PMs change and lol we're all gonna die (but brexit will never end)

where's the sublime outing? do our work for us fgs

I was more tickled by the "even if you MUST disrespect her maj at the very least you will of course want to protect the sacred constitution of the UK, the only thing saving us from barbarism". the v next tweet in the thread

it was v unclear stuff and not as advertised imo

xxp I had a weird ilx dream last night where I was walking with various people to a tube station for a FAP & you were the only one who wouldn’t come with, you said “I’ll make my own way”. It has haunted me all morning ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Interesting briefing with Ruth Davidson’s spokesman

- She supports Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament
- No immediate Tory leadership election, Jackson Carlaw to step in until around October
- She hasn’t decided whether or not to stay on as MSP beyond 2021

— Chris Green (@cghgreen) August 29, 2019

profiles in courage

The only future for a politician is dependant on whether votes are won. What does a fabled conversion to the EU have to do with anything?

Well, it has to do with how votes are won - the rest of the paragraph is the connective tissue there.

Though I will admit that I am partly doing something I dislike in others, which is confusing what he personally thinks with tactical Labour Policy as shaped by him. I'm not a Corbyn did Brexit truther, we lost by more than one vote so I don't give a fuck how he voted.

As noted on the other thread he's best when he's supporting something he clearly believes in, but it was never going to be an exact match.

Also, sorry about the speech-to-text, that is not I hope me posting as I normally do.

post the 2017 electio, corbyn, despite losing it, was suddenly considered a serious threat instead of a ludicrous joke

Ehh, I think he was both before that, the slider may have been moving steadily in one direction though.

My understanding is that No Deal was still no the table for May (though largely as a tool to keep ERG onside) until not long before March 29th - a briefing that it would actually break up the union caused her to come down against it.

Something which is an obsession of mine but also something that I find difficult to put into words is the changes in who gets to be fully-realised hero-of-their-own-story-this-side-of-the-grave people over the last few centuries, and the impossibility of a drafted war in the modern world - and how that would underpin an attractive image of a past (everyone imagines themselves officers, not privates).

the impossibility of a drafted war in the modern world

A local Scot suggests that apart from anything else, if the MSP do take Shetland, they'd only need one more seat to hit 50% in Holyrood.

Sorry, SNP!

"Well, it has to do with how votes are won - the rest of the paragraph is the connective tissue there."

That is not really true is it? Republicans don't care how Trump has won the votes at the last election. That he won them is more than enough.

Similarly, the few weeks where the PLP were nice to Corbyn post 2017. They had to overlook the how..

The only future for a politician is dependant on whether votes are won. What does a fabled conversion to the EU have to do with anything?

Well, it has to do with how votes are won - the rest of the paragraph is the connective tissue there.

The 'it' here is the fabled conversion to the EU.

Fraser Nelson wondering why we are being beastly to the immigrants:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/battle-begins/

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace caught on camera explaining the real reason why Parliament has been prorogued.

Nothing to do with a new agenda - it is all about numbers as the government knows they can’t command a majority in the House of Commons, thus they have misled The Queen. pic.twitter.com/kJ5CtLPuep

— Charlie Proctor (@MonarchyUK) August 29, 2019

Not necessarily worth giving them the clicks but the gist of the piece is that Johnson and Patel are setting the wrong tone for an outward-looking post-Brexit future and lists a bunch of worthy EU citizens denied permanent leave to remain - a brewing ‘new Windrush’.

“These are not the immigrants we wanted removed” is likely to be a constant theme in coming months.

oh noes, how dare they MISLEAD our QUEEN

Struggling to read you Andrew, is this about pre-election strategy or whether Corbyn stays post-election?

Our frail 993 year old QUEEN

@MonarchyUK are the source of scoops now. What a world!

I particularly like the bit where he laughs about all this like it's nothing to do with him.

she's a bit older than that i think you'll find, the silurian period ended 416 million years ago

queen of Avalonia

thank you, thank you, (not you), thank you https://t.co/HELWHcznJX

— dom (@loubegatherion) August 29, 2019

good piece (in unherd! blimey!) on cummings and (bad) game theory: https://unherd.com/2019/08/dominic-cummings-is-no-chicken/

it goes well with this piece by alex harrowell on john boyd and the ooda loop: http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2019/07/28/round-and-round-the-ooda-loop-folk-boyd-and-the-brexiters/

be sure and click through further when you have the option in the harrowell piece, i know what you're like :)

never mind that, i'm struggling to make it past

Both he and I are big fans of the nerdy, abstruse bit of the internet filled with people who are sometimes called “Rationalists”.

i think he ends up handling this problematic intro fairly well all things considered

yeah i'm persevering

on another note, i ask in all seriousness, is there a legit tactical reason why Gina Miller is pursuing a court judgement against the prorogation separately the Jo Swindon et al one or is she just addicted to the shindig?

maybe it's a by-product of the forever war between the people's vote ppl and the second referendum ppl?

(or whatever this stupid split was, i'm afraid the only note i took was a bleak lol)

it involved alastair campbell being the bad guy if this helps narrow it down

ah that might make some sense

Unherd piece is...ok as far as it goes. he doesn't seem to account for the possibility that you might want to stage a head-on collision if you knew you personally would survive it and profit from it. also still insufficiently beastly to the Brights

Short, thoughtful thread on yesterday's protest

like lots of people, i’ve avoided the anti-brexit protests cos who wants to hang out with grauniad-reading white liberals who love brie and think corbyn is the devil.

— Sita Balani (@sitainshort) August 28, 2019

there's an implied logic diagram in the unherd argument i think: are they idiots or are they lying? well, if they think they're being clever (games theory) then in fact they're idiots -- so it won't matter if you assume they're just lying

the Ranter piece was predictably meatier tho.

also in general yes trying to get into the reptilian brain of Cummings is probably a more useful journalistic endeavour right now than amplifying the Johnson = Trump steez that the Tribune article critiques

as a confirmed public transport maven i'll confirm the dream upthread as an eminent irl possibility

Sita Balani thread is v good and now i feel (even) bad(der)

i rolled my eyes a bit at the "croissant munching" bit of the intro* but otherwise largely yes: ppl i know who've turned out for some of the marches wd be delighted if they got this kind of makeover

*(lol i don't mind guardian-reading, cf me griping at the START of the "is it worse now" thread)

A group of British people who live in Ireland are due to protest outside the British Embassy next week against Boris Johnson's moves to prorogue parliament.

The name of the group?

Brits Not Out.

— Richard Chambers (@newschambers) August 29, 2019

Tried until now to not delve too deeply into what Cummings has been reading/thinking and how it informs whatever strategy. Those pieces are pretty useful and interesting to see how things that are applied in engineering are going to go down.

Thurrock sounds like a lovely place:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/29/its-fearmongering-talk-of-coup-fails-to-impress-brexit-backing-grays

“My little boy is six and is extremely bright but he’s being held back because the school he goes to is one where there has been a massive influx of Romanians, Poles and other people, and the teacher’s time is being taken up with teaching their children how to speak English in the first place,” said Scarrott, who noted that most of her customers spoke in accents that appeared to be from overseas.

Struggling to read you Andrew, is this about pre-election strategy or whether Corbyn stays post-election?

Well, the first affects the second. I agree that the result of the election is largely what matters (within reason).

How terrible for her extremely bright little boy...

...to have her as a parent!!

/calz

xpost

I like that the photographer who snapped that shot of her with the balloons is Romanian.

Chivers is UnHerd's equivalent of Massie in the Spectator. It doesn't sound wrong, but NV OTM -- it is wrong to ignore possibility that Cummings might not mind a crash, because then he can collect the insurance.

Is there any coherent articulation of what Cummings et al want to see as the end state of all this burn-it-down shit? Is it actually tax-haven-style unbridled Capitalism? Brexit has to be a means to an end, and there must be a poorly constructed blog post talking about what that end is, no? And can it be achieved after an illegitimate Brexit, or has he lost sight of that goal by focusing on the immediate prize?

Thurrock sounds like a lovely place:

It's regularly voted the unhappiest place in Britain fwiw. You'd never know from The Guardian treating it like a lumpen racist safari park that the Tories very nearly lost it to Labour at the last election. idk what value consistently handing a megaphone to the worst, most ignorant people and not challenging or contextualising their opinions has.

Cummings end goal: maybe this is a summary of some of his thinking? https://dominiccummings.com/2014/12/04/times-op-ed-what-is-to-be-done-an-answer-to-dean-achesons-famous-quip/

To live a long enough and interesting enough life that Benedict Cumberbatch plays him again in the sequel.

If Thurrock boy was that bright he'd be bumped up a year.

Like the others, the restoration of lost sovereignty was a priority

Lost sovereignty? They must mean Empire.

That's an illuminating read, thanks Toby. I actually feel some of his frustrations: EU procurement is something I never want to do again; big orgs/bureaucracies are a nightmare to get stuff done quickly within. But God save us all from "what we need is to be more like a startup". (Startups are, at heart, all about getting to scale and/or an exit. The state starts at scale, and there is no exit for it. Having the state emulate the worst "fuck the negative externalities and fuck the rules" mindset also creates a terrible environment for everyone, including actual startups.)

Behind the blether I think he is selling a shittier update of "efficient private-sector businessmen should run the services of the state. Top Businessmen". If his Brexit is at heart a stepping stone to get there by returning us to prelapsarian pre-bureaucratic feudal idyll, well that's just depressing in its vaucity. Even the Lexiters can do better.

(Ironic too that if everyone had done his Maths For Dummies, Politicans and the Leader Class courses we might not be in this predicament. I wonder how he finds Boris measuring up to his statistics-aware patrician ideal)

Just another disruptor with all a disruptor's care for other people and their lives

stet otm again.

start ups are a *terrible* model for solving your existing business problems.
1) start ups are VC spread betting magnets. failure is expected in the majority of cases.
2) your big structural and legacy problems will not be solved by “thinking more like a start up” or “disrupting from within.
3) stet’s scale/exit/IPO point, which is really just 1) magnified, but also *that’s the model of even successful start ups*.
4) Tech start ups with the software/agile/fail fast model of deployment really hit all sorts of problems when you’re looking at real world SLAs, serious QA or uptime requirements. which together with
5) many start ups use loopholes based on the fact legislation hasn’t caught up with technology and its externalities

give stet’s fuck the externalities fuck the rules point.

none of this stops it being recommended by people who’ve got a musty Economist article rotting beneath the floorboards of their brains somewhere. (there are some useful day to day practices that come out of customer/user engagement etc - it’s not all bad, but i come out in hives when i hear the be more like a start up mantra).

and second

yes cummings is basically often *efficient private sector* thinking and well, i got news for you, bub.