UK Politics: It's Time To Think The Unthinkable But This Lot Can't Even Think The Thinkable

[Varysblackfyre321]

57 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

But what about their sovereignty???!?

What if Ukraine wants to be terrible to sexual and gender minorities and do a little bit of the autocracy? Don’t you see how awful it’s been to Hungary?/s

[Pebble thats Stubby]

7 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

But what about their sovereignty???!?

to be fair (which BoJo does not deserve) Russia has to go through many countries before it can invade the UK.

Ukraine may loose some imagined sovereignty bey joining the EU and Nato, but it looses far more if Russia one day succeeds. Joining the EU or Nato should protect it better from future Russian ambitions.  

 

For those that did not watch the clip BoJo was talking about after Ukraine wins.

[mormont]

Sovereignty is something Boris Johnson holds as dear to him as his wife and children i.e. something to be ditched at the slightest inconvenience.

[Derfel Cadarn]

54 minutes ago, mormont said:

Sovereignty is something Boris Johnson holds as dear to him as his wife and children i.e. something to be ditched at the slightest inconvenience.

But Ukraine will have to accept non-bendy bananas! 

[Derfel Cadarn]

Hope this happened

 

[Varysblackfyre321]

31 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Hope this happened

 

isn’t calling a Tory a cunt a bit redundant? (-8

[Varysblackfyre321]

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/exclusive-liz-truss-comeback-on-sunday_uk_63dcdc0ee4b01a436393b718

After going to America to learn the art of fascist from republicans she’s coming back.

Get ready for Red Truss.

 

[mormont]

2 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/exclusive-liz-truss-comeback-on-sunday_uk_63dcdc0ee4b01a436393b718
 

 

Quote

A close ally said: “Liz has taken a few months to gather her thoughts"

To be fair, she has about one thought a month so that makes sense.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Just when you think the Daily Heil can’t sink any lower, they prove that rock bottom has a basement.

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

I think there's a distasteful Liz Truss joke in there somewhere, I just can't quite put my finger on it.

[James Arryn]

So, not trying to kick anyone when they’re down, just being sincere:

 

Wife and I were talking last night. Girls turn 3 in a couple weeks, makes you look at the world you’ve brought them into more. I know everyone everywhere has times where they feel like the world is going pear-shaped, but I know that even in the I.r. community it’s conceded that we have been in, as the curse goes, ‘interesting times’ for a while now, no end in sight, many of the issues likely to get worse before they get any better, and we were trying to decide when, for us, it began. Or at least we noticed it beginning. And separately we both arrived at the same moment: being in London for Brexit night.

That was our first indication of a new time, at least that we could see. Where millions and millions of people would actually do that to themselves. Take slow and deliberate aim at their own foot, and confidently squeeze the trigger and blow it off. Then scream and hop around wondering what the hell went wrong. It was sobering, made more so by the ways in which the Brexit side had won, by appealing to the worst aspects of nationalism, by playing their target audience for fools, and it working. Being in London for that, staying up listening as the results started trickling in from I think Scotland and up north, being slightly confused at how early in the results they were already seeing a Leave win, etc.

 

Going out the next day seeing all the wait staff or w/e with Euro accents, many of whose lives had changed overnight because of those accents. Hearing the first of the reports about racist violence, religiously bigoted attacks and threats, and just wondering wtf has happened here, how could a people do something that so clearly would be detrimental to their interests and for what? The nativist pride in replacing one bureaucracy with another, less effective one, and only having to tear your economy apart to do it. Saw a stat recently: at the time of the referendum the UK’s economy was ~ 90% of Germany’s…it’s now less than 60%. And as far as I know Germany got Covid too. 
 

That made us both much more wary of Trump winning than almost anyone we knew was at the time. We had witnessed people freely choose self-destruction to the sound of jingoistic refrains and that meant it could happen again. There is no guardrail, no adult to step in and say ‘um, don’t do that’. And since then it feels like a lot of previously way off the table stuff is now constantly on the table, and often it’s the destroyers who are carving themselves out the biggest parts of the carcass. 
 

My wife and I parted ways, she went home and I began one of my ~ around the world trips, Europe, ME, Asia, Australia, etc. and everywhere I went people were talking about Brexit and the only people on the entire trip that I met who didn’t think it was absolutely bonkers were English. Everyone else was just dumbfounded, and routinely blamed it on either Britain wanting to turn back the clock and pretend to be an empire again or just plain bigotry and pig-headedness. Notably I travelled through many Commonwealth countries, met lots of interesting people and heard the same thing a lot, like this business exec I met in Singapore, who was already saying that corporations have zero incentive to broker less advantageous deals with the UK than the EU because they just couldn’t compete with the benefits of dealing with the EU, and he predicted, rightly as it turns out, that most commonwealth nations (in Asia at least) would heavily prioritize their EU connections even at the cost of their relationship with the UK. No one thought it made any sense, some were a bit more ‘we’ll see’ but no one thought Britain would gain, just differed on how much it would lose, and most thought Britain had just managed to lock itself out in the cold. 
 

Thinking of the world our two angels will face is deeply concerning to us. There is so much we won’t be able to protect them from, be it the environment, rising authoritarianism and bigotry celebrating itself out loud, corporate monopolies, a new age of oligarchic warlords, etc. And it all began for us in that hotel room near St.Paul’s, that one long night. Not saying Brexit was the cause of all of this, just the thing that let us know these kinds of things were no longer, as the thread says, unthinkable. 

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, James Arryn said:

So, not trying to kick anyone when they’re down, just being sincere:

 

Wife and I were talking last night. Girls turn 3 in a couple weeks, makes you look at the world you’ve brought them into more. I know everyone everywhere has times where they feel like the world is going pear-shaped, but I know that even in the I.r. community it’s conceded that we have been in, as the curse goes, ‘interesting times’ for a while now, no end in sight, many of the issues likely to get worse before they get any better, and we were trying to decide when, for us, it began. Or at least we noticed it beginning. And separately we both arrived at the same moment: being in London for Brexit night.

That was our first indication of a new time, at least that we could see. Where millions and millions of people would actually do that to themselves. Take slow and deliberate aim at their own foot, and confidently squeeze the trigger and blow it off. Then scream and hop around wondering what the hell went wrong. It was sobering, made more so by the ways in which the Brexit side had won, by appealing to the worst aspects of nationalism, by playing their target audience for fools, and it working. Being in London for that, staying up listening as the results started trickling in from I think Scotland and up north, being slightly confused at how early in the results they were already seeing a Leave win, etc.

 

Going out the next day seeing all the wait staff or w/e with Euro accents, many of whose lives had changed overnight because of those accents. Hearing the first of the reports about racist violence, religiously bigoted attacks and threats, and just wondering wtf has happened here, how could a people do something that so clearly would be detrimental to their interests and for what? The nativist pride in replacing one bureaucracy with another, less effective one, and only having to tear your economy apart to do it. Saw a stat recently: at the time of the referendum the UK’s economy was ~ 90% of Germany’s…it’s now less than 60%. And as far as I know Germany got Covid too. 
 

That made us both much more wary of Trump winning than almost anyone we knew was at the time. We had witnessed people freely choose self-destruction to the sound of jingoistic refrains and that meant it could happen again. There is no guardrail, no adult to step in and say ‘um, don’t do that’. And since then it feels like a lot of previously way off the table stuff is now constantly on the table, and often it’s the destroyers who are carving themselves out the biggest parts of the carcass. 
 

My wife and I parted ways, she went home and I began one of my ~ around the world trips, Europe, ME, Asia, Australia, etc. and everywhere I went people were talking about Brexit and the only people on the entire trip that I met who didn’t think it was absolutely bonkers were English. Everyone else was just dumbfounded, and routinely blamed it on either Britain wanting to turn back the clock and pretend to be an empire again or just plain bigotry and pig-headedness. Notably I travelled through many Commonwealth countries, met lots of interesting people and heard the same thing a lot, like this business exec I met in Singapore, who was already saying that corporations have zero incentive to broker less advantageous deals with the UK than the EU because they just couldn’t compete with the benefits of dealing with the EU, and he predicted, rightly as it turns out, that most commonwealth nations (in Asia at least) would heavily prioritize their EU connections even at the cost of their relationship with the UK. No one thought it made any sense, some were a bit more ‘we’ll see’ but no one thought Britain would gain, just differed on how much it would lose, and most thought Britain had just managed to lock itself out in the cold. 
 

Thinking of the world our two angels will face is deeply concerning to us. There is so much we won’t be able to protect them from, be it the environment, rising authoritarianism and bigotry celebrating itself out loud, corporate monopolies, a new age of oligarchic warlords, etc. And it all began for us in that hotel room near St.Paul’s, that one long night. Not saying Brexit was the cause of all of this, just the thing that let us know these kinds of things were no longer, as the thread says, unthinkable. 

Honestly the only take away from this is that it just highlights the flaws in your own perspective. 

[James Arryn]

7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Honestly the only take away from this is that it just highlights the flaws in your own perspective. 

Serious question, you know that recent poll that found that only 3 out of 362 UK constituencies still thinks Brexit was a good idea…do you live in one of those? Or are you from this side of the Atlantic? Seriously curious, tots cool if you think TMI, and odds are huge I’m wrong, obviously. 

Anyways, sorry, we were talking about potentially flawed perspectives?

[karaddin]

I wasn't in the UK for it, but I took pretty much the same view of it as you and was convinced Trump was going to win for the same reasons. 

[DaveSumm]

That stat is being reported by constituency to make it seem worse; the actual vote had nothing to do constituencies, the original vote was 52% to leave, now it’s 54% who believe it was a mistake. But that 54% is just the general public, not anyone who voted a particular way or even voted at all.

So yea, it’s creeping more towards the Remain position but not dramatically so.

[James Arryn]

3 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

That stat is being reported by constituency to make it seem worse; the actual vote had nothing to do constituencies, the original vote was 52% to leave, now it’s 54% who believe it was a mistake. But that 54% is just the general public, not anyone who voted a particular way or even voted at all.

So yea, it’s creeping more towards the Remain position but not dramatically so.

It is, though. It’s 54% think it’s a mistake compared to only ~ 32% think it’s not a mistake. The rest were non-response/I don’t know. That’s almost 2:1, and dropping all the time. 

[DaveSumm]

But without reference to who of those polled voted one way or the another in the referendum, it’s not all that meaningful a stat. It makes it sound like it’s dropped from 52 to 32 but it hasn’t necessarily.

[Spockydog]

It takes a lot to admit you were wrong. To admit you were conned. To admit you were a useful idiot in the single biggest British Establishment cock-up since Suez.

And no matter how hard JRM and his ilk try to gaslight everyone, including probably themselves (see above), we can all see, with our own eyes and ears, what Brexit has done to this country.

The scary thing is, the worst is probably yet to come.

[karaddin]

But it hasn't done anything Spocky, it's all just uniquely British challenges which are being faced by everyone here

[Derfel Cadarn]

7 hours ago, Spockydog said:

It takes a lot to admit you were wrong. To admit you were conned. To admit you were a useful idiot in the single biggest British Establishment cock-up since Suez.

And no matter how hard JRM and his ilk try to gaslight everyone, including probably themselves (see above), we can all see, with our own eyes and ears, what Brexit has done to this country.

The scary thing is, the worst is probably yet to come.

Largely led by a liar who wqs undecided until the last minute, and seemed to pick Brexit to further his personal ambitions. A liar who previously is on record saying the UK should stay in EU, and is now encouraging Ukraine to join it.