Friday, April 21, 2023

5G Is Coming To Get You!…or maybe not

The misinformation related to 5G is firmly rooted in science denialism.  Not being sure which topic of the list of related bad ideas, I’ve settled on this because flat earth nonsense, the reigning champion of science denial, has been beaten to death.  In fact, if you apply the friends test to someone talking about 5G, it’s impossible to not find someone yammering about both of them?

Why is this a problem?  Just like finding antonyms with matching gematria, the science denial is self-contradictory.  Not as blatant as in a single post, but a red flag is that Person A blabbering about 5G radiation killing you, or even causing Covid, person B is that close friend that thinks the earth is flat and hates NASA.  That GPS that let your pizza delivery person find you is getting a signal from satellites orbiting the globe.

These contradictions don’t get attention since the senses are dulled by taking things for granted the convenience of a technological society.  Cell tower radiation isn’t much different from your car radio or microwave.  What it is - a new talking point for grifters.  The flat earth is overused.  5G radiation is more fresh and exciting.

A fun side effect of 5G talking points is an opportunity to use bad statistics that easily fool the unsuspecting.  I give you, the bad map:



What it actually is - a map of cell tower coverage.  But be prepared to find someone claiming it’s any number of health scare topics.  Health issues are a primary source of science denial - with modern medicine being taken for granted.  Finding an unlabeled map is easy.  Altering it to caption it the way you want takes a bit of work.  I could make it say:

COVID CASES JULY 2020-OCTOBER 2020
Or
INCREASE IN LUNG CANCER 2019-2022
Or
CAR ACCIDENT FATALITIES CAUSED BY 5G 2023
Etc…

In some cases these fake talking points aren’t technically wrong.  There probably are more lung cancer cases in the red areas.  Yet, something is missing from the fake maps that is important.  The map is really only related to population density  not population.  A meaningful map would be labeled something like CAR ACCIDENT FATALITIES PER 10,000 ACCIDENTS.

Cell phone companies are <shocker> a business.  It’s only natural that there’s a bigger need for bigger populations.  There’s not going to be a gigantic red spot over Utqiagvik, Alaska for anything related to just population and not density.  Unless it’s vampire related.

The issues of social interaction with family and erstwhile friends over how to approach their addiction to fake news are challenging.  Do you take the stance of abandoning all hope and admitting they are hopelessly close minded and not worth the trouble?  Do you double down on your efforts to try to get through?  The grifters love the chaos and turmoil of the fake news cycle.  As Barnum said, a sucker is born every minute.

5G and the social interaction instability of rapid communication:


5G directly causing COVID because radiation is scary:


Neither of those like much of this post are written in easy to understand English.  See how easy it is to believe a nice little mislabeled (purposefully) map?  The summation of all this?  Statistically misleading maps are common enough that all, unless from a clearly trusted source should be viewed skeptically.  The correct answer isn’t written in English.  Do some actual research and find someone to dumb it down to an understandable level, admit the conspiracy theorist has a critical thinking problem and go from there.

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