Boiling frog syndrome is a metaphor that refers to the creep of some insidious process that sinks in slowly and only becomes apparent over time. In it, a frog in increasingly hot water will not attempt escape as long as the temperature is increased gradually. It happens a little bit at a time, until the poor frog meets its end, in the end.
Scientifically, the fable is on poor footing — most frogs would actually leap to escape at some point along the way. But metaphorically, the analogy is a useful descriptor for some processes which tend empirically to have this quality of imperceptible changes over time resulting in seismic shifts when taken as a whole.
This syndrome is frequently invoked in discussions about social, political, or environmental issues. For example, in the context of climate change, it suggests that incremental increases in temperature and gradual environmental degradation might not be met with immediate action, leading to a lack of urgency in addressing the problem. The metaphor is a cautionary tale, urging people to be aware of and responsive to gradual changes that might have serious consequences if left unchecked. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and acting upon subtle shifts in our environment, whether they are literal or figurative, to prevent detrimental outcomes.
The right wing is full of contradictions — a defining trait, almost. Chief among them is this bit of cognitive dissonance:
hatred of liberals
love of “freedom”
You can’t have this both ways, philosophically speaking. The entire concept of individual liberty (hint: it’s right there in the name!) is a core insight of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment Inspired the United States
This 18th century philosophical movement grew large in Europe, predating the French Revolution of 1789 and influencing heavily the American Revolution. Resting on the then recent revolutions in science, math, and philosophy including the works of Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz, The Enlightenment has its roots in 1680s England with the political philosophy of John Locke.
Locke argued that human beings are capable of self-improvement via rational thought and accumulated experience. His philosophy was a break with traditional assumptions that knowledge came only from authorities, and that truth was opaque and unknowable. Working in the same era as Isaac Newton, Locke’s ideas about human nature were highly informed by the Scientific Revolution well underway by this time. The two strains of philosophy have a common commitment to reason and empiricism at their core.
Political ideas of The Enlightenment
You can appreciate why any number of authorities would find the radical ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers potentially threatening — their age-old power structures were in jeopardy. It represented the democratization of knowledge, removing a dependency of the less powerful upon the powerful as a singular source of truth. The church, monarchy, and aristocracy were all on the chopping block — sometimes literally — during this age of philosophical and political revolutions.
The following philosophical and political ideals emerged from The Enlightenment:
Reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy. Phenomena can be examined in the real world to understand more about how things work and what is true. Everything should be subject to critical examination, versus simply being taken on faith.
People have natural rights, and prime among them is liberty — or freedom to pursue the kind of life they so choose, without infringing upon the natural rights of others.
Equality is the concept that all members of a nation or society are equal members and have equal standing in terms of their political influence and power. These are expressed in the American concept of equality before the law (14th Amendment), free speech, and one person/one vote.
Progress as the collective project and meaningful unifying force for a nation or group. The goal is to create better societies and better people by discarding outmoded traditions and embracing rationalism.
Religious tolerance as a rational way to prevent civil unrest. Appears in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Consent of the governed is one of several foundations of liberal thought from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who stated that to be legitimate, political power must be representative and agreed to by the people bound by it.
The social contract is a foundational concept from both John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, extending the consent of the governed and placing it as the true basis for governmental authority.
Fraternity in a philosophical sense is concerned with an ethical relationship between people, based on love and solidarity as the foundation for how individuals in society should treat each other.
Separation of church and state is a logical outgrowth of freedom of religion. The idea is older, but its introduction to the United Sates is attributed to Thomas Jefferson who declared the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause to be about building a “wall of separation between church and state.”
Property rights as a natural outgrowth of natural rights and labor (Locke).
Freedom is self-determination, but is not unlimited
The history of political philosophy reveals the evolution of Enlightenment thinking over the course of centuries, and how the ideas underpinning our government have deep roots. Freedom isn’t a new idea, and it does come with some caveats.
The first caveat is that freedom cannot be unlimited if we are to have a civil society. As Hobbes put it, if men are left to their natural state our lives will be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Also, we cannot preserve equal rights for all citizens if some members of society are allowed to trample on the rights of others.
That’s why the concept of liberty is so important. It’s important to our democracy, and it’s important to our day to day lives and how we treat each other. Freedom and liberty are similar and we often use these words interchangeably, but there is a very important distinction between them.
Liberty flows from equal rights
Liberty means that I have freedom, but only insofar as I don’t intrude upon your freedom. I must respect your rights and not invade your sovereign boundaries of life and property. For all persons are created equal, and the rights of one another shall not be infringed.
Political liberty has its foundations in Greek philosophy and was closely linked with the concept of democracy. Aristotle and Plato among others planted the seeds that would later be picked up by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and John Stuart Mill — giving us our modern concept of liberty today.
Doxxing is intentionally researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual with the intent and purpose of having law enforcement called on them for spurious reasons.
The doxxing term is derived from “dropping dox” or “documents,” and it refers to the malicious practice of researching, collecting, and publicly disclosing someone’s personal and private information without their consent. This information can include home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, or any other data that can compromise an individual’s privacy.
The intent behind doxxing is often to intimidate, harass, shame, or exact revenge on the target by exposing them to potential threats, unwanted contact, or public scrutiny.
The act of doxxing can have serious repercussions, not just infringing on an individual’s privacy but also potentially leading to real-world consequences such as stalking, identity theft, and physical harm. In the digital age, where vast amounts of personal data can be found online, doxxing has become a significant concern.
The ease with which personal information can be gathered and disseminated across various platforms—social media, forums, and websites—amplifies the risks associated with this invasive act, making digital literacy and privacy protection more crucial than ever.
Cruelty is a line for me. It’s a one-strike-you’re out policy. We will not be friends.
Cruelty is a moral stain. Something we need to outgrow from childhood to become a member of society. As a form of sadism, it does basic disrespect to the natural rights of persons and flouts the core ideals of democracy. Cruelty is antisocial behavior, and will not be tolerated.
I will speak up for those being crueled. And speak out against those crueling.
Primo Levi maintained that few monsters exist. “More dangerous are the common man, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions,” the Holocaust survivor said.
Evil is self-absorption; obsession with pleasure; fascination with the surfaces of things.
The nature of evil is to create a world full of anger, violence, and destruction.
Superficiality is evil
Triviality is evil. The emptiness and pettiness of American pop culture and politics accelerates the destruction of critical thinking. It is unconscionable mindlessness.
Superficiality acts as a kind of psychic armor. It’s a kind of ketman, a performance for all including, sometimes, the protagonist.
Superficial traits:
focus on the apparent rather than the real
focus outward
lacks emotional depth
perceptually shallow
concerned with or comprehending only what is on the surface or obvious
lack of “inner compass”; not grounded in anything or any framework
low self-awareness
overly materialistic
overly judgmental
sense of entitlement
Evil never looked so good
Bad folks don’t generally announce themselves to the world. Ergo, the devil in disguise phenomenon. Many are quite charming and persuasive.
Many people are taken in by the wiles of evil. It can be magnetic, and very entertaining — downright addictive.
The banality of evil can be seductive, in its reduction of cognitive overload: evil is an over-simplification. It is a perilous narrowing down of the range of possible thought. It is the clipping of the mind, as if a fowl’s wings.
Evil is the forcing function of morality into black and white, binary thinking, and limited options. To tunnel vision. It trades the tyranny choice for the tyranny of, well, just tyranny.
We have so many mental frames related to numbers, that have been handed down culturally for, in some cases, hundreds and even thousands of years. These numerical superstitions come from myths, some from science, some cultural and historic — and many are universal. They remind us that despite our differences across nations and across time, we human beings still have a lot more in common with one another than we have differences.
1 is the loneliest number… but can also be unity, and the origin of all things
2 is duality ☯️
3’s a crowd
4 is a square; representative of justice | Buddhist Four Noble Truths ⬛
5 is alive
6 is the first perfect number
7 notes in the musical scale 🎼
8 is paradise; lucky in Buddhism 🍀
9 lives 😺
10 is the most perfect number 🔟
11 players in soccer & football ⚽
12 is cosmological: zodiac symbols, stations of the Moon, stations of the Sun | 12 inches in a foot 📏
A dichotomy along similar lines is between the artistic loner, and the fundamentalist thinking and conformity of the tribe. This narrative also evokes themes of belonging versus rejection, creativity vs. conformity, strange vs. familiar, insanity vs. sanity, and many others.
Freedom vs. Control
These concepts are two very different conceptions of the Good Life, and I know that for me — I’m solidly in the artist camp. I’m all about generativity, about synthesis, and about making something new.
But is everyone? Not so much. Especially now or, perhaps — as with the coronavirus outbreak — having been here long before and in larger numbers than we knew at the time.
While multiple formal investigations against the Trump family and administration continue to unfold, and Drumpf supporters weirdly deny the probable cause for concern, Putin’s troll army continues to operate out in the open on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and other social media networks. The sheer scale of this operation started to become clear to me in the months leading up to Election 2016, having both spent a lot of time on social media both professionally and personally for over a decade as well as a hefty amount of time on political investigation during this presidential cycle: bots on Twitter had taken over.
Whatever your thoughts on the #RussiaGate corruption scandal may be, it should concern any citizen that an enormous group of bad actors is working together to infiltrate American social media, with a specific intent to sway politics. Media literacy is one part of the answer, but we’re going to need new tools to help us identify accounts that are only present in bad faith to political discourse: they are not who they claim to be, and their real goals are kept carefully opaque.
Cold War 2.0
We should consider our nation embroiled in a large international game of psychological warfare, or PsyOps as it is referred to in intelligence circles. The goal is to sow disinformation as widely as possible, such that it becomes very difficult to discern what separates truth from propaganda. A secondary goal is to sow dissent among the citizenry, particularly to rile up the extremist factions within America’s two dominant political parties in an attempt to pull the political sphere apart from the center.
We didn’t really need much help in that department as it is, with deep partisan fault lines having been open as gaping wounds on the American political landscape for some decades now — so the dramatically escalated troll army operation has acted as an intense catalyst for further igniting the power kegs being stored up between conservatives and progressives in this country.
Luckily there are some ways to help defray the opposition’s ability to distract and spread disinfo by identifying the signatures given off by suspicious accounts. I’ve developed a few ways to evaluate whether a given account may be a participant in paid propaganda, or at least is likely to be misrepresenting who they say they are, and what their agenda is.
Sometimes it’s fun to get embroiled in a heated “tweetoff,” but I’ve noticed how easy it is to feel “triggered” by something someone says online and how the opposition is effectively “hacking” that tendency to drag well-meaning people into pointless back-and-forths designed not to defend a point of view, but simply to waste an activist’s time, demoralize them, and occupy the focus — a focus that could be better spent elsewhere on Real Politics with real citizens who in some way care about their country and their lives.
Bots on Twitter have “Tells”
1) Hyper-patriotism
– Conspicuously hyper-patriotic bio (and often, name) – Posts predominantly anti-Democrat, anti-liberal/libtard, anti-Clinton, anti-Sanders, anti-antifa etc. memes:
2) Hyper-Christianity
– Conspicuously hyper-Christian in bio and/or name of bots on Twitter:
3) Abnormally high tweet volume
Seems to tweet &/or RT constantly without breaks — supporting evidence of use of a scheduler tool at minimum, and displaying obviously automated responses from some accounts. The above account, for example, started less than 2 years ago, has tweeted 15,000 more times than I have in over 10 years of frequent use (28K). Most normal people don’t schedule their tweets — but marketers and PR people do.
4) Posts only about politics and one other thing (usually a sport)
– Posts exclusively about politics and potentially one other primary “normie” topic, which is often a sport – May proclaim to be staunchly not “politically correct”:
5) Hates Twitter Lists
– Bots on Twitter have a strange aversion to being added to Lists, or making Lists of their own:
6) Overuse of hashtags
– Uses hashtags more than normal, non-marketing people usually do:
7) Pushes a one-dimensional message
– Seems ultimately too one-dimensional and predictable to reflect a real personality, and/or too vaguely similar to the formula:
8) Redundant tweets
– Most obviously of all, it retweets the same thing over and over again:
9) Rehashes a familiar set of memes
– Tweets predominantly about a predictable set of memes:
Mismatched location and time zone is another “tell” — and although you can’t get the second piece of data from the public profile, it is available from the Twitter API. If you know Python and/or feel adventurous, I’m sharing an earlier version of the above tool on Github (and need to get around to pushing the latest version…) — and if you know of any other “tells” please share by commenting or tweeting at me. Next bits I want to work on include:
Examining follower & followed networks against a matchlist of usual suspect accounts
Looking at percentage of Cyrillic characters in use
Graphing tweet volume over time to identify “bot” and “cyborg” periods
Looking at “burst velocity” of opposition tweets as bot networks are engaged to boost messages
Digging deeper into the overlap between the far-right and far-left as similar memes are implanted and travel through both “sides” of the networks
