Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

So when they see other countries taking the load/lead on things they don't think it's an "us vs them" situation, they think it will stay us, as in together. When everything is working ok, when everyone feel like they are getting their fair share, it works fine; but when the world becomes unstable, and they are tensions about resources and power it all breaks down.

This is the mindset that created the biggest providence state that ever was. But the problem is that it was always a lie. The thing was built on power imbalance between countries, and just because they accepted the deal when they were weak doesn't mean it will stay that way forever.

The only reason it worked in the first place is that they sold the newer generation's future, borrowing aggressively to fund a way of life that wasn't sustainable If they had thought long term, they would never have given so much power to other countries, the USA is one of them, but it's the same for China, and Russia to a lower extent. Now that those big countries are fighting for domination, they find themselves in the crossfire, just now figuring out that we are too dependent and don't have that much say because we don't have a lot of power.

You cannot solve a problem with the mind that created it, and that's the issue we face. We desperately need to think differently that what got us there, but they cannot erase their "programming", for them, it's the "right" way, it's basically the only way.

The US will fare a bit better for a while, precisely because they control important stuff, like the tech industry, decent army power and are still the de facto reserve currency. But in reality, they will face the same problems down the line if they don't change as well. The protectionism is because at the rate it's going, we will all be under China's rule before long. You can trade stuff, but never make yourself completely dependent on another country. You may be friends, until you are not. Things change, politics are unpredictable, it's a bad idea to hope for mercy when a big power is rising.

You seem to conveniently forget that all of this was "possible" only with heavy borrowing, and it looks like many countries won't be able to even pay the principal soon enough. When you take this into account, the "growth" has been negative for over 10 years, and it was barely stagnant for quite a while before. We exported the growth and manipulated money, now the truth appear. You can only pretend for so long.

The reality is that the value creating has been quite low in most of the EU and now that the economic engine that was Germany has stalled, everything is grinding to a halt. Germany had heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for its chemical industry and premium car market, both are getting disrupted massively. It's actually a perfect example on why we should avoid too much reliance on other countries. The hilarious part is that in the meantime, Germany was giving "ecology" lessons to all their neighbors and the world at large. In typical arrogant German fashion, they had everything figured out, until they didn't, that is. They actually hold a lot of responsibility for their terrible leadership on the EU.

"[Remainers] conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened"

The report you cite it isn't showing a measurable negative impact of Brexit, although you brought it up as a rebuttal to that point. It's a modeling exercise in which the authors imagine a hypothetical world up to 2035, and then pick a long series of unvalidated assumptions which causes the UK's performance to diverge massively from that of the wider EU and prior trends. None of these assumptions are plausible:

• They admit that they did a similar exercise in 2018 which was wrong.

• On page 14 they even admit that they are being deliberately pessimistic.

• They assume an annual GDP growth rate of 4.3% suddenly starting in 2026. That's US levels of growth. Both the UK and the EU only grew at 1.4% last year.

Arguments of the form "I told Excel it will be bad and therefore it's bad" are invalid, but were exactly the strategy the Remain campaign used during the referendum. In the years that followed their predictions were all falsified. Anyone can pay some consultants to write a Word document about the future that imagines whatever the customer wants. Go ahead and imagine 4.3% GDP growth appearing out of nowhere, why not? Such reports aren't independent by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly don't show that anything bad has already happened.

Unfortunately, Sadiq Khan is a manipulator who understands the psychological weaknesses of his supporters very well. So this set of imaginings about the future gets presented in the present tense, with sentences like "London’s economy alone has shrunk by more than £30 billion". It hasn't. Go look at the actual data. It has "shrunk" vs the imaginary numbers in his report, which means nothing.

Predictions are not reality. Reality is reality. And in reality, there has been no measurable negative impact of Brexit, which is why people like Sadiq Khan are forced to make numbers up.

This is begging the question. I would say the US spirit most prevalent on this site is neofeudalist, not democratic. The discourse here has always tended to defend or excuse monopolist behaviour ("it's their app store/OS/device, they should have 100% control over what happens with it") and discourage small or local initiatives ("this will not scale and therefore you shouldn't waste effort on making things better for only these 100,000 people").