It’s been something of a problem to decide which newspaper to read each morning while in Europe, and after quite a bit of trial and error, I have locked onto The New York Times. It is American politics that is the most important at the moment, and it does turn out that it does not seem to matter which of the British papers I choose, none of them are any better. They are all filled with the same kind of deceit, trying to ease the pain among the left, and looking to find whatever vulnerabilities there are in Trump as president.
The NYT has ended up the least painful to read since it is so consistent in its idiocies. Nothing in it ever does anything but fill me with disgust at what seems to be some kind of competition to find the most ridiculous means to discredit the election, but after a while you get used to it. What they are doing is, of course, not just dangerous but downright evil since the very processes of a democratic system depend on the general acceptance of the processes in which our political leaders are chosen. The left has no uses for such established processes except to the extent that they are able to place their people into positions of power. One article after another has been about how the electoral system is broken, written by one cretin after another.
So imagine my surprise when I opened the editorial page for Friday’s paper (on the continent the papers are always a day late) and in the feature position was an article on “Voting should be mandatory” written by none other than Waleed Aly, “columnist and broadcaster and a politics lecturer at Monash University”. Bottoms of barrels don’t get scraped any more thoroughly than this. He starts:
When you survey the wreckage of 2016, it’s easy to forget that the most seismic democratic events were brought about by minorities.
Only 37 percent of eligible Britons voted to leave the European Union. The case is even clearer in the American election, which Donald J. Trump won despite having persuaded only a quarter of the American electorate to support him. Mr. Trump triumphed in a low-turnout election.
The probability that the US will adopt compulsory voting is zero to the hundredth decimal point. What is important is that NYT readers can now sagely nod their heads and agree that, on the evidence of the 2016 election, the system has “handed power to someone whose plan was to keep turnout low, hoping to appeal to an impassioned minority rather than a nation at large”.
But you do wonder whether Aly volunteered to write this article, or whether the editorial board sought out someone who could write these inanities for them and lit on the most reliable person on the left in a country with compulsory voting. They therefore chose Waleed as the bunny to put this article together, helping to convince his fellow political fools on the left in the US that the American voting system is broken and that DJT is not really their legitimate president after all.
Law of Markets 