Are you a POMO?
Being a POMO is not what you'd call "all the rage". The acronym stands for Person of Minority Opinions...and so by definition, it's hard to get respect and recognition if you're a POMO citizen in a democracy where majority rule applies.
More and more these days, POMOs overcompensate for this disadvantage by becoming increasingly extreme - almost as if turning into a fanatic might in some way make them more persuasive. Usually, the opposite is true. The regrettably current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a classic example of the syndrome, although to be precise about this, he is very clearly an incompetent fanatic, which doesn't help.
In short, as he lacks the tolerant persuasion skills to turn his views into those of the mainstream majority, he is doomed. [Note: the US Democratic Party of Harris and Warren is accelerating towards the same fate].
I'm soon to be 77 years old, and one way or another I have been a POMO for the best part of forty years. I cannot recall the exact date of my conversion, but it was around about the time 'haulage' became 'logistics'.
As its original monniker suggested, haulage is to do with distribution and delivery by road. Logistics, by contrast, is prententious science-baffle that could mean anything from ski-lodge accommodation provision through to the process of floating felled trees downriver to the saw mill.
It marked the beginning of the Age of impenetrable Jargon spouted by everyone from bankers and techies to bureacrats and service providers aiming to look far more clever than they could ever be. The tendency has given us HNWIs [rich people], gain of function [who knows?], data [meaning smartphone internet, pronounced day-are] and myocardial infarction [heart attack] along with Upper respiratory infection [the common cold].
I'm opposed to aggrandising my skills in the eyes of others: were I forced by circumstances to be the local council bloke who empties the trash-bins every week, I would not call myself a Refuse Disposal Officer.
My goal these days is to use accessible syntax to debunk cod science, and try to convince the majority that - for example - Social Distancing was nothing more or less than disguised control freakery by shadowy wannabe totalitarian bloc corporacrats who do not want intelligent people doubting Government veracity by going to the pub and discussing the shit v sugar thing....the same people, in fact, who disappear or censor blog and substack comments questioning the status quo.
Like all POMO commentators, I prefer the real to the New Normal, and rigorously investigated empiricism to illogical lock-step legacy media wish-fulfilment.
Delving into this dilemma a little more here, I wonder if any of you counted how many times (during the Senate sub-committee's RFKJr hate fest) his opponents referred to Kennedy's alleged propensity for engaging in "conspiracy theory". I listened to about sixty per cent of the live coverage, and I can tell you that there were forty-one uses of this now standard smear. Not only does all that confirm what a sad person I really am, it also adds to my sincere belief that the term is used primarily by people who have run out of rational points to add. For me, it's up there with "Get a grip" as a means of trying to end a debate that the Opposition is losing.
"How do you know so much about POMOism?" I sense you asking. The answer is, I invented the term two days ago following a poolside conversation with a hugely intelligent and utterly charming Ethiopian lady who felt she had, over the years, turned into a Grumpy Old Woman. She was anything but that: the adjective 'grumpy' of course is yet another blasé insult handed out by the Right-On classes with nothing more sensible to say. At a supper party in London during the early 1990s, an Islamic guest called me a Grumpy Old Man, to which I responded with "Fine, if that's the level of this debate, you're an ugly young Muslim". This rebuttal did not go down well.
Here are my two bottom lines: the wisdom that comes with old age disenfranchises a person; and yet, today's POMO analysis is tomorrow's widely accepted mainstream Weltanschauuung - ie, World View.
And therein lies a fundamental weakness in the universal voting rights model...summed up quite well, I think, by this image:
It was Plato who observed that "the quickest route to dictatorship is an uninformed electorate".
Asserting "One man, one vote" is fine in theory, but it suffers from the same weakness as that of the constipated neoliberal economist who insists that "The market must decide".
We are still left with the question, "But what if the market is wrong?"...as it palpably often is.
One man one vote is in turn a reflection of the American Bill Of Rights which asserts, 'We hold it as self evident that all men are created equal'. My twofold response is "Oh no they aren't" and "What about the Womenfolk, fellas?"
I have no panacea solution to the universal suffrage dilemma. My sole counsel in closing today is as follows:
The Open Mind is vastly preferable to the Open Mouth
