It’s hard to keep from just burying my head under the covers and waiting for everything to go away. But I don’t think that’s going to work; the nasty people in the world are simply not going to allow us to escape unmolested; in fact molesting everyone who is not them is their objective.
They are sickening and disgusting.
I guess that’s part of the point: the things they want to do to everyone in the world that is not them, ought to worry everyone who might wind up a target. The enlightenment ideal of governments run by the people for the people has been utterly suborned in the US, India, Turkey, China, and Russia – those are the more recent ones. I just don’t have it in me to try to estimate the number of humans who are now living under some form of dictatorship or pseudodemocracy, but when you consider that the nations with the largest populations are also the pseudodemocracies (at best) it looks like the enlightenment project of human flourishing has been sidetracked into a train-wreck of greed and personal aggrandizement for the shittiest humans on the planet. Shitty humans that have appealed to the nastiest forms of tribalism and racism to get the worst people in their countries to follow them, because they’re convinced that if they shit on someone else they must be better than them. I.e.: they profoundly misunderstand the situation.
I’m not exactly sure where brexit fits into that picture, but it also is going a long way to showing how much of British democracy is a lie. If you can get the bottom half of your bell curve to vote to punch themselves in the face, are you living up to your democratic ideals if you prevent that outcome? I can’t sort it out, to be honest, all I can do is look at it as a general rejection of the idea of democracy. It appears that Plato was right: democracies fail as soon as shitty people rally behind a charismatic manure-heap that tells them “you will be rulers of shit mountain!” And they’re voted in. Of course Plato’s preferred political system was aristocracy, so as far as I am concerned: fuck him, too.
So, Donald Trump, cartoonish clown of self-dealing, our golfer-in-chief – proposed to hold the G7 summit at his tacky shithotel in Florida, and there was much uproar from everyone who is not consumed with greed or politically submissive. So, after hue and cry, the idea was sulkily withdrawn.
I have a suggestion.
Why not show those world leaders American hospitality?
ICE detention center. Source: LA Times
The US, Russia, China, France, England(?) why not put the world leaders who have come to enjoy American hospitality behind some chain-link fences.
These autocrats want to get together and sniff eachother’s butts (“Oh, my, Ci-devant Macron, your butt smells like pate and champagne!”) and sleep in fine cotton sheets in a nice bedbug-free resort, where every whim is catered to.
Calais “migrant” (refugee) concentration camp. Source: France24
China, Uighur “reeducation” concentration camp. Source: New York Review of Books
Russia: Vietnamese “migrants” in concentration camp in Moscow. Source: Guardian.
How dare they put on airs? (Though, seriously, they were probably afraid that Trump would set up a VIP lounge with strippers and cheap champagne, or something similarly declasse)
They should be ashamed to go out in public, let alone hobnob in comfort, insulated from the reality of the world that they have helped create, and which they (largely) control. These fucking assholes are going to talk about their plannity plans and pretend as though their nations are not largely the cause of the migrant crises that they are trying to deal with. I guess the Japanese and the Germans can feel that their hands are somewhat clean – after all, they haven’t been herding people into concentration camps and shooting them for decades.
Seriously, though, I wish one of those leaders had the guts to ask the US to put them up in an ICE facility. That would answer a question that has been nagging at me: is Donald Trump’s sense of shame vestigial, or did he have it surgically removed?
Question: which had a greater contribution to the “migrant crisis”?
a) global warming
b) “regime change” operations by imperial powers
Marcus said: “That would answer a question that has been nagging at me: is Donald Trump’s sense of shame vestigial, or did he have it surgically removed?”
What makes you think he ever had one?
DonDueed@#1:
What makes you think he ever had one?
Silly me!
The impractical sci-fi solution: weighted votes. If you keep voting for bad ideas, your vote will count increasingly less. If you’re always “right”, your vote will start to count more than the average. On the upside it would encourage voters to seriously consider an issue before voting, or else at least abstain. Naturally, the downsides are multitude, not least being the question what a good outcome is. You’d basically have to stipulate that “big data works” and everything can be quantified. Presumably this would involve collecting even more data and throwing ever more cryptic neural nets at it to go, “cold, warmer, hot, hot, hot!” It must work, it’s so complicated!
The biggest downside, of course, would be that people have to vote on issues instead of voting for professional electees, a.k.a. political reality TV stars, and who wants that? Certainly not the electees – they have book deals to sign and 100k$ lectures to give.
Personally, I’d like and prefer to vote on issues over gambling on some pre-selected politician in the vain hopes they’ll at least keep some promises. But I’m not sure how it would work out either. Brexit is a wonderful test scenario.
The first bits easy: Leaver votes get downgraded for making a shitty decision and falling for blatant, albeit comfortable lies. Then it gets complicated. Since then everything has been deadlocked, so in a sense every voter* is wrong. Brexiteers could have accepted they were lied to and put the pressure on to abort this whole mess. Remainers could have given in to save the UK an endless (and endlessly embarrassing) bit of political theatre. Make it short and less painful, then either deal with reality or campaign to reenter the EU.
Instead we’re in year 3 of a two-year “transition period” that hasn’t even begun, Boris Lying Johnson is in charge (if you had your hand in that you’ll never vote again) and ten days before the latest deadline, how are things going?
… (Checks BBC) …
“Boris Johnson’s Brexit bill clears first hurdle”
First hurdle. Right. Let’s not do anything rash or, gods forbid, definitive now, parliament.
*I’m not distinguishing between voting MPs or voters in general here. Too many layers and proxies everywhere. *cough* electoralcollege *cough*
I know it’s rather off-topic, but I made the mistake of re-checking the BBC after posting, having already re-checked it just before posting
“MPs reject Brexit bill timetable”
I must be trapped in some awful, awful fairy tale – they all are anyhow. “And they debated loudly forever after”
@ ^ Komarov : Nothing lasts forever. Not even our Cosmos.
Thinking of which I spose I’;m theony person here who hears G7 and immediately thinks of stellar spectral classes and stars that are a bit cooler and ,i>(on main-seqence type V stars anyhow) smaller than ours? Anyhow.
***
Dunno. Hard to untangle and insufficent evidence – both have played a role among other factors like the xenophobia whipped up by bigots in many of the nations people are migrating to notably Australia, USA, UK and some European nations? I gatehr cliamet change and conseqeucnt cropfailure wa sone fator in causing th eSyrian civil war for example. The “regime change” operations” also contributed too.
Again, dunno really. But if people voted for a punch in the face thinking they wouldn’t get punched in the face and were doing it because they wanted to vote for something different as a protest or because they were lied to and thought “punch in the face” meant a bowl of delicious alcoholic (or non-alcoholic?) punch beverage or something? As seems perhaps the case here? Well, the process was fundamentally dishonest and the people who were fooled were people who were fooled and didn’t know what they were doing so, erm, maybe time for a re-vote with an actual understanding of what the vote actually means, exactly what they are voting for and no deception like, say, oh, the latest Aussie election where people were told Shorten would do things he wasn’t going to do and the LNPalmer mob were actually doing a good economic job when, no, they weren’t. Also that Palmer’s whole multimillion $ campaign was something other than trick designed to funnel votes to the LNP and prevent the ALP getting elected. But that’s probly another sad, and too familiar tale again, sorry..
It is a pre-requisite for Democracy that voters be accurately and well informed and elections fair as well as just free. .Seems why we’re now failing so often, so many places. The emphasised part implies its own remedies. If we can make them happen?
StevoR:
It is a pre-requisite for Democracy that voters be accurately and well informed and elections fair.
Yes, that is a good observation. Ideally we’d have some kind of political truth-in-advertising, but getting politicians to agree to that is a huge stretch. It seems to me that rational people should realize that politicians can’t be trusted and assume they are lying about everything. But what if they are not?
Political Truth in Advertising – with penalties for non-compliance including, say, removing 1,000 votes per lie or suchlike? Would be so good. Yes, please.
@StevOr: every lie, you forfeit a week in office. Since power is what they want, that’s the currency that will make them notice.
We are the mice voting to bell the cat.
Sure, but that’s a necessary, not sufficient condition. Was that a problem with Brexit? Apparently not:
Certainly not if people were aware that they were “punch[ing] themselves in the face” and thought it worthwhile.
@Curt Sampson
I was thinking the same thing when I read the original post and the earlier replies. One big issue is that people have very different priorities. Not everyone is motivated by primarily economic issues. In the case of Brexit, quite a few people seem to have been motivated by a belief that they would be more in charge of their own future if they were not part of the EU. This is less tangible than economic performance, but very important to many people. If national autonomy is more important than economic success, Brexit makes more sense, at least superficially, though I am personally sceptical that the average resident of the UK will have any more control of their own destiny outside the EU than within it.
Nevertheless, I think that some people tend to forget that intangible factors like national pride or a general sense of being in control of one’s future are immensely important to lots of people, sometimes more important than how the economy is doing.
It’s also worth remembering that the benefits of improved economic performance are extremely unevenly distributed… People are less likely to worry about the economic costs if they don’t feel they’re sharing in the economic benefits.