Inverted

I've not been following the proceedings from start to finish, but from what I can tell yesterday, Lord Pannick (Miller's lawyer) seemed to handle the bench far better than Lord Keen (chief Gov lawyer for Scotland) did. Right now James Eadie (chief Gov lawyer for E+W) is speaking. He's presenting better and more confidently than Lord Keen did, but his argument is walking a very tricky tightrope. He's essentially having to argue that Parliament has a chance to exercise control over the government, and that the prorogation isn't excessive, whilst also arguing that in any case it's not up to the court to even decide these questions. It's a bold argument because he's close to saying that there is absolutely no possible legal control on prorogation in basically any scenario. Lord Keen seemed to stutter at the edge of coming to that conclusion under questioning, whereas Eadie is taking the opposite approach and sticking to his guns on the issue.

Had this beast on my bookshelf for a while, going to try and get through at least one volume of it heading into winter.

"We're anti-EU, not anti-Europe" *2 seconds later* "THIS CUNT LIKES FRANCE"

A significant portion of that 30% are also snivelling bootlickers who get a rush from seeing their superiors get rich.

I think the case will be hugely embarrassing for the government but ultimately I doubt the SC will follow the Court of Session's approach. The English approach to constitutional law is much more focused on the absolute unjusticiability of prorogative power. I can a imagine a decision which is very scathing and which essentially finds the government to have acted improperly and deceitfully, but which refuses to declare the prorogation illegal.

The Court of Session refused to give an order explicitly ordering that parliament be recalled likely because they didn't want to rock the boat too much before the UKSC made a final decision, but it's interesting from a theoretical point of view.

The Court of Session (highest Scottish court) has ruled that the prorogation was unlawful - Government now has to appeal to the Supreme Court. Also now I don't know if it's ambiguous as to whether Parliament is now technically still in session, until the UKSC gives its decision. https://t.co/oTQLIMgLv4?amp=1

Though in my edition it's "Narziss" and Goldmund. Enjoying it a lot, not read a novel in a while. I'm definitely going to read some more Hesse after this.

I'm by no means trying to whitewash the Labour leadership because I think they have made mistakes at several points, and Corbyn has a lot of baggage which I would prefer a Labour leader not to have. Not necessarily because I am personally offended by it, but because it is such an easy target. What I'm saying is that this hypothetical Labour leader who could command the respect of the media and rally the liberal opposition around them, does not exist. Centre-left Ed Miliband was painted as a Marxist freak. The Lib Dems objected in principle to working with Gordon fucking Brown. No human can come out of the current degree of scrutiny with a spotless record. No leader can respond to years of endless sabotage from within, and relentless, withering attack from outwith their party, without making a mistake at some point. The important thing is that Labour stands right now, despite everything, with a meaningful chance of stopping Brexit, and a shot at entering government. The media and the other parties hate the Labour Party not for who leads it, but for what it is - that being a mass movement aimed at meaningful social and economic change. To make Labour palatable to these people, would require that it be turned back into what it was 20 years ago - a technocratic, leadership-dominated, centrist movement. Maybe if it had given up on what it was trying to do, and had a leader who would bend to the will of the papers and the Lib Dems, we could have had some kind of a Labour government by now. However, I think that would have been the last chance for meaningful democracy in this country within our lifetimes.

If you look at the way the Telegraph, and several other papers can report that Johnson does not want an election, then report that he is calling for one, and then report that Corbyn is a hypocrite for rejecting it, you can see what is meant when people say Corbyn is a bad leader. The British media is overwhelmingly middle-class and privately educated. They are winners from the UK's economic course over the last 30 years. Anyone who hints at reversing this, or offers a new vision, will be a target - for them all. Liberal papers like the Guardian will even tend to criticise them more than support them. It is nothing to do with Corbyn personally - Ed Miliband, who was not even as radical as Corbyn, was similarly smeared as dangerous, Marxist, as uncharismatic, and as harbouring foreign sympathies. If he had stuck around for longer, the coverage would eventually have moved onto racism and him being a national security risk. When people say "Labour need a better leader", they're saying "Labour need a centrist leader" - because that's the only way they're not going to be savaged every day across the entire media. And that's an admission that the scope of political choice and possibility is, and should be, dictated to 70 million people by a small cabal of a few-thousand well-to-do Londoners.

Apparently Lib Dems in general are taken aback by the party line on Corbyn's deal. The obsessively anti-Labour stance seems to be stemming from Swinson and Umunna, with Tom Watson's encouragement. If they didn't want to be dictated to by rabid Thatcherites maybe they should have joined a different party. Its also a good illustration careerist centrist psychopathy from Umunna. He's happy to push the country off the cliff-edge by domineering a party he joined a few weeks ago, rather than swallow an ounce of personal pride. Edit: Worth noting. The Lib Dem leadership are liars and manipulators, always have been. They'll compromise anything to work with the Tories, but to even brush shoulders with Labour they demand de facto control of the party. They see the Tories as their peers, and they see Labour as a working class mob that needs their guidance and approval.

Jo Swinson has refused to say whether a Labour government or No Deal would be worse. Turns out the Lib Dems aren't an anti-Brexit party, they're just an anti-working-class party.

Your explanation of the psychology of Remain and Leave totally ignores how sharply Scotland-England leads to different outcomes in opinion. In Scotland every social, ethnic, and age demographic is anti-Brexit, not just Bourgeois paradises like Edinburgh. You've got your economically disadvantaged post-industrial Glasgow, your wee oil-and-gas haven Aberdeen, bland grey council-estate shitholes in the middle of nowhere across the central belt, and your arch-Tory borderlands. More than economic circumstance, the driving force of Brexit is a psychological need to make some symbolic gesture of autonomy - we've went in the last 100 years has went from global hegemony to being one of several powerful but not dominating forces in the world. For Scotland, in which people have come to identify more as Scottish than British, it's an easy transition to make psychologically. Scottishness as a backup identity to Britishness means there's no difficulty in going from the mindset of world power, to the mindset of being one nation among many similarly-influential peers. Scottish people actually want to be thought of as a peer to similar countries like Ireland, Norway, etc. For England, there is no backup identity. Englishness has always been basically interchangeable with Britishness, and British people have never thought of themselves as one of a group of nations. We were always either different and mostly uninterested in getting involved, like in the 18th century, or superior and able to dictate the terms of our relations, like in the 19th and early 20th Century. The last 70-80 years has basically been the only period in our history when we've been forced to work-out how to live in a world where we have to cooperate with lots of countries on an equal footing, and several who are far superior to us. We've done an alright job of it. Some horrendous blunders, sure, but we got ourselves a pretty cushty position. We were closely connected with our closest equals and natural allies in Europe, whilst also operating in a privileged position of reduced commitment. We had a good relationship with the greatest military power in history, without being too exposed to any negative economic or legal influences from them. Sadly, the skills needed to gain this position - multi-lateral cooperation, and relations-management with a superior power - are disgusting to the pre-1945 British mindset, which has survived long past its day in the British cultural fabric. People in their 50s in Britain think as if they personally fought in WW2. Much of our senior journalistic establishment still hasn't seriously come to terms with Ireland being a separate country. People live in a Bridge Too Far, Dads Army wonderland where we don't need to admit Suez ever happened. We've never developed the maturity needed to exist in a world in which we aren't special. We think we can go bargain with America as a fellow great-power like it's 1920, when it's 2019 and they just look at us as another helpless vassal. We think we can create a special relationship with our ex colonies like Canada or India, when to them we are just one of the several larger European countries trying to set up our stall. We think we register a significant partner/opponent to China, when to them we are barely more significant than a country like the Netherlands or Poland. Nobody has ever sat the British public down and explained this to them. And so, when we hit a period of slowing growth and growing poverty, it became all-too easy to blame our problems on our failure to exercise our huge influence properly - rather than consider the real, internal causes of our problems. Delusions of national grandeur are a great opiate for the poor, and a great shield for the rich. And by the way when I said "Lib Dem melts" I actually did mean to say that I consider all Lib-Dems to be melts.

Labour policy has been a constant effort at bridging the gap, as shown by the fact that firm pro-Brexit types are accusing Labour of being too pro-Remain, and Lib-Dem melts accusing them of being hardcore pro-Brexit.

I'm not saying that middle-class people aren't any use. I'm just saying that the Green approach of trying to save the world without ever leaving the nicer parts of Bristol isn't going to lead anywhere positive. Labour has a lot of middle-class leadership but also more working-class senior leadership than anybody else, and also the most working-class members - meaning that Labour is the only party which actually involves large numbers of working-class people in designing policy. You've got to have a mix of perspectives - even old Karl himself was middle-class

I used to be a big fan of hers but the Greens have just degenerated into farce. Turns out you can't build a progressive movement from middle-class paternalism. They're evidently not serious about stopping No Deal, and Labour are by far the more environment-conscious party. It's sad to see.

Caroline Lucas is calling for an all-female cabinet to beat Brexit: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/11/cabinet-women-no-deal-brexit-caroline-lucas Oh yeah, it's also coincidentally all-white. And all-middle-class. And mostly pro-austerity. Whoops. I love it when middle-class liberals accidentally let the world see a bit too much of the inner workings of their minds.

Am I dreaming

By the same token you could just as easily say islamic fundamentalists are driven by mental illness and their hatred for gays/christians/atheists whatever, which isn't strictly a political platform. Wanting to kill as many Mexicans as possible to stop immigration might sound too far-fetched to be a political programme, but Bin Laden's most "moderate" demand (that the US withdraws from Saudi Arabia) was also a complete fantasy that was never going to be achieved.

The worst part is how obviously a large chunk of white Americans not only turn a blind eye to this sort of stuff, but actually silently support it. When the GOP wants to proscribe and crack down on "Antifa", a non-existent organisation, used to describe a broad range of left-wing protestors, but somehow can't see that there is a domestic terrorism crisis, it shows only one thing. Vandalism, milkshaking etc from the other side requires the full force of the law. But they quietly welcome mass murder if it's done in the service of their own ideas.

Another lone wolf who just coincidentally has the exact same profile and also the same ideas and aims as all the other lone wolves.

Just finished this and am now moving onto this:

Edinburgh is absolutely packed with Liverpool fans for the Murrayfield friendly today.

I always thought that the Holocaust specifically referred to the escalation from harassment and persecution into mass-murder. And 1941 was when killings began on the scale of tens of thousands. As bad as stuff like the race laws, and the Krystallnacht were, I didn't think they were counted as part of the Holocaust.

Oh btw the new anti-semitism furore is Labour using the academically-accepted start date (1941) of the Holocaust. You know, the year when the Babi-Yar massacre happened and the first gassings took place at Chelmno and Auschwitz. https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/jewish-labour-mp-hits-out-at-jeremy-corbyn-s-antisemitism-leaflet-saying-holocaust-started-1941-1.486725 We're coincidentally not told what the right date in the MP's or the writer's opinion is.