Thank you for pointing out what poor judges of people and situations many Maltese are

My thanks to whoever wrote the original comment, and to Rachel Thake for reproducing it. All these years I’ve lived and worked and the thing that always gets to me the most is the way Maltese people in general are such very poor judges of character and situations. It’s as though they’re chronically unable to collate and process a totality of information and can only see and consider it in segments, each one in isolation from the other.

I’ve always wondered, too, whether it has anything to do with the mantra of ‘condemn the sin but not the sinner’, which raises children to adulthood completely unable to understand that there are such things as bad people, vicious characters and worst of all, sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists.

The fact of the matter is that people can be divided into four broad categories: the fundamentally good, the fundamentally bad, the fundamentally spineless, and the fundamentally amoral. With three of those categories, you have a very real problem one way or another, and they are best avoided in all life situations.

But this often doesn’t happen because fundamentally bad and amoral people are often the most entertaining and charming: sociopaths do it deliberately. And then people make the disastrous equation: I like him = he is a good person. I don’t like him = he is a bad person.

That’s why I always said you should not vote for Joseph Muscat. He’s a fundamentally amoral person. No good can come out of that in any situation, let alone by putting him in a charge of a small country with EU membership status and no checks and balances.