ICYMI, Brexit has happened. Nobody has much of a notion what happens next.
Here are some highlights from my 'as it happened' notes.
The Irish government publishes its contingency plan. As this contingency plan is a badly formatted table that sprawls over eight pages and is titled 'Appendix', I'm not entirely filled with confidence for the future.
For some reason the ever-cautious Michael Martin decides it is now safe to give David Cameron a few kicks.
A woman loudly calls Boris Johnson a twat as he gets into a car outside his London home. Sky News is there to capture the moment. Continuing this theme, I feel the only word to describe the framing on display here is 'masterful'.
The Irish Times publishes a witty letter that reads simply 'Perfidious Albion, eh?', which I've no doubt the author is inordinately proud of.
Ian Paisley Jr. advises his constituents to get their hands on Irish passports if they are eligible to do so. These waters are indeed uncharted.
Some other Brexit reading below. I've no idea when normal service will be resumed.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like David Cameron’s face.
'I want my country back', Laurie Penny
Combined with that, there is the folly of allowing a billionaire from Australia to corrupt our press. A good deal of it was already corrupt (the Zinoviev Letter, for instance, a forgery published by the Daily Mail to ensure a Conservative victory in 1924), but the depth to which the bulk of our newspapers have sunk, the extent to which they are nothing more than mouthpieces for spittle-flecked xenophobia (“Up Yours Delors”, from the Sun, 1990), is a wonder of the civilised world.
'Philip Pullman on the 1,000 causes of Brexit', Philip Pullman
In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish. If risk modelling (using notions of statistical normality) was the defining research technique of the 19th and 20th centuries, sentiment analysis is the defining one of the emerging digital era.
'Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit', Will Davies
The real division in Britain is not between London and the north, Scotland and Wales or the old and young, but between Johnson, Gove and Farage and the voters they defrauded. What tale will serve them now?
'There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove', Nick Cohen
A different, more durable and threatening kind of inequality is also at stake here. A majority of people around the United Kingdom are feeling like non-people, un-citizens, their lives jerked about like marionettes by wire-pullers far away. In those circumstances, very bad things indeed can be expected.
'Britain's EU Problem is a London Problem', Peter Mandler
Worth Pondering
Eye Candy
Lithographed Portugese seafood cans
Totally Confused
Mac n' Cheetos, fire walk with me, bloviating flesh bag, autocomplete Pi poetry and a grope for Brexit (and art).
Yours etc., @loughlin
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