Common nonsense
If I were king, I’d let anyone say whatever they want. But if they say nonsense and it goes viral, I’d fine them. Be glad I'm not king. Be gladder Vivek Ramaswamy isn't king.
Hedonists headed to gather in the Nevada desert for Burning Man found the road to Black Rock City blocked by other hedonists who denounce hedonism if it involves things they themselves can’t afford. Specifically, Seven Circles, the organization that organized the blockade and banners reading “BURNERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”, “ABOLISH CAPITALISM”, and “GENERAL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE,” write in a press release that the “blockade is also in protest against the popularization of Burning Man among affluent people who do not live the stated values of Burning Man, resulting in the commodification of the event.”
These are also the people who want to ban private jets, thereby eliminating an economic segment providing $150 billion and 1.2 million jobs in the U.S. economy, according to NBAA. They have a perfect right to say what they want to say, though blocking the road to say it is rather stupid and childish.
I also have to ask: how did the protesters get to Black Rock City in the first place, since there are no EV chargers anywhere nearby. One Redditor posted “Bring your adapter and make friends with a big camp running a generator…or bring your own.” Another replied, “This has to be a troll right? how f*#!ing stupid it is to drive an EV just to run a FUEL GENNIE to charge it.” I love Reddit for its rank honesty.
Apparently, according to another Redditor, if you buy a VIP pass (up to $2,228 a ticket), you can use the charging stations at Will Call. But folks who do the EV thing to BM find it’s not an easy trek. This raises the question: would the protesters blocking the road to Black Rock City also block EVs?
In the opposite vein, the Georgia Department of Torture Transportation announced that on the busiest road day of the summer, they have suspended the normal lane closures that plague the state’s highways. Thank God for angels and ministers of grace, because the roads in Georgia are plugged up tighter than the digestive systems of people on the steak & eggs version of the primal diet. And as a non-Tesla EV owner, finding a working, open charger on a road trip through this state is nearly as foolish as driving a Rivian to Black Rock City.
It only makes sense that to eliminate internal combustion road vehicles, there would need to be enough charging capacity for electric ones. There isn’t. If you don’t have a home charger and time to use it every day, and you live in a place like Massachusetts, you are doomed. Tesla charging stations are optimized for Tesla vehicles. There are only a handful of locations that are open to non-Teslas and those illuminate problems with using other EVs mixed in with Teslas. The country is years or even a decade away from solving the most basic problems in standardizing EV use.
So this Labor Day weekend, I’m staying home, in case you were wondering.
One of the best expositions of “Common Sense” is the pamphlet distributed by Thomas Paine in 1776. In it, Paine covers the gap between necessity, when failing to work together on important tasks like food and shelter result in perishing, and what happens when these needs are generally met and exceeded.
Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which would supercede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but Heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other: and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.
If the patriots of Paine’s day (about a third of Americans at that time favored independence; a third were undecided; and a third were Tories) took him at his word, they certainly understood that the government they sought was one that could somehow check their own relaxation of “duty and attachment to each other.” Compared to those days, we’re spineless jellyfish, recumbent in our own biases.
Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, ‘tis right.
‘Tis right. If you think about things rationally, but we’ve tossed away the ability to do it.
Vivek Ramaswamy was born in 1985, and attended both Harvard University and Yale Law. There he learned the technical aspects of how to be a politician and debater, without learning the things worth debating over. They don’t teach the things that ‘tis right at Harvard anymore, and they haven’t at Yale since William F. Buckley wrote “God and Man at Yale” in 1951.
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans website proudly lists Ramaswamy as a fellow, receiving a grant in 2011 to help him through Yale, as “the child of immigrants from India.” Ramaswamy is now seeking the Republican nomination for president, mostly by focusing on how to be the most annoying person on any stage, whether he’s rapping Eminem or drawing fire from every other candidate with his ability to cast ‘tis right asunder while making it sound cool.
Ramaswamy is emblematic of the generation that doesn’t even try at autodidactic success. He knows what he knows as if he is the first to learn such things, which means that he’s wrong 90 percent of the time, and spectacularly wrong at that. Pedants who argue nonsense with conviction are annoying to people who know things, which is why Mom—aka Nikki Haley—lectured Vivek, her annoyance fully on display at the recent debate.
Vivek has the typical overachiever resume: accomplished pianist, junior nationally-ranked tennis player, child of an engineer-cum-patent lawyer dad and psychiatrist mom, according to his polished and varnished Wikipedia entry. He’s an immigrant success story, because in India, many who are well-educated but in the wrong caste can never attain anything above their station. Of course, the Ramaswamy family is of the Brahmin caste—the equivalent of Cohens if they were Jews—so never mind.
Besides his annoying know-it-all manner, people in Ramaswamy’s corner of society (I’m thinking Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz), focus in on the government’s assault on common sense, of course without the ‘tis right guardrails that Paine sought.
Like masks, no thank you. There’s been a small uptick in COVID-19 infections (just search “uptick in COVID” on Google), and some take that as a sign we need mask mandates again. I agree with CDC Director Mandy Cohen, who said that if you’re unvaccinated, haven’t already been infected with the virus, and have underlying health conditions, well yeah, you might want to wear a mask. But if you’re in that population, what is the chance you’ll agree to do it? Does this mean the rest of us, who are vaccinated, have had COVID, and are in relatively good health, should mask up to show those at-risk people how it’s done? Paine is squirming in his grave.
This is the nonsense that makes people like Vivek Ramaswamy sound smart. Surely he’s intelligent and learned, but smart Vivek ain’t. But he’s smarter than the reflexive morons who think we’re ready for more masking, school closures, and restrictions on gatherings.
Plus, Ramaswamy’s Harvard degree is in biology, and that’s how he made his fortune. In an interview with Steve Deace, Ramaswamy threaded the needle of COVID restrictions, liberty, and science, since he owns $50 million in shares of Roivant, which he founded, and sold to Genevant—the licensee of the patented lipid nanoparticle technology Moderna used (and is being sued for improper use) in their COVID-19 vaccine. Money is a great source of necessity, ‘tis right.
He also threaded the climate change needle, with a dog-whistle to the “hoax” crowd, while at the same time confounding the Washington Post’s fact-checkers. “The climate change agenda is a hoax … The reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” Whether the assertion itself could be true is not the point. The point is that both sides of the climate change debate have a reactionary rosacea, red-faced, when confronted with anything that might weaken their narrative.
Common sense dictates that it’s getting hotter, and humans have been pumping 50 billion tons of hot-making-gas into the atmosphere every year for half a century. Math says that the Tonga undersea eruption might have made it 0.063℉ hotter, and El Niño also contributed, but the fact that it was frickin’ hot in the first place is part of the pattern we can trace back to human activity. It’s like blaming the sprinkles, cherry, and whipped cream for the calories in a hot fudge sundae.
But Ramaswamy didn’t argue climate change is a hoax, just the agenda of the climate change religious nuts, who would make ice cream itself illegal because some people consume hot fudge sundaes. Hard to argue with that, except many who believe the climate change religious nuts are, well, nuts, also believe that it’s the sprinkles and cherry that make hot fudge sundaes unhealthy.
We can’t rely on narrative-pitching fabulists and government hacks to give us our ‘tis right, because they buy into the same nonsense as the rest of their own bias tribe. We can’t rely on young rich, educated people because they are just as likely to choose crime as their hustle as they are to found legitimate companies.
On divisive issues like abortion, transgender treatments for minors, and climate change, it’s going to take some common sense to get past the competing narratives and clashing know-it-alls.
If I were king, I’d let anyone say whatever they want. But if they say nonsense and it goes viral, I’d fine them, like ten cents for every like, repost, or view. Avoiding fines is a wonderful necessity. Be glad I’m not king. Be gladder Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t king.
Have a great weekend, and stay off the roads, or at least avoid the anti-capitalist road blockers, DOT agents of catastrophic delay, and getting stranded in an EV without a charging station in range.