Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The governing class wants to be the ruling class

We certainly seem to be confronting a crisis where our governing class (political leaders, mainstream media, and academia) are all abandoning our traditional Classical Liberal norms.  These Classical Liberal norms would include natural rights (freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc.), consent of the governed, rule of law, equality before the law, property rights, etc.  Instead, the governing class seems to have morphed into a ruling class, intent on coercion, repression, suspension of rights and suspension of constitutional law, and the creation of two classes of citizens with one set of rules for the nomenklatura and and a different set for everyone else (think of all the photos of masked servants with unmasked guests at big political or cultural events.)

The why of this happening is still rife for speculation but that it is happening seems clear.

And with this transition we enter into all sorts of newish territory.  The old patterns are still there (propaganda instead of reporting) but now enabled by greater centralization and more sophisticated technology.  

One of the core issues is the increasing number of issues where it simply is unclear what is happening in the world.

An old version of this would be all the propaganda around Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) as it was originally known.  The claim was that we need to remake the global economy in order to avert climate catastrophe due to man-made effects.  

It was lightly plausible in the beginning but quickly devolved into a sustained but weakening propaganda campaign with AGW morphing into Global Warming, then into Climate Crisis, and now into Climate Change.  

The challenge was both definitional and measurement.  Climate is always evolving, a fact known through the modern era.  It has been warmer and colder in the past, sometimes for decades, centuries or millennia.  We know some reasons for those past periods of greater or lesser heat such as solar activity, ocean current change, changes in cloud dynamics, etc.  What AGW proposed was that we could discern and measure the portion of natural climate change due to human activities and more specifically that those proportions were increasing in size and were due primarily or solely to CO2 emissions.

The reality seems to be that yes we are influencing pre-existing climate change evolution and the primary mechanism seems to be land use with a possible but still uncertain role for CO2.

Our knowledge will continue to evolve,  shoring up some arguments and eroding others.  In contrast to the ignorant claim that "The Science is Settled", most sentient people know that almost definitionally science is never settled, it is always evolving towards greater definitional exactitude and comprehension.

But the fear mongering, coercion, and propaganda around Climate Change continues, as do the corollary efforts around coercion, repression, suspension of rights and suspension of constitutional law, the ignoring of property rights, and the creation of two classes of citizens.

But Climate Change is old news.  

Currently we have the ruling class trying to insist through fear mongering, coercion and propaganda that there is only one way to understand Covid-19, one way to understand what is going on in Ukraine, one way to understand what is going on in Canada, and that there is only one way to understand what is happening with misinformation.

With Covid-19, we are nearing the end of the fear mongering, coercion, and propaganda.  The ruling class has stripped itself of credibility by pursuing a portfolio of actions (zero covid, vaccines over treatments, lockdowns, school closings, and masking) which empirically and objectively have been non-starters from the beginning.  And they have pursued these actions with an enthusiasm and incompetence which has been hard to miss.  

But that is not how the ruling class wants it to be seen.

Ukraine has been the next crisis served up.  The ruling class wants this to be seen as a global and national crisis with the Russian Evil Empire about to gobble up innocent Ukraine and threaten western Europe.  I must admit that mid-week last week I was trying to force myself to take a position, to come up with an estimation of how likely Russia would be to invade this past weekend as many in the establishment were predicting.

It has been a fascinating experience because other than the propaganda mouthpieces of the establishment there has been a huge diversity of opinion, with many strange bed-fellows, as people both interpret faulty reporting through their prior assumptions and try to assimilate a more empirical picture.  

My estimation was colored by several factors - 1) We are coming to the end of winter and the ground softens in Ukraine in the spring.  If there is to be a military intervention it has to be soon to avoid literally bogging down.  2) As with the US, Russia has had a series of foreign interventions in recent decades (Afghanistan and Chechnya being the two largest) with 15-25,000 dead and 7-10,000 dead respectively and each of which generated significant domestic opposition.  3) It is unclear just how capable the Russian military services are.  There are many questions and they might still be quite powerful.  However, if they are as weakened as some expect, a war in Ukraine would make it obvious to Russia's detriment.  Better to appear dangerous and not be than to prove that you aren't.  4) Russian economic weakness.  5) Seeming much lower concern on the part of the Ukraine government.

We had much of our government and mainstream talking heads shouting about the likelihood of war and the need for preparation and so on.  And on the other side there were many speaking to the fact that there is little obvious national interest in Ukraine.  

Is there a possibility of a Ukraine-Russia war?  Yes.  Is there a possibility that this is being blown up to distract attention from falling presidential polls and a failing Covid-19 position?  Yes. 

Where is the balance of probabilities?  I frankly don't know and when people start shouting it always makes low probability events more likely.  But I am guessing that there is not much there there despite the ruling class efforts to make Ukraine a thing.  We'll see.  It could still get hot.

How about Canada and the truckers and the insistence of the ruling class that we move along, nothing to see?  Again, hard to tell.  The mainstream media is reluctant to cover and when they do it kowtows to a statist view that citizens are not allowed to object to central government edicts and diktats.  The non-mainstream media is pushing the alternate that this is people power with a Canadian face - polite, cheerful, considerate.

I am inclined towards the second interpretation over the first.  Something else has to be going on for Trudeau to invoke emergency powers and there seems to be no real making of that case.  Were the truckers creating a food crisis in Ottawa?  I could believe that but I have seen no such claim.  Were they blocking transportation corridors to such an extent that it prevented emergency services?  I haven't seen those claims either.  

From a distance, this seems like a dysfunctional ruling class letting a nominal crisis get away from it and then panicking.  We'll see.

Here in the US, we have the ruling class once again trying to revoke freedom of speech.  The old argument of "hate speech" is still invoked but now supplemented with claims of mis-information and dis-information.  Claims which ring hollow after two years where mis- and dis-information were the necessary predicates for the public health policies which were adopted.  

The ruling class does not want freedom of speech and is fighting hard to shut down, deplatform and cancel voices which bring evidence and logic to our public arguments.  

It all seems part of the Great Revealing which is going on.  Our ruling class no longer is interested in the well-being of the nation or the citizens but is focused on sustaining its sinecures and comfortable positions of power.  It is time for us not to fundamentally transform anything but to bring back the rudiments which have served us so well in the past.  A governing class which observes and accepts natural rights (freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc.), consent of the governed, rule of law, equality before the law, property rights, etc.



Various pieces from this morning which are relevant to the above perspective.

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