Political musings

This being a record of waking musings this Tuesday morning.

Item 1, jail, win or lose, about half of the US electorate will vote for Trump. That is, a great many people think that he is a good thing. And even more think that he is a better thing than his even older opponent.

Item 2, cheating at the polls or not, I dare say that more than half of the Russian electorate do think that Putin is a good thing. I associate to a story from a correspondent about being at Borodino, on the outskirts of Moscow, for the bicentenary of the famous battle there - to find it swarming with rather unpleasant young men, somewhere in the space occupied by Hells Angels, skinheads, punks and the National Front (a rather unpleasant far-right group, once prominent in this country). Lots of people that firmly believed that Russians should rule in their part of the world. A god-given mission going back at least a thousand years.

And let's not forget that, cheating or not, I dare say that a good chunk of the electorate of the UK would still vote for Fat Leader Johnson if they were given the choice tomorrow.

Or that the rather authoritarian leaders of both China and India command the support of very large chunks of their electorates. Despite both of them having track records of treating minorities very badly.

Five places which between them account for getting on for half the population of the world. For which see reference 1.

I then moved onto why it might be that President Erdoğan of Turkey gets on with President Putin of Russia, his neighbour across the Black Sea. Is it relevant that they both preside over the rumps of rough, old-style empires, the Ottoman Empire and the Tsarist Russian Empire, with the latter having been succeeded by the relatively short-lived Soviet Empire? With the Turkish rump once including three large minorities: Armenian, Greek and Kurdish, the first two of which have been dealt with. While the Russian rump lost some of its minorities, but is keen to get the land if not the people back. With both empires once having had seaside capitals on their western, western Europe facing fringes, that is to say Constantinople and St. Petersburg.

PS 1: on a lighter note, BH has now abandoned her attack on Orley Farm, noticed at reference 2. Not bad, with plenty of good bits, but rather long and with a preposterous plot. Lady Mason unconvincing in the lead. To which I might respond that lots of good books have preposterous plots. Realism, whatever that might mean in this context, can be overrated. Think all the police dramas on television, which, despite their realistic trimmings, have pretty preposterous plots too - while managing to remain entertaining.

PS 2: the snap above is said to be five years old. But I dare say it captures the current mood of a Trump rally well enough.

References

Reference 1: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/orley-farm.html.