Far-right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones reportedly hosted a livestream on social media with "Assassinate Biden" in the title, causing the internet to erupt in calls for an investigation. Independent multimedia journalist David Leavitt flagged Jones' stream on X, which was formerly ...
      • Nobody@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        20 days ago

        Exactly. It doesn’t make sense because it’s a grift. These “pundits” are getting rich by scaring ignorant people.

        • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
          41·
          20 days ago

          We are all so distracted with our own problems we allow the wolves to run rampant. It’s quite sad.

      • Leviathan@lemmy.world
        4·
        20 days ago

        Exactly, it’s akin to a dog pushing a button to get a treat, he’ll push it more and more often if it works. Except in this case the button is what gets his fans engaged and the treat is money.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      9·
      20 days ago

      I’m of the opinion that we defined it several thousand years ago, in some form at least.

      https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/

      Belangia helpfully adds: “A-gnoia means literally ‘not-knowing’; a-mathia means literally ‘not-learning.’ In addition to the type of amathia that is an inability to learn, there is another form that is an unwillingness to learn. … Robert Musii in an essay called On Stupidity, distinguished between two forms of stupidity, one he called ‘an honorable kind’ due to a lack of natural ability and another, much more sinister kind, that he called ‘intelligent stupidity.'”

      Belangia also quotes Glenn Hughes, from an essay entitled “Voegelin’s Use of Musil’s Concept of Intelligent Stupidity in Hitler and the Germans,” providing a further elucidation of the concept of amathia (italics in the original):

      “The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”

      • Machinist@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        20 days ago

        Willful ignorance is the greatest sin. I’ve been saying that for a while now, not that I believe in sin.

        COVID was a real eye opener for me. Seeing how far people would go to remain ignorant.

        Stupid can’t be helped and there is nothing wrong with it. Ignorance is different and not necessarily bad, if you see that you’re ignorant about something, you can choose to educate yourself.

        However, willful ignorance is a different thing. I believe that most of society’s ills are rooted in willful ignorance and its exploitation by the evil.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
          4·
          20 days ago

          However, willful ignorance is a different thing. I believe that most of society’s ills are rooted in willful ignorance and its exploitation by the evil.

          “Wisdom alone, is the good for man, ignorance the only evil” (Euthydemus 281d)

          “There is, he said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance” (in Diogenes Laertius, II.31)

          Personally I believe in the statement about “a spiritual disease needing a spiritual cure”, but I’m not going for some spiritual mumbojumbo. If we take the spiritual disease to be some sort of block in your empathic abilities, however conscious or unconscious, and then we look at some of the most recent studies on empathogens (MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, etc), it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that the “spiritual cure” might be something as simple as MDMA/psychedelic-assisted therapy.

          Maybe we could call looking into this something like "Project Pretty-obvious-when-you-think-about-it "

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          3·
          20 days ago

          not that I believe in sin

          It’s perfectly legitimate to have the concept of sin, even if you don’t believe in a deity. There’s a moral code, whether defined by religious precepts, societal convention, personal preference,or objective logic, and evil is a sin against that regardless.

      • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
        143·
        20 days ago

        I’m of the opinion that the car-based society in the States throughout the 50s to the 90s is the reason they’re all fucked in the head due to lead poisoning from gas fumes

        So yes, heavy metal poisoning

        • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
          5·
          20 days ago

          That might explain some of the boomer problems. Jones is a gen-xer though, we had phased lead based fuel out of almost everything by the time he was growing up.

          He very well could have eaten lead paint chips as a kid though. His supplements have also been tested and shown to contain unhealthy amounts of lead.

      • foggy@lemmy.world
        6·
        20 days ago

        Possibly. I think he really lacks an ability to see how his attention seeking habits negatively affect others, and I don’t think he’s quite capable of having it explained to him.

        I feel like something broke in his brain when he got fuck you money for doing good investigative journalism in the early 90s.

        Like his brain went “oh okay. Just tell people how they’re being manipulated and you get a free ride.” and he’s been stuck there ever since. And his tales of how we’re being manipulated grew taller and taller.

        It’s like some attention seeking shit mixed with a super low IQ. Idk.

    • dwemthy@lemdro.idEnglish
      4·
      20 days ago

      He has a “freakishly large neck” (his words) that prevents him from getting enough oxygen when he sleeps. When he was young he spent hours under a house with insecticide spray in the air. I’m sure there are other tidbits in forgetting, but suffice it to say that you’re underselling him by saying he has “a” yet to be defined mental disorder.