\u2026Yes, it\u2019s going to be a bit anachronistic and sexist, but that\u2019s right on the nose for Brexit, isn\u2019t it? (Also let me say here that I like my mother-in-law a LOT more than I like my wife’s mother-in-law, so this is not directed at anyone in particular.)<\/p>\n
The Brexit referendum, \u201cwould you like to be rid of the EU,\u201d is a bit like a referendum on \u201cwould you like to be rid of your mother-in-law.\u201d And by a vote of 52-48, you decide yes you would quite like to be rid of your mother-in-law. Well, now, how to go about it? Guess you\u2019ll just wait for her to die of natural causes. Oh no, she\u2019s in rude health, going to live to a hundred she is. That won\u2019t do at all.<\/p>\n
Welp, suppose you\u2019ll have to kill her. \u201cBut I\u2019m not a murderer! I couldn\u2019t possibly kill her in cold blood!\u201d Could always hire someone. \u201cNo! That won\u2019t do at all!\u201d Well all right then. If you\u2019re not going to kill her, how else will you be rid of her?<\/p>\n
Well, you know, you could always leave your wife, then you wouldn\u2019t have a mother-in-law at all, you\u2019d be rid of her that way. \u201cBut I love my wife! I love my children, I won\u2019t do that! I wouldn\u2019t break up my family just to be rid of my mother-in-law!\u201d** Well it\u2019s that or murder her. I mean, you voted.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe this wasn\u2019t such a good idea after all. It\u2019s not worth it just to be rid of my mother-in-law.\u201d Ah, but that\u2019s what you chose. <\/em>You can\u2019t reconsider it now, to go back on that decision would be to blaspheme the sanctity of the decision-making process and destroy the fabric of society. You have<\/em> to do away with your mother-in-law or democracy itself is meaningless.<\/p>\n You see where this is headed?<\/p>\n It\u2019s like Star Trek, and the referendum is the illogical question that Captain Cameron put to the democracy super-computer, and now it\u2019s smoking and sparking and barking out \u201cERROR, ERROR, CANNOT COMPUTE.\u201d You can chuck Theresa May out the window (and good riddance), you can have a new prime minister, you can call a general election and set the world on tilt (and probably wind up with some sort of coalition government that has the Brexit party as either a constituent or the leading force of the opposition), but it comes down to the same three options: leave with a deal and live with the consequences, leave with no deal and face chaos (and possibly the end of the United Kingdom), or pull the plug on a bad idea and face the consequences of \u201csubverting the will of the people\u201d (as expressed in a nebulous referendum rife with dodgy external influences). There is no door number four unless you\u2019re willing to wait for the mother-in-law to die and hope nobody forces the issue, and there\u2019s a large (but still not a majority) proportion of the British electorate clamoring for someone to pull the trigger right now.<\/em><\/p>\n Rock, paper, scissors. The only way to solve it is by making it a decision between two options rather than three, but since nobody knows how to make \u201ca deal\u201d into \u201cthe deal\u201d, nobody knows how to sanely reduce it to only two.<\/p>\n **(And in this analogy, the wife is actually the EU and the kids are Scotland and Northern Ireland, and guess who\u2019s getting the kids in the divorce.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2026Yes, it\u2019s going to be a bit anachronistic and sexist, but that\u2019s right on the nose for Brexit, isn\u2019t it? (Also let me say here that I like my mother-in-law a LOT more than I like my wife’s mother-in-law, so this is not directed at anyone in particular.) The Brexit referendum, \u201cwould you like to … <\/p>\n