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

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

#281
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem the EU has always had is that it wasn't really unified and that non elected officials held to much sway over countries. Countries, not states, not territories, or such. Meaning that you had distinct separation, governments, and the like, being controlled by people not of the same. This will always lead to strife. If anything vote simply reaffirms that EU favoring side either failed to communicate properly…

Is the EU really that bad?! I had the feeling that they forced countries to do the right thing, for example granting human rights. Even here in Germany we had laws that let you lock up people forever. What was the bad stuff that happend in the EU? The "crisis" was mostly due to the "elected" governments of the countries which have now financial problems. What the EU did in the last years was mainly telling "the peopl…

The Remain campaign never made any positive points about staying in the EU (apart from a few in the Labour party talking about workers rights, but they got about 4% airtime and very little newspaper coverage). The vast majority of the Remain campaign was all about the terrible consequences of leaving.

The Leave campaign was a mix of fear of foreigners, fear of unaccountable bureaucracy and a vision of a Britain that had "taken back control".

The purely negative vision lost.

(There are also those that say that the Eurozone was doomed to failure because of the imbalances in the countries involved with no mechanisms to rectify those imbalances - making the fact that the EU stepped in and replaced two democratically elected governments an inevitability. So it engineered a bad situation then punished the losers in that situation for falling into it. But I don't know enough about economics to argue that point)

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

#282
post #3

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.

That reminds me of certain American voters saying they support Trump just because they want to tear the system down. I don't think they realize what tearing the system down would actually mean.

Do you know anyone personally who has said this?

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

#283
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about dynamic voting? Let voters change their vote in real time up to the final second or to a percentage cut off. Mathematically, 1-(1/e) percent is the ideal cut off (~63%).

> Mathematically, 1-(1/e) percent is the ideal cut off (~65%) What? can you explain?

[deleted]

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

#284
post #233
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's fallacy. The big business that decides is the media.

The media is a big business owned by special interest and wealthy elites. Obviously all the scare tactics used in the media did not work on the voters.

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

#285
post #195
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…

The problem with democracy is the people are easily influenced by false truths. I'm all for democracy, but I also realize that a well informed vote and an uninformed vote are equal and therein lies the problem. It's not really something that can be fixed within a true democracy.

The false premise in your post is that "being well-informed" would lead you to a particular conclusion. Governing isn't like building a dam. You'd be insane to build a dam by getting random people on the street to design it. But the principles underlying governance aren't predictable like the principles underlying engineering. You're not going to find prominent engineers at leading universities disagree about whether concrete with a particular compressive strength will hold back a particular amount of water. Yet, you had a number of prominent economists on the pro-Brexit side: http://www.wsj.com/articles/pro-brexit-economists-make-case-....

At the end of the day, on most issues (obviously there are exceptions), the "informed" class is just guessing or following a particular ideology. Was NAFTA good for the average American? 20 years later economists still can't definitively answer that question!

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We haven't figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas? As a Swiss citizen, I think the swiss system is very close to perfect in this regard. Sure, emotional and stupid arguments sometimes prevail, but most of the time the people make the perfect decision. Public discourse is most often also very rational, more so than most world parliaments. Irrational arguments…

Switzerland is also much smaller than the UK or California in most respects.

Switzerland also has a much higher literacy rate. That makes it a lot easier to get an intelligent decision from the public.

LA for example is only about 66 percent: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed33a.htm

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how should they be decided then?

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

A big part of this vote is a huge swathe of voters who felt that they were not being properly represented by their representatives. All three major parties had similar lines on economic liberalisation, immigration and freedom of movement and so on and this has been the case for almost 20 years. So when a new party stepped in and said "we hear you, we want things to change to" it's not surprising it captured some of the public's imagination.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is a much more divided society than Switzerland, in terms of the base level of income and education. The median income in Switzerland is double that of the UK. Education is harder to compare, but you can't really expect the same level of discourse

I remember listening to a Ted talk where the speaker basically said, Get income inequality in check by whatever means and most of your problems go away.

Get hold of a copy of Tony Judt's Ill fares the land. It has references to the correlation between inequality and many measures of 'problems' and tries to make the case for a causal link. Also explains philosophical background.
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