Western Leadership Is The Most Worthless In My Life

I assume you mean prime minister Starmer rather than Cameron?

The only thing worse than a moron is a corrupt moron and the only thing worse than a corrupt moron is an arrogant, corrupt moron. American leadership, if you can call it leadership and I don’t think you can, is comprised of a slew of arrogant, corrupt morons. The worst of the worst of the worst.

http://youtube.com/post/UgkxfufKJsm-v-jal6UhqI6K8n4lV9YMQlAv?si=sr2qqtkWuuExaeXS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqJiXoObZCA

Ah, if it were only the leaders who were stupid in our idiocracy . . .

I am increasingly convinced that the core problem is not that “our leaders” think they are masters of the situation, but that deep down, they imagine that nothing they do actually matters or has consequences. It is easy to imagine you are embedded in a simulation driven in its outline by the moral parameters of a great drama. It is how narrative history is written and how great novels are constructed. It has been at times how I myself “think” about the great events of my Times as well as some of the petty dramas of my personal and work life.

What I have noticed recently — last ten years — is that people generally seem inclined to ignore entirely the anchor of objective, indifferent reality and its implications for coordinating social behavior. Most people may not even be aware that they have detached themselves from “the game.” I saw it writ large in Russiagate, painted in lurid colors: fact-checking spiraled downward. Of course, in retrospect, I recall WMD and the second Iraq War — a war to avenge 9/11 against a country that had nothing to do with that event.

I saw it — see it — in COVID. Some people make their personality revolve around resolute masking and concern for Long COVID symptoms. Others are convinced that the whole pandemic was a hoax, the mRNA vaccines a dangerous innovation, ivermectin unfairly maligned.

It may be that smart phones, social media and screen addictions have amplified the human propensity to fall into suggestible trance states and experience. Derationalizing mass delusions are nothing new in human history. I am only noticing what may be a small shift, perhaps the consequence of removing some critical guardrails from the political culture, some now missing feedback loop no longer dampening control. In elite circles, which I can only view from a great distance, it seems from my perspective to be related to a loss of self-awareness and political memory or integrity — actors find themselves lost in the play, improvising their lines with no sense that the outcome is not pre-determined by the plot.

My point is that the madness of “our leaders” runs all the way down in the body politic. I would like to imagine the alarm I feel about the increasing difficulty in finding a reality to be realistic about might effect at least a partial cure.

Also, I think you meant decreases in the birth rate. That’s so funny– neoliberalism makes it too expensive to have kids and then complains that no one is having them.

Minor quibble about “fastest great extinction” . . . I think the asteroid was faster. So, second fastest.

It looks to me like Carney is doing better than the rest so far. Would I be right to think so?

Thanks to spud. Yes, I watched the Sam Altman video in the open thread, these clowns are anointed by the likes of Thiel and the other oligarchs to spin straw into gold, it’s all a giant Pump ‘n’ Dump Ponzi scheme.

Thanks also to Bruce Wilder, for this– “I am increasingly convinced that the core problem is not that “our leaders” think they are masters of the situation, but that deep down, they imagine that nothing they do actually matters or has consequences.” This is exactly the problem.

I was joking about the US Destroyer Gerald Ford, it’s not that the elites lacked a level of impunity prior to 1974, but when he let Nixon off scot-free for political fuckery and High Crimes and Misdemeanors there was no guard rail on the highway anymore. The Elite Class knew they could do almost anything, Hell, Jeffrey Epstein, a mostly moronic front man (who only had “charisma” coz the Zionist Entity/ FBI/ CIA etc. were using him openly for compromat and blackmail) ran pedophile rings for years with near-complete impunity.

Ian’s Rogues Gallery of the Idiocrats is pretty complete:

Starmer a breathtakingly stupid and charisma-free toad who likes E. European Rent Boys and billionaires buying his clothing and glasses. He shivved his “friend” Jeremy Corbin in the back without even one moment of shame or regret.

The Euro-Slugs kept their Nazi revivalist cults going after WW II with only the pretense of (false) regrets. Of course, Britain planted the AshkeNAZI Jews (who are not Semites and never lived in the “Holy Land” with few exceptions) in the Levant for white supremacist purposes. In 1948, three years after some of them escaped Death Camps, they did the same thing to Palestinians that had been done to that with only a few (Albert Eintstein, e.g.) objecting. Scum like Blackrock Merz and Ursula von der Lyin’ are straight from Nazi families hoping to revive their generational heritage– just like your own Canadian Chrystia Freedland, “My grandpa’s stealing a home from Jews and running a Nazi-supporting Der Sturmer style rag with printing press stolen from Jewish Victims wasn’t a Nazi, I do Not See it that way, he was a cuddly old bear.” And you’ve got the “Jewish” Victoria Nuland putting Azov Brigade Nazis along with Right Sector, etc. in charge of Ukraine. But these are the same people who were happy to work with ISIS, as Jake Sullivan boasted of to Hillary in an email that Wikilieaks revealed.

“Little Napoleon” Macron is mentally ill, victimized in his mid-teens by his pedo-adjacent future wife, tweets pics of himself with giant (AI-created) muscles hitting a punching bag like he’s a latter-day Schwarzenegger, and tells the masses to eat cake, destroys their pensions.

Yeah, Trump seems to be the stupidest. Bushie Jr. was deeply stupid (brain rotted from heavy boozing and cocaine abuse from age 14 or 15 to age 40) but he did not have Drumf’s sense of being God’s Anointed #1 Superior Being ever in Human History on Planet Earth, part of him knew he was a god-damned moron (as predicted by Mencken) and let smarter people like Darth Cheney and Karl Rove sandpaper over or block some of his worst instincts. Trump cannot do this, he is incapable.

Estonia’s “stunning and brave” Kalla Kallas (per the Mighty Wurlitzer) leads a flea-sized country, just over 1.3 million people (smaller than Alameda county where I used to live in Northern California) and total land mass is 17,054 square miles, threatens China and Russia, lies about “Russia has attacked 19 countries in recent years and nobody ever attacked them.” Though actually during WW II, the USSR was attacked by Germany, Italy, Japan, Romania, Hungary, and Finland.

Australia– well, as US-born I am ashamed of our genocides but c’mon, the Aussies inherited the British proclivity of their origins, massacring darkies is just jolly good fun. Lickspittles who were proud to be subjects of a King and Queen 1,000s of miles away, even though some of them were shipped out as convicts to survive or die.

Japan was always monstrous, they borrowed directly from the Brits by industrializing early and heavily and imagining they could (& succeeded for awhile) subdue China, Mongolia and the other regional neighbors, force the victims into slavery and prostitution due to their “racial superiority.” Humiliated and A-bombed by the racist idiot Harry S. Truman, the “Japs” proved their subservience to their oppressor. (At least that shows consistency if Right Makes Might.)

Starmer will gladly destroy his farmers and the Labour Party, he (like Kamala Harris, and most of the US MIC) will do whatever he is told, no matter how monstrous, without even a pause to check a . . . well, this class of people do not have consciences.

The Clintons were always about Kiss Up and Kick Down. I recently learned that Harry Reid did one smart thing late in his political career, which was in ’08 to prepare the Anointed One, Barry Hussein Obama to be the next POTOP. (President of the One Percent.) He had enough sense to know Hills would attempt to grab the nomination and lose badly, despised by the public. But still they let her do so in ’16 after the Kiss Up Kick Down 8 years of Barry’s terms. But he made great speeches and simulated intelligence and even charisma.

Look at the American Ruling Class– Obese stinker Randy Fine ranting openly that he wants every last Palestinian exterminated (I think even AIPAC backed away from him), along with Josh Hawley telling Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin she would be murdered for siding with the Untermenschen on camera when she confronted him. Debby Wasserman Schulz and other Dimmie apparatchiks rigging primaries to put losers like HRC into power and failing badly, twice . . . Turning Points USA marketing a clever, racist, misogynist grifter with a glib tongue, he’s murdered in a ridiculous false-flag plot as soon as he backs away from the Zionist entity a couple of steps, then little Ben Shapiro rides his midget horse (per Megyn Kelley) into their big Convention and tells everyone that Tucker Carlson and the few people like him who (shockingly) developed a conscience must be deplatformed and “cancelled”, despite Charlie supposedly being “a martyr for free speech.”

To steal a line from Morrisey, were he still alive many of these people would “make Caligula blush.” They always imagined that Commies, or Anarchists, or whatever generic bad guy would burn it all down, while they wield the gas can and the matches.

What is all this talk of UK farmers being destroyed? Is this the inheritance tax whinge or something I have missed in the meantime?

What a beautiful and accurate rant!

The West’s sloven arrogance will be the undoing of civil society.

now i remember when these dim wits came to power. one of the results i think was wellington or auckland going without electricity for weeks. it was just shrugged off as no big deal. let alone all of the other carnage from their stupidity.

once dim wits like this get a hold of a party and government, its almost irreversible. and new zealand is still struggling today.

roger thinks his policies were good and worked, as he surveyed the carnage. his remarks are the same remarks that all dim wits have barked and brayed where this type came to power in the west.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogernomics

“New Zealand’s leap into the neoliberal global economy exposed both businesses and the wider workforce to the unregulated practices of private capital – this led to a decade of insignificant (and sometimes negative) growth with the “economic miracle” being experienced by only a relatively small proportion of the population.[41] With no restrictions on overseas money coming into the country the focus in the economy shifted from the productive sector to finance.[42] Finance capital outstripped industrial capital[36] and redundancies occurred in manufacturing industry; approximately 76,000 manufacturing jobs were lost between 1987 and 1992.[37] The new state-owned enterprises created from 1 April 1987 began to shed thousands of jobs adding to unemployment:
Redundancies by SOE [43] State-Owned Enterprise Redundancies
Electricity Corporation 3,000
Coal Corporation 4,000
Forestry Corporation 5,000
New Zealand Post 8,000

The newly unfettered business environment created by the deregulation of the financial sector, David Grant writes, left New Zealanders “easy targets for speculators and their agents”,[44] exacerbating the effects of the October 1987 stock market crash.

During wage bargaining in 1986 and 1987, employers started to bargain harder. Lock-outs were not uncommon; the most spectacular occurred at a pulp and paper mill owned by Fletcher Challenge and led to changes to work practices and a no-strike commitment from the union. Later settlements drew further concessions from unions, including below-inflation wage increases, and an effective real wage cut.[43] There was a structural change in the economy from industry to services, which, along with the arrival of trans-Tasman retail chains and an increasingly cosmopolitan hospitality industry, led to a new ‘café culture’ enjoyed by more affluent New Zealanders. Some argue that for the rest of the population, Rogernomics failed to deliver the higher standard of living promised by its advocates.[36][45]

Over 15 years, New Zealand’s economy and social capital faced serious problems: the proliferation of food banks increased dramatically to an estimated 365 in 1994;[46] the number of New Zealanders estimated to be living in poverty grew by at least 35% between 1989 and 1992 while child poverty doubled from 14% in 1982 to 29% in 1994.[47] Those on low incomes failed to return to the 1984 standard of living until 1996; the lowest 30% did not recover their own 1980s living standards for twenty years.[48] The health of the New Zealand population was also especially hard-hit, leading to a significant deterioration in health standards among working and middle-class people.[49] In addition, many of the promised economic benefits of the experiment never materialised.[50] Between 1985 and 1992, New Zealand’s economy grew by 4.7% during the same period in which the average OECD nation grew by 28.2%.[51][failed verification] From 1984 to 1993 inflation averaged 9% per year and New Zealand’s credit rating dropped twice.[52] Between 1986 and 1992, the unemployment rate rose from 3.6% to 11%.[53]

Rogernomics, however, has been credited with a number of other positive impacts on the New Zealand economy:[54] inflation, which had reached a high of 17.15% in 1980, has been in single digits every year since the end of Douglas’ tenure as finance minister;[55] and income tax rates were halved,[54] while gross national income per capita almost doubled, from $6,950 USD in 1984 to $13,640 USD in 1990.[56] Other supporters of Rogernomics have argued that many statistics do not take into account the improvements in consumer goods it brought,[57] transforming New Zealand from a country where permits were needed to buy overseas magazines, and where prices were high and choice was limited, into a country with a range of consumer goods available similar to those enjoyed by other western democracies.[58] Douglas himself has claimed that the unwillingness of subsequent governments to alter any of his reforms is a testament to their quality.[59]
Legacy

The policies of Ruth Richardson, sometimes called “Ruthanasia”, were a continuation of Rogernomics.[60] Richardson served as Finance Minister in the National Party government from 1990 to 1993. Beginning with the Mother of all Budgets, the National Government expanded these policies by drastically cutting spending, deregulating labour markets, and further asset sales.[61]

In 1990 David Lange said of the Government:

“It is there to be the securer of its citizen[s’] welfare. Where the market works well, it should be given its head. Where the market results in manifest inequity, or poor economic performance, the Government must get involved.”[62]

After Rogernomics, the New Zealand Labour Party was paralysed by infighting for much of their time in opposition, initially led by Mike Moore as leader of the Opposition (1990–1993). Moore was then followed by Helen Clark, whose first term as leader of the Opposition was undermined by those who opposed her leadership. Some later left to form their own political parties ACT, the Alliance, and United (later United Future). Clark for her part survived these internal leadership scuffles and Labour stabilised under her leadership during the third and final term of the Jim Bolger and Jenny Shipley ministries.[63] Much like Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, Clark assumed a compromise solution to social exclusion and poverty, combining advocacy of the open economy and of free trade with greater emphasis on fighting the consequences of neoliberal policies. Labour became loosely aligned with the Third Way between 1999 and 2008.[64]

The ACT Party, co-founded by Roger Douglas in 1993 to participate in the 1996 MMP election, is the heir to Rogernomics and continues to advance free-market policies.[65] In 1990s New Zealand, advocates of radical economic policies were often branded as “rogergnomes” by their opponents, linking their views to Douglas’s and to the supposed baleful influence of international bankers, characterised as the “Gnomes of Zurich”.[66]

A 2015 Treasury report said that inequality in New Zealand increased in the 1980s and 1990s but has been stable for the last 20 years.[67] However, another 2015 article reported that New Zealand’s rate of rise of inequality had been the highest in the OECD, and that New Zealand’s inequality had previously been low by OECD standards.[68] ”

then of course these idiots, and today as far as i know, they said they did nothing wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_financial_crisis

In 2001, banks were deregulated in Iceland.[111]

(GASP WHO’DA EVER THUNK THIS WOULD CAUSE PROBLEMS!)

his set the stage for banks to upload debts when foreign companies were accumulated.[111] The crisis unfolded when these banks became unable to refinance their debts. It is estimated that the three major banks held foreign debt in excess of €50 billion,[4] or about €160,000 per Icelandic resident, compared with Iceland’s gross domestic product of €8.5 billion.[5][112] As early as March 2008, the cost of private deposit insurance for deposits in Landsbanki and Kaupthing was already far higher (6–8+1⁄2% of the sum deposited) than for other European banks.[citation needed] The króna, which was ranked by The Economist in early 2007 as the most overvalued currency in the world (based on the Big Mac Index),[113] has further suffered from the effects of carry trading.[114]

“Coming from a small domestic market, Iceland’s banks have financed their expansion with loans on the interbank lending market and, more recently, by deposits from outside Iceland (which are also a form of external debt). Households also took on a large amount of debt, equivalent to 213% of disposable income, which led to inflation.[115] This inflation was exacerbated by the practice of the Central Bank of Iceland issuing liquidity loans to banks on the basis of newly issued, uncovered bonds[116] – effectively, printing money on demand.

In response to the rise in prices – 14% in the twelve months to September 2008,[12] compared with a target of 2.5% – the Central Bank of Iceland held interest rates high (15.5%).[13] Such high interest rates, compared with 5.5% in the United Kingdom or 4% in the eurozone for example, encouraged overseas investors to hold deposits in Icelandic krónur, leading to monetary inflation: the Icelandic money supply (M3) grew 56.5% in the twelve months to September 2008, compared with 5.0% GDP growth.[117] The situation was effectively an economic bubble, with investors overestimating the true value of the króna. “