Canned Dragons

Mastodon was created in 2016, and the site still harkens back to its origins, a time when Gamergate and the atrocious harassment of women in tech on Twitter was still very fresh in our minds. The platform was in a way a reaction to that and the rising toxic atmosphere on social media. At the time, Twitter was also in the throes of dealing with the side effects of a Donald Trump candidacy and subsequent presidency. As such, one of the primary features of Mastodon was to stamp out hate and harassment. It's a laudable goal, and very much needed in today's technology landscape. There's a problem there, though, in that Mastodon seems to define itself, at least in part, as the anti-Twitter.

But because so much news happens on Twitter — and because Twitter itself is such a news story — the social network symbolized by a tiny bird casts a very large shadow over the social network named after a giant prehistoric beast.

Users of Mastodon spill a lot of digital ink writing about what is commonly referred to there as "the bird site." The overall environment on Mastodon is very meta. It's social media about social media.

You would be forgiven for thinking that perhaps Mastodon is an overcorrection for the sins of Twitter. Joining most Mastodon instances (servers) is an exercise in immediately learning what types of people and speech they will not permit. Literally, that's the screen that appears first. The prohibitions list usually consists of made-up pathologies you might find in a fake DSM. Ever heard of a terve? If I have to look up the meaning of words just to know what is tolerated, I'm not super likely to join. From what I've seen, Mastodon users and moderators seem more interested in policing speech they don't like than in having interesting discussions with diverse viewpoints. It doesn't initially sound like much fun.

You have to apply for membership in some Mastodon servers. It seems pretty exclusive. Presumably, if Steve Rubell lets you behind the velvet rope, then you are in the Studio 54 of social networks. However, you need to watch what you say. Many Mastodon users seem to spend their time trying to get each other banned. From the article in the NYT quoted above — on journa.host, a user was banned for referring to someone trying to get him banned as an "activist." The woman who successfully got him banned was shortly thereafter banned herself. It all sounds a bit like an early season of Survivor, minus the lush tropical surroundings. If the goal is not to get voted off the island, you have to play a very political game.

Raspberry parade

More recently, there was a firestorm of controversy around Raspberry Pi hiring a guy who was a surveillance officer in a previous life. When people objected, the Raspberry Pi folks were dismissive, calling the accusations "childish," and telling people who were critical "bye bye." As a result, the agitators worked to get Raspberry Pi "defederated." To be defederated in Mastodon terms is to have other servers in the fediverse refuse to talk with the one you are on. It's the modern equivalent of being excommunicated from the techno-church. This GitHub Gist outlines the chain of events that led to Raspberry Pi getting defederated. It takes the stance that users who objected to the company's hiring decisions were "insulted." It also implies that those making the complaints were made unsafe by the responses.

The business instance being defederated will be a huge blow to any reach that might have been gained, as administrators and moderators seeking to ensure safety for their users are able to remove tens of thousands of their users in a few clicks.

This is a part of a growing phenomenon, whereby people are framed as being put at risk by exposure to speech with which they disagree.

Mastodon is still defined by its relationship to Twitter

In a sense, Mastodon seems frozen in time, a reactionary monument to an ugly time in internet history. Now that Twitter is trending to become more of a right-leaning network, Mastodon, in defining itself as the anti-Twitter, seems on the way to becoming more left-wing. On both networks, users that don't follow the dominant belief system there are getting "blocked and reported." It's a shame, because people from different perspectives interacting is what we need more of, not less. As these spaces become even tighter echo chambers, the extent to which we spend time in them may govern our view of those on the other side. We already know that partisans on both sides have vastly unrealistic views of those on the other side. If social networks keep people from straying outside of their comfort zones by purging users, polarization is going to keep getting worse.

In a worship service recently, our pastor explored the genealogy of Jesus as presented in the book of Matthew. It was a thought-provoking homily about family ties. Alastair Roberts writes for Plough magazine about how we fit our own lives into the continuum of people that have come before us.

Moderns have become dulled to our own place in the generations, to the ways that we receive, bear, and pass on legacies, to the ways we are the harvest of former generations’ labors and how our own labors await the harvest of future generations. In Matthew’s genealogy, Jesus is introduced to us through the patterns of a long succession of earlier generations, as the fulfillment of their hopes, and their redemption from tragedy, frustration, and death.

It was interesting for me to read this passage at almost the same time I read a different article about how we must mentally disassociate ourselves from our predecessors. Lora Burnett seeks to help us separate from the past simply by changing the pronouns we use when referring to history.

The pronouns of history are not we, our, and ours, but they, them, and theirs. In classroom lectures and class discussions, using they, them, and theirs when examining the actions or beliefs or circumstances of historical subjects is absolutely essential to grasping the pastness of the past and the vast temporal distance that separates that time from this time, their world from ours.

It seems to me that in grappling with the past, we must admit, for better or for worse, our historical place in that past. That admission doesn't mean we believe that our ancestor's actions have the same weight on us as our own actions. It doesn't mean we are primary movers in the events of history from before we are born. However, it does acknowledge that our places in life have benefitted from, or been hindered by, the place of our families, churches, nations and other groups to which we belong. This gets at what Roberts is putting forth.

I think it matters that my Mennonite ancestors fled Ukraine after persecution from Russia and ended up in Minnesota. Perhaps a change of events would have meant that I would not have been born, or would have been born in a different country, or — at the very least — had less of an understanding of current events illuminated by the light of historical perspective. In an age where identity stems from many different aspects of our being, I don't think we should be closed to the traditional view of that identity being influenced by our lineage.

I was already a fan of the angular and noisy Truman's Water, Glen Galloway's former band, when he launched Soul-Junk. The new group was conceived after Galloway had a tour van conversion to Christianity. My friend, who was not a believer, but was a fan of Shrimper Records, made me a mix tape with Soul-Junk's "I Turned My Back On You." I listened to the mix tape while I was exploring a return to Christianity. The lyrics spoke to me about my own wandering away from faith and subsequently finding my way back.

Though many of Soul-Junk's songs take their lyrics directly from the Bible, "I Turned My Back On You" merely riffs on biblical themes. It reminds me of the Psalms.

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. (Psalm 139: 7-10)

Soul-Junk started out as lo-fi, but began experimenting with higher fidelity sounds and completely new genres a few years after their start. By the album 1953, they were bringing in elements from genres outside of indie rock. Their rock still had some of the sharp points and strange tunings that characterized the Truman's Water canon, but mixed with stuttering beats and hip-hop vocals for a strange and satisfying concoction. 1953 album opener "Junca De Sol Andromeda" is perhaps the best example of this marriage of styles. It's energetic, reverent and even explosive, characteristics that mark some of Soul-Junk's best work.

Perhaps the definitive cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep,” from their seminal album, Loveless, is Memoryhouse’s version from their 2010 Yours Truly live session. The song was breathlessly passed around the internet and gained Memoryhouse a fair amount of attention. When I saw Memoryhouse play live, I asked the band’s Even Abeele if they were ever going to record a studio version of the cover. He told me they were setup to do just that, in New York, with James Iha from the Smashing Pumpkins, no less. Unfortunately, someone contributing to the session got in a car accident on the way to record. What a missed opportunity.

As compensation, I’ll take DIIV’s live album, recorded in 2017 at the Murmrr Theatre. The live recording is more hushed, introspective and slower than the band’s studio recordings. With the more languid pace, you can actually understand the lyrics. Singer Zach Cole jokes at the beginning that it’s DIIV’s piano recital. The fourth song is a cover of “When You Sleep” that ranks up there with the Memoryhouse version. With it’s sparse atmospherics harkening back to the 2010 Yours Truly Sessions, the DIIV version almost sounds like a cover of a cover, with the piano bearing a similarly heavy load.

The My Bloody Valentine cover is followed directly by my favorite song by DIIV, a heroin fix called “Dopamine.” With this version and other songs on the recording, you get a more relaxed and starker realization of the songs than appear on the proper albums. It’s done to gorgeous effect and is perfect for this time of year. Just huddle under a blanket by the fire and let it sink into you.

via Space Echo

Side note: Not to get all big business monkey when talking about a piece of art, but this release is the kind of content strategy that makes sense done through Bandcamp. Release your primary albums through all available channels, but keep collector’s artifacts off the all-you-can-eat streaming platforms and release them through independent paid download channels. If an artist is concerned about exposure and revenue streams, this seems like the best strategy.

After 14 years and over 10,000 tweets, I've deactivated my Twitter account. I've been critical of Twitter for a long time now without actually leaving the platform. Obviously, things have changed rapidly for the worse. When, on Saturday, Elon Musk let DT back on the platform, while including a little blasphemy with his announcement, that was the last straw. Almost all of my tweets were syndicated from Micro.blog, anyway. I thought about pinning a tweet that pointed to where you can find me now, but if you have been following my account for any length of time, you already have that information.

I should no longer be tempted by the urge to scroll endlessly. I realized that I don't have to subordinate my principles to the twitch. I will miss people that I only heard from on Twitter, though. Corey Doctorow writes about the hardest thing regarding leaving social media.

Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social media platforms for a long time, but we hang in there, year after year, scandal after scandal, because as much as we hate the platform, we love the people who use the platform.We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose them. They don’t leave because they don’t want to lose us. It’s a hostage situation, and we’re all holding each other hostage.

There were so many times I almost pulled the plug on Twitter. The first time was after they changed their API to put impediments in front of third-party developers. I almost quit when things got rancorous in the run-up to the 2016 election. I almost quit — earlier this year — when bullies forced Elizabeth Bruenig off the platform and I saw user after user gloating about it. Finally, I almost quit after hearing that Elon Musk was buying the platform.

I'm usually terrible about prognostications and the guessing of ulterior motives, but I did a pretty good job back in April, when I guessed that Elon Musk was planning on taking over Twitter because the conservative commentary site The Babylon Bee was banned.

Last week, Twitter banned the conservative satirical site The Babylon Bee for what it termed “hate speech.” Specifically, the “satire” involved misgendering U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine as a man. I’m not sure what’s satirical about that, but it seems cruel and certainly not at all funny. As a sign of the coming apocalypse, Elon Musk was interviewed by the Babylon Bee in December 2021. Is it possible that this ban was the act which spurred Musk into thinking of buying into Twitter to change its direction?

It appears now, based on texts with his ex-wife, that Musk initially decided to buy Twitter for just that reason. I would link to what I've read, but well, it's on Twitter. I won't go back into the burning building just to grab it. Was this incredibly insightful on my part? Nah. It's better attributed to the predictable petulance of the billionaire who now owns the technology platform with the largest mindshare.

I don't know if or when Twitter will go down. I think you can run Twitter with a lot less people than the company had prior to the Musk takeover. However, I also believe that you can't and shouldn't alienate your employees and cause the best to quit without repercussions.

My degree is in psychology, and though I focused on family and child counseling, industrial/organizational psychology was a close second in my affections. I loved taking a case study from a disaster at NASA — like the Challenger shuttle explosion — and looking at what went wrong organizationally to allow that to happen. So, as you can imagine, I’m riveted by the Twitter saga. The twists and turns. The overall smugness of the CEO in the face of a serious threat to the product’s existence. The ultimatums and the promises that staying at the company could be at the expense of any life outside your job. The employees wandering the virtual halls of Slack, trying to figure out if they still have a manager, but who can’t check with HR because HR is gone.

One worker who wanted to resign said she had spent two days looking for her manager, whose identity she no longer knew because so many people had quit in the days beforehand. After finally finding her direct supervisor, she tendered her resignation. The next day, her supervisor also quit.

The press requests go unanswered by a communications team that was one of the first to get the axe when layoffs came swiftly following acquisition. Just when there are soooo many questions. Users are trying to decide if the jig is up and saying goodbye to the platform and their followers. Maybe Twitter was just the friends we made along the way?

At any given time, Twitter employees may be asked to come into the office to work, upon threat of termination or may be shut out of working at the office. Badge access denied. Oh, and let’s not forget about badges. There are all kinds of badges floating around Twitter now. Badges you can buy, badges you are given and badges that are rescinded. Badges even change color. It’s chaos badging.

One of the most fascinating things about this whole process is that, while employees get discarded or flee like rats from a sinking ship, many users of Twitter seem to think that doesn’t make a difference. Well, this site’s still running, so they must not have needed those people. Folks, humans aren’t literally powering the site. There aren’t employees running on a hamster wheel to generate electricity to keep the servers on.

A building doesn’t just collapse when the people leave. It rots, over time, from neglect. Just because the app hasn’t crashed (yet) doesn’t mean you can run it in the long-term without platform engineering and site-reliability experts. The infrastructure is still there, after all, and it’s architected to handle spikes in traffic through elasticity. It won’t just fail, if the engineers have done their job. At least, not initially. At some point, there will be a crisis. It might happen pushing new code for that mega-blue badge that allows you to DM a celebrity in exchange for cash money. It may happen during a targeted attack. Newton’s First Law of Physics is, “an object in motion stays in motion in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” In software, there are many unbalanced forces. It’s just a question of when one pops up.

For a few years now, I’ve followed a “read the Bible in a year” program. Last year, I used the plan from Bible Class Material, which presents the readings in a more-or-less chronological order that I’ve found extremely helpful for following the Old Testament material.

Every year that I have read the Bible, I have gained new insights and different passages have stuck out to me in different ways. It’s been a new experience, each time. Heraclitus said that “a man never stands in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” This has perhaps rarely been more apparent to me than when wading through the river of life-giving waters that is holy scripture. When I bring to the reading fresh experiences from my own life, I see the verses through different eyes.

This year, one of the books I have discovered anew is the book of Jonah. Famous as being one of the most kid-friendly books of the Bible, Jonah has a lot more to it than the children’s adaptations present. Most of us are familiar with this Sunday School depiction of Jonah as the reluctant prophet, called to a foreign city to preach about God, attempting to run away from the task to which he is called and ending up in a “big fish.” After his encounter with the fish, Jonah realizes he can’t escape God’s will for him and does indeed travel on to Nineveh. However, most of the “Jonah and the whale” stories for younger children omit the the fourth and final chapter of the book completely. If you can put aside the whole guy getting swallowed by a big fish and having a change of heart thing, the last chapter is where the book of Jonah really gets interesting.

It is well understood from any reading of the story that Jonah fiercely resisted God’s command to go to Nineveh. If we put ourselves in the place of Jonah, the command from God was like being asked to go to Mosul under ISIS control and preach repentance. In fact, the city of Nineveh, to which Jonah was called, was located in the area of the modern day city of Mosul. The Ninevites had been brutal to the Israelites, as the carvings from Lachish attest (be sure not to miss the guys getting flayed alive). Not only did Jonah not want to go, but, as is revealed in the fourth chapter, Jonah didn’t actually want the Ninevites to repent. He wanted them to end up as toast, deserving recipients of the righteous wrath of God.

However, surprisingly enough, the Ninevites did heed the prophecy from the Lord that their city would be destroyed if they didn’t repent and turn from their ways. Jonah was far from being happy about this outcome. The successful prophet turns his back on God again, this time angry that the citizens of Nineveh actually listened to his warnings and were spared from the punishment they so richly deserved. Jonah’s despair causes him to wish for his life to end, there in the desert, under the hot sun. Instead, in a single day, God makes a tree that grows to a height that shields Jonah from the scorching rays. After having endured the sun’s punishing heat, Jonah is more than happy to accept God’s gift. However, the next day, the tree has withered, causing Jonah to complain bitterly. God responds by reminding Jonah that he has made the people and animals of Nineveh just as he has made the tree.

The message that we can take away from the book of Jonah is that the creator God makes, and yes, even cherishes, our enemies. It’s a bold and disconcerting lesson. It likely brings us no more comfort than it brought Jonah. We should keep the book of Jonah in mind when we read that Jesus taught us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. There is a consistency of thought there stretching from the prophets of the Old Testament to the teachings of the Son of God in the New Testament. It’s almost as if, though not many people, if any at all, can actually follow these teachings, they help us to understand the heart of God. They help to shape our perception of who God is and what He values.

This was originally published on Medium, a few years ago. Since we are about to begin a class focused on Jonah at church, I wanted to republish it on my current blog.

This week I got the latest issue of Presbyterians Today, the periodical from the Presbyterian Church USA. The magazine, like the denomination itself, has a pretty progressive slant. It's not filled with numerous biblical references, or spiritual content, but with social justice activism. I'm not pointing this out to condemn social justice activism. After all, the prophets and Jesus remind us constantly of the value of social justice. In fact, I think it's sad that if you look up "Christian social justice" on Amazon, many of the books the search pulls up are negative. Titles like Why Social Justice Is Not Biblical Justice: An Urgent Appeal to Fellow Christians in a Time of Social Crisis and Christianity and Social Justice: Religions in Conflict are bestsellers.

Social justice is an important part of a well-rounded and robust Christian faith. The prophet Isaiah frames this well for Jews and Christians in the first chapter of the book bearing his name:

Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. (Isaiah 1:17)

To translate that passage into modern parlance, the oppressed, the fatherless and the widow are what we would call the marginalized. Those who have a place in life that makes it more difficult to succeed in numerous ways. From front to back, the Bible makes the case for why we owe service to these people. This is an exhortation from the prophets, and perhaps pleaded most strongly by the gospels.

The fruits of this emphasis on charity are manifest. In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt notes that people who are religious are among those who are most charitable with their resources.

Studies of charitable giving in the United States show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity. People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7 percent of their income to charity, and the majority of that giving is to religious organizations. It’s the same story for volunteer work: religious people do far more than secular folk, and the bulk of that work is done for, or at least through, their religious organizations.

The problem, for Christians at least, occurs when we start to develop ideologies that innovate, or go beyond the mandate given by the progenitors of our faith. It is in this effort that we start to frame even that we worship in a modern, secular conception of what it means to be a human guided by the true, the good and the beautiful. My fear for some time has been that the idea of progress can become an idol that we chase. This chase of whatever is currently the cause célèbre comes at the expense of timeless wisdom on the subject of justice.

Vibe Shift

Samuel Son has been writing a series for Presbyterians Today on the hot subjects of our time — diversity, equity, and inclusion — and how those concepts apply within the church. In his latest column, my fears for the eventual trajectory of this line of questioning come to pass. Even Christ (the "author and perfecter of our faith") is not exempt from the author's critique around inclusion. In his latest column, Diversity isn't inclusivity (not yet available on the web), Son praises Jesus' group of followers for including women and being diverse in this way. However, he laments that women were not usually part of the inner circle.

Scripture also shows us that Jesus' inner circle was men only. Jesus' entourage looked like the most diverse gathering of any movement, but when it came to the core, it was your typical boys' club. This is diversity without inclusion.

Son reminds us that, "we shouldn't be anachronistic with our morality, judging ancestors by our standards." However, then he goes on to say of Jesus and the Twelve, "what they took for granted is exactly how we fail at inclusion." In using Jesus as a negative example, Son is doing exactly what he asks the reader not to: he is judging an ancient people by a modern conceptual framework.

In the Christian conception, we come to view the world through the eyes of Christ. That is, with compassion and grace. To invert that process and view Christ through the eyes of the world, and its ever-changing standards sets a dangerous precedent. Instead of letting Jesus be the template for our understanding of what is good, we let contemporary popular thought become that template. It is in this exercise that we shed our Christianity and conform instead to secular notions of an improved humanity, which lead to hubris. We rob the church of its authority, leaning instead on partially formed ideas with a very modern genesis. Is it any wonder, then, when people leave the church, believing it no longer has a claim on truth? If you can get the wisdom you need from the latest trend in collective thought, or the current zeitgeist, what does the church have to offer you?

On the opposite page from Son's column is a piece by Derrick Weston about charity. Weston questions the willingness to feed people without tackling the injustices at the root of their hunger. He refers to this using a phrase taken from a book published in 2012: Toxic Charity. Weston brings up an important point that is anchored in ancient notions of justice and enabling sustainability. However, he is wrong in going after works of charity. Would Weston attack Jesus feeding of the 5000 (Matthew 14:13-21) as "toxic charity?" Yet again, you have a writer who finds fault with the way that Christ comported Himself. It's another erosion of the authority of the Son of God. To be clear, Weston is not advocating for us to cease doing works of pure charity, but in questioning the way in which we pattern our deeds after Christ, he is casting doubt on the fundamentals of the church.

In the Christian conception, we come to view the world through the eyes of Christ. That is, with compassion and grace. To invert that process and view Christ through the eyes of the world, and its ever-changing standards sets a dangerous precedent.

Many have suggested that people are turning away from Christian churches because those in the churches do not seem to be living in a Christian way. Their hypocrisy presents a barrier to belief in onlookers who want to see genuine expressions of faith in a God of love. I have no doubt that this true. Unfortunately, I find myself disgusted regularly by the actions of those who are carrying the banner of Christ. However, I would also add that those who are within the church and attacking the very foundations on which it stands are driving people away. Jesus teaches us, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand" (Matthew 12:25). This is not an exhortation to avoid criticism of those within the church. Goodness knows, Paul the Apostle teaches us time and again to turn our focus inwards when we look for fault. However, I would make an appeal not to take a novel conception of what human flourishing looks like and retroactively apply it critically to the works of Christ Himself. To do so undermines the effectiveness of our beliefs and our witness. We need our True North, perhaps especially in a time of changing values.

So, the deal has finally gone through, and Elon Musk is the new owner of Twitter. The first thing I wanted to do when I heard this was check on those who swore to get rid of Twitter if Musk ran it. Would they have fidelity to their promises? My lady friend pulled down all of her data and said she was cancelling her account. This would be a big move for her, as she is a fairly voracious Twitter consumer. No more cute cat videos or political snark. Predictably, when I asked her about it again, she just hadn't gotten around to it and then the next time I saw her, she was doomscrolling on the site.

I'm not a fan of Mr. Musk, but I'm not dropping off Twitter just yet. It seems like a situation where you can wait and see where it goes. However, I don't trust the new proprietor, even if he has been saying some of the right things in the past couple of days (while carrying a sink and insisting that his presence at Twitter HQ will have to "sink in").

Manton Reece, the owner of Micro.blog, has some words on the subject.

The common digital “square” should be the entire web, with a diverse set of platforms. There should be common APIs but many communities with their own rules, goals, and business models. Concentrating too much power in only a couple social media companies is what created the mess we’re in. The way out is more platforms, free to make the best decisions for their users knowing that there are options to leave and less lock-in for developers.

He's absolutely right. Like it or not, though, Twitter is the common digital town square we have right now. I'd love it if more people decamped from the fractious confines of the dominant microblogging platform and gave Reece the business his network deserves. I don't envision a mass exodus, though. People who are more technically literate and aware than most are still just now discovering the 5-year-old microblogging service.

Charlie Warzel goes through all sorts of scenarios in which Musk actively destroys Twitter with incompetent meddling, but then eventually concludes with a different outcome.

Living, breathing things do one thing quite reliably: They eventually die, for all kinds of reasons. They die of natural causes, or because of direct harm. They die because of unforeseeable events. Musk very well could kill Twitter out of malice or hubris, or through calculated, boneheaded decisions. But one possibility seems more likely than others. If Twitter dies at the hands of this billionaire, the cause is likely to be tragically banal—neglect.

Predictions aren't usually my stock-in-trade, and I'm not going to speculate too much on what will happen with a Musk-owned Twitter. I am pretty sure Musk is too addicted to hearing his own voice on a global platform to neglect it. In the end, I'm just glad I'm no longer tethered to Twitter, as an investor or as a user. Every so often, I think maybe we should all just move over to Mastodon.

Several times a week, I get an email from my son's high school with a link to a newsletter-type of page that details events at the school. To be honest, I don't often read it. I assume that if there's anything important going on, my son will tell me. One thing I'm not concerned about is the newsletter informing me that the school is installing litter boxes for students who identify as furries. That may sound crazy, but some parents are truly worried about it.

Why on earth would parents think a school would install litter boxes in bathrooms? Some Republican politicians and Republican-adjacent types like Joe Rogan are claiming this is a thing. Although they don't have any evidence, they hardly need it to penetrate the overactive imaginations of their constituents and listeners. Tyler Kingkade has the story (and a wonderfully surreal image to go with it) for NBC News.

But the claim has taken on a life of its own among a growing number of Republicans, conservative influencers and political commentators. In an episode of Spotify’s “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast this week, host Joe Rogan told former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard that a litter box was installed in a school that his friend’s wife worked at for a girl who “identifies as an animal.” A clip of the discussion quickly began to circulate on social media. Rogan did not name the school, and his publicist did not respond to a request for comment.

As usual, you have Rogan taking part in this cultural controversy, with his, "aw shucks, I'm just an everyman who heard about this and I don't have to research it" nonsense. This is your music tax dollars (AKA, your Spotify subscription fees) hard at work. While artists are paid fractions of pennies, this guy gets unholy amounts of money to spout whatever comes off the top of his dome.

I used to laugh at this rumor, but instead of dying out like I expected, it only seems to have picked up steam, with people unthinkingly repeating it seemingly everywhere in the U.S. and Canada. When politicians were putting this stuff out there, it was bad enough, but now you have the host of the most-listened to podcast in history repeating it. I know Rogan has incredible numbers of listeners because his supporters are always touting the stats like they somehow confer legitimacy upon his show. I guess you're supposed to just accept — prima facie — that large numbers of people can't be wrong.

Theoretically, the proliferation of media should have brought about easy dismissals of stories like this after simple fact checking. Many news outlets have looked into these claims and found no evidence of their veracity. However, that is not a barrier to the spread of even the silliest rumors in a post-truth society. This isn't totally new. As P.T. Barnum once said, "Many people are gullible, and we can expect this to continue." Now, though, false beliefs appear to be moving faster than ever.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go clean my personal litter box.