Sunday, January 28, 2018

Politics 101

I'm sitting here watching "The Peaky Blinders."

It's not for everyone, but I love it. The musical accompaniment is worth the price of admission alone. Especially if you add a little of that, soon to be legalized, recreational spice.

Anyway, in one scene this guy came up with one of the best descriptions of politics I have ever heard.

"Politics is deliberately making things better for some people, by deliberately making them worse for others."

So simple, yet so true.

Think of Kathleen Wynne and her Ontario Liberal party, for example.

Or bike lanes. A few avid cyclists, (and crack-heads) get their very own special bits of road space, while countless drivers rip their hair out of their heads. Pollution increases from eons of pointless idling. And there's the excessive brake dust generation from a multiplication of unnecessary, and pointless stops.

"Politics is deliberately making things better for some people, by deliberately making them worse for others."

Brake dust. Especially unnecessary brake dust, makes things worse for anyone who happens to live in the area. It's probably not a big threat to the locals but hey, why do it in the first place if it accomplishes nothing? Why not just hand out free smokes? At least some people would be thankful.

Who was that comedian that popularized the joke, "She: Mind if I smoke? He: No. Mind if I legislate a little extra brake dust into your living room?"

While I am on the subject I think I will go a bit further.

Think about all of those new stop signs, stop lights, speed bumps, bike lanes, and bollards etc.

In theory, they are all about preventing grannys from getting hit by cars, and of course, about saving the planet from a changing climate, like that hasn't been a problem for the last 4.5 billion years.

In reality, what they do is impede traffic flow. Every driver knows this to be true. The countless hours wasted in compliance with government mandates.

No left turn. Why? Because in the next thousand years there is the possibility that some crackhead, or Hamilton's mayor, who is "all about using bike lanes," might be whizzing down the bike lane to your left, and if you turn, well, he is going to crash right into you. And it will be your fault.

One more time.

"Politics is deliberately making things better for some people, by deliberately making them worse for others."

Take those words to heart. Roll them around in your mind. I promise you will never look at a politician the same way again.

Thinking of Kathleen however, makes me want to add that the best politicians are those who are adept at fooling the greatest number of people into believing they are in the first group, like the poor buggers who will lose jobs and hours, and those who will never find work in the first place, because of Ms. Wynne's wave of her magic wand to raise the wages of some Ontario workers.

In my simple mind, the game of politics is less than a zero sum game. It is a negative sum game.

Because my math tells me that, in addition to making things better for some people, politicians also tend to make things better for themselves. I seek balance. It's a habit of mine.

And if politicians are making things better for themselves.............

Finally, as if to confirm that the one hand of government literally does not know what the other hand is doing, the City of Hamilton, which has been promoting unnecessary idling for going on twenty-five years now, has an anti-idling bylaw! This kind of stupidity can't be by accident. It's part of a psyop that derives its effect by barraging citizens with diametrically opposed mandates. The end goal, is to create apathy so that voters will accept any insulting lunacy that politicians can dream up.