political violence

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.

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Hannah Arendt, author of "On Lying and Politics"

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to refer to the confoundingly commonplace motives of the Nazis who perpetrated some of the worst war crimes in history.

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.

Evil is narcissistic abuse. It is Planet Ego.

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.

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Anger is the defining emotion of the internet.

It’s designed to whip you up into a frenzy in order to foment cheap pageviews. Its interest is in you becoming a histrionic attention whore, such that you suck in as much clandestinely stolen user data to your platform of choice as possible. Turns out, conflict gets attention.

Anger is also notably the “loophole” emotion — it’s the invisible one men get to have, while claiming for generations upon generations that “women are too emotional to be entrusted” with leadership or anything meaningful, really. Meanwhile male anger and aggression have killed hundreds of millions and wreaked destruction upon the earth many times over, as fragile masculinity is repeatably and predictably triggered over any little old thing.

A neat trick.

A story.

A lie.

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We need to bring the fire down from the mountain. We are not on that project — we are still on the opposite project: keeping the wizards behind the curtain.

Too many of the wizards are male, and are busying themselves in playing petty economic and status zero-sum power games instead of recognizing the context they are in — we are all in — as an infinite game in which the enlargement of the participant group to include and, not just reluctantly tolerate, but to avidly welcome women in to the club will massively benefit all the players. 

Then there are the white wizards who create pseudoscientific rationalizations for wasting time obsessing over 18th century racial animus as a massive distraction from having to do the work of creating anything useful or contributing any value to the world. They’ve taken their centuries of evolutionary advantage and painstakingly developed economic pie to split hairs over who ought to be denied a few of the crumbs, as a cheap method of papering over the deep well of collective insecurity and ego fragility precipitated by a lack of meaningful individuation and their failure to create anything useful or contribute any value to the world.

We could be playing this game together. Instead, we furtively dart about in Plato’s Cave imagining we are still living in a world of scarcity, rather than leveling ourselves up to behold the vision of the new world of abundance we have the capacity to create.

Not Ready Player One.

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