It won't help at all but it is another way for the Tory party to put off its collision with reality.

(oh, and, you have mail)

All of us?

The mail is weird now. Everyday my wife gets an email with pictures of the front of the envelope of all the mail we are going to get that day. I don't want any spoilers.

2: me?

4: what! really?

Yes. I don't know how.

7: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-mail-preview-service-informed-delivery/

Here's the link if you want to sign up!

https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.action

If everyone learns about this, being the person who always gets the mail will no longer be a good way to keep your subscription to "Dinosaurs Fucking Cars Quarterly" from your family.

10: That's probably good. That sounds like a publication your entire family could enjoy.

(For folks wondering, NW sent me an email, and we had a chat. Enjoy your day!)

It was a fun derail while it lasted. Until the dinosaur porn.

We had to derail! We don't want to collide with reality!

It's not for lack of trying that dinosaurs don't exist anymore.

Living under a perpetual but uncertain fear of Brexit is still better than actual Brexit, right?

We can't know until Brexit happens. As a/b testers, their duty is clear.

yhe brexit behind closed doors documentary was v interesting, i was a bit surprised by how early the eu side, in internal discussions, was frank about desire to be shot of uk. they kept up a public face of sadness/regret for quite some time, considering. also love verhoefstadt's asst's camper van strategy.

we just booked tix to visit mother-in-law first 2 weeks of nov, so can bring supplies to deepest cornwall & i plan to ruthlessly profit from favorable ex rate 2nd week of trip in london. liberty here i come! but possibly complicated to pop over to amsterdam for a concert, paris to see friends/clients.

Never to have to hear May utter the phrase "deliver Brexit" is a small blessing in itself.

NW is more informed than me and I'm sure 1 is all you really need to know, but the other part, I assume, is that even the desperate notion that May could figure out something better in the future and pass it is untenable. By now May couldn't get a resolution declaring Bone Day through Dog Parliament.

Dog Parliament isn't very sex positive.

If, hypothetically, she actually gets around to resigning at some point, how is she replaced? Simple vote in the Commons?

Future PM BoJo's great successes as Foreign Minister auger well for the green and pleasant land.

Who wants a flaming bag of dog shit left on their doorstep? Is the UK awash in Tory politicians making Shermanesque statements? If not, why not?

A hole drilled in every British head!
I can't parse 24.

25: He's suggesting that a wise person would not choose to be the Prime Minister at this juncture.

Ah. That bit of Sherman. I thought he was suggesting a scorched earth campaign, but also not.

22: Tories pick a new leader and they become PM. Their process is to have their MPs (or 1922 committee?) make a shortlist of two, and then the party members, approximately 150k people, pick from those two. Signs point to Boris winning.

22: her replacement as PM will be the next leader of the Tory party. That is chosen from a shortlist of two, supplied by the parliamentary party, by the membership of the Conservative party -- something between 100 and 120,000 overwhelmingly elderly, white, and extrapolitan people who will have been traumatised by the crushing of their party by Farage in yesterday's Euro elections. Lots of them, I guess, will have in fact voted for the bastard.

This person will have won by promising to deliver by sheer willpower and charisma the Brexit that may couldn't, the one that delivers complete freedom from foreigners. They will then find they have to negotiate this deal with foreigners. They won't get it. The party will turn on them.

There are by now only two possible outcomes: May's deal, or no Brexit. What is described as "no deal" will in practice be May's deal hurriedly agreed to after a couple of weeks of humiliating chaos. But that of course will lead to a further eighteen months of painful and ghastly negotiations, at the end of which there will still be the choice of cutting off Northern Ireland, which must remain in the Customs Union and to all intents and purposes in the single market as well, or staying in them (but without a vote) to stay with NI. The Tory party as presently constituted, and certainly the Farage party, would dump the Northern Irish in a heartbeat. The are English nationalists.

What is described as "no deal" will in practice be May's deal hurriedly agreed to after a couple of weeks of humiliating chaos.

I would by no means rule out the possibility that they will get the timing wrong and actually end up outside the EU with no agreement by mistake.

Fixed terms are such a bad idea, there really needs to be a new election. I'll be in Scotland for the next month, as far as I can tell there's little chance of Brexit happening during that time, I hope? Lewis and Harris meetup anyone?

30: That won't be the end state, though we may pass through it. Trade has to continue, and for that we need legal arrangements.

||

The corpses recovered from the Thai side of the Mekong river, which forms the border with Laos, were identified in January as Chatcharn Buppawan, 56, and Kraidej Luelert, 46. The bodies of the two men, who helped run an anti-junta radio programme called "Thailand Revolution" from Laos, had been handcuffed and stuffed with concrete.

Stuffed *with*?

It's weird the way that "all politics is local" has broken down not just from the local to national level (with all US elections increasingly being based on national issues, and with incumbancy advantage decreasing) but also on an international level. I feel pretty invested in UK elections now, and I certainly feel like I have more in common with anti-brexit British people than I do with American Republicans. Likud and the Republicans are almost a unified party and no one would expect either of them to put their own country's interests over the joint party's interest. And as mad as I get about Republicans favoring Putin over Democrats, I definitely feel more loyalty to the global center left than to America.

Also, are people leaving literal flaming bags of dog shit at May's house?

They're hiring a Polish guy to do it for them.

35: but also on an international level

Indeed, so you have leads like this one:

Steve Bannon and George Galloway reportedly hugged each other in Kazakhstan following Theresa May's resignation as prime minister.

36. No, people with bags of dog shit and lighters can't get within a hundred yards of May's house. But people can be quite nasty to politicians. When Nick Clegg led the Lib Dems into coalition with the Tories and reneged on all their vaguely progressive stuff, his constituents forced him to move out of the city by besieging his house and screaming abuse at him in the supermarket when he went shopping. People also have long memories, so she'll live a rather restricted life from here on.

Apparently PMs at least since Tony Blair have been tricking everyone by actually residing at 11 Downing St. and making the Chancellor of the Exchequer their human shield at No. 10.

He effectively killed the Lib Dems, didn't he?

I believe the Lib Dems are now back, thanks to David Cameron, as since he made Brexit the only political issue anyone talks about, thus many Labour voters who love the EU, e.g. because they are highly educated or are actual immigrants themselves, feel morally bound to vote for a party that demands to not Brexit under any conditions whatsoever, the biggest of which is the Lib Dems.

Well, I guess that's at least an improvement.

Clegg himself got gone, though.

A short play from August 2019...

PM BoJo: "Hey, EU there, we want to renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement because reasons."

EU-27: "LOL, no."

The end.

I just want to express appreciation for the post title.

Several of my acquaintance who are lifelong Labour voters have voted Green in this election, as they can't bring themselves to vote Lib Dem under any circumstances. I think they'll mostly go back to Labour at the next general election, though.

47. I would have thought I would have had trouble voting LD, but I made myself do it, since Gina Miller's outfit had run the numbers and they were the ones with the best chance of picking up seats. I think it hasn't quite sunk in for most people quite how pernicious Farage is, quite apart from his anti-EU antics.

(For those unfamiliar with Gina Miller, she's a business woman who is probably extremely nasty in most senses, but has underwritten various pro-remain organisations which are quite useful, and in consequence is living with a constant barrage of death threats from those nice democratic Leavers.)

47: you can add me to that list except for the bit about going back at the next GE which is highly uncertain.

OT: I'd heard of the "Walk Away" bullshit before, but only just now realized the name of fucker grifting on it.

Which, to be clear, means that I knew him when he was child not that I have anything in particular against the name qua name.

His dad (I think) was someone I mentioned before, because of his involvement with trying to breed a red heifer for Armageddon-related reasons.

Everybody always wants to breed a red heifer for Armageddon-related reasons. It seems like no one does it just for the sport any more.

The guy's day job was breeding red heifer for purposes of eating their offspring.

I ask because I'm assuming at some point the Tory leader has to be approved by parliament, where the party doesn't have a majority; and if as NW indicates the next leader may be perfectly willing to ditch NI, they may lose their supply agreement with the DUP; and in the coup attempt against May the Brexiteers lacked a majority of Tory MPs; which leads me to wonder whether the party has decayed to the point that some fraction of MPs could vote against the party leader in parliament.

The PM has to be able to command a majority in parliament. Not sure what happens if no one can... General election?

48: Is it past time that we started calling him Nigel Falange?

55: I don't think that ditching Northern Ireland will actually be in the winning candidate's manifesto, if you see what I mean. And the DUP can't want an election because as soon as they lose the balance of power at Westminster they are finished there.

But this raises the interesting question of what happens to the DUP when it has a summer in which to reflect on where it has got to. The party is split between the urban hardliners and the rural groups who know perfectly well how much they are dependent on cross-border trade.

I voted Green rather than LD largely because the candidate in our constituency is a lecturer in pre-Socratic philosophy. I think in the long run the Greens have a deep class problem which I'll try to work out in print some time but they are of course the only party to take seriously the biggest problem.

58.2 is a very sound point.

Is there any possibility that Jeremy Corbyn will be replaced? He seems like a real toad.

There's no chance that the next leader -- chosen for his* pro-Brexit convictions -- comes around to saying, out loud, that the only real obstacle to having the Brexit everyone dreams about is clinging to NI? Doesn't giving Ireland back to the Irish, as that moptop put it, actually make a whole lot of sense? In a world where Brexit makes any kind of sense at all, that is.

* It's going to be a man, isn't it.

NI is very very far from being the only obstacle to a successful Brexit. Also the inhabitants don't want to be given back to the ROI and the ROI don't want to take them.

62: If by that you mean explicitly allow/encourage NI to join the ROI, I think Conservatives would hate that for different reasons. NI is still a vestigial symbol of empire and its departure would rank up there with the "loss" of India among historic betrayals for nostalgic wankers to fume over.

If you mean NI stays but with a sea border, I don't think that's completely impossible - if leadership starts to seriously consider which tradeoffs they can make, which they haven't yet - but it would be more likely an eleventh-hour solution than something they campaign on.

Unless we suck enough carbon out of the air to reverse global warming and restore the ice to the extent that Doggerland comes back, it will have to stay a sea border.

62. Probably it's going to be a man. There are two women in the running who are nasty enough to get a fair following from the Tories, but I wouldn't put money on them.

The problem with "giving Ireland back to the Irish" is that the massive gerrymander which created Norn Iron in 1922 remains in place, and notwithstanding NW's 58.2, my guess is that there would still be a Unionist majority there if it came to a referendum, which is the procedure laid down in the GFA. Almost certainly you wouldn't see a 60% majority for Irish unification, which would probably be demanded in any referendum run by the Tories.

A substantial majority in England and Wales, and a narrower one in Scotland, would organise street parties with public fountains spewing wine if we could get rid of the bloody Unionists, but the Tories were the Conservative and Unionist Party until about 50 years ago and are still in that headspace; and most other people would have deep reservations about doing something that radical against the wishes of the majority, gerrymandered though they be; also, the Republic wouldn't wear it: they don't want another civil war, and they're dubious enough about taking on the subvention of the North, which is a failed state economically as well as politically.

How much is Northern Ireland subsidized by the U.K.? I kind of assumed not as much as it used to be, but it occurs to me now that I don't actually know.

I guess I can just google shit. 11 billion pounds sounds like a lot of money for less than 2 million people.

68. If somebody wants to give me five and a half million a year I won't say no.

I think maybe my source was using the American definition of 'billion'.

£5,500 would be better than nothing. Not life changing, but worry reducing.

I'm guessing you don't get it directly and that it doesn't get distributed evenly.

It looks like the per capita subsidies* for Mississippi and West Virginia were about the same ($7,000). New Mexico was quite a bit higher, but I suspect that's got to do with the high percentage of natives.

* Federal taxes paid vs federal benefits received.

Anyway, I wouldn't move to Mississippi for $70,000 extra a year. There are places in West Virginia I'd happily move to for the same money if I could work from home and my son was already out of the house.

73 Those comparisons are kind of annoying. We have some long interstate highways that run through the state, and while, yes, communities along them get a disproportionate benefit, lots of parts of Montana are a long way away. And certainly I-90 has plenty of trucks going from Seattle to Chicago, or whatever. They didn't build, and don't maintain, the interstates for us, so allocating the cost to us on a per capita basis isn't exactly fair. National forests cost something to manage -- while plenty of that money finds its way into local economies, calling it 'welfare' is, I think, not intellectually honest. The air base, including the missiles silos, costs some money, and of course our politicians have fought to keep the whole thing here. That said, it's here because of our relative proximity to Russia, not just because we're getting welfare. Car dealers and bars in Great Falls thank you for sending us young men, from all around the country, with their first real paycheck. How to allocate, regionally, those costs is more complicated than just looking at their current zip code.

And in any event, federal spending, per capita, is less here that in Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia, or Washington, among others, and is very close to the national average. What makes us 'takers' in these analyses is the other end of the scale: we pay less in federal income taxes because we are poorer. Ridicule away! Obviously, there are also some federal expenditures in connection with Native communities: is this enough to be what puts us over the national average in federal expenditure per capita? You think it's a good look to be whining about that?

I'm sorry for unintentionally insulting your state and/or province.

NM is weird because Oppenheimer had a ranch there and it was obscure to foreigners, so it ended up with the Manhattan project, and now multiple giant nuclear labs. This is also why it is near the bottom on all educational measurements except percentage of residents with PhDs.

Was there a majority for May's deal without the NI issues? I thought just as big a problem is that enough of the hard brexiteers believe in ponies and unicorns and enough of them won't accept any actual deal.

Would unionists accept union with Scotland, but not England/Wales? The phenomenon where NI gets a special (better) deal and everyone in NI says "no we don't want that" and Scotland says "wait, why can't we have that" is a very weird one.

Yes, I think 78.1 better summarizes it.

Entertaining thread rundown of Tory leadership candidates.

Northern Ireland is the only possible thing that the Conservatives could think they have leverage over the EU on, right? They can pretend that they're going to be ok with (or be willfully ignorant that they'd be) restarting a low-level sectarian conflict with terrorist attacks but I think they'd quickly find voters, even in England, are not. I hope? Most Tory voters remember the Troubles, no?

80: The leverage the Tories have over the EU is that "no deal" will really fuck over the Irish economy. The leverage to Irish have over the Tories is that there is still a huge sentimental and pig ignorant Irish lobby vote in Congress, which will want to preserve the Good Friday Agreement (which requires the infamous backstop). And if that is thrown away, there will be, uhm, difficulties negotiating the trade deal Trump is certain to offer on his upcoming visit.

Against Chris Y's points on Norn Iron: I believe the GFA states only the reunification would require "a majority" and a 60% boondoggle might well not prove possible.
Also, there was a poll last year showing that something either very close to or just over 50% now favour reunification.It was a real shocker. But Haven't run down the reference, I'm afraid.

I can imagine sentiment changing a bit if the rest of the UK gets out of Europe, and nativist England responds to the particular issues of the Irish border with 'fuck them anyway.' No?

81 Trump has more or less announced that he's no longer going to pay attention to Congress but will make all the laws himself.

Ireland is so unbelievably screwed with no deal. There's no infrastructure for getting goods to Ireland without going through the UK.

The EU was the best thing that ever happened to ROI/NI relations. The return of some sort of "hard border" scenario, under some sort of Brexit, is just some sort of stupid and ugly.

82.2: An Irish Times opinion piece said in five recent NI polls support for staying in the UK ranged 45-55%, which is lower than it used to be. But it also discussed significant numbers of people responding "not sure / don't know", especially in face-to-face polls. So it could be that even when "stay in UK" got 45%, "leave UK" got significantly less, like 35%. But maybe some headline writer misleadingly wrote up that result as if it was reunification reaching majority?

Initially I thought this post was about the entire month of May, and I have to say I would be in tentatively favor because it's been that kind of month.

84. They're working on it. I understand that includes new ferry services to the mainland without going through Britain. Apparently the EU has agreed to subvent the beef industry, of which 50% has come to the UK. They'll be damaged; everywhere will be damaged, but they are using the time to prepare rather than to have stupid internal fights in Fine Gael.

85. You have no idea how stupid and ugly the DUP is. Think Alabama Republican state congresspeople, and then think worse.

Chester Campbell in Peaky Blinders seems like he would be a DUP MP today. (Sam Neill was born in Omagh, NI.)

Further to 88.

"of course the only party to take seriously the biggest problem"

when we all have time to kill on the liferaft I'll look forward to hearing all my smart well-meaning non-Green friends explain why this was never more than an afterthought or peripheral consideration for them

FPTP voting seems to distort NI politics more than the UK's other countries these days - the DUP got 56% of the Westminster seats with 36% of the vote.

I guess there specifically they know what it looks like using a more rational system via the NI Assembly, which approximates proportionality.

And the Lib Dems did have a generational chance to sell the public on a different system, and fluffed it.

If the English want to be lead by somebody who is rich, a total tool, and living in the past, maybe look into this guy? I don't know what his actual opinion are, but the odds are good they can't be worse than the alternatives.

Euregesis?
So Conservatives and Labour both trashed, losing Corbyn and May's constituencies. IDK how well one can extrapolate from these voters to the General election voters, but on the face of it Leave and Remain is the only meaningful axis left and the Remainers overall have a majority.

And continent wide as I read it a whole lot of good news. Turnout way up, no major gains for eurosceptics and far right excepting Liga and Brexit party*. Huge gains for greens and liberals; Golden Dawn, Finns Party, Danish People's Party all down, some by a lot; PiS and Fidesz slightly up; Vox and FN slightly down (even if Macron got a bloody nose). And big losses for center left and center right all over. On the face of it the center has moved well to the left, toward Europe, toward environmentalism.
*Big exceptions, granted, but Brexit is offset by LD gains and may anyway disappear in the event of Brexit.; and Liga has backed away

95: It makes sense that European Parliament elections would hinge more on people's opinions about Europe, and a parliamentary election wouldn't have quite as dramatically low numbers for Labour/Tories. The latest polls for a general election still have Labour+Tories right around 50%, as opposed to 23% in the EP elections.

85. You have no idea how stupid and ugly the DUP is.

Eh, I guess I do have a bit of an inkling. My mother and her siblings used to stay inside the house on the 12th of July, and that was in Ontario, Canada, fer god's sake. That was the day the members of the Loyal Orange Order used to parade through the streets of small-town Ontario, sneering at Irish Catholics and French-Canadians alike, and just daring them to retaliate.

||

A couple of days ago, there was a bunch of twitter chatter about Moby. Now there's a lot about Hicks.

|>

I love this post title, btw.

94: if it has to be a Tory we could do better than Stewart whose experience as governor of the Mars Arabs and knowledge of Border history should be useful in dealing with feuds, religious schism, bitter historical obsessions etc.

99: It's almost like it's an existential crisis for someone on this blog.

95. I devoutly hope this doesn't translate into a general election, where with FPTP it would probably give the Farage gang a working majority. On the other hand, if you leave out Lab+Con the vote for Remain parties was 40.4% against 34.9% for Brexit+Ukip. If we pretend Lab are 2:1 Remain and the Tories are 2:1 remain, the numbers are even more striking. LibDems, Greens and CUK need to stop pratting around and negotiate a modus vivendi.

And MC is right that continent wide the results are reassuring.

Somebody wants to subpoena pictures of me and Natalie Portman.

82: Although Brexit admirably demonstrates the folly of pushing major constitutional change through with 50% +1.

83: I can imagine sentiment changing a bit if the rest of the UK gets out of Europe, and nativist England responds to the particular issues of the Irish border with 'fuck them anyway.' No?

Nativist England responds with "Let the rest of Ireland re-join the UK, as God intended."

Oh, right, of course He did.

I've been mispronouncing Farage in my head, I assume it was fa ra ZHAY kind of like Faberge eggs, not rhyming with garage.

107: Maybe we could just go with Nigel Falange instead?

Let you be the first to quip.

Wikipedia's pronunciation guide says stress goes on the first syllable, which seems wrong - I've heard various Brits saying it and it was stressed on the second, if not stridently. It also has the first vowel as æ, whereas I hear some schwa-ization.

Actually now that I think of it Wikipedia's guide matches up precisely with what I think of as the (stereotypical?) British pronunciation of "garage", but I'm used to hearing it rhyme with the American version of the same word.

Considering the man's politics, the official pronunciation should definitely be the prescriptivist one.

You say "car hole".

Since many of his voters prolly pronounce the car hole "garridge", I feel we should call him "Farridge"

114. I got told off for saying that yesterday, because apparently I must pronounce it as pseudo-french because he does. I said, OK I'll just call him that Fascist twat. End of convo.

114: wait, doesn't everyone in the UK say garridge? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say garazh except in the US.

103 is highly unlikely since it didn't happen in 2014...

A farrago of farage and farridge.

117 is what I thought, but I just checked UK speakers on Forvo and a surprising number pronounced it GARaazhe, whereas US is garAAZHE.

I pronounce it GAR-age, like the lifespan of North American fish.

I just accidentally explained the English pronunciation to myself.

Anybody get higher than 32 in Splash the Fash?

Next pub meet I'll give you a special treat, then, if that's not violating the sanctity oobc

122 just got 37 on my first try

122, 124: Censorship! I tried it and got: "Unavailable due to a police request given recent events."

You need to pick Burger King.

Wait! Only the McDonald's milkshake gets you the "unavailable" message. The BK shake still works. Got 39 on my second try.

Ripped from the headlines.

||

"They sell fascism as socialism, like a street vendor passes off dog meat as lamb."

How is that cheaper?

You trap the dogs right behind your stall, with leftover dog meat. No markets and trucking out to the country and shit.

(I'm assuming the vendor, like the plurality of all humans, lives in a super dense city with a feral dog problem.)

Which is the polite way of saying, check your privilege, bro.

My city is dense by American standards, but people will try to rescue any cat or dog that looks sad or lost.

Yeah. They would say that.

Maybe the people asking for coolers to provide shelter for feral cats were actually eating the cats.

131 A variant of the old cat and rat farm bit.

My city is dense by American standards

Pennsylvanians as a whole are pretty damn dense, but really, the city folks aren't that bad.

My understanding is that Americans are actually less dense than average owing to abnormal lipid content.

I'm at Chipotle right now.

Get a Mexican your size and compare his displacement with yours.