Jonathan Sumption has given an interview to Yascha Mounk at Persuasion about why democracy is in peril. The basic problem, he thinks, is that citizens of liberal democracies have become more and more risk averse and as a result want the state to do more and more to protect them from the kind of minor, everyday risks that are part and parcel of living as free citizens. Here is an extract:
Mounk: It strikes me that when I was in grad school and starting to learn about the subject, there was tremendous certainty about the future of democracy. Now the consensus seems to have flipped. Why do you think that, in all the time the American and British democracies have existed, it is at this point that we’re seeing special stress on the institutions?
Sumption: I think there are a number of reasons, but the most important of them is risk aversion. This is, in one sense, a perfectly natural development of human societies once a larger number of people becomes involved in public affairs. But over the last century, people in the West have become progressively more risk averse. They have become progressively anxious that the state should protect them against risks which are not just sudden, external, once-in-a-century catastrophes, but are very much part of the ordinary risks associated with any kind of life in which there is a reasonable degree of individual freedom. Financial risks, health risks, safety risks of one sort or another. We expect a high degree of protection from the state against these risks.
The problem is that when you get up a fear of risks which are associated with ordinary life, and you look to the state to deal with that, the state will react in the only way it knows, which is by introducing coercion, in order to prevent you doing the things that give rise to the risk and prevent everyone else doing them as well. So you get a situation where the state suppresses part of life in order to suppress the taking of risks, which is actually inseparable from any kind of free activity in a democracy.
Worth reading in full.
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Anyone following this..
https://youtube.com/shorts/B2cx-jEiSFs?si=OMRj5ajijO–TwBB
Farage on Southport murders…
If the rumour is true, there will be serious riots this time..
Well, it is a bit weird, isn’t it? Total information blackout.
There is something they really don’t want us to know, because even with the other religion-of-peace attacks, the motives were known fairly quickly. But not this time.
Theres a very good reason why there is an information blackout, tbh im not sure if i should post on here what that reason is, im highly likely to get a knock on my door if its incorrect, or maybe even if it is correct..
Lets put it this way… Have we heard or seen who the father of Axel Rudakubaba is????… Absolutely nothing…
This scandel implicates Starmer massively…
True, the parents seem to have disappeared into thin air.
Perhaps they have been relocated, for their safety and that of certain complicit politicians? I would not be surprised if that is the case.
Nah…miles off………….. .. Like father like son….
Maybe the Speaker of the House will advise Farage not to ask those type of questions again. Very democratic!
If it is correct, as seems likely, they won’t knock.
They will smash the door to smithereens.
thus the closing down of free speech by Starmer has been a success.
I thought that as I typed that I felt i couldn’t post what I wanted to… What have we become
The private prosecution is doomed to fail. The Crown Prosecution Service will intervene and “adopt” the case for the Crown…and then drop it. That is how the CPS stop evidence embarrassing to the state from being exposed and sworn.
The private prosecution is the Manchester Airport event. Not Southport.
But Southport will follow if something doesn’t happen soon!
would explain why its not allowed to be discussed in Parliament, an all time first. The very fact that Starmer has shut down discussion in the supposed Mother of Democracy demonstrates the terrible power he wields and his readiness to use and abuse it.
Officially, it’s the Speaker who has shut down discussion in the Mother of Parliaments.
That’s the same Speaker who subverted Parliamentary procedures to suit Keir-Ching! and the Labour Party …. and to “protect” MPs and their families from the oh-so-peaceful-and-tolerant-Muslim-extremists.
Quite fitting that SStarmer met with President Xi….Just like Trudeau they love the technocracy of China and salivate over emulating them.
If you run a private business, then ultimately even if you miss out the “review” phase, the markets will carry out a review of the product. So the feedback loop is built in. If you produce rubbish, people won’t buy it.
With a vaccine mandated by the government, there is no review phase. If the vaccine does not work, you can just claim that not enough people have yet been vaccinated not enough times.
We all have this tendency in mind as a strategy and it doesn’t matter so much if it just concerns some vain conceit. But to do so with an issue of this magnitude. We are talking about the greatest crime in human history. I doubt that the Atlanteans did anything this evil. The destruction of most of your friends and family and most of your nation in a staggered slow motion way but death is coming. Turbo cancer sounds good because it sounds like a quick end to the misery. I have seen these deaths and the last three months or so aren’t very pleasant at all. We aren’t talking about some human foible we are talking about the greatest evil ever commited in the history of humankind.
The BBC were trying to claim turbo cancer had always been seen in some cases yesterday….Propaganda central at work again! Professor Angus Dalgleish agrees totally with you jabby, a pity the BMA and Lancet are also trying to cover it up.
Since the Holocaust; politicised as a useful tool to avoid too much publicity by smearing Andrew Bridgen.
The brilliant Eric Weinstein…
The Media are lying to us all….
https://youtu.be/LJxBnSyH0T4?si=VkYbh7Bx6C05jAzn
..
What’s one more virtue-signalling vaxtard dropping dead out of the blue, decades before their time? At least she died from a heart attack and not the flu, which I’m sure is totally coincidental at the age of 43yrs.
;
The irony of the bottom right pic though
https://x.com/toobaffled/status/1858535968875425870
Sad for her family of course, but she had access to the same information as we did and chose to believe the opposite.
The physical damage isn’t the real issue it is the damage that it does to the connection to the divine. Read the book of Revelation and the opening of the first seal. Many new age types took the jab out of fear but then felt that something was amiss. And then when they went to an energy healer the healer felt that they had lost the connection to godhead. This is a serious matter. To destroy the body is nothing any of us could do that. But to sever the connection to the divine represents a serious trangression.
Our times are telling you that you didn’t have to bother with inititation before, leave it to those who seek it out. If you want to live then understand that the times we live in now are telling you that you have to become an initiate and hurry up about it. You will either understand or you won’t.
A lot of these young lads are fired up with the holy spirit. That’s why their parents call it ADHD. The parents aren’t used to seeing the holy spirit flying around their living room. They should get used to it. I have looked after proper maniacs and I love it.
The best people in terms of their company and their character are the ones with the most demons in. You should enjoy that about them. You simultaneously love them unconditionally and try to remove anything from them that might cause them suffering. This is a delicate operation and well worth focussing on. I have looked at this situation and I can tell you that the only way out is through the heart.
If we bring about the right state of heart and mind then a lot more becomes possible. Just reflect on how polluted by blue light we are, and everything else. We should block it all out and just return to a simple silence where we can listen to things.
It isn’t necessarily a pleasant operation dealing with a patient with dementia and cancer but you have to deal with it regardless of their relationship to you. That’s all though. You don’t have to deal with the morons teling you to take an injection. You did alright you avoided the injection. You might be wondering, where do we go from here.
Politics – Art of Repeating Huge Mistakes
Sorry. I dispute the use of the Somme battles as a poor example of this behaviour. Black adder is a very bad piece of history. The British army during the Somme battles (a series of battles over several months) learnt lessons and changed tactics. Day 1 was a disaster because of many failuresof tactics. The German general Von Ludendorf said at the end of those battles that the German army had been destroyed (their casualtieshad been enormous and caused by the British).
And battles were and are not normally fought to gain territory; they are fought to destroy an enemy army and it’s fighting capabilities. There is very poor understanding of the first world war.
Ninety eight generals were killed in that war – because they went near or to the front to see what was going on. And the Brirish army became the most effective army in that war. We invented tanks and much of the flexible artillery tactics that became effective, in the end, at breaking the Germans.
There were mistakes, and there were a few bad generals. Haig was not bad in actuality. He made some mistakes but overall we won the war in four years- which was how long Kitchener predicted it would last, at the start.
We must stop peddling nonsensical, left wing views (Blackadder, Oh What a Lovely War, etc) bullshit about that war. Awful as it was, the British did pretty well compared to the French and Germans.
Excellent point.
The British Imperial Army also devised the most effective tactical deployment of tanks as part of combined arms manoeuvre warfare and achieved astonishing success at the Battle of Amiens 1918 under Haig’s overall command.
Alanbrooke, a key architect of victory in the Second World War, was an important part of the artillery innovations employed at Amiens to great effect; creeping barrages and surprise counter battery fire.
Nonsense, you have just made an attempt to justify 20k deaths in a single day, shame on you.
Absolute proof that in over 100 years we have gone nowhere…
I only put in the bit about Blackadder to add a touch of levity. I can assure you that I don’t take history lessons from TV comedy programmes. For example, I don’t believe that the picture of the Madonna with the Big B**bies in Allo Allo is an actual historical episode. I guess you don’t share what I would optimistically call ‘my sense of humour’.
There was a good documentary about WW1 on TPTV the other day; minor annoyances were mentioned like solders getting lost in the trenches. They all had numbers and street names etc, but with the carnage those numbers would get blown off and many groups would be delayed in attacks because they were unaware of their surroundings. Interesting also how they adapted trenches in S bends and zig-zags rather than straight lines that caused more casualties. However, the justification of WW1 was not worth the sacrifice in the mind of any sane person. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
The German general Von Ludendorf said at the end of those battles that the German army had been destroyed
The guy is called Ludendorff and he was never ennobled (hence, no von Ludendorff). As British history has it, the British won the first world war every year since 1915 and were only saved from the ignominious defeat they brought unto themselves in this way by French and British politicians finally getting their act together and appointing the French general Foch as supreme allied commander after the tactically enormously successful German Michael offensive of 1918 which almost brought the Brits to the point of abandoning their French allies to retreat to safety on the channel coast.
After the Germans had burnt through most of their manpower reserves without accomplishing anything beyond (hiterhto unheard of) tactical successes in 1918 and after another suprise attack with tanks in the fog (the 3rd, 1st Cambrai 1917, second French attack at Soissons a month earlier), Ludendorff came to the conclusion that the war had to be terminated because the Germans couldn’t possibly win it by military force anymore. This lead to another three months of very bloody and now, completely useless fighting in the hope to achieve a military victory until a bolshevist uprising in Germany combined with a coup of the SPD forced the German army to capitulate for want of supplies.
BTW, the reason why the German offensives 1918 predominantly targetted the English army was that it was seen as the much less dangerous enemy due to its tactical and strategic clumsiness. Numerical superiority in anything and – see above – just about timely neutalization of Haig saved its butt.
Very true article, with the obvious results we see Worldwide in excess deaths. Doctors still try to jab us to death (literally), probably because of the Government monitory incentives. Murder by another name.
You are correct. To admit failure they see it as weakness, they would rather see millions die than admit wrong and change course.
Andrew Bridgen told us that a CON Party Grandee, who was deployed to try and get him to STFU about the jab damage, said that there was no appetite in the party to investigate the issue and wouldn’t be for about 20 years …. when he would probably be proved right.
We’ve seen it time and time again …. most recently the infected blood scandal.
The Establishment closes ranks to protect its own. I may still be alive when they admit the truth (I reckon I have another 30-odd years) but I’m not banking on it.
I can’t wait that long, I want to see these fuckers pay for what they pushed the Nation into now!
Stop calling them rulers, they are nothing but parasites!
Why did the Florida authorities act like a private sector organisation? What was the difference?
Because Florida is a Republican state under the excellent governor Ron DeSantis unlike communist California under the awful Gavin Newsom
The reason they double down is that they are waging a covert war against the people at the behest of their globalist overlords. The immiseration and destruction is all part of the plan.
I won’t comment on the supposed parallell with COVID vaccination but the statement
The British top brass learnt nothing at all from the catastrophic losses on the first day and just kept on repeating the same failed tactics day after day, week after week.
is completely false. Some of the Entente generals hoped that they’d eventually manage to break through the German lines and come to something like decisive military operation but not all of them¹. The general plan for the Somme battle was to use overwhelming superiority in soldiers, artillery and ammunition to keep attacking the German lines after intense, preparatory barrages to find out would happen then. The attack was seen as necessary to relieve the French forces which were hard-pressed by the German Verdun offensive by forcing the Germans to fight against the English army as well.
After the hope of an initial breakthrough by virtue of a preparatory bombardement of a hitherto unheard of intensity had faded, the British top brass never meant to accomplish anything beyond keep the fight going to wear the Germans down over time and stop them from grinding the French army to dusty at Verdun. They didn’t care for their losses because there was no reason why they should. They had plenty of people to spare and knew that the Germans didn’t.
Hostlities in the Somme area were basically brought to an end by winter and it was planned to continue them using a somewhat different method (devised by the new French supreme commander Nivelle) in 1917. The new German leaders (Hindenburg/ Ludendorff) preempted this by a suprise withdrawal from the old battlefied to a prepared (and shorter) line of field fortifications behind it (the so-called Siegfriedlinie, known as Hindeburg Line in English literature).
¹ Specifically, Rawlinson was of the opinion that there was no real chance of success beyond incrementally wearing the German defenders down.
Verdun Fort was interesting; the French defenders run out of water from the bombardments shattering their internal water storage. They say that when it was captured the first thing the French did was to drink from the bogs regardless of what was floating in them.
You’re probably referring to Fort Vaux, the 2nd of the two forts which were captured by Germans in 1916. As opposed to Fort Douaumont, which was basically uncrewed and fell to a surprise attack, it was defended vigorously for months. The Germans eventually managed to capture the Vaux Mountain which cut the supply line of the fort. Fighting continued inside of it until the commanding officer capitulated because the defenders had ran out of water, later telling the German commanding officer (quoted from German sources) “You didn’t conquer me, the thirst conquered me¹.”
The bog story is probably a generic legend based on actual events (it’s also in at least one German novel about the time). Due to continuous shelling of the whole area by both French and German artillery, field fortifications, ie, trenches, didn’t really exist as everyhing which was dug out during the night was invariably levelled on the next day. Soldiers would thus take up positions in lines of shell craters. Supplies could only reach them during the nights as part of perilous, hour-long foot journeys through the ever-changing, corpse and debris strewn wasteland if they reached them at all. Because of this, hunger and thirst were constant companions.
¹ A bit vainglorious as thousands of German soldiers had died during the attacks until enough territority had been captured to stop the fort from being resupplied.