Friday, May 10, 2024

A Favorite Old Book







Not the entire comment, but most of it.  It’s all the key points from an old favorite book.

Before this, and if I remember correctly *just* before this, comments were open.  Occasionally a Zachosphere flunky would pop in to drop a nastygram.  But this was the most lengthy and surprisingly coherent attempt at adding a comment to the blog.  It’s not worthy of being a posted comment without the context I’m providing here.

So a summary.  “Real truth seeking” does not include the frivolity of gematria.  And his debunk (superior than mine according to his own words) is not wrong.  But there’s already a research no-no.  He’s unearthed pretty much zilch, except one comment on a blog loaded with criticism.  A blog that includes similar mathematical analysis, for example tue ability to find words of just the right length and adding a negative modifier to them to produce contradictions between normal ordinal and reverse.  So he’s already managed to cherry pick and insinuate that all he could find was one post on antonyms without digging through an entire blog obviously focused on anti gematria content.

And he tips his hand, probably intentionally, by calling the post he was referencing was about -chilling antonyms.  The Rationalwiki article I originally wrote still refers to the antonym chart as -cool antonyms.  Oh, he knows exactly who I am.  Whether a Freudian slip or as I guess an intentional nod to let me know Qanon was aware of this material.

June 15, 2021 - less than six months after some overzealous gullible and violent people attempted to topple the government of the country they claim to be defending.  And the best they can do is try to through shade on gematria.  A straw man argument to distract from other disinformation presented in the comment that I might have been dumb enough to allow on the blog.  Nope.  No extra oxygen on the internet for your insinuation that these debunked ideas are true just because you think gematria is silly.  So to clarify and for the record:

Jan 6 was not a peaceful protest.  The election was not stolen.  Real children died at Sandy Hook.  The Cyber Ninjas had bs to work with and no choice but to give up.  Big Tech is not promoting gematria other than allowing monetized videos on dubious content.

Rereading an old favorite book is like rewatching TV shows in syndication reruns.  It doesn’t work unless you have forgotten parts, or pick up on something that you missed the first time around and have a eureka moment.  Or nostalgia.  And that’s what I get from readdressing this now.  The vindication that my being one of the first to be openly critical of the potential of gematria to add fuel to the misinformation ecosystem.  To foreshadow how what started as a way to rip off people for a couple of bucks on sorts betting could easily be used for other, bigger projects.  Like the megachurch of Alex Jones and the Qanon involvement in the incitement of one of the darkest days of American history.  Things average people wish they didn’t have to put up with and hope someone puts the effort in to it so they don’t have to.

The landscape in the misinformation/disinformation ecosystem constantly changes.  And Mr. Cherrypicker Strawman might have been right about gematria not being legitimate truth seeking, but for people like Mr. CS nothing is legitimate other than what gets the most engagement that day.  AI is getting better and better and playing with that is bound to be more convincing than SOCIETY OF JESUS=56.  I hope someone else invests effort in to minimizing the damage that’s brewing there.  People have been lying for a long time and there’s no reason to think that our nature will ever change.

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