ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/10/uk-to-deny-asylum-to-refugees-passing-through-safe-third-country

we've got our country back. and it turns out it's a shithole filled with racists.

yeah, what a little country.

“The UK has a proud history of providing sanctuary to those in need"

I keep hearing this claptrap from idiot pols of all parties.. I mean has it really? Kindertransport aside there are not really many examples these mealy mouthed pols can bring up to back up this canard. Tell that to Jews who were hiding in Clifford's Tower and so on and so on. They've only ever really provided sanctuary to wealthy foreigners or those from the Caribbean whose labour they needed and are now deporting their children, to their deaths in in many cases, "back" to a country they've never even visited. It's nasty little madly xenophobic island nation, always has been.

That reminds me, I had a very peculiar conversation with someone the other day, not a stupid person, about the size and population of the UK. This person - very much a Remainer - seemed to have reacted against the jingoistic nonsense of the Brexit camp by minimizing the size and importance of the UK to such a degree that they were genuinely astonished that the UK was third only to Russia and Germany in terms of population in *Europe. They thought the UK was probably about the size of **Portugal and you could fit four UKs into France!

(*Not counting Turkey. **tbf they had no idea what size Portugal is either.)

https://countrymeters.info/en

^^

you should send them this link!

I should know better but I'm constantly amazed by the stuff people don't know.

I had a jigsaw of Europe as a kid, it was Eastern Bloc era of course - but I've always been obsessed with the size, shapes and of populations of countries. There was program on one of the Habsburgs, might have been Catherine I can't remember. But one of the things they talked about was the poor standard of Habsburg cartography at the time meant the emperor had a very poor sense of the scale of her own empire and even the courses that the big rivers took etc.

I had a jigsaw of Europe as a kid, it was Eastern Bloc era of course - but I've always been obsessed with the size, shapes and of populations of countries. There was program on one of the Habsburgs, might have been Catherine I can't remember. But one of the things they talked about was the poor standard of Habsburg cartography at the time meant the emperor had a very poor sense of the scale of her own empire and even the courses that the big rivers took etc.

and i’m kind of fascinated about cadastral knowledge and politics etc. how we define and map space and the people who live in that space, literally origin of statistics really matters and will define emnity, solidarity, movement, economics etc.

yeah it was an in our time, that was the one!

this is a great piece on how spatial and cartographic representation is manipulated when you want to make a *point* or sell something (to Tom D and calz’s posts)

https://link.medium.com/zIsgUwbC9bb

perception by remainers of an essential smallness or irrelevance to counteract brexit bombast being a version of this.

like there’s a reason kant was interested in cadastral definition: these create ontologies of understanding and perception. they define our reality.

The one that gets me is, "We're just a little island". Well, yes but there actually aren't that many bigger islands in the world and one of those is Greenland.

... and at least one Arctic Canadian island with a population of 12.

and most of australia is uninhabited.

Australia is not considered an island though.

The "We're just a little island" line being extremely popular with those with genuine concerns about immigration - so we're being squeezed into a smaller and smaller space at both ends of the Brexit argument.

yes one interesting thing that’s shared by brexitera and remainers is that we’re somehow a failure as a country and that we don’t have genuine success stories like, to pick three:

• pharmaceutical research
• data driven government (including our government digital services)
• further education

‘lol, we are a small insignificant joke of a place with delusions of grandeur’ has been common currency at least since the junior-partner relationship over Iraq and probably extends back much further. It may be true in some senses but idk if it isn’t also a way of coping with / distancing from the legacy of Empire - a counterpart to ‘imperialism was a long time ago, forget about it’ on the right. If you pretend the U.K. is a small, powerless, hot-air factory, you can ignore the arms trade, propping up dictators, exploitation of resources overseas, etc.

lol i’m skating over the fact that i didn’t know that australia isn’t considered an island though i did ask myself before i posted “land mass? maybe but so what” “continent? no”.

i never really know how to define australasia/apac/australia while we’re talking about cadastral definition.

‘lol, we are a small insignificant joke of a place with delusions of grandeur’ has been common currency at least since the junior-partner relationship over Iraq and probably extends back much further. It may be true in some senses but idk if it isn’t also a way of coping with / distancing from the legacy of Empire - a counterpart to ‘imperialism was a long time ago, forget about it’ on the right. If you pretend the U.K. is a small, powerless, hot-air factory, you can ignore the arms trade, propping up dictators, exploitation of resources overseas, etc.

Of course the flipside to the minimising complex is *The British Isles* look pretty big and at least half the size of India on most of those decorative BE maps. If you can murder someone to steal their train ticket these days, alls you see is mostly vast expanses of nothing between Birmingham and London and similar between Yorkshire and Scotland, it isn't as densely populated as Japan. And it's never had 100% food self-sufficiency for centuries - even when the population was less than 20 million I think.

If you can murder someone Sir Kieth to steal their train ticket these days,

is good self sufficiency an important metric? or, to put it another way, does it matter?

is good self sufficiency an important metric? or, to put it another way, does it matter?

need more lebensraum, need more Australian bacon rather than Danish!

There's plenty of raum to leben in Scotland.

"If you pretend the U.K. is a small, powerless, hot-air factory, you can ignore the arms trade, propping up dictators"

I got this link from a slightly "tin-hatty" twitter poster about the UK's huge *invisible* military industrial complex (something like 140+ foreign military bases) which is not something the UK govt boasts about very often!

yeah, national military pride boasting - lots, inaccurately, dark nasty military stuff - not so much, also inaccurately.

> ‘lol, we are a small insignificant joke of a place with delusions of grandeur’

but isn't the flip side of this british exceptionalism? and that's dangerous too.

(i guess the truth is somewhere in the middle, "Parts of it are excellent!")

yeah it's the binary stuff that's dangerous. people who aren't capable of saying 'these things are good, how do we build on that' 'these things aren't so good, how do we make them better' are a problem, because you have 'fix everything' solutions like brexit, or remaining in europe will solve everything.

There are specific ways in which the UK won't be able to feed into climate change response because it isn't part of the EU anymore, I think. So it may have less power.

And by becoming poorer and more insular we will be on the path to perhaps closing some of those bases, but still exporting hardware and the like and doing more of the nastier stuff. Maybe like a Gulf-style state?

I have never heard the word 'cadastral' before.

"i count population size as one of those things you should just *know* and they should beat into you with a stick at school"

It's probably a good thing to know, but I'm not sure it's more important than knowing a thousand other things, eg: mathematical skills, cooking, history of medical science, history of forms of government, how solar energy works.

(i guess the truth is somewhere in the middle, "Parts of it are excellent!")

Not sure I'd be using too many words like excellent tbh. I get irritated by people saying stuff that is plainly untrue however.

I have never heard the word 'cadastral' before.

I thought it was that thing where Derek Jacobi played a monk.

I don't think I know anyone who knows the population size of most countries, so Fizzles, the former chimp, has a lot of beating to do with his stick.

> Not sure I'd be using too many words like excellent tbh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:True_humility.png

I don't think I know anyone who knows the population size of most countries, so Fizzles, the former chimp, has a lot of beating to do with his stick.

― the pinefox, Saturday, 12 December 2020 11:47 bookmarkflaglink

totally agree. but i think it's one of those useful 'world knowledge' items that is worth knowing, just for purposes of proportions and relative understanding.

I'd expect people to know that the UK is one the bigger countries in Europe, in terms of population, at least.

that country.meters link I posted upthread is excellent btw. It's essential if you find yourself wracked with anxiety and insomnia and wondering how many people currently live in Indonesia and how rapid was their population boom in the post war years, like you do.

conversely, i was amazed when i realised how small england is in land mass size. less than twice the size of the free state. My sense that it was so much bigger was inflated by the presence of scotland and wales and the relative differences in population.

ireland c. 70k km2 and england c. 130k km2

an arctic canadian island with a population of 12 you say

*googles "nunavut visas" *

i spent some time dicking about on the open data site, when i was trying to find out more about an estimation that the world population would top out at ~9 billion. i think the current estimation there is 11 billion, but i still don't really get what causes it to change. i guess life expectancy and fertility rates?

the UN open data site, sorry.

blimey, there is a lot to look at there!

lol i know. more food for your insomnia travels.

My recollection is UK population now is 67 million. And has grown by 10 million since ... 10 years ago? 30 years ago?

I think the figure is bigger than Spain.

^
My attempt at Fizzles' basic knowledge.

The UK is so keen to protect its fishing boats, but what about the fishing boat of Louis Mountbatten it failed to protect on 27 August 1979...?

— Father Pissmas Shitty (@doctor___fuck) December 12, 2020

Lol, nice