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Comment by xeonmc | Hacker News Reader

So what you’re saying is, they’re just incompetent rather than malicious?

How anybody can look at the past few years of the Tories and go "there is a group of people clearly capable of planing and executing a genius level long term strategy with finesse and subterfuge", is beyond me.

Feigning incompetence is classic passive aggression and always has plausible deniability.

…because the Tories are the ones being manipulated. A PM earns less than 200k£, a Minister even less and an MP even less - they’re incredibly cheap to ‘buy’.

We should pay them 10x more

... because a billionaire will look at the £2M price tag for the British PM and throw up their hands and say "shucks"?

As long as extreme wealth inequality exists, politicians will keep being bought and sold by the minority for their own interest at the expense of the majority.

There's no such thing as an incompetent politician. They may be technically illiterate, but their personal goal is to maintain power, and a good part of the time they don't spend telling bullshit to the public is spent asking their experts in a given field (IT in this context) to find ways to do something that would increase their power and also can be advertised as good for the people by telling more bullshit.

This is what I was getting at - it is impossible for us underlings to imagine what it is like to have the grasp of power over millions of individuals and innumerable resources. We might experience something of it if someone comes to us for help, clueless, and sense we can say or do certain things that would profit us at the expense of the needy person.

Even if the political class don't rationally understand everything they do, they are very good at dressing their apelike dominance-pleasure in saleable words instead of naked aggression, because modern politicians are essentially just trained PR mouthpieces. What they are doing feels right, and that's enough reason to continue because they are addicted to power, one of the most addictive things we can experience. It's perverse and we're all trapped in it.

> There's no such thing as an incompetent politician.

I present Liz Truss as a counterexample.

>their personal goal is to maintain power

The current government have largely given up on that goal - they're so disastrously far behind in the polls that they're facing a historic defeat and staying in power is a near-impossibility. They've fallen back on a damage-limitation strategy, using culture war wedge issues to try and secure their base and set a lower bound on how badly they'll lose. They're positioning themselves well to the right of the median voter, because they simply don't have the credibility to fight over the middle ground.

https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/20/uk/uk-sunak-climate-targe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/world/europe/uk-rishi-sun...

It's definitely both.

Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.

We have to excercise our choice whether or not we are delighted about the other options. We cannot let any party get too entrenched or feel too safe.

If the message "I suppose I'd rather eat cat shit than dog shit" is then interpreted as "I really love cat shit, feed me more" I'm not sure that works.

It's more like crop rotation than a message. If you grow the same crop in a field too often then it impoverishes the soil and allows pests and diseases to build up.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

Stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. Try again.

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