rigging the game

It sounds like Rishi Sunak has somehow managed to mostly un-fuck the Northern Ireland Protocol which was dumped on him by…his predecessor but one, who in turn bluffed out his “oven ready Brexit” as a response to the unexpected secession from the EU…which he campaigned for in a referendum called by…his own party leader one preceding. And now the Windsor Agreement, so-called, is being questions and sandbagged by the very same bad-faith DUP who walked out of the NI Assembly to bring this deal about, and who provided the balance of majority for…the same party that called the referendum, signed the NI Protocol, and then spent three years wailing about the horrible burden of…the deal they negotiated.

Honestly, at this point, an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking that the problem behind all of this is simply the fact that the Tories are in charge, and have been for almost thirteen years, and that they took over a country with a comparatively strong European economy and now want credit for partly re-attaching the leg they blew off with a shotgun themselves. One could also boggle at the fact that in that thirteen year period, the Tories have put up five different individuals as Prime Minister, four since the Brexit vote and three in the last twelve months. It rather begs the question of why there hasn’t been an election at this point.

And that goes back to 2010, when the Tories made a deal with the LibDems to get into government and then quickly passed a law that would guarantee them a full five years, rather than facing a vote of no confidence. Thanks largely to that, the Tories have been able to avoid accountability – gladly undoing their own rules to get rid of Theresa May or Boris Johnson without facing the voters. For all the turnover, they’ve only faced two general elections since Brexit – one which was won by Boris Johnson on the basis of outright misinformation and misrepresentation, and one very nearly lost by Theresa May and saved by selling out to the DUP.

The DUP has been a bad-faith player from the beginning, going back to their opposition to the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998. They lent their supply and confidence to the Tories in 2017 in exchange for being allowed to work their will in the North with the tacit protection of the Tories. As a result, when the DUP found themselves behind Sinn Fein and Alliance, they were able to fall back on “cross-community” and tank the NI Assembly rather than go into a position where they would enjoy only mildly reduced puissance. And now, despite the fact that a solid majority of the people of NI support this agreement, they will have the power to thwart it if they don’t get special feelings in their chicken parts about it.

This is of a piece with so many things. You could point to the Super League, and flailing powers in Spain and France (and England, if we’re keeping it a quid) trying to keep by rule what they cannot earn on the field or at the turnstiles. You could point to the Republican Party in the United States, clinging to national power through gerrymandering and the Electoral College and rigging the judiciary to their advantage. Right now, we are watching an old and fading generation trying to rewrite the rules of the game to keep their power and wealth at the expense of everyone who comes after.

Everything dies, as Bruce told us, that’s a fact. Nothing lasts forever. Those who rage against the dying of the light have a choice: accept the inevitability of life and death and do the best you can for those around you and those who will follow you, and thereby attempt to make yourself a glide path to the end of the line – or pretend it’s not going to happen, change the rules to say it can’t happen, and then die ugly when it comes for you all the same. The people whose future is being choked to death will not be content to shrug and say “well the rules clearly state that the Boomers can choke us to death, and the rules clearly state that we only get 3/5 of a vote” – and the people who have rigged the game may not like what happens when the players who are always made to lose decided to play a very different game.

Which is the problem with being just this age. I never could get my head around being in one’s 50s – it felt like a weird sort of no-man’s land where you were too old to even pretend to be young, but not old enough to retire, and an age where it was too late to start from scratch. So the idea that I’m pig-committed to a career path and a retirement savings solution that depend on other people’s greed and bad decisions…well, suffice to say, I’m looking forward to being under 55 and having my Social Security savings handed over to Goldman Sachs or some such shit while the generation that won’t let go continues to get its tax free Social Security benefits, and then in twenty years or so watching as retirement income gets taxed to the gills to stick it to boomers who are mostly dead by the people who got shafted for their first twenty years in the workforce.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way in my first year with a 5 on the front of it, it’s that nothing lasts forever and anything can be taken away from you at any time. All you can do is hold onto what you have, hope you don’t lose it, and learn to live with the loss when it comes. And it’s hard not to hear Robert Palmer’s most anomalous song echoing in the distance.

Johnny’s always running around trying to find certainty

he needs all the world to confirm that he ain’t lonely…

the weak and the stupid

I find it interesting that we’re staring to see Trump pitching slurs against DeSantis. It’s pretty clear that the whole USP for DeSantis is “Trumpism without Trump”, and the only way for Trump himself to strike back against that is to say that the governor of Florida is not a real true believer. It’s pitched at the level of a third grade schoolyard spat – but then, that’s the intellectual level of Republican politics for the last quarter-century or more.

The standout feature of this kind of politics is how much it relies on not only stupidity, but weakness. Donald Trump prevailed over a field of fifteen other candidates simply because none of them could get traction in that huge a swamp, and therefore all of them were waiting for someone else to fail. And they all thought ”well Trump will lose eventually, and I can pick up his supporters and vault to the top of the pack.” And that is the weakness. Everyone is afraid to stand up to Trump, to stand up to those who support him. Had just one candidate confronted him and said “you’re wrong and you’re going to lose it all for us, and I’m not having it”, and had the Never Trump people all rallied behind this single candidate, and had the press not been high on the daily fart of another Trump appearance, he never could have won the nomination.

But everyone was too weak to stand up to him until it was too late. And now, here you have DeSantis. DeSantis, who won Florida by twenty points in the middle of the biggest Republican national El Foldo in a midterms in decades. DeSantis, who the New York Times is dying to anoint as Not Trump (speaking of stupid and weak, but we’ll get to that). DeSantis, who has made no secret of wanting to be the nominee in 2024 and whose entire policy program revolves around giving Fox News viewers special feelings in their chicken parts. And he will not denounce Trump. He will not tell off Trump. He is standing on the bridge of the ship while Trump teeters on the plank and he doesn’t have the balls to push him, because he is terrified that personal attachment to a whining Yankee who is electoral poison is somehow a greater draw in the South than open racism and hippie-punching.

Stupid and weak.

And that’s the other thing we come back to. The GOP has won any national success in the last twenty-five years on gerrymandering, technicalities and war panic. Trump is not that popular. His policies are not that popular. And yet, for fear of his supporters, the mainstream press insists on telling us how much we all hate Joe Biden, how much we all hate Hillary Clinton, how bad the economy is and how out of control inflation is – when individual commodity prices can be easily shown to be a product of supply chain breakdown, or avian flu (for eggs), or OPEC manipulation (for gas), and when corporations are laying off employees by the thousands at a time when profits are through the roof. Yet after fifty years of being mau-mau’d by the right, the stalwarts of the mainstream media are in thrall to providing they’re not liberal and as a result bend over backwards to tongue-bathe the most easily disproven liars among us.

Stupid and weak.

And it’s no wonder that Trump’s strongest state is Alabama. The state of the big mules, the state of company coal towns and sharecropper scamming, the state where the poor have to be kept down below the salt in the pickle barrel so that Alabama Power and TCI and Blue Cross and Georgia Pacific can have their way with a nice healthy bidness environment. A state where the great and the good have fallen about themselves for decades to keep people weak and stupid and offer them nothing in return but Baptist-fried racism and the promise that you’re better off than the darkies and your reward is coming in the next world. It is a mentality that the GOP has taken national with Trump as its flag-bearer: you just believe whatever we say and we will give you someone to shit on.

Stupid and weak.

Because what’s the platform at this point? What are the issues? What are the things that are the highest priority? Trans people are gross and icky? The cops should be allowed to do murder without explanation or consequence? White people should never be limited in how much firepower they can accumulate? Children must never find out that someone might be different from them – or worse, that they might be different from someone else?

Stupid. And. Weak.

I don’t want to live in a country where stupid and weak is aspirational.

looking backward

Sometimes, in idle moments, I think about what it would be like if I were actually able to retire someday. A small walkable village somewhere in the west of Ireland, or even on the coast somewhere between Pacifica and Aptos, maybe. And I think that I would need the AppleTV for things like BritBox and PBS and Disney+, and my Kindle for reading, and maybe a HomePod that i could ask for music from Apple Music or SomaFM or maybe even RTE, depending…

And then I start to think about what I would need from the phone in that situation. Music? Well, a good bit of the local stuff I rely on could be on an SD card converted to MP3, and Twitter is dead and half my friends are barely on social media in any way that can’t be managed by group chat, and…could I get by with a modern Nokia flip phone? And my hand strays toward the order button until I realize I don’t have a personal SIM to put in it any more, let alone an excuse for it when the iPhone is work phone, personal phone and shutdown night phone all in one. And then it occurs to me to think about how many phones I went through in that span between late 2000 and mid-2007, and how many more I wanted and never got hold of, and how stale the world of phones is, and…

Did the iPhone actually ruin everything?

I’ve made much of the fact that the phone crossed the finish line ten years ago. Yes, nicer screens, yes better camera and faster networks, but what new features have descended on phones since NFC payment and different biometric unlock? (This is a good spot to point out that the Moto X not only supported swipe or PIN login, but NFC-based login where you could tag a sticker on your desk or a little clip on your pocket to unlock the device, something I haven’t seen anyone else ever adopt…and lest we forget it took 7 years for Apple to mostly approximate the feature set of that original Moto X.) The iPhone 13 mini which I intend to ride to its death does everything a little better than the original iPhone SE that it eventually replaced as my personal phone, but what does it do that the SE couldn’t (albeit slower or fuzzier, I grant you)? And what did the SE do that the iPhone 4S couldn’t? That 4S, free as a warranty fix in the spring of 2012, had Siri and shot HD video and had GPS and was one-handable.

I guess MagSafe? Maybe? MagSafe isn’t bad, especially for a battery booster, but then, I used to carry a SonyEricsson Z520 that went four days between charges. I also used to carry an iPod alongside it, but now, in a world where I don’t get out much and don’t work remotely…would it be enough to say “hey Siri, play the St Patrick’s Day Essentials playlist on Apple Music” and let the fabric thing on the desk do the job? If I lived in a place where the pubs all had their own trad – or the carefully-curated Pandora stream at Trials – maybe?

In the end, the biggest thing that made the old tools viable is that they only had to be a phone, or a Kindle, or an audio player. The new phone has to be everything, but it also has to be a lifeline in a world where all of the Castro Street Dining Consortium have moved away, and Vox is a news site instead of an LiveJournal successor, and the only way to digest news is second hand through foreign podcasts. Technological solutions to social problems don’t exist, more’s the pity.

It would feel nice to think you could still get by with a flip phone, though.