Gulfstream

http://slate.com/id/2109242/ British reactions to the US election. I want to write properly about this. Many of these reactions (particularly that of the Mirror) strike me as illegitimate. As a non-US person, it’s quite okay to be concerned about the US’s foreign policy (US foreign policy affects the rest of the world like no other country’s does), but there’s basically no legitimate claim on anything else: on gay marriage, capital punishment, the economy… You might not like it, you might think it indicates a moral failing, but it’s nothing to do with you. (Also—and I think this is important to remember—for every putative outrage perpetrated in the US, another country does it better: other countries execute more people, are more racist, have less democratic institutions, have more powerful corporations, and so on. So to improve the lot of humanity, you want to focus on countries other than the US.) A single mother living in rural Arkansas is not likely to be voting on the same set of issues as a Mirror reader—if she votes for Bush, why this this make her dumb? 21:10