Words Vs Perceptions

Words are an abstract invention of humanity to represent a meaning.

We arrange them into an order to convey a more complex idea.

Sometimes we overcomplexify and need to distill back to a single word.

The picture can speak a thousand words.

Those with an artistic brain, like me, just glaze over alot of the word soup, trying to condense and summarize all the blabber into what we need to know quickly.

I might look at one website, let’s call it a news website, and grab what I need to know over the two or three words that jump at me, combined with whatever the one or two most prominent photos are, the banner, the font, the branding, the colours, and any ads and side promotions. And what the lead columnists or editors look like if they publish a photo. All that goes into a funnel, and out comes “info from this page i should retain. It may not be what the publishers think. Ultimately, truly worthwhile fact is hard to pin down as opposed to something which is merely the opinion of someone i like or don’t like at that given time.

You come to realise that politicians and journalists by comparison aren’t really trained to think this way. They are word-priority people. And I frankly have a fairly low regard for most of them. Except Trump of course (bless that man). But then he wasn’t trained in that field, and that’s the critical difference.

Neither was Pauline Hanson, she was a fish’n’chip shop owner.

The word-people, and you can include most of the lawyers in this, are having a hard time coming to grips with this. When you have been trained to see a body of complicated text as supreme above all, you have a hard time taking the opinions seriously of anyone who has been trained to see the world differentky.

But words don’t feed you, or keep your house warm, or run your aircon, or get you from point A to B. Not unless they are literally your job.

Maybe there aren’t enough explainers for the word people to try to understand the non-word people. Those explainers, and I suppose thats me right here, sometimes make some kind of half-hearted attempt to bridge the gap.

…Which we are only motivated to do with the people who treat us well.

If you treat us like shit, we will go the other way. Because we aren’t experts but can work tolerably enough in either camp to get by. And then we can go off and do our own shit undisturbed. Simples.

This might be a good time to pay my respects to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, and arch-Maga-ite.

I loved Dilbert growing up, it was an extremely witty and funny comic. I remember the brief animation-series too and thought that was great.

This is all Scott Adams would’ve been known for had Trump never decided to run for office. But Trump did and people laughed at the stupid reality star with the funny hair, then got baffled as to why he started leading the polls. Not to mention outraged by it. Boy were they outraged.

Enter Scott Adams, cartoonist, artist, who helpfully tried to explain this to the masses. Because as well as being artistically gifted, Scott also happened to be a good verbal and written communicator (writing text in speech bubbles does train a certain kind of word efficiency), AND Scott had also taken courses in the art of hypnotism, out of some kind of esoteric interest in magic. But hypnotism is closely related to persuasion.

Scott popped his head above the artistic parapet to try to explain to the fellow word-people why the non-word-people were backing Trump. He was being a helpful messenger. He even wrote a book or two. He appeared on podcasts. I was reading and hearing him do this in real time. And I don’t think he could’ve been more objective, impartial and mild-mannered if he tried.

For all this he was excoriated. The word-elite were quite metaphorically shooting the messenger. He was called all their worst names.

Scott was burned by this, he was afterall just trying to help, and explain this phenomenon to his friends. So he decided to put his lot in with MAGA and declare for Trump. He was a former Democrat mind you. And Trump was a former Democrat too. And Gabbard, and RFK Jr. And Reagan. And Irving Kristoll who was a former Trotskyite.

Do the left ever stop to wonder why this keeps happening?

I’ll note that, as the Albanese regime tries to ram hate speech laws down our throats, Starmer in the UK doing the same, another self-proclaimed lefty-in-exile, David Llewellyn-Smith has hit on the fact that the politicians who are trying to ban hate speech are actually the most hated people.

I have known a few people like this: unable to tolerate dissent.

To them I would say: self-accountability and humility would be a good start. It won’t change my mind but better late than never.

For those who think I get my ideas from the Herald Sun, or Fox News, or “Murdoch” or some other tired old trope… No actually.

I have a bookmark folder of about 50+ news sites, and i give alot of them a brief gander. Mind you, alot of these news websites whether they agree with me or not (and half of them aren’t even about news) now furiously gatekeep or even forbid commenting under their articles. The DailyMail and NYPost are two notable MSM exceptions, but even they are heavily moderated. 4Chan by contrast is an anonymous chatboard (though likely fed-tracked) that can basically now be considered a news-site in its own right. Kind of like the internet’s version of the toilet wall. But then I have this other thing too, called the outside world. The real world. My own eyeballs looking at reality around me and talking with the people in my own real life, who themselves represent various demographic combinations but spanning age, class, sex, ethnicity, occupation, religion, but who are also unique people composed of these different labels and with the added ingredient of their own life experiences that might be idiosyncratic in some way and impossible to explain. Then there’s things like their mood and mental temperament of the day. Because we all have good and bad days. And their actions. How do their actions track against their words?

Well thats it for now. Read Scott Adams’ books if you want to get an idea as to how we got into this fraught situation. You might learn a thing or too. RIP.