Guest Post by The Zman
Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.
–Goethe
It is our nature, whenever we are examining the failings of our enemies, to assume the absolute worst of motives and purposes. We want our enemies to be evil, so all of their mistakes and failures are cast as proof of their villainy. It’s human nature. This is particularly true in politics, where there is no benefit to acting honorably. In fact, the normal virtues are vices when it comes to jockeying for power in an organization. The truth is, though, our enemies are rarely evil and their mistakes are usually due to stupidity.
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That’s worth thinking about as we rocket into the custodial state, ruled over by layers of management. The people in charge are rarely in their positions due to merit. Instead, they are there because of serendipity, rumbswabbery or maybe they ticked the right boxes to satisfy the diversity engineers. Spend anytime around the Imperial Capital and you figure out that management teams are usually built for the team photo.The corporate partners of the state are suffering the same problem, as we see with Google and PayPal.
That’s a good thing to keep in mind when following the Pakistani IT scandal. The latest is about the chief of staff to Yvette Clarke, a Congressman from New York. According to this story in the Daily Caller, her chief of staff casually signed off on what appears to be a theft ring operating inside the Democrat Congressional Caucus. The facts thus far suggest the Awan gang was running the oldest of scams. They would sell computer gear out the back door and claim it was stolen. For reasons unknown, staffers signed off on it.
Mx. Clarke is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so it is reasonable to assume that her staff is not working math problems in their free time. Outwitting them is a challenge to no one. These are people that, in a better age, would be pulling a cart on a farm somewhere or unloading ships at the docks. They also believe that by ticking the right boxes, they are exempt from the rules that apply to the blue-eyed devil. That means they don’t spend much time learning about those rules or complying with them. They are easy marks.
That’s the feature of this story thus far. Everyone on all sides of this thing can tick one of the correct boxes. There are no white men implicated in this scandal. Based on the news accounts alone, it is hard to imagine the Awan brothers getting very far with this scam in the private sector. They were not very good at their work and they made salary demands no one would meet. Even small companies do rudimentary background checks on new employees and contractors. The Democrats never bothered to do any of it.
Now, there could be a nefarious motive behind all of this. The Paki IT people reportedly gained access to all of the Democrat’s data, including e-mail. That means they had lots of embarrassing material on their bosses. It also means their bosses were scurrying around looking for a way to cover their asses for having let these guys gain access to their systems and data. It’s not unrealistic to think that blackmail and extortion were at the heart of this thing. No one wants to private correspondence made public, especially Democrats.
The willingness to sign off on theft of this magnitude is also a red flag. It’s hard to say you did not notice what was happening when your name is on it and the theft amounts to ten percent of the budget. Throw in the extraordinary efforts made at the highest levels to protect the Awan gang from investigators and a skeptical man will start to think there’s more here. It has all the contours of an extortion racket. At the minimum, the Democrats may have been trying to hide gross negligence and the mishandling of information.
Still, the way to bet here is that the people involved were morons. Even the Awan gang operated like a comedy act from old movies. Their car dealership scam was so clownish and amateurish it is a miracle they did not get bagged for that. The thumbless way they ran their scams makes it hard to believe they were expertly shaking down professional shake down artists like Wasserman-Schultz and Yvette Clarke. Politicians are rarely smart, but they are ruthlessly shrewd and they know how to work a con.
When you put this story into the mosaic of recent news stories, the pattern that emerges is one where stupidity is the primary feature of our betters. The foolish way Google handled their trouble should make everyone think twice about letting them manufacture driverless cars or protect your personal data. The reckless actions of PayPal, slamming shut accounts of dissidents, without any thought of the consequences, suggests the people making these decisions are dangerously stupid.
Of course, the recent shipwrecks by the Navy have a similar feature. These were easy to avoid errors, engineered by people who checked the right boxes. Maybe that’s unfair, but patterns are often unfair on the individual basis. The facts of life are unfair. A military that is hell bent on having trannies on submarines and refuses to acknowledge the pregnancy problem aboard ship, is not going to worry about social promotion and the consequences that arise from it. After all, diversity is not just their strength, it’s their reason to exist.
Everyone knows that even a committee of really smart people is never the sum of its parts. People in STEM fields will make this point about work teams. Start adding in stupid people with conflicting agendas and the team’s effectiveness will rapidly degrade. The smart people are suddenly burdened with the additional task of mitigating the damage done by the stupid members. Start scaling this up to custodial state size organizations and the same Smart Fraction issues faced by Detroit come into play with managerialism.
In the early stages of the custodial state, we may be seeing a fatal flaw. That is the pseudo-meritocracy, a mix of affirmative action and credentialism, may have internal contradictions that make the system unworkable. If you want to have a massive custodial state, you better select for the best and brightest, regardless of diversity. Alternatively, you can have diversity, but you better not give them too much power or empower too many of them. In other words, you can diversity or managerialism, but not both.
” our enemies are rarely evil ” that has got to be one of the most ass back ward statements you have ever made.If you have noticed these people have a plan and that plan is to destroy us .From the communist street fighters to the elite in banking and government. These people are evil whether you believe it or not.You will soon enough.
The Zman has a point, that “our enemies are rarely evil”. Very few people in history were motivated by the desire to do evil. Even monsters like Hitler and Pol Pot did not see themselves or their policies as evil. In their demented, deluded minds they believed they were doing good. I also must reject the notion that some people ARE evil. It’s a syllogism: if God created a man, and that man is evil, then God created evil (which my faith teaches he would not do). Are we capable of doing evil deeds? Yes, absolutely!
Marsh….I do appreciate some of your comments.
It doesn’t matter that evil people think they are good or doing good things. If they do evil, they are evil.
Years ago, a study of recidivist killers (9that were let out of prison and killed again) and they all responded the same way when asked why they killed again – I killed them before they killed me. It didn’t matter that those killed were elderly Package Store owners and not members of a rival gang – these guys were instilled in specific culture – period .They all thought they were good people.
I was recently in a discussion on a previous thread about this very thing. Llpoh, whom I assume is a long time poster here, was arguing with Robert Gore – Straight Line Logic author – that he attended an Ivy League college, and that it was worth it. That the folks in attendance were exceptionally bright, and that they are these utopia’s of intelligence. I think this article explains the point I was attempting to make well.
If all of these people from the Ivy league are so intelligent, and far superior to the normal’s, who decided that decades of debt and servitude were not their path of choice, why is everything so messed up? I think we can all agree that the “leaders” of today are shuttled from these Ivy leagues, straight in to high ranking, presumably leading positions upon graduation, simply because they have that elite credential. Then where are the brilliant decisions? Where is the great thought and rare insight of these people? Where is the planning and 3D chess moves that it is assumed these people can perform, while the rest of us scabs, down here in the muck of rudimentary intelligence, and commonness lead our mundane, meaningless existence?
My gut, as well as many who see with clear vision, and not just paper dreams and credential filled egos, tells me that the people who attend these “Elite” universities, have the same dispersion pattern of intelligence as the populous as a whole. Period. They just had the good fortune to be A: born in to the right family, B: checked the correct box or C: got lucky. And in (hopefully) most of these cases, they also are smart enough to realize that they did get lucky, and work at making something out of it, and ride the wave of awe that the paper gives you in today’s mess of a credentialed based caste system.
The rest, suffer from intolerable arrogance, ignorance, and complete apathy, and simply coast through to the CEO role so they can destroy, from the top down, an organization that was probably built by someone who actually knew something.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing social advantage with actual intelligence. Remember, Albert Einstein was a lowly patent clerk, and was rejected by most of the “elite” universities in his time. That is until he wrote this little ditty about general relativity. Then, all of a sudden he was “intelligent”. Something tells me Einstein had little use for a credential in his life.
Don’t know much about Einstein’s pre Princeton life but I suspect ‘patent clerk’ was not as low level a job at the dawn of the 20th century as it may sound like today.
Back when I first got on the ‘internet’ or, more precisely, USENET as the forums were then called, one of the more fascinating things one discovered was how quickly one could get in over one’s head. The same thing happens at elite universities. People who considered themselves the top students at their high schools suddenly found themselves in classrooms with people who were really smart. Only the negroes impervious self esteem allows them to push on at schools like Stanford or MIT when, by all objective standards, they no more belong there than a draft horse belongs in the Kentucky Derby!
When it comes to negroes in the US Congress, a reasonable precaution would be to assign an FBI agent as their chief of staff. I say this not because white Congressman are never corrupt but because almost every black Congressman will, eventually, be caught up in some scheme that can no longer be overlooked. That maybe because blacks just can’t help themselves from temptation or are too stupid to think through the consequences of their activities.
It is a fair bet that, were the FBI to send in some forensic accountants to investigate the Congressional Black Caucus few if any would escape indictment.
Since all I have to offer are anecdotes, here’s another.
About 15 years ago I was involved in promoting a film. The director was going to appear in person at Princeton University for a showing and we went to the college radio station to do a promo. During the course of the visit I discovered that the Student Affairs rep was a senior MAJORING in economics and was only a few months from graduating. I asked him a few questions and before long we got to the topic of the Federal Reserve and it became clear that aside from having heard the name he knew virtually nothing about it- purpose, creation, who was involved, how it was run, that it wasn’t a branch of the government, etc.
This young man is out there, likely involved in economics or banking, almost certainly with an advanced degree (not a lot of Ivy League students in that field go for the Bachelors and leave it at that) and will almost certainly be in senior management by this stage of his professional life and yet he was not only that ignorant, but equally incurious.
I know, it’s only one example.
Noted.
Having worked in a heavy industry where affirmative action was in the beginning stages with a full head of steam regardless the results or consequences . I witnessed the ridiculous nature of the advancement from tools to management . It became increasingly obvious that being good at what you do meant the company had to keep you in the production area . That meant slow pay scale lower vacation and retirement benefits while the dum ass ignorant black dude who was known for low productivity and often tagged as lazy or widow maker (we were in a dangerous enviorment) got advancement . Though incapable of doing the math to keep things straight he be buying a cadallic with his raise .
Costs spun out of control with a manager for every 8 men and a trained mechanical staff that knew they got screwed so your effort drops to minimum and poof the company is out of business .
It was not the union wages or benefits it was the work enviorment created by idiots to make a show . Sadly even the black guys with the skills to supervise were left in production while the weakest head moved up . People that can and did perform were left to perform the company could not afford to lose the productivity even though we all slowed down ! What’s the use , the top heavy dead weight was killing all of us and there was no stopping it !
It’s called the Peter Principle, BG.
“… the observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence.”
rumbswabbery ?
Rumpswabbery. Wiping the bottoms of your betters.
Affirmative action is always wrong. College admission should be based on test scores pertinent to success in college. Job applicants should be selected on which people are best suited to do the job in question.
“College admission should be based on test scores”, If we reduce admissions to a simple numbers game, only applicants with a 4.0 would get into medical schools. There are other valuable criteria. For example, what about a 3.6 student who had done volunteer work in some medical crisis area? What about a working-class student with a 3.5 who worked full-time to put herself though college? if we reduce admissions to a numbers games, we even don’t need an admissions staff. A computer could do it. Also, admissions test like the SAT, LSAT, and MCAT reveal a positive correlation between higher test scores and higher family income. So, the numbers game would potentially favor wealthy applicants at the expense of working-class applicants.
And
“Job applicants should be selected on which people are best suited to do the job”, so does ending affirmative action include a ban on hiring someone because he’s the boss’s son-in-law, or her dad works there, or his friend put in a “good word” for him?
It should. It should include a ban on anyone who’s not actually needed, productive, and willing to work hard to make the enterprise go.
Quotas are ridiculous. The assumption is that black, brown and female people are not hired and promoted because of racism / sexism / whatever.
If you are talented you will likely be hired. You could be such a grump, gruff, irritating personality that you won’t last long, and be fired. More likely, if you are REALLY talented, the organization will figure out a way – up to and including assigning your own personal “handler” to keep you isolated, active and producing, away from the rest of the organization – to harvest the benefits of your talent while minimizing the damage.
I’ve seen it, on white / black / Asian / female / whatevers – “Dr. So and So is a real pain in the ass: never makes meetings, never writes up the paperwork, never says a kind word to anybody – but he has 38 patents and keeps getting new ones. Angela and David are in charge of handling Dr. So and So’s paperwork, equipment requisitions, giving his feedback and points in meetings, and everything else. We’d fire him tomorrow but one of our competitors would hire him – and do exactly what we have, give him handlers and keep him out of sight and productive – and THEY would get the patents, licensing fees, new ideas and developments. I know it’s not fair to Angela and David, but we pay them well, give them extra vacation when Dr. So and So goes, and make sure they can rest, vent and recover between times. It works for us.” And so it goes.
Talent makes up for lots of other shortcomings. Similar approaches are seen in sales (for the top producers, many doors are always open), R&D, floor management (good floor / operations people are rare, and getting rarer), you name it. Government can reward incompetence, minority status only without talent, cronyism, nepotism and so forth because GOVERNMENT DOESN’T HAVE TO MAKE A PROFIT TO STAY IN BUSINESS.
It’s also why government must ALWAYS be MINIMIZED – because nothing wastes resources like a government.