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: