Scribblings: museums, why Trump, slavery and fussbucketry (plus an odd airport)

First a cheat in that it's not a scribbling but I had to share it somewhere - the story of Denver International Airport's embracing of conspiracy loons as a marketing tool:

After being tortured for years by the ceaseless, incredulous questioning, airport officials have assumed a new stance on the subject. What started as denial and moved onto anger, then despair, has finally landed on acceptance.

"For many years the airport tried to fight against the conspiracies, and we constantly had to explain and disprove them,” says Stacy Stegman, senior vice-president of communications for DIA. “Over time we've kind of learned to love that there's a certain amount of strangeness associated with the airport, and it's kind of fun."

Absolutely wonderful stuff and top marks to the airport management. In the meantime we discover from Julia that some museums are more equal than others:

So all presumptuous would-be museum builders should think they won't get a warm welcome?

Well...

You'll have to read to find out why one museum gets the nod and other doesn't - politics is a good hint. And while we're in America Tim Newman's spotted a great article about how the liberal elite "gleefully bludgeons people with opposing views into silence" and concludes with hitting right on why Trump - despite being a hideous, self-serving, sexist sleazeball - has got down to, effectively, the last two for America's top job:

You don’t need to be a Trump supporter, a Republican, or a Right Winger to see that a self-selected wealthy elite browbeating swathes of the population into ever-more strict silence won’t end well.

That's about the sum of it. Trump's too flawed to win - looking more like he'll be flattened unless something drastic happens (and the Republican Party will suffer for selecting such a disaster) - but the problem remains (or in the UK, Remains).

On this theme A K Haart takes Strindberg as the text in suggesting that 'progressives' are something of a cult - a new religion:

It may be going a little too far to paint socialism as a secular religion but there are interesting parallels once we focus on behavioural control and blur the distinction between politics and religion. Socialism has its priesthood, evangelists, taboos and possibly sacred texts. The Communist Manifesto for example. It may not be a church but it has a collection plate where even the unrighteous have to cough up their compulsory donations, compulsion being essential to progressive ideas.

And with all religions it needs a devil and demons - you can join us here.

So much to the politics of now - what about work? There's lots of talk about the future of work and in parallel with the past of work and especially slavery. Which makes Demetrius's discussion of the subject quite fascinating:

In England into long in the 19th Century the Acts of Settlement applied by which people could be forcibly sent to what the law specified was their home Parish. Once there it could be the Workhouse and in those places and under the Poor Law of 1834 for those at the benches, in the fields or breaking rocks it was a form of servitude hard to escape.

Read the article, it opens up the question of what we actually mean by slavery. And why we need to own the robots rather than be sacked by them.

And finally a couple of updates from the febrile world of fussbucketry courtesy of Longrider and Dick Puddlecote:

I am becoming increasingly angry at this attitude that somehow we owe the NHS anything. We do not. We pay – handsomely – for this service and it owes us, not the other way around. Unfortunately, socialised healthcare leads us to this moronic thinking that other people’s health is any of our concern because the NHS may be needed to care for them in the event of a lifestyle choice. Well, the gentleman Allsopp observed is also likely a taxpayer and has paid for any healthcare he may need, but does he?

And:

Arnott once proudly boasted of the "confidence trick" she employed to con politicians into depriving private businesses of their right to determine their own policies on smoking in their premises. I hear that at the recent Royal Society of Medicine event, which Simon Chapman's fans all avoided, she was equally gushing about how she had conned parliamentarians into going for plain packaging.

Keep up the good work!

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Hey Lib Dems, you could try truth and liberalism for a change?

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Nick Clegg - I'm guessing the party has a new marketing boss or something - has been told that he needs to "rebrand" the Liberal Democrat Party.

Last week, Liberal Democrat MPs were summoned to a meeting to be told that "external brand experts" had been hired to try to boost the party's standing with the next general election still more than three years away.

In a further internal move, Mr Clegg has recruited a party donor and millionaire accountant, Neil Sherlock, to run his Cabinet Office team with the title of director of government relations.

Aha, not a marketing director - worse, an accountant!

And the strategy appears to be that old Lib Dem stand-by - taking credit for things they didn't do (a sub-set of their usual dissembling and unpleasantness). Starting with the abolition of slavery:

MPs should also, they were told, claim more credit for "Liberal" achievements of the past such as the abolition of slavery - even though the leading abolitionist, William Wilberforce, was an independent MP. 

And let me just correct the Daily Telegraph there - Wilberforce was, of course, a Tory.

However, in the interests of a coalition partner, let me suggest how the Liberal democrats might resolve their problem. It seems to me, a humble observer, that the party might do better if it:

Stopped laying claims - whether locally, nationally or historically - to things it had no hand in (this applies equally to the filling in of potholes, the abolition of slavery and the introduction of universal suffrage)

Started being a liberal party - you know one that actually believes in liberalism rather than the statist, social democratic, nanny state party it is at present

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Stumbling towards enslavement...

Iam dominit ut pareant, nondum ut serviant

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Back in the first century AD, Cornelius Tacitus wrote these words about the British...

"...being already schooled to obey, but not ready for slavery."

Sadly, we find ourselves in this condition again. Trained to obey - to accept unquestioning the controls our rulers place upon us. And Tacitus, explaining Boudicca's revolt said:

"Once we had one king at a time, but now we get two imposed, the legate to ravage our lifeblood and the procurator our goods, one served by centurions, the other by slaves, all combining violence with insolence..."

Taxation and compulsion - the twin obsessions of our current government. Along with the opium for the masses, the comfortable life that awaits the acquiescent...

"...gradually they were drawn off into decadence with colonnades and baths and chic parties. This these innocents called civilised life, whereas it was really part of their enslavement."

Have we learned nothing in 2000 years?

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*Note: Tacitus quotes and translations from "Ad Infinitum" by Nicholas Ostler