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Opinion piece I came across. Don't agree with everything in it but thought it interesting. FWIW........
Now, what do I mean by “bad”? Taking politics, for the moment, to be a purely technical activity, it seems obvious that somebody who’s going into politics should have, or plan to acquire, a number of simple and obvious skills as they would anywhere else. You would expect a carpenter to be able to saw accurately, an accountant to be at home with figures, an actor to be able to enter into the minds of different characters. So with politicians. What do we expect from them?
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Too Much of Not A Lot
In recent essays, I’ve had quite a bit to say about the disastrous decline in the capabilities of government, institutions and the private sector in the western world. Others have weighed in also, like John Michael Greer, and Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism who has not only provided a forum for discussions of the problem, but has made some important contributions herself. This essay, though, is not another diatribe or jeremiad against this undoubted galloping incompetence, but rather an attempt to understand and explain one of the most puzzling features of it: why are politicians in the West today so bad at being politicians?Now, what do I mean by “bad”? Taking politics, for the moment, to be a purely technical activity, it seems obvious that somebody who’s going into politics should have, or plan to acquire, a number of simple and obvious skills as they would anywhere else. You would expect a carpenter to be able to saw accurately, an accountant to be at home with figures, an actor to be able to enter into the minds of different characters. So with politicians. What do we expect from them?
Read the rest here:
