House of Eratosthenes

The first group resolutely refuses to consider the possibility he won this election fairly or legitimately. The second group refuses to consider any possibility that he didn’t. These two groups all by themselves create considerable difficulty for the task of governance, since they’re both sizable and each of them represents a different reality. In rhetoric, there’s no way for both of them to win a contest. And in reality, there is no way for both of them to be right. They are entirely mutually-exclusive.

There is a third group of people who think Biden won the election fairly, but aren’t militant about it. They’re willing to allow for the possibility that some shenanigans may have taken place. But they justify this with questionable excuses like “not enough fraud to change the results.” They don’t think they’re rewarding the fraud, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing. It is the sentiment of crooked places within our great nation, like Chicago, Baltimore, Sacramento…the bosses fix the election, and whaddya gonna do? Just let it ride. A lot of people in this group are from such crooked places, and they don’t understand the damage that’s involved when you get the entire country working this way.

The fourth group is like the third group, but biased the other way. I’m in this group. The idea that the Biden/Harris ticket won this election fair and square, it just doesn’t compute. We know that history, even when recorded by historians who hated Trump and loved seeing him go, will offer up a huge bright cherry-red asterisk by the Biden administration. And we know that is fair and just.

But only one group gets the megaphone, and that’s the second group. We could call this the “Schwarzenegger Group.” They call others “spineless,” but they’re the ones who “know” things that they don’t really know. Nevertheless, their “knowledge” has become the dominant narrative, so I guess that’s good for Placeholder Joe. It portends ominous things for the rest of us, though, when the prevailing narrative doesn’t allow for sensible doubts. They are deeply suspicious of anyone who doesn’t agree with them. About everything.

Maybe people in the fourth group like me, will end up relying on the good graces of people in the third group for…staples of life? Food? Shelter? They are leaning in the correct direction and they won’t be ostracized. But they’re not following logic and reason. They’re just trying not to be ostracized.

The first group is actually more logical than the third group. Yes, they’re strident, maybe even shrill. The first group, like the second group, will not tolerate any doubts. But at least they’ve been paying attention and they’re refusing to be gaslit into accepting silly, nonsensical things.

What’s scary is that a lot of people who would claim to be in the third group, actually aren’t there, they’re in the Schwarzenegger Group. The defining distinction I laid out is tolerance of doubt, which is a characteristic of reasonable, mature thinkers. A lot of these people want the cachet that goes with being a reasonable, mature thinker but they’re not willing to bring it. If you show doubt, they will mock and ridicule you mercilessly, and that’s the acid test.

After all: Doubts about Placeholder Joe’s legitimacy, contribute to structural weakness in our system of law and order. That’s the lie they have been told, and they’re eager and anxious to pay it forward.

Meanwhile, they’re in no hurry to fix what was broken with the 2020 elections that led to this fracturing. To the contrary, they want the system to remain dirty, and in the near future, to get a whole lot dirtier.

It’s going to be an interesting four years. It won’t be fun to be in the fourth group, where I am. But I think it will be even less fun to be Placeholder Joe. Or Gigglepuss Kamala.

Since people have a hard time putting their emotions aside when it comes to current stuff, I like using the analogy of Prohibition to get folks thinking about current events.

Using the same “four groups” scheme, we had:

A) The folks who wanted all alcohol banned everywhere.
B) Those who wanted no alcohol banned anywhere.
C) Those who were indifferent but favored Prohibition.
D) Those who were indifferent but anti-Prohibition.

Of these, only group B understood the true nature of the problem: Category error. Check out the full text of the 18th amendment. It’s a model of brevity, and today’s Congresscritters could learn a LOT from that, but look, here’s the only relevant section (of 3, the other two being procedural):

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Everybody see the problem? Every other amendment is either a positive check on the power of government — the famous “Congress shall make no law” of the First Amendment — or procedural stuff (tenure of the presidency, income tax, etc.). The 18th Amendment, though, uses the Constitution to regulate private commercial behavior.

So now you’ve committed the Federal Government to a business model. Worse, it’s not just any ol’ private commercial behavior they’re committed to regulating; it’s lifestyle stuff. In other words, it’s completely unenforceable anyway — making “intoxicating liquors” is only slightly more difficult than “farming” pot, which is literally a weed that grows in ditches. Even the insanely intrusive surveillance state we’ve had for years now, and which the incipient Bidenreich will put on steroids and crack, can’t prevent either of those things.

So now you’ve got a law, passed at the highest possible level, which is completely unenforceable. And it’s lifestyle stuff, which means that you can get a nice little rebellious thrill out of taking the drink you were going to take anyway. Even worse, hamfisted enforcement efforts have made folk heroes out of psychotic thugs like Al Capone. Even worse than that, guys like Capone can not just dodge the law, but actively subvert it, since cops are people too — they like a drink as well as the next man, but even if they personally abstain, they know lots of drinkers. They’re mostly nice guys. Are they, the cops, going to risk getting in a shootout with obviously psychotic thugs like Al Capone, to stop the parish priest from having a wee nip of whiskey at night? Better to take Capone’s money and look the other way… heck, buy your wife something nice with it, or put it in the parish poor box.

Worst of all, when the Feds finally DO get Capone, it’s for piddly process-crime bullshit. They can’t pin even one of the many murders he obviously committed on him. Hell, they can’t even get him for violating the Volstead Act, which he’s somehow even more obviously guilty of, and which was the whole point of the exercise anyway. No, they get him for income tax evasion, which — let’s be honest — we kinda admire the guy for, because what right do the Feds have to our money anyway? (Recall especially the context; the 16th Amendment, which allowed federal income tax, was ratified in 1913. The 18th — Prohibition — was ratified just six years later, in 1919, and the Volstead Act six months later. In other words, most of the people who saw and understood Capone’s antics had lived almost their entire lives without paying any income tax themselves).

So congrats, guys, your nagging little lifestyle amendment netted us a huge, and hugely intrusive, new Federal bureaucracy, that can’t even do the one job it was explicitly created to do, and oh yeah, your stupid amendment got repealed — the only one in American history — just fourteen years later. If you were trying to make the Federal government — ALL of it — look like clueless, incompetent bozos you couldn’t have done a better job of it than Prohibition did.

With me? Now apply to the current year. Even if you’re in the “Biden won clean; there was absolutely no fraud of any kind” camp, you’re making the same mistake Group A, above, made — category error. Whether or not there actually was any fraud is immaterial. Hell, let’s go ahead and stipulate that there wasn’t — everything was so clean, you could perform open-heart surgery with the election results. Nonetheless, something like 80% of the entire country, including something like 40% of Democrats, think shenanigans were afoot. Just as nobody could ever look at the government the same way after the Prohibition debacle, you can’t, absolutely CANNOT, continue to have a legitimate government without addressing the widespread perception of fraud. Doing nothing is the second-worst thing you could possibly do….

… so, of course, Our Rulers pick the worst possible thing, which is to all but hang up building-sized blinking neon billboards, Blade Runner-style, announcing that yeah, there was lots of fraud, but whaddaya gonna do about it, peons?

That has never ended well, but since we’re talking about ancient history here, note that the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933. Quite an eventful year, that. It’s probably worth remembering that, in 1933, there were an awful lot of pissed-off veterans out there who felt they’d been sold out, betrayed, stabbed in the back, if you will, by the very government they’d shed oceans of their own blood for. One is tempted to ask the veterans in one’s life “hey, how’s that ‘spreading democracy’ thing working out? We in a good place with that? I hear Iraqi elections, at least, are on the up-and-up”….
- Severian | 01/17/2021 @ 09:00
[…] comment I left at our parent site is kind of a mini-post, and I probably should’ve put it here, but […]
- Quick Hit: The Return of the Volstead Act | Rotten Chestnuts | 01/17/2021 @ 09:11
[…] We need a new unit of measurement. We’ve got people running around who think they’ve thought this through all the way, saying “Sure there was fraud in the 2020 election but not enough to change the results.” They think they are quantifying. They are not. They do not even have a unit of measurement they can use to measure fraud. And so I propose the FRAUDULUM. It is the smallest unit of fraud. — House of Eratosthenes […]
- Strange Daze | 01/21/2021 @ 22:43

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The Four GroupsSaturday, January 16th, 2021

The Four Groups
Saturday, January 16th, 2021