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Thread: Brexit (new thread)

  1. #1
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    Brexit (new thread)

    So I searched and found an old thread that was full of posts by someone who no longer posts here, and it was from 2 years ago....figured it would be better to start a new thread.

    I just watched the John Oliver take on the situation which helped me to understand it better.




    So it's only a few weeks until *something* apparently happens, and it looks like lots of companies are already jumping ship. I can't see this as being a good thing unless they hit the reset button somehow on all of this.

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    Good Things include me being able to buy half of Manchester after March 29. Woohoo!!

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    It's a complete clusterfuck.

    I think it's worth separating two things here:
    1) Leaving the EU is a terrible idea
    2) The way the government is leaving the EU is almost the worst possible way to do so
    Last edited by samoht; February 20th, 2019 at 11:07 AM.

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    Brexit is pretty much like Donald Trump. Obviously no good.

    However, previous status quo was obviously not working that well either... otherwise there wouldn't be enough upset voters around to vote for such stupid options.

    John Oliver was right about the surgeon shouldn't be the one asking the patient whether to take the appendix out or not. The dysfunctional government couldn't figure out whether to stay or leave and tossed the responsibility to the voters, naturally the same government couldn't figure out how to properly leave either.

    US government has similar issues. Hopefully things like Brexit or Trump will help usher in a new wave of reform in our governments... and thus turn these disasters into something good in the end. fingers crossed. Had we kept going along with the status quo, our nations probably will simply transition into this numbing slow deaths without ever knowing it until it's too late.

    Another question is... is EU even a good idea? I'm not really sure it's a good idea to unite all these vastly different European nations like that. If the EU were to one day fail, then England probably would be better off leaving it sooner.
    Last edited by Crazed_Insanity; February 20th, 2019 at 12:21 PM.

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    Brexit has nothing to do with shonky government. It was a con-job brought about by new-wave right-wingery against the good people of the UK.

    Now that everyone is realising what brexit actually entails, it’s becoming an ugly process. Nigel Farage has conveniently wiped his hands and parked the party bus full of lies in a barn somewhere, and is now sitting in a pub in a rich, white neighbourhood, sipping a pint.

    Farage has left poor Teresa May and her cohort to try and broom the mess into a nice neat pile. Oh what a time to be running the country. Their political careers are basically trash. The only good place for a Tory MP right now is somewhere on the back bench, far away from any attention.

    Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn waits for the next election to fall into his lap.

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    This 'new wave' of right wingery is riding on a 'wave' of something.

    If people were happy about their current situation in UK and the US and pretty much everywhere around the globe, these right wingers would have nothing to ride on. People would actually be happy with status quo and be happy to maintain it. Why would anyone want to leave a happy marriage? That referendum and Trump really weren't all that seductive. People left that marriage only because they were upset at their current spouse. Of course now they found out divorce sucks too.
    Last edited by Crazed_Insanity; February 20th, 2019 at 12:32 PM.

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    That whole paragraph you used to build a metaphor was already explained using two words in my last post: con job.

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    I'm inclined to feel that both things are true; Brexit was a con job, combining illegal funding with illegal use of personal data to target the vulnerable with lies tailor-made for their personal weaknesses.

    At the same time, I think that if more people had meaningful and satisfying lives, fewer of them would have been persuaded to vote for radical change and uncertainty and to support a cause laced with a huge portion of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.

    That is, both citizen dissatisfaction and criminal fraud were needed in order to achieve the referendum result.


    The strongest correlation factor with leave/remain was levels of education. I interpret this as, in what is increasingly a knowledge economy, education gives one agency and opportunities, while the lack of it can lead to dissatisfaction and resentment. (other interpretations are possible).

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    Quote Originally Posted by samoht View Post
    I'm inclined to feel that both things are true; Brexit was a con job, combining illegal funding with illegal use of personal data to target the vulnerable with lies tailor-made for their personal weaknesses.

    At the same time, I think that if more people had meaningful and satisfying lives, fewer of them would have been persuaded to vote for radical change and uncertainty and to support a cause laced with a huge portion of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.

    That is, both citizen dissatisfaction and criminal fraud were needed in order to achieve the referendum result.


    The strongest correlation factor with leave/remain was levels of education. I interpret this as, in what is increasingly a knowledge economy, education gives one agency and opportunities, while the lack of it can lead to dissatisfaction and resentment. (other interpretations are possible).
    Agreed, and we're seeing that sentiment in several places. Basically there's a massive wage gap that keeps widening in many places.........along with corporations who own media companies and tell people who to blame for their problems (hint: it's anything BUT the corporations). The tactics aren't new, they've just reached a modern era with new technology and platforms like Facebook and Twitter make spreading the misinformation more easy than ever.

    As I've said before, along with certain governments playing dangerous politics and trying to re-ignite a cold war, there's multi-national corporations that aren't as bound to national laws and use their overwhelming power to sway politicians to enact policies friendly to them.

    Having said all of that, I don't see how Brexit is supposed to help the UK economy.

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    Quote Originally Posted by MR2 Fan View Post
    Having said all of that, I don't see how Brexit is supposed to help the UK economy.
    I'm sure it won't. Our economy has developed in a specialised, inter-dependent fashion where UK workers provide certain parts of a whole, using our residual industrial skills base, strong brands, English language, legal & education systems to earn a living as part of the global economy. Rupturing those links puts the economy at risk; doing so abruptly with near-zero notice, if we crash out with no deal and no transition period, will cause big problems - I guess at least similar to the loss of coal mining jobs through the 80s and 90s. Over a longer period I'm sure it would be more manageable.

    There was never any plausible plan put forward as to how leaving the EU would help our economy, so it was a 'fuck it, anything's better than this' kind of a thing. The irony is that the factory jobs that offer decent wage without requiring a degree are the first to be lost, as we're seeing with Nissan and Honda just now.

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