Being right for wrong reasons

I consider 2020 to be the cut-off point after which it was time for various idiots to shine and make impact on the world. And they’ve been doing an outstanding work since. Among their achievements is something I didn’t expect to see and yet here it is: being right (for completely wrong reasons).

Normally you see the opposite: somebody takes a sane idea and uses it as a pretext for some bad proposals (let’s not even touch all those proposals with the justification of “but think of the children!”, the famous Chinese Four Pests campaign should serve as a good example too—you start with a sane idea of increasing harvests by eliminating pests that hurt crops, you decide to eradicate all species seen near fields and you end up discovering a truth known to any biologist, that birds are much better at hunting insects than people and killing them was a bad idea). Occasionally you see the proverbial broken clock being right (if you generate inane ideas sooner or later one of them might be sane for a change). But recently I’ve started to notice a significant amount of ideas that are actually right but for all the wrong reasons. Most of them are political ones but you can spot some in other areas (like medicine—it is hard to explain why wearing masks was proposed during COVID-19 pandemic when they didn’t believe in the virus spreading by air).

Before moving to the powerhouse of right ideas for wrong reasons, I’d like to mention Hungarian prime minister who claims that Ukraine won’t be allowed to the EU until it conquers corruption. Of course he’s right except for one detail: it is Hungarian corruption that blocks Ukrainian membership and it’s EU that should do something about it (and yet does nothing—so it’s up to Ukraine to fight against at least one of major “patrons” of Hungarian government).

And of course the majority of right ideas for wrong reasons come from the USA. For starters, USian president had a proposal to Europe to stop buying russian gas and oil. There’s nothing wrong with that idea except when you look at the motives, and they’re not about undermining the aggressor’s main income but rather for making Europe dependent on USian fossil fuel (but still dependent on single supplier). A similar proposal for Europe to be more self-reliant in the defence sector instead of relying on USA is equally good unless you see the implied part, namely that Europe can’t trust USA to honour its obligations and that “self-reliance” means buying USian equipment to replace what currently garrisoned forces use and probably paying for the e.g. USian military intelligence services. I’m starting to see a pattern here…

For more IT-related stuff, banning TikTok is an excellent idea. I have not used it myself but from what I heard about it from different sources it’s essentially a digital drug with controlled narratives (and with a vehemently denied role of CPC in that process). Both addictiveness and propaganda are good reasons to ban it and similar creations outright. And yet we see that the main reason is not that it is bad but rather because it is not controlled by US government or corporations (is there still a difference?), so if the USian segment is sold to a USian company it’s all fine.

The last one would be the warrant put by the International Criminal Court on Netanyahu. Regardless of what you think about his recent actions against Gaza, it is his politics that created this situation and endangered lives of the people he is supposed to protect (the same applies to Iran with its mostly peaceful nuclear programme that previously was stopped by Israeli military forces at much earlier stages than “couple of weeks before a bomb”). Throw in his behaviour of a typical dictator (nominally just a prime minister but considering their recent judicial reform and similar things any other dictator in the club does), he really deserves an international warrant (especially since local courts are not likely to do anything about him). But the way ICC handled it feels more like they were politically (or even religiously) motivated instead of trying to bring justice. Sadly this is a likely story with all those international organisations—they tend to outlive their usefulness and become an empty formality often driven by petty interests of the only members who care enough to do anything.

As usual, I can’t do anything about it so I simply point out what’s wrong with this world and move on. The solution exists though: just make people remember old deeds and claims, think, and call others on their bullshit—this will make things much better in just one generation. Implementation details are left to the reader as an exercise.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 6th, 2025 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Useless Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.