* He must have heard that classic rhetorical advice somewhere along his way about the necessity to deliver both to your audience: Delights and insights. – And he did take this lesson to his heart.
Btw. – his hint to Freud is a meta-joke because Boris Johnson transforms here Freuds penis-envy theorem = the Viennese’s interpretation of the classical Greek Oedipus saga as a faraway hint at the little girl’s envious mental disposition. And now comes Boris Johnson’s funny and witty indeed move: He looks at all the men who were turned into little boys by Margret Thatcher and lets them – öh – shrink even more by characterizing them as terrorized (=traumatized…) by the recesses (the huge empty space) of – something attached to Margret Thatcher.
In other words, Boris Johnson lets the men Ms. Tatcher dwarfed shiver over the imagination of a symbol (the handbag) of her sexes sexual strength actually which is – receding (=the recesses) big style inwards just like her – vagina does – – making the little boy’s little penises – in this dark and horrific tale, Boris JonJohnson is telling here – absolutely lost.
(A man of true wits and talents).
* There’s a strong argument to be made that the coming waves of AI will be harder on the administrative middle and even upper-middle classes than on the ‘hands-on’ working class.
Lots of legal procedures, medical diagnostics, routine business transactions, and so on will be easier and easier to automate. The reign of the midwit symbol-manipulators will be undermined.
I also suspect more and more people, exhausted by the thin virtuality of social media, will become obsessed with the ‘authenticity’ of their day-to-day experiences, and will seek out and pay for ‘artisanal’ interactions not just in restaurants and bars, but also in shopping, health care, and so on. You can see this happening right now with food — products that can be marketed as the products of personalized curating and care command premium prices. This demand is bound to spread.
* Boris’s presentation here strikes me as quite a bit more intelligent than what we get from American politicians. Easy to draw out a few points:
— You need some inequality to make people compete/produce. And you need winners to milk. (There’s no milk if no one’s gone milking.)
— There’s a natural inequality of talent.
– A 1/6 of the population is really pretty stupid. (And can’t contribute much.)
– A very small fraction has the smarts to grab opportunities and grab outsized rewards.
— Worldwide economic competition is heating up. There are fewer protected areas. This heightened competition sorts on natural ability even more than before.
Not exactly rocket science points–should be stuff everyone understands by high school–but at least actually intelligent/true–unlike 99% of our American politicians spew.
