July, 2019 archive
Trapped in a Cell (Phone) 0
Glen Geher explores the dark side of living in a screen-based world. A snippet:
Intuitively, we can understand why. Someone who is posting anonymously to a blog probably will never meet the blogger in person. They probably have little investment in the blogger’s personal success. Further, unless the blogger is some kind of super computer hacker, the anonymous commenter is probably never going to “get caught.” So the possibility of retribution is unlikely.
Of course, evolved human conditions were not like this at all. However, the “anonymous blog comment” is, as we all know, just the tip of the iceberg. These days, people are regularly, across a broad array of platforms, communicating with others in anonymous, deindividuated* ways. This is a highly mismatched, unnatural way for humans to communicate with one another, and for a variety of reasons, it brings out the worst in us.
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*From Britannica.com (more at the link): “Deindividuation, phenomenon in which people engage in seemingly impulsive, deviant, and sometimes violent acts in situations in which they believe they cannot be personally identified (e.g., in groups and crowds and on the Internet).”
Russian Impulses 0
Later: I don’t know why the image is not displaying reliably. If it doesn’t display, click the link to view it.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Show politeness to your friends.
One of the teens called 911. “There was a gun in the house and we were showing him and he grabbed it and it shot him.”
And Now for a Change of Pace 0
We need a loony story.
Tales of the Trumpling: Snapshots of Trickle-Down Trumpery 0
Words fail me.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Be polite to the driver of your automotive conveyance.
Suffer the Children 0
One more time, it’s Republican policy.
Roots 0
Solomon Jones marvels at the capacity that some have for forgetting where they came from.
(Misplet wrod correxd.)
