Yeah, like me. Information here is heavily opinionated, My education, IQ, and most importantly my stance this is presented as a take it or leave it whether you want to get anything out of it without me getting paid for it - is a bit different than a lot of the material.
The prompt that drove me to today’s material, I found a link to an essay on social media, analyzing an old topic:
Does Donald Trump have Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Now if you go to Twitter even today you can search something like Trump NPD and find lots of recent activity, and of course a lot of old posts.
It’s important for this paragraph to understand I have some considerable experience with the topic, and my own thoughts are muddied by wondering whether it is my own cognitive biases, particularly confirmation bias, lead me to my personal conclusion. But this is only incidental to the main point. I believe he does. I think there’s a long term pattern showing all the signs outlined in the authoritative material from certified psychological analysts. However, whenever I start to doubt whether I’m allowed to think this way, I remind myself that proving that is impossible, and more importantly, it ultimately doesn’t matter. At a minimum he acts as a toxic narcissist often enough that as far as somebody being in charge of so many aspects of my life - I would prefer to be living in a cave by myself.
There’s a lot of armchair quarterbacking going on about this. Amateur psychoanalysts abound even on that Twitter search mentioned above. You can Google it and find both pro and con, including from certified people with actual degrees weighing in on both sides. Previous little seems to cover the, “Does it really matter?” angle I mentioned, which may simply be that social media doesn’t generally allow you the space to write a novel length treatise on the subject.
So, how does gematria fit into this? Am I suggesting that people use gematria to psychoanalyze political leaders? Of course not. Gematria lingers in the background giving a voice to armchair quarterbacks who dismiss being wrong. This is related to the Appeal to Authority logical fallacy.
Both sides have been doing this forever, treating long term viability of countries and the world like a football game. Instead of “here’s my well thought out arguments, let’s have an honest and open debate about it” we get “I’m not a Democrat” or “I’m not a Republican” as the sun total of evidence. Gematria and it’s kin of confirmation bias scam thinking is even worse, driving people further into the rabbit hole. The gematria newbie, getting frustrated with the experts constant misfires internalizes that they are smarter than the experts. They are the authority and appealing to their own authority. Beware the phrase, “I did my own research!”
The last I checked on Brother Berg, literally years ago, he was selling gematria readings instead of sports picks. So yesterday, I also found this guy and this reminded me how gematria is a symptom of biased thinking instead of exclusive to the sports gambling world:
If you had a stranger bump into you on the street and told you to give them $10 to say something vague you can interpret however you want, would you really do it? Because that’s what he’s selling. Want more evidence of that?
You can be wildly confident with gematria, because there are no right or wrong answers. Never before have I seen such a bold and blatant admission of the uselessness of numerology to base your decisions on. Yet, there are people paying $10 for wrong answers. Or even worse, people, knowing full well that gematria scamming goes on think that maybe they need themselves a slice of that grifting pie.
I would hope most people are beyond the psychic readings as shown in movie tropes by now. It’s unlikely that a Nigerian prince email actually works now, but more likely one of the variations of the advanced fee scam (lottery, inheritance, etc….) I hope that if some lady with an actual crystal ball, large gold earrings and a Romanian accent (faked) sold people a psychic reading that they would recognize that if they cough up the $10 it’s just a lark. I hope that the gematria variation of the psychic reading scam reaches that point. “Vell, darlink…give me $10 and I vill give you da wronk information!”
But here we are with everybody being an expert on everything, muddying up the Internet armchair quarterbacking because gullible people are voters, too. As they should be, and this is your semi-regular reminder that these things are not even close to being new to the 21st century. Can hardly wait for the 2024 US presidential election. Should be lots of fun.
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