Bye, bye, Boris!

When I went to bed last night, British prime minister Boris Johnson was defiantly claiming that he would stay on even as there was a steady stream of resignations by members of his government and of Conservative party officials, coupled with reports that those cabinet members still remaining had urged him privately to resign because he had lost too much support. Johnson had even been defiant at the weekly session known as PMQs where the prime minister is supposed to answer questions. Needless to say, the House of Commons was overflowing and raucous, with members even sitting on the aisle steps. Johnson kept insisting that he could continue as prime minister and that the country needed him to carry out the mandate that the electorate had given him two years ago.

Here is a brief except.


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The dangers of unthinking risk taking

In a recent post, I wrote about my dislike of people taking risks with their lives because there exists an audience for it, and how this can lead to tragedy. It is bad enough when this happens to adults who have trained for the act and take precautions. They are taking calculated risks and even making a living from doing so. But the problem is that in an era of social media, we find young people taking dangerous risks and streaming their efforts in return for the remote possibility of becoming famous, however fleetingly, and without thinking things through or having any backup plan if things should go wrong.

The phenomenon of ‘TikTok’ challenges, where someone comes up with some risky action and others take up the challenge and pass it on, have resulted in numerous cases of this, the more famous ones being the ice bucket challenge and the milk crate challenge, the latter leading to some serious injuries.
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Boris Johnson and Donald Trump – two peas in a pod

Like his friend Donald Trump, Boris Johnson is a sleazy, corrupt, liar who only cares about his pwn interests. They are both assisted by enablers who help them until things get too hot at which point some of the enablers abandon ship to advance their own interests or to salvage their reputations. The number of people in the Trump administration who fit this description are too many to count.

Johnson’s government was rocked yesterday by the simultaneous resignations of two senior cabinet members who in their letters said that they no longer had confidence in Johnson’s leadership after a series of scandals

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dealt a huge blow on Tuesday when two of his top ministers announced their resignations, saying they could no longer work for a government mired in scandal.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak and [health secretary] Sajid Javid both announced they were quitting in letters posted to Twitter within minutes of each other on Tuesday evening.

“The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously,” Sunak said in his resignation letter. “I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe these standards are worth fighting for and that is why I am resigning.”

Javid and Sunak were not the only ones to go on Tuesday.

Shortly the two quit their jobs, Conservative party vice chair Bim Afolami announced live on television that he too was resigning.
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The paranoid style in American politics

The title of this post is that of a very influential lecture by Richard Hofstadter that he gave in 1963 that was later revised and expanded into an essay and was later published in an abridged form in 1964. The full essay can be found in the collection of his essays Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. What is noteworthy is how remarkably relevant it is to what is going on today. It is a long essay and I have excerpted below just the main aspects, omitting much of the historical arguments that he provides to support his case.

We are currently living in a time in the US when we are awash in grand conspiratorial theories that are being pushed by prominent individuals, like Donald Trump about the election being stolen, to anonymous creators of fantastical ideas such as that there is a vast conspiracy of pedophiles at the highest levels of government and public life or that there is an organized movement to replace white Christians with people of color and other religions or that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately created and released and that the vaccines to combat it is also part of some diabolical plot. Going by Hofstadter, these are the just the most recent manifestations of a long-standing tendency in US politics.
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Taking great risks for the enjoyment of others

A stuntman has died during a performance.

Chris Darnell, 40, was driving the “Shockwave Jet Truck” while racing two planes during the Field of Flight Airshow in Battle Creek. The truck, capable of reaching speeds of up to 300 MPH, crashed during the maneuver and flipped off the runway. Darnell died at the scene.

The Shockwave Jet Truck show is a family-run business that travels the nation performing at airshows and events. Chris’ father, Neal Darnell, is also a driver and pilot. He posted a note on the company’s Facebook page, “We are so sad. Just one month ago Chris turned 40. He was so well-loved by everyone who knew him. Chris so loved the air show business. He was living the dream’.”

There are some jobs that are necessarily dangerous but need to be done. But then there are people (tight rope walkers, trapeze artists, etc.) who enjoy doing things that put their lives at risk just for the entertainment of others. There must be something about risking death that they find exhilarating. There are also people who get vicarious pleasure from watching other people take risks. Hence it is inevitable that given the existence of an audience willing to pay to watch them, the risk takers have an incentive to take it up as a career and do it again and again, sometimes raising the risk level.

I am very risk-averse. I also do not enjoy watching other people take risks just for my enjoyment. Hence I never watch live performances of people who do such things. I did not like circuses as a child because I always worried about people falling from a height or getting attacked by ferocious animals, as sometimes happens. As a child, I wished to avoid the horror of seeing such a thing. As an adult, a new concern has been added. I feel that I would be complicit if such a tragedy should occur because without an audience, some of those people would not have done those things in the first place.

Film review: American History X (1998) and the neo-Nazi movement

I finally got around to seeing this film that had long been on my list of things to watch. It tells the story of a young man Derek Vinyard (superbly played by Edward Norton) who, under the influence of an older neo-Nazi, gets drawn into a skinhead gang in Los Angeles with swastika tattoos and all, and becomes a leader and recruiter for the gang. He ends up killing two black men and goes to prison where he undergoes a change in views that causes him to abandon his prior beliefs. When he emerges, he tries to change the beliefs of his younger brother who idolizes him and, in his absence, has joined the gang that he had been in, under the influence of the same older neo-Nazi. What struck me most about this film is that though it was made in 1998, how contemporary it is in terms of the neo-Nazi ideology it articulates.

There are three powerful scenes (they are in black and white like all the flashback scenes). One is a flashback to the family dinner table where high-schooler Derek describes his excitement about his English course where he is reading the book Native Son. His fire fighter father advises him to reject the teaching of his charismatic black teacher because it is all propaganda designed to advance black people at the expense of white people. The film implies that this is what starts Derek down the road to racism.


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Rat makes more sense to me now that I am older

(Pearls Before Swine)

I went camping just once. There were about ten of us and it was just after we had finished our final exams at college, before the results were released and we had to start work. We camped on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka next to the wonderful warm and calm ocean and the golden sandy beaches. The whole area was empty of people, just coconut trees and other vegetation. Sleeping in the open near the ocean under the night sky where we could see so many stars that were invisible in the city was a real experience. None of us really knew much about camping and any seasoned camper would have been horrified at our ineptness but I recall that we all had a great time.

A few years ago, I returned to that same area that we had camped as students . It was unrecognizable. It has now been utterly transformed with luxury hotels all along the beachfront. All that remains of what I remembered are the sandy beaches and the warm, placid ocean.

Some of my friends on that trip still enjoy camping but I have no desire to do so anymore. In particular, a decent bathroom is one thing that I am very reluctant to voluntarily do without.

Measure B’s defeat shows importance of each vote

Readers may recall a recent post of mine where I described the heated emotions about the move to add a bike and pedestrian trail in the small town of Del Rey Oaks that I live in that would provide easier access to a small body of water accurately called the Frog Pond. Opponents of the move had put on the ballot an initiative known as Measure B that would have prohibited the trail and the vote was held on June 7th. Since California routinely allows mail-in voting, it takes a long time to get the final results and just this past week the official results were announced and Measure B had been defeated, which means that construction of the trail will proceed.

The result was a squeaker, with 387 ‘Yes’ votes and 399 ‘No’ votes, a narrow margin of 12 votes. Noteworthy was the fact that the total number of people who voted was 799. Since the town has a population of only 1520 with 1216 registered voters, the turn out was 65.7% of registered voters, more than twice the countywide average of 31.1%. This shows the intensity of the feeling that the Frog Pond generated. Leading up the the election, the only people who came to my door to canvass were those on both sides of this issue, not any of the candidates for office. Also, the overwhelming amount of literature that I received was about Measure B.

Of the 799 people who voted, for unknown reasons 13 did not vote on this particular issue, greater than the margin of the result. In big elections, it is is easy to feel that one’s vote does not matter and decide not to bother. It is small town elections that reveal the importance of voting.

“Nice testimony you got there. Too bad if anything happened to you after you give it.”

During Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that has been highly damaging to Trump World, committee vice chair Liz Cheney mentioned two messages that potential witnesses received before that day that contained veiled threats to pressure them to not say anything damaging to Trump and his enabling cronies. We now learn that Hutchinson was the recipient.
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