With this, we have a genuinely tricky moment, simply because of the sheer and unbridled number of unexamined assumptions going on here. In many ways they form a knot too thick to unpick—you can’t just isolate, for instance, the idea that a precise and unambiguous metric for how well the government is performing is a desirable concept in the first place from the bizarre and unspoken sociopathy of a view of government that’s utterly unconnected to any motive based on the well-being of its population. But to my mind the most compellingly fucked up thing here is the basic idea that turning a
...more
