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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

#551

Post by pessimizer »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #455
taylorwc wrote: post #85

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill

He also said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." "Perhaps the late Lord Attlee was right," she [Mrs Thatcher] observed, "when he said that the referendum was a device of dictators and demagogues."

Obligatory horrific Churchill quote: "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

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

#552

Post by ZenoArrow »

capote wrote: post #550
throwanem wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't know either way, so you're just drawing conclusions from outright ignorance here. That doesn't seem like a useful way to spend time.

I spend much of my time in unuseful ways, and so do you. Outright ignorance is definitely pushing it. It's a guess, but very much an educated guess that it's mostly Brexiters who are googling it. Bremainers tend to be better informed, so they are less likely to be doing last minute (or in this case post-last minute) googling about the issue.

> "Bremainers tend to be better informed"

What a load of bollocks. The majority of people on both sides have been getting the bulk of their information from mainstream media, which is heavily biased towards a limited set of narratives. There's a fair amount of compelling information that has been omitted from or suppressed in the public debates.

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

#553

Post by fdsaaf »

sergiotapia wrote: post #386
fdsaaf wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to express leftist sentiment, at least in public, because expressing other views is very bad for your career. And you'd be surprised how big the "public" space is for people who'd like to ruin you for thinking the wrong way.

That's true but just don't say bad things and you'll be fine - right?

Where the set of "bad things" gets bigger and bigger, and increasingly detached from reality, every year.

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

#554

Post by Spooky23 »

jacquesm wrote: post #468
Spooky23 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's too easy to get lost in the details. Look at the map. London wanted in. Scotland wanted in. The rest of the country is dissatisfied with their state and want out. Look at the US map and you see similar things. You can call the populace stupid and ignorant, but by doing so you're displaying your own form of ignorance. Lots of facts and figures and economic models can be used to say that everything is just…

The major fallacy at work here is that in-or-out may not be correlated with solving the problems of the dissatisfied portion. Out may well make their problems worse rather than to improve their state.

People react to things in different ways. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my friend, whether or not that actually makes sense.

Look at the reaction on a forum like this which represents the upper middle class business-oriented citizen towards the societal impact of tech. Globalism is seen as an opportunity here, not a threat. Politicians, media, academia and business have told millions of people that things are great, but they are the problem -- they lack education, skills, wherewithal and have expectations for prosperity that are misaligned with reality.

So they lash out. They think to themselves "If some douche from the Bank of England or the Conservatives doesn't like this, that's good enough for me." That's democracy -- it's a messy business.

Is that a "good" reaction? History will judge. Depending on your POV, the crowd is either wise or rabble. But -- the critique that democracy is somehow broken is an incredible leap of ignorance. We (speaking from the US perspective) have been offered a sham of a democracy that isn't meeting the needs of many. We're very fortunate that we live in an age where peaceful democratic revolution results in a bad day/weeks for stocks. A hundred years ago, you'd have mobs in the streets and soldiers with bayonets shooting into crowds.

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

#555

Post by DanBC »

pessimizer wrote: post #548
twoquestions wrote: post #12

"People of $MY_IDENTITY believe a thing, so I'll vote for it no matter what $OTHERS say!" I thought before reading that story that the above was a bad caricature, but holy shit. How can you not know what the EU is if you're in a member country and can read? It's like an American not knowing what Congress is!

If you google "What is cancer?" after being diagnosed with it, does that mean that you don't know what cancer is, or that you don't know about it in the detail that you now expect to need? The upper middle class think that everyone who works with their hands is a failure, and are willing to believe the worst about them.

People were lied to. Some of them believed the lies.

Borris and Farage said that £350m will go to the NHS. Here's a picture of Borris by a sign that he had created for his campaign:

https://twitter.com/mgtmccartney/status/746245181532418048

It says "Let's give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week"

Here's a picture of their campaign bus:

https://twitter.com/mgtmccartney/status/746245181532418048

That says "We send the EU £350 million a week

Let's fund our NHS instead"

What have the Brexit campaigners said the day after the referendum?

Here's Farage explaining that saying it was a "mistake" to say the £350m per week would go to the NHS.

https://twitter.com/GMB/status/746218028195426305

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

#556

Post by rm445 »

nsomaru wrote: post #492
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…

Disclaimer: armchair politik. Benevolent dictatorship. Someone who can think better than mostly everyone and is dedicated to service to the nation above all else. In theory (s)he always makes the best decision because (s)he is not swayed by excess emotion and is able to keep the best interest of the nation in view at all times. Another option arises if we have a truly objective test of benevolent rationality (yes I j…

A reasonable strategy, so long as one accepts from the outset that no human could be a sufficiently competent dictator, and even if occasionally someone was 'close enough' then succession crises would de-stabilise the system.

We need to design and build our own benevolent dictator, and then keep it running and upgraded as needed :-)

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

#557

Post by Malician »

cookiecaper wrote: post #365
mentalpiracy wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another self-loathing millennial, it's also distressing to empirically see the detrimental effect of my elders making extremely poor choices that will fundamentally affect my life much more than theirs. Nobody really wants to disenfranchise certain voters. But it doesn't mean that we aren't frustrated with their poor choices either.

This is a simple matter of disagreement. Your elders aren't "making extremely poor choices" in an objective sense. They're making the choice they believe is for the long-term interest of the country, just as you did. You should not assume idiocy or malice on the opposing side's part just because you lost. Informed, well-educated people can and do disagree. This must be valued and believed in a democratic society if i…

You make a good point with your last paragraph: given the circumstances, if we held a vote on who should get to vote, the answer would not be one millenials would relish. Those calling for disenfranchisement of the elderly are not only morally wrong but would bring down the very system which protects young people.

I do think that it is possible for a reasonable person to call certain decisions bad, even if it's not entirely objective. The vast majority of the credentialed economic establishment believes that Brexit was a tragedy, so does the stock market, and so do most of those educated on international political relations who study the subject.

Of course, the rejection of the establishment by voters who are tired of having their will systematically ignored, mocked, and thwarted is the reason for Brexit, so for the Leave crowd that isn't much of a point.

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

#558

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #65
mc32 wrote: post #9

Isn't that expected? People who voted for the establishment status quo want to know what might happen in the years to come now that the vote has gone against them. Voting to stay meant no change, therefore they knew more or less the outcome, but now that the outcome is opposite their votes, they want to look into the repercussions --this informs that it's likely they stay vote didn't investigate the alternative befor…

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#559

Post by igravious »

rattray wrote: post #217
brador wrote: 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?

(~63%)*

And yes, what? Do explain!

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

#560

Post by DasIch »

emsy wrote: post #408
DasIch wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else do you expect to read they day afterwards? The arguments have been made before the referendum repeatedly and in detail. There is no point in going over them now.

It's disheartening, because I often see these insults from liberal, intellectual people. It shows a disability do empathize with 50% of the population, which I find worrying.

It's still early, at this point this shows that the people involved are human and have emotions they're expressing.
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