ and that baby Isla weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces.” Many women will be jealous of that record.

THE DIPLOMAD 2.0: New Whine in an Old Battle.

Let me put it in nice simple terms so that the Swamp Beings will understand: The President sets and conducts foreign policy, not State, not the NSC, not the DOD, not any other alphabet agency. He does not have to go through State or NSC to conduct said policy; he does not have to consult with Kent or Taylor or anybody else on Ukraine or any other aspect of foreign policy.

IMPEACHMENT COUNSELS ARE POLAR OPPOSITES: It’s like Daniel Goldman for the Democrats and Stephen Castor for the Republicans are from two different planets. Or perhaps two different galaxies. Wonder what they talk about if they happen to step onto the same elevator?