This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/14/boris-johnson-brexit-arguments-an-unholy-mix-of-bald-assertion-and-wikipedia
The article has changed 5 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 1 | Version 2 |
|---|---|
| Boris’s Brexit arguments – an unholy mix of bald assertion and Wikipedia | Boris’s Brexit arguments – an unholy mix of bald assertion and Wikipedia |
| (about 5 hours later) | |
| The foreign secretary’s latest speech provided more colourful nonsense from his half-baked imagination | The foreign secretary’s latest speech provided more colourful nonsense from his half-baked imagination |
| Contact author | Contact author |
| Wed 14 Feb 2018 16.05 GMT | Wed 14 Feb 2018 16.05 GMT |
| Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 22.00 GMT | |
| Share on Facebook | Share on Facebook |
| Share on Twitter | Share on Twitter |
| Share via Email | Share via Email |
| View more sharing options | View more sharing options |
| Share on LinkedIn | Share on LinkedIn |
| Share on Pinterest | Share on Pinterest |
| Share on Google+ | Share on Google+ |
| Share on WhatsApp | Share on WhatsApp |
| Share on Messenger | Share on Messenger |
| Close | Close |
| Anything – hair, cycling – can be sullied by association with Boris Johnson. You used to like cycling, but now that he does it, you have to get a bus. Sometimes he’s not doing it on purpose; other times, poisoning the well is clearly part of his plan. Arguably, we have had enough of his own words, since his asinine yet menacing Valentine’s Day speech, but here he is on his time as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent in the 90s: “I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.” Yeah. Super weird. Reframe an entire debate so that it centres on nonsense rather than fact and feel the thrill. Still, it didn’t seem important because it was only a matter of time before he changed his mind. More of his own words, in 2013: “Most of our problems are not caused by ‘Bwussels’, but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills.” Too late, unfortunately – he had spread enough muck on the EU that even turning his hose on his compatriots wasn’t enough to detoxify it. | Anything – hair, cycling – can be sullied by association with Boris Johnson. You used to like cycling, but now that he does it, you have to get a bus. Sometimes he’s not doing it on purpose; other times, poisoning the well is clearly part of his plan. Arguably, we have had enough of his own words, since his asinine yet menacing Valentine’s Day speech, but here he is on his time as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent in the 90s: “I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.” Yeah. Super weird. Reframe an entire debate so that it centres on nonsense rather than fact and feel the thrill. Still, it didn’t seem important because it was only a matter of time before he changed his mind. More of his own words, in 2013: “Most of our problems are not caused by ‘Bwussels’, but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills.” Too late, unfortunately – he had spread enough muck on the EU that even turning his hose on his compatriots wasn’t enough to detoxify it. |
| Today, he brought a message of love to remainers: it’s not enough to tell us we lost and should get over it. We should really feel heard, and then have it firmly explained how much better off we will be after, how much more money there will be for the NHS, how much more global we will be once we are out on our own, how much more innovative we can be once we don’t have any regulations, and how the EU doesn’t matter that much, considering how many of us live in Australia. | Today, he brought a message of love to remainers: it’s not enough to tell us we lost and should get over it. We should really feel heard, and then have it firmly explained how much better off we will be after, how much more money there will be for the NHS, how much more global we will be once we are out on our own, how much more innovative we can be once we don’t have any regulations, and how the EU doesn’t matter that much, considering how many of us live in Australia. |
| In the midst of all that, we should be told how ineradicable the betrayal will be if we continue to argue against a programme that millions voted for, despite having no clue what it was. | In the midst of all that, we should be told how ineradicable the betrayal will be if we continue to argue against a programme that millions voted for, despite having no clue what it was. |
| Johnson is foreign secretary, with all the research capacity the job brings: yet he could find no better argument for our “global future” than the fact that UK citizens took 71m foreign trips last year and often go to Thailand; no firmer evidence for our future prosperity outside the EU than the notion that prosperity is the kind of thing we are good at; no solid case for our place on the world stage beyond that he saw some British troops in Estonia the other day. He had nothing to report – no trade deal, no progress in negotiation, no plan. It was all improbable promises (we will still be able to retire to Spain, apparently; how we uphold this right while taking back control of our borders is opaque) and meaningless flowery side notes (“As you measure the blue straits with your fingers,” he says of the channel, “you can see that this moat is really an overgrown prehistoric river.”) | Johnson is foreign secretary, with all the research capacity the job brings: yet he could find no better argument for our “global future” than the fact that UK citizens took 71m foreign trips last year and often go to Thailand; no firmer evidence for our future prosperity outside the EU than the notion that prosperity is the kind of thing we are good at; no solid case for our place on the world stage beyond that he saw some British troops in Estonia the other day. He had nothing to report – no trade deal, no progress in negotiation, no plan. It was all improbable promises (we will still be able to retire to Spain, apparently; how we uphold this right while taking back control of our borders is opaque) and meaningless flowery side notes (“As you measure the blue straits with your fingers,” he says of the channel, “you can see that this moat is really an overgrown prehistoric river.”) |
| He brings patriotism into disrepute and turns the future into a gaudy fiction, festooned with colourful nonsense from his half-baked imagination. He flags a message of conciliation but delivers yet another text of: “We won, end of.” Twenty months in, and he is still groping his way forward with nothing but bald assertion and Wikipedia. When people halloo him on the street, he said: “At least they know who I am. At least they know what I do.” I know who he is, but I have no idea what he does. | He brings patriotism into disrepute and turns the future into a gaudy fiction, festooned with colourful nonsense from his half-baked imagination. He flags a message of conciliation but delivers yet another text of: “We won, end of.” Twenty months in, and he is still groping his way forward with nothing but bald assertion and Wikipedia. When people halloo him on the street, he said: “At least they know who I am. At least they know what I do.” I know who he is, but I have no idea what he does. |
| How robots are opening some doors and closing others | How robots are opening some doors and closing others |
| The problem with robot revolutions is that at their frontier – extended this week when a robodog called SpotMini opened a door for its robodog buddy – they look like something a robot could already do in an 80s film, with more sass. Yet SpotMini’s master, Boston Dynamics, has the tech-aware world running scared: a robot that can open a door is one step closer to automating us all into unemployment. A robot that can cooperate with a colleague on a Monday morning is already an asset most workplaces would kill for. | The problem with robot revolutions is that at their frontier – extended this week when a robodog called SpotMini opened a door for its robodog buddy – they look like something a robot could already do in an 80s film, with more sass. Yet SpotMini’s master, Boston Dynamics, has the tech-aware world running scared: a robot that can open a door is one step closer to automating us all into unemployment. A robot that can cooperate with a colleague on a Monday morning is already an asset most workplaces would kill for. |
| It has been a year since they last spooked us, with Atlas, a humanoid-bot who could also open a door, but only one of those fire doors with a bar across it, which is to say, one that is already open. It could also get up again, after a man (a real one) pushed it over. The most terrifying thing about that video was how enjoyable it looked to torture a robot. “Push him over again!” I yelled at the screen. “Try it with a cattle prod!” Was I a sadist or a luddite? Was it possible to be both? Inside the company, anxieties flared, as a leaked PR document cautioned: “We’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs … We don’t want to answer most of the Qs it triggers.” | It has been a year since they last spooked us, with Atlas, a humanoid-bot who could also open a door, but only one of those fire doors with a bar across it, which is to say, one that is already open. It could also get up again, after a man (a real one) pushed it over. The most terrifying thing about that video was how enjoyable it looked to torture a robot. “Push him over again!” I yelled at the screen. “Try it with a cattle prod!” Was I a sadist or a luddite? Was it possible to be both? Inside the company, anxieties flared, as a leaked PR document cautioned: “We’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs … We don’t want to answer most of the Qs it triggers.” |
| We used to talk about career planning for a post-oil age – now we need to build a skill set that a robot cannot possibly match. Projections are that they will be able to do everything except that which requires a human touch: caring, gardening, pastry, animal husbandry, lace. The fact that most humans can’t do these things either is an evolutionary curiosity. I’m going to concentrate on being able to open doors with round, slightly slippery handles. I reckon I’ll be fine. | We used to talk about career planning for a post-oil age – now we need to build a skill set that a robot cannot possibly match. Projections are that they will be able to do everything except that which requires a human touch: caring, gardening, pastry, animal husbandry, lace. The fact that most humans can’t do these things either is an evolutionary curiosity. I’m going to concentrate on being able to open doors with round, slightly slippery handles. I reckon I’ll be fine. |
| How my reading list became a grey area | How my reading list became a grey area |
| I was reading Fifty Shades Freed – the third in the franchise, released as a Valentine’s film for couples in that intoxicating bridge phase, between having sex and pretending to have forgotten it exists – in Kathmandu airport. Our hero’s character had been baked by the third book, leaving only one trait relatively unexplored – his billionaireyness. It’s shopping porn all the way through, from diamonds to bikinis; the film is a stuff-movie. | I was reading Fifty Shades Freed – the third in the franchise, released as a Valentine’s film for couples in that intoxicating bridge phase, between having sex and pretending to have forgotten it exists – in Kathmandu airport. Our hero’s character had been baked by the third book, leaving only one trait relatively unexplored – his billionaireyness. It’s shopping porn all the way through, from diamonds to bikinis; the film is a stuff-movie. |
| Unaccountably, I approached the customs desk of a socially conservative and politically Marxist country with this book in my hand. The guy looked at it. Frowned. “You like reading?” Yes ... not books like this ... good books. “Have you read the Mayor of Casterbridge?” | Unaccountably, I approached the customs desk of a socially conservative and politically Marxist country with this book in my hand. The guy looked at it. Frowned. “You like reading?” Yes ... not books like this ... good books. “Have you read the Mayor of Casterbridge?” |
| Boris Johnson | Boris Johnson |
| Opinion | Opinion |
| Brexit | Brexit |
| European Union | European Union |
| Foreign policy | Foreign policy |
| Fifty Shades Freed | Fifty Shades Freed |
| Robots | Robots |
| comment | comment |
| Share on Facebook | Share on Facebook |
| Share on Twitter | Share on Twitter |
| Share via Email | Share via Email |
| Share on LinkedIn | Share on LinkedIn |
| Share on Pinterest | Share on Pinterest |
| Share on Google+ | Share on Google+ |
| Share on WhatsApp | Share on WhatsApp |
| Share on Messenger | Share on Messenger |
| Reuse this content | Reuse this content |