Data is not knowledge and it certainly is not wisdom. However, people in the west keep trying to mine it for purpose, meaning, certainty and everything they lack. This doesn’t work. It is, in fact, paralyzing.

Human beings cannot possibly read all the studies relevant to basic life decisions like eating, raising children, or not dying in a plague. We certainly cannot read them critically and then connect them back to our own lives.

And yet this seems to be the expectation not of leaders, but of average people, just trying to take their kids to school and have a fucking snack.

Given that this is impossible, the corporate media tries to filter things out, which results in nonsense like ‘eat magic berries’ or ‘China did worse by notgetting the plague.’

Meanwhile they miss obvious stuff like ‘maybe don’t build cities around cars and housing around food deserts’ and ‘maybe don’t just live with the disease.’

Faced with this pompous bullshit, many people ‘do their own research’, but then they end up in a nether realm of even more bullshit, stuff like ‘eat only meat and live on the toilet’ or ‘vaccines made my cousin’s balls explode.’ They find their own data, which is even worse. They just go from the frying pan to the fire. The problem is not this or that data but the paralyzing reliance on data for meaning, which it categorically cannot provide.

🤡 Basic Hygiene

Take the debate around masks in the United States. It’s important to understand that other countries aren’t fighting about this. This is a unique preoccupation of White Empire.

Where I live in Sri Lanka we just see everyone else wearing masks and put on one. In East Asia they’ve been wearing masks since SARS. Within White White Empire, however, this shit has been endlessly debated for years.

Masks have become this divisive shibboleth that everyone needs to have an opinion on, but everywhere else it’s just basic hygiene, like washing your butt, or not wearing shoes in the house (also, please do these things).

Like covering your mouth when you cough, you don’t need a huge amount of data on this. With any airborne disease, keeping a barrier over your airhole obviously does something. Either way, it’s not such an inconvenience, so why not be safe? Since you live in a society, why not be polite?

Do we need data on basic hygiene like this? Apparently paid pundit Chris Hayes does, and he needs it for every size and shape of cakehole. So here he is confidently sowing doubt about children wearing masks:

To unpack the erudite nonsense here he’s basically saying ‘I don’t know for sure’ in a really complicated way. It’s just a smart way of being dumb.

He talks about ‘available data’ when no one is going to do a double-blind where kids don’t wear masks. It has such obvious benefits and supporting data that such a study would be unethical. He’s also discussing this during an outbreak where everything is fucked and no variables are controlled at all.

We already have tons of data that COVID spreads through your airholes, that masks cover your airholes, and that children have the same basic anatomy as adults, ie a face. We also have the general understanding that a school is a type of building also known as an ‘indoor space’ where masking might be a good idea.

How much data do you need here, especially during a pandemic where a little indecision causes major casualties? Compared to the risk of killing grandma, wearing a mask is a minor inconvenience, and you don’t need to wait for more data to do this. Just take a little precaution and common sense.

Children can figure this out, but adults some how need ‘more data’. It’s like diapers for the incontinent brain.

Someone like Chris Hayes is an elite literally paid to think about stuff like this, but what does he leave ordinary people with? He just sows self-confident doubt and then goes back to his triple-vaxxed, highly-tested bubble, proud of how smart he is. It’s dangerously dumb.

🤡 🤡 Poverty

Now take the New York Times and Harvard (again, please). Here they are making Jesus weep. They’re appealing to data on whether not being poor is good for babies, or as they understand them, ‘brains’. God help your souls.

Here’s the New York Times, owned by five generations of Och-Sulzbergers, and Charles A. Nelson the third asking whether maybe some generational help is good for children. I dunno, maybe just ask Charles A. Nelson I and II? Ask your great-great grandpappy? Was it fucking helpful for you?

As Shailja Patel said, “Who could possibly have predicted that providing the basics of survival for new mothers might give them more time with their babies?”

As Brandon Bradford said, “Every year a study comes out that says ~”Did you know the poors learn better when they aren’t struggling to survive” and I find it very hard to not be angry.”

It is obvious from fucking fruit fly studies that more resources for young animals leads to healthier, happier creatures, but we somehow have to spend millions of dollars figuring this out for human beings, and then pointedly not doing anything.

Literally every prophet and decent human being throughout history has been saying to care for children and the poor, that this is good for our soulsbut white people have to make it about brains.

Honestly, they’re fucking zombies.

🤡 🤡 🤡 COVID

I’m looping back, but nowhere has this debilitating data diarrhea been more obvious than with COVID-19. White Empire keeps producing even more data and infographics on how fucked they are, and how they could optimize their collapse, while never once contemplating just not getting the damn disease. Instead you get a thousand articles on how and why you need to just get sick and maybe die.

‘Avoid it like the plague’ obviously doesn’t apply to those who are constantly avoiding reality in such detailed ways. Ever since COVID was discovered, sequenced, and squashed in China, everyone has seen exactly what to do and exactly how seriously to take this threat, but western media wasted that time debating whether it was really a threat at all.

How much fucking data do you need? They’re always like, “well, it’s killing old people, or it’s killing this percentage of people, or how do we compare to RICH countries, or WHITE countries” while COVID just shrugs and eats their faces.

People constantly need to be shown data to do the right thing on global vaccinations, or just covering their faces, or choosing which brand of vaccine and it’s completely paralyzing. Everything becomes a debate over ultimate meanings and nothing gets done.

🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡 Climate Collapse

This is endemic through White Empire, which contains its people with free choice like the bloody Squid Game. Given that they’re still colonizing the earth and air, however, this affects everyone.

Take Climate Collapse (again and again, please). My children understand the basic principle that lighting stuff on fire makes it hot. They understand that the exhaust that comes out of the car is stinky and bad. They understand that polar bears are nice and maybe should not die. How much fucking data do we need?

White people have produced the most climate change and the most hot air about climate change. It really just adds insult to injury. People in Pacific Islands or my neighbors in the Maldives don’t require reports. The water is already lapping over their feet.

The thing is that everyone can see this now, we have collapsing weather patterns everywhere. Anyone who lives anywhere near a fossil fuel plant knows that shit is nasty and definitely not an environmental good. Anyone can see plastic bottle on the beach and feel that over-consumption is bad.

And yet again White Empire keeps producing more and more data, which is really just a way of delaying action that threatens the only numbers they actually care about. Their stock markets. And so economists must also be roped in, the temple priests of capitalism, to trot out the idea that we need to ‘balance’ the deck chairs on the Titanic, so the people in first-class don’t have to put their champagne down.

It’s just another way that data is used to fundamentally not do anythingwhile dumping the entire weight of these social problems on individuals to somehow figure out.

Data Error

The problem here is that this is not your problem. You — the individual — should not have to be an amateur nutritionist, psychologist, and epidemiologist just to survive. You should not be crunching numbers before taking a bite. You should not be reading pre-prints before taking a flight.

This data should not be processed at the individual level at all. It should all be processed at the social, cultural, and institutional level, ie not in your stupid monkey mind. The fact is that no amount of data will change the fact that no human brain can fit it all inside.

Thus the real problem is not that you’re eating the wrong food or raising your kids wrong or that you failed to breathe right. The problem is that you, some random ape, has to be figuring all this shit out on your own. The real problem is that the society around you has died