I know there’s be a ‘rejoiner’ motive to sharing this one, but it does a great job in showing everyone not to make assumptions about the majority of the electorate who aren’t strongly engaged.

BVbritishvoter.bsky.socialSep 27, 2024 8:19am

I’m against pile-ons …. except for edgelords. If you write something *designed* to get people revved up for clicks, there’s almost a moral duty on the rest of us to make them regret it.

*shakes head* It’s come to this!

It’s hard to imagine a worse incentive structure to drive that than the electoral politics which is conducted in a privately owned public sphere which selects for certainty, self-righteousness, time-wealth and snark.

The key to refocusing modern states on its most important priorities-improving productivity, and ensuring that those benefits are spread fairly amongst the population and not just those “rivals” lies in us re-establishing the status of representation as a serious sober high-status business.

I do feel that a lot more spaces should be made on the guest lists for people who work in (taking one example at random) film industry guilds tho?

Having just read the excellent Failed State by @samfr.bsky.social I sense that we now have a well-written and accessible ‘description of the problem’ for the first time in ages. (It’s a great book, but I don’t fully agree with Sam’s remedies).

Or they are even hostile foreign powers. And all of these rivals have found cheerful allies in almost everybody who is involved in political discourse. So, no, I don’t expect political people to grasp the value of the opportunity to reawaken the values of Representative Democracy.

And this is where the words “rivals“ a few posts earlier comes in. Those rivals are those who would game regulation in their own interests - get government money spent with them, stop defenders of the public interests hurting them. They also religious and political cranks, or grifters.

The reason it was so successful was that it went largely unnoticed. Not only that, it also successfully co-opted the political centre and the left. We’ve allowed a stupid cynicism about politics to become a high-status opinion, cultivated by snarky political reporting from all quarters.