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Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
When The Motte was on Reddit, there was a post about women possibly having a... personalised... take on what they experience relative to reality. Was the post-author... you? A childhood magazine was involved, I believe, and AOC was invoked (not in the magazine, but the comment/post, or maybe in the replies).
In combination between that post, my experiences, one of the last comments from Namrok on women being possibly p-zombies, @WhiningCoil 's recent comment on 'white-knuckling' it, and other sources such as a comment here about wishful female thinking, there is maybe something to this as to a wider unified hypothesis.
Comedian and marriage guy Mark Gungor has a whole schtick on why men and women are fundamentally incomprehensible to each other, the model of boxes vs wires. I’ve linked to the start of the part most people go to the video for, 55 seconds in.
Other examinations I’ve leaned on for preparing for understanding women’s behavior and choices include the Dave Sim’s Cerebus comics and Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder comics, particularly her graphic novel “Five Crazy Women”. (If a woman warns you that all women are crazy, listen to her.)
This video is very interesting to me, in the sense that it does not resonate with my experience, at least of my own internal life, at all. I think I’ve made allusions before to the fact that I tend to recognize within myself many patterns and frames of mind that are generally associated with femininity; my free testosterone levels have certainly increased over the years and I’ve observed a concomitant decrease in the prevalence of these patterns, but I still seem to experience them far more often than the modal heterosexual man. This is why I’ve always held out a bit more sympathy for a soft version of the “gender is a non-binary spectrum separate from sex” cluster of ideas than one might expect, given my opinions about many other culture-war topics.
I think it is very obvious that masculinity and femininity are bimodal distributions; in that sense, I’m certainly in strong disagreement with the full gender abolitionists and gender-sex-separators. Where I think a lot of the more fertile disagreement lies is the question of just how many people sit somewhere in the psychological overlap between those distributions, and what to do with them. I’m completely uninterested in entertaining discussions of what to do about the vanishingly small number of people who are physically intermediate between the two poles, but as someone in the awkward position of finding myself psychologically somewhere in the undifferentiated middle ground, it’s odd watching a video which clearly the vast majority of people find insightful and relatable and getting pretty much nothing out of it myself.
As a male (but not an especially masculine one), this is also very much not my experience, but I notice that most of the men I know also don't seem to have this either, even ones who are more masculine than me in general. So clearly something is wrong here. I only know my own experiences, and I don't ever think about literally nothing. I don't know what that even means, other than being unconscious. But I don't think it matches most of the men I know, so I'm mostly just extrapolating from there. It's probably not true, and if it's is true for some men it's probably not true of people who I encounter in my filter bubble. I'm torn between three possible hypotheses. In approximate order of how likely I think they are:
1: This is a made up stereotype based on conversation preferences. Nobody really experiences nothing in their mind, they just daydream about unimportant stuff and then when asked about it either lose their train of thought and forget, or are embarrassed by how silly it was. It's easier to tell your wife that you were thinking about "nothing" than it is to tell her you were imagining the broader ecological implications if squirrels didn't have tails, or that you were trying to find symmetries in the patterns on the wall, and then have her judge you and ask questions about what's wrong with you that you'd think about something silly like that. Or if you were imagining having a threesome with two of your favorite celebrities, and you think she'd get angry if you admitted something like that. It's entirely possible that enough men (not all men, but a non-negligible number) have negative experiences with women questioning their inner thoughts and starting conflicts over it, or they just don't enjoy having conversations when they're trying to have alone time to think, and they learn to say "nothing" as the easiest response. And if enough do this, and men do this more often then women, then it becomes a stereotype.
2: This is an intelligence thing, not a gender thing. Maybe people with IQ below a certain threshold really do space out and think about nothing sometimes. I suspect if you were thinking about literally nothing you'd be trapped there forever, you have to have some sort of route for external stimulus to reach your brain, but I suppose your conscious mind could be off while your unconscious is still on. Or more likely they're thinking about very little which gets rounded off to "nothing" when queried. This is pretty far from my experience, I suppose the closest I can think of is when I'm really sleepy and my thoughts seem to slow and get muddled. Maybe some people do this on purpose as a sort of micronap? I don't know. If this is the correct explanation, then I can think of two possibilities for why this is stereotyped as a gender thing. One possibility is that it is socially uncouth to criticize women in certain ways, especially about their intelligence, so if men and women both do this men who talk about women doing this will be criticized for being misogynistic, while women who talk about men doing this will be sympathized with. The other possibility is the male variability hypothesis. If this only occurs in people with IQ below 90, and men have higher IQ variance, then more men will have this feature, therefore the stereotype might get applied to men more. It could even be the case that there is a genuine gender component to this in combination with the IQ thing. Like, maybe it only happens to women with IQ less than 80 and men with IQ less than 90, so some couples with the same IQ might see differences across gender. Heck, it could even be the case that it never happens to women, and happens to all men with IQ less than 90, and it would still be consistent with lots of men in general having it, while none of the men you or I interact with have it.
3: This is a genuine gender thing. Some sort of hormone or brain structure or socially nurtured psychological patterns cause some men to sometimes think about nothing. That is, there is a common causal source (other than IQ) of many correlated masculine traits, and empty brain. The stereotypes are right, even if not universal, and you and I are just less masculine than all of the meatheads out there. Maybe I'm wrong about the inner worlds of the intelligent but not feminine men around me, and they do sometimes think about literally nothing, just not when they're around me. That seems vaguely plausible, if you actually pay attention while you're at work and socializing and save your sitting around thinking about nothing when you're alone at home.
Again, I think 1 is the most likely, then 2, then 3. But I suppose any are possible.
3.5: This is a head injury thing, and stereotypical masculine activities are more likely to result in head injuries.
I hadn't thought of that. I'm doubtful that this is the main cause, because this would still be pretty rare even in men, and I'm not sure that would be enough to create the stereotype. But it could be this.
It may be rare in men as a whole, but still common enough in some notable subsets of men (eg, athletes in certain popular sports) to create the stereotype.
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