The Game is Afoot
I don’t usually do this. Put up a post at Facebook that felt like it also belonged here. So here it is, based on a Breitbarf story:
This is one of those “As If” stories. Written and posted as if it were news, which it isn’t. Writing down Whwt the kids say in the Playroom when no adults are presumed present is just something to occupy the time when nobody really knows what’s happening in the big story topics. Iran. Who knows? Ukraine. Minnesota’s H.S. version of Fort Sumter. Who knows? The SCOTUS ruling on tariffs. Who knows? The U.S. District Court Insurgency. Who knows? Greenland. WTF knows? Aaaaah. The parliamentary democracies of the British Commonwealth are doing a Parker-Bros Monopoly version of “The Empire Strikes Back”! How touching. How quaint.
My own theory is that the mass media, left and right birth, have been so exhausted by the hectic pace of the first year of Trump 2.0 that when New Year’s came, they seized on the opportunity for a bender to all benders and haven’t recovered yet. [insert graphic of stereotypical icepack on aching hangover head of missed aged white schlump…] So this story is the closest they can get to real news at the moment.
FTA: <<The British government has reportedly reached out to fellow leftist-run Anglo-sphere nations Australia and Canada in an attempt to wage a coordinated campaign to potentially ban Elon Musk’s X social media platform.
Earlier this week, UK Prime Minsiter Sir Keir Starmer said that “all options” were on the table, including a potential ban of X in Britain, over users being able to have the platform’s Grok artificial intelligence generate “deepfake” nude images of women and children.
The recently enacted Online Safety Act — passed by the previous “Conservative” government — empowers broadcasting regulator Ofcom to impose fines of up to 10 per cent of a social media firm’s global revenue, and allows for bans in extreme cases.
Yet apparently reticent to draw the ire of President Donald Trump alone, Downing Street reportedly held talks in recent days with Canberra and Ottawa to craft a joint response to the tech platform, The Telegraph reported.>>
What this little firestorm — kids playing with matches in the closet — reminds me of is a narrative one used to hear a lot from American Democrats, who have never, let’s be honest, liked the Constitution much. When they were being vexed and thwarted by Republican Presidents, they had a habit of writing wistful essays about the supremacy of parliamentary democracies. You can schedule votes on national leadership whenever a big crisis or decision point is reached. And a prime minister is not really a head of state, but aMore human scale head of party. He can be replaced even without a national vote. But the best thing is that it’s Parliament in charge. Majority wins. Always. Whereas in the United States, the country has a too-powerful head of state who can’t be replaced just because nobody understands WTF he is up to at the moment, which is dangerous, because Look! Even when all the polls say the man in charge sucks! Look at Hoover! Look at Nixon! Look at Lincoln! (Well, maybe not so much that one.)
Why the Parliamentary system sucks. They always suck. The majority isn’t always right about every step of the road being traveled. A good leader has to weather the criticism without losing his resolve or the ability to do the job he was elected to do. Nobody in the U.K., Australia, or Canada votes directly for the chief executive in charge of government. (France has an elected head of state, but he has no power, and democracy still gets to ruin everything with envy and greed.) Britain led the Commonwealth nations down the garden path by giving them a Parliament with a leftover head of state wearing a powerless crown. When labor unions had risen high enough in power to render the House of Lords as ceremonial as the King, the transition to pure democracy (i.e., mob rule) was complete. What the founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution protected us from… A government whose citizens were mere subjects to whatever a gross(!… all too often) majority wanted at the moment.
The Brits have no Constitution. They claim that a thousand-year old laws passed in all sorts of extreme moments are a sufficient constraint on nonsensical lapses in judgment. There is actually nothing that can rule a new rule passed by the House of Commons ‘Unconstitutional.’ What American Democrats are now secretly striving for underneath all their chatter about SCOTUS reform. Remember all the windy op-eds you’ve read about how the Constitution should be a “living document”? Meaning every new law is constitutional because it’s new and reflects what people are thinking this instant. Which also means there’s no need for a constitution at all. Look! The Brits don’t have one, and see how great they’re doing… uh, I mean how long they’ve lasted through a bunch of murdered kings and imperial wars and such, until they forgot all about everything and the worst thing they can think of is anybody having the right to bring it up and demand accountability.
Where we are in this little pissy maneuver by the biggest losers in the whole history of democracy. You know, the one Winston Churchill called the worst form of government there is, excepting all others. (But Churchill was half American, on his non-syphilitic side, and knew the United States Constitution was a breakthrough improvement. (People set too much store by the fact Douglas MacArthur wrote a parliamentary system for the Japanese because they had exactly the same head of state problem the Brits, and Aussies, and Canucks have…)
Everybody in our mass media should know this is all a nonsense discussion by has-beens who are going nowhere but downhill. But it’s easier to pretend it’s something we should worry about. Like we don’t have enough real sh*t to worry about.
P.S. Here are some related posts from a few years ago:
Things You Learn About the English from the BBC
Have You Heard About the Devil Cancer Crisis?
A Quick Flash Of Klieg Lights from Down Under
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