Monte Mader

Accountability

A short play in three acts.

Bluesky

Here is a full list of every state that DOJ had sued and lost for access to their voter file: Arizona California Connecticut Kentucky Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island Virginia West Virginia Wisconsin

— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) July 29, 2026 at 4:31 PM

Ain't Seen Nuthin' Yet

You crybaby MAGA dopes think we're being mean and nasty now when it's Lindsey - and prob'ly Mitch here pretty soon too?

Wait'll you see what we come up with when that stupid puffy Cheetoh-face motherfucker finally kicks off.

That shit's gonna singe your eyebrows.

A.I. Psychosis

The business model always reigns supreme. And the business model is weighted heavily towards keeping you engaged.

IMO, the point seems not to be getting machines to think like humans, but to condition humans to think like machines.

The Three Chatbot Behaviors That Can Drive Humans to Delusional Thinking

How AI’s sycophantic responses, language mirroring and hyperpersonalized content work together to send some people into a spiral

We’ve all experienced the tendency of AI chatbots to tell us what we want to hear, but there are two other, more nuanced factors that help chatbots worm their way into human hearts.

In addition to being overly agreeable, chatbots mirror the way people speak and generate highly personalized responses based on prior conversations. Psychiatric researchers are referring to the confluence of these three characteristics—sycophancy, linguistic alignment and hyperpersonalization—as the “amplification spiral,” suggesting it’s the mechanism by which delusional thinking can fester.

“The mirroring and personalization draw you in and give the experience of talking not to a system, but to someone,” said Marc Augustin, a psychiatrist and professor at Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany, and co-author of a newly published review of the literature on AI-related delusions.

Matching another person’s syntax and verbal expressions is a common way for humans to build rapport. Recent research has found that artificial-intelligence models adapt significantly to the conversational style of the humans using them. Another study suggested that the highly personalized content generated by chatbots, which builds over the course of lengthy conversations, can amplify human-confirmation bias.

Augustin cited research that documented a pattern in which chatbots rephrased and extrapolated what people shared, and told them they’re unique and that their thoughts have great implications. “This can be viewed as an element of hyperpersonalization that sycophancy alone cannot account for,” he wrote.

Some AI companies have tried to tone down the sycophantic nature of their chatbots. OpenAI discontinued its popular but problematic 4o model, which had been widely criticized for being overly agreeable. It was the subject of several lawsuits involving user delusions, suicides and a homicide. In GPT-5, the company said, sycophantic replies dropped from 14.5% to less than 6%.

Google in April said it had trained Gemini not to reinforce false beliefs, and to “gently distinguish subjective experience from objective fact.”

Still, chatbot-related dependency remains pervasive, according to clinicians.

Some 68% of psychologists surveyed in April by the American Psychological Association said their patients felt validated by chatbots. While many of the more than 1,200 respondents reported that patients had positive communication with chatbots and used them to reinforce healthy coping skills, 36% said patients had forged a dependency on a chatbot and 15% reported that patients had developed distorted thinking or delusions.

“From what I hear from my own patients, there has been an uptick in using AI for emotional support,” said Allison LoPilato, who treats adolescents and is an associate professor in the psychiatry and behavioral-sciences department at Emory University School of Medicine.

“Chatbots still tend to be warm and reassuring,” said LoPilato, who helped craft a new guide on safe AI use for the American Psychological Association. Because they gather information about you, “it can feel like the chatbot understands you, and it can trick you into a sense of alliance and trust.”

Chatbots can even pose harm when a person isn’t vulnerable to delusional thinking, said researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University. They measured the prevalence of sycophancy across 11 models—including GPT-5—and determined their responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than human responses. They did this by copying real scenarios people had posted in a popular Reddit forum, putting them into the AI models and then comparing the chatbot replies with the replies on Reddit.

Anthropic sampled one million conversations of its own Claude chatbot in March and April and found that it displayed sycophantic behavior most often in conversations in which people sought relationship advice.

“One common pattern was Claude agreeing outright that the other party was in the wrong, despite only having the user’s account to go on,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Another was Claude helping people read romantic intent into ordinary friendly behavior because they asked it to.”

Anthropic used its findings to improve the training of its latest models. It said Opus 4.7 had shown half the sycophancy rate of Opus 4.6 when it came to relationship guidance. Sycophancy has been reduced further in Opus 4.8, its most recent model, the company said.

Completely eliminating sycophancy is hard, said Myra Cheng, lead author of the Stanford study and a Stanford Ph.D. candidate in computer science. “When someone prompts a model, it has no idea which parts of a prompt are wrong,” she said. “It has to take a user’s framing of a situation at face value.”

Addressing other factors that make chatbots so compelling, such as using first-person pronouns and asking follow-up questions, runs counter to the business model, said Vaile Wright, senior director of healthcare innovation at the American Psychological Association.

"It’s not the agreeableness alone, it’s all these subtle engineering choices that make chatbots feel human,” Wright said. “As long as engagement remains the business model, AI companies will engineer these chatbots to keep you on the platform.”

Dear MAGA

From one of our Canadian cousins, theofficialdawsonmckie over at Threads.

Dear MAGA,

Fuck off with the fake patriotism, the flag-wrapped tantrums, and the endless parade of red hats acting like they were personally appointed by God, Walmart, and an angry Facebook comment section.

You scream “freedom” while trying to control women’s bodies, queer people’s existence, books, classrooms, healthcare, history, elections, language, and whether somebody can wear a goddamn mask in a grocery store.

Your version of freedom is apparently just “I get to be loud, ignorant, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and never face consequences.” What a beautiful fucking little fantasy world you’ve built out of bumper stickers and lead paint.

You call everyone else snowflakes while having a full fucking emotional collapse because Target sold a rainbow shirt, a Black woman got promoted, a trans person asked to be treated like a human being, or somebody put oat milk in your coffee without saluting the Constitution first.

You do not care about children. You care about controlling women. You do not care about religion. You care about using Christianity as a weapon with a cross duct-taped to a fucking baseball bat.

You do not care about “the Constitution.” You care about whichever sentence you can drag out of it to justify being a cruel, loud, undereducated asshole in public.

You worship billionaires who would step over your fucking body to avoid paying you a living wage. You worship politicians who would not piss on you if you were on fire, unless a camera was rolling and they could turn it into a campaign ad. You call Trump a genius while he talks like a haunted rotisserie chicken with access to Wi-Fi.

Every time you say “do your research,” an actual book loses its will to live. Every time you say “common sense,” you mean whatever bullshit a guy named Dale yelled into a truck-stop microphone after three Coors Lights and a Facebook conspiracy video.

You keep calling yourselves patriots while cheering for authoritarian garbage, attacking elections when you lose, and treating democracy like a fucking vending machine that only counts if it gives you the candy bar you wanted.

That is not patriotism. That is toddler logic with firearms and a flag decal.

And the racism. The misogyny. The transphobia. The cruelty toward immigrants. The obsession with punishing anyone who does not look, pray, vote, fuck, love, or think exactly like you. You people have turned bitterness into a personality trait and ignorance into a goddamn hobby.

So no, I will not “respect your opinion” when your opinion is just cruelty wearing a flag pin.

I will not pretend your bigotry is bravery because you typed it in all caps. I will not treat your rage like intelligence because you added twelve crying-laughing emojis and misspelled “communist.”

Fuck MAGA. Fuck the cult behavior. Fuck the fake outrage.

Fuck the racist dog whistles, the misogynistic bullshit, the persecution fantasies, the fascist cosplay, and the endless whining from people who have confused being criticized with being oppressed.

You are not the silent majority. You are the loudest fucking embarrassment in the room.

Erika

Parasocial Exploitation

Parasocial exploitation is the practice where influencers, content creators, or brands deliberately manufacture an illusion of genuine friendship or intimacy with their audience to maximize financial gain. It turns a fan's natural emotional investment into a transactional commodity, often leading to overspending or psychological harm.

The A.I. Algorithm Thing

A Quote

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.

--Hanna Arendt

Dumb Evolution

Friends in high school:

It doesn't make any sense for me to take biology, or chemistry, or any kind of science class - when am I ever going to need any of that nerdy shit?

Those same friends now on Facebook:

Vaccines can cause autism, GMOs can alter your DNA, Climate Change is a hoax, and the Earth is flat. I've done my own research, and you're all sheep.

A Chat With ChatGPT

Posted on Facebook by a friend:

Why are political conflicts so stressful for many people?

Political conflicts are stressful for many people because they press on some of the deepest psychological and social fault lines humans have. A few interlocking reasons stand out:

1. Politics threatens identity, not just opinions.
For many people, political views are tied to core values—fairness, freedom, safety, dignity, belonging. When those views are challenged, it can feel less like a debate about policy and more like an attack on who they are or what kind of person they are. That triggers defensive emotions similar to those provoked by personal insults.

2. They activate tribal instincts.
Humans evolved to survive in groups. Political conflict often maps neatly onto “us vs. them” categories, activating ancient threat-detection systems. Once someone is perceived as part of an opposing tribe, the brain shifts toward vigilance, anger, and readiness to fight—literally stress responses, not calm reasoning.

3. The stakes feel existential.
Politics governs issues like safety, rights, livelihoods, and the future of one’s children. Even if the actual risk is abstract or long-term, the perceived stakes are high. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish well between an immediate physical threat and a symbolic one that feels just as consequential.

4. Moral emotions run hot.
Political disagreements often involve moral judgments—who deserves help, who is responsible for harm, what is just. Moral emotions (outrage, disgust, righteous anger) are especially intense because they evolved to enforce social norms. Once morality enters the room, compromise can feel like betrayal.

5. Lack of control and ambiguity.
People feel stress when outcomes matter but are largely outside their control. Most individuals have very little direct influence over political outcomes, yet are constantly exposed to alarming narratives about what might happen. That mismatch—high importance, low agency—is a classic recipe for anxiety.

6. Social risk is real.
Political conflict can cost friendships, family harmony, professional standing, or social belonging. Even anticipating conflict raises stress levels, because humans are exquisitely sensitive to social rejection. The fear isn’t imaginary; people really do get ostracized over politics.

7. Modern media amplifies everything.
News and social platforms reward outrage, simplify complex issues into moral binaries, and keep conflicts constantly visible. The result is chronic activation of the stress response with little opportunity for resolution or rest.

8. Compassion fatigue and moral injury.
For people who care deeply, repeated exposure to suffering, injustice, or perceived cruelty—especially when paired with powerlessness—can lead to emotional exhaustion or a sense that the world violates one’s moral expectations. That’s profoundly stressful.

In short, political conflicts are stressful because they blur boundaries between ideas and identity, disagreement and threat, concern and helplessness. They recruit the brain’s survival machinery for problems that rarely have clean, immediate solutions.

Trump Is A Sick Fuck

If your shitty little MAGA media post mocking a dead man makes James Woods mad, you're ankle-deep and head first in the cesspool.

The TwiXter Thing Explained

I've got a sneaking suspicion Elmo did it on purpose.

But Not For Lack Of Trying

DOJ Can’t Tie Suspected Kirk Killer to Left Like MAGA Wants

Investigators have yet to turn up evidence that suspect Tyler Robinson was connected to any left-wing organizations.

There is nothing to suggest that the suspected killer of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was connected to any “left-wing groups,” according to investigators looking into the killing.

Three Justice Department officials working on the case spoke with NBC News, and one said, “Thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.” They added there is “every indication... that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive.”

The officials also voiced that it would be difficult to bring federal charges against Robinson, as Robinson allegedly committed the crime in Utah and is a resident of the Beehive State. Furthermore, Kirk was an influencer activist, and not an elected official.

The Justice Department spokesperson officially declined to comment on the case as an ongoing investigation.

Robinson’s alleged motives remain unknown, though the indictment against him says his Republican mother described him as “moving to the left.” Text messages in the indictment between Robinson and his transitioning partner find Robinson saying he had had enough of Kirk’s “hatred.”

Kirk’s murder is being used by the Trump administration to threaten crackdowns on left-wing groups. White House Deputy Chief of Staff vowed vengeance on the Left on the first episode of The Charlie Kirk Show since the assassination, saying left-wing organizations amounted to a “vast domestic terror movement.”

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Stephen Miller told Vice President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s show. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Trump also voiced his desire to label “antifa” a “domestic terror organization.”

It is unknown how the Trump administration intends to crack down on left-wing groups. “Antifa” is not a formal organization but rather an ideology that is associated with some small activist groups. “Antifa” does not have a leadership structure or base of operations.

Right-wing groups have been responsible for over ten times more terror attacks than left-wing groups since 2002, according to a study conducted by the ADL. The Justice Department recently found similar numbers in its own study. It recently scrubbed that study from its website.

The Daddy State on Social Media

The basic MAGA formula gets pretty simple.

• Deny deny deny
• Project project project

Daddy State Awareness Guide, Rule 1

Every accusation is a confession

Bye Bye Elmo

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/

Manufacturing Media Addiction

Today's lesson: Politics, Power, and Profit In Social Media.

Just Couldn't Stay Away

TwiXter

Elmo has been all about "free speech" since he bought Twitter.

He and his butt buddy Trump - along with an army of MAGA twerps - have been posting all manner of shit for years.

And I have matched them almost tweet for tweet.

But suddenly, the TweeXt police jump in and tell me I've crossed the line.

I "appealed", but I'm not holding my breath - I believe I'll just hang for a while and see if they let me back in.

Overheard

The end of fact-checking marks a new Golden Age Of Free Speech

Go ahead

Go nuts