Futurology, Maps, Opinion, Politics

Oh no

I didn’t make this blog to rant about politics, yet that seems to be a thing I’ve done all to often, and with this post I will have done it again.

Brexit. Ugh.

When the results came in, I thought it would be minor — why else would anyone be willing to put it to a referendum? — and so, despite losing, didn’t feel dismay or despair or anger.

Then Cameron resigned, then the pound dropped more than the stated worst case scenario for economic damage and stayed low, then May promised an outcome so extreme that Leave campaigners had previously dismissed the possibility as “project fear”, then… you know what, it doesn’t matter much how or why I got scared.

What matters is that for the last few years, I’ve been alternating between a few different models for how this will work out. Which one I expect depends on part on which of cancel/hard/WTO I think most likely:

  1. D20 × 100,000 (100k-2M) fatalities.

    figure_1

    Graph showing all sixty possible numbers from the set of dice rolls D6^D10, sorted by how big the number is (y-axis is logarithmic)

  2. D6^D10 fatalities (see graph, 1-60,466,176 fatalities)
  3. Population-adjusted Troubles:
    ~165k fatalities, 2.2 million injured
  4. Population-adjusted Irish Potato Famine: 20-25% depopulation, half by death the rest by emigration, 6.6M-8.3M of each.

If these numbers seem unreasonably high to you, ask yourself: why?

…

But that’s just a summary of where we’re at, it’s not news, not really.

What is news is a recent survey by the university of Cardiff which shows that about 2/3rds of both Leavers and Remainers think that political violence in support of their side is justified if it means “winning”. I’m sad to say that matches my gut instinct that one side is sincere when it claims it’s living in a humiliating dictatorship and leaving will do no real harm, while the other is equally sincere when it claims that leaving will leave many dead.

  • Most Leave voters across all three countries think violence towards MPs is a ‘price worth paying’ for Brexit – 71% in England, 60% in Scotland and 70% in Wales. The majority of Remain voters across all three countries think violence towards MPs is a ‘price worth paying’ to Remain – 58% in England, 53% in Scotland and 56% in Wales.
  • A majority of Remain voters across all three countries think protests in which members of the public are badly injured are a ‘price worth paying’ to stop Brexit and remain in the EU – 57% in England, 56% in Scotland and 57% in Wales. Even larger majorities of Leave voters in all three countries think protests in which members of the public are badly injured are a ‘price worth paying’ to achieve Brexit – 69% in England, 62% in Scotland and 70% in Wales.

— https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/1709008-future-of-england-survey-reveals-public-attitudes-towards-brexit-and-the-union

This survey does not say that 2/3rds will commit political violence. It also does not say that 2/3rds will accept the corollary, of violence done against them as a cost for winning.

However, even if nobody is violent (please, for Christmas, I wish nobody was violent), given that only 3.5% have to quietly and persistently be disobedient for even a belligerently totalitarian dictatorship to fall (https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/the-3-5-percent-solution), the UK is unsustainable in any possible outcome. Leave, remain, the UK is over, it’s finished… ugh, and it’s not going to be as simple as splitting up into Scotland, Wales, England, and re-unifying Ireland, as each region is itself divided:

img_6534

Map of the United Kingdom showing the voting areas for the European Union membership referendum, 2016. Areas marked in blue show a majority of votes in favour of leaving the European Union, while areas marked in yellow show a majority in favour of remaining a member. Credit: various Wikipedia contributors listed in link.

…which basically means people everywhere in the UK other than central London, Oxbridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Gibraltar, Derry, and Brighton in the Remain side — and Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Southend-on-Sea, and the three general areas of The Wash National Nature Reserve/Clacton-on-Sea/Lowestoft on the Leave side — could well be facing deep-seated interpersonal violence (hopefully no violence, but Brexit has the habit of finding new ways to disappoint) from their neighbours. The Remain parts aren’t pure Remain and the Leave parts aren’t pure Leave.

I’m expecting the political map of the UK to look something like this by 2030:

Possible British Isles political map 2030.png

Political map of the British Isles circa 2030. Don’t take this too seriously, I briefly considered illustrating the point with a map of chip-shop sauce preferences, which isn’t much less sensible than having the city of York independent from an independent Yorkshire.

That said, there is a way I can be wrong. This is all predicated on treating people’s words as sincere, and my repeated mistake over all this has been to do just that. I didn’t have the right concepts in my mind to properly understand my mistake, but I do now: Mistake theory vs. Conflict theory.

Mistake theory is roughly how science works: if two people disagree, at least one of them made a mistake, and if they discuss things openly and with humility they will become less wrong.

Conflict theory is roughly how politics works: there is no real “right side”, only “my side” and “their side”, and any argument is a conflict. There are no real rules in this conflict — lies, propaganda, crimes, whatever — only empowering victory or humiliating defeat.

I believe Leave voters and campaigners are generally in Conflict theory mode. I don’t know whether Remain voters and campaigners are generally Mistake theorists or Conflict theorists, but I suspect Cameron was a Conflict theorist.

The leader of any Conflict theory… tribe?… might be able to prevent that tribe from engaging in violence by merely claiming — without regard to truth one way or the other — victory.

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Opinion

Medical-Computer analogies

Pharmacist First level tech support
GP Second or third level tech support
Audiologist Audio engineer
Cardiologist Hardware engineer /
CPU designer
Dentist Keyboard and mouse vendor
Dermatologist /
Plastic Surgeon		 Front-end developer /
Web developer /
Mobile developer
Endocrinologist Operating Systems expert
Epidemiologist /
Immunologist /
Infectious Disease Specialist		 Security researcher
Neurologist Database engineer /
API specialist
Neurosurgeon Cryprography expert (never confuse with cryptocurrency)
Physiologist /
Psychiatrist		 A.I. researcher
Vetinarian /
Zoologist /
Genetics researcher		 Hard-real-time /
Embedded systems /
Anything that works in aerospace
Homeopathist Cryprocurrency advocate (never confuse with cryprography)

 

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Fiction, Humour

The Totally Credible Heroes

Superheroes, but all their powers are incredibly minor:

  • Übermensch has 5 milliwatt laser eyes, giving him the power to entertain cats and give PowerPoint presentations without the need of a laser pointer. He has occasionally dazzled himself while shaving.
  • Water-Woman has webbed hands and feet, so can swim quite fast. She also has a habit of talking to seaweed, but it doesn’t reply.
  • The Sprinter can run a half-marathon at the speed an average person can sprint 400 meters. He has been banned from most sporting events, even the ones he would lose.
  • Mr Boring is so dull nobody pays him any attention, making him essentially invisible to anyone except security guards.
  • Cat Man likes to dress up as a cat, but denies all suggestions that he is a furry. The claws are his own fingernails cut into points, and not particularly dangerous.
  • Cyber-Woman has cochlear implants which can be connected to her phone via Bluetooth. She also has a prosthetic leg which looks pretty futuristic, but doesn’t do anything unusual.
  • Doctor Komisch has a PhD in the politics of the British Isles in the 13th century, and is a practicing Wiccan priest. He is skilled at cold-reading, but none of the spells he knows do more than make him feel happy.
  • Titanium Man likes to build his own jet packs and similar flying apparatus. His jet packs are very expensive to build and consume a lot of fuel.
  • The Greek is a dominatrix with a kevlar rope lasso. She is a skilled interrogator, and can get the truth about 95% of the time.
  • Miss Tesla can generate and sense weak magnetic fields from her nerves, allowing her to read and edit the magnetic stripe on any credit card she can touch, to open magnetically sealed doors, and to pick up small ferrous objects that would otherwise only be reachable with a magnet on a stick.
  • The Human Dragon can belch methane. It only catches fire with an external source of ignition, and is much like a street entertainer performing fire-breathing only slightly less impressive.
  • The Face-shifter has unusually elastic skin and far more tiny face muscles than normal, and can perfectly mimic the face of anyone… provided they have similar melanin levels, no obvious moles, birthmarks, or current sunburn. They cannot transform their hair, but they have heard of wigs and hair dye.
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history, Politics

History, according to the British

If you’ve ever wondered why the UK acts the way it does, consider that my formal history lessons at school went like this:

  • Boudica had a perfectly justified but ultimately futile fight with the Romans
  • Saxons exist
  • “William the Conqueror” came, saw, and conquered liberated and/or unified the country
  • “The” Manga Carta
  • Civil war War of the Roses
  • Henry VIII
  • Civil war Catholics or Protestants argue about which one is sent from God and which is the unholy spawn of Satan’s armpit hair
  • Witch hunts
  • “The civil war”
  • The Spanish Armada is defeated by Britain being awesome in a totally unspecified way
  • Britain decided to end the slave trade but only after profiting from it greatly and at around the same time as everyone else in Europe, probably because the industrial revolution had started and manual labour was becoming less important
  • The Industrial Revolution, which according to this version of events consists entirely of “Steam Engine → power loom (that it exists, no description given) → one specific picture of Isambard Kingdom Brunel”
  • Queen Victoria, who never smiled, perfectly embodied the essence of what it means to be British by calling herself “Empress of India”, marrying her first cousin (Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) and being the head of state when the Great Famine hit Ireland and a million people starved to death
  • World War 1
  • World War 2, where the UK stood alone against the Nazis with only the help of USA, the USSR, the British Empire, the French resistance, the Danish resistance…

In addition to my sarcastic strike-through comments, notice what is missing:

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