Truth Irrelevancy Project Update

When traffickers in intellectual gobbledegook have free reign, the Truth Irrelevancy Project’s work is done.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Truth is always the enemy of power. Exposure of power’s motivations, depredations, and corruption never serves power’s ends. Truth is often suppressed and those who disclose it persecuted. Any illegitimate government (currently, all of them) that fails to do so risks its own termination.

What if, instead of suppressing the truth, a regime could render it irrelevant and not have to worry about it? That prospect is the Holy Grail for those who rule or seek to rule.

Robert Gore, “Make the Truth Irrelevant,”  Straight Line Logic, October 16, 2019

By now most people recognize war is being waged. “Make the Truth Irrelevant” was published before Covid-19 or the George Floyd protests and riots, but it offers the perspective necessary to understand who is waging war against whom, and what’s at stake.

Science is one way humanity searches for truth. The Covid-19 panic and response are a direct assault on what remains of science. All of the hysteria and the political reaction to it are driven by models and projections, which are nothing more than hypotheses.

It is said that models are only as good as the underlying data and assumptions they incorporate, but that’s misleading. They may use the best available data and assumptions and still be wildly off the mark. For any model of a complex phenomenon—the weather, the climate, financial markets, or the progression of a disease—substitute “our best guess” for the word “model” and you have a better understanding of what the model actually is.

“Our best guess” also depends on who’s doing the guessing. The Covid-19 models that have been accepted and heavily publicized are the ones with the most dire projections for cases and deaths. The projections have generated the fear and panic necessary to support unprecedented restrictions on freedom and individual rights—lockdowns, business closures, involuntary unemployment, social distancing, and face masks—and a concomitant expansion of governments’ power, essentially rule by decree.

The truth and logic were made irrelevant in many ways. Any opposition to the substitution of “our best guess” for actual science was roundly denounced as anti-science! The effectiveness of the totalitarian measures had never been established and still has not. There are in fact ample indications that they have made the outbreak worse. The use of hydroxychloriquine with antibiotics and zinc compounds, and other alternatives, as a treatment for Covid-19, based on doctors and other researchers’ observations, hypotheses, and experimentation—the scientific method—that too was anti-scientific. When non-science (sounds a lot like nonsense, doesn’t it?) becomes science and real science is scorned and discarded, the Holy Grail is within grasp.

Even after the models upon which the totalitarian measures were based proved dramatically wrong, questions and dissent were suppressed and the measures kept in place. Nobody was to question the motives or the political philosophies of the officially approved best-guessers or their sponsors, even after the best guesses were wildly errant. Nobody was to question the good faith of the government officials who imposed the totalitarian measures even as the dire consequences mounted. When the official story cannot be questioned and alternative stories are suppressed, what does it say about the official story?

Social media companies openly proclaim their fealty to the party line and remove anyone who has the temerity to challenge it. After a slow start most of the alternative media has woken up. Only a remnant cling to the official narrative, hoping any new uptick in cases anywhere heralds the kind of pandemic they predicted but never came, or at least a second wave of the one that did. Disappointingly for them, death rates keep going down and increases in cases are mostly driven by the increases in testing the coronavirus commissars have mandated.

Corrupting science is the penultimate step to making the truth irrelevant. The last step is obliterating thought. The chaos in the streets that erupted after George Floyd’s death is a flyspeck compared to the mental chaos it reflects, which finds the ostensibly opposing sides on the same side, waging full-on war against reason and logic. A small and lonely brigade does battle against huge armies marching under banners of intellectual gobbledegook.

Violence or its threat precludes discussion, which means you don’t have to rhetorically disarm and win a debate with someone who’s pointing a gun at you before you physically disarm, injure, or kill him in self-defense. Anyone who inflicts violence on people or property must be confronted by law enforcement with whatever force is necessary to stop the violence and subdue the perpetrator. Peaceful, law abiding citizens have the right to call upon what is, in a rational society, their agent the government to do it’s duty and arrest, try, and, once the violent criminal is convicted, incarcerate, regardless of the criminal’s beliefs and purported justifications.

George Floyd’s death raises a variety of disturbing questions and issues. The facts surrounding his death are not altogether clear, but will presumably be clearer after further investigation and the trials of the four police. Some have taken his death as an indictment of, among other things, police tactics, police in general, public laws, government, and the status of racial groups within the US. They have the right to peaceably protest. However, their questions, accusations, and condemnations, well-founded or not, afford no justification for violence and the destruction of property.

A society in which violence is initiated against people and property and is excused in the name of a cause is a society well down the road to its own destruction. People’s safety and freedom cannot be subject to the random and arbitrary terrors of political and ideological zealotry. To claim otherwise is to excuse the inexcusable.

The rioters are using the alleged murder of George Floyd and the alleged violation of his rights as a suspected criminal to justify the wholesale violation of rights of people who had nothing to do with the situation. You cannot protest a violation of yours or someone else’s rights while claiming the right to violate other people’s rights. It’s a double standard, which is the same thing as no standard—more gobbledegook.

If a white person is racist by virtue of being born white, but those using that pejorative and rationale are not racist for doing so, the words racist and racism have lost all meaning. Definitions of those words contingent on who’s using them and to whom it’s being applied render them meaningless. The guilt and apologies from some whites for racism and acceptance of their accusers’ claim that it is congenital is akin to guilt and apologies for attributes they actually are born with—blue eyes, curly hair, etc. An accusation that has no meaning or force is an accusation that must be ignored.

Similarly, “medical science” that warns of the dangers of anti-lockdown and Trump rallies but blesses George Floyd protests destroys the meaning of that term. A double standard is no standard and consideration of either the warning or the blessing is precluded by their self-contradictory idiocy. It is yet another indication of the corruption of medical science, already glaringly evident since the onset of the coronavirus outbreak.

The premise essential to the argument against racism is that individuals as a matter of logic must be judged as individuals, on their individual merits and flaws, not on their race. The concepts of racial guilt and racial pride are equally fatuous, a cover for people who want to either artificially inflate or deflate their own or someone else’s worth based on the accomplishments or transgressions of people to which they have no connection other than race and who often lived before they were even born. While the motivations of such people vary, it’s a plausible speculation that they stem from feelings of personal inadequacy.

Any racial generalization—commendatory, pejorative, or benign—is disproven by at least one individual member of the race who does not conform to it. Other than the characteristics which define a race, it is virtually impossible to make any true and universal generalizations (including generalizations about privilege or its lack) about any particular race. That’s on the questionable assumption that race can be even a definable concept in societies where races intermarry. What race is a child with a white and black parent? What is the race of the grandchildren if that child procreates with an Asian or Hispanic?

To paraphrase Ayn Rand, don’t bother analyzing nonsense, instead ask what it accomplishes. The premise of individuality and the impossibility of generalization cannot be acknowledged because this “war” is actually just another skirmish in the endless battle between the individual and collectivism, which at root is violence against the mind.

The rioters, looters, and vandals, and their political and rhetorical enablers have been forthright about their desire to destroy, stop, or cancel any form of individual expression that does not conform to their ever-shifting whims and dictates. They are more honest than the Covid-19 totalitarians, who want the same things but are hiding behind the spurious rationale of protecting public health. Both groups claim the collective good as they define it transcends individual rights, meaning it transcends the individual mind.

Undoubtedly there are people behind the scenes who are pulling the strings of the coronavirus commissars, peaceful protestors, and rioters. Many believe the string-pullers’ long-term goal is to install their version of order from the chaos they are fomenting. However, order out of chaos is a historical and intellectual canard, still more gobbledegook.

What will come out of chaos is what has always come when that crowd gains control: suppression, submission, stagnation, decay, tyranny, totalitarianism, and mass murder. Coronavirus totalitarianism and the open embrace of Marxism by many of the rioters tell you all need to know. One question undercuts Marxism: why will the people of ability continue to produce for the people of need? It’s a question whose only correct answer is that they won’t, not for long, and it should have relegated Marxism and its collectivist fellow travelers to intellectual dustbins from the moment they were promulgated. Instead, those ideologies drove the murder of at least 100 million people in the twentieth century.

Misery and death will always be Marxism and its collectivist way stations’ end product. Collectivism, whether the product of an uprising from below or some grand plan from above, inevitably degenerates to the “order” of the prison, the concentration camp, the Antebellum plantation, the gas chamber, or the graveyard. It’s also the order of the pressure cooker, as such measures always generate intense counter-pressure from the irrepressible human mind and spirit.

“Order” imposed and enforced by arbitrary violence is not order, it’s violence, destruction and death, a different and often more pernicious version of the same chaos it ostensibly replaces. To say that the communists replaced the chaos of Tsar Nicholas II’s regime with order is to equate the infliction of incalculable misery and despair and the death of tens of millions at the hands of their violent dictatorship with a scientific laboratory, a factory, a library, or any other endeavor dedicated to the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, production, and human advancement. That equalization stretches the definition of “order” beyond the breaking point.

Order is a human value, produced by rational human minds, not intellectual gobbledegook and chaotic violence. Order is a consequence of freedom and the protection of individual rights. There is nothing spontaneous about such order, it doesn’t happen by chance. It happens because people have discovered its necessary conditions and requirements, instituted corresponding social, political, legal, and economic arrangements, and find it in their self-interest to support and defend such arrangements (it’s not easy). The order that emerges results from voluntary choices, not violent control, which ultimately leads to chaos.

Sense and nonsense cannot peacefully coexist, either intellectually or in real life. Sense will be the first to realize that. Nonsense cannot recognize it—sense provides its sustenance. The desirability of separation is seeping into the alternative media. Terms like “secession” and “divorce” are used more frequently, especially among people who espouse freedom and liberty as their ultimate goal. They understand the totalitarian designs of the globalists, coronavirus commissars, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the politicians, celebrities, and businesspeople kowtowing to them, and know full well who has the ability and who has the need.

The first requirement of collectivism is victims. Its proponents can’t let their victims (sustenance) walk away, so there won’t be an amicable divorce. It will come down to history’s perpetual victims—the capable, competent, and honorable who ask of government only that it protect their rights—confidently asserting their own value, refusing to be victims, establishing one or more enclaves, defending their right to their own lives and free and peaceful order, and ignoring the collectivists’ screams as they consume themselves.

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