Proof of Gato's Postulate

The UK is run by rubes.

The wonderfully erudite and entertaining El Gato, enlightened us again this morning with this piece¹, explaining his postulate:

a democratic government powerful enough to dictate that which is bought and sold will inevitably devolve into rule by rube².

and this is how you wind up with government where the people running the scam not only have no conception that they are running a scam but have subsumed their entire identities into it.

and they have no idea how anything works.

they were flat out selected for not knowing how anything works.

if they did understand any of it, they’d see the scams and wise up instead of becoming some kind of final form pokemon chump selling themselves down the river.

but they don’t. and they won’t.

it’s rube upon rube upon rube.

and they lack the ability to even assess much less resolve the escalating cascades of problems they set off.

and it’s everywhere. can you seriously tell me you have not noticed the astonishing lack of not just competence, but even of the basic knowledge of how literally anything works that has become so globally endemic?

no one running anything seems to understand even its basic rudiments.

And so it is, that I present you with my Member of Parliament, Kemi Badenoch.

I mean to be ignorant is one thing but to make a public display of that ignorance on parliamentary headed paper is something else, isn’t it? Only a rube could possibly do this?

And to think, when I run against her in the next general election, she will beat me by a landslide.

At least I’ll get one vote for sure, that of the constituent she addressed. This is her reply:

Dear Mrs Badenoch,

Thank you for your letter of 21st September 2022.

Please provide evidence of your claim that “The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the greatest challenges to the established international order since the Second World War.”  As I have repeatedly said, I am not interested in opinion, and wish to see hard facts and rigorous, gold-standard data to back up your claim.

Please also provide extensive evidence that the measures you supported “restricted the spread and the virus”.

If you had been diligent in scrutinising “the science” you refer to, and not just simply accepted it without any critical evaluation, you might have discovered that scientists such as Professor John Ioannidis from Stanford University, and many others with a wealth of relevant credentials, were challenging ”the science” from the outset.

Finally, please do not be under any illusion that you can fob me off with emotive rhetoric.

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Quick show of hands:

1. I particularly liked it because he used the phrase “proselytizing zeal” which reminded me of the preface to The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, where I first saw it used almost 40 years ago. It is one of my favourite novels and being epistolary is quite apt for this article.

2. stupid and uneducated.