Yes, Exactly

Taleb is right, as he often is.

I would resent being told how to live even by people who were perfectly right and competent to do it. No one likes to be mothered past a certain age, not even by your mother. What's really aggravating about the current case is the attempted mothering by the likes of the Obamas, Hillary Clinton, or Ezra Klein:
[T]hese self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
The same is true of the ilk of Lois Lerner. They're willing to be vicious to us to enforce their power to order our lives, but they're completely clueless about how to improve anything they touch.

6 comments:

raven said...

Yep. And all those alphabet agencies too.
The good news is more and more of us simply treat them as irrelevant.
Until they bring the guns. Or they deny necessities. Then they become relevant. Criminal conspiracies are one thing- no one really expects politicians to be pillars of integrity- it's when they become Lewis's moral busybodies they get really insufferable.

Gresham's law applies to people as much as money- the bad drives out the good. Eventually agencies and enforcement arms become staffed with the moral dregs of society. As well as the courts. When the courts become perceived as unable or unwilling to redress wrongs perpetrated by the government, then other methods of redress will occur. These will be savagely repressed, sparking actions of a pro-active, rather than reactive nature. People in this country, by and large, do not know violence. Violence is continually degraded by being associated with words or feelings. This is dangerous, as the truth of it is whitewashed. The realities of civil war are the horrors of hell unleashed. Yet, they keep pushing.

douglas said...

I want to agree with him, but his position on GMOs and how sloppily and arrogantly he arrived there force me to question his reliability as a critic. Given that, I suspect he has the ability to be correct, but almost just as easily led astray by the very skills that make him oft times correct.

Grim said...

NNT is given to flights of arrogance, to be sure. On the other hand, he is perfectly right that none of the people he is describing deadlift.

douglas said...

Oh, to be sure there's a great deal in that article that strikes me correct and resonates emotionally with me, and I think there's certainly truth there. For me, the question is only how broad that brush is. I suppose I agree with him more than I made it sound earlier, but my caution flag is up sometimes when I agree very much with something.

Eric Blair said...

He sounds like Orwell. Not a bad thing.

Ymar Sakar said...

Ezra is a perfect example of why the testament in various Christian Gospels speak about the Jews being stiff necked or stubborn, how God punished them with 2000 near years of exile from their homeland because the Jews refused to obey God and rebelled against God, much as Lucifer did. Do the people in Israel, have they improved? Probably, if using the example of the Jewish authorities who sold out their promised Savior for some silver as a comparison.

But many people of that descendant line is still stiff nicked and unwilling to recognize their own mistakes and evils. The whole vineyard story comes back. Vines planted in different areas of the Earth, grow bad fruit.

It's a story that might eventually apply to the US even. The US is also in a contract with God, much as the ancient Israelis were and still are. Some humans do not believe in a personal God, just as some humans believe that socialism is just and will work. Their actions may matter more in the end than their beliefs.