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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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What is the correct answer to the reasoning test? My position is that while the WEF holds no formal power, paying some degree of attention to it makes sense to keep a finger on the pulse of what technocratic policymakers think would be basically pretty good ideas. In 2020, I observed an arbitrary level of power exercised by both federal and local bureaucrats in seemingly mundane agencies - the CDC suddenly discovered that it had the power to set national housing policy and require landlords to house people indefinitely, local agencies followed broader leads in determining which businesses (and even which aisles in those businesses) may remain open.

Seeing these incredibly broad powers exercised with no meaningful check suggests to me that I could see public health, land management, energy departments, and so on take similarly strong and broad-reaching policies to address the putative emergencies of climate change, refugee resettlement, natural disasters, famine, and wars. If the CDC can force quartering of the destitute indefinitely, why couldn't the Department of Energy place heavy restrictions on use of gas-powered vehicles or the Department of Agriculture implement a ban on certain meat products?

This does not require believing in an evil conspiracy master-minded by the dastardly Schwab. In fact, it would be easier to address if there was a dastardly conspiracy afoot! Instead, it just looks like an incredibly boring set of safety-minded bureaucrats getting together to decide what's best for everyone going forward, to all appearances being basically sincere in their belief that they're serving the public.

the putative emergencies of climate change, refugee resettlement, natural disasters, famine, and wars.

Is your position that these issues are not important, or that you have superior policies in mind? If not, what problems do you think are important (aside from the well-tread topics of wokeness and the CDC)?

My complaint isn't that the issues aren't important, it's that they should not be considered license to create arbitrary powers for government agencies and that nothing about them validates abrogation of constitutional rights in the fashion that Covid was used to justify. Whatever their importance, they're not temporal emergencies, they're issues that should be subject to the severe policy-making constraints of limitations on federal powers that would have been considered normal a century ago rather than the unlimited capacity that seems possible now.

Not to promote this view necessarily, but I believe that the WEF-conspiracist POV on this is that it's not even important which issues are chosen -- the WEF solution to any issue is globalist techno-totalitarianism; the consolidation of power is the point, not the issues themselves.

I will promote the view, and yes that is a succinct way of phrasing my objections to the whole thing. Thank you.