Letter: Protecting the Vulnerable, Preventing harm

Recent advert featuring the odious political grooming gangster Negligent Fearage using the same old tactic to generate a personal revenue stream — very fishy indeed!

One is an honest, transparent democratic political leader, the other a political grooming gangster, with form(1): the outcomes of their policies speak volumes.

Here’s a letter I sent to various print media in Ireland and the UK

It could be used anywhere, translated into any language…

To the editor,

I propose a legal definition of behaviour that we are all too familiar with.

“Organised operations that target peoples cognitive biases, their social wounded-nesses, their insecurities, prejudices and worries, their misunderstandings, cultural conditioning and fears, and do that through public and social media, through marketing, propaganda and media campaigns operating on as cottage industries or at an industrial scale, manipulating vulnerable people for ideological, religious, political or economic advantage.”

This behaviour is grooming.

If we had legislation defining this, and criminalising it because it is intentional exploitation of human vulnerability and thus it is a profound abuse, then media platforms would be unable to permit any publishing of such content on their platforms, and it would be impossible then to exploit as a revenue stream.”

Yours etc…

— — — — —

Cambridge Analytica would not have existed.

Trump would probably not have been elected.

Johnson would probably not have been elected.

The 500,000 avoidable COVID19 deaths in UK and USA would likely have been avoided.

This is not an inhibition of Free Speech. It is the assertion of the *responsibility of Free Speech.

On Free Speech as a responsibility.

*Free Speech

Free Speech is a *Responsibility, beyond Right or a Privilege.

The Responsibility is to speak honestly, to be evidence based, to be as good a listener as a speaker and to acknowledge what is verified, reliable and true as such, and to also acknowledge beliefs as made up, as guess-work at the very best.

Free Speech is not a right to promote beliefs over evidence in matters concerning the shared commons.

Free Speech is not a right to groom, manipulate or exploit others through use of language and various logical fallacies, on any public platform..

On Boris Johnsons psychological setting:

1: “I saw the whole [European Union] change. It was a wonderful time to be there. The Berlin Wall fell and the French and Germans had to decide how they were going to respond to this event, and what was Europe going to become, and there was this fantastic pressure to create a single polity, to create an answer to the historic German problem, and this produced the most fantastic strains in the Conservative Party, so everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power.

Boris Johnson”

source: page 102, Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson (2006) a biography of Boris Johnson by Andrew Gimson,

In essence, Johnson derives personal pleasure in causing distress to others at a distance and he was encouraged in this and very well remunerated for that behaviour by others who sought to exploit his ‘talents’.

Whilst he is the performer, those who knowingly sponsored him, who gave him a public platform he could never have generated on his own, are the truly worrisome elements in all of this. They have vast wealth and power and no individual could ever counter their efforts.

Thus the only safe way to counter them is to legislate and criminalise political and ideological grooming operations as defined above, within the public domain, and elsewhere.