Tag: dealing with idiots

The world has loved, hated and envied the U.S. Now, for the first time, we pity it.

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Writing in the Irish Times, Fintan O’toole says:

“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

“It is hard not to feel sorry for Americans,” he states. “Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

“It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time — willfully, malevolently, vindictively,” he added. “It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

“The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.”

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I thought it was a joke

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but no. Drumpf actually retweeted this…

Nero, according to ancient tradition, climbed to the top of his city walls and fiddled as Rome burned. While the historical accuracy can be questioned, the moral of the story is typically used to criticize someone for doing something trivial and nonsensical in the midst of a crisis.

So Drumpf’s retweet of his social-media manager’s tweet showing him playing a fiddle couldn’t be more timely, considering the continued spread of the coronavirus (which will all be sorted in a week, because the US has the best, most beautiful, testing kits) and the fact that the Dow Jones plunged more than 2,000 points early in start of week trading and triggered the stop-breakers.

You can’t make this shit up. Up is down, left is right, the world is going mad…

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Vote early, vote often!

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MPs voted by 438 to 20 to have a pre-Christmas election in what is expected to be the most unpredictable contest in a generation.

After Johnson failed to take the UK out of the EU on October 31 as promised, the major battle line will be drawn along on the subject of Brexit. Sadly, he didn’t die in a ditch. Yet another promise that wasn’t upheld.

The Conservatives will campaign to get Brexit done by pushing through Johnson’s deal, while Labour is promising a second referendum to let the people resolve the EU question.

The Brexit party will try to outgun the Tories by arguing for a no deal Brexit, while the Liberal Democrats will seek remain votes from Labour by pledging to revoke article 50.

God knows how the vote will be split once everything is tallied.

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It shouldn’t be this complicated 

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I went to get letter notarized today. Took 10 minutes, great! Get home, realize that they put my name as Richard Gaston and not Richard Gaston Cote (Gaston is my middle name). So go back to the cabinet. They reprint a sheet, have it signed by big boss. Except that now, the date is wrong. They reprint it again, get it signed by big boss again. Name OK, date OK. 

Every time they do this they unstaple and restaple the letter. The front page now looks like Swiss cheese with the number of holes in it. 

And I’ll have to go back again tomorrow, because I am a Ms Richard Gaston Cote, and they verified her identity against official documents.

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Op-Ed from the Guardian – not mincing words

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After a Brussels press conference punctuated with knowing sighs, in which he again made clear the withdrawal agreement was not up for renegotiation but that – as a gesture of goodwill – he was willing to entertain sensible alternative suggestions from the UK government, the EU council’s president concluded with a simple thought. “I’ve been wondering,” he mused, “what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.

This was Donald Tusk unplugged. A politician tired of diplomacy that kept going nowhere – ‘What bit of backstop doesn’t the UK get?’ – and happy for once to speak his mind. “They’ll give you a terrible time in the British press for that,” whispered a delighted Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach. Tusk merely smiled. “Yes, I know. Hahaha.” He no longer cared that much what anyone thought. He had tried to be nice to the Brits but all you got in return was news bulletins with Theresa May in a Spitfire and people comparing the EU’s aims with Hitler.

In any case, his question had been largely rhetorical. That special place in hell was only too familiar; it looks pretty much like where we are now. It wasn’t one reserved only for an incompetent and negligent elite of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Theresa May and the rest. Whatever hell they had in mind, they were taking the rest of us with them. Hell wasn’t other people, it was the whole lot of us.

A UK where everything was steadily getting a little worse by the day. One where the only hope left was that things might not get quite as bad as everyone feared. A reality show for self-harmers and the terminally depressed, hosted by Jacob Rees-Mogg. A land of unmanaged decline. The direction of travel was clear. All that remained unanswered was in which circle of hell we were located.

Original link here

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