For the Record

Murdoch stopped pretending to care about immigration. (This effect was 100% predictable, and Brit racists who imagined leaving EU would somehow halt immigration from former Brit colonies in South Asia and Caribbean and Africa were too stupid to even live.)

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2022

Murdoch said very plainly what his reason was for backing Brexit, and immigration had nothing to do with it. https://t.co/hr7hYmjBWi pic.twitter.com/ixeTNJW8Nc

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2022

Voting as consumer brand identity, shopping for something you don't really need. I'll only vote if you make me feel hip. (And can't be bothered to find out what this bunch actually have accomplished, I have to FEEL it.) https://t.co/INSid0gy80

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2022

If you don't need government you can afford to not vote, or wait for the candidate that makes you feel special, but you could try to remember not everybody has that luxury. Check your privilege.

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2022

That was because Durham mistakenly indicted somebody's ham sandwich. https://t.co/LjG6fTUaL2

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2022

That was because Durham mistakenly indicted somebody's ham sandwich. https://t.co/LjG6fTUaL2

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2022

Postcard From Parliament Square

Pouring beer on the flag of the European Union is a thing somebody did. Photo credit to PA/Independent.

Not a postcard from me, but from Tom Peck for The Independent, observing how "on Friday 31 January, between the hours of 9pm and 11pm, Westminster’s Parliament Square played host to a static, knuckle dragging carnival of the irredeemably stupid."

I’ve listened back now to the sound on my dictaphone that records Britain’s moment of liberation and it goes exactly like this: “Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! FREEDOM!!!! YEAAAASSSS!!!! F****** FREEDOM!!!! WE F****** DID IT!!! F****** FREEDOM!!! F****** DO ONE!! F****** DO ONE!!!!”

It seems as worthy a catch phrase of the moment as anything else. F****** do one! Who exactly? Absolutely everyone. It doesn’t matter. Just f****** do one. Put that, as they say, on the side of the bus....

We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by. We have won our freedom from our own imagined nightmares. We have liberated ourselves from the terrors of the monster under the bed that was never there. We are the children that never grew up.

Today, The Independent is informing its readers that

Donald Trump is facing fresh ridicule after tweeting his congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs after they won Super Bowl LIV by saying they represented “the Great State of Kansas... so very well” when the team is, in fact, based in Missouri.

One of the most disturbing things for me about this Revolt of the Stupid is the way it calls into question everybody's commitment to democracy. The rebels, of course, have no interest in democracy; they're interested in owning the libs, permanently, and would rather not be asked to think about anything else. They gladly surrender their political power to an authority, preferably one as stupid as they are, who's willing to tell them all the lies they can listen to. But we, too, in our disgust that such people as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are enabled to exercise that sort of democratically obtained power, are we really interested in democracy? Are we really not tempted to wish we could, at least, exclude the stupid from power? Are we really not secretly inclined to long for the rule of Plato's philosopher kings? Not, strictly speaking, undemocratic philosopher kings—I'd like underlings like me to be listened to—but more like a kind of weighting in the distribution of political power in which you get more if you know there are two Kansas Cities and only one has an NFL franchise, or grasp that the European Union isn't responsible for the presence in England of immigrants from the Caribbean and and South Asia.

I hope I'm not thinking that way. I hope I'm thinking the opposite way, that stupid people are in the minority and more effective democracy (bringing in the people who are smart enough to be too cynical to vote) would keep them out of power.

Blindingly Obvious

Ladies and gentlemen, the First Minister of Scotland.

Literally wondering if Boris von Pfeffel Kemal aka Johnson was getting advice from Donald Trump in their sideline conference in Biarritz over the weekend, because that's how bad today's move is looking—asking the Queen to prorogue Parliament for five weeks, ostensibly (this would be the normal reason, but a normal prorogation would last five or six days) to give him time, as the new prime minister, to prepare his government's legislative program, but obviously being Johnson he hasn't got a legislative program and plans to wing it, and the real reason is to render them unable to act to stop Britain from falling involuntarily out of the European Union on the Halloween deadline.

Or as John Bercow, speaker of the House of Commons (in becoming speaker, he was required to give up all party affiliation, but he was a Conservative until then) put it:

What did you do in the war against reality, Daddy?

George W. Bush in Texas with chainsaw. From Erynn's Pinterest.

I've been reading and digesting and rereading this essay, "Normalnost", in the current LA Review of Books, by Peter Pomerantsev and in conjunction with the marketing of his new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which brings together the Russia theme and the Trump and Brexit themes across some unexpected parameters: not that Pomerantsev discounts the thing we've come to expect about "them" doing something horrible to "us", but that he sees the horrible thing that's happened to us as something that also happened to them, first, and something you could notice at first in the world of the arts, at the time of the breakup of the USSR, in the collapse of "a system of making sense of the world":

In History Becomes Form, the Russian art historian Boris Groys describes this process as the “Big Tsimtsum,” a term he borrows from the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, an alternative version of creation where God first brings the word into being and then retreats from it. “[T]he withdrawal of Soviet power, or the Tsimtsum of Communism, created the infinite space of signs emptied of sense,” writes Groys. “Soviet ideology knew nothing of chance. […] It saw itself as the necessary product of historical development as understood by dialectical materialism. […] In the early 1990s this ideology was suddenly gone — and the world became devoid of meaning[, leaving Soviets] in a sea of empty signifiers.”

Which led to the Russian avant-garde of conceptualists and performance artists becoming increasingly fixated on the panic of meaninglessness, depicting meaning as disposable or abandoning language altogether or contrariwise trying to rebuild meaning as a kind of group-therapy activity, when

Welcome Boris!

I can't get over this. Shit happens on Twitter, especially when you're using a phone, and nobody proofreads everything they emit, but the particular stupidity of it is so irresistible. Via Kyle Griffin, who got the screenshot in time.

He's not going to be prime minister of the United Kingdom for long, some say (including UK journalist James Butler in an NYT op-ed), if Boris gets his way and lets the European separation work itself out on the no-deal plan, in which case Scotland really does become a lot more interested in independence from the 1707 union with England, and Northern Ireland could even be thinking about reuniting with the rest of the Irish island, both because Europe has done a lot more for them than England ever has, and people prefer to stay in it, so there won't be a United Kingdom any more. I can't speak to the United Kingston.

One of the less-known things Johnson has in common with Trump is a family history of pretending not to be German. As I was recalling a couple of weeks ago the Trumps, descended from the late 19th-century immigrant barber and Alaska brothelkeeper Friedrich Drumpf, started calling themselves Swedish after World War II, out of a sense that their many Jewish tenants would prefer not to have a German landlord, and Donald himself was still clinging to the story as late as 1990 ("My father was not German; my father’s parents were German . . . Swedish, and really sort of all over Europe . . . "). In the same way, Johnson's father's maternal grandmother was Baroness (or Freiin) Maria Luise von Pfeffel, renamed Marie Louise de Pfeffel around World War I because a French-looking name seemed nicer at the time.

Uneasy Lies

The idea that a Conservative government was going to celebrate Brexit by adding £350 million/week to the budget of the National Health Service was an even worse lie, but let that pass. Image via The Guardian, which calculated that if you accept the premises of the argument the most you could say UK "sent" to Brussels was £136 million per week, or less than 40% of the alleged amount, which of course leaves out the enormous indirect benefits of EU membership, sustaining 3.1 million jobs in UK and subsidizing 476,000 farm workers, not to mention the consumer protections which are, trust me, the things Conservatives are really aiming at, because they hate people.

I can't seem to get away from Britain, but this is too delicious:

Misconduct in public office--repeatedly said EU membership cost UK £350 million/week, an idiotic lie that Brexit voters believed. https://t.co/GvOH5F9E4V If we had a law like that in US Trump would be serving multiple life sentences.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 29, 2019

The case is launched by Marcus Ball, a 29-year-old businessman who has raised over £400,000 to prosecute the case. Judge Margot Coleman made no finding of fact but

Psychopaths on Parade

Feral Britain. Forest of Dean, 2008, photo by David Slater/Alamy via Times Literary Supplement.

Stephen Castle and Ellen Barry in the New York Times:

“When it came down to it, she was just too sensible,” said Rosa Prince, the author of a biography of Mrs. May. “She’s got to be thinking of her legacy now, and if people are dying for lack of medicine, if there are food shortages, if Britain goes feral, that’s not how she wants to be remembered.”

It's not such a big deal that Britain might go feral, but that might lead to people saying unkind things about Theresa May.

Breaking

Caucus Race. Emily Carew Woodard, 2015, via Classic FM.

1

A little literally breaking news on BBC News Hour, reporting on ongoing debates in the House of Commons: what the government is proposing to do after they lose the next vote they're going to lose, which will be to seek a longer extension (beyond 29 March) to the Brexit process than the one they were seeking before, and to use "the first two weeks" of that extension to try to "find a majority" either for her deal (which will be trotted out as a zombie, I guess, since it's pretty clear there will never be a majority for that) or for some unnamed cross-party alternative, as if the parties themselves were going to stand down from the debate and the MPs take over as individuals.

As if it were starting to sink in for them what we've all been seeing from the outside, that the deepest problem is the political incompetence of all the UK political parties as currently constituted, but who knows what's really going on. May herself has evidently understood that just asking for more time isn't a solution, so that's progress.

2

Also in semi-breaking news from Washington, the return of the rumor that the Mueller investigation is about to end, this time more convincing than usual, as the top money-laundering prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, leaves the team:

They broke the Brexit

Don't buy this house without a thorough inspection! Via Syracuse.com.

Conservative MP Bin Afolami from Hitchin and Harpenden, North Herts, a Remainer constituency, who voted to Remain but supports the prime minister now, sort of, on NPR yesterday morning, offering his view in the current chaos, which is that the Norway solution is still in some way available, and that he rejects the idea of a People's Vote that would give the population an opportunity to do a retake, though he's opposed to referenda in general—at one point in the fall he was arguing that you couldn't do a retake because the 2016 referendum wasn't legally binding:

the nexus between the triggering of article 50 and the referendum is weaker than if the referendum had been legally binding. Does that not weaken the case for the referendum result to be overturned or for article 50 to be rescinded, because Parliament is making an even more independent judgment than would otherwise have been the case?

Anyway I was struck by his more elaborated reasons for not doing it, in the NPR interview:

And I don't believe, if you - if you go down the route of having referendums - and I personally don't think they're a very good idea. But once you've gone through that, to then say, well, you know, we've tried it for a couple of years, it's all been a bit difficult; let's do it again, is something that is profoundly difficult for a lot of people, the majority of whom voted to leave.

They will say, we voted to leave. We gave the - our politicians a simple instruction, to get that done, and you've manifestly failed to do so. What that does to trust, not just in politicians themselves, but also to our political system, that if you vote for something very clearly, that you at least get that, I think that's very difficult.

"We made an awful mistake, so we mustn't do anything to try to fix it, because that would just make people cynical."

Goodbye to All That

Via DepositPhotos.

There was some news from Britain with a kind of family resemblance to good news, if you read it all together, starting with the report this morning from The Mirror, as members of the Labour Party converged on Liverpool for the annual party conference, that leader Jeremy Corbyn is ready to accept the party's will on the question of whether to have a second Brexit referendum, what they're calling a "People's Vote", if they demand it at the conference, as they apparently will; confirmed later on in the Telly Graf:

Labour is poised to back a second referendum after Jeremy Corbyn confirmed he is prepared to commit to a major policy shift if the party’s members vote for it.

On the eve of Labour's annual conference, Mr Corbyn said he was "bound by the democracy of our party" and would "adhere" to "what comes out of conference", although he insisted he would rather bring about a general election.

The general election in question was one he was said to be planning to force by joining with the violent Conservative faction of Jacob Rees-Mogg to defeat Prime Minister May's "Chequers proposal" for the Brexit, in which Britain was going to get a relationship with Europe something like Canada's, except for Northern Ireland, which would sort of remain in Europe for certain purposes—a proposal which, I should add, has already been totally rejected by the European Union, as well as May's own Secretary of Brexit, which seems to be a new cabinet department, Dominic Raab, so don't ask me why the hell Parliament should be voting on it. I know, as we anglophiles like to say, a dead proposal, and I'm looking at one right now. That proposal is definitely deceased. Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PROPOSAL!!!

Annals of Derp: McMegan on Scotland

McArdle delighted by the English revolt against the "elites" in the "remote capital" and their burdensome regulation of the struggling and oppressed capitalist class.

Not so pleased, on the other hand, by the prospect of Scots revolting against English imperialism, or what you and I would call elite rule from a remote capital, where they extract profits out of the land and leave the people in need, when Scotland wants to keep enjoying some of that Brussels regulation and the open borders that go along with it. McArdle thinks the economic sufferings Brexit will bring to the UK are a trivial matter, but issues dark warnings on the economic dangers for the Scots if they separate from UK to be a member of the EU on their own. Which are totally wrong, of course. At least as far as I know; she hasn't replied to my last Tweet yet.

.@asymmetricinfo @RameshPonnuru In fact almost certainly not. https://t.co/uRJGMDk1cu Google is your friend you know.

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 25, 2016

.@asymmetricinfo @RameshPonnuru But they win oil and gas revenues just as prices begin to rise https://t.co/0el7T9F8J3

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 25, 2016

I told her about Google, too!

E pluribus multum

"Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do." But little England couldn't ever imagine it. #pecksniff

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2016

I'm literally grieving. This should not have happened. If the European Union isn't democratic enough, the point ought to be to democratize it, not to retire into your island fastness.

Western pond turtle, via Aquarium Tidings.

Across the Pondering

Members of the Not In My Name campaign, a group dedicated to opposing the so-called Islamic State, in Luton, Bedfordshire. None of these men is an immigrant from the European Union.

Megan McArdle finally found herself!

This past weekend, I found myself in the British borough of Luton, pondering a British exit from the European Union. “How did you find yourself in Luton?” you will ask, and I will reply, “That is a long story, and alas, a very dull one"...

Shit Megan, you sound just like fucking Thackeray. That British air has such a bracing effect upon one's literary style!

Though there's a clue to the mystery, in that

this dull story involved many hours spent in a horrible third-tier European airport with middle-class Britons heading home from their holidays.

"I'll tell you, Watson, I suspect the Luton episode of this supposedly long, dull story involves an episode of travel from England to the United States." "Good God, Holmes, how do you deduce that?" "Elementary: travel is an almost constant concomitant of presence in airports." As turns out to be the case; she had a long layover there on an EasyJet flight, and the main point of the story may well be a complaint about Bloomberg's stinginess with the expenses.

So there she was, at one of an apparently inadequate number of phone-charging stations,