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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VII–Science: It May Not Be All You Think It Is

October 5, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VII

Oct 12, 2020

Science: It May Not Be All You Think It Is

Ha! It’s poetry in motion
Now she’s making love to me
The spheres are in commotion
The elements in harmony
She blinded me with science
(She blinded me with science!)
And hit me with technology
-Thomas Dolby, 1982 (She Blinded Me With Science)

Science, it turns outs, is a process not an answer. And, it usually has many answers from various sciences, each having their own methods and standards. When someone tells you, “the science says,” be skeptical. They are usually being paid to say what they are about to say or at least have been thoroughly indoctrinated by others who are paid. There is never just one answer to any supposedly scientific question.
-Kurt Cobb (Why am I feeling so anxious? The end of modernism arrives)

Unfortunately, there are many other misconceptions about science. One of the most common misconceptions concerns the so-called “scientific proofs.” Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a scientific proof…all scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, and nothing is final. There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science. The currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives. Its status as the accepted theory is contingent on what other theories are available and might suddenly change tomorrow if there appears a better theory or new evidence that might challenge the accepted theory. No knowledge or theory (which embodies scientific knowledge) is final.
-Satoshi Kanazawa (Common Misconceptions About Science I: “Scientific Proof”)

In short, we can never be 100% that our perception of reality is accurate, and scientific experiments are virtually impossible to totally and completely control. Further, science often uses inductive logic, and it relies on probabilities to draw conclusions. All of this prevents science from ever proving anything with absolute certainty. That does not, however, mean that science is untrustworthy, or that you can reject it whenever you like. Science tells us what is most likely true given the current evidence, but it is a skeptical process that always acknowledges the possibility of being wrong.
-Fallacy Man (Science doesn’t prove anything, and that’s a good thing)

The answers you get depend on the questions you ask…What man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conception experience has taught him to see…Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time…Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances…The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.
-Thomas S. Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)

Science! That is the refrain from some to argue for what IS and what IS NOT ‘true’ or ‘factual’ in this world of social media edicts and memes (and associated self-created echo chambers), especially regarding fake news, climate change/global warming, pandemics, politics, and life in general.

The idea that science provides us with ‘objective proof’ about issues is a common error I’ve encountered time and time again. It is held for many reasons, primary among them may be the ‘politicisation’ of the notion; that is, the use of ‘science’ by politicians and others to reinforce what are for all intents and purposes desired goals/policies/actions/narratives/etc., and their insistence about science providing definitive support. We are certainly seeing this more and more with competing narratives regarding Covid-19 and what should and should not be done to address certain concerns.

My enlightenment, as it were, regarding scientific ‘proof’ and associated beliefs came in two parts during my university education. First was a poignant discussion with a professor providing feedback on a paper I had written and used the idea of science proving something to support my conclusion. He stated rather bluntly that “‘proof’ is only relevant in mathematics and jurisprudence, not science.” He then went on to explain the concept in greater detail, but it was that short statement that has stuck with me and altered my view of ‘objective science’ as ‘proof’ of various beliefs.

The second tipping point for me was during a presentation on human intelligence by the psychology department of the university (I had become interested in the subject as I explored human evolution via physical anthropology classes and sat in on a presentation by a guest speaker). As I recall, the visiting professor asked somewhat rhetorically what was the definition of intelligence we could use to explore the concept. After entertaining a few responses (all of which were different) he stressed that if we were to ask 100 psychologists such a question, we would get back 100 different answers: there was no agreed upon definition. One’s particular perspective ‘coloured’ what was important and observed.

There were also a handful of texts I read that impacted my beliefs. Some of the most pertinent ones were: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Mismeasure of Man, Ever Since Darwin, The Interpretation of Cultures.

The two experiences described above and the books I read impacted my interests at the time and I set off exploring other ideas and perspectives, getting into deconstructivism, philology, hermeneutics, dialectics, epistemology, objectivity versus subjectivity, and skepticism. More recently I’ve explored the somewhat related subjects of complexity and cognition.

All of these ‘colour’ my belief system and my arguments regarding ‘collapse’. Do I know for certain some of the things I pontificate about. Absolutely not. And I hope I couch my rhetoric in words such as ‘likely’, ‘evidence’, ‘probably’, etc. to demonstrate my uncertainty. Because when we get right down to it, not one of us can be certain about the future and our beliefs about it. As several people have been credited with stating: It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. We live within complex systems made up of complex systems that, because of the nonlinear feedback loops that exist and emergent phenomena that arise from them, can neither be predicted nor controlled. Of this, I am fairly certain.

Do I believe ‘collapse’ of our current globalised, industrial world will occur? Yes. The evidence, to me, seems overwhelming; particularly all the experiments involving complex societies that have been carried out before us and ended with decline/collapse (see Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies and Diamond’s Collapse) and the ‘fact’ that we live on a world with finite resources but are pursuing perpetual growth (see Meadows et al’s The Limits to Growth and Catton’s Overshoot).

Will, as some argue, our technology and human ingenuity save us in this current trial in complex societies? I’m doubtful; in fact, I’m fairly certain these things will simply expedite the fall as we rush into them to try and solve the problems we have created, bumping up against the real biophysical limits imposed by a finite world in the process and creating even more problems and dilemmas.

Of course, because I cannot predict the future with certainty, only time will tell…

Doug Casey on How Economic Witch Doctors Convince Everyone They’re Neurosurgeons

August 17, 2023

Doug Casey on How Economic Witch Doctors Convince Everyone They’re Neurosurgeons

International Man: The average person doesn’t care about economics. But to the extent that he does, he only reads mainstream publications like The Economist and editorials in The New York Times.

In these publications, the average person will find so-called economists advocating upside-down and destructive concepts like negative interest rates, banning cash, debt-fueled consumption, government spending, and rampant money printing as the cures to economic ailments.

And if those methods don’t work—or inflict damage—the establishment economists’ response is to simply call for more money printing, more debt, and even lower interest rates.

What’s your take on conventional economic thinking and methods?

Doug Casey: Frankly, most “economists” today are only political apologists masquerading as economists.

An economist is somebody that describes the way the world works—how people go about producing, consuming, buying, selling, and living their lives. That’s not, however, what most of today’s PhD economists do. Instead, they prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.

As a result, legitimate economics barely exists today. What passes for economics has a very bad reputation, and it’s well deserved. Economics has become degraded. It’s not quite a laughingstock like gender studies, but it’s on a level with political science—which isn’t a science at all.

Every individual has vastly differing likes and dislikes and wants and needs. But these so-called economists like to treat people as if they were standardized atoms. They think they can manipulate people as if they were chemicals and treat the economy as something they can heat up or cool down. And they’re the ones who decide what the masses need.

Economics has become an excuse for central planning, and economists have become social engineers.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Performance is Over

August 17, 2023

The Performance is Over

Even if the artists don’t realise it.

Note: Last week’s comments got sidetracked into bad-tempered exchanges on climate change, which was not what the essay was about. I had several requests to delete comments that some people found offensive. I let them pass on that occasion, but as from now I will start deleting abusive comments. Discussion here has always been very civilised. Let’s keep it that way.

A reminder that Spanish versions of my essays are now available here. and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Many thanks to the translators. Now on to the main feature.

Last week, I argued that the kind of crises that we can expect over the next few years will be beyond the ability of our enfeebled governments to tackle, and that in any case their room for manoeuvre to tackle them will be very limited. (If you think climate change is not a problem, fine, you can substitute any other of a long list of potentially ruinous events.) This week, I want to take the next logical step, of trying to begin to imagine what a society in which government could no longer deal with major problems would be like, and what the implications would be.

I want to discuss it via a consideration of the nature of Power. Now in English, “power” has generally-negative connotations, not helped by its incessant use by IdiotPol pundits, who are obsessed with it and see it everywhere. But “power” is derived from the medieval Anglo-French pouair , with its roots in the Vulgar Latin potere, meaning “to be able to do something.” This is essentially the principal meaning of pouvoir in modern French: a good translation would be ‘capability.” (Foucault, who wrote about pouvoir a lot, was essentially interested in how things got done.)…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

What If There Are No Politically Feasible Answers?

August 6, 2023

What If There Are No Politically Feasible Answers?

Political Realism vs Ecological Realism

At times, we are confronted with choices that demand us to pick between two undesirable alternatives, often known as a dilemma. The annals of history are brimming with such instances. When Hitler ascended to power in Germany and commenced his invasions across Europe, we were presented with the dire decision of either passively observing country after country succumb to Germany’s might or intervening in the war to halt him by force. There was no solution that could be deemed politically feasible, at least not in the traditionally peaceful democratic sense. Sometimes, circumstances unfold just like that.

It appears we find ourselves in the grip of a similar quandary at present. We’re forced to select from a set of distressing options. Some would present it as a decision between climate change causing widespread avian fatalities, or in their judgement, causing fewer with the installation of wind turbines and transmission lines and thwarting the climate crisis.

L.A. Times journalist Sammy Roth penned an article exploring the Audubon Society’s endorsement of wind turbines and transmission lines, notwithstanding the escalating tally of bird deaths attributed to these structures. Roth expressed via Twitter that while the loss of birds may not be the optimal outcome, it could be a required sacrifice for the broader objective of addressing climate change.

The Audubon Society and many others, including Roth, perceive our options as a choice between renewable energy and climate change. However, in my view, they overlook a critical component that they, along with the majority, are reluctant to contemplate.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Rise Of Totalitarianism: Banks Denying Services Based On Political Views

July 24, 2023

The Rise Of Totalitarianism: Banks Denying Services Based On Political Views

*Then British Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage speaks during a visit at Dover harbour, in Dover, Britain, on Aug. 12, 2020. (Matthew Childs/Reuters)*

When the Berlin Wall fell, I naively supposed that freedom was now secure, that never again would the spectre of totalitarianism return to Europe. I failed to take into account what I should have known, that the thirst for power is at least as great as that for freedom. Freedom and power are forever locked into a kind of Manichaean struggle, as are good and evil, and the thirst for power is perfectly capable of making an instrument of supposed good causes.

History doesn’t repeat itself, at least not in precisely the same way. The new totalitarianism doesn’t resort to thugs in the street and the midnight knock on the door. It’s somewhat more subtle than that, but nonetheless ruthless and dangerous for all its subtlety.

In Britain, a well-known politician, Nigel Farage, has had his bank account closed by a bank called Coutts that specializes in rich clients. It’s owned by the much larger National Westminster Bank, whose largest single shareholder by far, since the banking crisis of 2008, is the British government.

Mr. Farage is a well-known figure, the scourge of the Euro-federalists, and probably more responsible than any other single person for the referendum vote in 2016 for Britain to leave the European Union. Like most public figures with both strong opinions and a strong personality, Mr. Farage is both widely admired and widely detested. If you ask someone about him, he’s unlikely to answer, “On the one hand, on the other …”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Fed Is a Purely Political Institution, and It’s Definitely Not a Bank.

January 17, 2023

The Fed Is a Purely Political Institution, and It’s Definitely Not a Bank.

Those who know Wall Street lore sometimes recall that Fed chairman William Miller—Paul Volcker’s immediate predecessor—joked that most Americans believed the Federal Reserve was either an Indian reservation, a wildlife preserve, or a brand of whiskey. The Fed, of course, is none of those things, but there’s also one other thing the Federal Reserve is not: an actual bank. It is simply a government agency that does bank-like things.

It’s easy to see why many people might think it is a bank. “Bank” is right there in the name of the twelve regional banks that make up the system: for example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The Fed also enjoys many titles that make it sound like a bank. It’s sometimes called the “lender of last resort.” Or it is sometimes called “a banker’s bank.” Moreover, many people often call the Fed “the central bank.” That phrase is useful enough, but not quite true.

Moreover, even critics of the bank often repeat the myth that the Federal Reserve is “a private bank,” as if that were the main problem with the Federal Reserve. And then there are the economists who like to spread fairy tales about how the Fed is “independent” from the political system and makes decisions based primarily on economic theory as interpreted by wise economists.

The de facto reality of the Federal Reserve is that it is a government agency, run by government technocrats, that enjoys the benefits of being subject to very little oversight from Congress. It is no more “private” than the Environmental Protection Agency, and it is no more a “bank” than the US Department of the Treasury.

It’s a Purely Political Institution

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Politics, climate conspire as Tigris and Euphrates dwindle

November 21, 2022

A fisherman walks across a dry patch of land in the marshes of southern Iraq which has suffered dire consequences from back to back drought and rising salinity levels, in Dhi Qar province, Iraq, Friday Sept. 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Anmar Khalil)

Politics, climate conspire as Tigris and Euphrates dwindle

DAWWAYAH, Iraq and ILISU DAM, Turkey (AP) — Next year, the water will come. The pipes have been laid to Ata Yigit’s sprawling farm in Turkey’s southeast connecting it to a dam on the Euphrates River. A dream, soon to become a reality, he says.

He’s already grown a small corn patch on some of the water. The golden stalks are tall and abundant. “The kernels are big,” he says, proudly. Soon he’ll be able to water all his fields.

Over 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) downstream in southern Iraq, nothing grows anymore in Obeid Hafez’s wheat farm. The water stopped coming a year ago, the 95-year-old said, straining to speak.

“The last time we planted the seed, it went green, then suddenly it died,” he said.

Water levels in the Chibayish marshes of southern Iraq are declining and fishermen say certain water-ways are no longer accessible by boat, in Dhi Qar province, Iraq, Sept. 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Anmal Khalil)

The starkly different realities are playing out along the length of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, one of the world’s most vulnerable watersheds. River flows have fallen by 40% in the past four decades as the states along its length — Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq — pursue rapid, unilateral development of the waters’ use.

The drop is projected to worsen as temperatures rise from climate change. Both Turkey and Iraq, the two biggest consumers, acknowledge they must cooperate to preserve the river system that some 60 million people rely on to sustain their lives.

But political failures and intransigence conspire to prevent a deal sharing the rivers.

The Associated Press conducted more than a dozen interviews in both countries, from top water envoys and senior officials to local farmers, and gained exclusive visits to controversial dam projects…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Rise of Public Health and ‘Green’ Police: Securitization Theory

September 28, 2022

The Rise of Public Health and ‘Green’ Police: Securitization Theory

Policing has come a long way since the days of good ole boy Barney Fife.

Once upon a time, cops were tasked primarily with things like catching murderers and rapists and protecting property.

They were always used, of course, whenever necessary, to protect state interests – but, then again, the state’s interests weren’t always so obviously nefarious and illegitimate as they are today.

Law enforcement’s purview expansion is explained in large part by securitization theory.

As a result of the this process, peculiar new breeds of law enforcement – Public Health© officers and green police – have sprung up throughout the West.

Securitization theory: the advent of new security threats

The basic premise of securitization theory in political science is that, given the opportunity, a state will endlessly concoct new security “threats” as a justification to exercise greater power outside of the constraints of the normal political process:

“Securitisation theory shows us that national security policy is not a natural given, but carefully designated by politicians and decision-makers. According to securitisation theory, political issues are constituted as extreme security issues to be dealt with urgently when they have been labelled as ‘dangerous’… by a ‘securitising actor’ who has the social and institutional power to move the issue ‘beyond politics’.”

The process, in a nutshell, works like this:

The government identifies a new existential “threat,” either legitimate or overblown, either naturally occurring or cynically engineered by the state itself.
The corporate media and corporate state stoke fear about the threat into the hearts and minds of a gullible public
In the fog of panic, the state slyly provisions itself with new authority and resources to combat the threat, thereby increasing its power

The threats change, but whether “domestic terrorism,” COVID-19, or climate change, the process largely remains the same.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Failure of Central Banking: Politics

May 17, 2022

The seal of the Federal Reserve on a U.S. banknote. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

The Failure of Central Banking: Politics

The view was generally held that centralization of banking would inevitably result in one of two alternatives: either complete government control, which meant politics in banking, or control by ‘Wall Street,’ which meant banking in politics.

– Paul Warburg, 1930

The idea of the central bank was born in the Middle Ages, when failures of the largest merchant banks of that era, founded by the Bardi and Peruzzi families, shocked the Italian City-State of Florence in 1343 and 1346. These financial crises gave birth to the idea that the commercial banking sector would need a “liquidity backstop,” i.e., an entity that could lend to private financial institutions in trouble. This was the original aim of central banks: to act as piggy banks for solvent commercial banks with temporary liquidity problems.

The first central bank that resembled the modern ones emerged in 1609, when the Dutch empire created an exchange bank, Wisselbank, to convert foreign coins into domestic currency. The central bank of Sweden, the Riksbanken, was created in 1668, and the Bank of England (BoE) in 1694. These were mostly servants of rulers and governments. But the really big twist came in 1914, when the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was created. Its creation was mired with worries that it might socialize the economy.

To calm these fears, the power of the Fed to issue legal tender (currency) was restricted by both the “real bills doctrine” and the gold standard. The real bills doctrine stated that the Fed could only extend credit and thus increase the supply of money against collateral that already had established value through a “commercial transaction.” This meant that the value of the collateral could not be in the future effectively banning, e.g., the monetization of the federal debt…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Politics Is Dead, Here’s What Killed It

January 17, 2022

Politics Is Dead, Here’s What Killed It

Here’s “politics” in America now: come with mega-millions or don’t even bother to show up.

Representational democracy–a.k.a. politics as a solution to social and economic problems–has passed away. It did not die a natural death. Politics developed a cancer very early in life (circa the early 1800s), caused by wealth outweighing public opinion. This cancer spread slowly but metastasized in the past few decades, spreading to every nook and cranny of our society and economy as “democracy” devolved into an invitation-only auction of elections and political favors.

Politics might have had a fighting chance but three forces betrayed the nation and its citizenry.

1. The Federal Reserve transferred trillions of dollars of unearned wealth into the feeding troughs of the super-wealthy and corporations, vastly increasing the wealth the top 0.01% had to buy elections and favors. The Federal Reserve cloaked its treachery with jargon– quantitative easing, stimulus, etc.–and then stabbed the nation’s representational democracy in the back.

2. The Supreme Court betrayed the nation’s representative democracy by labeling corporations buying elections and political favors a form of “free speech.” (Please don’t hurt yourself laughing too hard.) The Supreme Court’s equating wealth buying elections and favors with individual citizens’ sacrosanct right of free speech was a knife in the back of the nation and its citizenry.

3. The two political parties betrayed their traditional voter bases to kneel at the altar of corporate / elite wealth, wealth which bought elections and political favors. The Democrats, traditional champions of the workforce in the 20th century, abandoned workers in favor of serving their corporate masters, masking their betrayal with fine-sounding phrases.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End Of Venezuela’s Oil Era

November 20, 2021

The End Of Venezuela’s Oil Era

Venezuela, once Latin America’s largest oil producer and a founding member of OPEC, has seen its economically vital oil industry collapse triggering one of the worst economic and humanitarian crises of the century. The pain is far from over for Venezuela’s people and the country’s failing economy. Before 1920, Venezuela was a poor agricultural country facing many of the developmental issues plaguing Latin America. The country’s journey to becoming a crude oil superpower, leading petroleum state, and founding OPEC member began in 1914 with the drilling of the Zumaque well in the Mene Grande field on the eastern shores of Lake Maracaibo. This was Venezuela’s first commercial oil well and it launched a monumental oil boom that transformed the country and by 1950 saw it become the world’s fourth wealthiest nation per capita. Venezuela was not only heralded as Latin America’s richest nation but also its most developed. By the 1970s, the country, which is now a socialist dictatorship, was lauded as Latin America’s most stable democracy at a time when most nations in the region were ruled by military dictatorships. By the 1980s, Venezuela’s democracy was unraveling because of a global recession and sharply weaker oil prices. These events weighed heavily on the economy, and government spending, causing the country to spiral into debt. By the late-1980s Caracas had turned to the International Monetary Fund for help. The IMF recommended market-oriented neoliberal economic reforms including savage budget cuts, primarily impacting social programs such as public health and education. When these reforms were implemented by Caracas, they triggered considerable civil unrest. The reforms also sparked runaway inflation which only worsened the suffering of every-day Venezuelans. Those events illustrated the substantial dependence of Venezuela’s economy on oil and the country’s vulnerability to weaker prices…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Super Serious News Reporting: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

November 5, 2021

Super Serious News Reporting: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

Hi I’m a very serious news reporter. The Russians are controlling our thoughts with Facebook memes and scrambling our brains with invisible ray gun attacks. In other news, capitalism is working fine and our wars defend freedom and democracy. The government never lies. Here’s Bob with the weather.

❖

It’s hilarious that people still think the Democratic Party cares about winning elections. That’s not its job, children. That’s not why the Democratic Party exists. The Democratic Party exists to kill leftward progress in the world’s most powerful nation. That’s all it cares about doing.

The Democratic Party doesn’t care about winning elections. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about promoting popular policies. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about passing legislation. The Democratic Party only cares about doing things like this:

❖

They were always going to blame Biden’s failures on the left.

❖

“The political spectrum has moved too far to the left. I believe this because I was told to by a millionaire with a vested interest in stifling support for socialism. Also I think ‘left’ means having pink hair and using words like ‘polycule’ in casual conversation.”

❖

So mad at American leftists for forcing the Democratic Party to be a right wing imperialist oligarch front who nobody wants to vote for.

❖

US troops are four times more likely to die by their own hand than in combat. They’ve figured out how to protect US military personnel from enemy fire, but not from the psychological consequences of working for the US military.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

October 5, 2021

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

“Whistleblower” Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse.

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies at the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing entitled ‘Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower’ on Capitol Hill October 5, 2021 in Washington, (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week’s anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a “whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen’s star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook’s dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The problem with climate change politics

August 16, 2021

The problem with climate change politics

Climate change bears all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored crisis, useful to shift attention from other political failures. But the absence of financial accountability which characterises government actions also introduces behavioural errors.

The absence of a profit motive in any state action exposes the relationship between governments and their electors to psychological factors. We all know that governments use propaganda and other tools to manage crowd psychology and influence their electorates. What is less understood is that governments themselves are misled by a crowd psychology in its own ranks which contributes to policy failure.

This article does not question the climate change debate itself. Instead, it examines the debate in the context of the psychology driving it. The release of government-sponsored propaganda on climate change in the form of a unanimous IPCC report predicting the end of the world as we know it is the latest example of a political and bureaucratic phenomenon, making the timing of this article apposite.
Introduction

Western economies have moved on from free markets to the point where they hardly exist in the true meaning of the phrase. Yet the state continually claims that it is free markets that fail, not government.

The reason governments fail in economic terms is that economic calculation is never part of their brief, and nor can it be. By economic calculation, we mean taking positive actions aimed at a profitable outcome. To survive and prosper, businesses and individuals must do this all the time — the only exception being when they can rely on the state to underwrite their failures, which is why established businesses encourage statist regulation to place hurdles in the way of upstart competitors. And why at an individual level there is a ready demand for state welfare.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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It’s a Purely Political Institution

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