House of Eratosthenes

As always, if we’re going to argue about something then let’s do it honestly. An agenda exists, which some people support — and they can give convincing reasons why they support it — to make sure Trump never, ever, ever occupies public office ever again. This is not within the realm of dispute. It’s been announced by more than one public figure. So yes, of course there are 70+ charges. That’s twice as much assurance as 35.

But, is that how the law works?

Wouldn’t those who support this be willing to concede, this being the case, that if Trump is guilty of being dishonest about something then he certainly doesn’t corner the market on dishonesty?

There are those who offer a somewhat different argument: Right or wrong, this is surely surpassing the tonnage limit on acceptable baggage in a presidential candidate. The prosecution may be dishonest, but it’s a game the bad guys have won already, so let them have it. Throw Trump overboard, feed those monsters, maybe they eat us last then. After all, he’s not innocent. And then…as I understand the plan…we can get a Republican nominated who has a chance of coming out on top. And we’ll have a Republican President. After playing the game of “be nice to the monsters they eat us last.” Which, of course, has a long and venerable history of working out great.

Uh…no it doesn’t.

There’s something deeply flawed going on here. Deep within the layers that never see the light of day. A crack in the building’s foundation. We have people calling Trump an always-loser when they know darn good and well, if that were true, we wouldn’t be talking about him at all. So they’re saying something that isn’t true, and after they say it, they advance some alternative candidate who consistently fails to net anything within forty points of Trump. So their point is that everyone else can win and Trump’s a loser, but before, during and after they make this point, they see Trump winning and their guy losing. By a lot. Then they keep saying it some more.

It’s like truth has taken a vacation. It just doesn’t matter.

And this affects everything. The more you look, the more you see it.

People voting for Biden, not willing to admit it was the wrong decision. Not willing to admit Kamala Harris has serious problems, is an inarticulate idiot, and is reflecting poorly on women.

It affects things that don’t have anything to do with politics. We’re eyebrows deep in the muck. Truth. Falsehood. Consequences. Somehow, somewhere, these have fallen off the table.

People walking their dogs, watering their lawns and riding their bikes, all alone, on sunny days, with cloth masks on their faces.

“Woke” movies losing money. Ninety-nine box-office bomb money losers for every 1 money-making Barbie movie. Like a lottery, they just keep making them. Except lottery tickets are a buck, not $200 million and up.

Jussie Smollett.

Heavy plastic grocery bags built for “multi use” and we can’t use them for that.

Paper straws. In plastic packaging.

Intelligence has all but ruled out that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine, settling on that device being planted Russian disinformation. Eh, no. That was b.s.

The virus couldn’t have escaped from that local lab, we’ve ruled that out too. Eh, no you didn’t.

A zillion and one failed climate-disaster predictions.

Entirely preventable “supply chain” disasters.

Crime wave, California water droughts, inflation. Manufactured crises. These were very real, what’s fake is the “oopsie” part of it. The spontaneity, the unpredictability. “Unexpectedly!” No. These were avoidable problems.

We are told things that plainly thwart common sense. The “climate” is about to lower some kind of cataclysm on us, so we’re going to change some rules. Move power around. Give up sovereignty, raise taxes, have conferences. And all this involves lots of important people flying long distances in private jets…often.

Being born with genitals doesn’t define your “gender.” But surgically altering those genitals “affirms” a gender. Someone should be explaining how that works, squaring the circle. Such an answer has yet to find its way to me.

Florida’s new education curriculum says slavery was a good thing. Eh, no it doesn’t.

They passed a “don’t say gay” law. No they didn’t.

Lie after lie after lie after lie…they get thoroughly debunked, and people see it happen with their own eyes. They know the lies are lies. But they maintain a belief in the lie, and continue to act out this belief, that they consciously know holds no merit.

Hanlon’s Razor says you should never attribute to malice that which can be ascribed to incompetence. I have a third alternative explanation to offer:

Our leaders, just like the hoi polloi they represent, are simply unidirectional. They have encapsulated their beliefs and their behavior, separating these from the evolving base of knowledge that’s supposed to drive them. They don’t change bearing, don’t learn. They don’t say: This isn’t working. Or, that didn’t work. Something’s wrong. We made a mistake. Stop doing this. Do something different.

Think about it: When’s the last time you heard of anybody with any meaningful profile and visibility, even come close to that? They all just keep-on keeping-on. If something went wrong, that must be the fault of the other guy.

Politicians have always blamed the predecessor when something goes wrong on their watch. But this is different. In the world we’re living in now, no one admits to a bad call in anything anywhere. They won’t even hide behind the old excuse of “My decision was good based on the incomplete information I had at the time.” You haven’t heard that lately, either.

There’s been a sea change. We are all to blame. One thing we’re going to have to conclude, or acknowledge on our way to concluding something else, is that the social calculus has shifted. The penalty for admitting you were wrong, about anything, ever, must have spiked. Or, the penalty for acting out a belief you must know is incorrect, must have been removed, or flatlined. We trust someone who makes bad decisions, as long as he does it consistently, above someone who has had a learning experience and is willing to admit it, share it and talk about it.

This change has affected relationships, associations, circles-of-trust. Someone tells a lie and gets caught at it — they just puff out their chests and spout more stuff, acting like it never happened. You’d think it wouldn’t work. It works almost all the time, and perfectly. If there’s any enmity in the aftermath of a lie being exposed, seems it’s become popular to reserve that for the person who exposed the lie, not for the liar.

I’m guessing maybe the China Virus did this to us. The paradox of these post-COVID times is that the labor participation has cratered. You could go so far as to say that working for a living has become the exception, and coasting along on social safety nets and the kindness of others has become the norm.

And yet at the same time, we’ve crested out in the willingness and drive people show to reject what they know to be true, and embrace what they know to be false, out of fear of being unemployed or unemployable. They’re acting like the monkeys in the firehose experiment, attacking any among their peers who show signs of intention to call out the lies.

I don’t know how to reconcile that. Except maybe, if people have been taking advantage of the COVID potato-chips-and-video-games lifestyle, their ability to get a job again if they choose has become an unknown and thus a source of apprehension. That would mean they’ve been creating their own problem. It wouldn’t be the first time people have done something like that.

You can see a noticeable difference in the quality of “leaders,” be they merely figureheads, or genuinely influential people. Even among their fan base, seems no one would be willing to go on record saying these are anything close to our best. In families, organizations, state governments, all around the world; the most influential out of any gathering, are carnival barkers. The decision has been formed before they ever stepped into the ring, or the decision is a continuation of something they said before. It’s been thrust upon them. In their capacity, they sell the decision, they don’t actually make it. They sell options everyone knows are not the right ones. And they do it convincingly. Those are the leaders we have now. They’re not leading us to good places.

I used to see people make amends from bad decisions, or heed warnings that came from the bad decisions of others. Time was, you’d have to wait a little bit, then you’d see it. I haven’t seen it in a very long time now. Anywhere. Where there were people saying “That worked out well for him, let’s try doing the same thing” or “He fell on hard times after doing the thing we were about to do, so let’s not do it” — instead, you just see people gloming on to brainless mantras, memorizing the lyrics, melody and rhythm, and repeating it without accepting any culpability for the ultimate outcome if someone else does what they say.

And we wonder why things in general continue to suck. No one’s learning. People are doing, driving, encouraging, discouraging, and a whole lot of arguing and talking. But there’s no course change even when there’s a clear and demonstrable need to bear hard to port or starboard. Everything’s just cruising in a straight line, top speed, like an asteroid that hasn’t hit anything yet. So processes do not, and cannot, improve. If we fix anything else, but don’t fix that, we haven’t fixed anything.

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LiesMonday, July 31st, 2023

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Monday, July 31st, 2023