151–160 of 249 posts
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I made a progress bar against the NoDeal counter-petition: https://brexit-petitions-count.now.sh (Pending API availability)
Does your site cache the numbers? It could be really useful to take some of the load off the main petition's site, as people keep going there and refreshing the page which is overloading it.
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The Brexiteers had won when they successfully framed Brexit as "the will of the 17M". Remainers didn't counter-frame this with "50M didn't vote for Brexit". Therefor all the marches, petitions etc. are always/can be ignored in the context of "but the will of the 17M". "Don't Think of an Elephant!" is now such an old book, and still a lot of people haven't read it. Brexiteers have read it it seems.
If someone does not vote, when there was ample opportunity to do so, then they implicitly are accepting the outcome - whichever way it goes. This actually should read "Brexit - The will of the 17m + 50m who are okay with this" This would have read the same if the result had gone the other way: "Remain - The will of the Xm + 50m who are okay with this" At the end of the day, there was a vote and more people wanted Bre…
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>We already know half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay The two halves are not static. Leave voters are predominately older and enough of them have died to shift the proportion ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-... ). It's clear that that Leave was a racist ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/06/25/483362200... ) campaign designed to frighten old people. >Even if…
You don't get to keep having do overs until enough of your opposition has died to get the result you want. Might as well just start banning "racists" and other undesirables from the polls outright if that's the path you want to go down.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/07/corrupt-vot...
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True, but I think the British (my brothers to the east and north) need to remember that Brexit was ultimately a popular movement. Parliamentary shenanigans played a role, and have been making a mockery of themselves since but... Brexit was a popular vote, with neither party actually supporting it. The interest in Brexit also grew against the wishes of major parties, industries and most centres of power. A reason parl…
Popular movement sponsored by a weird coalition of lying press, controversy-driven TV, illegal use of personal data, and (seemingly) foreign intelligence services? The inability to force a clear Leave manifesto is the root of the disaster. What "should" have happened is either a Leave PM, or the 2017 election should have been run on a clear Leave manifesto specifying a realistic deal to be sought against a Remain opp…
I don't mean to say you're wrong. I'm just saying there appears to be obvious, legitimate concerns here, and your suggesting otherwise seems possibly disingenuous.
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Yes I agree, if you don't vote (having voted in every election the last 30y and would never not vote) you're ok with the result and can't complain, but from a Remainer standpoint the framing would be "50M didn't vote for Brexit" - then I'd think their arguing would be easier. Having watched many Commons discussions, it basically always ends with "but the 17M".
The trouble with your first point is that UK democracy feels like this: * Vote winner — your fault, don’t get to complain * Vote loser/2nd party — you lost, suck it up, don’t get to complain * Vote 3rd party/spoiled ballot — you wasted your vote, don’t get to complain * Didn’t vote — you must be OK with any outcome, don’t get to complain * Found new party — how interesting, let’s invite you on TV even if you got 249…
These petitions are almost always met with a boilerplate response. There was a recent one (which I can't find as the site's currently down) regarding Russian interference in the last UK election, with the government response being along the lines of "we don't know what you're talking about, move on". More on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/b2vmm0/gover... While the huge number of signings o…
I don't really understand how Paris has real protests almost every weekend, yet we're leaving the EU and we've just had a few marches. Marches do nothing, they're preplanned to cause minimal disruption, just make the people in them feel like they're doing something so that it doesn't go further than that. The march on Saturday needs to at least move off the preplanned route and actually cause some inconvenience.
The French make themselves unrulable, while the British have been utterly subjugated by the state. Positive change has completely exited the British imagination, to the point where even progressives can't articulate a positive program, only a defence of whatever happens to exist at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Brexiteers had won when they successfully framed Brexit as "the will of the 17M". Remainers didn't counter-frame this with "50M didn't vote for Brexit". Therefor all the marches, petitions etc. are always/can be ignored in the context of "but the will of the 17M". "Don't Think of an Elephant!" is now such an old book, and still a lot of people haven't read it. Brexiteers have read it it seems.
If someone does not vote, when there was ample opportunity to do so, then they implicitly are accepting the outcome - whichever way it goes. This actually should read "Brexit - The will of the 17m + 50m who are okay with this" This would have read the same if the result had gone the other way: "Remain - The will of the Xm + 50m who are okay with this" At the end of the day, there was a vote and more people wanted Bre…
Putting the question to the people, in a representative democracy, is a terrible idea. they should have known this after Boaty McBoatface already.
In addition UK MSM has some of the most inflaming language in all the news in Europe (and even US). I have my news.google.com set to UK by default and I switch around to other region and languages to get a more complete picture. Every country has screamy headlines. But the UK tabloids (Express, Mirror and Daily) seem to be the absolute fucking worst. Even from just reading the headlines (and knowing that it's BS) fills me with more hate than any other country's news. And I wonder: if _I_ feel so incited by this, how do Brits feel who compared to me have actual skin in the game?
[1] actually on both sides. The leave camp was infiltrated by the radical right and the left was controlled by people who were so arrogant that they'd called anyone a racist who disagreed. Those minorities who are at the fringe and work 16 hrs days (while still on the brink of homelessness) were thrown into the same pot as white-supremacists.
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Perhaps if she hadn't called a pointless general election and then run one of the worst campaigns in living memory that ended up removing the Conservative majority requiring pandering to the DUP I might have some sympathy.
If she had thought strategically she might have held off on an election until closer to this moment and then she could have used the threat of an election, and the attendant annihilation at the polls, as a threat against the rebels to secure the key factor of party unity. Effective head-kicking is absolutely essential in these sorts of situations. May has ended up just making herself look weak again and again.
[1] hand-waving the credibility of tine travel, of course
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If every vote in which the outcome was swayed with misdirection and untruth was invalidated, we’d have to give up on democracy completely. Every view and opinion was expressed and the electorate had plenty of opportunity to make a decision. I certainly feel I had sufficient information to make an informed choice. I take a longer view. Democracy is a serious business and the fact the referendum decided on a specific o…
> If every vote in which the outcome was swayed with misdirection and untruth was invalidated, we’d have to give up on democracy completely. I would say the opposite: unless you do that, you have already given up on democracy. > I certainly feel I had sufficient information to make an informed choice. So do 93% of both leavers and remainers. Trouble is, these two groups disagree about which statements are true: is th…
As you say yourself, despite all that has happened, the vast majority of leavers and remainers still believe in the same choice. Most of the issues are matters of opinion, not fact. Even if leaving the EU is a disaster, many Brexiteers will believe it was only disaster because "it wasn't done properly".
My take on that is, this was a risk they chose to accept when voting for Brexit and which I chose not to accept when voting for remain. However they won the vote, so we all took that risk.
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>We already know half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay The two halves are not static. Leave voters are predominately older and enough of them have died to shift the proportion ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-... ). It's clear that that Leave was a racist ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/06/25/483362200... ) campaign designed to frighten old people. >Even if…
People become more conservative as they grow older and more experienced (case in point: in Slovenia, the support for the far-left party with almost communist policies is highest amongst the young). Maybe the old dying would be outweighted by the young growing older.
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/07/24/conserva...