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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Public standards mean nothing if the public won’t own them
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Public standards mean nothing if the public won’t own them
Why is Mike Pence not now the President of the United States? The immediate answer is, of course, that there weren’t 67 members of the Senate willing to vote to convict him of the charges brought by the House. But to get to the deeper answers we have to ask: why not?
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In short, using the office of the President of the United States to browbeat foreign leaders to help you get re-elected is expected behaviour.
The Democrats fought the wrong battle.
We only have to look back to December to see the same phenomenon here.
Trump is a vile, terrible POTUS who should be out - but not because of anything he's done or not done with Biden's son.
Seats that for decades had only ever voted red suddenly went blue because the reds weren't doing what the voters wanted.
You're just irritable because it wasn't your standard the voters wanted.
Trump wins.
Here in Essex we have a fine example of the error in doing so in the 991 Battle of Maldon, which could easily have been a disaster for the Vikings, but which resulted in the first payment of Danegeld.
The cynic in me thought it was an attempt to weaken Biden
It was pure partisan malarkey and they got called out
Although personally I'd cite Horatio defending the Janiculum bridge as the ultimate example of a great place to make a stand, and Flaminius at Trasimene as the example of where one ought not go.
Good morning, everyone.
When you put it like that - imagine how shite the other leaders must have been for the voters to give Boris an 80 seat majority.
You keep trotting out these lines like one day they are going to have a different effect. Truth is, there's a vast army of adulterers out there. They chose not to cast the first stone. Boris's suspension of Parliament was initially upheld by the Queen's Bench. It only became "illegal" when a politically-motivated Supreme Court "did their bit" to try and nail Brexit Boris.
You fall into the exact trap as the Democrats just did. Thinking the voters give a shiny shit about the things you are getting puce in the face about on their behalf.
Johnson was unfit for office (and still is). He won because Corbyn had all his faults and none of his talent.
I was thinking last night in fact that the Trump administration is a pretty good indication of what a Corbyn government would have looked like - deeply corrupt, hopelessly incompetent, with a complete disregard for the rules and naked populism based on huge borrowing, coupled with a foreign policy based on personal like and dislike and an extraordinary cultish devotion from the true believers of somebody unfit to run a bath.
Again, Johnson is hardly better but at least he will be swiftly removed if he looks like a liability.
The exception is sex that the public does not find normal as Derek Mackay found out to his cost this week. What he did does not appear to be criminal in any sense but it was morally wrong in a way that there is still a consensus about. In contrast no one cares that Boris left his wife for Carrie or that they are living together unmarried in No 10. Of course this is nothing new, Lloyd George's philandering never seems to have done him any harm either.
What I regret is the lack of a consensus on other standards of behaviour. Failed policies and wasted public money used to to involve an element of contrition marked by a resignation, even if it was only temporary. The lack of that creates cynicism and disengagement amongst the public but is very much driven by the extreme partisanship that seems the norm these days.
As others have said, Leavers have descended into such a tribe, ignoring Boris Johnson’s manifest unsuitability because they considered Brexit to be more important. One or two shed a few crocodile tears but if they actually cared about governance standards they wouldn’t have voted for him.
Interestingly, enough Remainers have not yet made that descent, refusing to give Jeremy Corbyn support to block Brexit. Those who submitted to the judgment of Solomon have found themselves ignored and derided since. Virtue has not been rewarded.
The lesson they will learn is that tribalism pays. The country will suffer more accordingly.
Interesting and messy Democratic debate last night in NH, with lots of open attacks on each other. One poll now shows Buttigeg 1 point ahead (though it's Suffolk, which has been consistently showing him stronger than other polls), another shows him several points behind (though that's Emersen, of which the reverse is true). He seems to have the momentum, which makes his 3.2 price on Betfair for the primary look tempting. DYOR though!
They were lucky that the Republicans didn't turn it into a trial of Joe and Hunter Biden in the Senate, although the early primaries aren't looking too good for JB now anyway.
(Oh, and some sub-editing required on that first paragraph, it definitely reads as though Pence was impeached).
Disraeli’s immortal reply was, ‘Silence fool! If that news is known, he will sweep the country.’
https://twitter.com/goodwinmj/status/1225873750647803910?s=21
The voters have decided that Boris Johnson was manifestly suitable to give an 80 seat majority. You are the one out of line.
It ends with people not saving enough into their pensions and becoming a burden on the State.
To say the people are right or wrong objectively is of course to set something above democracy as a decision making standard. In Iran it is theocrats. In China it is a tiny elite controlling the system. PBers are singularly and rightly reluctant to spell out what, in the USA or UK, that higher power might be. I can't speak for the USA but in the UK to elect Boris and not elect Jezza as our PM seems to many people an entirely rational choice when looking not at non-existing ideal outcomes but at the real choice.
And isn't that sort of thing one of the causes of difficulty retaining experienced doctors?
Perhaps Mr Screaming can help persuade him.
You have your own bile.
The big question is where the Biden vote will go
Virtue, you say, has not been rewarded. Democracy rewards strategy, campaigns, tactics but above all votes. There isn't a virtue about votes to be rewarded. Or at best you can, unless there is a higher power who knows more, only discern what Virtue is by looking at the result.
It may be a flaw in democracy, but at least I can see whose wisdom of which crowd can address it.
That’s most likely enough to stop an old age spent eating catfood in the dark. The rest is personal responsibility. And at the same time announce the old age pension is hereby abolished for everyone born after 2020.
If they’re gonna (correctly) borrow at negative real rates to plug the infrastructure deficit, they really need to attack the future inversion of the population pyramid and old age costs while they’re at it. Upon successful implementation, you could roll it up the age groups as desired.
https://twitter.com/murdo_fraser/status/1226065294327734272?s=21
Is asking the wrong question for a politician. The impression of Effective government is what is winning hence Boris > May, Corbyn or Trump over Dem losers.
Effectiveness covers focussing on what most voters care about a eg jobs, security over Twitter slights or intersectional language.
Who will be the first person on the soft left to get it ?
Tim Farron has - but he’s yesterday’s man.
You might argue that Jeremy Corbyn was even more unsuitable than Boris Johnson (I’d regard it as being a dead heat). But I don’t think you can argue that happened.
As for morality, Leavers will just have to decide for themselves whether handing untrammelled power to someone who has already tried to suspend democracy once was wise. The rest of us have to live with their tribal choice.
And the attempt to link being a predator with trans issues is disgusting.
Transphobes are utterly, utterly obsessed. There is no issue that cannot be fixed by discriminating against trans people in their mind. The only thing holding back a tidal wave of support for Independence is support for GRA reform.
Gina Miller as an asset to Boris Johnson?
On Topic - the problem is that the Democrats spent the last 4 years shoving our old friend the Overton Window around.
The narrative they created was this : after tons of investigations, trials or aides etc they achieved nothing in their quest to remove Trump from office. So they resorted to impeachment, but only when the traditional get-your-children-strangely-high-paid-jobs bandwagon was threatened.
A classic example of the stupidity was this - using the Emoluments Clause to try and prosecute him on the basis that every time someone from a foreign government stays in a Trump hotel, it is a bribe. That failed. So now there is little to do, when Trump orders the whole travelling circus of the Executive Branch to stay at his hotels at huge rates - which is manifestly corrupt.
Stamp duty has suffocated the property market in London. And it's stopped many people from downsizing/upsizing elsewhere. North sea oil surcharges sunk that too.
I think current pension tax reliefs are something like a max of £40k per year and a lifetime limit of just over £1m.
That's sensible (and even a bit low, I'd keep the lifetime limit the same and up the annual relief to £50k) because you have some years in your career when you do very well and save enough, and other more parsimonious years. That applies in particular to the self-employed.
The Tories should not be attacking individual responsibility and saving.
Now that's what I call an "energized base" !!
The lobby is effective.
You're making a values judgement, which reeks of confirmation bias.
Your second job is to quantify "the median quality" of people "as people" (whatever that means) into some measure that a statistically survey can record.
You have done all this, and have "overwhelming evidence".
Let's see your evidence.
Apocalyptic oblivion would be absolutely final.
"WHAT!!?!! You prefer HITLER?! You're a NAZI!!!!"
Etc. Etc.
Which is odd in a country which worships its founders and its constitution.
Trump's mendacity is GW Bush's truthiness on steroids. Arguably Reagan too, delaying the hostages' release and the Iran-Contras scandal. Closer to home, take Corbyn's clinging on despite the no-confidence votes when an honourable man, his opponents calculated, would surely have resigned. Even Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering was motivated by the sincere belief Labour had rigged the system against them.
Trump was acquitted not because he deserved to be or the case was lacking but because a partisan Senate declined to hear the evidence.
But, I was in no doubt as to what Lady Hale's personal politics were.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51413562
He has an engaging woolliness of thinking. Which I quite like.
In this case, we are all expected to accept as proven fact:
- that the country thinks Johnson is a good prime minister
- that it wanted to get Brexit done
- that it doesn't care about undemocratic actions by the government
- that Corbyn was the worst political leader this country has ever seen
- that socialists will always lose
- that every individual item in the Labour manifesto was unpopular
- that every individual item in the Conservative manifesto was popular
and anyone who question any one of these things is a whining loser who is still in denial.
The logical fallacy of these claims is so obvious that it should hardly need spelling out, yet somehow it does, again and again.
It's time for Americans to stop paying taxes.
I can see the LibDems pulling the trigger this time.
In the same piece Ashworth is positioning himself for a top job under the new regime.
I'll be in interested to hear how much more simply she thinks the policy could have been explained.
I think that Corbyn's/Labour's unpopularity mattered much more than attitudes towards Johnson and the Conservatives.
Corbyn was an immense asset for Johnson.
The fact that most high achievers in most fields are Remainers?
The fact that almost all known "deplorables" are supporters of Leave?
MOBSTER.
Yet we've just seen an exchange (one of many like it) in which Alastair Meeks was told to shut up because people who agree with him on a particular issue lost, and that proves him wrong. It's that absurdity that deserves to be ridiculed.
But worse than that was the stupidity. The odds on a Lib Dem straight General Election triumph were an order of magnitude longer than getting a second referendum (and Remain winning it). But the revocation policy put off plenty of people whilst at the same time being very unlikely to ever happen yet being front and centre of the Lib Dem platform on the EU.
Not unlike 'Little Englander' and 'back of the queue' it was an entirely needless own goal at a time when the Lib Dems were enjoying some defections and had some momentum going.
Edited extra bit: ahem, the problem was not* clarity etc etc.
But I do reject the "woolly thinking" charge obvs. I like to meander and roam but there is a cold clean streak of ruthless logic running throughout.
Everyone (and I mean everyone) who mouths an opinion about Brexit out loud at my place of work is a Remainer, and talk to me with the very clear presumption that I too am a Remainer. What they say is often unpleasant and paints them in a poor light.
I've learnt to keep my mouth shut, and change the subject.
See the recent USA polling about political outcomes v meteorite destruction for another example.
In a peace loving democracy most are never ever going to say they prefer a non democratic outcome, like the threat of violence, to the enacting of a democratic mandate.