Summary: an evolving list

Ambrose Bierce defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”.

As Trump, Netanyahu and Putin continue to use this as their platonic ideal, here are a few more commonly used terms to better understand this brand of politics in the 21st Century.

1. Betrayal — The dispatch of Caesar by his own signature methods.
2. Consolation — The knowledge that nits become lice.
3. Context — The reason a “tragic mistake” was all the enemy’s fault.
4. Decency — An elusive quality discovered in Caesar only after the knives have safely done their work; curiously unaffected by foreign war crimes.
5. Human moment — A politician’s self-pity.
6. Human rights – before October 2023 something that was universally understood to be universal, now thought by many, particularly human rights lawyers turned politicians, only to apply to white people.
7. Investigation — A process for discovering that a “tragic mistake” was unavoidable.
8. A lawrencefox – any man who uses the occasion of a toxic divorce to show the whole world how lucky his ex-wife was to flee.
9. A mcgregor – an idiom similar to a “paper tiger”, derived from the idea of a braggadocio individual who find it more difficult to fight trained men than to rape the defenceless. Usage: “Contemplating the impasse at the Strait of Hormuz, Netanyahu realised that Israel was now exposed as a mcgregor amongst the nations of the world.”
10. Responsibility — when it comes to bad things, something that never applies to the privileged. For example, “We are sorry that the enemy made us kill those civilians.”
11. Self-defence — Violence committed by ourselves.
12. Terrorism — Violence committed by the enemy.
13. Tragic mistake — Violence committed by ourselves against civilians after we got caught.