I don't think I've read as brutal an indictment against a culture as this one by @pluralistic
@cass_m @pluralistic What an excellent point that has been made
@cass_m @pluralistic What's the source article?
Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

@cass_m @pluralistic @Elodie_lyra

Now I have ye olde song “Imaginary Lovers” stuck in my head but it’s “Imaginary Children” and I am profoundly tempted to rework every line of the song.

@cass_m @pluralistic

Gosh, such good writing about insights so powerful.

@cass_m @pluralistic
💯🎯

@ThomHartmann & Revd Dr. Wm. Barber of the #PoorPeoplesCampaign have made this excellent point in the past. It bears repeating... over & over.

But the @dnc is busy funding #genocide & #IranWar bc #AIPAC told them to

@cass_m @pluralistic People of industrialized countries have been raised on media. Most of their life lessons are learned through fictional drama presented to them on a screen. As such people long to be the hero of a drama with all of the rules fiction provides. Unfortunately real life is dynamic and messy. One day a villain does a heroic thing and the next an upstanding figure is caught in a scandal. People love online narrative garbage because it gives them a good/bad binary that they crave
@cass_m @pluralistic This is accurate. Loyalist/authoritarians essentially always structure themselves against an imaginary world, one which seamlessly morphs to suit any desired outcome.
For, and this is important, to them all words and rhetoric is SECONDARY. Action desired for the in-group is primary.

@cass_m @pluralistic

Yes, the objects of imaginary harm are called "strawmen" and the right has been mass-producing these scary scarecrows for ...mmm...over 50 years now.

thanks for noticing!

Now back to your regularly scheduled ...programming. So you can continue to rediscover this, over and over, for another 50 years.

Brings up a thought....crows may be smarter than humans. That scarecrows are fake is already genetic memory for them!

Go crows! Maybe they should get the vote....

@cass_m @pluralistic The wording here reminds me of Dave Barnhart's post about "the unborn" that went viral on Facebook (quote re-posted to Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10357009-the-unborn-are-a-convenient-group-of-people-to-advocate )
A quote by Dave Barnhart

The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, ad...

@Intaglio_Dragon @cass_m A very good quote and I'm sure I encountered it at the time, doubtless it helped inspire me.
@Intaglio_Dragon @cass_m @pluralistic I knew I'd seen that before, thank you for finding it

@cass_m alt text for your image:-

"There's a different advantage to confining your concerns to imaginary things: imaginary things don't exist, so they don't contest your public statements about them, nor do they make demands on you. Think of how the right concerns itself with imaginary children (unborn babies, children in Wayfair furniture; children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, children undergoing gender confirmation surgery). These are very convenient children to advocate for, since, unlike real children (hungry children, children killed in the Gaza genocide, children whose parents have been kidnapped by ICE, children whom Matt Goetz and Donald Trump trafficked for sex, children in cages at the US border, trans kids driven to self-harm and suicide after being denied care), nonexistent children don't want anything from you and they never make public pronouncements about whether you have their best interests at heart."

@[email protected] there is alt text included. Maybe check your client.