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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

I am by no means whatsoever an Alex Jones listener or fan. But he's been laughed at for proclaiming that human/animal hybrids are being "developed" for some time now (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa9jXkVpnw0, for example).

It's scary to see this article because it's essentially "proving" Alex Jones right. This is a very bad precedent.

The issue at hand is serious, but it's obscured because of the comedic/crazy veil that Jones's delivery and accompanying distortion/exaggeration of the facts causes.

This reminds me of his erroneous "they're turning the friggin' frogs gay" comment, which has links in a serious issue — atrazine feminizing male frogs: https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/.

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Alex Jones claimed 1) that the US Air Force attacked Texas with weather control weapons 2) that the majority of frogs in the US are now gay because the government is intentionally turning people homosexual for population control 3) that the most monstrous shooting in my lifetime, Sandy Hook, was a false flag and the bereaved families of the murdered first graders were crisis actors.

Alex Jones is an awful person. He lies about so much, some of it will end up being accidentally correct. What he says or thinks should be shunned by any decent human being, and he should not be brought up here.

Yes, I don't disagree.

My point here is that a lot of people who are not very informed, who may be susceptible to his conspiracy theories, will see this news come out and think, "Oh, he was right. Maybe he's right about something else."

IMO the problem is that it was ridiculed when he said it. Now he can look back and post a link to an NPR article stating that human-monkey chimera embryos have been created.

I make this comment only because a friend of mine sent me the NPR article [0] with a note saying "man maybe Alex Jones is right about a lot of stuff, lol." I don't know how common this sentiment is, but it's another talking point lodged in Jones's favor (to the detriment of all of us).

[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/15/9871645...

The frog thing is interesting because there's a kernel of truth there; we're releasing an enormous number of endocrine disrupters into the environment (PVC, BPA, etc, etc etc), which is wreaking havoc on both animal animal and human animal hormonal balances.

Obviously it's not an intentional government plot... but that doesn't mean we _aren't_ "turning frogs gay".

Conspiracy theories usually start with a kernel of truth. And then a combination of misunderstanding, paranoia, and intentional disinformation fills them with heavy amounts of untruth.

> Alex Jones is an awful person. He lies about so much, some of it will end up being accidentally correct.

Agreed.

> What he says or thinks should be shunned by any decent human being, and he should not be brought up here.

No. He should not be a taboo topic. Let it out in the open where rational people can see for themselves how crazy he is and make up their own minds.

I really hate this whole cancel culture thing, I don't even wish it on the Alex Joneses of the world.

I don't care for cancel culture, too. That doesn't mean we can be selective about who and what we spend our limited time on Earth discussing. Not talking about a pathologically lying conspiracy theorist is good for efficiency and mental health. To each their own.

I barely knew Alex Jones existed before he was starting to get censored from all kinds of platforms. What was previously just a blip on the radar, censorship turned into a mainstream talking point.

Agreed, that's the only reason I've heard of him either.

You're both lucky. He's been around a while, and had explosively grown in prominence before deplatforming.

What has been challenging, as an adult growing up into the internet is seeing younger kids exposed to polished and talented psychopaths. These people are very, very good at exploiting social systems and have no qualms about leveraging social norms for their personal benefit. This goes well beyond partisan media. I'm sure this will all sort out someday, but it usually takes years to develop resistance to the sort of manipulation techniques they employee to leverage standard weaknesses that all people have, and the internet has given them massive leverage. People are now exposed to this well before their cognitive development is complete. It is a lot to ask of kids to be able to develop defense mechanisms to military grade propaganda while their prefrontal cortex is still a work in progress.

Anyway, Alex Jones is bad, and while I don't care for cancel culture like I said earlier, I will worry about that after the many other more pressing problems facing life on Earth are in a stabler place.

I never understood 2).

Doesn't the global economy essentially hinge on an ever growing supply of workforce?

The frog one isn't far from the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5uSbp0YDhc

If you spout out every random conspiracy theory you know, some of the things you say will be true.

If he referenced some good reasoning, he'd be proven right. If he's just screaming random ideas often enough that one turns out to be true... he's still just screaming random ideas.

(Also turning frogs female is not the same as turning them gay - if he meant that it would propagate harmful stereotypes)

Jones is a kind of "bullshitter," as defined by Harry Frankfurt [0][1].

To paraphrase — a liar has some respect for the truth, because he knows its power and shies away from it. A bullshitter doesn't care if something is true or false, only if they persuade their listener, and therefore the bullshitter has no respect for the truth.

The point I was trying to make, and maybe I did not make it well, was that this is another thing Jones's adherents can point to to say "well, look, he was right about this." That means he can persuade more people, which is clearly not good.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

We can't prevent it until it crosses into directly harmful territory. We can just ignore it and call out the random luck when it is. He wasn't the first one and won't be the last one.

I'm with you there.

Exactly, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

If you'd rather have Nerd Cred just say you got the idea from the secret mission in StarCraft Brood War https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Origin

Life imitates art, after all.

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