I read the various news and commentary about the regular police force; five full-time officers and a chief strong, and a couple of other city employees resigning in a body from their jobs in Kenly, North Carolina, in protest over the hostile work atmosphere generated through a new city manager hire. Details on this are all obscure about the personalities and specific incidences of workplace hostility involved. One can sort of fill in the empty spaces, just applying what can be deduced from the personal details and past employment record of the city manager involved, and suppositions regarding the civic employees who have resigned. That and reading the comments appended to the news stories about this interesting happening from those who seem to be familiar. All the parties involved seem to be tight-lipped about what set the whole thing off. The town council was supposed to have held a closed-door meeting on Friday to resolve the situation, but there has not been anything new in the news media that I can find.
Deep Thoughts
Starvation and Centralization
It’s now well-known that the nation of Sri Lanka has been reduced to poverty, hunger, and chaos by top-down policies requiring organic farming and forbidding the use of artificial fertilizers. Western ‘experts’ who encouraged them onto this path are nowhere to be seen, and some of their historical posts/tweets have been deleted.
I’m reminded of a passage in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon. The protagonist, Rubashov, is an Old Bolshevik who has been arrested by the Stalinist regime, and the book represents his musings while awaiting trial and likely execution.
A short time ago, our leading agriculturalist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs. In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance : it can decide the issue of the next war. If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him. If he was wrong…
Note that phrase in a nationally centralized agriculture. When things are centralized, decisions become overwhelmingly important. There will be strong pressure against allowing dissidents to ‘interfere with’ what has been determined to be the One Best Way.
Of course, it is theoretically possible for a maker of centralized decisions to decide that parallel and differing paths must be pursued. This even sometimes happens in practice. In the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, designs were developed for use of two different types of fissionables (Plutonium and U-235) and three or four different methods for the separation of Uranium isotopes were pursued.
But the multiple-paths approach rarely seems to happen in practice. The kind of people who rise to become key decision-makers in government rarely possess a great depth of nuance, and they are greatly influenced by confirmation bias, motivate reasoning, and political marketing considerations.
And even the most brilliant and thoughtful individuals can be wrong in a big way. Vannevar Bush, who was FDR’s science advisor during WWII, was an unquestionably brilliant and creative man who, along with his many other contributions, invented the mechanical analog computer and envisaged the concept of hypertext, long before the Internet and the World Wide Web. Yet, regarding the prospect of intercontinental ballistic missiles, he wrote in 1945:
The people who have been writing these things that annoy me have been talking about a 3,000-mile, high-angle rocket, shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb, and so directed as to be a precise weapon, which would land exactly on a certain target, such as a city. I say, technically I don’t think anybody in the world knows how to do such a thing, and 1 feel confident it will not be done for a very long period of time to come. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking.
If Dr Bush had had complete control over American defense and aerospace research, it is likely that the US would have been much later in ICBM deployment than it in fact was. We cannot know what the consequences of such lateness would have been, but it’s safe to say that they would not have been good.
And how likely is it that any significant number of our current experts in economics, social sciences, and various other sciences–and their political sponsors and makers of relevant decisions in various countries–are anywhere near as perceptive and forward thinking as Dr Bush was?…let alone more nearly infallible?
Want to bet your and your family’s food supply on it?
Screen Size and Depth of Dialogue
Via Instapunit, here is an article about online motorcycle forums, which says that there used to be many of these but that they have been drying up and going away. Why?
In January 2014, desktop internet use was overtaken by mobile internet use in America. This means screens got smaller, layouts moved primarily from horizontal to vertical, and physical keyboards were largely unavailable.
This means writing a longer post was more difficult. Formatting it to appear nicely with photos in line with the text became more difficult. Reading a post that was text-heavy became more onerous. As people drifted away from their desktop computers, they began to drift away from forums.
The post goes on to note that “social media sure is easy” and that many people tend to prefer getting information in social media form and “being served interesting things all the time with cross-pollination all in a one-stop dopamine hit. Do you love golf, Audi cars, retro-cafe motorcycles, and sushi? Social media can easily serve that up to you in a seemingly constant stream.”
and
You may be saying, “Hey, it’s easier to consume, but it’s a pain to create content on Insta or Facebook.” I’d agree with you. I’d also argue it’s going to be much harder to find great content in the future (if it even exists) because traditional social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are designed to deliver the latest content, not the deepest.
Also, these platforms seems specifically designed for distraction. If you’re trying to compose a reasonably long post on Facebook, you will likely be constantly interrupted by messages informing you that some person (who you may barely know or remember) liked or commented on some post that you did or commented on previously.
People do seem to like the Walled Gardens of social media, even though these gardens come complete with serpent. The author of the linked article seems to feel that the eclipsing of forums by social media was inevitable, like the replacement of printed motorcycle magazines…and seems OK with it:
The forum, which was somewhat asynchronous and perhaps more demanding of users’ time, whether giving or receiving information, has been supplanted by a much faster mode of communication. Some quality of the exchange probably suffers, but the volume has probably increased by more than the quality of post content has slipped.
The issue here goes far beyond the motorcycle community. Technologies, especially communications technologies, do affect thought processes and social interactions. The runaway success of social media…especially as combined with the tendency for the phone to become the universal device…has discouraged connected thought and discussion in ways that cannot be good either for our political culture or for the ability of people who have grown up in this environment to do complicated work.
Thoughts?
Very Nicely Put
The Constitution is not the law that governs us, it is the law that governs those who govern us.
–Randy E Barnett, quoted here.
Abuse of Authority
If you are a teacher or professor, you have a legitimate sphere of authority concerning teaching methods, classroom discussion, grades, etc. But you do not have legitimate authority to focus class time on selling students on your own personal political or social views–still less do you have authority to assign grades based on compliance with those views.
If you are Chairman or CEO of a publicly-traded corporation, you have a legitimate sphere of authority concerning organization design, business strategy, financing, people-selection, and many other things. But you do not have legitimate authority to devote corporate resources–of which you are not the owner–to promoting your personal political views.
If you are an Intelligence Officer employed by the federal government, then certain things fall within your legitimate sphere of authority. One thing that does not fall within your legitimate authority is using your position to influence US domestic election outcomes.
The whole concept that spheres of authority are and should be limited seems to be under assault in America today. Not only do many people reject the idea of any limits on their own authority; many people object to the idea of limits on the authority of institutions. Indeed, here is a law school dean who seems to reject the principle that courts should be constrained by laws.
I also observe that there are plenty of people in leadership positions who, while showing very poor performance in their own jobs, are insistent that people outside their sphere of authority do things to solve their problems…a prime example being governors and mayors who blame the skyrocketing crime rates in their jurisdictions on lack of (what they consider) proper gun control in adjacent states, when there are plenty of things they could do within their own scopes of authority and influence to address the problem. Similarly with education–tolerate increasingly-awful performance on the part of the schools and malevolent interference on the part of the teachers unions, while blaming the problem of uneducated graduates entirely on Systemic Racism…so those politicians are off the hook because Somebody Else does something, or some set of things.
Your thoughts?