Café Lob-On

Government of notional utility

Has everyone gone absolutely mad? Seriously? This is the new big idea, is it? A “government of national unity”? A temporary, caretaker Prime Minister to extend, or even revoke Article 50? This is what we’re going with now? Was the second referendum that was quite obviously never going to happen not implausible enough?

The Brexit saga has obviously been a continuous, rumbling exercise in absolute stupidity, in which otherwise intelligent people with a vested interest in seeing their particular vision of how the whole affair should play out — on both sides of the remain/leave divide — posit increasingly unlikely and self-sabotaging ways in which they can achieve their desired political ends. However, while the leave side is at least able to implement its ends, being as it has had effective control of the executive since August 2016 and also happened to win that referendum everyone keeps banging on about, the remain side have spent their time thinking up new and more ludicrous ways in which we can all just try and forget that this whole sorry affair even happened. Performative remainerism has now given way to primal scream therapy remainerism, and this “government of national unity”/”caretaker government” bollocks is final proof that anyone on the more vociferous remain side has completely and totally lost the fucking plot.

The core issue, as ever, lies with Parliamentary arithmetic and our decrepit constitution. Simply put, the numbers are not there for any end that involves Parliament actively voting for something. The political will from within the executive is also not there for implementing anything Parliament votes for that it does not feel like implementing. In fact, Parliament has little to no remedy for an executive (one led by, say, Boris Johnson) that flatly refuses to implement what Parliament wants him to. All Boris Johnson — or anyone else who wants no deal — needs to do is absolutely nothing at all, and it will happen by force of law at 11pm on the 31st October.

In a rational world, we would have sought to change the Parliamentary arithmetic the first time Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement got voted down in late 2018. There would have been a general election to solve the Parliamentary deadlock, which after all is about the only way you can resolve such a thing, and it would have been over and done with well before the initial Article 50 date of 29th March. That’s what you’re supposed to do if your government can’t pass legislation. However, because this general election would have had a non-zero chance of returning a government led by Jeremy Corbyn (who at this point appears to be some totemic figure of Brexity evil in the minds of too many self-described “moderates”, to a level far in excess of any of his actual evidenced misdeeds), May wouldn’t do it, the DUP wouldn’t budge, and the Lib Dems prevaricated. So we were effectively stuck with the 2017 parliament, which won’t vote for anything beyond kicking the can down the road until it has to make an actual decision.

It’s worth pointing out at this juncture that back in those heady days of late 2018, Labour called a vote of no confidence in May’s government, and it failed. If that vote had succeeded, the “Tory rebels” shown even the slightest semblance of a spine and May’s government fallen, we may not be guaranteed to be in a better position right now, but we almost certainly would have a far different parliamentary makeup to allow the passage of some other legislation to secure a better outcome. Instead, assorted People’s Voters repeated their usual yarn about how what we really needed before and instead of literally anything else was a second referendum, which Corbyn had actually voted and whipped for but failed in the Commons. The idea that an election is a precondition of any outcome that is not inaction didn’t seem to cross their minds.

But what then, they say, if we don’t change the parliament, if we just change the Prime Minister, to gain an amenable executive who will extend Article 50 and avoid us going over the no-deal cliff edge? Leaving aside that this still doesn’t grant any further parliamentary votes to any positive outcome — which, to reiterate, is an overarching problem with any proposition that will only be conclusively solved by a general election — nobody is going to agree on who this Prime Minister is, and how they get into office in the first place.

This is where we are now. The main talking point of the Liberal Democrats, now led by Jo Swinson, seems to be that they want Boris Johnson gone, but they also don’t want Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. This is at least a comprehensible thing for a Liberal Democrat to say, however Swinson’s frankly idiotic demand completely torpedoes any chance of a good outcome for anyone except Boris Johnson. Corbyn, like him or not, agree with his politics or not, is the legitimate leader of the Labour party. He whips around 250 MPs. His and his party’s support is therefore totally and utterly crucial for virtually any outcome that does not come with the blessing of the Tory whip. But, Swinson says, Labour should instead vote in a different Prime Minister — she posits today Ken Clarke or Harriet Harman, two figures about as likely to win a vote of confidence as literally any breakfast cereal mascot you could care to think of.

Swinson is on crack. She must know that this is an unreasonable demand, and even a lot of rank and file Lib Dems (including those who, having apparently not learned the lessons of 2010, defected from Labour in search of a more “principled” party) seem to bristle at the extreme self-defeating idiocy on display here. There is no way in hell that Labour would, or should be expected to, rip their party apart to make Ken Clarke Prime Minister. The concept is just ludicrous. It is about as likely as waking up one morning to discover that the Honey Monster is running the country. It is complete and total horseshit on a very base level.

As the contributor of the most votes to this putative arrangement, it is completely right, fair and with abundant historical precedent that Corbyn leads any alternative government, no matter how short-lived. Again, you may not like him, but he is not Boris Johnson, he is the rightful leader of the opposition, and his is your only ticket out of this bullshit. All of this talk of different non-Corbyn putative prime ministers — Clarke, Harman, Hermon — is deranged and anyone entertaining it seriously for even a second is on as much crack as Swinson is. None of the other options are plausible; all roads lead to or go via Corbyn. A government of national unity led by Corbyn may only have a 10% chance of happening, optimistically, but one not led by Corbyn has an absolute zero chance of happening because the votes — already parlous for Corbyn as it is — are not there and never will be, because any vote by Labour MPs to put in place a Prime Minister that is not the Labour leader is going to irrevocably destroy the party. Once again — you may not like this state of affairs, and you may think it’s very terribly selfish that the opposition party won’t vote itself out of existence to satisfy the whims of a party with 14 MPs and an overblown sense of self-importance, but that is reality. You have to work with reality as you find it. Less idealism from remainers and more pragmatism would be much appreciated at this point.

For the Liberal Democrats in particular, the mask has fallen. The piss diamonds transparently do not actually care all that much about Brexit, either the fact of its implementation or as an overarching concept, except as a very convenient and apparently quite resonant wedge issue that they can use against their key opponents, the Labour party — as Iraq was in 2005, as tuition fees were in 2010 — but discard for the sake of political expediency with nary a second thought once it becomes obstructive to their ends. If they actually cared, if they were a “party of Remain” as they so pompously call themselves, they would not be so squeamish about putting in place Corbyn for a very weak, single-issue government that they could collapse almost instantly in even the most optimistic best case scenario, with the express intention of averting the worst, most deleterious form of Brexit that exists.

Corbyn has, with the full benefit of hindsight, been the one conducting himself as a moderate, reasonable adult throughout this whole idiotic process, and the pram throwing from his opponents here is extremely unseemly. What remainers saw as his “fence sitting” now looks more and more like a good faith attempt to reflect that the referendum was not a particularly strong mandate for either side, bar the basic fact of not being a member of the European Union, and that people with opposing views to them are real, have honestly held views, are actually quite numerous and have a not-unreasonable idea that their views should be listened to in some sense. Rather than seek to work with him to improve the ultimate outcome to a more amenable one, the “Remain parties” have spent their time instead on a vicious and desperately partisan monstering campaign, with the apparently successful intention of turning someone who gave this rather excellent, coherently and cogently pro-Remain speech before the referendum into Farage with a red rosette in the public imagination, and Labour itself into a “leave party” of the same kind as the Tories. They have destroyed whatever meagre trust that remains between their putative allies on the left, and confirmed in the past couple of days that that distrust was more than justified; well done them.

Ultimately though, this whole affair represents a lot of chickens coming home to roost. We should have had an election ten months ago, and if not ten months ago then five months ago, and it was in everyone’s interests to do so no matter how much they squawked about it. The monomaniacal obsession with a second referendum, a demand that got dropped as soon as Labour agreed to it unconditionally, a demand that would never be met in any event because the Parliamentary numbers weren’t there at all, obscured that there were other routes that could have been taken. Similarly, the absolute refusal to establish a heirarchy of acceptable outcomes, rather than simply refusing to accept anything other than a second referendum or revocation of Article 50, has led to the consensus “Brexit” option landing on the no deal that is now fast approaching. And the deliberate monstering of Corbyn and Labour has embittered and repulsed a party and group whose support is crucial if anything is to get done, and conversely fatal to any proposal if withdrawn. These are four catastrophic strategic decisions on the part of a huge number of people that we now no longer have the time, means or political will to resolve, and neither Jo Swinson or Ken Clarke or Lady Sylvia Hermon are going to save you. In all likelihood, you will get what Boris wants and you will get it good and hard.

I hate to say I told you so.

Bloonface

August 15, 2019

Politics

Brexit, Centrism, FBPE, Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Swinson Britain's Next Prime Minister, Labour Party, Liberal Democrats, Politics, Stupidity, UK politics
The very real limits of Chris Leslie’s non-ideological ideology

If we’re to move entirely past the rather ideologically bankrupt centre-left consensus that emerged in the aftermath of 2008, we need to get into what the defining issues of that consensus are — its main tenets and its main flaws. A good case study of this is a pamphlet authored by former Shadow Chancellor and notable opponent of the hard left, whoever they are, Chris Leslie. Nobly entitled “Centre Ground — Six Values of Mainstream Britain” (PDF), it deftly illustrates the profound limits of this kind of thinking, which accepts the structures of neoliberal Britain wholesale and proposes that not only is fundamental change undesirable, but that anyone who suggests it is a misguided populist.

The issues with this start with the title; “Centre Ground — Six Values of Mainstream Britain” makes several assertions within its seven words, none of which stand up to basic questioning. Leslie is here saying that the thoughts and values contained within are in the “centre ground” (implying, in the most generous sense, that they are shared by a wide number of people), that the “values” he identifies (which your average horoscope writer would consider a bit broad) speak to universal truths, and furthermore that these are mainstream and indeed universal to Britain.
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Bloonface

January 28, 2019

Politics

Centrism, Dullards, Labour Party, Politics, Stupidity, UK politics
Corbyn and I

Jo Maugham QC, one of Twitter’s most prominent critics of Jeremy Corbyn (and board member of the Bright Blue conservative think tank) set the social network on fire on Saturday morning, with his incendiary claim that Corbyn’s statement of “I don’t drink” in an interview with Der Spiegel was false. In fact, he said that “with [his] own eyes, [he had] watched him neck glass after glass of wine.”

Some people will see these flabbergasting accusations and say nitpicking things like “maybe he was misquoted or something since he’s previously stated that he does drink but infrequently” and “why does this matter at all” and “of all the things you could focus on why do you care about that”. However, I can personally vouch for what Maugham is saying here because I too have witnessed Jeremy Corbyn’s predilection for alcohol, and I must say that having sat on this for over two years the knowledge of his debauchery has been eating away at me inside, knowing that he still today goes around saying things like “I don’t drink” in the middle of a larger sentence in a throwaway bit of an interview.

I have been drinking with Jeremy Corbyn. And I somehow lived to tell the tale.
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Bloonface

November 10, 2018

Humour, Politics

Humour, Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Maugham, Labour Party, Norwich, Satire, UK politics
Insults won’t get the Corbyn-supporting left to like you

In a previous post [no longer available], about it being moronic to have a pop at David Baddiel for something he didn’t write on a subject he’s fully entitled to write about, I wrote this:

Corbyn has hardly, overall, had friendly media treatment — some of it for stupid reasons, some of it for entirely justifiable and pertinent reasons that he hasn’t really fully accounted for. His supporters, equally, haven’t been treated well either, with the idiotic minority of them used to dismiss and marginalise all of them as some sort of lunatic Trotskyite anti-Semitic cult.

Corbyn’s hostile treatment by the media is a subject that has been written about exhaustively, and suffice to say while a fair bit of it can be rightfully attributed to groupthink on the part of the media — particularly a kind that considers left-wing opinions to be beyond the pale and not reflective of the country at large, which in my opinion is wrong on multiple count — a lot also reflects justifiable reasons for concern over Corbyn, his associates and his history, and the electoral viability of a party led by such a person. That such concerns were not, ultimately, borne out to any great degree does not change that it’s right and should be expected for the media to publicise them or talk about them. That’s all I have to really say on the matter, because as I say we have heard all about this for the past three years and the subject has been well and truly done to death.

The real story, then, is in the last bit; not so much the treatment of Corbyn himself, who as a public figure and prospective leader of the country merits scrutiny and whose historic and present conduct surely invites it, but the treatment of the people who voted for him in leadership contests, the people who support him and the people who voted for a party led by him in 2017, both inside and outside of the Labour Party itself. This story is not a pretty one; for every (unjustifiable and frankly stupid) cry of “red Tory” and “join the Tories” that there’s been, there’s been a far more powerful and signal-boosted cry of these people — who are ultimately normal people, expressing political views that aren’t especially extreme or that far outside of the mainstream — being deluded, out of touch, stupid, brainwashed, idiotic or simply wrong.

Most of all, this story thoroughly illustrates how the moderate wing of the Labour party, the segment that wants Corbyn to no longer lead it (a completely justifiable stance) has poisoned its own well. As is the case in all of politics, you do not win people over by insulting them and treating the concerns they express and the causes they believe in as an idiotic irrelevance that must be enthusiastically sidelined — while, in the case of Labour members, expecting their wholehearted support for the voluntary organisation they’re a paid-up supporter of to be unconditional. Moreover the treatment they’ve meted out to Corbyn and his supporters in an attempt to “get their party back” has arguably further entrenched the left of the party into the defensive bunker mentality that they, with some justification, now occupy.
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Bloonface

June 30, 2018

Politics

Centrism, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Politics, Tony Blair, UK politics
Performative remainerism

I’m neither surprised or shocked that the People’s Vote campaign, which aims to secure a second referendum on whatever deal Theresa May can rustle up in concert with the EU, has another completely unproductive idea for getting this; a protest march. Protest marches, obviously, are incredibly good mechanisms for obtaining change, particularly when it comes to stupid decisions that the government of the day is for some reason dead set on implementing; that’s why the war in Iraq never happened.

I’m not upset at the idea of a pro-second referendum demonstration. What I am genuinely sad for, however, is the fact that lots of well-meaning, decent people donated upwards of £100,000 towards this endeavour in the good faith belief that it would in some way help towards securing a second referendum, as is the Peoples’ Vote campaign’s whole purpose. To say this is a misallocation of resources on their behalf is putting it mildly; to put it in the terms it truly merits, it’s pissing a huge amount of money straight down a drain towards yet another opportunity for performative remainerism; remainers demonstrating to other remainers just how committed they are to remaining, changing nobody’s minds and achieving nothing concrete.

The left have a nice word that’s useful here: praxis, the application of theory to reality. The continuity remain movement is terrible at praxis. Praxis requires pragmatism, requires engagement with activities that actually help towards a larger ideological end goal. It’s difficult to see how hashtags in display names achieve anything towards remaining in the European Union or securing a second referendum. It’s equally difficult to see how a protest march will change anything. Neither is it readily obvious how the obvious preference of remain activists towards attacking Labour, as opposed to the Conservative party that is actually pursuing and implementing Brexit, is going to assist in any way towards any positive outcome for them given the iron laws of first past the post meaning that in most cases not voting Labour allows the Conservative party to win. All of these do however become rather more explicable if you realise that the end goal of these particular activities is not actually to remain, or secure a second referendum, since it’s transparently obvious that they won’t actually help towards that; it’s performative remainerism. Remainers, demonstrating to other remainers, just how remainy they are.

The pro-EU campaigns and the hordes of hashtag-display-named people that support them need a serious attiude adjustment of the sort the Corbyn-supporting left of the Labour party largely got shitkicked into after discovering, through a sheer baptism of fire, that ideology alone won’t get you far in politics and you do actually need a bit of that fabled praxis to get anything done. They need to take notice of political reality as it exists; not how it exists in frankly delusionally idealistic fantasies about how all you need is a “movement” of people with hashtags in their names, or “an opposition that does something” as if the force of words alone can somehow change parliamentary arithmetic. They need to stop talking up people like Anna Soubry who have done absolutely nothing concrete towards any of their goals, but are certainly enjoying the spotlight they’re being given as “liberal Tories”. They need to realise that every time someone on the notional “centre” praises a Tory for empty words while viciously doing down the Labour party that bears essentially none of the responsibility for any of this, they piss off more and more of the many people who both dislike the Tories and Brexit.

They need to take account of the realities of first past the post, that “anti-Brexit tactical voting” accomplishes nothing but splitting the non-Tory vote and empowers nobody except the Conservative party that is currently most ideologically committed to Brexit. They need to stop trying to refight a battle they lost in 2016 by trying to do so in the same way they did before, with a weak technocratic campaign based around abstract financial loss, no matter how sound these predictions are (they‘re probably right; that doesn’t matter if nobody believes them and it’s your only message). They need to stop talking up things like the referendum being advisory and the spectre of foreign interference in it as if it does anything except make them look like sore losers that wish to move the goalposts well after the goal was missed. They need to stop repulsing people who otherwise agree with them by talking bollocks about how the Labour party is exactly the same as (or even worse than!) the Tories on the matter, or is racist, or is for “hard Brexit”, or any number of other such talking points. They need to stop putting hashtags in display names, because that doesn’t actually work and whoever told them it did was grotesquely wrong. Most importantly, they need to recognise, as David Allen Green pointed out to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, that Article 50 has been invoked, there is next to no chance of its invocation being revoked, there is equally no chance of a second referendum and that this battle is irretrievably lost. We lost it — the leave side won it.

Remainers, let’s be clear on this, have lost. At present, there is an entity with control of the executive, that is negotiating Brexit on the country’s behalf, that has the parliamentary numbers (even if not directly) to pass laws to that effect through Parliament, and a significant fringe element in its parliamentary party that will knife any leader in the back if they decide to go through with a Brexit they aren’t particularly fond of. That party is the Conservative party, and for all intents and purposes it won the last election. Jeremy Corbyn could appear in Parliament wrapped in an EU flag and put all of his energies towards remaining in the EU full throttle and it would come to nought, because he has neither the Parliamentary numbers nor the outside support to perform such a move, whereas the Conservatives have the force of law and — crucially — our mass media behind them. The referendum was effectively lost twice; once in June 2016 and again in June 2017. Article 50 was invoked last March (something, to reiterate, that the Conservative party would have had the votes to do all by itself as Theresa May had an actual majority at this point, but that would have shattered the Labour party and guaranteed the Tories a 100+ seat majority had they voted against) and we will be leaving the EU by force of law at midnight on the 29th March next year. The ruling party does not want a second referendum, and the votes aren’t there to carry one; more to the point, I’m not sure that whatever remain campaign there is actually knows of a good strategy to win a second referendum seeing as it has totally failed to understand any of the lessons delivered from the first one. Whatever hope there is relies on Parliament voting down the deal that Theresa May comes up with in October; Labour is currently setting itself up to do this through its “six tests” but whether it will actually achieve anything, given the lack of inclination of “Tory rebels” to actually rebel and the fact that this would essentially be a life-or-death matter for the Conservative Party, is open to question. Put bluntly, it is over for remainers. We lost.

All of these are hard truths to take, however, and I suspect the reason behind the prevalence of the other strategy — to undertake pointless activities that do nothing except express some sort of solidarity with the notion of remaining, the performative remainerism I speak of — is that it’s very tough, psychologically, to admit that you’ve lost. On that level I understand it. But that does not mean that carrying on with this purity-seeking inward-focused idiocy is a good idea. If anything all it does is reinforce the “sore loser” narrative and continually make the actual job ahead — of convincing people who voted to leave of the need to accept a soft Brexit or to rejoin post-March 2019 — all the harder, while repulsing what potential allies one has. It helps absolutely nobody to do so, much as it doesn’t help to engage in magical thinking where all it takes is a large enough movement to accomplish whatever goals you please, or to think that all that needs to happen is for Theresa May to understand that remainers really want to remain and it will change everything. They need to learn that lesson and internalise it or they will stay where they are at present; undertaking pointless, non-productive activities, repelling their own natural caucus and wasting precious time, money, political capital and energy for the sake of nothing except their own self-satisfaction.

Note: To make one thing absolutely crystal clear for anyone with a hashtag in their Twitter name who’s now looking to call me a Brexiter or a Lexiter or some such nonsense; I am a remainer. I voted to remain in the EU and would crawl through broken glass to do so again were I given the opportunity. Brexit is a stupid idea and it would be better for everyone in the country if it were annulled, Article 50 revoked and the entire pointless and costly enterprise put behind us as the failed, stillborn idiocy that it manifestly is. Brexit cannot succeed and will not succeed unless Britain were to somehow transform itself into a country with the work ethic, attitude to public investment, education levels and industrial capacity of Japan overnight — the problem being that we can barely replicate Japan’s convenience stores successfully, let alone the structure of their entire economy. It’s never going to work, and our politicians are essentially left playing along with the delusion that it will because the groups that turn out to vote most reliably will utterly annihilate whichever is the first of the two major parties that points out that the emperor has no clothes.

Bloonface

May 10, 2018

Politics

Brexit, Centrism, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Politics, Stupidity, UK politics
Memes won’t make young people like the Tories

It has now been almost eight months since the 2017 general election knocked on the head Theresa May’s dreams of what she, along with most pundits, had thought would be a nailed-down massive majority; with Labour’s seat gains and Tory losses removing the majority David Cameron had won in 2015 entirely and thus forcing her into coalition with the DUP to stay afloat. And there the story of Theresa May’s achievements as Prime Minister ends. A brutal, single-mindedly xenophobic Home Secretary becomes Prime Minister promising to deal with burning injustices, deals with precisely none of them, promises in a manifesto to do nothing anyone wants and then somehow manages the admittedly impressive feat of leading her party into the wilderness while it is also in government. This is, I suppose, an achievement of sorts.

Part of this was credited to a surge in youth voters going to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which has been given a title so cretinous and forced-meme’d into public consciousness I’m not even going to use it here in case I lose whatever self-respect I have left. The precise quantity and even existence of that surge has been called into question by many, but suffice to say the notion that young people are motivated by Labour’s current promises and beliefs is a rather sound one, borne out by polling evidence and engagement in grassroots organisations like Momentum and indeed the Labour party itself. What is not so much talked about is the opposite and equally sound counterpart to that idea; that young people are actively repulsed by what the Conservative Party stands for. While the most vocal Tory supporters and Tory-friendly members of the commentariat — even some of the Labour right — are eager to dismiss this as the people concerned being “bribed” or “deluded”, the reason for the sheer amount of youth distrust is a lot simpler and probably a lot harder for such people to deal with psychologically. It boils down to something very simple indeed; Labour is promising to materially improve young peoples’ lives, while the Conservatives are promising to make them worse.
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Bloonface

January 30, 2018

Politics

Conservative Party, Politics, Stupidity, UK politics
Peacocks’ Christmas advert soiled my soul

It’s finally happened, everyone. Littlewoods’ 2011 Christmas advert, which went about ruthlessly erasing Santa in favour of your mother owing lots of money to Shop Direct Group, has been surpassed in its awfulness. It feels almost wrong to be typing those words, because I was firmly convinced that nothing could be worse than that. I was wrong. So very, tragically wrong. Peacocks have outdone them. The “Worst Christmas Advert I’ve Ever Seen” contest now has Peacocks as the all time winner. This is a brown note of an advert that is simply unpleasant in an obnoxious, insulting way from start to finish. Brace yourselves.

I’ll freely admit that I don’t know much about Peacocks. I don’t think I’ve been into one of their stores willingly, and my impression of their brand positioning until now is “Primark but not”. I was wrong about that too; apparently their brand positioning is “we’re like Iceland in the Kerry Katona-fronted days, only for clothes”. I don’t understand why they would take this approach, and this is one of the first things I very concretely don’t understand and don’t want to understand about it.

I don’t understand, for instance, why the centrepiece of anyone’s Christmas ad campaign would be Honey G. For a start, having Honey G advertise fashion is like having Ian Huntley advertise childcare. For another thing, Honey G has such limited relevance to most people that the campaign could probably be fronted by a variety of characters from Studio Ghibli films — not even the good ones — and have more cultural resonance. Lord knows I’d rather see the dull lead character from Only Yesterday try and flog me blouses before I would Honey G. The only thing Honey G could effectively advertise is Dignitas.
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Bloonface

November 24, 2017

Humour, Television

Adverts, Awfulness, Barely-alive retailers, Christmas, Honey G, Jedward, Peacocks, Satire, Stupidity
Some bullshit about dogs that played the piano in order to fight the USSR during the Cold War

Backstory: My partner was writing an essay, and I wanted to prove that 2000 words was a relatively small goal and that I could in fact write an essay about a concept that didn’t exist, which is doubtless harder than writing about something that verifiably exists in the real world. So I wrote this in about an hour. It is the biggest load of fucking nonsense I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I’m the idiot who wrote it.

Dogs that can play the piano: a historical study

Introduction

In this essay, I will attempt to describe the historical background and mechanics behind human efforts to make dogs play the piano, and the often shadowy reasons for this endeavour — nothing to do with entertainment or mere merriment, but espionage, intrigue and psychological warfare at the most dangerous time in human history.

Beginnings

For centuries, human civilization has attempted to make various animals play musical instruments. In ancient Rome, poets attempted to make horses blow across open bottles in order to produce a crude facsimile of the sound of panpipes; Shakespeare once forcibly inserted a hammer into a cat’s anus in order to make a violin-like screeching noise by twisting it. However, as part of secret Cold War research, there are now a secret race of dogs, canis pianis, that can play the Piano.

Obviously, with these experiments taking place behind the Iron Curtain in the secretive Soviet Union, records of piano playing dogs have been hard to come by. However, since the fall of the USSR, we have been able to gain access to a vast archive of data on these extraordinary creatures. Declassified documents from the US, meanwhile, show that the United States Army was also conducting its own research into piano-playing dogs for use in psychological warfare. To quote an unnamed colonel at the time, speaking frankly to a congressional investigation into the practise in 1996, after the Soviet studies came to light:

The idea was that Communist subverters or spies would walk into a building and see a Dachshund playing “The Entertainer”, shit and piss themselves in fear and run away screaming that they do not wish to be in the Soviet Union any more as the United States deserves to win because they have dogs that play the piano. Problem was, they’d just go back to their hotel and get an update via a numbers station about how there was a spaniel in Minsk that was playing Chopsticks better than the human that taught it. We didn’t know that at the time. If we did we’d probably have not bothered.

This was yet another example of the red queen’s race of offensive technology between the two great Cold War adversaries, coming firstly after the famous contest between Nikita Kruschchev and Richard Nixon to see who could swear the most in a single sentence and secondly after the secret experiments in underground bunkers to weaponise Cilla Black against a theorised Soviet invasion of extremely irritating KGB Saturday night entertainers infiltrating ITV quiz shows (of which Keith Chegwin was a theorised participant.) But the call for piano playing dogs was strong from the upper echelons of both the US and USSR governments. Leonid Brezhnev was reportedly the inspiration for the entire idea in the first place as he was drunk and thought it was funny; he relayed this idea to the KGB, who immediately started work on the idea, but was unable to retract the order the next morning once he was sober. CIA spies then got wind of the project and decided that, not wishing to have a musical dog gap, they must start work on a matching project — Jimmy Carter was reportedly so terrified of the prospect of dogs on flatcars being towed through the streets of smalltown America playing songs of Communism on pianos that, after hearing of the Soviet project, he refused to leave his bedroom for two days and screamed the entire time. An observer reported:

He just screamed and screamed and screamed. It was constant, and deafening. Sometimes you could make out words, like “dogs” or “Communism” or “Pedigree Chum” but other than that it was just incoherent noise. We did consult to see if we could sedate the President with a tranquiliser dart, to try and get him to calm down, but we were told that it would just make him more upset. The First Lady was damn near inconsolable. It was worse when he spotted some guy just innocently walking his dog on the sidewalk outside the White House — I don’t think he appreciated what the Secret Service did to that poor thing when Carter got his way.

How it worked

The mechanics of the dog playing the piano differed according to the country that was pursuing it. The Soviet Union preferred a system in which metal braces were fitted into the dog’s mouth which controlled a series of pulleys, lifting up and pushing down a set of metal fingers attached to the dog simulating it playing the piano with real human hands. Meanwhile, the US independently pursued bionic implants into the dog’s paws, allowing it to play the piano directly using its own appendages. The Soviet system appears to have worked earlier, albeit being unwieldy and difficult to set up, while the development of the US system was fraught with delays but, eventually, produced a more reliable system. The Soviet system had an unfortunate and fatal flaw, that was considered tolerable in service; if the dog reached a particularly energetic passage of a piece of music and became too enthused by it, it would rip its own head off using the force of the braces, often sending it flying directly at a nearby bystander observing the process. Seven people lost their sight from this, receiving high-ranking medals from the Soviet government for their sacrifice.

The US effort was not without tragedy either. While the dogs in their programme were able to play the piano with greater precision and poise, and with much less removal and disposal of their own heads into the faces of people nearby, the bionic implants were large and ugly, often frightening and traumatising those who saw the dog wearing them, as it resembled a spider with four fully metal legs, the body of a dog, the head of a dog and four legs of a dog with metal versions of human hands on the end of them. The same observer who saw Carter’s reaction to news of the Soviet project also recorded his reaction when he saw an initial US prototype, codenamed “Rick Wakedog” after the Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman:

The meltdown Carter went into when he saw Rick for the first time was just tremendous. He went white and then red and then he just let rip. He was a very devout man, and he was just very insistent that we had created something unholy and against God’s will, but that because it existed it meant that Satan had won and that we must all swear allegiance to him. He wanted to kill it, to “sacrifice it to Baphomet and his eternal glory” and “to appease the many-headed goat being that now rules us all forever” (sic). We tried to tell him, no, this isn’t proof of Satan’s dominion of Earth and the coming of the end of days, it’s a dog that plays piano and we’ve called it Rick Wakedog, and that just made it worse for him because he hated Yes ever since someone bought him one of their albums for Christmas in 1971 and he spent four years listening to a boring guitar solo with awful lyrics over the top. He had to be physically restrained by the Secret Service from going and getting his shotgun and, in his words, “grabbing the hellish hound by the face, throwing it in the air and blasting it into a million f**king pieces with my glorious weapon of Christ.” It was very unnerving.

Ronald Reagan was also privy to the project after becoming President in 1980, although his visit to the project to see another prototype, “Anne Doglead”, went rather better:

He just walked in and saw the dog and immediately he took on an entirely new attitude. “I want to have sex with it,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything quite so arousing in all my life. I am engorged in every part of me that can be engorged. Let me in it.” I think the Secret Service had to defuse that one somehow. They wouldn’t tell me how and I don’t really want to know.

Mikhail Gorbachev also reminisced about his experiences with the Soviet piano-playing dogs, although the differences between the two nations’ methods and their end results are clear:

I walked into the room and there was a smell of blood. There was a dog’s head on a stick for some reason. There was a dog at a piano and it was making attempts to play. It played the right note and a KGB officer gave it a treat. It played the wrong note and the officer put 20,000 volts through it. I watched this process for about 15 minutes. I grew nauseous. But — if the dog could put this fear into me, what would it do to the capitalist enemy?

This also sheds some light on, having first solved the problem of how to allow a dog to hit piano keys, the two countries actually got the dogs to play a tune. As above, the Soviet effort focused on a simple punishment/reward conditioning system, which led again to an earlier result but a less flexible one in which the dog can only play one song — this was a specific composition for the project that, to modern ears, sounds atonal and dismal, or for a more direct comparison akin to “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor. This song was composed with the specific intention of, combined with the shock of seeing a dog playing piano, grinding down the observer’s will to live so that they will either convert to communism or simply kill themselves. The US project meanwhile involved a number of high profile piano players and tutors being drafted in to teach the dogs how to both read sheet music and play piano using patient teaching and special dog enhancement drugs.

This produced a situation where the more “rough and ready” Soviet dogs could effectively demoralise, disable and collectivise an entire medium sized city extremely quickly and with brute force, after which point its head would most likely come off, while the American dogs could pursue a subtler approach of being manoeuvred into position disguised as a contemporary lounge musician, playing commensurate music, and then suddenly playing songs of freedom and liberty causing a violent anarcho-capitalist overthrow of the Soviet establishment. The dog could then be undressed by its handlers and set loose to blend into society, or possibly have the bionic spider leg implants retained and a minigun added in order to effectively fight any remaining Communists.

What happened to the projects?

Neither the US or Soviet piano playing dogs were ever used in military or espionage service. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and was replaced with the Russian Federation — incoming president Boris Yeltsin was reportedly, in one of his more lucid moments, overheard describing the project as “a load of old boiled-away piss leaving behind only remnants of urea and shattered kidney stone”, cancelling it immediately. The dogs were put into civilian usage and entered into Eurovision in 1995 under the name “Soyuz Ner-woof-shimi”, placing second with the song “Bonio Rodeo” and with dancers mimicking the dogs in everything they did, including the grand finale of their heads flying off.

The American dogs meanwhile were, in view of their classified implants, intended to be humanely euthanised in a peaceful manner. This was, however, not to be; as former US presidents are able to receive security briefings, President Carter got word of the decommissioning of the dogs, infiltrated the facility in which they were hiding and reportedly was found the next morning covered in dog blood and entrails, feasting on the brains of one of the dogs and repeatedly saying “his dark majesty is satisfied by my offering of penance for the sin of humankind”. The US government forbids any media disclosure of this event on grounds of national security.

Since this point, there have been fears that the so-called Islamic State will similarly independently develop piano-playing dogs, however many security experts downplay this on the basis that it is and always has been a fucking stupid idea.

Bloonface

March 27, 2016

Humour

Dogs, Eurovision, History, Humour, Jimmy Carter, Real events that actually happened, Soviet Union, Stupidity
No wonder the young are supporting unapologetic socialists— they’re fucked

NOTE FROM 2023: This article was written in early 2016. While I broadly still agree with its theory and conclusions, and stand by the overarching notion that a great deal of millennials and then-nascent zoomers are drastically underserved by most non-left candidates, I think I – in common with many others at the time and since – horribly overegged the “socialist” credentials of Corbyn/Sanders and their supporters. Much of what they espoused and was popular amongst these demographics was far closer to social democracy than any recognisable form of “democratic socialism”.

I now view the perception of these candidates as further left than they were, and the consequent self-description of people who are in all aspects that matter socdems as something far farther left than that, as being something that has been corrosive to our politics and our discourse. It’s ultimately led to a situation now where we have people talking about the overthrow of capitalism and the state whose ultimate maximal demands are indistinguishable from them being better off within hierarchical capitalism, thus creating an artificial division between them and “liberals” as a snarl word that ultimately helps nobody. While I definitely don’t now think that the centrist pablum on offer from everyone besides Corbyn/Sanders is truly what these people wanted all along, and certainly acknowledge that there are some truly committed communists and anarchists amongst them, in that sense I think the piece is wrong.

There’s a rather similar back story to the rise of both Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Both have been propelled to, in Corbyn’s case, the office of Leader of the Opposition, and in Sanders’ case the current front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination (and, if the polling is correct, winner of the presidential race overall; Sanders handily cleans the clock of every single one of his potential Republican opponents, except Marco Rubio, who is now at best an irrelevance after taking great pains to tell us all that Barack Obama knows exactly what he’s doing). Both also have a significant base among young people — YouGov identifies Corbyn’s supporters as being predominantly aged between 18–24 (compared to David Cameron, who does better amongst those aged over 55), with similar results for Bernie Sanders (Hillary Clinton getting the same results as Cameron). In both cases these are unapologetic firebrand socialists with a reputation for sticking to their principles and envisioning a more Scandinavian, social democratic society for their respective countries. And young people are lapping this up.

It’s quite easy to reflexively dismiss this as just idealistic students being idealistic students. However, I think there is something far more important at play in the overwhelming enthusiasm now being shown amongst those who may have just voted in their first general election, and those who are going to in four years’ time. And that something is the fact that young people are fucked. Something I’m going to illustrate with a couple of worked examples.
(more…)

Bloonface

February 10, 2016

Politics

Centrism, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Politics, UK politics

Dogs that can play the piano: a historical study

Introduction

Beginnings

How it worked

What happened to the projects?