The New Leader of the Free World
The New Leader of the Free World
Eat Your (Nonexistent) Heart Out, Donald Trump
https://eand.co/the-new-leader-of-the-free-world-4c9faa78f9b3
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Jacinda Ardern. The new leader of the free world. Isn’t she fast becoming something like that to many of those, I suppose, who are still sane and thoughtful people? And there’s something deliciously funny about it, precisely because there’s also more than a grain of truth in it.
Jacinda is like the anti-Donald. Young woman, old man. Fiery social democrat — disgusting ultra-conservative bordering on authoritarian-fascist. Thoughtful, intelligent, empathic, warm woman. Sociopath, narcissist, idiot man-child. The contrast is pretty funny when you think about it. Especially when you imagine the size of the tantrum…that a fool as insecure as Donald Trump would throw…at the very thought of… a whole world…admiring a young woman…actually building a better society…more than him.
She’s not just the anti-Donald, though. She’s the anti-Bolsonaro, the anti-Boris-Johnson, the anti-Nigel, the anti-Putin, anti-Modi. She’s the literal antithesis in every way of the strongman politics that have swept across the globe like a volcanic eruption of mass idiocy. I’ll come back to that.
One woman keeping the lights of civilization on…against the…collective strongmen of the world. It is funny, because it reveals how weak and stupid and vain they really are. Hence, people like my friends at the dog park look up to….the thirty-something prime minister of a tiny country at the edge of the world. And also to the country. Let me try to explain, in my own words, why they do. (And by the way, I don’t say any of this out of ideology. I’m not really political, I don’t care enough about it to be ideological. I’m just a pragmatist. The facts tell me this.)
Who do you see at the other end of the world? It’s absurd to speak of Americans as free in any meaningful way. Nobody thoughtful can think America is a country that leads the free world anymore — and yes, I do think there is a “free world.” Is America even part of the free world anymore?
Americans don’t have decent healthcare, retirement, education, incomes, governance. Trust and happiness have plummeted, and suicide and hopelessness are skyrocketing. Freedom became free-dumb in America. But in places like New Zealand, it evolved. It became the idea that we are freer when we all have expansive public goods, like healthcare, education, retirement, and so on. We are freest when we can treat everyone like a human being with dignity and worth — doesn’t “everyone” include us, too? — not like disposable commodities, rivals for scarce resources, adversaries in a never-ending, brutal, daily contest for survival — one that ultimately makes people hated enemies — as in America, where people still don’t even really know they’ve been dehumanized that way. Americans are regressing backwards in time at light-speed — fast becoming a nation of “low-wage service workers”, an economists’ euphemism for “servants.”
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Let New England, NY and Michigan become the next Canadian provinces.
We promise we will behave.
