Sticking Together

I’ve been married for many years now, so I am blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the dating scene. But I’ve heard from single friends that it’s a hellish endeavor

Yes, it has to be difficult to go out on date after date, vainly searching for that one person with whom you can laugh, open up, and plot the overthrow of the lizard people who are trying to enslave humanity.

This universal dilemma has provoked fed-up and ostracized conspiracy theorists to set up “their own dedicated dating sites, in response to what they see as their growing incompatibility with mainstream society.”

Hey, just because someone is a raving lunatic who believes Jewish laser beams are targeting patriots doesn’t mean he isn’t looking for love. Come on, after a hard day of ranting on Reddit about liberal pedophiles, guys just want to cuddle with a lucky lady who will agree that Islamic terrorists are poisoning the water supply.

One such dating site asks users “to list which conspiracy theories they consider to be real — such as coronavirus, QAnon, New World Order or prepper ideology.”

Really, that’s a lot of craziness to choose from, and one wonders if the person who picks all of them is considered a real catch.

In any case, the desire of conspiracy theorists to mate only with people who share their belief in chemtrails is understandable. After all, so-called normal people are unwilling to put up with lengthy diatribes about JFK Jr. coming back to life. And as one dating-site owner puts it, “vaccinated people are hardly an option” for true believers.

Conspiracy-oriented dating sites are part of a larger pattern. In America and Europe, “hardline conspiracy groups have set up their own off-grid “education hubs” to pull their children out of mainstream education, while others have launched efforts to set up entire breakaway communities.”

Just imagine that community. Every town hall would deteriorate into a shouting match about secret symbols and which neighbor is plotting to betray the others to the one-world government. 

In such an environment, can true love last?

Smarty Pants

I will be on vacation and away from my computer, so I will not publish a new article next week. As such, I am doubling up this week with another post. 

However, I don’t have time to create a new earthshaking diatribe that will alter your perception and shred your preconceived notions. You see, I have to pack my luggage.

Therefore, I yet again called upon artificial intelligence to help me out. Anyone who has read my posts lately knows that I am semi-obsessed with AI, and its potential to propel us forward into an enlightened, technology-enhanced utopia and/or kill us all.

And it’s also great for creating images of, say, a one-armed zombie killer on a rampage.

So I asked AI a sadly relevant question:

“What is the best way to decrease gun violence in a nation?”

Here are its responses:

1. Strengthening gun laws: One of the most effective ways to reduce gun violence is to strengthen gun laws. This could include measures such as universal background checks, waiting periods for gun purchases, and restrictions on the sale of high-capacity magazines and assault weapons. Research has shown that countries with stronger gun laws tend to have lower rates of gun violence.
2. Improving access to mental health care: Many incidents of gun violence are committed by individuals with mental health issues. Improving access to mental health care and addressing the stigma around mental illness can help prevent these incidents.
3. Investing in community-based violence prevention programs: Violence prevention programs that work with at-risk individuals and communities have been shown to be effective in reducing gun violence. These programs can include initiatives such as conflict resolution training, mentorship programs, and job training.
4. Encouraging responsible gun ownership: Encouraging responsible gun ownership can help prevent gun accidents and reduce the likelihood of guns falling into the wrong hands. This could include measures such as safe storage requirements, gun safety education programs, and mandatory gun training and licensing.
5. Addressing systemic issues: Gun violence often occurs in communities that are disproportionately affected by poverty, racism, and other systemic issues. Addressing these underlying issues through measures such as economic and social policies, education, and criminal justice reform can help reduce the root causes of gun violence.

Now, we certainly don’t want to take AI’s pronouncements as infallible insights that we must follow. The factual and ethical flaws with AI’s outputs have been well-documented. 

At the same time, AI is a great tool for synthesizing data. In the case of reducing gun violence, AI presumably looked at studies, research, and case studies of what has worked in other countries.

Also, keep in mind that I didn’t ask a politically loaded question like “How can we overturn the Second Amendment” or “What does effective gun control look like?”

I asked, “What is the best way to decrease gun violence in a nation?” This is a goal that we all supposedly share.

Look again at the suggestions. Nowhere do you see “More guns” or “Loosen gun laws” or “Arm the teachers.”

Unless you want to accuse AI of being a cyber liberal, it appears that the most logical solutions for reducing gun violence are all progressive ideas.

It seems that if you strip away political posturing, fear-based reactions, and crazed conspiracy theories, you get a list of rational solutions that just about every other industrialized nation has adopted. You get ideas that are the very antithesis of Republican talking points.

We can reduce gun violence, which is stratospheric when compared to every other industrialized country, or we can literally shrug and say, “We’re not gonna fix it.”

Yes, it’s too bad that AI can’t eliminate apathy, greed, and cowardice.

But let’s end on a lighter note.

You’ll be happy to know that I also asked AI to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in the style of an AC/DC song from the 1980s. The chorus is where it really gets rocking:

GETTYSBURG! A battle cry for freedom 

GETTYSBURG! A nation's call to arms 

GETTYSBURG! A sacred ground we defend 

GETTYSBURG! Where heroes live forevermore

Can’t you just hear the crunch of the power chords?

See you in a couple of weeks.

Flip It and Reverse It

By now, we were supposed to have enjoyed the thrilling spectacle of our mega-corrupt ex-president getting handcuffed and frog-marched off to jail. 

But our former chief executive was once again either factually wrong or bloviating hyperbole when he predicted his arrest. Because nothing happened, beyond rubes handing over their money — yet again — to an unrepentant, cackling conman.

Instead of being fitted for an orange jumpsuit, the guy who once advised Americans to gurgle bleach spent his time displaying totally normal behavior for a major political party’s leading contender for its presidential nomination. He “stood with his hand over his heart” as loudspeakers blared a rendition of the national anthem “sung by a group of inmates that are incarcerated for their role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.”

During the song, “images from the Capitol riot, in which Trump supporters stormed the complex to overturn the 2020 election, played on a screen.” And yes, Trump’s first official 2024 campaign rally was held in Waco, Texas, which is no coincidence because the town is synonymous with either crazed religious cults that abuse children or brave anti-government protesters — depending on your perspective.

In any case, the celebration of insurrection is popular with the GOP, which once insisted that Antifa was behind the January 6 violence but now says there was no violence at all (even though we all saw Trump supporters ransacking the building). I suppose this means there was no Antifa either, but who can keep all those meandering, contradictory, treacherous rationalizations straight anyway?

When they aren’t openly praising violent sedition, Republicans are threatening death and destruction. They are also trying to subvert laws that might prevent lunatics from threatening all that death and destruction in the first place.

Oh, they are also attempting to persuade Americans that a washed-up narcissist who committed multiple felonies when he paid hush money to a porn star is somehow being unjustly persecuted. Yes, if that isn’t a bedrock conservative principle, I don’t know what is.

Of course, Republicans are pretty good at gaslighting, obfuscating, and befuddling their followers. For example, a “far-right projectthat has helped spread Donald Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in 2020, and misinformation about Covid vaccines, is trying to expand its mission.” The organization “pushes disinformation using Christian nationalist messages” and proudly relies upon uneducated, hyper-religious Americans. 

Historians are bemoaning the fact that “for the first time, one of the major political parties displays contempt for learning” and is “dependent for its success on anti-intellectual postures.”

Hey, conservatives can’t even remember that their hero was president in 2020 (i.e., the worst year in recent history). Republicans blame everything horrible that happened during GOP administrations on Biden or Obama, which must be psychologically comforting but is deeply weird.

Eventually, the GOP will fold back in on itself to proclaim every negative event is an uplifting miracle. And millions of conservatives will place their hands over their hearts and sing along to the lies.

Priorities

We are a couple of months into the reign of the House GOP, and thus far, Republicans have tamed inflation and ended all crime in America.

Ha, not really. But it doesn’t matter, because you probably forgot that this was their whole campaign pitch last year. It was all, “vote Republican, or thugs will murder you and run off with your milk that cost $89 per gallon.”

Once Republicans actually took over the House, however, they “turned to investigations, abortion, threatening the national debt, and trying to defund the Internal Revenue Service rather than dealing with the issues they insisted were vital in 2022: crime and inflation.”

Currently, the GOP is working hard to convince Americans that the January 6 riots weren’t that bad, that trans people are coming to eat everyone’s babies, and that “woke” is a horrific, Lovecraftian monster so terrifying that it literally defies description.

Congressional Republicans spend their days on hearings designed to expose the Deep State’s weaponization of government, only to flop so badly that even fellow conservatives have tuned out on a “slow-moving train wreck” that exposes nothing more alarming than GOP incompetence.

And when Republicans aren’t spreading conspiracy theories or calling their opponents pedophiles, they are looking “backward resolutely and angrily to an imagined past,” completely oblivious and indifferent to the fact that they are “out of step with the majority of Americans on issues like LGBTQ rights, climate change, gun safety, and abortion.”

But hey, don’t go thinking that the GOP will change course, just because their agenda is ludicrous and millions of Americans hate their ideas. Keep in mind that the “oppressiveness and unpopularity of any particular policy has rarely deterred this bunch from pursuing it.”

Republican leaders know that “the MAGA base will ride and die for this right-wing culture war predominantly animated by fear and racial anxiety.” 

Now, on a human level, this grotesque ploy always backfires. After all, the GOP manipulates “white victimhood and rage… to win over — and kill — their own voters.”

But on a political level, it’s a big winner. Rage-filled conservatives continue to vote Republican, even if it is perfectly clear that the only beneficiaries of GOP policies are billionaires and corporations.

Yes, ever since Reagan, the US has “moved toward an economic policy that often allows corporations to behave as they want, based on the theory that the free market will solve any excesses.” But to be blunt, “the results haven’t been very good,” evident by the fact that during that time, “economic growth has slowed, corporate profits have risen faster than wages, income inequality has soared, and living standards have grown slowly.”

But if you try to explain that to a working-class guy living in small town, he will just shout about freedom and critical race theory and gay immigrants.

And he will vote Republican.

Pack of Lies

Let’s say you get an email from a total stranger who claims, among other things, that her soul once left her body, the wind talks to her (telling her that she is a ghost), and that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered while being hunted for sport.

You would likely hit delete and check your spam-filter settings.

But you are not a seasoned journalist like the brilliant minds at Fox News. 

You see, back in 2020, a deranged Minnesota woman sent an email to Fox that was full of the above gibberish and made-up “facts” that “proved” Biden had stolen the election.

This revelation comes from the Dominion lawsuit, which previously revealed that Fox anchors knowingly lied to their audience to maintain their ratings, which is a concept that I never learned in journalism school.

Also, Fox anchors hate Trump and think their viewers are morons, so I guess we have something in common.

In any case, Dominion has stated that “the alleged source of the voter-fraud claims that sparked the lawsuit is a single email from a previously unknown woman” who admits that “she conjures her theories out of nothing.”

Again, it might strike you as odd that Fox would broadcast incendiary commentary based on one email from an anonymous person who freely admits that her “now nationally prominent ideas about election fraud” are based on “hidden messages she detects in films, song lyrics she hears on the radio, and overheard conversations she hears while in line at the supermarket checkout.”

But again, you are not a Fox journalist.

They listened to this woman, who had zero qualifications and offered “a jumble of ideas that centered on ties between telepaths, the Bank of the Vatican, the NXIVM sex cult, and the 1970 film Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

And they thought, “Seems credible.”

Of course, it is improbable that many people at Fox believed this lunatic’s email (although it would probably be disturbing to know how many did). More likely, they saw these rantings from a representative of their core audience and used it as a springboard or brainstorming tool for their coverage. After all, there was no actual evidence of voter fraud, so why not make up some bizarre shit and hope it sticks? And why not start with the psychotic assertions of a swing-state nutjob?

Hey, at least she’s not an East Coast elitist, right?

Fox has shown that it is terrified of offending its audience, so it will go to appalling lengths to keep the right-wing outrage percolating. This is the power of the Republican base.

Hey, even the few conservative leaders “who do not embrace the racism, sexism, religiosity, nihilism, and authoritarianism of the hard-core MAGA Republicans appear to believe they cannot win an election without the votes of those people, [and] so the extremists now own the party.”

Conservatives are no longer even offering the dog-whistle ideal of making the country great (again). Instead, they are clamoring for leaders who will eradicate the libs and engage in unbridled retribution.

They openly admit that their lies — so obvious to anyone who is not delusional, partisan, or idiotic — are just to appease the base.

But the base doesn’t care. 

They want to believe that we can bomb Mexico, and that will end our drug problem.

They want the GOP to take “a wartime posture — even calling for a “national divorce” — to cover up “their party’s misalignment with large swaths of the United States.”

They want to see heavily edited video that implies January 6 was a pleasant stroll rather than a riot, a ploy so childish and ludicrous that one assumes even the people spouting this nonsense are incredulous.

Brief aside: there should be a word that describes a pathetic effort to convince people of obvious lies that are so absurd that even the perpetrators don’t believe it. There probably is a word in German that covers this idea, and I imagine it’s something like werheschfeltzanthursse.

Regardless, the lies don’t matter, and neither does the public admission of the lies.

Right-wingers are ready to believe anything. 

Just ask that woman in Minnesota.

Better yet, don’t ask. The last thing you want is an email correspondence with her.