The fleas are the problem

The article When META Met Society by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) writes about the evils of META (Most Effective Tactics Available). The author cites an essay by Megan McArdle. Neither one of these fools can think of an example of META that corresponds to actual power. That perennial dipshit McArdle thinks that a 17-year-old swatting hundreds of people is a good example. Greenfield sticks to the obvious, as cited below.

“If you were big and strong, you could beat up someone small and weak. You could steal their wallet, watch and jewelry. The only thing that prevented this from happening constantly was the societal belief that this was wrong and bad, and that people who did this to other people were wrong and bad. ”

And here’s another one of his hobby-horses,

“The law prohibits the use of deadly force against another except in self-defense (with certain inapplicable exceptions). Protesters figured out that they could simply stand in front of a car, which would turn into a deadly weapon if intentionally driven into a person, and there wasn’t a damn thing the car could lawfully do about it. A handful of protesters could thus shut down thousands of cars, together with the thousands of people within them, to inflict misery for their cause with this one cool trick.”

He and McArdle agree that “dubious asylum claims” are a dastardly life-hack exploited by immigrants. The common thread in all of their examples is that they are perpetrated by people with little-to-no power who obtain power through a hack. This pisses off elitists like McArdle and Greenfield the most because they feel that “those people” should know their place. The system has been rigged against them, but they should still play by the rules. Fair is fair.

Except that no-one who actually has any power plays by those rules. That is what society teaches. Fake it ‘til you make it. Cheat big or go home. McArdle and Greenfield are probably more than well-off enough to be taking advantage of dozens of sleazy tax loopholes that let them enjoy much more of the benefit of their burgeoning investments than they would in a fair society.

Instead, they are focused laser-like on the evils of:

• Immigrants with only the clothes on their back taking advantage of a country whose immigration system is overwhelmed because it spends all of its money bombing and fomenting unrest in the countries those people come from.
• Mentally disturbed teenagers who use an unhinged and unquestioning and vastly overpowered and under-controlled police force to attack innocent people.
• Climate activists who prevent people from driving to their jobs by unfairly gluing themselves to the road.

None of these examples of META—let’s just call them “hacks”—are admirable, but they’re chump change. These examples are fleas on the back of the dog. The same dog that’s tearing everyone’s lives apart is complaining about the fleas and getting its victims to side with it.

Neither are any of their examples of the people who have real power in society. The real hack is to figure out how to make money without doing much of anything, or to figure out how to con the government out of a lot of money, then use that money to maintain the structure that let you get rich and to manipulate it into making you even richer.

I think it’s much more relevant to talk about “levers” instead of META or even “hacks”. Western civilization seems to have settled on running a society that’s inherently scammy. People will find ways to scam. They are encouraged to do so. The whole of modern society is a Swiss cheese of ethics and morals, where we’ve been taught that nothing means anything, unless you can get money.

Money by The Flying Lizards (YouTube)

It’s inevitable that the parchment of laws is going to get a bit holey as everyone who gets a lot of money pops holes in it. Go read some of Vince McMahon’s alleged text messages—the article Vince McMahon’s Disturbing Texts to Janel Grant in Trafficking Lawsuit Revealed by Subjoheet Mukherjee (Ringside News) includes enough of them to give you an appalling idea. Those will convince you that the problem is not at the bottom but at the top. The people taking the most advantage of the holes in society’s rules are the ones who made them.

McMahon’s text messages also illustrate how corrupt and debased a society is for obviously deranged people like him to be able to not only succeed, but basically win. As Some Thoughts On Vince McMahon by Chris Seaton (Simple Justice) writes,

“Why is a billionaire in his seventies who spends his days dictating his every word to professional assistants writing text messages like a drunken, horny 17 year old boy?”

Or why is he “allegedly sexually assaulting a young woman with his boss while she recovered from cancer treatments.”

But sure, let’s focus laser-like on how teenagers, climate activists, teen-aged climate activists, and desperate immigrants are tearing the country apart. A likely story (as my Mom loved to say). “Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf,” as we say here in the DACH[1] region.