Musical chairs, artificial intelligence, and British politics

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The people allegedly leading Britain played musical chairs this week. Suella Braverman, who’d been the head of the Home Office, was the one most noticeably left sitting on the floor when her chair was yanked away. So she goes from Home to home, or at least to Parliament’s humiliating back benches, where she’ll do everything she can to make herself the focal point of the party’s combative right wing. 

Her de-chairification surprises no one. She was a horror show, although that doesn’t disqualify anyone these days. More to the point is that she was too blatent about not following orders. 

I don’t like admitting this, but I find it hard to make fun of her. She drains the humor right out of me, so forgive a lapse or three here.

One of the least horrid things she’s done, and that’s because it didn’t involve any actual consequences, was say that people lived on the street as a lifestyle choice. She’s also tried to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda (the Supreme Court just ruled that illegal) and dog-whistled up a right-wing mob that fought the police and tried to attack London’s ceasefire demonstration.

Irrlevant photo: Grapes, growing above the tables at an outdoor cafe this past summer.

 

Since her chair was pulled out from under her, she smashed it up on her way out (metaphor alert there), sending a letter of resignation that accused the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, of failure, betrayal, magical thinking, and bad breath.  She claims that she made a secret agreement with Sunak when she accepted the post of Home Secretary, which he betrayed.

Would she release the text of it, a reporter asked? 

Um, not today. 

In the meantime, as long as he was moving the furniture, Mr. du Jour moved everyone else around too. The foreign secretary became the home secretary, which is his seventh ministerial position since 2019.  He is, of course, an expert in whatever the hell he was in charge of in all of them. The health secretary became the environment secretary. The chief secretary to the Treasury became the paymaster general.

Hands up anyone who knew the country had a paymaster general.

Me neither.

And to solve a problem I didn’t know we had, he appointed Esther McVey to be a minister without portfolio in charge of the government’s anti-woke agenda. We’ll all be notified that we need to turn in our alarm clocks any day now. 

Okay, she’s also in charge of common sense. I did know we had problems around that.

To replace the foreign minister, Mr. du Jour grabbed someone who’s been sitting home contemplating the obesity of the universe* and made him the new foreign secretary.

Who are we talking about? Why, David Cameron, one of our many former prime ministers. We’re rich in former prime ministers these days. Since Britain’s deindustrialization, producing them is one of our top industries and if you’d like to order a few dozen let me know and I’ll send you a link.

Cameron, what with being the foreign secretary of the moment, isn’t available for export just yet, but let me talk him up anyway. He’s the guy who thought having a referendum on Brexit would mean his party would stop arguing about it, the country would settle down, and we’d stay in the European Union and live happily ever after. So yeah, he’s a bright guy with infallible political instincts.

After he retreated from politics, he got caught with his fingers not quite in the till but close enough that an inquiry scolded him for a “significant lack of judgment” after he lobbied government officials on behalf of a bank he had an interest in, which collapsed not long after. But who cares about that? We’re all so punchy, it looks like the act of an elder statesman. Mr. du Jour’s hoping Cameron comes with a stash of stability and authority that he’ll share with his several-times-removed replacement, and maybe even pass around the table at cabinet meetings. 

As for Mr. du Jour himself, no one yanked his chair away but someone did replace his political persona. Some five weeks ago at the Conservative Party conference, he presented himself as the candidate of change. He wasn’t running yet, but so what? It’s never too early to stake out your position. It makes you look strong. And stable. And several other adjectives. He would be the candidate of change, overturning three decades of political consensus.

Why did he want to overturn thirty years of political consensus? Is political consensus necessarily bad? Who cares? It’s something to run against, and it costs nothing. Or–well, yeah, it costs a lot when the country falls apart, but it doesn’t appear as a line item in the budget so you can always blame someone else for the results. 

Whatever. His party has been in power for thirteen years, making it hard to be the candidate of change, so whatever he came up with was likely to be extreme.

But now Mr. du Jour is positioning himself as the candidate of stability. He’s moving to the center of his party. Which isn’t that close to center, mind you. Cameron’s the guy who introduced austerity, driving a fair swath of the country into poverty and leaving the infrastructure creaking and groaning, but hey, it’s all just politics, right? Don’t take it personally.

Are these people real? 

Possibly not. It turns out that artificial intelligence can now generate pictures that look more real than pictures of real people. Admittedly, it has to stick to the faces of whites to do it. It’s absorbed the structural racism of the society in which it functions. 

As an aside, if Suella Braverman heard me say that, she’d accuse me of being a member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, and she’d be one-third right. I’m not a big fan of tofu and can’t stay up much past nine these days, but the Guardian’s a good paper.  

But back to artificial intelligence. I’m reasonably sure that these people aren’t real–especially Sunak, who’s had more political persona transplants than any flesh-and-blood human could survive.

I mentioned that AI isn’t as convincing at generating non-white faces, though, and Britain’s current government has a significant number of brown-skinned cabinet members, who are doing fuck-all to make the country a more equal place, except possibly for the people at the very top. Or at least for themselves. So they may look slightly less real than the white cabinet members, and–following the logic that says the most real looking people are the ones who aren’t real–you might therefore mistake them for real people. They’re not. They’re a double bluff using AI’s limitations to scam us all. 

We’re being governed by avatars who’ve broken loose from some apocalyptic computer game. Or the next season of Dr. Who.

 

And from the Department of Political Overreach . . .

. . . comes this story: 

The principal of a Texas school introduced a policy that said students could only play theatrical roles that aligned with their sex at birth. His goal was to cut a trans boy out of a starring role in a production of Oklahoma. High school drama departments being what they are though–there are never enough boys–that meant other students couldn’t play the roles they’d landed. 

All hell broke loose and the school said, okay, fine, you perverts can play any role you want but we’re cutting the play so it’s more age appropriate–incidentally cutting the trans kid’s solo. 

What’s age inappropriate in Oklahoma? It was first performed in 1943, when sex hadn’t even been invented yet.

More hell broke loose and the school board reversed the principal’s decision.

We’ll give the last word to the trans kid, Max Hightower: “To know there is a big group out of people who want to help me and help everyone affected, it feels like we’re on even sides now and can actually win this fight.”  

*

And this: The Florida legislature is considering a bill that would ban any discussion of girls’ menstrual cycles in the schools before the sixth grade. Any discussion. So if some kid is bold enough to bring it up, presumably everyone has to run out of the room. Forget the enforced calm of a fire drill. Run, kids, before the sound wave catches you. It’ll destroy your innocence and you’ll never get it back.

How old are kids in the sixth grade? Eleven to twelve. Some kids get their periods at eight. 

*

Not to be outdone, a priest in a Czech village smashed the pumpkins that kids had carved and set out near his church. Twice, since when the original ones were replaced he did it a second time. 

In a letter of apology, he wrote, “Leaving the rectory on Sunday evening, I saw numerous symbols of the satanic feast of ‘Halloween’ placed in front of our sacred grounds. I acted according to my faith and duty to be a father and protector of the children entrusted to me and removed these symbols,” 

He wouldn’t have done that if he’d known they’d been carved by kids, he said,

“But try to remember that my duty as a figure of authority and a priest is to protect children and families from hidden evil.”

Now there’s a guy who knows how to apologize.

 

And finally the Department of Political Irrelevance reports . . . 

. . . that deodorant sales are up 15% since workers have (reluctantly, for the most part) returned to the office after working remotely.

—————-

  • Contemplating the obesity of the universe: I’m indebted for this phrase to a guy who taught philosophy, and to a student of his who wrote in a paper, “When we consider the obesity of the unvierse, we know there must be a god.”

36 thoughts on “Musical chairs, artificial intelligence, and British politics”

  1. Monday was quite educational. I had no idea that there were so many different ways in which you could say ‘I wasn’t sacked, I went of my own accord’. All of them would have been more believable, had not so many ministers decided that they had better things to do on the same day.

    I find it quite shocking that a school decided to put on Oklahoma!. Jud makes unwelcome advances to Laurey. Curly tells Jud to kill himself. Jud tries to kill him and falls on his own knife. As for sex, I’m pretty sure that Ado Annie hasn’t just been holding hands with Ali Hakim.

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    • When I saw it, back in prehistory, all that was just business as usual, although I’d say any sex that happens off stage can be assumed not to have happened.

      Okay, I had no memory left of the plot, although a few of the songs took root, and have only the vaguest memory now that you’ve reminded me.

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      • I love the songs, but most of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have dodgy plots. Carousel has violence against women and a murder, all on stage. The King and I has polygamy and forced marriage. South Pacific is about racial prejudice and colonial power. There’s also off-stage sex.

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        • Very much of their time. It’s interesting to think abou them now (and I haven’t in decades) and notice all the things that barely raised an eyebrow back then. I wouldn’t think high school kids have to be protected from any mention of those things. The question is, how are they handled? Critically? Uncritically? If we go back into our early literature, a good part of it is dodgy. Consider Clarissa, which I slogged through in high school (mercifully in an abridge edition but it was still several thousand pages too long).

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          • Fortunately, I’ve never been forced to read Clarissa, nor have I had the inclination to do so. The first book I had to read for my university course, though, was about a man who was essentially a gigolo and we read Liaisons Dangereuses later that year. It might be argued that an eighteen-year-old shouldn’t be shocked by such things, but I was a very young eighteen.

            R&H are critical(ish) of racism, but they seem to think that violence against women is OK. Polygamy, slavery and forced marriage are not OK. The Sound of Music is famously anti-Nazi.

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            • I can’t help thinking that it falls to anyone teaching those texts to discuss the issues head-on, along with the history and context.We can’t clean up the past, but we can understand it. It helps us understand how we got where we are today. And yes, it will shock some kids–and should. But most kids, I suspect, are more resilient than we give them credit for.

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  7. One may hope that these poor, innocent Texans are never confronted with these perverse European Baroque operas, where all is about fornication, crossdressing, and violence of course.
    I really can not say something about Ms Braverman, I somehow switched off when I had heard her remarks about homeless people.
    The pumpkin smasher is either a relic from the 17th century, or top notch spear head of the avantguarde, a menetekel for things to come, I can’t decide.
    This possible Floridian bill on the other hand shows that uptightness can be ordered ; shame is still the best tool to domesticate that women’s folk.

    DeSantis should introduce the Cross of Honour for the Floridian Mother, after the forth.

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  8. I had an attack of flu complicated by kidney stones and was AWOL sometime. (It feels like I fell asleep the Sunday before Halloween and awoke on Nov. 15) so I am still sorting out the idiocies between our two gummints. Your news makes them seem mor like than different. If only someone would unseat “Empty” Greene…

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    • Okay, this is complicated, but I’m here to help. Is it a plain or fruit (that is, raisin) scone? Is it a cheese scone?

      Cheese scone? Butter.

      Plain or fruit scone? A) Butter. B) Butter and jam. C) Just jam–maybe. That may be just one of those strange things immigrants from the US do because they don’t know any better. D) Jam and clotted cream. This is called cream tea and it’s much loved in the southwest. Now you get into regional differences. In Cornwall, you put the jam on first, then the cream. In Devon, you put the cream on first and then the jam. No, I didn’t make that up.

      What’s clotted cream? It’s cream that’s been beatified. If you could cross butter and whipped cream, you’d come close to it.

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  11. Beautified? I probably need to be beatified. I’m more beast than beauty, but I really appreciate the scone lesson. I’m likely more the jam on first bloke. And generous on the jam, oh my yes.

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