I mean, if you look at the entire history of the human race, abusing power by grabbing power is human nature. This has literally been going on for thousands of years longer than the Conservative party has existed. Humans being shitty to each other is human nature. There has never been a point in history when humans have lived side by side in perfect harmony, without anybody taking more than their fair share or abusing whatever power they seized for themselves.
And no, believing Tories are humans doesn’t contradict holding them to account. Expecting (as in, anticipating that) people will behave perfectly contradicts holding them to account. That’s literally the basis for the “good chaps” principle in government: that people will behave themselves and therefore don’t need rules to hold them to account. Recognising that people don’t behave perfectly and are party to the base impulses of human nature is why we create rules to hold them to account; it sets a boundary for what is acceptable, and it creates consequences for when that boundary is broken. If you put politicians up on a pedestal, thinking that they must inherently be better than everyone else, that’s when you create the conditions that allow abuse of power, because they’re not inherently better than other people. They’re just people.
I think we’re actually in agreement in principle here, but are disagreeing on semantics. We both agree that rules should be in place to prevent abuse of power. We should expect (as in, insist that) politicians maintain high standards of behaviour. Where we differ is in how realistic we think it is for politicians to inherently meet those standards. I think it isn’t realistic, and that’s why rules need to exist, so that we can say “we set these rules, you knew about the rules, and you broke the rules, so this consequence is now being imposed”.
Most crimes stem from human nature too. Humans doing human things, in response to human emotions and human experiences with life. But they cross boundaries that have been set (generally in the name of ensuring the safety of others), so the fact that the action stemmed from human nature doesn’t mean we don’t impose consequences or hold people accountable for their actions. It’s in knowing that some people will break laws that mean we need to have them. We don’t have laws against things that nobody is going to do, and if nobody ever, say, committed murder, it would be unnecessary to have laws about it. The very fact that murder happens is what necessitates having laws saying that we don’t accept it in our society. And while it’s nice to hope that one day we can have a world where nobody murders anyone and everyone just lives up to that standard inherently, in the meantime we accept reality as it is: sometimes this is something that happens, and no matter what the very human motivation was behind it, we still hold murderers to account. And we (should) still treat murderers like humans, rather than dehumanising them.
Remembering that breaking laws/rules stems from human nature helps to ensure we don’t dehumanise those who cross the boundaries. When you start saying “it’s not human nature to do X”, it becomes entirely too easy to start dehumanising those who do X. That holds true for politicians too. We’d like them to behave perfectly, and we should hold them to account when they break the rules (and we should set those rules pronto), but we shouldn’t treat it as an aberration when they fail. We should anticipate that they will screw up sometimes. Because they will.
The thing that really changed for me when I started following politics closely was that I saw how incredibly human these people are. All of them. And yeah, lots of them are stupid, many of them are misguided, far too many are incompetent and in over their heads, and a few are malicious. Sometimes I want to grab them and shake them and tell them to stop being so short-sighted. But they’re not monsters or robots. They’re just… people doing what people do. They lack self-awareness and empathy, to levels that seem pretty consistent with the lives they’ve had, but ascribing some grand scheme to their largely disorganised flailing just doesn’t seem realistic to me.
I would agree with what you are saying, but evidence of premeditation is very prevalent here. Everything the Tories have done is by design and under advice.
Braverman and Patel do not give a crap about the amount of refugees that come into the country. They are stoking a furnace to justify their inactions. The reality is that people are making money from those refugees being held in stasis, and that in turn creates Tory donations. Truss has evidence of misappropriation that should be looked into. Sunak will jump on a plane quicker than you can pack a bag once he looses the election, because he knows how quickly the light will be shined in his direction. Zahawi, Johnson, Hunt, Anderson, the list goes on and on. When a group of people do this sort of thing deliberately, then there is no excuses and only collective responsibility.
You think these people are incredibly human, and yet all I see is role play. To me, it is an act and nothing more. Look into US politics and the similarities are so stark on many levels.
Your idea that this is human behaviour holds water, as this will happen again unless steps are taken. Where we differ is that I see this as unacceptable human behaviour, and you are saying it is understandable actions of human beings. That may be semantics, but to me it is crucial to holding these people to account. The idea of holding to account is not about retribution or justice. The Tories have committed the biggest heist the UK has ever seen. People have suffered and even died because of it. I never want to see this happen in the UK again.
ascribing some grand scheme to their largely disorganised flailing just doesn’t seem realistic to me.
A final note to prove a point. If Sunak really wants to improve the country he will want his party to succeed. My belief is that he really does not. There are two by-elections this week. You will not see Sunak on any canvas trail. You may get a twitter note wishing the candidates good luck. I doubt you will see anything more than that. This is a sign of utter contempt for his own party and the constituents they serve.
I believe Sunak is in it for that last gig. He wants the India deal. I do not believe in anyway shape or form that he wishes to be an MP after the next election. I highly doubt he will canvas his own area at the next GE. I would not be surprised in the slightest if something is released about him once the India deal is signed, something that will sour his chances of being re-elected. If this one turns out to be correct then you can only conclude it is by “grand design”.
Where we differ is that I see this as unacceptable human behaviour, and you are saying it is understandable actions of human beings.
We don’t differ here, actually. A lot of human behaviour is understandable but still unacceptable. Like, again, most crimes. One can understand the human impulse behind the crime without thinking it’s acceptable behaviour. I simply draw a distinction between being angry/annoyed/whatever because of the action, while not devoting energy to hating the person.
And yeah, a lot of politics is acting. Doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to see what’s underneath that. That’s the human element I see. Not humanity in, say, Braverman’s vicious, spiteful rhetoric, but the massive lack of self-esteem underneath. Not humanity in Johnson’s egregious lies, but in the emotionally damaged toddler underneath. I don’t think it excuses or justifies the behaviour, I just think it explains it. All the lies, corruption, fraud, financial gain, etc… not acceptable, they should all lose their jobs (and arrested if it rises to the level of criminality). But they’re still just behaving in ways that we know humans behave when they’re in a position to get away with it, because we haven’t developed a sufficiently rigorous means of making sure they can’t get away with it. Where everyone in this thread seems to be wilfully misunderstanding me is assuming that because I understand why they’re doing it, it means I think it’s okay and that they shouldn’t be held to account. Knowing why someone did something unacceptable doesn’t mean it’s okay that they did it or that they shouldn’t face consequences for their actions, whatever those consequences may be. It’s just about not engaging with a tribalistic “I’m good, they’re evil” mentality. Hatred and black and white thinking is corrosive of democracy and of society as a whole, regardless of who is doing it, and it’s impossible to hate someone when you’ve taken the time to consider what normal human impulses are driving them. You can still judge the action, while refusing to fall into the trap of perceiving them as less human or more malicious than you are.
Sunak is weak. He’s an intelligent enough guy, but he’s not assertive enough to actually control his party, and that’s what’s necessary to make it succeed. He wants it to succeed, he just doesn’t have the strength to make it happen, ultimately because so many of the MP’s are fucked up emotionally stunted children who are too unruly for someone as weak as Sunak to wrangle. He’s also got a lot of that traditional conservative “if you want to succeed, you should put in the work yourself” mentality, because that’s how life has always seemed to go for him - ignoring, of course, that he had a lot of luck in his favour, and advantages that others never had access to. A lot of people who’ve had fairly easy lives think their success is because they worked really hard, when the reality is they’ve often had to work less hard than others. Sunak is intelligent, but because he’s sailed through life on easy mode, he’s actually pretty lazy and isn’t able to work hard to get through a real challenge.
A description I saw of him a month or two ago (from a left-leaning publication) really resonated with me: he is actually working as hard as he can, and he really resents the fact that right now, it’s not getting him what he feels he deserves, and he’s annoyed with the fact that the electorate aren’t sufficiently grateful. That would be because he’s trying to give the country what he thinks it needs, rather than what it actually needs, with the result being that the electorate have nothing to be grateful for. Sunak’s biggest weakness is in believing that everybody should be just like him. He can’t control his party because most of them aren’t like him, and he can’t relate to the electorate because most of them aren’t like him either. Doesn’t mean he’s evil, just kind of spoiled and insulated from the realities of life for most people.
Definitely agree Sunak will jump on a plane and head back to the US when he loses the election, though. Not because he’s fleeing the scene of the crime, so to speak, but purely because it’ll be a “they don’t understand my brilliance, so they don’t deserve to have me” tantrum. He’ll want to go somewhere where he feels people “get” how “brilliant” he is.
Always good to hear a different view, but when the evidence is so vast, you have to wonder what it would take to convince some people just how parasitic these scum are. Enjoy your day.
I mean, if you look at the entire history of the human race, abusing power by grabbing power is human nature. This has literally been going on for thousands of years longer than the Conservative party has existed. Humans being shitty to each other is human nature. There has never been a point in history when humans have lived side by side in perfect harmony, without anybody taking more than their fair share or abusing whatever power they seized for themselves.
And no, believing Tories are humans doesn’t contradict holding them to account. Expecting (as in, anticipating that) people will behave perfectly contradicts holding them to account. That’s literally the basis for the “good chaps” principle in government: that people will behave themselves and therefore don’t need rules to hold them to account. Recognising that people don’t behave perfectly and are party to the base impulses of human nature is why we create rules to hold them to account; it sets a boundary for what is acceptable, and it creates consequences for when that boundary is broken. If you put politicians up on a pedestal, thinking that they must inherently be better than everyone else, that’s when you create the conditions that allow abuse of power, because they’re not inherently better than other people. They’re just people.
I think we’re actually in agreement in principle here, but are disagreeing on semantics. We both agree that rules should be in place to prevent abuse of power. We should expect (as in, insist that) politicians maintain high standards of behaviour. Where we differ is in how realistic we think it is for politicians to inherently meet those standards. I think it isn’t realistic, and that’s why rules need to exist, so that we can say “we set these rules, you knew about the rules, and you broke the rules, so this consequence is now being imposed”.
Most crimes stem from human nature too. Humans doing human things, in response to human emotions and human experiences with life. But they cross boundaries that have been set (generally in the name of ensuring the safety of others), so the fact that the action stemmed from human nature doesn’t mean we don’t impose consequences or hold people accountable for their actions. It’s in knowing that some people will break laws that mean we need to have them. We don’t have laws against things that nobody is going to do, and if nobody ever, say, committed murder, it would be unnecessary to have laws about it. The very fact that murder happens is what necessitates having laws saying that we don’t accept it in our society. And while it’s nice to hope that one day we can have a world where nobody murders anyone and everyone just lives up to that standard inherently, in the meantime we accept reality as it is: sometimes this is something that happens, and no matter what the very human motivation was behind it, we still hold murderers to account. And we (should) still treat murderers like humans, rather than dehumanising them.
Remembering that breaking laws/rules stems from human nature helps to ensure we don’t dehumanise those who cross the boundaries. When you start saying “it’s not human nature to do X”, it becomes entirely too easy to start dehumanising those who do X. That holds true for politicians too. We’d like them to behave perfectly, and we should hold them to account when they break the rules (and we should set those rules pronto), but we shouldn’t treat it as an aberration when they fail. We should anticipate that they will screw up sometimes. Because they will.
The thing that really changed for me when I started following politics closely was that I saw how incredibly human these people are. All of them. And yeah, lots of them are stupid, many of them are misguided, far too many are incompetent and in over their heads, and a few are malicious. Sometimes I want to grab them and shake them and tell them to stop being so short-sighted. But they’re not monsters or robots. They’re just… people doing what people do. They lack self-awareness and empathy, to levels that seem pretty consistent with the lives they’ve had, but ascribing some grand scheme to their largely disorganised flailing just doesn’t seem realistic to me.
I would agree with what you are saying, but evidence of premeditation is very prevalent here. Everything the Tories have done is by design and under advice.
Braverman and Patel do not give a crap about the amount of refugees that come into the country. They are stoking a furnace to justify their inactions. The reality is that people are making money from those refugees being held in stasis, and that in turn creates Tory donations. Truss has evidence of misappropriation that should be looked into. Sunak will jump on a plane quicker than you can pack a bag once he looses the election, because he knows how quickly the light will be shined in his direction. Zahawi, Johnson, Hunt, Anderson, the list goes on and on. When a group of people do this sort of thing deliberately, then there is no excuses and only collective responsibility.
You think these people are incredibly human, and yet all I see is role play. To me, it is an act and nothing more. Look into US politics and the similarities are so stark on many levels.
Your idea that this is human behaviour holds water, as this will happen again unless steps are taken. Where we differ is that I see this as unacceptable human behaviour, and you are saying it is understandable actions of human beings. That may be semantics, but to me it is crucial to holding these people to account. The idea of holding to account is not about retribution or justice. The Tories have committed the biggest heist the UK has ever seen. People have suffered and even died because of it. I never want to see this happen in the UK again.
A final note to prove a point. If Sunak really wants to improve the country he will want his party to succeed. My belief is that he really does not. There are two by-elections this week. You will not see Sunak on any canvas trail. You may get a twitter note wishing the candidates good luck. I doubt you will see anything more than that. This is a sign of utter contempt for his own party and the constituents they serve.
I believe Sunak is in it for that last gig. He wants the India deal. I do not believe in anyway shape or form that he wishes to be an MP after the next election. I highly doubt he will canvas his own area at the next GE. I would not be surprised in the slightest if something is released about him once the India deal is signed, something that will sour his chances of being re-elected. If this one turns out to be correct then you can only conclude it is by “grand design”.
We don’t differ here, actually. A lot of human behaviour is understandable but still unacceptable. Like, again, most crimes. One can understand the human impulse behind the crime without thinking it’s acceptable behaviour. I simply draw a distinction between being angry/annoyed/whatever because of the action, while not devoting energy to hating the person.
And yeah, a lot of politics is acting. Doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to see what’s underneath that. That’s the human element I see. Not humanity in, say, Braverman’s vicious, spiteful rhetoric, but the massive lack of self-esteem underneath. Not humanity in Johnson’s egregious lies, but in the emotionally damaged toddler underneath. I don’t think it excuses or justifies the behaviour, I just think it explains it. All the lies, corruption, fraud, financial gain, etc… not acceptable, they should all lose their jobs (and arrested if it rises to the level of criminality). But they’re still just behaving in ways that we know humans behave when they’re in a position to get away with it, because we haven’t developed a sufficiently rigorous means of making sure they can’t get away with it. Where everyone in this thread seems to be wilfully misunderstanding me is assuming that because I understand why they’re doing it, it means I think it’s okay and that they shouldn’t be held to account. Knowing why someone did something unacceptable doesn’t mean it’s okay that they did it or that they shouldn’t face consequences for their actions, whatever those consequences may be. It’s just about not engaging with a tribalistic “I’m good, they’re evil” mentality. Hatred and black and white thinking is corrosive of democracy and of society as a whole, regardless of who is doing it, and it’s impossible to hate someone when you’ve taken the time to consider what normal human impulses are driving them. You can still judge the action, while refusing to fall into the trap of perceiving them as less human or more malicious than you are.
Sunak is weak. He’s an intelligent enough guy, but he’s not assertive enough to actually control his party, and that’s what’s necessary to make it succeed. He wants it to succeed, he just doesn’t have the strength to make it happen, ultimately because so many of the MP’s are fucked up emotionally stunted children who are too unruly for someone as weak as Sunak to wrangle. He’s also got a lot of that traditional conservative “if you want to succeed, you should put in the work yourself” mentality, because that’s how life has always seemed to go for him - ignoring, of course, that he had a lot of luck in his favour, and advantages that others never had access to. A lot of people who’ve had fairly easy lives think their success is because they worked really hard, when the reality is they’ve often had to work less hard than others. Sunak is intelligent, but because he’s sailed through life on easy mode, he’s actually pretty lazy and isn’t able to work hard to get through a real challenge.
A description I saw of him a month or two ago (from a left-leaning publication) really resonated with me: he is actually working as hard as he can, and he really resents the fact that right now, it’s not getting him what he feels he deserves, and he’s annoyed with the fact that the electorate aren’t sufficiently grateful. That would be because he’s trying to give the country what he thinks it needs, rather than what it actually needs, with the result being that the electorate have nothing to be grateful for. Sunak’s biggest weakness is in believing that everybody should be just like him. He can’t control his party because most of them aren’t like him, and he can’t relate to the electorate because most of them aren’t like him either. Doesn’t mean he’s evil, just kind of spoiled and insulated from the realities of life for most people.
Definitely agree Sunak will jump on a plane and head back to the US when he loses the election, though. Not because he’s fleeing the scene of the crime, so to speak, but purely because it’ll be a “they don’t understand my brilliance, so they don’t deserve to have me” tantrum. He’ll want to go somewhere where he feels people “get” how “brilliant” he is.
Always good to hear a different view, but when the evidence is so vast, you have to wonder what it would take to convince some people just how parasitic these scum are. Enjoy your day.
You have a nice day too. Sharing different views is good, even if we end up agreeing to disagree and parting ways amicably. :)