The stupidity ratchet

It's really not difficult to explain how it works.

First, they pick some objective datum dividing a population in two subsets. It really doesn't matter what, blonde-vs-brunette, being female as opposed to male, being born a slave, it makes no difference specifically. As long as it is factual and it discriminates among people -- it's good enough.ⁱ

Then, they declare one of the lobes "bad" and another of the lobes "good". It really doesn't matter if the divisor produces two or more groups (though they generally tend to pick the largest as "bad" and the smallest as "good" for purely ideological reasons), all that matters is to breach the is-ought gap -- perhaps the easiest task a crook ever facedⁱⁱ, as there's nothing in nature either stronger or more eagerly ignored by feelings-driven "people".

Finally, they propose that "nobody should have to be The Bad"ⁱⁱⁱ. The application of any practical measures towards this hallucinatory optionality isn't even necessary, although they usually sink at least some cursory effort into pretending to such.

But stop and think for a minute about what it is that the stupidity ratchet actually does : the cost of resolving the practical implications of imaginary meanings has been foisted upon you! What have you done, goes the immediate question, so as to not-the-bad ? Have you bought the hairspray they're selling ? Did you go to church ? Have you given at the office ? Has anything you've done today made you poorer and the stupidity ratcheteers richer ???

It's not too late to opt out, you know.

1. How hard is it to believe that dark hair is bad hair ? Evidently not nearly as hard as anything else -- literally anything else. We know this by that sure sign that advertising is built around this rather than something else. If something else were easier -- again, anything else whatsoever -- advertising'd have been built around that. Now you see the relation to Skinner's box ?

   PS. Since we're doing Romanian antiqua, here's a lulz. 2011 - 2018, bridges over decades, nothing's changed because nothing could because why would it ?! (I'm mostly leaving this here in case the most recent such slavegirl candidate actually writes an article about all the lulzy males aiming to "help her" in the past week or so. This way she'll have what to link against, keks.) [↩]

2. Inept crooks try to convince you of objective nonsense -- that they bent a spoon, for instance. This is impossible, because the natural verification of such claims consists of examining objective reality, so the "effect" is ultimately doomed -- sooner or later it comes out that no bending occurred in fact.

   Politicians merely attempt to convince you of subjective nonsense -- that spoons are "bad", for instance. The natural verification for such claims is intricate and complex, so most "people" evaluate it lazily : they go by what they perceive "most other people" to be doing. It's evidently trivial to herd a bunch of these lazy pigglets together, and thereby create imaginary alt-realities that nevertheless "hold true" within the ample confines of their pigsty. [↩]

3. They spent a little over a century trying to propose "anyone should be able to be The Good", but that didn't work nearly as well (not that it's gone out of social practice entirely for that reason -- it's just no longer the fashionable approach to ratchet stupidity for the moment ; a later resurgence's still entirely in the books). [↩]