Off Topic Politics Thread

[TheSecondStain]

There is a wave of ignorance sweeping across the English speaking world. Rational people in the UK have so far resisted it, in that they have not caved in to the corrupt EU referendum result. In the USA they elected Trump. The Buffoon is our own Trump. Just as dense, just as much a pathological liar. In my opinion, there are so many similarities to the Buffoon and Trump that it is actually more difficult to find differences. Obviously, they even appeal to a similar demograph.

What troubles me is how did these dangerous people get anywhere near power? In Trump's case, I would chance a random pin selection in the US census. The resulting person to come forward would almost certainly be so blown away by the responsibility that they would listen to experts. Trump does none of that. He is super dangerous. And Buffoon is a pawn who Trump can manipulate. Does it not impinge upon people that Trump thinks Buffoon is the right person to lead the UK?

We could into the grey areas of Cambridge Analytica, Hacking, Farage and the Far Right, Putin, and a whole host of catalysts that appear to have had startling success in manipulating public opinion. But that's a loooong conversation. But if none of that is true, and that we got here by sheer democracy, how did the UK electorate vote for something so spectacularly bad for our future?

 

[San Tejón]

From yesterday.

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[ChilcoSaint]

There is a wave of ignorance sweeping across the English speaking world. Rational people in the UK have so far resisted it, in that they have not caved in to the corrupt EU referendum result. In the USA they elected Trump. The Buffoon is our own Trump. Just as dense, just as much a pathological liar. In my opinion, there are so many similarities to the Buffoon and Trump that it is actually more difficult to find differences. Obviously, they even appeal to a similar demograph.

What troubles me is how did these dangerous people get anywhere near power? In Trump's case, I would chance a random pin selection in the US census. The resulting person to come forward would almost certainly be so blown away by the responsibility that they would listen to experts. Trump does none of that. He is super dangerous. And Buffoon is a pawn who Trump can manipulate. Does it not impinge upon people that Trump thinks Buffoon is the right person to lead the UK?

We could into the grey areas of Cambridge Analytica, Hacking, Farage and the Far Right, Putin, and a whole host of catalysts that appear to have had startling success in manipulating public opinion. But that's a loooong conversation. But if none of that is true, and that we got here by sheer democracy, how did the UK electorate vote for something so spectacularly bad for our future?

In a nutshell, money talks. Trump has his own fortune that he inherited and has built on, and in reaching for ultimate power, he attracted huge backing from like-minded individuals. Johnson has a modest family fortune compared to the Donald, but the same principle applies, in that once he proved himself to be electable, the money flowed in. He won the London Mayoralty twice, essentially by promising things he knew he could never deliver, and the electorate fell for it.

His star might just be on the wane however. The last two elections he has participated in saw, in Uxbridge in 2017, his majority cut to 5,000 with a 13.6% swing to Labour, and in the Tory leadership election which saw him temporarily installed as Prime Member, just 0.1% of the UK electorate voted him in.

And money bought the referendum result too.

 

[TheSecondStain]

In a nutshell, money talks. Trump has his own fortune that he inherited and has built on, and in reaching for ultimate power, he attracted huge backing from like-minded individuals. Johnson has a modest family fortune compared to the Donald, but the same principle applies, in that once he proved himself to be electable, the money flowed in. He won the London Mayoralty twice, essentially by promising things he knew he could never deliver, and the electorate fell for it.

His star might just be on the wane however. The last two elections he has participated in saw, in Uxbridge in 2017, his majority cut to 5,000 with a 13.6% swing to Labour, and in the Tory leadership election which saw him temporarily installed as Prime Member, just 0.1% of the UK electorate voted him in.

And money bought the referendum result too.

Agreed, but you can't bribe half of the UK to vote against their own interests, especially when they are caught in the yoke of austerity. There's more to it than just money going to specific people. And I am not a conspiracy theorist.

 

[ChilcoSaint]

Agreed, but you can't bribe half of the UK to vote against their own interests, especially when they are caught in the yoke of austerity. There's more to it than just money going to specific people. And I am not a conspiracy theorist.

Advertising, in the case of the referendum campaign, targeted at undecided voters who had shown themselves to be persuadable. 1.5 billion personalised Facebook ads sent to a couple of million voters in a matter of days. That all cost a huge amount of money, and they didn’t even declare it.

 

[Osvaldorama]

Agreed, but you can't bribe half of the UK to vote against their own interests, especially when they are caught in the yoke of austerity. There's more to it than just money going to specific people. And I am not a conspiracy theorist.

Idiots with no critical thinking skills.

99% of leavers have no idea what the customs union, the single market or the EU actually are.

 

[San Tejón]

None of it’s real.

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[TheSecondStain]

Advertising, in the case of the referendum campaign, targeted at undecided voters who had shown themselves to be persuadable. 1.5 billion personalised Facebook ads sent to a couple of million voters in a matter of days. That all cost a huge amount of money, and they didn’t even declare it.

Yes, I get what you're saying Chilco, but it wasn't just money per se. It was what was done to the British electorate that took money to make that possible.

Idiots with no critical thinking skills.
99% of leavers have no idea what the customs union, the single market or the EU actually are.

Well that's a pretty generalised statement, which is extremely tempting to agree with. In fact, I have even pointed to "less well educated" parts of the electorate as being manipulated into voting against their interests, before myself. But let's stop short of calling people "idiots" and consider them less well skilled in the thought process. It just turns people away, and there is a difference anyway.

It's something that I've been thinking more about in the last few weeks. How do you reason with people who have dug in their heels on their opinion, even though you realise they have been manipulated to make their own world more constricted and less free? We have to at some point or we are going to be stuck with this fluctuating 50-50 split in thinking until enough of them die off to make a shift.

 

[thereisonlyoneno7]

As I said to a mate at work who was trying to convince me that leave was the right option.

“I could agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong”

 

[SaintinSerbia]

just logged in to gov.uk to claim back some over payed tax. Did it in the end, what a ****ing rigmarole! (how our aged people get to do it I have no idea and I'm no spring chicken) but more interestingly, the second line of the website says "the UK is leaving the EU on October 31st, click for details" Is it ****!

 

[ChilcoSaint]

Yes, I get what you're saying Chilco, but it wasn't just money per se. It was what was done to the British electorate that took money to make that possible.


Well that's a pretty generalised statement, which is extremely tempting to agree with. In fact, I have even pointed to "less well educated" parts of the electorate as being manipulated into voting against their interests, before myself. But let's stop short of calling people "idiots" and consider them less well skilled in the thought process. It just turns people away, and there is a difference anyway.

It's something that I've been thinking more about in the last few weeks. How do you reason with people who have dug in their heels on their opinion, even though you realise they have been manipulated to make their own world more constricted and less free? We have to at some point or we are going to be stuck with this fluctuating 50-50 split in thinking until enough of them die off to make a shift.

One could argue that the whole object of this strange deviation from “normal” political life wasn’t just to achieve Brexit, but to divide the country down the middle so that we spend our energy shouting at each other rather than the people who got us into this mess.

Philip II expressed the strategy as “διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε”. Julius Caesar called it “divide et impera”. Psychologists recognise it as a trait in narcissism, where some individuals are scapegoated and others favoured in order to manipulate them. It’s a bloody effective way of establishing a dictatorship, as Hitler did when he picked on antisemitism as his road to power.

If we are to escape from this mess that Divide and Rule has led us into, we will all have to find a way to live with each other again, or the Dominic Cummings of this world will have triumphed.

 

[thereisonlyoneno7]

One could argue that the whole object of this strange deviation from “normal” political life wasn’t just to achieve Brexit, but to divide the country down the middle so that we spend our energy shouting at each other rather than the people who got us into this mess.

Philip II expressed the strategy as “διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε”. Julius Caesar called it “divide et impera”. Psychologists recognise it as a trait in narcissism, where some individuals are scapegoated and others favoured in order to manipulate them. It’s a bloody effective way of establishing a dictatorship, as Hitler did when he picked on antisemitism as his road to power.

If we are to escape from this mess that Divide and Rule has led us into, we will all have to find a way to live with each other again, or the Dominic Cummings of this world will have triumphed.

^^^This 100%

The rise of the Third Reich was entirely due to choosing a scapegoat and then dividing the nation in already troubled times - the German people were suffering from a global recession and from the fallout of the First World War. This fallout was due to foreign nations reparations after the war.

In 2016 we were/are under a terror alert, and now we have a divided nation fueled by xenophobia and belief that immigration and so called foreign rule was to blame.

Loads of parallels. And no I am not being dramatic.

 

[SaintinSerbia]

I'm not convinced us humans will ever learn. All this crap has been played out a thousand times and never ended well. Usually takes another species to reset the balance. Not a hyper intelligent species like us, a bacteria or a virus!

 

[thereisonlyoneno7]

I'm not convinced us humans will ever learn. All this crap has been played out a thousand times and never ended well. Usually takes another species to reset the balance. Not a hyper intelligent species like us, a bacteria or a virus!

Or maybe a meteor

 

[Archers Road]

Idiots with no critical thinking skills.

99% of leavers have no idea what the customs union, the single market or the EU actually are.

It’s easier to manipulate people’s emotions than it is to appeal to their rational minds. So Leave.Uk did exactly that - they made a frothy emotional appeal to patriotic (and nationalist) sentiment.

 

[I Sorry I Ruined The Party]

Agreed, but you can't bribe half of the UK to vote against their own interests, especially when they are caught in the yoke of austerity. There's more to it than just money going to specific people. And I am not a conspiracy theorist.

I think we need to be careful about thinking we know what other people's interests are. We assume it's mainly financial, or at least strongly fiscally related. But what if their interest something based more on morality and culture? And they feel so strongly about it and have reached a level of desperation that they're effectively going all-in and do not care anymore about niceties like political process, or their own short-term fiscal interests?

I don't think there's a big conspiracy here. I think the world has moved on from a certain culture in both of our countries, and people are desperate to bring that culture back. Some of them are desperate enough to believe whatever certain leaders tell them, some of them don't care that their leaders are **** because they feel (probably correctly) like every other alternative is even worse for them. And for some, the cruelty is the point. They're fully aware that they're at war and they can only win with dirty/guerilla tactics and scorched Earth policies.

 

[VocalMinority]

I think we need to be careful about thinking we know what other people's interests are. We assume it's mainly financial, or at least strongly fiscally related. But what if their interest something based more on morality and culture? And they feel so strongly about it and have reached a level of desperation that they're effectively going all-in and do not care anymore about niceties like political process, or their own short-term fiscal interests?

I don't think there's a big conspiracy here. I think the world has moved on from a certain culture in both of our countries, and people are desperate to bring that culture back. Some of them are desperate enough to believe whatever certain leaders tell them, some of them don't care that their leaders are **** because they feel (probably correctly) like every other alternative is even worse for them. And for some, the cruelty is the point. They're fully aware that they're at war and they can only win with dirty/guerilla tactics and scorched Earth policies.

I think that's true for most. You can especially tell with the likes of Mogg and his banning the use of metric, despite trying to deal with a collection of countries using metric....


But I can't see anything but self interest from Johnson. He just wanted to be PM.

 

[ChilcoSaint]

I think we need to be careful about thinking we know what other people's interests are. We assume it's mainly financial, or at least strongly fiscally related. But what if their interest something based more on morality and culture? And they feel so strongly about it and have reached a level of desperation that they're effectively going all-in and do not care anymore about niceties like political process, or their own short-term fiscal interests?

I don't think there's a big conspiracy here. I think the world has moved on from a certain culture in both of our countries, and people are desperate to bring that culture back. Some of them are desperate enough to believe whatever certain leaders tell them, some of them don't care that their leaders are **** because they feel (probably correctly) like every other alternative is even worse for them. And for some, the cruelty is the point. They're fully aware that they're at war and they can only win with dirty/guerilla tactics and scorched Earth policies.

The evidence from the referendum campaign tells a different story. But surely, standing up for altruistic ideals rather than lowest common denominator gutter press populism is the way to go? Or even standing up for Parliamentary democracy against an executive with an increasingly scant regard for the rule of law?

On that, I’ve been watching the goings-on in the Supreme Court, which is actually compelling viewing. You can watch it yourself tomorrow morning from 10:30 am UK time:
https://www.supremecourt.uk/live/court-01.html

 

[SaintinSerbia]

I think everyone's over thinking this. 5 years ago I never heard anyone,ever, discuss membership of the EU. Some people went to Europe on holiday, some people moved there for a bit of sun. Some people worked there. Some people had their plumbing done at a reasonable rate. Most people had never been there or to London or Southampton. Then, a few people, who had enough money, thought they could make some more (or were afraid they might lose some) and manipulated the above and succeeded. Now us plebs are arguing whilst they are smurking.

 

[StJabbo1]

just logged in to gov.uk to claim back some over payed tax. Did it in the end, what a ****ing rigmarole! (how our aged people get to do it I have no idea and I'm no spring chicken) but more interestingly, the second line of the website says "the UK is leaving the EU on October 31st, click for details" Is it ****!

Had similar from the international pensions department telling me my pension will continue to be payed after we leave 31/10. I'm waiting to calm down before I reply but the "is it ****" tone has to be there. I want to know where the instructions came from for this 31/10 assurance to be made when there's a law saying extend if no deal made and passed by parliament. Is the twisted mind of Cummings behind this?