“My right to swing my fists ends where another man’s nose begins”.
This is a passage from material from the HONR Network, an organization founded by Lenny Pozner. If you know a little bit of misinformation history there’s a good chance you’ve heard the name. He’s one of the Sandy Hook parents. And he’s suffered more than enough harassment.
The Alex Jones problem brewed for a long time. Training internet constitutional expert wannabes to troll and actively assert that our fundamental rights to free speech and guns were being taken away from us. While some lessons in civics and socialization were taught to the generations most influenced by the blossoming internet a weird sort of cognitive inertia developed. The prevailing attitude that an individual’s rights only mattered to every single individual and lack of recognition of others exact same rights. We the People became Me the People.
Being self centered and looking out for yourself as numero uno is nothing new. But what the internet (and preceding technological advances in information dissemination) did was make it easier to assert your views to a wider audience. And what I call reverse trolling was born. Now instead of just encountering the loudmouth at the bar who makes you want to find a new drinking hole, every corner of social media became infested with armchair constitutional experts stirring up trouble. Training others to follow their footsteps. As if being an overly aggressive attention whore is the most important thing to do with your life. Poking and prodding to look for little cracks in the defendant’s honor, trying to debate them on well practiced logical fallacy laden arguments.
I apologize for framing this as the U.S. Constitution and a quick acknowledgment is in order to explain that this is a seriously old issue that’s been everywhere for a long time. Governments have always struggled to keep large groups of people content. And bad influencers have long ago figured out how thoroughly gullible humans can be as a species. That being done.
Gematria and other loopy internet content serves as a sort of gateway drug to other “swinging your arms wildly on the internet” content. Within the training program there are built in some well practiced advantages, one of which is constant talk about persecution. The projection that others are trying to strip you of your rights as etched into a governing document. And in practice you are helping strip others of their rights to not have their friends, families and themselves suffering the consequences of bad information.
I am not actively encouraging anyone to join the HONR Network. Dedicating time to calling out bad ideas isn’t for everyone. But I’m certainly not beyond helping spread awareness on how sad it is that such a thing needs to exist. The education and socialization over generations has really dropped the ball on this internet thing. You’re supposed to find comfort in improving your knowledge instead of being stuck in the cognitive inertia of miring in the talk about the negative feedback loop you’re stuck in. At the end of the day you being addicted to bad information is YOUR problem. Unless you’re swinging them arms too wildly. And there are visible symptoms of desire to swing them arms too wildly. Like listening to a propaganda outlet instead of a more legitimate news source. Doing gematria. Defending Alex Jones as the poster boy for making money off of deliberately being wrong about everything.
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