These technologies are not limited to drones, munitions, weapons, and surveillance equipment either.
They include the propaganda, online ops, media control mechanisms, and other information warfare technologies already being used by our governments.
Those are now being honed.
All of the technologies being used by Israel to commit genocide against Palestinians will ultimately be used against us by our own governments.
Perhaps not to commit genocide—perhaps just to maintain and consolidate power—but nonetheless.
And no one will come to save us either.
For the sake of future generations, we need to be clear about both the horrors AND about how stupid everything is at the same time.
Previous recorders of history failed us by not emphasizing the stupidity—and its presence is one of the reasons the horrors aren’t taken seriously.
Social media platforms serve as surfaces for the acceleration of this dangerous synergy.
If we are determined to do so, we can also use them as spaces for its deconstruction.
But we must maintain our capacities to discern, reason, and connect with others for that to happen.
In the digital age, the disinformation, conspiracy theory, and state and non-state propaganda have become like the air that we breathe.
We are both in it and of it. We consume it. We expel it. We move it around as we navigate within it.
The synergy boosts the weapons’ powers.
Weaponized unreality combines disinformation, conspiracy theory, and state and non-state propaganda to create a simulacrum of the world we live in.
Because we move within the simulacrum, we become unwitting participants in the destruction of our own shared perception of reality.
So much that is being reacted to isn’t real, and so much that is real isn’t even being acknowledged.
If you’re experiencing a sense of confusion, disconnection, and unease that you can’t quite put into words, know you’re not alone.
This is what weaponized unreality feels like.
Happy New Year’s Eve
As many of you who follow me know, this has been a year of immense loss for me. Thank you for bearing witness to my grieving and for supporting me through it.
Sending my love and gratitude to you all 💜
“Autism as a Disorder of High Intelligence”
Fascinating exploration by Bernard Crespi:
#ActuallyAutistic
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2016.00300/full
A suite of recent studies has reported positive genetic correlations between autism risk and measures of mental ability. These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence, which appears paradoxical given that autism is characterized, overall, by below-average IQ. This paradox can be resolved under the hypothesis that autism etiology commonly involves enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. This hypothesis is supported by convergent evidence showing that autism and high IQ share a diverse set of convergent correlates, including large brain size, fast brain growth, increased sensory and visual-spatial abilities, enhanced synaptic functions, increased attentional focus, high socioeconomic status, more deliberative decision-making, profession and occupational interests in engineering and physical sciences, and high levels of positive assortative mating. These findings help to provide an evolutionary basis to understanding autism risk as underlain in part by dysregulation of intelligence, a core human-specific adaptation. In turn, integration of studies on intelligence with studies of autism should provide novel insights into the neurological and genetic causes of high mental abilities, with important implications for cognitive enhancement, artificial intelligence, the relationship of autism with schizophrenia, and the treatment of both autism and intellectual disability.
Did Chaya Raichik of LibsOfTikTok infamy trespass at the Capitol on January 6th?
She was there, by her own admission, and this analysis by @chadloder (who has been deplatformed from Twitter) shows compelling evidence she “trespassed on restricted Capitol grounds”:
https://newsletter.extremism.io/archive/did-chaya-raichik-trespass-at-the-capitol/
