I owe some commentor a hat tip for this rather-too-close-to-home rant. Laurie Penny, in the New Statesman:
… So, here’s the thing. This was never a referendum on the EU. It was a referendum on the modern world, and yesterday the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain voted out, out, out, and today we’ve all woken up still strapped onto this ghost-train as it hurtles off the tracks. Leave voters are finding they care less about immigration now that their pension pots are under threat. Maybe one of the gurning pundits promising them pride and sovereignty should have mentioned that, but they were too busy lying about the NHS. The curtain has been torn away and now we all have to look at the men behind it. They are not good men.
Anyone feel like they’ve got their country back yet? No? That, after all, was the rallying cry of the Leave campaign – the transatlantic echo of “Make America Great Again”. There’s a precedent for what happens when svengalis with aggressively terrible haircuts are allowed to appeal to parochialism and fear in the teeth of a global recession, and it isn’t pretty…
There are huge areas of post-industrial decline and neglect where people are more furious than Cameron and his ilk could possibly understand, areas where any kind of antiestablishment rabble-rousing sounds like a clarion call. In depressed mountain villages and knackered seaside towns and burned-out former factory heartlands across the country, ordinary people were promised that for once, their vote would matter, that they could give the powers that be a poke in the eye. Westminster may have underestimated how very much it is hated by those to whom mainstream politics have not spoken in generations…
In the meantime, the cackling clown-car drivers rolling this catastrophe over the wreckage of civil society are already cheerfully admitting that they lied about their key campaign statements. No, there won’t be £350m more to spend on the NHS, whatever Farage wrote on his battle bus. It turns out that the reason you can’t get a GP appointment isn’t because of immigration, but because the Conservatives have spent six years systematically defunding the health service and cutting public spending to the bone. Brexit will mean more of that, not less…
This Britain is not my Britain. I want my country back. I want my scrappy, tolerant, forward-thinking, creative country, the country of David Bowie, not Paul Daniels; the country of Sadiq Khan, not Boris Johnson; the country of J K Rowling, not Enid Blyton; the country not of Nigel Farage, but Jo Cox. That country never existed, not on its own, no more than the country the Leave campaign promised to take us to in their tin-foil time machine. Britain, like everywhere else, has always had its cringing, fearful side, its cruel delusions, its racist fringe movements, its demagogues preying on the dispossessed. Those things are part of us as much as beef wellington and bad dentistry. But in happier times, those things do not overwhelm us. We do not let bad actors reading bad lines in bad faith walk us across the stage to the scaffold. We are better than this.I believe we can still be better than this. I want my country back, and it’s a country I’ve never known, and getting there will take more strength, more kindness, more resilience than this divided nation has mustered in living memory…
First impressions: UK Leave vote dominated by people who themselves had been left out, hit by needless 'austerity' pic.twitter.com/Olp9a2u5tG
— Alex Cobham (@alexcobham) June 24, 2016
Never underestimate the willingness of people who feel left out of gains to burn the barn down with everyone inside. https://t.co/r6jJgqRb4a
— James Hupp (@jameshupp) June 24, 2016
England has decided to stop immigration by making their economy so damaged nobody wants to come there any more
— Dante Atkins (@DanteAtkins) June 25, 2016
Bottom line: this was a PR stunt that was never supposed to happen. There is no plan. https://t.co/D5x1LigoAJ
— Mike Duncan (@mikeduncan) June 25, 2016
chopper
makes sense.
Major Major Major Major
Oops!
OT: Well, I’m off to five thousand Pride pre-parties ? then coming home and playing video games with my cat. Peace y’all.
Mike in NC
Drumpf promises to make the trains run on time, and as a side benefit, your tee times will also be on time at his crappy golf courses.
Omnes Omnibus
Setting up the referendum with a requirement for a supermajority or the requirement that all constituent parts of the the UK must vote to leave would have let Cameron fulfill his promise and let people protest vote without the danger of “Leave” actually winning. Cameron is an pig-sodomizing, utterly incompetent embarrassment to dim-witted, upper class twits.
Mike J
Always loved that song. Written by an English Prof at Memphis State. He also brought us that immortal line, “Like a ghost in a castle/that’s my destiny to wrassle“
amk
Looks like for all his racist rhetoric, limey drumpf might not get his wish after all. The ‘establishment’ is pushing for Theresa May. Yeah, that May who is known for cockamamie ‘immigration policies’ and see them backfire in her face.
Mebbe the queen should call for fresh elections.
pseudonymous in nc
‘Burn it all fucking down’ has become a scary political force in 2016.
The Clinton campaign needs some positive counterargument to the bullshit. One of the things that’s emerged in the Brexit postmortem is that those who stayed voted ‘leave’, and those who left voted ‘stay’.
That’s to say, those who had the talent and ambition (and money and help) to get the fuck out of their crap home towns to cities like London and Manchester and Liverpool (and Oxford and Cambridge) versus those who stayed behind. The stay-behinds include the senior-citizen parents — people who’ve often never lived far from their birthplace — who don’t see their middle-aged kids and their grandkids as much as they’d like.
It’s social mobility versus social cohesion and continuity, and right now it feels zero-sum.
(It’s also about a broadly-encompassing civic identity, which is what devolved Scotland possesses.)
amk
Also. Too. Limey bernie is facing a revolt within his own party and might get booted out.
debbie
Who’s the boss in how this turns out? Is England free to take their time in disengaging or can the EU demand it be done quickly?
fuckwit
There was a book some years ago “Jihad vs. McWorld’. It pretty much describes everything we’re seeing and have seen for the last 20 years, from AQ and ISIL and the Taliban to the Bundys and Drumpf and LePen and UKIP/Brexit.
It’s not a new thing, and I’m not even talking about the 1930s. Marx talked about it 150 years ago, it’s called “false consciousness”. The modern world is scary and complex and greedy rich 1%ers are fucking everyone over. But they can always blame some “other”, some minority group, some religion or sexual orientation or ethnicity, some scary boogeyman, and people will fall for it.
Ninedragonspot
@Major Major Major Major: that’s one talented cat.
Mai.naem.mobile
Why did she have to mention Enid Blyton? I grew up on Enid Blyton books. She used language of her time and its not fine literature but its decent childrens lit. Anyhow,I heard Frederick Forsyth on NPR. Change to an American accent and switch some terms and you’ve got a teabagger Real disappointing.
redshirt
One of the common denominators between the Brexit vote and Trump is the influence of Rupert Murdoch. He’s poisoned the wells for decades now in each country, and we’re reaping the bitter results.
If sanity ever returns, I hope something can be done about his influence and any other folks who would have similar ideas.
schrodinger's cat
What’s wrong with Enid Blyton. I remember reading some of her books when I was 10 or so and enjoyed them. Whatever was offensive about them probably totally sailed over my head then.
redshirt
@debbie: No one knows, as this has never happened. That said, it’s in the EU’s interest not to be held hostage to member states playing games with leaving/demanding concessions.
debbie
@Mai.naem.mobile:
They’ve interviewed him a few times. Such a twit.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mai.naem.mobile: Forsyth has always been a Euro-sceptic Tory.
Adam L Silverman
I’ll just leave this here (again):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giy6-Mw8Ilw
debbie
@redshirt:
Tough love. Cut them off immediately.
ThresherK
Show of hands: Who else here learned a new insult from various Scots’ twitter lambastings of Trump (“Scotland took their country back!”) today?
pseudonymous in nc
@amk:
She doesn’t get to do that on her own. But I now think there’ll be a late summer election — during the traditional party conference season — which has no modern precedent.
And Corbyn now needs to be summarily defenestrated. Labour needs a leader who isn’t a 70s-vintage euro-ambivalent.
Emma
Well, of all people Angela Merkel is trying to cool the fire. I do wonder if she’s burning up the phone lines to her bff in DC.
RaflW
This is why I think the idiot press and their “Brexit vote good for Trump!” spit-balling hot take is totally wrong. People much smarter than Chuck Todd will (aka the H Clinton campaign) will find a way to tell this story. Sure, Fox viewers may not hear it, but they don’t have to.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: Why not let them look for a way to wiggle out of the referendum result? Better for everyone.
debbie
@ThresherK:
It was like Trainspotting Redux.
Renie
what’s the deal with asshole politicians and their hair? this guy is tRump’s twin
Matt McIrvin
@ThresherK: I plan to use the phrase “incompressible jizztrumpet” at every available opportunity.
pseudonymous in nc
@Mai.naem.mobile:
Gender roles, class roles. Noddy’s golliwogs.
Omnes Omnibus
@ThresherK: ::hand up::
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t think the Leavers would fess up to being wrong.
Mike J
@pseudonymous in nc: I was always a Corbin sceptic. Purity ponies and crossover voting are a scourge everywhere they pop up. He may be well meaning, but completely clueless about getting things done. It’s a pity the NYDN didn’t interview him before the party conference.
ThresherK
@Matt McIrvin: I never thought I’d live to type that phrase into a search engine. I was wrong.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: A bunch already have.
Major Major Major Major
@Ninedragonspot: he’s pretty much just a camper who mashes the buttons.
Emma
@debbie: 2,000,000 people demanding a redo at the Parliament website. Tons of stories about people being pissed that Johnson and his crew lied.
ThresherK
@RaflW: I hate to correct quotes, but my wife is an Oz geek, so:
redshirt
Parliament should just straight up ignore this vote “in the best interests of the country”. Let the chips fall where they may after that. And if they don’t, they should get the funk out.
Emma
@efgoldman: Forget the Tower. The crown still owns a couple of islands in the north of Scotland where even the terns won’t nest.
Taylor
There is a very real chance that we’re going to see a split in the Labor party, if Corbyn refuses to quit. His performance during the referendum as party leader was appalling.
Omnes Omnibus
@Taylor: Looking in from the outside, I never saw Corbyn’s appeal. OTOH, I was never in Bernie’s corner either.
Humanities Grad
@Omnes Omnibus:
Commenters at Lawyers, Guns & Money have pointed out that TECHNICALLY, there’s no wiggling required. What just happened in the UK was a popular referendum with no binding legal force. If the British government chose to simply ignore the results and remain in the EU, they could.
That said, it is, of course, not that simple. There’s no legal obstacle to simply ignoring the referendum’s results, but the political problems with calling, and then seeming to disregard a popular referendum are very, very real.
sloan
So Britons have now been told the main rationale for leaving was a bald-faced lie. There is no extra money for health care. Immigration will not be curbed. And the liar Boris Johnson will most likely be installed as their new Prime Minister, replacing the one they actually elected.
Sinn Fein is making noise. Why should Northern Ireland be ejected from the EU against their will? They may lose Scotland too, after 1200 years of fighting for it, because of a political fight between conservative douchebags.
Somewhere, William Wallace is laughing.
And American conservatives? They’ve puffed up their chests and are crowing like little red roosters, as if this is somehow obviously good for Cheeto Jesus.
I don’t really have a point here. Just totally shocked by the ignorance and incompetence of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic.
debbie
@Emma:
Imagine, politicians lying!
I’m interested in seeing Scotland having a second referendum. They’ll surely vote to stay in the EU, but how will England react to that?
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: They already are. The petition to Parliament for a revote already has over a million signatures, and is approaching, if it hasn’t already surpassed, the margin of victory of the referendum. A lot of those signers have indicated that they voted for leave as protest, not because they wanted to leave or they voted because they believed Johnson’s, Gove’s, Stuart’s, Farage’s, etc lies and since they’ve now admitted they were BS, they don’t want to leave. When you combine this with municipal governments writing to Parliament demanding that the Exchequer make up the now admitted shortfalls that will exist because of leaving or, as was the case with Cardiff, contacting the EU directly asking if they could still keep their subsidy for the EU if Britain leaves, and Parliament will have cover to either schedule a revote with proper conditions: minimum 75% turnout threshold and all four component parts of the UK must vote to leave or to just ignore the thing all together. Serious buyer’s remorse has set in. I expect that both party leaderships are going to be shaken quite up. I don’t think Johnson is going to be Conservative Leader or PM – I think he’s done as everyone now sees he doesn’t have any idea at all, let alone any idea what to do. Gove is likely done as well. And I expect Corbyn to be gone too. I also expect that there will be a lot of incumbent MPs out of office with the next election; especially if this brings down the goverment. If the British economy continues to tank next week I expect that Parliament will overturn the election law and the government will fall. The only real question is who will pick up the pieces? Clearly the people running things now don’t no what to do, not that there wasn’t abundant evidence of this prior to the referendum.
redshirt
@Taylor: I don’t fully appreciate all the dynamics, but wasn’t Corbyn kinda hamstrung by the fact that much of his supporters were Brexit supporters and he wasn’t, and he tried to straddle the difference?
pseudonymous in nc
@Mike J: I’m not sure there was much Corbyn could have said to the Labour heartlands where you have old white people who just don’t like foreigners, but might forget about how much they disliked foreigners if they were less squeezed by austerity. He doesn’t control the reins of power. Labour councils have their budgets squeezed. He delivered 60-odd percent of Labour voters, more than the Lib Dems, and much more than Cameron, who delivered 40% of Tories.
But: the behind-the-scenes attitude — no joint appearances, no email list sharing with the official Remain campaign — was atrocious, and his ‘meh’ response to the result make him a fucking liability. It’s up to the Labour parliamentary party to stab him in the front like Caesar.
SRW1
@debbie:
@redshirt:
Apparently, Martin Schulz, the President of the European Parliament did have lawyers look into this question and their conclusion was that invoking Article 50 is purely the right of the government of the country wishing to leave, ie in this case the UK.
However, I very much doubt that the UK can drag this out for a very long time. For one, minimizing economic fallout means avoiding uncertainty as much as possible. Secondly, the UK may wanna avoid poisoning the negotiations by mucking around.
Major Major Major Major
One of my friends had a “BS your way through parties” guide he tried out on Friday with pretty good success. The two best ones were “well, nobody said the Norwegian model was ideal” and “maybe the UK could become Europe’s Singapore.”
Reminded me of those old Lifemanship books.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: Also, no one actually golfs at his courses. He’s reported to the Scottish government that he’s lost millions on his Trump Links and Resort in Aberdeen. Of course he reported it as a tremendous profit on his last FEC financial disclosure. The former is the truth, not the latter, as he is required by Scottish Law to accurately and correctly report how his businesses there are doing. I expect that he’ll try, as soon as he can do it outside of the spotlight, to either sell the course and resort or take it through the Scottish equivalent of bankruptcy. He won’t enjoy the latter because the process doesn’t work the same way as it does here. Also, as I learned when I was there when dealing with a couple of guys who tried to kill me and the people I was being paid to protect with an axe (the guy with the axe already had 25 convictions for assault or assault with intent to commit grievous bodily harm and the guy with the pipe 19), prison in Scotland is for people who can’t pay their debts. And one of the biggest debtors in Scotland right now is Trump, and he’s also one of the most despised people as well. Unlike here being Trump will not protect him if one or both of his resorts go under.
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
Wow, Brit voters are actually dumber than American voters? I’m genuinely shocked. Did they think this was a game? Were the ballots poorly worded?
Matt McIrvin
@ThresherK: I’ve always thought the Wizard was protesting a bit too much there.
(Though that is one of the very few lines in the movie that was taken verbatim from the book.)
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: How did you defeat the guy with the axe?
Adam L Silverman
@Emma: That’s now above the margin of victory for Leave. The wheels are going to come right off of this very, very quickly. And remember that Farage doesn’t hold any elected office
and neither does Johnson. They can be prosecuted for fraud and have no ministerial protections.Omnes Omnibus
@Humanities Grad: Hence the wiggling.
Adam L Silverman
@Taylor: @Omnes Omnibus: I think its likely you could see splits in both major parties if things continued to go south.
? Martin
@pseudonymous in nc:
That’ll help, but it won’t really do much. For one, I doubt that she can deliver the kind of message people need to hear. It’s not beyond her, but I’m not sure Democrats are willing to go there. Plus anyone who likes the message will disbelieve it can be achieved because the message needs to deliver Congress as well.
It would not hurt if she would go after a wholesale reworking of federal agencies. Obama accomplished some pretty good progress here, but it’s just a fraction of what is needed. The government doesn’t have credibility of competence with the public. That’s the fault of both parties, but it needs to get fixed for the sake of both.
pseudonymous in nc
@redshirt:
Corbyn’s own position is probably what you might call Bennite: distrustful of the EU from the classic British left perspective as an anti-democratic neoliberal project. Which is a reasonable argument, but as anti-democratic neoliberal projects go, it’s preferable to all of the post-Brexit alternatives.
debbie
I’m picturing Graham Chapman as the Queen, in tiara and mink stole, beating the crap out of Boris with her handbag.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: Maybe London could become Europe’s Singapore, after seceding from the UK.
Emma
@debbie: Well, their biggest problem is that there are a number of EU nations that have their own regional separatist movements that don’t look upon them with favor. Spain has already hinted they would vote no. If that happens, and they still hold a referendum, and leave, Scotland will be a nation without a currency. Not good. Secondly, they will have to renegotiate new commercial/financialdiplomatic agreements (so will the UK if they Brexit). And they will have to disentangle their finances from Whitehall, which won’t be pretty.
Of course, their leadership is supposed to be ten times better than those hopeless Labour numpties, so… *waggles hand*
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: 37% of Labour voters voted for Leave. My guess if you broke that down demographically they’re retirees/pensioners and live in semi-rural to rural areas.
Matt McIrvin
@debbie: Only Scott Thompson can be the Queen.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: you can’t lie for personal gain in England?
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Boris is an MP, I believe.
Prescott Cactus
“When They Say We Want Our America Back”
She had a pretty big hit with the song “I Kissed a Girl”
Jill Sobule at Netroots Nation 2011. This is the first time she performed it live.
Emma
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, I agree with you. What a summer it’s going to be.
ThresherK
@Adam L Silverman: the people I was being paid to protect with an axe
“Phrasing.”
pseudonymous in nc
@Adam L Silverman: They won’t be charged with fraud. Not gonna happen. Campaign promises don’t have to be true.
The imminent problem here is that nobody knows anything, and there’s the potential for hysteresis.
I’m sure you know the June-July 1914 sequence of events. This isn’t 1914, but deadlines and ultimatums and demands to “act now” and leaders who can’t lead create their own terrifying momentum.
(Lock up your archdukes for the next month or so.)
Merkel seems to be the savviest person in the European room right now. And Nicola Sturgeon is the savviest person in power in the UK right now.
schrodinger's cat
@pseudonymous in nc: I have not read Noddy. Naughtiest Girl series was kinda fun to read when I was 10. If that’s the standard than Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes has plenty of racism of the orientalist variety.
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: @Adam L Silverman: From what I have seen, Corbyn was rather ambivalent personally. His party was not.
Emma
@pseudonymous in nc:
Indeed.
PsiFighter37
The incredible short-sightedness of Cameron calling this vote 3+ years ago simply to shore up his right flank is incredible.
That said, this is definitely a case of blaming both sides – Jeremy Fucking Corbyn was about as worthless as you can get in rallying historical Labour constituencies to vote Remain. Let that be a lesson to the Democratic Party about what happens when you put a no-name asshole backbencher who has no interest in the greater good unless it intersects with his own purity in charge of the party.
Still a complete fucking clownshow. Even if they figure out a way to tell the British populace “JK, we’re going to stay!”, they have opened Pandora’s Box on the rest of the EU. The EU now has every incentive on Britain to follow through – if they don’t, the rest of the fringe right-wingers in Europe will say that the EU is a Venus fly trap. And internally, both the Tories and Labour have screwed themselves – the UKIP will win a boatload of seats in the next election. There will have to be a massive realigning of political interests to prevent this scenario from happening if the UK decides they don’t want to leave.
PF37 +4 and wondering what the hell is going to happen when he goes to work Monday morning
Gex
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ll never find the article now, but I read a piece that said someone advised Cameron to require each constituent part to pass it but he declined.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: see, it’s working already. Now you’re doing the talking and I sound like I at least read the news.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: They thought Remain would get a larger amount of the vote and so voted to register protest; basically they were making a consumer choice type of vote. Others believed the 350 million pounds a week for the NHS instead of the EU was meant sincerely (must have been all the signs and the bus Johnson and Gove and Stuart kept speaking in front of…). Now that they’ve been told by the Leave Campaign Leaders in and out of government, and across the Conservative, Labour, and UKIP parties that nope, this was all just a lie to get you to do what we wanted because we didn’t want to tell you our real reasons (being PM and/or getting more power within the party: Johnson, Gove, and Stuart or I’m an unreconstructed racist, bigot, anti-Semite, homophobe, and xenophobe: Farage) because you never would have done what we wanted if we did, they rightly feel duped (they should have known better, but denial isn’t just a river in the Midlands), and what a redo. Finally, there is a third group that seems not to actually really understand what the EU is, does, and just exactly what the UK’s special set of agreements with the EU were.
Gex
@debbie: From what I read it is two years from when article 50 is invoked. Whether or not all the exit negotiations are concluded between the EU and the departing state, they will be out of the union two years after article 50.
However, it sounds like the UK is not all that rushed to invoke it.
SRW1
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not only that, Boris is even a member of the cabinet and entitled to participate at the weekly meetings. He doesn’t hold a portfolio, though.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gex: It was so simple. Scotland was never going to vote for “Leave.”
pseudonymous in nc
@debbie:
The ballots were as clear as clear can be.
Lots of Leave voters said that they were protesting against the ruling elites but didn’t expect Leave to win. They just wanted to leave the Remain campaigners with a bloody nose. Lots of Leave voters said that they didn’t know the consequences, and if they’d known them — i.e. they’d paid attention and not been entranced by Farage’s bullshit and Gove saying not to believe experts — they’d have voted differently.
The Daily Mail — known for hating immigrants, daily — is also the source of personal finance and travel news to the middle-classes, and it put out a surprisingly straight news piece saying what its readers could now expect. People were staggered that their dogs might not be able to come and go with them from their second home in France on the EU Pet Passport scheme. Or that they themselves might not be guaranteed the right to live in their second home in France.
shortribs
@Emma:
Maybe those stories should have come out before the vote. Lots of things broken in this world, but the media/press is seemingly beyond repair.
mvr
Gotta love the Rosanne Cash clip!
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: a fairly big group, in that last category, if the next day’s google trends for “what is the EU” are any indication
schrodinger's cat
@pseudonymous in nc: Of all the things done under the name of God and King (Queen) by Laurie Penny’s countrymen and women, the sins of Ms. Blyton such as they are, are small potatoes.
pseudonymous in nc
@Adam L Silverman:
Pensioners, yes, but in (post-)industrial towns and more run-down cities. Labour’s rural vote is minuscule.
Major Major Major Major
@srv: One of your finer pieces of trolling, I’ll admit.
PsiFighter37
@redshirt: Corbyn was a secret ‘Leave’ supporter, despite whatever he said publicly. The thing is that he was as lukewarm as hours-old tea on the issue, and he screwed his own party in the future – a lot of historical Labour districts voted Leave. They will all be UKIP supporters in the next election.
Labour has been a disaster since Gordon Brown decided not to call a snap election after taking office. The UK has always been a bit center-right (relative to the U.S., this is still more left than the U.S.), but Brown got blamed for the financial crisis. Ed Miliband then decided it would be a good idea to shiv his older brother David and win the party leadership. He was a terrible leader and got smacked in the last election. Corbyn has been even worse.
Tony Blair may be an asshole on many topics (first and foremost for partnering with Dubya for going into Iraq), but all of his commentary about Labour’s predicament has been prescient – and frankly, Labour in the UK is basically the equivalent of the Labor Party in Israel (or is it the Zionist Union now?) – the fading half of a two-party system. Thursday’s vote was the final nail in their coffin, and the longer Corbyn stays on as leader, the deeper they will get buried.
debbie
@pseudonymous in nc:
I expect that kind of stupidity from RWNJs, but this is still shocking to me.
ETA: I know there are reactionaries in other countries, but to be sizable enough to swing a vote is what’s shocking me.
SRW1
@shortribs:
Parts of the press did report that the 350 million pound per week was not true. Of course, the Murdoch papers couldn’t be arsed about that inconvenient truth.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: in British it’s “actions has consequences”
PsiFighter37
@pseudonymous in nc: The papers/tabloids in Britain deserve much of the blame for misinformation. That blame falls squarely on Australian citizen Rupert Murdoch.
Felonius Monk
@schrodinger’s cat:
Maybe this:
(Source)
Major Major Major Major
@PsiFighter37: dead-on about Corbyn. He really is their Bernie
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: If you remember the movie Chariot’s of Fire, at the end, they’re running along a doglegged stretch of beach towards a town. That’s West Sands in St. Andrews. On the dune above the bend is where the 1st and 18th greens of the Old Course meet. When I was there, every spring, they’d put up a huge marquee tent adjacent to it of the course and rent it out for events. The Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Trust’s St. Andrews University chapter hired it out to do a charity disco. They got the booze donated at a cut rate, dj the same, and hired me, my housemate, and the guys and gals we worked with as bouncers to do the security – also at 1/2 our normal rate. Entry by ticket purchase only and the tickets could only be purchased by students, faculty, and/or staff from the university. So if you were a townie or from out of the area, you had to be with someone tied to the university. I had four people at the front of the tent, two on the side exit, two at the bar, two with the dj, and a couple of us circulating. As I came to the front my guy’s there told me to locals had showed up, wanted to buy tickets, but they were turned away because 1) the tent was at capacity – 1,250 people inside and 2) they weren’t/weren’t with students. They threw a few punches, got smacked a bit, went to their car, and drove off.
I hung out and about 30 minutes later the same car pulled back up, the two guys got out, and came running towards us swinging something – between the dark and the flood lamps it was not possible to tell initially. Turned out one had a lead pipe and the other had a freshly sharpened axe. I met the guy with the pipe, took the middle of the pipe on my left forearm (all the force is in the end), and threw him. He landed, one of my guys collected the weapon, and I immediately turned to see where the other guy went. And that’s why I’m alive. The most important thing I’ve ever learned from Messores Sensei is when finished with an attacker, do a pivot to reestablish situational awareness. Instead of taking the blade in the middle of the back of my head, I took the haft on my left shoulder. This nocked me to the ground where I put a wrestling leg ride on the guy with the pipe to keep him down and kept hitting him in the back of the neck with my forearm. The guy with the axecame running up, kneed me in the jaw, and started to swing for my head. I grab his testicles, crushed one, and when he hit his knees in pain, I put the palm of my right hand through his left super orbital ridge. I then got off the other guy’s back and as we were hauling them to their feet they bolted. We called the cops, gave them a description of the guys and the car, and within two hours of last call they had them arrested. If they’d gotten past us and into the tent with that axe and that lead pipe, there would have been a lot of damage done.
Emma
@shortribs: Yeah, well. The British press doesn’t play the American figleaf of “neutrality.” And people read “their” paper. But what really put the saber tooth tiger among the pigeons was the Leave gents’ appearances on breakfast news shows the day after the vote saying “we didn’t mean it.”
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: You know, all that stuff that we left-of-center people say about Europe: so advanced compared to us, so civilized, etc? It ‘s because we meet people like us in the big cities. We don’t go to the post-industrial shit holes and talk to under-educated racists who lost their jobs. OTOH, we don’t go to Wisconsin Rapids, WI, and talk to the same people here who have not jobs since the paper mill closed down. Those same people live in European countries.
rikyrah
the fact that that lying muthaphucka on LEAVE came on tv the next morning and was like, ‘ Yeah, I lied about the money for National Healthcare’…..and, still has a job is RIDICULOUS.
Adam L Silverman
@Emma: That was the first time around when they were looking to leave the UK for nationalist reasons. Now they’re looking to leave because they want to remain in the EU. That changes the dynamic.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Of course you can, but there’s a difference between lying for personal gain and fraud. I’m not a solicitor or a barrister, so I have no idea how far you can push it before you cross the lines of British electoral law.
rikyrah
@Omnes Omnibus:
.
I agree. Another binding, immediate Prop 50 proposed if they win at 60 percent. Do the referendum in 30 days.
period.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Everyone I looked yesterday did not list him as an MP, only the former Mayor of London. But I just checked and apparently he got elected last year. I stand corrected. Good catch.
divF
@Emma:
Time for one my favorite quotes from Yes, Minister.
Gravenstone
@ThresherK: Residents of Great Britain in general tend to have such a wonderfully broad ranging command of obscenity and insult. Near enough 30 years ago I got to see Bruce Dickinson (vocalist for Iron Maiden) upbraid a moron in Toledo, OH who had apparently just missed hitting one of the band with a thrown bottle. I’ve yet to see its equal in terms of sheer creative vituperation. Bonus points that the band then went on with the show for the rest of us.
rikyrah
@debbie:
Lying mofo got on tv THE NEXT MORNING and admitted he LIED about the money for National Healthcare.
The very next morning.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: This is very true. I ‘left the boat’ as it were in between Munich and Berlin a couple of years ago. Was not pretty.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman:
I took Aikido lessons at the Y for a year when I was in high school and that sounds more like bar fighting than Aikido. I consider advanced bar fighting to be a martial art.
Adam L Silverman
@ThresherK: Its my favorite Scottish party game: Axe, Axe, Who’s Got the Axe?
And the attacker had the axe.
pseudonymous in nc
@PsiFighter37:
Honestly, not squarely. The middle-market Mail (proprietor: Lord Rothermere, tax dodger) and the Express (proprietor: Richard Desmond, pornographer) are more extreme in saying that immigrants will give your house price cancer.
Though in Liverpool — a city where the Sun has not been sold for decades because of the lies told about the Hillsborough tragedy — the Leave vote was a lot lower than in many industrial/port towns.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: I can’t and won’t argue with any of that. If Sturgeon wanted to be, she could probably be PM. And Merkel is almost always the smartest European leader in the room. She is one sharp and tough cookie.
Emma
@Adam L Silverman: I’ve been looking through the Spanish newspapers and right now the government, that seems to have its own troubles, seem to be concerned only about expats and the markets. Something might change after the meeting next week, but I still think that the Spanish don’t want to give the Catalans any ideas.
pseudonymous in nc
@Adam L Silverman: Gisela Stuart is apparently in the shit because she didn’t declare her interest in a financial planning company that was offering advice connected to a Leave vote. Farage is just a braying tweedy tinpot Mussolini.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: 63% Remain, 37% Leave for Labour voters. Corbyn just sacked one of his shadow ministers, Hillary Benn, to protect him from an intraparty coup.
OldDave
@Adam L Silverman: This needs some editing (or I need to wake up). Example:
Two pipes? Chronologically out of sequence? OldDave needs sleep?
Adam L Silverman
@Gex: I mentioned it in my post last night. Alex Salmond mentioned it on the BBC Thursday night with a chuckle that Cameron was probably wishing he’d listened to that advice.
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin: @efgoldman: What efg said.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Yep.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: well you’re forgetting what Martin’s definition of saying and doing the right thing is.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: Okay, good to know.
Christopher H
@PsiFighter37: Rupert Murdoch is a USA citizen. (He had to be, to take up elements of his USA media empire.) Notoriously, and apocryphally, in negotiating to seek media interests in China he was asked by a Chinese negotiator ‘and will you become a Chinese citizen, Mr Murdoch?’
In Australia, the ownership provisions of the Broadcasting Act were rewritten to allow him to keep his empire twice, but not rewritten further after the elaborate development of the use of trust structures to avoid the application of Australia’s control tests.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Tony Benn’s son? Wow.
amk
@divF: The best of brit humor.
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major: Help me out? And speaking of out, shouldn’t you be out being out?
schrodinger's cat
@Felonius Monk: Her writing was probably a reflection of society as it was. This is the first time I have read these entries, you mention above. Some of them do sound heinous. On the other hand,little kids can be pretty sexist IRL. Its only in the teen years that the people of the opposite sex starts becoming attractive.
Adam L Silverman
@PsiFighter37: Oh to know what would have happened if John Smith had lived to lead Labour rather than Blair. That Blair should be PM and Smith lie with the Scottish kings at Iona was a cruel twist of fate.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Nice details. Thanks for the cool story.
I took out an eye on a sledgehammer wielding attacker. And his sledgehammer. I was amazed the cops cared so little.
Emma
@divF: I love that! And I will say, The Financial Times is worth reading, especially the Sunday edition.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: Always leave your audience wanting more! The rest of the story is here:
@Adam L Silverman:
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m sure you’re right. The Brits I knew while living in NYC were mostly Conservatives, but they wouldn’t have gone for Brexit.
Mike G
@redshirt:
I predict a perfunctory stab at negotiating some disadvantageous terms for leaving with the EU, then another referendum where people can vote on actually leaving under these terms, given that the conditions imposed “are much poorer than we expected”, or somesuch face-saving dodge. Brexit2 is then solidly defeated, game over.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s so difficult to find *competent* pig-sodomizing embarrassments to the upper classes these days…
pseudonymous in nc
@Adam L Silverman:
Alex Salmond was a little too susceptible to the Trump bullshit field, and that bit him on the arse when Trump turned out to be… Trump.
debbie
@rikyrah:
If only the GOP could be as forthcoming!
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: The only two aikido moves I did were: 1) throw the guy with the pipe and 2) do a tai sabake/pivot from the center to see what other threats were out there. Once I was on the ground I was doing other things I’d learned before I did aikido.
Adam L Silverman
@Emma: I’m sure they don’t.
Joel
This shit is crazy. Let’s remember a simpler time.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: That is what the original writer was saying. Not that Blyton’s works have no value but that today’s Britain does not, or should not, exemplify many of the values portrayed in her works. How do you think she viewed Indians?
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: Yep on Stuart. I put that in my Brexit post last night. Always nice to be an immigrant from what was then the EEU/EC or whatever they were calling things in 1974, and have a financial conflict of interest, while working to shut the door that you walked through now that you’ve done well.
max
@Adam L Silverman: They already are. The petition to Parliament for a revote already has over a million signatures, and is approaching, if it hasn’t already surpassed, the margin of victory of the referendum. A lot of those signers have indicated that they voted for leave as protest, not because they wanted to leave or they voted because they believed Johnson’s, Gove’s, Stuart’s, Farage’s, etc lies and since they’ve now admitted they were BS, they don’t want to leave.
2.5 million signatures.
I expect that both party leaderships are going to be shaken quite up. I don’t think Johnson is going to be Conservative Leader or PM – I think he’s done as everyone now sees he doesn’t have any idea at all, let alone any idea what to do. Gove is likely done as well. And I expect Corbyn to be gone too. I also expect that there will be a lot of incumbent MPs out of office with the next election; especially if this brings down the goverment.
The essential problem is that since Cameron was backing Remain and Corbyn was backing Remain than the referendum going to Leave means that it was first and foremost a vote of no confidence in the current Government. And perhaps the Loyal Opposition as well. Traditionally this means the Parliament should go to election but thanks to (gah!) Nick Clegg we have the stupid law mandating 5 years terms which makes no sense in a parliamentary system. It can also be overridden. Given that Parliament is also pro-EU it seems like if they are so much as going to breathe in the direction of Brexit, they need to go to election first. The Queen cannot do anything about this directly, but Buckingham Palace can certainly sniff nastily in the general direction of Commons.
If the British economy continues to tank next week I expect that Parliament will overturn the election law and the government will fall.
The economy may continue to trend downward, but the overall world market trend should stabilize a bit.
The only real question is who will pick up the pieces? Clearly the people running things now don’t no what to do, not that there wasn’t abundant evidence of this prior to the referendum.
They need party leadership elections. And then they need to go to election. And then maybe they do something. Or not do something.
SNP is getting ahead of itself here, but I guess if they’re dead set of going from the frying pan to the fire, well, ‘England wants to commit economic suicide – by God, we’ll show them how economic suicide is DONE’ is the order of the day.
max
[‘…’]
Adam L Silverman
@OldDave: Just fixed it, that guy who’s testicle I crushed was the guy with the axe. Thanks for catching that.
Jeffro
@redshirt:
Agreed. New PM: “This vote, while ill-conceived and ill-executed, allowed the people of Great Britain to vent their long pent-up concerns about globalism, immigration, austerity policies, and the concentration of wealth by the 1%. It was a close vote and obviously many millions of Britons have since come to regret the consequences of taking ______ (Leave politicians) at their word. To avoid rupturing our relations with the EU and to avoid even further economic damage to those least able to bear it here in the UK, I am calling for another referendum in 30 days. The results of that referendum, if “Leave” stands, will result in the triggering of Article 50 within 24 hours of the vote certification.” Etc, etc.
you know, real leadership…
Miss Bianca
@Mai.naem.mobile: Yeah, I know, she had me till she dissed Enid Blyton. But then I remember re-reading one of the “Adventure” books – I think it was “The Valley of Adventure” – earlier this year and being a bit appalled. Let’s make fun of the Welsh, they talk funny! Bad men are all swarthy! (or is it “Swarthy men are all bad”? It’s hard to keep it straight). There was enough good stuff in there to make me remember why I loved these books when I was a kid, but I’d have a hard time justifying giving them to kids in my turn – same with the “Chronicles of Narnia”.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/26/hilary-benn-revolt-jeremy-corbyn
He was brilliant on the BBC Thursday night. Explaining in exact detail what would happen if Leave did in fact win. I doubt this will save Corbyn though.
Peter VE
@pseudonymous in nc: Why did their hometowns have to be crap? The Neoliberal project turned those towns to crap, and all the Neoliberal promises were lies. Not all Remainers are rich sociopathic neoliberals who invade other countries and cause hundreds and thousands of deaths, but rich sociopathic neoliberals all voted Remain.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Cops can be funny that way.
imonlylurking
@Adam L Silverman: Have you ever considered writing a thinly-disguised novel?
maya
The word is that when Trump gets back to the states he’s going to start his own referendum – USexit. However, it may not mean what he thinks it means.
TS
@debbie:
They only decided they didn’t want to leave when the markets crashed, the supporters of exit admitted that they lied and many of them suddenly remembered that their communities receive massive infrastructure grants from the EU. For the latter check our Cornwall and Wales.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: This is true. When I lived in Scotland in the early to mid 90s, he and the SNP were considered to be a bit out there and something of a joke. But he’s been a pretty shrewd politician. And Trump’s a special type of con man and not one, I would imagine, that Salmond had seen before.
Omnes Omnibus
@Peter VE: Your solution?
pseudonymous in nc
@Adam L Silverman:
I saw Smith give an address on remaking British politics and rebuilding public trust in 1993. I remember when he died: utter devastation. And that makes me think of Robin Cook and Donald Dewar, whose deaths diminished Labour in the mid-2000s.
Miss Bianca
@Mike J: It wouldn’t have made any difference. Look at the response to Sanders’s interview. People who were Bernie-skeptical – or even just Bernie-curious – were appalled. People who had drunk the Green Tea made every excuse under the sun for him. Same would have been true for Corbyn. True believers gonna truly believe, no matter what.
Adam L Silverman
@imonlylurking: No. I can’t do dialogue. I can’t even figure out how to write book length non-fiction on stuff I’m a subject matter expert on and have plenty of source material for. I’ve reached the point where if I can’t make the point in a tightly worded single spaced 15-25 pps or less, I can’t write it. I’m pretty sure if I had to do my doctoral dissertation now, I could write it under 20 pps.
Felonius Monk
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’m sure it was. I wasn’t making any judgement because I had never heard of her before I read the OP and your comment. I got curious and went looking for the reason.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I can happily dump on the English all I want, as I’m mostly of English extraction, but, thank God, my forebears all had the good sense to leave that clammy little island 300 years ago. I don’t feel any kind of tie to the place, and, as an American, I feel like they made their beds and now they damned well ought to lie in them. if nothing else, maybe it’ll spark some semblance of brain activity in the minds of the ignorant hordes of Trump voters and treasonous secessionists here, once they get the first damned clue about what this kind of shit leads to.
And, yeah, I know, the British gave us Monty Python and the Moody Blues, among other treasures. But for the last, what, 30 years, they’ve been coasting off the cachet they get for once having been a great power. Maybe it’s mean, but I just don’t give a shit what happens to them. I feel bad for the almost half of Britons who want to stay; but Scotland can always leave, as can Northern Ireland. As for the sensible people left in England and Wales… Well, I don’t know what to think. I feel bad for them. I guess they can always move to Europe…
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: I should have mentioned both of them as well. But I watched Smith from the vantage point of Scotland and I was in country when he died. It wasn’t a loss just to Labour, it was a loss for Britain. I think Cook and Dewar where similar.
Omnes Omnibus
@pseudonymous in nc: Labour’s future has been affected by leaders death’s since the ’50s.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Prison in Scotland is for debtors, *not* for people who try to attack you with axes or pipes?
Omnes Omnibus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): And fuck what it does to the rest of the EU and world economy? Right?
NobodySpecial
@Adam L Silverman: To put that in perspective, Scotland as a whole went 62% for Remain, and no one’s calling for Sturgeon’s head or begging to replace her with a Tony Blair clone.
That’s the main reason why I don’t think Corbyn goes – he has tremendous support among his base and the Blairites don’t.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: I gave them the sledgehammer, thinking they’d want it to dust for prints. lol. They didn’t even want to take it.
redshirt
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): I hope the US keeps out UK immigrants. We need a sea wall. Huge. Atlantis will pay for it.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Yep, each of those guys got fines in the mid 400 pound range and before the judge left the bench they stood up in the dock, turned around, pointed at me (I was sitting with the detective’s from the local constabulary as I had to testify), and screamed across the courtroom: “We’re coming for you tonight. You’re dead you yank cunt!”. The judge looked up, looked at them, looked towards me, and just kept heading out of the room. The detectives said: “when you’re done with them tonight, just give us a call.” The idiots never showed up. Between my housemates and I, our house looked like a martial arts store display. We staged our preferred equipment where we thought we’d need it, popped a video in, and sat around waiting for nothing.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: I hope you have it mounted as a trophy!
pseudonymous in nc
@Peter VE:
Because of globalisation, yes, but also because of mobility in pursuit of opportunity.
This is similar to the West Virginia problem: there is a perceived “dignity of labour” in being a coal miner who’s the son and grandson of a coal miner, but if you have the smarts and ambition to get to college (or enlist, an option that’s not as prevalent in the UK) then there’s a good chance that you’ll leave and not come back. Or for instance if you’re gay and grow up in a town of homophobes, you’ll get the fuck out as soon as possible. (None of this is to disparage our WV-resident military veteran host, needless to say.)
For my parents’ generation (born in the 40s) with fewer opportunities to go to university or establish professional careers in bigger cities, many of the talented and ambitious young people stayed around. You could get a white-collar job at the steelworks or the chemicals plant, and yes you could go to London to seek your fortune in things like the music industry — but mostly you either stayed there forever or you emigrated to places like Australia.
The steelworks aren’t coming back. The chemicals plants aren’t coming back. Heavy industry that gives you a pension but knocks 10 years off your life expectancy isn’t coming back. That’s not a terrible thing. These towns need something more like the German Mittelstand — engineering, tooling, specialised manufacturing, high-value and high-margin exports — but the Tories couldn’t be fucked with them in the 80s and 90s, Labour didn’t do enough in its time, focusing on quick service-sector job fixes, and the current Tory regime can’t be fucked either.
Emma
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): The rest of Europe is already feeling the negative results. So’s the rest of the world. So is your 401k. Personally, even as diversified as I am, I will feel it — and I am 5 years from retirement. So don’t take this wrong, but, screw you.
TS
@Mike G:
That would require assistance from the other EU countries – doubt it would happen.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Oh they took it, and filled out my report, with a comical “Siiiigh”.
Post script: The attacker was never brought to justice. For his crime on me. I’m sure he’s already been arrested for other crimes. One Eyed Brian.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: did you keep the eye as a trophy?
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: It oozed out onto the cold sidewalk that night, I’m afraid.
Miss Bianca
@redshirt: Wait, now *I’m* confused. You took out an eye on someone else wielding a sledgehammer? Or lost an eye yourself in a sledgehammer encounter? (The fact that I’ve been doing “King Lear” somehow makes this quest for clarification not seem weird to me – not when you’ve heard “Out, vile jelly!/Where is thy luster now?” enough times).
ETA: Never mind.
patrick II
@fuckwit:
Jihad vs McWorld in The Atlantic.
redshirt
@Miss Bianca: Someone else, the sledgehammer wielding attacker. My eyes are great!
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Updates file: No sledgehammer – check. No defeated opponents eye – check.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: I can see it now – “OK, we can’t have the volume on the video *too* loud, or we’re not going to hear the sound of glass breaking”.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: More seriously are/were you okay?
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: We left the doors unlocked and we had the windows open. Summer in Scotland – the weather was beautiful. For four minutes…
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Oh, the old “come on in, the water’s fine” trick?
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: I had some scrapes but otherwise just fine. Tae Kwon Do worked perfectly that night. I feel like every hour of training was worth it for those… 45 seconds? 90 seconds? It all happened fast.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: We wanted them to show up. It was me, my three housemates who worked with me, and a couple of the other bouncers. We cooked, someone brought wine and beer and Iron Bru (made from girders, taste’s like the inside of a shoe…), then around 1 or 2 we wandered down to the Chinese take away, got more food and drinks, went back and when they didn’t show up, and the sun came up around four, everyone racked out.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Well done! Glad you came out of it okay. And the time dilation effects are amazing.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
I know I’m supposed to hate The Horse and His Boy now, but I just can’t. Aravis is just too awesome and overcomes any of the other stereotypes in the book for me.
But I can’t watch the Disney version of “Peter Pan” anymore because the stereotypes bother me too much — not just the Indians, but also the bitchiness of Tinker Bell trying to kill Wendy.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Indeed. Not my only experience with the phenomena.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: Never piss off a pixie. They’ll cut a bitch!//
Ian
@pseudonymous in nc:
I actually think Corbyn is what the British left wants (his merit/effectiveness we can debate another time
I know he’s been called Limey-Bernie here some times, but Corbyn won a majority vote of the labour party. He is their leader and the old guard blairites don’t like it. The refrain going up in the labor elite and leadership against him is that he didn’t enough to stop this. 2/3 of his party’s voters voted to remain. I’m pretty sure the data available from the past two years indicated that he is very much in line with what the rank and file British labor wants.
Link
In his election most of his support came from young first time voters over the establishment Milliband. It sounds more similar to 2008 than 2016. Additionally labor is nearly tied to the tories in polling, much better than the Milliband era.
Link
In short, I think it would be a bad idea to replace Corbyn. It would create a crisis in labor at a time when a general election might come (though why the conservatives want to do this when they don’t need to until 2020 is beyond me). And if the majority of the party is on board, and the voting public is giving you your best numbers in years, why change leaders?
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: The adrenaline dump and eventual clear are also fun, fun, fun!
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Same here. But of course, Lewis does his goddamned best to undermine Aravis at every turn he can – and of course, only *she* gets punished for the way in which she manages to escape. Fucking Aslan.
ETA: I listened to “Peter Pan” on audio book last year – first time I’d read the original since I was a kid – and I was generally stunned by the sexism and creepy, almost pedophiliac vibe to the whole thing. Either JM Barrie was seriously fucked up, or our culture is, that we still celebrate this damn thing. Even tho’ there are some great moments.
Ian
@Renie:
I don’t like bojo one bit, but he is entirely to smart and to funny to be Trump’s twin. Though they were both born in New York. Sufficient to say, I am going to need to see two long form birth certificates, and I am going to need to see them yesterday.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
So, basically, everyone in that room — including the criminals — knew perfectly well that they weren’t going to show up, because they knew they would get their asses kicked again. Just a little cultural misunderstanding.
Weirdly, a similar thing happened after the one and only physical fight I ever got into — when we got called to the vice principal’s office, the other girl made a big show of saying she wanted to meet me after school to fight again, but in retrospect, you’re not going to tell the vice principal exactly where and when you’re going to do your follow-up fight if you really mean it.
(I am a small person, but what this girl didn’t know is that I have 4 older brothers, so after she punched me in the back of the head, I whipped around and had her up against the locker with my hand around her throat before she knew what was happening, so her friends pulled us apart and all ran different directions, My brothers still brag about it to this day, 30+ years later!)
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Well…I’m sure you hoping for some more fun…I just find myself feeling rather happy to hear that you did not, in fact, take an axe blade to the back of the head.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: It’s like a drug, really. That’s why I always see Batman as an addict.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Barrie was seriously screwed up. He is often referred to as the boy that never grew up – physically. His brother died when they were boys and Barrie basically stopped growing taller from that point. There have been arguments made that the emotional impact stunted his growth. Regardless, Pan is thought to be loosely modeled on Barrie’s deceased brother – also a boy who never (got to) grow up.
sigaba
@Miss Bianca: “Either JM Barrie was seriously fucked up, or our culture is, that we still celebrate this damn thing”
People have a way of processing children’s lit.
I must come to Barrie’s defense a little– me and my brother are named for him, I got his Christian name and my brother got his family name, and the Barrie’s are distant relatives of mine.
[Eta: Mu dad uncritically read us his Peter Pan all the time, I haven’t cracked it open since I was 12 though :) ]
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: People often do not do smart target acquisition.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: I had heard some of that that – I forget whether it was part of an introduction to the audio book or not (which was narrated by Tim Curry, btw, so a worthwhile experience despite my queasiness at the tale).
sigaba
@Miss Bianca: Oh well if Dr. Frankenfurter is reading the child molestation fantasies it’s all okay then!
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: We weren’t hoping, just prepared. They were both local neer do well children of local elites and notables. The guy with the axe is the son of one of the wealthiest families in town – they owned a very nice pub and restaurant. The guy with the pipe is the son of the local glazier. The former had done the Scottish equivalent of golden gloves boxing and he testified to the court that no one had ever beaten him as badly as I had. His barrister also argued, in his defense, that I’d come to Scotland two years before and enrolled as a student in a post-graduate course of instruction with the sole purpose of beating up his clients two years later. There were some chuckles in the court room.
All of that said I was incredibly lucky. I had a good team I was working with and my training and abilities were sufficient to allow me to come out of it with only some scrapes and bruises. I could very well have been killed that night before I ever had a chance to do much.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
Huh. When I re-read it, I still felt like Aravis was the smart one — she came up with all of the plans and they almost always worked. She almost felt like a prototype for Hermione Grainger.
And IIRC, she was punished by Aslan not for her escape, but because she had allowed an innocent person (her servant) be punished in her place.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Tasteful.
Ian
@PsiFighter37:
Then how do you explain that they are at their highest polling in years?
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I have pictures of the Pan statue and JM Barrie monument from Kensington Garden’s somewhere. If I can find them, I’ll scan them in – these were taken in 95 – and shoot them across.
sigaba
@efgoldman: Acetone and benzene. The Judge calls it “The Dip.”
nutella
There have already been consequences from the EU: Jonathan Hill, Britain’s EU commissioner, got the boot from his position managing financial services for the EU, and the EU said that an agreement from February of this year about Britain’s status with the EU is now void. No matter how much the Brits try to delay making the formal request to leave, they’re going to be shut out of EU government discussions and decisions because they are, obviously!, hopelessly unreliable.
Miss Bianca
@sigaba: IKR? He did an *awesome* Captain Hook – who comes off as the most sympathetic character in the story, at least to adult me!
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, but Shasta does the same thing. Or does the fact that he steals some guy’s horse and leaves his “dad” to face the consequences not matter because hey, “dad” was going to sell him to the Calormene? It’s OK if you’re a white boy…
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
Well, I was barely 5 feet tall, with glasses and braces, and hung out with all of the nerds, so I probably looked like a safe target, but sometimes appearances are deceiving. ?
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Damn right.
Did these punks do any time?
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
No, it was okay because his “dad” had kidnapped him from Shasta’s real family and basically kept him as a slave before trying to sell him to someone else.
Aravis allowed an innocent person to be punished for something she did, and she didn’t care, because the innocent person was “only” a servant, so not really human.
Taylor
@Adam L Silverman:
The Guardian was reporting this morning that Corbyn would resign “within the hour.”
That didn’t happen. Instead we have a column by Tristram Hunt explaining why Corbyn must go (summary: UKIP is going to eat Labor’s lunch if Corbyn stays), and reports that Benn was trying to organize a mass resignation of the shadow cabinet if Corbyn did not quit.
Then Benn is fired while the story is on the presses.
I would not try to predict where all of this is going, but I suspect we will eventually get the back story.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: yeah, and if these rich-boy assholes *had* killed you, would that have been enough to get them tossed in jail (sorry, “gaol”) with the REAL Scots criminals, debtors?
Sorry, it’s just that my class prejudices are showing – somehow it seems *worse* to me that these were privileged kids who had no reason except the shield of their privilege to fuck shit and people up. Or something.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: No the one with the axe, who was convicted of another five counts of assault with grievous bodily harm, taking his total to 29 convictions for that at that point, was fined 425 pounds. The guy with the lead pipe, got the same conviction bringing his total to 19, was fined 350 pounds. And then they were free to go.
redshirt
Also, Adam, this story sounds like an awesome 80’s movie. If there’s not a girl involved she’ll be added for the movie.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Wow. So you can have nearly 30 counts of assault in the UK and get a few more and just pay a fine?
What a country!
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Lewis sets up the situation so that the brown girl does something to get punished – for her “arrogance” and the white boy doesn’t have to, because he’s a Magical Narnian Accursed But Beautiful Barbarian. Sticks in my craw.
Adam L Silverman
@Taylor: I’ve read the reporting. Benn notified him that he was polling the shadow cabinet on a request that he step down. Corbyn then sacked him at 1 AM their time. Word has already leaked that the shadow cabinet, almost all of them not Corbyn supporters, but Labour MPs that took their positions to keep things on an even keel for the next four years, have no loyalty to Corbyn and are likely to be in full revolt. And Labour MPs are now, on twitter, calling for the shadow ministers to either sack Corbyn or face the parliamentary Labour Party doing it for them. There’s some question as to what the party whip is doing, there’s rumor she is trying to delay a no confidence vote until the week after next to allow Corbyn’s trusted deputy to take over, but she’s denied it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Corbyn is out and Benn or someone else is in by the end of the weekend.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I have no idea. My understanding, and what I was told by my Scottish friends, was that prison was for people that can’t pay their debts – even in the 1990s. Not people that commit violent crimes. How much of that was their small town/village highland upbringing showing versus reality I have no idea. I do know that Scottish Law is different than English Law and that’s about it.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Emma: I never said I don’t care what happens to everybody else. But I don’t care about the shitbirds who voted for this and now think maybe they might have made a mistake. I’ve heard this shit long enough from ignorant bastards in this country who don’t care how badly they fuck themselves, as long as the right people get fucked harder. I just have no patience for this shit any longer. If they want to shoot themselves in the face… Well, I hope they don’t, and if they were to ask me, I’d tell them not to. But if they’re hell bent on doing it, just so long as some of the buckshot they’re aiming at themselves hits those they deem unworthy, then, well, I won’t waste any tender feelings on their behalf. There are deserving people to feel bad for.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: I had two women that worked with us. One was one of my housemates and the girlfriend of one of the other guys on the team. The other was a member of the university’s karate dojo. The real reason for the fight/violence was that it was the anniversary of the death of the brother of the guy with the axe. So he and his buddy went out, had a few drinks in his brother’s memory, and decided they wanted to beat on some students. Things did not go how they planned.
sigaba
@Miss Bianca: I think Lewis was actually trying to say that Narnians aren’t actually human, and thus we can’t punish them, because it would be like yelling at a dog.
@redshirt: I see Dick Donner directing, the role of Adam going to Judge Reinhold and the two Scots being played by Steven Antin and Keifer Sutherland (flashbacks to a dead Kevin Costner omitted in the cutting room).
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Scotland yes, I have no idea about England.
Adam L Silverman
@sigaba: I don’t look anything at all like Judge Reinhold.
sigaba
@Adam L Silverman: Oh but he’d have played the beats perfectly, smug foreigner.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
Well, here’s the description of Shasta’s life with his “father”:
So, yeah, hard to argue that Shasta needs to be punished for running away. Aravis, on the other hand, is an escaped noblewoman who left her maidservant to be whipped for letting her escape. And once Aslan explains why she was punished, she’s grown enough as a person to accept that what she did was wrong.
And, hey, she helps save the kingdom, marries Shasta, and becomes Queen, so it’s not like it was a lifelong punishment.
Taylor
@Adam L Silverman: No way that Benn replaces Corbyn, I don’t think. Politically he is very unlike his father, more of a Blairite. Maybe someone like Andy Burnham, who can be all things to all people, as an intermediate leader.
It sounds like the MPs in the PLP are terrified of getting slaughtered in a snap election, if Corbyn stays as leader. Slaughtered and replaced by UKIP, who will demagogue concerns about immigration that Corbyn refuses to engage with.
pseudonymous in nc
@Ian:
That it did. (Though Milliband wasn’t part of the election.) And those young voters weren’t persuaded to show up for the referendum in the needed volume, and it’s their long-term future that got fucked over. So he’s let them down at the first big hurdle.
The PLP has been biding its time: they’ve tolerated Corbyn for the good of the party. Labour’s future now has to be with young, outward-looking defenders of the marginalised. It was epitomised by the dynamism and talent of Jo Cox, who hadn’t been in the Commons long enough to gain a front bench position, but was rising in reputation, and her loss surely weighs heavily on her colleagues. I don’t want to see a drawn-out leadership challenge: I want to see a good old-fashioned political overthrow.
redshirt
I’m listening to Bauhaus right now and imagining the soundtrack.
Adam L Silverman
@Taylor: You know more about Benn than I do. I know the family pedigree and thought he was very, very sharp on Thursday night. But I’ve not lived in Britain in 21 years and really don’t know who’s who in each parties zoo so to speak.
As for worrying about a snap election, that is, I think from what I’ve read, exactly what they’re worried about.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: How about a 1994 PCU Jeremy Piven?
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
And, okay, just because I’ve always loved this description of their happily-ever-after:
I always get an impression with Lewis that he genuinely liked children, both boys and girls, but had a problem relating to adult women (though he did eventually get married, and they were quite happy until she died of cancer).
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Nope didn’t look anything like him either.
pseudonymous in nc
@Taylor:
There was that belief last year: UKIP ended up with precisely one MP.
Fuck “valid concerns about immigration”. Get a leader who’ll talk honestly about economic security and the need to look outward. Have a bit of courage and dignity and self-belief. Don’t cringe, don’t condescend.
Plus, local UKIP candidates are still freaks and loons at best, at worst open bigots with far-right pasts. It’s not so much a talent pool as a stagnant puddle.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: And propose anything that isn’t an austerity budget and you’ve got something!
Fair Economist
@Taylor:
So the idea is that the eurosceptic working class voters are going to leave unless Labour has a fire-breathing pro-EU leader? Boy, that makes *so* much sense.
What’s really going on is that the Tories are in for a world of hurt when the fact that the referendum will not actually result in Brexit seeps into the public consciousness. Labour is going to be in a very good position for the next election, and the neoliberal and leftist factions are fighting for control, because the winner has a good chance of controlling the UK in the reasonably near future.
Taylor
@pseudonymous in nc: Labor lost the last election because UKIP denied them majorities in many constituencies (and the Tories ate the Liberal vote). UKIP only got one seat because of the mind-bogglingly stupid and undemocratic first-past-the-post voting system. There is concern that a generational realignment is coming in British politics, and it won’t be pretty.
Re Benn: He is chiefly remembered now for an impassioned speech, as shadow foreign secretary, advocating for military intervention in Syria. Corbyn kept him on as a signal of tolerance to the Blairite wing of the party.
Taylor
@Fair Economist:
I don’t think anyone has said that, and the comment seems to contradict itself.
Tristram Hunt’s case for Corbyn leaving.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: So what 80’s/early 90’s actor would you say you most resemble?
Taylor
And as a final comment, since I’ve seen some naively say here that a United Ireland might be a positive outcome of the Brexit vote: The English have placed a bomb under the Irish peace process.
Anyone that had any doubt about this just had to watch the vile Theresa Devilliers (Northern Ireland secretary!) breezily claim on the BBC that “technology” would fix any problems with trade between NI and the Republic. The Brexiters just don’t give a damn.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman:
My last name is Scottish, even though my grandparents came from Connemara (name probably came over when Cromwell sent the rebels ‘to Hell or Connaught’). Stories like this one of yours hit the news, my Norwegian-American Spousal Unit reminds me that the hardcore Viking hellraisers left Scandinavia for the Celtic lands & mostly never went back… his people, according to the family genealogists, have been peaceful farmers since at least the 1600s!
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: I have no idea.
Fair Economist
@Taylor:
Most of the complaints I’ve seen are that Corbyn didn’t campaign for Remain hard enough. Fine, but replacing him with someone even more pro-EU is going to make more voters switch to UKIP, not less.
Hunt is saying Labour needs an anti-immigrant leader to gain politically. That’s at least plausible, unlike the idea that a more pro-EU leader will keep anti-EU voters in the party. However, I don’t relish the thought of all the major parties in a mad race to beat up on immigrants.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: Okay, I don’t understand the hit the news bit, but the rest sort of makes sense. I do have a short news clipping about the whole thing from a local paper one of my professors gave me. Its in a box somewhere.
And with that to bed!
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Chiklis from The Shield?
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: When it comes to international stories in the news, “Scottish Man” seems to fill the niche we Americans assign to “Florida Man” (or, in the Midwest, “Ohio Man”). Darwin Award competitors, and descendents of the people about whom both the more fearsome sagas and Faulkner’s novels were written…
I have a redhead’s temper; Spousal Unit is also a redhead, but much much calmer. We were housemates before we started dating, almost forty years ago (in fact, he was my landlord for a while) so it’s not as though he didn’t know what to expect!
Applejinx
@? Martin:
This. I’m more certain than ever that we gotta go with Clinton and pray, because Bernie is the US Corbyn. We’re lucky his mass movement wasn’t more powerful than Clinton’s political muscle. The thing is, if we got Bernie, he’d be impeached within four years as soon as a crisis hit and the rest of the government turned away with fingers in their ears saying ‘la la la can’t heaaar you’. There is absolutely no way he has the political leverage to get stuff done in Washington no matter how many hippies he can get to camp out on the White House lawn.
Clinton would have the political leverage and if we play our cards right we can give her a massive landslide on the grounds of ‘only candidate in either party who could get things done for good or ill, full stop’. The problem the Left have with her isn’t that she’d be feckless and incoherent, the Left are convinced she’d just perpetuate… kind of the same type of governance that gave the UK, Brexit. Further starving of the poors, make sure the working class are so desperate that they’re prepared to try and outwork algorithms and robots, and hey presto a jobless recovery with money for the investing classes, and London/SF/etc are booming. If you only know other rich people it makes a kind of sense. That’s what the Left think is going to happen.
Unlike Sanders, Clinton is not gonna get impeached (or indicted), pretty much regardless of what she does or did, because she’s too powerful a figure. The only question is whether she’s prepared to take advantage of the situation (and that doesn’t mean adopting the full Berner laundry list of demands). There’s a huge amount of elasticity in her potential revenue as leader of the free world: the investor class has been having it all its own way for decades, plus the US controls its money supply in a time where others are locked in austerity or tied to the Euro.
Clinton very well could put the hurt on the investor class simply because they have nowhere else to turn, with the argument that Bill did likewise in the 90s and the rich got richer in the long run. People understand arguments like that and again, conditions are exactly right for running that play again, there’s a huge amount of slack for harnessing that economic engine without choking it off (it’s running wildly out of control, uselessly). It would take such a small percentage of the investor class’s economic pillaging to entirely transform people’s lived experience of what it means to be an American, and there are so many political gains to be had from doing that (guaranteed re-election, full credit for working an ‘economic miracle’, delivering a renewed American consumer class to a desperate-for-exports Eurozone)
The recipe is pretty much ‘bail Main Street the fuck out, bigtime, and American interests prosper’. And the American investor class would make way more than they initially lost. Hillary would have to be thoroughly in control to do it, and the narrative would have to be ‘like Bill before her, reinventing liberalism to make the economy boom’. This time, though, there’s no middle class left to work with so she’s gotta get the money to the lower class and the poors (whether or not they are ‘working’). Their jobs are now ‘consume so that the world becomes dependent on Americans spending money’.
Sloane Ranger
@TS: During the campaign I talked to loads of people who told me that we gave shed loads of money to the EU and got nothing back. When I told them otherwise they did not believe me.
I think this comes down to the fact that when I travel in Europe there are masses of billboards announcing in giant lettering that this or that project was being supported by an EU grant/subsidy. In the UK the only acknowledgement I have ever seen of EU support appeared in very small letters on a plaque about the renovation of the seafront at Corner.
evgen
What I have not seen anyone else mention related to the Corbyn/Bernie comparison is the nature of the voting pool that put him in power. In one of his dumber moments, Ed Milliband effectively created an “open” primary. He let anyone vote for Labour leadership just by sending in a fiver and joining at the last minute. Unions piled into this en masse and went with the most crunchy-left candidate on the ballot. At the moment Unite and others are about the only support that Corbyn has left…
Taylor
@Fair Economist:
If I was an English carpenter making ends meet with construction work, I’d be worried about Polish carpenters coming in and undercutting me.
If an economist or a Labor party leader accused me of being a racist for feeling that way, with no engagement with my concerns, I’d bide my time until the next election, so I could show you the consequences of your lack of engagement.
Robert Sneddon
@Adam L Silverman: Bouncer at the door of a rough Scottish pub (it might be the Horseshoe, it might be the Sarry Heid):
“Huv yoose goat ony shivs, knives, hatchets or cleavers oan ye?”
“Uh, no.”
“Does ye waant tae rent some?”
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I am sure she was no worse than Kipling. I still enjoyed reading some of their respective works.
There were worse things that the British did than what Blyton and Kipling reflect in their books. I reserve my outrage for those deeds. Including but not limited to mass starvation and killing unarmed protestors. British India was a police state. Indians were coolies to them and there was a strict hierarchy in British India. I am aware of the history.
LAC
@efgoldman: I know. Both parties responsible for underfunded agencies, both parties responsible for government shutdowns? Really?
pseudonymous in nc
@Fair Economist:
Tristram Hunt is a stupid… person. (I met him very briefly once.) You can’t out-UKIP UKIP.
And as the weekend has shown, fascist skinhead bigots have taken the vote as a mandate to start abusing immigrants openly, and the power vacuum has enabled them.
Adam L Silverman
@Robert Sneddon: Some of the worst fights I ever saw in Scottish pubs were the dominos players. Not being able to score your tiles correctly and ale is not a good combination!
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: I have hair.
cain
@Adam L Silverman: Goddam, that read like some action novel. Hell of a life.
Vhh
@Gex: but the EU is determined to have its vengeance, so th UK will get nada from then from now on, forcing the matter forward.
cain
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I’m sorry, but no. Th eBritish Empire is what has caused the shit world we have, thankyouverymuch. There would have been no Pakistan if the empire hadn’t decided to play wormtongue in Jinnah’s ear. Never mind the clusterfucks in the middle east (Iraq) and south africa.
Thankfully they are not the same people as they were in the turn of the century. But there was nothing awesome of great about Great Britain as a person who came from a former colony and still exposed to the legacy of the British Empire.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@cain: Maybe I didn’t phrase that well. I meant “great power” in that they were what people 100 years ago called a great power. Great as in “mighty”–not “wonderful”. But for 80 years, they’ve been riding off the, well, cachet of once having been so important.
cain
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
OK, thanks for the clarification. Yes, it was a mighty empire.. I don’t hold any of the people today accountable to what the empire did in the past. We just need to move on and fix our shit.
Suffragete City elftx
I’m closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley’s uniform
Of imagery
I’m living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm
Of dream reality
I’m frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain’t got the power anymore
No, I ain’t got the power anymore
I’m the twisted name on Garbo’s eyes
Living proof of Churchill’s lies
I’m destiny
I’m torn between the light and dark
Where others see their targets
Divine symmetry
Should I kiss the viper’s fang
Or herald loud the death of Man?
I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore
[Chorus:]
Don’t believe in yourself
Don’t deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death’s release
I’m not a prophet or a stone age man
Just a mortal with potential of a superman
I’m living on
I’m tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien
Can’t take my eyes from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith
If I don’t explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it on the next bardo
I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore