By Professor Doom
“The whole problem with the world is that
fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so
full of doubts.”
--Bertrand
Russel
It really seems
like reality is not nearly as objective as it should be. My pointing at
empirical evidence regarding global warming, for example, does no good. “You
are blind to it!” say my friends, even as I encourage them to look with their
own eyes. “You’re not a climate scientist!” they say, even as they swear by the
“teachings” of Bill Nye and Al Gore, although neither are climate scientists
(not that you really need a slip of paper to understand science, truth be
told…).
“Trump is unelectable!”
--pretty
much every major news site, pre-election day in 2016 presented this as fact,
time and again. How’d that fact work out?
People hear stuff
on the news, and they are so confident that they’re hearing facts. It didn’t
matter when I tried to explain the polls in the last election were obviously
biased. “You’re a racist” cried one friend, “You hate women!” cried
another…their claims were taken as facts, while my pointing out Trump rallies,
Twitter feeds, and Youtube videos all were dwarfing Hillary’s by magnitudes of
3:1 or greater (heck, the “Hillary for Prison” twitter followers vastly
outnumbered the “Hillary for President” twitter followers, and both put
together didn’t match Trump’s followers).
“You just
don’t believe in facts, do you?”
--a Leftist
friend’s response when I tried to convince him that Lincoln was a Republican,
that the Democrats were pro-slavery and continued advocating racist policies
well into the 60s (and arguably today). No citation of evidence on my part was
relevant, every source I cited was attacked.
But my “facts”
were treated as conspiracy theories, and more than once I was told that I was
delusional. After all, every major news site was not merely predicting Hillary
would win, and was more focused on how great the historic “Hillary landslide”
would be.
“You’re
being illogical!”
--a recent
reader told me this. I tried to get him to explain his definitive statement, to
demonstrate my improper use of logic…but no deal, simply saying my argument was
illogical made it a fact, somehow.
There’s this weird
way of arguing nowadays. You don’t have to be right, you have to be extremely
smug and overconfident. I’ve literally seen people say, with a straight face
and no awareness of their idiocy, that other people are “objectively” wrong in
their opinion over their personal preferences.
“You keep using that word. I don’t think
it means what you think it means.”
Inigo
Montoya, Princess Bride.
It’s not just the
media, but lots of people keeping shouting “facts” at me…but the blustering
confidence of such people just drives me nuts. The worst of it is when a
politician quotes “facts,” and then those facts are now taken to be, well
actual facts.
“You are
wrong. ‘Consensus’ and ‘average’ mean the same thing and can be used
interchangeably. They are the same thing.”
--Some 9
different Ph.D. administrators told me as much, and there was no dictionary I
could cite that would convince them that the consensus of a data set
{1,1,1,1,0} was “1,” while its average was 0.8. I’m so pleased to no longer be
working at a fake state community college. Even though I knew the definitions
of the word “consensus,” I checked it time and again to make sure I was correct.
While admin always has perfect confidence in their rightness, I have doubts,
you see…
Ok, my anecdote above about
Educrats is just one of many, but even when I try to tell people about the
difference between gold currency and fiat money…I run into brick walls by
people super-confident about their facts. “You’re a gold bug!” gets shouted at
me, among worse epithets. I’m a fan of precious metals, I admit, but in today’s
“O% interest rate” world, it just makes far more sense to buy pretty rocks than
have slips of paper with arbitrary numbers on them or digits in a bank’s
computer file…the
empirical evidence regarding fiat currency is unarguable, but for
some reason empirical evidence means nothing next to “facts.”
While governments
are generally incompetent, some of our state governments are dimly starting to
protect themselves from the inevitable death of the US dollar (note: it might
be next month, next year, or in 20 years or more, but my admittedly cloudy crystal
ball predicts “sooner rather than later”). So, some states have been passing
bills regarding the use of gold as money. Recently a politician stated some
“facts” about gold:
“In 1868
Gold Was $27 An Ounce… Today It Is $1,218…”
I’m….puzzled
at his confusion here. Anybody can go to E-bay can see US $20 gold
coins made in 1868. You can find similar coins
from 1869 or 1867, so it’s pretty clear gold was around $20 an ounce at that
time. There certainly could be fluctuations, mind you, but gold was basically
$20 an ounce for a very long time. As long as the government kept making (nearly)
1 ounce gold coins with a face value of $20, that’s pretty much the “value”
(whatever that word means) of gold.
The Democrat Idaho House Minority Leader
continues:
“…you can’t say gold is going to protect us from
inflation when you have that type of a price range over the last hundred years…”
Now, he said this on March 14th
of this year…I dare say that 2017 is noticeably more than 100 years past 1868.
More importantly, he has absolutely no clue that what he just said demonstrates
how gold protects from inflation. You spend 20 fiat dollars on gold, and many
years later you can trade that gold in for more than 1200 fiat dollars (currently; this
could change dramatically in the coming months). Now, this is not a
money-making proposition. The things you could buy with $20 in the 18th
century—a few month’s rent or food--are roughly what you can buy with $1200
today.
“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value—zero.”
---Voltaire. Voltaire died in 1778, but the rules for paper money are the
same now as then.
That’s the point: fiat currencies
inevitably become more and more worthless. You buy gold, and well, gee, it
preserves value. That’s exactly what is meant by protection from inflation.
Then the government official does what is
so common today: pound on the table and acts like he’s made a valid argument:
“i just want to point out that facts are important…”
You can see the video with your own
eyes, it’s
a wonderful demonstration of how brilliant our “professional” politicians are
today (and completely destroying any criticism of Trump for his “amateur”
status as a politician—our professional politicians by and large are morons). I
know many people that would use this video, the politician’s words, as “proof”
my opinions on gold are “objectively wrong.”
We live
in a world where “facts” every bit as valid as the ones I’ve quoted above from
the politician really are the complete opposite of the facts I believe to be
true. The mainstream media has been using “alternative facts” in much the same
way as “fake news,” but I’m tired of having lies shouted at me, and offended by
such rubbish being referred to in any way as “fact.”
We
really are at the stage where we need to start accepting alternative facts at
face value, particularly when those alternative facts are the exact opposite of
the “facts” being presented to us by our government officials and mainstream
media—not that there’s much difference between the two.
It’s a
matter of empirical evidence, and self-defense.
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