Two ejected from City Council meeting after starting to yell about Wu and Covid-19 or something

Might be the result of undiagnosed childhood lead poisoning.

That woman looks neurologically off - somehow. Mask like crazy face. When you make Larouchies and Scientologists look sane ...

Mental. Illness.

They've been brainwashed by the right wing media / internet to think that anyone further left than Ted Cruz is a child molester. It's not mental illness, it's the gullibility of the human race and the increasing willingness of the right wing to abandon all pretensions to civility and exploit that gullibility by any means necessary.

It's also terrifying and it's going to continue the increase in violent lawlessness on the right, if your enemies are the most evil thing you can think of, why wouldn't you keep them from voting, run them off the road, or even shoot them?

Just opposing the policies of a politician, or the politician, is not good enough. Policies or politicians must also be compared to fascists, communists, white supremacists, and the like.

That said, I do often ask that key question, "what is wrong with people?"

You're right, when there were mask and vax mandates, they had a inch of good reason to do this. Now.. they are nutters.

And yeah I think we do need to figure out where they are getting it from. But I think its Q, social media, and Fox News. It really makes me wonder if FoxNews was shutdown, what would happen. Would it cause a moment of clarity? (nah, they are too far gone)

But yeah I think its time to start to pull these people in for evals.They can scream "1st amendment" all they want.. but at this point, it's gonna be 'for what?". They have nothing, so 1st doesn't apply. Combined with not being able to control yourself, outbursts, and just general spewing of misinformation should be enough to tip this toward a mental health reason vs a 1st amendment one.

Let's revisit this in six months if these folks are still doing this... Im gonna guess yeah they probably will be.

Bridgewater only houses men. Someone who is female (natal sex or gender) would not be sent there.

I think we also need to start looking at these untruths that they have been convinced to be real, and try to trace back where they are coming from. Sure... some of it is from the loose nut cases out there but just how much of that is coming from foreign influence trying to destabilize our society.

This sure isn't my field, but I've done a lot of reading in the past few years in an attempt to understand it -- and in so doing, I've run across the works of those who have been analyzing it since well before most of us started to notice it. More on that later.

What's producing this obvious disconnect with reality is not simply mental instability, and it's not simply foreign influence and disinformation. I think it's a combination of a certain mindset or mental tendencies, and a deliberate (if often uncoordinated) effort to create a slippery slope of unreality. Disinformation exists along a spectrum, from "untrue but plausible" to "absolutely blatant bullshit that no one with two marbles to knock together would believe". So, if you come right out the gate with something that's in the latter category, it will clash with what the average person knows or reasonably believes to be true. Moreover, it will clash without undermining existing knowledge or belief. It will disagree with observable fact, it will offer no sensible arguments to counter observable fact, and so anyone who's compos mentis is going to discard this disinformation out of hand, as absurd and not credible.

But what happens if you start off with something at the other end of the disinformation spectrum? It's just as untrue, but it is plausible: for example, "President Biden wore a green tie in his press conference on January 11", vs. "President Biden eats babies for breakfast and throws the bones to his pet hyenas whose feces fertilize the White House rose gardens." If you're not crazy, you will immediately discard the latter as absurd, even if you don't personally have knowledge of contradictory facts ("I know that's not true because I had breakfast with President Biden yesterday and he ate cornflakes."). But you don't have to be crazy to believe the former example -- and if someone says it just like that, you're probably going to accept it. Why not? Wearing a green tie has no particular implications (although a tan suit, well...we won't go there).

Now take it a step further: President Biden wore a union pin on his lapel in his press conference on January 11. OK, again, most people will believe it -- but unlike a green tie, a union pin has a bit of a charge. Now make it a BLM pin. Now he called Congressional Republicans "traitors". Now he's proposing legislation to restrict gun ownership nationwide. Now he's planning an executive order if he doesn't get the legislation. Now he's going to nationalize the National Guard to enforce the order. Now he has plans to round up anyone who was fool enough to register their guns. It's all boiling the frog, sliding down the slippery slope, and there are some factors that work against the process and others that accelerate it. And the more you go down the slope, the harder it is to break free of the cascade of beliefs that it took to get you there. At every step you buy into something, you accept something as truth, and of course that is enabled by skillful disinformation that projects an authoritative, credible aura, and that is distributed in such a way as to appear to be coming from many sources at once, when it's really a single source reverberating through many echoes.

I know people who have bought into some real down-home nonsense, and I can attest that in those cases, it was not stupidity, it was not ignorance in the strict sense, and it was certainly not mental illness. It was definitely a slippery slope, aided by disinformation and enabled by an absence of tools to counter the trend. For example, I know one man who is quite intelligent, and quite well-traveled - he's backpacked in many different countries, and not the standard gap-year destinations either. But he didn't have a great formal education, and as a result he didn't get exposure to sufficient facts, historical knowledge, and critical thinking processes to tell certain kinds of bullshit from truth. He shared a dogwhistle meme once, that made reference to bankers and Rothschilds, and when I attempted to gently explain that this was an antisemitic trope, he blew up with I AM NOT AN ANTISEMITE. OK, maybe not, but his education didn't teach him about the whole "Jewish banker" canard, so him didn't smell it when it passed right under his nose. His education didn't teach him that conspiracies such as this meme proposed are vanishingly unlikely. It didn't teach him about what sources can be trusted and how to evaluate information critically. So, he bought this, not as a conscious, self-aware antisemite would, but as someone who was convinced that he was not antisemitic, and yet was accepting and promoting an antisemitic meme.

So my friend, and many others in our country, are less well-equipped than they need to be to resist the nudges down the slippery slope. I am no sort of a mental health professional, and so I won't even begin to speculate on whether this progression leads to mental illness. It certainly does not help, though, if a person is already so disposed.

Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner shot Gabby Giffords (and a bunch of other people), I read an article by a clinician who specializes in treating people diagnosed as paranoid. He wasn't attempting to diagnose Loughner, but he pointed out that effective treatments for paranoid people rely on the clinician insisting on the facts, and refusing to acquiesce or enable the patient's delusions. Constant and repeated grounding in reality, he said, was necessary for treatment -- so when the social climate increasingly veers off the reality axis and amplifies counterfactual narratives, it's an uphill battle to keep a person with paranoid tendencies from succumbing to these delusions.

This was in 2011, mind you.

So, I don't know that the distinction matters in practice, but my sense is that it's not a matter of a "serious mental flaw" so much as a disinformation process aimed at detaching people from reality, which will of course most easily affect those who are are most predisposed, and those who are least capable by lack of reasoning skills to offer themselves a compelling alternative.

I will readily accept any and all reprimands from mental health practitioners for veering out of my lane on this one -- but please, if you think I'm wrong, tell me how.

In re: my earlier reference to those who have been studying this for a long time, Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" -- "paranoid" not in the clinical sense, but "simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind...I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant." This essay was written in 1964. It could have been written last week.

… set of contradictions and complications.

and its council chambers. Not to protest, just to watch some public hearing, years ago, on a topic that I no longer remember. Everyone has the right to do that.

There are also art galleries, registries, tax offices, and other things that a non-Boston resident may want or need to visit.

That would probably open huge can of Constitutional worms. It's a public hearing in a space open to the general public for that reason. It must remain open to anyone, regardless of residency. Just as localities can not restrict access to public ways, publicly owned open space, and parks, etc. to residents only, they can't restrict access to public hearings and meetings to residents only either.

No.

Looks like it's a pocket Constitution, because of course it is.
https://nccs.net/collections/pocket-constitution