nigel's forage posted:

I am so sick and tired of the press treating this gormless little nerd as some sort of Machiavellian schemer. The archetype of a keyboard warrior who spends all his time telling his little circle of forum boys how clever they all are on an obscure right wing blog will be familiar to any of us who have ever had the misfortune of accidentally landing on an alt right reddit thread. The obvious giveaway that this is the case should come from the fact that Cummings hired a literal race eugenicist on the basis that he frequently complimented his sophomoric blog posts. Who knew that “assorted weirdos” actually just meant a bunch of posh Oxbridge humanities twits who really liked your 8000 word psychoanalysis of Otto von Bismarck’s dress sense.

This clown is little more than a glorified press relations spin doctor who happens to know a few lobby journalists moderately well. By not pointing this out more directly, broadcast hacks like Laura Kuenssberg and Robert Peston have let this shill buy his own bulls*** and shape this undeserved reputation as some kind of political rebel outsider who is fighting “the system” and has gone rogue.

I cannot be the only one who is insanely irritated by the incongruence of this guy's attitude/ image of himself and the actually existing reality of his job. He acts like he is some kind of silicone valley techbro libertarian punk rocker who has a total contempt for the humanities and the civil service. While in reality he has an oxbridge history degree, a wife who writes for the spectator, and has been working in politics as an unelected bureaucrat for his entire life. As aesthetically “unconventional” as our little Einstein thinks he is, he moves in exactly the same incestuous and unmeritocratic social circles as basically any toryboy mover and shaker ever has.

You can walk around all day talking about "coding" and how you would like to be a "disruption innovato-preneur" and it will probably convince the type of gormless dimwit who nowadays becomes a tory mp, but anybody who has spent more than 5 minutes in any professional services job will recognise this as the pretentious pseudobabbling of a technically useless marketing strategy consultant. Dress like a slightly-past-his-peak, middle-aged wannabe shoreditch creative type if you insist, but then do not act like it is subversive when you come out of 10 downing street looking like a dishevelled peacock. The fact that he can get away with this when Jeremy Corbyn could not should surely be some kind of indicator that nobody really sees this cheap hack as a remotely serious threat to any kind of established power structures.

Dominic Cummings is not some kind of uniquely sui generis personality, much as he would like to think otherwise. It is pretty clear that he is just the final form of the overly indulged British upperclass eccentric that has throughout the ages been gently coddled into thinking that he is a galaxybrained genius by a fawning gaggle of parliamentary courtiers. All this after having spent a career failing upwards (if anybody doubts his credentials, just look at the dogs breakfast the charlatan made out of his stint at the department of education). Meanwhile totally convinced of his own success since there is no feedback to either the stupidity of his actions or the consequences of his incompetence. Truly the idiot’s idea of what a smart person looks like.

This kind of "renaissance man" who knows nothing about everything has long been prized for holding their own in a tutorial meeting by the chipping norton set, but the dimwit's only actual area of expertise seems to be superfluously connecting everything that has happened in the 20th century back to Otto Van Bismarck somehow. Only now that the British Empire is no longer a cultural hegemon, the usual package of functionally useless cultural signifiers comes with a weird atlanticist twist where everything is distorted through the libertarian prism of MBA-style airport books. For sure, the one thing that the Tory party has been missing until now is a disruptor who thinks that we should run government “more like a business” and is absolutely certain that he is up to the task because he once read Jack Welches autobiography.

With this ridiculous furore about some middling useless advisor doing something wrong, it feels like the UK press have just entirely missed the point; who cares if this dork gets sacked? As if that could possibly have any significant long term effect on anything, either positive or negative. All that this navel-gazing obsession with personalities tells us is that the entire country has lost its mind and is projecting a decade of lost status and institutional failings onto a real life proponent of the “great man theory of history”. He is just a keyboard warrior who spent too much time talking to Michael Gove, not bloody napoleon

Even more pathetic than pointlessly hating him is the FT’s very own resident client journalist Sebastian Payne writing an article about how “the cabinet needs Cummings to get Brexit done”. WHAT?! Why? Is there a greater indictment of this useless wretched tory party than that? What insight could the UK’s very own poundshop megamind possibly have that makes him indispensable? I have yet to see any proof of his valence, competence, intelligence, anything at all beyond what Toryboy Seb claims is there.

Yes I dislike Cummings, A LOT, but I am not about to delude myself into thinking that anything he does is not going to come up fundamentally exactly the same as if anyone from the equally detestable Tory B team like Grant Shapps, Nick Timothy, or whichever other worm has somehow managed to wriggle his way up johnson’s fat rump, gets subbed in. None of these subservient boot-lickers have any room to maneuver anyway, we are getting a hard Brexit regardless of which braying captain finally goes down with the ship. The only logical conclusion is that Dommo is not somehow special, every single one of the Frothing Brexiteers leftover in the cabinet are all exactly as bad as each other.

The absolute tory piglets in charge of this government have already run this country into the ground. The impact has already happened, we are just watching the collapse now. The economy is totally overindebted and is only now starting to deleverage, we are Japan in 1991 folks, get ready for a lost decade. The UK was described to me by an American friend as a country without a future. I am just glad to have left the sinking ship by emigrating.