Feeling that the law shouldn’t apply to such matters…does absolutely nothing to change the…facts. – Elizabeth N. Brown
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic (#1374)
“Sex addiction” is basically a shared delusion of guilt-ridden patients and biased “therapists”:
Moral incongruence theory…has been used to explain why so-called sex addicts don’t have more sex than other people but feel worse about it. When people hold moral beliefs about certain kinds of sexual behavior but still engage in those same behaviors, they are likely to experience shame…guilt…depression, distress, and anxiety…therapists who promote…sex and porn addiction do little to help resolve these moral conflicts and instead focus on the sexual behaviors. This may be due to moral incongruence in the therapists themselves…No research supports treatments that address pornography as an addiction. New research by Justine Meador…[showed that] certified sex addiction therapists…had a personal history of seeking sex addiction treatment themselves, compared to less than 5 percent of non-CSAT therapists…Mental health professionals who had higher levels of moral incongruence about their own sexuality were significantly more likely to diagnose porn addiction in other people…[even] when considering clinical vignettes containing symptoms of depression or bipolar disorder along with pornography use…
The Vultures Descend (#1417)
“Fetal personhood” policies are going to keep getting more absurd:
…Honeyhline and Jason Heidemann [used in-vitro fertilization in 2015 to conceive a daughter, and they cryogenically stored two remaining embryos. An agreement they signed at the time specified that any frozen embryos would be owned jointly but did not say what would happen in the event of divorce. When they divorced in 2018, they] couldn’t decide who should retain ownership of the frozen embryos…Honeyhline…wanted to use the frozen embryos to conceive another child…But [on] March 7, 2025…Judge Dontae L. Bugg…dismiss[ed her]…suit [under the ridiculous pretense] that “human embryos are not subject to partition” under Virginia law “as they do not constitute goods or chattels capable of being valued and sold.” Bugg goes on to [opine] that there’s no way that two embryos can be divided equally between two people because “the unique nature of each human embryo means that an equal division cannot conveniently be made”…
Yes, American jurisprudence has now descended to the point where “two cannot be evenly divided by two” is supposed to be taken as a serious judicial opinion.
Enshittification
Another factor in the coming dark age: computer-generated garbage making records of this period unreliable:
There are thousands of…accounts [spew]ing thousands of [computer-generated video]s and images across every social media platform. Large parts of the SEO industry have pivoted entirely to [CGI] content, as has some of the internet advertising industry…the brute force attack….relies on rapid trial-and-error to guess a password…[these] attacks are not very efficient, but they are effective. An attacker relentlessly hammers the target until a vulnerability is found or a password is guessed…The best way to think of the slop and spam that [CGI] enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality…the intended “audience” of [CGI] slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings. What this means…is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by [CGI] content because of the sheer amount of it…there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online…[so] many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore…
Thought Control (#1491)
Just keep plunging that ice pick in; the bad thoughts will go away eventually:
Florida leads the nation in book [censorship], and [sane people] fear new legislation moving through the State Capitol would make [the problem even worse]. Currently, state law surrounding book challenges mirrors the national standard of obscenity, also known as the Miller Test…the new legislation approved by its first Senate committee Tuesday would prohibit school boards from [using any kind of human judgment] when [responding to a censorship demand, instead requiring them to robotically]…take a book down to its parts and pieces and [censor it if any Froot Loop objects to as much as a single word or line]. The bill also includes penalties for districts that [don’t censor enough books for state politicians’ liking], allowing the Department of Education to withhold state funding…
Vulture Watching (#1500)
Texas pretends to care about women’s health in defense of its crusade to kill more women:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton [crowed about] the arrest of Maria Margarita Rojas…for providing…abortions and illegally operating a network of clinics…without a license…Paxton [vomited disgusting propaganda onto the upturned faces of reporters, pretending to care about the health of pregnant women]…
Unsafe for Human Consumption (#1514)
The mad emperor wants to use copaganda to wreck the medical system and excuse even more state violence:
[Mad emperor] Trump [plans to] designat[e]…fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction…a…State [Department]…source speculates the purpose is a combination of designating fentanyl cartels as terrorist organizations…creating justification for conducting military [invasions of] Mexico and Canada…[and inventing] justification for rounding up homeless encampments and deporting drug users who are not citizens…[the imperial proclamation] “cites a statute that does not entail an authority to ‘designate’ substances as WMD” [and will obviously have] “negative effects on entities that legitimately handle, ship, and deliver opioids for pharmaceutical purposes”…
Do As I Say, Not As I Do (#1521) 
Laws are for the peasantry, not the rulers:
Minnesota [Trumpist politician] Justin Eichorn was arrested…for…soliciting a [cop who was fantasy role-playing as]…a 16-year-old [girl online. When he showed up to] meet [the imaginary teen sex worker]…he was arrested…
Just last week, Eichorn made national news for his nauseating display of bootlicking, proposing that he and three other MAGA cultists, none of who have PhDs in psychology, be allowed to invent an imaginary mental illness called “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, characterized by a revulsion for Trump and his disgusting behavior, and have it counted by actual mental health professionals as an actual mental illness in Minnesota.
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There’s no good reason to rehash my columns for last year’s “Banned Books Week” and those of 2023 and 2022; my records have not yet been censored, so those essays, all heavily-fortified with links to earlier writings on the subject, are still there for your perusal. Instead, it seems more urgent to call your attention to the fact that the impending dark age I have warned about for years has now arrived. Lest some of you (especially the ones who used to call me a crank for warning what facial recognition would become) think I’m exaggerating, let me reiterate what a dark age actually is. People who know nothing about history tend to think of the term as synonymous with the Middle Ages, despite the facts that A) only a small part of that thousand-year period qualify as “dark” in the historical sense; B) there have been a number of dark ages in human history; and C) the term in and of itself says nothing about technological progress per se. In reality, a dark age is one lacking reliable records, so historians cannot be certain of what actually happened. Of course, censorship is typically part of that; if a government or religion burns books, anything recorded in those books is not available to future historians. And if too many of the burned books contain scientific or technical knowledge, the result may indeed be a reversal of technological progress. But such a decline is not the defining characteristic, and indeed one of the major causes of the dark age we’re now entering is the misuse of technology.
