2020 was the year that the mob of the hopelessly (and haplessly) mediocre bullied the best and brightest into silence through endless virtue signaling and institutional capture.

no one who is any good at medicine gets an MPH. it's the booby prize for failures and political climbers. yet these are those to whom we turned and it turns out they are:

stupid, venal, power hungry, hysterical, and hopelessly politically captured by grant money and political need.

we handed medicine to the brownshirts and got totalitarian response back. cost benefit and calculated harm reduction was abandoned for moral absolutes and absurdist hectoring.

government backed it. media backed it. it's the natural unholy alliance of authoritarians, political climbers, and self-serving fear mongers.

and now we need to uncook this pernicious porridge of oppressive mediocrity and the only way to do it is to dump out the bowl and start again.

this whole branch of government and its tentacles into schools (though money and cultivated dependence) and business (through regulation like FAA, OSHA etc) need to be ripped out or it WILL do this again.

always poignant gatopal @elonbachman summed up this danger nicely:

https://twitter.com/ElonBachman/status/1420065102250844164?s=20