Funny that a company so concerned with justice itself failed to act justly, and in three senses. Amazon estimated objects improperly, distributed its own resources in an unbecoming way, and messed with other people’s stuff, specifically the filmmakers’ promises due.
Whether or not Covid was a true black swan event is not my focus here. I’m interested in Taleb’s more general epistemological point that what catches us off guard would not have done so if we had a different perspective.
In a utopian world where absolute truth is decipherable, we are surely obliged to separate fact from fiction. But in a corruptible world, it’s worth remembering that medical patients are often encouraged to seek a second opinion.
Of all the objections to the Covid-industrial complex you did not expect, chief among them ought to rank Gracia Grindal’s religious protest poems, Epistles to Eve. You will find yourself meditating on the strangeness of humanity’s discovery of itself.
I want to explore two questions: Why has public health been reduced to drag? What does it mean to live in a society where the vast majority of civil society has lost access to logic and reason?
Note that in the period covered in X’s latest “Transparency Report” to the EU on its “content moderation” efforts, nearly 90% of such requests for information on the purveyors of ostensibly “illegal or harmful speech” came from one country: Germany.
This brings us to the root of the problem that I would like to discuss, the primacy of conscience versus the propaganda of progress and the resulting technocratic paradigm of modern Western society.
Christianity threatens the regime because it demands faith in something greater than the state. The assault on religion is not collateral damage in the war against free expression; suppressing worship is fundamental to the cause of tyranny.
Those assuming the White Woman’s Burden believe that there is a moral elect embedded in almost every population whose job it is to liberate the majority from their weaknesses and superstitions through instruction, and if need be, loving coercion.
The neo-liberal consensus built in the postwar period contained the seeds of its own destruction. It was too dependent on the creation of institutions beyond people’s control and too reliant on elite mastery of events.
For better or worse, authoritarianism has happened many times in history — it’s kind of the human default. The original state.
Perhaps with regards to healthspan and lifespan, instead of calorie restriction, we can bio-hack through either eating as much as we want once a day, or eating non-insulin-stimulating foods. Doing both will further enhance their effects.
