2. Ecological fallacy is a clever term used by clever people. I can tell because I had to look it up in that unimpeachable source of wisdom, Wikipedia.
3. One of the many things I like about twitter is all the new language that I had never heard during the many years I lived on top of my column.
4. Everything from ROFL and LMAO (life is baffling until someone explains) to virtue signalling (shudder) or snowflake (shudder shudder) and then onto the exceedingly clever realms of ergodic or Bayesian.

It’s not easy for a simple ascetic like me.
5. But I digress, and so enlightened (maybe enheavied?) this piece plods wearily on to the summary Wikipedia definition of ecological fallacy...
6. ‘A formal fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data that occurs when inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inferences about the group to which those individuals belong.’
7. Got that? Still paying attention? I hope not. Haven’t you got children to feed, hangovers to nurse and dogs to walk?
8. But if you’re still here, the point is the piece suggests that the Europeans don’t understand the Brits because if they did they’d realise the government’s negotiating position is not a bluff and its will is harder than the hardest thing in hard Brexit land.
9. The fallacy, I think, is the already dubious inference that the Europeans not understanding the Brits can be applied to M Barnier’s negotiating strategy.
10. Wishful thinking, I suspect, not least because the thought can be quite easily turned on its head - the Brits are mistaking the EU not understanding the Brexit gestalt for an actual, well, red line negotiating position.
11. It’s a little like the German carmaker fallacy in which the balance of trade between the UK and the EU is incorrectly extrapolated to the actions of business lobbying groups.

So much fallacy. On all sides. Who can tell.
12. For, reasons, I feel obliged to compete with all this cleverness. And so, like a toothless old man contemplating a lamb chop, my devastating and devastationally self petard hoisting take is that this excellent piece might be considered a literary heterotopia.
13. Bwahahahaha
14. Reeling to the bookshelves hewn into the living rock of Pillar Mission Control, I extract Andrew Thacker’s excellent Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism for this helpful summary of the French savant Michel Foucault’s concept of literary heterotopia...
15. ...As ‘a form of writing that undermines the idea of such an ordering of knowledge’, which I am now going to misappropriate and oversimplify as any literary work that often unintentionally occupies two different literary spaces at the same time.
16. On the one hand, this interesting piece is undoubtedly a very well sourced and acutely observed work of political analysis that presents an insightful and complete picture of government thinking re the Brexit deal negotiations.
17. But on the other hand, precisely because it is all these things it can also be read for those so inclined as satire.
18. The piece quotes, ‘A senior Tory who gets regular readouts from Brussels’, who says...
19. ...’the UK government is so shambolic and incompetent and all over the place about Covid-19 that they will need a deal just to demonstrate some competence and that they cannot afford for it to be a shambles.’
20. Tragifunnily for those who are not fans of a no deal Brexit, the government apparently sees a no deal during a pandemic as either relatively inconsequential or something of an opportunity.
21. For Brexit cynics, this presents the somewhat alarming possibility that the EU view may be wrong not because the government isn’t ‘shambolic and incompetent’ but because it’s so shambolic and incompetent that it thinks no deal is a good idea.
22. No deal unenthusiasts might refer anyone who thinks no deal will go well to the various calamitous blunders over the last six months.
23. And there is this outraged response from ‘a member of the government negotiating team’:  “I personally don’t know how they could think we are bluffing...Now this is very much a government where Brexit does mean change.”
24. I’m just an ancient hermit whose best days are far behind him but even I know why the EU might think the government may be bluffing.
25. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s a long shot I know, it’s because at the end of the last negotiation Mr Johnson capitulated to the EU, in the process shattering its relationship with its staunch ally the DUP.
26. Who can tell. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. We can only look forward to the next riveting instalment.

/ends
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