Thanks for explaining the culture of the world in a way that can fit into a handbag although it would be more convenient to me if it could be further condensed so it fits in a change purse or wallet so I could take it with me everywhere.
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well for a start, the Italian handbag fetishing is surely the same “don’t change a thing, I want it exactly as I imagine it FOREVER” that they’re complaining about with Blightly and an imagined perfect past.
someone’s going to make a better handbag. Or a better thing than a handbag. Some kind of money carrying flying companion robot or something. And I say look forward to that wonderous future rather than grasping onto the bit where Europe got into an early lead.
side note: it is funny how much English people fetishize the empire as a golden age, assuming they’d have been on a veranda in India running the show, rather than being press ganged into the navy and dying of scurvy, or worked to death in a textile mill.
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There are a few users on MW that I remember being proud of their voting ‘to teach the UK a lesson’ that I notice lately are all ‘oh no, why do I need to pay taxes on things from the EU now?’
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Germany?
First off, disregarding the absolute echo chamber this place is, I find it questionable that you lot voted for this 3 times and there are zero redeeming qualities. Or was it more than 3 times? I stopped counting after 3. Seriously, how in the hell can the majority of people vote multiple times for something that is universally “bad” for everyone? The very notion is absurd.
Surely there have to have been benefits. Who did in fact benefit from this and in what ways?
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I don’t know about that one. There is fierce competition.
Without judging this particular example (Brexit), I think this behaviour pattern is the result of our human desire to simplify things until we are able to comprehend and handle them and the fact that this desire is increasingly exploited systematically in ever more complex conditions.
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It also occurs to me that the system fought this pretty hard, hence to need to keep voting on it. Why did the system not want it? What was at risk for them? Has said system torpedoed the whole process so that it cannot achieve whatever the stated goal may have been in the first place?
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only one public vote, no? After that it’s just political self-preservation for MPs I think.
I think the issue is just that people voted for imaginary results of the process, rather than the process itself. You can see this, because despite the delivery of “leaving the EU” which was all people were asked to vote for, a lot of leavers are certain that this version of Brexit isn’t what they voted for.
That is… people voted for say “350 million pounds a week extra for the NHS” or “taking control of our borders” and now those things haven’t materialised it is either because it was a massive misrepresentation/lie (remain voters) or because remainers and incompetent politicians sabotaged a proper brexit (leave voters).
The public voted once. Parliament voted 3 times, perhaps that’s what you meant.
The only redeeming qualities:
- a win for the parliamentary party that correctly predicted which way the wind was blowing
- a win for the financial elites who bet the right way on the outcome. Yes, those same financial elites who the winning party likes to protect.
Everyone else lost. That’s the current state of UK democracy.
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The UK. Several layers worse and less organised than any other country. The place we went to was practically empty too, so not like they were busy.
The UK general elections in 2017 and 2019 were widely seen/advertised as being a vote on the “flavour of Brexit” among other things.
I guess that could be where the three votes came from?
There are benefits of Brexit, the only problem is that to reap those benefits you need a lot of money already and an inside line on what is happening/due to happen. Hence why so many Tories and friends of the Tory party have made ridiculous amounts of money from the whole thing.
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That sums up any bit of public policy that I’ve seen voted into existence over my nearly 50 times around the sun. Sad but true.
That´s surprising. Not that the british aren´t that good. More surprising is that it was not Germany that put the most inefficient paper-work on you.
I am german and I am so sad about Britain leaving the EU.
I always thought that politicians do their (sometimes dirty) thing but people stay together.
It is a thing of our weird times that everything and most of all the common sense can be manipulated that much.
Everybody is losing in this construction. I hope that someday the british will come back and join us again.
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The finnish populist far right party stated recently that their endgame is to make Fixit happen and get Finland out of the union too. And they’re one of the three big parties in this country.
A normal dude learns from his mistakes.
A smart dude learns from the mistakes other people made.
I guess that applies to political parties too.
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Concur. Social media also played a crucial part in the referendum result.
Yup … that’s what I was alluding to here
As someone who recently moved from the UK to the USA, those little-englanders have no idea how European they actually are!
If they hadn’t been so scared of their neighbours they might have realised how much they actually had in common.
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I don’t know how I ever thought that nationalism would one day become a niche hobby in my lifetime.
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We have plenty of ‘economic migrants’ from the UK in Switzerland. For some reason, they like to call themselves ‘expats’. They tend to work in finance and tend to live in small tax havens nested inside our big tax haven.
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