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Samizdata quote of the day – the crisis of British politics and governmentWe don’t face a Brexit crisis, a migration crisis, a housing crisis, an NHS crisis, a social care crisis, an energy crisis, a productivity crisis, a deficit crisis or an education crisis — there is one universal and interconnected crisis of British politics and government. The article is not new but it is still interesting. December 16th, 2023 |
 30 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – the crisis of British politics and governmentLeave a Reply |
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It isn’t just Britain. This is a problem, everywhere.
Look at the world around you. Are there any nations experiencing “good governance”? Anywhere?
Singapore? Maybe? I’ve heard some unpleasant things about cronyism and other issues from a couple of former expats that lived there. No first-hand knowledge, but that’s about the only exception to misrule that I can think of.
Everywhere else? Dear God, but the exquisite incompetence, malfeasance, and outright criminality. Is there a single nation in the world that is currently being governed by people who truly have the best interests of the actual citizens of that nation to heart? That aren’t tools of the “global elite”?
Can’t think of a one, to be honest.
I could live with criminals running things, if they were looking out for everyone’s best interests and doing it fairly honestly. No such case exists, however.
To a degree, I think you can trace out a distinct line where we started to go wrong, and that was with this whole concept of a school-trained, carefully-selected technocratic elite running things. Anywhere that mentality has taken hold, and it’s been damn near everywhere, that has resulted in utter disaster.
Where’d that idea get its start? I think it really got rolling during the French Third Republic, with its expansive ideas about building les grandes écoles to create this uber-class of elite managers and technocrats. The French haven’t done so well under that regime, have they? And, the idea spread like a mind-virus everywhere in the world, until it infested all the institutions of higher learning.
Which would be great, but there’s a demonstrated performance issue with this “technocratic elite” that has come into being. They’re really not all that good at managing things, being all too prone to human failings of arrogance and inability to recognize error. These institutions we’ve created, across governance and academia all share one common trait: Their products are all people that don’t recognize their own failures, and who continue to keep digging no matter how deep the hole they find themselves in.
If you stop and think about it, really think, remembering the last fifty years of public life… Has there ever been a case where any of these people have admitted they f*cked something up, and then backed off on a policy they came up with? Where they’ve ever even admitted failure of one of their pet projects or policy changes? Have any of them stood up, admitted failure, and then backtracked on anything?
I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single instance. Anywhere. Meili in Argentina may be an initial case of this actually happening, but we still need to see how it actually works out. He’s made a good start, but the real question is, how many of the “Deep State” Argentinians are going to get out of the way and let him do his work?
The biggest problem we have around the world? The utter inability of the people in charge to admit error, and learn from their mistakes. The issues with the “Birth Dearth” are an excellent example… The powers-that-are-for-the-moment don’t even bother to analyze what is really going on, what is behind the reluctance of people to have kids. There are a million-and-one contributing factors in every nation; here in the US? One of them is the expense of affording a big enough car to get a family around, these days… You want big families? Don’t make it prohibitively expensive in money, time, and effort to raise kids. One of the larger contributing factors to the “small family” issue is that the cars are so tiny, and the mandates for all the safety seats and all the rest.
You want to know why everything is failing? Look at how things are being run, and by who. Is there any evidence, anywhere, that the people in charge are capable of learning from their mistakes?
I harp on this with the “homelessness” crisis here in the US. We’re throwing money at the problem hand-over-fist, but do we see any results? Are they actually fixing anything with regards to this, or are we witnessing failure after failure, immiserating the working populations of our largest cities?
The critical failure here is that we’ve ennobled this class of losers as our leadership caste, who have demonstrated neither merit nor virtue. Why are we putting up with them?
It’s a crisis of “elite competence” and “ability to learn from experience”. Hell, just having them recognize reality would be a refreshing change of pace.
If an electorate votes in a government because it specifically wishes that government to do deeply stupid things, and then that government does those deeply stupid things, doesn’t that make that government democratically responsive?
For various reasons, I’d blame the voters in all of our countries more than I’d blame the individual politicians. Representative government will only do smart things when a majority of the voters are smart.
I’d have to point out, in all due deference, that many of those “foolish electorate” types have been very trusting in believing and listening to those who’ve self-appointed themselves as their “wise technocrats”.
The modern problem isn’t necessarily due to the people voting for these things, but the lying liars who’ve been cozening them for generations. The promises made, the words of the “wise”? They’ve all been trusted, deferred to. The current crisis is mostly due to the fact that the “willing suspension of disbelief” is going away. The process started a long time ago, and has accelerated since 2020.
Adam Smith once commented that “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”, after being told that Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga. I’d say, too, that there’s a “great deal of trust and patience” on the part of the average citizen when it comes to these things, and once the elites have burned through that reservoir…? Things like the French Revolution tend to happen.
I don’t blame the electorate. They’ve been very trusting when they’ve been told all these things, that the people in charge knew what they were doing, and had the average citizen’s best interests in mind with all that they were doing.
The real problem isn’t that the elites are corrupt. That’s always been a feature of governance. The real problem is that they’re so damn stupid these days that they can’t see that they’re working against their own long-term self-interest, and cannot work out cause from likely effect. Nor do they demonstrate the least ability to either identify failure or learn from it.
We could live with corruption. What we can’t live with are elites that act against the best interests of their very own nation’s electorates. There is no “global” anything deserving of loyalty or that the average person will willingly participate in. Trying to force it into being, against the will of the general populace? Ain’t going to work. As well, the entire idea is predicated on the concept that these idjits that can’t manage their way out of a paper bag are suddenly going to develop the competence to manage something exponentially larger, which is so unlikely as to exist far on the other side of the border between “reasonable” and “ludicrous”.
I mean… Bill Gates? The guy behind multiple iterations of failure at Microsoft and Windows? He’s gonna try and “improve” the world? WTF? Anyone remember the hash he made of the computer market and the mistakes he made along the way? This is the guy trying to take charge of all these things he’s working on…? The ability to game the economic system and make yourself a billionaire does not indicate much in the way of real skill or competence at real things, like solving the issues he’s undertaken.
Dude’s actually a bit of an idiot, when you get down to it: He decries population growth, but at the same time, he’s the one trying to improve health care in Africa, which is driving that population growth… If he truly believed in his own BS, then why is he sponsoring all these “health care initiatives” across the Third World?
Just like the rest of the globalists, he’s functionally not all that smart. You want lower population? Just do the demographic work, observe the current lived reality, and be patient: The crisis of the late 21st and early 22nd Centuries ain’t going to be too many people, but too few…
I agree. But I count that as being dumb – they’re just believing and trusting based on party/tribal affiliation, which means you intentionally refuse to use your own reasoning powers. It’s like you agree ahead of time to “believe” things you know to be untrue, because then the team will like you.
A society can handle some percentage of people like that in an electorate, but we’re way past that percentage. We don’t really have a crisis in leadership – we have a crisis because society has become proudly ignorant.
There’s a theory called Cliodynamics (by Peter Turchin) that suggests that an Elite takes control and eventually produces too many children for the Elite Jobs available. The Elite overproduction eventually leads to chaos as all the young Elite scramble for jobs (often invented jobs) while the old Elite hang on to the plum jobs like grim death. This cycle takes several decades and repeats.
I suspect we are in a period of chaos that ends the old Elite and leads to the birth of a newer, slimmer, Elite. It would explain much… the lunacy of identity politics, transgenderism as a protected group, technocratic government run by the Establishment, no blame politics, obscenely wealthy individuals trying to bend the world to their will.
What will replace it, I don’t know. Maybe Brexit, Trump, Johnson, Meloni and Milei are the outriders, but it could easily be a decade before the ‘new Elite’ are in power. An Elite is always in power.
Can anyone tell me why our A level system needs replacement and why someone who’s supposed to be conservative would wish to do so?
I don’t recall being asked to vote for net zero. I certainly did not vote for the elimination of the ICE engine in 2030, nor did I vote to have boilers banned in favour of heat pumps. Nor was I asked to vote on being criminalised for causing offence. What we have is a political elite that, once elected, just does what it likes and damn the people who vote, because any manifesto isn’t binding, is it?
That saved me a job, that’s pretty much word for word what I was planning to post. I might have added something about these “elites” and the Dunning Kruger effect.
We live in amazing times. We create more wealth than ever before, we have highly efficient transport and more than enough fuel for the foreseeable future and we know how to build safe and reliable nuclear power stations to provide all the energy we need. None of this is available to the ordinary citizen, however, as the government has decided otherwise. If we were governed by our enemies, what would they be doing differently?
One widespread stupidity/perverseness is the focus on electricity. Electricity is good, electricity is useful, but it is not all we need. Fossil fuels might be replaced by windmill, solar, and nuclear electricity for powering things that stand still. Maybe, with great ingenuity, it will even empower things that move. But those dreaded oil and gas deposits are amazingly necessary as chemical feedstocks. Where will we get our useful, sometimes irreplaceable, plastics? I don’t want to go back to whale oil.
Many leading Green Thinkers say there are too many people, and our civilization is too rich and comfortable. They are trying to fix that. Some may even realize that means a lot fewer people, and feet and horses instead of cars and trucks. If we are lucky, we may get a new Rome out of it, but there’ll be a lot of death by starvation and violence along the way. And I’m starting to think they think that’s a good idea. The low-level Greens are happily supplying the violence. If they completely succeed, we’ll end up back in caves.
You start with smart lunatics at the top. They convince, and lead, a mid-level cadre. There are thousands and thousands of idiots on the streets, carrying signs and trying to throw monkey-wrenches into the civilization they hate. Enough voters believe this bull they elect governments that give the bull lip service – and if they act otherwise, the Greens stop gluing themselves to roads and start burning things.
THAT is how we’ve got the governments we have.
Fortunately, the Third World doesn’t always agree. They want things, and know windmills won’t supply them. They dig for coal to make electricity. Tyrannies and oligarchies don’t listen to their Greens, so they move right along, with the occasional purge, holodomor, or Great Leap Forward. May the Gods of the Copybook Headings preserve us, China may end up in charge.
I’ve been using Greens as an example, but they’re only one strand of the problem. George Soros is another, plus Antifa, BLM, and many others. The noisy dominate the debate, especially if they’re violent about it.
bobby b, “…society has become proudly ignorant…”
Agree, but I’d amend this to “is poorly educated and has become proudly ignorant”.
The poorly educated bit is squarely the fault of the technocrat elites Kirk rightly disparages. The takeover of our schools and the elimination of what we used to teach (history, civics, reading, writing, and arithmetic) has led directly to the ignorance you cite.
Until and unless we educate every voter with the basics of good civics and make sure every voter has skin in the game (pays sales, income AND property taxes, at least some), we won’t turn this around. Turning this around will require decades, at least a generation if not two or three.
And of course, we are clearly not facing a climate crisis. We have benefitted from a gentle warming, not atypical given previous warmings, plus we have as a bonus, a very welcome increase in ambient CO2 levels. Good news all round.
Whether one looks at government spending, taxation, regulations, or “social issues”, the left has been in uninterrupted power in the United Kingdom since at least 1990 (the establishment coup against Margaret Thatcher) – a period of some 33 years. It is true that Prime Minister Liz Truss (Mary Elizabeth O’Leary) made what I believe was a sincere effort to challenge the Collectivists, but the international Corporate State establishment, with the active help of the Bank of England, removed her in a very brief period of time – and the lying “mainstream media” have blamed British economic decline on a Prime Minister who was in office for a few weeks and was not allowed to do anything.
As for the “think tanks” – the are often useless, for example the last time I entered the Institute of Economic Affairs the first thing I spotted were copies of the “Economist” magazine, a publication that thinks that the highest tax level in 70 years is NOT HIGH ENOUGH. And if one ignores the warning of that piece of filth, the Economist magazine, in the entrance area and looks into the organisation itself – one finds demands for more “infrastructure” (there is not enough money to maintain the existing roads and what-not – and these people are demanding more of it) and “lower interest rates” a “less tight money supply” – i.e. even more Credit Money, “money” created from nothing.
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) was founded, in large part, to fight the Keynesianism it now supports.
The last 33 years of the decline of liberty, the rise of Progressive statism, seems to be a return to a tendency of the growth of government spending, even as a proportion of the economy, and of regulations, that started at the beginning of the 1870s.
A long term, historic, decline of liberty – the rise of Collectivism, in this country and most other nations.
We ARE governed by our enemies. These are people who want to restrict my life choices for the stupidest of reasons and are actively doing me real harm. How else would you describe them if not as enemies?
The problem with educating the electorate is: who educates them? We are seeing the results of doing exactly that for the last fifty years. The electorate are demonstrating the results of being educated – by the leftist blob that seeks to destroy civilisation.
There is also the basic matter of whether the elected politicians control the government.
According to the international establishment, including the European Union, for the elected people to control the government machine is “against democratic norms”, yes they are that Orwellian – democracy is “anti democratic” in their dictionary, and against “the rule of law” – by which they mean the rule of leftist judges.
This is the real reason for the hatred of the elected government of Hungary – it is NOT the very real faults of this elected government that give rise to the hated the international Corporate State (“international community”) has for this elected government – it is the control that the elected government has over the government machine that is the real reason for the hatred.
By comparison elected politicians in the United Kingdom have little power over the government (“the blog” as it is called) – if they attempt to control it, elected politicians are removed for “bullying” as former Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab found, or there is a coup – an artificially created “economic crises” and media agitprop (agitation propaganda) campaign – as was done to Prime Minister Truss.
I say again – I believe that Prime Minister Truss made a sincere effort to oppose the Collectivists, the international Corporate State, but the international Corporate State is very powerful – in the end Economic Law will destroy it (its basic practices contradict Economic Law – so, in the end the international Corporate State will destroy itself), but the time was not yet ripe.
Kirk – in recent years two things have struck me about some, some, American States.
A few American States defied the “international community” and refused to have a Covid lockdown (or had a very short one) – and a few States have defied the “international community” and do not support baby killing. These are largely the SAME STATES.
The United States has terrible problems and may well be destroyed – but it is NOT yet dead, elections still matter in the United States, both at the State and the Federal level.
Unlike the United States (where the Presidential election of 2020 was massively rigged – and there was rigging again in some States in 2022) the left do not tend to bother to rig elections in the United Kingdom (they do in a few areas – but it is very rare), and there is a very bad reason why they do not bother.
@Paul Marks
The United States has terrible problems and may well be destroyed – but it is NOT yet dead, elections still matter in the United States, both at the State and the Federal level.
That is “strictly” true, but not practically true. It is true that one is a bit freer in, for example, Florida, than in New York, but only a little bit. Of course a little bit is better than nothing at all, but the central problem, if you’ll excuse the pun, is that the United States has largely abandoned the federal system and sucked all the power up to the center. They have this horrible thing where they tax the citizens of a state and then tell those same citizens that if they pass their laws the way the federal government want it, they might deign to give the citizens back some of their money. It really is a malicious evil.
However, there are places where you are MUCH freer than the US and the UK. For example, I was listening to the radio recently and they were describing how Christmas is celebrated much more unreservedly in Dubai than it is in New York… Go figure that one out.
I might add that all the people who think that Trump being re-elected will somehow restore things back are kidding themselves. Trump v1 with Russiagate and two impeachments and an implacable bureaucracy will be kids play compared to what will happen in Trump v2. He does have 91 indictments to deal with (and probably a lot more to come). 2024 will be a horrible mess, and a second Trump presidency will be utter chaos. FWIW, a Ramaswamy presidency I think would make a difference (not a fix everything difference, but a put the brakes on difference) but that seems unlikely.
Of course anything is better than Biden 2, or, OMG, Kamala 1. Though FWIW, I think the chances of Biden as the nominee are going downhill with some speed, and Newsom is looking more and more likely. But it’ll be pretty hard for them to skip the loathsome, moronic Kamala. Maybe they’ll be able to roll out St. Michelle. Who knows, but one thing I do know is that out of the likely outcomes they are all very bleak indeed.
I suspect we’re reaching a point where “rigging the elections” ain’t going to work. They sense that, and that’s a large part of the panic.
My opinion about Trump, as I’ve stated before, is that he’s more of a warning shot across the bows of the elect, both the formally elected and the unelected ones. And, as a reciprocal? Their reaction to him, which is entirely irrational, is one of fear. It’s why they went after the January Sixth people so hard; they sense the Timisoara Moment in the offing, and think they can put that reckoning off through fear.
What they’re doing is stoking the fire, instead. That they don’t understand this? That’s the thing we all need to worry about, and that’s the really remarkable thing. There is no reason at all that the people in DC couldn’t have done with Trump exactly what they’ve done with every other “reformer” that’s gone there in the last few generations: Co-opted and corrupted them. They could have so easily “worked with Trump” and gotten away with it. He’d have just been another one of these “Republicans in Name Only” that went to DC full of good intentions who then gradually morphed into ineffective caricatures. I mean, look at the ease with which they basically destroyed his presidency through “helpful” suggestions about appointees and all the rest? The “Republicans” were in on it; just look at Sessions and Barr, along with the rest of those asses.
Now, the really big question is, why didn’t they do that?
They’ve basically chosen the form of their own destructor, here. By going after Trump the way they have, and all the rest? They’ve made him far more popular and powerful than he would have been; all those indictments might as well be in-kind campaign contributions.
I’m still of a mind that Trump might well be a stalking horse in the Kabuki theater of US politics. No idea, really; about all I do know is that the man is the lone US president in my lifetime to actually try and do what he said he’d do, while campaigning. I’m also pretty sure that he’s the only one in my lifetime that really had the best interests of American citizens at heart, and was really willing to fight for him. So, if he’s the candidate? I’ll probably vote for him. Again. Last time I did so, it was basically a “verloren hoep” sort of thing, more a vote against Hillary and the Clinton machine than anything else. I was pleasantly surprised by how he performed as President, although I think he’d have done a hell of a lot better to be a lot more paranoid about the Establishment. Hopefully, he’s learned better.
Or, maybe not. Remains to be seen.
No matter what, their demonstrated incompetency and corruption is becoming undeniably apparent even to their most partisan supporters. In Romania, from what I’ve heard anecdotally, even the more stalwart members of the Communist Party there were growing increasingly disenchanted with Ceaucescu, as things wound down. The moment that reached critical mass, which was that morning in Timisoara, that meant it was all over.
We’ve yet to see a Timisoara Moment with regards to these self-described “genius” types that have wound their way to the top of the heap through cronyism and mastering the credentials game without really gaining the actual underpinning knowledge those credentials are supposed to imply. When that moment happens, it’ll be something that comes as a total surprise, and it will be one of those pivotal cusp moments in history that everyone talks about, like the way the British garrison in Boston decided to try and confiscate the militia’s arms at Concord and Lexington. Or, when the East German officials stood there that day and gave the word that led to the Berlin Wall coming down… That was a comedy of errors, and I suspect that the end stage for this mob of clowns will be something a lot less dignified. Perhaps. If they make it so, it’ll be a lot bloodier and a lot more of a mess.
This remark by Kirk gives me a thin pretext for linking to this excellent essay by Robert Graboyes.
The essay itself is very much worth reading. (I have a few qualifications, but never mind.)
But i want to call your attention specifically to the video at the end of the post. That is one of the most impressive speeches that i ever read. (I also heard it, of course, but i mostly read the subtitles, since i don’t understand German.)
Here is a German politician, of the Green party for good measure, who does not just denounce antisemitism, but says that Muslims in Germany must renounce antisemitism — or else!
Who not only denounces German Putinists, but acknowledges the antisemitism on his own side.
Will he live up to his declared principles?
Ellen said:
I think you’re trying to say something here that isn’t readily apparent to a first read-through, so I thought I’d chime in on what I think that is:
Electricity isn’t an energy source. Period. Electricity is an energy transmission technique, nothing more. You can transform stored water to electricity via hydraulics and gravity, but you cannot create electricity from nothing. It isn’t an actual energy source. The actual energy source for hydropower is the sun, which drives the evaporation cycle that feeds the weather that feeds the rivers that we can dam. Electricity isn’t anything other than a final transformative step taking that hydropower and turning it into a transmissible and usable form.
Which is why it’s asinine for Washington state to class hydropower as “non-renewable” energy. Which they did, at least once, to my knowledge. Like wind, the collection and transmission stuff is turning weather into energy.
The real problem here is the technical ignorance of most people. You talk to the average person, and they’ve no more idea where the electricity in their outlets comes from than they do the meat and milk in their supermarket. Both situations are horrible, in my view: These people make decisions every year about who and what they vote for with zero actual knowledge of the issues those blithering idiots are blathering on and on and on about.
Electricity ain’t an “energy source”, yo.
Pretty sure that’s what Ellen was alluding to, but I didn’t think she was making it clear enough.
Kirk: see also the all-pervasive attituded of “I charge my phone by plugging it into the house outlet, surely I can plug my car in, it’s just electricity”. The most pervasive is in the articles claiming people should be able to plug their cars into lamp-posts. Have they ever seen inside a lamp-post? They’re wired up with barely bell-wire, and street lighting has been subject to 150 years of ever increasing redesigns to *REDUCE* their current draw. *NO* municipality wants to be paying more for street lighting than they absolutely have to, and street-lighting has been one of the fastest-improving resource-reducing technology in the modern electric world.
New Zealand now has a government that is not left wing nor woke. The sheer amount of bleating about even their policy, let alone any actual actions, is a guide to that. We’ll see if they deliver on their promises, but they are definitely not Ardern-lite. (Actually even Labour have drifted away from Ardern’s policies.)
Sweden too has a government where the central right depends on the actual right. They’ve run a budget surplus for a few years, which is rather unusual these days. They have a hard job convincing the Swedes that they don’t have to take every person who turns up at their door, even when clearly unlikely to integrate, but they are trying to reduce immigration of the wrong sort.
Denmark is showing signs of moving in the same direction. They keep their deficit in check too, often running a surplus.
Running a country well is pretty much an impossible task. There’s too many moving parts. All I want my governments to do is 1) run a surplus, 2) allow immigration, but only vetted and legal entrants, 3) reduce or streamline regulation, especially for business, and 4) don’t try everyone’s righteous mother when it comes to drugs/guns/sex/etc. I’ll vote for the left if it can do that. Indeed, I have.
@Chester Draws
I think what you want is a Classical Liberalism. From Wikipedia:
“Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism which advocates free market and laissez-faire economics; and civil liberties under the rule of law, with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech.”
What a shame that there is no such party in the USA or the UK. The Conservatives came closest until the infection of Tony Blair and ever since then they have been sucked down into the swamp (h/t D Trump) more and more until there is little to be seen.
“Modern politics is an Establishment culture which advocates intervention in free market and economics; and law under the yoke of the preferred human rights, with special emphasis on collective identity, unlimited government, constrained economic freedom, constrained political freedom and constrained freedom of speech.”
There has been talk about Trump, and a bit about Biden, on this thread. The Democratic nominee in 2024 will be Michelle Obama. Biden will be allowed enough time and support to beat any declared and potential conventional rivals: Congressman, Senators and Governors, and then will announce (be persuaded to announce) that because of a ‘newly discovered’ health condition it would not be appropriate for him to offer himself to ‘serve the American people’ for another 4 years. The claim will be that the Party should not turn to a defeated candidate but should seek someone who can ‘unite’ the country.
Enter Michelle Obama.
And can you imagine what kind of coverage she’ll get from the MSM? It’ll be ecstatic. On the back of that she’ll probably win the election in November 2024.
Now, I’m not on the inside of Democratic Party politics, but I would bet my house that there have already been un-minuted discussions along these lines by the real power brokers in the Democratic Party, and their allies.
Kirk, you mentioned people not knowing where electricity comes from. That may be true to a point (e.g. the majority who simply don’t think about it beyond plugging into a wall socket any more than they think about where their food comes from), but it may be a little more complicated than that. One of the premises, if not THE premise, of the series Connections by James Burke is that the world has gotten so complicated and interconnected by our technological systems that it is utterly impossible for anyone to really have a grasp on how it all works. A piece here or a strand there, sure, but beyond that is just guesswork beyond a general idea.
I may know my power comes from the coal powered generating plant across the river, but then do I know how the coal gets there? Or how the metals that compose the wiring goes from raw ore in the ground to finished wire, or the glass in the insulating materials, if indeed glass is still used and not some polycarbonate long-chain molecule made in a factory in China and shipped to the US on a cargo ship, and every point in that chain is dependent on dozens of other technological chains and if anyone one of them should fail the whole thing can come crashing down.
To illustrate that lesson, the first episode is devoted to how a single faulty relay caused a cascade of failure that ended with the NYC blackout of 1977. Even if your average New Yorker thinks about the power system beyond flipping a light switch on, most of them didn’t know enough about how the system works to even think about a single relay bringing the whole thing crashing down. Such is the world we live in today.
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it and thanks to the Internet, it’s availble to watch.
https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke/Connections/Season+1/Connections+S01E01+-+The+Trigger+Effect.mp4
And there is a new series from the same James Burke for those so interested.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/fans-of-connections-rejoice-rebooted-classic-sci-doc-series-returns-with-original-host/
@James Strong, you might be right, and if she runs she will win. She certainly won’t be vetted by the media, or pressed in a debate. WHich is just as well since I am sure she has a glass jaw… in fact a very fragile glass jaw. From what I see it isn’t clear she wants to do it, but who knows. I think Newsom is more likely.
BTW, I had a realization last night about the Republicans. Putting aside Trump for a moment, the three main candidates actually represent the three wings of the Republican party. DeSantis is the traditional smaller government, culture warrior, one nation type Republican beloved of the evangelicals, Ramaswamy is the classic libertarian wing of the Republicans, and Nikki Haley is your classic NeoCon, RINO, big government type Republican. As to Christie, he is really just a grudge candidate, so I’m not sure he has much of a position except “hate Trump, love me.” Republicans are a coalition of these three wings and it is interesting that they are so clearly represented in these three candidates. Although Trump would hate this, he is basically from the same wing as DeSantis. He most certainly is not a libertarian nor a NeoCon RINO.
Maybe that is obvious to everyone, but it struck me as I was thinking about it last night.
@Steven R, who said:
Steven, both you and I know better. Lots and lots of people out there also know better.
The Gretchenfrage of our times, our milieu, our Zeitgeist would be this: Why the hell don’t any of our leaders know these things?
Observe the unpleasant reality we have here in the US, wherein not a one of the politicians that have voted for and enacted these laws banning “fossil fuel transportation” understands that they can’t make it happen without incredible expenditures in new grid build-out, new generation capacity (which will likely have to remain fossil fueled…), and entirely new cars that nobody can afford?
How’d these technical ignoramuses wind up in charge, and in power? The local apprentice electricians know better than to say that any of the crap enacted by state government is workable, because I’ve talked to them about it. They can do the math; they know what the local grid is able to handle, and adding in 40 amp hardware in every house for every new electric car that will be needed by the date they’ve pulled out of their asses ain’t happening. Apprentices know these things; why are the people in charge ignorant of them?
That is a microcosmic example of the “crisis of our age”, right there.
Frasor Orr – yes the Federal Government is the big problem.
If the FBI decides they want to arrest you, on false charges, and have you raped and abused in prison (“it was not our fault – we did not personally do it”) they can – and there is nothing much a State Governor can about it. And if you survive to go to court – you will find the entire system is rigged against you – witnesses will be offered inducements by the prosecution to give false testimony against you (this happens more and more – as the corrupt system allows it, it is “legal” to offer a witness a reduced sentence of the dropping of charges – the system is a charter for perjury), and there will be vast numbers of “charges” against you, most of which will be “process crimes” (i.e. not real crimes at all – but with endless prison attached to them), and, of course, the jury will be leftists – the area the trial is held in we will be carefully picked to get a leftist jury.
As for who the Dems will nominate.
It will not be Gavin Newsom – he is, I believe, finished.
It will be K. Harris or Michelle Obama – or BOTH on the ticket.
And the nomination process will be totally rigged – it will be a coronation of K. Harris or Michelle Obama, or both, in Chicago.
Chicago – that pit of decay.
Not Kamala Harris. She is, I believe, the most unpopular VP in US history. And that includes Spiro Agnew, who resigned in disgrace.
I am thinking that Hakim Jeffries might make an appearance on the Left ticket.