Let's Get This Over With

After the Super Tuesday primaries, it is increasingly likely that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. This is somewhat unfortunate because Biden will lose to Trump in spectacular fashion. 

He'll lose by a wider electoral margin than Hillary did and win the popular vote by a slimmer margin. There's going to be a lot of pieces dissecting what went wrong, how it could've happened, and who's to blame eight months from now, but for once in my life I figured I should get something done ahead of time.

The Left is Too Divided

This is going to be the big one. I can already see the think piece headlines, the gloating talking heads on Fox, the condescending on CNN, and the lamenting on MSNBC. So many people are going to lambast Bernie Sanders and his supporters for not backing Biden because he didn't live up to their impossible purity test and I am already rolling my eyes at this. 

What this will fail to understand is that the reason leftists by-and-large rejected Biden is because Biden, along with most mainstream Democratic politicians, aren't on the Left. 

This isn't a No true Scotsman argument, just an honest assessment of where people stand. A crippling aspect of American political culture is the refusal to see politics as a binary, of two opposite sides arrayed against each other in order to find the perfect balance between their viewpoints. Obviously this is just dumb. Politics work on a spectrum, meaning people can be political opponents and still be working within the same ideological framework.

Biden is a fundamentally center-right politician. He doesn't necessarily believe the government should actively discriminate against people, but he's not exactly opposed to it, either. He thinks the government should step in at times of disaster like hurricanes or the financial crisis; but that intervention is a temporary action meant to reestablish the normal workings of business and finance as quickly as possible. 

In his internet infamous interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, Biden said that even if Congress passed a Medicare-for-All bill, he wouldn't automatically sign it. His reasons for doing so were concerns over its budgetary impact and whether it would delay the ability of citizens getting healthcare "now."

These sound reasonable enough, but they're indicitive of where Biden's core concerns lay. He mentions taxes and how terrible a burden it'd be on the middle class, but it ignores the burden of paying potentially thousands in premiums every year and the tens or hundreds of thousands debt on top of it. Does Joe Biden really think that a tax increase that amounts to maybe a few hundred or a thousand dollars spread out over a full year is a greater burden than $100k in medical debt?

Biden also repeats that $35 trillion number so many times it becomes a fucking mantra. Broken down, that's $3.5 trillion a year. Our current total healthcare spending, both government and private, is $3.6 trillion. By 2027, that number is expected to climb to $6 trillion. So what it comes down to is Biden is freaking out about the budget impact of a national policy that cuts costs by nearly 50%. It's also important to remember that that $3.5 trillion covers everything, for everyone, whenever they need it. 

Freaking out about the Medicare-for-All price tag is like being told you could live in a mansion and pay the same rent as your shitty college apartment but saying no because you can't spare $700.

At the heart of it all is that Biden doesn't see the payments and obligations to private insurers and hospitals because they generate profit. The jobs they create inflate both the cost and complexity of our medical system to no benefit, but hey, economic activity right?

In Biden's view, the government is the only possible source of undue obligations or burdens. If private enterprise costs too much then, well, that's the market's problem to fix. The government can't get too involved or provide services directly because then that robs a potential bootstrapper of their profit stream. 

And that's really it. In the left's view, the government not only has the capability but the obligation to provide directly for its citizens. Personal freedom is meaningless if the only outcomes of education to better yourself or using medicine to save your life leaves you in ruinous debt. If the only way to avoid those things is to stay at a job you hate or throw yourself at the mercy of a company willing to pay your tuition once you've "proved" your worth to them, that's just feudalism with extra steps. 

The Youth

Biden's numbers from young voters in the primaries are abysmal. They won't get better, and his weakness here is fatal. 

It's easy enough to figure out why. Bidens only response to every major concern of my generation has been, in so many words, "Fuck you."

On climate change, student loan debt, income inequality, Biden has insisted that sure, they're kinda problems, but everything's basically fine, okay? 

This is so astoundingly tone deaf that I'm honestly impressed by it. Axios had a story that showed Biden's potential Cabinet picks and it's just every Wall Street ghoul you can think of. Biden is legit prepared to hand over the reigns of power to the very people who destroyed the world 13 years ago and walked away scot free and he expects a generation who's grown up in the wreckage of that financial crash to go along with it? Are you kidding me?

Even without all that, Biden has nothing to offer. He condescendingly lectures about how incremental change is the only thing possible, that it's the only way anything gets done. Trump has blown this excuse to bits; he's proven that if you want to change something, all you need to do is do it and the rest will pretty much fall in line. 

Plus, incremental change is completely inadequate to the challenges in front of us. Spending three years to work out an agreement to begin phasing out fossil fuels ten years from the signing date is a resignation to the catastrophic effects of climate change that Biden and his rich benefactors won't have to face. We need someone who recognizes that these are the problems of now that need to be dealt with now and Biden not only has no interest in being that person, he doesn't even believe that person is really necessary. 

Put all this together and you have a candidate who not only doesn't represent the interests of an entire segment of the voting population, he's actively dismissive if not outright hostile to them. I'm already preparing myself for the months of mental work I'll have to do to choke down the revulsion I'll feel voting for Biden. But I know there are hundreds of thousands of people like me who won't. 

It's not worth it to them to fight back that existential despair knowing that voting for Biden means consigning the world to a different flavor of certain doom than Trump. And I can't blame them for that. 

I mean, they saw what happened. When Bernie won New Hampshire and Nevada the DNC, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and MSNBC all rallied behind Biden, who looked on the verge of a breakdown the more the primary went on, to make sure the narrative and momentum of Sanders campaign stopped dead in its tracks. 

And hey, it looks like it's working. But this isn't about a candidate, really. What made Bernie so compelling to so many people is he made them feel like they mattered, that they were important, and, most importantly, they were seen. Recognition is a powerful thing, once given, it creates a level of trust and commitment that's hard to break or transfer, especially when that same level empathy isn't given. 

What the DNC has done with their media blitz against Sanders and his platform is tell all the people who believed in him that they don't matter, that their problems just aren't worth solving because it's too inconvenient and expensive. 

In his essay The Rebel, Albert Camus said that when a man says "No" what he means is "Yes." That yes, he does have value, his concerns are relevant, and yes, he can refuse what is being commanded of him. Biden will make the same mistakes Hillary did in that he will focus exclusively on the evils of Trump's administration while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge or rectify the actions he took that directly created this situation. 

He won't reach out, he won't do the work, he will simply point and say "At least I'm not that dude." He will act as if he is entitled and we will all pay dearly for the fact that he is not. 

The Russians

Ah, yes, our favorite Cold War hit is back from the grave. This trope is going to do so much work over the next weeks and months. It will undoubtedly come up when ashy critique of Biden from the Left about how his previous actions plus current plans don't add up to these problems at hand. At which point, shills everywhere will instantly harp on whoever's making the critique for being a Russian stooge working to divide the Democrats and ensure Trump's reelection. 

Will some of those critiques originate or get boosted by Russian-operated bot accounts looking to fuck with our political system? Of course. Is that relevant? No. 

What should be the bigger concern here is that if you don't want your presidential nominee harassed for their policy record of screwing over working class people and the poor then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't work so hard to elevate a candidate who has a record of screwing over the working class and the poor. You should especially not tell people who headed legitimate concerns that those concerns aren't real, or, even if they are real, that theoretically serve the interests of a foreign bad man, so shut up.

All the Russia hysteria does is leave a vulnerable, problematic candidate with the same vulnerabilities and problems. Since Biden and his surrogates will do nothing to fix his problems except scream "Putin!" at them hoping they'll go away, they won't adapt, won't modify anything and then they'll go down in flames wondering how all this could happen to them again. 

As I see it, those are the big three reasons the media and pundits will trot out after November to make sunset of it all. It's all overcomplicated nonsense to disguise that Joe Biden is a terrible candidate that has next to no chance of winning. What's hilarious though is that if I'm the people running Biden's campaign, I am thanking god for the miracle of the coronavirus. 

The best thing that can happen for Biden is for people to not physically see him or be in his presence. Sure, we all had a giggle when told that factory worker spouting that 2nd amendment NRA nonsense that he was full of shit because honestly, fuck the NRA. But what happens if he pulls that on someone who brings up climate change, or healthcare? What if someone calls him on the effects of his crime bill and he loses it on them? 

That's not to mention the fact that his debate performances have been getting worse as the primaries go on so, yeah, if you need a healthcare system that cannot handle the fallout from a global pandemic as an equalizer, maybe you shouldn't be running for president. 

Hopefully, I'm wrong. The world is a volatile place at the best of times and calling not only the outcome but the response to something eight months away is inherently reckless and more than a little stupid. Still, that the best case scenario of me being wrong is that the collapse of our society into a fascistic autocracy on a planet in ecological crisis makes worrying about being wrong feel silly. 

The Tricky Art of Adaptation

As long as we've been telling stories, we've made adaptations. The first stories we ever wrote down are adaptations of the oral traditions that came before.

So it makes sense that once we started monetizing our stories we continued the tradition. From a business perspective, taking an already popular story and transposing it to a new medium is, theoretically, less risky than throwing an unfamiliar, original property in front of audiences. It's been a staple of Hollywood since before there even was a Hollywood- D.W. Griffith's infamous The Birth of a Nation was based off the second book in a then popular trilogy focused on the "heroics" of the Ku Klux Klan.

As a strategy, adapting stories did lead to a lot of financial and critical successes for early Hollywood- think Disney, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, The Maltese Falcon, even Casablanca- so in the mode of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," Hollywood has continued to look for the next profitable well to draw from.

These days, fantasy is the gold vein the entertainment industry keeps mining for the next big hit, with the usual mixed results in success and quality. Today I want to look at three recent franchises- Watchmen, Game of Thrones, and The Witcher- and examine how well, or more often, where the tricky art goes sideways. 

We'll start with Watchmen. Now, even though this technically isn't an adaptation of the original comic, the show is clearly trying to continue Alan Moore's tone and themes, so it counts. And unfortunately, it is the worst kind of adaptation, filled with pointless references and callbacks to the original comic with no real purpose but to mindlessly copy the source material. 

At the end of the first episode, the main character, Angela Abar, pulls up to a tree in the dead of night to find an old black man in a wheelchair sitting underneath the hanged figure of Judd Crawford, Chief of Tulsa Police, Angela's boss, friend, and mentor. The camera pans over his dead body, going down to the ground until we see his badge laying in the grass. The camera switches to a slow zoom on the badge getting closer and closer until a single drop of blood falls from Crawford's body, splattering in a nice, single streak across the left hand side of the badge.

Or, from earlier in the pilot, there's a scene where Klan stand ins the 7th Kalvary read a message claiming credit for the death of a cop. They mention how the filth will be hosed from the streets and the streets of Tulsa will become extended gutters full of race traitors and whores. There's also Angela, investigating Crawford's death, sneaking around his bedroom finding an old costume hidden behind a false panel in the closet. Or, in a later episode, Adrian Veidt screaming "I did it! I did it!" when he escapes the pocket dimension he's imprisoned in. Let's not forget Looking Glass broodily eating a can of beans with his mask pulled up just above his nose.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head, but the show is littered with moments like these. If you haven't read the source material, these moments just fly by, they don't particular stick out for any reason, but they don't seem to be serving any kind of purpose, either. But if you've read the comic, you instantly recognize all these individual moments because they are lifted wholesale from Dave Gibbons panels. The act of referencing a parent work isn't inherently bad- it's only a bad thing when you do it for no apparent reason.

A film criticism channel on Youtube called Red Letter Media invented a phrase that perfectly captures this phenomena- I Clapped When I Saw. They devised it when talking about Rogue One and the incessant Easter eggs or more blatant references to the original trilogy for no reason other than to elicit an emotional response from audience members who recognize it.

It's an empty, meaningless gesture. The charitable way to look at it is that showrunner Damon Lindelof is a genuine fan who wants to pepper in as many little references to the source material as he can because he wants to make a game for other mega fans like him to rewatch the show frame-by-frame to find as many of these little details as they can. 

The other, more cynical possibility is that Lindelof and/or the other producers were uneasy about the show's reception among parts of the comic fandom. Specifically, their worries would've centered around whether segments of the fandom would react rather violently and negatively towards the fact that the show focuses on black characters, and a black woman at that. So these references were peppered in to ease the anxiety, a security blanket to give comfort to those who would say that it isn't Watchmen because well, it can't be Watchmen and be about them.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that it's a bit of both. Lindelof has a blurb on the anniversary editions of the comic, so his appreciation of the work is genuine. I also have no doubt that the producers and HBO wanted to ease any controversy from that the story would generate with the bigoted elements which tend to be even more expressive around this specific comic by tying this iteration to the original in as many ways as they could. The mismatch of this strategy- part genuine love, part marketing strategy- means the result is haphazard, obvious, and manipulative at best, and lazy and desperate at worst.

Granted, these complaints mean nothing to general audiences and why would they? It doesn't mean anything to them if references and callbacks to a thing they've never read are done badly or mishandled, as long as those references don't shit on the uninitiated's heads as they fly over, they're not going to notice.

While this may seem a point in the show's favor- that a central part of its construction isn't obtrusive to a general audience's enjoyment- what's the harm. To which I say, if a part of the show is so utterly pointless you wouldn't notice it if was never there, why do it at all?

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, let's take a look at what is by far the best episode of the Watchmen series, "This Extraordinary Dream." The episode follows Will Reeves, Angela's grandfather, from his time as a child survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, to his time as a cop in 1940's New York City.

Part of what makes this episode so powerful is that it takes a blank spot in the original comic- in this case, the identity of Hooded Justice- and expands on it. It takes the opportunity to recast or thinking of the original by making Hooded Justice a black man who survived one of the worst instances of racial violence in U.S. history, who then goes on to be nearly lynched by his fellow officers. It lets

Will Reeves take the noose, the instrument of so many extra-judicial and official murders of his people, and turn it into something he can use to inspire the same terror against those who have hunted his own for so long. It's a transcendent episode, one that shows what the show could've done if it wasn't so obsessed with referencing everything it could from the original.

Moving on to another HBO property, Game of Thrones faced a different challenge in adapting a series of massive novels with hundreds of named characters and multiple point of view characters in a story spanning multiple continents. To navigate this unwieldy mess requires an exacting attention to detail, distilling each book to the essential themes and character arcs so you could figure out what to cut, how to those cut pieces work with what you are keeping, and plot out how what you're cutting will affect the story further down the line.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the show runners for GoT, did none of these things.

In a Q&A session at South by Southwest, the duo said their process for adapting the books boiled down to taking the key scenes from each book and transcribing them over to their scripts. This, well, this explains everything that went wrong with the show.

The problem with this piecemeal approach to adaptation is that, eventually, you end up with a show with big blockbuster moments with no connective tissue to build up to them or to add cohesion- plot, character, thematic etc- to the events themselves.

This, among many, many other structural writing problems, is what overtook GoT in an avalanche of botched story lines. The absolute mess made of the Dornish plot-line, for example, is a direct result of D&D cutting almost every single character from that plot-line and then having no idea what to do with the characters that remained. Since they cut off all their own avenues for characters with depth, D&D instead left themselves no other option but to write horrible, one-dimensional vamps that pretty much every one was happy to see die.

Now, obviously, even when done in such a ad hoc fashion, this is still a very complicated process. Trying to pinpoint any one decision as the representative example of why the show ultimately failed is overly simplistic.

That said, the changes made to Varys conspiracy doomed any hope the show had of paying off.
In the books, Varys swaps out Rhaygar's son with another baby and squirrels him away to the eastern continent where he is to receive the best education Varys can devise to make the boy grow up to be the "perfect" king. What this means in practice is that Varys actively works to sabotage the monarchy so that Westeros remains unstable and divided, aka the perfect environment for the lost heir to a old dynasty to come back and restore order to the world.

The plot isn't finished, obviously, but there's enough to find its shape. The maybe lost child takes over parts of the country, disposes of the Lannister regime- who have no connection to the meta-plot tied to the White Walkers- and then acts as a final, brutal confrontation for Danereys as she tries to balance out her desire to bring justice to the world with the autocratic, kneel or die drive to bring that same world to heel. This clears up a lot of loose ends and setting up while making sure all the important character beats get to where they need to be.

By removing this element, D&D entered their end game without any tension or way to deliver on their grand finale which lead to well, season 8.

Finally, let's look at The Witcher.

This series had a somewhat unique challenge in that it was adapting a set of only sometimes connected short stories into a long form series. The main challenge with this series was to find a way to give a story about a character who actively doesn't want to be in his story a sense of drive and momentum. Sadly, the series doesn't quite pull this off.

Part of this comes down to having Ciri being one of the three main characters that appears in every episode. Yes, the series eventually does revolve around her as the child of destiny and all, but these stories aren't that. The books handle this by weaving Ciri in and out of the narrative so she acts like an inescapable center of gravity. I honestly don't know why the show didn't follow this formula but, we all make choices.

Where the show does go well, for the most part, is Yennefer. The addition of her backstory from hunchbacked farm girl to sorceress is extremely well done, and adds lots of depth to what is one of my favorite characters in fiction. The wrinkle of her wanting a baby after sacrificing the chance so she could then become a sorcerer is something I don't like, but that's personal taste. It's in character for Yen to want everything that's possible for her to get her hands on in the world and do whatever she can to get it. That the story skirts uncomfortably close to making Yen's central character drive just dressed up baby fever isn't the fault of the show as much it is the just what they've got to work with.

A big complaint of Hollywood is that they don't do any new stories anymore. That it's all just reboots and adaptations. Remember The Maltese Falcon? The one with Humphrey Bogart, the that gets counted as an all-time classic? That was the third crack at adapting the book. However new you think a trend is, it's not, and has probably been done worse, or better, then what's going on right now.

We won't ever see a day where we get an entertainment industry of 100% original stories. It's neither feasible or, more importantly, what we as audiences want. There's a reason we keep passing around familiar stories in new forms. We want the comfort of something familiar with the thrill of seeing it in a new way. Adaptations aren't inherently a bad thing; done well, they can expand the story we love and present it to us in a way that only draws us in further. Done badly, they're just largely forgotten and we all move on, thankfully.

More often than not, though, we get (mostly) well meaning attempts that are a mishmash of success and failures. Even though we've been doing this for as literally as long we could write, we've still got a lot to learn. Which just makes things more fun, don't you think?

Fallout 4 is a Terrible Game

As I was walking this morning, I saw this Jeep with the Brotherhood of Steel logo on it. Since I will take any opportunity to think about the Fallout series, my mind started drifting over the game's when I landed on how terribly awkward the Brotherhood's introduction in Fallout 4 is.

It starts out well enough- you come across a small, besieged scouting party holed up in a police station in post-apocalyptic Cambridge outside Boston. You help them clear out the ghouls attacking them, then find out they're on a mission to recover some advanced technology they don't want falling into the wrong hands. It all goes well, you shoot your way out from an ambush by the big bads of the game and even get a cool energy gun as a reward. 

Then, just as everything is going so well, you get an offer to join the organization right then and there. 

The first time I played the game, this blew me away and practically killed all my hopes for it. Overly dramatic, no doubt, but it served as a harbinger, a sign of things to come that point to the fatal flaw at the core of Fallout 4. That is, Fallout 4 is an open-world RPG that doesn't want you to engage in its world. 

To catch everybody up, the premise of the game is that your character lived in the time before the nuclear war that annihilated the world. You actually start the game on the day all hell breaks loose, making it into a vault just minutes after the bombs start dropping before you're thrown into a cryogenic freezing chamber. Time passes, until you wake up to venture out into the wasteland to figure out why you've been awoken, who did it, and what's become of the world in the 200 years after the atomic war. 

Your very first mission involves you stumbling across a rag tag group of survivors, besieged by the ne'er-do-wells of the wasteland, who call themselves the Minutemen. You find out that they're the last survivors of a group dedicated to reestablishing a form of democratic society with all that entails in the Commonwealth wasteland. But they were betrayed and set upon by another mercenary group, who annihilated the rest of the Minutemen and let the survivors run into the wild to let the world finish the job. 

This wisp of a group is seeking one last place of refuge, somewhere they can make a home and rebuild. Since you're the main character, you lead them to the ruins of what was once the suburb you lived in with your family and it's here you get introduced to the settlement system. Or, as I like to call it, the mechanic that single handedly strangles the game in its crib. 

I have always, always hated the settlement system. At first, I thought it was because you are bulldozed into doing it- even if you don't want to, you have missions where the direct result is the creation of a settlement that you're now responsible for. Even if you neglect them, it's still an active decision that you have to maintain. The looting, inventory, and upgrading/customization options all either directly incentivize or require you to have at least one bare minimum settlement that can fulfill those functions. 

In a game that's ostensibly about you affecting the world through the choices you make, having a mechanic that requires you to shape the world in one specific way is actively antagonistic to that experience. And for the longest time, I was content to leave it at that. 

But then that little decal sticker led me to a breakthrough. That the system is actually worse than I thought. Because, the reason your induction into all the different factions have to be so divorced from the world the game presents is that the game never intends for you to fully experience the world it takes place in. 

Your settlements don't integrate with the communities in the world. Some individual farms and homesteads come under your protection if you pursue the Minutemen story, but once they do that, they just disappear into the background until they're an objective to protect in the mind-numbingly repetitive quest system. 

It'd be great if, after you've built up your settlement network, you had the opportunity to set up alliances or trade networks with the two main cities in the Boston wasteland. Hell, even if you just had the chance to use your settlements as supply boosts for the Minutemen, or workshops for the Brotherhood, or safe houses as part of the runaway slave network the Railroad runs, they'd be amazing. 

Instead, the settlements become more insular the more advanced they become. Eventually, you can build shops at them, meaning all your gear and loot selling needs will be contained to the settlements, so what's the point going anywhere else?

This leaves nothing for you to invest in the world the game creates or explore it for any other reason than to strip mine it for the raw materials you need to build and upgrade your settlements. 

Which is a goddamn shame when you get right down to it. Fenway Park has been turned into a community called Diamond City where people turned the baseball diamond into a thoroughfare which they built a community around. There's a seedy neighborhood of misfits, criminals, and the desperate called Good Neighbor that should be so much fun to delve into but you get like, three or four quests there. And then you're done forever with the place.

The core of the Fallout games is the wider world they exist in. There's a joy of discovery in wandering around the wasteland, tripping over whatever weird shit is waiting out there for you. And there's plenty here in the game that delivers on that front, too.

One of my absolute favorites, in this or any Fallout game that I've played, involves you creeping up on the Salem Witch Museum. When you get there, you find a few mauled bodies, one of which has recording on them. When you listen to it, you hear the small platoon talk amongst themselves when they hear something following them in the dark. When you go inside the basement door, working your way through the building, all is quiet except a very heavy thump from the floor above you. Then, when you finally get up to the second floor, the lights flicker over all the naked mannequins inside until you finally come face-to-face with the thing that slaughtered the mercenaries.

That, is a Deathclaw. An 8-foot-tall figure of death that's terrified Fallout players for years. And now you have to fight one in a dark, cramped, enclosed space with nowhere to run. It's a great moment, full of tension, atmosphere, with a terrifying and exhilarating climax.

But the game doesn't care. Which is what makes it so incredibly frustrating to play. Bethesda knows what draws people to the Fallout series, knows what makes the game interesting, but in the end decides not to focus on them at all. Instead, they shunt you off into a glorified inventory management mini-game and insist you enjoy it so you won't notice the lack of attention paid to literally every aspect of the world.

There are moments, scattered throughout the story, that almost, almost make the game worthwhile. The Railroad, with its mission to free the androids created solely to be slaves by the Institute is one of the coolest factions in the series. The moment you find out your son is actually in his sixties and is leading the Institute's efforts to swap out real people with identical android copies to extend their influence and destabilize the region, awesome. All your companions have the classic "burn outs need redemption" story lines- save two, who are excellent exceptions to this rule-that are a delight to play through (Kat, Piper, and Nick are my favorites). 

For all that, though, none of those threads are woven together to create a cohesive whole. None of them compound, enhance, or enrich the others. Nothing that happens in the world really matters because you aren't connected to it. Whatever end you choose, the sun comes up on a wasteland that barely even notices the next day and the day after that. And that feeling, that all you've done means nothing, just makes the whole experience feel like a crushing waste of time.

A Song of Ice and Fire Review

Over the summer, I decided that since Game of Thrones ended so abysmally, I decided to do the thing I told myself I wouldn't do the entire eight years the show ran- I would read George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I'm glad I didn't choose to read it until now, because it's clear the themes of Martin's work flew over David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' head like an albatross over a ship at sea. My laziness saved me a great deal of frustration from a rather piss poor adaptation both in terms of comparing it to the source material and how well it told its own story.

Overall, the books are pretty good; the wandering close 3rd-person chapters- were each chapter is told in a different point of view- is a rather brilliant idea that, more than the events and scope of the story itself, make the books so grand and cosmic in scale. Martin's prose has a rather brisk pace to it allowing him to modulate the speed of the action on the page without losing any momentum. And Martin's remixing of historical events into a fantasy setting adds the layer of political authenticity and intrigue that people have been eating up in the series for over twenty years now.

As always, I've got issues, too. You can tell Martin really wanted to put the whole idea of the chosen child hero so common in fantasy through the ringer to show just how awful the idea really is. So we have the Stark children, ranging from three to fifteen, and Daenerys, who's thirteen when the series starts with her being sold to Khal Drogo. The problems here are twofold.

The first is that- especially with Sansa, Arya, and Dany- they live in a world where they are constantly held under the threat of rape or sexual exploitation from well, everyone. Sansa has the Hound, Ser Dontos, Tyrion, and of course Littlefinger all doing the Westersoi barely legal countdown, Arya spends all of Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords held captive by various soldiers and mercenaries who never fail to mention how she'd better behave or they'll violate her in a myriad set of ways, and then of course there's Dany who gets the wonderful experience of marital rape with Drogo and then works her way down to rampant sexual harassment from Jorah Mormont and Daario Naharis after Drogo bites it.

Compounding all this is that you can't follow through on the danger you're putting your protagonist in, lest you become that fantasy series distinguished by its non-zero occurrences of child rape. 

So what to do? 

With Dany, Martin decided that she should find a way to make Drogo see her as an equal. To do this, she introduces him to the cowgirl position, and by extension, consent. Martin tries really hard to justify this with the logic that since the Dothraki are nomadic horse worshipping people, they equate riding with dominance; so it totally makes sense that when Dany rides Drogo in front of the whole khalasar the only possible outcome is that they see her as an equal, too. It’s still an obvious attempt to post hoc justify all the abuse Dany suffered because she just needed to find a way to engage in the behaviour on her own terms. 

Martin lightly did this to Sansa, too. After her marriage to Tyrion and the Red Wedding, she has a mildly sexy dream of Tyrion and the Hound, but there’s no physical consummation either in the dream or real life. So at least Martin had the decency(?) not to fully commit to “it’s totally okay this is happening because they wanted it all along, just not the way they initially got it” twice. Dany, at least, got dragons to put her in a position of power that keeps her relatively ensconced from physical attempts. Sansa, meanwhile, gets jack shit. 

On top of living under the constant threat of the sadosexual impulses from burgeoning serial killer Joffery, Sansa then gets passed around to ostensible protectors who only further victimize her. The Hound saves Sansa from being raped by the mob during the riot in King’s Landing, then forces her to kiss and sing to him during the Battle of Blackwater Bay when he deserts. Tyrion shields her as best he can while he’s acting Hand, then when during their forced marriage he uses the fact that he wants to have sex with a 13-year-old to fuel his self-hatred because the only way any woman who’s not a whore will sleep with him is if he forces her to do so. Which, it's nice that Sansa’s potential assault is used to fuel man pain. It’s great, even. Then there’s Ser Dontos who, acting as a pawn of Littlefinger, helps frame Sansa for Joffery’s assassination then delivers her directly into Littlefinger’s pedo hands. 

Arya at least gets off easy by having anyone remotely close to her die or move on from her, driving her need to become a little miss murder machine to protect herself. 

But yeah, Martin creates this constant threat of bodily violation around the female characters, but can’t really follow through with much of any of it because of how pointlessly horrific it’d be, but he can’t have all that tension or danger go to waste so he has to redirect it to side characters who end up as gristle so Martin doesn’t subject his child heroes to wave after wave of nihilistic violence.

The second problem that comes out of this is that, in the end, Martin ends up having to rely heavily on the very trope he’s trying to deconstruct and examine. Jon Snow leads the defense of the Wall and becomes Lord Commander when he’s 16 because he’s just that well trained and competent from his whole undercover wilding adventure? Sure. Robb becomes king at 15 then goes on to run circles around commanders twice or three times his age? Why not? Bran becomes trainee to a shape-shifting, sorta time traveling omniscient psychic when he’s nine? Totally. 

By making his characters so young, Martin has no real choice but for the trope that child heroes go through extraordinary circumstances become exemplary individuals who naturally become more than their fellow men, thus are they able to fulfill their grand destinies. Basically, by trying so hard to throw cold water on that particular storytelling trope, Martin in the end has to rely on our acceptance of it to roll with the idea that the whole world will be saved by a handful of teenagers without blinking an eye.

The biggest loser of all this is though is Martin’s thematic statement of purpose. To borrow a phrase from Steven Attawell, Martin is a Romantic, not a nihilist, but it’d be hard to figure that out from Martin’s work at first glance. Since Martin creates a charnel house that consumes characters as they try, and fail, repeatedly, to save or otherwise improve the lives of people around them, you get the sense that all attempts to improve are bound to fail in the face of an uncaring, ruthless, world. It’s all very hopelessly pointless.

Except.

Except the point Martin wants to make in all this is that heroism and bravery aren’t found in the result, they’re found in the attempt. In sticking your neck out against hopeless odds, against a brutal, cruel world that relentlessly just doesn’t care. Because to Martin, the point is when it comes to living, we have a choice to be a reflection of the world around us, or to set ourselves apart, to rise above for no more reason than that it’s right. Most of the time, yes, it’ll end in failure. But sometimes, sometimes you take a leap of faith and kill an ice demon elf from the dawn of time.

All this could be avoided with reading comprehension beyond surface level events, but, still, when you stack failure upon failure upon failure on top of each other, it is your fault when people think that’s the point you’re shooting for and that whatever successes do come are fleeting accidents. 

What also bugs me is how Martin has given fodder for people to blame characters for things that aren’t their fault because he hamstrings their capabilities to preserve his plotting. 

The example that stands out through the series is Catelyn Stark. When her dying father keeps muttering the word “tansy” and apologizing but the boy was just too lowborn, that he would find her a better match, Catelyn puzzles out that tansy refers to tansy tea- a real life thing used to induce abortions- that the woman he’s apologizing to is her sister Lysa, but she stumbles a bit on who the lowborn noble could be.

Why this could only happen if Martin beat Catelyn mercilessly with the stupid stick is that by this point, Catelyn knows that Littlefinger has been going around for years telling literally everyone that he claimed both her and her sister Lysa's virginity when they were children. She also knows that Littlefinger lied to her about the origin of the dagger that someone used in the attempt to kill her son and, finally, that Littlefinger was an essential part in betraying Ned to getting his head chopped off. So, here she is, sitting as one of the few characters in the entire series who knows how Littlefinger is connected to every major event so far but… nope. She never puts it together because she can’t. Because Martin isn’t ready for that goose to be cooked yet so one of the smartest, savviest characters in the series just has a brain fart in the name of plotting.

The result of this is that Catelyn gets blamed for causing the Red Wedding, specifically through her release of Jaime Lannister. To be clear, this decision is a mistake, it causes a major breach in the Northern forces which leads to the Karstarks killing the remaining Lannister prisoners, which leads to Robb needing to kill the patriarch of the Karstark clan, which leads to the desertion of the Karstark army, which, is what helps create the circumstances for the Red Wedding to be as successful as it is. 

So, does all that make what happens Catelyn's fault, in whole or in part? No. What Martin is doing here is flexing his Greek tragedy muscles- Catelyn's mistake is borne out of her love for her children. She does everything she can to save everything that's important to her in the world, and all it does is bring her closer to losing everything she thinks she has left. It's heartbreaking, because for as much as she thinks she's responsible, there are hundreds of little things she can't control that brought about the destruction of everything she held dear.

That's the core of tragedy, that whatever actions that brought the character closer, it's nothing compared to the tides of fate that pull them in like an undertow to their deaths. But, instead of feeling that, Martin makes Catelyn act really stupid so instead of the Red Wedding feeling like an inevitable, inescapable act of fate, it just feels like she brought it down on herself by a moment of weakness acting like a typical, emotional woman. It's just a shame to see Martin's execution bungle his dramatic intent. 

In the end, I’m happy I read the series. I can see why it became such a phenomenon in the fantasy literary community and why it had such staying power when it got adapted. It's an epic, sweeping story that Martin, for the most part, pulls off. I'm glad that the series is one of the few things that live up to the hype. 

The Witcher Series Review

When Netflix announced it was adapting The Witcher into an original series, I was skeptical and apprehensive. When Henry Caville was cast in the lead role, that feeling intensified and intensified again when the trailers dropped. Having watched the series, I'm glad to say that all my fears were for naught in the end. 

As an adaptation, The Witcher sticks pretty closely to the stories it adapts from Andrezj Sapkowski's short story collections and translates them with more successes than misses, largely because showrunner Lauren Schmidt doesn't pull away from the fairy tale aspects and magic imbued into the stories to make them more serious for a general audience. That the series leans into the majesty as well as the darker twists keeps the series from miring in a navel gazing cynicism. 

On its own, the show is carried by solid performances from two of its three main leads, deftly executed action scenes, and plenty of witty dialogue that helps lighten the mood. Henry Caville does well conveying the simmering emotions under Geralt's monotone voice while Anya Chalotra captures the ambition, fury, and pride of Yennefer with each glance. The only lead who doesn't really carry their weight is Freya Allan's Ciri, but, that's more a writing problem than anything to do with her capabilities as a performer. 

Where the show gets in its own way is the decision to tell all three arcs at once. I can see why they'd want to- the stories they're drawing from are all mostly self-contained adventures with no direct impact on the larger plot except for people telling Geralt he really should take this whole destiny thing seriously. It's fun, engaging, and gives the characters depth but it doesn't provide a lot of momentum, plot wise. 

I see what they're trying to do, weaving multiple threads of rising action together to build a more sustained pace of excitement and cliff hangers that ties in to the Netflix's binging model of consumption. 

It's a fine plan, in theory, but fails in its execution because all three character arcs are fall into a valley of single-minded obsession almost immediately so instead of multiple threads rising and falling against each other, you have three flat lines with interruptions pretending to be complications. No obstacle is meaningful because none of them can have any impact until the finale allows it. 

Overall, The Witcher is a solid show with some of the funnest action scenes in fantasy, and where it's biggest flaw is mitigated by its short episode order so the frustration is over relatively quickly. 

Series grade: B

Blunderbots, Roll Out

On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi formally called for Articles of Impeachment against President Trump. This is based on the report issued by the House Intelligence Committee led by Adam Schiff which alleged after weeks of testimony, that Donald Trump attempted to use the power of his office to solicit Ukraine for assistance in his 2020 reelection campaign, which Trump confessed to on live TV months ago.

To be blunt, nothing's going to come of this. Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in the House have bungled this from the very beginning, which isn't a surprise given that the leadership never wanted to impeach Trump in the first place.

We'll start with the bungling. One criticism that has been lobbed at the hearings from the very start is that they're boring as hell to watch. Obviously, there's a disingenuous aspect to this critique when it comes from people like Trump's son or on Fox News since they have a vested interest in making all of the President's abuses of power seem like nothing more than triggered liberals getting the vapors over the actions of a True American Hero. That being said, that there are those making the criticism with corrupt motives, doesn't mean there's no substance to the criticism at all.

The thing to realize about impeachment investigations is that the point isn't really to find out what's happened; by the time impeachment hearings start in the House, the broad strokes of the president's transgressions are already known and undeniable, the point of impeachment hearings is to generate and drive home the idea that the president is unfit for office and must be removed for his actions. Removing a duly elected sitting president is inherently a moment of high drama, if you want the effort to succeed, you have to lean into that, you have to give people a good show to keep their attention and passions high.

Instead of that, Schiff and the Intelligence Committee decided that the better approach was to let the hearings be a somber, stolid affair, where sensible, responsible government imposed itself over the chaos of the administration.

I can't emphasize enough how fatal of a mistake this is. In normal times, a government with unnecessary drama or grandstanding is fantastic. But if we're at the point where impeachment is not only possible but necessary, an ethos against making a fuss or causing a ruckus is going to get you absolutely nowhere.

This strategy makes even less sense when you consider the environment the inquiry would be taking place in. In the world of Fox News, the Republican base is going to be blasted literally every minute of every day that the proceedings are baseless, vindictive, or, hilariously, unconstitutional. Every thing that needs to be done to reinforce the idea that the Left is viciously attacking their dear president for no reason will be done, no matter how ridiculous.

Are they going to trout out an absolutely preposterous idea that impeachment hearings are a violation of the 6th amendments due process protections? Sure, why not. How about championing the conspiracy theory that it was really Ukraine who hacked the DNC server and interfered in the 2016 election? Fine, fuck it, whatever we need to do.

In this environment, the chances of swinging enough Republican voters- and, by extension, Republican Congressmen, is close to nil. So, instead of beating your head against the wall trying to achieve bipartisan support, you use that to make the noose tighter, to paint the picture that a failure to condemn Trump both in the House and the Senate isn't an act of exoneration, but complicity.

Now, I get the idea that calling something like impeachment hearings "boring" and expecting to be taken seriously is stupid, a sign of our hollowed out attention spans ruining our ethics of citizenship. What's at stake here are the foundational principles of our democracy, but we're too busy griping about not being entertained.

There seems to be this idea that there's a divide with politics on the one side, and principles like Duty, Honor, etc. etc. on the other. The politics side is seen as dirty, as the mire which we must overcome to reach the lofty principles of better, more refined civilizations. Thing is, if you want people to do those things, you gotta bring them there, you have to give them reasons, something to believe in, and to do that, it takes doing the dirty work of politics to convince people that there's something more to them, and the world they live in.

A few weeks of staid testimony followed by a day of constitutional law professors lecturing the public on the finer points of impeachment does not a compelling case make, so all this will just die on the vine in the face of a Senate with no incentive to side against Trump.

Which, isn't a surprise, since the Democrats came into this on their back foot.

It's been clear since the beginning of the year that Nancy Pelosi had no intention of doing any impeachment inquiries no matter what happened. Even when Robert Mueller handed Congress a report detailing ten times Trump used the power of his office to commit literal crimes, she passed. The only reason this is happening is that she was facing a revolt in the ranks because of her refusal to do literally anything to hold Trump to account. Which, just as a sidebar, think about that, faced with one of the most corrupt, unpopular presidents in the history of the country, supposedly master politician Nancy Pelosi was on the verge of losing the support of at least half her caucus. That's talent.

Anyway, they don't mean to fuck up, they just do. Democrats from Pelosi's generation operate under a philosophy of politics that shuns public passions as rule, so it makes sense that they'd fail so abysmally in marshaling them effectively. Deeper than that, though, is something else, I think, that impeachment is a fight Pelosi is afraid to lose but absolutely terrified of winning.

The losing part makes sense; Pelosi's power comes from her ability as fundraiser, securing money from people with more power than her by convincing them she'll be the best person to carry out their interests. She was in Congress for Clinton's impeachment, she saw the fallout of how that fight went both for the Republicans as a whole and for Newt Gingrich personally. She saw how Gingrich went from being one of the most influential and powerful men in politics to having to scrape by as a talking shill on Fox News, forever blacklisted from any strata of real power. I imagine Pelosi sees her nightmare version of that being a special guest on MSNBC, eternally trading quips with Joe Scarborough in the morning and tut-tutting Russia with Rachel Maddow for the evening crowd.

Still, even that pales next to the Boschian hellscape she would face if Trump was successfully impeached. Part of how the mainstream Democratic political strategy works is by reinforcing the idea that powerful political figures operate behind a protective veil of influence and power that can't be penetrated by regular ol' public pressure, it's just too hard. The idea is to make it feel like there's a barrier between those in power and the electorate that puts them there. This is done to make sure that any populist policies like Medicare for All or Debt Free college are both dead on arrival, and that Democrats have sufficient cover after killing them.

Most importantly, for this philosophy to work, no one must be held to account, for anything, ever. Think of literally everyone from the Bush administration who still appear on TV, work in the Trump administration, or do whatever the hell they want not living in prison where they belong. I mean, sure, you can lambaste Trump for giving John Bolton and Gina Haspel jobs, but he wasn't the one who let them walk away from their atrocities with no consequences.

That's why all the talk about holding Trump accountable, that no one is above the law blah blah blah falls so flat. The Democrats were happy to let Trump get away with literally everything he's done so far, including helping pass a $4 billion border security bill with no oversight after the concentration camp conditions the Border Patrol were holding asylum seekers in became common knowledge. People who behave or operate with the kind of incentives that Pelosi and her ilk operate cannot successfully hold Trump to account because, at heart, they don't really believe they should or are even capable of doing so.

It's honestly amazing that Trump has found himself in this position. He's a petty, real estate grifter operating as chief executive of a political system that almost explicitly encourages his kind of grift. Even with that handicap, he still manages to get himself in trouble by sheer repulsive force, backing a inept, submissive Congress into a shambolic display of what it should be doing as a co-equal branch of government.

If Trump fell, it'd prove that presidents are touchable, that with enough public pressure and action, they can fall just like anyone else. And what would happen then? Well, people might get the idea in their head that they can, and should, hold everyone to account, to make sure all those who put us in this position are banished for their failures.

For Pelosi and her ilk, that cannot, must not be allowed to happen. And for that, she will almost instinctively sell all of us out, even protect Trump as president, to keep whatever strands of power she can grasp.

In the end, this will go much the same way as Trump's bankruptcies- anyone who could bring him to heel will let him walk away clean as he passes  the ruin onto everybody else.

Brexit, Revisited

As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm fascinated by the politics of disaster. How governments and societies navigate their way through chaos and havoc has always been something I've been drawn to mainly because the primary strategy is to act like there is no disaster. Everything gets played off as business as usual which, of course, makes everything worse and any solution impossible. Over the last three years, the two primary examples of this dynamic have been the Trump administration and Brexit. The former I talk about all the time, so I think it's only fair I pivot to the latter.

I wrote a post about the referendum a few years ago, and, looking back on it, I'm still pretty happy with it. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, said she wants to call another Scottish independence referendum by 2021; considering that a significant factor in the last referendum was the UK threatening Scottish admittance into the EU- a thing Scotland really wants to be a part of- isn't going to be at play anymore, I imagine the vote would be closer if not flipped if it happened again. Right now, the polls I could find on the issue usually fall between 49% opposed- 43% in favor with the rest undecided. It's a tight spread, one I can easily see being swayed by whatever shape Brexit takes over the next few years.

The other prediction I feel even more confident in though is that Northern Ireland will leave the UK and reunite with the rest of the island to make Ireland a whole republic. Because of how Theresa May pursued the Brexit project and the redlines that came with that position, I believe has only made Northern Ireland's exit an inevitability. 

 

To put this in context, May, as Prime Minister, set out to achieve what was called a "Hard Brexit" meaning that the UK would have no membership in the Single Market, or be in any way a part of any trade or customs agreement with the EU except those it negotiated after the UK left. This presents a problem because if the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland aren't covered by a shared set of laws any more, then there must be a border between them, which makes everyone really uneasy because any border with all the guard towers and military checkpoints that come with it will bring back the Troubles almost instantly.

So what to do? Well, the EU proposed, and the UK agreed to, a measure called the "backstop." Basically, it says that, barring any other options- which don't exist - when the UK leaves the EU, Northern Ireland will effectively stay inside the EU so it maintains all the same legal standards as the Republic, therefore eliminating the need for a physical border. The kicker of this arrangement, which May and the Democratic Unionist Party both complained about, is that instead of a physical border on the island, it creates an internal "sea border" between NI and the UK- meaning anything transported from NI would have to go through the full range of customs checks before it could be sold to the rest of the UK and vice versa.

How does this all tie together and make me think that the break up is inevitable? Because, at the end of the day, the consequence of Brexit for Northern Ireland is going to be one of two things- a return to sectarian partisan violence, or further integration with the Republic at the cost of isolation from the rest of the UK. If there's violence, all the old political questions of why do family's on the same island have to suffer border and military checks just to visit or do business with each other resurface in all the same ugly fashions. The other added wrinkle is that Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly against Brexit and it's own domestic legislative body - Stormount - hasn't been in session for two years after the fallout of a corruption scandal involving the current head of the DUP, Arlene Foster. If violence does come, it will be because of policies pursued against the popular will, Catholic and Protestant alike, so I expect people to start asking rather pointed questions about why they should live in fear and die over a political project they didn't want to happen and was pursued with no regard to their rather delicate situation.

On the other hand, an internal sea border, by nature, would force greater cooperation between the Republic, Northern Ireland, and the EU, with the rest of the UK left out in the cold. This is why May, along with Foster, were so dead set against the idea of the backstop. It reinforces the idea that Northern Ireland has more in common, and more to gain, by being closely allied to Ireland proper while keeping the UK at arms length (Foster and the DUP as a whole have the added incentive of wanting to stay in the UK because that's the only way their regressive Protestant asses can stay in power.)

No matter how you look at it, whether it's a the problem is of returning violence or the wonky reality of trying to manage one country with two separate legal frameworks, the easiest, less convoluted answer to the Irish question is for Northern Ireland to just be Ireland. That reality is acting like a political singularity, pulling every discussion of the matter into its orbit until the crushing effect of its gravity brings the idea to fruition.

And while I believe that wholeheartedly, I don't want to put any kind of time table on when this will happen because of the major mistake I made in the first Brexit post I did. In that piece, I predicted that the EU would react with its general ruthlessness in enforcing its political agenda against what it saw as an existential threat. I was basing my analysis on the Greek debt debacle, where the EU Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund- collectively known as The Troika- ground the newly elected Syriza party officials into dust over the issue of Greece's debt repayments. Syriza's (correct) position was that the Troika's terms of austerity were madness, that imposing such drastic cuts to public budgets would only make it more impossible for Greece to repay its loans which would drive them deeper into debt, which would only make the Troika demand deeper cuts for further assistance etc. etc. This argument fell on deaf ears and the Troika went about setting and forcing the Greek government to agree to absolutely punishing terms to the point where Greece still hasn't recovered from the 2008 crisis.

I expected the negotiations with the UK to go much the same way. In the early days after the referendum, Theresa May was making moves that pointed to UK's strategy being basically cherry picking EU membership benefits; full, unrestricted access to the single market, but without accepting any of the four freedoms central to that market. Obviously, this wasn't going to happen, and I foretold a brutal negotiation process where the EU laid out in excruciating detail that the extended grace which kept the UK sitting at the adults table of international affairs was now over, and would forcibly show it to its proper place where the other hanger on powers belonged.

This didn't happen. It didn't happen because the UK has, for three years now, acted like a senile, delusional old family member who's only around to rave about politics at Thanksgiving. It's almost impossible to lay out in full the sheer incompetence and bad faith the government has shown over the last three years. From triggering the Article 51 clause to leave the EU without any clear idea what it meant, to insisting, repeatedly, that the EU would grant it special exceptions to allow UK products and financial services when the EU negotiating team loudly, publicly, and insistently said that under no circumstances would that ever happen.

While she was Prime Minister, May would constantly go to summits in Brussels, seemingly come to an agreement with the EU team, then, when news broke in Britian about whatever the agreement was, would immediately backtrack and denounce the very same provisions she had spent the weekend negotiating. She would also try to make an end run around the European Commission by going directly to the different European heads of state to get support for her half baked initiatives even though the heads of state and the Commission told her every single time that such action wasn't appreciated and was completely unprofessional if not outright disrespectful.

Look, if a member of a foreign government names their cat "Brexit" because the constant indecision about wanting to go outside or stay reminds them of your government,  you've lost all credibility past, present, and future.

 

The only good moment Theresa May had came last November after negotiations closed and produced the withdrawal agreement. She said that the options before Britain were her deal, no deal, or no Brexit. It's literally the only moment of honest reflection in her entire tenure and it mattered not at all. 

Three votes were held to get Parliament's approval for the agreement and each time the measures went down in flames.

The final defeat prompted May to resign, which means the UK spent three of the six month extension the EU gave it on a meaningless election that changes absolutely nothing. Her replacement, Boris Johnson, is a buffoon who's spent his entire career honing that natural talent to become a living spectacle worthy of P.T. Barnum.

Recently, Johnson said that the backstop was dead, that he wouldn't honor it, and that he plans to go back and renegotiate not only that provision but the entire Withdrawal Agreement. That the EU has said, repeatedly (again), that renegotiating wasn't an option, that the Withdrawal Agreement is the only deal on the table and that the only reason the UK was granted an extension was so they could figure how to pass the Withdrawal Agreement is, of course, entirely ignored.

All this means that the UK is more likely than not to crash out of the EU without a deal of any kind which, is absolutely insane.

At their core, countries are legal entities with shit tons of people and land attached to them. Relationships between countries, by extension, are also just elaborate legal agreements. This is why Michael Barnier, the lead negotiator for the EU, set up that Brexit chart- it's basically a staircase of "If-Then" scenarios that break down "If these UK redlines, then this outcome." It's as close as a man can come to sketching out the terms of the deal in crayon so the UK could fully understand the consequences of their choices. Alas.

In effect, deal or no-deal, it doesn't really matter because Britain is screwed either way. One of the main rallying cries for this whole project was that it was an effort for the UK to take back its sovereignty from faceless EU bureaucrats. I'm curious about what they're getting though. Does forcing an ambassador to retire because he pointed out the obvious about the Trump administration or acting as proxy agents seizing Iranian ships off the coast of Spain sound like the actions of a sovereign nation, or do they sound like a client trying not to piss off its lone sugar daddy?

This dynamic is going to play out in social policy, too. When Trump did his state visit in May, he talked about the possibilities of the new trade deals that would come in the Brexit wake. In his usual "say the quiet parts out loud" way, Trump mentioned that one of the new avenues the US was excited for was opening up the NHS to US healthcare companies. Many a British politician - including Tories - lambasted the idea that the NHS would be auctioned off for profit to foreign companies.

That's all well and good, far as outrage goes, but when that request comes, what, exactly is the UK going to do to say no? If they leave with no deal, they'll need whatever deal they can get and it's not like Boris Johnson has shown any inclination to take an aggressive stance against Trump, or any U.S. administration's, demands. There's also the issue that the Tories can't protest too much about privatizing and crapifying the NHS since they've been doing that for years.

Then, you know, there's the EU. If the UK wants to do business with the EU, then they have  to sell products that conform to EU standards; standards the UK complained were too stringent and now will have no say in crafting or implementing. Because nothing says sovereignty than having to match your entire regulatory framework to a power that you didn't elect and can't influence in any way. (This dynamic is why the UK joined the EU in the first place.)

In the end, none of this really matters. The minute the referendum results came in, the UK set itself up for a path where the only possible outcome would be a UK diminished, humiliated, and dependent on the world powers that filled the vacuum left in the disintegration of the British empire. The only question was how.

You do have to wonder, now that they've got the "independence" they thought was so cravenly taken from them, are they happy?