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Like, Totally Orwellian: Nearly A Third Of GenZ Favors ‘Government Surveillance Cameras In Every Household’
Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023
From Ivy League campuses to the publishing industry and the digital domains of Facebook, there is an Orwellian sense of perpetual emergency, an irrational fear that misinformation and hate speech will overwhelm society unless every utterance is subject to a censor’s scrutiny.
What’s interesting about that is that 53% of Americans who support a CBDC also support in-home surveillance cameras.
BY TYLER DURDEN
Nearly one-third of Generation Z says they’d be just fine with government-installed surveillance cameras in every household under the guise of reducing domestic violence and other illegal activity.
“Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?” asks a new survey from the Cato Institute. Of the responses, 29% of those aged 18-29 said yes.
As the NY Post notes;
In 1791, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed building a “panopticon” in which people’s behavior could be monitored at all times.
But Bentham’s panopticon was meant to be a prison. A sizable segment of Generation Z would like to call it home.
When it comes to other age brackets, 20% of millennials (between the ages of 30 and 44) also want everyone watched.
Then, wisdom appears to kick in – as just 6% of Americans aged 45 and older were OK with government surveillance in every home.
Broken down by politics, 19% of liberals and 18% of centrists agreed that our daily lives should be monitored by the government for our own safety, while 9 – 11% of those who identify as conservative, very conservative, or very liberal agreed in what appears to be a “horseshoe” issue that unites both ends of the political spectrum.
It’s the middle that has the ethic of old East German secret police — or the KGB.
Maybe that’s not surprising considering the way respectable liberal institutions now run themselves.
From Ivy League campuses to the publishing industry and the digital domains of Facebook, there is an Orwellian sense of perpetual emergency, an irrational fear that misinformation and hate speech will overwhelm society unless every utterance is subject to a censor’s scrutiny.
Even Orwell didn’t imagine Newspeak would require new pronouns. -NY Post
Broken down by race, 33% of black Americans said they’re fine with government in-home surveillance, as did 25% of hispanics, 11% of whites, and 9% of asians respectively.
The question was asked as part of the Cato Institute’s survey on American attitudes on the prospect of a ‘central bank digital currency.’ What’s interesting about that is that 53% of Americans who support a CBDC also support in-home surveillance cameras.
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Environmentalism and the Immoral Low Ground | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023
There’s a common misconception that the next great evil ideological mania to sweep our world will be easily identified as a sinister movement from the outset. But that’s not true. The next great evil will play out like all the past ones. It will sound good to many. It will be popular. And there will be social pressure to join in. But underneath the moving language will lie a rejection of humanity—be it a subset or the whole species. That rejection plants the seed for future atrocities.
Now every state would be telling US not to charge EVs because power plants can’t keep up.
https://mises.org/wire/environmentalism-and-immoral-low-ground
Last month, the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency proposed new power plant regulations that would put harsh limits on the amount of carbon dioxide released while producing electricity. This comes from the same administration pushing to electrify all parts of daily life, from driving to cooking. As if slamming the power grid with artificial demand is not enough, now the federal government has also set its sights on electricity suppliers.
Policies as ludicrous as this are only possible because the ideology they rest on, environmentalism, has long enjoyed a perch on the moral high ground that has gone almost unchallenged. That needs to change. Environmentalism presents itself as a philosophy advocating benevolence toward nature and prudence with resources. But in reality, it is an antihuman ideology capable of justifying atrocities.
Environmentalism rests on the valuation of untouched, nonhuman nature as the highest good. There are, of course, radical and moderate environmentalists, but all adherents subscribe to this fundamental moral valuation. They only differ in their degree of consistency.
This moral view was perhaps best summarized by National Park Service biologist David Graber in his 1989 review of Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature. Dr. Graber concludes his review with these three haunting paragraphs:
That makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. . . . McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them.
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.
It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
That final line was unsurprisingly revisited during the last few years. In this view, if there was anything bad about covid-19 it’s that it was not deadly enough—especially for young people who have yet to have kids. That viewpoint is evil.
This idea that humanity is a cancer can be found in the writings and arguments of other environmentalists, though most are less explicit.
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Not a Single American Deserved to Die in Korea
Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023
We can never know what might have happened to South Korea had the United States not intervened in the Korean civil war. Regardless of whatever good things happened in South Korea after the war, however, it was not worth 36,000 dead Americans, or even one dead American. Ask the families of the U.S. soldiers who died in the Korean War if the loss of their loved ones is worth whatever became of South Korea.
No American soldier should ever have to die in defense of some other country.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/not-a-single-american-deserved-to-die-in-korea/
The remains of an American soldier were laid to rest on Memorial Day at the Andersonville National Cemetery in Georgia after a police car with lights flashing escorted the casket to the cemetery. What made this funeral service so unique and so tragic is that Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was killed on September 1, 1950, during the Korean War. He was just eighteen years old.
Story left high school during his sophomore year and enlisted in the Army. In the summer of 1950, he deployed to Korea with Company A of the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. After he was wounded when his unit came under attack by three divisions of North Korean troops, Story seized a machine gun and killed or wounded about 100 men according to his Medal of Honor citation that his father received at a Pentagon ceremony in 1951. “Realizing that his wounds would hamper his comrades, he refused to retire to the next position but remained to cover the company’s withdrawal,” the award citation said. “When last seen, he was firing every weapon available and fighting off another hostile assault.” An unidentified body recovered from the area where Story was last seen fighting was buried in 1950 with other unknown service members at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, of the more than 36,000 American soldiers who died in the Korean War, more than 7,500 of them remain missing or unidentified.
Story’s remains were disinterred in 2021 as part of a broader military effort to determine the identities of unknown Korean War veterans. DNA from Story’s bones was matched with DNA samples submitted by his mother and his niece.
It is good that Story’s remains were identified and his surviving family members notified. But this doesn’t change the fact that Story’s death was senseless, in vain, pointless, unnecessary—and entirely preventable.
After World War II, the United States and its allies divided Korea at the 38th parallel, with the Soviets occupying the north and the Americans occupying the south. After three years and three million, mostly civilian, deaths, the Korean War ended in 1953 in a stalemate roughly along that same miliary demarcation line, which then became the border between North and South Korea..
There was no U.S. declaration of war against North Korea. There was no congressional authorization for the president to use military force in defense of South Korea. There was no cry from Americans for the government to take sides or intervene in a civil war halfway around the world. There was no duty for the United States to contain communism. There was no threat to the United States by North Korea. No American in Alaska, Hawaii, California, Topeka, or Peoria was in any danger from anyone in North Korea. There was absolutely no reason for 1,789,000 American soldiers or one American soldier to go to Korea. President Harry Truman simply ordered U.S. troops to go to Korea, and they obeyed—just like they obeyed orders and went to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
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The Ukrainian Army Is Run Not by the Generals but by the PR Department
Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023
Yesterday Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who is campaigning against Joe Biden for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in the 2024 U.S. elections publicly announced that approximately 350,000 Ukrainian combatants have died in the area of Russia’s Special Military Operation so far. Judging by yesterday’s massacre during the first big attack by the Ukrainians in the southern Donetsk oblast, the death toll will accelerate in the days ahead. Are any people of conscience listening in Europe or the USA?
What can you expect from a government headed by a comic actor named Zelensky? We see the answer to that question day by day in the way the Ukrainian armed forces are carrying out their much-anticipated spring counteroffensive: it is being stage managed by the Public Relations team with scant regard for their cannon fodder army.
Why do I say this? Because each of the latest military setbacks if not outright fiascoes of military operations is being covered up by sensational sideshows intended to divert public attention at home and especially abroad from what is going on in the battlefield.
In the past couple of weeks, Zelensky was under enormous pressure from Washington to finally launch the much heralded counteroffensive. Notwithstanding his complaints that insufficient new military hardware had arrived to date and his demands on NATO countries to step up deliveries of tanks and F16 fighter jets, the Pentagon was insisting that the Ukrainians were now well equipped and should prove on the battlefield that this investment by the Americans and Europeans was justified, to prove that they can indeed push back the Russians and free all the occupied territory.
Yet, on the battlefield all that we saw was positional fighting and probing for weak spots in the Russian defense lines. There was no sign of a massive counter offensive until a day ago. What we saw instead were incursions of Ukrainian special forces, mostly said to be mercenaries from Poland and elsewhere, across the border from the Ukrainian held Kharkov oblast into the neighboring RF oblast of Belgorod. And then, about four days ago, we saw the start of a destructive artillery and rocket attack on the border town of Shebekino, where 400 or 600 strikes on residential neighborhoods have been recorded in 24 hour periods. As we now see daily on Russian television, the whole population on the Russian side of the border across from Kharkov city is being evacuated and media there are discussing why their government has not done more to protect the frontier and to hit back.
Of course, if the Kremlin were to do so it would fall into the trap of withdrawing forces from the front lines and weakening preparedness for whatever mass counter offensive may yet lie ahead. But it would be more appropriate to see in the border attacks on Belgorod not a military tactical purpose but a PR dimension, to capture the airwaves and divert attention from the still delayed massive offensive by providing some highly photogenic developments for the news crews.
Today’s number one item on Euronews is the destruction of part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant in the southern region of Kherson to one side of the Dnepr river, with the consequence that water from the reservoir to feed the plant now is pouring out in uncontrolled fashion into the Dnepr. Let us remember that here the right (western) bank of the Dnepr, with the homonymous former capital town of the Kherson oblast, is held by the Ukrainians and the left (eastern) bank is held by the Russians.
Threats to the large Kakhovka reservoir were discussed widely in local and global media more than eight months ago when the Russians abandoned Kherson city and withdrew all forces to the left bank of the Dnepr. At that time already, the Russians anticipated a possible breach of the dam with the consequence of dangerous, life threatening flooding downstream. They pulled back the local population from areas deemed to be most at danger. Moreover, as CNN reminds us, the shutdown of the hydroelectric power plant which ran on water from the reservoir might put at risk the not too distant Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, where critical equipment for its operation run on electricity generated by the Kakhovka plant. So the nuclear danger once again raises its ugly head.
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‘Give War a Chance’ – A ‘War That Even Pacifists Can Get Behind’
Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023
But the flip-side to this Atlanticist aspiration – as President Emmanuel Macron noted – is its inexorable logic that Europeans simply end by becoming American vassals. Macron was trying rather, to rally Europe towards the coming ‘age of empires’,hoping to position Europe as a ‘third pole’ in a concert of empires.
The Atlanticists were duly enraged by Macron’s remarks (which nonetheless drew support of other EU states). It could even seem (to furious Atlanticists) that Macron actually was channelling General de Gaulle who had called NATO a “false pretence” designed to “disguise America’s chokehold over Europe”.
The West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order, Alastair Crooke writes.
More than a year into Russia’s Special Operation, the initial burst of European excitement at western push-back on Russia has dissipated. The mood instead has turned to “existential dread, a nagging suspicion that [western] civilisation may destroy itself”, Professor Helen Thompson writes.
For an instant, a euphoria had coalesced around the putative projection of the EU as a world power; as a key actor, about to compete on a world scale. Initially, events seemed to play to Europe’s conviction of its market powers: Europe was going to bring down a major power – Russia – by financial coup d’état alone. The EU felt ‘six feet tall’.
It seemed at the time a galvanising moment: “The war re-forged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the West, assuming ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the ‘West’ was rebaptised”, Arta Moeini suggests.
After the initial disappointment at the lack of a ‘quick kill’, the hope persisted – that if only the sanctions were given more time, and made more all-embracing, then Russia surely would ultimately collapse. That hope has turned to dust. And the reality of what Europe has done to itself has begun to dawn – hence Professor Thomson’s dire warning:
“Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human Will, have never before had to bet so heavily on technology over [fossil] energy – as the driver of our material advancement”.
For the Euro-Atlanticists however, what Ukraine seemed to offer – finally – was validation for their yearning to centralise power in the EU, sufficiently, to merit a place at the ‘top table’ with the U.S., as partners in playing the Great Game.
Ukraine, for better or worse, underlined Europe’s profound military dependence on Washington – and on NATO.
More particularly, the Ukraine conflict seemed to open the prospect for consolidating the strange metamorphosis of NATO from military alliance to an enlightened, Progressive, peace alliance! As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”.
The Ukraine war is portrayed, in this vein, as the “war that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seemed to be singing is “Give War a Chance””.
Lily Lynch, a Belgrade-based writer, argues that,
“…especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe … ”
“No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968 … But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party – that would one day tear it apart”.
“Kosovo then changed everything: The 78-day NATO bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia in 1999, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens. NATO for the Greens became an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom – well beyond the borders of its member states”.
A few years later, in 2002, an EU functionary (Robert Cooper) could envisage Europe as a new ‘liberal imperialism’. The ‘new’ was that Europe eschewed hard military power, in favour of weaponising both a controlled ‘narrative’ and controlled participation in its market. He advocated for ‘a new age of empire’, in which Western powers no longer would have to follow international law in their dealings with ‘old fashioned’ states; they could use military force independently of the United Nations; and could impose protectorates to replace regimes which ‘misgovern’.
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WHO Adopts European-Style COVID-19 Vaccine Passports As Part Of New Global Digital Health Certificate
Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023
The WHO said in a statement that, as part of the new initiative, it will “take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats.”
No need to show us your papers, we already have them. Wait! I see you don’t have the latest chemical control injection….
BY TYLER DURDEN
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The World Health Organization (WHO) said it will take up the European Union’s digital COVID-19 vaccine passport framework as part of a new global network of digital health certificates.
The WHO said in a June 5 statement that it had entered into a “landmark digital health partnership” with the European Commission (EC), the European Union’s executive body.
As part of this new joint venture, Europe’s existing framework of digital vaccine passports will serve as the first building block of a global network of digital health products.
Dubbed the Global Digital Health Certification Network, the new vaccine passport framework has already drawn criticism, with Australian senator Alex Antic saying in a statement that the move is “just another conspiracy theory coming true.”
Vaccine passports—and various other forms of digital identity schemes—have been criticized as an invasion of privacy and as having the potential to enable governments and corporations to coerce human behavior by, for instance, denying access to infrastructure or services.
The WHO said in a statement that, as part of the new initiative, it will “take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats.”
The EU’s digital COVID-19 vaccine certificate entered into force in July 2021, with over 2.3 billion certificates issued.
As the pandemic has waned, the use of vaccine passports has seen limited use of late—and it has declined further since the WHO recently declared an end to COVID-19 as a global public health emergency.
While the EU Digital COVID Certificate Regulation is set to expire at the end of June 2023, the WHO sees potential in the bloc’s digital vaccine passport framework for additional use cases beyond COVID-19, such as by digitizing the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis.
Critics have denounced vaccine passports as discriminatory for facilitating denial of access to public services to the unvaccinated or paving the way for more intrusive health-based surveillance.
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Our Merit-Based Society Has Been Displaced by a Diversity-Based Society
Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023
Merit is clearly discriminatory, but it discriminates on the basis of ability, not on the basis of race and gender. There always have been highly capable women and non-whites. Why not hire them on the basis of their merit, not for their race and gender?
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Our Merit-Based Society Has Been Displaced by a Diversity-Based Society
Paul Craig Roberts
I have been watching its arrival for a number of years, and now it has arrived–the transformation of our society from merit-based to status-based. This is a major revolution.
“From status to contract” was Sir Henry Maine’s description of the rise of a merit-based society in which aristocratic privilege was eliminated and equality under the law instituted. This revolution has now been overthrown, and we as a society have moved back to status as determined by race and gender. If you are a member of an “under-represented” race or gender, you enjoy “diversity status” and preference in hiring and promotion just as aristocrats did in the hierarchy of social class.
The new status-based society is everywhere one looks. For example, the accounting firm, Price-Waterhouse, describes itself as “a culture of belonging.” “Unwavering determination and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” has achieved a Price-Waterhouse board that is 40% female and 40% racially/ethnically diverse. Price-Waterhouse’s aspirational goals for 2026 are a 50% increase in the firm’s black and Hispanic/Latinx workforce, a 50% increase in women, and to have 40% of its suppliers “certified diverse.”
Notice that Price-Waterhouse does not define its aspiration in terms of having the best qualified work force. Apparently, Price-Waterhouse thinks that hiring based on merit would be discriminatory and not inclusive. Why does Price-Waterhouse think that white women and non-white ethnicities are less capable than white men? If Price-Waterhouse did not think that, why does the firm base its hiring on race and gender status?
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How weapons firms influence the Ukraine debate
Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023
Experts’ from defense industry funded think tanks are flooding the media, pushing for more arms without disclosing their benefactors.
Written by
Ben Freeman
“To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles. …To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use,” argues Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic.
What neither Cohen, who also famously pushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, nor The Atlantic acknowledge in the article is that most of the weapons Cohen mentions in the article — including long-range missiles, F-16s, and even F-35s — are made by funders of Cohen’s employer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
While this might seem like a glaring conflict of interest that, at the very least, should be disclosed in the article, a new Quincy Institute brief that I authored, “Defense Contractor Funded Think Tanks Dominate Ukraine Debate,” shows that this article isn’t an exception; it’s the norm. America’s top foreign policy think tanks are awash in funding from the defense industry. They’ve dominated the media market related to the Ukraine war, and they seldom, if ever, disclose that many of the weapons they’re recommending the U.S. give to Ukraine are made by their funders.
In short, when you hear a think tank scholar comment on the Ukraine war, chances are you’re hearing from someone whose employer is funded by those who profit from war, but you’ll probably never know it. That’s because 78 percent of the top ranked foreign policy think tanks in the U.S. receive funding from the Pentagon or its contractors, as documented in the new brief.
At the very top, defense industry influence is even greater: every single one of the top 10 ranked foreign policy think tanks receives funding from the defense sector. And, for many think tanks, the amount of defense funding is enormous. For example, CSIS, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and The Atlantic Council all reported receiving more than a million dollars a year from the defense sector.
These and other think tanks that receive considerable defense sector funding have publicly advocated for more militarized U.S. responses to the Ukraine war and, compared to their counterparts at think tanks that accept little or no defense sector funding, have dominated the media landscape related to the Ukraine war.
The new brief analyzed mentions of these top ranked foreign policy think tanks in Ukraine war related articles that appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. This analysis revealed that media outlets were more than seven times as likely to cite a think tank with defense sector support as they were to cite a think tank without it. Of the 1,247 think tank media mentions we tracked for the brief, 1,064 (or 85 percent) were mentions of think tanks with defense sector funding. And, the two most mentioned think tanks in Ukraine war related articles were think tanks flooded with defense sector dollars: CSIS and The Atlantic Council.
Yet, we only know the extent of CSIS and the Atlantic Council’s funding from the defense sector because both think tanks are commendably transparent about their donors and list all funders, within funding ranges, on their websites. Unfortunately, many of the nation’s top think tanks aren’t as forthcoming. In fact, the new brief found that nearly one third of the top U.S. foreign policy think tanks do not publicly disclose their donors.
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What Happens When the Competent Opt Out?
Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun23/competence6-23.html
Charles Hugh Smith
By this terminal stage, the competent have been driven out, quit or burned out.
What happens with the competent retire, burn out or opt out? It’s a question few bother to ask because the base assumption is that there is an essentially limitless pool of competent people who can be tapped or trained to replace those who retire, burn out or opt out, i.e. quit in favor of a lifestyle that doesn’t require much in the way of income or stress.
These assumptions are no longer valid. A great many essential services that are tightly bound to other essential services are cracking as the competent decide (or realize) they’re done with the rat-race.
The drivers of the Competent Opting Out are obvious yet difficult to quantify. Those retiring, burning out and opting out will deny they’re leaving for these reasons because it’s not politic to be so honest and direct. They will offer time-honored dodges such as “pursue other opportunities” or “family obligations.”
1. The steady increase in workloads, paperwork, compliance and make-work (i.e. work that has nothing to do with the institution’s actual purpose and mission) that lead to burnout. There is only so much we can accomplish, and if we’re burdened with ever-increasing demands for paperwork, compliance, useless meetings, training sessions, etc., then we no longer have the time or energy to perform our productive work.
I wrote a short book on my experience of Burnout. I believe it is increasingly common in jobs that demand responsibility and accountability yet don’t provide the tools and time to fulfill these demands. Once you’ve burned out, you cannot continue. That option no longer exists.
For others, the meager rewards simply aren’t worth the sacrifices required. The theme song playing in the background is the Johnny Paycheck classic Take this job and shove it.
Healthcare workloads, paperwork and compliance are one example of many. Failure to complete all the make-work can have dire consequences, so it becomes necessary to do less “real work” in order to complete all the work that has little or nothing to do with actual patient care. Alternatively, the workload expands to the point that it breaks the competent and they leave.
2. Loss of autonomy, control, belonging, rewards, accomplishment and fairness. Professor Christina Malasch pioneered research on the causes of burnout, which can be summarized as any work environment that reduces autonomy, control, belonging, rewards, accomplishment and fairness. Despite a near-infinite avalanche of corporate happy-talk (“we’re all family,”–oh, barf) this describes a great many work environments in the US: in a word, depersonalized. Everyone is a replaceable cog in a great impersonal machine optimized to maximize profits for shareholders.
3. The politicization of the work environment. Let’s begin by distinguishing between policies enforcing equal opportunity, pay, standards and accountability, policies required to fulfill the legal promises embedded in the nation’s social contract, and politicization, which demands allegiance and declarations of loyalty to political ideologies that have nothing to do with the work being done or the standards of accountability necessary to the operation of the complex institution or enterprise.
The problem with politicization is that it is 1) intrinsically inauthentic and 2) it substitutes the ideologically pure for the competent. Rigid, top-down hierarchies (including not just Communist regimes but corporations and institutions) demand expressions of fealty (the equivalent of loyalty oaths) and compliance to ideological demands (check the right boxes of party indoctrination, “self-criticism,” “struggle sessions,” etc.).
The correct verbiage and ideological enthusiasm become the basis of advancement rather than accountability to standards of competence. The competent are thus replaced with the politically savvy. Since competence is no longer being selected for, it’s replaced by what is being selected for, political compliance.
It doesn’t matter what flavor of ideological purity holds sway–conservative, progressive, communist or religious–all fatally erode competence by selecting for ideological compliance. Everyone knows the enthusiasm is inauthentic and only for show, but artifice and inauthenticity are perfectly adequate for the politicization taskmasters.
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