Hanlon's Razor Can't Cut It!

The belief that a capacity for incompetence rules out corrupt intent is both juvenile and utopian. Human stupidity may be infinite, but our malice is catching up quickly.

Just as correlation does not rule out causation, stupidity does not rule out malice. Contrary to popular discourse, millions of knee jerk X responses, and chat bot scripting standards, correlation actually points to causation and I would go so far as to suggest that stupidity will lead one to evil, both internally and externally.

I’ve seen so many versions of these cliched and idiotic retorts lately, that I felt compelled to create a handy infographic illustrating a non exhaustive list of exceptions to Hanlon’s Razor (as dull as both he and it were, it was easy. )

• Stupidity should result in pain, not a paycheck. If the one who made the mistake, benefits financially from the mistake, it is a safe bet that malice was involved. e.g. a pharmaceutical company rolls out a new counter measure for a novel emergency illness that unfortunately causes a number of ailments for those forced to take the emergency countermeasure. Luckily, the pharma company sells therapeutics and symptom suppressants for most of the resulting illnesses. Luck and fortune had little to do with this scenario. The odds are that the alleged emergency was nothing more than a sales campaign for the subsequent treatments. Can you think of any real world examples of this happening lately? Please write them into the comments below.

• History repeats and those who fail to learn from it are forced to ride the cycle until they do. This has nothing to do with the nature of history or reality and everything to do with the lack of imagination on the part of the evildoers and lack of short and long term memory storage of their victims. History repeats because humanity keeps falling for the same schemes, over and over again. e.g. Military forces have 2 functions- Kill people and break stuff. The Romans knew this and that is why they forbid the legions from entering Rome. Our representatives knew this 150 years ago and enacted the Posse Comitas Act in 1878, forbidding the US military from engaging in law enforcement activities on US Soil.
  
  The State of New Mexico just activated the National Guard to assist with law enforcement activities. The local authorities have purposely let the situation get so bad here that the public begged for our military forces to come here, kill us, and break our stuff. Those begging to be killed are stupid, but those who inspired this stupidity know what they are doing. This is the same final sprint to tyranny that has happened all over the world since the beginning of time. Can you think of any examples where rolling the tanks in helped the people living in the area the tanks rolled over? Put them into the comments, please.

• The “Oopsie daisy” always seems to hit the marginalized the most. e.g. Our economic regulations are flaunted and actively flayed by the richest people in the country, but when those economically illiterate, but bonus blessed individuals fuck up bad enough that they risk becoming poor like the rest of us, the government steps in and alleviates their losses by taking the futures away from those with the least resources, every time. That is not an accidental paradigm. That is socialism for the rich and rugged individualism and victimization for the poor. Not a mistake. The only mistake is letting them get away with it over and over again. Know any reasonable excuse for why we let them do this to us? Please write it down in the comments below.

• The unimaginable error that occurs has a well prepared response including but not limited to-
  
  -pre written legislation alleged to have been written in order to specifically ensure that this unprecedented and totally unforeseen problem never happens again, a la The Patriot Act.
  
  -extensive history of public wargaming to find solutions to this once in a million year accident, coincidentally involving the same individuals responsible for the unprecedented forced error in the first place, a la Event 201 and the Spars Pandemic exercises. Can you think of any other examples of pre planned surprise events? Please add them in the comments below.

• Finally, if the mistake involves politics in any way, you can be certain that it was not an accident. In fact, there are no political accidents and that fact was well known by Confucius a few thousand years ago, Greek philosophers a bit later on, and pretty much every human living during the Renaissance, but no one seems to know this now. Well, now you know. Good luck with that!