Thread by @jhamby

This is an excellent point, and reminds me of a favorite author I don't often talk about because he's one about avoiding stalkers & related.

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That author is Gavin de Becker. He wrote a book called The Gift of Fear. So I've grown up in SoCal & lived in the Bay Area, which is…

…fairly anonymous, compared to Hollywood, Burbank, and the rest of Los Angeles, where you have news helicopters that can fly anywhere to 📹.

And then you're on the nightly news, or whatever. Or you're a character actor and now you have a for-real stalker. What do you do to fix it?

So Gavin de Becker wrote a book titled The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence, which it explains how to decode.

There's a whole bit about how not to get false alarms from people because they seem a little unfamiliar when you see them in person. Useful.

For the purposes of the thread I started, I was thinking about, ok, I have 3,442 followers right now on Twitter, which I think is amazing.

Thank you all for listening. Sincerely. In a Richard Simmons sense of the word, jumping up & down, thank you all. I love you all. You rock.

Emoji emoji (sorry, I'm on my iMac now). Send me $1 to pay for my iMac so I can deduct it from next year's taxes. paypal.me/JakeHamby

But the flip side of that is, I have 3,442, + or - real people following me. 2% of you might be stalkers. Or billionaires (send me $100).

For my Twitter wisdom this year. Anyway, YouTube is a whole other level. Y'all don't know what kind of YouTube videos I'm preparing soon.

(Millionaires: send me $10. Capitalism works, & it helps people).
As I was saying, The Gift of Fear is worth reading because he talks about…

…how to know which kinds of people give off "rapey" vibes vs. not, and how to put the odds in your favor, like approaching people at random.

Imagine you see me (I look almost the same as my profile photo when I've shaved, although it's a few years old) walking down the street. 👀

This is an example of a Monty Hall problem that de Becker explains, but I can do it in a tweet: all other things being equal, if you ask me…

…for help at random, if you dropped a package, or need help with a door or a flat tire or whatever, I'm much less likely to be a weirdo…

…who'll chop you up into pieces in his experimental Danish submarine or worse, than if I show up by your side offering my assistance to you.

Same pic, same me. But people who are predators, who are in the mood to pull some illegal IRL stuff on someone, are more likely to seek out…

…someone and help them in exchange for more than it's value. tbqh, this is the one thing Ayn Rand got 100% correct. People instinctively…

…have a sense of "tit-for-tat", prisoner's dilemma type fairness rules hardwired into our brains. Dogs & cats know about "fairness", right.

That's why it's a bad idea to reply to a DM from someone you've never heard of who doesn't seem to have a personality & complements you.

Don't DM the "Durgesh catfished" meme because the story behind the photo is unbelievably sad. As an aside. nymag.com/selectall/2017…

People can be cruel to each other, with personal grudges, despite whatever the ideological system is. User-generated content is free.

As I was saying, I'm just me, right. But Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, or the Trump family, crooked as they may or may not all be…

…they actually need that Secret Service protection because @BarackObama has nearly 100M Twitter followers, & @HillaryClinton nearly 20M.

I think of the murder of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez (1971–1995), breakout Tejano singer, killed by a fan just before her 24th birthday. RIP.

She would be 46 now, not much older than me. Gun violence. That circles back around to what I was saying about HST. 2005 was a bad time.

[untagging] Thompson killed himself during the middle of Bush 43's two terms, with Iraq & Afghanistan, & things did eventually get better.

Lots of people die at young ages from gun violence. Dressing up and worshipping Trump or Clinton is mostly harmless. But the makeup is odd.

She's not trying to look like Madonna or Cyndi Lauper or Annie Lennox or anyone else but Hillary Clinton. It's too bad she lost the EC vote.

Now that we've solved the gun crisis (depressed & psychopathic people shouldn't have them), I'll unroll this thread on counter-stalkerdom.

As a footnote for those more mathematically inclined than me, I have a theory that Twitter follower counts are logarithmic, not linear.

I just checked and the @gavindebecker Twitter account has around 2,000 followers, which is less than the ~3,440 followers that I have now.

Very good book, Gift of Fear. Read it so you don't have to pay them for private consulting.

[untagging] then there's @ExistentialEnso, who has a really nice style that I like. Succinct. She has 4,000 followers now, which is v. good.

…and she's cute & a woman & in a relationship so there's like 400x the potential for creepy people to have to avoid than before Twitter.

[untagging] every women from like 10 years old to 60 years old has problems with guys sending unsolicited sex DMs like you & I don't know.

So keep this stuff in mind. It really hasn't changed much since the Internet days. Anyway, log-10, 2,000, 4,000 followers. Then you get 20K.

Then you get 100K. Then 164K like Peter Daou. Then 1M. Then you run for President of whichever country(ies) you live in. Then you get 10M.

BTW, @AnnieLennox has 223K followers right now, and @ToriAmos has only 110K followers. So Peter Daou is in singer-songwriter territory here.

[untagging] And Donald Trump has 41.6M followers, and follows only 45 other accounts. So he's in @HillaryClinton & @BarackObama land.

[untagging] I have to say that I felt really sad when Twitter caught me in their spam filters. Too many Apple Music song tweets = shadowban.