reaching consensus about "consensus" being a weasel-word

oh noes, social media makes it "really hard to govern today!"

if ever there were a contest to find the living avatar of the phrase “the clothes have no emperor,” i’d pick john kerry and pit him against all comers.

i’m not sure there is an emptier suit in all the beltway.

it’s like someone did a gain of function experiment on patrician stupidity and entitlement, slapped a politician haircut on top, jolted the neck bolts to life, and sent it tottering down the hill towards some unsuspecting heiress.

but such people are often useful as they go to forums like the WEF and dazzle the davos devotees with endless reprisals of “saying the quiet part out loud” because they don’t know any better and the manic monocultures of assumptive right to rule that sit in such auditoriums actually applaud this.

have a listen:

when the government starts talking about how “difficult” or “awkward” the bill of rights makes governing, there is only one answer:

good.

that’s quite literally the point. that’s quite literally the genius of the form of republic imagined and enshrined by our framers.

the individual stands paramount to the state. our rights, derived from and imbued by our personhood not from some proffered license from leviathan, stand paramount to the state. and if that makes it impossible for the state to do some thing that it wants to do?

tough noogies.

that’s almost certainly a sign that it’s something the state should never have been contemplating in the first place.

the job of a just state is to protect the rights of we the people and stay out of the damn way as we go forth to pursue our happiness.

“we need to take your rights for the collective good” is the mantra of the dictatorial demagogue.

collective good is a lie. there is no collective good. it cannot be measured or foreseen. there is no valid fashion in which to measure trade offs or ensure optimization. it cannot be maximized by diktat. “collective good” is an entirely unknowable fiction conjured into being to convince a populace to sell itself down the river by adopting the “one size fits none” coercive solutions of elites, aristocracies, or technocrats (or perhaps worst of all, of a tyrannical majority).

the best way to make the demos think that your way is the best way is to lie to it about the facts and menace it with fabricated hobgoblins custom cut to sway and to frighten them into compliance.

truth takes a distant back seat if ever it manages to get in the car at all.

katherine maher, CEO of national public radio, lays out the media elite position here with perfect candor and admirable brevity:

it’s not about truth. “truth gets in the way of finding consensus and getting important things done.”

yowsa.

note the dovetail with kerry:

“the referees we used to have to have to determine what is and is not a fact have been kind of eviscerated.”

um, yes.

exactly.

there’s your “referee” telling us in her own clear, simple words that she mistrusts “truth” and therefore “facts” and just wants consensus and call to action.

this is not “saving democracy” it’s buttressing the demagogues guild and making sure its members are the only ones speaking. they do not seek an era of openness or honesty, they seek a return to the bad old days of messaging monopoly and “it’s not news (or facts) until we say it is” while using your tax dollars to fund their manipulations.

the goal is not to erect logical arguments, it’s to pollute the logic of others with false salients to cause good reasoning to reach bad conclusions.

garbage in, garbage out.

if i can monopolize your input data, bet your bottom dollar i can monopolize your downstream determinations as well.

where “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts” once stood now arises “your facts are the enemy of my consensus. stop wising up my chumps.”

so let’s take some real note of this other word that keeps surfacing in both speeches: “consensus.”

this is a slippery word, a liar’s word, a word whose true meaning in this context stands in diametric opposition to its portrayal.

“consensus” in the context of a society is a shibboleth for “someone is about to get railroaded.”

consider: if there were real, 100% consensus, then you need no law, no diktat. everyone is agreed and will simply do as they prefer. we only need such things manifest as a coercive state that mandates things and takes and redistributes by force if someone somewhere in this equation does not want such actions.

and that’s pretty much always the case.

they call mob rule in support of such involuntary takings and subjugation “democracy” and “will of the people” but is the consensus of 3 wolves and a sheep voting about what’s for dinner truly consensus? not to the sheep it isn’t. and adding 6 more wolves so now it’s “90% approval” hardly changes this conclusion, does it?

consensus based coercive rule is the opposite of rights and of liberty. it’s tyranny and tyranny of the majority is the worst sort of tyranny for dictators that go too far find themselves isolated and overthrown, but majorities are always secure in their numbers and this is why demagogues prefer to hide behind them and why they seek to limit, filter, and oligopolize the information that the mob uses to determine its mind and throw its weight.

after all, it’s for “the common good.”

the whole thing is a labyrinth of semantic psyop.

it all sounds so reasonable.

but it’s not.

the aspiring aristocrats want nothing like even or universal rules. they want the ability and the right to lie, the ability and right to denounce others as liars and anoint themselves as truth arbiters, and to deny this right to others who might speak against them.

they HATE social media for this reason. they do not want we smallfolk gaining voices vaster than theirs and coming to know one another or that no one really believes in them or their increasingly hallucinatory and absurdist world views. they want to repeat their mantras over and over until they become the consensus and their consensus becomes the truth. (because frankly, most people cannot tell the difference)

but it’s not working because we are all out here talking. (and worse, we’re laughing)

it’s not working because we increasingly see them for what they are but they are blinded to themselves.

watch this masterpiece of post modern informational interview theater as peppermint psaki praises kammy cuddlebug and nanny aficionado doug emhoff for “reshaping the perception of masculinity.”

sometimes words fail even me. LOL. just kidding. no way. i got words for this one. oh, yes indeedy…

gatotake™:

this is nothing like the commentary that they think it is.

basically no one believes this and everyone knows that no one believes this.

there may have been a time that such a level of tortured twaddle could be passed off, but today it’s naught but an insanely high pitched dog whistle audible only within an ever shrinking echo chamber that is so self-absorbed that it has no idea how unappealing it looks to the outside world.

their world view is entirely recursive.

they never interact with anyone apart from their fellow travelers.

this is not some cunning plan.

they have evolved into unwitting self-parody because they have no idea how far off the zeitgeist they are.

the cure for dominion by such deluded souls is to give them a soap box, a megaphone, and to make sure everyone hears what they have to say.

"say more words to the demos" is their path to self-destruction.

it’s kind of glorious in its own tragic flaw perfection.

they are losing everyone.

let’s look:

i suspect ur feminist camille paglia and i could spend an 8 hour car ride together and never agree once on economics, but when the woman has a point, she tends to be right on point and i would happily take that road trip just to hear her drop pearls like this:

now THIS is someone i’d like to see moderate a debate

paglia’s brand of feminism was the real, useful, cask strength stuff rooted in empowerment, responsibility, and self-actualization as opposed to the toxic feminism aggrievement anxiety amplification theater of today that must always be a negative sum game that comes at the expense of someone else.

and her ideas are resurgent.

like her or no, she’s the real deal and no real deal can handle the modern left’s level of cringe. they are all walking away and doing so increasingly volubly.

you know who doesn’t hate social media? paglia. know why? because she’s got a point to make, makes it well, and relishes the ruckus even when she gets slammed.

and so too should we.

and so too must we.

that’s what it’s for and the fact that the powers that once were hate it so much because it makes it hard to lie to us and drive us into false consensus that we might be governed by our betters is not a bug, it’s a feature: the primary feature, the critical feature, the feature our founders and framers would have stood up to applaud.

the genius of our republic is that it was SUPPOSED to be hard to make laws and interfere with people. it was supposed to be hard, even impossible to govern us. we had rights and they were inalienable. the state had limits to enumerated powers, and those WERE alienable.

gaslighting us into accepting that it’s the other way around is self-serving inversion from lecherous leviathan.

they’re telling it like it was never supposed to be.

in the end, there can be only one winner and no compromise whatsoever in the debate over whose rights take precedence, those of we the people or those of the state.

it’s a stark binary and a choice between visions.

there is this:

and there is this:

choose wisely.

a poor choice may be the last one you get to make for quite a long time…