One thing I first noticed during Covid – but the phenomenon is...
eugyppius@eugyppius1
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Mar 05, 2025
~2 min read
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One thing I first noticed during Covid – but the phenomenon is surely older – is this subcategory of political quagmire wherein (for obscure reasons) all the Smart and Important People go totally crazy and become completely and diametrically wrong.
Suddenly everything everybody says about the issue at hand is bizarrely incorrect and indefensible, even though all involved were saying totally sensible things about this same issue a few years or months ago.
What is more baffling, they get wronger and wronger over time! With each failure that ought to point them back towards the path of being Not Wrong, they get wronger still!
They also start to be fractally wrong, which is to say that the subcomponents and the details of their statements and proposals and arguments are just as wrong as their headline policy proposals. You're just in this total spiral of Alice-in-Wonderland irrationality.
This goes on and on, they get crazier and crazier, until they just run out of petrol and try to make the whole thing go away. Euro leadership on Ukraine feels like this right now. Totally crazy, totally wrong, completely deranged, deprived of all sense, half of what they're saying is at cross-purposes to the other half of what they're saying, and at some point in the near future they will all deeply regret having uttered any of these things.
Suddenly everything everybody says about the issue at hand is bizarrely incorrect and indefensible, even though all involved were saying totally sensible things about this same issue a few years or months ago.
What is more baffling, they get wronger and wronger over time! With each failure that ought to point them back towards the path of being Not Wrong, they get wronger still!
They also start to be fractally wrong, which is to say that the subcomponents and the details of their statements and proposals and arguments are just as wrong as their headline policy proposals. You're just in this total spiral of Alice-in-Wonderland irrationality.
This goes on and on, they get crazier and crazier, until they just run out of petrol and try to make the whole thing go away. Euro leadership on Ukraine feels like this right now. Totally crazy, totally wrong, completely deranged, deprived of all sense, half of what they're saying is at cross-purposes to the other half of what they're saying, and at some point in the near future they will all deeply regret having uttered any of these things.
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And the parenthetical statement is very important: It's sort of odd, nobody knows exactly why this is happening right now, and with this specific issue and not any number of others.
And to head off one objection: Crazy statements, poorly articulated positions and obfuscation are obviously normal in politics, that's not what I'm talking about. In the cases at issue here, you can't drill down to any underlying rational purpose. When the true motives of actors are revealed, everything is shown to be even crazier and more retarded than it seemed at first.
And to head off one objection: Crazy statements, poorly articulated positions and obfuscation are obviously normal in politics, that's not what I'm talking about. In the cases at issue here, you can't drill down to any underlying rational purpose. When the true motives of actors are revealed, everything is shown to be even crazier and more retarded than it seemed at first.
