Brexit What Happens Next Thread ---multiple merged threads.

[jonb2]

19 hours ago, debtlessmanc said:

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

The thing about the far right is that you can spot them a mile way, thanks to good old adolf, we know what makes them tick, the most  recent book i read about the nazi period was "travels in the third reich" it is fascinating account of foreigners letters etc about their experience of facism. The thing that comes over most strongly is that people simply did not take the nazi's seriously. Sadly casual antisemitism was widespread in europe at the time, so Hitler was seen as "a bit over the top, but dont worry he part of the establishment really". My own great uncle was in the british division who liberated Belsen, his own response was amazement that British propaganda had actually understated the Nazi's evil.

As to the rest of your post, i find it difficult to be sure how bad the billionaires are, afterall they do not eat more than 3 meals a day (as warren Buffet says). No society has ever existed without "rich people"  as you say. Soviet Russia had people in it who had access to all the private jets, Dachas and murderous armed guards that any other states do. If you accept we are just a bunch of overevolved apes like i do, it is difficult to see what an ideal human society looks like. The scandinavian social democracies are pretty good, so it is high taxation and good services, i believe in that. However, they also have some seriously rich people, i do not think any society will ever escaped that.

The UK is pretty good, it just needs to think sbout the average person a bit more that is all, and turn to science+engineering to solve its problems as it once did.

There is an interesting book that argues, given the right set of circumstances, the extreme right have a chance of power anywhere.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/

Personally, I have had this argument many times with people - do not underestimate the creep of fascism. I do understand how it attracts some - it offers power by proxy. But the reality is different. Only the inner circle and the useful idiot SS officers stand to gain anything like its promises. They will smile as the lime pits are filled with the bodies of others though.

Now, this conflated with 'global big money' makes it even more sinister and threatening. As to your belief in the UK, you do know we are the money laundering capital of the world?

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-world-dirty-money-by-the-numbers/

I suggest you watch this too if you can.

 

Now, onto the oligarchs

Here are some books that might change your mind about the danger of the super-elites:

---- Dark money

"Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0735210330/?psc=1

---- Moneyland

"... tells the story of how the world's super-rich have broken free of democratic control, and formed their own nomadic global community. "

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moneyland-Thieves-Crooks-Rule-World/dp/1781257930/260-5310844-2823029?psc=1

---- The Finance Curse

This is a book that none of us can afford to ignore – an agenda-setting, campaigning investigation that shows how global finance works for the few and not the many.

** A Financial Times Book of the Year **
‘Essential reading’ YANIS VAROUFAKIS

We need finance – but when finance grows too big it becomes a curse.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1784705047/?psc=1

---- Kochland

" 'Kochland is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time.' -- Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kochland-Christopher-Leonard/dp/1471186970

The Koch brothers have interfered over here. They sponsor the right wing think tank talking heads. We should be worried when the influence of foreign money controls our destiny as a country. Like this too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit

And this

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/the-american-dark-money-behind-europes-far-right/

"Which takes us to Britain’s dark-money-funded think tanks. We showed how a staff member for a group called the Legatum Institute, connected to a hedge fund in Dubai and owned by a disaster capitalist who made a fortune from the collapsing Soviet Union, had unprecedented access to government ministers during the Brexit process, despite the fact that no one is sure who is paying his wages. And when he took a job with a private lobbying agency despite sitting on Liam Fox’s committee of advisors, our story forced him to resign from that committee."

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/dark-money-investigations-what-we-ve-found-out-and-why-we-re-looking/

Whatever these people want. It ain't good, it ain't got anything to do with democracy and it will certainly make our lives a lot worse if they succeed with their festering plan of control.

 

 

 

[Bob8]

4 hours ago, crouch said:

Your scepticism is unfounded:

"A lot of people, regardless of their preference for leave or remain, believe that the referendum was a democratic vote, regardless of what they think of the outcome. So in the words of the PM, they might agree that we needed to get Brexit done," says Will Jennings, Professor in Politics at the University of Southampton.

"Asking people hypothetically how they would vote if the referendum were happening now, you might get an interesting answer. But it is a fundamentally different question."

Some on this forum reflect this. They voted Remain but accept that we voted out and out we must go.

Yes, we went out in February this year.

There is no democratic mandate for going further. No sensible person suggests otherwise.

[crouch]

20 minutes ago, dugsbody said:

I wonder if we could make both sides happy by pretending we've left the EU but silently rejoin, keeping everything as it was before we left.

My guess is those people wouldn't actually notice, so win/win.

Ever heard of BRINO?

[jonb2]

18 hours ago, pig said:

Can't help but think its a particular strand of dull but toxic male psychology (psychopathy?) thats at play there. Copy paste jihadis.

Manufacturing disgust/contempt however is more the trade of populism and nationalism. Hence the obsession with weirdo fantasies about paedophillia, Soros, Gates 5G and so on that are signs of contemporary RW brainwashing. You see it. creeping into debates here often enough.

I'm not so concerned about 'government' or the politicians - yesterday Starmer evicerated an almost bizarre Johnson again. Its really to do with the section of the duped public, albeit shrinking, who are still happy to put up with a hopeless prime minister and the lack of leadership and accountability in the Jenrick and Cummings scandal.

Without them the government can't get away with their rolling disaster - its interesting that they are obsessed with SM.

 

 

Copy paste Jihadis is a great description.

But I think there is something much more worrying to what's happening. Summed up in Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization:

It's a technique and it works. The Russians designed it. They have always been clever by necessity of not having the same budget as the USA in 40 years of cold war. Work on the mind. They are a million miles ahead with a weapon that costs a fraction of a nuclear missile and destroys by body-snatching.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/

Now if only Cummings was really as clever as Vladimir Surkov - the modern master of turning the mind to mush. He's a 2 year old by comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov

Brought up here if you've not watched it

"Our world is strange and often fake and corrupt. But we think it’s normal because we can’t see anything else. HyperNormalisation - the story of how we got here."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c

These too are worth a butcher's

Damn clever those Ruskies. You've got to give it to them.

Edited June 26, 2020 by jonb2

[crouch]

19 minutes ago, jonb2 said:

There is an interesting book that argues, given the right set of circumstances, the extreme right have a chance of power anywhere.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/

Personally, I have had this argument many times with people - do not underestimate the creep of fascism. I do understand how it attracts some - it offers power by proxy. But the reality is different. Only the inner circle and the useful idiot SS officers stand to gain anything like its promises. They will smile as the lime pits are filled with the bodies of others though.

Now, this conflated with 'global big money' makes it even more sinister and threatening. As to your belief in the UK, you do know we are the money laundering capital of the world?

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-world-dirty-money-by-the-numbers/

I suggest you watch this too if you can.

 

Now, onto the oligarchs

Here are some books that might change your mind about the danger of the super-elites:

---- Dark money

"Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0735210330/?psc=1

---- Moneyland

"... tells the story of how the world's super-rich have broken free of democratic control, and formed their own nomadic global community. "

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moneyland-Thieves-Crooks-Rule-World/dp/1781257930/260-5310844-2823029?psc=1

---- The Finance Curse

This is a book that none of us can afford to ignore – an agenda-setting, campaigning investigation that shows how global finance works for the few and not the many.

** A Financial Times Book of the Year **
‘Essential reading’ YANIS VAROUFAKIS

We need finance – but when finance grows too big it becomes a curse.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1784705047/?psc=1

---- Kochland

" 'Kochland is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time.' -- Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kochland-Christopher-Leonard/dp/1471186970

The Koch brothers have interfered over here. They sponsor the right wing think tank talking heads. We should be worried when the influence of foreign money controls our destiny as a country. Like this too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit

And this

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/the-american-dark-money-behind-europes-far-right/

"Which takes us to Britain’s dark-money-funded think tanks. We showed how a staff member for a group called the Legatum Institute, connected to a hedge fund in Dubai and owned by a disaster capitalist who made a fortune from the collapsing Soviet Union, had unprecedented access to government ministers during the Brexit process, despite the fact that no one is sure who is paying his wages. And when he took a job with a private lobbying agency despite sitting on Liam Fox’s committee of advisors, our story forced him to resign from that committee."

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/dark-money-investigations-what-we-ve-found-out-and-why-we-re-looking/

Whatever these people want. It ain't good, it ain't got anything to do with democracy and it will certainly make our lives a lot worse if they succeed with their festering plan of control.

 

 

 

Very interesting but what is new about all this? People want power and wealth and often when they get it bad things happen - to others. Is this really news?

At the end of the day Edmund Burke perhaps had it right when he said " The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That is the short version. The long, and more interesting version is:

"Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

[Bob8]

4 minutes ago, jonb2 said:

There is an interesting book that argues, given the right set of circumstances, the extreme right have a chance of power anywhere.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/

Personally, I have had this argument many times with people - do not underestimate the creep of fascism. I do understand how it attracts some - it offers power by proxy. But the reality is different. Only the inner circle and the useful idiot SS officers stand to gain anything like its promises. They will smile as the lime pits are filled with the bodies of others though.

Now, this conflated with 'global big money' makes it even more sinister and threatening. As to your belief in the UK, you do know we are the money laundering capital of the world?

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-world-dirty-money-by-the-numbers/

I suggest you watch this too if you can.

 

Now, onto the oligarchs

Here are some books that might change your mind about the danger of the super-elites:

---- Dark money

"Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0735210330/?psc=1

---- Moneyland

"... tells the story of how the world's super-rich have broken free of democratic control, and formed their own nomadic global community. "

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moneyland-Thieves-Crooks-Rule-World/dp/1781257930/260-5310844-2823029?psc=1

---- The Finance Curse

This is a book that none of us can afford to ignore – an agenda-setting, campaigning investigation that shows how global finance works for the few and not the many.

** A Financial Times Book of the Year **
‘Essential reading’ YANIS VAROUFAKIS

We need finance – but when finance grows too big it becomes a curse.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1784705047/?psc=1

---- Kochland

" 'Kochland is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time.' -- Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kochland-Christopher-Leonard/dp/1471186970

The Koch brothers have interfered over here. They sponsor the right wing think tank talking heads. We should be worried when the influence of foreign money controls our destiny as a country. Like this too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit

And this

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/the-american-dark-money-behind-europes-far-right/

"Which takes us to Britain’s dark-money-funded think tanks. We showed how a staff member for a group called the Legatum Institute, connected to a hedge fund in Dubai and owned by a disaster capitalist who made a fortune from the collapsing Soviet Union, had unprecedented access to government ministers during the Brexit process, despite the fact that no one is sure who is paying his wages. And when he took a job with a private lobbying agency despite sitting on Liam Fox’s committee of advisors, our story forced him to resign from that committee."

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/dark-money-investigations-what-we-ve-found-out-and-why-we-re-looking/

Whatever these people want. It ain't good, it ain't got anything to do with democracy and it will certainly make our lives a lot worse if they succeed with their festering plan of control.

My (uninformed) impression is that the different political positions base themselves on different narratives.

Some people are tied to a narrative, but others will be affected to a certain extent by reality. When reality coincides with a political narrative, then that political view points has a big boost.

Facism says the people have become weak and corrupt, they need to be led by the clear sighted. Society is in danger because we are pursuing individual ideologies, and society needs to be lead by a firm masculine hand, to purify society and bring glory. Which makes sense, when society under threat from communism, and men are struggling to get sexual partners. People are divided between them and us. The approach is to see the dangers as specific and an all or nothing zero sum game.
Left wing version: Marxism says the people need correcting too.

Populism says that the people are good. There are corrupting outside forces (e.g. Catholics, EU, foreigners)  from the outside, that are corrupting the elite and the youth. They no longer count as the people. But, once these are exorcised all will be well. The approach is to see the dangers are simple and specific (so, simple solutions) and a gradual zero sum game.
Left wing version is if the population are impoverished and young, and they will blame capitalism and imperialism.

 

[Bob8]

29 minutes ago, crouch said:

Ever heard of BRINO?

As brexit does not have a permentent meaning, I think this is a silly statement.

[jonb2]

19 minutes ago, crouch said:

Very interesting but what is new about all this? People want power and wealth and often when they get it bad things happen - to others. Is this really news?

At the end of the day Edmund Burke perhaps had it right when he said " The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That is the short version. The long, and more interesting version is:

"Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Two things

It is different this time as we have a global communication system that does more harm than good. In fact everything is global where wealth is concerned. So, unlike 100 years ago, other people halfway round the world can control things that affect us directly. Maliciously.

"A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes"

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

However said this, he/she is right. We have never lived in a time where manipulation of huge crowds of people has had so much reach and consequence. This combined with the same reach of controlling huge fortune is toxic, as we are finding out as it unfolds.

Second, may I correct you on your quote.

3. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Attributed to Edmund Burke, including by John F Kennedy in a speech in 1961. Burke didn’t say it, and its earliest form was by John Stuart Mill, who said in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-top-10-misattributed-quotations-a7910361.html

 

 

[crouch]

3 minutes ago, jonb2 said:

It is different this time as we have a global communication system that does more harm than good. In fact everything is global where wealth is concerned. So, unlike 100 years ago, other people halfway round the world can control things that affect us directly. Maliciously.

What you appear to be saying is that evil men have more tools than in the past. Quite.

5 minutes ago, jonb2 said:

Second, may I correct you on your quote.

3. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Attributed to Edmund Burke, including by John F Kennedy in a speech in 1961. Burke didn’t say it, and its earliest form was by John Stuart Mill, who said in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-top-10-misattributed-quotations-a7910361.html

I understood that this was a quote from Burke in a letter to William Smith dated January 9 1795.

[crouch]

26 minutes ago, Bob8 said:

As brexit does not have a permentent meaning, I think this is a silly statement.

BRINO was IIRC a term used to describe Theresa May's withdrawal agreement.

[IMHAL]

1 hour ago, crouch said:

Are you saying that we should now rejoin the EU?

 

Not yet. Give it a couple of years for the trajectory of Brexit to become apparent. Then we should consider rather more carefully what our options really are and where our interest are best served.

It may become obvious that what we thought we could do with Brexit is in fact not achievable. This realisation could come soon or I may be wrong and it's all good. Nothing should be ruled out, not even re-joining.

[jonb2]

1 hour ago, Bob8 said:

My (uninformed) impression is that the different political positions base themselves on different narratives.

Some people are tied to a narrative, but others will be affected to a certain extent by reality. When reality coincides with a political narrative, then that political view points has a big boost.

Facism says the people have become weak and corrupt, they need to be led by the clear sighted. Society is in danger because we are pursuing individual ideologies, and society needs to be lead by a firm masculine hand, to purify society and bring glory. Which makes sense, when society under threat from communism, and men are struggling to get sexual partners. People are divided between them and us. The approach is to see the dangers as specific and an all or nothing zero sum game.
Left wing version: Marxism says the people need correcting too.

Populism says that the people are good. There are corrupting outside forces (e.g. Catholics, EU, foreigners)  from the outside, that are corrupting the elite and the youth. They no longer count as the people. But, once these are exorcised all will be well. The approach is to see the dangers are simple and specific (so, simple solutions) and a gradual zero sum game.
Left wing version is if the population are impoverished and young, and they will blame capitalism and imperialism.

 

I am not sure right and left wing absolutely apply any more Bob. I think we should try to ignore partisan politics as it seems its time has passed in many western countries - especially the Anglo-Saxon ones.

I get we need monikers. We need to pigeon hole and neatly put things away in compartments. It's a human thing. I think most of the political thinkers of the past were driven by their time.“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness". As Marx said.

IMO, it gets easier to start anew, while still pulling in some of the older markers from the great thinkers of the past. I see it as a hierarchy of conflicting attitudes. One group wants to go forwards, the other wants to go backwards. Each one might have good arguments. But this is convenient to those that want to amplify the discord between these two groups. By labelling them, defining them, it affords them and us.

Me? I would rather be called a progressive than left wing. As I feel it's a good thing that the human race marches on and invents things, learns new things, gets a greater understanding of the similarities and differences betweens peoples - and generally tries to make the world a better place. And being honest, there might have been a time, many years ago, when I was afraid of foreigners, of dissimilarity - but working with people from all over the world has cured this phobia. The difference is only ever skin-deep.

On the other hand, I love history, am proud of my country and hate political correctness - a wholly American import. So I grok the traditionalists (not to be mistaken with nationalists).

Most of all, I hate greed and corruption and the manipulators that enable and uphold it. Populism is a great way to let loose the wolves of avarice.

Whether you are right wing or left wing, or in a more modern context, a progressive or traditionalist. I smell something very dark moving under the surface of where we are today. If it's allowed to break cover and rampage, it's not going to be kind to anybody that isn't super-wealthy.

Edited June 26, 2020 by jonb2

[jonb2]

29 minutes ago, crouch said:

What you appear to be saying is that evil men have more tools than in the past. Quite.

I understood that this was a quote from Burke in a letter to William Smith dated January 9 1795.

I am saying that evil men can be a magnitude more evil - given the modern structures - will have dimensionally more resources to use in spreading the evil.

And that this evil will have more consequences and have more reach into the lives of Everyday Joe.

Never before has so few owned so much. And it's never enough.

[crouch]

11 minutes ago, jonb2 said:

I am saying that evil men can be a magnitude more evil - given the modern structures - will have dimensionally more resources to use in spreading the evil.

And that this evil will have more consequences and have more reach into the lives of Everyday Joe.

Never before has so few owned so much. And it's never enough.

Well, I can't say I disagree violently with whatyou say but - so what? What is your point?

[jonb2]

16 minutes ago, crouch said:

Well, I can't say I disagree violently with whatyou say but - so what? What is your point?

May I point you to my other recent posts.

For example, something like Brexit is not hatched for the sake of the country or its people, but for the sake of few mammon-obsessed fanatics and the size of their fortunes. Like Putin wanting a vote - it legitimises the theft.

And knowing you - you'll deny this. But then, can you answer as to why there was so much American dark money and power put behind the referendum? Did they do it as they had nothing better to do?

Answers on a postcard.

[crouch]

12 minutes ago, jonb2 said:

May I point you to my other recent posts.

For example, something like Brexit is not hatched for the sake of the country or its people, but for the sake of few mammon-obsessed fanatics and the size of their fortunes. Like Putin wanting a vote - it legitimises the theft.

And knowing you - you'll deny this. But then, can you answer as to why there was so much American dark money and power put behind the referendum? Did they do it as they had nothing better to do?

Answers on a postcard.

Why would I deny what I don't know? You may be right. You don't know me at all.

Are you saying that there will never be any crossover of interests between TPTB and the rest and that we are just in a giant conspiracy which can bring no benefit to the masses?

[Kosmin]

On 25/06/2020 at 09:32, Mikhail Liebenstein said:

I think it is already proven and clearly the case that Brexit is a monumental clustered f*ck up.

The US and Bank of America now see Sterling as an emerging market currency.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/forget-bitcoin-volatility-boa-says-134954578.html

"Emerging" sounds hopeful!

[IMHAL]

22 minutes ago, Kosmin said:

"Emerging" sounds hopeful!

?

[pig]

1 hour ago, crouch said:

Why would I deny what I don't know? You may be right. You don't know me at all.

Are you saying that there will never be any crossover of interests between TPTB and the rest and that we are just in a giant conspiracy which can bring no benefit to the masses?

It’s called geopolitics.

It’s  useful to know why corporate America and Russia are keen on Brexit and see if they are congruent with British Interests.

Or are you claiming they are ?

[crouch]

4 minutes ago, pig said:

Or are you claiming they are ?

I'm not claiming anything. I'm just trying see whether this gigantic conspiracy has legs or whether it's a simple case of paranoia.

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

1 hour ago, Kosmin said:

"Emerging" sounds hopeful!

Yes, I think in the case of Brexit ”Emerging” is not used in the optimistic sense.......more like a COVID infested turd emerging from the anus of Boris Johnson.

Edited June 26, 2020 by Mikhail Liebenstein

[Bob8]

3 hours ago, crouch said:

BRINO was IIRC a term used to describe Theresa May's withdrawal agreement.

Only by idiots.

Come on, you are not stupid. You can see the idiots who do use such terms keep changing their mind as to what brexit means. I do not mean you at all. There are stupid people on both sides.

[Bob8]

 

 

3 hours ago, jonb2 said:

I am not sure right and left wing absolutely apply any more Bob. I think we should try to ignore partisan politics as it seems its time has passed in many western countries - especially the Anglo-Saxon ones.

I get we need monikers. We need to pigeon hole and neatly put things away in compartments. It's a human thing. I think most of the political thinkers of the past were driven by their time.“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness". As Marx said.

IMO, it gets easier to start anew, while still pulling in some of the older markers from the great thinkers of the past. I see it as a hierarchy of conflicting attitudes. One group wants to go forwards, the other wants to go backwards. Each one might have good arguments. But this is convenient to those that want to amplify the discord between these two groups. By labelling them, defining them, it affords them and us.

Me? I would rather be called a progressive than left wing. As I feel it's a good thing that the human race marches on and invents things, learns new things, gets a greater understanding of the similarities and differences betweens peoples - and generally tries to make the world a better place. And being honest, there might have been a time, many years ago, when I was afraid of foreigners, of dissimilarity - but working with people from all over the world has cured this phobia. The difference is only ever skin-deep.

On the other hand, I love history, am proud of my country and hate political correctness - a wholly American import. So I grok the traditionalists (not to be mistaken with nationalists).

Most of all, I hate greed and corruption and the manipulators that enable and uphold it. Populism is a great way to let loose the wolves of avarice.

Whether you are right wing or left wing, or in a more modern context, a progressive or traditionalist. I smell something very dark moving under the surface of where we are today. If it's allowed to break cover and rampage, it's not going to be kind to anybody that isn't super-wealthy.

I think there is the modernist vs traditionalist axis and the left right one.

I agree they should not be confused. That we have gone from left vs right to modernist vs traditionalist means I am agreeing with Bruce Banner on things, which is weird.

[pig]

41 minutes ago, crouch said:

I'm not claiming anything. I'm just trying see whether this gigantic conspiracy has legs or whether it's a simple case of paranoia.

What do you mean by ‘conspiracy’ ? Geopolitics is a fact of life. Countries and corporations oppose support or don’t care what happens outside their country.

[crouch]

7 minutes ago, pig said:

What do you mean by ‘conspiracy’ ? Geopolitics is a fact of life. Countries and corporations oppose support or don’t care what happens outside their country.

 A secret plan by cliques within countries, not competition between countries themselves which is, as you say, geopolitics.