Nameless Voice on 16/10/2019 at 23:55
I can't tell if you're agreeing with my impressions, or smiling at my naivete (since I hardly got to see enough to build an informed opinion from just being there for a few days.)
Quote Posted by Marecki
where public transportation actually works
I find this a bit funny because even the public transport in the UK - generally described as being rather poor due to decades of neglect - is so far beyond what Ireland can imagine, especially outside of Dublin.
I remember seeing somewhere that good public transport is one of the biggest things to reduce the levels of poverty in a place, since it allows people to get where they need to go to work cheaply, without needing to own a car - yet of course it's one of the things no one ever wants to invest in here in the English-speaking countries.
demagogue on 19/10/2019 at 00:26
Things are looking grim. Anyway, I just found this quote remarkable and, as it says, telling. It seems it's all about fatigue in ending this thing already and there's no energy to even pretend something good is coming out of it.
Quote Posted by Guardian
In a telling slip, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, told Northern Ireland to cheer up and realise it was getting a “cracking deal” that would allow it to keep “frictionless access to the single market” - which rather highlights why this is a terrible deal for everyone else.
Source: (
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/18/remainers-boris-johnson-brexit) For three years, we remainers have held our breath. This is the moment our dreams may die
Starker on 19/10/2019 at 01:14
I don't know. Sounds better than no deal or eternal limbo. As long as there's peace in NI, I wouldn't call it grim. Certainly, there are no good outcomes here, but I can think of quite a few worse ones.
Gray on 20/10/2019 at 01:20
Yeah, always listen to Dominic Raab. He's so handsome you might forget he was Brexit secretary and didn't understand there might be a slight problem Dover-Calais in a no-deal situation. I'm sure he's vastly competent. Just like his predecessor, who managed to do 3.5 hours of actual work in only 8 months.
Like I've said many times before, the level of incompetence and awfulness just keeps escalating. It keeps getting massively worse, on a daily basis, then we dodge a bullet, then we're tricked again, it's all dodging and swerving and spin and twisting things. I hate this process
SO much. But I don't hate it
enough to just give up and take a deal,
any terrible deal as we've had this week, when it clearly makes more sense to endure the pain a bit longer and do it right, or better yet, let's call the whole thing off. You say potato. I say pomme frites.
I see no happy end to this with Boris as PM. But then again, Corbyn would make a complete mess of it too, he's been such a terrible opposition leader so far that he hasn't been able to score ONCE over three years, with an open goal, and all the opposing team's players on the bench squabbling with each other and not even watching the ball. If he's been able to fail this badly, he can not be trusted. But who can? I have no idea. There are some people in the background of this I may still naively trust slightly, but perhaps only because I've seen them say the occasional thing that made sense, and just not seen them being massively incompetent yet.
Over many years, prior to him becoming PM, I've developed a deep mistrust in Boris. Underneath all that poshtwattery and bumblefoolery sometimes mislabeled as "charm and charisma", Boris is a truly, genuinely horrible person who doesn't give a flying fuck about Britain, he can't possibly, given how he doesn't even bother trying to understand how it works, and appears to only be working to further his own political ambitions, not in the slightest in what's actaully good for the country. Maybe his vision of "Britain" is some hazy Churchill fantasy that was never true in the first place. He doesn't understand Northern Ireland, and how very delicate it is. He doesn't understand Scotland, and how it may escalate very badly quite soonish. He doesn't understand Wales, just fluffs his hair and appear in high-vis and a helmet at some factory. People say he's very clever, and they may be right, he sure is quite a manipulative lying bastard, but he is vastly underinformed about most parts of the nation he is supposedly the leader of. And given how many, many,
MANY times he's been proven a liar with actual facts I find it extremely difficult to believe any single word coming out of his mouth. A no confidence vote can not come soon enough.
But then what? More chaos. Just hopefully a nicer, calmer chaos, until we settle this ongoing disaster.
Quote Posted by Marecki
I know when I am not welcome somewhere.
Yeah, I've been getting that feeling increasingly over the last three years. But not from Scotland. I feel welcomed by Scotland, but not by Britain. Hostility from Westminster and hardline Brexiteers, curiously all of them English rich posh twats, with the exception of the nouveau riche vulgar loudmouth twats. And the clueless working-class English loudmouth bulldogs with their heads up so far up their asses they can't tell when they're being played. I've been here 8 years now, and I have my Settled Status, so I'm technically allowed to stay, but I've very often reminded that I'm part of "the problem that we have to get rid of". This smells a bit iffy to me, and reminds me of some unpleasant history. I'm not saying we're getting there yet, I'm just saying there are some warning signs.
Quote Posted by Marecki
On a positive note, I do look forward to living once again in a place where you can rent something larger than a shoe box with terrible energy efficiency to live in without paying through the nose, where public transportation actually works and where you can actually see the motorway you are driving on at night without switching your high beams on.
Yes. All those things. I do miss nice weather, properly built houses with both insulation and ventilation, and more reasonable prices. But on the upside, the booze is cheaper in the UK and there's more great music, so it's not all bad. It's just that some of the bad things are really bad. Why the hell do they build houses out of cardboard in a country where it always rains?
Oh, and snow. I miss that. 8 months of snow, and -32C. And where half an inch of snow doesn't cause chaos for a full week. Hmm, maybe the racist assholes are right, maybe I should go back to where I came from. Except my home is here now, and my family.
Starker on 20/10/2019 at 05:41
Oh I trust those posh twats about as far as I can comfortably spit out a rat. But surely reaching a bad deal (and there are no good ones) is preferable to crashing out with no deal at all?
I mean, the only other alternative seems to be to negotiate for all eternity in hopes that the impossible would suddenly become possible.
Gray on 20/10/2019 at 05:53
The unending tension of prolonging and extending is unbearable. It stresses me out to no end. But, to me, it is utterly vital that this is not done the wrong way, my whole future literally depends on it. Like everybody else, I have Brexit fatigue, but I'd hate to see a bad deal being rushed through, only to later realise that I am apparently now an enemy of the nation and will have to be expelled.
To me, the only satisfactory solution would be to cancel the whole damn thing, chalk it up as a massive mistake having costed millions of pounds pointlessly, which is still better than costing us billions each year.
[Edit]
Just for clarification, I'd like to add the following:
To a greater or lesser extent, all politicians will have to lie, whether they want to or not. It comes with the job, They have to make promises they can not possibly keep, or they will never get elected. Much of this is aspirational, what they aim to achieve if elected, then the reality hits and they actually can't. This is generally understood by most of their voters, who will grumble for a while and then forget. But, some politicians take this too far. Way too far. Boris is one of them. He's lied so frequently about so very important things that have been proven factually wrong time and time again, which is why he has lost the trust of so many people now and can never regain it. He's burned all his bridges. He has screwed his own credibility. That is why he always doubles down, and never admits failure, because that would mean some of the stuff he has said in the past may not necessarily have been entirely true, and that he may have exaggerated by just a few hundred billion pounds. As long as he keeps up the pretense, some people who aren't paying attention will probably still believe him. The trouble with this strategy is that it sets you up for a spectacular failure. But then there are some politicians who for some reason appear to be bulletproof, like Boris and Trump, and it doesn't matter how many mistakes, lies, scandals they go through in a single day that would bring down any self-respecting politician, they just keep doubling down, dismissing it, and are somehow inexplicably not called up on all the bullshit. You can NOT chalk this down to charisma, Boris is slightly less charming than a wet mop in a janitor's smelly bucket, despite the very similar hairstyle. So what is it? Smugness? Rich posh twat privilege? A complete narcissistic inability to ever see how they could be wrong? Suppression of actual facts? I don't know, and it baffles me. How can this clown be our PM? What the hell happened? How could he ever have been taken seriously enough to even be considered to stand for PM? Am I the only person paying attention to what a horribly shitty person he was well before Brexit? Why are so many people so easily fooled? "A man of the people?" No fucking way! Not in any of the possible ways you can interpret that sentence. This rich, posh, Eton-educated privileged twat with no connection with the real world can ever even know these supposed "people". Even the word "man" is questionable there, that would suggest he's an actual human. Based on his behaviour, facts do not weigh in his favour.
So in short, I'm not a fan.
Nameless Voice on 20/10/2019 at 22:27
I'm sure I've said it before, but I'll say it again.
Politicians should be held to a higher level than normal people, not a lower one.
A politician intentionally lying to their people should be a crime. Any politician caught lying should be immediately expelled from their office and banned from running or holding any public office for at least a few years.
There is no legitimate reason for a politician to lie to their own people. Politicians are supposed to be representatives of those people and answerable to those people, and lying is always the exact opposite of that.
But, of course, any such laws would need to be introduced by politicians, since they run all our world governments, so the chances of such legislation ever being passed is pretty much zero.
I'm talking about intentional lies here, not so much the "aspirational lies" of someone who promises to do something and then discovers that they can't. But there's no reason for politicians to make such aspirational lies either - they can instead use wording like "I promise to try to ..." in their election pitches, instead of "I will ...".
heywood on 21/10/2019 at 14:57
I think most people want to be lied to. They don't want to know about the complexity of government, or the challenges and tradeoffs involved in solving hard problems. They want the world to be black and white and believe every problem has a right answer, and they want politicians to pander to their desires and not challenge their simplistic assumptions. As Gray indicated, voters are drawn to aspirational leaders who will look into the camera and tell them they can solve any problem if they get enough support. A great example is when interest groups demand pledges, e.g. no new taxes, close gitmo, balance the budget, bring the troops home, appoint certain judges, etc. Even if the people know a promise or pledge isn't realistic, they demand politicians make it anyway.
Gray on 24/10/2019 at 21:13
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
I'm sure I've said it before, but I'll say it again.
Politicians should be held to a higher level than normal people, not a lower one.
A politician intentionally lying to their people should be
a crime. Any politician caught lying should be immediately expelled from their office and banned from running or holding any public office for at least a few years.
But, of course, any such laws would need to be introduced by politicians, since they run all our world governments, so the chances of such legislation ever being passed is pretty much zero.
I fully agree, but I strongly doubt this will ever happen, for the reason you mentioned. They are supposed to be our elected leaders, and if they're seen as lying cheating bastards, people will think "well if they're doing it, why should I bother keeping straight?" I find it very disappointing when people who not only lie but actively try to obscure the truth are in power. Then again, power corrupts, and I've never had any power, so I wouldn't even begin to know what it's like. I've never been rich and tried to avoid taxes. Perhaps all my "strong" morals would crumble if I had money and power. I just hope I'm not that kind of a bastard. I guess we'll never know, I'm probably gonna stay poor and insignificant forever.