J.M. Berger
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jmberger.com
J.M. Berger
@jmberger.com
25K followers 630 following 7.2K posts
I wrote the book on extremism. It's called "Extremism." PhD in criminology.

https://www.jmberger.com/

► EXTREMISM @mitpress http://amzn.to/2BKXLgU
► OPTIMAL: A dystopian novel http://amzn.to/3aKYZ99

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jmberger.com
A movie you've seen more than seven times with a GIF
November 3, 2025 at 4:19 AM
jmberger.com
Seriously
While OpenAI appears to have succeeded in making ChatGPT safer, the data it shared has significant limitations. The company designed its own benchmarks, and it's unclear how these metrics translate into real-world outcomes. Even if the model produced better answers in the doctor evaluations, there is no way to know whether users experiencing psychosis, suicidal thoughts, or unhealthy emotional attachment will actually seek help faster or change their behavior.
October 27, 2025 at 8:06 PM
jmberger.com
Putin with a handlebar moustache
October 21, 2025 at 3:36 AM
jmberger.com
Um
A world-renowned historian of early Christianity and ancient Judaism lifts the veil on the life of Mary—revealing her revolutionary role as the matriarch of the Jesus movement “A great leap forward in understanding and contextualizing Mary’s life, after two millennia of her being dismissed and rewritten by patriarchal power structures.” —*James Cameron,* creator of Avatar, Titanic, and The Terminator
October 14, 2025 at 4:44 AM
jmberger.com
Also in every time, but especially in the age of chattel slavery, there were plenty of people in the dominant in-group who objected to these things. I spent a good bit of time on this point in the first Lawful Extremism paper:

www.middlebury.edu/institute/ct...
Every effort to minimize or absolve the significance of historical racism is grounded in the erasure of racism’s victims. Taney was a man of his time, but he was not the only man of his time, nor was he the only person, nor was he archetypical in any meaningful sense. It would be more accurate, but still grievously incomplete, to say he was a White person of his time, since most Black people from the same period strongly objected to the beliefs and opinions presented in the Scott decision. As Douglass implies, Taney was also not the only White man of his time, nor was he an especially representative one. Millions of White men and women of the day opposed slavery and opposed the Dred Scott decision’s disenfranchisement of free Black people, even if relatively few of those people could be considered anti-racist in any modern sense. The “man of his time” framing implies that it is not reasonable to expect someone of Taney’s era to display the necessary moral sophistication and fortitude to oppose the cultural norms under which he lived. But in fact, that is an entirely reasonable expectation, and Taney himself appeared to have displayed such sophistication many years earlier. As a young lawyer, Taney represented both free Black people and White emancipationists. During his arguments defending a radical abolitionist, Taney called slavery “a blot on our national character.” At the age of 41, he made the decision to free his own slaves. There is ample evidence that Taney, at one time, possessed enough moral discernment to understand that chattel slavery was wrong. Yet as he entered his 80s, he unambiguously aligned himself with enslavers.59
October 13, 2025 at 6:55 PM
jmberger.com
We aren't quite there yet, but Zuck has said it's his goal: People surrounded by "communities" of chatbots that replace humans as participants in the social construction of reality, which will lead us nowhere good.

*Parasocial construction of reality*

You heard it here first (I think).
No results for "Parasocial construction of reality" on DuckDuckGo No results for "Parasocial construction of reality" on Google
October 12, 2025 at 7:17 PM
jmberger.com
I'm mad because I have been wanting to do almost exactly this paper for something like a decade and could never manage to get it off the ground due to funding and whatever.

Nevertheless, you should read this. The methodology is important.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
ABSTRACT Research indicates both similarities and differences in the rhetoric employed by far-right and violent jihadi extremists. This article employs natural language processing and linguistic analysis to investigate identity construction in selected far-right (FR) and jihadi extremist (VJE) English material. We assess inter-group differences at the level of the subject, e.g. “us,” “you,” and “them,” along linguistic dimensions such as moral foundations, psychological processes, and social processes. The findings reveal that the construction of the “us” identity in both FR and VJEs demonstrates a strong presence of social processes while showing a relative absence of cognitive and analytic features compared to neutral data. Conversely, features associated with cognitive processes and morality are more prevalent in the construction of audience identities and the “other.” Additionally, both the FR and VJE corpora exhibit a stronger focus on the past compared to the neutral baseline. We also discuss specific linguistic features critical for identifying extremist subjects, namely “us,” “you” and “them.
October 12, 2025 at 5:41 PM
jmberger.com
"You might remember me from such films as"
Troy McClure
October 11, 2025 at 10:11 PM
jmberger.com
Probably fine!
Elizabeth from The Americans
October 10, 2025 at 5:44 PM
jmberger.com
"We took the freedom of speech away"
Jack Nicholson meltdown from the conclusion of "A Few Good Men"
October 8, 2025 at 7:57 PM
jmberger.com
October 8, 2025 at 5:09 PM
jmberger.com
Mike McLintock on Veep
October 7, 2025 at 4:53 PM
jmberger.com
This is a must-read
Even if you think restoration is possible, it’s a bad idea. The Constitution has failed. Or, more accurately, the Constitutional order built out of the New Deal, the Second Reconstruction, and the repudiation of the Nixon presidency has failed. This is not a prediction. It’s not a “if we continue on our current course.” The Constitution as designed by the founders, was supposed to prevent the current regime. Its original guardrails did not work. The ones added after the Civil War did not work. The de facto amendments created by the accretion of judicial decisions did not work. The post-Watergate reforms did not work.
October 6, 2025 at 5:09 AM
jmberger.com
Jethro Tull Stormwatch
October 4, 2025 at 8:25 PM
jmberger.com
Ugh no

From gg.deals/subscription...
Amazon is working on developing exclusive titles to GameNight, starting with Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg, which is described as an AI-powered improv game set in a courtroom, where players try to defend themselves in front of an AI Judge Snoop Dogg.
October 2, 2025 at 6:28 PM
jmberger.com
Also if this doesn't describe Zuck, Bezos, and Musk, I don't know what would.
Mr. Bartholomew: That's a bad habit you've got there. You know what that habit will make you dream, Moonpie? You'll dream you're an executive. You'll have your hands on all the controls, and you will wear a gray suit, and you will make decisions. But you know what, Moonpie? You know what those executives dream about out there behind their desks? They dream they're great Rollerballers. They dream they're Jonathan; they have muscles, they bash in faces.
September 29, 2025 at 6:10 PM
jmberger.com
"Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it's ever asked of anyone, ever, is not to interfere with management decisions."
Mr. Bartholomew in Rollerball
September 25, 2025 at 2:42 AM
jmberger.com
Nathan Thurm, smoking and sweating
September 24, 2025 at 4:52 PM
jmberger.com
Deep Cover, an incredible movie from 1992 starring Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum (if it sucks, I plead "haven't seen it since the 1990s and my recollection of 90s media is sometimes rose-tinted")
September 21, 2025 at 3:32 AM
jmberger.com
Tobias from Arrested Development. iykyk
September 19, 2025 at 3:22 PM
jmberger.com
This
It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.
September 13, 2025 at 4:39 PM
jmberger.com
American Gothic with Gary Cole
September 12, 2025 at 11:38 PM
jmberger.com
“Please don’t think I’m being impolite,” he said, “but I need to shake your hand before we proceed.” I’d never touched someone on a first meeting before. The anachronistic greeting was a striking departure from modern norms. But I had never been especially prudish, so I extended my hand. His grip was warm and firm, and the shake was vigorous. “Thank you,” he said. “I had to be sure you weren’t astroturf. Now we can really talk.” From Optimal by JM Berger
September 9, 2025 at 10:12 PM
jmberger.com
Yep
President Donald Trump tweeted out a letter Thursday that referred to a group of protesters as “terrorists,” following their violent ouster from a park near the White House earlier this week. The letter is signed by Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd and addressed to “Jim” in a probable reference to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It lambasted the former Pentagon chief after he called out Trump on Wednesday for threatening a military response to protests that have engulfed cities across the country. In his letter, Dowd referred to a group of protesters who were violently forced out of Washington’s Lafayette Square on Monday as “terrorists using idle hate … to burn and destroy.”
September 5, 2025 at 5:19 PM
jmberger.com
First day for the new headline writer?

Don't let the bastards grind you down!
NYT: Crime Festers in Republican States While Their Troops Patrol Washington
September 2, 2025 at 1:27 AM