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

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.

The end of goal has always seemed to be to turn the United Kingdom into Singapore.

Anyone who has ever worked for a startup would never ever use the "work like a startup" line. They're fuckin' nightmares.

it's "running the country like a business" for cursed gen xers or something

xxp More news for him: "fuck the rules" tactics you can get away with in the shadows of the DoE struggle in the spotlight of Number 10.

“This is not easy, I’m trying to engage with my constituents” Cheltenham MP Alex Chalk faces protesters outside his office pic.twitter.com/rcpHd9Jo1n

— Hayley Mortimer (@HayleyMortimer) August 29, 2019

I think the wheels might be falling off this wheeze. Majority of 1 and MPs getting doorstepped? Nah.

running the country like a neil woodford investment fund.

You love to see it

Conservative MP Alex Chalk — also PPS to the Foreign Secretary — asks a crowd gathered outside his office whether they think bringing down the government is a good idea pic.twitter.com/fsR7VNe1G4

— Matt Zarb-Cousin (@mattzarb) August 29, 2019

Ah, same link as stet. That’s a prime Lib Dem target.

Cheltenham MP Alex Chalk is booed by protesters as he returns to his office pic.twitter.com/LvVW5AI08A

— Hayley Mortimer (@HayleyMortimer) August 29, 2019

i feel there’s quite a lot of background dramatic potential in cummings’ willingness to be disliked - why are you booing me? I’m right! - and johnson’s desire to be liked.

“ffs dominic this is going down like a sack of shit” etc.

i may be guilty of humanising them too much.

My question to ilxor brits: why is Corbyn still in charge of the opposition? He has been there for what? 4 years? He's had the referendum, a general election, and the entire EU negotiation process to rally the nation against this scourge, a scourge that is the largest existential threat to his ideology and he just seems unable to stop it. Is there really no one else more competent for the situation?

[popcorn.gif]

Considering the intense media antipathy, general lack of Remainer/counter-No-Deal backbone and the parliamentary math he seems to have done fine to me? But I'll let the UKers weigh in lol

He has solid support from the party membership is why. The portion that hate him look around and see that all the wets that could/would/tried to challenge him are incapable of doing so because they mostly rode in on Blair's coattails and it seems like they don't actually know how to win things or plot. Plus -- even if they were it's hardly a good time because we're in a permanent state of crisis/"don't interrupt your enemy" territory rn.

tldr: they came for the king, they missed.

A joint statement from @UKLabour, @theSNP, @LibDems, @Plaid_Cymru, @ForChange_Now and @TheGreenParty as we work together to stop Boris Johnson's smash and grab on democracy: pic.twitter.com/e8fd2uSstS

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) August 29, 2019