We compare coats
wear imitations on our feet
and borrow sympathetic voices
for sideshows
until insight is a stranger
and tomorrow but an echo
Sideshow
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Tag Archives: Responsibility
Oversold
Opportunities are not results,
So do not oversell,
For the leverage of your theories
Are as nowt without the actual clout
And where there are made winners,
Are more losers made, as well.
***
”Not enough attention is paid to a similar cliff edge on the other side of the English Channel” – Institute for Government
”Home Affairs Committee raises serious concerns about the Government’s contingency planning for post-Brexit customs operations” – UK Parliament
”It is the UK which is choosing to leave the single market and customs union and that means, by definition, creating a border” – Chris Grey
Excellent reality check: ’A beginners’ guide to trade negotiations’ – UK Trade Forum
***
Lull me a lullaby
Sand in my eyes
Buy me a mockingbird
Give me the sky
Betcha by golly
Wow, build me a folly
Bring me some Kool Aid
Let’s fill up the trolley
Sprinkle the pixie dust
Set up a blind trust
Go short of a picnic
And cut off the crusts
Pipe me a loony tune
Red, white and blue my shoes
Kansas is dying
Jump over the moon
[December 2017]
Political incorrectness gone mad
When meaningful is meaningless
And meaningless is meaningful,
Political incorrectness has gone mad;
When the Government is synonymous
With conquering ignoramuses
Why are these Brexits still so fucking sad?
***
‘David Davis is still denying MPs a “meaningful vote” on Brexit’ – “Things can only get bitter.”
Why are Brexits so unhappy? They won. Scrutiny and accountability are fundamental to Sovereignty and Democracy. Well, it might be rather late in the Brexit day but that is exactly what is happening. Brexits said they were fighting to take back control but they are busily trying to give it away with no discernment, whatsoever. And they say it is the remoaners who are not patriotic…
Other words for people doing their jobs:
Saboteurs
Enemies of the people
Mutineers (£)
On Twitter, @ LeaveEUOfficial even précis a link to a ‘Westmonster’ post, today (I won’t dignify it with a direct link), with “The 15 Tory MPs who voted against enshrining the Brexit date into UK law are the cancer within their party and traitors to their country. Total disregard for the people’s democratic choice”
It’s that kind of crazy-arsed paranoia that started all this catastrophic crap.
The value in the tale
In pride of place
That cut your nose to spite your face
And say you did not recognise it, anyway
Of all the scapegoats in your myth
Did make yourselves its greatest gift
Of value in the tale
***
”At the heart of all this is the political irony that defines our times: that the very thing so many places voted for makes any attempt at their area’s revival even less likely.” – John Harris (Guardian)
”So having advised investors to remove their money from the UK, the Rt. Hon. John [Brexiteer] Redwood told the UK government to go for ‘hard Brexit’”. – Frances Coppola (Forbes)
Brexiteer James Dyson says he wants to make it “easier to hire and fire” people and for the government to scrap corporation tax (Metro) – Then “warns government not to cut farm subsidies”, his total farming estate – Beeswax Dyson Farming – is the biggest in the UK (Farmers Weekly)
[”100 reasons why Brexit was a good thing” (Telegraph)] 🤷🏻♀️
‘much worse than that’
World: Are you really this stupid or have you completely lost control?
UK Government: 🍰
**
“Brexit Britain doesn’t even have a solid relationship with the rest of the archipelago it inhabits… If it were a personal ad, it would read: ‘Petulant bolter seeks stable, lifelong relationship.’” – Fintan O’Toole (Guardian/Observer)
”If only we were still in the days when governments did things which were merely stupid. This is much worse than that.” – Ian Dunt
“No One Knows What Britain Is Anymore” – Steven Erlanger (NYT)
“To old friends, Great Britain, as they used to call it, is in the clasp of an inexplicable fever. Renowned for solidity and pragmatism, the Brits have fallen to rage and resentment. Carefully judged self-interest has surrendered to dangerous dogmatism.” – Philip Stephens (FT)
[I highly recommend politics.co.uk and Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? by Ian Dunt, who is widely considered an authority on the matter]
howls of latent despair
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Neither fish nor chlorinated fowl
Nor maize nor daffodil be spared
”Nothing has changed”
But howls of latent despair
Share decreasing dissonance
Brexit exemption sought for Grimsby seafood trade
What is wrong with chlorinated chicken?
Eye-roll and sigh…
Well done, Homespun
Well done, Homespun
You won
In tongues:
Forked-puns
Unhealthy sums
Ten times the burden on our young
Top-table crumbs
Fair-weather chums
New depths to plumb
The right to be somebody else’s never-setting Sun
No actual benefit – zip, nada, none
No fun
No fun
No fun beneath
Your unopposable thumb.
Mr Opportunity
You who think themselves hunted by witches; who
need their empathy spoon-fed: you really cannot tell
if you have abused your power or pushed your luck?
You don’t understand where her boundaries are, anymore?
Why, poor lamb, they are where they have always been,
if you would only
stop getting your clues and taking your cues
from a world of patriarchal design.
Stop looking up for her. Stop looking down at her. She is
right here. Meet her eyes: she knows
you are both in a prison of Fathers’ makings
and there is a limit to how much she can keep saving you.
Heartifice
A Brexit-deep state of mind:
Heartifice, by design.
Truth be told, a waste of time
When fiddled faith says
”This is fine.”
People can make-believe of anything
People can make-believe of anything: an idea; a time/place; a person; the worth of Brexit. It might be founded on sheer strength of feeling or on the perception that a logical position is providing a complete picture. Checks on reasoning are subsumed into the comfort of confirmation bias. It becomes a feedback-loop of superiority and victimhood, working as a shield against all opposition.
The greater the investment in a position, the greater the requirement for its justification and, the more one justifies an investment, the more one becomes consumed by the need to. This is an ideological dependency developing a religious-like zeal for its own protection. Seeing is believing where believing is seeing: these are now the same thing. Chicken and egg. It doesn’t lead to truths, except by virtue of coincidental overlap – luck – or by lessons learned through the observation of its example – judgement.
And because the cold, hard truths of Brexit are self-evident, either you admit your error, to yourself, at the very least, or you double down and brazen it out, in the hope that denial will buy time and yet save your face. Thus, through fear or cynicism, you set yourself to the mission of converting and recruiting others because, well, safety and righteous correctness in evangelical numbers, right?
juxtaposed 