Today's headlines in the Daily Express!

@cstross Ah yes, it's “The reason why Brexit didn't work is because it wasn't REAL Brexit." It's the right-wing version of the continually-moving-the-goalposts logic that has a certain class of tankie telling you that the reason the Soviet Union wasn't paradise on Earth is because it wasn't REAL Communism (that part at least is true, but …)

I assume the Real Brexiteers won't be happy until the British Empire is restored. Or not even then, because of course it won't be the REAL British Empire …

@cstross Also, stop all supplies coming into the UK 12 miles from port. Or unload into a British vessel in the middle of the sea!!!!111!!!!

@cstross I don't think that will cut it. I think true Brexit will be achieved when the UK bans all exchanges of any kind with the EU: trade, people, communication, including sectioning Internet cables.

@bruce Coming soon to a @cstross novel near you: “Undead cyborg Admiral Nelson commanding Her Majesty's warships Caledonia and Hibernia at the re-taking of Hong Kong and Kowloon: Chinese robot defenders sorely discomfited by brisk volley of grapeshot fired by stout-hearted tars of the Royal Navy.”

@rogerb @angusm @cstross That’s not too far from current reality anyways, is it?

@rogerb @angusm @cstross same as the Alberta separatists…they think they'll get statehood because oil but would become a territory with subjected to poor wages and unleashed pollution.

@Remittancegirl @angusm @cstross

They're trapped by a politics of negativity. They don't want to build, nourish, invest, research, create. It's all ban this, cancel that, withdraw from any kind of cooperation, stop the boats, cut taxes, cut regulations. They're full of ideas to stop doing things or go back to an imagined past, haven't got the most rudimentary idea of a positive thing to start doing or a way to move forwards.

Also they're super racist and creepy around women and children.

@angusm @cstross On the continent, we call this kind of thing a Dolchstosslegende: it is taken as so self-evident that X should have succeeded, even if it clearly didn't (say starting WW I, or leaving the EU), it must be due to some deep conspiracy, so the solution is to do the same thing, only harder...

@petealexharris @Remittancegirl @angusm @cstross That’s because they dare not actually be upfront about what they want to impose on us. So their main way of getting people on side is to simply make people scared and angry at imaginary things.

@rogerb @cstross "Take back control! (and give it to a few of our rich mates on the other side of the Atlantic)”

@cstross thanks, now I'm listening to DDT's "Revolution" (ДДТ - Революция). "Revolution, you taught us to believe in virtue's injustice. How many worlds an hour will we burn in the name of your bright fire?"

@petealexharris @Remittancegirl @angusm @cstross Quoting Sergio Caneva, writing in 1973, describing Italian Fascism in his book documenting the history of partisans in the Veneto (my translation).

“Fascism was neither an idea nor a doctrine, it was just a big cloud of soot created to defend the interest of the land owners and industrialists ... with the abuse of the word ‘fatherland’.”

History rhyming and all that.

@bjn @Remittancegirl @angusm @cstross

Yeah, but all the things they aren't saying out loud yet are more of the same turned up to 11.

They want to do a smash and grab to loot the country, and maybe aren't openly admitting the intent to grab, but all they're offering is the smash.

@rogerb @angusm @cstross it's almost as if the British Empire they yearn so nostalgically for couldn't be made to work without the 50 trillion pounds it extracted from India over 200 years.

@angusm
In truth, they'll never be happy because their joints still ache and their pub is still closed.

everything else is pretending the reason is grander than they can admit.
@cstross

@FediThing @cstross
Well obviously all the people in the detention camps will be those to blame. And if you asking awkward questions about the camps, you obviously should be sent to them too. England Prevails!

@dgold @cstross I mean, not to be mean about it, but that's a case of hoist by their own petard...

@cstross @raymaccarthy @FediThing
And more or less written by (the Tory) David Maxwell-Fyfe, Earl of Kilmuir. Who also insisted that it should have its own court, to prevent national governments bypassing it. For all that he was an unpleasant (& homophobic) right-winger, he was damn sure after prosecuting cases at Nuremberg that he didn't want the Nazis rising again anywhere.

@bruce @angusm @cstross well can we at least tie people we don’t like across cannons and fire them? Land of hope and gory.

@cstross @FediThing but instead they’d have British rights, at the sufferance of whatever British Bill of Rights parliament saw fit to pass. Which would be inherently superior to the current arrangement because it has British in the name, obviously