EU referendum are you in or out

[gilesgoat]

remember, the referendum was 48 to 52% - within a margin of error, very close to a tie breaker. So it doesn't really take that much movement to flip that over to a 52 / 48% in favour of Remain.

This would be a terrible impasse in which to find ourselves - Brexiteers would simply dismiss it as “well, you didn’t respect our 4-point win - we don’t respect yours”. The Brexit party would entrench itself in our political landscape such that we will never be able to move on.

I honestly think that the least worst option at this point is exactly what Labour have been proposing: honour the result, but try to retain a close working relationship with Europe.

Cameron fucked us all by calling this cursed vote in the first place - it can never be undone. I’ve said it before in this thread, I think, but it’s like he lanced a boil that is now threatening to kill us with sepsis. There is no complete cure, but an amputation might save our life. Yes, we end up missing a limb, but it needn’t be the end. The #FBPE, hardcore Remain lot would have us believe we can go back in time and choose not to lance it.

I think we could someway say that "Cameron totally ruined the UK" BUT I still agree to disagree on the fact that the full referendum was "totally dishonest" and based on "absolutely fake promises and facts" there could/should be "legal grounds" to dismiss it as "not a valid informed choice".

This is the big thing, you may say "in numbers it appear it won" but it's been a totally rigged up thing, "honoring" it I am afraid that is NOT acceptable by any means.

[edit] - let's face it, all this proves that "this whole democratic system has its own failures", that Tories and Labour alone "are not good enough" and that something in the whole organization of the whole country needs to be modified.

We need "something different" to belive and trust, Tories and Labour have made their time, it's over.

[edit] - also CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG, WASN'T THAT A *NON-BINDING* REFERENDUM ??!!

[edit2] - also "who's been voting all time for NON-BINDING decisions" and making them "real" ONLY when it suited THEM ??

.. don't even make me start of this "they do ONLY what THEY want for THEIR gain NOT our good", is THEIR "idea of good".

[Cloudane]

I think that phattslagg is, or at least was, more of a Remainer than a Brexiteer.

They do a good impression of one though

For a short time to be fair, I used to believe the centrist stuff about remainers, leftists, etc being somehow the cause for Brexiteers, fascists and neo-Nazis and "pushing them into it". But you think about it and it just doesn't make sense. "Oh if only you leftists didn't challenge me so robustly I wouldn't be forced into fascism!" sayeth all the Tommy Robinsons.. and Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin and to some extent Jonathan Pie

I don't buy appeasement as the solution to the rise of the far-right at all.

[PFVA]

I just heard on the news (TV) that we have 1.5 million registered voters living outside the country. That = 15% of the total population.

[tufty]

They do a good impression of one though

I suspect that impression is given by one's own bias.

I don't buy appeasement as the solution to the rise of the far-right at all.

No, it's not, but shouting "nazi" at people who have bought into the populist bullshit isn't going to make them question their motivations, rather drive them further into the far right echo chamber. This is something the far right have understood, and use to their own ends.

[KlaxonCow]

I suspect that impression is given by one's own bias [...] but shouting "nazi" at people who have bought into the populist bullshit isn't going to make them question their motivations

Yet shouting "Leftist bias!!" at Cloudane will make him question his own motivations?

(Just wondering if you're actually suggesting this is asymmetrical, or whether you're just contradicting yourself.)

[gilesgoat]

I suspect that impression is given by one's own bias [...] but shouting "nazi" at people who have bought into the populist bullshit isn't going to make them question their motivations

Yet shouting "Leftist bias!!" at Cloudane will make him question his own motivations?

(Just wondering if you're actually suggesting this is asymmetrical, or whether you're just contradicting yourself.)

... obligatory



This is a sequence from a movie called "Un sacco bello" ( "Beautyful a lot" ) where the actor you see ( Mario Brega ) is re-united with his now hippie son ( Carlo Verdone ) and invites him home "for a cup of coffee" and a very long discussion about life and politics ensues with various guests ending up in tragicomic consequences

In this little famous segment his son's girlfriend accuses him of begin "a fascio" ( i.e. of fascists tendencies ) he replies ( with some swearwords ) saying that "He's not communist like THAT but LIKE THAT !" ( raising not just one but two closed fists in the air )

[tufty]

I suspect that impression is given by one's own bias [...] but shouting "nazi" at people who have bought into the populist bullshit isn't going to make them question their motivations

Yet shouting "Leftist bias!!" at Cloudane will make him question his own motivations?

(Just wondering if you're actually suggesting this is asymmetrical, or whether you're just contradicting yourself.)

We're all biased to some extent. My own bias is extremely *ahem* "leftist", to the point where (based purely on my own, biased, interpretation of Cloudane's output here) I would consider Cloudane to be, at best, one of the centrists he decried in the post I was replying to... As for your question, yes, absolutely, it's asymmetric. There exists a part of the population who are, at least to some extent, able to "keep an open mind", and question their own beliefs, and I would suggest that a vast majority of those who have fallen into the extremist right wing trap (and equally, one might suggest, the extreme left's believers, of which I am one), are *not* part of that part of the population.

I am certain that Cloudane is perfectly able to re-read phatslagg's post as see that he's interpreting that post, which contains a message he doesn't believe, as coming from the other side of a bipolar divide when that's not actually the case. Far from shouting "leftist bias", I'm (gently, I hope), suggesting that a careful rereading with one's shock glands turned off is often the best solution.

Personally, I don't agree with phatslagg's position, but I can understand it, much as I can understand my friend's hypothesis that "if we can get brexit over and done with, maybe the racist violence will stop" - I think it's a misguided argument, but unlike him, I don't have mixed race children in the UK's school system being treated as "filthy paki" and "fucking muslim" (which, unsurprisingly, they are neither).

[venusian]

Reaching back a little bit, somebody said "Cameron ruined the country".

No he didn't.

The country has always been like this, only now we can see it. The idea that we're somehow the virtuous mirror image of Nazi Germany is a fiction. As a population, we're more 4chan than yakyak.

[Cloudane]

Whatever, I'll just shut up and stop annoying everyone.

(Except for the people who say you shouldn't stay silent about what you believe in, but hard luck)

[KlaxonCow]

As for your question, yes, absolutely, it's asymmetric.

Then I'm glad I probed into that to get you to say so explicitly, even if my original motivations were leg pulling to point out that you were doing the very thing that you'd said, two seconds earlier, shouldn't be done.

Personally, I'm "classical liberal". To me, the Marxist left / right is a false dichotomy. Neither society nor the individual should be sacrificed for the sake of the other - because many individuals are a society, and society is many individuals. Sacrificing the hand for the sake of the fingers, or sacrificing fingers for the sake of the hand makes little sense to me, when a hand is essentially "a collection of fingers".

And, beyond that bit of philosophy, I feel the pragmatic reflection of this confused thinking is that we've seen extreme authoritarianism on both sides.

And, to my way of thinking, authoritarianism is the actual enemy. Tyrants, censors, blind dogmatism, oppression / persecution / deportation / sending folks to the gas chambers or to the Gulags, intolerance, slavery and all that shit.

It's not just deeply unpleasant and inhumane - though there certainly is that and that cannot be remotely overlooked - it simply doesn't work. Where in history did this kind of behaviour ever produce a genuine long-term good?

Whereas freedom of thought - when they escaped the religious censor of Rome, in independent Venice (Galileo) or the independent Netherlands (Descartes) or the Protestant England (Newton) - exploded into the Scientific Revolution, which pretty much gives us a good 90+% of all the quality of life improvements we all enjoy. And "all" is emphasised - as science does not refuse to share its benefits with anyone.

And while I'm absolutely no "unregulated free market" advocate at all - largely because, if you don't regulate, companies will always strive for monopoly (because that's the state of "maximum profits") and, upon gaining it, that's actually what kills off a genuinely free market and the few benefits that capitalism shouldn't be criticised for (e.g. competitive pressure, consumer choice, etc.) - we can again see a ridiculous difference between the pre-industrial and pre-globalised past, compared to the mass-production and mass-consumerism afterwards.

It's certainly not without some major caveats, but capitalism takes the benefits of science and puts it into everyone's pockets for a reasonable price.

Restriction is not just nasty - though it is that - it's pragmatically stupid, as history shows that all you're doing is cutting off your own oxygen. You're strangling yourself.

Freedom is just a nice thing to have - though there is that - but it provably makes shit better across the board.

The freer nations of the West aren't just nicer places to live than the backwards Medieval shithole of, say, Saudi Arabia. While the West was the champion of freedom - science, innovation, diversity, etc. - then these were also the richest nations, the most technologically advanced nations, the nations with the highest standards of living (albeit that, yes, I'll come in with a criticism that not addressing levels of inequality - which, to my mind, is inherently another denial of freedom, as poverty is perfectly restrictive - horribly spoils the party and puts a black mark on an otherwise admirable record).

You get the gist, I'm sure.

Increasing freedom makes shit better across the board. For everyone. (And where you could criticise "free nations", you'll notice these are places where, in fact, freedom is actually compromised - e.g. big corporations monopolise which undoes the freedoms of the market and that's where it goes horribly wrong, inequality compromises freedom as poverty cuts off all the options and that's where it goes horribly wrong).

Whereas, restrictions and tyrannies and oppressions have produced no notable long-term good for anyone. Ever. In all of human history. It ain't just nasty, it's dumb, as it's never actually bloody worked.

I appreciate Marx had his heart in the right place, but I think he's proved rather horribly unhelpful and massively divisive in practice. And the Marxist left / right is, to my mind, simply a false dichotomy.

[Dio]

The "freedom == progress" isn't true throughout history, right? Ancient Egypt and Rome were far less free societies than the loose agglomerations of tribes that made up the rest of Europe or Africa, but both were enormous technical innovators. And China is likely set to challenge that in the next 100 years as well. I think you're drawing a very dubious cause and effect line there.

I would suspect political stability is a more interesting predictor of scientific progress, and it just happens that over the last few hundred years more democratic societies have tended to be more stable.

[gilesgoat]

The "freedom == progress" isn't true throughout history, right? Ancient Egypt and Rome were far less free societies than the loose agglomerations of tribes that made up the rest of Europe or Africa, but both were enormous technical innovators. And China is likely set to challenge that in the next 100 years as well. I think you're drawing a very dubious cause and effect line there.

I would suspect political stability is a more interesting predictor of scientific progress, and it just happens that over the last few hundred years more democratic societies have tended to be more stable.

I suppose that probably 'you need a good balancing of both', you need freedom to express and change ideas and be able to freely communicate but you also need political and economical stability, because you need money and time to develop the ideas.

Going along that line of reasoning I suppose it's partially true that even in times of war/big restrictions you had quite some tech advance "because it was all for the war".

However I think 'the situation is complicated' again 'super tech advance' does not necessarely mean 'immediately reflects into super nice life'.

Also there's always the risk - real - that "tech can be misused/abused with people with other agenda".

Political/Economical instability is probably 'the worst' as it leads to all sort of failures, if people are starving or there are too inequalities and 'the politic does not look good or cannot be trusted' then you don't have 'basis' for a development of any good.

But "You can't even precisely force a system" if there's no perception of "goodness" in it, you can't say "we set on this because this is the best for you" if there's no true feeling that really good.

I think it's complicated, you have to balance freedom with politics with economics with religion with else, clearly one thing seems "sure" and is that "extremes" and "cohercion" never works.

I think maybe the best "you have to be honest and realistic" you have to inform people PRECISELY of pros/cons but "without second meanings" or "bias".

And that .. so far .. never happens .. there's always "bias" or "a plan" behind in "information".

[KlaxonCow]

It was Ancient Greece that was the enormous technical innovator.

The Romans inherited that - including even their gods, renamed - and then spread it all around.

And the question as to why Ancient Greece was crammed full of philosophers, innovating ideas in all directions - and just exploded in terms of scientific and technological progress - has been well investigated.

There are many factors, but the chief one, agreed on by most historians, is that of agricultural excess. They nailed their food supplies.

For all the romanticism of tribal rural "barbarian / savage / native" life - as Hollywood movies, such as Avatar, continue to project the "nature people good, technology evil" mythology at us, over and over - they absolutely were not "free as a bird", just swanning about enjoying flowers and trees and shit, without any stresses or strains.

Of course not. Because, fundamentally, every single one of us needs to eat.

If nomadic, then the tribe would forever wander to avoid exhausting resources in any one place. Constant movement, so no roots planted anywhere. Everything has to be portable. With no solid foundations, you can't really build anything up. Not much scope for anything much beyond perpetual hunting and gathering - all the time, constantly.

It was a "running to stand still" kind of life of perpetual basic survival. Hunt, eat, gather, eat, shit, sleep, hunt, eat, gather, eat, shit, sleep... the odd war with another tribe because a temporary reprieve from this never-ending grind was simply to steal all the food from someone else. But that won't last forever, so you're back to hunt, eat, gather, eat, shit, sleep all over again.

If settled, then farming and animal husbandry would occupy most of your time. The great innovation - stick a ditch or wall around those animals and they're not going anywhere. "Hunt" them at your leisure. But as this cuts off the animal's ability to go hunting and gathering itself, then you've got to bring the feed to the animals. Look after them and manage it all, so that you've got a steady supply of food coming in.

Babylonian idea. But the Ancient Greeks got really, really bloody good at it. To the point of doing something previously unheard of - producing food to an excess. To sufficient excess that you freed people up. You didn't need "all hands on deck" to keep the food supply steady. A small portion of the population dealt with the farming, freeing up others to...

Well, that's the point. What would all these now-unemployed people do? They needed to do something, as they still needed money to buy food, as everyone still needs to eat, of course. But folks could diversify into their own specialist areas - farming, smithing, carpentry, fishing, sculpture, construction, professional soldier, etc. - and then trade their specialist expertise with others for money to, ultimately, buy food.

"Fisherman, if you give me 3 fish then I'll fix up your roof for you".
"I'm out fishing all day, so don't have much time to do it myself and you're the expert, as you fix roofs full-time, thatcher, so you'd do a way better job than me anyway. For just 3 fish? Bargain. You've got a deal. Let's shake hands on it."

This is civilisation. And it grows, like a fungus, on the excess.

Ancient Greece got so good at solving "the food problem" that, in the excess, there was room to have people just sitting around specialising in "thinking". Or specialising in construction full-time - giving them plenty of time to experiment and discover better methods. For them to notice the geometrical and mathematical ratios underlying things, which the "thinking specialists" converted into theorems and formulas.

The simplest solution to Pythagoras' theorem is the "3, 4, 5" triangle. Cut three strips of wood. One 3 units, one 4 units and one 5 units (doesn't matter what those units are - feet, metres, centimetres, length of my thumb - as long as they're consistent). Stick them together and you've got a device for measuring perfect right-angles. 3² + 4² = 5².

There you go, my builder friends, now you've got a method to ensure that all of your lines and angles are always dead straight.

This is great. But you need a society that's got the excess to "spare" people for other things. To spare Pythagoras from toiling the fields, so he could spend his time thinking about triangles instead. To have people who could sit around and just notice - by observation - that folks wallowing in their own shit would get ill more often than folks that bathed in water - hmm, I wonder, could we get disease right down if we, for example, flushed our shit and piss away? I propose this new idea that I call "sewers" to carry our shit away from where we live.

And this explodes. It self-perpetuates. Because if folks aren't getting ill as often, then all your farmers remain in good health, so you can "spare" more folks to do other different specialist things.

The loose, often nomadic, tribes were not free. They were perpetual slaves to basic survival.

Just like, after Rome fell and its ideas were forgotten, Medieval peasants went back to this miserable existence of perpetual "subsistence farming". Back to "running to stand still" - where you spent your life just perpetually keeping yourself alive.

But Pythagoras was free to play with numbers and start a "numbers cult". Society could support that. So, go on, mate, you play with your triangles and report back if you find anything interesting. Archimedes was free to lounge around in his bath thinking about how you could accurately weight things... until "Eureka!" and he was then very "free", with his willy waving around as he ran around naked through the streets (allegedly).

There was - is - greater freedom in civilisation than tribal living, because when society has such excess, we can afford to have hairdressers, interior decorators, social media "influencers", folks who make a living making games, people who seem to be famous just for being famous, folks who do humanities degrees that like to create "safe spaces", etc..

Some folks might see these things as some kind of indication of social decay. But, on the contrary, it's a sign of healthy "excess" that we can perfectly well more than tolerate people swanning about not doing "real jobs".

Sure, I'd also prefer them to be using their free time doing something I feel is more productive - like science or maths or engineering or something - but that's just me showing my prejudices and biases.

Hypocritically so too, as we all enjoy a good story and I totally will be watching, as I do most weeks, "Holby City" on the TV later. Watching folks who don't have "a real job", pretending in front of cameras to be people who they aren't. Lying to me for my amusement. Them "luvvies". But mock them all you like, they have the last laugh because we all do watch Game of Thrones or Star Wars or Star Trek or whatever else on the TV or in the movies, and thoroughly love it. Because that's humans for you. We just love stories.

In the excess, you are free.

Free to follow your passions. Free to waste your time pleasurably. Free to specialise obsessively on one thing - e.g. triangles. Free to make terrible consumer choices.


"Aristotle, Aristotle, he was a bugger for the bottle..."

[Dio]

OK, I'll accept the possibility of redefining freedom in such an inclusive way, but to me this seems to conflict with the traditional definition of freedom that I think you were using in your previous post.

At the very least, with this new definition you need to do a lot more 'freedom accounting' to try to prove your original point, and I think we can all conclude that would be rather tedious .

[merman]

The new and improved Withdrawal Bill then...
Option of a second referendum if MPs vote to hold one
Discussions on what type of customs union to sign up to
Must solve Irish border problem by the end of 2020
"Alignment" to keep Northern Ireland in the same "customs territory" as the rest of the U.K.
Formal negotiations on the "policy document" Theresa signed in March

The upshot?
Corbyn calls it a rehash
Rees-Mogg and other Tory Brexiteers say they won't vote for it
Other Tories saying she can't deliver it because she is going anyway
BBC political editor and Tory stooge Laura Kuensberg thinks Theresa has "made things worse"


So, on Thursday, vote to Remain. But please to God don't vote for the Brexit Party - currently under investigation by the EU over the donation of £450,000 by Aaron Banks to Nigel "milkshake" Farage...