Or, Are They Crazy?, part 2
I recently had a long and unpleasant discussion with a “constitutionalist” who had a collection of unshakable-by-facts beliefs. And I realized; this is what they used to call paranoia. So I went off to DSM-5, the handbook of names and descriptions of mental illness, to find out more.
Summary of a series of tweets.
If Elon Musk takes over Twitter, and it becomes toxic, well, it's been nice knowing you. Twitter, for all its faults, has helped me find news and people I wouldn't otherwise have known. Some of you I'll follow on to other platforms. Some of you can follow my blog.
The Twitter algorithm, despite its flaws, has helped me find people and news, and no-one seems interested in implementing another version or operating a service that would run it. Mastodon, with no algorithm, is not a useful substitute; it drowns one in toots (and why did the author not know that is an English euphemism for "farts?") and doesn't allow weighting by author, content, or anything else.
So here's hoping Musk's deal falls through! – tweets
A while back, in the context of discussing our current situation as a second civil war, I wrote “It is not yet clear to me what the next move of our would-be traitors will be. Perhaps a campaign of domestic terror on the lines of the first Klan?”
It now appears to me that the overturning of Roe, and the consequent
passage of numerous misogynistic state laws will be the third move. Liberal states are already
preparing responses. State laws are coming into conflict, which are
going to have to be litigated in federal courts. I am not hopeful the
Roberts Court will decide the cases in any positive way.
And that explains Abbott and DeSantis and Trump: they let cowards believe they are brave, true, right and upstanding. And the cowards will not abandon their belief, for then they would have to face their cowardice.
