AI Realism

Is there no alternative?

First: Please like this post! Your likes make my day.

Not long ago, a Republican woman told me that, over the years, she’d seen dozens of people carry assault rifles through security at Laguardia. The TSA, she said, didn’t say boo.

Obviously she’d seen no such thing. But why did she say this? The implication seemed to be that terrorists had been so coddled by leftist governments that they were now allowed on flights flamboyantly armed. It’s possible she had started with racism and had spent her life manufacturing fake threats to justify it. She wouldn’t be the first.

But something in the way Mrs. W. scanned my face for a response made me think otherwise. Her statement—”people openly carry guns through airport security”—didn’t seem to have a belief behind it at all. It had the ring of fiction. And the claim was a Mad Lib. Anything could have been subbed for the nouns and verbs. She might have said it was now mandatory to carry Sno-Cones at the airport.

She dropped the point almost as soon as she brought it up. She was talking to talk. She was talking to disturb the airwaves and my equilibrium. That’s how many of us talk. And she just wanted, at 88, to insist on a kind of weird and pervy confabulation to prove she could talk.