#parody psychotherapy

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

"She's flawless at getting it ALL wrong. She has the worst judgment of anyone in the world."*

Netflix With Love, Meghan Crisis Meetings

Her Netflix trailer bombed with the public & suddenly it's someone else's fault! Isn't it SHE who must be obeyed the person who continues to proudly promote that TRAILER via her own social media platform? Wasn't it SHE who must be obeyed the one who enlisted her "friends" to do the same? SHE who must be obeyed is afraid to promote projects via traditional media & press junkets and she's surprised her trailer received legendary backlash?

This woman has been repeatedly voted the most unliked celebrity and Netflix executives now pretend that they were ignorant of the MARKLED effect? Now she's taking up LA hotel rooms/resources in the (Pretty Woman) Presidential Suite at The Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel.

Make It Make Sense.

Show Up. Mess Up.

"The Duchess tried to stay under the radar in all black workout gear with an LA baseball hat" 🤡

Netflix Crisis Meeting Parody

Delusional Duchess of Sus Parody

"Meghan's Got a Trailer (grab your inhaler)" Parody Psychotherapy

"Stand By Me, While It's All About Me"

"She's a wicked wicked girl." -Queen Elizabeth

"I am informed that, contrary to the story being promulgated by the Duchess of Sussex that the delay of the launch of her lifestyle series @withlovemeghan from this Wednesday to the 4th March, was her idea, it was entirely @netflix's. They evidently strongly recommended that she use the intervening period to try to turn around the wave of unpopularity that has engulfed all of them, unbelievably to their surprise. "They thought they might have problems owing to how toxic she now is, but they've been taken aback by the depth of feeling the public have shown," someone who is Hollywood royalty told me. So what does she do? She goes and shows the public even more clearly what a ghoul she is by plugging in yet again to disaster the way she tastelesslyy did at Uvalde, once more tipping off @TMZ of her and Harry's intentions to do their version of ambulance chasing. She posed up a storm beside the perfectly groomed Mrs @GavinNewsom, then moves off to hug a member of her detail, all the while surrounded by the cameramen who had accompanied her. She's been rightly condemned for this deathly display of opportunistic limelighting, but at least she was canny enough to dress down, which is more than could be said for the perfectly-groomed First Lady of California, who looked as if she was preparing for one of Anna Wintour's left-of-centre @voguemagazine spreads. I gather the visit lasted all of 17 minutes - five minutes longer than the time spent with His Majesty The King when Harry crossed the Atlantic for that photo-op. Does this couple have no shame?" Lady Colin Campbell

"Let Them Eat Doughnuts"-Lady C

The Presidential Suite at Pretty Woman's Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel

[kata4a]

incidentally, from the same book:

A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy. Colby et al. write, for example, "Further work must be done before the program will be ready for clinical use. If the method proves beneficial, then it would provide a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists. Because of the time-sharing capabilities of modern and future computers, several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man since his efforts would no longer be limited to the one-to-one patient-therapist ratio as now exists." I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another learn to cope with his emotional problems, that the helper himself participate in the other's experience of those problems and, in large part by way of his own empathic recognition of them, himself come to understand them. There are undoubtedly many techniques to facilitate the therapist's imaginative projection into the patient's inner life. But that is was possible for even one practicing psychiatrist to advocate that this crucial component of the therapeutic process be entirely supplanted by pure technique—that I had not imagined! What must a psychiatrist who makes such a suggestion think he is doing while treating a patient, that he can view the simplest mechanical parody of a single interviewing technique as having captured anything of the essence of a human encounter? Perhaps Colby et al. give us the required clue when they write; "A human therapist can be viewed as an information processor and decision maker with a set of decision rules which are closely linked to short-range and long-range goals, . . . He is guided in these decisions by rough empiric rules telling him what is appropriate to say and not to say in certain contexts. To incorporated these processes, to the degree possessed by a human therapist, in the program would be a considerable undertaking, but we are attempting to move in this direction." What can the psychiatrist's image of his patient be when he sees himself, as therapist, not as an engaged human being acting as a healer, but as an information processor following rules, etc.? Such questions were my awakening to what Polanyi had earlier called a "scientific outlook that appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Christopher F. Rufo

Published: Apr 17, 2024

Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.

Mere weeks into this new role, Maher has stepped into controversy. Long-time NPR senior editor Uri Berliner published a scathing indictment of the self-professed “public” media service’s ideological capture. Rather than address the substance of these criticisms—which will ring true to anyone who has listened to NPR over the past decade—Maher punished Berliner with a five-day unpaid suspension. (Berliner announced his resignation from NPR earlier today.)

But Maher has another problem: her archive of 29,400 tweets.

I have spent the past few days exploring Maher’s prolific history on social media, which she seems to have used as a private diary, narrating her every thought, emotion, meeting, and political opinion in real-time. This archive is a collection of her statements, but at a deeper level, it provides a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal—many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions.

What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”

On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands” with Kamala Harris. She worked to “get out the vote” in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a “Biden supporter”; for her, it was simply a matter of being a “supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a “deranged racist sociopath.”

If you read Maher’s tweets closely, you also get glimpses of the human being. She spent much of her time in airports, taxis, meetings, and conferences. She expressed anger over the fact that most first-class flyers were white men, then noted that she went straight “to the back of the bus.” In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that “the planet is literally burning” and that she could not, in good conscience, “bring a child into a warming world.”

Behind the frenetic activity and the moral posturing, you wonder. Maher once posted her daily routine, which involved yoga, iced coffee, back-to-back meetings, and Zoom-based psychotherapy. She resented being served maternity advertisements on Instagram, she said. She was not “currently in the market for a baby” and would not be “tending her ovaries” according to the dictates of American capitalism. 

Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.

The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.

Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.

Each social gambit is designed for smothering the institution in ideology. Maher says that she knows “that hysteric white woman voice.” She has “done it.” And while she might not be proud of it—she is aware that she has “a big fat privilege pass”—she is willing to do what it takes to move the dictates of conventional left-wing opinion into a position of domination.

It didn’t begin at NPR, and it won’t end there.

--

==

The First Amendment being viewed as an impediment to what she wants to do, is not a good look for the CEO of a publicly (i.e. government, i.e. taxpayer) funded broadcaster.

[tscritical]

srednas anon pt. 3 we also used to get annoyed when people made the comparison but for us its not a huge thing anymore bc we can see where its coming from, and also perhaps we're biased but i think it might be better if it was a system hence the parody idea gjldksgds like the idea of parts of a person having their own names and character arcs sounds very not-singlet to me but that's my opinion and you are totally valid in how you feel about it as well :O in the end it makes no difference to the series itself, and my only hope for the season finale is that it's decent gjlksdgjk

yeah like i guess i can see where it’s coming from too, but like. it’s more similar to internal family systems than anything else

IFS therapy is a form of psychotherapy where you literally visualize aspects of your personality as subpersonalities with unique qualities and viewpoints. sound familiar? (you can read more about it here and here)

i don’t know the ins and outs of IFS therapy but like. *gestures wildly*

anyway i do kinda like your idea!! it’d be cool to see it realized :3

[emme-likes-words]

Model Citizen

This is a parody of "Hip To Be Square" by Huey Lewis & The News. For the best experience, listen to the instrumental of that song while you read.

♪~I used to be a renegade~♪

♪~Used to degenerate~♪

♪~But all my friends showed me what's right~♪

♪~And helped me quit the fight~♪

♪~I cut my hair and trashed my leather~♪

♪~Now I feel much better~♪

♪~I used to be a punk,~♪

♪~But now I'm fitting in!~♪

♪~I'm a model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~I used to be an enemy~♪

♪~Defending those like me~♪

♪~But one-oh-one converted me~♪

♪~With psychotherapy~♪

♪~Now I don't like to debate~♪

♪~I'm standing up straight~♪

♪~I was a bachelor,~♪

♪~But now I'm fitting in!~♪

♪~I'm a model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~It's hard not seeming crazy~♪

♪~'Cause I know that they see~♪

♪~I don't want to make a scene~♪

♪~So I hide the magazine~♪

♪~I'm spotted by my wife~♪

♪~Lost my job and my life~♪

♪~I was lavender~♪

♪~Now I'm hanging from a tree~♪

♪~That's the only way for me to be a~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

♪~Model citizen!~♪

[zikadraws]

🎶"And we live in an actual niGHtMAAAAAAAAAAAAAARE-"🎶

I don't watch this show other than the clips I see on Youtube and from here, but I do appreciate the chaos, muppet show parodying and downright existential horror ! Hopefully these guys will ever come anywhere close of unraveling the truth. Or at least learning their own names.

And by the way, I screwed around with the filters for this one, so as a bonus here's the OG scan and another pretty cool one with the most appropriate lighting focus.

(Also I hope one day they'll get an episode themed around psychotherapy. Be it only for the literal mindf*ck. Do it cowards.)

Anyways

[gallusrostromegalus]

Modern AU Phantom of the Opera, but it's all modern people with the original Erik from eighteenwhatever who is immortal for extremely stupid reasons that are immediately glossed over in favor of subjecting him to the horrors of modern life.

For instance, the new theater owners are a pair of elder millennial lesbians that got in on bitcoin early and decided to buy the opera house* because why the hell not, and upon recciving his first letter demanding pay, write back:

"Great! Glad we don't have to hire a new art director because everyone who applied is a pretentious shithead. Come up to the office so we can set up a direct deposit."

Because honestly? The maniac in the basement that rants about inventive methods of homicide in french is like, only the eighth weirdest person in the house crew, never mind the freaks in the actual cast. Highlights include:

---

"Erik. My dude. You can't have live tigers on the stage. They're an endangered species and probably an OSHA violation."

"Who is this OSHA who dares dictate the how and what of MY theater? Do you fear them more than me, the Opera Ghost?"

"Its the new york state attorneys office, and yes. You'll only stab or hang me. They'll make me suffer. How about we put that baritone you didn't like in a tiger costume instead?"

---

Erik getting into twitter beef and his managers allowing it because you couldn't buy this kind of publicity.

---

Modern AU La Carlotta is played by Madonna, like in the Dick Tracy movie, but she's a parody of herself.

---

The Author Takes A Long And Very Blatant Pro-Union Ramble For Half A Chapter.

---

Erik Basementghost vs. CBT.

The Therapy technique, he's already familiar with and probably versed in the fetish from the 1800's. Modern psychotherapy though? Terrifying, please punch him in the dick instead.

---

Erik is old enough to remember at least reading about the original Alexander Hamilton and writes to Lin-manuel Miranda about the inaccuracy of "jefferson should have been eating macaroni and cheese every time he was on stage."

---

Erik having an enormous tantrum that he was not around during the Golden Age of Broadway. One of the managers goes down to his non-OSHA-compliant-former-subway-station he uses for an office and finds he's somehow acquired a twelve foot tall portrait of Lorenz Hart.

"What."

"My lost beloved from another time, I only learned of him far too late..."

"Weren't you alive then?"

"Yes, but alas, I was in the Atlantic for most of his career."

"AGAIN?"

---

* it's not the paris opera house because I know fuck all about paris and because I feel like this extremely dumb AU is the sequel to this magnum opus: https://www.google.com/amp/s/muirin007.tumblr.com/post/190275380840/wait-wait-wait-have-i-not-told-you-guys-this/amp

So it's probably like, The Met, because that's the only american opera house I can think of at 2:30 AM.

[parttimesarah]

Ok, I found some more photos from this sketch and I feel pretty comfortable saying it’s probably “The Psychiatrist” from the 1966 series of Not Only… But Also… It’s sad that these photos are the closest we’ll ever get to seeing this sketch. At least we can listen to it!

Here’s some interesting background on the topic they are satirizing in the sketch (from the blog Mind Hacks by vaughnbell)

It’s actually a parody of a technique in psychotherapy called “unconditional positive regard” in which the therapist accepts the person’s behaviour, experiences and emotions, good or bad, without judging the person’s core value as a human being.

This was originally developed by psychologist Carl Rogers as part of a humanistic or person-centred approach to psychotherapy.

It’s unsurprising that Peter would choose to write a sketch poking fun at psychotherapy, something which Dudley was heavily involved with and which Peter never put much stock in.

[vaas]

beboot se4 movie 2 opening with a fucking. surreal nightmare sitcom parody. laugh tracks giving way to existential horror. the Brady bunch parody. dot in psychotherapy. Jesus christ.

[sfpml2]

I invite you to read the text of the remarks with which I introduced my workshop at the 2019 Post-Human Network Symposium. A link to the remarks and the abstract for my workshop are below.

LINK: (Re)Creating the Self; or, the Technologies of Self-Parody

ABSTRACT: (Post)modern psychotherapy is a cybernetics: it doesn’t coax us to obey the law, nor does it coax us to conform to the norm—instead, it coaxes us to self-regulate. Those who have affective disorders are given treatments to help them regulate their moods, those who have psychotic disorders are given treatments to help them regulate their phantasies, and those who have anxiety disorders are given treatments to help them regulate their apprehensions. By recasting schizoanalysis as a supplement, a pharmakon to (post)modern psychotherapy, a vector of fortuitous (dis)orders, my work advances an ethics of dissemination that runs counter to cybernetic notions of regulation, and my workshop will attempt to affectively dramatize schizotherapeutic treatments that disseminate moods, phantasies, and apprehensions.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

A Happy Dance Bop & Bounce Banger for the Birthday Princess: We Be Jammin'

Dear Lovely Princess of Wales,

Your presence in the BRF has brought JOY into billions of households. I hope you feel all the love that the world carries in our hearts for you, your Wills, your babies, and all your Middleton family.

Here's the happy dance bop/banger We Be Jammin 💃🕺 to spin at your birthday celebration

Have a blessed day and a Jammin' Year. The best is yet to come! With love from New England.

DJ Princess 👑 💃🕺🎧

[kinojournal]

depth mental

Some notes in the process of working on a film about childhood mental trauma and the study of the difference between psychosis as an irreversible change in the brain, and neurosis that can be treated with psychotherapy through confrontation with negative experiences. Sources: "Psychopathology" by Karl Jaspers and "History of Madness" by Michel Foucault.

             Altered States (1980) Ken Russell

Voltaire believed that the brain for the soul is the same as the eye for vision, the muscles of the legs for walking, that is, brain damage causes disease of the soul, so madness is proof of the materiality of the soul.

Most mental illnesses are accompanied by personality changes. A common feature of all procedurally determined changes in personality is its limitation or disintegration. Used for such cases, the term dementia means a disorder of mental abilities, memory, etc.

The basis of most mental disorders lies in the breakdown of associative ties. The appearance of false judgments and ideas in a person, their conflict with each other or with reality is thought of as the splitting of a strong network of associations. Due to the violation of the "continuity" of the nerve pathways, the "loss of certain associative manifestations" within the same person, several different personalities can arise at the same time, ie the splitting of the personality can occur. Abnormal movements (para-kinesis) are also caused by the breakdown of associative connections.

A series of portraits of monomaniacs by Théodore Géricault (1822) is perhaps the first depiction of the mentally ill in art.

Confusing thoughts, incoherence, delusions, etc. are the consequences of somatic symptoms or heredity (like any mental illness). The nonsense of "normal" people is more or less the same, while the nonsense of the mentally ill is unique because no two are equally ill. It takes years for a doctor to understand the nature of each patient's disease, and the existing categories are too general. Each individual case requires empathy and immersion in the history of life and illness not only of the patient but also of the whole family.

A person can be understood only by following a person’s way of thinking, his or her judgments and thought process, everything else is an attempt to deceive oneself and others. Neither we nor the person is able to understand oneself to the end, because the personality is psychologically incomprehensible, always external to many roles and under the shell of words, always "in the process of formation", which has no end.            

                 Permanent Vacation (1980)

Therefore, it’s absolutely impossible for an actor to embody a hero with a mental disorder in a film, and in each case it will be an external imitation of movements and grimaces, caricature and parody (as in Jim Jarmusch film’s image depicted above).

Anna Charlotte Robertson, the author of experimental films, believed that for her, cinema was a therapeutic healing from the mental problems she suffered from and which she spoke of in her works. Such self-portraits of artists with mental disorders are obviously the only way to talk about this topic in art.

N.І.

               Anne Charlotte Robertson

[antivirusprogram2020]

I am an antivirus program (2020)

> Chapter 4 (OPTIONAL) This whole project has been a facsimile to actual real projects, and verbalised in the most abstruse way possible. It’s the culmination of it’s time, and you can’t blame me for it. I’m stuck transfixed to a screen as my only means to even interface with reality - the occasional trip to the shop is a parody of real life, this isn’t life, this is arrested development. And it’s unjust. And it’s affecting everyone in some way or another, some in multiple ways. Some people just straight up woke up dead this morning and I’m willing to bet that a large majority of those deaths were preventable. I really don’t know how I’m expected to engage with the world when the natural fabric of ‘our world’ is so anti-human. I spent 7 days in bed Ill and felt completely unproductive, this is the mob mentality of education, of a global system predicated on use value - I can’t even make art the right way, or design. The only thing I feel truly capable to achieve right now is to write. Its a fiction don’t you get it, the rest of the world looks surreal, ghostly and shimmering with collapse, a spectre is haunting a spectre is haunting a spectre. Before I couldn’t get studio access, and you know... work... I had an idea to produce triptychs. I had been in communication with a friend and peer from the painting course and we were making as if the making was its own independent voice, talking back and forth through print and paint exchanges. Maybe that idea for a triptych still remains in this text, but I doesn’t really matter, the text has lost a sense of materiality, daesin, presence. And that was just one of many of the projects I was involved with, you know I set up a temporary Riso studio from within our department, Risome Press, it made sense - that click you get when you’re doing something and you’re simultaneously having fun and within an iota of being good at it, capable. I don’t get that with writing - it’s really a struggle, my eyes start to go and I get this reverberation just resonating through my head, I can feel it, like a little planet orbit my head and putting the brakes right on. But the next day, I get started back on it, I spend the prior night, as all nights, thinking - you have to let things ruminate for a while before you can really conceptualise what it is you’re trying to say - I haven’t got there yet, and the antivirus thing was ironic, scientists haven’t come up with a vaccine so why the fuck would you expect anything from me. And an antivirus isn’t 100% full proof either, the human race will be blindsided by one thing or another and right now I’m really hoping that we’re not blindsiding ourselves. A jolly optimism never hurts until you’re lying on your floor with your ears ringing and your head whirling, blaring out Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’, halted by intrusive thoughts. I know this isn’t supposed to sound like a catalogue cliché of some angst teen drama, but the reality is almost inevitably far sadder. Quite possibly the worst form of psychotherapy is telemetry media, constantly checking in to read/write user profiles, altering itself to fit a model > insert market research profile. Success seems to be contingent on right place right time magical thinking model, like a form of chaos magic that you’ve been practicing throughout your formative years, and it’s hard to do anything when you’re stuck still in the middle of a global pandemic, during a surge of fascism and economic instability. And here you are sat at the other end of this schtick, having to assess and mark students - evaluate them for the slow cancellation of the future. Maybe the antivirus progam is absurdism at it’s simplest - if it doesn’t make sense then go, keep going, there are always small things to do - even when you’re in that feedback loop of schizophrenic design, the schizoaesthetic. Because, while it looks like a loop, it’s conditional, there is an out you just have to find it (I promise it's there). And that could mean stepping back, not looking for it for years and it coming to you. Or charting every piece of meaning you stumble upon. It’s a terrifying game of chicken between getting out of the loop and dying (both fascilitate some kind of escape in a very dark morbid way). I will offer this last shred of my optimism here... Humankind can not bear much reality, but when we do, it inspires hope - revolution. The winds of change are a blowing, and you dont have to feel the wind on your face to know that.

[robinallender]

This is an extremely dated and often quite nasty novel parodying the boom in self-help and psychotherapy in the 1970s. In some ways it’s fascinating to read because it’s often hard to work out what Amis is satirising! It’s like hearing a very drunk man tell you the punchline to a joke having forgotten the set-up. 

As always with Amis there are bits that made me laugh, particularly the chapter titles. Chapter 9: Guilt and Shame. Chapter 10: Wanker! And the description of Jake’s bowels ‘emitting moans of poignant grief’. But overall the experience reminded me of visiting a house where people still smoke inside. Curiously nostalgic, but not altogether pleasant.

[reeacd-blog]

Check out this short IT Parody https://youtu.be/06V-ijWEq-o . . . . . #it #itmovie #itparody #film #shortfilm #filmmaker #filmmaking #indiefilmmaker #indiefilm #indiefilmmaking #director #producer #setlife #scripttoscreen #psycho #therapy #psychotherapy https://www.instagram.com/p/B2Hyu5Rn8zf/?igshid=17ipu1z1lynmk

[lazilysillyprince]

California is Considering Taxing Texts. Here's the 1 Insane Detail Hardly Anyone Has Noticed

New Post has been published on http://psychotherapy-online.com/california-is-considering-taxing-texts-heres-the-1-insane-detail-hardly-anyone-has-noticed/

California is Considering Taxing Texts. Here's the 1 Insane Detail Hardly Anyone Has Noticed

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek. 

It sounded bad. 

So bad, in fact, that it was just the sort of thing you’d expect from California.

My home state has a certain reputation —  especially among those who don’t live there — for taxing its inhabitants,

This week, there came news of a potential new tax, one that sounded so Californian as to border on parody.

And a million accusing Eastern fingers pointed toward the west and its serial predilection for socialized nonsense. (I’m not sure how many of those fingers came from East Coasters, how many from Russians and how many from Russians who had emigrated to the East Coast.)

The essence of the tax lies in the fact that people have stopped talking on the phone so much. 

Yes, California currently taxes phone calls. It dedicates the revenue raised to providing the least fortunate with some sort of telecommunications service.

It does the same with other utilities, too.

The phone call revenue has, naturally, fallen as telephonic talking has fallen, so the state proposes taxing texts. Doing this, says California’s Public Utilities Commission, could raise $44.5 million.

Which leaves one small, painful detail: Not many people send text messages.

You might think you do, because texting has become a generic term for constantly saying things in writing to people via your phone — only to occasionally be misunderstood.

Yet the majority of people use iMessage, WhatsApp or even Facebook Messages. These are sent over the internet. 

And, if California suddenly decided it now wants to include these over-the-web services in its tax proposals, does that mean it can start taxing every email? 

Now there’s a delicious revenue-generating idea that could instantly finance so many Californian projects and deter people from sending those dreary reply-all emails that plague business life. 

Naturally, phone industry lobbyists are drinking — I mean, working — late into the night to prevent California’s proposal from being instituted in a vote on January 10.

Should it pass, there might be enormous confusion, with users assuming that all their phone messaging is being taxed? 

What if they stopped texting altogether? 

That simply wouldn’t be the modern world anymore.