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A Demoralized Society

May 19, 2025May 19, 2025
by nK9

I think I know how Hannah Arendt must have felt. It’s painful to watch society crumble, have a pretty good idea why, and have almost no one listen to or believe you. I’ve been afraid of creeping totalitarianism since I was an adolescent and first started paying attention, and there have been numerous trends over the last several decades that point the way to an absolutely terrible, nightmare future for humanity. At least, as I see it.

I’ve been subjected to relentless “us vs. them” rhetoric my ENTIRE life, but in the past there used to be a recognition that political opponents could only do so much to each other and their “side”, because we understood that ours was not an unlimited democracy, but a republic, with specifically enumerated powers that would require a momentous effort to add to. That is, until the late 19th century. After Lincoln changed the nature of the federal government from one that facilitates and smooths out disagreements between states and regions to one that holds dominion over them, constitutional limits began to be more, shall we say, malleable?

Where I think the Progressive Era went askew was using the movement to add to government power. Instead of just removing bad laws from the books, they took a positivist approach and added new laws that would “add protections” for specific classes of people. One of the major deleterious effects of this was to industrialize grievance. Think about it; if you can get the government involved with your cause, and the government has enough power, it can create a department to address the problem. This, in turn, gives rise to activist groups, NGOs, and all of the state and local branches of what becomes a bloated bureaucracy that ends up spending more time fighting for budgets and handouts than in solving problems. In fact, that’s the LAST thing they want! If you actually solve a problem the money goes away so there is a negative incentive to do so. And they never do. This suggests to me that social ills are better cured through society, not through the ballot box.

But this system has the effect of disconnecting the givers from the receivers of assistance; if you count on the government to fix it because you’ve paid taxes and they promised to fix it, you can put out of your mind any personal responsibility you may have felt for your neighbors’ suffering. You don’t need to see it, you don’t need to talk about it, and you don’t have to think about solutions because the “experts” are gonna handle it. Now, after long enough, no one who isn’t an “expert” can even discuss the problem, and any suggestion that there’s a better way to do it is met with the assumption that any talk of change ACTUALLY means that you hate the person that needs help and you want to destroy them. That’s the erosion of public discourse and judgement; you can’t even discuss ideas without misinterpretation so you certainly can’t trust each other to work independently; an authority must be in charge!!

The moronic obsession with making everything political is always going to have this effect, and it leads to a world where we no longer can trust in the good faith of anyone. We fear and hate our political rivals because they can exercise power over us, we dehumanize them because it’s easier to make people your enemies if they aren’t “the same” as you, and no one cares about the truth if it makes them look bad. And the only thing that’s consistent is that the government gets bigger and more powerful no matter who is in charge. (If any Trump fans are reading, I’ll believe “drain the swamp” when I see it.) The totalitarian mindset can only see limits to government power when it affects them personally, but their solution is always MORE LAWS, not less.

We need to break away from the idea that the government will solve our problems; that’s utopian, religious thinking. And it makes it easier for the creeps and motherfuckers to divide us and destroy what could have been history’s greatest society. The great thing about the US of the past had NOTHING to do with the government; in fact, our greatness was inversely proportional to the government’s involvement in daily life, and not enough people acknowledge that. We need to return to a moral foundation that agrees that coercion is wrong, only individuals can and should be responsible for their actions, and that truth and continuity are important. Because what we have now is a society that can no longer differentiate between right and wrong. We celebrate thieves, liars, crooks and killers and shame people that earnestly want to make a better world without forcing anyone else to go along with them. And I’m not talking about corporations vs. the people, or republicans vs. democrats; that’s all surface level. I’m talking about those who would coerce you or otherwise force your submission, be it outright and violent, or insidious and shady, like a business who gets the government to write a law that forces you to do business with them. Wrong is wrong, we need to stop making excuses for it.

Rant

The Individualism Strawman

April 6, 2025
by nK9

When I hear people bag on individualism it’s almost always the same thing; no one is an island and we need community in order to have nice things. Therefore, goes the argument, individualism is stupid and childish, impractical, dumb, mean, and maybe even evil. People live and act in groups, so thinking of people as collectives, be they along racial, national, class, educational, or generational lines is valid and proper.

This sidesteps the entire reason that I personally consider myself an individualist. That reason is accountability. I understand that only individuals can act and that taking action creates effects.

Let’s say an innocent man is killed by police. The collectivists will say that there’s a “systemic” problem with policing and that the institution needs to change. But what if there isn’t any kind of policy that unjustly results someone being killed? What if it’s just the guy pulling the trigger being incompetent or an asshole? I think it’s lazy to blame a system rather than go after the individual people doing the bad things. Was there a protest that turned into a riot? Why blame everybody when actual, specific people caused the damage?

Well, for one it allows entire groups of people to be guilty. One thing that I find amusing is that depending on the specifics of an incident each side will fall into one group that blames the entire other group, and the target group, depending on whether or not they think the act is even bad, will either deny that anything is wrong, or rightly point out that only the person committing the act is guilty of it.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit collective punishment (yeah, yeah, I know that bringing up the UN and expecting them to consistently apply any of their principles is silly, but the point stands that it’s a solid principle) for a very good reason, yet we see it happen every day in a myriad of ways.

If you don’t like how something works on your social media feed, don’t blame “the algorithm”, blame the people that wrote it! It didn’t just spring into the world fully formed, specific people wrote the program! Do I know, necessarily, who those people are? Likely not, but that doesn’t stop me from directing blame where it should actually go. Even if there actually is a racist, classist, religious, or otherwise-biased rule, again, there are people that you can point to that wrote and implemented it, and are responsible for it no longer being there

What I think is happening, however, is that it’s that vague for a very good reason; there is an industry to support! If your livelihood depended on a social ill, you have to admit there are people out there just as interested in perpetuating the problem as there would be in ending it, if not more. The way our government works, there’s a LOT of free (taxpayer) money out there if you’re an activist for a particular cause. Deny it all you want, but there are millions (billions, really) of dollars available to anyone with a cause and a halfway decent line of bullshit.

Do we blame “the mob” when rioters burn something down, or do we blame the people that lit the fire? I blame the specific people because I don’t blame people for things they didn’t do. Do I support gun control? No, for the same reason; if my guns and I are innocent we shouldn’t be treated otherwise. And the “safety” argument doesn’t work, because criminals aren’t waiting for that one really tough law before they go straight, they will ignore the new law just as they’ve ignored all the previous ones.

What it all boils down to is accountability. Only the perpetrators should be punished, only the actual heroes deserve credit. No one else is or should be involved.

Politics

Let’s Talk It Out, Shall We?

January 31, 2025
by nK9

Since the inauguration I’ve watched as hysteria spews forth about the incoming administration with zero reflection as to their own “side” and its sins. It’s nothing more than the same divide and conquer, partisan bs. We dealt with four years of constant panic last time Trump was in office, and it’s already at a fever pitch once again.

If you don’t want a bunch of billionaire close to the White House, did you also have a problem with all the billionaires that worked with various levels of government during several previous administrations? I hope so, because I firmly believe in a separation of business and state and think the collusion between the two is the source of many of our troubles, and has been for quite some time. It’s also a tenet of literal old-school, OG Italian fascism. If you defend the apparently illegal (and in some cases, quite sickening) actions documented on Hunter Biden’s laptop by saying that he isn’t an elected official and shouldn’t be under such scrutiny, will you extend that same grace to any of the Trump-adjacent scumbags? What crimes that involve so-called “private citizens” colluding with government officials in order to enrich themselves (and their government patrons) should we pay attention to? What are the standards? Are there any other than team “bad guy” versus team “good guy”? If you’re not worried about Biden’s pre-emptive pardons, is it because you’re afraid Trump would have initiated witch hunts? If you believe that’s true, can you also accept that a lot of people believe that Trump and most, if not all of the J6 defendants were subject to witch hunts, or is that something only Republicans are depraved and evil enough to initiate? Why?

An old friend of mine, in an online discussion with a Trump voter, said that he wanted to talk more with him to understand why he would “ally himself with hate”, because that wasn’t in keeping with what he thought of his friend’s character. If that doesn’t explain that we live in different realities then I don’t know what does! It is also an incredibly disingenuous rhetorical trick akin to the classic “when did you stop beating your wife?”, creating a false reality that one has to deal with before tackling the real issue. He can’t see how his friend could be so hateful and everything-phobic; the simplest answer is that he isn’t, and that my friend’s been manipulated by assholes to assume otherwise, but so much of his identity is tied up with his politics that he can’t let go of the divide. He HAS to feel like he’s a fundamentally better person. It would never even occur to him that his friend of many decades simply has a different perspective as to who the good and bad guys are (both bad, but I digress), acts accordingly, and MAY just be as good and moral a person as he. And it’s the same story in reverse; I know that a number of my Republican friends think all Democrats are just useful idiots to communists and buy into Marxist propaganda because they’re lazy parasites that don’t understand economic (or biological) reality and think that declaring something makes that thing true, or that you can override economic realities with the stroke of a pen. Many of these things may indeed be true (on both sides) but making an assumption about what’s in the heart and mind of someone without checking with them is the height of folly.

I prefer to think that people don’t actually do all that much thinking of their own and that it’s a lot easier and cheaper in intellectual labor cost to outsource to someone who you believe aligns with your worldview and isn’t lying to you. Unfortunately, if you consume most of the media that’s out there, that is certainly not the case. You are lied to about everything, constantly. And even if they’re not outright lying, they may choose to run with an incomplete story just to be the first to publish, or tell a highly edited version, which has consequences quite similar to simply having lied. An untrue story is published, and thus believed, and no amount of corrections or follow-ups will ever convince everyone that the initial report was untrue, incomplete, or otherwise missing context.

To help bridge the divide, I propose that we start talking to each other as the actual humans we are; imperfect, complex, often contradictory. If you then find that someone’s world view is incompatible and you choose to become enemies, at least it’s because of something real rather than a strawman that you let a third (belligerent) party build up in your mind.

-nK9

Politics

Treating the Symptom

October 14, 2024
by nK9

I’m reminded of the Thoreau quote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,” because all I see around me are efforts to treat the symptoms of a problem while hardly anyone is trying to find the reason for the problem so it can be stopped at it’s source.

It’s everywhere; in politics, medicine, economics, even interpersonal relationships. More effort goes into slapping a Band-Aid on a problem rather than taking the time to figure out what’s actually wrong.

Social ill? Pass a law that forbids a particular behavior you don’t like. Got bad numbers on a blood test? Take a pill! Government running out of money and what little YOU have doesn’t buy anything? Just print more and tell people to stop complaining because stock prices (and everything else, they never mention) are rising so the economy is actually doing well!

I had a doctor whose solution to just about every problem was “I’ve got a pill for that!” but I never got any better and was spending tons of money on prescription meds, so I fired him. I dug into the causes of the issues I was having, found some treatments that were uncomfortable but doable, and went to work, experimenting on myself. “Experimenting on myself?” I imagine you saying, and yes, I was experimenting on myself. I figured, if so-called “experts” could experiment with entire populations without our consent, it’s no big stretch that I could do it on an individual scale. I found another doctor that was willing to help me fix things, so we started to see what I could do and how it would affect me. It took a while, but we found the right dietary changes to make, and I’ve now been off of all medications for about 15 years now. I can’t imagine the price tag of having done nothing!

About experimentation: Yes, we’re constantly being experimented on without our consent, and almost always without our knowledge. For more info, look up Operation Sea Spray, the Tuskegee Experiments, MKUltra, Operation Popeye (one of my favorites), and that’s just a few off the top of my noggin. There are others like Operation Whitecoat, that featured a form of consent (subjects were allowed to volunteer or likely be sent to Vietnam as a medic, so more of a you’re screwed either way kind of deal than actual consent), and a host of other governments that did horrible things to their populations (usually indigenous) with no accountability. I mean, sure, an occasional doctor or bureaucrat would have to be sacrificed to the mob if we found out, but none of the actual decision-makers have been held to account. This is usually because the really nasty details only come out after the perpetrators are safely retired or dead. On that note, don’t think they stopped doing horrible things, they just change how and by whom they are done.

But it’s not just medical experimentation; our “leaders” will often enact a new economic or social policy because it feels or sounds good, or because an expert in some government bureau or another thinks it’ll fix things, or more cynically, because they’re getting a kickback to push a particular piece of legislation, the contents of which are a mystery to all.

It could also be that they’re all truly evil, KNOW whatever it is isn’t going to work, but know they’ll be at the front of a new industry, governmental department, or think tank that will be dedicated to solving the problems they continually make worse.

We get legislation to cure economic ills, but the Federal Reserve is the actual cause. Nothing is done to fix what’s wrong at the fed, so nothing they do to “fix” the economy will be effective. The real solution is to close down the fed, liberalize the economy, have competing currencies, and make Congress ask us for money. That would destroy the government’s ability to piss away money on things that benefit them and their friends, though, so it’ll never happen.

We get legislation to fix the social ills of society, but the problem is governments at various levels having too much power over peoples’ decisions and associations, so none of it works. The real solution is to let people live their lives, and get our noses out of other peoples’ business unless it ACTUALLY concerns us, but that would destroy numerous industries that revolve around grievance, oppression, and hatred, and that makes a lot of folks a LOT of money, so it’ll never happen because they hold the levers of power.

We get all kinds of educational assistance bills, are told that college is what everyone should aspire to, yet few can afford it even after all the “help” (partly because of the economic stuff I mentioned above, partly because the government props up the college system so no one can make something better), when the real solutions are to end public education and state sponsorship of higher education. If students were the customers instead of the students’ parents and lenders, college would of necessity become more affordable and may even change form entirely to more of a specialized model since children would enter higher education with a much better base of knowledge than they do at present. This would also be likely to happen because no federal oversight would force colleges and universities to all follow the same rules, which degrades choice.

If we as a society were simply more diligent and showed some effort, we would make great progress toward fixing things, but we are instead brainwashed and indoctrinated to think that only a handful of special people have the ability to do so, and we just need to listen to them. Further, we’re told that everyone else’s problems are our problems, or that other peoples’ issues are something “the village” needs to, and has the power to, solve. I ask you, what has gotten better in life since the rise of the bureaucratic, fascist (actually fascist, as in the merging of corporate and government power) state? Sure, certain small groups have received benefits, but if a small group benefits at the expense of everyone else, is that right or just? I say no. Even if they’ve been historically oppressed; that kind of thinking only creates a pendulum effect of oppressed and oppressor.

As an aside, I know that a lot of the grievance industry centers on historical wrongs, but I think that’s a diversion. I ask you, internet, what is the starting point? I assure you, there has been beef between families, tribes, villages, and nations for millennia longer than any of us have been around. This is one area I really don’t think it’s possible to find the root of the problem, ironically. There isn’t a way to make anyone accountable, and that’s very convenient and a terrific way to keep the industry going because you’re always creating new victims. And there’s no way to go back to the original starting point before any fuckery, because doing so would have negative affects on actual people living right now.

Uncategorized

Misunderstanding Simple Concepts (Because it’s easier than thinking)

March 14, 2023August 17, 2023
by nK9

From my perspective, I’ve been warning people that they’re being lied to by the experts and authorities they trust, and I’ve been doing so since the early 90’s.

From almost anyone else in my life’s perspective, however (I’m assuming; no one is very willing to engage me on the topic for some reason), I’ve been spewing nonsense conspiracy theories and none of my “being right” has been anything more than an occasional lucky guess.

I can’t really change that, or convince doubters that I’ve been right if they’re determined to believe that all the reversals in policy made by “the authorities” has been the result of “more information being available” or, “the science” changing. And here, dear reader, is the rub, at least as far as I see it.

When people accuse me of denying “the science” I’m really doing no such thing; that’s the first misunderstanding. When people on Facebook were insulting my intelligence and telling me that I had no education nor basis for doubting all the peer-reviewed studies that were being thrown in my face regarding the safety and efficacy of masks and RNA therapies, I simply suggested that perhaps the data being used to justify everything was not necessarily complete, truthful, or accurate. I said that not as someone claiming to hold additional or conflicting data of my own, merely as someone who could read, and having read numerous accounts of the very experts in question being credibly accused of lying and hiding unflattering data in the past (with billions in fines, say), I doubt them whenever they speak.

Once burned, shame on me; fool me twice, your pants are on fire.

That’s what bothered me so much about the arguments I was in; I wasn’t accusing any of these people, who are actually scientists and researchers in some cases, of being incompetent as scientists or researchers. I really just accused them of being gullible, or maybe intellectually lazy. I suppose now that I type it out it makes sense; no highly educated person wants to believe that they could be scared into trusting such a corrupt group of absolute scumbags as those in pharmaceutical companies, government bureaucracies, and the media that were doing all the fearmongering, and also providing all of the studies and computer models that would supposedly justify the hysteria, right? I mean, if an idiot like me can see through the veil of bullshit, then why can’t an actual smart person?

Unless, of course, they’re right and I’m wrong.

My ego will certainly allow me to be wrong, but I doubt that’s the case. Especially as I haven’t had to change my stance once this entire time, and I don’t just mean about El Cüf. I’ve been sounding the nonsense alarm about major news stories since I found out how little relation the mainstream story about the Branch Davidian raid in Waco had to the truth. Then I looked into several other events in history that seemed fishy and you’ll never believe it, but I found out that the stories we hear in school about the past are largely, shall we say, not precisely true!

I’m soft-pedaling that; they’re utter bullshit. Now, if you were a rational person and you found out that every emergency the USA has been through in at least the last 175 years was launched on a campaign of misinformation and censorship of dissent (and let’s be honest, that’s been the tried-and-true strategy for A LONG TIME NOW, and not just here in the USA), wouldn’t you take everything you hear with at least a little tiny grain of salt? I don’t know about you and your predictive accuracy, but I’ve kept my stats high by immediately doubting all of the panic headlines and calls of “we must DO SOMETHING”, and I haven’t been wrong yet.

Even a friend of mine who I’d thought I’d gotten through to was fooled, at least at first. We talked over the situation at the beginning of March 2020 and I repeatedly heard, “I dunno man” followed by some statement about how it was 20-50x more deadly than the flu, that there were people dropping dead of it on the streets, up to 2,000,000 people could die in the US in 2020 alone, etc. In other words, he basically swallowed everything he was fed “just in case.” And I thought I’d done so well with him after he had his economic awakening…

Bygones.

Here I stand, doubting known liars, and still being called an uninformed, misinformation-peddling conspiracy theorist, while I have not had to change my interpretation ONE SINGLE TIME during the last several decades. Actually, that’s not true; I’ve fallen for deceptively-edited videos once or twice and made statements about the participants before the entire story was out. But those instances have been rare, and I believe I’ve consistently tempered my reaction based on the feeling that there might be more to the story.

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post (as if anyone even knew, lol), I’ll try to be consistent from here on out. There were reasons.

Uncategorized

Anthropomorphized bugs or human action?

September 23, 2021
by nK9

Seriously, it’s annoying as hell. First, I digress: when the US government decided to wage war on a tactic in 2001 I was skeptical, especially since the original uses of the term referred to terrorism as, basically, “rule by terror”. The establishment inversion of the term to remove governments from the definition and turn terrorists into non-state actors rankles but has been predictable given the nature of people in positions of coercive power; it’s still irritating. So when the US government declared a War on Terror, I did my obligatory spit-take, tried to explain to my friends, associates, and acquaintances how ludicrous it was, and was called crackpot, unpatriotic, paranoid, delusional, etc. per the usual. Then I tried to point out that terrorizing people halfway around the world was going to do nothing to make us safer, and that no justice would ever be done (precisely the opposite), and cue, once again, the same smears I always hear.

My plea was that investigation would show, if done well, who was involved in the various plots, then we could either persuade those harboring the accused to turn them over to our courts or go get them ourselves in small tactical teams (Side note: I don’t actually support the US court system I’m just trying to sell to normies at this point). No invasion would be necessary. Of course, as an anarchist there are a lot of practical problems with bounty hunting the baddies, but they don’t cost a trillion dollars or 20 years, and any violations of property rights would have been, by virtue of the much smaller scale of action, on a much smaller scale of harm. I should point out here that I fully embrace the idea that I can violate my own principles if I feel I need to. I also fully embrace the idea I be held to account for any harm I do while doing so. I don’t find this to be a contradiction; if you do, let’s talk about it and see if I can’t convince you. I suggest that someone harboring an accused terrorist would be justified in demanding to see the evidence against a person they’re sheltering, but once it’s been provided, stand aside or assist them in securing defensive counsel. And that’s also why I’d wait for solid proof; if I’m gonna violate my principles I’m gonna be DAMNED sure I’m right. Anyway, moving on!

Individuals act. Groups of any size do not act, only the individuals within them. Similarly, you cannot accuse any third party of being at fault when another party is actually performing the action in question. We all hear about what “the virus” or “the pandemic” did to our society, businesses, schools, supply chain, mental health, and economy but we seldom, if ever, have it pointed out in the mainstream that individual bureaucrats and politicians did all that shit! Stop scapegoating! If you look at the numbers from states that took a variety of measures and used a range of coercion to pursue them, you will see that the virus did pretty much what it was gonna do, regardless. Places that had hard lockdowns, mask mandates, and all the draconian controls your little black heart desires had no better, and in several places worse, outcomes to places that had none of that. Blaming human action on a virus is insulting; it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that the people most at risk are old people and those with unhealthy lifestyles, either because they’re just fuckin lazy, they’re ignorant of proper nutrition, or because they’re too damaged for whatever reason to take good care of themselves anymore. There are exceptions, of course, but I’m waiting until next time to talk about them, because they deserve their own post. If we eliminate comorbidities from the official count (which I in no way consider to be accurate, but stick with me) we had about 60,000 deaths from only covid, maximum. And those people were almost all over 80. All the rest died by their habits; they were fundamentally unhealthy. And this is no less a tragedy, but it’s no reason to take actions that make it harder to be healthy, which is what we’ve experienced the last 18 months. Not to be callous but I see no need to shut down the world and fuck things up immeasurably for years, maybe decades or even for the rest of human history, over things that are preventable.

The virus does what it has been programmed to do. Take that how you will; if it’s natural or man-made the description fits, it’s only a difference of whether humans or natural circumstances directed the virus to behave as it does, which is spread. (Side Note: it makes no sense to me that unjabbed, uninfected people are accused of forcing mutations, since there is no immunity to force a virus to mutate to invade their cells in the first place. Makes sense to me that people with antibodies or memory cells would bar the way for the virus, thus it would be forced to disguise or change itself in order to fool the bouncer and get past the door, so to speak. But I’m no expert; can an expert please explain how I’m wrong?) Also, it means that our mitigation efforts can only be effective if they prevent transmission, period. Anything less will allow spread and mutation, and you just can’t keep up with that as there are too many people scattered all over the planet. And all of THAT presupposes that we know the first thing about viruses or they way they interact with human bodies, of which I’ve never been convinced. As I’m fond of saying; folks are acting like we’re in Star Trek levels of medical science while I contend we’re barely past blaming “Bad Humors” for disease. And also for the record, I say that clean water, nutritious food, and good hygiene trump the efficacy of any vaccine, any day. Fight me. Okay, not really, there are exceptions. But for the most part, I don’t think we’ve ever needed vaccines to eliminate disease, or we wouldn’t have eliminated diseases for which there has never been a vaccine. When was the last time you heard of someone being sick with scarlet fever?

Viruses do what they do, they don’t discuss strategy in hazy back rooms or pass mandates or set guidelines; that’s humans. And humans are who you should be mad at for doing all this dumb shit over and over and over again and claiming to expect a different result. I say “claiming” because I’m not at all certain that this isn’t just a continuing experiment, or series of them. Having seen firsthand the past 30+ years’ worth of lies, ridiculous bullshit that passes for explanation and analysis, posturing and making grand rhetorical stands for the cameras, results that have nothing to do with intentions, and all the other unintended consequences of massive coercive systems I can only conclude that we’re all (and have been) Guinea Pigs at the mercy of whichever group of maniacal assholes happen to be in charge of wherever you live at a given time. They have no damned clue what they’re doing, but they seldom have to pay the piper for the tunes they’re calling, we foot the bill in every way. But they have credentials and the ear of the people making the rules so we all have to go along, don’t we?

Some people have decided to rush the pace of scientific discovery and push things into the world before they’re ready and provide for no control group. They are attempting to force it on all of us with no real idea how it’ll turn out, and we all will, once again, have to deal with the consequences. I’d say that makes them selfish, not the ones refusing to go along. I’d say that makes them short-sighted, not us. The panicked rush some people get to “do something” whenever they’re made to feel fear may very well be our downfall.

Uncategorized

An “I told you so”

September 10, 2021
by nK9

There are witnesses to every single statement I made in this video, but I suspect they just heard “crazy conspiracy” and dismissed the details of what I actually said.

Uncategorized

What makes an expert?

August 19, 2021
by nK9

We hear a lot about experts. But what makes someone an expert? A lot of education? Good guesses? A really fast computer that can run complex simulations with lightning speed? Sure, all of these help, but what REALLY matters is who is calling you an expert. A note: there are several Wikipedia links in this post and I’m not normally a fan, but for basic informational purposes about the people I’m talking about I don’t think it’s too great a sin. Onward!

If you have the ear of corporate media, establishment tech and/or pharmaceutical companies, politicians and their staff, academia, or lifer government bureaucrats, you can and will be considered an expert if you say what they want to hear, pretty much regardless of your actual credentials or your results. If they want fear and you can make a terrifying prediction, you’re in the club! If you make a fearmongering statement that goes viral, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t the truth, because very few people will believe (or even see) the correction.

And once you’re in, it takes a lot of bad guesses to get kicked out. Unless you do something else that’s forbidden, that is. Take Neil Ferguson, who, despite being a naughty boy and stepping down from his role as an advisor to the UK government officially, and various governments un-or-quasi-officially, continues to wield influence among the “respectable” scientific community, despite flipping and flopping (sorry for the paywall link but even the first bit is illustrative) more than a serious scientist should, in my opinion. And that’s a major part of the issue; they speak with authority from a place of intellectual ignorance and use their credentials as a cudgel against dissenters, and entire governments go along with their advice, as long as they get what they want out of it.

And this is not new. When Ancel Keys put forward his dietary advice, which comes to some very good conclusions about a healthy diet despite the mechanism for doing so being wrong, he used his influence to destroy people just as “expert” as he was, because they went against the orthodoxy we wished to establish. John Yudkin was attacked, discredited, and then ignored, and only recently has his research been getting a fair hearing once again. However, the damage has been done; once bureaucrats got ahold of dietary guidelines, and subsidies started to flow, inertia set in and it will take a lot to undo the damage. Not to say that either one of them had done perfect science, but both of them deserved to be heard so others could follow along, refine their methods, and get ever closer to truth.

Let me be the first to say that I have not studied the specialties that these people have, but I am open to listening to credentialed experts that disagree with them, judging their arguments, and seeing who makes a better case. Skeptics simply ask if a purported expert is sure of their conclusions before we make major changes to our way of life and they act as if the very act of seeking truth is being questioned, and that is unbelievably dangerous. We’re still finding out how much damage has been done to us by advice given in the 50s and 60s, and we’ve been making major changes to how we live and what goes on and in us the entire time, as well. It’s going to take a long time to sort out all the bad advice from the good, and also to even know what advice is bad and good for which people, because we all react to our environment as individuals.

Which brings up one last point I want to make; we don’t know very much at all about the human body. I predict that in another 30 years we’ll look back on our medical industry much like Bones McCoy looked at the 1980s-era doctors in Star Trek IV. But I seriously doubt anyone will be held to account for legislating harmful policies and encouraging poor food choices on people for several decades, because the blame will always be passed; the experts will blame lack of information, and the legislators will blame the scientists for coming to the wrong conclusion. Then the bureaucrats will shrug and say that they were only doing what the law decreed, and no one stops to ask “what if they just DID NOTHING instead and let people decide how best to live their lives?” I’d wager the results would be no worse, and I personally think significantly better.

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