The Political Thread

[Funt Solo]

A useful exercise anyone can try is to think back to the instinctive reaction they had to Brexit.

Actually, even that one sentence is entirely misleading. The idea that someone hears about the idea of the UK leaving the EU (because it wasn't called Brexit then) for the first time and their reaction is based purely on instinct is just hogwash. It's a distracting argument that dismisses any intellectual response based on already present evidence as some kind of emotional reflex.

That's even before we get to the terrible presumption that nobody ever changes their mind based on new evidence, which I'm sure large swathes of people (including one or two scientists) might take issue with, as I do.

[Professor Bear]

Iraq, Indonesia, Egypt, France - all protest hotspots right now, but all we see is Venezuela this and Hong Kong that for some strange reason.  I don't suppose we'll ever know why we only see activity sponsored by the CIA and not the grassroots uprisings on the news.  One of life's mysteries, I guess.
I'm just thankful that kind of thing could never happen here.

[IndigoPrime]

A useful exercise anyone can try is to think back to the instinctive reaction they had to Brexit.

Depends who we're talking about, given that Brexit voting patterns have since been shown to break down into a range of areas.

For the working classes (which were apparently split 50/50), there's a lot of ignorance, combined with ongoing decline of jobs and locales. This isn't the fault of the EU – it's primarily down to a lack of education combined with a lack of central government spending on infrastructure. That's prime territory for manipulation, which is precisely what happened – and continues to happen, whipping people into a religious frenzy to vote against their best interests. It's a straight copy of the GoP playbook in the US.

For wealthy Tories, who make up a substantial amount of the Brexit vote, mostly in the south of England, this is often about a combination of xenophobia and money. For the very wealthy, tax evasion stuff being put through the EU would cause them to personally lose out on savings. Those who aren't insanely wealthy probably didn't think that far beyond this, given that they're going to get a kicking along with everyone else.

And then there are the delusional Lexit set, old bastards who think they lived through the war but didn't, and so on.

Also, as someone put it on Twitter recently, the actual campaign was a shitshow. Remain put up a spreadsheet, when Leave had some really powerful slides. No competition. And in the unlikely scenario where we do get to a second referendum, there's no suggestion things will be any different next time either. (Mrs IP has stated that we won't be sticking around if the UK votes leave twice.)

[Frank]

To summarize and synthesize Funt & IP's posts, one-third of the adults in the UK reached a different conclusion to them (and me) because they are by turns ignorant, easily manipulated, delusional, xenophobic and greedy.

And they refuse to change their minds in spite of all available evidence proving them wrong.

[TordelBack]

Sorry to say it Frank, but while I fully accept there are many exceptions to that generalisation, as an outsider it strikes me as a depressingly accurate summary.

I do gowever understand and appreciate the psychological point you are making,

[Professor Bear]

BEHOLD - The holy text from which all wisdom flows:

[Frank]

Sorry to say it Frank, but while I fully accept there are many exceptions to that generalisation, as an outsider it strikes me as a depressingly accurate summary.

I do however understand and appreciate the psychological point you are making.

It's an epistemological point as much as a psychological one.

Projecting the exponentially mushrooming number of possible outcomes resulting from changing the terms of the UK's relationship with EU member states, numbering the links in a chain of causality of such length and complexity no human or (existing) artificial intelligence can hope to hold them in their mind at one time, is an impossible task.

I'm not arguing Funt or IP aren't clever enough to know how they should have voted in 2016, I'm saying nobody is.

Faced with an impossibly huge and complex conundrum, the intelligent human focuses on smaller tasks and whatever facts they can be sure of, and uses those to make a best guess. It's not a bad strategy*, but it's important to recognise that's all it is - and that others can use the same strategy and the same facts to reach different conclusions.

No matter how much evidence you amass and consider, the final step is only ever a hunch.


* It's a perfectly rational and practical strategy. I heard a professional quiz champion break down how he approaches questions to which he just doesn't know the answer. His methodology is to run through whatever he does know about the subject and use that to eliminate the many possible answers until he's left with one or two to choose from, then makes his best guess.

[JayzusB.Christ]

BEHOLD - The holy text from which all wisdom flows:

Not sure if I'd throw Noam Chomsky, an outspoken Anarchist but a very well informed one, in with the rest of the lunatic fringe. Or am I reading it wrong?

[TordelBack]

FFS that horseshoe thing is beyond moronic.

[JOE SOAP]

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

It's supposed to be the other way up to keep the good luck in.

[IndigoPrime]

because they are by turns ignorant, easily manipulated

Perhaps I wasn't clear, but I think it's more nuanced than that for many. Ignorance has been baked in at a national level. This isn't down to people being stupid, but in a population that has to actively go looking for information about how the country they live in actually works. That is a reckless and negligent approach to education. People quite often say they didn't know about our relationship with Europe, and how things functioned. That is just appalling from a structural standpoint.

The same argument should go to our print media, which for decades has mostly been akin to trash US TV rather than proper quality journalism without obvious bias. And the manipulation pays into that. I'm not suggesting all Leave voters were "easily manipulated", but I am saying a great many were manipulated (not just by print media, but also gaming social networking, and micro targeting individual accounts).

delusional, xenophobic and greedy.

This, on the other hand, I don't feel needs any clarification!

And they refuse to change their minds in spite of all available evidence proving them wrong.

And this is the problem. By setting Brexit as a class war/religion, people dig in. Humans are terrible at admitting wrongs anyway; but with Brexit, you can see from the way in which polling has totally stalled that we're basically fucked. (My original prediction was that by now, we'd be roughly in super-majority territory for Remain, albeit having left. Instead, we're still – albeit only just – inside margin of error territory, with Remain having a small lead for many months.

It's not nearly enough, though. As many others have said, the depressing thing about all this is that people really may have to see what life outside the EU is like before recognising and understanding the damage. But by then, it'll be too late to reverse it. Best-case scenario – and vanishingly unlikely – is rejoining in a decade, with a worse deal, and far less influence. Fairly typical scenario, from those in the know, is that the UK would be unlikely to be a member again for decades. After all, everyone else in the club would have to unanimously let the UK rejoin – and, frankly, why would they?

I'm not arguing Funt or IP aren't clever enough to know how they should have voted in 2016, I'm saying nobody is.

Personally, I don't think it should ever have gone to referendum. Also, I agree to some extent that no-one's bright enough to know for sure about how they should have voted. But the vast majority of experts were pretty clear that Remain was the safe, secure option for everything from social benefits to economic power. It was notable that the Leave lot had to wheel out the exact same voices time and again. So: defer to experts. But experts had been trashed.

However, I will concede that the arguments were skewed. Leave more or less ran with classic Euroscepticism dressed up in language that was intentionally vague – that "free trade area" that runs from Iceland to Turkey; "let's give £350m a week to the NHS". All ditched the second they won, and arguments then shifted to these things being possibilities and aspirations, rather than pledges and promises. Of course, the response then is that both sides lied. Really, Remain got the speed of impact wrong (not least due to some sterling work by Mark Carney, and the UK govt not immediately triggering Article 50); but Leave lied in a big way all the way through.

No matter how much evidence you amass and consider, the final step is only ever a hunch.

One could make that argument about everything. But when you've 99 people saying to not jump off a cliff, because you'll break every bone in your body, but one fucker with a loudhailer saying you'll be fine and probably sprout wings on the way down anyway because BY GOD YOU'RE BRITISH, it's more than just a hunch.

FFS that horseshoe thing is beyond moronic.

That version is a bit over the top. But there's certainly some truth in the far left and far right having certain things in common regarding authoritarianism and anti-migrant thinking. There are reasons why the ERG and Momentum have the same wishes for Brexit – albeit different ideas about how they want to rule the ashes.

[Funt Solo]

No matter how much evidence you amass and consider, the final step is only ever a hunch.

My problem with your theory (and I see a partial validity in it) is that it dismisses both sides of the argument as effectively random by extrapolating the results of any decision to a distant future point.

We can still make decisions based on the rationale we have available (as you suggest). But you present both sides in the argument as having equally valid rationales.

They don't. Where are the experts (not politicians, but experts) claiming that Brexit will be good for the UK economy? I just haven't seen or heard any of that reported. I saw posters of migrant swarms (doctored by Brexit-leaning politicians) and I saw false promises on buses (doctored by Brexit-leaning politicians). The expert testimony against Brexit has been from what appear to be neutral economists.

It's just not the even playing field that you suggest.

[Professor Bear]

Or am I reading it wrong?

Ah don't worry about it, I sometimes forget to make it clear when I shitpost something, and I certainly didn't mean for anyone to take that ludicrous old cobblers seriously.
If I was, you may as well ask why the diagram doesn't include Judaism, a religion that practices genital mutilation on children, or why Catholicism and environmentalism are on opposite ends of the spectrum and does this mean that there are no Catholic environmentalists?  Or are the things on opposite sides supposed to be equivalent rather than mutually exclusive positions?  If they aren't meant to be mutually exclusive, doesn't this negate the entire concept of the horseshoe theory?  Also, why are terms like "classic feminism" or "postmodernism" on there when these are alt-right code for TERFism and "cultural Bolshevism" (an antisemitic conspiracy theory) respectively?  Why is Liberalism there when that's become a right wing position after being supplanted by neoliberalism?
And that's before you even get to the basic problem with centrism: adopting a neutral position when faced with oppression is to endorse it.
More like horseSHIT Theory, amiright?

True story: I went looking for that diagram on the web and found it on a Quora page where the related questions included "Were the Nazis on the left or right?"

[TordelBack]

No matter how much evidence you amass and consider, the final step is only ever a hunch.

Don't make me post a link to Tim Minchin's Storm .