A Christian Heart Is Deeply Cynical

On the one hand, rational objectivity is a myth. It’s a myth in the one most important sense that you’ll never see evidence of it when humans make decisions on behalf of others, that thing we call “government policy.” The theoretical existence of rational objectivity means nothing at all against the very real oppressive decisions of those who use scientific lies as an excuse for enforcing something that benefits them.

And I’ve seen it repeatedly on the smaller scale, where someone simply offering advice to another has clung to things that were contrary to the objective proof and the attendant rational analysis that was painfully obvious to everyone else. There comes a point when theory means nothing because you can’t find any real examples of what your theory says should be or could be. Persistence in believing your theory then constitutes a less than rational bias in itself.

This lies behind some of my blather about quantum reasoning. When you reduce something to it’s bare minimum in practical terms (the meaning behind the word “quantum”), not just theoretical terms, the resulting ground of assumptions will bring you closer to reality. On top of this, I assert that common Western thinking resists complexity. That is, we have been trained to develop a knee-jerk reaction seeking simplistic answers, that “truth” consists of simple linear conclusions drawn from whatever input was acceptable at the time. Quantum reasoning assumes complexity as the norm.

Thus, a thousand different choices in any context might work well enough without having to nail down one single answer as the absolute truth. Culturally, this is an abomination, as you can tell from everyday conversations. The same snooty elitist who complain about this are the people doing their damnedest to make sure the masses remain thus ignorant, carefully avoiding even the slightest effort to reach out to the masses with anything that approaches effectiveness. What you end up with is a thousand flavors of snooty elitists mutually accusing all the other flavors of ignorance.

In essence, most of what people push as science-based government policy is actually bad religion.

So here’s the result: the Drug War is a religion. There is the appearance of success on measures the holy warriors admit, but desolate failure in the broader claims of doing moral good for society. The destructiveness of the Drug War outweighs the destruction arising from drug abuse itself. That the Holy Drug Warriors will continue against all evidence can be seen in how every anti-terror policy has been subverted to simple anti-drug police work.

For example, we have the alleged blanket privacy of the Tor Network. We have propaganda released from certain key leakers that insists the NSA is frustrated by the success of Tor at hiding “terrorist” networking activity. Back when Tor was first designed secretly in government labs, it was supposed to protect government agents and their communications. When it was first promoted, there was an open admission that this would be most effective if this government traffic was inflated and masked by frankly criminal traffic.

Side note: Only a fool imagines that there is any real difference between criminal and government activity in moral terms. The difference is little more than permits from the official government. More important to note is that the private criminal enterprise is overwhelmingly larger in volume of traffic than the officially permitted government stuff. There is a vast gulf between popular moral policy agenda and the end point of government agent execution of said policy.

But you might imagine that all the government funding of Tor (in essence, no other funding at all) would indicate the possibility of government hackers trying to reserve for themselves methods of breaking the supposed anonymization of traffic when it suits government purpose. This was alleged long ago by minds far brighter than mine. However, I did include the notion in some of my fiction writing, and my guess at the method turned out to be consistent with the criticisms — it’s possible to track threads of traffic based on what happens at either end. In other words, if we can detect something happening on one end, it matters not where it goes in the middle. We can deduce from the events on one end what the traffic on the other end looks like, and check the various nodes until we detect that deduced traffic pattern. Then we trace it from the entry point back to the individual.

So while it may not be possible to disentangle the whole volume of what crosses the masking network, it’s not so hard to pick out something specific. On top of that, we are quite sure that there remains some internal means of capture even more precise than that. Not because of leaks that serve only to confirm the propaganda, but because of real-world results. You see, the Holy Drug Warriors couldn’t resist betraying this by their seizing upon the trickery to fulfill their divine mandate. The official transcripts in court of the evidence against Ross Ulbricht, and how they got that evidence, is sheer bullshit to anyone who understands networking.

Fortunately for the Holy Drug Warriors, they don’t have to tell the truth in court, and judges and juries are seldom savvy in networking, especially if the prosecuting attorney objects to having networking geeks on the jury.

I’m not defending Ulbricht nor his alleged business. I’m attacking the vastly more harmful methods that appeal to the baser religious instincts of humans. We most certainly do have a powerful government-approved religion at work here.

19 April 1993, Waco TX: forget not — Is your church BATF-approved?

You can answer “yes” to that question only if your church tends to support the government’s own religion. In common Christian language, that’s “compromise” as opposed to “holiness.” The latter term means separated, devoted solely for God’s use.

By now perhaps you could have guessed it: Heart-led living makes you very cynical because you grasp the Fall at a very fundamental level. We owe it to our hearts to peel away the vast smothering layers of Western mythology from our minds or we cannot begin to walk in the righteousness of Christ.