Why The Slaughter Of The Ostriches Matters

You could argue that CBDCs, or Biometric IDs, or A.I. generated porn matter most in the stelling¹ of the Technocracy. Dryly compared to those, the recent slaughter of ostriches pales. But does it? No. Trust your heart. There's one aspect of the case in particular to hone in on, should you wish to hit the technocrats where it hurts.

Let’s start with the narrative, as it drives everything online nowadays. I haven’t even looked it up; I can guess. One side is going to claim that the other is being sentimental and risking billions of dollars over the sake of 400 animals. The other side is going to claim that this was cruel, Orwellian overreach at its worst.

Were billions of dollars at risk from one ostrich farm? The argument falls down when one notes that the corpses were not burned immediately as per best practice. The logic is even more conspicuously absent when one finds that natural immunity was not a factor in Team Technocrat's decision. Why kill the survivors? Imagine you survive polio as a child, but your government still insists that you take the polio vaccine when you turn 21, so you do, and unfortunately this coincides with a polio epidemic. You are tested for polio and return ‘positive’.² You plead that this is because of the vaccine, but no luck. To be on the safe side, you are culled.

That's the first reason why the slaughter of the ostriches matters. A dearth of logic can be lethal. This whole incident shows we are dealing with so-called 'experts' who grew up without a mere sip of Socrates or Aristotle. Formal logic needs to be a prerequisite of all Science degrees, but it’s a bit late now; they drank a draft of dogma. They are in a cult called Scientism. There is no bringing them around. We need to wise up that they will kill our pets, kill our livestock, kill us. How many more ostriches need to die before you get the message?

Or squirrels. Remember Peanut? To emphasize the point I just made, I will juxtapose Peanut’s owner, a man who rescued the poor little creature from certain death, with the woman in charge of the Department which put that same little creature to death.³ See here.

Commentary unneeded. Let me just say this. If a baron from the 14th century was transported to 2025 and was shown this picture, what judgement do you think he would pass on our civilization?

We're all at risk, but especially people who grow food. I mean, farmers and gardeners. The slaughter of the ostriches was a warning shot. That's quite obvious. There's a deep-cut too. The ostrich-slaughter is an example of (what I call) the Alex-Jonesian Dialectic; namely, governments make the problem to make the solution, and it always depowers the populace a bit more.⁴ I believe that H1N1 and similar variants of bird flu got out of a U.S. lab, but you don’t need to buy into this.⁵ The Alex-Jonesian Dialectic still works, because industrial farming practices make the viruses more virulent and rapidly spread, just as small, organic farming hinders them. The Canadian Government subsidizes the virus-spreading way, and then jumps in as the saviour. It should make your blood boil that they force a solution which harms the very people doing something helpful to fix the problem.

Let’s recap. The slaughter of the ostriches matters to anti-technocrats because it shows...

• ... that the dearth of logic by the so-called experts can be lethal.
• ... that farmers and gardeners will be targeted.
• ... how a typical case of the Alex-Jonesian Dialectic works.

All these are merely warm-up acts. Are you ready for the headliner? Did you guess some Big Pharma conspiracy? Wrong. Here it is, then, the single most important reason why it the slaughter of the ostriches matters to anti-technocrats…

It matters because...

• ... ostriches are cute.

Wait! I can explain!

Let’s go back to something I wrote earlier:

One side is going to claim that the other is being sentimental and risking billions of dollars over the sake of 400 animals.

There’s a couple of things buried in this. One is Utilitarianism. “Sure, slaughtering some innocent animals is not nice, but, on balance, it’s justified.” Utilitarianism is certainly l’éthique du jour of the technocrats. I’ll leave that one, because I want to wade into something else, something related. Taken for granted is the notion that certain attitudes and emotions are useless. Being sentimental for example. Isn’t it silly to be sentimental, when important things like money and the food-supply are at stake?

It’s silly to be irrational over important decisions, yes. To survive, a society must make decisions based on evidence and reason. Nevertheless, it’s not the full picture.

The man who made human resources departments possible

You need to know about Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Finance Minister under Louis XIV. If you’ve heard of him, you might have heard how Jean-Baptiste Colbert put in tariffs and rooted out corruption. I want to hone in on something lesser known, but formative for the world we live in. Colbert brought in the notion that bureaucrats must be able to show a profit or a loss. One might comment: Not too surprising for the son of a cloth-peddler. He stelled the idea in the royal court that government should be run like a business. If you lean libertarian like me⁶, you believe that governments are always wasteful. Running a tight ship is a good thing. I’m not totally against Colbert’s actions. This is about ideas however; therein lies his gravity; he was an agent of the profane. Colbert’s drive for efficiency ushered in a radical change in politics. It was bolstered by the French Revolution, and blended in with the mercantile class’s takeover of the West. A rich idea of human being gave way to a poor abstraction.

People were to be managed as economic units.

Many past civilizations, such as the Chinese in the Han era, had a top-notch managerial class. None, as far as I know, had the ruthless dryness of our modern lot.

Can you see whither I’m heading now?

Are you dry enough for the 21st century?

The Machine needs us to be machine-like. When we, as a matter of course, deem our nature trivial, we have been programmed to do so. We are being good little input-units.

So far, this is Beatnik stuff. I don’t think the fight against the Technocracy scores hits that way. “Get in touch with your feelings, man, here…take a drag on this reefer…”. Tactically useless. I might argue in another post that much of the late 20th century rebellion— the ‘Rage Against The Machine’ stuff— failed because it basically followed the beatnik version of counterculture.

Tactically, one needs to be rational and calculating. Personally, one needs to be prone to mocking, doting, flirting, being nostalgic, to name but a few. To name one more… actually, I don’t have a name for it, but let me describe it to you. In the 1970s British sitcom Love Thy Neighbour, one of the characters, Jacko (played by Keith Marsh), a just-passed-middle-age lovable loser, bordering on a simpleton, only ever orders a half-pint of beer with his catchphrase “I’ll 'ave 'arf.” He never explains why he orders half-pints. It’s not because he drinks any less than the others; indeed, he drains his mug first. His catchphrase annoys the other characters. I suppose nowadays we would say that Jacko was ‘on the spectrum’. Jacko is a bad input-unit in the system. Whatever you’d call this wierd, cute quirk, I love it.

Speaking of cute, I’d better return to the main thread. What is it to find an animal ‘cute’? Cute animals are stupid in some ways, cunning in others, and behave like people sometimes. That’s why an ostrich is cute but a barnacle isn’t. Watching cute animals reminds us to be more natural. Stop! Did you notice that my instinct was to try to justify its utility?

To fight the good fight against the Technocracy, you must know about VPNs, E2EE messengers, Agorism, and lots more dry things. That’s only half the battle. The other half is psychological. You must not neglect the ‘wet’ things. Being ‘sentimental’ is one such thing. I wouldn’t even describe it as such. I would just say that feeling sorry for innocent animals is a perfect response to the technocrats. Especially animals as cute as ostriches.