Astonishing, isn’t it, how quickly you can take decisions when you’re a dictator operating in a totalitarian system
Muscat is impressed because a dictatorship can take “astonishingly” quick decisions
At a public talk during a breakfast meeting a few days ago, the prime minister said of the Chinese government: “They take decisions astonishingly fast.”
Well, of course they do.
They’re a communist dictatorship, not an elected government. The system is a totalitarian autocracy, not a democracy.
There are no checks and balances. There is no scrutiny or free press.
The Chinese dictatorship is not accountable to the electorate because there is no electorate.
Did Joseph Muscat really say “astonishingly”? I only have the newspaper reports to rely on because I wasn’t there myself, the thought of eating scrambled eggs while watching others scramble the remains of their dignity in sucking up for a dollar to a man on the make who’s giving his snake-oil-hawker’s spiel being too much for even my stomach at 8am.
Maltese men do not say ‘astonishingly’. I have lived among them for 50 years and I should know. Not even the English-speaking variety says ‘astonishingly’, let alone the variety from Burmarrad.
The only two Maltese men I know who would use the word ‘astonishingly’ are effete and hugely camp (and gay, though it is quite possible to be effete, camp and straight, and equally possible to be gay but neither effete nor camp).
They carry it off because they speak idiomatic British English astonishingly well, and tend to have an elegant turn of phrase. And also because of the other factors.
If the individual who wrote Muscat’s speech is Maltese, then she is probably a woman, hence the ‘astonishingly’. And if he is a British man – British men do occasionally say ‘astonishingly’ – then he can’t possibly be from a very good background or he would not have written ‘they take decisions astonishingly fast’.
The proper word to denote speed in situations which do not involve physical movement is ‘quick’ and not ‘fast’. It is a fine distinction, but it is these fine distinctions which separate the native/educated speakers from the non-native/insufficiently educated ones. All languages are replete with such distinctions, which are so foxing and frustrating.
Mary is a fast walker. But she is a quick thinker.
Muscat’s options – or rather his speech-writer’s – were two:
1. They take astonishingly quick decisions.
2. They take decisions astonishingly quickly.
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‘Noted, but no thanks.’
Surely you mean “no tanks”?
U ijwa mux xorta!
#ejja ha mmorru #
Muscat should see the way they expropriate land and all that’s on it to build their magnificent towers. No private property, no problem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXNLFlbrlg8
Pity they can’t see for themselves what human rights mean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfAhkl7VtKg
It seems when Shanghai’s ‘state of the art’ high speed rail crashed, killing hundreds, they actually resorted to bulldoze over the wreckage, bodies and all, to clear the mess as quickly as possible.
Same as was done hundreds of years ago, when the Great Wall was being built. Bulldozers may have replaced coolies, but the mentality remains the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZ19c_5nCI
So there.
LNG?
No, that was LPG. That’s what Chinese authorities said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTQrVXEPQrM
Muscat had a third option, he could have turned down the invitation to talk and kept himself out of sight and out of earshot to give us all a break.
I have said this once and I will say it again: the Labour Party always succumbs to dictator envy.
Dictator envy is a common affliction in democratic countries. The very nature of democracy is simple an endless parade of fluctuations and sharp changes in directions. It never sails smoothly forward, but rather stumbles and fumbles on its way changing governments and policies, laws and attitudes.
As a result, democracy can be somewhat slow and unable to take decisions because everything keeps on changing all the time, causing the leaders of a democratic country a lot of problems. They just fixed a new pipe line, but the press keep harping on about unemployment, for example. Governments are dropped at the whim of the people.
This makes all leaders of a democracy somewhat jealous of dictators. Sure their people are unhappy, oppressed and poor, but at least they get things done. Of course only the true democratic leaders will then follow that thought up with “but the people’s freedom is paramount”.
However, to the uneducated and clueless, not to mention out right ignorant who are not self aware in the slightest and who think that just because they feel something then it must be correct, the very nature of democracy gets seen as a form of ineffiency. It’s not practical, nothing can get done, you have to constantly change and adapt because people object and you have to listen to them (humph!). The very reasons why democractic countries are more successful than dictatorships are viewed with scorn and they feel that democracy is holding them back from being that great and almighty leader they just know they are deep inside: belying the crucial fact that they are not good leaders at all.
Muscat and the Labour Party are completely guilty of giving in to this envy. I suggest they read up on it, because the fact that Muscat said that means it’s on his mind already, even after just one year, and the Labour Party love to justify such forms of leadership which are unacceptable.
Which is why the left in Malta requires a paradigm shift, based as it is on Mintoffian terzomondismo.
It does not trust a population to better itself, feeds off a fatalistic streak that everything is ultimately futile.
Mintoff chose to replace the local strain of Catholicism instead of challenging the church’s stasis, problem is, he absorbed all its tendencies to isolation.
Anything too mental soon becomes dangerous to social stability. Ever been shut up simply because you dared look at things differently?
It’s usually the ones who’ll declare themselves sorted and very free of everything. Why they have to lay it into others remains a mystery to me.
Labour isn’t a political party, it’s a creed, mindset, obsessed with distracting oneself from the ‘predicament’ of being born in this tiny place.
Land use, nanny state, parochial micro-politics, superlatives, all require the typical people you mention to express and personify as national misgivings.
That’s why democracy’s in the way, too crowded and not necessarily up to these ‘constraints’.
Noticed how Labour stopped all talk of any higher education and personal achievement as being the ultimate ambition, the moment they moved into power?
That’s a luxury we can’t afford in their book. The spiel slowly becoming ‘il-pajjiz ma jiflahx mod iehor’.
3. Muscat takes quickly to astonishing decisions.
Thajjar Muscat. Ghax ma tmexxix b’mod aristokratiku. Ma tkunx l-ewwel darba ghall-Labour Party.
Trid tghid “mod dittatorjali” mhux “mod aristokratiku” – mod kommunist Ciniz tant ammirat minn Muscat.
Muscat had better learn a thing or two about seemingly miracle growth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HePvTuATnjw
90% of China’s groundwater is polluted, 60% severely so, can’t be used for anything, China now faces massive food shortages through its forced urbanisation and as a consequence of rapid industrialisation poison spewing monsters.
16 out of the world’s 20 most polluted places on Earth are Chinese cities, Linfen a major cancer epidemic ticking away.
Then there’s this mental control.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3cBjcJ_U_Y
Every government official will tell you not to compare Chinese ‘democracy’ using Western parameters belonging to fully developed countries.
Sweet, allow us our Dickensian phase, that we catch up, preferably through the best of times, the worst of times.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hH8EYvnlDxQ