I would never have guessed that so many people online not only don’t know what a Socratic question is, but are so insecure about their ignorance they call such questions “stupid”. But last week a parade of clowns on Bluesky declared that such a question I posed was not only “stupid”, but also not a Socratic question at all because…they believe all Socratic questions follow some kind of rigid and predictable form, I guess. Given that they could simply have consulted the Wikipedia entry I linked above, this cannot be a mere failure of education; it appears to be a manifestation of Asimov’s observation that Americans seem to think that “democracy” means an ignorant opinion is equal to an educated one. Another factor is that very few (two people as of this writing) of those who responded with more than a “like” or retweet seem to have actually understood the question that was being asked. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of that online; most people seem to glance at a sentence or tweet, recognize a few words, quickly form their own question from those few words, and respond to that mistaken notion of the question rather than the one which was actually asked. I’m not sure if that has to do with the “guess the meaning” school of reading which was popular in US public schools for several decades, or if it’s a manifestation of the inability to focus that seems to plague many younger Americans, or both. Most social media users would rather guess at the meaning of a tweet and vomit out a quick reaction than actually read the question asked and consider it before replying, or else simply ignore it and move on to something else. They seem to consider it some kind of moral failing to simply bypass things without spewing out some kind of reaction, yet at the same time they don’t want to invest the cerebral effort to answer like a rational adult rather than like an ill-bred and rather stupid child who would rather be playing in the mud than actually [ugh] thinking.
Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Socratic Stupidity?
Posted in Philosophy, Words, tagged Bluesky, internet, language, psychology, teachers on July 3, 2026| 1 Comment »
The World of Throwback Thursday
Posted in Biography, History, Miscellaneous, Music, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged activism, blogging, censorship, consensual crime, cops, fascism, games, holidays, law, lawheads, LGBT rights, politicians, psychology, universal criminality, weaponry on July 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I liked Pride so much better when it was one day celebrated by grass-roots organizations than a whole month ballyhooed by major corporations with rainbow-hued consumer goods, and with hypocritical expressions of solidarity from politicians and cops.
– “June is Tweeting Out All Over”
One…aspect of my neuroatypicality…[is] that…[I] spend [a lot of] time composing and performing a kind of music only I can hear.
– “The Music in the Numbers”
Unfortunately, societies’ tendency to self-lobotomize into stagnation and decay is something that will almost certainly never be solved.
– “The Eternal Frontier”
The only moral form of warfare is War of Assassins, in which the only combatants and the only legitimate targets are the rulers, their henchmen, and their agents. – “War of Assassins“
Diary #835
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, drugs, psychology, Sunset on June 30, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I’m pleased to report that Axel is completely off of the trazodone which the shelter had him on. When I first got him at the end of November, he was on 400mg/day, an immense dose for a 20kg animal. So I immediately started weaning him off, at first reducing the dose by 50mg/day every week, then once we were down to 100mg/day slowing the reduction to 25mg/day every few weeks. At the end of April he was down to 25mg/day, then for all of May 12.5mg/day, and then at the beginning of June I started skipping days between doses; since I saw no difference in his behavior between med days and no-med days, his last dose was a week ago, Monday the 22nd, and he’s just fine. He no longer chases the cats or snaps at strangers, and he isn’t nearly as high-strung as he was just a few months ago; about the only relics of his former problems are a tendency to eat cat shit (I know it isn’t an unusual dog behavior, but I’ve never owned a dog that did it before) and some separation anxiety. He no longer gets upset when he doesn’t see me, unless I go off in a car; when I get back, even if I’m only gone for a couple of hours, he cries and runs around when I return until I pet him and calm him down. Given that I was told his first owner died when he was seven, my guess is that the owner went off to the hospital in a car and never came back, so he is afraid when I leave in a car. But other than those comparatively minor issues, I’d say he has passed his good boy tests with flying colors, and demonstrated that he was exactly the right choice to bring into our Sunset family.
The Vanishing Canals
Posted in Biography, History, tagged New Orleans, psychology, The Big Boom on June 26, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I’ve always loved maps, from old-time gas-station road maps to historical maps to maps of imaginary places. As a child, I delighted in preparing maps of places I’d dreamed up for make-believe play, and in my teens that turned into preparing maps for the world of my D&D campaign, ranging from dungeons my players would explore all the way up to the entire world they lived in. And though I rarely draw my own any more, I’m still always excited to find maps which show me something I didn’t know before, or at least didn’t know in sufficient detail. Case in point, the map at right, which some of y’all may recognize as depicting the western half of New Orleans; the part that was important to me is a small detail which those of y’all unfamiliar with New Orleans history may not recognize as interesting without explanation.
Last month I wrote about discovering a guide (including maps) to New Orleans’ extensive streetcar system of the early 20th century. But before the streetcars there were canals, leading from the then-much-smaller city through the swamps to the north, ending in Lake Pontchartrain (which connects to the Gulf of Mexico through a tidal channel named The Rigolets). I always knew about the New Basin Canal because it was not filled in until the 1940s, and in my youth I knew several older folks who remembered it. But in one of those strange oversights which often affect even people with relatively sharp minds, it had never occurred to me to ask where the Old Basin Canal had been! Furthermore, I never realized just how far the New Basin Canal came into the city until I found this map while researching for The Big Boom. If you zoom in you’ll see a straight channel running from the end of Bayou St. John (the wriggly thing just to the right of the map’s centerline), labeled “Carondelet Canal“. That’s what it was officially named from 1794 until the 1830s, when people started calling it the “Old Basin Canal” in contrast with the newly-completed New Basin Canal. If you look at a modern map of New Orleans, you can see a narrow strip of green running from Louis Armstrong Park to the end of the Bayou (very close to where I lived from 2004-2006, incidentally); that’s the former route of the canal, which was filled in by the city in the 1920s after the new Industrial Canal opened in 1923. The famous Basin Street of Storyville fame and jazz legend was named for the turning basin at the terminus, just north of the Vieux Carre.
That was exciting enough, but the part I got really jazzed about (ahem) was realizing that the New Basin Canal went so far into the city. If any of y’all have ever driven on West End Blvd in New Orleans, you’ve probably been impressed with its incredibly wide neutral ground (grassy median); the reason it’s that wide is it’s the filled-in route of the canal. But at the foot of that Boulevard, where it meets I-10 today, the canal once jogged over and continued almost to the river. After the canal was closed in the late 1940s, the Pontchartrain Expressway was built over the route in the 1950s; in the 1960s the expressway became part of I-10. The area of the filled-in turning basin was used by the city for storage until the late ’60s, when it was decided to build the Superdome there. So if you ever drive through New Orleans toward the Superdome on I-10 coming from the direction of the airport, you’re following a transportation corridor which has been there for just short of 200 years, only now on land rather than water.
Throwback Thursday and the Playgirls
Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged blogging, imaginative fiction, left-right myth, propaganda, psychology, Twitter on June 25, 2026| Leave a Comment »
There is nothing as good for anxiety as feeling supported and cared for! – “Diary #625”
It’s hardly incisive criticism or inspired analysis to point out that children see and enjoy different things in a movie or show than adults do, or that young adults and older adults may enjoy different things about the same show. –
“The Eye of Childhood”
Art cannot exist as handmaiden to politics. This is not to say that art cannot be political; “Guernica” is art. But if the artistic impulse does not precede the political one, the result is mere propaganda. Artists can make political statements, but partisans can’t make art. – “Tweets Aplenty”
Grief, loss, and pain are transmuted [by the brain’s alchemy] into art, much like a compost heap transmutes organic garbage into humus for growing new plants. – “Diary #782“
Diary #834
Posted in Diary, tagged drugs, psychology, Sunset on June 23, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Well, I was wrong about the daisies two years ago, because though there are only a few this year, my allergies still reappeared the night of June 1st and have continued since. Fortunately, I got help last year to figure out a proper over-the-counter meds regimen, so within a week or so I had it mostly under control (though my eyes were still bothering me pretty badly until the latter part of last week); I’ve stopped trying to figure out what exactly is causing it and just resigning myself to this being another reason to dislike summer. Usually, I can start stepping down the meds in August, and be back to normal by September. Alas, “normal” ain’t what it used to be; one of the reasons I’ve stopped trying to figure out what environmental factor I’m allergic to is that I’ve had to recognize that my body is aging rapidly, as I always expected it to. What I mean is, I enjoyed excellent health through my forties and the early part of my fifties, then about four years ago that started to change; I figure the allergies are just a part of the whole constellation of physical ailments that have now become part of my life, including anemia, fatigue, diminished physical strength and flexibility, and increased back pain. Given that the latter is due to five fractured vertebrae incurred in a severe car accident in April 1995, and that I learned to manage it well enough that it was only an occasional problem for the past 30 years, I really can’t complain that is finally returning in the last act; I just have to accept it as another way that my body is not merely suggesting I slow down and take things easier, but rather leaving me no other options.
Links #833
Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged acting, Alabama, Arkansas, artificial stupidity, cops, Florida, imaginative fiction, language, lawyers, Mad Libs, Never Call the Cops, New Mexico, Oklahoma, propaganda, psychology, Reviews, robots, Texas, video on June 22, 2026| Leave a Comment »
There were two clients who basically were paying for ChatGPT…to argue against itself. – Rob Freund
My friend Chester Brown, the well-known comic book artist, plays Merlin in this video from Sook-Yin Lee‘s new album. The links above the video were provided by Jesse Walker and Dan Savage; IncarcerNation; The Onion; Mike Masnick; Ryan Marino; and IncarcerNation again (x2).
- R.I.P. Joe Negri and Gene Shalit.
- “Never” really does mean “never”.
- The best satire cleaves close to the truth.
- Another great moment in artificial stupidity.
- In which “nudged” is used to mean “violently rammed”.
- “Crime”: contempt of cop. Penalty: summary execution.
- Another triumph for the police suicide-assistance service.
From the Archives
- I was fated to be threatened with state violence regardless of career path.
- Civil liberties violations only start with targets of politicians’ demonization.
- No parody of puritanism could be as absurd as the current Florida reality.
- Too few states have held this, because the spying is convenient for cops.
- Another textbook example of McNeill’s Law, courtesy “Moms for Liberty”.
- Non-busybodies block Indiana’s “monkey see, monkey do” parade float.
- It’s too bad cops don’t spend all their time role-playing with each other.
- “Died after an altercation” is a sterile way to say “murdered by screws”.
- Are prosecutors going to retroactively label all cults as “sex trafficking”?
- If there’s a camera, cops will conscript it for use as a surveillance tool.
- They’re still not implicating cops we know were Heuermann’s buddies.
- Another cop stalks victims through the official cop grooming program.
- One of the people the government empowers to police your sexuality.
- Cops, undead, Sly Stone, James Lowe, Brian Wilson, and much more.
- Backpage was only the test case for this ethically-bankrupt strategy.
- The resources flushed down the “culture war” toilet are incalculable.
- McCarthy, Romita, Jackson, Ellsberg, Williams, Vaziri & much more.
- Sick men may respond violently when they can’t own sex workers.
- This pernicious abuse of power has become more common of late.
- Hanging a camera on an animal turns it into a surveillance drone.
- Dare I hope fewer journalists are willing to cover up cops’ crimes?
- If you didn’t see this coming, you haven’t been paying attention.
- Cops, elephants, artificial stupidity, Willie Mays, and much more.
- Unbalanced minds use external tools to amplify existing beliefs.
- WaPo has discovered what I’ve been writing about for 14 years.
- Elon Musk’s “DOGE” didn’t “fail”; it worked exactly as intended.
- Politicians will never stop until the open internet is destroyed.
- Your “leaders” work hard to ensure this happens more often.
- Florida censors have descended completely into self-parody.
- Most Americans still believe France is a sex-positive society.
- Ruling thus on standing doesn’t actually mean a great deal.
- Your “leaders” call this “correction”, but you don’t have to.
- You’d think “youth pastor” would be a big red flag by now.
- Any use of this error-prone surveillance system is misuse.
- Gaining a new, adult appreciation of childhood favorites.
- Curated selections of tweets from June 2023 and 2025.
- It’s getting harder to tell the preachers from the cops.
- Some people still claim we don’t live in a police state.
- Honoring what would’ve been Grace’s 67th birthday.
- My three previous columns for the summer solstice.
- This ongoing travesty has a complicated backstory.
- Just another kind of cop, with typical cop behavior.
- Anyone who trusts Zuckerberg is out of his mind.
- Religion is often used an excuse for molestation.
- Scream, Throwback Thursday, Scream.
- Why does anyone still trust Facebook?
- An unusually chilly spring at Sunset.
- Redoing the atrium ceiling lights.
- Another cop following his bliss.
- I’m pretty sure it’s the daisies.
- Why zombies?.
- Fridaystein.
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
In the News (#1648)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Broken Record, California, cell phones, cops, Europe, fascism, Florida, games, hysteria, Imaginary Evils, LGBT rights, Nebraska, Panopticon, politicians, prohibitionist myths, propaganda, psychology, Pyrrhic Victory, restaurants, robots, Size Matters, sporting events, surveillance, Time Warp, Welcome to the Future on June 20, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Academics who have studied human trafficking at big sporting events…say that it is all hokum. – Dave Mastio
Nebraska politicians recently held a bizarrely-anachronistic press conference during which they spouted the kind of “sex trafficking” fantasies which were popular at the height of the hysteria 14 years ago; the panic is so moribund that even a journalist in a largely-rural state feels comfortable calling these politicians liars and debunking a boss hog’s nonsense “statistics”. It took far too long, but it’s still good to see; contrast with “Broken Record” below.
…At least three gay bars in [San Francisco] have started using Patronscan…a [facial recognition system sold as] intended to flag fake IDs…[and] the experience of having a camera turned on every person entering the venues, often without warning, has left many [justifiably] outraged…Management at Mix, Badlands, and Toad Hall [refus]ed to speak to the Gazetteer about the issue, though…the Patronscan website…admits…the [scan] goes beyond simple document checks to…include…third-party checks…[to betray] people [to cops, spooks, and goons]…a…bouncer [also admitted]…facial scans would be stored [indefinitely on a bouncer’s say-so]…The company [justified jumping off a bridge by saying]…more than 700 [other kids have already done it]…But it has already become the subject of…a class-action lawsuit in Illinois…
This is a very unusual development:
A European religious freedom group is slamming the prosecution of OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone and former executive Rachel Cherwitz…Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience…has United Nations consultative status, which means it’s accredited by the U.N. to submit written statements and make oral arguments before the U.N. Human Rights Council…prosecutors seemed intent on putting the group’s beliefs and practices on trial…”The legal theory used…marks a major departure from established constitutional principles…The defendants were convicted…based solely on psychological influence, without evidence of threats, violence, or physical coercion.” You can see how this theory might apply to a wide range of religious groups, philosophical movements, political movements, self-improvement programs, health regimens, lifestyle groups, and so on. If the federal statute against human trafficking [can be used thus]…we risk turning all sorts of influence and ordinary business into a crime. All authorities have to do is label something a cult, and voila—any of the group’s instructions, practices, and marketing tactics become sinister…
The only way to keep data from being abused or leaked is not to collect it:
…ALPR…company Flock exposed the reasons cops conducted searches, and sometimes the specific searched license plates, in common search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing, according to tests by…the NoCo Privacy Coalition…“Flock appears to be leaking tons of law enforcement vehicle queries and possible user data. Data publicly visible in search result URLs includes: license plate state and numbers, make, model, color, identifiers such as ‘window stickers’ and ‘top rack,’ case number, and more,” the organization said…Flock’s [response was to absurdly belch that] “Protecting customer data is a top priority for Flock” [when their entire business model is to enable cops to conduct unconstitutional warrantless searches]…
When an internet service is “free”, you are the product:
Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn [make-believe] rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and [were sold to] train a camera-based navigation model that a [fascist] contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots…[so they can] locate…by sight when satellite signals fail…Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon, who previously led the team behind Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View, has said the approach suits robots operating where GPS regularly drops out, such as dense cities, and where signals are deliberately blocked, such as war zones…
Government thugs don’t care how many lives are destroyed by their evil:
Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, [ignoring all evidence other than a]…facial recognition [false positive]. Represented by the…ACLU…he is now suing the [pig]s and [cop shop]s who put him through it. In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s…In August 2024, deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away…More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question. But [cops ignored]…mobile ordering records, payment data…online account information from McDonald’s…the [fact that the] manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”…and…his cell phone’s GPS data, showing…he was…300 miles away…on the night in question…
[Even] sex worker platform[s sometimes buy into ridiculous myths, as demonstrated by the platform] Erobella, [which moronically claims] that…9,000 [European sex workers are “]planning[” travel to North American for the World Cup], while 22,000 others are [“]considering[“] it…[given that] Erobella [claims it] is…committed to combating stigma around sex work, [it seems especially bizarre that it is promoting the nonsensical propaganda]…that major sporting events like the World Cup have historically been really lucrative periods for the sex industry, [given that any sex worker who has ever actually worked during one of these events knows better]…
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
Blue Skies Above
Posted in Biography, History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged advertising, artificial stupidity, blogging, Bluesky, Catholicism, censorship, China, comics, crypto-moralism, fascism, games, Google, Grace, illegal aliens, imaginative fiction, Japan, language, left-right myth, libraries, Massachusetts, Michigan, politicians, prisons, propaganda, psychology, racism, restaurants, robots, scams, sex work is work, sporting events, STEM, Thanatopsis, United Kingdom on June 19, 2026| Leave a Comment »
They'll need to figure out how to send a letter back in time to threaten Warner Brothers as well.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-14T18:02:09.514Z
This is called "the martial arts".
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-17T04:09:51.125Z
I reckon this must be a tataille, because it sure ain't a lougarou.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-17T17:54:41.692Z
"When somebody offers you a seat on the rocket ship, just get on" http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5…
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T03:50:10.197Z
Reporters, please stop saying "pod" to mean "cell block". Imprisoned people are neither whales nor alien body snatchers; they don't come from "pods". Just because the monsters in the US carceral system use euphemisms to hide their evil, doesn't mean you need to parrot them.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T16:59:03.072Z
If you think THAT'S something, just wait until you see Ram Man.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T04:12:32.430Z
People are doing "10 bands you've seen live" on Twitter & it keeps reminding me of Grace, who was a studio musician for years. Once we were at a party where this girl was bragging about getting backstage passes & Grace said to me, "I've *blown* more big name rock stars than she's seen in concert."
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T16:52:25.724Z
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." – Frank Herbert, "Dune"
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-22T17:29:39.662Z
It boggled my mind that a restaurant would be named after a dessert. It still does. I mean, nobody goes to "Flan Bell" or "Hand Pie King" or "Spumone Hut".
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-23T18:42:01.117Z
No D&D player should be surprised when a high-level cleric quotes a high-level wizard.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-25T17:06:01.707Z
Crypto-moralists never let little things like facts get in the way of barfing the word "unhealthy" in people's faces every time they do anything more exciting than eating raw vegetables & water once a day after their toil & drudgery, then going to sleep on the floor in an un-climate-controlled room.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-26T16:52:56.642Z
"Are we just going to give up and breathe?""Are we just going to give up and eat?""Are we just going to give up and be affected by gravity?""Are we just going to give up and have mass?""Are we just going to give up and emit heat?"This is what you sound like to sane people.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-27T17:35:31.457Z
You'd think that after all these decades as an adult, I'd have grown jaded enough to feel something milder than utter contempt for nitwits who believe the entire world of human political thought can be reduced to a single one-dimensional axis. But in actuality, my contempt merely grows more bitter.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-29T17:23:12.409Z
If you're a scientist on social media who wants to be accepted as an authority in your field, it's probably a bad idea to claim that a cause can be responsible for "more than 100%" of an observed effect.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-30T17:01:30.319Z
"Trump is acting like an authoritarian" = "Einstein is acting like a scientist" = "Streisand is acting like a diva" = "Spielberg is acting like a director" = "Kermit is acting like a Muppet" = "Lassie is acting like a dog" = "Yersinia pestis is acting like a disease organism".
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-05-31T17:08:54.673Z
Hey fellow old folks, remember the late '80s, when food companies were trying to cram oat bran into everything because "nutritionists" told the hoi-polloi it had magical life-extension powers?Some things never change.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T17:10:49.087Z
Sooner or later, sensible people will need to just tell anti-immigration bigots to go to hell. archive.is/ZwLwc
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-02T17:26:11.101Z
Also, electricity and the microcomputer actually did most of what they were claimed to be able to do.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T03:33:10.119Z
Imagine having enough money to do basically anything which doesn't actually violate physical laws, and instead choosing to live your life like this.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T17:58:36.047Z
The heckler's veto as US government policy.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-05T17:57:26.404Z
Nobody who ever watched a single episode of any '60s spy show involving double agents should be surprised at this.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-07T17:51:58.453Z
You know how "I had sex with your dad" has become a way for sex workers to mock squares? Well, I had sex with a lot of people's grandpas. A lot of great-grandpas too.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T17:31:16.476Z
Fucking a lot of people of both sexes, reading omnivorously, writing A+ essays, running a D&D campaign, hanging out with my friends and predicting the eventual disasters that would result from bad US politics?Yep, checks out.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-10T17:31:49.443Z
I know it's difficult for males stuck at 12, but not everything is a pissing contest.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-11T17:21:28.738Z
Can we please stop saying [name of Trumpified institution] to mean "Trump"? Don't tell me "The Pentagon" or "The Department of Justice" or "The Kennedy Center" did something; the management of those places are just sock puppets speaking in Trump's voice, like an evil Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T17:30:43.841Z
"Mythos".They are taunting y'all, and few are literate enough to recognize it.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-13T17:38:37.133Z
Doctor Dolittle books. As players rise in levels, they learn more animal languages and gain more animal helpers. Experience is earned by traveling around the world, making friends with animals & with people of different races; by finding unique beings; and by visiting fantastic places like the Moon.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-15T03:51:15.730Z
If it looks like a circle jerk, sounds like a circle jerk, smells like a circle jerk, and jerks around like a circle jerk, it's probably a circle jerk.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-17T04:07:56.859Z
One of the most important causes of the Great Depression was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-17T18:05:59.672Z
People who accept domination by "leaders" cannot be free.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-06-18T18:42:45.618Z
Atom Age Throwback Thursday
Posted in Biography, History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged blogging, Catholicism, ethics, imaginative fiction, language, Mad Libs, psychology, STEM on June 18, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I’ve always thought [“inflation”] was a serious misnomer, because the problem isn’t really that prices are going up; it’s that the value of the currency is going down. –
“When Ends Don’t Meet”
The one moral concept from my Catholic upbringing which has remained steadfastly lodged in my head is that waste is a sin. – “Throwback Thursdays”
While traditional zombies are objects of horror to be feared, modern “zombies” are objects of loathing, to be exterminated…they…are people it’s OK to hate and even kill without having to worry about their rights, a fantasy outlet for violent impulses. – “Why Zombies?”
Digital computers…are fundamentally unable to think as we understand the concept, regardless of how big or fast they are or how complex the software, because intelligence requires grasping the concept “maybe”, which is excluded by binary data processing. – “Mad Libs (#1546)“
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