Democracy of ideas as a concept is so consistently, reverently heaped with effusive praise that its dire imperfections remain unappreciated.  As the channels of expression in our technologically advanced time become frictionless the wise and foolish each find voice.  Which is which and who does or does not deserve our attention is a question at the heart of political science, a question democracy lays at the feet of a marketplace, one of ideas.  The unfortunate downside of the empowerment afforded by technology is that bad ideas greatly outnumber and can effectively crowd out the good ones.
It is this author’s sad duty to account, kind reader, that in the great global shouting match it appears dumbshits are steering the conversation.

Earlier this week in the United States a man was fatally shot by police in a Walmart after someone placed a 9-1-1 call reporting a man loading an assault rifle and pointing it at people.  The man was actually looking at a BB gun for sale in the store, but police procedure dictates that in the absence of other information the account from the emergency call is assumed to be true.  Therefore police descended on the scene expecting a confrontation with a heavily armed killer in the act, and in keeping with the “better safe than sorry”, shoot-first disposition common in American police work, used deadly force in haste on an innocent person.  Here the faulty testimony of some dumbshit untrained in law enforcement was allowed to leverage lethal aggression in complete error.

Firearm enthusiasts in the United States commonly advocate for the democracy, indeed the ubiquity, of guns as remedy to gun violence.  The rationalization is: “if everyone is armed, we can shoot back at bad guys, which keeps them at bay.” One is reminded anecdotally for example that at one point the number of shootings in Starbucks from criminal activity was dwarfed by that of shootings due to misfires and other accidents.  Apply a statistical model to the opportunities for accidents, mistakes and poor judgement in general compared to violent crime rates and it becomes clear that in a “guns everywhere” society one is at best marginally safer from criminal gun violence but put at immense risk of being shot by a dumbshit.

Meanwhile a small ragtag army of ideological maniacs is kicking up dust in Syria and Northern Iraq and rattling its tiny swords at the West.  Through a few videos that went viral on the internet they managed to rattle the Western war hawks and entice them to pull the trigger in a blind rage yet again.  The United States, so disposed to stupidly bumble into futile, economically draining foreign misadventures demonstrates itself attentive and responsive to the crazed provocations of any dimestore dumbshit in the desert with a hood, a knife and a camera.

In the United States the Republican party struggles with existential threats of irrelevance, and a faction known as the “Tea Party” wages an insurrection as a champion of ideological purity within the party.  The threat of being challenged from their political right within their own party has driven elected Republicans toward impractical standards of ideological appearance which demand they adopt positions so far to the right they bound on the absurd.  This circumstance in concert with primary elections where dismal turnouts consist of only the angriest and most extreme voters becomes a vehicle for political spoils going to the bigger dumbshit.

Part of the symptomology of the information age is the splintering of media channels into near countless numbers, all of which compete for our finite pool of collective attention.  In this overheated fray among the most effective strategies to attract a large audience is shameless pandering to a group’s political sensibilities, which has raised the modern-day “pundit” to prominence.  A pundit filters and interprets current events so they sympathize with and reinforce a particular ideological standpoint.  Subject material is not evaluated for its intrinsic value, so it does not serve to illuminate or challenge.  Communities that remain selectively insular to accurate information develop skewed interpretations of reality over time, cleaving them further from reason and thus a culture of profligate dumshittery is cultivated.

When it comes to getting attention, it appears the dumbshits have the upper hand.  We at Entropy International are pledged to break the grip dumbshits have on our public discourse, our culture and our prospects for the future.  If we give them no credence, they will have no power.  If we expose them, they will wither.  Together, kind reader, let us fearlessly thrust a blazing lamp into the bitter darkness, banish the scourge of misinformation and the disease of ignorance to the ash-heap of history and reach a plane of enlightenment at peace.