Hanlon’s Razor, Revisited

Kellerbn at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

When something is successful, do a sequel! But long after the desire for more is gone… So here we are!

Politicians, academics, and the media continue to violate Hanlon’s Razor. For those unaware, this means I assign malice instead of incompetence to those doing something bad. In short, you’re not stupid but evil. Let’s dive deeper into that, shall we?

Because of sociology’s outsize influence on academia in the last few decades, the very idea that someone can even be evil has been hotly contested. The problem with this string of logic is that it’s just stupid. You have to be willfully blind to ignore that not all actions are rational, so that even though an evil actor might have cause for their response, it does not make their response rational. Whatever you think might have led to the events of 09/11/2001, there is no way killing over 3,000 innocent people by flying planes into buildings could be seen as rational by anyone with half a brain. It is evil, plain and simple. This goes back to the bad influence Noam Chomsky has had over academia, but he’s merely the most famous of the tankie jerks academia breeds like it’s going out of style. He’s not a unique flower outside of how putrid his particular scent is.

Sociology, in modern academia, is the undermining that America is special or better than any other country in the world. America is special. While the political science department might be more honest, they’re too obvious to be a succor for the masses. Political science professors wear their political affiliation on their shirt sleeves. You know what you’re getting. Sociology professors couch their obvious political bias under science so soft, you could spread it on a cracker. Sociology is a science the same way creationism is science.¹ It turned science into belief by hijacking the scientific method and reversing it. Pick a conclusion and find all evidence, no matter how thin or contradictory, to validate that preferred conclusion. And then pretend that the science is settled and that your blatantly stupid opinion has the benefit of fact behind it. It’s not much different from organized religion.

Why do I bring this seemingly tangential point about sociology up here, a sequel to my most read article? Because it is this train of illogic that has infested politics.

Academia is the avenue by which most politicians and media personalities learn to act like such total morons. Now, this is most strongly seen among progressives and other liberals, but most of the “top dogs” in the Republican Party and conservative media went to the same august schools as the other side. As a local example, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania is named John Fetterman. He touts himself as a man of the people but has a Master’s degree from Harvard. He looks like a Philly dock worker, but that doesn’t change the fact that he has a degree from a school most people could not get into on their best day. Unless Biden really screws the pooch, Fetterman is currently favored to replace the retiring Pat Toomey in the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. His man-of-the-people vibe may or may not be putting on airs, but his pedigree is what we have come to expect from those in politics. Hell, before ACB was put on the court, every single current member of the Supreme Court went to an Ivy League law school. Biden is the first President since Reagan without an Ivy League education! Even Trump went to Wharton. This is the kind of maddening marketing that pisses me off.

So many claim they don’t fall for propaganda or marketing, but tribalism is the rule, not the exception. Everyone, even the most enlightened, has stupid crap they fall for. Be it name propaganda, patriotic advertisements by corporations that just want your brand loyalty, or the dumb things politicians say because the average voter is not that hard to convince. It beggars belief that Obama was not aware of the myriad scandals that infected his eight years in office, but the media covered for him nearly every step of the way in such strong fashion that historians ranked him the tenth best President recently. Seriously? The guy who didn’t get a single major legislative accomplishment under his belt after his first two years? That guy?. I wouldn’t rank him among the worst, but he is no better than middle of the pack. As I mentioned before, Reagan was the last great President. But we’re getting off topic.

Politicians lie and do so purposefully. Lying is the coin of the realm. Most of them are lawyers prior to elected office. They’re trained to be good at it! Some of them lies are whoppers, too. And the media, including conservative media, will cover for their preferred politicians in ways that are no different than being a trained lapdog. And the lies just snowball. Biden’s comms team thought it was a good idea to tout that this year’s Independence Day BBQ costs $0.16 less than last year’s. Even if you were inclined to believe that (it’s nonsense,) $0.16 is literal pocket change. Jen Psaki, whose job title might as well be “person who lies for the president,” is so bad at being Press Secretary that she had no response to the obvious criticism that gas is over a dollar more a gallon than it was last July, making the $0.16 stat pointless in practice.

I could keep going for hours, but the problem with democracy is that the people get what they want, good and hard.

1. As a Lutheran myself, creationism has no place in a high school science class.