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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

#561

Post by Malician »

cookiecaper wrote: post #380
fnovd wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if your government voted for a lifetime stipend of $10000/month for everyone over 65, to be paid for by higher taxes on renters, students, and earners? I think there is a breaking point where it is unacceptable to support the wants of an aging population over the future of the young, even by majority vote. However, I don't think the Brexit falls into that category.

Here's the thing: old people don't vote for that kind of thing, at least not if they have children and grandchildren. They've invested decades of heavy personal sacrifice into building a future for their posterity. They're not going to counteract that lifelong goal and knowingly vote for something that will inflict real pain or hindrance on the generations they've parented. Personally I believe the elderly make much…

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh...

Even recently, 30% of older people support laws prohibiting black and white people from marrying each other. Only 4% of young people do. Twenty years ago, the vast majority of older people held those opinions(!) I think you'll find the same trends for many similar social issues.

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

#562

Post by htns »

PKop wrote: post #476
manarth wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is being widely reported: "The higher the level of education, the higher the EU support". > "According the polls, university graduates were the most likely people to want to remain in the EU - while those with a GCSE or equivalent as their highest qualification were more likely to back Brexit." > "Those with no education tended to vote Brexit" Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/eu-referendum-how.…

Uneducated ~> poor, Educated ~> wealthy. Don't you think opposition to mass immigration policy supported by the pro-EU side might have something to do with lower income/education class voting leave? Something at all... maybe a little bit? Perhaps, though you might not have noticed it, they were voting their self interest? Is it surprising that highly educated class wouldn't feel threatened by importing more low-skill…

If economics and prices were the cause of the crisis you would expect people's voting patterns to vary based on whether or not their profession's job pool scales up with population count. Yet I expect even most of those liable to be out of work if construction slows down with population growth to have voted to leave.

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

#563

Post by sergiotapia »

fdsaaf wrote: post #553
sergiotapia wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Preaching to the choir here.

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

#564

Post by cookiecaper »

Malician wrote: post #561
cookiecaper wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing: old people don't vote for that kind of thing, at least not if they have children and grandchildren. They've invested decades of heavy personal sacrifice into building a future for their posterity. They're not going to counteract that lifelong goal and knowingly vote for something that will inflict real pain or hindrance on the generations they've parented. Personally I believe the elderly make much…

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh... Even recently, 30% of older people support laws prohibiting black and white people from marrying each other. Only 4% of young people do. Twenty years ago, the vast majority of older people held those opinions(!) I think you'll find the same trends for many similar social issues.

I really don't see what this has to do with what I said. You disagree with 30% of older people on a social topic, and therefore, they don't care about the future of the country that their children and grandchildren will most likely inhabit for many generations? What?

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

#565

Post by BRValentine »

Haven't read all the comments here, but isn't it possible or even likely that it's Remain voters having an "oh shit what next" moment that are Googling the EU and the implications of leaving, as opposed to ignorant abstainers and Leave voters checking up on the consequences of their vote after the fact?

The article doesn't actually take a position, but the tenor of the viral social media chatter seems to assume the latter case.

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

#566

Post by tripzilch »

gshulegaard wrote: post #258
Inthenameofmine wrote: post #145

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…

As a Californian, I am genuinely curious what you think is the problem with California at the moment?

Well for one, I hear it's on fire a lot.

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

#567

Post by vacri »

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…

I'm 43, and I think the idea of no-votes-until-30 is a crazy idea. Yes, the young are less informed, but they're also more interested in finding alternatives. The old are incredibly conservative, and as proven in this referendum, more fearful of diversity. They don't want to deal with change, which is a bad thing in a world that constantly changes - for example, keep in mind that the internet is only 20 years old, as far as the public is concerned. Cut off the young, and you take away the meat of the progressives, and your society will stagnate. Wisdom is definitely important, but so is the will to enact change.

And if you want evidence that the old are just as susceptible to stupid politics, look to Fox News's target audience: the silver hair brigade. Or talkback radio. Wisdom in personal life (everybody has one) does not necessarily translate to wisdom in political life (where few actually do engage).

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

#568

Post by vacri »

Karunamon wrote: post #227
maxerickson wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And this is why statistics can be misleading - 72% of the population turned out for the vote. Almost a record. It's pointless at best, actively harmful at worst, to compare the voters vs the non voters in an attempt to make the result seem undemocratic. The non voters abandoned their ability to influence this issue; if they had wanted to participate, they had plenty of opportunity to do so.

72% of voters, not 72% of the population. Kids don't vote, neither do transient workers and a few other demographics.

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

#569

Post by vacri »

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.

> The upper middle class think that everyone who works with their hands is a failure, and are willing to believe the worst about them.

This is just as stupid a generalisation as 'all brexiters are stupid'.

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

#570

Post by vacri »

_audakel wrote: post #465

Going out on a tangent - Would California be more successful leaving the US as an independent country? As things stand, California is currently the eighth largest economy in the world on their own. 17 of the top 30 U.S. tech companies are in California, which should come as no surprise. Tourism, entertainment, biotech, and agriculture are multibillion dollar industries already. Aerospace and defense contracts still r…

There is no legal path for a state to leave the union once it joins. Membership is permanent, so if you want to secede from the US, you have to do so against it's laws, which basically means armed uprising. There's no state which wants independence so much that enough of their people would actually go to war over it.
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