Sunday, August 25, 2019

Opinion
The Shallow Cynicism of ‘Everything Is Rigged’
By GREG WEINER (Political Scientist)


A Stupidity Inoculation, In Plain View


Q.: When is common sense "shallow cynicism?"

A.: When the intra-class warfare between the major factions of a capitalist dictatorship have reached an intensity where:

  • A prisoner awaiting trial has to be murdered to avoid exposing the depth of the dictatorship's criminality.
  • Where principled persons are extra-judicially imprisoned for even partially revealing the dictatorship's criminality.
Stupidity is the HIV of infected intellectuals, and it is characteristic of the propaganda apparatus of a ruthless dictatorship that it will deliberately expose its people to such individuals in the hope of spreading their disease.

This Op-Ed by a political scientist is an obvious attempt by the NYT to stigmatize the by now common sense observation that the U.S. political system is corrupt. The stigmatization proceeds on two tracks:

  • Creating a "straw man" by crudely paraphrasing the common sense observation into "Everything is Rigged,"
  • Calling it not merely cynicism, but "Shallow Cynicism."

On the subject of euphemizing stupidity into its opposite:
Prof. Hito Steyerl of the Berlin University of the Arts has coined a relationship between artificial intelligence and artificial stupidity in this short clip from a much longer talk: