Don't mention the unicorn

[selenak]

Apparantly British MPs have some kind of competition going on wherein every week, one of them must be Basil Fawlty in The Germans? With the latest entry being the one from Shropshire, who apparently never heard of the fact Britain got far more monetary aid from the Marshall Plan than West Germany did. (East Germany, for obvious reasons, got nothing.) Aside from far too many WWII movies, tv shows, books, what have you, this latest round of German bashing seems to hail from disappointment that one of the Brexiteers‘ favourite scripts – „the German car industry wants to sell cars in Britain, so they will force Angela Merkel to give us all we want, and she’ll force the rest of the EU!“ - just refuses to happen. Mind you, no one outside of Britain ever assumed it would, and most certainly no one in Germany (where both the car industry and Angela Merkel have other problems than the delusions of the British upper class) but then, that’s part of the general, ongoing problem – Brexiteers keep talking endlessly among themselves and no one ever seems to take in what the EU has (consistently) said it will and won’t accept. This article from the Washington Post sums up the Brexit developments thus far superbly, concluding with: Britain is one of the richest and most advanced democracies in the world. It is currently locked in a room, babbling away to itself hysterically while threatening to blow its own kneecaps off. This is what nationalist populism does to a country.

No kidding. Says she who lives in a country where national populism produced the worst results in human history. A few days ago, Saul Friedländer spoke in front of the Bundestag, our parliament, apropos the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He spoke of his parents murdered there, of his own memories, of so many others, and he chose to speak in German, the German of his childhood. The horror and shame hit me all over again while I listened, and also the gratitude that he was there, alive, to be listened to. And then you get online and encounter people treating all that horror still as the ultimate role playing game with themselves as the heroes.

Comments

[trobadora]

locked in a room, babbling away to itself hysterically while threatening to blow its own kneecaps off

How very apt.

And then you get online and encounter people treating all that horror still as the ultimate role playing game with themselves as the heroes.

Right? Ugh. :(

[selenak]

Ugh indeed.

[muccamukk]

I quite liked the one about Partition coming back to haunt them.

[rydra_wong]

I wish to express my deep agreement, but have nothing except incoherent screaming to do it with.

[selenak]

I hate that this is happening to you, and so many other people who did their best to prevent it.

[ratcreature]

I feel so sorry for everyone. I don't think any regular person who voted for Brexit actually wanted to just blow up all their international and trade relationships in a burning trash fire of incompetence (apparently with a literal one even, from the latest headline about their potential problems with waste export post Brexit I read).

[neotoma]

What?! The British ship waste out of the country and don't have plans about what to do about that when Brexit happens?

:rolls eyes: I mean, as an American I don't have much room to talk, but damn. That's really incompetent.

[ratcreature]

Last I heard they haven't solved the electrical grid issue either, because afaik right now the electrical grid is balanced across EU with EU regulations and price agreements and such, so afterwards without a deal they might have to just buy it to free market conditions? I'm not entirely sure about the issues, but I read articles worried about electricity supplies, especially in Northern Ireland. The last BBC article I read on this expected blackouts in case of no deal, anyway.

So the trash fire seems the UK situation in pretty much all the vital areas if a "no deal" happens. As I understand it, there isn't even time to pass all the necessary new laws in theory, let alone set up all the suddenly missing bureaucracy they used to have outsourced to the EU over four decades. (Obviously if you aren't in the EU your laws can't make use of EU courts or institutions without some sort of deal arranging for that, so even if they don't for example change the content of some industry regulation, you need to change the legal framework, so that means a lot of laws need to be approved.)

Really the problem lists pretty much read like some zombie apocalypse scenarios, complete with leaked plans for military deployments, emergency powers, evacuation of the royals away from population centers and so on, with disturbingly high probabilities for various disasters and certainty of inconvenience (if you believe experts at least, otherwise it's all "project fear").

All of which is why nobody thought "no deal" was a real possibility after all (though apparently as selenak points out there seems a growing minority in the UK who dream of being able to do their apocalypse disaster larping for real, except most haven't even set themselves up for that by preemptively prepping with their victory gardens or such, because if they had, they certainly wouldn't have scheduled their leave date for the end of March, so really it's kind of pathetic even from that angle -- incidentally I've listened to a podcast by actual UK preppers once, like ex military types doing a podcast with information about personal emergency preparedness, and those were not Brexit enthusiasts, but they thought pessimistically that no deal would happen). Unfortunately the politicians set "no deal" up as the default option that happens if they fail to agree on anything else.

[selenak]

It's a tragedy for everyone, including the people who voted for it, yes, and I just feel like screaming every time I think of it.

[ratcreature]

I also can't help to be aghast that there actually doesn't seem to be a conservative party in the UK anymore, as a majority of them now seems to be in favor of a total overthrow of the current political and economic framework in favor of half-baked ideas that align with ideology instead of reality. And the ideology isn't even anything particularly internally consistent.

I mean in theoretical underpinnings I have quite radical inclinations myself, and totally get the impulse to really want to change things fundamentally already to fix obvious flaws (if with rather different ideological underpinnings from the Brextremists), but one of the few things I genuinely appreciate about traditional conservatism is its mistrust of radical solutions in favor of preserviation of things that may not be perfect but at least work somewhat, so you at least are not uncertain about things, even if they suck. I get that mindset. And then they maybe go gradually from there, to not accidentally break too many things if you have to change, but they don't tend to careen all over the place and things are predictable.

Of course this sucks if they cautiously preserve entrenched injustices (and it can be maladaptive in its own way, e.g. in some areas like carbon emission reduction I think that by now radical changes are the only rational path because we conservatively dithered far too long clinging to the status quo). So it's really not where my sympathies naturally go, otoh I appreciate that you don't end up with with brigades forcing everyone to suddenly be a peasant based on some idea you had about achieving revolutionary equality or something either.

Under actual conservative leadership you really should not have ended up in a total quagmire of uncertainty looking mere months ahead, not without some unexpected Black Swan type thing happening that overthrew things. So it's kind of disconcerting to watch that.

[4thofeleven]

There seems to be a certain type of Briton who's image of their nation is somehow fossilised at the height of the Empire – it's not even a frustration at their country's relative decline as a great power so much as a complete denial of the reality that they're not the dominant global power any more.

I've met more than a few Brexit supporters while on holiday who seemed actively confused when I tried to explain to them that, no, Australia and the other former British dominions probably wouldn't give Britain any sort of favourable trade deals. They seemed convinced that we would just happily abandon our regional trade ties or any agreements with Europe to return to the economic domination of the mother country...

[lilacsigil]

I'm also Australian and I keep seeing this too! I'm in a farming area and people are excited about the potential trade, sure, but they're trade opportunities, not "give all our food to Britain because we love them" opportunities!

[selenak]

Right. It's become a cliché at this point, and not just re: Britain and Brexit, but people are really capable of living in their own realities, no matter how much information to the contrary is available. Ten years, even five years ago I'd have said Britons like that were a tiny minority and surely satire still using them would be unfair and dated. More fool me.

[watervole]

I'm avoiding reading about it.

IF we get a second referendum, I shall vote Remain again, but if we don't nothing I can do will make any difference.

We can't have our cake and eat it, and sooner later, one hopes people will realise that. Preferably sooner...