Horse 2762 - There Are No Dumb Questions? Untrue - Here Are Fifteen

 1. Is it possible to drown a table?

If you threw a table into a lake, then most of the time it would sink. If you were to wait just one minute, you would find out that not only is the table not breathing but also it can not save itself. Yes, it would be drowned.

2. Do fish actually like swimming?

I am sure that they do. I for one like the fact that I have been breathing for more than 40 years. Since I am not aware of what the alternative feels like, then I will have to suggest that I like being alive. I think that it would be similar for fish.

3. Should jujitsu be compulsory for recovering librarians or would they be better off learning the clarinet?

Librarians are like dragons in that they are in charge of a hoard of things; except those things happen to be books and they happen to be available to the public. Someone who is a recovering librarian still has tendencies to hoard things and so I would suggest that they take up jujitsu as a way of defending themselves and whatever their next hoard happens to be.

4. Who would have been the better Formula One driver: Composer, Bedric Smittner or Painter, Tinteretto? 

This would largely depend on who they were driving for. However, given that the most famous painter of all time (Adolf Hitler) instigated the funding of both the Mercedes Benz and Auto Union racing teams, then Tinteretto would probably be better.

5. Do snakes have lungs?

Yes; obviously.

6. Is blinking overrated?

I don't believe in magic. Blinking is automatic.

7. What is all the fuss about cushions?

Somewhere down the barrel of the cannon of our minds, is the idea that a cushion might be used to seat a great crown of state or perhaps some other piece of finery. Our minds might very well be like a cannon in that we're always shooting them off with a great deal of pomp and circumstance but I do not think that we can all be collectively wrong about cushions. They are fine things; which hint at luxury.

8. Carrots or Tennis?

Carrots are a food which is actively enjoyed by nobody. Tennis is a sport which is actively enjoyed by nobody. People will profess to enjoy carrots and/or tennis but that is because they are part of the conspiracy. 

Since this is a question of which is the lesser of two things that aren't actually evil, then we need to frame the question around the thought experiment of which one would be missed by the least amount of people if it were to cease to exist. Tennis is terrible and achieves nothing but carrots are edible and can be put into salads, cakes, pies, casseroles etc.

The answer is objectively carrots.

9. What's going on within the next hour?

The sun will spew out so much heat and light that it would make your mind explode if you actually could comprehend that number. There are so many electrons whizzing around protons and neutrons on planet Earth that we do not have a name for anything close to that kind of number (or maybe we do). Chemistry is happening. Physics is happening. History is happening. Maths, Arts, Politics, and the entirety of current human endeavour is happening. 

10. Who is Max Clearance and when will Bill Posters be prosecuted?

Max Clearance is a goods trader who is as dodgy as all get out. He's a little bit wahey and a little bit whoa; and a lot of what he has to sell has "fallen off the back of a truck".

Bill Posters is a shifty character who despite frequent attempts by law enforcement agencies, has never been caught. At this point, the statement that Bill Posters will be prosecuted is more of a cry for help than a statement of intent.

11. What happens if you drink too much Red Bull?

The clue is in their marketing propaganda, in that "Red Bull gives you wings." People who have drunk excessive amounts of Red Bull have been known to spontaneously generate wings and then after having never learned how to use or control them, end up crashing into the ground and objects. Death by flying accident as a result of drinking too much Red Bull, is not statistically insignificant.

12. How should I go about creating an absolute despotism with me in charge?

Probably the first thing that you need to do is either join and existing political party or form one of your own, to win whatever democratic process currently exists.

Then you need to find some suitable target to become an other, to galvanise your political base behind you. Once you've established your acceptable target, then present a bunch of problems which you claim that only you can solve (it need not matter if you actually caused the problems). 

Then you need to invent some kind of emergency or other existential crisis so that the democratic process will voluntarily (or perhaps involuntarily if you have already manipulated your base into the majority) assign you power. Then after having obtained control, all you need to do is assign yourself your new title.

13. Is pineapple on a pizza a war crime?

No.

Pineapple on a pizza is a crime against sanity and against common decency but it isn't quite a crime against humanity. People are allowed to like what they like; including if what they like happens to be strange and weird.

14. War - huh - yeah. What is it good for?

a - filling up history books

b - fast forwarding technological advancement

c - killing loads of people who have have families, and destroying the lives of millions. Okay, that's not actually good in the sense of being morally virtuous or even producing happiness but it is good in the sense that that is the transaction which takes place, as in a passout is good for a return entry into the venue.

15. Stop staring at my beans.

That's not actually a question but the answer is still 'no'. Those there are some very very fine looking beans and nobody can help themselves. Everyone in the world is compelled to stare at your beans because they are so attractive. 

Horse 2761 - The US Supreme Court Was Always Conservative

 Due to the fact that we are saturated in American media and news and because the United States has been the most powerful country in the Anglosphere since at least before 1945, we are awash with news in Australia to do with the appointment of an appointment of a new justice to the United States Supreme Court; despite them have zero relevance to Australian law. I would go so has as to say that more people in Australia know that the United States Supreme Court has 9 members, than would know what the highest court in the Australian court hierarchy is called; much less how many members it has¹. 

The other thing that I do not understand, is why people are suddenly concerned with the appointment of a conservative judge to the United States Supreme Court; in the light of it almost always being a majority conservative institution.

As far as I can make out, the reasons why anyone would vote for Donald Trump at all are because of his promises to shake up Washington from the outside (which has now been proven to be completely wrong), or because they genuinely hated Hilary Clinton (which given the propagandandising by media outlets like Fox and Breitbart might very well be true), or most likely because they are prepared to make a weird kind of Faustian Bargain which thus far has also included more deaths than all wars since WW2 combined for the sole purpose of having Mr Trump make some Supreme Court nominations.

This is of course the long game that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been trying to play for for the last four years. He successfully used the rules of the US Constitution which say that the President can only appoint judges on the advice and consent of the Senate; which he withheld from the then President Barack Obama. Since then he has got two Supreme Court nominations through and with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that opens up a vacancy for another. 

Nominally that places the inherent bias of the court at 6-3 and locks that kind of advantage in until well after McConnell will have died himself.

However what everyone seems to have forgotten is that not only has the court been nominally conservative since before the memories of everyone's currently alive but those same conservative courts have sometimes moved very quickly indeed.

The landmark case of Roe v Wade in 1973 was passed 7-2 in a nominally conservative court which had a bias of 6-3. That meant for the case to have passed, four judges needed to flip. This is the stirling piece of propaganda which has persisted ever since - that no matter what kind of awful legislation that has been brought through, which includes Reagan's union smashing agenda, the magic words of "Abortion!" and "Gay Marriage!" have been yelled at increasingly stupid and compliant church, for the sole purpose of collecting votes. Just as long as conservatives have the ability to yell those magic words of "Abortion!" and "Gay Marriage!" they can continue to do all kinds of beastly things, including taking the United States to wars on the basis of lies. All the while, the courts have always held the ability to overturn Roe v Wade because the numbers on the Supreme Court have always been there.

Elections are almost never won upon the basis of record. Elections are won upon the expectation of promises that can be kept. That means to say that that it is actually an advantage for conservatives to not repeal Roe v Wade because by keeping it on the books, they have a perpetual symbol that they can rail against. If it was to be repealed, then they lose their symbol and one of their magic words. This is almost certainly the reason why despite being in the majority of the Supreme Court for the entirety of the time since 1973, Roe v Wade hasn't been repealed; even though it could have actually been repealed at any time. 

Essentially it is a giant shell game with the American people being taken for a rube. By yelling "Abortion!", "Gay Marriage!", "Prayer in schools!", things like education have been able to be defunded and gutted, health care has never been extended as a right, obvious racism and violence against people on the basis of the colour of their skin has been allowed to continue with little to no consequence, and the really big commercial interests have been allowed to what they want because everyone else is perpetually distracted².

As Supreme Court appointments are for life, then Mitch McConnell is basically giving his patrons and benefactors a present which perpetuates the advantages that they have either bought for themselves or stolen; and he does so for a very long time. That is the other side of the Faustian Bargain that people have bought into and the genius of Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party, and conservatism generally, has been how to get ordinary people to vote against their own interests for so long.

Even now as America passes the 200,000 death mark due to COVID-19, which is more than all of wars combined since World War II, it still doesn't have universal healthcare. Even as the economy implodes and not only are people losing their jobs but the jobs that they are going back to have the lowest real wages since 1977, America still doesn't have basic wage conditions like holiday pay and sick pay for many industries. Even though the pandemic doesn't care about race or religion, America still has people being murdered by the police and those murders being excused by the judiciary.

These things aren't by accident but by design. It is worth remembering that the current age of conservatism in the United States and the enmeshing of the Republican Party and evangelical voters, was first framed in response to a university getting its tax exempt status removed because it still pursued segregationist policies. Donald Trump isn't some genius political operator, it's just that he quite rightly saw that he could manipulate the electorate just as easily as the Republican Party has done; then after winning office with literally no agenda, he has been useful to the architecture of conservatism.

¹The High Court of Australia has seven members: Kiefel, Bell, Gageler, Keane, Nettle, Gordon, Edelman.

²Installing a reality TV star as the President, has been a tremendous distraction while Congress has gone about its existing agenda almost unchecked.

Horse 2760 - Darkness at Noon: Who Actually Runs The Troll/Bots?

 Australia is in the midst of a propaganda war which is being fought in places like Facebook and Twitter. In an age of universal connectivity where everyone has access to virtually everything all of the time, I find the distinct lack of curiosity from people to properly investigate even the most obviously stupid of claims, to be singularly disappointing.

Bothering to do basic research is a small amount of work and as people and politics follow Newton's First Law of Motion (things are lazy and keep on doing what they are already doing until a massive enough force stops them or makes them do something else), then they will continue on their merry little way.

One of these little battles took place on the fields of the Sydney Morning Herald. ABC1's Media Watch did a longer form piece on this.

https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/polls/12662916

Buy Twitter Poll Votes will deliver you 15,000 bot votes for US$495 and 20,000 for US$660, at which prices The Age poll could have been gamed for around 2000 bucks.  

So who would have done that? Well, we have no way of knowing and we’re not pointing the finger. 

- Media Watch, ABC1, 14th Sep 2020.

What the Media Watch article didn't do was analyse the whyfor. They know where the lines of news reportage are, rather than editorialising and speculating like second-level yelling from the peanut gallery which is what I can do (because I don't actually go out and gather the news).

I think that we need to remember the principle motivation of Hunter (also on the ABC in the 1980s):

He's on his bike or in his den,
He's always looking around and then,
He's asking:
What? Why? Where? and When? 

Again, this requires a modicum of curiosity and that same basic desire to see what is hiding behind the curtain. Perhaps we can chase away the spectre of oh so many years ago with a little illumination.

Let's play this game as though it were a crime novel. We have the body (the manipulated polls), we have the means (via some organised troll/bot service which someone has paid for and/or operates; which if you go looking, often has the Twitter handle of xxxx-kkkkkkkk where x is some name and k is a string of eight numbers and always eight numbers); all we need to do is find out who has the biggest motive. If you can establish opportunity, means, and motive, then you can make a pretty good guess as to whom you might suspect.

This is someone who obviously is interested enough to manipulate a Twitter poll which makes the ABC look bad. This is also someone who is probably capable of writing this off as a business expense because I do not see what kind of benefit that a private individual would have in manipulating a Twitter poll if it cost them good money. It is most likely to be someone in Australia because there isn't a good enough reason why a foreign actor would want to manipulate a Twitter poll which relates to the attitude of the Australian public to the national broadcaster. 

The only entities which I can think of which would care enough to do this are News Corp, the IPA, and the Liberal/National Party.

Under cover of COVID-19 which has been used by the Morrison Government as an excuse to ideologically slash budgets and staff from the ABC, universities, the CSIRO, and any other government organisation which dares speak against their owners, an equally insipid information and propaganda war is currently being fought. Although there has been a cover story of Russia or perhaps China interfering in domestic politics in Australia, the more likely story is that these are paid entities in places with access to the internet and who are being funded from within rather than without. I think it a more credible story that the IPA especially which as a registered not for profit organisation which never gets investigated, is responsible since they have the biggest motive for bringing down Australian Government departments which they don't like, more than anyone else.

The IPA already falls neatly under the letter of the law as a terrorist organisation, per the acts which were passed by the Howard Government at the dawn of this century but have as far as I know, never even once been investigated for same.

What possible motives do the Russians have for giving a passing thought about Australia? What of China? They don't gain anything of value that I can see for interfering with Australian Government departments. This looks to me like a classic shell game, where there is misdirection going on via sleight of hand.

If you look at the broad political ideology of the troll/bots, they all appear to be operating from the same side of politics. If the game is one of massive amounts of instability in all directions then you should expect to see troll/bots from various positions attacking from multiple angles but I just do not see that there is evidence of this. They all seem to be operating from the same set of neoconservative talking points and also use that same limited vocabulary set. If you poke a bear with different kinds of pointed sticks, then you should expect to get different kinds of growls but there just aren't any. 

Where are the pro-China troll/bots? I would expect to see plenty of those if China was actually engaged in fighting a propaganda war in Australia. And if they are the ones in charge, why are they all in favour of the Liberal Party? Surely they'd want to support the leftist politics of Labor? What possible motivation does Russia have?

Especially at the moment when China has supposedly signed up the state of Victoria to their 'belt and road' scheme, surely we should expect pro-Andrews troll/bots to be defending him? Moreover, why are they only going after Andrews and Palaszczuk? It wouldn't be because they are both Labor Premiers, would it?

I will admit at this point that I don't really have any other suspects because I just don't see what anyone else gets out of waging such a campaign. I suppose that could equally be a failure of imagination on my part but Occam's Razor is pretty sharp and I'm very quickly running out of things to cut out. 

I will also be curious to see what kind of response this gets because that's also extra evidence of a sort. 

Horse 2759 - In Defence Of Multi-Party Parliamentary Systems

I write this for an audience which I know spans at least four continents and I do so, writing from the jurisdiction which has the longest continuously sitting parliament in the world (NSW). Right from the get go, I need to declare that I like the system of government that we have in Australia and I think that it is among the best in the world. I also happen to think that we have some utterly terrible corruption in the political parties but that's not actually the fault of the parliaments themselves.

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Matt Whitman of the Ten Minute Bible Hour Youtube channel among other things¹, came up with what I think is an excellent suggestion:

Idea for making things better: If someone is on the ballot in all 50 states, they should participate in the presidential debates whether I like their ideas or not. This would force us (voters) to engage in full-spectrum thought instead of simplistic 1 and 0 thought.

- Matt Whitman on Twitter, 19th Sep 2020.

The reason why I think that this is an excellent suggestion is that as with so many things in life, the world is far more complex than most of us have the ability to imagine and so when you arrive at a particular position, it is usually because of an equally complex process of thought, which is influenced by myriad factors. When it comes to electing someone for a position in which the executive of a nation is singularly vested, then that process should demand a complex process of thought; and the only way that such a process can happen is if there is an complex process of inputs from which the electorate has the ability to make such thoughts.

Of course, as we live in a world which is run by powerful people who have vested interests in making people not think at all, then the forces that be, do not want the status quo to change. If you can make the voters engage in really dumb thought, then its like combining a positive simplistic 1 and a negative simplistic 1. Simple maths tells us that +1 -1 = 0. 

There was a really curious reply to this, which looked at the pragmatic outcomes of this:

No, they really shouldn't be. Getting on the ballot is strictly a $$ issue. People would start buying their way into the national spotlight. The 2 party system has its flaws, but it's infinitely better than parliamentary systems. The parties are basically single-issue lobbyists.

- Dominic on Twitter, 19th Sep 2020.

I think that this is flawed but nonetheless completely valid. His warning about people buying their way into the national spotlight is arguably what the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave did; however that was enabled precisely because of the political machines which form the two party system in America. All of this made me want to pull apart the ideas here. I tend to look at the Anglosphere because these are the parliaments that I am most familiar with (being an Anglophone).

You have to be really careful when you talk about what the two party system actually is. In the contexts of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand etc. the parliaments themselves are really quite indifferent and agnostic when it comes to the flavour of the people that sit in the seats. In the case of the United Kingdom and New Zealand, there isn't even a formal constitution; so whatever conception that exists surrounding the political parties, must exist from the outside. In the case of the United States and Australia which do have written constitutions, those constitutions are completely silent on the subject; mostly because at the time of inception of those countries, no formal political parties either existed or had a sufficiently large enough hold over the game of politics that they needed to be mentioned.

All of this should lead us to a rather obvious question; namely would the various parliaments operate without any political parties? In the cases of the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, the answer is 'yes'. Those countries proved that having no political parties is no impediment whatsoever to the functioning of government. 

Representative parliamentary democracy (which is what all of these countries have in common) fills up the seats in the parliaments and the executive, on an electoral basis which is actually independent of the political parties. The people who fill those seats can in fact come from a party, no party, or perhaps a formal melding of parties. 

The two party system if it is in fact to be considered as a thing, needs to be viewed through the lens of cold reality and not the gamification of politics that everyone in the grandstands has made it. The rules of the game itself need to be examined.

There are in fact only two conditions which happen after an election. Either you win the seat, or you do not. When the music stops, you either have a seat, or you do not. 

As there are only two possible conditions, then you should expect that interested parties will organise themselves in order to win those seats. In an Australian House of Representatives seat, unless the seat is as safe as houses, then you can end up with loads of various groups competing for those seats. The rules which determine how those seats are allocated will naturally determine how many different kinds of voices occupy those seats; we will come back to that later.

Once the various seats have been filled, there are in fact only two conditions which happen. Governments and majorities are formed out of the majority of members in the room (this also applies to the office of the President where the number of seats in the room is 1). There are only two possible condition. Either you are in the majority, or not. You are either in the government, which is formed out of the majority of members, or you are not. 

If you go back to the rules which govern how those seats and majorities are formed, there are no explicit rules at all. If there was a truly partiless parliament, then that majority of seats would need to be formed whenever any piece of legislation was deliberated upon. That process exists. In Westminster Parliaments, that process is called a 'division' and there is always a mad dash of people running through the building to appear on the floors of the various parliaments whenever this happens. Depending on the jurisdiction in the United States, this is often known as the less pretentious name of a 'vote'. 

Yet again for pieces of legislation, there are only two possible conditions. Either the legislation is passed with an 'aye' or a 'yay', or not.

This is important to bear in mind here. The parliaments themselves don't care about what kind of political parties are used to load up the seats with. The constitutions also don't care about what kind of arguments happen in the process of hammering legislation into shape. All of this is political overlay; which actually sits outside of the rules of parliaments.

The reason why Australia, New Zealand, and Germany, have more voices which speak into those parliaments, is to do with the rules under which members of their parliaments are selected. 

Political scientist Maurice Duverger noted that Single Member Districts tended towards two party politics; this is known as Duverger's Law. Australia, New Zealand, and Germany, have elements in their selection processes for members which elect multiple members at once. Where you have proportional representation, the various seats are allocated on a proportional basis of the number of votes that someone has won². Australia also operates with preferential voting which means that someone's vote in the ballot box is transferred if their favoured candidate fails to garner enough votes. That means that for Australia at least, every member of the House of Representatives has been elected with at least 50% of the votes, and in the places with proportional representation they have all been elected with an appropriate quota of votes.

Australia, New Zealand, and Germany, all have a plurality of voices speaking into the chambers and that is a function of the vote counting process which puts the members there.

None of this actually addresses the central question of whether or not a two party system is a good idea. That I fear is a matter of opinion; which is very much subject to your own personal biases. I personally think that having lots of different voices speaking into parliaments is a far better idea than voting systems which narrow the kinds of discussions which can be had, and I also think that having big party machines which gamify the political process for mostly private purposes, is itself quite terrible. 

There is also one issue that I personally find quite appalling; which is split into two parts:

A political party apart from representing a narrower range of interests that presumably everyone has to sign up for, invariably will have some kind of party discipline system which ensures that people all vote the same way. If an individual dares to think too far outside of the party's intellectual box, they may find themselves disendorsed by the party. That means that matters of conscience and matters of singular harm, can be completely trampled by the big party machines. 

I also wonder if in fact, the two party system is genuinely real. In the United States, the Republican Party has had recent factions such as the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and Donald Trump. This means that instead of being wrangled on the floor of parliaments, legislation is more likely to be wrangled and hammered out in secret. I do not think that this is good for transparency of democracy. In Australia, New Zealand, and Germany, where we you have parties in coalition to form government and parties who are not in the government but who hold the balance of power and the necessary wedge votes within parliaments, then you get open dissent on the floors of parliaments to legislation and the necessary discussion which happens, is a matter of public record. 

All of this brings me one of the reasons why I think that multi-party parliamentary systems and in particular the ones in Australia, New Zealand and Germany are better than the United States or the United Kingdom. 

Even despite single issue parties, or rather precisely because of them, there is more full-spectrum thought instead of simplistic 1 and 0 thought. There have been parties and politicians in Australia which I have found to be utterly repugnant and repulsive but I still think that their ideas should be aired in public to at least give us the chance to test those ideas and make our choices. Also, by having those different voices, the end results of legislation are also not 1 or 0 but tend towards more compromise and negotiation. 

I think that we are better off for it and still flawed anyway.

¹Ten Minute Bible Hour - Youtube 

Also the No Dumb Questions podcast. 

²We didn't always have this - https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/australias-upper-houses/11038996

Horse 2758 - Trump's Pick For The Next Supreme Court Justice Is 100% Legally Fine And The System Is Working As Intended

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has meant that the United States Supreme Court now has a vacancy that needs to be filled. Had this happened in 1960 when Eisenhower was still President, or perhaps in 1968 when LBJ was President, then very few people would have given what should be a fairly boring and non-partisan appointment, any thought at all. Since about 1980 though, and especially since 2008 when US politics has fallen into an incandescent apoplectic rage about nearly everything, this appointment has become as much in the spirit of rage and vengeance as the rest of politics.

A great deal of this has to do with the weaponisation of identity politics in about 2008 and about ten seconds after Barack Obama became the nominee for the President. Since then we've seen the Tea Party movement morph into a weird kind of nativist nationalist movement with circus ringleader and showman Donald Trump as its media star. Mr Trump who is applauded for 'saying what he thinks', very often says things which are outright racist and look like the same kinds of things said by the fascists actions Europe in the 1920s. 

The people who voted for Donald Trump certainly didn't vote for his ability to manage government and they have been duly rewarded by his complete inability to manage government. In fact, even though we are almost four years into his presidency, there are still more than 2000 positions within US Federal Government departments which should have been filled but still lie vacant. That means that people who should be running the day to day operations of those government departments are now required by law to make policy decisions and report to the various Secretaries. That explains why departments like the US Department of Health and Homeland Security have been woefully inside at doing basic functions that should have been vitally necessary in the face of a pandemic.

The people who like to cheer on small government have ultimately helped to cause unnecessary deaths in the United States due to COVID-19 and the election of Donald Trump, was a factor in that.

The overwhelming response as to why people voted for Donald Trump, wasn't his ability to run an administration but rather because he would be the who would get the Supreme Court nominations when they arose. Following the death Justice Antonin Scalia four years ago, Mitch McConnell as the Leader of the Senate, made it abundantly clear that he was not going to allow President Obama to get any of his nominations past the Senate and ran the line that that should be for the next President whoever that might be to get their nomination passed. That should be viewed in the light of political malice and given the tilt that we have seen by this current administration to almost outright racist fascism, that should have probably been expected.

McConnell:

https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ID=A3B740CE-F80C-4842-B656-11A1154B55D0

“It’s clear that concern over confirming Supreme Court nominations made near the end of a presidential term is not new. Given that we are in the midst of the presidential election process, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and I believe that it is today the American people who are best-positioned to help make this important decision — rather than a lame-duck president whose priorities and policies they just rejected in the most-recent national election."

- McConnell Statement on the Passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, 22nd Feb 2016

This time around though, the rules that applied when prosecuting one's enemies simply do not apply to one's friends. 

Normally this kind of thing would be the stuff of hypocrisy but if someone never had a moral compass to begin with, then it is a logical thing to suggest that they have defied it? Donald Trump appears to view everything through the lens of how much something benefits Donald Trump; Mitch McConnell as the defacto creator of policy, doesn't quite have that same purity of purpose but he does view things through the lens of how much something benefits his supporters, including if that thing causes harm and expense to normal people.

Also McConnell:

https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ID=825034E2-7DDD-4559-B883-12E434F73B25

By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise.

President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.

- McConnell Statement on the Passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 18th Sep 2020

Four years and a change in circumstances might make this look like rank hypocrisy but when you consider that the underlying motivation here is pure malice which has been enabled and dare I say is part of the design of the way that the three ring circus of the United States Government is put together, it should be expected.

And yet this was the prize which people voted for. Article 2, Section 2 contains the following clauses:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-2/section-2/

He (the President) shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States

As only a third of the Senate is voted for in any two year phase, then the Senate in 2016 had an almost zero percent chance of flipping to a Democratic held house. Since it is the Senate who gets to confirm the choice of the President, and the President in this case had zero skill in running an administration, then the Senate could line up whoever they wanted to and the disinterested President would rubber stamp their decision. All that was needed to enable that situation, was to convince the American public to burn the White House to the ground in order to win the Supreme Court for a generation.

It is worth remembering that the United States as a nation was started in response to the punitive measures taken by the British Government against the 13 colonies, partly as a way of funding the loss making venture that was those 13 colonies and making them contribute to their own upkeep, and partly in response to wanting to retain the right to keep slavery (which was abolished at Common Law in England in 1777, and by statute in varying degrees in 1804 and 1830). The American Revolution was in part about selling a myth to the American people, with the underlying motivation of retaining private advantage. Arguably, the Constitution reflects that; hence why it has produced results retaining private advantage except for moments when the public consciousness has fought back. The 2016 election was also about selling a myth to the American people; some of whom have bought into it with a similar cult of personality for Mr Trump that followed Mr Washington.

The US Constitution is mostly the design of the architecture laid out by James Madison (who would himself later become President) and Alexander Hamilton, the latter of whom was a serial philander and who successfully managed to get himself killed in a duel after the Vice President Aaron Burr shot him. To be honest, I do not think that either Madison or Hamilton thought through the consequences of the form of government that they'd invented; after being captivated with a kind of reverence for George Washington. The whole design of the United States Constitution shows a tremendous amount of naivety about human nature; especially when the so-called checks and balances which were built into the system can be overcome entirely by gaming out the mechanics of how it works. Everyone since the beginning of time is to some degree terrible and designing the system to bake in that terribleness for longer than the term of someone's political career is in my not very well paid opinion, proof positive that the US Constitution in so many ways is fundamentally broken and idiotic.

At this point in time and even so late in the election cycle, Trump's pick for the next Justice of the Supreme Court is in fact what the people voted for, four years ago. In this case the system is working as intended; it's just that when you have a Senate which has gamed the system and a President who always had zero  ability to run an administration, this is the expected outcome.

Horse 2757 - The Most Essential Essential Workers

 All the way back at the beginning of the pandemic, the Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) when questioned about what an 'essential worker' was said that "If you've got a job, then you are an essential worker." As someone who travels 88km to get to and from work every day, I get to look out of the train window and see for myself that the world is a complex place and that it is best to think about the kosmos as one massive swirly thing with parts that all work together. It seems to me though that there probably are some workers which actually are more 'essential' than others and as I read articles in the news that more people are being laid off and no longer fit the Prime Minister's (Scott Morrison) definition of what an 'essential worker' is, I can't help but feel that it sounds a little bit cruel.

As someone who is way way left of centre on the economic spectrum, I tend to look at everyone in the economy as those mythical creatures which are called households; who are responsible for buying things and in doing so, they are the most essential things which keep the wheels of the economy spinning. Back in 1929 everyone got really sad and stopped spending money, which meant that when they weren't buying stuff, that money didn't flow to firms who also didn't buy stuff and in turn didn't employ people to make the stuff. When everyone gets sad all at once and everyone stops buying stuff, it is called a depression.

If you were to strip back the economy to just the barest of wheels, then you find out essentially who are the essential 'essential workers' and in essence find out who you can really strip away. I do not think that there are really that many kinds of workers in the economy and this is the essential list:

1. Scientists

Scientists are the first people to do anything. They are the ones who by invention and experiment, work out how to make stuff and how the world works. 

2. Engineers

Engineers are the people who build stuff. They are the ones who come after the scientists and physically build the systems and the infrastructure which makes the world run.

3. Technicians

These are the people who come along after the engineers and they make sure that the systems and the infrastructure runs properly. 

4. Operators

These are the people who operate the machinery of the economy which actually makes the stuff that the economy has to sell. These are the people who do most of the real work in the economy.

5. Artists

These are the people who become skilled at operating the stuff in the world and make it pretty and beautiful. Artists are also employed to give form to the stuff that is being produced.

6. Recorders

These are the people who keep the records of what has been done. These are the people who you talk to if you want to plan for the future because unless you are flying a plane, every task and every decision is essentially flying backwards; based upon whatever happened before.

7. Rulemakers

These are the people who look at what's happened and decide upon the common rules that everyone will play together with. 

8. Managers

These are the people who direct others to do stuff. Management is about arranging all of the things so that whatever it is can continue.

End of list!

Literally everyone in the world who has a job can be classified according to these eight categories. If you can think of anything else then I'd like to know about it but speaking with the mindset of an engineer (I built the list), I reduced this to the fewest number of components.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, then what it has taught us is that the people who are essentially the most essential, are the operatives and the technicians. If literally everyone else in the world instantly lost their job, then these are the people who would keep the world turning. Admittedly it would be frightfully unpleasant but that's to be expected when you strip away everything to the fewest number of components. 

The real irony is that the economy hasn't been designed by the scientists who would have found new ways to do things, nor the engineers who build the systems, nor the technicians who run the systems, nor the operatives who build and make the things, nor the artists who would have made society prettier and more beautiful, nor the recorders because they can not design anything, but by the rulemakers and the managers. The sad thing is that the rulemakers and the managers largely got to those positions because they made the rules which got them there and then managed the economy to keep them there.

The poor dum-dums who actually make stuff and do the vast majority of the work in the economy are paid the fewest rewards for doing so. If they were the ones who actually stopped working, then the whole kosmos would stop spinning, everyone would stop buying stuff and when everyone gets sad all at once and everyone stops buying stuff, it is called a depression.

However what we've seen during the pandemic is that the government for its part wants to defund the scientists, some of the engineers, pay the technicians and the operators even less, destroy the artists, destroy government recorders, and then destroy the teaching capabilities of all these people; then give even more rewards of the economy to the rulemakers and the managers. I'd argue that the people in those last two categories just stayed home and did nothing all day, most of the economy would be none the wiser. I find it also cruel that when faced with the pandemic and the possibility that the disease might kill people, they're quite happy to let the technicians and the operators face the risk; while they stay home anyway. 

Horse 2756 - Let The Kids Have Their High School Formal

 2020 is a year which is unprecedented in the amount of hyperbole which has been thrown around and unprecedented in the amount of use that the word "unprecedented" has gotten. When you shine the smallest light of scrutiny upon how unprecedented this is, it ceases to be unprecedented and just looks like another thing that has happened many times over. I can't help but feel that if you look at the cholera pandemics of the 1880s, the typhoid and tuberculosis pandemics of the 1890s, and the 1918-20 Pneumonic Influenza Pandemic, then what we are currently going through is not really unprecedented but just a current failure of people to remember the past.

Someone wiser than me once said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it but for so much of history, the actual ability to remember the past is impossible because people who are living were not there. For instance, there will be people voting in the United States elections this year for whom it is impossible to remember what the events of September 11 2001 were like to witness because they weren't alive at the time. Likewise, although we can read about the past and perhaps learn something about it from those people who have left a record, when it comes to remembering it, then it is literally impossible. There must be very few people indeed, on the whole entire planet who can actually remember the 1918-20 Pneumonic Influenza Pandemic and I suspect that there would be nobody who is currently living on the planet who has a birthday in the 1800s.

As yet another reminder that we are living through something which very few people alive can remember, we are seeing the same kinds of protests, demonstrations and reactions to public health orders that the newspapers wrote about a hundred years ago. 

I was privy to one of these demonstrations this week; which happened outside of the Mosman Town Hall by parents and students from a high school in Mosman, who I later found out were arguing that the Year 12 Formal should go ahead; despite and possibly in spite of the enduring pandemic.

From what I understand, I think that they were arguing in favour of holding the Year 12 Formal outside; on Mosman Oval. In principle this sounds like a sensible idea because if this pandemic is spread by droplet transmission and putting physical space between people is excellent in mitigating the risk, then holding an event outside is a good idea. I am actually surprised that more institutions like churches and movie houses haven't moved outside because not only do maximum occupancy limits increase massively when moved outside but the basic science suggests that moving outside to the best kind of ventilated area, massively reduces the risk of community transmission. This was the most widely used solution to the problem of holding events during the 1918-20 Pneumonic Influenza Pandemic.

After the rabble had cleared out, we then had some ex-rabblers appear at our door because they wanted to have their tax returns done. Mr Seventeen and his mate Mr Eighteen arrived at our offices as cold callers, having shown some initiative and while I was quite frankly shocked to find out that Mr Seventeen had derived more than six figures of income as part of a tax minimisation strategy by his family, there's nothing illegal about that. 

The thing that I find really really odd was Mr Seventeen wanted to get his dad to leverage Mosman Council into allowing the Year 12 Formal to go ahead on Mosman Oval. I do not know how much leverage that his dad has with the council but it is certainly worth a try.

As the formal is proposed to be held on the oval, which is outside, then the chances of COVID-19 transmission are significantly lower than if they were inside. We know that the COVID-19 virus is primarily spread from person to person through respiratory droplets released into the air when talking, coughing, or sneezing. This means that people in confined spaces such as nursing homes and cruise ships are particularly susceptible to community transmission. If you are outside though, fresh air is constantly moving, which disperses the droplets; so that means that you are far less likely to breathe in enough of the respiratory droplets containing the virus that causes COVID-19 to become infected.

While I could write some piece about how there are multiple Australias and how this and indeed every pandemic affects poorer people in a more pronounced manner, I can't help but feel a sense of loss for the kids of Year 12 2020; irrespective of what economic class they come from. The pandemic doesn't care about class; nor does it discriminate against whom it chooses to visit. The fact that halls and venues all over the world have been closed as a sensible response to this public health crisis, is not only inconvenient but quite sad.

I personally can not relate to what the loss of a Year 12 Formal is like because I never went to mine. I have no idea what the asking price was but as my dad had been made redundant in the recession of the 1990s, the the Year 12 Formal was a luxury to which I was never going to be a part of. 

However, for kids who were expecting to go to their Year 12 Formal; especially in a year which has been so incredibly disrupted and disturbed, this must be heartbreaking for them. In a lot of cases, the Year 12 Formal marks possibly the last time that they will ever see some of their fellow classmates and when you already have raging hormones on top of an anxiety producing set of circumstances, this must be just awful. For them to miss out on an experience with the only people who went through the thing together, is a cruel twist of fate. 

I find myself hoping that the council will yield to their requests because just as I do not think that people deserve a lot of what they have got but should be thankful that they have won the lottery of life, I also think that people do not deserve a lot of what they get when that same lottery declares all entries to be void. In other words, just because life happens to have dealt you a better hand, doesn't therefore mean that you somehow deserve bad things happening to you more. There is no moral through line here. 

I hope that the kids of Mosman do get to hold their high school formal out on the oval if that means that it is able to go ahead. I can see how fancy clothes and terrible shoes out on the grass might make dancing difficult and I can imagine the kind of stink that the neighbours will kick up over having loud music play into the summer night but in a year which is so disrupted, a little bit more disruption isn't going to hurt. Let the kids have their high school formal on the oval. 2020 is already weird; it doesn't need to be cruel as well.

Horse 2754 - We Still Live On A Good Earth

Humans as deeply selfish and self-interested electro-mechanical meatbags which somehow contain consciousness and a conscience, have tremendous abilities to recognise patterns and to catastrophise things. Entire treatises have been written about the benefits of selfishness and arguably selfishness is the core driver which underpins economics. 

It is also probably true that apart from accident and natural disasters, every single bad thing that has happened to us since the beginning of time has been the result of someone's selfishness and/or stupidity. Note that I haven't included laziness in there as laziness is a result of someone's selfishness and/or stupidity. 

As individuals we are mostly powerless to do very much in a complex world, unless we form collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements such as families, clubs, churches, corporations, partnerships, association, and nation states. Sometimes, those very big collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements produce singular moments of insane complexity and dare I say it, wonder.

A little over 50 years ago, the United States sent 12 clowns to the moon. To the moon!

Even though the technology which underpinned the rockets ultimately came out of selfishness and the desires of a few German people to inflict the results of selfishness and cruelty on the world, and even while those clowns were on the moon there was other selfishness and cruelty being inflicted by other hmans on each other back on Earth by way of the Vietnam War, that little patch of collective effort arrangements was a bright spot in an otherwise cruel and heartless world.

On the Apollo 8 mission to fly around the moon, in one of three missions before people landed on its surface, the three astronauts read the beginning of Genesis 1; in an event which would be later challenged for legality for using government property for religious purposes. I now include that audio.

I have no idea if you are religious or not or even anti-religious but the point that I want to draw out here on September 11, which is a day which has also gone down in history for its selfishness and stupidity and which triggered still more selfishness and stupidity, is that we still live on a Good Earth.

The sun still comes up and it still goes down. Although we have almost certainly caused massive environmental damage which is going to change the weather through the effects of global warming, the chemistry, the physics, the systems, which actually sustain life upon this planet, still work. I very much think that we should direct our collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements as well as the power of our collective selfishness to look after our big spaceship because we still live on a Good Earth.

2020 which in 2019 we would have only associated with the word 'vision' is with hindsight an annus horriblus which was repeatedly warned about but which thanks to selfishness and stupidity by governments, we took very little effort to do anything about. With 2020 hindsight though, everything has come into sharp clarity. Perhaps what isn't clear amidst the Coronademic is that even in spite of our collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements being inadequate and people still arguing for their own personal selfishness and stupidity to be enacted, clouds still race across the sky, the rivers still run, the winds still blow and the trees are still eating sunlight and pooping out oxygen because we still live on a Good Earth.

If you want a distraction from the natural disaster which has currently made our lives temporarily unpleasant and if you are allowed to, go outside. Look at the trees; walk through a park or a woodland or a field; stare at the ocean. Cry if you need to. Yell all kinds of cuss words into the sky if that helps. The earth is an impersonal thing which isn't capable of caring and more importantly isn't capable of judging you. 

And it's still really really pretty because we live on a Good Earth.

Horse 2753 - RU OK Day Is OK

 I do not particularly care much about manufactured holidays such as National Muffin Day, National Ice Cream Day, or National Bowling Day because not only are there no public holidays for these things but as they are the invention of a marketing company, they also have no significance beyond selling whatever the thing in question is.

It should be in keeping with my general apathy on the matter that I also shouldn't care about RU OK Day but I can see the utility in such a day and think that discussion about mental health is important. Moreover it is important to look out for people who you care about. 

The RU OK Day website describes itself as "our national day of action when we remind Australians that every day is the day to ask, “Are you OK?” if someone in your world is struggling with life's ups and downs." While that's fine and good and proper, I do wonder about the people for whom the question is never asked. In asking "Are you OK?", if nothing else we demonstrate that that person has value of greater than zero. What happens to the people of whom the question is never asked?

I can safely say that in all the years of RU OK Day, that exactly nobody has asked if I am okay. I do not whether or not I should be glad that people think that my mental health is fine, or be hideously in despair because I matter so very little to people. I could get eaten by a bear and nobody would care. No, if I got eaten by a bear then that would be extraordinary because we don't have bears in Australia.

I have sufficiently large enough of a mental toolkit that I'm actually quite fine with nobody asking the question and even if I actually matter to nobody, I find that somewhat liberating as that means that I am also not important enough to be someone's enemy. I've probably been forced to build my own mental toolkit due to acts of insensible unkindness by people and while that's all good for me, it matters not an iota to someone who hurts.

Mental health is something that I am hopelessly unqualified to speak about. As my mind lives in a fragile shell which can be destroyed and I can only see the world from a single perspective, then any advice that I dispense should mostly never be followed. In fact, the only advice that I can offer which I can guarantee is sensible is this: Try to be kind to people.

Someone you know might be openly or secretly coping with difficult circumstances and that's more likely at the moment. Try to be kind to them. Make that phone call because if nothing else, they will know that they matter to someone. Just asking the question is proof that someone matters more than zero.

What about the people who you sort of don't know how they are going? A mind that is coping badly usually does not want to reach out for any help because that complicates things further. A mind which has already got the knives out, is also highly likely to be worried about turning them inwards. Try to be kind to them. Make that phone call.

Maybe you aren't okay. If you are reading this and are not okay, then that is perfectly acceptable. In fact, if someone is going through something awful then being happy about it might either be the response of someone lying to themselves or deliberately being stupid. It is okay not to be okay. If the issue is big enough, you might need to get out of it. Also, make the phone call. Sometimes we need to have the grace to let someone else be kind to us.

The world is mostly a selfish, self-interested, and impersonal mess. A lot of the systems which exist, exist solely to extract money and power from people. If you multiply that by more than seven billion then that means that there are an awful lot of people who are not okay. While your uniqueness is completely real, that uniqueness is a small component of a very big system. Everything worthwhile has been built by people in community who have built something bigger than themselves. If you are not okay, then you are allowed to ask for help.

I like RU OK Day. I like that this manufactured day exists because unlike National Muffin Day, National Ice Cream Day, or National Bowling Day, it exists for a greater purpose than selling things - but if you want to eat Muffins or Ice Cream, or go bowing, that's okay too.

Horse 2752 - Please Play Monopoly Properly

Hidden away in people's cupboards somewhere, is often a copy of the board game Monopoly. People also often give away different themed versions of Monopoly; wherein they are played once at Christmas and then possibly never again, once people remember that even a themed version of Monopoly is still in fact Monopoly.

The game of Monopoly was originally designed as a teaching tool to teach people that an unrestricted rentier class ends up ruining the world for everyone and that unfettered Monopolies of property are horrible things.

It is an almost universally acknowledged truth, that everyone who has played Monopoly ends up hating it. This is mostly due to the fact that practically everyone plays the game incorrectly and has made up house rules which make the game not function properly.

For instance:

1) There are no rules that say that taxes and penalties from Chance and Community Chest go in the middle of the board.

2) Nowhere in the rules does it say that you get any reward for landing on Free Parking whatsoever. As far as I can make out Free Parking serves no function at all in the game, other than being the corner square.

3) Nowhere in the rules does it say that you have to go on a tour of the board before you can buy property.

4) Moreover, if a property is turned in without being bought, the rules actually say that an auction must be held immediately.

If you have been playing with any of these rules, stop. The game of Monopoly is actually designed so that there's not enough money in the game to keep everyone solvent. Any additional injections of cash, merely prolong the pain. 

I implore you, in the name of Uncle Rich Pennybags to play the game of Monopoly properly; that way you might find that it isn't deserving of all the hatred that is heaped upon it. That's your fault for not ever reading or following the rules properly, you little monsters.

On that fourth point, when someone does land on a property and doesn't immediately buy it at the listed price, then you should hold an auction. In fact, deliberately turning down a property and then buying it at the following auction might save you a pretty penny. 

Conducting auctions in Monopoly is actually ludicrously easy and provided you actually play the game properly, an entire game of Monopoly can actually be over in about 25 minutes. One of the best ways to conduct a lot of auctions in a game of Monopoly is to run them all as silent auctions.

Have everyone participating in the auction write down their bid on a piece of paper and turn them in to the banker. Whoever wins the auction, at whatever price they have written down, including if it is £1 or £10,000 is the price which they will be held to; including if it bankrupts them in the process - Especially if it bankrupts them in the process. 

If in the event that someone wins an auction with a ludicrously stupidly high bid and they are bankrupted in the process, those properties need not be landed upon again and may be reauctioned immediately.

The reason why Monopoly is actually not a terrible game but why it ends up being terrible is because people fundamentally misunderstand what the game is. To be honest, a game where you roll dice and move tokens around the board is pretty boring and that is why Candyland which is a zero player game, is only really of interest to children under the age of seven. The Monopoly board while being iconic is not actually the game but only the apparatus to help play the game. The actual game, which is even stated on the box, is that it is a property trading game.

If you conduct auctions right after the first roll of the dice, then not only does the game begin immediately but the psychological battle also begins.

The game is actually pretty well designed. Under the absolute best set of conditions, the value of money coming into the economy is just a shade over 13% but as money is sunk into property. What that means is that as the amount paid as 'salary' for passing Go remains fixed, then this has the effect of making real wages growth go backwards. As cash is sunk into property improvements (houses, hotels, or bonuses for owning monopolies) then the value of return on that property begins to vastly exceed the rate of new cash being generated, then there is a tipping point where those people who have postioned themselves the best, are the most likely to win. If the game is played properly and auctions are held right from the start, then the rate of return on property very quickly rises to more than 10% as real wages growth falls below that number.

If everyone knows all of this from the outset, then the game becomes far more interesting than the usual boring phase at the beginning where everyone sits around semi-patiently and waits for everyone else to faff about. If played properly and actually according to the rules as printed, then Monopoly is actually quite a fast game of nastiness.

I have been in a game where someone bought Mayfair for £201 in the auction and then immediately mortgaged it. Pay $201, get back £200; which means that they actually effectively bought the thing for £1 net and took the power of the "Advance token to Mayfair" card out of the game; plus they had an almost useless thing to give away in lieu of cash when the bankruptcy man comes knocking at the door.

The other thing about holding auctions which you're probably not doing, is that they can be held for literally any asset at any time in the game. There is nothing to prevent you from auctioning off a property at any time, nor is there anything in the rules to prevent you from auctioning off a Get Out Of Gaol Free Card. Truth be told, an auction is actually the most effective way to determine what the actual value of a thing is at any given point in time. The other thing about a private auction as opposed to one being conducted by the bank is that even in a silent auction, you can set a silent reserve price; which means that if the bids aren't high enough, you can turn all of them down.

The next time that anyone thinks about playing Monopoly, don't dismiss it out of hand because it's 'boring'. The reason why it is boring is almost certainly on your head; if you played by the rules instead of making up nonsensical house rules which break the game, you might find that Monopoly unmortgages itself.

Horse 2751 - Nothing Funny About Attacking BBC Comedy

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1330138/bbc-left-wing-bias-comedy-shows-commissioner-tim-davie-tv-licence-fee

BRITONS support the new BBC commissioner's proposals to scrap left-wing comedy shows, according to an Express.co.uk poll.

The BBC’s new commissioner, Tim Davie, has vowed to tackle alleged left-wing bias in the corporation’s comedy shows. Some programmes could be axed altogether, while others will have to ensure they project a wider range of views on issues such as Brexit.

Express.co.uk readers have overwhelmingly backed such a move, if the plans were to go ahead.

- The Express, 1st Sep 2020

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/bbc-left-wing-comedy-shows-tim-davie-reactions-conservatives-a9698521.html

Tim Davie, the new director-general of the BBC, is reportedly planning to tackle perceived “left-wing bias” in the corporation’s comedy sector. Mr Davie’s first speech in his new position on Thursday will reveal plans to restore “trust and confidence” in the BBC, according to The Daily Telegraph.

There could be an expectation of BBC programme-makers to find a more “balanced” list of satirical targets for comedians, as opposed to jokes that consistently take aim at the Conservatives.

- The Independent, 1st Sep 2020

There have been reports coming from both without and within the BBC that the new Director General of the Corporation, intends to sweep through the Beeb and start cutting budgets for television shows which display left-wing bias. Evidently the same kind of people who have white-anted our own ABC in Australia, have been appointed to positions of patronage by the Tories in as much of a piquant of ideological based acidification, as what has happened here in Australia.

Unlike the last time that this kind of purge happened at the BBC, the memories of people who served the nation in times of war no longer exist and it has become increasingly obvious that anything and everything that keeps the general populace informed about what the economic owners of the country want to do, must be kicked apart.

The thing is though is that comedy by its very nature, sets itself up against power; for the very practical reason that laughter is one of humanity's coping mechanisms against horrible things. It doesn't help that apart from natural disasters, literally every bad thing that happens in the world is the result of someone's selfishness and/or stupidity. The classic elements which form comedy (sarcasm, surrealism, vanity, surprise, wordplay) are all directed at taking a given set of conditions and rules and then subverting them. Political comedy is mostly about taking those elements and directing them against the horribleness perpetrated by whoever is in charge; and because government has broadly shifted to the economic right and the authoritarian north over the last 40 years, that's where the sights of comedy are most likely to be directed.

Comedy in principle is a subset of stories in general. Virtually every story since the beginning of time follows at barest, the structure of: Situation, Conflict, Resolution, and Denouement. Most television shows and films (and even longer form series) follow this almost formulaically to the point where you can actually track to the minute where you are within a story. Mrs Rollo and I were watching a comedy program on the telly recently and because we were at the exact lowest point in the story for the main character, I commented that we were at "16 minutes" (being 25 x ⅔); we were actually at 16:33. Once you know how stories work because humans are pattern recognising machines, it becomes impossible not to notice this type of thing.

That second element of how a story is built, is why political comedy if it exists, is usually going to set itself up in opposition to the prevailing power structures; whatever they happen to be. Comedy almost always sets itself up against the people in government irrespective of political persuasion and the rich and powerful. Admittedly comedy does set itself up against the poor and downtrodden but because they are already being beaten up by society, comedy in opposition to the poor and downtrodden tends to look cruel. That kind of comedy is the comedy of the bully; which is almost always an '-ist' (sexist, racist, ableist, classist, nativist). It should be noted that nobody much likes being the subject which comedy is being set up against; it's just that the rich and powerful are more of an acceptable target because they have the ability to walk away from the consequences more pleasantly.

The fact that the Director General of the BBC who is a Tory appointment, hates left wing comedy and wants to defund it, cancel it, and shut it down, is perfectly understandable. The fact that rich people don't like to be ridiculed is no different whatsoever to anyone else; it's just that they have the ability to exact punitive measures against the people who ridicule them. 

Fitting the general theory of how comedy works over the top of the political compass, also gives you a pretty good idea of why right-wing comedy is so rare and why there is a tendency towards left-wing comedy.

On the left-right spectrum of economics (completely state owned collectivism on the left to completely privately owned individualism on the right), there actually isn't all that much space for comedy at all. Remember, comedy requires conflict and just on a pure economic scale, all you get are technical discussions about what is appropriate for people to own. Comedy is fought on the material of character mostly and for that you need the overlay of the north-south authoritarian-libertarian spectrum.

Comedy which sets itself up against libertarians trades heavily on the ridicule of vanity. Comedy against libertarians is for the most part, done by libertarians against themselves. Comedy which sets itself up against authoritarianism, is in fact where the vast majority of political comedy lives; it is far easier to write material which makes sport of the stupidity and vanity of those who exact power, than those who advocate for open liberal democracy. Comedy against authoritarianism looks pretty similar in both collectivist and individualist economies. Comedy against Khrushchev, Honecker, Thatcher, Reagan, Stalin, and Mao, once you remove the names, may as well be identical; even though their economic views of the world are totally different.

You can of course write comedy which is not much more than parody but that's not really politically driven; even though the targets might very well be. The other point worth mentioning in relation to this is that comedy which is targeted against Libertarians, generally has no ability to find a foothold for the simple reason that almost due to the very nature of governance itself, government and the enactment of policy doesn't happen without whoever is in charge having some weight of authority to be able to enact policy. Whether they like it or not (or even because they know it) governance doesn't simply disappear because the state has stepped out of the way. When that happens, private governance happens; which is often even more authoritarian than organised government.

I say all of this because I think that it is exceptionally difficult for right-wing comedy to be funny. Once you've attacked the people on the economic left for inefficiency (which requires deliberate and willful blindness on the right) or attacked Libertarians on matters of style, there's not really a whole heap of interesting or funny places to go. Calling out wokeness (whatever that's supposed to be) doesn't really provide enough grist for the mill of comedy. I honestly can not think of any really funny right-wing comedy and it isn't through lack of trying. On the other hand, left-wing comedy almost always attacks the apparatus of power itself.

No doubt that the BBC will enact the policy coming from the Director General and start purging comedians; then we shall see just how unfunny the right actually is. Silencing voices of dissent is an authoritarian concept and is completely divorced from the left-right economic spectrum. However, in the setting of a right shifted economic environment where the private owners of capital are the ones making policy, then it's very easy to see what voices they want silence and why. Comedy doesn't live on the right because there's nothing that you can kick against, if you already own everything. 

Horse 2750 - No One's Around To Help

 One of the surprise cultural touchstones of 2020 has been the popularity of the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The game is an open world builder in which you progressively build an island resort thing for a bunch of animals. 

In the current time of Coronavirus, I think that people are looking for a distraction from not only the world that waits outside but the always ever present world that lives inside people. Animal Crossing provides a very cute sandbox to play inside; with a heap of characters be who are mostly equally cute. 

I think that the world that we've collectively built for ourselves in the twenty-first century is more in line with the projected dystopia of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' or Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' than George Orwell's '1984'; for the simple reason that the organisations which want to sell stuff to us, have all found it easier to bait us with honey than scare us with force. 

The big problem that neither Huxley nor Bradbury could address, is what happens when we find out that our permanently-happy-drug-Soma-filled holiday, or the TV show with the Screaming Clown is over? Then what? In all three of these dystopias, the main character is broken to some degree and owing to the way that this kind of literature works, there is no method offered of putting anyone back together again. In fact the only solution ever offered, if indeed you can call it that, is in Brave New World and that solution is a sort of drug induced suicide. That is certainly no way to live. In the world that we've created and are currently living in, we've built for ourselves the ability to be entertained constantly and yet, people are still finding that our Soma-filled holiday has stopped and there's no method of putting anyone back together again.

One question posed in a Zoom group that I was in recently was "What is the biggest disease in the world today?" and while there are lots of compelling answers such as people's selfishness, cruelty, thoughtlessness, ignorance, racism, fear, and megalomania, the one disease which I am finding compellingly visible in other people, is the enduring diseases of loneliness which has been exacerbated by social distancing or isolation.

The one thing which this current moment in time has taught lots of people, is that who you were before this, is the biggest determinant on how you are going to react to it. Likewise, when the next big catastrophic thing comes (and it will do) the person who you are you are going into it, will be the person who is left to deal with it.

I mention that I have observed this in other people because although I like everyone else who has ever lived knows what it is like to be lonely, I have probably also learned that it is fine to be alone as well. Admittedly the method by which I was taught that by society at large was probably unfriendly, it is still a valuable thing to learn.

I also feel as though I have certain unfair advantages in all of this: namely that due to the nature of my job which is in an office and is still ongoing, and because I am married which means that I always come home to someone lovely, and because I am connected to a church community, my life has probably been the least disrupted of everyone that I know. 

I also have another advantage which I am unexpectedly grateful for; that is that I have had some truly awful experiences that I wouldn't wish on anyone. I know what it's like to be that kid on the outside; whom people have decided that they don't like. I know what it's like to be actually forgotten and left somewhere. I know what it's like to have people waiting for you who want to be nasty to you. I know what it's like to feel so alone that you don't know how to ask any questions that might help you. If that sounds like a really strange thing to be grateful for, then it's worth considering what the effects of that are.

Granted that I am probably not the most radiant or likeable person in the world but if I am the one who has to live inside this, then to a very very large degree, I have had to build the fortress of my mind from the inside. When the world without is very much not a holiday, then the world within has to become a refuge.

What does any of this have to do with Animal Crossing? This:

As someone who has never played the game but who has seen videos of other people either playing it or sharing highlights from it, then I understand that the game actively encourages you to find friends to help you out. This however, is the loading screen which comes up when there is no one around to help.

Bob the Cat is aware that there is no one around to help and yet he looks like he is fine with it. We can layer what ever story we like on top of Bob because this is an open canvas; so the story that I want to lay on this is one of resilience. We have no idea exactly how Bob got to be this way but almost certainly it has cost him a lot of pain and suffering because virtue and character is invariably paid for with the coin of pain and suffering. We can see Bob dancing but we can't see all of the thousands of steps that brought him here. 

I think that this current pandemic is forcing a lot of people who have maybe never experienced social isolation to finally confront it; in possibly the brutal way imaginable. Maybe for the first time in a long time, some people have had to work out how to operate when their entire set of social networks have been placed on pause.

I don't really want to diminish the importance of mental health here, because that's a whole other set of really important and serious questions. If you think that you need help, or think that you know someone who needs help with mental health care, get help.

Setting that aside for a bit, I will ask the question of what happens when there is no one around to help? 

I am hardly qualified to offer anything like meaningful advice but I will suggest that this current pandemic has brought into sharp focus, the importance of cultivating an inner life. There are certainly people in the world of whom it would appear on the outside that they never pause to think about anything deeply at all and I suspect that those kinds of people, who are also more likely to be extroverted and draw their energy from outside of themselves, are also more likely to be impacted when that source is removed. If someone's personal mine of thought is shallow, then they are going to find it more difficult to mine for new thought if they have to break the ground for the first time.

My sort of global observation here is that people who have already gone through something hard, generally find it easier to go through something else hard because the tools which they have forged through experience have been work hardened. It could also be that having been through a hard experience, means that they already have the tools in hand to cope with the next hard thing.

I fully endorse the idea that humans are social creatures and that we supposed to live in community. Even hyper-capitalists are hyper-hypocrites if you investigate this as an idea because they will promote the idea of a corporation which by very definition is just another collective purchasing arrangement. Virtually every big thing that people have built has been a collective effort by people working together, even if the rewards for that effort haven't fairly (and in a lot of cases, brutally unfairly) distributed.

However, this pandemic apart from asking us how we look after ourselves collectively is also asking us individually how we look after ourselves.

The other thing of note here is that this pandemic has also not been fair with what it has metered out to everyone. The trouble that it has brought has not in any way been handed out evenly or fairly. Despite all of this, those people to whom the world previously been unkind to, seem to have better coping skills in this moment when the world is being unkind to everyone. Those unpopular virtues of patience, long-suffering, and what not, are expensively won. 

No one is around to help - and for some people, that might not be all that hard to deal with because it isn't new. For Bob though, no-one's around to help and that's fine.