Comments: on the sad state of politics

Here in Australia we have suffered a series of dirty political events that have led to the election of one of the worst possible national governments. However it always an education to pop one’s head up over the wall to look to see how other countries are faring.

Here are links to two bad cases mentioned in recent articles.

The first article, from The Rolling Stone magazine, provides an extensive view on the role of the Koch brothers in US politics. While we have the sort-of-rich Clive Palmer using his wealth to both get elected and to then influence as many political agendas (often badly), he is nothing when compared to these two ruthless rich thugs – click here.

The second story is closer to home. It is from The Guardian and outlines the dirty tricks being used by the New Zealand Prime Minister to stay in power. It is all about setting up others to do your dirty work so that publicly you are not seen as the one running the negative campaign. Click here.

As a footnote to the latter story, I have experienced several people in my working life who operate like this. The last one was a real nasty piece of work who had so many people in her power. As my partner would say of such people, she is capable of hypnotizing chickens. In this case, the people she used to do her dirty work were in fact very much of the chicken kind in that they were spineless and very gullible.

They would put about all forms of dirt around on people on behalf of this one wicked and nasty person. In her former life as an academic I heard one story whereby she apparently used her contacts to destroy the reputation of a Dean from another university. The story-teller told me that she did this because the Dean in question was developing a program that would have been serious competition to her own program. The latter Dean eventually lost his position due to the doubts about him apparently all based on stories that originated from this one nasty person. There’s a much larger story to be told about this person one day and on how academia can be infiltrated by someone of very ordinary intellect, at best, but with rat cunning and who learnt early on how to destroy others in order to get her own way.

The real sad part of the story of this person, is how she is held in awe by so many of her bunnies – or is that chickens?

Such people exit in all levels of our society not just in academia. When such people are in politics the most damage can be wrought on our society. This is the current state of politics in this country and as in the stories above, in others such as New Zealand and the USA.

Such people do what they do because others allow them to do so by their acquiescence and an unwillingness not to stand up to such nasty behaviour.

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Paul Costigan, 26 September 2014