Going Rogue

A lot of people are going rogue at the moment. Sarah Palin started it, of course, when she went rogue during the Presidential campaign and then wrote a book about it.

But everyone's at it now. Facebook's gone rogue, Wall Street's gone rogue, even someone's goldfish may have gone rogue.

Or did they? To say that someone's gone rogue is to say that they've done something they shouldn't have, because they were committed to playing by some set of rules. Which means that if you think someone's gone rogue, you're implying that you trusted them in the first place.

When Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy Führer, stole a plane and flew to Scotland in the middle of WW2 in a crazy bid to make peace with Britain, that was going rogue. But Palin, Facebook, and Wall Street didn't so much go rogue, as stay rogue. They were just being themselves.

When John McCain picked Palin as his running mate, either he should have known how she'd act, or (more likely) he should have realized that he didn't know, that she was an unknown quantity. When you gave a private, for-profit company access to all your personal details, you shouldn't be surprised when it turns out that they're using them to make profit.

That's all pretty minor stuff, but there's more: if you voted for the politicians whose policy was to deregulate finance and let banks speculate wildly with your money (i.e. pretty much all mainstream parties), you can hardly blame the banks for speculating wildly with your money. Banks exist to try and make a profit, with your money. They don't owe you anything. If you don't want them to take certain risks with your money, that's a political issue.

Likewise, all too often you hear people bemoaning Big Pharma for pushing drugs at people who don't need them, or suppressing the results of trials, or whatever. But unless a drug company is actually breaking the law, you have no grounds for complaint: they're just trying to make a profit, which is what they're for, being private companies. They're rogues by design.

If you don't like drug companies pushing drugs at consumers, get your politicians to ban direct-to-consumer advertising. If you don't want them hiding the results of clinical trials, get your politicians to force them to reveal all their data (like this). It's a political issue.