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Brexit Thoughts (Faith in humanity lost, again)
9 years ago
Alright.
I... I don't like to call people stupid...
But I can't conceive of why anyone who thought about it for more than two seconds would think a "Leave" vote would do anything the UKIP promised.
Seriously, none of their promises (increased economic power, closed borders, less red tape) make any practical sense.
*Why did anyone think that the world's fifth biggest economy pulling out of the world's biggest market would affect investor confidence? Why did they forget that investor confidence influences fiat currency?
*Why did anyone assume that they'd still "get" single market and freedom of movement when (A) They'd be the ones who take their ball and go home and would be in no position to negotiate any of these matters, and (B) a significant part of the appeal to a lot of the leave voters IS split market and impediment of movement and immigration?
*There are three million UK citizens residing around the EU and two million EU citizens residing in the UK. Nigel pretended they didn't matter.
*This would trap your youth on the most depressing island yet inhabited. Think of your children, who had the entire continent spread before them, and now it's gone.
*You've torpedoed basically every pan-european collaboration in small business or art that involves you. As an animator, I keep seeing stories of animation moving out of the UK because producing the film outside the EU would be too much red tape.
*Who thought the factories that closed in the Thatcher era would whirr to life? They didn't close because Britain didn't need them, they closed because the world no longer needed them. There are factories around the world which can deliver faster, cheaper, or better product, and cutting Britain off from them will only increase prices, require further subsidy, all sorts of things.
*Yes, the poverty and degradation Britain has endured under conservative governments is not good. However, splitting yourself off from your biggest market will not make the poverty any better. A market that, I repeat, is the extension of the Common Market that it already took DECADES to convince you guys to join in the first place, and they sure as hell aren't going to take you again with your tail between your legs.
*The difficulties you complain about in the European Union, their own economic problems, their stalemates, they may affect the market, but they also affect the currency. You don't use the currency. This doesn't affect you half as bad as it does them, and you don't really see them whining.
*Look at Switzerland. Look at how Switzerland grumbles about not getting a vote. Now you've joined them.
*The EU requires that countries such as Switzerland that border only EU countries have to abide by EU open border rules. The UK's only border is with an EU member. There is, I repeat, if you're so goddamn worried about terrorists, nothing stopping, nor can there stop, someone traveling from France to Ireland, and then to Ulster, and then to Britain. Leaving it would not help that.
*Did it occur to any of you, again, that the only border with the EU is one of the most contested and hithertofore violent borders in the country? Militarizing that border will bring the Troubles back by a factor of five.
*If you leave because you hate red tape and regulations, why would you leave the market? You now have to renegotiate your trade deals with every country on earth. That's red tape on a scale you never dreamed of.
*The UKIP never cogently discussed or even elaborated upon what they expected to happen after the break. They never brought out actual economists or sociologists to inform us. That alone should have been suspicious. Now it's immediately evident that they had no actual plan in mind.
*Infrastructure such as the Chunnel would not have happened without the EU. You can complain about how much it cost all you want, but has anybody ever heard of an economic principle called SUNK COST. The only way to recoup your monies from sunk costs is to keep them running as long as humanly possible. You see, sunk costs is money that's not fucking yours anymore, and no decision you can make will bring that money back. This is fucking Econ 101, people.
*If you like Scottish unification so much, remember that the only goddamn reason their independence referendum didn't pass majority was their worry that they wouldn't be able to join the EU.
*The refugee crisis is, indeed, a crisis of resources and overcrowding and citizenship issues. I've a friend in Greece right now covering it. However, they're not all terrorists, if I can repeat that part. In fact, ISIS' plans involve framing their refugees as terrorists to persuade their subjects to stop fleeing. The worse you treat their refugees, the more ISIS wins.
*You haven't had an empire for nineteen years. The cushion you thought you had isn't really a thing anymore. And not many people are going to let you build it up again.
A leave vote was a vote against elementary logic, against elementary sociology, against elementary economics.
I don't call people "stupid" for their politics because their political values disagree with mine.
I DO call people "stupid" for their politics if it's logically evident that their politics rely on emotions, their politics are internally consistent but not practically consistent, their politics relies on closed systems on anything other than worldwide scale, if their politics are illogical, or if they support policies that will logically result in the exact opposite of what they want. In short, if you get your news from Rupert Murdoch.
This is the death of my faith in human nature, human intelligence, and our propensity to behave logically when discussing complex issues.
I think I understand, even if I don't quite agree, why the Dark Enlightenment hates democracy so much. The biggest obstacle to the world right now really is human nature, with its racism and its tribalism and its being-bad-at-math and its logical fallacies and its addiction to stories and conflict with villains and heroes and three-act-structures applied to the real world that have none of those.
The apocalypse really can't come soon enough.
(TW unfortunate and really shitty opinion ahead)
My unfortunate and oft-suppressed propensity to sweeping August Strindberg thoughts ("The building is too solid to be torn down, it can only be blown up" and "we can breed the illogical people out of the human race and abolish all emotion from the mind and thought processes") is surfacing again, out of anger and disgust pushing them to the surface, and it'll take a lot of alcohol to make them stop. As much as it's a constant struggle to remove my emotions from my deductive process and decision-making, it's an even worse struggle to remind myself that people need to do this by themselves, and we as yet have devised no theory non-pseudoscientific enough, intelligent enough, expansive enough, or non-dogmatic enough to implement such programs without considerable and unfair costs of human suffering, life, or mental or physical health, to say nothing of not only the dignity lost but also the fact that every time someone tries to "improve" humanity through coercive means the cure ends up being worse than the disease. Please, don't be eugenicists. I repeat, it has never ended well and probably never will until we find people smart enough to fix the flaws in its implementation, much less fix the flaws in its very conception of people being better than others by virtue of matching an ideal which doesn't exist. It's bullshit that latches onto this bigger problem and repeats scientific buzzwords like fetishes to guarantee legitimacy. But we simply must find a way to remove the urges of the lizard brain from the intellectual heritage of humanity as a whole, now that said heritage has reached such heights of complexity and precision above humanity that heurism interferes with its continued growth and preservation. Such gall as to think that people can be "ubermenschen;" even our most intelligent individuals can do little but touch the truth, and hopefully let our sight exceed our reach, even if our reach exceeds our grasp. We need it, we can barely have different skin colors without fucking it up.
In theory, though this is a long shot, the next PM now that Cameron's left could take a look at the economic crash and all the work of a painful, messy divorce, ignore the referendum result, and put it to a parliamentary vote, and hope that they're as afraid of pulling out as he is, and remain. It'd risk the wrath of the "apparent" majority, but it seems the only way anyone's getting out of this with their hides intact. No one even really knows how article 50 will play out in practice.
I... I don't like to call people stupid...
But I can't conceive of why anyone who thought about it for more than two seconds would think a "Leave" vote would do anything the UKIP promised.
Seriously, none of their promises (increased economic power, closed borders, less red tape) make any practical sense.
*Why did anyone think that the world's fifth biggest economy pulling out of the world's biggest market would affect investor confidence? Why did they forget that investor confidence influences fiat currency?
*Why did anyone assume that they'd still "get" single market and freedom of movement when (A) They'd be the ones who take their ball and go home and would be in no position to negotiate any of these matters, and (B) a significant part of the appeal to a lot of the leave voters IS split market and impediment of movement and immigration?
*There are three million UK citizens residing around the EU and two million EU citizens residing in the UK. Nigel pretended they didn't matter.
*This would trap your youth on the most depressing island yet inhabited. Think of your children, who had the entire continent spread before them, and now it's gone.
*You've torpedoed basically every pan-european collaboration in small business or art that involves you. As an animator, I keep seeing stories of animation moving out of the UK because producing the film outside the EU would be too much red tape.
*Who thought the factories that closed in the Thatcher era would whirr to life? They didn't close because Britain didn't need them, they closed because the world no longer needed them. There are factories around the world which can deliver faster, cheaper, or better product, and cutting Britain off from them will only increase prices, require further subsidy, all sorts of things.
*Yes, the poverty and degradation Britain has endured under conservative governments is not good. However, splitting yourself off from your biggest market will not make the poverty any better. A market that, I repeat, is the extension of the Common Market that it already took DECADES to convince you guys to join in the first place, and they sure as hell aren't going to take you again with your tail between your legs.
*The difficulties you complain about in the European Union, their own economic problems, their stalemates, they may affect the market, but they also affect the currency. You don't use the currency. This doesn't affect you half as bad as it does them, and you don't really see them whining.
*Look at Switzerland. Look at how Switzerland grumbles about not getting a vote. Now you've joined them.
*The EU requires that countries such as Switzerland that border only EU countries have to abide by EU open border rules. The UK's only border is with an EU member. There is, I repeat, if you're so goddamn worried about terrorists, nothing stopping, nor can there stop, someone traveling from France to Ireland, and then to Ulster, and then to Britain. Leaving it would not help that.
*Did it occur to any of you, again, that the only border with the EU is one of the most contested and hithertofore violent borders in the country? Militarizing that border will bring the Troubles back by a factor of five.
*If you leave because you hate red tape and regulations, why would you leave the market? You now have to renegotiate your trade deals with every country on earth. That's red tape on a scale you never dreamed of.
*The UKIP never cogently discussed or even elaborated upon what they expected to happen after the break. They never brought out actual economists or sociologists to inform us. That alone should have been suspicious. Now it's immediately evident that they had no actual plan in mind.
*Infrastructure such as the Chunnel would not have happened without the EU. You can complain about how much it cost all you want, but has anybody ever heard of an economic principle called SUNK COST. The only way to recoup your monies from sunk costs is to keep them running as long as humanly possible. You see, sunk costs is money that's not fucking yours anymore, and no decision you can make will bring that money back. This is fucking Econ 101, people.
*If you like Scottish unification so much, remember that the only goddamn reason their independence referendum didn't pass majority was their worry that they wouldn't be able to join the EU.
*The refugee crisis is, indeed, a crisis of resources and overcrowding and citizenship issues. I've a friend in Greece right now covering it. However, they're not all terrorists, if I can repeat that part. In fact, ISIS' plans involve framing their refugees as terrorists to persuade their subjects to stop fleeing. The worse you treat their refugees, the more ISIS wins.
*You haven't had an empire for nineteen years. The cushion you thought you had isn't really a thing anymore. And not many people are going to let you build it up again.
A leave vote was a vote against elementary logic, against elementary sociology, against elementary economics.
I don't call people "stupid" for their politics because their political values disagree with mine.
I DO call people "stupid" for their politics if it's logically evident that their politics rely on emotions, their politics are internally consistent but not practically consistent, their politics relies on closed systems on anything other than worldwide scale, if their politics are illogical, or if they support policies that will logically result in the exact opposite of what they want. In short, if you get your news from Rupert Murdoch.
This is the death of my faith in human nature, human intelligence, and our propensity to behave logically when discussing complex issues.
I think I understand, even if I don't quite agree, why the Dark Enlightenment hates democracy so much. The biggest obstacle to the world right now really is human nature, with its racism and its tribalism and its being-bad-at-math and its logical fallacies and its addiction to stories and conflict with villains and heroes and three-act-structures applied to the real world that have none of those.
The apocalypse really can't come soon enough.
(TW unfortunate and really shitty opinion ahead)
My unfortunate and oft-suppressed propensity to sweeping August Strindberg thoughts ("The building is too solid to be torn down, it can only be blown up" and "we can breed the illogical people out of the human race and abolish all emotion from the mind and thought processes") is surfacing again, out of anger and disgust pushing them to the surface, and it'll take a lot of alcohol to make them stop. As much as it's a constant struggle to remove my emotions from my deductive process and decision-making, it's an even worse struggle to remind myself that people need to do this by themselves, and we as yet have devised no theory non-pseudoscientific enough, intelligent enough, expansive enough, or non-dogmatic enough to implement such programs without considerable and unfair costs of human suffering, life, or mental or physical health, to say nothing of not only the dignity lost but also the fact that every time someone tries to "improve" humanity through coercive means the cure ends up being worse than the disease. Please, don't be eugenicists. I repeat, it has never ended well and probably never will until we find people smart enough to fix the flaws in its implementation, much less fix the flaws in its very conception of people being better than others by virtue of matching an ideal which doesn't exist. It's bullshit that latches onto this bigger problem and repeats scientific buzzwords like fetishes to guarantee legitimacy. But we simply must find a way to remove the urges of the lizard brain from the intellectual heritage of humanity as a whole, now that said heritage has reached such heights of complexity and precision above humanity that heurism interferes with its continued growth and preservation. Such gall as to think that people can be "ubermenschen;" even our most intelligent individuals can do little but touch the truth, and hopefully let our sight exceed our reach, even if our reach exceeds our grasp. We need it, we can barely have different skin colors without fucking it up.
In theory, though this is a long shot, the next PM now that Cameron's left could take a look at the economic crash and all the work of a painful, messy divorce, ignore the referendum result, and put it to a parliamentary vote, and hope that they're as afraid of pulling out as he is, and remain. It'd risk the wrath of the "apparent" majority, but it seems the only way anyone's getting out of this with their hides intact. No one even really knows how article 50 will play out in practice.
I actually hadn't considered that possibility, but now I'm gonna keep my fingers crossed for it. The referendum isn't legally binding, so far as I know, and Cameron hasn't left office yet. Nor does he have a clear pro-Brexit successor. And if leaving the EU went to a parliamentary vote I imagine it'd have a much harder time passing. Especially after seeing the economical ****show play out over the last few days and seeing UKIP already starting to backpedal on some of their promises.
Really makes me worry about how November is going to play out in the States though. :/
This scares me about the future. Deeply.
Given your clear left ideologies, maybe you'd relate better to a simple metaphor: I doubt you'd be happy to find out that an isolated indigenous tribe of aboriginals in Australia suddenly had hundreds of muslims decide to move into their mud huts. What would happen if there were a 1/1 ratio of muslim to aboriginal? They'd be introduced to cellphones, to alcohol, to a new language and religion, and within six generations, those aboriginals would no longer exist because they'd procreate with the muslims.
I don't know why leftists get angry at the idea of indigenous people being fucked with, but they cheer and give the middle finger to the right who wants to maintain their white blood and culture.