That's not incompetence. The rich are in charge.

As long as extreme wealth inequality exists, politicians will keep being bought and sold by the minority for their own interest at the expense of the majority.

Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.

Even if the political class don't rationally understand everything they do, they are very good at dressing their apelike dominance-pleasure in saleable words instead of naked aggression, because modern politicians are essentially just trained PR mouthpieces. What they are doing feels right, and that's enough reason to continue because they are addicted to power, one of the most addictive things we can experience. It's perverse and we're all trapped in it.

I present Liz Truss as a counterexample.

The current government have largely given up on that goal - they're so disastrously far behind in the polls that they're facing a historic defeat and staying in power is a near-impossibility. They've fallen back on a damage-limitation strategy, using culture war wedge issues to try and secure their base and set a lower bound on how badly they'll lose. They're positioning themselves well to the right of the median voter, because they simply don't have the credibility to fight over the middle ground.

https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/20/uk/uk-sunak-climate-targe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/world/europe/uk-rishi-sun...

At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack. This is preferable to the alternative of nobody being directly at the helm and all these transgressions are done for a purely political game of chess that awards the person responsible with marginally more power than they had prior.

Honestly, that reality terrifies me more than some secretive cabal.

Oh but there is such an overarching plan: some people have power, and they want to keep it. It’s not even a secret, see how increasingly plutocratic governance is becoming across the whole West. Problem is, the known methods to thwart that plan (that is, taking power from those who currently have it), tend to be unpredictable and deadly.

Our Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology is a woman called Michelle Donelan. She graduated with a BA in history and politics, and her career outside of being a career politician was in marketing, including a time working on Marie Claire magazine and for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). How in the world is she qualified for to run the nations tech initiatives? If she was appointed as CEO of a tech company, the stock would sink like a rock over night. Dare I even get started on Michael Gove, who originally wanted the role. Let's compare this to some other comparable countries to the UK:

Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry; François-Philippe Champagne. Ex Vice-President and Senior Counsel of ABB Group, as well as Strategic Development Director, acting General Counsel, and Chief Ethics Officer and Member of the Group Management Committee of Amec Foster Wheeler.

Taiwan's Minister of Digital Affairs; Audrey Tang. Tang was a child prodigy, reading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight, and she began to learn Perl at age 12. On CPAN, Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects between June 2001 and July 2006, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5.

South Korea's Minister of Science and ICT; Lee Jong-ho. Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Seoul National University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for contributions to development and characterization of bulk multiple-gate field effect transistors.

Australian Minister for Industry and Science; Edham Husic. Husic worked as a research officer for the member for Chifley, Roger Price. Husic was first elected as a branch organiser in 1997. In 1998, he was elected as vice-president of the Communications Division of the CEPU. From 1999 to 2003, he worked for Integral Energy as a communications manager.

I can do the same peer-to-peer analysis when looking at our agricultural, education, health, and transport secretaries. Our government is criminally incompetent when compared to the majority of other first world countries. It's a fucking embarrassment.

1. Appoint Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev to House of Lords as Lord of Siberia. His dad is a Russian oligarch and owns evening standard.

2. Handing out billions in PPE contracts to Tory donors to companies that were literally registered yesterday.

3. Privatise rail. Allow massive dividends from private rail companies. Spend 3.5 billion bailing out the same rail companies.

4. Allow 80 billion in dividents to be extracted from private water companies. Legalised dumping of raw sewage into rivers by water companies. Infrastructure is not maintained and most of water is lost to leaks. Enter talks about bailout with water companies.

Idk, maybe start with the 8 people who own more wealth than 3.6 billion people combined? 3 own more wealth than half the US. Probably freaking them?!? I really hope this is rhetorical.

>There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here.

Of course not... Enslaving us is not the goal, just the best means to infinite wealth/power accumulation. The US is built on free labor, from slaves to the prison labor we use as slaves today.

>It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.

Laughably naive. You're describing the apathetic's contribution, the banality of the evil, not the people who really drive decisions who rely on that apathy.

This guy? "Boris Johnson Libya 'dead bodies' comment provokes anger"

"There's a group of UK business people, actually, some wonderful guys who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was captured and executed as some of you may have seen."

"They have got a brilliant vision to turn Sirte into the next Dubai."

"The only thing they have got to do is clear the dead bodies away," he said, before laughing.