The Slow Burn

There’s an old story about putting a frog in boiling water, which for full disclosure is not about preparing dinner.  Oddly enough, I was thinking about this post several days ago which now has coincidental tie ins. Or maybe not, the Organic Matrix might be fiddling with the settings just to mess with my mind.

But anyway:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Our unlucky test subject recognizes that if immediately dropped into dangerously hot water, it’s a holy shit, this is dangerous moment.  If the temperature is raised slowly, the frog has more time to reflect on his situation, waiting until it’s so uncomfortable that it finally jumps out or succumbs since it waited too long.  The story in the most common format is that the frog…croaks.  Neglecting the part about how frogs in reality don’t like excess heat and would jump out long before death.

Part of the mix in what makes gematria/misinfo/disinfo/conspiracy content so dangerous is the deliberate attempt to target a younger generation that hasn’t had enough life experiences necessary to process that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Some would call this grooming, although thanks to our old friend psychological projection, this almost always means the evil leftists are making our children LGBTQ+.  Coincidence #1 - Alex Jones talking about chemicals turning frogs gay.  Hmmmm…

As for a slow burn that goes unnoticed, climate change is a classic example.  I had already figured out in high school that the fossil fuel industry was not being entirely truthful about the long term consequences.  Lying to make money today is far easier than actually caring about events a century down the road when one has croaked.  A seminal moment in my anti-conspiracy activity occurred when some jackass used the logical fallacy of claiming my comments had no importance since, “there are megachurches raking in billions”.  To try to dumb this down - apparently two wrongs make a right.

Coincidence #2 - Pat Robertson died yesterday.  It’s up to greater minds than mine to decide if his life benefited society or if he was just a high profile grifter.

What I do know is that grifting on the Internet  is a new slow burn bullet point.  Success stories create coattail riders that think, even if they are fully aware it’s morally questionable, that grabbing a slice of the grifting pie is the way to go.  Social media reaction has been lip service to try to satisfy getting government off their back long enough to keep raking in the $$.  Where climate change impacts the quality of life or worst case scenario our existence, rampant grifting on the Internet affects our quality of life economically.  There simply aren’t enough resources to keep an eye on all the shady activity.  Somewhere between a 2am illegal left turn with no signal with nobody around for miles, and plowing your car through a holiday parade killing several people is a vague line where it’s ok to ignore the offense and it’s finally time to do something about it.

Effective grifting requires some kind of exit plan.  Probably before losing a billion dollar lawsuit or getting thrown in jail for sedition.  And the easiest exit plan is to choose not to be involved in the first place.  Just like we are immune to alien takeover since humans make shitty slaves, people in general do not enjoy being ripped off.

Currently we seem to be in a phase where while there’s still far more money in hatred, there’s also far more content related to awareness of the Internet grift problem than ten years ago.  The slow burn of gematria and conspiracy thinking developed into Alex Jones, Qanon, -48, Queen Romana, and for now seems to be combatted on the other side by non-monetized people with a moral compass.  There’s a reference point out there on how these groups and individuals don’t work out long term.  They rely on the “stop or I’ll say stop again” attitude of those claiming to manage the offensive content.  They feed off that, relying on the lag time between the first entry in the pot of water and when it starts to boil.

Hans Gruber claimed to have an exit plan of enjoying the fruits of his one big heist on a sunny tropical beach.  Enjoy your moment in the sun now, sports grifters, nobody really cares about the petty theft.  Just don’t push it until you create too many John McClane’s and you get involved in something that saying, “I’m sorry” isn’t good enough.