some things i learned
some things i learned
a gato reflects upon the nature of government and governors
politicians are terrible at science, economics, and finance. most of them are terrible at most things apart from getting elected.
having spoken to, advised, and interacted with dozens upon dozens of them across covid (having really been blessedly free from exposure to this ecosystem previously) i have just been astonished at how much they presume to dictate about given how little they understand.
it’s children juggling nitroglycerine because they assume no one would have handed it to them if it were dangerous and that “someone must know what’s going on.”
but no one does.
certainly the “experts” don’t. they are making stuff up, getting it wrong, and flogging long dead hobbyhorses as they drag us ever deeper into ditches.
and this becomes a severe problem when the technocratic tail starts wagging the governmental dog.
and make no mistake: they do.
what do you think just happened? politicians saw a crisis and had no idea what to do about it. they knew nothing about pandemics. they have no one on their staff who did. they relied entirely on “experts” at CDC, FDA, NIH and we all saw how that plan worked out.
and it will happen again. it’s already happening again. the green grift is just a smarter version of covid with greater reach.
the greatest enemy of we the people is not left or right. it’s bureaucracy and technocracy. it’s the belief in experts, in accumulated institutional competence, fair play, and honest attempts at getting it right that have left us easy marks for carnival barkers and charlatans.
and they are fooling the politicians just as they fool us, probably more.
and this makes the politicians all the more dangerous to us: because they have no idea if they are telling the truth
recall gato’s postulate (whose derivation you may see HERE)
a democratic government powerful enough to dictate that which is bought and sold will inevitably devolve into rule by rube.
the rube lacks all discernment. the rube is a true believer who has taken over for the grifters that built the system but who does not understand that the system is a grift.
they inhabit an ideology bespoke for taking money and freedom and really, truly believe it to be science or justice or biology and seek righteous crusades to “serve the collective good” and remake the world to save it.
they have crossed the event horizon into the clownworld singularity and can no longer observe events outside it.
it’s painfully obvious when you see their actual conclaves.
only in a perfectly circular self-referential frame can this seem like science.
they deny reality as core belief and inhabit a schoolchild’s LARP of “managing the world” when they lack even the basic information to see, much less assess any sort of objective ground state reality.
gatopal™ and long time friend doomberg always has lots of useful things to say on this topic.
(plus, it’s fun to watch a plucky green chicken repeatedly beat world leaders at tic tac toe)
the reality is that reality does not care about “consensus.” no matter how hard you “believe” that windmills can run a viable power grid with stable baseline output, it will not heat your home when the breeze drops. power over sweep is still a third power function of windspeed.
no matter how hard you believe that “communism is totally going to work and not devolve into homicidal dictatorship because we have smarter guys this time!” it won’t. they aren’t smarter and even if they were, no one is smart enough to solve the informational problems of central planning and not cause calamity.
and if those purportedly “in charge” cannot see this, you are in for some interesting times…
these “alpha-rubes” live in a world that is all appeal to authority stacked like turtles all the way down.
so what happens if this source of validation is corrupt?
you get the worst of all worlds:
a scheming, unaccountable grand vizier and a useful idiot king on the mistaken moral crusade upon which his advisors have set him.
do you think ANY of these people understand climate science or pandemic management or even basic statistics, economics, or logic beyond what the people around them are telling them?
can they tell a good expert from a liar with a model?
no.
and worse, the selection is adverse.
they choose flash, profession of certainty, and whatever allows them to do what they wanted. so they gravitate to the liars and simplifiers who are telling it like it ain’t with sensational claims that lack foundation.
if you cannot tell an expert from a credentialed con-man, you go with what works for you. you go with the answer that lets you do what you want. and politicians want power.
and this is, of course, precisely why we should not grant it to them. this is “sorcerer’s apprentice” level debacle in process with 20 more on deck. then they will call you crazy and gaslight you for claiming otherwise.
this is how the basic nature of “democratically elected” government becomes a puppetshow with the strings held by a few unelected and near perpetual puppetmasters.
who is declaring “the crises”?
who is deciding upon “the solutions”?
because it sure ain’t anyone you voted for.
it’s how one winds up serving a technocracy that was intended to serve us and increasingly having no idea where within these byzantine systems the actual power lies.
who in late 2019 would have wagered that in 2020, the most influential figures in the US government would be debbie birx, tony fauci, and robert redfield? i mean, how many had even heard their names before.
but when you panic the rubes you left in charge, the “leaders” desperately demand to be led. and this puts all save the most independent and iconoclastic of them at the mercy of viziers with delusions of grandeur.
and this really crystalized something for me. the future lies in open, emergent science and the reigning technocratic clerisy will do everything it can to kill this impulse and train their prerogative and privilege.
they will do anything to avoid the free and fair playing field of open adversarial assessment that science is supposed to be.
“your silence is settled” was the mantra.
“shut up!” they said, “the wizards of woo woo are speaking!”
this is going to be the unalterable agenda of those who inhabit narrative over reality precisely because these narratives cannot survive contact with reality.
they will grant themselves position and prestige and then use them in circular fashion to validate the grants. we’re in power because we’re the experts. we’re experts because we’re in power and get to decide who gets published and credentialed. lather, rinse, repeat.
this woo woo has become endemic to our way of life and mode of governance.
the cancer is fully metastatic and you will find it in every organ you examine like some vast fractal infection self-similar at every level.
left vs right is mostly a sideshow.
the real fight is us against the institutions, the bureaucracy, the regulator: all the dangerous denizens of the permanent state.
you’re seeing over and over the disdain in which they hold you and the extent to which they collaborate against you.
it won’t stop.
this is quite literally what this system is for, what it was designed and evolved to so, and the frisson of funktionslust it derives from so doing is palpable.
the permanent state loves its job.
this is not democracy, it is the devolution of power into invisible and unaccountable realms.
this is not freedom, it is servitude.
and if we would regain our agency, then it must be the project of our time to implacable tear this down, brick by brick, bureaucrat by bureaucrat and return to the inalienable rights that constitute a republic.
there is one simple heuristic and polestar that we may use to guide us on that which need be excised.
and it is this:
because this is how they get you. they find some emotional case and “bad outcome” and say “oh, how terrible, we should have the power to stop it!” and then call you “pro little kids starving” for wanting to make stealing from stores a crime or call you “a denier” and “an enemy of humanity” for suggesting that even if climate is changing, it’s easier and more fruitful to adapt than to destroy the modern world in the vain hope of living in the dark and eating bugs to change the weather. if we do not decide who can open a restaurant and under what conditions, then ANYONE could open one any way they wanted!
um, yes. that’s sort of the point.
rights are absolute or they are not rights.
the government is not here to help.
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
and if you mistake a bad wizard for a good one, well, what happens next is on you…
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