December 13, 2022

The MAGA mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable, or just plain dumb conundrum

 The MAGA mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable, or just plain dumb conundrum

 

By Hal Brown


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Public Domain  from Wikipedia

Yesterday I wrote about  the media normalizing mentally ill MAGA's.

Today I noticed the same thing that is a subject of this article in RawStory  even before I read it.


Before reading this I noticed that George T. Conway, III was quoted as saying "The GOP congressman who called for 'Marshall Law!!' in a text to Meadows obviously must have thought he was participating in a coo, not a coup, and so is clearly off the hook." I even made an illustration and tweeted it to Conway.

As I write this this is being discussed on Morning Joe:


Looking back at Trump, who claimed many times to have the biggest brain and bringing up the genes he supposedly inherited from his MIT scientist uncle, and that he went to the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Business School (implying it was their graduate school). Actually he did his first two years at Fordham and transferred to Penn. While there was a clamor for Trump to release his tax returns I never saw anyone demand he release his college transcripts, not that this would have told us anything since he could have cheated his ass off and paid people to do his work.

My friend, a clinical psychologist, who has expertise in interpreting standard IQ tests, told me that she thought Trump's testable IQ would be slightly below average, that is under 100.

While some MAGA politicians spouting conspiracy theories have advanced degrees, and may fit into the category of being mentally ill in one or another way, Mark Meadows has an associate degree from the University of South Florida. We don't know what his grades were, but he is probably their most "distinguished" graduate.

Lauren Boebert went to Rifle High School in Colorado but did not graduate and got her GED.
Boebert's fellow loony-tuner Marjorie Taylor Greene has her BBA (Bachelors of Business Administration) from the University of George.

Of course there are now and always have been brilliant  and accomplished people who never went to college or like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out, though they were in Harvard.  Some even quit high school before they graduated. Richard Branson quit school when he was 15. David Karp dropped out of an elite Bronx high school, also at the age of 15, to launch Tumblr. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped out of high school to pursue a career in body building and Quentin Tarantino quit because he thought he could do a better job educating himself. There are many more listed here.

Then there's Elon Musk, whose IQ supposedly is in the neighborhood of 155. He is an example of someone who has lost the ability to think critically and not engage in self-defeating behavior because, while they are intelligent, they have the kind of psychiatric disorder described in my previous story.

There is no correlation between intelligence and psychosis, including delusional disorders. There has been research (see the article Personality and Intelligence, for example) into the correlation between various personality types and intelligence. 

It seems to me that anyone can develop a belief that leads them into the morass of conspiracy theories like those of QAnon regardless of their testable IQ.  For example here's how Steven Hassan, a well known expert on cults, describes how he ended up joining the Moonies. (About Hassan)

What all this seems to boil down to is that there is no conclusion to be drawn regarding the initial question about whether these MAGA cultists are mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable like Steve Hassan was, or just plain dumb. They can be either one, two or all of them. 

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker is quoted in the RawStory piece: "Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question." We certain can fairly question their base intelligence, however going further than that leads us into the realm of both the unknown and the unknowable. 

Intelligence may be a factor in their beliefs, but there's no way a conclusion can be drawn to label the overall intelligence of those who can be considered to be MAGA cultists.

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December 12, 2022

Should you be buried in a biodegradable wicker basket? Your family might not like it but do you really care?

This has absolutely nothing to do with caskets and coffins... it is about Mastodon

UPDATE DEC 16

Scroll down for the whole story

Here's a toot I just put on Mastodon

I wanted to see what was listed as trending on Twitter to add hashtags to my link to my Mastodon blog story which doesn't mention it and saw #ThursdayNightMassacre and found out that we have a new member @joyannreid who tweets are still there (see screen grab of her tweet) so a BIG welcome to her. Hard to track all the journalists moving here. Welcome to @pkrugman@mastod JenRubin@masto.ai and Rachel Maddow -  maddow@beta.mstdn.cf




Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.

The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.

The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

Many of the journalists suspended Thursday, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, had been covering that rule change, as well as Musk’s claims that he and his family had been endangered by location sharing.

Twitter did not directly respond to questions about the suspensions. But Musk suggested on Twitter, without evidence, that the journalists had revealed private information about his family, known as doxing. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” he tweeted late Thursday.




 



I originally posted this on Twitter like this:
Now my new tweet looks like this:

I was hoping some of my followers would click the first tweet but hardly anyone even looked at it.

Changed the tweet to see if I can lure more people to click on the link without getting kicked off Twitter.

This blog, despite the title, really has to do with the alternative to Twitter named after a prehistoric beast. It is growing in popularity.
The Twitter bird evolved for a few years (read about it here) but until Elon Musk bought it the bird, with notable exceptions, like most birds mostly tweeted. Now with Musk, it is screeching. 

We don't know what a mastodon sounded like but presumably it was something like an elephant. You can listen to elephant sounds here. Mostly they trumpet and this is how they are depicted in most movies. They rumble when communicating with each other, they also roar, bark, snort, and grunt. Tooting isn't on the list, but why quibble. I think the term "toot" conveys that Mastodon wants to be a civil and respectful town square.

Not tooting yet. Click above to create an account.
Not ready. Learn more about it here.
Excerpt:

Mastodon is an innovative open-source and self-hostable microblogging platform similar to Twitter or Tumblr. Its development was started in 2016 by Eugen Rochko and since then Mastodon constantly attracted new users and communities looking for a social environment independent from big company logics and censorship.

Mastodon is not a Twitter clone: by concept, structure and functionalities it is something completely different and much more interesting!

This page is an introduction to Mastodon’s basic concepts and features which you should know to fully understand how Mastodon works. It is structured in independent sections which you can jump to from the Index (see the link in the upper-left side), but it can also be read as a single text.

The site also hosts an Instances search engine that you can use to find the Mastodon instance that best fits your needs.


I've posted the link to this blog on Mastodon and have been working to add as many links to Mastodon servers as I can find for those who want to get a feel for what it is like, and hopefully if they like it they will join. Scroll down to see the links.

This is what Twitter is doing to those who tweet a link to Mastodon 

This is what someone tooted (the same as a Twitter tweet) on Mastodon:

If you’re wondering about Mastodon’s impact, Twitter is now automatically marking links to mastodon as “sensitive” (aka dangerous) and forcing users who get them to “appeal” the claim. In case Elon didn’t seem desperate enough for you already…

Below is a screen grab of what they tooted with their identity blocked out by me because there's no established convention or policy there about sharing the identity of someone who posts there.

Those who want to view or join Mastodon can do so at web addresses for Mastodon servers which are decentralized. You can use any of these. More will be posted as I find them:

The five above appear to have the most members.

Others have fewer, even some less than 200.

https://kinky.business/explore A Mastodon instance for the kink community. Safe, sane, consensual.
https://zeroes.ca/explore  COVID-aware Twitter escapees ♥️ COVID content, science, resources, advocacy; social, meetup, chat, etc.
https://mastodon.ie/explore Irish, with 10k members

All the images below are links

This one has a cute logo, click above
https://toot.community/explore "We're a generic, free-for-all Mastodon instance hosted in The Netherlands. We're welcoming to all that seek a place of enjoyment online while being excellent to each other."


.



https://hachyderm.io/explore "Here we are trying to build a curated network of respectful professionals in the tech industry around the globe."





If you have followers on Twitter (I have 154) who you want to be able to know you are leaving there and moving to Mastodon you may be able tweet without running afoul of Elon's attempt to keep anyone from finding you. Just figure out a way to persuade your followers to click my link without alerting the evil genius.

If you want to promote Mastodon on Twitter you may be able to avoid their algorithm tagging their tweet by 1) not using the word Mastodon and 2) trying to outfox them by tweeting something innocuous which will also clue in your followers that you are doing something that you want them to know about.

I recommend you that if you have things to share that don't fit into the word limit for a toot that you try out a free website builder.  I  have used Google Blogger since 2012. It costs extra to have dedicated web address. I chose a dot org after my name because dot com was taken. I am an organization of one. If you have a website you can write anything at any length, include pictures if you like, and put a link to your page in a toot.

Most popular web building platforms have a free version and some you have to pay for extra features. Popular platforms are Wordpress, Weebly, Wix, and GoDaddy. Musk said he was open to buying another website platform, Substack, another popular platform. They weren't interested

 I can only see how many people looked at the tweet (impressions), 17 so far, but without paying I can't see how many people click the link (engagements). Before Musk took over a tweeter could see both for free.

This is what I tooted on Mastodon:

Click above to enlarge.




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As if being a foul-mouthed sadistic malignant narcissist isn't enough, he's a foul-mouthed sadistic misogynistic malignant narcissist. He's crude, he's rude, he's shrewd, and they love him for this.

  Scroll down for my Dec. 10th post. As if being a foul-mouthed sadistic malignant narcissist isn't enough, he's a foul-mouthed sadi...