Interesting Links for 04-07-2018

[andrewducker]

Brexit: The Endgame

(tags: UK Europe politics )

Theresa May pledges to overhaul bureaucratic and intrusive hurdles to changing gender

(tags: UK transgender lgbt GoodNews )

How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas

(tags: insects size viaElfy )

Government says post-Brexit customs system could take up to five years - business says ten.

(tags: trade UK europe )

Fake “Radical Feminist” group actually paid political front for anti-LGBT organization

(tags: lgbt fraud christianity religion homophobia )

Conservatives enter alliance with Swedish far-right in European Parliament

(tags: conservatives Sweden Europe fascism )

Comments

[drplokta]

The most impressive thing about those tiny wasps is that their mass is actually less than the Planck mass (which at 22.micrograms feels a lot bigger to us than the Planck length or Planck time do).

[andrewducker]

That is very cool.

Surprised that the Planck mass is so large!

[cmcmck]

Been filling in the government survey just now.

'Long winded' just about describes it and it assumes one hell of a lot of personal knowledge (which, of course, I have :o)

[heron61]

Brexit: The Endgame

This article started out well and ended nonsensically. It very much looked to me that the author mentioned why it was exceptionally against the EU's interests to allow all of the UK to be given a treaty that allows them to remain in the SM w/o freedom of movement - that would be a clear path to destroying the EU and only benefits racists (and Putin).

Then, the author goes on to say that this is what Theresa May should ask for, w/o giving any shred of a reason why the EU should or would accept this. From my PoV, the options the EU should be willing to accept are:

1) Northern Ireland in the SM but w/o freedom of movement (which from my PoV is too generous, but avoiding a return of The Troubles is obviously important), but with a hard border between NI & the rest of the UK.

2) All of the UK stays in the SM, but with freedom of movement (and everyone sensible can laugh at the leave voters).

3) If May remains determined, a hard Brexit + offers to help allow NI to join the ROI before things take effect. I sincerely hope the EU offers the UK 0 other options, because anything else standards an excellent chance of destroying the EU, and this article gives no reason why the EU should accept any SM w/o FOM aggreement for the entire UK.

[(Anonymous)]

The EU's strategy all along has clearly been, in between delaying as much as possible, to offer deals which are either totally unworkable or totally unacceptable, in the assumption that this will mean that the UK government will, in the end, decide to simply ignore the voters and refuse to honour the referendum result.

Because that's what they would do. I understand the first question asked of British officials in Brussels the day after the referendum was: 'So how are you going to get out of this?' That is, the assumption was that the vote would be ignored, the only question was how: was it to be by having another vote, as in Ireland? Was it to be by simply changing the name of something, as when the French and Dutch voters rejected the Constitution, only to have it imposed on them anyway (without a vote, this time, in case they tried voting the wrong way again) a few years later?

So no deal is basically a certainty now, because the EU is deliberately trying to offer the UK the worst possible deal, so that the UK rescinds article 50 rather than sign up to it.

(They may even think they are being helpful, digging the government out of what they see as a hole by allowing the government to blame the lack of an acceptable deal as a reason for abandoning the Leave project. They don't seem to realise, or alternatively care, that this would make the population of the UK hate the EU even more than they do already, which is considerably).

But they don't understand that this isn't how things work in the UK. It's probably something to do with the difference between common-law and imposed-from-the-top-law systems. The UK government is not going to simply ignore the result of a referendum, and if the deal is so bad that a 'meaningful vote' in the House of Commons rejects it — and it looks like it will certainly be that bad — then a 'no deal' exit is the automatic outcome, next March.

[In fairness, the UK government has also been atrocious at this and played right into their hands. They should never have let the EU get away with all these delaying tactics; and they should have said right up front that 'no deal' was what they were going for, and happily, if the EU didn't cave. But, that's spilt milk now.]

A hard(er) border between the UK and the Republic would probably be no bad thing, actually. The current 'invisible border' arrangement has, I fear, made some think that a united Ireland is just around the corner, and hardening the border might help make it clear that that is not going to happen, in the near future or the far, Brexit or no Brexit.

[heron61]

I applaud the EU's tactics if your summary is in fact correct, but given that this is also the only time I've heard of that tactice, and I have no idea who you are, so I'm doubtful. Regardless, giving the UK some version of the customs unions &/or single market w/o freedom of movement is clearly a vastly destructive decision (to the EU) that would result in other nations attempting to follow the UK, which is clearly a terrible thing (except for racists & Putin who would both applaud such a decision).

A hard(er) border between the UK and the Republic would probably be no bad thing, actually. The current 'invisible border' arrangement has, I fear, made some think that a united Ireland is just around the corner, and hardening the border might help make it clear that that is not going to happen, in the near future or the far, Brexit or no Brexit.

From everything I've read, the degree to which a hard border between NI & the ROI would be a bad idea is difficult to underestimate. OTOH, a customs border between NI and the rest of the UK seems like a workable solution, except for the DUP wackjobs that May has allied her exceptionally tenuous government with. Also, given recent polling, a united Ireland seems far from certain, but definitely possible, and in fact seems notably more likely if the alternative is a hard border.

Finally, while I'm from the UK, I've been keeping up with a moderate amount of Brexit news, and the only thing that looks likely to be rejected by the House of Commons is a no deal Brexit, which is obviously the correct thing to do, since economically ruining the UK because of an ill-considered non-binding vote is clearly the least good of the options.

At this point, unless May ignored the wishes of the DUP and goes for a customs border between the rest of the UK and NI (which sounds like no one other than the DUP will particularly care about), I'm expecting some sort of Brexit in name only, since there's increasing evidence that no deal won't be acceptable to Parliament, and there aren't any other options on the table that the EU will be likely to accept.