re: #35 Schadenboner

I literally (literally-literally, not figuratively-literally) think that this has to do with the fact that the crazy no longer depends on either the speaker’s form or voice: when an obvious drooling loony comes up to you shrieking about the Fed or the Biltburg Group or whatever you instinctively know to avoid that person. Same thing (to an extent) with traditional one-to-many mass media (radio or TV): insanity has some tell-tale affectations of movement and voice and humans are well evolved to know that these people are, somehow, “off” (especially American humans who are by nature pragmatic and if not non-ideological then at least they think themselves non-ideological, there is a reason that as bad as Coughlin and Lindburg and the Klan got, it was never more than a tiny minority of actual supporters).

But when you read some bug-fuck-crazy blog you’re reading it in your own head in your own “voice”. It bypasses your social defense mechanisms. It seems reasonable because it sounds reasonable because you’re the one “saying” it.

People’s Exhibit A: all of this sounds perfectly reasonable to me, yet it’s patently insane!

Wait, shit…