“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”
“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”
So remarked an anonymous commenter on Slashdot in response to news that FEMA’s website will not allow Hurricane Katrina victims to file a claim unless they are using Internet Explorer. Users of all other browsers are just shit out of luck.
The quote above came into the discussion after someone noted that this wasn’t a case of a clearly malicious policy so much as absolutely gross incompetence — of which we’ve seen plenty the past few days.
In my own opinion, and apparently that of the commenter quoted above, the split between governmental incompetence and governmental malice is a false dichotomy, though. We’re really talking about two sides of the same coin. They are operationally identical.
People are already speculating about stuff (that may even be true) which will be labeled “conspiracy theories” by the usual, metaphorically-sleeping Xanax-junkies in the mainstream media. Wise and prudent people know that conspiracies transpire all of the time, here and there — and that both bureaucrats and politicians are perhaps circumstantially and temperamentally best suited for them.
In truth, though, conspiracies are not required to explain much that can’t also be explained by incompetence — and Occams’s Razor dictates that rational people should go with the simplest explanation, all other evidence being equal.
Which brings me to my point, actually…
Let’s talk about real-world, observable phenomena. Isn’t someone just as dead if they are killed by the drawbacks of a dysfunctional organizational paradigm (government) as if the people at the top of government specifically intended to kill them?
While evidence irrefutably proving whether people in authority have bad intentions or are simply braindead is hard to come by, it doesn’t matter.
Drunk drivers who never intended to kill anybody still go to jail over killing someone. What’s so different about being drunk with power?
We have evidence of people being just as dead, just as screwed over by the system, just as dispossessed, just as hungry, just as uprooted, just as thirsty, just as forced out of their homes at gunpoint if they want to stay and just as forcibly confined if they wanted to get out. The mostly unknowable secret state of mind of people in power is irrelevant.
So why should their incompetence meet a response any different than a response to malice? And what should the response of the American people be, if it were discovered their government had maliciously slaughtered at least ten thousand innocent Americans and put hundreds of thousands more through unnecessary hell?
If you love government more than logic, you will make illogical decisions. In a crisis, that gets people killed. They become sacrificial lambs slaughtered on the altar of a cult of bad ideas. And amidst the slaughter of the lambs, the goats watch warily, while sharpening their horns.
UPDATE: Some people report sucess without IE on the FEMA site using the Mozilla Firefox web browser with a seperately installed extension called User Agent Switcher which allows your Firefox browser to falsely identify itself as Internet Explorer. I also know the Konqueror web browser for Linux has similar, built-in capabilities to masquerade as Internet Explorer. So — in this case at the very least — if you need help, LIE IF YOU HAVE TO!
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