There’s this old but annoying (and sometimes infuriating) thing called self-fulfilling excuses. Essentially it’s when somebody uses a deferred reasoning “this thing will not work, because I’ll be stonewalling it until it fails, and then I can proudly claim that I was right”. Here I’ll give three examples of it.
First, there’s the tired “masks won’t work against spreading COVID-19”. From the facts I know even WHO finally admitted that the virus is airborne, so using a mask to protect yourself against it by filtering it out of the air you breathe sounds like a reasonable precaution (especially since virus size and masks filtering capabilities are known). And yet indeed masks were not an effective measure because of so many opinionated idiots who refused to not wear them. Just this year alone two random people shouted at me because they saw me wearing a mask (I don’t know who loves wearing them but I keep doing that in public confined places like shops or public transport because my health is not good enough as it is already).
Second, there’s this recent drama about Rust in Linux kernel. I can’t tell whether Rust really belongs there or if it was a mistake admitting it there in the first place—let the technical points be discussed by the experts—but the recent resignation of one of the maintainers demonstrated that the main reason why Rust code can’t work in Linux kernel because certain maintainers are against it. And you know what, if the rest of Rust kernel writers would leave and create their own kernel it may be for the best—I always supported having an alternative (this would be a good place to insert an advertisement for librempeg but Paul hasn’t provided one).
Third, there’s the situation with American help for Ukraine. Just yesterday russian plane sent bombs to my home city, killing civilians and destroying living houses. The most reasonable action would be to allow Ukraine use the provided missiles to strike those planes right at their airbases, eliminating or reducing the threat both directly and indirectly (as russians would have to operate the remaining planes from farther airbases, making their further strikes less effective). Instead USA forbids using its missiles for that purpose. Among the reasons quoted were that there are too few missiles USA can give anyway (right, nobody knows how to allocate scarce resources) and that there’s no strategic advantage to that (link provided as a proof that I’m not the one making it up). And considering that russians are taking such threat into account and have started building plane shelters on the airbases closer to Ukrainian borders, that will turn out true.
Apropos, this is an appropriate place to spotlight this saying:
This will probably keep being true for a long time.
If you’re looking for any solutions, you won’t find them here. This is an innate thing to many humans so I don’t believe it can be eliminated without cardinal changes to human nature (and we don’t know what and how to change), and while theoretically the consequences can be mitigated by the reasonable discussions and rational decisions, those are not common things either (and what I said above the human nature applies here as well). In other words, this world is imperfect and sucks a lot. I have more trite things to say but that’s enough for now.