Feeding the Dragon: Guards! Guards! and Brexit

For a book published 31 years ago, "Guards! Guards!" by Sir Terry Pratchett has a lot to tell us about Brexit. I started reading it for light relief from the news; it didn't entirely work, but did give me a new perspective.

(Minor spoilers follow, but as noted, it's been 31 years.)

I hadn't reread GG for at least a decade, and what struck me this time is how angry it is. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Beneath all the daft puns and jokes (which are extremely funny), is a deep and righteous anger at the petty evil of humanity.

Ltoinel, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Election 2020: No Longer Worthy

The 2020 US Presidential election is tomorrow. I almost wish I believed in gods, so I could pray to them to have mercy on us all. I don't; and if I'm wrong and the gods are real, they would seem to have a twisted sense of humour.

I hope Biden wins. I truly do. He would at least slow the American republic's descent into the abyss. He would give America a chance. That's worth hoping for. For American citizens, it's worth fighting for. But no matter what happens in the next few days, the rotting heart of America has been exposed for all to see. 

Trump and Biden with former President Obama, in 2017 as this nightmare got underway.
(U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Cristian L. Ricardo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Electioneering

British politics is a steaming heap of rubbish. Every time I look, the pile is higher and smellier. It's leaking some kind of fluid. There are things moving around in there. It's making disturbing organic noises. Why would I want to poke it with a stick?

Metaphorically speaking, this is why I haven't written much on this blog lately. I've followed British politics for a long time. If anything I do so more closely now, because it has the fascination of all truly awful disasters. But I just haven't had it in me to write about it. I salute commentators like @IanDunt, @ChrisGrey, and @SteveBullock who have the fortitude to cover it week in and week out; and I have the highest respect for people like Professor Tanja Bueltmann, who has suffered relentless personal abuse for championing the rights of EU immigrants to the UK.

That said, an election is upon us, and I have words to say about it. The hard part is using words, not just incoherent wails of despair; but here we go.

Image source: Getty Images via BBC

In Which I Select The Least Awful Conservative Leadership Candidate

The British Conservative Party is having the leadership contest for which it has long yearned.

Inspired by John Scalzi's posts on the 2016 and 2012 US Republican candidates, I am ranking the contenders from most to least terrible.

Rogues' gallery. Image source: BBC

Jumping The Queue And Other Lies

Theresa May, who brought us the hostile environment, the "citizens of nowhere" speech, and the Windrush deportations, has struck again. This time, trying to sell her embattled Brexit deal to the public, she has said it will stop EU citizens from "jumping the queue" ahead of "engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi".

This is offensive nonsense. There is no queue; EU citizens have exercised a right of free movement guaranteed by international treaty. But it's revealing of the aims and likely outcome of Brexit.

Theresa May. Source: The Independent/Reuters

What does May mean by this phrase? Of course, some of it is tribal signalling, almost beneath the level of spoken language. "Britain good, Europe bad" is the crude subtext. For this purpose, she might as well be flinging her own feces at a European flag. But there's something more interesting going on here.

What Is This I Cannot Even

Reading the news seemed a harmless habit, even virtuous; but that was before the world went wrong.

I miss the old days, when we could be concerned about a stained blue dress or a guy eating a bacon sandwich. Paying attention to current affairs is becoming too much to stomach.

Blogging here has been light for a while, and nonexistent for a month. That's partly because I'm still settling into my new life in Toronto. Maybe some of it is blog fatigue, after four years of posting on a weekly basis. But mostly it's just... how do you react to absolute and total madness?

What They Want Is Everything: Part 3

What endgame will there be for Trump?

This is not a fairy tale. The knight does not slay the dragon. Everyone does not live happily ever after.

What They Want Is Everything: Part 2

It's taken me a while to write this, because it's hard even to think about. It strikes close to home. I am referring to President Trump's policy of separating immigrant children from their families.

There have been a few milestones in the sorry tale of ineptitude and hate that is the Trump administration. There are moments when anyone with an ounce of humanity, paying even minimal attention, must recognise: We are witnesses to evil.

What They Want Is Everything: Part 1

The Trump administration has reached new depths of obscenity over the last couple of weeks. It's going to take me more than one post to address it.

First, consider the Supreme Court vacancy. Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Reagan but generally regarded as a moderate, has chosen to retire. The fact that his replacement will be appointed by a Republican President and Senate may or may not have influenced his thinking.

I'm not the first to observe that if your political system hinges on one octogenarian's decision to retire, it is a stupid political system.

Be that as it may, the reason things have come to this pass is the Democrats have lost and lost and lost.

Low Information Voter

Yesterday I voted in my first ever Canadian election. I was under voting age when I left, and by the time I was an adult I'd been away far too long for an absentee ballot, but now I'm back.

THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Rachel Verbin

(On a personal note: I'm back to blogging, too, after a longer-than-planned absence. It turns out moving to another continent with a three-year-old child and a cat is very tiring, but I'm enjoying my new home.)

Without Limit

At the reliably excellent Gin and Tacos, Ed reflects on the Senate election held this week in Alabama. He says of the Republican party:

By failing to make what was a very easy play – disown Moore and claim some sort of moral high ground – they signaled that literally nothing is more important to them than maintaining power. Nothing. There is no "bridge too far."

Something very similar applies to the Brexit ultras in the British media and Parliament.

Data Security: Just Read The Instructions

Basic internet security isn't that hard, but people who should know better still contrive to foul it up.

Image: Blue Devil Hub / Creative Commons

I'm a professional software developer with some grounding in the mathematics of cryptography, but not an Internet security expert. In this context, I don't need to be. I know wretched carelessness when I see it.

A Brexit Thanksgiving

This week I've been preparing my usual Thanksgiving turkey feast, and being thankful that I'm getting out of the UK.

It gives me no pleasure to say this. I love the UK, I've made my home here for many years, and I wish it well; but the news on Brexit looks worse with every passing day.

It's becoming increasingly apparent the government has no plan, no grip, no strategy, and no prospect of locating any of them using both hands and a map. It doesn't understand the technical complexities of Brexit, and doesn't want to. It deals with inconvenient facts by pretending they don't exist. Meanwhile the clock ticks inexorably on, and the hour of Brexit draws ever closer.

If the great British public understood the consequences of their government's foolishness, I think there would be riots in the streets. Brexit is a massive and costly challenge at best; in this government's careless hands, it will make the poll tax look like a birthday party.

Storming of the Bastille, 1789.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Leaving

Suffer the dreams of a world gone mad
I like it like that and I know it

--- REM, "Leave"

I'm leaving the UK in April 2018 for a new job and new life in Toronto, Canada. I was born in Canada, and after twenty-six years I will be going back.

There are a lot of positive reasons for this move. It means our son can be closer to his grandparents. It's an exciting new job and I think it will be good for my career. It looks like a fascinating city and a great place to live. I will be able to watch North American sports in the proper time zone.

That said, as regular readers of this blog will have noticed, I'm very pessimistic about the future of the UK in the face of Brexit.

Perspectives on Annihilation

Trump could destroy us all.

This statement deserves further consideration.

It's become a commonplace thing to say. It's the new normal. The United States' nuclear arsenal is commanded by a man with all the foresight, empathy and self-control of a spoiled child.

Nuclear explosion over Nagasaki, 9 August 1945.
Source: MaxPixel

American Torture

The moral degradation of US politics goes back long before Trump arrived on the scene. This was reiterated by the blogger known as Mike the Mad Biologist:

Time was, in popular culture, torturers were viewed as evil, not as heroes ‘doing what needs to be done.’

Leaving aside “the score of efficacy”–though in isolation, torture is useless and requires a regime of mass torture, doesn’t work, and offers the temptation of manufacturing false evidence–once you have normalized torture, there is nothing left that can not be normalized. Telling ridiculous lies, spouting racist rhetoric, or offering laughably unrealistic policies is nothing by comparison to the brutal and vile degradation of human beings.

The first sentence got me thinking.

It's not hard to find older movies in which torture is shown as unequivocally evil. In Return of the Jedi (1983), it's a simple and convenient shorthand.

To establish that Jabba the Hutt is nasty and scary, we have a brief shot of a dungeon in which droids are being tormented with red-hot irons. There's no need to stop and explain that Jabba is a Bad Guy Torturer, as opposed to a Good Guy Torturer. He orders torture, so by definition he's evil. We can move swiftly on and watch Luke fight the Rancor monster.

Newer films, by contrast, tend to be more ambivalent about torture -- if not openly endorsing it as Okay When A Good Guy Does It.

The examples I'm going to use are a couple of light-hearted comedies. They aren't extreme cinema, setting out to break taboos and push the portrayal of violence to its limits. They're films in which torture is present and important, but tangential to the main story. As such they may be a better representation of mainstream beliefs.

Consider The Princess Bride (1987), which as most of us know includes "fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles."

This Is Who They Are

I thought I was numb to hearing about acts of cruelty by the UK immigration authorites. I was wrong.

Two cases this week gave me a sick, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

• Julie Bolitho's husband Vikram was deported from the UK, not because of any error on their part; not because they had fallen foul of the complex and arbitrary immigration rules; but because the Home Office had broken its own regulations and refused to back down from the error.
• Leah Waterman is raising two young children, and caring for her husband Simon, who was severely disabled by a stroke. The Home Office has deported her, saying that Simon must act as sole carer to the children, even though he suffers from hours-long seizures and is unable to speak or write.

In a horrible way, these are the lucky ones. They have chosen to fight, can afford legal representation, and are articulate enough to get their stories into the media. Others must be simply going, silently; they have much to contribute to the UK, but are being thrown out for no good reason.

"What kind of man are you?"
--- Dave Brewster, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

Joining the Choir Invisible

The British government has pledged that if any petition on its official website receives more than 100,000 signatures, it will merit a formal response from the government and a debate in Parliament.

Going to meet its maker?
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A petition requesting a second referendum on the terms of Brexit has reached that threshold. The Parliamentary debate has yet to be scheduled, but it has received a response from the recently created Department for Exiting the European Union. It is worth quoting in full, as a window into the government's rather flaky state of mind:

A Brexit Analogy

Britain would be a lot more fun at parties if, after her third drink, she didn't start mumbling about how awesome the Empire was. Not for the first time, current events have reminded me of this.

Britannia rules no more.

A new campaigning group has a rather curious approach to Brexit. Here is an analogy for their idea:

Junior Officer of the TSA

Short blog entry this week, on account of jet lag. Back to normal next week.

Meanwhile, my son has been deputised as a junior officer of the TSA -- or to give its full title, the Transport Security Administration of the USA. They gave him an official sticker while we were waiting for our turn in the scanners.

The TSA has a reputation for unseemly and unprofessional behaviour. This may have grown out of the sheer absurdity of airport security theatre. They may overcompensate for the fundamental insanity of their job by carrying it out in the most rigid and inhumane way possible. Enforcing rules which make no logical sense, and exist largely to give the impression of doing something, does not strike me as a task which is likely to attract the best and brightest. This is unfortunate; last week we observed the sixteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and real failures in airport security are a serious matter.

To be clear, I don't think a sticker can possibly excuse any misbehaviour by the TSA. I'm more impressed that they are trying at all to be friendly, instead of relying on their overwhelming power to make your life unpleasant. It's as if the Uruk-hai offered the hobbits a nice cup of tea instead of threatening to eat them.

Maybe the sticker is part of some kind of public relations counteroffensive; or someone, somewhere in the humourless bureaucracy of the TSA has retained a sense of fun; or a two year-old could in fact handle airport security just as well as they do. Although my son is a US citizen, if he wants a career in law enforcement I think I'd encourage him to choose some other agency.