Aspects of society

Maybe if you sort Rishi out with a massive loan he'll make you chair of the BBC and you can make your dreams come true!

I suppose I better get rich then and lobby for a world where all TV channels are compulsory required to show Anime and there’s a government subsidised maid café on every corner.

When someone donates millions of pounds to a political party or pays a politician to lobby for them, they're not doing it for kicks. Even knighthoods and seats in the house of Lords can be obtained with enough money in the right hands.

You can absolutely buy power.

Actually mostly no. Money buys you comparatively little power. Maybe if you’re the kind of megamillionaire who can use it to buy newspapers or Twitter it buys you some sort of influence over the public discourse. But it doesn’t permit you to I don’t know invade peoples bedrooms and tell them what sex acts they can and can’t do or what kind of pictures They can Or can’t take. No amount of money can allow you to arrest people for praying. That particular form of privacy and liberty invading megalomania is reserved for politicians.

Very good point, Caelus.

Ben

Power, money, same thing really.

Oh the government isn’t all in it for the money. Some of them are power mad maniacs as well.

Yep just as long as the public don't follow the money to find out who the real most immediate threat to our lives are - the ones in government, the gov will happily point the finger elsewhere. And they use their money chain lap dogs running the media to do it.

Yeah when They are confronted with actual real monsters they do everything possible to try and persuade the public they don’t exist. Like the prospect of a full blown conventional war with Russia or China.

Or the possibility of a coronal mass ejection event

Reminds me of something I saw the other day and I have always said it, though I never thought I was the first since some form of it has been in The Neverending Story  and Gmork says it near the end of the film (book published nearing  100 years ago) but anyway it resurfaced quoted in F T magazine, turns out  journalist H L Menken (b.1880 d.1956) already caught on to the idea too, as he put it:   

        "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed and thus clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with a whole series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."


So once again the public is having their fears whipped up about those who are different rather in order to provide political scapegoats, distractions, and make the public easier to manipulate with manufactured fear and outrage, because if we ever stopped long enough to realise what makes us the same on mass for long enough the cronies would be turfed out by their ears.
As Talking Heads said. "Same as it ever was."

It’s something they would’ve found a lot harder to justify pre-Covid. But in a world where the police can arrest two people for walking side-by-side holding a cups of coffee The police arresting a load of people because they happen to have superglue in their pockets seems a lot less absurd, as patently absurd as it actually is.

One of the only things left and right wing can agree on is that our society is dysfunctional. But they both have radically different opinions on how it’s dysfunctional. there are people who think Brexit is dysfunctional because we haven’t become a capitalist utopia. And then there are others who think that Brexit is dysfunctional because we haven’t suddenly become an economically interventionist socialist regime.

There are  people who  think that society is dysfunctional because lots of people are saying things they don’t like, things they consider hateful. and then there are those who think society is dysfunctional because more and more people are being told that they can or cannot say this or that thing.

modernity is forcing us to make uncomfortable choices about what we value more. Freedom or security. Sensitivity or sincerity. Personal Wealth or personal choice.

i’ll give you an excellent example. To get on a plane I had to stand in a little box where a woman I never met got to see a picture of my naked body with a unflatteringly small Bar placed over my genitals. Society collectively decided that security, or the appearance of security, was more important to them than dignity.

Although  there are still quite a few of us who disagree.

Society cannot agree on the direction it wants to go forward in, it cannot agree on the values that matter most to it. If society is dysfunctional this is surely the cause.

could be...

or... perhaps the world was always broken and we only realise its broken when we grow up. but as kids we dont realise it and think its perfectly fine and also believe in proffesionalism and adults knowing what they are doing.. ofcourse when you grow up you realise all adults dont really know what they are doing and theres no true proffesionalism, everyone is still just like a child just winging it, but older. and we realise society is broken, while we dont see that as a kid as we think everything is running fine.

Its interesting you mention the last 3 years, since it is 3 years since Covid happened. 
I think covid lockdowns have caused a complete breakdown in a society that was already pretty broken before then. 

I think if there's one positive thing you can take from the crackdown on the right to peaceful protest (and that's an "if" the size of the Moon), it's that obviously a lot of people do care and the government/police/crown are terrified by that.

I'm curious the most about the three years you specified. Ut sounds like a short time for major social changes to be noticeable. Do you think something special happened that caused this change during the past three years in your region?

I'm afraid I see a lot of that in political terms...spare you PPE lecture- I'm sure you all have your own views - but too many selfish interests (Ahhhh hmmm- horrid Boris, chums and sucessors), and not enough selfless interest in the common wheal. 

When we all give a bit, we all gain the world entire, but it's dog eat dog out there and no one buys into their fellow person's future welfare or pauses to consider the needs of others beyond their own.

Society is broken - and it is well and truely broken - because no one cares.

I'm not sure I've noticed much of a difference in my local area, but on a larger national or global scale things definitely seem to have trended in a not great direction. I have hope that things will turn around over time, but I'm scared that the people of 2023 will have done too much damage for the people of 2038 to have any hope of fixing.

The whole world is broken. And it's getting worse all the time.