Every now and then I think about the 2006 "prophetic documentary" Idiocracy, which is about a future America where everyone is stupid because the underclass of society has lots of babies and the intelligentsia has none. However, the movie is fundamentally flawed as we have discovered in the past few years that the "smart" people in society are incredibly stupid and incompetent.
There has been a political and cultural selection for middle-management personas in media, education, and governance in the past few decades—colloquially known as drongos if we apply Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown's snipe at journalists more broadly.
Journalists are of course very upset that someone couldn't care less about filtering his communication through them. It's insanely laughable to hear all this talk from them about how "leadership" and "accountability" are required. We've had enough of that for the past thees years, being fed lies from the "Podium of Truth" with a fawning bought-off hoard of drongos asking vapid questions.
I didn't vote for Wayne Brown and I certainly wasn't a fan of him before Friday, but now I see him as a hero of the people. He hates the media as much as any of us. It's not like his tardiness to declare a state of emergency made a difference to the storm damage or cleanup. The media's calls for him to step down would be laughable if they weren't so insane. These emergency powers have barely been used, and seem most applicable to clearing state highways and other roads rapidly without paperwork, which makes you wonder why all that paperwork is normally required if it has to be dispensed with at the slightest inconvenience.
After getting the severity of Friday's storms wrong, they decided to double-down and overcompensate in getting everything for the next week wrong too. The media drongo frenzy compounded incompetence and annoyance for Aucklanders outside of the local areas directly impacted by flooding.
So it came to be that in South Auckland, we got demonic screeching "orange" weather alerts on our phones on Sunday and Tuesday nights, hardly any rain following both, no flooding or surface water, with all roads open, and all schools forcibly closed for two days by Wellington bureaucrats. Welcome to Drongostan, where no one pays any price for being wrong.
The blame for just about everything can be shifted when you're ruled by middle management. Build houses on floodplains, add more concrete and asphalt everywhere, put houses up on the edge of cliffs, and then wait for an inevitably bad storm. You can get the drongos to run all the political messaging you want for a few weeks and no one has to take any responsibility—except for the general population who need to own nothing, eat bugs, and live in a pod to "fix the climate." Rinse and repeat. Never let a crisis go to waste.
The "permanent emergency" state was quick to pick up its lockdown-style powers again at the slightest hint that something out of the ordinary might be going on. The COVID brainrot appears to have permanently damaged media drongos and bureaucrats alike, who expect the temporarily elevated state of importance they played since 2020 to continue.
It feels like we live in a dongocracy.