Author Archives: Tim Newman

Universal Basic Idiocy

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I’m about half an hour into Joe Rogan’s podcast with Andrew Yang, an American presidential hopeful who’s main platform is a universal basic income (UBI). I find discussions of a UBI to be useful and sometimes fun in philosophical terms, but as a policy idea it suffers from fatal flaws which ought to be obvious but for some apparently aren’t. The ZMan points out one, which concerns price inflation:

Imagine the government decides to help BMW sell more cars, so they offer every citizen $5000 if they spend it on a BMW, rather than some other car. BMW is now facing a wave of people coming into American dealerships toting a $5,000 check payable to BMW. The logical thing for BMW to do is raise the price of their low end models by $5000. That way, they don’t increase production costs, but they increase the profit per car. In effect, the floor for entry level buyers was just raised by $5000 by the government.

There’s a pretty good real world example of this. The government decided to do something to help working class people get into college. Since many need remedial help, before taking on college work, the scheme was to offer a subsidy to be used for community colleges. The students would use the money to prep for college then head off to a four year university, presumably using loans and aid at that level. The result, however, was the community colleges just raised their tuition by about 65% of the subsidy.

But I don’t think even economic arguments do the most damage to the idea of a universal basic income. UBI comes from the libertarian fringe of politics and they have a habit of falling into the same trap they frequently accuse communists of: they ignore human nature. The reason welfare programs came into existence a few generations ago is people decided it was immoral for someone to be left to starve or die through illness or bad luck. The reason there are giant, all-encompassing welfare states today is people now think it immoral for anyone to suffer the consequences of their bone-headed actions. Proponents of a UBI think we’re still in some bygone era, rather than an age where couples with no job pump out seven children each and suffer no social opprobrium, even as they moan their taxpayer-funded house is too small.

The idea behind a UBI is it would partially replace other forms of welfare, but the reality is this money would disappear from the hands of the feckless quicker than #MeToo campaigners at the mention of Monica Lewinsky. They’d then be worse off than before and the same people who declared their situation intolerable and campaigned for the original welfare programs would pick right up where they left off. The idea that the society which constructed today’s welfare state would ignore the plight of some idiot who blew his UBI on crack and step over him while he starved in the gutter is ludicrous; the original payments would be restored, and the UBI a handy bonus for professional grifters who fancy a new set of alloys for their E36 M3s.

The fact this doesn’t get acknowledged by proponents of the UBI makes me wonder if they know much about the societies they claim to inhabit. The best that can be said is this makes them indistinguishable from most other politicians.

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Dark Continent

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Last summer, Cape Town suffered severe water shortages. While the global media ran interference blaming global warming, an article in Nature magazine – hardly a hotbed of climate change denialism – explained why:

Since the 1980s, South Africa’s major conurbations have used systems models to guide their water management. These models, run by the national government, are considered world-class. They map links between river basins, reservoirs and transmission channels and use historical hydrological data to predict probable stream flows. Those are then matched to projections of demand to assess how much storage is needed. The models support real-time operations of the water network as well as planning for development. Crucially, they allow planners to assess risks of supply failures to different categories of users and evaluate the effectiveness of responses such as restrictions.

For two decades, policymakers heeded the models. They guided managers, for example, on when and where to tap sources and build reservoirs to enable the Western Cape Water Supply System (WCWSS) to meet rising demand from urban and industrial growth.

But dam building stalled in the 2000s, when local environmentalists campaigned to switch the focus to water conservation and management of demand. Such opposition delayed the completion of the Berg River Dam by six years. Eventually finished in 2009, the dam helped to keep the taps running in Cape Town this summer.

South Africa is repeating what’s happened across much of the English-speaking world and mainland Europe: contemporary politicians inherit a perfectly adequate system which has worked for decades and, through the application of ignorance, fanaticism, and arrogance in equal measures, proceed to f*ck it up completely. Unfortunately for South Africa, they seem to be taking things to the next level:

Blackouts in South Africa intensified to a maximum level on Saturday after the state power utility said it lost additional generation, including electricity imports from Mozambique.

The power cuts, first implemented over the weekend to replenish water and diesel designed for surplus generation, were raised to so-called Stage 4, removing 4,000 megawatts from the grid, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. said in a statement on Saturday. It marked a third consecutive day of outages rotated throughout Africa’s most industrialized nation.

Eskom’s operational and financial woes stem from years of mismanagement and massive cost overruns on two new coal-fired power stations that should have been completed in 2015. The utility is seen as one of the biggest risks to the country’s economy.

It is tempting to blame this on an African government that’s reverting to type; they can certainly ask their brothers up in Nigeria for advice on living in a place with unreliable, intermittent electricity.

However, if this has been brought about by affirmative action policies, general incompetence of the political class, and religious-like commitment to environmental dogma foisted on them by supranational bodies and Geneva-based NGOs, how is this different to what’s going on in the developed world? The governments of France, Germany, the UK, and Australia have all decided to throw their electricity generating capacity into serious jeopardy by embracing windmills and closing nuclear plants, all for the purpose of impressing their peers at jamborees in resort towns. How long before supposedly developed countries are suffering brown-outs, or watching other parts of their infrastructure collapse? Italy can’t even keep its bridges from falling down, and I don’t think there’s a government anywhere which is capable of building anything without years of delays and quadrupling of costs. HS2, anyone? And it’s not as if South Africa is the only country in the world where people are appointed to senior positions based on skin-colour or other characteristics unrelated to experience, skills, and competence. Western organisations not only do this, they openly brag about it on their websites and give each other trophies for their efforts.

It used to be said that South Africa was a third-world country with first-world infrastructure. If they can’t even manage to keep the lights on, I think it’s fair to say that label is now obsolete. But what’s more concerning is the number of first-world countries which seem determined to have third-world infrastructure.

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Failblazing

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During strategy lectures you’ll often hear the term “first mover advantage”, which refers to a company being the first one to enter a market and carving out a dominant position for itself. This does exist, although examples are more rare than you think. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Yahoo and AltaVista were the number one search engines before Google showed up with a better algorithm and consigned them both to the rubbish bin.

While there can be advantages of going first, there are also drawbacks. The reason almost every modern underground system is better than London’s is because London went first and built tunnels that were too small and stations that were too curved. They had no idea in the 1860s that this thing they were building would become the main method of shuttling millions of people around major cities; had they done so they may have planned it better. By the time Moscow (1930s), Paris (1900s), Tokyo (1920s), and New York (1900s) came to build theirs, valuable lessons had already been learned. Alas, it was too late for London whose underground is still hobbled by design decisions made with no experience to draw on. No doubt there are other examples of pioneers helpfully making mistakes their rivals won’t have to, and readers are welcome to share them in the comments given I’m too lazy to think of them right now.

Anyway, a tweet by Lord Ashcroft reminds me of the benefits those who come later can draw from those who went first:


It’s not inconceivable that a second EU member state will look to leave in the next ten years. One would hope that, unlike ours, their political classes are at least on board with it and actually want to leave but it is likely to be as divisive as Brexit has been for the UK. The lesson future leavers will draw from the Brexit experience is to prepare for a No Deal well in advance of invoking Article 50, as there will be no guarantee the EU will agree to anything which can be sold to the public. The EU has made it plain they want to make leaving as painful as possible for Britain pour encourager les autres. What in fact they’ve done is give any would-be leavers a good look at their strategy, and allow Brexit to become a training manual on what not to do. As a minimum, I expect the next country to leave will put in place robust rules regarding former ministers and non-government politicians meeting with EU negotiators outside the formal process. They may wish to include a set of gallows to accompany that.

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Online Poke Her

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I found this interesting:

[An] experiment with Tinder that claimed that that “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.”

A couple of years back I saw another analysis of one of the big dating sites which showed that most men considered something like 70% of the women to be attractive enough to date, whereas most women saw only 20% of the men the same way. The two studies suggest women who go on dating sites are unrealistically fussy, especially considering they’re on a dating site in the first place. Men, being men, appear to be more open to compromise on looks if it means getting laid and (possibly) having a relationship. None of this will be new to those of us who are over thirty and walk around with our eyes open.

The trouble is, I’m not sure women quite understand the dynamics of dating sites, which the statistics above confirm. I recently had occasion to watch a couple of young women swiping away on one of the dating apps, and they got all giddy over a dashingly handsome young Italian complete with a tailored suit and designer stubble. I expect they imagined the possibility of a romantic relationship, but what I saw was a chap who’s probably having a whale of a time ploughing through those 78% of women dumb enough to think he’s boyfriend material. Unfortunately, anyone who didn’t match this guy’s looks got immediately discarded. What’s even more unfortunate is one of the girls was about hot enough to attract a guy like that. I suspect this has always been a problem for pretty girls, but it’s likely to be accentuated in the era of dating apps: they’ll attract the attention of the best looking guys, who will find them average rather than special and have few qualms about ditching them in favour of the next one. While many women talk about their disappointment with dating apps, I’d imagine for good looking women it’s a rollercoaster of flattery followed by inexplicable rejection.

I’m not sure even those who run dating apps quite know what’s going on, or if they do they pretend they don’t. One of the biggest problems is men who sit there all day carpet bombing women with “hi how r u sexy?” messages or dick pics. Any woman will tell you that within weeks of joining a dating site in London or Paris, her inbox is full of vulgar messages written in atrocious English from manual labourers in Turkey, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. Tinder attempted to deal with this by limiting “swipe-rights” to 100 per day, or something. Bumble took it one step further and made it such that only women could initiate a conversation, but as the statistics above show, all that does is fill up the inboxes of the top 20% of men while the other 80% wait in vain for the slightest interest, unable to chance their arm even with the biggest hound on the whole platform. In other words, they’ve sold rejection to the already rejected. The simple solution is to restrict men to initiating two or three contacts per day, but the business model is to get men using it for hours at a time and pestering them with ads, so they’re not going to do that. But if they were serious about hooking people up, which they’re not, that’s what they’d do.

I also get the impression women like their inboxes full of unsuitable proposals because it gives them an excuse for not making an effort. Every woman I’ve spoken to about her experience on dating sites says “Oh, I don’t have time, I get so many messages I can’t be bothered to go through them all.” From what I’ve read on blogs which cover this stuff, the sort of women who go on dating sites have a habit of not responding to genuine proposals for days or weeks, and only then grudgingly agreeing to a date because their days are crammed full of work, weekend breaks, yoga sessions, or after work drinks with the girls. One of the most peculiar aspects of modern dating is middle aged, professional women citing as a priority their desire to find a lifetime partner, but refusing to make the slightest effort to find and accommodate one. If women joined dating sites and found one or two serious, well-written introductions dropping into their inbox each week, they might be forced to accept their reasons for not responding were shallow indeed. Better to hide behind the avalanche of dick picks and conclude they’re above all that. By contrast, even the most eligible, suitable men who fall outside the top 20% must spend considerable effort writing thoughtful introductions only to receive a response once in every fifty or hundred attempts (I’m not exaggerating here).

If we are to believe dating sites aren’t the best way of showcasing your suitability as a mate, let alone finding one, the problem is compounded by the fact that most people below a certain age don’t know any other way. A few weeks ago on the recommendation of William of Ockham I listened to a Spectator Radio podcast which discussed the impact dating apps are having, and they speculated that da yoof spend all their time building online personalities at the expense of those they display in real life. This not only makes them reluctant to meet people in the flesh, but also pretty useless when they do, i.e. they have no idea how to flirt and interact romantically in the offline world. I can’t claim to understand the younger generation but I do meet a few of them these days, and I occasionally wonder if they put as much effort into developing communication skills and an interesting personality as they do their Instagram feeds, they may not need dating apps at all. One of the more amusing aspects of this era is when you hear a couple say they met in real life and they make it sound like a freak occurrence. Unfortunately, you more often hear a girl say she met her last five boyfriends on Tinder, without any idea of what she ought to deduce from that statement.

Me, I’m kinda glad I was born in 1977.

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Beta O’Rourke

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I’ve got my fifth and final exam of the week today, so I’ll keep this short. In case anyone is interested they’ve gone well so far, mainly because I’m not dumb enough to fork out for an MBA then flunk the exams because I’m too lazy to study. My observations tell me that if I were 22 and my wealthy family were paying for it this might be the case, but alas it isn’t.

Anyway, here’s a video of presidential hopeful and darling of divorcee Democrats Beto O’Rourke:


He comes across as one of those corporate types you meet who’s waited ten years longer than his peers for his first chance at management, and when it finally arrives he takes his subordinates to the pub and gives them a rousing speech without realising he’s addressing seasoned, middle-aged professionals not teenagers.

In fact, he looks and sounds an awful lot like my ex-boss.

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Robinson Screwed So

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Yesterday while in the car I listened to James Delingpole’s podcast with Tommy Robinson. Unless Robinson is lying through his teeth, which I doubt, it appears he has been the subject of highly illegal treatment at the hands of a panicked ruling class acting in concert with the police, courts, and media. What’s worse, the government gets away with it because they can count on the support of the middle classes. Nobody’s going to stand up for a far-right, racist thug, right?

Hence when he was wrongfully imprisoned, rather than the darling lawyer of the internet pointing out the gross injustice, he or she used the situation to signal their own virtues while slandering Robinson’s supporters. When the truth came out and he was proven wrong, the Secret Barrister wrote four thousand words to the effect of “Well, who can blame me for assuming the worst about this kind of man?”  Some barrister. The media’s handling of the subject is even worse, littered with smears, falsehoods, and libelous accusations as they play their assigned role as propaganda organ for the ruling classes. Not without reason does Robinson believe the upcoming BBC Panorama programme accusing him of child abuse is a last-ditch effort by the authorities to make him impossible to support. The campaign led by BBC staff and British politicians to get him banned from social media platforms looks carefully timed to ensure he has no way of responding to these allegations.

Two things sprang to mind when listening to the podcast. The first is that not a single MP, newspaper, or public figure questioned the treatment of Tommy Robinson. Contrast this with the way Labour politicians, Guardian columnists, and other Establishment figures fall over themselves to prevent jihadists, child rapists, and knife-wielding thugs from having to face justice. Apparently Sky News can travel to Syria and give sympathetic interviews with ISIS brides aimed at swaying public opinion towards repatriating them, but are uninterested in the fact that the state conspired to throw a British man who has broken no laws into solitary confinement for two months. When we are unable to deport hooked-hand lunatics inciting terrorism in London mosques, the chattering classes stroke their chins and deliver earnest sermons on the importance of human rights. But when Tommy Robinson is chucked in jail they say nothing, except perhaps to remind us of his real name and his highly suspect mortgage fraud conviction. Who do you think this inconsistency will harm in the long run? And where are the Conservatives in all this? That’s a rhetorical question.

The second thing that sprang to mind is the ruling classes had better be sure of their position here. Things are changing fast; the government is on the verge of collapse, the streets are boiling with anger, and the status quo is looking shaky indeed. If things get really chaotic and British politics flipped on its head, there is a reasonable chance Robinson might find himself in a position of power before he hits retirement age. It might seem unlikely now, but history is littered with pariahs who were jailed by failing governments and found themselves in charge a few years later. Now I doubt Robinson is ever going to be Prime Minister, but who knows where power and influence will lie if the current system is upended by a populist revolt? If even half of what Robinson says on the podcast is true, he will be fully justified in finding those politicians, judges, policemen, prison staff, and CPS agents who were responsible for his treatment and holding them to account. What form that will take I don’t know, but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on principles of human rights to save me if I were being fixed with a blindfold. That ship sailed in May last year, and the chattering classes were fine with it.

Go and listen to the podcast, and tell me I’m wrong.

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Open Thread

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Sorry folks, I’ve got final exams all this week so posting might be a bit sporadic unless something really jumps out at me. Feel free to talk among yourselves.

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Polyamor-Me

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Back in 2015 The Federalist ran an article by a Sara Burrows on her new-found polyamorous lifestyle. Titled Polyamory Is Next, And I’m One Reason Why, we learned:

Four years into our relationship, we found ourselves in the typical rut of co-dependence, resentment, boredom, and fighting over the grocery bill. We’d had an unplanned baby, I’d quit my job to do attachment parenting full-time, and Brad was working long hours in a dungeon of a warehouse. I was stuck at home washing dishes, folding laundry and talking to a two-year-old, bored out of my mind. If we didn’t have anything to fight about, we’d find something, just to make life a little more interesting.

People who complain of a dull life rarely consider that they, not their circumstances, are the problem.

I had freed myself from the grips of government, religion, and parents.

As everyone knows, self-fulfillment is dependent on external forces and cannot be derived from within.

Enter polyamory. Polyamory means “many loves.” It is the practice of engaging in several emotionally and possibly sexually intimate relationships simultaneously, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

If polyamory is the answer, you’ve not understood the question.

We’re both nervous and don’t know what to expect. I’ve pushed Brad to “go first” in dating and sexually exploring other women. He’s been on two dates so far, and we even arranged a crazy one-night stand to sort of break the ice and test our feelings.

Nothing screams maturity and responsibility like arranging a crazy one-night stand.

Since we’ve discovered polyamory, we don’t care about new houses or new cars or vacations.

As we’ve learned, polyamorists consider themselves on a higher spiritual plane to the rest of us.

We’re actually looking forward to the rest of our lives together now. When we were monogamous, our future seemed pretty mapped out: have a baby, get a better job, buy a house, get a promotion, buy a better car, start our own business, buy a better house, make more money, go on vacation, make more money, buy an even better house… grow old in it together.

All because of being able to shag around? Who knew something so simple could deliver such wide-reaching benefits?

We’ve gotten a lot of warnings and admonitions from well-intentioned friends and family members that we’re going to destroy our relationship and hurt our daughter, but we feel exactly the opposite.

Pah! What do they know?

For us, this is the perfect opportunity to save our relationship, spare our daughter from the heartbreak of a broken family, and give her the blessing of happy parents and extended family.

Quite. There is absolutely no reason to believe psychological issues such as loneliness, boredom, and detachment can’t be addressed through meaningless sex with strangers.

In her spare time, she blogs about their new journey into polyamory at polyamorydiaries.com.

So let’s have a look at the entry for the 11th January 2019, shall we?

It’s time to set the record straight. Most of this blog is bullshit.

Oh.

I was no longer in love with the father of my child/partner of 4 years, and he was clearly not in love with me.

The newfangled concept of “polyamory” was just a trendy excuse to play the field and see if I could find any better offers.

As many have observed, polyamory is often used as cover for people who lack the courage to get divorced.

Either I’d find someone who’d love me better… or Brad, out of fear of losing me, would shape up and start meeting my needs for emotional and sexual intimacy. Either way, I win, I thought.

But my subconscious plan backfired.

The only thing missing from a plan this bad is an appearance by Roadrunner at the end.

I didn’t find a man who loved me more than Brad did, I just found a man who was more excited to put his penis in my vagina because I was novel and he’d gone without sex a lot longer than Brad had.

This is someone who, in a fit of childish pique, bragged of throwing off the shackles of family and religion. She’s now learned the hard way what her granny could have told her aged 16.

I was “in love” in a way, but it was the kind of love you fall into, like a trap, not the kind of love that you rise into, that has the potential to last and grow.

Is she a grown woman, or a high-schooler lamenting a one-night stand with the captain of the football team?

Because I couldn’t empathize with Brad’s pain over this betrayal, because I couldn’t even fathom it, he subconsciously set out to teach me a lesson.

Subconsciously?

He had to make me feel the pain he’d felt firsthand, so I could know it. So I could have sympathy and compassion for what I put him through.

So he went out and fell just as hard in love as I had, and rubbed it right in my face, until my soul was bloody and bruised and begging him to stop.

This doesn’t sound very subconscious.

Someway, somehow, we made it through the  two most awful experiences of our lives, and came out a million times stronger on the other side.

Maybe you’ll want to hold off on the grand pronouncements for a while, eh?

I think society should encourage and celebrate sexual freedom and exploration among teenagers.

I think because society does not do this, and instead represses our sexuality, we wander around still starving for that kind of passion as adults.

Someone whose life is an utter trainwreck thinks society should encourage teenagers to be more promiscuous? Should we ask the drunk sleeping under the railway bridge what he thinks of trade tariffs while we’re at it?

Now you’re caught between a rock and a hard place.

You’re in love with two people.

By now, they are both jealous of your affection and wanting you to choose.

Apparently this is a drawback of polyamory. Who would have guessed?

But you have more history, trust and deeper friendship with the old partner, not to mention a child or two.

Ah yes, the children. Let’s include them in a flippant afterthought.

As Osho says, it is the one we develop a spiritual friendship with who becomes our lasting soulmate.

As I’ve noted before, there’s a peculiar habit of modern, western women to loudly declare they’re rejecting Christianity before plunging headlong into the nearest weirdo cult.

The good news is there can be healing and deeper intimacy on the other side. Brad and I have been more in love in the last 6 months of monogamy than in our entire 8 years before that,

There’s nothing like 8 years of meaningless sex with a succession of insincere strangers to shore up a failing marriage.

and I KNOW it’s only going to get better from here.

Presumably on the grounds things can’t get a whole lot worse.

I don’t know if he’s 100% there yet, but I dream of the day Osho talks about, when we rise so high in love with each other that everyone else disappears.

She’s mentioned Osho 3 times, whereas all she says about her child is:

The sad part about option B is that children’s hearts are often needlessly torn apart along with their parents.

Which is why mature, responsible, functioning adults don’t engage in polyamory. From start to finish, this entire story can be condensed to “me me me”. Everyone else’s concerns are just a side-issue, to be ignored or reclaimed as necessary at her own convenience. And in case anyone thinks such selfishness is limited to female practitioners of polyamory, here’s a post on Reddit:

I’m a 34 year old man who is married to a 33 year old woman and we have a 13 year old boy. I recently went poly with an 18 year old girl, primarily for sex, but we have become increasingly close and she will be moving in soon. My son is very close to his mom, my wife, and I’m not sure how he will react to this. How can I introduce my girlfriend to my son?

What’s the betting this 18 year old has severe mental problems, possibly caused by an absent father and/or sexual abuse at the hands of an adult? Remember people, polyamorists are perfectly normal, just like you and me.

(Burrows story via Michael Story and several readers on Twitter. Reddit post via Robert Mariani.)

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Mixed Martial Arts

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I’ve written before about how some modern women, probably empowered by sassy, go-gurrrrrll feminism and watching too many films, seem to think physically assaulting men is a good idea. Here’s another example:


Note that everyone only got outraged when he picked her up and dumped her on the floor. Until then, it was all a bit of a lark. However, you slap a man in the face like that and he’s likely to lose control in some way; this young lad is actually pretty restrained, and did just enough to neutralise his crazy classmate. You can see for a brief second where instinct takes over and he draws his fist back ready to knock her head clean off her shoulders, before he understands the consequences and relaxes. She was fortunate. A man in this state – especially a young, fit one – is a dangerous beast which is why it’s best not to provoke them like this. Men know this. Women used to know it instinctively, but modern society appears to have absolved them of simple common sense. They now seem to think they can go around physically attacking men with no consequences. Whether it’s feminists to blame for this mindset or someone else, there will be some women who pay a real and permanent price for it.

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No Defeat, Whole Surrender

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An article in The Spectator – the magazine for Britain’s centre-right political classes – contains a telling passage:

[T]here is no one to lead Britain through a no-deal Brexit and not enough MPs to support it. This is what Brexiteers have to accept.

Apparently British citizens just have to accept the fact their rulers are hopeless incompetents without an ounce of leadership skills among the whole lot of them. There is no other option, it seems. They are in the same position as Abraham Lincoln who said after the Battle of Antietam:

“There is no one to lead the Union armies to a decisive victory over the Confederates. This is what Americans have to accept.”

Actually no, he didn’t say that. Instead he fired the hapless George McClellan and (eventually) appointed the rather more capable Ulysses S. Grant.

The British people delivered a mandate to its rulers to negotiate, organise, and execute an orderly departure from the European Union in a manner which would maximise the long-term benefits for the country. What that precisely means is open to dispute, but the results of negotiations are rarely known in advance; a large part of the skill is being able to recalculate as positions shift. What is not open for dispute is the fact the British political leadership has utterly failed to deliver their mandate. It’s difficult to think of a single part of the process they’ve managed to get right; it’s just been one bungled catastrophe after another. The best they’ve come up with is an embarrassment of an agreement more akin to those signed by nations defeated in war, with the other option of simply exiting on 29th March being forced on them by virtue of their own incompetence. Even if you think No Deal is a good thing, it’s an indicator of how useless our politicians are that this is the most likely outcome. It’s like meeting for peace talks which drag on until everyone’s dead. Nobody’s going to get a Nobel Prize for that.

A term I sometimes hear to describe the current political philosophy, particularly in Europe, is “managed decline”. Our current crop of leaders have no interest in doing anything worthwhile beyond that which will elevate their personal status, power, and privilege. They are wholly uninterested in the future of the country beyond the next month, and treat the whole thing as a game where everyone’s on the same side except the general population who doesn’t even get to play. They have no standards, no self-confidence, no vision, and no ambition beyond that of a teenager singing into her hairbrush in her mother’s high heels. When Sadiq Khan glibly stated that Islamic terror attacks were just part and parcel of living in a big city, he should have been driven from office and into obscurity. He wasn’t, because for too many people this craven, pathetic, mediocrity is what they’ve come to expect from their leaders. That The Spectator is now endorsing this mindset speaks volumes. I’m beginning to think even “managed decline” is overly generous.

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