My alternative title:1 in 5 people on Twitter report mental nervous diseases, especially afflicted political marxists
Pinkerton: Biden Nominees Fall Prey to the Terrible Temptation of Twitter
ponents: “You’ve been an unusually combative presence on Twitter for the Hillary side.” To which Tanden answered. “I probably tweet too much. . . . I will plead guilty to wanting to defend her and defend her strenuously on Twitter. But I’m willing to concede I should tweet less.”
Yet even so, she did not tweet less. She kept it up, such that in 2019, at the end of a long tweet-bout, the other individual, obviously exasperated and bemused at the same time, tweeted, “neera, you’re responding to a graduate student on twitter at 1:40 am. spare me the bullshit. you are affected.”
Yes, Tanden is affected, that’s putting it softly. As a close ally of Tanden, John Podesta, conceded to the Washington Post, “I kind of think there were moments where she would have been better off asleep, rather than getting up in the middle of the night, responding to people attacking her.”
Someone who loses sleep to tweet might make for an interesting case study, focusing on perhaps the interplay of one’s mental state and digital technology: Are the two factors reinforcing each other, causing a vicious cycle and thereby pushing some people into a psychological-digital maelstrom?
In fact, author Joanna Weiss has already produced a non-clinical, long-distance analysis of Tanden’s case. Weiss explains that Twitter has its own way of tempting you into provocative tweets—and then turning on you. Indeed, scientists know that a tweet induces the brain to secrete a tiny bit dopamine, a pleasurable neurochemical. And since it’s so easy to tweet, it’s well, easy to become obsessed with, or even addicted to, this kind of pleasure.
And anger helps, too. As one researcher puts it, if grievance is a form of addiction, then one’s brain on grievance looks a lot like one’s brain on drugs.So it’s a loop: the angrier you get, the more chemically altered your brain gets, and that, in turn, gives you more anger–which can be a perversely good feeling
In fact, the realization that there’s a chemical basis for human emotions puts one of Tanden’s notorious tweets her 2017 jibe that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AL) was “high on her on supply”—in an ironic perspective. Tanden’s dig about “high” should properly apply to Tanden herself.
Author Weiss quotes one expert as saying that the internet functions like “the world’s largest slot machine.” Indeed, one is reminded of a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, aptly entitled, “The Fever,” in which a once-normal man becomes addicted to a Las Vegas slot machine, which he calls “a monster with a will all its own.” The monster eventually causes the man’s death.
So now we can see Twitter as a 21st-century slot machine, and Tanden as an all-too-willing victim of what might be calledTwitter Fever
Furthermore, one needn’t sympathize with her to see, nonetheless, that there’s a larger phenomenon here; we humans are going to have to think more about how we can safely interact with digital technology, just as we have to think about our interactions with gambling, alcohol, drugs, and other temptations.
Still, as we ponder the phenomenon of people flaming away on Twitter, we might recall a scene in the 1982 sci-fi movie Blade Runner, in which the doomed Byronic hero, Roy Batty, is told, “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.” So the moral for our time: Enjoy the dopamine-incandescence of Twitter, and of all social media, if you wish, but know that you’ll burn so hot that you won’t last long.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/03/27/pinkerton-biden-nominees-fall-prey-to-the-terrible-temptation-of-twitter/