>> you do not need vast conspiracies when you have widespread bad incentives.
No, but you DO need the willingness to do wrong. While this is a good post, absolutely none of the information is new: we've known exactly what the incentives are for over a year and anyone who knows anyone in institutional healthcare is up to their elbows in an…
>> you do not need vast conspiracies when you have widespread bad incentives.
No, but you DO need the willingness to do wrong. While this is a good post, absolutely none of the information is new: we've known exactly what the incentives are for over a year and anyone who knows anyone in institutional healthcare is up to their elbows in anecdotes of blatantly false and heavily-massaged reporting of admitting conditions, diagnostic coding, and so on.
This isn't a revelation at all.
Fine if you don't want to believe a cabal of globalist sociopaths aren't using the COVID phantom menace to bring about an unprecedented consolidation of power and collapse of privacy, liberty, property rights, and independent state authorities.
It still mean huge numbers of people in everyday positions of authority chose to lie. Chose to cheat. Chose to steal. And chose to DOUBLE AND TRIPLE AND QUADRUPLE AND QUINTUPLE DOWN on their lies and denials of guilt to the point that, aided and abetted by the media, the very meaning of 'true' or 'real' or 'scientific' has become lost.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. Can we settle for judging it as plain old immoral and criminal behavior?
They're not agnostic incentives. They're incentives to do WRONG. Poor law enforcement increases the incentive to commit crime, as the risk assessment changes. That doesn't mean it stops being crime, or more "understandable" or "forgivable."
Watch the videos of brazen pieces of shit strolling through drug stores filling garbage bags with valuables and walking out the door unaccosted that have become viral now. Does anyone here think that's awesome? Does anyone love that businesses close in their towns and prices go up because there is literally no cost to committing crime?
The people chasing perverse incentives have destroyed your economy, your democracy, and your mental health so they personally can make more money and oppress you to conceal their guilt. They're not rats pressing a button to get cocaine. They're humans exercising the free will to defraud their countrymen and punish others to avoid punishment themselves.
you seem to be missing most of the point of the post.
the point is that you do not need a vast conspiracy to achieve terrible outcomes.
you simply need to create top down incentive structures that drive emergent behavior from the bottom up.
no one has to tell a hospital to inflate covid. you never have to co-opt the admins or the patients or the docs.
you just need to have a few folks that set policy do so in a fashion that gets the results they want.
this actually means that small numbers of actors can be MUCH more effective in terms of pushing some sort of plan that they could be if they needed a conspiracy.
it only take a few of them at strategic points twisting price signals and incentive structures.
I think you’re both right :-) el gato precisely articulates what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” and how bureaucratic incentives create what Christopher Browning describes as “desk murderers” in “Ordinary Men”:
“Many scholars of the Holocaust, especially Raul Hilberg, have emphasized the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process. This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were so-called desk murderers whose role in the mass extermination was greatly facilitated by the bureaucratic nature of their participation. Their jobs frequently consisted of tiny steps in the overall killing process, and they performed them in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected. Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range.”
In “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45,” Milton Mayer describes the hierarchy of collusion that is required to enforce the authoritarian policies:
“A few hundred at the top, to plan and direct at every level; a few thousand to supervise and control (without a voice in policy) at every level; a few score thousand specialists (teachers, lawyers, journalists, scientists, artists, actors, athletes, and social workers) eager to serve or at least unwilling to pass up a job or to revolt; a million of the Pöbel, which sounds like ‘people’ and means ‘riffraff,’ to do what we would call the dirty work, ranging from murder, torture, robbery, and arson to the effort which probably employed more Germans in inhumanity than any other in Nazi history, the standing of ‘sentry’ in front of Jewish shops and offices in the boycott of April, 1933.”
this is the actual and deliberate weaponization of behavioral economics.
it's not about the MLM pyramid anymore. that's old tech. this is FAR more insidious as it actually seeds the bottom and grows from there.
it does not require middle management.
that makes it a VERY different kind of beast.
i think you're still thinking of this like it's the last war.
it's not. this is altogether more sophisticated and does not require the vast apparatus to operate.
it also leaves it with some new vulnerabilities. it instantly collapses when you cut the head of the snake because it's all responsive emergent process from one set of input salients.
Oh believe me, I wholeheartedly agree this is a level of insidiousness never previously seen and executed at such a strategically ingenious and widespread scale. I’m with CJ Hopkins that this is a new form of totalitarianism similar to (hence the value of studying past experiences and patterns) but ultimately divergent from the old totalitarianism. We are dealing with a different beast that will demand new mechanisms to defeat.
I do find your metaphor of decapitating the snake encouraging—let’s just hope it’s not a Medusa.
Since you bring it up, there is a lot more to WW II history than is taught in schools. Winners (re-)write history. There are certain groups that profit from a certain narrative. Did you know that to question the Holocaust is a crime punishable by prison in many supposedly "free" nations? To an impartial observer, that seems a very odd favor to confer upon certain groups. Particularly so for what in sane times would have been mere academic historical questions. Doesn't it seem odd if a scholar risks jail for (say) disputing details about Auschwitz, yet runs no such risk writing about Soviet gulags in the 1930s, or American treatment of prisoners during its Civil War? Even using official histories, there are flaws in the narrative. For example, if the Nazis were so intent on exterminating the Jews, why then were so many left alive (granted, in deplorable state) in the camps during the war? Anne Frank, poster child of the Holocaust, died in early 1945 in a camp hospital (probably) of typhus, not in a gas chamber or firing squad. None of this is to deny that the Nazis were inhuman in many ways. Merely sending civilians to concentration camps was bad enough, although America did the same, albeit in lesser numbers. Please don't call me a "denier." I am nothing of the sort. But I am a skeptic. There are holes in the official story. Plenty of them. Merely to ask "why" invites attack. Why?
See my response below. I do not believe that there is a "vast" conspiracy. I think there is absolutely an active conspiracy by a few very powerful actors, but this has nothing to do with the mundane evil of lying and stealing.
I'm saying the mundane evil of lying and stealing is the far bigger problem and it's dangerous to say "well, if you create perverse incentives, people behave badly" and leave it at that. Lots and lots of people made bad choices and lots of people suffered for it.
The key is the word "vast". But is there a small, effective conspiracy that created the incentives?
This is like the 2020 elections. I don't think there was "widespread" fraud. But perhaps there was there carefully targeted fraud that flipped the election.
What's misleading about the post is that this possibility, of a small-but-effective conspiracy, is not discussed.
I read this when you first posted. It's a good article, though I felt it was mainly preaching to the converted.
Anyone knowingly lying and dissembling at this point fears the consequences of their actions in a statutory sense more than the guilt of societal harm or immorality. They've already helped their mobster friend bury the dead hooker in the Meadowlands. They've had weeks to turn themselves in but are hoping she'll eventually be rotted beyond recognition so they won't have to.
*lol* Point taken, although my primary goal was to reach those who haven’t yet committed outright murder but who are being pressured to do so and may have an inkling of a conscience left and just need to be nudged into an act of bravery. Or those who have but are so wracked with guilt, they may be prompted to confess as an act of contrition. Aside from that, it is a handy tool to wield at colluders in the twitterverse and the like so they are identified as the sociopathic pariahs they are.
It's one of those things I would deeply love to know but almost certainly never will: does anyone actually read such a thing, however well-written, and think "oh my god, I must change immediately?"
And they still won't face justice, in the end. Our society cannot survive the consequence of having as many as a million or more people whose collusion in the pandemic lies led to death and the destruction of lives. The scale of harm is too vast for every deserving party to be punished.
most of this was created by a VERY small group that understood how to structure incentives. the rest was just reaction and self interest.
you're looking for a vast conspiracy that does not exist because you want someone nearby to blame. but the actual conspiracy is quite small, they just want you to believe it's huge so it seems harder to fight.
this comes down to a very few tactical control points, not rounding up millions.
you'll be fighting the wrong fight until you realize that.
I don't believe there's a "vast" conspiracy. I believe there's a huge number of people that took the $20 bill sitting on the table with the note saying "honor system :)," and I'm saying that's WORSE than a vast conspiracy because it points to a society that has become fundamentally sick.
What I'm saying is that what you're referring to as "reaction and self-interest" is worth taking more seriously and being recognized for what it is. You can be self-interested without being dishonest and criminal. Healthy free markets and democracies depend on the ability of humans to, in general, behave well.
Our medical system has been bad for our health for a long time now. Essentially all modern drugs are poisons, or surgery solves a problem by cutting out or replacing a body part. Neither of these address root causes. As Chris Rock says, "the money's in the come back"
So much this. And it's connected as well: they had to weaken and demoralize society for quite a while, in many different ways, to make this level of passive collusion possible.
This didn't happen overnight. Regulatory capture in the financial and healthcare systems is decades old. The takeover of the government and school systems and media even older. We are indeed at war.
It was a combination, IMO, of destroying existing social supports (shared cultural values) and quickly offering decadence to assuage the inevitable horror and pain created by those gaps.
I agree our society is "sick" or deteriorated as I'd say. I'm old enough to remember (as a child) when news stands had the "honor box" system. Nothing stopped anyone from taking one (or all) papers unpaid. But, the point is, that the system worked, at least up to a certain time. Of course, that system is long gone. Fast forward thirty years. That's the 1990s. I used to take a daily newspaper (this was the days just before the internet.) In two separate apartment complexes, I had such a problem with others stealing my morning paper that I had to cancel my subscription. And this was not a slum; it was middle to upper middle class area. There you are, a capsule lesson in how America has gone to shit over the years. 😠
I'm pretty angry myself, but I'd settle for some long-term and widespread shame and humility. But first, some public trials and real consequences at the top, and a whole lot of Truth and Reconciliation hearings on down the line. Many should, at least, be rendered no longer fit for public office.
Stick with it Guttermouth, I think you're right on the money. I would also add that in addition to the "huge numbers of people in everyday positions of authority chose to lie ... cheat ... steal ... AND QUINTUPLE DOWN on their lies" --> the doctors and nurses in that batch of people also have to break their morality and their Hippocratic oaths. The whole thing is a break down of the moral fiber of our society. Yes. Our society has become sick and I don't refer to covid.
>> you do not need vast conspiracies when you have widespread bad incentives.
No, but you DO need the willingness to do wrong. While this is a good post, absolutely none of the information is new: we've known exactly what the incentives are for over a year and anyone who knows anyone in institutional healthcare is up to their elbows in anecdotes of blatantly false and heavily-massaged reporting of admitting conditions, diagnostic coding, and so on.
This isn't a revelation at all.
Fine if you don't want to believe a cabal of globalist sociopaths aren't using the COVID phantom menace to bring about an unprecedented consolidation of power and collapse of privacy, liberty, property rights, and independent state authorities.
It still mean huge numbers of people in everyday positions of authority chose to lie. Chose to cheat. Chose to steal. And chose to DOUBLE AND TRIPLE AND QUADRUPLE AND QUINTUPLE DOWN on their lies and denials of guilt to the point that, aided and abetted by the media, the very meaning of 'true' or 'real' or 'scientific' has become lost.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. Can we settle for judging it as plain old immoral and criminal behavior?
They're not agnostic incentives. They're incentives to do WRONG. Poor law enforcement increases the incentive to commit crime, as the risk assessment changes. That doesn't mean it stops being crime, or more "understandable" or "forgivable."
Watch the videos of brazen pieces of shit strolling through drug stores filling garbage bags with valuables and walking out the door unaccosted that have become viral now. Does anyone here think that's awesome? Does anyone love that businesses close in their towns and prices go up because there is literally no cost to committing crime?
The people chasing perverse incentives have destroyed your economy, your democracy, and your mental health so they personally can make more money and oppress you to conceal their guilt. They're not rats pressing a button to get cocaine. They're humans exercising the free will to defraud their countrymen and punish others to avoid punishment themselves.
you seem to be missing most of the point of the post.
the point is that you do not need a vast conspiracy to achieve terrible outcomes.
you simply need to create top down incentive structures that drive emergent behavior from the bottom up.
no one has to tell a hospital to inflate covid. you never have to co-opt the admins or the patients or the docs.
you just need to have a few folks that set policy do so in a fashion that gets the results they want.
this actually means that small numbers of actors can be MUCH more effective in terms of pushing some sort of plan that they could be if they needed a conspiracy.
it only take a few of them at strategic points twisting price signals and incentive structures.
the rest takes care of itself.
you have this nearly 180 degrees backwards.
I think you’re both right :-) el gato precisely articulates what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” and how bureaucratic incentives create what Christopher Browning describes as “desk murderers” in “Ordinary Men”:
“Many scholars of the Holocaust, especially Raul Hilberg, have emphasized the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process. This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were so-called desk murderers whose role in the mass extermination was greatly facilitated by the bureaucratic nature of their participation. Their jobs frequently consisted of tiny steps in the overall killing process, and they performed them in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected. Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range.”
In “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45,” Milton Mayer describes the hierarchy of collusion that is required to enforce the authoritarian policies:
“A few hundred at the top, to plan and direct at every level; a few thousand to supervise and control (without a voice in policy) at every level; a few score thousand specialists (teachers, lawyers, journalists, scientists, artists, actors, athletes, and social workers) eager to serve or at least unwilling to pass up a job or to revolt; a million of the Pöbel, which sounds like ‘people’ and means ‘riffraff,’ to do what we would call the dirty work, ranging from murder, torture, robbery, and arson to the effort which probably employed more Germans in inhumanity than any other in Nazi history, the standing of ‘sentry’ in front of Jewish shops and offices in the boycott of April, 1933.”
i think this is way past arendt.
this is the actual and deliberate weaponization of behavioral economics.
it's not about the MLM pyramid anymore. that's old tech. this is FAR more insidious as it actually seeds the bottom and grows from there.
it does not require middle management.
that makes it a VERY different kind of beast.
i think you're still thinking of this like it's the last war.
it's not. this is altogether more sophisticated and does not require the vast apparatus to operate.
it also leaves it with some new vulnerabilities. it instantly collapses when you cut the head of the snake because it's all responsive emergent process from one set of input salients.
former structures did not.
Oh believe me, I wholeheartedly agree this is a level of insidiousness never previously seen and executed at such a strategically ingenious and widespread scale. I’m with CJ Hopkins that this is a new form of totalitarianism similar to (hence the value of studying past experiences and patterns) but ultimately divergent from the old totalitarianism. We are dealing with a different beast that will demand new mechanisms to defeat.
I do find your metaphor of decapitating the snake encouraging—let’s just hope it’s not a Medusa.
Just have to carry a mirror and go for the neck :-)
😆👍
That's the question exactly. Where is the head of the snake?
Since you bring it up, there is a lot more to WW II history than is taught in schools. Winners (re-)write history. There are certain groups that profit from a certain narrative. Did you know that to question the Holocaust is a crime punishable by prison in many supposedly "free" nations? To an impartial observer, that seems a very odd favor to confer upon certain groups. Particularly so for what in sane times would have been mere academic historical questions. Doesn't it seem odd if a scholar risks jail for (say) disputing details about Auschwitz, yet runs no such risk writing about Soviet gulags in the 1930s, or American treatment of prisoners during its Civil War? Even using official histories, there are flaws in the narrative. For example, if the Nazis were so intent on exterminating the Jews, why then were so many left alive (granted, in deplorable state) in the camps during the war? Anne Frank, poster child of the Holocaust, died in early 1945 in a camp hospital (probably) of typhus, not in a gas chamber or firing squad. None of this is to deny that the Nazis were inhuman in many ways. Merely sending civilians to concentration camps was bad enough, although America did the same, albeit in lesser numbers. Please don't call me a "denier." I am nothing of the sort. But I am a skeptic. There are holes in the official story. Plenty of them. Merely to ask "why" invites attack. Why?
Per our previous exchange on this at my last post (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-holocaust-denier), I am absolutely against infringement of free speech in any form and stand with people like Gad Saad on this matter. There was a time when the ACLU felt so strongly about the importance of defending free speech that they filed a lawsuit on behalf of the KKK (https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-free-speech). That was in 2012—less than a decade ago! And now look where we are 🤦♀️
See my response below. I do not believe that there is a "vast" conspiracy. I think there is absolutely an active conspiracy by a few very powerful actors, but this has nothing to do with the mundane evil of lying and stealing.
I'm saying the mundane evil of lying and stealing is the far bigger problem and it's dangerous to say "well, if you create perverse incentives, people behave badly" and leave it at that. Lots and lots of people made bad choices and lots of people suffered for it.
The key is the word "vast". But is there a small, effective conspiracy that created the incentives?
This is like the 2020 elections. I don't think there was "widespread" fraud. But perhaps there was there carefully targeted fraud that flipped the election.
What's misleading about the post is that this possibility, of a small-but-effective conspiracy, is not discussed.
Sing it Guttermouth. They are diabolical colluders, plain and simple, and this atrocity could not have been pulled off without their complicity: https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-colluder-stop-enabling
I read this when you first posted. It's a good article, though I felt it was mainly preaching to the converted.
Anyone knowingly lying and dissembling at this point fears the consequences of their actions in a statutory sense more than the guilt of societal harm or immorality. They've already helped their mobster friend bury the dead hooker in the Meadowlands. They've had weeks to turn themselves in but are hoping she'll eventually be rotted beyond recognition so they won't have to.
*lol* Point taken, although my primary goal was to reach those who haven’t yet committed outright murder but who are being pressured to do so and may have an inkling of a conscience left and just need to be nudged into an act of bravery. Or those who have but are so wracked with guilt, they may be prompted to confess as an act of contrition. Aside from that, it is a handy tool to wield at colluders in the twitterverse and the like so they are identified as the sociopathic pariahs they are.
It's one of those things I would deeply love to know but almost certainly never will: does anyone actually read such a thing, however well-written, and think "oh my god, I must change immediately?"
Would that I knew! All I can hope is it at least plants a seed and pricks their conscience to act at at time when it matters …
Hi Margaret! I can't find the reply you sent me yesterday (re: my 19 y.o. and spike shedding) but wanted to THANK YOU for it. - Maria
I hope it helps, and LMK if you need the info again!
Don't forget the hundreds of thousands that have died as a result of their negligence and lies. So many could have been saved...
And they still won't face justice, in the end. Our society cannot survive the consequence of having as many as a million or more people whose collusion in the pandemic lies led to death and the destruction of lives. The scale of harm is too vast for every deserving party to be punished.
And that makes me SO goddamn angry.
it's making you unhinged. you're also wrong.
most of this was created by a VERY small group that understood how to structure incentives. the rest was just reaction and self interest.
you're looking for a vast conspiracy that does not exist because you want someone nearby to blame. but the actual conspiracy is quite small, they just want you to believe it's huge so it seems harder to fight.
this comes down to a very few tactical control points, not rounding up millions.
you'll be fighting the wrong fight until you realize that.
I don't believe there's a "vast" conspiracy. I believe there's a huge number of people that took the $20 bill sitting on the table with the note saying "honor system :)," and I'm saying that's WORSE than a vast conspiracy because it points to a society that has become fundamentally sick.
What I'm saying is that what you're referring to as "reaction and self-interest" is worth taking more seriously and being recognized for what it is. You can be self-interested without being dishonest and criminal. Healthy free markets and democracies depend on the ability of humans to, in general, behave well.
Our medical system has been bad for our health for a long time now. Essentially all modern drugs are poisons, or surgery solves a problem by cutting out or replacing a body part. Neither of these address root causes. As Chris Rock says, "the money's in the come back"
So much this. And it's connected as well: they had to weaken and demoralize society for quite a while, in many different ways, to make this level of passive collusion possible.
This didn't happen overnight. Regulatory capture in the financial and healthcare systems is decades old. The takeover of the government and school systems and media even older. We are indeed at war.
It was a combination, IMO, of destroying existing social supports (shared cultural values) and quickly offering decadence to assuage the inevitable horror and pain created by those gaps.
I agree our society is "sick" or deteriorated as I'd say. I'm old enough to remember (as a child) when news stands had the "honor box" system. Nothing stopped anyone from taking one (or all) papers unpaid. But, the point is, that the system worked, at least up to a certain time. Of course, that system is long gone. Fast forward thirty years. That's the 1990s. I used to take a daily newspaper (this was the days just before the internet.) In two separate apartment complexes, I had such a problem with others stealing my morning paper that I had to cancel my subscription. And this was not a slum; it was middle to upper middle class area. There you are, a capsule lesson in how America has gone to shit over the years. 😠
Smoke, mirrors, and marionettes ...
I'm pretty angry myself, but I'd settle for some long-term and widespread shame and humility. But first, some public trials and real consequences at the top, and a whole lot of Truth and Reconciliation hearings on down the line. Many should, at least, be rendered no longer fit for public office.
Whew, this comment gave me life!
Unfortunately it seems to have made the gato mad. :(
Stick with it Guttermouth, I think you're right on the money. I would also add that in addition to the "huge numbers of people in everyday positions of authority chose to lie ... cheat ... steal ... AND QUINTUPLE DOWN on their lies" --> the doctors and nurses in that batch of people also have to break their morality and their Hippocratic oaths. The whole thing is a break down of the moral fiber of our society. Yes. Our society has become sick and I don't refer to covid.
Well we can't agree all the time. 😕
It still hurts to be called "unhinged" by someone you deeply respect, though.
I understand. 😔
Yes it does. *Especially* by someone you deeply respect.