Francis Berger
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An Intentionally Incompetent System Is Evil By Default

6/7/2019

5 Comments

 
Last week a Viking river cruise ship sailing on the Danube River in Budapest struck a smaller sightseeing craft called the Mermaid. The smaller boat sank immediately, taking practically every one of the South Korean tourists on board with it. As far as I know, only seven people of the 35 people on board survived. The death toll is now officially at fifteen, and there are still at least as many "missing." High river levels, murky water, and swift currents have hampered efforts to recover bodies, but one was recently discovered 100 kilometers downstream from the accident scene.  

As tragic as all of this is, what makes it even more tragic is the piece of news I accidentally came across today that revealed the Viking river cruise ship's captain, who Hungarian authorities arrested shortly after the accident, had been involved in another boat collision in the Netherlands a mere two months before the fatal collision that sank the Mermaid in Budapest last week. Granted, the collision the captain was involved in back in April did not kill anyone, but there was damage to the ship and passengers did report minor injuries. Despite the incident, Viking Cruises decided it was perfectly acceptable to have the same captain continue sailing their fleet. 

Now before I am accused of writing an outrage post - something I promised I would no longer do - allow me stop and say no more about this particular incident. What interests me more is what this incident reveals and how incidents like these are now quite commonplace and will become increasingly more common as we move forward. Why? Simple one word answer - incompetence. Not innocent or accidental incompetence, but purposive and managed incompetence. 

Take a moment to consider the levels of incompetence this incident involves starting with the ship's captain and working our way up through the Viking Cruise company all the way to the various authorities and law enforcement agencies that all believed it was perfectly acceptable to allow a captain who had been involved in a fairly serious boat collision to continue sailing ships without as much as a whiff of question mark. 

The level of incompetence plaguing everything in the West is at pathological levels. Never in the history of our civilization have so many unskilled, unimaginative, untalented, unqualified, and uninterested people occupied positions requiring skill, imagination, qualifications, and interest. This could not exist unless there was some intentional system-building mechanism behind it all. And there is. Imagine that. An entire system intentionally built on a "solid" foundation of incompetence. 

Accidents can and do happen, even with qualified pros, but accidents such as the Mermaid sinking in Budapest should no longer be regarded as accidents, but rather as incidents; incidents that reveal a massive system of stupidity, apathy, irresponsibility, and ineptitude. Incidents such as the Mermaid sinking in Budapest will only increase as each carefully placed domino of deficiency falls and crashes into the one placed beside it. So prepare yourself for more boats sinking, bridges collapsing, airplanes crashing, and countless other unimaginable horrors as the unqualified and inadequate continue to place their brethren into all sorts of positions where people's health and lives are at stake.

This is not about inept people in a  good, functioning, competent system. This is about inept people purposefully congesting an evil, malfunctioning, incompetent system with useless and inadequate people and policies. This systemic incompetence goes out of its way to interfere with the few competent people left in the system, the same people who have somehow managed to keep it all from descending into chaos.

Think of it as plate spinning. The competent within the evil, incompetent system can keep the plates spinning as long as the number of plates and the distances between them are manageable. But with each passing day, the number of plates increases, and the distances between the rods on which the plates are perched grows wider. Added to this is an army of useless zombies who do little more than knock the plates from the rods, sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. 

It's too much.  The Good people are not be able to keep up. Many plates are slowing down and starting to wobble.

Brace yourself for more crashing plates. They're coming.

Update: Shortly after I finished writing this post, Viking Cruises released a statement claiming the captain responsible for the crash on the Danube River had not been in charge of the ship involved in the accident in the Netherlands. Viking Cruises claimed the captain in question had been on the vessel in Holland, but had not been serving as that ship's captain at the time. 

Apparently, Viking Cruises believes this information will somehow make them look better, which is presumably why they released it to the media. Yet if you take a moment to consider this statement it in fact accomplishes little more than support my idea of intentional systemic incompetence.

Viking Cruises has admitted it has more than one inept captain manning its fleet. This proves the Danube disaster captain is not a one-off event - that there are in fact probably many incompetent captains at the company. In addition, by releasing this statement to the public in the hopes it will somehow cast the company in a better light suggests the PR people at Viking Cruises are also incredibly dim and inept, despite their university degrees in communications. 

It's systemic. Period. 
5 Comments
Keri Ford
6/8/2019 07:10:52

The West and i think the world as a whole has been moving in a materialist direction for a long time, through many generations, I think Barfield and Steiner give one of the best explanation of the dynamics of it and there is a possible good here, unfortunately it just has not been manifested at scale. One of the key elements of this is that meaning has been slowly draining away, the Gospel of John begins "In the beginning was the Logos..." meaning was at the very heart of creation, now everyone's opinion is equally valid and equally meaningless. Where has moral stature gone? There is evil a foot but I find it very hard to point to, it is diffuse and pervasive. I don't think Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau or Mark Zuckerberg have the stature to be orchestrating all this. Until a new trust in meaning emerges humanities obsessions will continue on a downward spiral of triviality. Ouch, that's bleak!

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Keri Ford
6/8/2019 07:13:21

A follow up to my last comment. Have you read Lewis' "That Hideous Strength"? My comment and the situation reminded me of that.

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Francis Berger
6/8/2019 21:35:51

@Keri - Thanks for the comment. I agree with what you have stated in your comment - and I yes, it is quite bleak, which is why I am writing fewer of these kinds of pieces and attempting to write more constructive posts. Nevertheless, every once in a while I cannot resist the urge to let loose, so to speak.

Incidentally, Bruce Charlton wrote a couple of interesting posts on systems this week. If you have not read them yet, I highly recommend them.

I have not read "That Hideous Strength", but based on what I read about it, I can certainly see where you are coming from.

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Bookslinger
6/21/2019 23:40:58

This is not to counter your main premise, but....

You don't mention which vessel was deemed by maritime authority to have been at fault. (And I haven't bothered to read the linked article.)

I have some formal training and actual work experience in commercial shipping in the United States.

As in all areas/industries, it is generally true that accidents/incidents are rarely reported correctly, especially before official findings are made and released.

River navigation, even in normal conditions, is tricky. A river is not "open water" such as a lake or bay/ocean. There are limited options for collision avoidance when rules are broken, or officers in charge of vessels don't communicate their intentions.

You state that in this instance there was high water (which covers obstacles that are normally seen, as well as provide extra depth over normally submersed obstacles) and swifter than normal currents.

It's those swifter than normal currents that get you.

There are definite "rules of the road" on water. One of them is that the larger, and hence less-maneuverable vessel, often has right-of-way in a situation where a vessel of equal size would not.

"Manueverability" has a definite play in which vessel has to "give way" to the other.

And, regardless of the above, the fact that the smaller vessel sank in no way implies that it was not at fault.

Given that the owners of the cruise ship had a much larger investment than the owners of the smaller craft (and therefore have more self-interest in hiring competent captain and crew), and given that larger vessels are generally regulated more strictly than smaller vessels, my guess, pending further official findings, is that the officer in charge of the smaller vessel will be found to have more "fault" than that of the larger.

Misreporting by the media is common. Such was much of the furor over the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska years ago.

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Francis Berger
6/22/2019 07:39:53

@ BS - I appreciate your detailed comment and expertise. Of course, you are correct about misreporting and jumping to conclusions, but let's assume the larger ship is not at fault. Incompetence still comes into play.

Nevertheless, from what I have heard, the larger ship was attempting to pass the smaller one under a bridge when it struck the smaller boat from behind. I am no expert in these things, but this is a strict no-no from what I've read. The larger ship had a crew of seven. Not one of them bothered to establish radio contact with the smaller ship. In addition, only the passengers on the larger seemed aware that an accident had even occurred - the larger ship kept going!

Accidents happen, even when only the best people are running things, but these types of accidents are no longer accidents, but incidents caused by putting incompetent people into circumstances they should not be in. That is the larger point I was making.

As for the investigation so far . . . well from what I have gathered, it's been an absolute trainwreck, which only further underlines my larger point.

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