Connecting the Dots
It is indeed amazing how thoughts come together...
The thing about connecting the dots is that the dots must first be collected. As I see it, you have to be exposed to the dot (let's say that's some piece of information, or an experience), you have to become aware of the dot, the dot has to be sufficiently noteworthy so as to be prioritized and stored somewhere, and only then can multiple dots be connected.
So it was with me this week, which is what happens when I have time to rest and reflect, time for the subconscious mind to make those connections. And two books I'm reading contributed multiple dots to the archive; The Mission, the Men, and Me, by Pete Blaber, and The Accidental Guerilla, by David Kilcullen. What connects all of these dots?
There's an old saying, "a map is not the territory," attributed to Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski. That's a dot. According to the wiki, "The map–territory relation is the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it." Of course this notion can be expanded; "you cannot judge a book by its cover," for example. You cannot judge a person by their physical looks, or "labels" that have been applied to an individual or group. No individual story is what actually happened; even a collection of stories from various perspectives is not what actually happened, although we might get closer to what happened as more and more stories from various vantage points are collected. Equations are not the problem itself, but simply a somewhat crude mathematical representation of the problem. A written history of a time and place is not the lived experience in that time and place. Reading a hundred books on farming is not the same thing as the experience of actually farming. Likewise you can read a hundred books on soldiering without knowing what it is to be a soldier. In short, all models (which includes maps, book covers, books, labels, equations, etc.) are by their very nature simplifications, and while perhaps useful to some extent, all models are wrong at some level. Climate models, hell, the near-term weather forecast, polling data, and of course I could go on and on, are of design approximations at best and just flat wrong at their worst.
The War on Covid
Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.
Which brings me to the subjects of both science and so-called mis-, dis-, or mal-information, depending on the day of the week. It came out this week that the government (CDC in particular) had worked with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to censor "vaccine misinformation." So, the first question that must be asked is, "what is misinformation from the perspective of the CDC?" To assume that the CDC, or any other source you can mention, is the sole source of valid information, a source omniscient in some sphere, is simply not a valid assumption in any situation whatsoever, and the assumption is especially invalid when the all-knowing source is a government! I'm saddened to have to say that many people thought censorship of so-called misinformation was a good thing; after all, we simply can't have people questioning the dogma in situations of extreme and harmful consequence. In fact, I submit, those are exactly the times when we need most to hear from those who have the courage to challenge the dogma, and the propaganda justifying the dogma. The propaganda in defense of our public policy response to Covid is not by definition the reality of Covid, it is simply a story, it's a single-source story authored cover-to-cover by the CDC, and therefore not to be believed. President Reagan made famous a Russian proverb, "trust, but verify;" when it comes to governments in general and the U.S. federal government in particular I modify that proverb to "distrust, and verify." As a sole source the government cannot and must not be trusted; this is precisely why we have, or perhaps "had" is more appropriate, a free press.
The War on Terrorism
In other wars…I'll start with the "War on Terrorism," which as a citizenry we bit on hook, line and sinker in the wake of 9-11. We will never win the War on Terrorism, for the same reasons gun controls will not solve the violence problems is some areas of Chicago, as I laid out in my post Gun Control - Why Not? We won't win the War on Terrorism because terrorism is not the problem, it is merely a symptom of the problem. Like guns, terrorism is a weapon, it is a tactic, but neither guns nor terrorism is the problem unto itself. Why are people picking up and using the weapon that is terrorism? I can hear the person now relating his story; "Why you ask, well...I just woke up one morning and decided that the best option for me was to become a terrorist, it seemed like a good idea at the time." Why are people picking up the weapon that is a gun, and using it to take the life of another human being; I'm sure it's not like "oh look, I found a gun in my pocket, now all I have to do is find someone to kill with it!?"
Conduct these thought experiments:
Ask yourself, "Why are people picking up and using the weapon that is terrorism?" Answer the question, and then again ask "why" and answer four more times.
Ask yourself, "Why are people picking up the weapon that is a gun, and using it to take the life of another human being?" Answer the question, and then again ask "why" and answer four more times.
In both of those thought experiments it's all the better if you involve others in the investigation.
Answering all of those questions might require some research, which is the point. Go deep. Get to root causes. Until we do address root causes these problems will not only persist, but worsen. You might find some answers that are uncomfortable to accept; that's a good sign that you're on the right track.
Likewise, we will never win the War on Drugs (drug use is a symptom of far more complex problems), or the War on Poverty, and both of these wars are bankrupting the nation fiscally and culturally. Yet like fools, we fight on, in the face of overwhelming evidence that a) we are not winning the fight, and b) we are actually exacerbating the underlying problem rather than solving it.
The War on Poverty
Let's look a bit more closely at the War on Poverty.
In his January 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” In the 50 years since that time, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution.
Well, what actually happened?
First of all, Johnson was late to the party, not that it matters. As you can see, the poverty rate had already been in steep decline for 15 years when Johnson saw fit to declare war on said poverty. The poverty rate bottomed at about 12% just 10 years later in 1974, and since then, for 48 years, the trend has been basically flat. The chart goes only through 2012, but the poverty rate in 2020 stood at 11.4%, roughly the same level it was at in 1974. In my view it's a complete waste of $22 Trillion (not including the money spent since 2014), or $66,700 dollars per man, woman and child in the United States today, spent to absolutely no positive effect. No thank you.
The War on Drugs
But, how about the War on Drugs?
Nixon declared "drug abuse" to be public enemy number one in 1971, the policies that his administration implemented as part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 were a continuation of drug prohibition policies in the U.S., which started in 1914...In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Administration was created to replace the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Remember what I wrote above about the U.S. federal government, "Distrust, and verify?" Everything is not as it first appears.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
— John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.
An 50 years later we are still at it. According to Drug Policy Alliance, “Over the past four decades, federal and state governments have poured over $1 trillion into the drug war and relied on taxpayers to foot the bill. Unfortunately, these tax dollars haven’t solved the problems they were intended to solve – while creating a whole new set of huge problems.” More detail regarding the whole new set of problems can be found at the Alliance’s article, “Making Economic Sense.”
In absolutely no coincidence, a similar tactic has been used regarding gun controls; the government needed to separate poor whites (indentured servants) from poor blacks (slave or free); can't have those two groups finding common cause of course. And so, poor whites were allowed guns while blacks were not.
All the way back in 1676, we had Bacon's Rebellion, which occurred in Virginia. It was a particularly interesting rebellion, because it was an allyship between Black slaves and white indentured servants; essentially they took a bunch of firearms and they tore stuff up. And the government's response to that was to roll out slave laws. And part of those slave laws were meant to ensure that Black people, whether they were enslaved or free, were not able to get firearms.
Divide and conquer, a tactic as old as conflict itself. When it comes to human nature, there is indeed nothing new under the sun.
When I was at the Naval Academy there were many, many acronyms, this is the military you know, and one of them was BOHICA. That's pronounced bō-hēka, long "o," long "e." On a side note, I have a friend Brian, who could speak entire paragraphs using only acronyms; it was hilarious! But I digress momentarily; the point is that whenever the feds declare war on anything, the first thing that comes to my mind is BOHICA, "bend over, here it comes again." It's sage advice.
In God we trust, for obvious reasons,
John
This was excellent John.