Dec 22, 2023·edited Dec 22, 2023Liked by Low Status Opinions
Why don't we make things any more? That's a great question. I ask myself often.
Governments in developed countries can't do great things any more because there is no constituency for great things. The left doesn't want to go to the moon and the right doesn't want to pay for the rocket fuel. My government in California couldn't even build a train track from Los Angeles to San Francisco. My government in the UK tried to build a train that goes from London to Manchester but could only get as far as Birmingham. There are too many forces arrayed against them and too many mischievous commentators too eager to demagogue them down.
We've lost our ability to tell ourselves stories too. Back then, we could say "We are going to the moon!" and tell a story about how it will make us great. If a president said "We are going to the moon!" now only about 5% of us would hear the story because we are so fragmented. Another 5% would see the headline in the Daily Mail or on Fox News about the government wasting money again on Holidays to the Moon. The best we can do now is to wear little Red Bonnets with Make America Great Again written across the front. And how does one Make America Great? By building a wall and making Mexico pay for it. So do we have a big, beautiful wall now? Reader, we do not. We didn't stop the boats either. The only story political parties know how to tell is how horrible the other party is.
Katherine writes that we don't have community any more because everyone has gone online (Hi, everyone online!) and joined tiny little communities like Pensioners Against Clean Air or Progressives Against Violent Speech where they don't have to talk to people who might tell stories they haven't heard before. I think there's something to that.
As for culture, I figure that most of the new cultural products are just not for me any more. I've crossed the generation gap. I didn't need to see Cardi B's Wet Ass Pussy any more than my grandparents needed to see Elvis shake his snake hips. That doesn't trouble me very much. It does trouble me that all the Zeitgeist is in video games and Discord channels where they talk about video games. Culture is no longer a force for good. It's hidden away in forums and it's no longer a force for anything. The last cultural product to make a dent in anything was Tumblr and what a horrible dent that made! I think Tumblr is about 60% responsible for the identity politics that are tearing us apart.
But!
I believe the cultural tide is turning. We've passed peak wokeness and intersectionality causes more eye-rolling than head-nodding these days. They've had the most powerful story for a long time but it's coming to an end now and we need a new story to replace it. 'Take Back Control' and 'Stop the Boats' were never great stories and the story tellers fluffed their lines anyway. The War on ULEZ Cameras and the War Against the War Against Christmas are fake. They only appeal to conspiracy nuts and conspiracy nuts never build anything.
The root cause of all our problems is that our political parties were designed for the problems of the 1970s. There's hardly anyone who loves the Democrats or the Republicans. The only reason they get votes is because the other guys are worse.
I don't know a single person who loves the Tories or Labour either. What we need is for one of the parties to collapse into obscurity and for the other party to acknowledge that they only stuck together to keep the other guys out. Parties are not meant to be forever and we desperately need new ones.
What a great comment Ragged. I don’t agree with some of it. (For one thing, I adore video games!) But I will definitely read it a couple of times more to get my thoughts in order. I certainly agree with your last paragraph though. Wholeheartedly. Great to have you here Ragged. Merry Christmas to you.
I think it's fine to adore video games. I adored them in my younger years. But I think it's unhealthy when they become all consuming as they are for too many people.
Video games have taken over as the primary cultural product but where books and music and movies used to have the cultural power to make a difference in the world, video games are a private affair that don't make much difference to anything. Young people no longer have the cultural references to understand the world.
I think political parties were developed as a response to the enlargement of the franchise in Britain - to divide and conquer: to give people the illusion that they could be represented in a democratic legislature by herding them into two groups who in their manufactured 'opposition' to each other, would forever maintain a status quo.
Yes. I’m not sure that was the intention. But it certainly seems to be the result. Should we be embracing PR? Or would that just lead to a permanent Social Democratic government as some suggest?
Yes, I think it would at a national level. I think that political parties should actually be banned altogether and that anyone standing for any election should be independent and should only be allowed one term in office. Both of those requirements would minimise the current problem of cronyism and patronage. At the level of Westminster, the huge power of the PM, who can make or break the political careers of his MP's is akin to a despotic monarch of old.
But be careful what you wish for. On paper the American system is carefully designed to prevent the 'despotic power' of a PM or a King, but in practice it works out exactly backwards. Probably dozens of volumes have been written about this.
Dec 22, 2023·edited Dec 22, 2023Liked by Low Status Opinions
Social democracy would be just fine with me. It's better than the two options we have currently.
But I think PR would introduce a little flexibility into the system and allow new parties to pop up and displace the mainstream parties as the issues change. As it is now, the Tories have to perform contortions as they pretend that the centrists and the right of the party care about the same thing. PR would allow the Tories to be tory and let another party tack to the right and PR would prevent them from tacking too far.
I'd rather see a single transferable vote though that allows us to register our interest in a third party like the Greens or Reform without wasting our vote entirely. PR is too much of a leap from our traditions. I think the tradition of one MP per constituency is worth keeping.
Yeah, on balance STV (or 'ranked ballot') is better since it sidelines parties, whereas normal PR is actually centered on parties. But PR does permit the rise of new parties that have a diffuse base of support
Dec 22, 2023·edited Dec 22, 2023Liked by Low Status Opinions
I strongly disagree, Bettina. The Labour Party was formed out of a sincere desire to address the needs of the growing working class at the start of the twentieth century.
There have always been *two parties* who care primarily about *two things*. For a while, the *two things* were crown vs parliament; then it was landed aristocracy vs industrialists; for a while it was established church vs nonconformists. Every now and again the political issues change and the parties have to change with them or they get wiped out as happened to the Liberals in the early twentieth century.
The two main issues since the expansion of the suffrage in 1918 have been the concerns of the capitalist owners vs the concerns of the workers. The working class is practically gone now though and the Labour party gets much of its support from the educated middle class. But we still have the same two parties. We are overdue a realignment.
I’ve heard this before Ragged and it feels right to me. We are perhaps moving away from a part of history where the ‘two things’ were different economic models and into an era when they are instead two different views of culture. Open or closed. With each side characterising themselves as the ‘open’ ones of course! Not sure it’s 100% correct, but it’s certainly a useful way of looking at the last few years.
I don't think that's really it. The working class in Britain or the U. S. is, respectively, a short-lived thing of maybe fifty or a hundred years. There is clearly no working class to speak of and there has not been one for two generations. It was all congealed into one. There is one mass of people instead of two social classes. Only one model to follow. So I disagree that there are two parties at all, and furthermore there are not "the same two parties" because that is over, finished. No classic two-sided anything!
Hi Jacob. Thanks for your comment. There definitely is a ‘working class’ in Britain. Although the term means something slightly different to what it does in the States, where I’m guessing you might be from. Walk around where I live in Camden London. Or take a trip to Newcastle, or even just to Essex. You’ll meet the working class. Looking forward to checking out your newsletter.
Well, the US is cutting-edge in terms of capitalism so we may interpret my comment to mean that the trend is towards elimination of this "working class" as a discernible counter-party, with some establishment or elite class on the other end of it. There is a "working class" in the USA. I suppose it depends on how we define one. As an active political force, no, I do not see one. There are plenty of "working class" in the USA but mostly they are not very smart and they lurk around doing crimes or something. Not that I am biased at all...
one says "I am the open one" and the other says also that: "I am the open one" but they are both the same people. No one is going to admit to having a "closed culture," because it sounds wrong in some way. So this is really a minor point, a bit of posturing. Tomorrow maybe they will say something else about how wonderful and peachy their own dang selves are. It's all ego.
Well summarized. Seems there's always the Left and the Right -- what they actually stand for can change. As we know the 'Left' tho still 'officially' the party of working people, in practice is now the party of the globalist elite -- the new aristocracy.
The American FF spilled quite a bit of ink worrying about parties -- they understood that political parties could be the death of their experiment in democracy. Yet they also understood that parties are inevitable in the same way that criminal gangs are inevitable -- people will combine forces to maximize their power. You can't stop parties any more than you can stop people farting, but you can minimize the harm that they do. Firstly, FPP voting must be replaced.
I think we could get away with a ban on parties in a reformed House of Lords where we elect people based on the skills and experience they have. But, I agree, I don't think we can get rid of parties in the Commons. They are with us forever.
Still it's interesting. Tho I have trouble believing it can really work, here in Canada, in the north, their legislature bans parties and so far so good. Marvelous if it sticks.
I suspect there are many roots but one could spend an enjoyable evening listening to thoughtful people advance their own favorite. Mine is PC. Long story short, we got so used to telling polite lies that reality sorta floated away. If there is a single cultural artifact that exemplifies this I'd say it's Lennon's 'Imagine'. Thing is tho that we forgot that it was just imagination and we started acting as tho things we wish were true were made true by our pretending that they were true. No, blame Jiminy! We wished upon a star ... but our dreams didn't come true -- the races are not equal and there are things men can do better than women and Western Civilization is better than that of New Guinea head hunters. Sorry.
The dualling of the A66 is an object lesson. In 2002:
"The consultants stated in the Final Report that the expected cost of full dualling of the A66 from Penrith to Scotch Corner was £66 million, however, by the time of the announcement of full dualling on 22 August 2002, made by the Minister for Roads, the cost had increased to £141 million. We have no explanation or information about this more than doubling in cost within nine months nor have we seen the Cost Benefit Analysis calculations upon which this new cost has been based. All the comparisons between dualling and other alternative low cost options were carried out on the basis of a cost of £66 million."
We are talking about 20 miles of dualling. It was done in the 2000s, but Blair cut the funding before the last few (but awkward) bits were done.
Today those last bits are in doubt, because the budget had gone up by 50% from £1 billion to £1.5 billion. That is 22 times more than the budget for the whole job 20 years ago. More time and money has so far been spent on digging holes, doing surveys, exploring the need for CPOs, worrying about nitrate neutrality, great crested newts, bats and biodiversity than was spent on doing the rest of it back in the 2000s, and not a square inch of tarmac has been laid.
We invent reasons why we can't do anything. Parliament has handed over sovereignty to the quangos, unelected supranational bodies, the House of Lords, the courts and the woke corporations. Stonewall has more influence on our daily lives. Ridiculous legislation starting with the Human Rights Act 1998 and including the Companies Act 2006, Climate Change Act 2008 and the Equality Act 2010 has committed governments to do things that are impractical at best. Government can be challenged in the courts on almost anything because it might impede our progress to net zero, for example.
The stifling bureaucracy of health and safety, net zero, human rights, biodiversity and so on mean that you need hundreds of pages of anodyne risk assessments, ecology reports, archaeological surveys and compliance checks before anything can be started. You can't build a house, a train line or a road within any sort of a sensible time scale.
The utter uselessness of the Public Sector but they are good at two things: paying themselves stunning salaries just for turning up a few days a week and then retiring early having achieved sod all to retire on a fat pension, just like every socialist banana republic before them.
But we should not forget that both Britain and America rose to their greatest success based on their competent public sectors. Righties like to say that the solution to bloat and incompetence in the PS is to privatize everything, but IMHO the solution is to impose discipline.
Our Public Sectors used to be small and still run on the ethos of prudence, that ended long, long ago. 'Impose discipline'??? But who will impose that discipline when they ALL have their snouts in the trough? Some local council chiefs in the UK are on £500,000pa. They are out of control.
We know what would happen if we achieved anything like that now. You just have to look at the Rosetta mission in 2014. We landed an exploratory spacecraft on a COMET !!! And it was a European mission as well, not NASA.
And the media coverage was about sexism.
Because the feminists went ape about some nerdy scientist at the press conference who barely spoke but who wore a goofy cartoon shirt with fantasy fiction half dressed women on it. Sexism. From feminists. All you heard about for days. Wall to wall culture wars. Women’s rights in the sciences.
What happened to not shaming people for their right to wear whatever they want .... I couldn’t believe it at the time and can’t forget it.
Which is one of the reasons why I find the Trans/Terf war absolutely hilarious.
The whichever wave it is now feminists getting their arses handed to them by the Trans militants, who are using the exact same tactics the feminists mobilised themselves. And the outrage about it and the calls on men to stand with them! They deserve it. Karmas a bitch. There are lots of reasons for the fall.
Amazing how the madness took hold and spread and just how quickly too. It’s the human condition I suppose.
Immense piece once again LSO. I enjoyed the Shelley Ozymandias reference. Committed to memory as a child in the days when learning and reciting poetry was seen as a thing of value.
Thank you Maria. Yes. A beautiful poem. They still learn them at school though definitely not in the same way. I put my daughter onto Keith Douglas when she was a little younger. She was impressed.
There's another subject worthy of an entire bottle of scotch. NO! I think you got it wrong. 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Ozzy built vast monuments to his own vanity. Contrast, dunno, say the plaque on the Golden Gate Bridge honoring the engineer who designed it (Ellis). The GGB is a great work, no doubt but it isn't Ozymandian. We do not despair looking at it, we rejoice. It isn't a monument to vanity, but a benefit to the people. And Ellis didn't even make the plaque it was added decades later. Same with Apollo -- we hardly remember the names of the engineers; the work was great, but 'Ozzymandian' is not quite right.
Fair points Ray. But some of the motivation behind Apollo was vanity. The Americans couldn’t bear to be upstaged by the Soviets. So yes. The US did ask the Russians to look upon their works and despair. The whole point was to show the world what America could achieve. At least that’s the angle I was going for when I included the Ozymandias reference.
Hmmm ... I think I can't do better than a draw when it comes to Apollo -- yeah, it was a vanity project -- Look on *our* rockets, ye commies, and despair.
Actually I fold. Yes, Apollo was Ozymandian. Mostly. Still the real accomplishments remain -- much was learned and there was some thought at least to 'all mankind' (which is sexist ;-)
Yes, your sentiments are justified. We humans have turned to navel gazing - with a very few notable exceptions, the satellites we launch now are turned towards the Earth.
My astronomy lecturer in the 1960s placed a bet of £1 in the early part of the decade that the US would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I believe he collected at 10000 to 1! He didn't say what he spent it on.
Uplifting, then sobering, if not saddening. And then, at the very last, the faintest hint of hope. Once more, well written LSO. 👏
In small coincidence I recently found myself listening, with hairs bristling on the back of my neck, to JFK’s moonshot speech, and I wondered: where have all the luminaries gone? Where are those men and women of courage, of strength, and conviction now? As I cast my gaze at the current political landscape, it appears to me to be as barren, and as empty as the grey, featureless tundra of the lunar landscape.
Yet there is still hope. Fragile, and so delicate that we fear to even whisper its name lest it flutters, splutters and fades from view. But I witnessed it today in a small, and simple act of kindness, as I craned my neck downwards, furrowing, focusing on your article on my iPhone. This simple act - that required no permission, special attributes or ability and is in easy reach of each and every one of us - was played out in a small town, in a corner of a candlelit cafe, full of small people with joy on their faces as the rain sheeted, the wind raged and the sky crept catlike, silent and as black as coal.
As I continued reading I wondered: perhaps we should all look for greatness not in exalted elites, but within? Perhaps we should, each of us, find the courage, strength, and conviction in the simple acts we perform on the stages of our own small lives?
Merry Christmas LSO, and peace and goodwill to all.
A lovely comment BitKoda. Thanks for that. Yes. There is greatness to be found in small acts of kindness. I firmly believe that. Happy Christmas to you. God bless us, everyone.
You would expect optimism from young people most of all, but they are all depressed, anxious and fearful about the future. There is a feedback loop for all this with the doom cult of the msm and indoctrination in the education system. The only way to break the cycle is for parents to get rid of their TVs, refuse to give their children smart phones (get an old Nokia for the 'I've missed the bus mum' moments) and home school/find alternative education.
Some are Bettina. But many I know, and I know plenty teenagers, are optimistic, rebellious and bullet proof. You know, like teenagers have always been. So I’m a bit more positive about the next generation than you maybe. The phones thing is tricky. This IS their world and there are some (please don’t ask me to list them!) positives. Having said that, the Jonathan Haidt stuff on smartphones sometimes makes me want to turn the clock back for all of us. Merry Christmas Bettina.
I know, you're right! The young people I know - twenty somethings mostly - have their heads screwed on and make me optimistic and cheerful. As you say, teens have always been a bit emo.
There's cause for optimism. The young people I know are almost universally unwoke and conservative. They roll their eyes at the bullshit. They are rootless because they have no education -- they don't understand anything and they have no clue what to do or where to go. But they do not love Big Brother.
Yes Ray. A lot of wokeness has surely come from young people looking for meaning in their lives. And since our culture refuses to give them a positive story to follow, they have made up one of their own. One where they are the goodies and literally anyone who isn’t them is a baddie. But hopefully the tide is turning with this new generation. Punk will save us yet.
Yeah it's another one of those things were one should be careful what one wishes for. When they killed Christianity it was supposed to be replaced with pure rationalism. Instead we got wokeness. Ray's Law of the Conservation of Irrationality in action. Can it be repaired? They own the institutions. Surely Harvard and the other Ivies are beyond salvaging?
I know, you're right. My twenty something childrens' friends are usually pleasantly surprised that an old person like me calls out the bullshit - they question a lot, but know shockingly little history. They don't seem to have a perspective on things - particularly the climate cult. Informing them that the Vikings grew wheat in the now glacier covered Greenland, whenever the boiling planet rubbish gets discussed, is a good one to lob in.
The history thing is so depressing. I try not to be a conspiracist, but it is almost as if there has been a concerted effort to keep them ignorant of their past.
I'm not sure what to make of young people's ignorance of history. I think kids study more history in school than I ever did but they don't seem to know any of what they studied. History was not compulsory back in my day and I dropped it as fast as I could but I've always loved reading about it. I feel offended and embarrassed when there is some historical fact that I didn't know.
This is brilliant stuff, as ever I will share widely. Thanks for your enlightening stuff in 2023, have a great Christmas break if you can and get that payment system set up in 2024 Sir.
Dec 22, 2023·edited Dec 22, 2023Liked by Low Status Opinions
Exceptional! So very true! I read the lyrics of Lizzie's WAP, God help the western world, and America. And a very happy Christmas to you and your brilliant readers!
Please try to remember that what passes for news, political leadership reporting etc. are only chosen snippets of the real world and that there are great minds everywhere: getting on with life and either making progress or learning from mistakes.
Amazing facts. Thanks Ray. I tried to get the steel bit right. I did check and I felt I was ok saying it. Maybe I looked at the wrong source. Happy to be corrected. Fascinating that Musk is using a lot of steel in his rockets then.
Yes, isn't it! Stainless steel bodies. Elon has an entirely different mentality from NASA. And it's not even 'fancy' stainless steel, just the plain old common stuff. He want's his rockets to be like washing machines. The tech is beyond cutting edge, yet the construction is 'common' for lack of a better word.
There are two fundamental reasons for this: one is cultural decline - the inevitable decay of mature democracies. The second is dysgenics: basically, dumb people have massively outbred smart ones. Check out the 2006 movie ‘Idiocracy’, which now looks more like a premonition than a satire.
Simple, we are at war with Communist China, they are pulling more strings behind the scenes than people realise. WW3 has been running now for 30/40 years. China has bought governments, politicians, NGOs, media groups etc etc. They use all forms of psyops through 3rd party organisations to change opinions and influence people; the biggest psyop that 90% of people have fallen for is 'Climate Change' it's 99% nonsense and if YOU believe it, you've been had. Look up the book 'Hidden Hand', your hair will stand on end.
If your analysis is that sexual reproduction plays a part and that somehow Darwinian selection has taken place at a hyper-lightning-fast speed then that doesn’t even reach the level of stolen mid-wittery but sticks very firmly at half-wit level.
Saying that (which is harsh) if we are both reading this blog then we probably agree on an awful lot. So what does that say about me.....
But this is entirely about corporate lobbying, corporate greed and corporate socialism and globalism. It’s about the Oligarchy that the boomer generation in the West signed up to, enabled, built and benefited from, and they are mainly the only ones still benefitting.
When you steal and degrade peoples culture and commoditise them and devalue all social traditions in the name of profit, then those who have spent their lives benefitting from corporate greed and globalism aren’t in a position to criticises the masses for being the victims of it. Reserve your animus more for the creators of this corrupt quasi-fascist oligarchy rather than for the pawns and victims of it.
Breeding ...... I know it’s Xmas but Jesus Christ ...
Global population has increased from 2.6bn to 8.2bn in only the last 70 years. That's given plenty of scope for dysgenic effect. The Bell Curve book by Charles Murray records it too. Like I said, the other major driver is cultural decline, as anticipated by Aristotle, who said that (to paraphrase) democracies fail when the needy and greedy vote privileges for themselves.
And can we please keep it civilised, Aqua? Calling me a half-wit does not constitute considered debate.
Yes Richard. Not sure I 100% agree but it could certainly be a factor. But yes please Aqua. All are welcome to disagree civilly here. As you put it, we probably all agree on an awful lot. So let’s stick together. Not sure I want to turn this comment section into a mini Twitter! Happy Christmas to you both.
But unlike the original poster who is presumably self identifying as intelligent, I know for a fact that Darwinian selection does not take place across billions of people, in just 50 years across all continents. That was the point I was making and to propose that calls into question intelligence and highlights a rather nasty bias I think.
Of course intelligence is related to genetics, as are emotions and physicality and all the rest of it, of course, but so is lifestyle and education and diet and culture and productivity factors and adversity faced as a child and teen and as an adult and also place and time and how it is measured and what kind of performance you value and measure for, but genetic evolution and Darwinian selection especially, does not account for the last 50 years.
That's just a stupid thing for someone to say. And came across as a bit cheap and nasty.
And quoting idiocracy is a bit lazy and cliche too. Bearing in mind that the writers and directors are definitely on the woke side themselves.
I'm just a bit sick of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives that have royally screwed everything up for the last 50 years at the same time as feathering their own nests, sneering at people they think are beneath them.
> I know for a fact that Darwinian selection does not take place across billions of people, in just 50 years across all continents.
I don't recall the OP as making such sweeping claims. He pointed out that an economic/social system in which the poor and unintelligent reproduce faster than the well-off and intelligent, is going to impact the gene pool. You disagree?
> ... but genetic evolution and Darwinian selection especially, does not account for the last 50 years.
Where did you get the number '50' from? In any case Darwinism is actually what is being specifically avoided -- what we have is the exact opposite of Darwin -- survival of the fittest. What we have is preferential survival of the dumbest via various social programs. How quickly could this have an effect? Very quickly. To make an illustration, supposing we killed every person at the age of 12 who was under five feet in height. I put it to you that the average height of people would increase very rapidly.
> I'm just a bit sick of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives that have royally screwed everything up for the last 50 years
Me too. Mind, they've joined forces with the woke who now control our institutions as the former control all the money -- ordinary, working, sane people are thus 'surrounded'. In any case, the question is one of the effects of our social choices on genetics, not whether or not one likes neo-liberals (who, BTW, are not conservatives). Oh, and the current clerisy may think that others are beneath them, but that feeling has no basis in any kind of real superiority -- they are largely morons.
My pleasure. Glad to have Aqua here, but we should hold each other to some standards.
As to the issue, it's as deep a problem as we face. On the one hand you have Hitler's cheerful view that the strong not only can and should, but *must* eternally be at war with the weak so that the race is being eternally perfected. On the other pole you have the Welfare Queen who's 9 children all have different fathers, none of whom contribute to their kid's support and all of whom (dads and kids) -- like their mother -- have IQs in the 70s and all of whom will end up on welfare and having 9 kids ... and so on. This problem has been with us since the first efforts at charity.
I am asking: where does the feeling of grandiosity come from? It sounds more like I would expect to hear from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I am talking about styles of speaking --- and I am asking where this particular style (which reminds me of FDR) comes from in the first place? Why do persons speak like that? IT doesn't matter whether it is FDR or JFK.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
And:
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Why don't we make things any more? That's a great question. I ask myself often.
Governments in developed countries can't do great things any more because there is no constituency for great things. The left doesn't want to go to the moon and the right doesn't want to pay for the rocket fuel. My government in California couldn't even build a train track from Los Angeles to San Francisco. My government in the UK tried to build a train that goes from London to Manchester but could only get as far as Birmingham. There are too many forces arrayed against them and too many mischievous commentators too eager to demagogue them down.
We've lost our ability to tell ourselves stories too. Back then, we could say "We are going to the moon!" and tell a story about how it will make us great. If a president said "We are going to the moon!" now only about 5% of us would hear the story because we are so fragmented. Another 5% would see the headline in the Daily Mail or on Fox News about the government wasting money again on Holidays to the Moon. The best we can do now is to wear little Red Bonnets with Make America Great Again written across the front. And how does one Make America Great? By building a wall and making Mexico pay for it. So do we have a big, beautiful wall now? Reader, we do not. We didn't stop the boats either. The only story political parties know how to tell is how horrible the other party is.
Katherine writes that we don't have community any more because everyone has gone online (Hi, everyone online!) and joined tiny little communities like Pensioners Against Clean Air or Progressives Against Violent Speech where they don't have to talk to people who might tell stories they haven't heard before. I think there's something to that.
https://www.katherinewrites.com/p/beyond-the-white-picket-fence
As for culture, I figure that most of the new cultural products are just not for me any more. I've crossed the generation gap. I didn't need to see Cardi B's Wet Ass Pussy any more than my grandparents needed to see Elvis shake his snake hips. That doesn't trouble me very much. It does trouble me that all the Zeitgeist is in video games and Discord channels where they talk about video games. Culture is no longer a force for good. It's hidden away in forums and it's no longer a force for anything. The last cultural product to make a dent in anything was Tumblr and what a horrible dent that made! I think Tumblr is about 60% responsible for the identity politics that are tearing us apart.
But!
I believe the cultural tide is turning. We've passed peak wokeness and intersectionality causes more eye-rolling than head-nodding these days. They've had the most powerful story for a long time but it's coming to an end now and we need a new story to replace it. 'Take Back Control' and 'Stop the Boats' were never great stories and the story tellers fluffed their lines anyway. The War on ULEZ Cameras and the War Against the War Against Christmas are fake. They only appeal to conspiracy nuts and conspiracy nuts never build anything.
The root cause of all our problems is that our political parties were designed for the problems of the 1970s. There's hardly anyone who loves the Democrats or the Republicans. The only reason they get votes is because the other guys are worse.
I don't know a single person who loves the Tories or Labour either. What we need is for one of the parties to collapse into obscurity and for the other party to acknowledge that they only stuck together to keep the other guys out. Parties are not meant to be forever and we desperately need new ones.
We need a new story to tell.
What a great comment Ragged. I don’t agree with some of it. (For one thing, I adore video games!) But I will definitely read it a couple of times more to get my thoughts in order. I certainly agree with your last paragraph though. Wholeheartedly. Great to have you here Ragged. Merry Christmas to you.
I think it's fine to adore video games. I adored them in my younger years. But I think it's unhealthy when they become all consuming as they are for too many people.
Video games have taken over as the primary cultural product but where books and music and movies used to have the cultural power to make a difference in the world, video games are a private affair that don't make much difference to anything. Young people no longer have the cultural references to understand the world.
I think political parties were developed as a response to the enlargement of the franchise in Britain - to divide and conquer: to give people the illusion that they could be represented in a democratic legislature by herding them into two groups who in their manufactured 'opposition' to each other, would forever maintain a status quo.
Yes. I’m not sure that was the intention. But it certainly seems to be the result. Should we be embracing PR? Or would that just lead to a permanent Social Democratic government as some suggest?
Yes, I think it would at a national level. I think that political parties should actually be banned altogether and that anyone standing for any election should be independent and should only be allowed one term in office. Both of those requirements would minimise the current problem of cronyism and patronage. At the level of Westminster, the huge power of the PM, who can make or break the political careers of his MP's is akin to a despotic monarch of old.
But be careful what you wish for. On paper the American system is carefully designed to prevent the 'despotic power' of a PM or a King, but in practice it works out exactly backwards. Probably dozens of volumes have been written about this.
Social democracy would be just fine with me. It's better than the two options we have currently.
But I think PR would introduce a little flexibility into the system and allow new parties to pop up and displace the mainstream parties as the issues change. As it is now, the Tories have to perform contortions as they pretend that the centrists and the right of the party care about the same thing. PR would allow the Tories to be tory and let another party tack to the right and PR would prevent them from tacking too far.
I'd rather see a single transferable vote though that allows us to register our interest in a third party like the Greens or Reform without wasting our vote entirely. PR is too much of a leap from our traditions. I think the tradition of one MP per constituency is worth keeping.
Yeah, on balance STV (or 'ranked ballot') is better since it sidelines parties, whereas normal PR is actually centered on parties. But PR does permit the rise of new parties that have a diffuse base of support
Would it? Several European countries are moving right, and PR seems not to have slowed that down, or did it?
I strongly disagree, Bettina. The Labour Party was formed out of a sincere desire to address the needs of the growing working class at the start of the twentieth century.
There have always been *two parties* who care primarily about *two things*. For a while, the *two things* were crown vs parliament; then it was landed aristocracy vs industrialists; for a while it was established church vs nonconformists. Every now and again the political issues change and the parties have to change with them or they get wiped out as happened to the Liberals in the early twentieth century.
The two main issues since the expansion of the suffrage in 1918 have been the concerns of the capitalist owners vs the concerns of the workers. The working class is practically gone now though and the Labour party gets much of its support from the educated middle class. But we still have the same two parties. We are overdue a realignment.
I’ve heard this before Ragged and it feels right to me. We are perhaps moving away from a part of history where the ‘two things’ were different economic models and into an era when they are instead two different views of culture. Open or closed. With each side characterising themselves as the ‘open’ ones of course! Not sure it’s 100% correct, but it’s certainly a useful way of looking at the last few years.
I don't think that's really it. The working class in Britain or the U. S. is, respectively, a short-lived thing of maybe fifty or a hundred years. There is clearly no working class to speak of and there has not been one for two generations. It was all congealed into one. There is one mass of people instead of two social classes. Only one model to follow. So I disagree that there are two parties at all, and furthermore there are not "the same two parties" because that is over, finished. No classic two-sided anything!
Hi Jacob. Thanks for your comment. There definitely is a ‘working class’ in Britain. Although the term means something slightly different to what it does in the States, where I’m guessing you might be from. Walk around where I live in Camden London. Or take a trip to Newcastle, or even just to Essex. You’ll meet the working class. Looking forward to checking out your newsletter.
Well, the US is cutting-edge in terms of capitalism so we may interpret my comment to mean that the trend is towards elimination of this "working class" as a discernible counter-party, with some establishment or elite class on the other end of it. There is a "working class" in the USA. I suppose it depends on how we define one. As an active political force, no, I do not see one. There are plenty of "working class" in the USA but mostly they are not very smart and they lurk around doing crimes or something. Not that I am biased at all...
one says "I am the open one" and the other says also that: "I am the open one" but they are both the same people. No one is going to admit to having a "closed culture," because it sounds wrong in some way. So this is really a minor point, a bit of posturing. Tomorrow maybe they will say something else about how wonderful and peachy their own dang selves are. It's all ego.
Well summarized. Seems there's always the Left and the Right -- what they actually stand for can change. As we know the 'Left' tho still 'officially' the party of working people, in practice is now the party of the globalist elite -- the new aristocracy.
The American FF spilled quite a bit of ink worrying about parties -- they understood that political parties could be the death of their experiment in democracy. Yet they also understood that parties are inevitable in the same way that criminal gangs are inevitable -- people will combine forces to maximize their power. You can't stop parties any more than you can stop people farting, but you can minimize the harm that they do. Firstly, FPP voting must be replaced.
I think we could get away with a ban on parties in a reformed House of Lords where we elect people based on the skills and experience they have. But, I agree, I don't think we can get rid of parties in the Commons. They are with us forever.
Still it's interesting. Tho I have trouble believing it can really work, here in Canada, in the north, their legislature bans parties and so far so good. Marvelous if it sticks.
> The root cause of all our problems
I suspect there are many roots but one could spend an enjoyable evening listening to thoughtful people advance their own favorite. Mine is PC. Long story short, we got so used to telling polite lies that reality sorta floated away. If there is a single cultural artifact that exemplifies this I'd say it's Lennon's 'Imagine'. Thing is tho that we forgot that it was just imagination and we started acting as tho things we wish were true were made true by our pretending that they were true. No, blame Jiminy! We wished upon a star ... but our dreams didn't come true -- the races are not equal and there are things men can do better than women and Western Civilization is better than that of New Guinea head hunters. Sorry.
The dualling of the A66 is an object lesson. In 2002:
"The consultants stated in the Final Report that the expected cost of full dualling of the A66 from Penrith to Scotch Corner was £66 million, however, by the time of the announcement of full dualling on 22 August 2002, made by the Minister for Roads, the cost had increased to £141 million. We have no explanation or information about this more than doubling in cost within nine months nor have we seen the Cost Benefit Analysis calculations upon which this new cost has been based. All the comparisons between dualling and other alternative low cost options were carried out on the basis of a cost of £66 million."
We are talking about 20 miles of dualling. It was done in the 2000s, but Blair cut the funding before the last few (but awkward) bits were done.
Today those last bits are in doubt, because the budget had gone up by 50% from £1 billion to £1.5 billion. That is 22 times more than the budget for the whole job 20 years ago. More time and money has so far been spent on digging holes, doing surveys, exploring the need for CPOs, worrying about nitrate neutrality, great crested newts, bats and biodiversity than was spent on doing the rest of it back in the 2000s, and not a square inch of tarmac has been laid.
We invent reasons why we can't do anything. Parliament has handed over sovereignty to the quangos, unelected supranational bodies, the House of Lords, the courts and the woke corporations. Stonewall has more influence on our daily lives. Ridiculous legislation starting with the Human Rights Act 1998 and including the Companies Act 2006, Climate Change Act 2008 and the Equality Act 2010 has committed governments to do things that are impractical at best. Government can be challenged in the courts on almost anything because it might impede our progress to net zero, for example.
The stifling bureaucracy of health and safety, net zero, human rights, biodiversity and so on mean that you need hundreds of pages of anodyne risk assessments, ecology reports, archaeological surveys and compliance checks before anything can be started. You can't build a house, a train line or a road within any sort of a sensible time scale.
The utter uselessness of the Public Sector but they are good at two things: paying themselves stunning salaries just for turning up a few days a week and then retiring early having achieved sod all to retire on a fat pension, just like every socialist banana republic before them.
> The utter uselessness of the Public Sector
But we should not forget that both Britain and America rose to their greatest success based on their competent public sectors. Righties like to say that the solution to bloat and incompetence in the PS is to privatize everything, but IMHO the solution is to impose discipline.
Our Public Sectors used to be small and still run on the ethos of prudence, that ended long, long ago. 'Impose discipline'??? But who will impose that discipline when they ALL have their snouts in the trough? Some local council chiefs in the UK are on £500,000pa. They are out of control.
Not saying it will be easy. Perhaps collapse is inevitable still that would/will be very messy and I'd try to avoid it if possible.
I've also come to that conclusion, we unfortunately need an economic meltdown for change to happen, probably is inevitable.
That’s the one thing I think they are capable of delivering Mrs Bucket.
Proud to say I don't know what a WAP is or why you would shake it and am disinclined to find out.
Good decision Jacqueline!
Just found out by reading the next comment - ewww
Ha ha. Sorry Bettina. I feel partially responsible, for bringing it up in the first place.
Which next comment? I'm curious.
That may have been mine, Peter. Sorry.
https://lowstatus.substack.com/p/over-the-moon/comment/45863496
We know what would happen if we achieved anything like that now. You just have to look at the Rosetta mission in 2014. We landed an exploratory spacecraft on a COMET !!! And it was a European mission as well, not NASA.
And the media coverage was about sexism.
Because the feminists went ape about some nerdy scientist at the press conference who barely spoke but who wore a goofy cartoon shirt with fantasy fiction half dressed women on it. Sexism. From feminists. All you heard about for days. Wall to wall culture wars. Women’s rights in the sciences.
What happened to not shaming people for their right to wear whatever they want .... I couldn’t believe it at the time and can’t forget it.
Which is one of the reasons why I find the Trans/Terf war absolutely hilarious.
The whichever wave it is now feminists getting their arses handed to them by the Trans militants, who are using the exact same tactics the feminists mobilised themselves. And the outrage about it and the calls on men to stand with them! They deserve it. Karmas a bitch. There are lots of reasons for the fall.
Amazing how the madness took hold and spread and just how quickly too. It’s the human condition I suppose.
I remember Dr Matt Taylor’s shirt! Actually just ordered one for Christmas.
Immense piece once again LSO. I enjoyed the Shelley Ozymandias reference. Committed to memory as a child in the days when learning and reciting poetry was seen as a thing of value.
Thank you Maria. Yes. A beautiful poem. They still learn them at school though definitely not in the same way. I put my daughter onto Keith Douglas when she was a little younger. She was impressed.
There's another subject worthy of an entire bottle of scotch. NO! I think you got it wrong. 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Ozzy built vast monuments to his own vanity. Contrast, dunno, say the plaque on the Golden Gate Bridge honoring the engineer who designed it (Ellis). The GGB is a great work, no doubt but it isn't Ozymandian. We do not despair looking at it, we rejoice. It isn't a monument to vanity, but a benefit to the people. And Ellis didn't even make the plaque it was added decades later. Same with Apollo -- we hardly remember the names of the engineers; the work was great, but 'Ozzymandian' is not quite right.
Fair points Ray. But some of the motivation behind Apollo was vanity. The Americans couldn’t bear to be upstaged by the Soviets. So yes. The US did ask the Russians to look upon their works and despair. The whole point was to show the world what America could achieve. At least that’s the angle I was going for when I included the Ozymandias reference.
Hmmm ... I think I can't do better than a draw when it comes to Apollo -- yeah, it was a vanity project -- Look on *our* rockets, ye commies, and despair.
Actually I fold. Yes, Apollo was Ozymandian. Mostly. Still the real accomplishments remain -- much was learned and there was some thought at least to 'all mankind' (which is sexist ;-)
Yes, your sentiments are justified. We humans have turned to navel gazing - with a very few notable exceptions, the satellites we launch now are turned towards the Earth.
My astronomy lecturer in the 1960s placed a bet of £1 in the early part of the decade that the US would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I believe he collected at 10000 to 1! He didn't say what he spent it on.
Uplifting, then sobering, if not saddening. And then, at the very last, the faintest hint of hope. Once more, well written LSO. 👏
In small coincidence I recently found myself listening, with hairs bristling on the back of my neck, to JFK’s moonshot speech, and I wondered: where have all the luminaries gone? Where are those men and women of courage, of strength, and conviction now? As I cast my gaze at the current political landscape, it appears to me to be as barren, and as empty as the grey, featureless tundra of the lunar landscape.
Yet there is still hope. Fragile, and so delicate that we fear to even whisper its name lest it flutters, splutters and fades from view. But I witnessed it today in a small, and simple act of kindness, as I craned my neck downwards, furrowing, focusing on your article on my iPhone. This simple act - that required no permission, special attributes or ability and is in easy reach of each and every one of us - was played out in a small town, in a corner of a candlelit cafe, full of small people with joy on their faces as the rain sheeted, the wind raged and the sky crept catlike, silent and as black as coal.
As I continued reading I wondered: perhaps we should all look for greatness not in exalted elites, but within? Perhaps we should, each of us, find the courage, strength, and conviction in the simple acts we perform on the stages of our own small lives?
Merry Christmas LSO, and peace and goodwill to all.
A lovely comment BitKoda. Thanks for that. Yes. There is greatness to be found in small acts of kindness. I firmly believe that. Happy Christmas to you. God bless us, everyone.
Geez, that was poetry.
You would expect optimism from young people most of all, but they are all depressed, anxious and fearful about the future. There is a feedback loop for all this with the doom cult of the msm and indoctrination in the education system. The only way to break the cycle is for parents to get rid of their TVs, refuse to give their children smart phones (get an old Nokia for the 'I've missed the bus mum' moments) and home school/find alternative education.
Some are Bettina. But many I know, and I know plenty teenagers, are optimistic, rebellious and bullet proof. You know, like teenagers have always been. So I’m a bit more positive about the next generation than you maybe. The phones thing is tricky. This IS their world and there are some (please don’t ask me to list them!) positives. Having said that, the Jonathan Haidt stuff on smartphones sometimes makes me want to turn the clock back for all of us. Merry Christmas Bettina.
I know, you're right! The young people I know - twenty somethings mostly - have their heads screwed on and make me optimistic and cheerful. As you say, teens have always been a bit emo.
Merry Christmas 🥂
There's cause for optimism. The young people I know are almost universally unwoke and conservative. They roll their eyes at the bullshit. They are rootless because they have no education -- they don't understand anything and they have no clue what to do or where to go. But they do not love Big Brother.
Yes Ray. A lot of wokeness has surely come from young people looking for meaning in their lives. And since our culture refuses to give them a positive story to follow, they have made up one of their own. One where they are the goodies and literally anyone who isn’t them is a baddie. But hopefully the tide is turning with this new generation. Punk will save us yet.
Yeah it's another one of those things were one should be careful what one wishes for. When they killed Christianity it was supposed to be replaced with pure rationalism. Instead we got wokeness. Ray's Law of the Conservation of Irrationality in action. Can it be repaired? They own the institutions. Surely Harvard and the other Ivies are beyond salvaging?
Let’s hope not. I’m not sure I’m prepared to surrender our institutions of excellence quite yet.
I know, you're right. My twenty something childrens' friends are usually pleasantly surprised that an old person like me calls out the bullshit - they question a lot, but know shockingly little history. They don't seem to have a perspective on things - particularly the climate cult. Informing them that the Vikings grew wheat in the now glacier covered Greenland, whenever the boiling planet rubbish gets discussed, is a good one to lob in.
The history thing is so depressing. I try not to be a conspiracist, but it is almost as if there has been a concerted effort to keep them ignorant of their past.
I'm not sure what to make of young people's ignorance of history. I think kids study more history in school than I ever did but they don't seem to know any of what they studied. History was not compulsory back in my day and I dropped it as fast as I could but I've always loved reading about it. I feel offended and embarrassed when there is some historical fact that I didn't know.
Yes! Definitely!
This is brilliant stuff, as ever I will share widely. Thanks for your enlightening stuff in 2023, have a great Christmas break if you can and get that payment system set up in 2024 Sir.
Thank you Matthew. Merry Christmas to you and yours. ATB.
Exceptional! So very true! I read the lyrics of Lizzie's WAP, God help the western world, and America. And a very happy Christmas to you and your brilliant readers!
Fixed!
Thank you Mrs Bucket. I do try to proofread. But that slipped through. Many thanks. I will fix now. All the best and Merry Christmas.
Please try to remember that what passes for news, political leadership reporting etc. are only chosen snippets of the real world and that there are great minds everywhere: getting on with life and either making progress or learning from mistakes.
> the boneshaking lift off of the Apollo 11 rocket
Fun facts:
- Noise about 203 dB -- equivalent to about 10,000 jet engines.
- Within 1/4 mile would kill you.
-3 1/4 miles away, shook down the ceiling of an observation room.
- Water deluge system not so much to quench the exhaust, but to prevent the noise from actually shaking the rocket to destruction.
- Stories that the noise was so loud that it started fires in the grass around the pad.
BTW, pedantic detail:
> this immense steel monster
Very little steel, almost entirely constructed of aluminum alloys.
Amazing facts. Thanks Ray. I tried to get the steel bit right. I did check and I felt I was ok saying it. Maybe I looked at the wrong source. Happy to be corrected. Fascinating that Musk is using a lot of steel in his rockets then.
Yes, isn't it! Stainless steel bodies. Elon has an entirely different mentality from NASA. And it's not even 'fancy' stainless steel, just the plain old common stuff. He want's his rockets to be like washing machines. The tech is beyond cutting edge, yet the construction is 'common' for lack of a better word.
There are two fundamental reasons for this: one is cultural decline - the inevitable decay of mature democracies. The second is dysgenics: basically, dumb people have massively outbred smart ones. Check out the 2006 movie ‘Idiocracy’, which now looks more like a premonition than a satire.
I agree but why is it that the "remaining" smart ones are the ones coming up with a lot of this nonsense?
Simple, we are at war with Communist China, they are pulling more strings behind the scenes than people realise. WW3 has been running now for 30/40 years. China has bought governments, politicians, NGOs, media groups etc etc. They use all forms of psyops through 3rd party organisations to change opinions and influence people; the biggest psyop that 90% of people have fallen for is 'Climate Change' it's 99% nonsense and if YOU believe it, you've been had. Look up the book 'Hidden Hand', your hair will stand on end.
If your analysis is that sexual reproduction plays a part and that somehow Darwinian selection has taken place at a hyper-lightning-fast speed then that doesn’t even reach the level of stolen mid-wittery but sticks very firmly at half-wit level.
Saying that (which is harsh) if we are both reading this blog then we probably agree on an awful lot. So what does that say about me.....
But this is entirely about corporate lobbying, corporate greed and corporate socialism and globalism. It’s about the Oligarchy that the boomer generation in the West signed up to, enabled, built and benefited from, and they are mainly the only ones still benefitting.
When you steal and degrade peoples culture and commoditise them and devalue all social traditions in the name of profit, then those who have spent their lives benefitting from corporate greed and globalism aren’t in a position to criticises the masses for being the victims of it. Reserve your animus more for the creators of this corrupt quasi-fascist oligarchy rather than for the pawns and victims of it.
Breeding ...... I know it’s Xmas but Jesus Christ ...
Global population has increased from 2.6bn to 8.2bn in only the last 70 years. That's given plenty of scope for dysgenic effect. The Bell Curve book by Charles Murray records it too. Like I said, the other major driver is cultural decline, as anticipated by Aristotle, who said that (to paraphrase) democracies fail when the needy and greedy vote privileges for themselves.
And can we please keep it civilised, Aqua? Calling me a half-wit does not constitute considered debate.
Yes Richard. Not sure I 100% agree but it could certainly be a factor. But yes please Aqua. All are welcome to disagree civilly here. As you put it, we probably all agree on an awful lot. So let’s stick together. Not sure I want to turn this comment section into a mini Twitter! Happy Christmas to you both.
Thanks boss. This site is yet small, but the quality of the comments is second to none. Aqua, please restrain yourself.
So your opinion then is that intelligence has nothing to do with genetics? This is Received Doctrine among the woke, but you don't seem woke.
No not at all, it absolutely does.
But unlike the original poster who is presumably self identifying as intelligent, I know for a fact that Darwinian selection does not take place across billions of people, in just 50 years across all continents. That was the point I was making and to propose that calls into question intelligence and highlights a rather nasty bias I think.
Of course intelligence is related to genetics, as are emotions and physicality and all the rest of it, of course, but so is lifestyle and education and diet and culture and productivity factors and adversity faced as a child and teen and as an adult and also place and time and how it is measured and what kind of performance you value and measure for, but genetic evolution and Darwinian selection especially, does not account for the last 50 years.
That's just a stupid thing for someone to say. And came across as a bit cheap and nasty.
And quoting idiocracy is a bit lazy and cliche too. Bearing in mind that the writers and directors are definitely on the woke side themselves.
I'm just a bit sick of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives that have royally screwed everything up for the last 50 years at the same time as feathering their own nests, sneering at people they think are beneath them.
> I know for a fact that Darwinian selection does not take place across billions of people, in just 50 years across all continents.
I don't recall the OP as making such sweeping claims. He pointed out that an economic/social system in which the poor and unintelligent reproduce faster than the well-off and intelligent, is going to impact the gene pool. You disagree?
> ... but genetic evolution and Darwinian selection especially, does not account for the last 50 years.
Where did you get the number '50' from? In any case Darwinism is actually what is being specifically avoided -- what we have is the exact opposite of Darwin -- survival of the fittest. What we have is preferential survival of the dumbest via various social programs. How quickly could this have an effect? Very quickly. To make an illustration, supposing we killed every person at the age of 12 who was under five feet in height. I put it to you that the average height of people would increase very rapidly.
> I'm just a bit sick of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives that have royally screwed everything up for the last 50 years
Me too. Mind, they've joined forces with the woke who now control our institutions as the former control all the money -- ordinary, working, sane people are thus 'surrounded'. In any case, the question is one of the effects of our social choices on genetics, not whether or not one likes neo-liberals (who, BTW, are not conservatives). Oh, and the current clerisy may think that others are beneath them, but that feeling has no basis in any kind of real superiority -- they are largely morons.
Thank you, Ray, for your eloquent defence of my original post.
My pleasure. Glad to have Aqua here, but we should hold each other to some standards.
As to the issue, it's as deep a problem as we face. On the one hand you have Hitler's cheerful view that the strong not only can and should, but *must* eternally be at war with the weak so that the race is being eternally perfected. On the other pole you have the Welfare Queen who's 9 children all have different fathers, none of whom contribute to their kid's support and all of whom (dads and kids) -- like their mother -- have IQs in the 70s and all of whom will end up on welfare and having 9 kids ... and so on. This problem has been with us since the first efforts at charity.
..."that ‘before the decade is out’, " ... actually this sounds rather more like FDR (Roosevelt). Where does the grandiose speech come from ???
JFK. Rice University. Speech of September 12, 1962. It’s referenced and linked in the article.
I am asking: where does the feeling of grandiosity come from? It sounds more like I would expect to hear from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I am talking about styles of speaking --- and I am asking where this particular style (which reminds me of FDR) comes from in the first place? Why do persons speak like that? IT doesn't matter whether it is FDR or JFK.
Very true, utterly depressing.
I’ll have a read. I’m a big fan of the Daily Sceptic. And the podcast especially.
Indeed. As H L Mencken said:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
And:
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."