Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 602 posts

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#171

Post by rayiner »

CM30 wrote: post #158
rayiner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But way to go WaPo and imply naïveté on the Brexiters. The D.C. political class : politics :: MBAs : business. And WaPo is the Harvard Business Review. In that it's often useful, but suffers from the belief that the hoi polloi would be lost without the "professional political class" to tell them what they want, and derisively dismisses ideas that don't originate within certain orthodox circles.

So in other words, a lot like most of the media then. As well as quite a few university students and most politicians.

Most media and politicians have a distinct opinion or slant. I don't think WaPo does. Their MO is more: "Either X or Y might be right, but whatever is right is only right because we tell you it's right."

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#172

Post by daleharvey »

ixtli wrote: post #156
nbouscal wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prominent lies from Remain? There was a lot of what people were calling scaremongering, but if you look at the markets it looks like it was pretty accurate. I've seen thorough takedowns of blatant lies from Leave, but haven't seen anything similar for Remain.

https://www.facebook.com/WTFlockNews/videos/1132580646806052 Nigel Farage made direct, public claims that the "money going to the EU" would be redirected to the NHS. An hour after the referendum he went on TV claiming that his adverts aren't what he said. This is just the most recent, flaming pile of noxious vomit to come from him but not the only one. EDIT: I completely misread the parent post. My bad! :)

"What prominent lies from Remain?"

Farage was campaigning to leave.

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#173

Post by jazzyk »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #72
TearsInTheRain wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how should they be decided then?

By representatives. You need a buffer between raw emotion and action. Otherwise, this happens.

How is this "raw emotion", though? Leaving the EU has been discussed for a few years now, quite widely.

Also, "raw emotion", direct democracy (in Switzerland, for example) can work very well. Direct democracy may not scale well, hence we need representation, but big issues should be left up to the people to be voted on.

In the end, I believe, the people in the UK voted against not so much the idea of EU, but rather expressed their frustration with the EU's inability (unwillingness?) to fix its problems. It's been brewing for a while.

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#174

Post by zghst »

netcan wrote: post #82

I'm strangely moved by this whole thing. It's a pretty decent status check on where we are with democracy ATM. I'm not against democracy, but I do think we need to pay attention to what it can & can't do. On one hand, this has been a model of democracy. A primary election agenda and referendum. The phrasing of the question was simple, clear and unbiased. The "will of the people" won over the will of the ruling struct…

You're against democracy because people had the right to decide what was in their interest and not the government or big business??

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#175

Post by maxerickson »

emsy wrote: post #167

What I're read so far about pro-leavers: -They are stupid. -They are xenophobic racists (over 50% of the population!). -Trump welcomes the Brexit, so being pro-leave is stupid. -Old people vote "leave" since they don't have to face the consequences as long as the young people, and old people have no clue. -"Leave" votes come mainly from E.U. subsidized areas, thus they bite the hand that feeds them. -Pro-leave doesn'…

Lots of people didn't vote, so leave won even though only 37% of the population voted that way.

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#176

Post by rayiner »

rtpg wrote: post #169
rayiner wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is fine. The intellectual class just needs to learn to respect it. There is pretty much nothing that deserves to be decided by the will of the people--their values, their emotions, their world views--than the question of "what body politic do I want to belong to?" The deep irony of the anti-Brexit narrative is that the same people would froth at the mouth if you said "India would've been better off economic…

Honestly the India comparison is "slightly" exaggerated. British people could vote for European MPs. It's not like the UK was colonised by Europe. There is devolution of sovereignty but you're gonna basically end up with that with the kind of trade pacts the EU demands anyways. Lots of symbolism involved of course.

I'm not saying it's literally as bad as colonization. But the symbolism is useful in showing that the focus on economic impacts is utterly misguided. Democracy isn't about optimizing for economics; it's about people deciding how they want to be governed. "Who should be able to tell me what to do?" That's a sacrosanct decision! It shouldn't be made by bureaucrats and intellectuals looking at the impact on currency prices.

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#177

Post by unit91 »

Sanity check: Google searchers aren't necessarily voters. The UK had a massive (72.2%) turnout, which still leaves 13 million potential voters at home [1]. I think it's reasonable that those least-likely to vote on this issue also might be a large contingent of those who don't even know what the EU is. Moreover, Google searchers aren't necessarily in the electorate. They might be kids, etc.

1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/23/high-turnout-for-...

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#178

Post by nzp »

Analemma_ wrote: post #2

Here's a Leave fellow who says he just did it as a protest vote thinking it wouldn't actually pass. https://twitter.com/AdamWSweeney/status/746269140915208193 I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The most important international agreement in the UK's history torn up because people thought this was a Buzzfeed poll.

So you're characterizing everyone who voted to leave based on a distorted statement of one person the BBC pulled out. He in fact did not say that, quoted no less, sentence at all! Find the clip, the full clip, and watch it. He said he was shocked that they won, AND didn't expect Cameron to resign, and so is worried about that. It's quite understandable to be worried about big changes regardless of wanting them or not. He has neither said it was a protest vote or anything like that, nor that he regrets it.

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#179

Post by Styx- »

api wrote: post #32

Pundits need to stop it with this "mock the unsophisticated yokels" click-baiting and trolling. Of course people are Googling about the EU after a major upset referendum about the EU. One reason "insane" anti-establishment positions like this are winning (even when they are insane) is because pundits stubbornly refuse to actually listen to peoples' reasons for supporting them. Instead they mock them as backwater idio…

I find that just such a sentiment prevails on HN alarmingly often now.

Can you recommend any alternative news sources with a better signal to noise ratio?

Re: The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

#180

Post by delboy88 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #2

Here's a Leave fellow who says he just did it as a protest vote thinking it wouldn't actually pass. https://twitter.com/AdamWSweeney/status/746269140915208193 I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The most important international agreement in the UK's history torn up because people thought this was a Buzzfeed poll.

>Here's a Leave fellow who says he just did it as a protest vote thinking it wouldn't actually pass.

So?

>The most important international agreement in the UK's history torn up

The Act of Union 1707 was torn up because of this?

>because people thought this was a Buzzfeed poll.

It's really pathetic that sore losers like yourself are making nonsense claims like this.

Post reply on HN