Freedom Convoy Arrives in Ottawa, Canada

A huge convoy of truckers that started on the west coast of Canada has begun arriving in Ottawa, the country's capitol. They are protesting vaccine mandates and they're not alone. Other convoys headed for Ottawa started around Canada and the United States--even farmers driving tractors have joined them. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called them a small fringe group, but according to the video below, the head of the convoy crossed into Ontario as the tail was crossing the border into Manitoba. That's close to 500 miles (800 kilometers) long.

Various news sources I've read say the vast majority of the truckers are vaccinated. The point isn't the vaccines, it's the mandates. As Canadian vlogger Viva Frei puts it, Canada and particular his home province of Quebec is being run by idiots. (As are parts of the US.) The idiots running Quebec forbade unvaccinated people to use big box stores, but allowed them to go to pharmacies...not realizing that Wal-Mart (a big box store) has a pharmacy. Apparently, they've never been in a Wal-Mart.

The point of all the protests is not, to my mind, against vaccines but being governed by intellectual-yet-idiots (IYI), a type who'd never set foot in Wal-Mart, described by Nassim Taleb in a piece from Skin in the Game that could have been written yesterday.

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do...

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking.

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”.

They are so blinded by verbalistic notions such as science, education, democracy, racism, equality, evidence, rationality and similar buzzwords that they can be easily taken for a ride. They can thus cause monstrous iatrogenics [harm done by the healer] without even feeling a shade of a guilt, because they are convinced that they mean well and that they can be thus justified to ignore the deep effect on reality.

Regrettably, Nassim Taleb freaked out when the pandemic started and hasn't been the same since. Nevertheless, he perfectly captures the smug, above-it-all attitude of officials whose destructive policies don't threaten their livelihoods or well-being. They don't have skin in the game. Nor the ability to "find a coconut on Coconut Island." He says they're less than one percent of the population, but so many people aspire to be IYIs that after two years, we're still seriously talking about containing an airborne virus. They're never going to admit they're wrong and say it's over. It's truckers, of all people, who are saying it's over.

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