footpad, posts by tag: stupidity - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

Birth of a conspiracy theorist	[Dec. 29th, 2009|10:06 am]Footpad
[Tags**|conspiracy, hanlon's razor, news, stupidity, terrorism] [Current Mood**	irritated]Amazing. You may have read that some deranged twit managed to singe his leg pretty badly on a plane the other day—about on a par with the agonising stupidity of all many recent "terrorist attacks". I mean, for the love of Pete, man, how difficult would it be to make up double the mix, take half of it out in the desert and check that it it actually goes boom? How can we account for such comical, bamboozling stupidity?To anyone with half an eye on these affairs, it was painfully obvious that governments would react with equally stupid "security measures", but it turns out (via thewerewolf) that the results can be even more bone-headed than I imagined. This is not security; it does nothing against the threat that provoked it (unless you forbid people to bring their legs onto planes); it does little to improve on existing security measures. All it does is to make life more obstructive and inconvenient for millions of people at huge expense. We all know it. I find it impossible to believe that the faceless bureaucrats, who made the rule somewhere in the borborygmic rectum of the governmental apparatus, don't know it too.I've seen organisational stupidity. I worked in an internationally-funded academic centre. When I was a brat I spent some time in a highly advanced stupidity factory. I've seen at first hand and in considerable detail, how the structure and anonymity of an organisation, coupled with cowardice and lack of accountability, can aggregate and amplify minor individual failings beyond the unintelligence of any single person.I scorn conspiracy theories on principle. People just generally aren't that evil, and the truth of Hanlon's Razor usually emerges in the end. Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But the stupidity of our national governments in opposing terrorist threats is starting to stretch the limits of my credulity. How stupid can honest people get? Really that stupid?There's a conspiracy theorist in the office at work. He's called Bert. Bert's into a lot of stuff I find fairly implausible and occasionally laughable, global movements and shadowy oligarchies and various other things that I put down to the emergent consequences of individual myopia and greed. Hanlon's Razor. But gradually I feel a mounting weight of disbelief at the actions of those ostensibly assigned to protect us from the bogeymen. The edge of Hanlon's Razor is dulling by the moment.With slow and nightmarish inexorability, I find myself gradually siding ever more with Bert.
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