Conversation of the Moment

This is an email from my pal entropydave.  We've worked together at two different companies on two different continents.  

We've each wandered away for the pursuits where we met...I've retired...He's gone back to living in Scotland and has become a philosophy professor.

I'm saving it here for future reference... his writing is exceptional.

***

b1-66er-

So this article...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43515330

...makes passing reference to the definition of the Irish border.  How would ANY of this madness make a difference?

Man, I'll tell you what, if you're on this side of the pond, all this Brexit business makes ZERO sense.

***

entropydave-

It doesn't make a lot of sense here.  I can summarize though:

For venal political reasons, the political class permitted a referendum on an ill-defined question, confident that the country would vote—as in most referenda—for the conservative, no-change option.  For reasons of incompetence and arrogance, the no-change remain campaign ran a grossly ineffective campaign.  The pro-Brexit campaign ran a populist campaign using willful misinformation to stoke xenophobia, nationalism and parochial greed, never imagining they would win, but imagining the political gain from having tried.  The press failed.  Conventional wisdom held that Brexit would be an act of political self-mutilation that would cost the country dearly, never the mind the symbolism of dissolving the bonds that had grown in traumatic soil left by the Second World War.  The electorate, ignorant, ill-educated and similarly venal were deaf to conventional wisdom and desirous of the confections dreamed up by the pro-Brexit camp.  They voted to leave.

So now we have a pig, being a plausibly democratic mandate for a collective act of self-mutilation in the name of nationalism and xenophobia.  Onto this pig it is hoped may be applied much lipstick.  

It is not the definition of the Irish border that is in question but whether the border will be without border controls or not.  The porousness of the border is an axiom of the agreements that have brought peace to Northern Ireland.  If there is a border between Ireland (in the EU) and Northern Ireland (not in the EU), then the fear is for peace on the island of Ireland.  If there is no border there, then there will be a de facto border between the EU and the British mainland, meaning that there will be an ersatz international border within the sovereign territory of the UK.  That is to say, Britain will not have control of its own territorial borders.  So what we need in Ireland is a contradiction, viz. a border that is not a border.  That said, given that the majority of the population of that island believe that the father, the son and the holy spirit are all one and the same, there is hope yet that a contradiction might be built—you know, with technology.