Dealing With Sociopaths, Liars, and Cranks
Since 2022 I've had to routinely deal with online bullying. By 2023 that bullying already started targeting family members (like my wife, my mother, and others). I reported the matter to the police only after it had become an actual crime and the police acknowledged it as such. On several occasions I invited them to my home to collect relevant evidence.
For 18 months (since February 2024) I also had to deal with another kind of bullying. I reported this to the relevant British authorities.
I quite like what Andy from the Cybershow says about authorities; we're not against authorities, we're against authoritarians. The authorities can provide many valuable services and those who abhor authorities aren't always anarchists, some just like to do illegal things and get all angry that authorities get in their way.
In some sense I grew to believe that authorities do serve many legitimate purposes; without authorities, things would get worse.
We live in an age of lies and superstition. We are surrounded by people who for medical reasons or due to trauma are detached from reality and some totally lack empathy. Some are literally sick for or addicted to money. For instance, I've had to deal with journalists who would defend bad behaviour because some company - unlike me - pays them to act that way.
Regarding lies, I've seen them all. Some people lie to shareholders, many people lie about their wealth (it's obscene how far these lies would go!), and some who commit crimes would outright deny those crimes ever happened (even if they did).
I worry about a society that's facilitating and actively entertaining such people; they're a yoke, since they defraud people, steal from people, viciously attack innocent people, and it's typically done for personal gain, emboldened by psychological problems. A dysfunctional society such as this would never develop.
This episode that I listened to yesterday said that British universities now openly and knowingly accept cyber criminals and fraudsters from other countries in exchange for tuition fees; both Helen and Andy give several examples that they saw firsthand; the administrators at universities don't seem to care at all; they try to brush it all under a rug while taking the money (to train cyber criminals and fraudsters). Andy posits that there is some kind of societal or systemic collapse in the making and, unlike back in "his days" (when he studied and became a lecturer), access to education is nowadays based on finances, not potential or underlying skills. It's all about money, no matter the means (like committing serious crimes with many real victims). █