> Johnson excelled in English and Classics
English and Classics... seriously, dude? That's good enough for working at Starbucks and McDonalds, I guess, but not for much else. Least of all for effective policymaking.
English and Classics... seriously, dude? That's good enough for working at Starbucks and McDonalds, I guess, but not for much else. Least of all for effective policymaking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20284021 and marked it off-topic.
'The Two Cultures is the first part of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into two cultures – the sciences and the humanities – which was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Edit: Boris was also President of the Oxford Union, assistant Editor of the Telegraph, and Editor of the Spectator, as well as two-term London mayor. Surely you must give him some credit! I suggest it would take an extraordinarily fortunate fool to be able to pull off a record like that.
Boris didn't even do anything with that one. Livingstone set everything up, but he left office before the scheme actually started. Boris just happened to be in charge when it started operating and he (very undeservedly IMO) got his name attached.
Max Hastings, his boss at the time doesn't have such a great opinion of Boris.
I would suggest as well that in more ordinary times, when the country has some decent leaders and is not so bitterly divided, he would have absolutely no chance of rising to the position he looks now likely to hold.
But these are very strange times, and "chaos is a ladder".
> so bitterly divided > very strange times
I'm not so sure we are as bitterly divided or that the times are as strange as we are led to believe, and I think both of above have been pushed hard by those that would seek to thwart Brexit: 'the country is so divided, we must compromise (BRINO) in order to heal these divisions!' and 'look at how broken our politics is, we must revoke Article 50 in order to safely navigate these perilous waters!'
I was obviously engaging in some hyperbole to make my point as clear as possible, but the basic issue stands AFAICT. Is there any evidence we could look at of Boris Johnson's expertise in policymaking? So far I haven't really seen it, and "Eton and Oxford are great places and Johnson definitely knows his English/Classics/philosophy", while definitely impressive in some sense, is just not relevant to the issue. It's a bit like saying "Donald Trump is great at making deals and building things!", like, that just doesn't cut it. About the most I can say for him is that he may have learned some journalism on the job, which is a bit more relevant to current issues than anything about ancient philosophy - but no one sane would trust the average journalist to be an effective policymaker, either!