BTW, great call on that 20 year campaign to promote high density urban living and public transportation, smart people
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 11, 2020
So much for ‘social distancing’. (But they've been at it for well more than 20 years!)
The solons of ‘urban planning’ never understood the problem with packing humans so closely together in an ugly urban environment. They foisted horrendous ‘Brutalist’ architecture on the taxpayers, crammed innocent citizens into concrete jungles and stinking public transportation, and seized a large portion of every worker's pay – all for the victims' own good – and then tried to improve their own miserable mess by ‘greening’ formerly useful space. They hobbled our public schools with absurd educational theories and crushed them with bureaucracy, and then called parents fools or worse for daring to make decisions for their own children. They told us how to live, what to think, and what to eat, never mind the utter lack of evidence for their enlightened advice. And when it all went very wrong, we were told to never mind all that because they're ‘experts’.
So now the Great and Wise Men mourn of ‘the death of expertise’ as a good portion of the public reject their advice and demand their damn money back, more so now as they see that richly funded CDC and NIH epidemiologists failed to plan for a foreseeable contingency and, even in the face of urgent need, FDA bureaucrats refused rule changes necessary to make COVID-19 testing more available. The excuse, as always, will be ‘a failure of imagination’.
And it is true: The baby has been tossed out with the bathwater. Good and vital advice sinks into disrepute by its proximity to bad, and sober judgement is buried under an avalanche screaming political hackery. But so much of ‘expertise’ is corrupt that the average victim of modern public education has no way to sort it out. The ‘experts’ have engineered their own downfall.
So boo-fricking-hoo and flush it all away. Mark II, the ‘experts’ can go pound sand and the people will return to judging true experts on the success of their advice, or by plain common sense. It's not perfect, but it's better than the way we had.
I keep hoping that sober judgement will win the day with the current Wuhan pandemic, and so far in my corner of the planet people are mostly taking reasonable precautions with only a trace of panic. (With a shake of his head and a shrug of his shoulders, the stock guy at the local Walmart replaces the empty pallets of toilet paper and bottled water, and I grin back. Yeah, he knows too.) But then I read what the jackasses on the nightly news are saying, and I throw up my hands.
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